Chiron Communiqué

Grandfather Leon Secatero, 65
Headman, Canoncito Band of Navajo,
widely respected native elder,
a founder of Spiritual Elders of Mother Earth
died on Sunday, September 28, 2008.

Services were held each day, concluding Thursday, October 2, 2008 at To’hajiilee-Canoncito, NM.

When I interviewed Grandfather Secatero in 2007 about his journey among the Wind Walkers, he related a part of the story in this manner:

Leon saw the Wind Walkers take corn pollen in their mouths to bless their words before they spoke to him.

“What I was shown was the way we should be, how we must be to influence the future, and also to influence all the plants, the animals, the waters, the air and the fire. It’s important. I came to a knowing that the only way you can have the power, is through the color and the light of positive thought and energy. Put all your concentration on this, not other things. Put your concentration on the positive. That’s how it’s done.”

The full story, Journey Among the Wind Walkers
http://www.chiron-communications.com/communique11-1.html

I was recently interviewed on “Home & Family Finance Radio,” a weekly one-hour program that offers information and advice on consumer finance issues,. Host Paul Berry led the discussion on food, farming and the future. As co-author of “Farms of Tomorrow” and author of the forthcoming book “The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century,” I welcomed the opportunity to speak on these themes to a wide audience.

You may listen to or download an MP3 file at this link:
http://www.cuna.org/media/hffradio_20080720-1.mp3

Dear Reiki friends,
I recently received the email pasted below from Kathelin Gray, a dear friend with a base here in Santa Fe.

Her father, John Harvey Gray, is one of my Reiki teachers, and her mother, Beth Gray,has been a well-known and well-loved Reiki teacher and spiritual adviser for many long years. She died this week on May 13 at age 90.

I felt many people would be interested to know about Beth and the beautiful legacy of her spiritual life.

Blessings, Steven

———————-
OBITUARY
Reiki Master Beth Gray passed away peacefully at 1:48 pm PST, May 13, 2008. She was in her home in San Carlos, California, in the arms of her daughter, and listening to the voice of her son speaking to her by telephone.

The eldest of seven children, Beth was born in Chicago on April 11, 1918, to an immigrant father and mother, a Southern belle from Kentucky. Beth was a gifted violinist as a girl and was concertmaster of the Chicago Women’s Orchestra.

She left home at 18, giving up the violin to study laboratory medicine at Stanford University. She wanted to devote herself to finding healing and spiritual modalities that she felt must exist but at that time were not known in the West.

These interests brought her together with her husband, Dartmouth graduate John Harvey Gray, and they married as World War II ended, subsequently settling in Woodside, California.

In the early ’70’s, Beth founded the Trinity Metaphysical Center in Redwood City. As pastor, she developed it as a pioneering center for interchange of spiritual teachings from around the world, and alternative healing activities.

At Trinity, she brought Hawayo Takata to teach, thereby launching what has become a social movement in energy healing. Trinity became the first Reiki center in the United States.

Takata was a Hawaiian-born Master of Japanese descent, who transmitted the Reiki teaching to the U.S. Beth and her husband John Harvey both realized that they had found the healing wisdom they had sought for so long, and they became two of the first Reiki Masters initiated by Takata. From that time on, both of them devoted their lives to the teaching and practice of Reiki.

Their son, John Harvey Gray III also studied under Takata and was later made a master by his father. Takata stayed with the Grays in their home and was also ordained as a minister. John Harvey and Beth later divorced, and taught separately, though they remained lifelong friends and spiritual partners.

Beth closed Trinity in order to devote herself to traveling in the U.S. and worldwide. She introduced Reiki healing to the continent of Australia, where her students included Denise Crundell and Barbara MacGregor.

Aided by her natural charisma, beauty, and wit, Beth brought the method and practice of the Usui lineage of Reiki to thousands and thousands of people. She spoke to large gatherings, appeared on radio and television shows, at the same time carefully transmitting the scrupulous Reiki healing methods to small groups. Beth carefully articulated and demonstrated what is considered to be one of the great healing traditions.

She also brought groups of students to the Philippines to investigate and experience the ‘psychic surgeons’ of that country. Beth and her husband John Harvey both had transformative experiences in the presence of those healers.

