January 2024 Interview with Valerie Dean + Middle East Poems

Part II: Interview with Valerie Dean
Keeper of Praise Song for the Earth

In relation to Praise Song, the altar is the round garden I have grown on the metal tray that is dressed every month and is the centrepiece. I feel it holds the energy of all the prayers, love, expressions of gratitude, etc., and this is the gift of beauty we give every month. I always take a photo at the end of each praise song to send out to the group. 

Here is a Praise Song that Valerie sent in October 2022, followed by the interview, and another Praise Song of Valerie’s from June 2022.

Praise Song for Earth, October 2022

My heart is singing

The sky is grey, high, and hazy. The trees show tongues of flame weaving through the green as She begins to show her autumn finery, red, gold, amber, heralds of change singing out summer and welcoming in the new. A staccato fall of acorns drums the message deeper and oh what a year it is for acorns, ankle deep at the back of the house, protective measures necessary to venture out to the bins, thank you mighty oak for this gift of giving, we will nurture some of these babies for you, find them homes where they can thrive and grow. A profusion of fungi is appearing, so many varieties, shapes, and sizes, once again I’m “tripping” on mushrooms walking through the orchard and down through the woodland, imagining their mycelium webs running under my feet, doing what they do, which I don’t entirely understand. The wind is soft and wraps itself around me like a much-needed comfort blanket and suddenly I am in Her, part of Her, held in love, safe, home. And I listen to the prayers in the wind …. live lightly, tread softly, breathe deeply…………. I reach the river, stand, and sing, and the wind sings with me, the riverbank trees invite me to the dance, shedding leaves which send out ripples across the water and now it is my heart which is singing, singing for Her, singing to Her, singing myself back home, back to the oneness, back to love. Look, She says, everything around you is a message, everything around you is my message of love, I love you, my arms are open to you, run, jump into my arms, I will hold you. And the only thing bigger than my love for Her is Her love for me but there is no Her and me and water and tree, just one heart singing out its love.

In amongst the chaos and disintegration of this weary world, there is still love, there is still beauty. Let us be love, let us be beauty, let our hearts sing Her praise. Join me on Saturday wherever you are, however you wish, I will be with the altar from 10.30. Anything you wish to share of your love for Her please share to the group, anything you send to me will be fed to the altar to become part of our gift to Her. 

May She know that She is loved
May She know that She is loved
May She know that She is loved

In the years between 2011 and 2020, my relationship with Earth as a living conscious being was constantly deepening and growing. I had been thinking about Praise Song for years, talking about the idea to a few close friends but doing nothing until at a women’s gathering led by Jackie Crovetto, who suggested I needed to start doing something, “Have a group, try things out.” (You can read Jackie’s Earth-Love interviews from April 2021 and May 2021.) Some days later, I sent an email to the women who had been at the gathering and friends who I thought might be interested. This was originally conceived as a gathering of women who would come together in praise of Earth, and sit around a living altar to help us deepen our relationship to Earth and find the different ways She may want to speak to us and through us. I was growing the altar from soil and rock and moss with a bowl, a pool, of water in the centre.

I wanted the gathering to be around the full moon. I gave very little notice. No one was able to come so I did it alone. Before the next full moon, we were in lockdown. Covid had come.

In my next email, I asked “Is there another way we can make this happen? Could people send me via email their offerings of love, gratitude, and beauty?”  I spent days looking at poetry, books, music, art, trying to find those things that expressed my gratitude to and love for Earth. People responded. A different idea of Praise Song had come into being and from that time my partner, David, joined me with the altar. The masculine came in which proved to be wonderful.

Oh, and the beauty of people’s responses, what joy, what creativity, what love. And in those very difficult times, Praise Song became a marker, a rhythm by which we lived. That was one of its gifts. In those first months, when lockdown meant quiet, peace, stillness, all I wanted to do was sit and listen to Her. There was also time to sit with fear. David has cancer and is very susceptible to infection.

Another gift was the writing itself, the discipline of finding something to write about each month. I have never considered myself a writer. It can take me a long time to get things on the page, it’s a very different way of using language than the oral tradition of storytelling or ceremony.

One lovely offshoot has been to see how people find the emails help them to remember and reconnect in their busy lives. When I send Praise Song, they will take a moment to breath with Her. That kind of feedback is wonderful to hear. I remember one of my early storytelling teachers saying, “If there’s one person in the audience whose heart is touched, your job is done.” 

I asked Val where the triplet came from.

May She know that She is loved 

May She know that She is loved 

May She know that She is loved 

It just happened, like the name Praise Song, it was waiting to be found, I think. Some of the people who are part of the group who receive the email, I’ve never met in person as it has been shared by friends. Occasionally, people join us in person for Praise Song, which is an absolute joy. I would love for that to happen more often but people would need to check with me first because of David’s health. If you’ve got a cold please don’t come. Larger groups are also difficult for the same reason, but I hold to the possibility there may be ways around that.

