I had another career before creating Sacred Earth Tribe. I had no intention of changing careers. But then in 2010, I attended a conference in the midst of the beautiful rolling Flint Hills and everything changed. The conference was interesting, but the real action happened after the sun went down. Each night I would lie down to sleep and dream of another life…
Earth Songs
I find myself here, in the midst of this prairie, but it is another time. I am a different woman, so young and beautiful with long black hair and a beaded belt. I travel with my tribe. We follow the buffalo.
I am young and so in love. I love a beautiful young warrior man-boy. And he loves me. We marry. I see this other me walking, eating, laughing, sleeping with my beautiful husband. For a brief time we are so happy together. But then there is war with another tribe, and my beautiful warrior must go to battle. I cling to him and say goodbye. I do not yet know that he will never return to me.
Days later, a few of the men return to the village, but my beautiful warrior husband is not with them. He has died and left me here alone. I am so very sad, overwhelmed with grief. I want to die, to join him on the other side. It seems pointless to stay here without him. I see nothing but pain ahead of me.
I wander half numb through my days. No one can comfort me. One night I leave my village and wander off into the prairie I lie on the ground. I am filled with grief, but I cannot even weep. My heart hurts so much that I want to die. But then I feel the energies of the soil beneath me reach out and surround me. The ground is holding me! Somehow, this earth is offering me love and comforting me. Mother Earth is holding me and loving me.
I lie on the Earth, feeling so held and loved. Then I hear a faint melody, just a whisper. A song is coming up out of the ground beneath me. The Earth is singing! I lie on her soil body and listen to her song. It is so beautiful! As Earth sings to me, the grief starts to leave me, draining into the dirt beneath me. Mama Earth gently holds me and sings to me. And slowly, I begin to let go of my grief.
After hours in Earth’s embrace, I come back to my life with my tribe. I still miss my beautiful husband, but I choose to stay and live with my tribe. I live to be an old woman. And I never forget how the Earth held me and healed me. Every day, I go into the prairie and I pray to her and listen to her song. I offer her my gratitude for this beautiful life.
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I dream of this other life on the prairie every single night of the conference. Every night I fall in love and then lose my beautiful warrior man-boy. Every night I grieve and Mama Earth helps me heal and go on living. Again and again I dream of this simple yet beautiful life. Night after night I spend years on this prairie, following the buffalo. And then the conference is over, and my dreams of another life end as well. They stop as suddenly as they began.
I would like to tell you that I woke up from these dreams of another life and immediately understood their message. But my life is way more complicated than that. I rarely travel in a straight line from point A to point B. My path twists and turns and sometimes it even fades away, forcing me to backtrack or find a new path. After a few weeks of puzzling over the dreams, I did what many people do when confronted with an experience that doesn’t jibe with their view of reality; I dismissed the dreams as a weird unexplainable anomaly that would never make any sense.
I tried to push the dreams aside and go on with my life. My only nod to the power of those dreams was to log them in my journal. But I found that I could not dismiss the dreams entirely. They continued to haunt me. That other life on the prairie called to me. The song that Mama Earth sang to me in the dreams also stayed with me. I continued to feel held and loved by her, even in the midst of the suburbs.
The dreams changed me. My priorities shifted. Things that had once seemed so important to me faded away. I began to crave time out in Nature. And memories returned of how much I had loved the Earth as a child. I began to seek out wild natural places where I could sit and listen for the song of Earth. And every once in a while, if I was very still and open, she would sing to me again. Eventually, my deepening connection with Mama Earth led me to move with my family to the edge of the Rockies. Here in the mountains, I am home in every sense of the word.
Five years after I first dreamed of Earth songs, I created this web site. Today I help and encourage others to venture into wild natural places and fall in love with the sacred song of Mama Earth.
Love and Hugs
Nancy Lankston
One Earth, One Tribe