Book Synopsis What does it mean to be rooted in the land? How can we be better relatives to our greatest teacher, the Earth? Bing Rooted invites us to live out a deeply spiritual relationship with the whole community of creation and with Creator. Meditations, epigraphs, and ideas for reflection and action help us be rooted in our relationship with creation and Creator. That includes today.”Ĭolumnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean staffer.About the Book Randy Woodley, an activist, scholar, and Cherokee descendant, guides us on a one-hundred-day journey to reconnect with the land around us, with the people native to that land, and with ourselves. “Our humanity is exercised one moment at a time, one day at a time. “After all, we have only today to be fully alive in this world – to be fully human,” Woodley writes. We can become adventurers together, learners, awakeners, deciding how to live out our spirituality each moment on the road to being better ancestors. Previous generations didn’t go around injuring “the earth that feeds them and maintains their existence as a species.” If we’re so smart, why do we work against our own self-interest?ĭespite our lethal contradictions, a connection to God’s creation can make the human community feel confident about the future. It’s peculiar that the current technological era considers itself superior to the ancestral past, he writes. Woodley talks of becoming intimate with the land, treating the relationship like a courtship, a kind of marriage or partnership to cherish, not something superficial. The detox partly depends on being open to new images of daily experience. But it takes me time to get there, some detox time to root out the annoying second-hand opinions in my head, the aftershocks of living in the economy of anxiety. We can’t control the outcome of any given situation but only respond to it. Allow them to flow freely.Įncourage people to share from their hearts. Each tree, he notices, sings a different song as the wind blows through it.

Living on the land alerts him daily to nature’s brute power but also sharpens his senses to the rain, sun, stars, red-tailed hawks, wind. Woodley comes out of Christian experience. Look for friends who align with these values. “Search for songs, ceremonies, and stories from your own ancestry.

“Begin working your way down the list and incorporating these Indigenous values into your own life,” writes Woodley, co-founder of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice in Oregon. Deep inside, everyone wants “Eloheh,” the Cherokee word for wholeness, peace, harmony. People long for harmony, mutual respect, a feeling of awe.

Indigenous wisdom is within reach … Speak from the heart. Our culture is on a destructive path, but we can change it. In these 100 short readings, his message is simple.

Becoming rooted by randy woodley