Category Archives: Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

Missa Gai/Earth Mass

Buddhism, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty tended his lecture by talking about an   album of music released by Paul Winter in 1982 called “Missa Gaia/Earth Mass”.  The title actually refers to two languages, Latin for the word missa which means mass (the religious service)  and gaia from the Greek which refers to Mother nature. The earth in others words. So Missa Gaia is a mass for the earth.

 

Winter became artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York City which Moriarty referred to as “a great ship wreck of a Church.” It was one of the largest churches in the world, which naturally did not impress Professor Moriarty. “It may be the biggest but it’s not the most beautiful he said. The mass has been referred to as “an environmental liturgy of contemporary music.” It is performed annually at that church. The calls of wolves, whales and other animals are weaved into the pieces of music sometimes used as melody.

 

Moriarty also said it was exclesias down there. Where God has come down to earth. This comes from the Greek word Ekklēsia (gathering of those summoned).  It was where people gathered. Like the Greek agora, that I remember from my very first day in Athens many years ago  led by a wonderful woman—Maria. She pointed out the agora to us. The word exclesias also makes us think of the Carol “Gloria, in excelsis Deo!”

 

In the music the voices of whales are heard and the alt sax that is used imitates the voice of the whale. And the voice of the loon and the voice of the wolf. When you hear this, Moriarty says, everything is brought in from the cold. You hear whales and wolves singing parts of the mass. It is an earth mass. It is a mass for the earth. It makes the entire earth sacred. And when you hear a mass for the earth how could you ravage it. It is sacred after all.

The Missa Gaia, according to Moriarty, is also the place where the Buddha found enlightenment. Apparently, there is now a temple there where the people have built a temple and called it Buddgaya or Bodh Gaya which is a village in the north east Indian state of Bihar.  It is considered one of  the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites and houses at an ancient Mahabodhi Temple Complex, that was built to commemorate the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment underneath a sacred Bodhi Tree.

 

The mass includes as text the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei. The mass is an environmental liturgy of contemporary music.  The “Kyrie” is derived from the call of a wolf, the “Sanctus” from the songs of humpback whales. Man literally learns how to sing from animals. Missa Gaia  is not just ecological it is also ecumenical. It wants to contain and include all voices of the earth. Many musical traditions are embraced by the Missa Gaia such as Gregorian chants  from the Middle Ages, Protestant hymns, Romantic organ music, African instruments, Latin American rhythms, elements of Gospel music, and even rock music.

The name “Missa Gaia” refers to the  “Gaia hypothesis” proposed by scientists Jame Lovelock and Lynn Margulis which provides that “the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and power far beyond its constituent parts”.

 The Mass had been performed annually at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at The Feast of St. Francis which is the blessing of the animals.

 

When St. Francis of Assisi referred to brother sun and sister moon he is really saying, says Moriarty, “I am the little brother.”  He is saying they are the great brother or sister.  He is not saying I am the great conqueror! He is not saying I am the ruler of the earth. He is saying we are kin! That brings us right back to the ideas of Chief Seattle and the indigenous people of North America and elsewhere. Now that is really a profound new attitude to the earth!

Moriarty asked a very pertinent question: “Why don’t we call the earth Buddgaya?” That it is an enlightened earth?” At least that the earth will one day be enlightened. Of course, he is really suggesting that it is not enlightened now. I think the reason that has not been done is that we need a completely new transformative attitude to nature. Only when we do that can we consider ourselves, or the earth we inhabit, enlightened. We have not yet earned the right to call us or the earth enlightened. Not yet.

If we can do that Moriarty says on Christmas night when he goes to the stable, he won’t have to say humans are alone in the earth. “I won’t be experiencing the awful desolation of us and them.” Until we are enlightened, we will be experiencing the awful alienation of us from the earth. “Maybe our mass has to become a Missa Gaia. When we walk the earth we must realize we are walking in Buddgaya.

Then finally we will be walking beautifully upon the sacred earth.

 

 

An Irish Stream

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty  told a story about a man in Dingle in the south west of Kerry on a lovely gorgeous evening when the mountains were almost heart-breakingly lovely and blue on a silent, silent evening. The only sound was the sound of a stream tumbling down the mountainside. An old man said, “It is calling us down into eternity out of which it is itself coming.” According to Moriarty this eternity is not behind time it is an eternity that is right there in front. It is right in front of you. It is unhidden.

