You Can be Religious and Be Spiritual: You Can Be Spiritual and Be Religious

 

 

“Your life is your spiritual path.  It's what's right in front of you. You can't live anyone else's life. The task is to live yours and stop trying to copy one you think looks better.” ― Sandy Nathan

Spirituality, to many, and me, as well, is a sense that we are connected to something higher than ourselves, higher than a prescribed doctrine, something deeply more holy and personal in connection with a Higher Being/Power that gives one peace and comfort, awe, healing and contentment in ways that one might personally seek the sacred within.  Religion is organized set of beliefs and practices shared by a community or group, that holds to many rules and regulations typically for salvation of some sort. 

Lame Deer, a Lakota medicine man is said to have said that First Nations of the Americas believe in the Great Spirit that is not human being, but a power and is not some old man with a beard.  Most of the First Nations believe that Creator is not gendered nor does Creator have to take on a specific form.  They believe that anything that had energy, that lived in some form, living or nonliving has or has an original spirit. 

Slow Buffalo, a Delaware-Lenape is said to have said that we have to remember the ones we are going to depend on.  You will find that they explain anything above immediate Mother Earth is our Grandfather.  What is between Mother Earth and immediate sky is our Mother/Father and the earth, of course, is our Mother Earth.  Then it reverses back to below ground being Grandfather again.  It is explained that all animals, fish, trees, rocks, birds, etc. are all our relations.  Some are older relations like the buffalo, the sturgeon, salmon, turtles, etc.  The things that came before us were our teachers and remain so. 

Our First Nations knew about the movement of stars and the shapes and the heavenly bodies and that they are either spirits of things passed on or are being noticed to teach us and we can learn things from them yet.  We live in a living womb and they all have ways of showing gratitude, asking for help, from those people, places and things that have gone on before… and are yet to come.  All ancient cultures passed down stories, drawings, and, even yet, do so in today’s way of teachings.  Spirituality is living. 

You will see, read, hear, that I have taken the best of all I have learned and will continue to learn and I have discarded what does not fit my soul.  I trust my soul/spirit to no intermediary.  I have found what works for me, to build and feel my spirit and my spirituality comforts me.  What more could I ask?

©Carol Desjarlais 12.30.22

  ****Painting is Aries.