Translator: Maria Helena de Souza Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
When I was six years old,
oh, I loved being squeezed into our old blue Plymouth,
with my five brothers and sisters and my mom and dad.
Every year we'd go several times.
We'd drive out of Kansas City into the countryside
to visit my special relatives.
We'd pull up in front of my aunt and uncle's house
with its white wooded siding,
and even before we'd enter, I could smell the food:
the potatoes, the flatbread, the beans.
Ooooh!
My family hugs a lot.
So we had to hug everybody before we went outside to play.
But what I remember most was later in the afternoon,
coming back inside and sitting in a circle
in order to listen to my uncle share stories
about how we are all connected to one another.
He would lower his eyes,
we would all lean forward,
and then with his calm, yet strong voice, he would say,
"This is what it means to be a whole human being,
to live knowing that we are all connected.
We are all one."
Then, he would make a huge circle.
And in that circle, he would place the people and he would say,
"We are part of all the people,
from the red, brown, black, white and yellow direction.
We part of the Earth, the water, the animals, the birds, all the elements.
We are part of Spirit, grandmother and grandfather.
There are no mistakes.
Everyone and everything has a place in this circle."
We knew to be quiet to not miss a word of what my uncle said.
And then he'd look each of us in the eyes and he'd say,
"Now, if you hurt another person with your thoughts, words or actions,
you not only hurt that person, you hurt all the people,
the Earth and the Spirit.
And if you hurt the Earth by polluting the water,
you not only hurt the water,
you hurt all the Earth, the Spirit and the people.
And if you hurt the Spirit by not honoring the sacredness and connection of all life,
then you hurt also the people and the Earth.
To be a whole human being means to live in harmony and connection with all life."
Believe me, if you were in that circle, you'd be saying just like I did,
"I don't ever want to hurt a person, the Earth or the Spirit."
Afterwards, we'd all sit down, eat and enjoy this delicious food.
And sleepily we'd get back in the car and go back to the city.
As a kid, I thought everybody had aunts and uncles,
grandparents, the elders who taught us these important instructions in life.
But as an adult, I learned it was different.
For you see, my uncle is a native American,
indigenous to this land, Osage, a wise and loving elder.
And I realized how blessed I was to have him in my life.
And it would be a blessing to have him today.
Why?
Because today, way too often, we act as we have no connections,
we act as if we have no relations.
We inject wastewater into the earth in the Midwest,
causing hundreds of tremors and earthquakes
where before there were only a few.
90% of the African lions are gone from the plains.
90% of the elephants are gone from the savannas.
90% of the large fish in our oceans are gone.
They are no longer part of the one circle.
They are gone,
gone,
gone.
Increasingly, people's homes and lands are no longer habitable.
They're becoming deserts.
They are being submerged by rising oceans.
Today we have more environmental refugees than we have refugees from war.
And it's only getting worse:
droughts, fires, storms,
exceeding historical records all over the world.
And we have regularly air warnings of the toxic pollution.
In cities like Beijing,
people cannot even safely open their windows for weeks on end.
I hear these and other things.
And what stopped me cold
is when I heard the Harvard scientist E. O. Wilson say
that if we continue on this course,
destroying our biodiversity,
life as we know it will end.
If mankind were to vanish, the Earth would regenerate itself
into this rich equilibrium that we had, existing ten thousand years ago.
If the insects vanish, the world will collapse in chaos.
Who would have thought
that these things we call pests are so essential to life.
My elder, my uncle's voice echoes in my heart.
"To be a whole human being
is to live in harmony and connection with all life.
We are not more than,
we are not lesser than,
all the beings in the circle."
As a social scientist and as a woman,
this is what fuels me; my search for the truth,
the reality of living knowing that we are all connected,
we are all one.
So I ask you,
what if we believed and behaved
as whole human beings who know that we are all connected?
Every summer,
I have the honor of taking a group of people
into the depths of the Amazon rain forest of Ecuador,
what we call the sacred headwaters of the Amazon.
We step out of the tiny planes onto the dirt airstrip,
surrounded by dense, green jungle,
and everyone in the village comes out to greet us.
The Achuar and the Sapara tribes are ancient people
who have lived for thousands of years in harmony with the rainforest.
