"Good fortune follows ..."

"...It doesn’t matter if anyone else values these things. Monday morning good fortune follows when you move to protect your interests. It’s not exactly ego interests. What I mean are the things that we sometimes put on the back burner, things that make us feel in touch with our singular selves but don’t necessarily jibe with everyone around us..." - Satori writes about today's sky.

My son and I were talking (via email) this weekend. 

I wrote, "I'm feeling disheartened." This was about my experiences with stepping into teaching face-to-face, sharing what I really love!

"Do you think you have to dumb it down for them? Is it relevant for them?" He said he asks himself these questions all the time. I told him I've been asking myself those same questions for decades.

The weekend was frothy with difficulty, death and obstacles left and right. Reflecting on the exchange of thoughts my son and I tossed back and forth I wonder about my need to keep looking in the 'rear view mirror' as a habit. Satori's thought, "It doesn't matter if anyone else values these things...good fortune follows when you move to protect your interests." As I try to feed these words onto the screen my Aumakua Raven is yelling in the Tall Trees above. I return the calls and ask, "What is it? Where are you." I step away from the screen and walk between the vardo and the Huckleberries. Above me Raven soars. Head South! That's what I see him do.

What I am trying to do is introduce and teach a culture that is "exotic" to some who are not Hawaiian, "interesting" to them for whatever reason, but ... there are requirements. What I ask of people requires them to be willing to change (if they are fragrance heavy) and, prepared to dig into TEK Indigenous Environmental Knowledge with a digging stick and not a shovel. The practices of TEK do not 'jibe with everyone around us' (as Satori writes). 

In the middle of the frothy weekend I quietly took myself on a walk ...

Puddles collected as the ground remembered what rain can do after a two-month dry spell

Blossoms burst from the Rose of Sharon I brought home to remember my Brother David

Spider webs held onto the rain ... treasuring each drop

When I went for a drive to check on some Medicine Plants, I see the braid of La'i to remind me "Remember to Remember."

Head South. Pay attention."O Great Spirit of the South, Protector of the fruitful land, And of all green and growing things, The nobel trees and grasses, Grandmothe Earth, Soul of Nature, Great power of the receptive, Of nurturance and endurance, Power to grow and bring forth Flowers of the field, Fruits of the garden. We pray that we may be aligned with you, so that your powers may flow through us, And be expressed by us, For the good of this planet Earth, And all living beings upon it. - from the Conclusion of Angeles Arrien's Four-Fold Way, "Four Elements Medicine Wheel Prayer Turtle Island West Coast Ralph Metzner