It is the same eternity that Wordsworth talked about in the intimations of Immortality and that Traherne talked about. So the corn is the orient and immortal wheat.

Moriarty contrasts that with the end of the 19th century when white people were scattering around the American continent  in pursuit of Manifest Destiny. They came upon the holy sacred mountains of the Sioux Indians. As Moriarty said, “an old life, a sacred life was being destroyed there.” Of course, the same thing was happening everywhere across this great continent.  Non-indigenous people were destroying nature in pursuit of economic advantage.

In California a man rose up to the heavens during an eclipse where he learned a sacred dance that later came to be called the Ghost dance. The dancers would fall into a sort of trance. It was an apocalyptic dance, according to Moriarty. They were dancing in circles. According to Moriarty. And they were dong it everywhere.

As Moriarty said,

“they were going to roll up the whole white world that we had brought with us in the way you would roll up a carpet, from the Chicagos  and New Yorks and then the North American continent would return to the way it originally was. We know Europeans who treat corn as an economic commodity  and have to undertake a ghost dance ourselves. Ghost dance was what Wordsworth called their light of common day out of our eyes. Ghost dance is what Traherne called the dirty devices of the world. The philosophical assumptions and axioms. Ghost dance the Medusa mind set, the European mind set out of our eyes.”

 

 

Moriarty wants us to walk “enfranchised on an enfranchised earth.”  We need to be liberated. Then we can be in a paradise that is not “out there”, but down here where we are. All we have to do is “ghost dance the dirty devices out of our world.”

Moriarty believes this could bring about a new and reborn agriculture.  It would no longer be just an economic thing. According to him, “our eyes have become economic tumours.” When we look at things in that way, we are committing a sin Moriarty says. That is why we must comb them out just the way Takana Kapsalut’s hair had to be combed out of the sins of the people. We need the ghost dance in Europe.

 

Moriarty railed against the ancient and long-standing tendency of humans to try to shape nature, rather than allowing nature to shape us. “Sometimes,” Moriarty said, “I think we have gone the wrong way. We have gone the disastrous way and the world is paying a terrible price for that.”  This is exactly what I have been saying. We desperately need a new attitude to nature. It is like Prometheus who stole technological fire from heaven. The whales and dolphins instead went into the water where there was no fire. They did not want to go the technological way. As Professor Moriarty said, “They did not go the way of technological domination of the earth. They said to the world shape us.”

 

Moriarty says he has problems with the idea of the transcendence of God and domination of the earth. It often seems that this is now impossible. No one can go the way of the whales and dolphins anymore, though Moriarty hopes that some people can still do this. We believe that somehow, we have given permission to do to the earth what we are doing. Moriarty has problems with that view. He too wants a new attitude to nature.

A Sacred Navajo Cradle

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

Professor Moriarty in his YouTube lecture, imagines the original great people who settled in Ireland and they brought with them sacred objects.  Then he imagines a new settler coming to Ireland and bringing a sacred Navajo cradle. He said, “A Navajo cradle is different from our cradle but it is still a cradle.”

Three is a Navajo Cradle song about a man making a cradle for his child.

“A Navajo Cradle

I have made a cradle board for you my child

May you grow to a great old age,

Of the sun’s rays I made the back

Of black clouds I have made a blanket

Of rainbow I have made the bow,

Of sunbeams I have made the side lopes,

Of lightning I have made the lacings

Of river mirrorings I have made the footboard,

Of dawn I have made the covering,

Of light on high horizons have I made the bed.”

 

Like Professor Moriarty, my wife Christiane and I have experienced stories from Navajo story tellers. I think in particular of one who gave us a spectacular jeep ride through Canyon de Chelly in northern Arizona. We learned a lot from him.  Professor Moriarty also learned a lot from the Navajo.

