Echos Calling Us Home

I was thinking about my connection to Augustine Mowa of the Hopi people. (The complete name of this indigenous tribe is Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, which means, “the peaceful people.”) I decided to do an internet search for Augustine, knowing he must have died many years ago, and the first hit that came up was a Dharma Journal post I wrote in the spring of this year. I took it as a sign.

I am not sure of the significance other than it elicited fond memories of my brief meeting with Augustine during which I received his teachings and the admonition, “Your problem is that you have no land.” His words resonate with me in every moment. How do I feel when I have lost my place in the world; my home, my land? I feel cast adrift without a place to moor. Then I remember all my mentors who insisted on calling me home to my true nature, the home I never left—nor can I leave.

The ground of our awareness, our true nature, is the land in which we are rooted. All our spiritual growth comes from remembering this as our ancestral home long before we appeared in this life and in this form. If we are attentive, we will recognize an echo of this land and its wisdom in our own awareness, arising in the form of a spiritual teaching we can use to call us home.

Every time I say a mantra, I hear the wind blow across the homeland of my heart, and I find solace there—even when I am experiencing a storm raging in my mind. It seems a simple thing, and like most simple things, they call us away from the complexity of our thoughts. We are swallowed by vast, open space, like standing in the middle of a desert or beholding the view from a mountain top.

Thank you, Augustine, and all my spiritual mentors for helping me rediscover a place to land.