by Leon Secatero, Navajo
The journey we are beginning now is for the next 500 years. What will be the sacred path that people will walk over the next 500 years? Even in the midst of all the changes taking place and all the things falling apart, we are building that foundation now. That’s something important for us to remember and to focus on. If we don’t do it, no one else will.
All anyone needs to do is look around. We have been destroying nature systematically for many decades. Now, nature is destroying us with winds and storms and earthquakes and volcanoes. All that was known a long time ago. The elders have been telling us for years that this would come. Now it’s here and it’s hurting us.
We need to take a close look at this and then really come to terms with ourselves. To move ahead into the next 500 years, we must leave some things behind or they will contaminate or even eliminate the future. We cannot go forward if we keep destroying the Earth. But we must also ask, what is good and healthy and helpful? Those good things can be part of our foundation, part of our pathway into the next 500 years.
The elders talked about positive things, focusing on the positive to make things happen, to bring in good energy so that life will continue. They said to use song, prayer, dance to focus on positive thought, and to help us go forward on the path to the future in a good way, in a sacred way.
What I was shown was the way we should be, how we must be to influence the future, and also to influence all the plants, the animals, the waters, the air and the fire. It’s important. I came to a knowing that the only way you can have the power is through the color and the light of positive thought and energy. Put all your concentration on this, not other things. Put your concentration on the positive. That’s how it’s done.
All the native knowings, or prophecies that have been passed down talk about a time when the five-fingered ones (human beings) would be so caught in the illusion of separation that they would forget their original instructions. This forgetting has caused terrible suffering for everyone and everything. It is very important for us to reconnect our life and our ways.
Things are changing and in the midst of this the most important thing is the sacred path to the next 500 years, creating that path in a sacred manner with positive thoughts and actions. We have experienced negativity on a mass scale. There is social illness; there is great pain and suffering in our world. Those kinds of negativity and social illnesses we do not need to take along this new pathway into the next 500 years. If we do, we only become sicker.
We can put everything forward that is sacred. You and I have to do it. Our children – and the generations that are coming – are waiting for this gift. So we are going to have to hold hands and go in one direction to give it to them.
What is so very important in our lives now – just like water, we need it all the time – is recognition that there is sacredness in every form. When you put all that together you have a process of what I call “sacredization,” a fundamental recognition of the sacredness of all things. That, I feel, is a part of our original instructions as human beings.
This is the time that we call the Winds of Change. It’s important to stabilize our way of being, the way we think, the way we do things. We can do that by deliberately planting positive seeds of culture and relationship and sacredization, seeds that will help carry us through the next 500 years.
For the next 500 years, the Winds of Change are blowing. Many of us have knowings about this. In fact, it’s a knowing we all have, but that most people ignore. They are confused, and they look the other way. But the knowing is there for all of us.
We are all asking ourselves ‘what do we do next?’ Our ending time has come and we are now asking for the best possible way to restructure, reset and put things back on track that give strength to us. So we have a huge task. We are going to have to come together. This pathway into the next 500 years has to be open so that we can bring in sacredness. We want to make a beginning, a pathway, a Blessingway for this next 500 years. That’s the task that is before all of us right now.
From Native Knowings: Wisdom Keys for 2012 and Beyond by Steven McFadden. Mcfadden wrote Native Knowings after travelling with many contemporary, Native American spiritual elders and hearing their teachings about the land and about the era of transition in which we live.
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