Echoes of Grace(Charles E.J. Moulton) Echoes of Grace

Cherokee Wisdom by Charles E.J. Moulton

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A Cherokee father named Rising Sun regularly took his daughter Laughing Daisy out on moonlit nights to look at the stars. These were magic rituals filled with mystery and imagination. The grass was felt, not just touched. Coyotes were listened to, not just heard in the distance. The moon was studied, not just watched. Nighttime became a close friend. A true companion. Every star was called by name, often after the names of family members. One star became Laughing Monkey, Rising Sun's twin brother. Another star became Smiling Squirrel, Rising Sun's wife. Sometimes, stars were given weird and funny names like Hiccupping Donkey or Burping Tiger and father and daughter would laugh.

Every constellation became a familiar picture. New constellations would appear in the child's mind. What did the stars look like? One day, Laughing Daisy would say the sky looked like fireflies stuck on a tipi. On other days, she said they looked like campfires shining far away in distant settlements. On a third, she saw herself in the sky. Whatever answer came out, her imagination was triggered. The gut instinct came from deep within. The physical reality of the stars spurred a spirit within. It opened up a fascination for nature that remained up to old age, long before Columbus arrived. Even the aging grandfathers would say that the Great Spirit sent them certain physical signs to show them where the true spirit dwelled. A leaf would fall at the right time, just as a woman walked by a tree, in order to show her something, make her stop and wonder. A coyote would howl just to make a boy stop long enough to see a friend coming to greet him. That way, the physical and spiritual realities were linked. There was no real difference between the two. So the stars were indeed friends. Laughing Daisy understood that.

And so, Laughing Daisy kept going to that field for years looking at the stars and doing the same thing with her kids.

What magic are you giving your kids? As Stephen Sondheim told his listeners in "Into the Woods": "Children will listen. Children will learn."

The ancient wisdom of spirit and matter being connected was not only an integral part of the Native American cultures. It was also part of the gnostic teachings of Mary Magdalene, who believed true spirituality could only be found when experienced fully in mind, body and soul. We are born with eyes, noses, ears, touch, taste and feelings in order to experience reality. We are conscious students in the workshop of life. We have to experience it consciously in order to learn something. The Native Americans found God in all the elements and told their children to honor the land and each animal they killed.

Indeed, conscious awareness is everything. If we just take everything for granted and walk the known roads, the small ordinary ones, we won't learn anything. So walk another just as ordinary road and be willing to see the extraordinary. Even Jesus asked people to watch closely and sense life. Be aware. Even stage presence is awareness. A person that is acutely aware of his or her surroundings will undoubtedly radiate awareness.

The idea of finding God everywhere is innate and wakes people up. It was in part lost to the modern world, but the core of it has remained. When we look at the world, most concepts come not from thoughts but from intuitive ideas that come seemingly from nowhere. Art still has that. Anyone that creates anything will tell you that the idea did not come from them, but from spirit. I have heard atheists say they believe in energy and spirit but not in God. But therein lies the great misunderstanding. Quantum physics tells us energy is everything. That really is Native American philosophy. Packets of light are everywhere. Talking with someone we like really is the light. Kissing someone we love really is the light. Making love to someone we love really is the light. Make love to angels. Find God while making babies and become a part of God. Awareness of what feelings we feel and what emotional signals we send out is a lost art. There are conversations behind all conversations. If we are honest, we all are extremely sensitive to dishonest people. We don't believe these people who lie us in the face. We believe the honest people. That would not be possible without spirit.

We should really take care of not spiritually polluting each other. Spiritual pollution is far more toxic than environmental pollution. Air can be cleaned. But a soul polluted by spiritual damage can sometimes take with its wounds through many lifetimes. If the soul does not know why it is afraid of something, it will take a whole lot of perseverance to fix it. And modern society tries to mute the psychosis with medicine, but it only makes it worse. Modern infrastructure does not sense or feel where other people are. Money runs the business and the internet has replaced introspection. Nothing is private anymore. Every reaction belongs to everyone and if we are unable to keep something to ourselves, we in part lose our identity. Be careful what you say. Children will listen. People react the way society tells them to react. Not where individuals are. We have become desensitized. Laughing Daisy never lost the ability to look deeper beyond the surface. She realized that good looking people can be enormously insecure and that life is a mystery.

Every composer, author or poet will admit that their best work came not from them, but from somewhere else. But where is that somewhere? Well, according to Cherokee wisdom that somewhere is everywhere and each place is accompanied with a spirit that is assigned to take care of it.

The medicine men of the ancient Cherokee said the spirits of the world dance around humans like fireflies. They know what we have deliberately forgotten and are experts in reminding us what we have need to remember. That the universe is one organism. We are, so said the Cherokee, parts of God. The lungs. The heart. The kidney. The liver. But we all serve the same purpose. Life. And so we see ourselves in the stars, just like the Cherokee girl did.

