spirituality – Quakers and Mutual Aid

End of the year reflections have me looking back over some of the quotations I’ve gathered along the way.

Silence, spirituality, and photography

Many of my photographs come from walks over the same path, over and over. In Indianapolis, it was walking to and from work. I lived about 2 miles from Riley Hospital for Children. I developed the habit of always carrying my camera with me. I was quite conscious of seeing more and more detail emerge from walking the same path. That made me look more closely intentionally, challenging me to look more deeply. This became a spiritual experience. I realized I was waiting in silence to be shown more clearly what I was looking at. I would look inward to help me see outward.

This helped me listen for the Spirit more closely during Quaker meetings for worship, where Friends sit in silence together. There is a circle of silence between photography and spirituality. Below are some images I made with the help of artificial intelligence to try to envision this.

Carrying my camera all the time meant others would see the War is Not the Answer button on my camera strap.

Some of my own quotes are about photography:

I listen with my eyes
Learn to see what you are looking at
Photography is a spiritual practice
Meeting for worship with attention to photography
Zen photography

I like this quote by W.B. Yeats, which I also think of in terms of photography. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

That stillness and vastness that enables the Universe to be, is not just out there in space…it is also within you. – Eckhart Tolle

Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home. – Mirabai Starr

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. – Robert Lynd

We Indians know about silence. We are not afraid of it. In fact, for us, silence is more powerful than words. Our elders were trained in the ways of silence, and they handed over this knowledge to us. Observe, listen, and then act, they would tell us. That was the manner of living. -Ella Deloria

Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come. –Greta Thunberg

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. - Dean Spade

My activism did not spring from being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values instilled in me by the grandparents who reared me… Those values were based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal. – Bayard Rustin

Capitalism has violated the communities of marginalized folks. capitalism is about the value of people, property and the people who own property. those who have wealth and property control the decisions that are made. the government comes second to capitalism when it comes to power. In the name of liberation, capitalism must be reversed and dismantled. meaning that capitalistic practices must be reprogrammed with mutual aid practices. -Des Moines Black Liberation

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something. -Neil Gaiman

But to do the truth, to live a life that enforces what we once had, a life and culture that made a millennia of humanity possible to thrive, is to be at war with what has defined and destroyed this world for too long. -Ronnie James

Photography and spirituality

I created these images with the help of artificial intelligence to try to express these ideas.

I recently attended the Zoom meeting hosted by the Pachamama Alliance, Insights for Earth Activists, with Arkan Lushwala. That video recording can be found below.

Arkan Lushwala is a Peruvian ceremonial leader and author who focuses on teaching others practices that can restore balance to the planet. He was adopted by a Lakota elder named Basil Brave Heart and carries spiritual traditions from the Andes and the Amazon. He has written three books: The Time of the Black Jaguar, Deer and Thunder, and The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks. You can read the Epilogue of The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks here.

I value what Arkan says because of the way he expresses his spirituality. I find it similar to how I try to express my own.

He speaks of ancestral wisdom having more to offer than technology, that technology cannot illuminate nor improve what lives inside people. I am blessed to have wisdom from my Quaker ancestors.

Introduction

While singing to the spirits of the mountains and preparing sacred offerings to feed our Mother Earth, I am seeing the paths that the Universe has opened for us lately—paths of spiritual and human development that we are going to need to walk in order to continue living. In the midst of so many disasters affecting humanity, I have seen something beautiful that I can no longer hide. Even more, I feel a longing to give birth to something new. And as mothers know well, this can only be done with full conviction, like a whale that crosses an ocean. Among my convictions, one comes from my relationship with the ancestral world I grew up surrounded by, having been born in the Andes. I am convinced that anything new, to have real power, needs an ancestral root.

When seeking new and better solutions for the great social problems and natural catastrophes of the present moment, I believe that ancestral wisdom has more to offer than technological advances. Because technology does not have the ability to illuminate nor improve what lives inside people—the true source of the problems that are harming the world. Social injustice, the destruction of nature, excessive wealth, and extreme poverty come as a result of excessive human ambition. Such greed will not disappear with new technologies. We need greed to stop being fashionable, to cease being the marker of human progress. Only with wisdom will it be possible to resolve the problems of our time, with sensible cultural proposals that can help us aspire to reach happiness in another way. Therefore, I have no doubt that the ancestral wisdom of our Andean-Amazonian communities has much to contribute to the development of a new world culture.

