[Chapter_Fourteen] Zone Zero

[Sherri L Mitchell]

Lindsey asked: How does living a path with heart inform stewardship?

Rachel - I enjoyed reading your post. Thank you for sharing your vision with
the group.

For me, as a native woman, this concept of stewardship is one that I have
wrestled with understanding for most of my life. I have been raised with an
expectation of being able to meaningfully contribute to the work of
generations of "stewards" who came before me, in order to preserve that
pathway for the generations who will follow. When I was younger I thought
that this idea of stewardship was a protective environmental stance. Today,
I realize that it is more a posture of cultivation. It is about cultivating
my own inner wisdom, guidance and truth. It is about cultivating a love that
will nourish and sustain me throughout my life. It is about cultivating
relationships, big and small, that will someday grow into vast networks of
caring and connected beings. It is about cultivating cultural knowledge and
indigenous intelligence, which teaches me of my place in creation and my
relatedness to all living things. Living a path with heart teaches us these
same things. It teaches us that we are infinitely tied to one another
through both visible and invisible threads of connectivity. It shows us that
movement within these threads propels our movement forward, together.

When we first embark on this path we begin to cultivate a life of
harmlessness, because we finally realize that others are affected. When we
deepen our awareness and sink deeper into the posture of harmlessness we
begin to actually feel how we are connected, not only to those who are
affected but also to the harm that is creating those impacts. This
strengthens our desire toward active stewardship. We are then compelled to
consciously "FLINK" (which is to simultaneously feel and think) about the
repercussions of our mental, emotional, spiritual and physical actions,
knowing fully that we are co-creating this world from a fundamental
vibrational level into physical form. This awareness continues to cultivate
deeper and deeper levels of stewardship from the ephemeral into the
tangible. And, all this begins with the first step that one takes toward
living a path with heart. To me, living a path with heart and stewardship
are deeply interconnected, one feeds and is fed by the other and both grow
and deepen in direct proportion to one another. It is a beautiful
demonstration of the cyclical nature of our conscious evolution.

Sherri

p.s. Thanks to Phyl Brazee for coining the term"flink," it so eloquently
describes one of the most important steps in our conscious evolution.

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 7:29 PM, Rachel A. Buddeberg <rachel at rabe.org>wrote:

> Lindsey asked: How does living a path with heart inform stewardship?
>
> To me, stewardship is about taking care of the earth in a way that is
> regenerative and sustainable.  Zone Zero reminds me that there is more to
> regeneration and sustainability.  The way we live our lives can be
> destructive to ourselves - we can be tied up in a stressful job that is
> draining rather than nourishing us.  Living on a path with heart allows us
> to regenerate ourselves, we slow down - and practice yoga between two busy
> streets in the sunshine, like i did today (thank you, Lindsey!).  It also
> meant for me to listen to my heart, which was screaming at me to quit my job
> and take a chance to figure out how to make a living in a way that is
> nourishing to myself and others, rather than making a dying in a job that
> contributed (in a very small way) to the financial crisis.  Living a path
> with heart, in my case means to honor the memory of a friend and co-worker
> who died of a massive heart attack on the job.  It is to understand deeply
> how destructive our current mainstream
>  culture really is - to the Earth and to all that is living on it,
> including us.  And it is sowing the seeds for something else: a way of live
> that lets us connect with others more deeply.
>
> Rachel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net mailing list
> chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net at lists.beforebefore.net
>
> http://lists.beforebefore.net/listinfo.cgi/chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net
>



-- 
Sherri Mitchell,
Treasurer, NNALSA
JD Candidate 2011
University of Arizona
202-299-4204
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.beforebefore.net/pipermail/chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net/attachments/20110213/a74f5765/attachment-0003.htm>