As Moriarty concluded about that Cradle Song:

“This is a cradle that all of us need. No matter what age we are, where young or old, male or female, it is a cradle we should all be willing to lie down into. We would be lying down to great creative nature. We would be lying down into the creative genius of the universe. In this cradle we can experience ecological second birth. We Europeans who think of ourselves as belonging to the first world and look upon the Navajo as belonging to the third world. It sometimes appears to me that we are living in a spiritual third world. Instead of having potbellies we have pot-bellied hearts and minds because we aren’t being nourished any longer by our culture. We aren’t being spiritually nourished and our seals breathing holes have closed over. Think of this whole evening [he was talking to adults listening to his lecture] as a journey to this Navajo cradle. A cradle in which we might all lie down in and be born again…God bless the first peoples of the world if we are willing to listen to them. Then we might listen and learn to stand and walk beautifully on the earth.”

 

You can see from Moriarty’s words that he is as much a poet as a teacher or professor. We learn a lot: We can be born again. We can walk beautifully on the earth again.We can make America and Canada great again, but just not the way some politicians claim

 

 

Big Medicine

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor John Moriarty talked about a North American indigenous story about a small mouse that learned from a buffalo and a wolf that the world was a world was of medicine. The buffalo and the wolf led the mouse to the edge of a river that was the medicine river. It was filled with Big Medicine and it saved and healed a sick mouse. Some indigenous people have learned this, he says, during a vision quest.

He contrasts this with average Europeans. As Moriarty says,

“when the average European stands up in the morning he sees an economic opportunity. When the average native American stands up he sees Big Medicine. The Earth is Big Medicine. Everything in it is medicine. Isn’t it a wonderful way to see the world and get in touch with it as medicine? We are destroying the medicines that would heal us.”

 

 

Again, Moriarty contrasts the European vision and the Native American vision:

“The European vision is to see God as transcendent. God is above us. God is out there.”  The Greek vision is to see the earth as divine. If you see the world that way you will be reluctant to put a scythe to it. And he says, “I am on the side of the Divine. I won’t abuse it in the way I won’t abuse a chalice. God is transcendent but God is also imminent.”

 

Such an attitude makes all of nature sacred.

The Origin of Agriculture: An Ojibwa Story

Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

This is an Ojibwa story about the origin of agriculture among a people of great hunters. A young man or boy was taken out by his grandfather to a Vison Quest.  A vision pit was dug for him and he had to stay there in the wilderness for 4 days and 4 nights without food.

His grandfather and grandmother prayed for him, but before he went in he had to undergo rites of purification in the sweat lodge. It was hoped his dream would have healing in it or medicine. But this boy had no dreams so when he was done a Sky Being came down to visit him in tassels and plumes and they wrestled all day.

Even though the boy was weak from lack of food and water, under neath him there was tremendous earth strength. When he wrestled the Sky Being it was like the earth and the sky were wrestling together.

This happened for 3 days and they wrestled each day. The Sky Being had weakened from the exercise and was about to die and asked to be buried and asked the boy and his father to tend to his grave and keep it clear of weeds. As a result, there grew corn in the grave and it looked like in tassels and plumes. This is how corn became so important to Ojibwa people. In some sense at least it is how they moved from the Hunter Gatherer stage to the stage of agriculture. In the story the corn is born out of a person. It is not from a person like ourselves but it is a person from the sky.  In this way, “agriculture is born out of a wrestling of heaven and earth.”  That is a fabulous story.

 According to Professor Moriarty, in Ancient Greece, the corn was also a person. In fact this is the Mediterranean tradition. Moriarty explained that

“In Greece the corn was a divinity and the earth was Gaia another divinity. In the Old Testament God is totally transcendent. Sometimes that is unfortunate because it means that all value is now in the super celestial world. All value is divine value and it’s in super celestial world. And that means that the earth is basically just raw material and we can only   look at it with an economic eye. But in this vision of it, the earth it itself a goddess. And the corn is a goddess. If the corn is a goddess than I am going to treat it sacredly. I am going to respond sacredly to it. When I take my sickle to the garden, I know that I am cutting down the goddess. When I broadcast the seed I know that it will grow into the goddess. But we have totally de-personalized corn. It has just become another economic proposition—economic material for us. And that is a pity.”

 

Now from the European perspective  that is a new attitude to nature.

