How can we make space for spirituality in our daughter’s life?
Her birth was the most miraculous moment I have ever lived. Her passage from the womb to join us in the breathing world birthed a world. The moment was a world unto itself, and it began the field of experience which is all the relations that make up her life. It was a sacred transformation of the world bringing something new, and so making the world new.
And now life has returned to routine-in-transition. Magic must be found in the everyday. As we instill in our daily lives with certain ways of being, our daughter also comes into rhythm with the world, with us. The patterns and traditions we embody become her world, how she knows how to be in the world. And the reverse is also true: she makes our world anew with each breath and gesture.
This is not merely mystical—this is everyday life lived as sacred while still recognizing and accepting it as it is with its terrible imperfection, practicing consciousness in everyday life, breathing into and out of each step with integrity while respecting all our relations.
These are beliefs I have inherited from many communities in my life. Animism—the idea that spirit is everywhere—is one way of naming these beliefs. Truly, this is the tradition of my ancestors, and yours: for the vast majority of our existence on this planet, simply looking beyond the past few hundred years, our ancestors all understood, on every corner of the globe, that we are one spirit among many, one point of consciousness connected to all other points of consciousness, navigating the varied and unpredictable flows of energy and power, with all the spirits inhabiting plants, animals, objects, places. It’s all alive: some of it eats us, some of it feeds us, and some of it we eat or feed. All is mysterious and powerful and to be respected.
We pray, and so articulate our own ajayus—our spirits—with words and song, sending and seeking blessings for our family, community and world. We pray when sharing food at meals, when beginning big journeys, when greeting the day or the plant relatives, praising the cycles of the moon and sun and time.
Her birth was the most miraculous moment I have ever lived. Her passage from the womb to join us in the breathing world birthed a world. The moment was a world unto itself, and it began the field of experience which is all the relations that make up her life. It was a sacred transformation of the world bringing something new, and so making the world new.
And now life has returned to routine-in-transition. Magic must be found in the everyday. As we instill in our daily lives with certain ways of being, our daughter also comes into rhythm with the world, with us. The patterns and traditions we embody become her world, how she knows how to be in the world. And the reverse is also true: she makes our world anew with each breath and gesture.
Countless patterns have been set already, yet our family traditions are still very few. Small rituals abound, and we cultivate these carefully: in thanking the sun and earth, in enjoying food together, in daily prayers. Yet larger celebrations—community and seasonal rituals—these have been very few since she was born. The cultures that we share with our families and community have many, many celebrations and accompanying beliefs, we celebrate with so many, and our own ancestral inheritance is vast and varied. So very varied that it becomes a question: what traditions are ours to pass on?
We cultivate and join traditions that foster care, gratitude, calm, resilience, balance, love. I hope all our holidays (holy days), all family and community rituals, and all spiritual attunement nurtures these values and the natural cycles of life.
That much we have clear. And still, exactly what spiritual traditions are we passing on? We are not Christian, like our parents, nor do we belong to any other church or religious institution. And so we have no prescribed set of spiritual traditions to give our daughter… and yet we hope to live into rich and rooted traditions together.
To know how this might best happen, I want to articulate my personal beliefs:
I believe that all existence is imbued with divine spirit—reality is divinity.
I believe the Earth and Cosmos are alive, existence breathing itself into being.
I believe we should strive for balance following the flow of life amid the world’s shifting currents of chaos and order, creation and destruction, life and death.
I believe the world is yin and yang, with each holding the seed of the other, and that change is the only constant.
I believe that the divine is both good and evil, and I serve the greatest good, which many people name God.
That much we have clear. And still, exactly what spiritual traditions are we passing on? We are not Christian, like our parents, nor do we belong to any other church or religious institution. And so we have no prescribed set of spiritual traditions to give our daughter… and yet we hope to live into rich and rooted traditions together.
To know how this might best happen, I want to articulate my personal beliefs:
I believe that all existence is imbued with divine spirit—reality is divinity.
I believe the Earth and Cosmos are alive, existence breathing itself into being.
I believe we should strive for balance following the flow of life amid the world’s shifting currents of chaos and order, creation and destruction, life and death.
