Guest post by…well, me! This was posted to my Dance blog in 2008. I awoke at dawn every day to dance in nature for over a year and blogged about it. Recently I came across this post and it really struck a chord. Hope it touches you as well.
SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008 – Santa Cruz CA
This morning I got a very strong feeling while dancing. It was an awareness of being involved in a quiet cultural movement with many divergent tributaries. I became aware of how many of us are involved in remembering the power of the Sacred that has been lost in our culture.
Of course this movement goes back quite a while and involves people from a variety of backgrounds. Remembering the Sacred does not lie strictly in the domain of those of us interested in earth-based spirituality, or even to those of us born in the last 100 years.
People from all spiritual traditions, and in many different disciplines are participating in what must be a great remembering, developing over many generations. This morning I could feel how the dawn dance I was performing was part of that current.
Rather than just being an extension of my own personal needs, my dance is reflective of a multi-generational need to experience and embody the sacred in our lives. It is an effort to embody a perspective that both recognizes the sovergnty of all things, and also fully embraces the oneness that we are all expressions of.
Remembering the Sacred has been with us for some time I expect, but I believe it has yet to find its zenith. Other ages had their early forbearers, toiling in obscurity, sometimes dying before they witnessed their contribution have its full impact on the world. Hildegard of Bingen was illuminating the Sacred within Christianity more than 800 years ago. Even from that great distance her work has touched our modern remembering.
When will the age of the Sacred come to fullness in the West? We have had the Age of Enlightment, the Age of Reason. We endured the Dark Ages. We have enjoyed the Industrial Revolution and experienced the Age of Computers in (appropriately enough) the blink of an eye. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for the age of the Sacred.
The idea of a rememberence is very Shamanic. It is what happens in the aftermath of a dismemberment. When the initiates body is completely decimated, the Spirits will sometimes put them back together or “remember” them. They are of course not put back together using the same material. In a sense “back together” doesn’t really apply here. They are made anew, remembered as a being with a new spiritual outlook.
I feel that we in the West are in the final throws of our dismemberment. The Bush presidency represents that moment in a dismemberment when you don’t think one last thing can be taken away and destroyed – and yet it is. There may be more to come, we have not turned the corner.
Suzie Gablic wrote in “The Re-Enchantment of Art” about remembering the sacred in art, especially by connecting it to the natural world. So many of us are involved in the Re-Enchantment of life. Oprah has devoted web episodes to Eckhart Tolle’s work “A New Earth”. The Mayor of Salinas is calling on his constituents to participate in a week of community fasting to help citizens reflect on how they might positively impact the epidemic of gang violence there. The presence of the Sacred is finding its way into the world through the work of people of special character. When will these early waves build and become strong enough to carry our nation into a tangible awareness of the sacredness in life? Only future generations looking back can know that.
Each morning I participate in this Great Remembering by waking at dawn and dancing. From now on I will know that my dance is one small part of a greater dance moving towards cohesion and empowerment. Regardless of what happens to me the greater dance will make its presence known and it will find its stride. I believe it will change the direction of our nation, if not of the people of the world.
As you face your day, as you face all of the moments of your own rememberings of the Sacred – whether they be rememberings in your job, in the food you eat, in the way you eat, in the way you love your family or raise your children. Whether you are remembering yourself as a sacred lover, a sacred warrior, a sacred priest, a sacred physician, a sacred farmer, or just a person who works to honor the sacred. Know that at dawn that day I arose to greet this Great Remembrance with all of the openness and earnestness I could muster. And know of course that I send my love to you.