WisdomBridge: The Director's Page

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Letter from the Director

Dear Friend,

Welcome to WisdomBridge. We hope that you find your time here a rich and rewarding one. It is our deepest intent to make this a site that engenders soul activism by informing, inspiring and conspiring to shake up the way we see ourselves and our place in the world.

We are living in challenging times when the machinery of empire, both corporate and military are straining the lifeways of this fragile planet. Fear is on the rise and the freedoms we assumed were ours, are under assault. As the poet William Stafford declared, "The darkness around us is deep."

What response can we make to unhinge this path of destruction? Not unlike the workers of the English trades who were seeing their ways destroyed by the emerging factory system, we too are being called to resist the onslaught of the mindless expansion of progress and the domestication of the wild soul.

We must come back to life, in both meanings of that phrase; back from a low-grade depression, our state of pre-death that mimics life and back to the vitality that surrounds us in this pulsing world. The core of our work is to reclaim our indigenous soul. Gary Snyder, in conversation with Bill Moyers said,

"What I would say in one sentence is that, for Americans, the real work is becoming native to North America. The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we're on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves developing a loyalty that goes back before the formation of any nation state, back billions of years and thousands of years into the future. The real work is accepting citizenship in the continent itself."

Each of us is being called to become indigenous to this land. That is the heartbeat of WisdomBridge, the underlying purpose of our work. Our conviction is to recover the basic movements that made us human through ritual, community, connection with nature, the primary satisfactions that truly feed and nourish the soul.

We are working to restore the Four-fold Pathway of the Indigenous Soul. (See our Resource Page) By doing so, we can help to mend the tears in our bodies and souls wrought by civilization and its growing discontents. This Pathway offers us tangible avenues to remember who we are, where we belong and what is sacred. By participating in these ancient practices, we activate the deep memory within us, the unforgotten wisdom that Jung spoke of that resides at the bedrock of the psyche and by so doing, we heal what forgetting has ruptured; we come home.

Whatever response we make individually, it is our experience with genuine community that empowers us on the deepest levels towards action. To know that we are welcomed and belong emboldens us to resist the daily conscription into the least layers of culture characterized by a narrow self-interest, unconscious consumption and the abuse of power. The Dalai Lama said that the next Buddha would not come as an individual, but as a community. It is in solidarity that our lives will change and we will help to end the era of shameless exploitation of our world for short-term gains. Remembering the earth as sacred is at the heart of our times.

We must renew the world, a practice set deep in the bone for many traditional cultures. The Yurok of Northern California held a ritual periodically to "put the posts under the world." The Jump Dance was intended to invigorate the vitality of the world and renew the life giving capacities of the natural systems. By ritually and spiritually returning energy to the earth, the reciprocal cycles of giving and receiving were met. The awareness of limitations within the living web that sustained them promoted values of restraint and moderation, values seldom seen in our consumerist culture where more is always better.

How de we, as modern men and women renew the world? How can we place something back into the body of the earth and cease simply being a point of extraction? These are crucial questions, ones answerable once we begin to feel our deep affinity, our heart's true affections for this luscious world. I hope you will find your own ways to "kneel and kiss the ground," as Rumi reminds us. Or perhaps you will find here, within the offerings of WisdomBridge, opportunities to participate in renewing the world. Whether through sharing your grief for the suffering of our world, celebrating our gratitude for all that is or accepting the challenge of becoming and initiated man or woman, these programs seek to restore the original matrix that guided our deep time ancestors. We look forward to meeting with you in our shared efforts to maintain the soul of the world.

In peace and friendship,

Francis Weller, Director

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