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Learning How to See with Brian McLaren

Seeing Nature as an Indigenous Person with Edith and Randy Woodley

Learning How to See with Brian McLaren

Center for Action and Contemplation

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8748 Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How can you apply Indigenous values like harmony, respect, and accountability to your own life and community?  In this episode, we’re learning to see nature through the eyes of an Indigenous Person. For this conversation, Brian McLaren is joined by Randy and Edith Woodley to discuss the importance of rediscovering Indigenous values to create a more harmonious relationship with the Earth and all its inhabitants. Randy and Edith Woodley recently released their book, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being. About the guests:  Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley is an activist, scholar, author, teacher, wisdom-keeper, and Cherokee descendant recognized by the Keetoowah Band who speaks on justice, faith, the earth, and Indigenous realities. He is the author of numerous books, including Becoming Rooted and Shalom and the Community of Creation. He and his wife, Edith, co-sustain Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds outside Portland, Oregon. Edith Woodley is the cofounder and co-sustainer of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds. She was raised on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and is a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. Woodley has a degree from Bacone College and mentors others in the spirituality of the land, farming methods, and seed-keeping. She is a leader in the Decolonizing with Badass Indigenous Grandmas cohort. She and her husband, Randy Woodley, have four grown children and six grandchildren. Resources:  The transcript for this episode can be found here.  Becoming Rooted by Randy Woodley was mentioned. You can find that here. Check out Randy and Edith Woodley’s new book, Journey to Eloheh here. Find out more about musician April Stace here.   Connect with us:  Have a response to Brian's call to action at the end of this episode, or a question in general?  Email us: podcasts@cac.org  Send us a voicemail: cac.org/voicemail  We'll be accepting questions for our Listener Questions episode until November 20th, 2024.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'd like to read you a short passage from a book by Randy Woodley, who will be one of our guests today on learning how to see.

0:12.1

The book is called Becoming Routed, and there's short daily reflections, a hundred of them, to help us reconnect with the sacred earth.

0:21.5

This is from chapter two.

0:24.1

A spring gently rises up out of the earth and becomes a stream,

0:30.1

which becomes a river, which becomes an ocean,

0:33.6

which evaporates and becomes rain,

0:36.4

which feeds itself back into the earth, again, finding its

0:40.3

way back to the surface, water repeats this sacred cycle of enduring life. Water, soil, seeds, plants,

0:49.5

the sun, the stars, the moon, these are all our teachers. They teach us about life, even as they give us life.

0:59.7

A fern is one of the best examples of enduring life. Scientists call the pattern of a fern a fractal.

1:08.0

The natural world is full of fractals, patterns that repeat themselves at different scales.

1:15.5

If you examine every part of the fern down to the smallest part of a leaf, you see it continuously

1:22.9

repeating itself.

1:24.9

I have read that a nautilus shell does something similar, but I've not seen one up

1:29.5

close. In a way, everything has a bit of a fractal nature, repeating itself, giving new life,

1:37.7

and moving itself forward into the future as a species. We humans are beings of a fractal type nature. We are born and we reproduce.

1:49.0

Life, sacred life continues naturally to our descendants. Like a stream, we are on an enduring

1:57.0

journey to seek the sacredness of our lives as human beings. How well we choose to listen

2:03.3

and how well we choose to live will determine how much of the sacredness we will discover.

2:10.1

Our most important teacher is dear nature, creation herself, Mother Earth. She holds the wisdom of the endless ages.

2:20.6

If we can learn to cherish our beloved teacher

2:23.3

and follow the wisdom found in her fractal-type patterns,

...

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