Finding my spiritual way

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

September 25

     Three months until Christmas. Just noticing.
     Today I would have been leaving for a Buddhist retreat center called Wonderwell Mountain Refuge. A five day program called Green Dharma: A Residential Retreat for EcoSattvas had caught my eye, and I signed up. I was calling this fall my "Continuing Education" time, finding myself hungrily signing up for a couple of retreats in which I could learn more about healing in the face of climate stress and anxiety. 
     This is my life's work, now. There has been a dawning

Black Elk among other teachers

awareness that I have the resources to help others with this: Reiki, my studies of Buddhism, Hinduism, shamanism, Sioux spirituality, Christianity - though none of them in depth or immersive except the Christian component. Perhaps a catalyst for this hunger was listening to Penobscot water keeper, activist, lawyer and teacher Sherri Mitchell speak for a day this summer.
     All morning we had listened to her talk about the relationship between her people and the land, how that was constantly under assault by colonializing cultures. She spoke non-linearly, almost like a story teller. She had been at Standing Rock; she was battling the State of Maine for the life of the Penobscot River; she was working on a second book; she had speaking engagements around the world.
     During the lunch break, I waited quietly for a moment to speak with her privately. When it was my turn, I told her I had been given a sacred pipe, and...
     Sherri's face changed slightly as she listened to me. I could sense her displeasure. My humbleness and reverence meant nothing. My stumbling question was: should I use the pipe or was this wrong? When she spoke, she said "Pray with the pipe for yourself. But these are not your ways or traditions, so don't use them ceremonially, and certainly never when money is involved." I flushed; I knew that much. But I was embarrassed deeper down at having offended her. In her eyes I was not so much an individual as one more wound-maker in the cloud of white colonists stealing the spirituality of her People.
     She was right. I knew it. But I had hoped she would say something else, something like "you must be special; I will find you a Wabanaki teacher." It was that slim hope, as well as a desire to settle this question in my heart, that had propelled my courage to ask her face to face.
     I thanked her and went to eat an egg salad sandwich.
     But here is the lesson:
     After lunch, when we had all regathered and Sherri had settled in on the chair up front, she opened by recounting our conversation in general terms, saying she wanted to discuss cultural appropriation. My ears felt warm; they were probably red. Playing Indian was not ok. I looked at the woman sitting on the floor in front of me, her blond hair tied in braids with a leather thong, soft moccasins on her feet, her body that had been leaning forward eagerly hanging on Sherri's words starting to shrink back a bit. Internally I had scoffed at her when I first sat down, but really, how am I any different?
     Acknowledging that those who "play Indian" do so because the customs and spirituality that attract them feed something missing from their own spirituality, she charged us with staying in our own inherited cultural traditions and finding what we need there.
     Christianity. I blanched. I grew up in a Christian household, had practiced actively, took my own young family to church and taught Sunday School, even led the charge to awaken my parish and Diocese to what we called "stewardship of Creation." As my nagging awareness that I didn't buy some key aspects of Christian theology and creed deepened, I threw myself into deeper study of it in a four-year course for lay people. But eventually I just drifted away from the Church, realizing that I did not need a mediator with the Divine, that for me a Savior, a sacrificial Son, was not an icon I could find meaning in.
     So what was I to do?
     Sherri's charge to stop appropriating and stick-with-what-you-got stuck in my craw. The second part at least; I understood the part about not appropriating.
     All summer I mulled this. I knew I couldn't go back to Christianity, though in my many studies and experiences with other wisdom traditions I had come to see and even appreciate the qualities of Christianity that were mystical and profound. It was one of many, many pathways to the Divine, the Creative Spirit that is at once within and without, inhabiting, connecting, encompassing.

     And this is where I have finally settled, thanks to Sherri's uncomfortable message: go back to what is yours. Mine is without label, a direct connection with Spirit, informed and supported by the arrows found in all traditions pointing to it. My spirituality is self-referential, as my Reiki Master teacher would say. I inquire within, where Spirit resides in me. I have my own daily practices, and they shift and deepen in a dynamic flow of my own ongoing awakening. For me, the most profound gateways to Spirit is the Earth itself, her depths, her beauty, her renewal, her seasons, her marriage to air and sky and cosmos, her constant pregnancy and nurturing and release of the creatures that come from her. And I am also Earth, and of the Earth, and we are only small manifestations of Something More that I cannot really comprehend.
     Stepping into the authenticity of my own spirituality, I believe I can help others who, like me, are suffering as the world moves towards drastic change at a frightening speed because of an overload of carbon and methane into the atmosphere. I can offer my wisdom and practices, and I can offer teachings and practices from other traditions that are freely shared.
     That is why I was signed up to go to the Green Dharma retreat: to learn directly from Buddhist teachers about this very problem of climate change suffering.
     Except I have a growth in my abdomen. And I have been scheduled to see a gynecological oncologist on what would have been the second day of my retreat.