Some of us are now becoming as aware of the ethical clothing movement as we are of the new ideas a few years ago around bio-ethics in food.  USA Today just pointed out, given the recent Bangladesh building collapse that destroyed five clothing factories and killed hundreds of underpaid clothing manufacturing workers, that when we buy cheap T-shirts and underwear, someone pays, even if it’s not us.  And someone is making a huge profit. (Bangladesh has a 20 billion dollar garment industry.)

Clothing supply chains are as convoluted as some of the hidden seams in the clothing we buy today. So it’s hard to trace, even given labels, where items originate.  Only about 1% of the clothing we purchase in the US has that familiar black, white and green “Fair Trade” stamp so we can’t be sure what we buy is “fairly” manufactured. Nor do we often care.  It’s a bargain. We buy it even though we may wear it only a few times and then feel righteous about giving it away to thrift shops.  The Salvation Army keeps clothing in the stores only about a week before baling it up and sending it on to….where?

Most likely, back to Third World Countries where they probably came from in the first place.   And those clothing items are often sold back to them for someone else’s profit, even though when, as I did, we lug big garbage bags full of clothing to our local thrift store, we think we’re doing somebody a great charitable favor.

So now I’m thinking about the larger picture when I’m tempted to buy a new pair of jeans or pull-over. Do I need it?  Will I wear it more than a half dozen times? Who benefits from my purchase?  Is there something comparable being made closer to home? When I’m “done” with this item, what will I do with it?

I admit I’m a clothes hoarder. I keep thinking, I’ll fit into it later.  Or I may need this for a party some day.  I read The Hoarder in You by Dr. Robin Zasio, the psychologist on the reality TV show, “The Hoarders” and I’m sure that’s what prompted my closet clean-out.   We all fall on that “cluttering” spectrum somewhere. Our drawers overflow. Our closets get crammed. Our basements and attics have boxes filled with “things” that we no longer need—probably never did need, but we are conditioned to buy more and more and more.  We probably should all sign up for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s clear, we need to “pluck and purge” even if it’s only one closet at a time. And truly rethink what we buy and why. Our planet (and closets) will thank us. 

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Natutilus Book Awards has just announced their 2013 winners. Divine Arts published four of them! An outstanding achievement for a newly formed imprint as well as to all the authors who are honored by these gold and silver medals.

Books are entered in 20-some categories and this year’s “gold winning” book in “Religion/Spirituality/Other is Sophia: The Feminine Face of God. (I am truly humbled to be placed in such august company. Last year’s winner in this category was Desmond Tutu.)

The three Divine Arts Media Silver medal winners were also announced today:

The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms by Don José Campos in the Religion/Spirituality/Other category.

A Heart Blown Open: The Life and Practice of Zen Master Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi by Keith Martin-Smith in the “Memoir/Personal Journey” category.

The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas by Glenn H. Mullin in the “Multicultural/Indigenous” category.

This marks the thirteenth year of the Nautilus Book Awards.  As Oliver Wendell Holmes said in his poem, The Chambered Nautilus, one day we will all be leaving our outgrown shell for “a dome more vast.”  Until then, we’ll keep reading good books, a few of us will write them, and some prescient publishers such as Divine Arts Media will  publish them. For that we are all truly grateful. As the Nautilus Book Award site puts it:

“Since ancient times, storytellers and scribes worldwide have gathered and shared the culture’s words and ideas in ways that encourage its people to think, feel, and improve the lives of upcoming generations. For centuries, the world’s great philosophers and leaders have used books to inspire the masses and affect their attitudes and emotions – not always for the better.  With  mass global communication, political upheaval, depletion and destruction of our natural resources along with religious and secular fanaticism all growing at an alarming rate, the need for books that promote viable options for positive social change is vast, and the phrase,  “Changing the World One Book at a Time” is more meaningful than ever before. Authors and publishers and their books CAN and ARE making a difference.”

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That night I had a very vivid shamanic dream. In this dream I found myself lifting off the earth,  freely and effortlessly flying through various dimensions at will, recognizing that the density of my physical body had changed, and that I was able to radiate the light of my divine self while still remaining in material form. It was an ecstatic feeling, and felt like the most natural thing in all the worlds.

A little later in the dream I was with a small group of other people and we all started to lift up from third density. It was like learning to fly the dragon in James Cameron’s movie, Avatar— just one big ecstatic dance of freedom. And then later in the dream I was given a date, which indicated a time of collective ascension/descension for Gaia.

