In the morning when you first awake, turn your thoughts to the ancestors and thank them for setting your feet upon the path of awareness.

As you rise and set your feet on the ground, or the floor that symbolizes stability and surety to us, give thanks to the earth, to the land in all its bounty for providing the nourishment that has kept you strong and helped you to thrive and grow.

As you bathe, shower, and dress, give thanks to the  Gods, to the Holy Powers and ask Their blessings throughout the day.

Each day is, as the cliche goes, a new beginning and that means each day is another chance to reconnect, to start one's day wisely and well. Each day is another chance to honor that three-fold fundamental connection that so informed our ancestors' world: to the Gods, the ancestors, the land itself.

We can do this thing called reconnection. We can restore our lost traditions and we can reclaim our indigenous filter. It all begins with that basic awareness of who we are and to whom /Whom we owe our gratitude. Take joy in this process. It is a joyous and joyful thing.
 
(and all those struggling to reclaim their indigeny,
all those struggling to throw off the yoke of conquest.)

Hold strong,
May your ancestors sustain you.

Hold strong,
May you never bow your head in this fight.

Hold strong against these people,
who come with their foreign Gods, foreign ways
and no ancestral voices to speak for them. 

The enemy comes offering bread.
The enemy comes offering books.
The enemy comes clothed in compassion
so that you will not see the poison behind their gifts.
That poison will destroy you.

Resist it with everything you have.
Resist it for your ancestors.
Resist it in the name of your Gods.
Resist it in the name of your people,
for your children,
so that they will have a future
in which their bellies and their spirits
will be fully nourished.

Hold fast, hold strong.
You are not alone in this fight.

Remember the sacrifices of your ancestors.
Remember the power and beauty of your people.

Do not allow the poison peddlers to divide you.
Engage, engage, engage
with all that nourishes you.

Drawn upon the wisdom and strength of your ancestors
And don’t ever let it go.

May you be nourished in all that you need.
May you ever hold fast.

I wrote this some time ago after learning that the new ideological position of Christian missionaries is that, as a colleague of mine wrote: “The un-G-O-D-ed folk of the world are now being referred to as "unengaged", not just "unreached".” We both wonder when this new position was taken and what it means to them. We also continue to take deep umbrage at that narrowly-focused target that gets placed on the backs of the world's otherwise QUITE fully and functionally 'engaged' indigenous people.” We are not unengaged. We’re  unbrainwashed. There’s a difference).




 
Oh my indigenous brothers and sisters,
hold your heads up high.
You were not sprung from your mothers' wombs
to make your oppressors comfortable.
You were not put upon this earth,
to accomodate
the disconnected, diseased panderers of hate,
and shame, and spiritual abrogation.
You were not given awareness
so that you could pour out offerings
to the God of your conquorers
and cannibalize your own children.
No. Seek your own ways,
and the ways of your dead.
They were wise and highly evolved.

Pour out offerings to the Gods of your people,
who followed you into slavery,
who stood by you through genocide,
who stood between you
and the spiritual penury
of monotheism,
Who sacrificed Themselves,
rather than see Their children perish.
Hold your heads up high
and know these things:

Your ancestors know your name.
You have a place.
You do not come from weak people.
You do not stand alone.
You, in your human skin,
whatever it may look like,
from wherever your lines might hail,
are magnificent.
You are your ancestral line walking.

So hold your head up high and proud,
and let no one, disconnected from their roots,
hold you down.
Do not accept the mental and spiritual chains.
Your ancestors worked too hard to free you from the same.
Praise them.
and walk with dignity and the strength
of thousands and thousands of men, women, and children,
bound to you by blood and spirit,
at your back.


 
We are in a world that requires revolution.  We are in a world where religious fanatics seek domination of our minds, hearts, and most of all our spirits. We are in a world where 1% of the privileged few feed on the blood of the poor and the sweat of the strong. We live in a world whose lifeblood is being crushed by the claw of monotheism and its children: greed, the corporatocracy, misogyny, racism, prejudice, callousness, and hate. We live in a world that is crying out for help; most of all, we live in a world where everyone is called to make a choice and make a stand.

What *do* you stand for? Which side of the equation do you support and favor? I hear many Pagans and even Heathens talking about peace. Peace does not come through non-involvement. Peace does not come through closing one’s eyes and accommodating the status quo. Peace does not come from swallowing injustice after injustice. Peace is the outgrowth of engagement. It rises up from the hearts of men and women deeply, compassionately, fiercely engaged with the pain and suffering of their world. It rises up from the efforts of those engaged to change their world for the better. Peace is the child of those who stand up and say ‘no more. No more.” It is not complaisance. It is not ennui. It is not un-involvement.