Praise Song for Earth, June 2022

Falling in love again

I listened to a talk with creation spirituality theologian Matthew Fox recently and thought to share some of his wise and wonderful words that seemed to speak directly to the heart of what Praise song is and does.

Firstly a quote from Thomas Berry, “The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth. In the end, the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. Celebration is a basic dynamic of the universe, an exuberant expression of existence itself.”

And from Matthew Fox, “We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being; indeed the universe is the primary sacred reality. We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world all around us.”

He suggested we practice falling in love with the other than human three times a day as a way to open our hearts. To keep falling in love with the beauty all around and within us, to pay attention to where we touch the sacred and where it touches us.

So, I take up this invitation and the first thing I fall into is the soft velvet throat of an iris so lush and glorious in its form and colour and perfume that it’s hard to imagine I have not knelt before it for all its existence. Some of the fallings are much more subtle but no less intense…..there is no end it seems……So I invite you to join me, to fall, to fall in deeper and deeper, into the love, into the sacred.

May I, may we, be just such an exuberant expression of existence when we come together in praise and prayer and love, may we fall ever deeper into her outstretched arms, into our own hearts, into the sacred at the centre, at the source.

Join me Saturday 11th wherever you are, however you wish, I will be with the altar from 10.30. Come with your expressions of love and gratitude and celebration. What have you fallen in love with? Forward anything you wish to share to the group, forward anything you wish to be woven into our gift of beauty; words, images, music, prayer, memory, experience, anything your heart wishes to offer.

May She know that She is loved
May She know that She is loved
May She know that She is loved

If you would like to take part in these monthly ceremonies or wish to contact Valerie, her email is: valeriemdean@icloud.com

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A friend in Australia sent this photo and poem. Thank you, Kim!

Hope in the clouds


Ancient bird 
here from eternity 
sang us songs 
awakens our tongues
Give us song
Flutter of beating wings 
heartbeat of sound
Music – 
give us words

Ancient bird 
here for eternity
Sing us songs
Soothe our heart 
give us songs – 
the evening chorus

Branches fall 
the tree lives on
Ancient bird sits
In the tree – 
being

Ancient bird
sings a mournful song 
till the stars and moon rise.

Kim Leevers

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Middle East Poems

With thanks and acknowledgments to Larry Robinson for sending these poems on his e-poem a day.

Wildpeace 
 
Not the peace of a cease-fire 
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, 
but rather 
as in the heart when the excitement is over 
and you can talk only about a great weariness. 
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult. 
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows 
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama. 
A peace 
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without 
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be 
light, floating, like lazy white foam. 
A little rest for the wounds – who speaks of healing? 
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation 
to the next, as in a relay race: 
the baton never falls.) 
 
Let it come 
like wildflowers, 
suddenly, because the field 
must have it: wildpeace. 
 
– Yehuda Amichai (1924-20000
 
 (Translation by Chana Bloch, in This Same Sky, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye)

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If I Must Die

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

        – Refaat Alareer

(Refaat Alareer, along with his brother, his sister, and four nieces, was killed by an Israeli bomb on December 6, 2023.)

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Peace in a Time of Revolution


To be still 
in the curl of chaos
to welcome dark waters
and lightning strike 

to steady in webbed roots
sinking down deep
as merciful wind
whips leaves, blasts dead branches

to choose this rough real-
a sacred gesture of the heart
emptied of all but 
yes

The peace of God 
is not my favored sleep
but rather trusting
this bloody death-
is bloody birth


        – Ruah Bull, Santa Rosa, California

ANNOUNCEMENTS

This past November, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee gave a talk, “Shifting Landscapes,” at St. Ethelburga’s Center for Reconciliation and Peace in London. With passion and great depth, Emmanuel shares “…for me the real story that is unfolding beneath the surface is the cry to decenter ourselves from the narrative that has engulfed our world…”

In the face of significant shifts, what can we contribute to the Earth? How can we align ourselves in a meaningful relationship with her? What possibilities emerge when love becomes a guiding force between us? “The real shifting landscape that must unfold,” as Emmanuel says, “is within.”

You can watch this dynamic talk at https://goldensufi.org/video/shifting-landscapes/

*****
In Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s final podcast episode, “Into the Light and Back Again,” he shares realms that he has traversed in the last 15 years that most of us can only imagine.

Llewellyn describes the episode as “…part of my own journey into the light and back again, a personal description of the landscape of light and love into which I was taken, and how this landscape has defined much of my later years. I also hope that the angels and devas that have become the companions of my old age will at some time in the future be a part of a reawakening world, an animate Earth becoming fully alive.”

You can listen to it at https://workingwithoneness.org/podcast/into-the-light-and-back-again/