I think we are still fluctuating between many possible timelines, and there are no calendars set in stone, whether Mayan or otherwise. I also feel that as we shift, we will begin to feel this for ourselves within ourselves, as any mother knows who has ever been pregnant.

 An appropriate metaphor for the nature of this timing is the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. At a certain point in its life cycle, the caterpillar identify begins to fade as old thoughts, feelings, forms, and memories dissolve into a genetic soup. In the darkness of the cocoon, new DNA material becomes activated, until eventually in the right timing a butterfly emerges fully formed from the soup.

Our own metamorphosis is an equally mysterious process. Sri Aurobindo refers to the journey of our species from the “human-human” to the “divine-human.” We are moving towards a higher stage of evolution in which our identity will no longer be mediated through our current linear third-dimensional thinking mind, but rather through a multidimensional soul-infused supra-mental center of consciousness.

Just as with a caterpillar, however, it is a biological process. We can facilitate this process by consciously aligning with the truth of who we are, but it is not about trying to do something or get someplace through mental effort. It is not about flapping our legs and trying to fly. We don’t become butterflies as long as we are running around trying to become better caterpillars. It is only when we surrender to the evolutionary forces that are already at work within us that the shift happens in its own mysterious way.

We are already beginning to experience this shift. As we go through an accelerating phase of magnetic fluctuations on the earth, our physical, emotional and mental bodies are already undergoing changes. Many of us are going through extreme physical challenges, including aches and pains in the joints, uncomfortable symptoms of kundalini activation, and various assorted illnesses as the density of our physical bodies responds to higher-vibrational evolutionary forces moving through us.

Many of us are likewise going through intense emotional “stuff’” as old patterns begin to surface from wherever they’ve been buried and we are forced to re-evaluate our priorities in context of who we truly are and what we really want. This includes a re-evaluation of deeply held belief systems as we move out of social conditioning and religious dogma into a direct experience of our multidimensional self. As old identities dissolve, we go through cocooning phases which feel dry, depressing, painful, and suffocating. Our minds stop functioning. We forget names and places. Certainties dissolve. Our attachments to places, people, roles and concepts fall away. We go through a dark night of the senses, even a dark night of the soul, where everything that we have ever known ourselves to be melts into cosmic soup.

And through it all a new light shines, a supra-mental light not yet seen on this earth, a beautiful emergence of butterfly consciousness where creator and creation ultimately realize their identity as one. This is the evolutionary goal in this grand experiment of life. This is why seven billion beings have chosen to be here at this time in a human form that has consciously chosen to move into the Human-Divine.

Kiara Windrider is the author of Year Zero: Time of the Great Shift and Ilahinoor: Awakening the Divine Human

 Trained in the spiritual traditions of India, Kiara now spends much of his life traveling and facilitating workshops on spiritual development, environmental healing, peacemaking, and social justice.

photo credit: <ahref=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/pipdiddly/5275898263/”>henna lion</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>cc</a>

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On Valentine’s Day, I walked into our bedroom and a bird flew up in my face.  He panicked, back and forth, fluttering off the walls.  I quickly opened a window and guided him out.  But that’s not the end of the story.  This bird has spent every day, for the last five weeks, pecking relentlessly against the windows of our cottage.  I can hear his repetitive tapping even now.

Some believe when a bird flies into a house it is a portent of death. Is he a messenger from the spirit world?  What is he trying to tell me?

The day the bird arrived was the day my dear friend, mentor, and spiritual teacher, Dewa Nyoman Batuan, died.  I met Batuan when I was twenty-four.  He welcomed me into his village compound in Bali and was my host for nearly a year.  Even though he was very poor, he shared his house, food, and knowledge with me.  We’ve watched each other grow for over forty years.  He book-ended most of my adult life.

I returned to Bali over twenty times and Batuan was always my first stop.  But often he beat me to it.  Wherever I stayed he would always find me, his face beaming and his arms outstretched.  We’d walk through the rice fields or sit for hours nursing our glasses of Bali coffee made simply with hot water and coffee grounds.  He would talk enthusiastically about spiritual connections he’d made and soon pull out his mandala paintings to punctuate his impromptu lecture.  “Why do I paint mandalas?” he asked. “Because it can hold everything.  Earth, air, fire, water, ether, animals and people.”  His work expressed his quest for enlightenment, made his life more beautiful and let him enjoy learning, practicing and passing it along.

A month after Fate first drew me into his village he set up Pengosaken Community of Painters.   His idea was that a handful of master painters could teach children and teenagers to provide much needed income for the village. The proceeds from sales would go back to the community, which in those days before the island’s over-development was how everything worked:  community first, then family.  Thinking about yourself first was unheard of.

