As the Sun greets Neptune, I participate in a healing event.

This past weekend, in concert with the illuminating Sun’s annual crossing of the deeply spiritual and transcendent planet Neptune, I traveled to the Oakwood Retreat Center (where the Baby Picture Project was launched) for yet another special 24-hour period. My friend Ted, who convened the event, called it “Raising the Frequency of Blessing,” and invited a dozen people to participate. Of these people, eight of us offered some kind of a presentation over three sessions, from Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning. Rituals, ceremony, music, astrology, poetry, personal herstory, all were invoked, around our Altar to the Earth Being —

— which grew to enormous proportions as we added guidance from both Our Lady of Guadalupe and Quin Yin, surrounded by objects representing our deep concerns.

One ceremony especially affected me, depicting the “Desecration and Consecration” of the Earth, as first, a black-hooded figure came in and dumped a garbage bag full of (“clean,” as she hastily added, in deference to the carpet below) trash over the Earth Being, and then asked us to help her pick it up; then she changed to a white scarf, and entered again to pay homage to our most sacred home, crowning her, and sprinkling her with rose petals.

This little family represents our concern for the millions of innocent refugees circulating the globe due to war, climate change, corporate takeover and ruination.

Another ceremony brought us into conscious resonance with water. How the planet, and our bodies, are composed mostly of water. The terrible poisoning of our water; our capacity, through meditation and blessing, to purify the waters.

Two pictures circulated among us, both of them devastating. The first depicts a consumer protest parade somewhere in Brazil, where people had immersed themselves in mud and then walked blind, and silent, with fresh brown paper bags for all the consumer “goods” that we continue to stuff into our bodies, homes, and beloved land and water.

The other picture depicted the sad little inhabitants of one of the Indian Schools, established on this continent in another genocidal attempt to swipe native minds clean of their thousands upon thousands of years inheritance of deep, soulful connection to the Earth Mother.

How do we heal from such abuse? How do we heal from the abuses we ourselves have committed? Who among us is without stain?

Kuan Yin’s Prayer for the Abuser

To those who withhold refuge,
I cradle you in safety at the core of my Being.
To those that cause a child to cry out,
I grant you the freedom to express your own choked agony.
To those that inflict terror,
I remind you that you shine with the purity of a thousand suns.
To those who would confine, suppress, or deny,
I offer the limitless expanse of the sky.
To those who need to cut, slash, or burn,
I remind you of the invincibility of Spring.
To those who cling and grasp,
I promise more abundance than you could ever hold onto.
To those who vent their rage on small children,
I return to you your deepest innocence.
To those who must frighten into submission,
I hold you in the bosom of your original mother.
To those who cause agony to others,
I give the gift of free flowing tears.
To those that deny another’s right to be,
I remind you that the angels sang in celebration of you on the day of your
birth.
To those who see only division and separateness,
I remind you that a part is born only by bisecting a whole.
For those who have forgotten the tender mercy of a mother’s embrace,
I send a gentle breeze to caress your brow.
To those who still feel somehow incomplete,
I offer the perfect sanctity of this very moment.

Over the course of this 24-hour period, we listened to many musical interludes resonant with the occasion of increasing the frequency of blessing. Two that surrendered us to both terrible pain and exquisite beauty were the second and third movements of the heartbreakingly beautiful third symphony by Henryk Gorecki. Perhaps, by listening to this “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” you may be transported somewhat to the presence and holy feeling of our healing weekend.

Over and over again, we offered our blessings, and our gratitude — for our capacity to wake up to the horror and devastation of both our planet and peoples, and for our commitment to create group cooperative events, such as this “Raising of the Frequency of Blessing,” that they may assist us as we begin to heal “all our relations” — with our own individual body/mind/souls, with each other, and with our beautiful home.