Adapting ancestral practices

To play while reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-047ko4v05s

I have been working on practicing sacred reciprocity with the land, as our ancestors did. I felt awkward at first, like I had no idea what I was doing. “What can I offer the land?” I wondered. As I’ve come more into the practice and believing that the land appreciates my offerings, I have been making them more my own.

One way I’ve found I can give back to the land for all it gives to me is by cleaning trash around the land. It may not be as “sexy” as our ancestor’s practices, but maybe in those times, the land wasn’t as littered as much of the land I visit here in Texas.

In addition to not being as sexy as other spiritual practices, picking up trash forces me to be more with my heart break.

Often, we ignore things because we don’t want, or don’t feel like we have the capacity, to be with the heartbreak of seeing things fully. If we really saw every homeless person we drove by, or the injustices in our workplace, so on, we would have to process the pain of the current situation.

I feel this way with picking up the trash, I have to be with all of my feelings about the way people treat the earth. I go through anger, feeling like most people don’t care (even if this is a story), feeling sad because we as a society have become so disconnected from the land that we don’t care about continually mistreating it.

Though picking up trash when I am with the land challenges to alchemize my feelings about the world, it truly feels like I am honoring the land. It may not be what my ancestors did, but in modern day reality, I believe it is deeply reverential.

Prompts:

• How do you honor the land?

• Is there one way you can modernize your spiritual practices to fit our present day reality?

Resources I’ve felt called to:

• Heart chakra work and meditations

• Resonance apothecary bleeding heart flower essence