 Batuan’s generosity was unlimited. He was always giving. He was a schoolteacher, community organizer, and for many years, the head of the village.  A traditional but also a modern man, he was able to discriminate between the values of each.  I may have been among the first Westerners to meet Batuan, but over the years his reputation became international and he befriended artists of all kinds.  Even though he and his wife raised six children and had seventeen grandchildren, and even though his spiritual devotions meant spending much of his day in temple duties, he was never without several canvases in progress. Over the decades, I watched his compound overflow with an endless stream of kaleidoscopic mandalas which he painted whether tourists bought them or not.  (But many did; both Queen Elizabeth and Ronald Reagan valued and hung his paintings.) More about Batuan

In 2009, I published an art book of his life’s work called Mandalas of Bali: Our Place in the World, which features 140 color mandalas and includes Batuan’s writing about the spiritual and cultural aspects of Bali.  It’s a wonderful expression encapsulating the wisdom and art of this extraordinary man. In 2011, Batuan appeared in my film TALKING WITH SPIRITS: Journeys into Balinese Spirit Worlds. 

I was very fortunate that my young eyes were opened by Batuan’s genuine concern for my unfolding.  His spirit was, and still is, an inspiration to me…and as persistent as that little bird tapping at my window, “Don’t forget me.” 

Michael Wiese is the publisher of Michael Wiese Productions and with his wife, Geraldine, Divine Arts Media. Visit their sites for more information on their books and films.

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We read headlines like this one:  “North Island Drought Most Severe” but we know that two hundred feet up from us, the heavy Northland clay is still moist five inches down. Native bush provides shelter, mulch and shades roots.  If native forests were grown in all the gullies and catchment heads, people could survive the droughts which will only become more severe in time. Scientists forecast dry spells will double by 2040 as temperatures continue to rise. New Zealand will experience a Mediterranean climate and experts claim climate change will spell the end of farming as we know it and Australia will be spending millions of dollars for drought relief .

map courtesy of http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/drought/livedrought.shtml

Human induced climate change is now accepted by the vast American N.O.A.A. organization.  [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].  I am aware of how our mussels and oysters are threatened by rising ocean acidity and I wonder why we continue to exploit fossil fuels rather than put every effort into sustainable pathways.  For further inspiration, I highly recommend the film by Dr. Simon Lamb.

Thanks to Drew Dillinger, a teacher and poet who wrote “Love Letter to the Milky Way,” Jan and I finish our nourishing, fresh dinner and read together:

“It’s 3:23 in the morning and I’m awake because my great-great-grandchildren won’t let me sleep.

My great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams “What did you do while the planet was plundered? What did you do  when the Earth was unraveling?”

“Surely you did something when the seasons started failing, as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying. Did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?

What did you do once you knew?”

Wade Doak is the author of Gaia Calls  

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One way of viewing shamans is that they are the cultural creatives of their communities. Whether they are providing healing through plants, balms, tonics, antidotes, chants, art-objects, music, story-telling, dance, and ritual, the shaman liberates a Cosmology for a collective according to interdependent forces and variable technologies. Mastery, of course, varies as it would in any field.

It is to Ayahuasca (a dark bitter brew that some Amazonian tribes drink) that I want turn to within the context of Buddhist meditation and offer some perspective on it. There is a record of Bon shamans ingesting “entheogens” to bring medicines, power, and knowledge back to their tribes as they interact with various “worlds.” Ayahuasca, in many circles, is revered as a Master Teacher.

The sense of awe, power, and mystery that is available at Deity-like scales during an Ayahuasca journey can serve a practitioner who wants accelerated access to states of consciousness such as detailed in The Flower Ornament Scripture, which Wikipedia notes as describing “a cosmos of infinite realms upon realms, mutually containing one another.”

Much of the accounts of communion, interdependence, participation, and personal humility that we find in spiritual/religious texts throughout various schools are experiences that Ayahuasca can provide. Mind you, Ayahuasca is not Shamanism. It is a “tool,” just one of the many technologies available for positive transmorphing.

I recall that my Vajrasattva practices during and after Ayahuasca experiences, the Sky gazing techniques of Dzogchen, the cutting through, the immense sense of compassion, gratitude, and peace that were part of my conscious practice with Ayahuasca left me blissful and as one with All That Is.

