7 Signs You May be a Rainbow Warrior
By Gary Z McGee
“Upon suffering beyond suffering, the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become one circle again.” –Crazy Horse
The human heart is greater than any perceived color. It is all colors and none. “When birds fall from the sky and the animals are dying,” says the Hopi prophecy, “a new tribe of people shall come unto the Earth from many colors, classes, and creeds. And who by their actions and deeds shall make the Earth green again. They will be known as the Warriors of the Rainbow.” Here are 7 ways you may be a rainbow warrior.
1.) You are eco-centric as opposed to egocentric
You are eco-moral and soul-centric. Your sense of right and wrong goes beyond the myopic and parochial perspective of good and evil and is based firmly in your understanding of healthy and unhealthy. Having individuated your ego, you are holistically conscious and compassionate. You are determined to use eco-centric strategies in order to bring balance to an egocentric world. You understand that human beings once lived in healthy accord with each other and with nature for millions of years, until they mistakenly went from living in an egalitarian, cooperative (eco-centric) way to living in an exploitative, competitive (egocentric) way. Your eco-centric/soul-centric method is the rainbow bridge leading us out of the unhealthy and unsustainable quagmire and into a healthy and sustainable providence.
2.) You are a spiritual chameleon par excellence
You are the personification of a spiritual reconnect between nature and the human soul. You practice a kind of new-syncretism: a mixing, matching, and borrowing of elements from a variety of spiritual and philosophical traditions to create a personalized path that works in accord with the greater cosmos. For you, the natural world is the realm of the spiritual and the sacred; indeed the natural is the spiritual. You take the good from all religions and blend them into a healthy soul-soup fit for spiritual consumption. You learn from the bad in all religions and then leave it all behind in order to create something more spiritually flexible. Like Bradford Keeney said, “The extent to which we are stretched between extreme absurdity and higher spiritual exhilaration determines how far we will walk on our sacred pilgrimage.” For you, higher spirituality is a compassionate regard for the diversity of human imagination. Like Daniel Quinn said, “There is no one right way for people to live. There never has and never will be.” There is only healthy and unhealthy, and a belief in spiritual diversity is one of the most important ingredients for a healthy interdependent planet.
3.) You blur the lines drawn between nations and cultures
“As Native Americans, we believe the Rainbow is a sign from the Spirit in all things. It is a sign of the union of all people, like one big family. The unity of all humanity, many tribes and peoples, is essential.” –Thomas Banyacya, Hopi elder You do not limit yourself to one tiny corner of the world. You are a global citizen, a cosmopolitan par excellence. Borders cannot contain you. Cages cannot imprison you. The world is your sovereign country and you do not limit yourself to the close-minded pettiness of nationalism. You ridicule and poke fun at the petty myopia of patriotic pride, striving instead for a sense of interconnectedness with all the nations of the world. You bridge the gap between nationalized one-upmanship and compassionate relationship, revealing that cooperation must trump competition if we are to survive as a species on this planet. You get much joy out of transforming boundaries into horizons and borders into flexible zones of human and environmental cohabitation. You have independently broken away from culturally conditioned, one-right-way, tribal thinking in order to unite the World Tribe as an interdependent whole.
4.) You count coup on tyranny
You are an unapologetic eco-warrior. You are willing to break the outdated taboos of rigid systems of human governance, especially when they are unhealthy and immoral and don’t work for human beings. You count coup on any and all unhealthy, unsustainable systems of human governance, and you count coup often. You have squeezed every last drop of slave’s blood from your mind, body, and soul; knowing that had you not done so, had you not challenged the entire notion of slavery, you would have just become another prisoner, boss, master or CEO in a violent, exploitative, dog-eat-dog system. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, a free person emerges. A free person is the personification of a prism, and when a free person sees the light nothing can prevent the rainbow warrior from emerging. The laws of men cannot control you. You work within the realm of cosmic law which is dictated by nature and not a matter of opinion. You are judge and jury. Then again so is everyone else, so you strive to be a good guide toward what is healthy and what is not healthy for human beings in this world. Like Derrick Jensen wrote, “We are the governors as well as the governed. This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not.”
5.) You plant seeds of sustainability in an unsustainable world
“We are seeds as well as parasites to the earth. We can either give or take, depending upon our perception of growth.” –Zephyr McintyreEco-theologian Jay McDaniel speaks of “green grace” and “red grace” as ways to experience a sense of healing in relation to suffering. Green grace arises from spiritual contact with the earth and a sense of awe for the world as a miraculous whole. Red grace is symbolic of blood and reminds us that we too have a hand in the suffering of the world. Using both red and green grace, you have learned how to tend to the soul of the earth. Your hands are dirty from digging up corrupt seeds and replacing them with seeds that have the potential to flourish. Your hands are bloody from pulling unsustainable swords out of unhealed wounds. You are the personification of moderation, walking the path of the Middle Way and Golden Mean, and using the golden ratio to balance all things. You agree with Alan During’s “ecological equivalent to the Golden Rule: each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects for future generations to meet their own needs.”
6.) You are an Infinite Player
While other people are playing finite games that indirectly and directly destroy the world, you are busy playing the infinite game of life for the sake of healing the world in order to continue play. While the world is busy falling apart, you are busy putting things back together again. You’ve made a sacred game out of it, connecting like minds, disconnecting unhealthy minds, and reconnecting cosmic mind. You realize that cooperation must be primary and competition secondary if the sacred play of life is to continue for human beings. But you also realize that the only absolute is change, and so you are, paraphrasing Picasso: busy learning the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. At the end of the day, you know all the rules but the rules do not know you, and so you are free to move about the chessboard of life checkmating outdated and tyrannical power structures that limit human potential and then replacing them with updated loving structures that lead to human flourishing.
7.) You are the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse
“When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.” –Cree ProphecyYou have taken it upon yourself to clean up the unsustainable mess of the previous four horsemen: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. As Providence, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, you are standing your ground and reclaiming agency in the face of a terrifying ecocidal mania. You are connecting the cultural, moral, and ecological dots necessary in order to get people to a point where they don’t have to cannibalize our only earth. You have recovered, and you are helping others recover, from a collective disassociation so deep that it has been delusional to the point of psychosis. You are no longer paralyzed nor hypnotized by the ruthless-as-a-dictatorship destructive economy that would rather crucify the world than relinquish its power. You have woken up. You have broken free. You have gone sane. You are a Phoenix rising up from the ashes. Your ego has been trumped by Soul, and there’s no turning back. “Don’t turn away from the hand stretched in pain of your Mother. Her name means freedom, Her body earthgreen, Her blood clear water, her voice is birdsong. Rainbow warriors, the future lies within your hands.” –Eyes of Fire, Cree wise-woman
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