In 1993 just before her 75th birthday, a stroke ended her extensive travel and public teachings. The doctors at the time of her stroke said she would survive no more than a couple of years, but she enjoyed a full 15 years more of life. To Beth, surviving her stroke signified that her outer spiritual teaching time was over, and it was time to concentrate on meditation to refine her inner spiritual life, and perfect her already well-developed psychic gifts. Many people wrote that she appeared to them in dreams and through ‘distance’ healing. She remained very social, entertaining visitors, and, in the San Francisco Bay Area where she had lived her entire adult life, she lit up every room she entered.

Shortly before her 90th birthday on April 11, 2008, she understood that soon after her birthday, she would make her transition, liberated in another form to heal our planet in crisis.

Beth Kathelin Hoffman Gray is survived by her daughter, the writer and producer, Kathelin Gray her son, Reiki Master John Harvey Gray III, her grandchildren Christina and Jason Gray, her sisters Joy Atwood and Emilie Anderson, and her brother, developer and former Ambassador to Portugal, Alfred Hoffman.

Her friend and former husband John Harvey Gray is the longest-practicing Reiki Master in the United States. He lives in Rindge, New Hampshire, and continues to actively teach with his second wife Lourdes Gray at the John Harvey Gray Center for Reiki Healing (http://learnreiki.org). John Harvey’s birthday is a year and a day before Beth’s, on April 10, 1917. He is 91 years old.

For messages or to send stories and reminiscences of Beth Gray, please email her daughter at kathelin@yahoo.com. on cellphone +1 505 310 8428

Beth’s daughter Kathelin Gray has developed a website devoted to Beth and her teachings at www.bethgray.org.

———————-

My name is Kathelin Gray, and I am the daughter of Reiki Masters Beth Gray and John Harvey Gray. It is over thirty years since Takata taught the Reiki method to my parents and others, and the first Reiki Center in the United States was founded by my mother, Trinity Metaphysical Center.

Mother retired as an active teacher after a stroke in 1993, curtailed her very busy travel schedule, a few days before her seventy-fifth birthday. Typically, she embraced that event as a blessing and continued her work channeling distant healing and meditating. To have been in her presence is to see a fully realized and beautiful soul who emanates joy. She derived great pleasure in reading letters from former students, and students-of-students, and in receiving visitors from all over the world, all living testaments to the thousands of people whose lives have changed through Reiki.

Her 90th birthday this year marked the end of her life’s mission. She made her transition to the Unknown Adventure on May 13, 2008 at 1:48 PM PST.

MESSAGE FROM BETH GRAY
These slightly updated notes were originally published in the Reiki News, on the occasion of Beth Grey’s 85th birthday 5 years ago:

“Greetings to all of you!

“In this difficult time in the world, it is my prayer and wish that we all may remember that we are made of and by Universal Love. May all practitioners of energy healing flow with peace and love. Let us issue a silent meditation to love and truth and peace and beauty that they make themselves at home in our hearts and in our world. Let us release all the troubles that seem to run rampant like a plague, and realize they are caused by the ego, which is an illusion.

“Make a decision that you will initiate and continue with the process of forgiveness, and that anger, greed, envy and violence are outmoded and ineffective methods of being and action. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy; the moment one definitely commits oneself, providence moves too, and a whole stream of events issues from the decision which no man could have dreamt. But this process begins in your dream. So dream the dream of your heart, and begin to live it, for boldness has genius and power and magic.”

In Joy, Beth Gray
February, 2003

Essay: A tribute to Beth Gray, My Teacher’s Teacher
http://www.compassionatedragon.com/reiki_beth_gray.html

My father John Harvey continues to actively teach Reiki with his second wife Lourdes. They remained
in close touch with Mother, as their loving friendship endured. John and Lourdes may be contacted through http://learnreiki.org/

all best,
Kathelin Gray

P.S. These photos were taken during my mother’s birthday celebrations this year (2008). I have also attached an image of one of her certificates from Hawaya Takata, the third degree.

–

I have recently initiated a new blog: The Call of the Land - An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century.

If you have an interest in food and matters agrarian, I invite you visit the blog, which I will develop steadily in the years ahead. I set out my reasons for doing so in one of my initial posts.