The sense of belonging, possibility, and deep affection that is the afterglow of many Ceremonies is enticing and hard to release. The shamanic sangha is quite the love and beauty fest. “Ceremonial” experiences have impacted my art and dying, but only because I have been a practitioner for several decades.

However, as I got invited to co-chair ceremonies with established Ayahuasqueros (also know as Curanderos and Vegetalistas), my sense of the overall value of this technology led me to the following awareness: I am more comfortable with the term “hallucinogen” as opposed to “entheogen” (that which releases the divinity within) since I see the word entheogen now as just a psychedelic-politically-correct way to refer to these substances that casts them in the most positive light. There is an unquestioned dogmatic structure operating minimally on the surface of the term that pervades as an “attachment,” even though it is to god realms.

Curanderos are not gurus, spiritual leaders or even necessarily brilliant thinkers. They are quite often afflicted with traumatic developmental histories that remain unresolved after decades of imbibing the brew. They can be invested in power hierarchies, and are often impaired in the areas of intimacy and emotional maturity. In many ways, their level of insight is no greater than the seekers that come to them for illumination and relief.

I have come to view true transformational technologies as being deeper and more thorough than what the volatile ethno-botanicals can deliver on their own. We can bring meditation, therapy, yoga, transversal ontologies, and so on to our practices in styles that enrich us and help us attain greater degrees of participation in a fully self-expressed life. Our syncretic moves are a benefit to Upper Amazon curanderismo without a doubt. And yet, we invest an enormous amount of positive transference to the curandero though what they serve is a plant concoction where we provide most of the psycho-spiritual ornaments along with extraterrestrials, brujos, and zombies. Is this actually liberating?

Curanderismo is also an incredibly lucrative business and assistants in the money chain, including the ones that host the curanderos in the United States, make enough (tax free) cash to keep invested in it. Let us not forget that for most of the planet N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the psychoactive ingredient in Ayahuasca, is a controlled substance with severe penalties being levied against those who’ve been successfully prosecuted for its distribution.

If you are a Buddhist or mystic of any type, yes, study the role of hallucinogens in your life, whatever that life stage, ponder the variety of motivations and reasons, and differentiate from there what is of durable value to you. Ayahuasca, at best, can be seen as one of many catalyzing agents that can pry out that which is already clamoring for attention and expression. However, sustained transformation requires a discipline that a tireless pursuit of healing through these concoctions cannot sustain. If you do not integrate this into your awareness, you will remain in a bardo of sensation and fascination. Welcome to shamanic Samsara.

Most of the effects of these substances can be achieved by other means, hence the power of contemporary cultural creative practices. Given the indiscriminate spread and increasing use of Ayahuasca (and other hallucinogens), I believe that most new users are not prepared psychologically or emotionally to reap any long-term enduring benefits from them. The reasons for this are a general presence ontological-existential immaturity and also because there is no adequate language for referring to these experiences afterwards. And because there is such a variety of modes of partaking of the substances, that it is not possible even to objectively evaluate what the deeper positive changes, if any, have been.

On top of it all, with the grotesque and carnivalesque expansion and proliferation of the Amazonian brew outside their natural contexts of use (even if geographically still in the original regions and countries), what we have now is a free-for-all groping, manipulation, ego-tripping, and narcissistic posturing of both old and new hands. Despite all the enthusiastic claims to the contrary, there is a lot of amateurism in these tropical destinations of so-called “healing” and “spiritual” work. It’s an exotic tourism for some and easy money-making opportunity for others. Contrary to the general impression of growth and expansion (true at the most obvious level), there will be more “accidents,” bad trips, abuse, and malpractices in this unregulated wild frontier — not a very healthy or sane environment for “enlightenment” or “healing.”

Let me ask you this: are not the rampant modern mythologies around the so-called “teacher” or “healing” plant, ”plant spirits,” and “dark/malevolent entities” part of the Legions of Mara as well? Who is the self that believes in any one of these?

Until there is a true, sophisticated, rich, and critical synthesis of the best of the original (native) practices with the best of the western advanced interdisciplinary epistemological and therapeutic methodologies, insights, and knowledge, I respectfully suggest you let go of these dubious contemporary playgrounds of/for the psyche. They can be fun, certainly, but also dangerous for many. Or, just a plain waste of time. Meditate, don’t hallucinate. Balance between reason and intuition is the Great Mystic Health.

