All My Relations

When entering the sweat lodge led by a Lakota man, we recited the phrase “All my relations." When my father first met his great grandmother, a Salish-Kootenai woman of the Flathead reservation she was leaving her sweat lodge.  I imagine she would enter and leave saying  "All My Relations.”

This prayer in my opinion is the recognition of our connection and interconnection with all beings throughout space and time.  We realize our intimacy with all beings, that all beings, sentient and insentient are my relations.  The mountains and rivers, the trees and the grasses, the birds and the insects, animals and humans, are all my relations. All are me, and I am them, and yet all are independent, and unique.

Dogen Zenji said:  

To study the Buddha way is to study the self,

To study the self is to forget the self, 

To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas.

To be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas is to awaken to "all my relations," all phenomena, all beings in the Dharma worlds, and all aspects of ourselves.  Awakening to the ten thousand dharmas is to realize the emptiness of all things.

In 1976, as an attorney living and working on the Rosebud Reservation, Marvin a native lawyer and colleague, and I were going to see a revered native elder on the Pine Ridge reservation to inquire about the treaty of 1868 between the Lakota people and the United States.  We walked down a grassy slope to the old man’s small cabin, a light rain started falling, yet it was still sunny.  Marvin put a blanket over us to protect us from the rain. There was just that awakened moment, the self forgotten. 

"To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas" means we are awakened to all phenomena, including the sentient and insentient.  From all life we learn impermanence, from the mountains we learn impermanence, from the rivers constant change. And yet we are supported by the earth, the air, the light from the sun, and so on.  When we realize impermanence, what naturally arises is gratitude for this life.

Coming home to who we truly are, not the one we think we are, rather the one who resides in not knowing, the one who is a mystery, we let the mystery be.

The Peace of Wild Things

….I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendel Berry