Earth's Prayers

Leave your blog to your friends for half a minute and they go telling high school secrets. Oy. We have to turn our focus somewhere in high school. Always did like a theme and a purpose.

In other news...I found WiFi in Yellowstone. Right there next to the buffalems and mule deer.

Did you know that Yellowstone is one of the world's five largest volcanos? And it blew 640,000 years ago? And it is currently ten years behind schedule to blow again? And when it DOES blow, it will be a big enough blast, and ash enough, and power enough to black out the sun to create the next ice age? There's a way to defeat global warming.

I learned all of this only after yesterday's walks through steaming, roiling, spewing water, its source the volcanic activity below. It's not just Old Faithful that lives out here. It's fields and fields of deep blue baths and smaller geysers, belching and spitting hot water and endless pillars of steam.
Usually when I'm out in nature, I get a little holy. I can't help but feel close to the earth and God and native spirituality. Whispers of history, ancient history, sneak up and make me feel small and wide-eyed in a big wide world. So I get quiet and listen for what the big, timeless things may have to share with me.

So here I am walking through the tourist-corrals reminding myself to pay attention to the beauty of natural Wyoming/Montana rather than the two-leggeds in shorts and short haircuts that trail each other like ducklings and keep placing little silver boxes between their faces and the other ducklings who gather and show their teeth when the little boxes comes out.

I keep pulling my attention to the mineral colors and the warm water pools and the steam and then I hit on something. I learned a practice a long time ago that is an energy clearing practice. You put your hands on the ground or the floor, and you breathe into the left hand and out of the right hand. You breathe in a cleansing breath, drawing it up from the earth, you let it course through you and you release all negativity through the right hand, breathe it out into the earth so the earth can take it away. The earth can handle it, deep and churning as it is below. I usually feel better whenever I do this. But never without wondering what the earth does with it all. I'm certainly not the only one practicing it.

In Sweat Lodges, which are ceremonial for many Native American tribes, they implore the people who sit in the steaming lodge to send their prayers up with the steam. Send your prayers to Great Spirit on the steam as it rises and purify yourself of your longing. Looking at the steam rising off the geysers and cauldrons and hot springs yesterday, it occurred to me that these are the earth's prayers, rising into the sky. This is how the earth sends what I give it, away to Great Spirit.

Then I learned about the volcanic activity and history and realized when it blows, that's gonna be one big prayer.