Alberto Roman, who has shaken out the spirits with Bradford Keeney, studied soul retrieval with Elena Avila, and sat until dawn in Peyote rituals with Lakota elders. He has endured the fire rounds in Sweat Lodges, circle-danced with Matthew Fox, been in trance in Balinese rituals, drummed with Sufis and African Masters, participated in Dying practices with Joan Halifax, and participated in many various mystical practices with countless others, known and unknown. He has partaken in and assisted Ayahuasca rituals with established Vegetalistas. He has degrees in Psychology and Philosophy.

Alberto was the translator of the book, The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms from the internationally respected Peruvian shaman Don José Campos and edited by Geraldine Overton. There is also a movie by Michael Wiese.

Thanks to allconsidering.com

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I’ve come to believe that for me writing IS breathing. If I don’t write, I feel less alive, less vital. All my life writing has been a creative pulse to which I danced. But for years I  chose not to write because I was engaged full time in helping others get their books published. That, however, was a crutch. Just because I dealt with other manuscripts all day long didn’t mean I couldn’t have found the time or the energy to write my own.

 I was struck by something I read by Richard Mitchell years ago. He called himself the “Underground Grammarian.” In his book, Less Than Words Can Say, he wrote: “Writing, whether it be a grocery list or The Brothers Karamazov freezes the work of the mind into a permanent and public form.” You only have to listen to most cable news stations or read web comments to know that we “pop jargon pills” as he puts it.  Repeated,  thoughtless phrases pepper our airways.  People who can’t put strings of sentences together in good order, Mitchell said, “cannot think.”

I recently heard seventy year old Vermont author John Irving interviewed on Vermont Public Radio.  He said he plans to keep writing until he dies. Writing is life for him.  He  writes in long hand on both sides of the paper, to conserve resources.  I look forward to reading his most recent book, his thirteenth novel: In One Person, an embrace of our sexual differences and the LGBT community. His main character, Billy Abbott, is a bi-sexual man. Like Dickens’ novels, Irving’s are character-driven plotted novel. He began working on this book, as he does with all his others, with the last sentence. “I know where I’m going and I just move there. I write toward it.”  J.K. Rowling apparently had the same experience since the end of the Harry Potter series came to her, along with the whole plotted story, during a train ride. She made quick notes and apparently all the books flowed like a roaring river toward the ending she already knew.

Irving said in an online interview that it wasn’t until he wrote his fourth novel, The World According to Garp, that he taught himself how to write for eight or nine hours a day. There is a difference, he said, in being a writer and being able to write only some of the time. He said he always has three or four novels waiting to be written. He describes his upcoming ones this way: a ghost story, a miracle story, a love story, and an adoption story.

Language aside, Ciardi called a book something more than “a random collection of words inked on paper.” We have about 600,000 words in our English language from which to chose even though in most day-to-day conversations we never use more than about 700 of them. Fewer for Twitter. But great things can be written with only a few of the words available to us. The King James Bible, for instance, was written with only 6,000.  So it’s not how many you use, but what you do with them. Writing is a matter of selecting the best words in the best order. And if you’re planning to be published, I wish you the good fortune of working with my copy editor!  

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From our “caterpillar perspective” we can’t imagine being “one” with that butterfly. We think we’re separate, when in fact, we are all “one.” “Striving for Oneness” has become a cliché, but in a world increasingly taking up “sides,” perhaps it’s worth restating.

We’re all three: caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly.  How can that be? How can responsible gun ownership advocates and those advocating unlimited gun ownership be the same? How can Muslim, Christian, and Jew be one? How can up be down and black be white? The people who are saved and the people bound for hell? The same?  We’ve lived with our “us” versus “them” dualities so long, it’s hard to  imagine any other way.

Because we live in a world of illusion, we think we’re separate. The Course in Miracles puts it this way: “The world you see is…a picture of complete disunity and total lack of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seemingly solid that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without, and what is out can never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall.”  P. 504

But just because our world is a yin/yang world, it doesn’t mean we can’t be both. Just because we see through a particular gender lens doesn’t mean we can’t learn how to see through the other one. If our aperture widens a bit, we can choose to see the world as “both/and” rather than “either/or.”

Because diversity often is too confusing and pluralism too fuzzy, we’re more comfortable seeing a world with clear boundaries. But we’re moving, as L. Robert Keck in Sacred Quest describes it, from a “caterpillar” epoch that wants all the answers into a “butterfly” epoch where new “answers” are created and old “answers” are questioned.  “How do we inhale the fresh air of the Spirit, if we are holding our breath in fear?”  p. 106  Sacred Quest.