Amplifying the Call

Our land, farms and food require immediate attention from everyone who recognizes what is so rapidly unfolding. Prices rising, supplies dwindling, crops mutating, population growing. An agrarian revolution is essential to our survival.

Agriculture is the foundation of our civilization. We must have it. Everything else depends on our meeting the primary needs of clean food and clean water. This state of affairs is a blessed necessity, for it interweaves our human souls with the soul of the earth. It is also a key to a successful future, for agriculture can serve as a basis for the wholesome renewal of our overall relationship with the earth.

Food and farms are in the ongoing thrall of a blitzkrieg of mutations, both negative and positive. Because agrarian matters are of such fundamental importance, impending matters of finance, transport, petrochemical supply, climate stability, environmental health, water supply, food availability and composition, necessitate—right now—a clear, visionary look at matters agrarian.

Our current approach is, bluntly, unsustainable, and the harsh consequences are now plain. As a matter of survival – while food prices rise and supplies dwindle — we must find wise ways to evolve. That evolution must take place swiftly, and it will require the involvement of almost all of us. A few farmers struggling the vortex of change cannot alone take care of us all. That has become an inescapable fact for anyone who follows agrarian news.

Just four months ago a major UN environment report (UNEP) concluded that our Earth is reaching the point of no return. The speed at which mankind is using and abusing the Earth’s resources is putting humanity’s survival at risk, the team of scientists said. They collectively issued an “urgent call for action.”

Meanwhile, geologists are now debating whether they should add a new epoch to the geological time scale. They call it the Anthropocene – the epoch when, for the first time in Earth’s history, humans have become a predominant geophysical force.

Perhaps the major factor of this “force” is modern industrial agriculture. On a massive scale it is poisoning and eroding the soil, draining water supplies, polluting the environment, and radically altering the genetic character of our planetary vegetation and livestock, as well as our diets and our perhaps our destiny.

While there may be no single remedy for the many challenges we face, there are many possible positive paths. With diligence we can construct a map for some of those paths, showing how a sustainable agrarian foundation can serve our brilliant yet fragile high-tech culture both nationally and globally.

For me a core ethical necessity in regard to our land and food is to strive in all endeavors to enhance the health and the regenerative capacity of the Earth. To support our farms so that, rather than being major sources of pollution, they are instead oases of environmental health, radiating this vitality out widely, and producing an abundance of clean food.

I intend this blog to amplify the call that is arising from our land. As Jack London put it in his classic novel, “The Call of the Wild,” we face a moment of truth.

- End -

Talk radio show host Bob Keeton recntly interviewed me for one hour on his Living Successfully satellite show. He felt the program was interesting, entertaining, and informative, and so he has made it available as a CD which listeners can purchase from his web site. To learn more or to order, follow this link to his Living Successfully radio show web site, and search under the Native American category. - Steven McFadden

With audio maestro Bob Keeton, I have begun to create a digital audio version of the true story, Odyssey of the 8th Fire. If you would like to listen to or to download this theatrical audio production, click here.

We are delivering this important story in audio format so that it may be brought before the people as a lively educational program offering direct, practical information and guidance about living on the earth together – all colors and faiths – in a sustainable and respectful manner.

Based in the teachings native to our land, the prophetic adventure tale of Odyssey brings what has been foreseen and foretold into the present in a dynamic format for consideration at a pivotal time in history.

Odyssey of the 8th Fire is an epic, nonfiction saga, a physical and spiritual travelogue of North America: its places, its history, its ancient and contemporary wisdom keepers, and the road immediately ahead for us all.

We would welcome your support to help us complete this audio project. - S.M.

What in the World’s Going On?
A look ahead with astrology for 2008 - 2012

with Steven McFadden and Merrylin LeBlanc.

The radio show will be broadcast Saturday, Jan. 12, 2008 at 6 a.m. MST To find where and how the show is broadcast so you can access it, see the Living Successfully web site.

The Santa Fe Astrology Forum presented five astrologers and a priestess from the Mayan tradition to a standing-room only crowd at Santa Fe Soul in late December, 2007. Two of those astrologers come to share even more with you about the years ahead, between now and 2012, on the popular radio show, Living Successfully.

