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Following is an excerpt from Session 8:
 


All through the sessions of Mapping Your Spiritual Journey you have been in relationship with nature. You began with a reminder to observe the seasons as you mapped your spiritual journey and to make some comparisons between the changes you observe in nature and your own changes on your spiritual journey. Elements from the Japanese Garden helped you to get started on a regular self-nourishing practice.
 
At the naming ceremony you created for yourself, you were invited to bring in sacred objects which could have included natural elements. Your symbol may be an animal or flower or something else from the natural world.
 
You explored your spiritual beliefs by being inspired by the Five Directions. In each direction is an element, a moon phase, a season, a time of day, an animal and a role such as planting seeds, blooming, bearing seeds or letting go.
 
In the session on home, you were encouraged to get in touch with your natural rhythm as you engage in household tasks. A memory walk got you in touch with ceremony and integrating the natural elements into rituals you create. You took a memory walk to a yard or a neighbourhood that helped you recall pleasant childhood memories in a natural environment. You may have also asked yourself the questions included in the Flowering Tree Ceremony.
 
In the last session, you read about some of the goddesses of Anatolia and made a list of your female ancestors which may have included some goddesses. Goddess images were created out of the clay of the earth and often were decorated with symbols of plant and animal life. We can't help but be connected to our ancestors through the natural world. Their remains are in the earth that nourish the plants, the trees, all creatures, including us as we partake in Mother Earth's abundance.
 
As Joan Halifax writes in The Fruitful Darkness:
 

"By feeding on the ancestral remains of countless plant and animal species, the great trees of tropical and temperate forests literally translated the past into our atmosphere", Joan Halifax writes. The destruction of these old forests then is an attack on our ancestors as they express themselves to Earth - as our very atmosphere.
 

When I travelled to Turkey in the spring of 1998, we visited Avanos where clay from the Red River, the Kizilirmak, is used for the making of pottery and plates. The pottery was exported to Greece and Rome in ancient times and the people are continuing that pottery making tradition. Avanos is near Cappadocia where people once lived and worshipped in cave sanctuaries and the landscape is covered with rock formations known as "fairy chimneys".
 
Inside one of the shops we watched an older man sit in front of the wheel turning it with his foot while shaping a piece of red clay. At first a lid. Then a tea pot miraculously appeared from his reddened fingers. The shop was inside a cave and as we walked further into it we could see many shelves of the pottery on display. There were goddess images, egg shapes, deer like those found at Alacahoyuk from the 2nd half of the third millennium bce. I chose a small plate with the tree of life on it which was used to hold fruit at our ritual at Catal Hoyuk.
 
Just after I was in Turkey, a symposium was held in Istanbul called "Earth Shaped by Woman, Woman Shaped By Earth". One artist/educator from California, Rose Wognum Frances, called her presentation "Wise Hands". According to Joan Cichon of Chicago who attended the conference, Rose posed the thesis that the act of art making was the origin of Palaeolithic and Neolithic culture and world view. She further argued that the materials themselves - clay, fibre, pigment - in relation to the human hand, shaped mythic consciousness.
 
Although not a potter myself, I realize the strong link with earth and universal evolution though pottery. Pottery made by hand from the earth and what the earth contains of elements of the whole solar system. In the human hand there is contact with other human hands who have touched the same particles made up of animals, plants, humans throughout the millennia. Hand in hand. Part of a Grand Overall Design.
 


The land on which we stand informs the stories we tell. The clay pots and images left behind by our ancestors for thousands of years tell their stories using the earth, their hands, their memories and their symbols.
 
Clay stories and our stories come from the earth. As Joan Halifax has written, stories like the sacred plants, are medicine and food and they come from the earth. "They remind us that we do not stand alone. Through them we live in the body of coyote and crow, tree and stone, gods and heroes, Ancestral Mothers and Grandmothers. In this way, we confirm our relationship with all of creation."
 
Halifax quotes her friend Steven Foster who said that people erect symbolic stories around themselves like houses. These stories are "circles of protection and purpose that bodily carry our spirits all the way to the gates of death".
 
Just look at how our stories, yours and mine in Mapping Your Spiritual Journey, have revealed how we are different and how we are the same. We unravelled these stories that have lead us to view ourselves in relation to one another, to our ancestors, including ancient goddesses and to the earth.
 



In Greece, the people combine an ancient connection to the land to a Christian celebration such as Easter. They roast a lamb outside and in the village near the Skoteino Cave I visited in Crete, the villagers take a walk to the cave. Carol Christ, who has made her home in Greece, says that spirituality "must be rooted in the land where we live, just as an authentic Greek spirituality must be rooted in the Greek land".
 
While at Tohum in the spring of 1998, an eco-farm in southern Turkey, we took part in a spring planting ceremony in the freshly ploughed fields. From the Great Mother Goddess of Catal Hoyuk to Kubaba, Kybele and Artemis, people worshipped the Goddess of Fertility in her various forms. They celebrated the planting of seeds and the harvest with prayers and dances, weaving the images into their carpets. At Tohum, we combined our many resources, singing and dancing in a circle to bless the spring planting.
 
On the grounds of the Ignatius Jesuit Centre of Guelph where my office is located, there is a Blessing of the Land once a year at which time people gather for a Roman Catholic Eucharist outside followed by wagon rides to various points of the land at which we stop and give thanks. This is land on which there are silent retreats, an ecology project, an organic farm, cows, sheep, wild animals like deer and nature trails. We give thanks for the many gifts this land shares with us and sing "we are walking on holy ground".
 
Can you think of a ceremony you attended where various elements were combined to create a form of honouring or thanksgiving? Can you think of a ceremony you would like to create integrating various spiritual beliefs, practices and gifts of the land?