I believe the world is yin and yang, with each holding the seed of the other, and that change is the only constant.
I believe that the divine is both good and evil, and I serve the greatest good, which many people name God.
This is not merely mystical—this is everyday life lived as sacred while still recognizing and accepting it as it is with its terrible imperfection, practicing consciousness in everyday life, breathing into and out of each step with integrity while respecting all our relations.
These are beliefs I have inherited from many communities in my life. Animism—the idea that spirit is everywhere—is one way of naming these beliefs. Truly, this is the tradition of my ancestors, and yours: for the vast majority of our existence on this planet, simply looking beyond the past few hundred years, our ancestors all understood, on every corner of the globe, that we are one spirit among many, one point of consciousness connected to all other points of consciousness, navigating the varied and unpredictable flows of energy and power, with all the spirits inhabiting plants, animals, objects, places. It’s all alive: some of it eats us, some of it feeds us, and some of it we eat or feed. All is mysterious and powerful and to be respected.
We pray, and so articulate our own ajayus—our spirits—with words and song, sending and seeking blessings for our family, community and world. We pray when sharing food at meals, when beginning big journeys, when greeting the day or the plant relatives, praising the cycles of the moon and sun and time.
And here on the ground of the mundane, we navigate the landscape we are born into. We wash dishes and sweep the floor, we write and work and play. We share, both the bounty and the struggle. We move in the movements for justice and peace, and try to lend our weight to rebalancing our world, whether that’s through the stands we take, the circles we walk in, or the way we sit on the bus. We try to keep out of the way of the political, social, natural disasters.
I hope to teach my daughter and the next generation how to navigate the capricious eddies of chaos lacing the order in our world. I’ve now lived long enough to see where many of these current currents are flowing from, and to have some idea of how to avoid or redirect some dangers. And yet truly, as we walk on a knife’s edge above the roiling currents of global convulsion, the chaos feels greater than the order at times, and our footing is shaky at best…
And it seems this has always been the case: humanity has always been on the edge of annihilation. The scale is greater than ever, and this also has always been the case. It seems this has always been part of navigating the yin-yang of the universe—the transformation of energy, each energy always containing the seeds of its opposite. Creation leads to destruction which leads to the seeds of new life. We are co-creators and co-destroyers of this world. I am dedicated to cultivating life and goodness, and to do so means keeping calm, humor, play, joy, and above all love, in the midst of the madness.
I don’t feel it’s necessary to teach our daughter any of this—it is evident. Infants naturally sense they are in an alive, scary, wonderful world, and they naturally take it one breath at a time with complete presence. It doesn’t seem to be necessary to teach my daughter that the world is divine… perhaps I simply need to not teach her otherwise. Perhaps I simply need to fully learn it from her. As she grows, and I grow with her, she will grow into a world we co-create together, into the spirit that we weave as a family into the spirit of this time.
I hope to teach my daughter and the next generation how to navigate the capricious eddies of chaos lacing the order in our world. I’ve now lived long enough to see where many of these current currents are flowing from, and to have some idea of how to avoid or redirect some dangers. And yet truly, as we walk on a knife’s edge above the roiling currents of global convulsion, the chaos feels greater than the order at times, and our footing is shaky at best…
And it seems this has always been the case: humanity has always been on the edge of annihilation. The scale is greater than ever, and this also has always been the case. It seems this has always been part of navigating the yin-yang of the universe—the transformation of energy, each energy always containing the seeds of its opposite. Creation leads to destruction which leads to the seeds of new life. We are co-creators and co-destroyers of this world. I am dedicated to cultivating life and goodness, and to do so means keeping calm, humor, play, joy, and above all love, in the midst of the madness.
I don’t feel it’s necessary to teach our daughter any of this—it is evident. Infants naturally sense they are in an alive, scary, wonderful world, and they naturally take it one breath at a time with complete presence. It doesn’t seem to be necessary to teach my daughter that the world is divine… perhaps I simply need to not teach her otherwise. Perhaps I simply need to fully learn it from her. As she grows, and I grow with her, she will grow into a world we co-create together, into the spirit that we weave as a family into the spirit of this time.
