Songs & Poems by Beth Garrigus
SACRED MOTHER / received on Lama Mountain in Fall 2014
Sacred Mother, we hear You calling. Sacred Mother, we hear Your prayer.
Sacred Mother, we feel Your anguish. Sacred Mother, we are here.
la il la ha il allah hu/ la il la ha il allah (2X)
We have come to ground Your Presence, protect life and make a stand.
We are rising as Your witness, as Your heart, Your voice, Your hand.
la il la ha il allah hu/ la il la ha il allah (2X)
We have come to shift the story, restore balance, dispell fear.
We are singing through the darkness to All Our Relations, we are here.
la il la ha il allah hu/ la il la ha il allah (2X)
We are praying with the waters, gather close Your sacred seed.
We are kneeling in the clear-cut, our love becoming a Sheltering Tree.
la il la ha il allah hu/ la il la ha il allah (2X)
FOR THE WATERS (Received by Kritee on 28th July 2020; with minor edits)
Sacred Spirit Keepers of This Land,
we are kneeling at the waters edge…
We are washing ourselves of the Limited (small) Mind
of our fears,
of our self centeredness, strategies and manipulations,
of our greed and of our self loathing,
of desiring to be anyone other than our true selves,
of daring to think that we are not enough.
we are stepping away from the shores of everything that has distracted and numbed and kept us small,
pushing off into the river that is inside;
touching the places that remember us when we have forgotten ourselves
and remind us who and what and why we are…
we are wrapping the trunks of aspen and oak, of cottonwood and sycamore and white pine with our Love; touching the footprints of deer, fox, possum, rabbit, coyote, field mouse, sandpiper and raccoon, mosses and skunk cabbage, tuckahoe and fern, nettle, grape vine and wild raspberry, tall grasses connected by tiny spider webs with our Love;…nests of squirrel and robin, sparrow and swallow, red-winged blackbird and grouse, flicker and cardinal, vulture, tern and owl with our Love.
in every language, in every part of the Earth we are saying estoferallah–forgive us for the suffering that we have inflicted on our relations–for the costs of our privilege;
for having walled off our tears…
may this prayer be part of the healing,
restore balance and flow to the waters outside and within us.
a Prayersong is rising.
every aquifer, well and spring, every great sea, ripple, wave and tidal bore, every trout-filled high mountain lake, every estuary where great blue herons, osprey, bald eagles and egrets roost, every silted inlet, every bog, every stagnant pond that holds the delicate remains of the frogs that once thrived there, every fly-infested flood plain, every factory farm, every oil-stained shore along which tiny sea-turtles hatch and make a hurried path to the river, every current that carries the seepage of coal ash and tar sands, the radiated waters of fukushima farther from their source… is sacred.
every leaf and bough, every frond and blade, every marsh flower, hive, borrow and den, every rookerie, every over-grazed grassland, every commercial feed lot, every place where a wolf’s waters have broken and she has suckled her young, where a badger has rooted for grubs, a cougar has taken her last breath…
to every clear-cut forest, every drought-shriveled field,
every dried up place within us…
we are singing la il la ha il allah—
we remember and we love you. we are part of one another.
please forgive us for the harm that we have caused.
we are pouring our Zhikr-Prayer into the waters all over the Earth
waters of the amazon, parana, uruguay and paraguay, the ganges, brahmaputra and indus, the congo, zambezi and niger, the hudson, susquehanna, and saint lawrence, cumberland, potomac, savannah and shenandoah, the mississippi and missouri, arkansas and colorado, the little big horn, klamath, columbia, mackenzie and yukon, yangtze, indus, yellow, and mekong, the volga, danube, rhine, and elbe, the tigris and euphrates and nile, the brazos and the rio grande…
asking for their forgiveness, wading into them with this Great Love…
— By Beth Garrigus