Steven McFadden is a journalist, a speaker, counselor, healer and astrologer. Among his seven books are, Legend of the Rainbow Warriors, Profiles in Wisdom, Farms of Tomorrow and the epic saga of North America, Odyssey of the 8th Fire. He also served as National Coordinator for the annual Earth Day Celebration in 1993 and as director of the Wisdom Conservancy at Merriam Hill Education Center in New Hampshire.

He draws several revealing references to the characters and plot of the Hollywood blockbuster film “The Golden Compass,” and our individual and collective paths ahead in the year 2008.

Merrylin LeBlanc is an astrologer who hosts a weekly program called “Moonwise” on KSFR radio in Santa Fe. Her specialty involves watching the moon’s movements and effects on life here on Earth. Merrylin shares a personal insight about voting that says it is time to choose for ourselves without consideration of who might win or even the “lesser of evils” mentality. Authenticity seems to be called for more than ever in this coming year.

Rebroadcasts: Saturday at 4 pm and Sunday at 8 am (Eastern).

To order a copy of the original, live panel discussion on the years 2008-2012 by the members of the Santa Fe Astrology Forum, follow this link:

http://www.livingsuccessfully.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11&products_id=522

END

“In our troubled world, we desperately need a vision that can inspire us to greatness. This vision will be a recovery of the wisdom, sanity, and hope represented in The 8th Fire.”

- Larry Dossey, MD

As readers of this blog know, last year I authored the true, epic saga of a walking pilgrimage across North America. The story is called “Odyssey of the 8th Fire,” and it is available in full at http://www.8thfire.net

In recent weeks I have had the honor of becoming acquainted with Cindy Pickard of Texas. She has produced an absolutely wonderful 1-hour film on a theme similar to the saga. Her film is entitled “The 8th Fire - One Earth - One Whole Circle – Again.”

The teachings of the 8th fire are among the many ancient prophecies that refer to the year 2012 and the years directly preceding it…

To the Aztecs this is the time of the 6th sun, a time of transformation and the creation of a new race,

To the Mayans it is the end of time as we know it,

To the Incas it is the time of meeting ourselves again.

In Egypt, according to the Great Pyramid the present time cycle ends in the year 2012.

The calendars of both the Mayans and the Cherokee end in 2012.

Dave Courchene Jr., whose traditional name means “Leading Earth Man,” is an Elder and spiritual advisor from the Anishnabe, Eagle Clan. Descended from a long line of chiefs and leaders of his people, he felt “Compelled by forces beyond his control” to quit his job as an educator and go on a ceremonial expedition of peace around the world.

Through his dreams, and visions, the experiences of others who have accompanied him on his journey and the words of the visionaries–past and present, he shares the possibilities of “The 8th Fire.” It is a vision of hope..for the future…for the Earth…for the children

The one-hour film “The 8th Fire” is available on DVD. For more information see http://www.the8thfire.org/index.htm

Here’s a link to a short, well-done video clip (about two minutes long) telling part of the ancient North American prophesy of the rainbow warriors.

http://www.youtube. com:80/watch? v=utBkbJIYMy8

To read a more detailed telling of the rainbow warriors legend, follow this link:

http://www.chiron-communications.com/legend.html

Copyright 2007 by Steven McFadden

After walking 3,500 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and arriving somewhat south of the place native people know as the Western Gate of Turtle Island, a band of pilgrims encountered poet Gary Snyder on the last night of January, 1996. We pilgrims had been walking toward this Western Gate for eight months, so we were paying attention.

With several other pilgrims, I heard Snyder speak that night at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He said that when he considered modern man’s relationship to the earth, he felt it lacked a conscious spiritual connection. “The fire of catastrophe,” said he, “has burnt out all.”

He revealed himself that night as one the many elders we had set out to find on our prophetic quest across the back of North America. He’d sounded a steady incantation for decades on behalf of the earth, his words finally reaching our pilgrim ears at the end of our epic walk specifically in quest of sacred places and steadying voices.

As it happens, poet Snyder won a Pulitzer Prize for authoring the collection, “Turtle Island.” He summoned his title from the creation stories native to our North American continent – the old, old name.

That night in Santa Barbara 11 years ago, Snyder said that as he saw it here on Turtle Island, people have organized themselves by race, gender, belief systems, and so forth, but not by ecosystems – the actual places where they live, and the actual resources native to these places. “Nature is no social construction,” he said. “The land sees no colors.”

