The Sisterhood is a Natural Response to Unnatural Times

The Sisterhood is a Natural Response to Unnatural Times

by Sister Kate, Snow Moon March 2018

We are living in unnatural times.  It is unnatural for one generation to have a worse quality of life than the generation before it.  It is unnatural to starve your people, while fueling a war machine.   It is unnatural that one generation is more ignorant that its ancestors, that the schools are less funded.  It is unnatural to have a growing wage and class divide.  It is unnatural that our kids eat less healthy food generation to generation, or to have a growing infant mortality rate.  It is unnatural to leave your populace to find their own medicines, because the tribe won’t take care of them.  It is unnatural to allow a dying paradigm to continue to gasp and struggle in pain.

We are Beguine-revivalists, we are the Brothers and Sisters of the Valley  . . . the valley from Psalm 23 that recognizes that we are walking in the valley of darkness.  We are in the dark night of the globe.  We are in the same valley, all of us.  We are on the brink of extinction.  And our old structures serve us no longer.   In times like these, it would be unnatural to NOT have an order like ours spring up.  We are a natural outcome of times like these.

We are not alone.  We are among many others who are connecting to a stream of consciousness, as if we are all riding our own trains but can reach up and pull the same stop-cord.  We reach up.  And we connect to a universal energy that exists to reverse what is unnatural in our lives.  We reverse the isolation by being together.  We reverse the over-messaging by working together silently.  We reverse the dismissal and insult to Mother Earth by putting her back in the center of our spiritual practices.

We do not rush anywhere, and we will not prepare our medicines or do any work in a rushed environment.  It is unnatural.  Our ancient mothers would object.  It is unnatural to approach projects or ceremonies or anything that requires planning, with a kind of muscle energy that assumes enthusiasm is all you really need to get something done.  That’s unnatural.  That’s what we call ‘white man’ thinking.  We sometimes call it ‘tweeker’ thinking.  It means a lot of rah-rah words, as if we need words to fuel our jobs.  We don’t.  We need a quiet safe space to hear our higher selves.

We believe that the best projects, the best meals, the best ceremonies, the best intimacies, are born of steady, calm, thoughtful planning, infused with prayerful, focused work.  That’s ancient wisdom.

We exist to combat the death of conscience in our culture, with a lifestyle that is radically conscience of all life forms and all energies.  We combat the death of the value of facts in our contemporary culture, by being scholars, and by valuing scientific data.  We combat the sad loss of expectation for any sane leadership with the requirement for Elders to provide excellence in leadership.  We counter the death of people’s faith in humanity by having great faith in our tribal members and all of Mother Earth’s children.  And we counter the death of the sacred by making all of our breaths, all of our efforts, all of our interactions, all that we are, all that we do, and all that we hope to become — sacred.  (Savage Grace)

Together we face the unnatural times and say, ‘our answer is to grow the Sisterhood!  Our answer to you, the dark night of the globe, is that we thrive.  The answer is for us to grow.  To you, unnatural forces, forces of evil, forces of old paradigm, to you, we say, ‘we will not stop growing’.  We will not stop until the whole planet is illuminated, and even then, our light will always grow brighter.