Covenanting – Light Morning

Mama Gaia, Papa Starlight

A Prayer of Remembrance and Repentance

Mama Gaia, Papa Starlight, your children we all do be, whether we dwell on the earth, fly through the sky, or swim in the sea.

You gifted us with life, and set within us a seed-like image of who we are to be. Help us unfold this image more fully, that we may come to know, love, and be one with our fellow creatures, just as you, Mama and Papa, know and love and are one with us.

Teach us to love those who are unkind and forgetful. We know the price they must pay, and know that we, too, are not reliably kind and mindful.

Be gently corrective with your human children, then, who so easily go astray, lose their way, and seem to be slow learners.

May Grace shield us from overeating the tempting fruit on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Once this tree has served its intended purposes, though, guide us to the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

An early Candlemas celebration at Light Morning.
Photo by Victor Fischer.

A Sword In My Side: 1

Everything Unresolved Is Recreated

The following story, in three parts, is told from the perspective
of how I experienced it 25 years ago, in December, 1995.

Prologue

After the trauma had served its intended purpose, I came to believe that the path I had traveled had to unfold as it did. The hard-earned clarity of hindsight showed me clues that I had missed and discernible traces of long-dried blood on the tracks.

But we don’t see what we’re not yet ready to see; or shouldn’t see. Foresight would have caused me to run from the pain that awaited me, and from the improbable healing and commitment that that pain would bring.

A New Kind of Family

[When Light Morning was an active community, those wanting to visit or intern here sometimes asked about our core values. In response, we posted three articles to an earlier version of this website: Living Close to the Earth, A New Kind of Family, and A Transformational Journey.]

In the spring of 1974, two couples arrived at an old Appalachian farm in southwest Virginia and started homesteading. Ron and Marlene and Joyce and I were passionate and vision-driven. We had just come out of a catalytic encounter with inner guidance. But we also came from significantly different backgrounds.

Joyce and I grew up in a small intentional village on the east coast. As young adults, we adopted the early hippie lifestyle of long hair, psychedelics, rock and roll, and Vietnam War protests. Ron and Marlene were raised on Wisconsin dairy farms. They came of age as straight-laced Midwesterners, never doing any drugs, ignoring the war, and becoming members of the John Birch Society.

How did two couples who would hardly have been acquaintances, let alone friends, end up spending their entire adult lives together? We later joked that it had been an arranged marriage, and we were still looking for who had arranged it. But whoever that mysterious matchmaker may have been, we were tightly bonded with a curiously durable glue.