Lushwala, Arkan. The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks: Ancestral Teachings of the Andean World for the Time of Natural Disorder (pp. 7-8). Disruption Books. Kindle Edition.

Arkan writes about the early European settlers being only interested in gold and being afraid of the Indigenous sacred world.

Just as they (Europeans) lost interest in being healed by our food, they could no longer see our hearts. Their eyes sought only gold, and they could not see us. They saw our sacred world from afar and, afraid of it, did not come closer. Their lack of experience in the art of entering into good relationships did not allow them to love us. Their only experience was with fighting, and they waged a terrible war in order to legalize the theft of our lands through their triumph. And despite the fact that they made our lands their own, they were never able to know their true treasures. Given that those who cannot be satisfied also don’t know how to stop, they didn’t consider taking the time to get to know the deepest secrets and the real treasures of the place they had come to. They continued on their way, looking for something new to appropriate. If they had simply let themselves sit down for a moment amid the pastures of these lands, they might have felt something in their hearts, and they might have become enamored of the beautiful people here who were one with the land. But they were too busy and could not take notice of what lay right in front of them. And so they lost the chance of encountering our mother, the mother we all have in common, the one they had forgotten—our Mother Earth.

Lushwala, Arkan. The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks: Ancestral Teachings of the Andean World for the Time of Natural Disorder (pp. 8-9). Disruption Books. Kindle Edition.

The most spiritual thing now is action.
This action needs to be born from a place in ourselves.
Arkan Lushwala

One day a brother from another country who was becoming a good friend came to see me. He was very affected by these same questions, tired of feeling himself separated from the beauty of the world. He had a great spiritual hunger and was searching for something different. I remember him asking me, “What can we do to change, those of us who have lost the memory of the original design for good living?” And aware that I didn’t have an answer for such a big question, I managed to not go to my head and look for one. I just responded spontaneously, “My brother, stop dedicating yourselves with so much enthusiasm to digging the holes you are going to fall into. Stop for a moment, brother, stop so much doing. Look, brother, let’s share some food, and let’s taste the earth.” I passed him some Kuka leaves and said to him: “Hallpaykusunchis wayq’echay” (Let us be the land—with tender affection—for our benefit, my little brother). And after a long silence, I smiled and said to him, “Saksachikuy wawq’ey,” which means “Make yourself satiated with tender affection for your benefit, my brother.

Arkan Lushwala, The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks

aware that I didn’t have an answer for such a big question, I managed to not go to my head and look for one
Arkan Lushwala

What can I do?

Speaking about what is happening on Earth right now,
many of the conditions of life that we used to take for granted,
now are really out of balance.
Hopefully we still have time to get back into balance
so life may continue.
I travel around the world and meet people and talk to people
from all different cultures.
And everywhere people ask, “what can we do?”
The question, what can we do, is the second question.
The first question is “what can we be?”
Because what you can do is a consequence of who you are.
Once you know what you can be, you know what you can do,
and we cannot afford wasting time;
we have little time.
We need to be precise now.
When someone sincerely asks, “what can I do?”
my humble answer,
the only answer that I find in my heart to be sincere is,
“First find out what you can be.”
Action is extremely necessary at this time.
This is not a time just to talk about it.
The most spiritual thing now is action.
To do something about what’s happening.
To go help where help is needed.
To stand up when we need to stand up,
and protect what is being damaged.
And still, this action needs to be born
from a place in ourselves that has real talent,
real intelligence, real power,
real connection to the heart of the Earth,
to universal wisdom,
so our actions are not a waste of time.
So our actions are precise,
our actions are in harmony with the movement,
the sacred movement,
of that force that wants to renew life here on Earth
and make it better for the following generations

The most spiritual thing now is action.
This action needs to be born from a place in ourselves.

Arkan Lushwala

Arkan talks about caring for our “sacred pot,” which made me want to visualize what that might look like. I’ve been learning to use a graphics tool, Microsoft Designer, to share about spirituality since words are usually inadequate.