Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands: Praying for Peace and Healing

"Creator, open our hearts to peace and healing between all people.

Creator, open our hearts to provide and protect for all children of the earth.

Creator, open our hearts to respect for the earth, and all the gifts of the earth.

Creator, open our hearts to end exclusion, violence, and fear among all.

Thank-you for the gifts of this day and every day."

(Native American Micmac Tribe, Alycia Longriver 1995)

Alycia Longriver was a participant in the "Sunbow 5 Walk" in which a small coalition of Native Americans walked from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to California on a journey that covered more than 3,000 miles and took more than seven months to complete."

Ms. Longriver states, "In 1995 I walked with a group across the US, speaking to other groups, and praying all the way (15 million steps) for the healing of people and the earth."

I prayed asking Creator 'to bring', but after the walk realized we already have these things. It is a matter of opening our hearts to the gifts within."

Oh such wisdom from these words. Truth and wisdom.

And I, always straddled between one world and the next, have done it with multitudes of challenges, changes, and losses.

Such is hope. And such also, is the endless lessons and understanding as I let good and let goodness in - cleaning out of the grief and pains of loss and sadness and even darkness as I grieve the unkindness of others in this world, and all of the dark they carry within.

I seek to bring back into myself - the light, the love, the caring mindfulness of wishing for the other what I wish for myself.

I remember so many openings of my heart after many periods of sadness. I am thinking of losing my sister in law who tried so hard to survive end stage kidney failure. Then I lost another sister-in-law who had battled cancer. Every chemo treatment required she and my brother flying from Juneau to Seattle ever 3 to 4 week. She went through a lot as did my brother who was with her in her last trip to Seattle when he had to call paramedics but she was already gone. So many other losses from my parents, to my aunts and uncles in both Alaska and Louisiana where my French mother was from..

So many beloved pets. O grieved their losses just as I grieved each of our dozen chicken pets. Four of my precious chickens I lost to to a neighbor's dog and two to pair of raccoons that are most likely the pair I saved from starvation when their mother was killed last winter.

Such are the cycles of nature and of life.

I have opened my heart to never giving up by getting even more baby chickens to raise and then because I just loved them so, a few more. On and on my chicken stories supplied me with fun and blog posts.

Then my pig stories! Oh my! Now those are some of our wildest stories. Again...good times...sad times...and crazy crazy "I can't believe it times!"

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*:

Search results for my Chicken stories

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/search?q=Chickens

And all those visiting pigs!

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/search?q=Pigs

Thank you Creator for this life and these opportunities to grow and to learn so very much by being and doing.