As I look into their calm, clear eyes, I see a people
who have never been infected by the illusion of separateness,
people who have lived in community
knowing the connection of the people, Earth and Spirit.
One of the first things that the travelers say -
who I call journeyers -
"What is that? I feel physically different."
And I get to tell them,
"It's the gift of true abundance,
an abundance of oxygen.
The rainforest,
the heart and the lungs of our Earth,
is cleansing the air,
and creating this high level of oxygen that is nourishing us."
We awaken. It´s dark. It's four o'clock in the morning.
We join the Achuar tribes, who start every day,
together as a family, and from the littlest one to the elder,
they share their dreams, and based on their dreams,
they decide what they're going to do that day.
My journeyer's mouth drops open
seeing the power of community.
As the days continue,
the journeyers begin to hear and listen more deeply
to the different sites and sounds of the animals, birds, the water.
A young Achuar boy asked us if we want to come and see his favorite fishing hole,
and the translator tells us what the boy is saying:
"When we see the frogs and toads moving in mass from the river,
we move away from the water too, for we know the flooding is coming.
We listen to each other.
We appreciate the animals, the birds as well as the frogs and toads
who set off the alarms so that we can be safe and live."
Journeyers are amazed by this reciprocity,
animals helping people and people helping animals,
totally attuned in the world, intimately interconnected.
We make our final stop in the last few days of our journey,
and we joined another tribe: the Sapara.
Again as journeyers we are awed
by the richness of the knowledge that they have
of using trees, plants, minerals, insects
to cure fevers, aches, wounds,
and life-threatening disease.
The Sapara freely provide their treatments to anyone,
the healing,
because the treatments are gifts of the Earth
and are meant to be shared by all of us.
We continued to hike for miles,
as the Sapara show us how they travel
to cut individual trees from different places.
For miles they travel to cut the trees down to build their homes.
They tell us, "We don't cut all the trees from just one spot,
because we must maintain and honor the rainforest
and the strength of it,
for the forest provides for us and we provide for the forest."
What become so increasingly clear
is that the Sapara and the Achuar do not live in the rainforest,
they are part of the rainforest.
The rainforest and they are one inseparable.
When the journey ended, everyone of us has been changed.
We can see the amazing gifts within the circle of life.
We are more able to understand
the joy and responsibility
of maintaining harmony and connection with all life.
And what I want to say to you
is that we don't have to travel
thousands of miles away from where you live,
to understand, to live, to know this connection,
because it's already inside of me
and it's inside of each and every one of you.
All we have to do is to open our heart
and allow those connections in.
And, we have to allow our behavior, our actions,
to be guided by those connections.
So now, what does this connecting really look like?
Let's do this together,
and in order to not be distracted by the people next to you,
I'm going to ask you to please lower or close your eyes.
Now, and as you're there, I want you to imagine in your heart
someone or something that brings you joy, awe, gratitude.
It might be a baby giggling, loved ones, an adored pet, a wild animal.
Perhaps it's the vista of the ocean, the mountains or the plains.
It might be an exquisite flower or expansive stars.
Whatever it is, allow the images to keep coming in and filling your heart.
Allow it to warm your spirit.
What you might be noticing is your heart actually getting bigger,
expanding.
You may be feeling a sense of joy,
of harmony, contentment,
love.
That is the connection that we can live every day, every moment.
It is our joy,
our birthright,
and our responsibility
to live this connection, and it is time that we rediscover it now.
A good friend of mine gave me, years ago, permission to sing this chant.
It's in Seneca language,
a language of one the tribes of this country, in the US.
I sing it every morning and every night.
It's giving gratitude to this great mystery, this circle.
And it's really dear to me.
So, I'm going to ask if you have not already opened your eyes, please do that.
Continue to image what you were imaging, your connection in your heart,
and please every one who is able, please stand.
When I sing this chant, I image the winds of the four directions,
East, south, west and north.
And why I image the winds
is because they remind me of our connection to everything,
as they move around the Earth touching everyone and everything.
So, thank you for standing as I sing.
(Singing) It is said,
it is said,
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
It is said,
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
It is said,
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit
It is said,
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
Thank you, Thank you,
Great Spirit.
Thank you.
(Applauses)