Using the rhythm of high language, Snyder told us that when we come to comprehend this, it will help us all to finally and truly become Native American in the full spiritual sense that embraces all the land and all the people, the plants and the animals.

Through hearing the poet’s lyric, I came once again to a basic realization about why we had walked, and what we – a multicultural, all-faiths band of pilgrims — hoped to accomplish with our procession on foot across North America to meet some of the contemporary elders of our land. We were striving to help establish the kind of authentic spiritual connection with the earth that Snyder invoked with his words.

Eleven years after the end of the walk, in 2007 shortly after I finished writing our story in the form of an epic saga (Odyssey of the 8th Fire), Gary Snyder reappeared. This time the poet came to Santa Fe to speak about his late compatriot, Jack Kerouac, the writer who crafted an undulating, enduring paean to America and freedom with his novel On the Road (1957).
Snyder was invited to Santa Fe by the Museum of New Mexico and the Palace of the Governors. They asked him to speak as a complement to their exhibit of Kerouac’s work, including the original, continuous and amazing 120-foot long teletype scroll that Kerouac used for writing On the Road – a novelized account of open, mad, freedom-expressing rushes across the back of Turtle Island in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with beauty to behold and creative souls to encounter.

On stage in downtown Santa Fe at the packed Lensic theater, Snyder told the audience that back in 1956 he had use of a cabin near Homestead Valley, just north of San Francisco. It was a rude structure, lacking glass for the windows. In this country abode, Kerouac moved in with him for 5-6 weeks – a place to crash.

Very much in command as he stood center stage, Snyder spoke directly of his friend Jack Kerouac as a man who was well intentioned, sweet, playful, sometimes goofy, non-judgmental, and imbued with the spirit of compassion. He said Kerouac was keenly intelligent, well read, and had a mind for words. One of Kerouac’s prime spiritual gifts, the poet said, was his ability to confront the immediacy of his imagination.

Once again, I listened attentively. I wanted to understand more. In preparing to write the nonfiction saga of our long walk across Turtle Island — Odyssey of the 8th Fire — I had been informed and inspired by grand books telling of our human journey: Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Paolo Cohelo’s The Pilgrimage. Inevitably, Kerouac’s On the Road also touched me with its entraining, exhilarating cross-America accounts of reaching outward, inward, downward, upward.

The miles that Kerouac’s Beatniks traveled in cars and buses and by hitchhiking, we odyssey pilgrims later traversed on foot – as if that were an era wanting speed to break free of bonds, and the era of our walk a time to slow down, to take measure of the vast, multi-faceted spiritual landscape sprawled out before us, to proceed across it for a time at a more deliberate pace.

With the overarching thrust of their works, Kerouac and Snyder were among a multitude of inspirations for me to journey with the other pilgrims on the walk across North America, and then to apply myself to relating the saga. In Odyssey of the 8th Fire, the place Turtle Island emerges with immediacy and relevancy. Spiritual elders of North America step forward by the dozens to share ancient teachings of our land.

The spontaneous, howling, Beat pilgrims Jack Kerouac wrote about were, in one conception, on the road for truth, freedom, and spiritual realization advancing in their time and place. Our on-the-road walking quest some fifty years later, I see in part as a natural extension and evolution of this fundamental quest, and also as part of the overall, amazing, grand, hope-lifting odyssey of all of us: multicolored, multi-faith masses of people over centuries of time striving awkwardly, unceasingly to establish a conscious, realized connection with the spirit of this beautiful land that we might finally be truly at home here on Turtle Island, and that the land and water and air might cleanly support our children and grandchildren in health and freedom.

We odyssey pilgrims acted. We did what we could. We walked to a great many of the holy sites of Turtle Island, and there enacted ceremony for all of the sacred hoop of life on Turtle Island, respecting all spiritual traditions and all colors of humanity – as had been the agreed-upon philosophy of our pilgrimage band, some 40 or more multicultural souls.

Our prophecy walk never advanced to the final sacred site. Our steps to the Western Gate were halted in 1996 about 100 miles to the south direction. As it happened, as it happens. That part of the odyssey remains unfolding, evolving. Circumstances impend. Roads exist. Poets sing.

END

Odyssey of the 8th Fire

http://www.8thfire.net