Original Invitations
Rather than Ten Commandments,
beginning with loving YHWH,
iconically accessible and yet mysterious
as ecosystemic Earth,
Native Americans
and perhaps all original people
mutually deploy Original Instructions,
both matriarchal and patriarchal,
intended to become prescriptive
only as the Golden Rule of cooperative learning
grows descriptive for each one listening
for how these creation and self/other management stories
inform our days and nights
as naked immigrants invited on and in this Turtle Island.
These creation instructions, not commandments,
begin with Gaia's invitation
to do as She loves,
to scatter our best seeds
rooted in healthiest nutritional needs
to follow where and only as long as these grow,
developing seeds of their own to further compost scatter
and to avoid those which ossify
into full-blown egocentric
ethnocentric
anthrocentric addictions,
hoarding out what began as healthy need
and grew to dominate our habits of mind and body
becoming capitalizing wealth through pirating
what began as good times
as good seeds
but turned into transparent addictions
to self-powering over Earth's nature,
Original Invitations to health as wealth,
and not texts and LeftBrain lists and lexicons
of not all that original commandments
to violently hoard fertile stealth
as if this were healthy self-wealth esteem.
Grace can only be truly heard as sacred invitation.
To listen for love as a command,
whether from self or God or other or Earth
as one whole deep and richly wise ecosystem,
sets up a double-bind
competing cooperation competition
between need and emerging addiction to self-idolatry,
between enslavement and self-serving aristocracy,
perennial addictions to overcoming aching loneliness,
rather than becoming cooperative rest,
listening for Earth's invitations
into deeper and richer voiceless grace.
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