Uluru, Australia

Feb 4, 2011

In the center of the Australian continent is the timeless ancestral homeland of the Aboriginal people. At the invitation of Uncle Bob Randall, custodial elder of Uluru (Ayers Rock), we will journey there and join him and his extended family in dedication to the Kanyini principle — caring for the land and all of life with unconditional love and responsibility. With Uncle Bob’s guidance, we will plant an Earth Treasure Vase at Uluru, offering our prayers for the Earth and the healing of all our relations.

Tjilpi (Uncle) Bob Randall is an elder of the Yankunytjatjara Nation of the Australian Central Desert. He is one of the “stolen generation” and is credited with bringing to light the issue of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. His lifelong efforts to retain Aboriginal culture and restore equal rights for all living beings were recognized in 1999 when he was named Indigenous Person of the Year.

Uncle Bob is a living bridge between cultures and world nations, creating lines of understanding so that indigenous and non-indigenous people can live and learn together, heal the past through a shared experience in the present, and enter a way of being that allows us, once again, to live in oneness and harmony with each other and all things.

On this 10-day pilgrimage, we will immerse ourselves in the Aboriginal way of life, attending formal teaching sessions with Uncle Bob and his family, and learn by doing and by being on the land. Our time in Uluru will deeply inform our understanding of the web of life and help guide our way forward for all our relations, offering an important key for the realization of the Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Project.

For a detailed itinerary, please click here.

To register for this pilgrimage, please click here.

The Australian vase was originally given to Pamela Meidell, an anti-nuclear activist and founder of the Atomic Mirror, who stewarded it for some years. Pamela carried the vase to several gatherings and filled it with the many impressive offerings she collected.

This is an account from Pamela:

In 1999, Mayumi Oda brought me an Earth Treasure Vase when we met in Berlin for the Y2K meeting with governments. I carefully carried it back to California, and then brought it with me to New York to the United Nations in May 2000 for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. The intention was to ensure that the vase went to the aboriginal people of Australia who have the oldest continuous oral tradition on the planet, particularly the women elders who are the traditional land-owners there.

Our intention was to bring the vase to the Mirrar people and their land in Kakadu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Mirrar have struggled against the destruction of their land, sacred sites, the dream tracks that traverse the land and their traditional ways due to uranium mining.

In 2000, a network of activists in Australia raised the money to bring Jacqui Katona, a representative of their matrilineal culture, to New York to participate in the events surrounding the NPT Review Conference to lobby governments, to strategize with NGOs at the annual Abolition 2000 international meeting (and other forums) and to testify in a Nuclear Truth Commission. I met with her early in the conference, introduced her to the Earth Treasure Vase, and asked her if she would be willing to take it back with her to Australia and bury it ceremonially in an appropriate location. She told me she was honored to be asked and that she would do it. Until that time, we kept the ETV in the Quaker House in New York where we were staying and where we hosted many informal gatherings of NGO friends and government delegates.

At the annual Abolition 2000 International meeting, the ETV was part of the opening ceremony. We gathered in a circle of chairs, and in the middle, I laid out a beautiful pareo from Te Ao Maohi (in French occupied Polynesia) and placed the ETV on top of it, along with other symbolic objects of meaning to people present. I then held up the ETV, opened it and told people its story. I asked them to come up during the breaks and offer prayers and any small objects of meaning/reverence into the vase. They were all moved, and many people offered prayers — spoken and written — stones from their homes, and other objects. I offered earth and herbs/flowers and poured into it some drops of the combined waters of healing collected all over the planet and carried across the nuclear landscapes of the US, Britain and Polynesia on the Atomic Mirror Pilgrimages (see attached list of waters and gifts of the earth that went into the vase).

Our closing ceremony, which lasted all day and included people and activists from all over the world, included the closing of the vase and the offering of a collective blessing in which the vase was passed around the circle and people then spoke something or made a gesture of offering into the vase. The theme of the prayers seemed to be the healing of the people, other life forms, lands, water and air contaminated and damaged by the nuclear enterprise. When the vase was closed and sealed, I formally presented it to Jacqui Katona and she then told people that she would bring it back to Australia to Kakadu and tell people the story and bury the vase.

As it happened, after the meeting, she was going out and she asked me if I would take the vase back to the Quaker House and keep it there for her until she could pick it up before she left. I agreed. A week or so later, the big fire broke out in Los Alamos, and people gathered in the Quaker House to hold the vase and offer prayers and healing for Los

Alamos. Jacqui was not there that night, but I told her about this additional incident. When the time came for her to leave, something happened with her ride and she wasn’t able to get to the Quaker House. We agreed on the phone to be in touch and ensure that the vase got to her in Australia. In the meantime, the NPT meeting came to a spectacular close with the nuclear weapons countries committing to an “unequivocal undertaking to eliminate their nuclear arsenals,” and laying out a plan of action for doing so.

Back in California, I contacted Jo Vallentine, a former Green senator in the Australian parliament, who helped to bring Jacqui to New York. I am in regular touch with Jo and asked for her help in getting the vase into the right hands in Australia. She agreed, but told me that Jacqui was no longer active on the scene. Since then, I have tried to find a way to get the vase to Australia, entrusting it by hand to someone to carry it there, as Mayumi carried it to me; however, the vase is still in my hands. Recently I heard from another colleague in Australia who is in touch with the women elders in the desert and we are working to find Jacqui or another representative for the vase. I have found that these gifts and processes seem to have a spirit and life of their own.

Time passed and the Earth Treasure Vase had been sitting happily ensconced on my bookshelf next to a traditional Dine sand painting and my sacred bundle of sutras, lotus seed mala from Bodh Gaya, and ryakusu from my Zen tradition but my life and work had changed. After 9 years, in the fall of 2008, the Earth Treasure Vase was returned to Cynthia to accomplish.

With great gratitude for being part of this project,

With gassho and many blessings,

Pamela Kanshin Meidell

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Burials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.