Our son gave us an Isle of Lewis chess set one year for Christmas. It was found in 1831 on the Outer Hebrides island where the famous Callanish Stones guard all that was and is to be. The walrus tusk and whale’s teeth carved pieces are thought to have originated in Trondheim, Norway, around the 12^th century. They appeal to my Scandinavian DNA.  Many of the carvings are based on designs found in Norway’s Nidaros Cathedral.  The British Museum has replicated 67 of the original 78 in brown and ivory.

I’m taken with the knight and castle pieces which are obviously “berserkers”—fierce warriors. Bear-like, they  unleashed their fury, believing that in doing so, they aligned themselves with archetypal models of the gods’ sacred fury. Even good kings, like Olaf who brought Christianity to his people, bloodied his sword, fully believing it was his duty as king to follow in the savage footsteps of the former gods.

Every time I play chess, I look at the troubled white queen and I think she seems to be saying, “Does the world have to be so divided and must we keep fighting like this?”

When two waterlilies—or lotuses—blossom together, it’s a beautiful symbol of love and affinity. Togetherness.  Oneness in twoness.  In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, it may seem like heresy to say that we can choose now to leave the world of “somebody wins and somebody loses” behind.  Instead, we can be the caterpillar saying, “I can’t wait to get a pair of those beautiful black and orange wings—because that’s really me.”

Photo credits:  Callanish stones, Chris Jones; waterlilies, Lester Allen

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It seems that consciousness and art goes back–way back. We’ve all heard accounts of Neanderthals with their bear femur and bird wing flutes.  The Shanidar Cave, for instance, in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq dates back 60,000 to 100,000 years. It was occupied by our ancestors for 40,000 years!  It’s called the Cave of Flowers because of the flower burials discovered there. Imagine our ancestor-musicians filling their world with music and tenderly burying their loved ones with flowers.  I was raised believing in “better living through chemistry” and that we present-day humans are perched on the upside of the Darwinian curve. We supposedly moved beyond the Flintstones to the magnificent humans we are today.  But I look around and wonder.

I’ve known, thanks to Marjia Gimbutus and others, about Çatal Hüyük and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. But I hadn’t discovered Derinkuyu in Cappadocia until just the other day. It covered two and a half square miles…rather like an underground Mesa Verde on steroids. It goes down, down so deep that to date only eight levels of about twenty have been excavated. And this is just one of thirty-six underground cities in that area.  Experts estimate that around 200,000 people may have lived in each underground city! Tunnels connect them. Why?  Most likely they were constructed so people could  escape from surface earth changes.

More “books” to read. More “letters” to open.

Peru is mountain-stitched on one side of a desert called Nasca where geoglyphs (ancient writing in the earth) challenge our imaginations. What are these lines that can only be “read” from the air? People have many theories, but no one knows for sure.

But most intriguing of all are some stones found not far from the Nasca lines near the village of Ica. There, hidden in a cave for heaven only knows how long, are thousands and thousands of stones–all covered with intricate etchings.  These grey and black Ica stones can’t be carbon-dated because there’s no burnable matter in these dense Andecite quartz-like stones.  Some weigh only ounces and can fit in your hand; others are the size of big dogs.  There are thousands of them—all etched with pictures and symbols. Researchers have pored over them and determined that the intricate etched lines were not made by any electric drill we know of. Like crop circles, some are obvious hoaxes; most are not. The Peruvian government forbids further digging and the cave where they were found is a big secret now. Whoever these stone carvers were, they were master artists!  And the rich symbolism drawn on their surfaces begs to be unraveled.

In the early sixties Javier Cabrera, a Peruvian doctor, got one of these stones as a gift. Engraved on it was an extinct fish–one that had lived on earth millions of years ago. Collectors later sold him 341 similar stones and Cabrera studied them for the next 35 years. By the time he died of cancer on Dec. 30, 2001, he had collected 15,000 of these stones and believed thousands more lay buried below the desert’s surface. What besides fish are on them? Hold on to your hats!

About a third of the ones studied depict dinosaurs with details only recently discovered by paleontologists. One shows people using telescopes to study the stars. Some show flora and fauna that experts say go back millions and millions of years! Who knew all this? Who recorded it?  Many stones show intricate medical procedures; others are maps showing early earth landmasses and continents which geologists claim may have looked like these “stone maps” of the Eastern Hemisphere some 200,000 years ago!

Like cave paintings and stone markings found throughout our precious landscapes, these Ica stones wash onto the shores of our consciousness and beg us to rethink how we view our planet, our universe and ourselves. Like other ancient glyphs, these engraved stones seem to echo:

 “Oh, you thought you knew, but your ancestors have much yet to teach you!”

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