In this world, the very act of reconnecting with our ancestors is a vital and revolutionary one. We are in a war and it will be won not with bombs and guns and armaments but with the force of thousands and thousands of minds, hearts, and spirits turning back to the nourishment of their ancestors, reclaiming the filter of their own inherent indigeny, and casting off the mental and spiritual chains of monotheism and conquest. Those chains run deep. They hold us tightly. They have wound their way through every aspect of our modern world. They are imbued with the poison that threatens even the process of reconnection. Let us be its antidote. Let each one of us, supported by our dead, in line with our Gods, be the antidote to two thousand years of spiritual oppression. Do not compromise. There is no room for compromise here. Do not sell yourselves into mental slavery. Do not collaborate with those who would and who do.

That is precisely what people like the DC40 group, the New Apostolic Reform movement, and many members of our Republican controlled congress (who, as of this writing, have just passed the ‘let women die’ bill, because obviously in their dominionist inspired world, women don’t really count) are doing: they are enslaving us, chipping away at our rights and freedoms little by little. We have all, as Americans, been sold the idea of freedom. We’ve never been taught, however, or encouraged to ask what that really means, and what safeguarding it on a personal level entails. While our government is sending us overseas in defense of “liberty,” we’re losing what few liberties we have right here at home. We are being kept so numb and dumb that far too many of us don’t even know when the chains are tightening about our spirits, our minds, our civil liberties. We do not realize that we are slaves to the machine. We do not realize that we have no more liberty than a cow being led to the slaughterhouse.

I end many of my emails with a quote from the great abolitionist Frederick Douglas: "Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without planting up the ground. They want the rain without thunder or lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

He was right. We are living in exactly that kind of struggle. We must be harsh. We must be uncompromising. We must never, ever, ever stop speaking truth to power. Most of all, we must never retreat, not a single inch, not a millimeter in this fight because no matter how hopeless a fight it seems, not a single one of us is in this alone. Our ancestors are gathered behind us urging us on; the spirits of all those who will come after us are desperately begging us to never give up, and across this sad and sorry world, more and more people are waking up.  Resistance is our hope. It is the gift we give to the future.

We live in a world that requires revolution. Resistance starts by the willingness to examine one’s filter. How have you been taught to see and engage with the world? What have you been taught to value? To whom have you been taught to pray? Why? Resistance begins by tearing down the mental bricks and mortar of that filter and seeing the world clearly. Reject the filter of conquest, most especially your own. THIS is why connecting to one’s ancestors is crucial: they can and will help each and every one of us do just this thing. They are aching for the opportunity because we were not meant to be slaves.

The Saxon polytheist who laid down his life rather than convert, the European Pagan tortured to death rather than abandon his ancestral ways, the Taino woman who took up arms to protect her people, the Apache man who fought the white soldiers to keep his people free, the African woman ripped away from her people and forced into the terror of the middle passage who kept alive the sacred stories of her tribal Gods, and thousands and thousands of men, women, and even children just like them did not sacrifice and suffer so that we could go to our deaths not knowing who we are and where we come from. We not only owe them better than this; we owe it to ourselves too.

Because persecution of indigeny did not stop with modernity. It is not a thing of the past. We are not only still reaping its consequences but it continues today more hidden perhaps, but on no less detrimental a scale. How many evangelists went to Haiti after the recent earthquake, bullying survivors into accepting their God? How many times have tele-evangelists referred to indigenous peoples as ‘savage’ and in need of being ‘conquered for Christ’? How many Pagans have had their children taken away in custody cases for no other reason than that they were Pagan? These are religions struggling to reconnect with their indigenous traditions. They may not be *there* yet, but they’re trying and in many cases experiencing a backlash. I could fill pages with contemporary examples.

The only requirement to change this is courage and a willingness to act. Look upon the world we have inherited as it is without flinching, and decide for yourselves if it is the kind of world you wish to leave your children.

 
As part of the DC40 campaign, individual states are being targetted throughout the forty day period. As each state becomes the focus of their prayer war, NAR members bombard them if not in person, then with prayers and malignant energy work. That IS the nature of what they are doing: it's malignant energy work. i.e. black magic. They wouldn't classify it as such, of course, but by definition, they are attempting to non-consensually coerce a group of people into doing their will. THAT, my friends, is black magic. It's also disgusting and a violation their own humanity.

Today, New Mexico was targeted.
Tomorrow, that campaign turns its attentions to Oklahoma.

Here is what you can do: pray for the people in those states. Pray that they are not influenced by the malignancy, hatred, and narrow mindedness of the DC40 people. Pray that each state is protected from their poison. Pray that the Gods and ancestors, and Turtle Island herself, extend a shield over this land. Pray that she drive out that poison and allow it no purchase in the minds, hearts, and spirits of the people who dwell here.

Then call upon the ancestors of that state, those Native men and women who fought hard and fast for their freedom, who stood guard over the land, and did what they could to ensure the survival of their people. Beg for their help, because in the end, the poison that the DC40 group preaches is not native to these shores. It is not indigenous to America. It did not arise from the soil of this land. It can be pushed back and if we are very determined, driven out. So pray and may the Gods and ancestors hear our prayers.