A Sacred Inuit Story

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty told a sacred Inuit Story. He said he could only do that if he did so with great reverence, for if you do that you can remove “a Berlin wall of misunderstandings between peoples.” Takana Kapsalut[1]  was the name of an Inuit woman. Her father was angry with her for not having a mate and threw her out of the kayak. When she tried to hang on he chopped off her fingers which then floated on the surfaced of the ocean as she sunk to the bottom.

 

This was the creative dream time of the beginning. Her fingers became mammals of the sea. She is the mother of sea beasts. When people on the earth don’t walk in the great imagination or don’t walk beautifully on the earth, when they sin, and when they do things against the Great Imagination a wall of anger grows around her on the ocean floor no seals will rise up at the breathing holes. As a result, people are hungry so they visit a Great Shaman who takes a journey to the ocean floor and he will go through various states of mind on his journey down for his state of mind will be equal to the state of mind of the earth.

 

The Shaman climbs a ladder up a cliff, but the rungs are turned like knives. He wants to go across the river but this is a trap for on the other side is an evil person, a witch. The wall of anger is meant to protect Takana Kapsalut and the shaman sings in the voice of whale, the voice of a wolf, and in all the voices of nature. That helps dissolve the wall of anger and makes the journey of the Shaman successful so the people can again go and hunt successfully and end the hunger of the people.

 

Takana Kapsalut is the mother of archetypes and she walks beautifully on the earth and rescues it. Takana Kapsalut is the mistress of life or the mother of life. But we in Europe, according to Moriarty have not walked in the great imagination. In the depths of our psyches “which is one with the universe anyway,” says Moriarty. Somewhere there is a mother of archetypes or a mother of great visons. Only someone who takes a great journey down the depths of his or her own psyche and sings there with a whale voice and dolphin voice understands that  “ the great life can emerge up again into us and again arise into the surface consciousness so that we will again be walking within the great Imagination and the great world.”

In the 20th century not many of us can do this. Instead, as Teilhard de Chardin said,

 

“we will walk in the “noise sphere”. We don’t hear the Great Imagination coming out of our televisions and our radios We are walking in our desert of Zin. No we are not blessed. Like the children of Israel our souls have dried away.

 

Moriarty said we need someone to go down to the bottom of the ocean to the floor of the psyche and sing there with the commonage voice with voices of nature and comb out Takana Kapsalut’s hair to comb out the sins of the people against grass, against elk, and all the creatures of the world against whom we have waged war. We need to comb out Cartesianism, comb out our Medusa mindset and comb out our economics. We need a entirely new attitude to nature. One that is foreign to European consciousness.

 

Then perhaps we can walk on the soil of Europe again the way our Paleolithic ancestors walked among the animals of the earth.  This is not walking among the animals to declare war on them. They walked among the animals in commonage consciousness. Then we can again walk on the earth in a great and sacred way.  This is what the Inuit story urges us to do.

 

[1] I am not sure how to spell the name

Commonage Consciousness: An ecologically better way of being on the earth

Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Indigenous--Indian Act, New Attitude to Nature

 

There were some ways in which Europeans had a completely different attitude to things than the Indigenous people of North America they encountered when they first had contact with each other.  For one thing, as I have been saying, they had a completely different attitude to nature.  Closely associated with that, was that they had a completely different attitude to property—at least real property (land and buildings). Europeans believed in private ownership of land. That idea was foreign to Indigenous people. Indigenous people believed in tribes or first nations having rights to land. Not individuals. That has had a profound impact.  The idea of private property is part of capitalist society. At least it has always has been so until they encountered the Indigenous people and recently, with the rise of capitalism in Communist countries or formerly communist countries such as China.

The Indigenous idea of property held in common was blessed by the Parliament of Canada when it enacted the Indian Act in the late 19th century as it tried to assert jurisdiction over First Nations in Canada. That notion is still part of the federal law in Canada since then, even though it has been criticized by some.

Professor John Moriarty though considers the issue from the perspective of a poet. As he said:

“It is time now in western Europe to reinstitute Commonage consciousness. We have to reinstate it in a way that would reinstitute a new sacrament. Unless we reinstitute commonage consciousness, then we are going to continue to inflict appalling damage to the earth. That is a story that could take us into an ecologically better way of being on the earth.”

