I was recently invited to address a gathering of resident chaplains in the pastoral care department of a major urban medical center. Specifically, they asked me to present the shamanic point of view of team building with an emphasis on creating alliances and community.
There is no such thing! From a shamanic point of view (as well as quantum scientific thought) separation is a false concept. It is redundant to think of reaching out to build teams, alliances, and communities, since we are already all connected, allied, joined together as one. The fact is there is no such thing as opposing sides.There is only one side: just us folks, all of us everywhere, trying to live life as best we can, much more alike than different. There is no us and them. There is only us. We — all of us who occupy this planet: organic and inorganic; living and not; past, present, and future —are the world. Continue reading “Interdependence Day by Mama Donna Henes”
I had a startling experience in church recently. It was Father’s Day, and the pastor was talking about how “God is our heavenly Father.” For the first time in 17 years, that idea held some appeal to me. But no sooner did the thought enter my mind, then it was ripped away by the realization that my church will never allow me to symbolize the divine as a “father.”
Seventy-two hours out of every week, I carry a hotline phone. While calls come in waves and some shifts are silent, my everyday and professional lives are peppered with reminders that evil doesn’t just pierce reality through acts of power, control, and violence – it seeps through in discrediting voices and disbelieving questions. It rolls into us off the well-meaning tongues of community members who’d rather protect the status quo than hold people accountable. It wraps its tendrils around us as we walk through each system we are forced to navigate – systems that are not set up to protect our vulnerable hearts and human dignity. Evil powers the backlash wave that tries to knock down every survivor who speaks out about gender, sexual, or intimate partner violence, and it also is in the fear we swallow when we choke down our own stories, press them down deeper, grasping to avoid yet another assault on our integrity, intelligence, and truth.
Dreaming has always been a huge part of my life. When I was a little girl, I would run to my mom in the morning, before I was even completely awake, and tell her what I had been dreaming, It would seem very important, I mean, desperately, terribly important, to share whatever journey I had been on.
One of my undergraduate professors was (and still is) a haiku enthusiast. When I took his Zen Buddhism course, students were required to write haiku throughout the semester. He encouraged us to focus on the natural world as we struggled to come up with three lines of seventeen syllables, arranged in a five-seven-five pattern. I eventually discovered lots of pleasure creating a haiku poem—crisp, even stark—using words with a precision I found beautiful.
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I bet almost no one knows this secret: the United States is being watched over by two goddesses! One of them stands on top of the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C. The other stands on an island in New York harbor.
“Where is my mother? I am thirsty.”
As so many of us recoil in horror at the Trump administration’s cruel attempts to enforce an impenetrable border between the U.S. and Mexico, I find myself struggling to understand what he and his supporters mean by “borders,” and why they are so invested in maintaining them. The administration’s vicious immigration policy, recently epitomized in a brief tweet on June 19th, 2018—Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when slaves were finally freed throughout the U.S. at the end of the Civil War—“If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country” has sent me back to 