If we indeed are stardust just like the scientists say, then seeing yourself in the sky is not so farfetched. When we love someone, we actually are so immersed in that love because we are looking at ourselves. If the universe is one organism, like every human consists of different cells, then we truly are one. The ancient Asian philosophy of Chi is just another version of Quantum Physics. The scientists of today have to connect that to human consciousness and they will find God.

If I look into your eyes, my dear, and fall in love with you, it is no wonder I want more of you, because I see myself inside you. That is the secret of every love song ever written. Frank Sinatra said every love song is about making love. Every love song is an endeavor to see the own eternity in someone else's eyes. No wonder we love kissing and making love to each other.

We even become little Gods through our love, creating a child. So it is actually perverse that the modern world has deemed sex to be a sin. We can't deny our nature. We just have to control the power of what we feel, channel it before it channels us. Trust your soul.

Sometimes wisdom challenges us. Opposites attract. We wonder why our partners are so different than us. But if they weren't, we would probably sink and not be able to handle life. It's all about balance between Yin and Yang, hot and cold, me and you, up and down, business and pleasure, fun and work. The truth is in the middle of all of that. In the harmony that appears between the two. That is why we incarnate. That is what we are here to achieve. We are rivers aiming to fuse with other rivers.

A very spiritual man who only sees the fabric of the universe would literally vanish into eternity away from reality if he didn't have his organized wife with her feet on the ground. He might complain about her ways, but if he didn't have her, he would waste his money and philander and live in complete chaos. He needs her. But she needs him, as well. A person cannot live on bread alone. And I believe that souls incarnate here to learn something. We keep on going back to our original task until we actually transform our energies for the harmony of the collective. Nothing else makes sense.

And so we pass from generation to generation a willingness to survive, to love, to share. It was given to us by the elders who passed the staff of light to us by candlelight over a hot cup of tea. We knew it was a light. For we saw the light inside our grandfather's eyes. And we wondered what it was, that spark. Why did his smile make us feel so good? Was it the smile itself? No, it was something behind the smile. The vehicle behind it. Grandpa had been working on it for lifetimes. He had found his way through cataclysm to touch eternity. And there he sat, with us on his knee, reading a book. Telling us a story. And we felt touched by heaven in his warmth when his wife, who made our mothers, called out that the apple pie was cooling off on the window sill. And we wondered why we had to let go of so many valuable artefacts to come so far. But we knew that, like Buddha, we would never have understood the universe in it's full gamut had we kept it all. For all of the universe is encompassed in one single molecule. So why would we hold on to a few things when the whole universe is ours to keep?

Heaven. We didn't just come from there. Heaven is ours to keep. We know that and we keep on knowing it. We just make the mistake of thinking we are not there. No matter what anyone said, we felt heaven when we kissed the person we loved for the first time. We felt heaven when we made love to that person hearing the person call out God's name. We were little snipbits of heaven, making love to angels, like pages from an old magazine we kept to read again and again, just to remind us who we were. We were cells in God's body and so very much God himself. Who knew? Maybe the cells themselves were individuals that had cells in them who prayed to them, knowing that there was something bigger than them. And so we proved it by understanding that there were galaxies beyond the big bang, proving eternity. We looked to the stars and saw ourselves looking down at us. Just like our lovers looked at us with a reflection of our own eyes when we made love to them. When they smiled, we saw our own soul in there. Which is why we suspected that we were connected.

Some of us fought in wars just to find the joy of coming back to embrace our loved ones, proving that love never dies. That love outshines everything. The kisses, the hugs, the lovemaking, the kindness, the children's laughter, the kind word given to a homeless man, the tears dried on a summer night. Some of us went into unspeakable troubles just to find peace at the end of the road. Some of us walked down lonely avenues of forgotten trees, crying behind thick sunglasses, asking God to let us find ourselves again. Some of us fought in the French Revolution on opposite sides just to realize that all the dead only lead to more dead and that the tyranny just changed names. Some of us reincarnated into other genders, trying to remember but always willing to forget. But we saw the truth in the stranger's eyes that told us we knew that person from the time when we were lead to the Guillotine.

But some of us found love and kept it, glorifying happiness by drinking rosé wine by the fireside on the sheep skin rug, eating chocolate truffles, to the sound of the music of The Carpenters. We proved that love indeed is imbedded inside every molecule we create.

We are love and light and we have guides and guardian angels that do nothing but try to influence us to be the best we are.

See the angels. Make love to them. And like Laughing Daisy, holding her father Rising Sun's hand, try seeing yourself in the sky.

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