 

When Moriarty went to the hills in Connemara  Ireland and saw no fences, he was awe struck. Moriarty noted how people thought it was a big deal to take down the Berlin wall between 2 European political systems, communism and capitalism. Was that really such a big deal? John Moriarty did not think that was a big deal.

 

However, Moriarty thought “it was hugely important to take down the wall between us and blades of grass, between us and trees, between us and the stars, between us and everything that is.” That is an entirely new attitude to nature, at least for non-Indigenous people.

 Talking about an Indigenous nation in North America, Moriarty said

 “the Blackfeet did not see the difference between them and the buffalo. They saw what was common between them and the buffalo. And what is common is grace. What separates us in a way is trivial but what we have in common is grace and immense.

 

Moriarty wants to take us back from our “us and them consciousness” to a commonage consciousness and then we will be walking the earth in a more beautiful way.”

 

 

Moriarty says the world will not reveal itself to a scientist who confronts it only as a scientist, or to a theologian. The world will reveal itself to a Saint Francis of Assisi who will walk out naked into the world and says “Brother sun and sister moon.” Some Christians had a similar point of view.

We must recognize that we are all kin with all creatures on the earth. As he said, “What else is this Blackfoot Indian story but an amplification of the story of Saint Francis of Assisi?”

We must learn that the sun is our brother. The moon is our sister. The fire is our kin. We must consider what we have in common. Consciousness is common. Moriarty liked the idea of the English novelist and writer D. H. Lawrence who said we should “take a great arc back into the past and come forward.”

As Moriarty said, “It is only to someone who walks beautifully on the earth that the earth will reveal itself.”

 

Inuit: The Eucharist—eating God

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

In my day in University, starting in 1967, most European or Canadian professors assumed we had nothing to learn from Indigenous people. I did not realize it at the time, but Professor Moriarty was different. He was an Irishman teaching English literature. Somewhere somehow he learned better. He learned we could learn a lot from indigenous people. it took me many years to learn better as well.

Professor John Moriarty tells a story about Inuit [though he calls them Eskimos as they were once referred to]. They stand at a breathing hole in the ice waiting for a seal to arise. Once they saw the water rippling, they knew there was a seal and they would launch their harpoon.

 

When the seal was captured and killed they would cut out the liver and eat it “Eucharistically.”  It was a religious ceremony to eat that seal’s liver together. Each hunter took a part. The indigenous people believe that the animal had offered itself up to the hunters. An animal that did not want to be caught would not be caught. While eating the liver raw they would talk to the spirit of the seal and thank it for offering itself as food to the hunters. They believed that after that the animal would take upon a new body. What a beautiful way to relate to prey. Is this pure fancy? Indigenous people believe it. Are they wrong?

The eucharist meant that God was being eaten.  Is this barbaric? Or is it sublime? In the Christian tradition you can only sin against God or man. You cannot sin against a blade of grass. You cannot sin against a cow about to be slaughtered. That is barbarism. That is a barbaric attitude to nature. That is why we need a new attitude to nature.

Christians should admit, says Moriarty, that

“you can sin against a blade of grass. You can sin against the Aids Virus. To look at a tree and see only cubic feet of timber that is to sin against the tree. When you see anything as smaller than it is, you are sinning against it. When you see something only with an economic eye you are sinning against it.”

 

This brought Moriarty back to the buffalo dance or buffalo song. The Blackfoot say that death is not final. You can go back and the spirit is left intact. The. Spirit is not wounded by the spear [that wounded the buffalo]. It can take on a new body of its choosing.

So too the buffalo did not damage the land.  The land learned to live with the millions of hoofprints and poop. You could say the land was blessed. And so are we.

Indigenous Stories: The Song of the Universe

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Moriarty started with a Navajo story that told about the 2nd or 3rd day of the world. He called it the Great Creative Beginning. It is the story of the first man and first woman.

Moriarty told the story of the Buffalo Dance and the Buffalo song of the Blackfoot people of North America. It was the story of a buffalo and a beautiful young Blackfoot girl coming together and separating again. The Buffalo danced without damaging the grass. It seemed that the mountains were dancing with them as were the constellations dancing with them.  They actually did that. Hundreds of thousands of bison (not really buffalo) would converge on the land the hooves cut the soil and the excrement fertilized it and the land was reborn. Moriarty said this dance was this was the song of the universe. It was the song of which the earth and the stars are manifestations.

