Conscious Choice: Prairie, Lake, River, Thunder

May 1996

Prairie, Lake, River, Thunder

by Kip Williams

I love Chicago. I grew up on the north side within six blocks of Wrigley field and the totem pole in Lincoln Park. I no longer live in the area, but still love the place. But it is not just the food, culture, music, museums, architecture, opportunities, and politics that I miss. While I do yearn to see a good play, eat Thai food, and read the Tribune sports page, I yearn for something else that is easily forgotten in the urban bustle: I yearn for the land itself.

Chicago is a place for which I have many emotional and image-laden memories. I remember the big waves of Lake Michigan trying to break the rock retaining walls during an April gale and the thunderstorms rushing in from the west while sitting on my parent’s back porch. I recall the colors of the hickories and oaks out near Woodstock during late October. I can smell the earthy, almost swampy odors of the Des Plaines river. I can see the young shoots of corn on the fields of Kane County. I can feel the wet, heavy snow from the blizzards of the late 1970s. I can hear the crickets and cicadas on a humid summer night in Horner Park. I remember the awe that I felt when I saw a Native American burial mound in southern Wisconsin. As such, I am not just from Chicago: it is my homeland.

Like all people who live or have lived in the area, I have my special, personal experiences that continue to connect me with this part of Mother Earth. But like most people that were raised in Judeo-Christian traditions, I had no spiritual vocabulary to help me make sense of my experience. To be more specific, I had no mythic or spiritual metaphor through which I could structure my experience. I possessed no coherent set of ideas which would guide me to see these experiences of the natural world as sacred or as infused with Divine consciousness. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to share some spiritual, philosophical, and psychological ideas and images that have been the foundation of my relationship to the earth in general and to this land, the Wild Onion country, in particular.

If there is one thing that is at the heart of all earth religion and aboriginal spiritual practices, it is the premise that there is a fundamental unity between conscious human beings and the natural world. The Lakota formulation of this idea is "Mitakuye Oyasin." Translated, these words mean "All my relations." In the Celtic tradition, it is expressed as "The true self and the land are one." In other words, human beings and the rest of the creation are in a close relationship. Minerals, plants, animals, elemental powers, seasons, weather, and places are accorded the same respect as other human beings. More important, the elements and aspects of the natural world have names, thoughts, feelings, histories, stories, talents, purposes, etc. They have knowledge and wisdom and will answer questions if asked with the right frame of mind. In short, the rest of the creation is conscious. The world itself and the parts of this world have awareness.

In addition to human beings and the conscious physical world, there are the beings we can call the Creator’s Helpers. In the Christian tradition, these helpers are the angels, archangels, and the Holy Spirit. In aboriginal spiritual traditions, there are a myriad of Sacred Persons which move back and forth between this world and the Creator. These persons include Mother Earth, Father Sky, the keepers or guardians of the four directions, the Chief Spirit of each kind of rock, animal, and plant, the four elements and the Ancestors.

In addition, there are the cultural heroes and "First Persons" in tribal histories that have been accorded with Divine status. Among the Native American elders with whom I have studied, there is a man who is variably called Old Man, Napi, Wesagayska, Nanabush, or Coyote. He was a human being and a Divine being who did not create the world but who caused the world to be the way that it is through his many insights, mistakes, and sacred adventures. He made the human beings, built the rivers and mountains, named the animals, placed the stars in their places, created religious ceremonies, etc. His work is seen in the world as it is known today. Other similar Native American Sacred Persons include Scarface of the Blackfeet, Changing Woman of the Apache, Skunny Wuddy of the Eastern Woodland tribes, and Iktomi of the Lakota.

There are two important and interrelated ways to think about these Sacred Persons, the Creator’s helpers. First, they are part of the stories, ceremonies, and mythology of aboriginal people. These Sacred Persons are entities, which are part of a greater tribal cosmology. They have specific powers and qualities to which a person can appeal for help. They act in harmony with the will of the Creator within the realm of human, worldly events. Second, these Sacred Persons are also mythological archetypes. At a psychological level, these Divine personalities represent the whole range of human hopes, attributes, ideas, and beliefs. They are expressions of human nature and the structures of human perception. In a mythic state of awareness, human beings experience these Divine helpers as real and the things that are said about them as meaningful. Mythology does not center itself on questions about fact or fiction, but the perception that "I experience the world in this way" and the intuition that "I live as if it were true."

There are two more significant things that I think make up a holistic bioregional spiritual metaphor. First, there is what I call the universal perception pattern. This pattern is based on the following matrix: a human being is an oblong creature that stands upright on a very large sphere that is perceived as being somewhat flat. Standing on the earth, a human tends to perceive space as organized into the following related parts: above, below, front, right, behind, and left. In relationship to itself, the human being sees the world from its own perspective: as the central axis that sees the horizontal plane of the world spread out around it. Many earth traditions have these six directions as part of their spiritual imagery and ritual practice. What all of the traditions have in common is a circle at the center of which stands a human being, a Sacred Person or a ritual object. The foundation of this commonality is the nature of human perception of the world in which it exists. For example, Native American elders point their Sacred Pipes to the four corners of the earth and Wiccans cast circles with their wands and swords.

Finally, there is the bioregion itself. Each part of the planet has a very distinct set of animals, plants, weather, shape, moisture etc. Aboriginal people continue to live in very close contact with their environment and have a very detailed and pragmatic knowledge of it. Over thousands of years, this knowledge and the qualities of the place were incorporated into their stories, art, ceremonies, explanations for the nature of things and answers to fundamental human questions. Some of these questions include the following: Why are we here? From where did we come? What is the nature of God? Their explanation of ultimate matters is interwoven with what is most immediate to them. In other words, the spiritual understanding is grounded in what lives and grows in their place on Mother Earth.

We can see that for aboriginal people, the natural landscape is also that which has ultimate meaning and power. At the core, they are living in Divine interdependency with the whole of Creation and with a particular place. We cannot perceive it as easily in modern cities. Yet it is true for us, as well.

As a human being and as a resident of the Wild Onion Bioregion, you already have all of the raw experience that you need in order to develop a sacred understanding of where you live. Universal and local patterns are implicit in your understanding. In the diagram on the next page I outline one spiritual metaphor for the Wild Onion Bioregion. Through this description, I hope that your understanding becomes richer and more explicit.

As a result of my ten years of study with traditional elders, the images and ideas in this metaphor are drawn from several Native traditions. But to be honest, this is not a Native American metaphor. Rather, it is a metaphor that is used by a native of North America. It is just one of many possible metaphors that are current among earth people who live in this area. It’s important to remember that a good metaphor is one which continues to help people to deal with the world in new and creative ways and leads to ever increasingly complex layers of knowledge and wisdom. If this particular description does not engage your perception, do not despair; you can find or create your own. The exact content of the metaphor is less important than the patterns of perception and the commitment to seeing the world in a sacred way.

Each and every place on Mother Earth is sacred and unique. The Wild Onion land on which you stand and from which you derive your life has a vibration, a myth, and a Divine personality of its own. As Outward Bound leaders and good spiritual teachers regularly say: Be Here Now. You are a child of this land. You choose to be a resident of this part of the planet. You live on the Prairie that is next to the Lake: you’re a person of the Wild Onion. Celebrate and appreciate this place and it will nourish your soul.

Kip Williams is a native of Chicago. An adopted grandson and nephew of traditional elders in the American West, he has studied the religious and cultural ways of these aboriginal peoples since 1986. He is committed to their preservation and active continuation.

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