All Our Relations
Earth, Mother, and Grandmother, we are speaking to you,
please listen to us! We know that we are all erlated.
We are your children, we two-legged ones, just like
the four-legged and the winged ones are your children.
We are all related. We are their relations,
and they are ours, all children of the same mother.
If we are all related to you, mother, we must make peace.
Why should your children fight like this? We are all related.
Help us to make peace with each other, lasting peace
among relatives. Mother, Grandmther, Earth,
may we walk lovingly and with mercy upon your paths.
May we make peace with all our relations.
--Prayers from Lakota ceremony for making of relatives.
How does any family live in peace with each other? Only through respect: we must respect the others with whom we share our world. Let us hope it is not too late to learn this lesson, and to apply it in our daily lives.
It a condemnatory statement I make here, and perhaps one born of anger and frustration at the state of the world, but... we cannot even respect others of our own species with whome we share our world. How in the name of the Universally holy are we supposed to respect other species?
We look for differences, and that - well that's a taught behaviour, not a natural one. Prejudice through colour... race... creed... faith... gender... all taught, and it's a crying shame. Even those of us who try not to allow this kind of separatism to prevail - the moment we allow our children access to a world outside of our influence, and allow them we will, for we want those in our care to grow into independent human beings, not miniature clones of us, we expose them to the influence of others not quite so open to allowing them to think for and by themselves.
Am I being harsh to my fellow humans? Perhaps, but it's what we've done down the ages...for as long as we have been able to notice that we are not all the same, and I... I don't know. I wouldn't say I despair of it; of the behaviour that allows one person to believe they are better just because they are ______ (fill out the blanks here) and someone else is ______. But it certainly saddens me, and will always do so, until we are all equal in each others eyes.
So how can we then respect the birds and beasts and plant life of this world, who are also our kin - all our relations - and treat them also with egality, concern and the 'humanity' which helps to bring us one step closer to divinity?
This question is a particularly painful one for me, having currently failed to extend such care and concern and all that goes with it - in an entirely unintentional way, (though I will not excuse myself because of that). It is something that I will forever be conscious of - even once I have reached the point in which I am living as I once did - as I will do again. All lithat lives is my relation.