This story came to Moriarty in Connemara Ireland where all the land was in commonage. All the farmers sent their cattle to that land. All used it together in common.  As Professor Moriarty said about this Buffalo story,

“Unlike the Christian creation story where you feel a Berlin Wall between each day of creation, what this story speaks to me of is commonage consciousness. That there is one consciousness, one universal consciousness and it is there in buffalo, it is there in rocks, it is there in trees and there really are no fences between us.”

Moriarty says this story though it came from Indigenous people of North America, it  could have been told anywhere. It was told in Europe and then went to Eurasia where it went to Asia and then it went down across the Bering Straits and ended up in Blackfoot territory and it could be our creation story. This story has survived in this old consciousness and the only way to save the world and make something new as D. H. Lawrence said is to go back into that consciousness. These old levels of consciousness are still alive in us.  As Moriarty said,

“It is only in commonage consciousness that the earth can be saved. We have to take down the fences between us and animals. We have to take down the fences between us and stars. We have to acknowledge the oneness of consciousness that is in the universe.”

 

These are beautiful thoughts and they show how indigenous learning can teach us to walk beautifully in the world, which, of course, was Moriarty’s goal. He wanted to help us do that. I think he succeeded. Brilliantly. With the help of indigenous people.

Becoming Aboriginal

Bog Guy, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Ireland, New Attitude to Nature

 

What surprised me most when I listened to Professor John Moriarty decades after he left the University of Manitoba was that he  had engaged some of the same thoughts as I did.  Specifically, he like I, had encountered Indigenous thought and spirituality, something frankly in 1967 this  was not something I ever considered. What could we possibly learn from indigenous people I thought. I never heard anything of my professors suggest otherwise either.  We all missed out on a lot in other words. Thankfully, for Professor Moriarty and I we both encountered indigenous thought later. We smartened up.

Like D.H. Lawrence, Moriarty says he has learned a lot about coming down to earth from Native Americans.  Lawrence had challenged himself to “follow the trail of vanished Native Americans at the foot of the crucifix and take upon the primordial Indian obstinacy.”  Lawrence wanted to make a new day with them. Lawrence did that in Taos New Mexico.  Even though he had lots of fine contact with Native North Americans he eventually realized he was just another Pale Face.  This is what Lawrence wrote:

 

“I was born of no virgin of no Holy Ghost. I know these old men telling the tribal tales were my fathers. I have a dark-faced, bronze-voiced, father far back in the resinous ages, but he like many old fathers with a changeling son, he would like to deny me, but I stand on the edge of their finite now, and they neither deny nor accept me. My way is my own of Great Father. I can’t cluster at the drum anymore.”

 

Moriarty says that like Lawrence he can’t deny he is a pale face and can’t cluster at the drum any more but he said when he came back to Connemara Ireland from Canada he couldn’t use Aristotle or Plato or other European thinkers to help him on that journey because he found Connemara to be cold and savage and the only way he could do that was to become aboriginal.

Now I must interject that I have been to Connemara and did not find it cold and savage, but admittedly I was there in summer. There was nothing cold and savage about it. One thing Moriarty learned from Canada was to face into the blizzard. That is what the buffalo do. They don’t run from the blizzard: they face it. They have the hairy face to do it too.

Moriarty said one day he was travelling among one the bogs of Connemara and he was in distress. So he fell down and asked the bog to heal him. He wanted the bog to suck out his “expensive European education”. It was not helping him there he thought. He realized his European head hurt the earth. His European head was doing damage to the earth. He did not want to continue like that. All of this also astonished me. After all I consider myself a bog guy. I don’t think I have blogged about that yet, but intend to. As well, I believe that the attitude to nature of Europeans and their descendants has been harmful to the earth, and we can learn a lot from indigenous people about learning a new attitude to nature.  I also believe bogs can do a lot to improve that.

Like me, Professor Moriarty wanted to start again in the bog. Shakespeare, whom he loved, as do I,  would not take him up but he found some old Native North American stories that helped him to get up again. He says some of those stories he learned from Indigenous people in Canada who took him back to the earth. He wanted to tell some of those stories. Some of those stories have helped me as well.

I will blog about them next.