Spiritual Pilgrimage
Throughout history, deep and profound changes in perspective on how to live in peace with justice for all have occurred alongside great pilgrimages. Consider the civil rights march from
Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and the
Salt March organized by Gandhi in 1930. These moments signaled that people have a moral imperative to trailblaze a path to justice and peace in non-violent resistance, regardless of whether our leaders or the mainstream have fully embraced the change many
people are ready for.
Our pilgrimage - called Compassionate Earth Walk - spans 1,300+ miles from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska, through Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. We will travel by foot along the roads closest to the proposed northern leg
of the keystone xl pipeline. Each day, our veggie oil powered bus will drive up the road to a safe resting spot where our camp will eat and sleep for the evening.
When our camp arrives in towns we welcome local community to share a meal and initiate a conversation ranging from economics, pipelines, and the environment, but primarily focused on how to bring more hope to our collective future. We offer free yoga, music,
movie screenings, and education as appropriate.
Meditation
The group will function much like a traveling monastic community - waking with meditation and encouraging each member to deepen their relationship with self, community, nature, and divine purpose.
Everyday, we will cultivate clear consciousness to move deeper with our intention to calmly and profoundly transform humanity's interaction with planet earth. We seek to abandon consumer driven wants and listen to nature about its limits, while highlighting
the spiritual and natural bounty that compassionate coexistence with the community of life can provide.
Compassionate Earth
Humans are an essential part of the ecology on planet earth. We need to be concious of our choice to systematically destroy wildness through industrial expansion or to cultivate an ecologically sensitive perspective.
Our message to the world is that 2013 is the year we must embolden our compassion for each other and for the earth, so that we might guide a peaceful, calm transition towards a sustainable interaction
with the earth.
We must alter and redefine our personal world views to not be driven by the incentives of empire - money, power, and convenient consumption - to become individuals inspired by empathy. We seek to trailblaze a path where people deeply understand
how it feels to belong to the universe and participate in it's ebbs and flows. Within the deepest stirrings of spirituality and compassion, inspired by the support of the whole earth, we find the strength and resilience to make this shift.
We begin with the openness of redefining ourselves as members of the community of life. We believe that committing to a life without dependance on debt based, extraction industries is an important tangible step. The next step is bridging local community
with nature to build local economies rich in resources essential to support the community of life - healthy food, clean water, shelter, and meaningful community.
At the end of our journey, we plan to publish a book that highlights what we learned from our conversations on the road to give everyone access to essential steps towards living in compassion with the earth.
Earth Pilgrims
The committed pilgrims for Compassionate Earth Walk come from diverse backgrounds. We are aged 22 to 79. We are settler and native alike. We are sons, daughters, grandmothers, fathers, mothers, aunts, sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews. We are all children
of the great father and of mother earth. We all share one vision for a humanity that doesn't seek to dominate the earth, but rather extend compassion to tend to the earth and humanity's essential needs, while casting off our short sighted material driven wants.
The walk was founded by Shodo Spring, a Zen Buddhist monk from Northfield, MN, who is leading the meditation of the pilgrims and offering spiritual leadership. Sitting in monastic retreat in the fall of 2011 she had a vision of walking the keystone xl pipeline
route which became Compassionate Earth Walk.
Rosalie Little Thunder, an elder, teacher, and artist from the Rosebud (Sicangu band) Lakota nation had an inspiration for walking the pipeline route and will be joining the pilgrimage as she is able.
Davey Rogner, of Silver Spring, MD, joined the walk after having an overwhelming calm, loving feeling come over him in meditation on the meaning of the walk. He joins with the experience of having just completed a three year campaign to walk - coast-to-coast
- across the contiguous US and pick up litter the entire way. (www.pickupamerica.org) His non-profit, The Harvest Collective, is the fiscal sponsor for the walk.
They are joined by an engineer, student climate activists, young spiritual travelers, a retired biologist, a yoga teacher, a reiki master, and a documentarian. If you would like to cultivate this movement for earth consciousness on the road with us, send
an email of your intention to join compassionate earth walk to [email protected].
