sky Archives - The Soul of the Earth

The depth of water: celebrating the Season of Creation

Raindrops on an upside down white poppy in a garden in California by Betsey Crawford

Our ancestors had it right: they worshipped water. And for this year’s Season of Creation I am joining them. I’m far from the only one. Indigenous peoples still revere water, as does the Afro-Caribbean culture. The rest of us would do well to take their hands because water’s presence on this planet is what makes every manifestation of life possible. Water is central to creation myths worldwide because it actually created us.

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The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address

Vivid sunset in Lakewood, Colorado by Betsey Crawford

The Confederacy of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations in what is now upstate New York has been meeting for 1,000 years. United by a common goal to live in harmony, each meeting, large and small, is opened with the beautiful and incantatory Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. This enfolds each gathering in a culture of

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The solace of deep time

In his 1981 book, Basin and Range, John McPhee gave us a good analogy for the scale of deep time. Stretch out your arm sideways, and imagine that the 4.55 billion-year timeline of earth’s history runs from the tip of your nose to the tip of your middle fingernail. A quick swipe of a nail file would wipe out human history.

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Songlines 2016: landscapes of love and prairies

When I first described my love for the Aboriginal concept of songlines, the paths taken by the First Beings as they sang the world into existence, I said that one of the ideas I love best is that we are tasked with continuing the work in our own lives. As we walk through our days, we

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Walking in beauty

I’ve been a walker all my life. From grade school through college, I walked to school. As teenagers in a small town with nowhere to go, we would take walks to hang out together. I walked to my first job after college. There were a couple of years, after moving to New York City, when

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Smoky Valley Ranch: preserving a prairie

Smoky Valley Ranch was the place I didn’t go to see. I went to Oakley, Kansas to see Monument Rocks and Lake Scott State Park, both recommended by a man named Mike Haddock, who runs a wonderful Kansas wildflower website. Oakley is not a destination site, but there are some interesting things to see there,

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Parcels of prairie: the Pawnee National Grasslands

The Pawnee National Grasslands were born out of grief. After years of drought, farmers of northeastern Colorado, already suffering through the Great Depression, watched as their soil literally blew away. Clouds of dirt rose 20,000 feet in the air and blew so far east that they eventually settled on boats crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Left

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The mysterious Yukon

If you want tundra, you must either go far enough north or high enough up. So a trip up the Dempster Highway in the Yukon was perfect for my longing for arctic plants. Two days of careful driving over the dirt and gravel road will take you into the Northwest Territories and to the Arctic

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Songlines 2015: north to Alaska

For the first Songlines post last spring, I wrote about how much I love creation stories that not only have the world sung into existence, but also have us continually bringing life to life as we relish our own passing presence. What a great joy it is to be given the task of singing of

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Samhain in New Jersey

I didn’t know I was going to a place I love in New Jersey until two weeks before I went, and had no idea I’d be celebrating Samhain there. But it’s the sort of place where that happens, so I might have guessed. Miriam McGillis is a friend, mentor, teacher. She started Genesis Farm, an

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