Dance With Destiny – New Film of Prophecy and Global Healing
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011Dance With Destiny:
A Film of Indigenous Prophecy & The Healing of The Earth
Reviewed by Jesse Wolf Hardin – www.AnimaCenter.org
“ …the world doesn’t have to end; it could go on, but unless we stop violating the earth and nature, depleting The Great Mother of her material energy, her organs, her vitality; unless people stop working against the Great Mother, the world will not last. ”
–Kogi Mamos
In 2009, I was interviewed by inspired activist film maker Bruce Weaver – along with the Mamos wisdom keepers of the South American jungle, Dr. Peter Russell, Arvol Looking Horse and many others – for a groundbreaking documentary blending indigenous prophecy and an urgent call to reconnect to our feeling selves and this inspirited earth. That movie, Dance With Destiny, is now complete. To get yours, go to:
Or you can rent streams of individual chapters on YouTube, at:
Here we have a film that awakens in us awareness as unsettling as it is exhilarating, a vision in which we are not victims of fate but “response-able” participants in the illusion shattering dance of destiny. Dance With Destiny explores the true frontiers of consciousness, where past, present and future meld seamlessly into activist art, an inclusive pulsing web of which we are both but a single inextricable strand and one of the crucial conscious weavers. We learn that our work is not only to create a sustainable future, but to develop the presence and judgment necessary to discern what values and ways of being are truly worth sustaining. Even as we face political repression and wars, environmental destruction and a culture of distraction and denial, we are each being given an assignment and opportunity to create holistic alternatives. We see that our personal struggles are part of a shamanic process of falling apart and being remade, much as the tumultuous Earth Changes tell the story of a living planet restoring balance through dramatic transformation.
Some marketers have equated this film with warnings regarding the significant ending of the current Mayan calendar in 2012, but its vision extends far past this single date, describing cultural and earth changes that will take generations to play out, and encompassing the vital “right now” where our own possible participation, remediation, resistance, re-creation and celebration occurs.
Buy it, share it, and take time to find venues and festivals that will screen it. Those privileged to watch this production, will come away not paralyzed with the fear of what so many have prophesied, but drawn to boldly attempt the so called ‘impossible’…called to be an active part of any global shift or cure.
Dance With Destiny is the earth’s clarion call. It was an honor to be featured in it.
-Jesse Wolf Hardin
Featuring:
The Kogi Mamos – Rev. Thomas Berry – Jesse Wolf Hardin – Arvol Looking Horse – Stephen Gaskin – Corbin Harney – Sequoyah Trueblood – Eugene Tsui – Dr. Ralph Metzner – Dr. Peter Russell – Rolling Thunder – Rakweeskeh and many more!
About the Film Maker:
Bruce Weaver did a masterful job of editing text and sequencing images in this movie, giving it diverse graphic power and lending its pace. His interviews are a credit not only to his subjects, but to himself for sensing where to seek out the right conversations, and for bringing to the table the pertinent questions of our time.
Throughout the 1990’s, this creative seeker dedicated himself to study and travel. Memorable among his journeys, was a vision quest to Prophecy Rock, on Hopi in Northern Arizona. An ancient petroglyph in which a message was transcribed by early Hopi elders: simply, a warning for mankind should we fail to care for the earth. In December 2006, Bruce received the invitation to interview the secretive Kogi Wiwa Mamos, “caretakers of the earth” as they call themselves, deep in the mountains of Columbia. Bruce has dedicated himself to the lifelong study of the earth and the wisdom of ancient people, and has heeded the warning he himself received, to remind mankind of the true cost of the loss of the sacred. Dance With Destiny is the result of that dedication.
From the Press Release:
“Dance With Destiny shows us how modernity’s problems are rooted in a host of unchecked ‘isms,’ corporatism, statism, militarism, egoism, etc. Solutions will come not from rulers of vested systems, such as politicians or corporate directors. Only radical, heartfelt, internal revolutions of the spirit – which many of the interviewees in this film focus on — can mend our souls and the web of life.
By combining deft reporting on a range of issues that contextualize the various interviews, Dance With Destiny shows how Mother Nature is paying humanity back for its hubris, excesses and neglects. In the tradition of Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of balance, the classic documentary by Godfrey Reggio, Dance With Destiny probes the conceptual ties between manmade and natural phenomenon (koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “life of moral corruption and turmoil” or “life out of balance”). It shows, for example, how in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented fervor, the scientific community is warning that the planet’s resources are being stretched to the point of collapse. It explores how media focuses on the political and diplomatic aspects of global warming while ignoring its impact on agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather, and how the coal and oil industry spend millions of dollars to plant public doubts about global warming’s role in recent natural disasters from tsunamis, hurricanes, abnormally massive rainfall, unprecedented wind storms and severe droughts.
As war marches on, new pandemics threaten vast populations. Medical technology births miracles but millions of children in the developing world die annually from disease such as diarrhea related dehydration. Globalization has lowered barriers to goods and ideas but conspicuous gaps separate the world’s rich and poor. Information is the currency of the age yet wisdom and spiritual intelligence run scare. Millions awake daily to spiritual isolation as ubiquitous technology dulls human curiosity and powers of observation.
The film invites comparison between various natural and man-made phenomena. The documentary’s narrative structure is a series of interviews that either directly or indirectly deals with several core themes, principally the concept of Prophecy. From Druids to Celts, Christians to American Indians, societies throughout history have recognized groups or individuals as having supernatural powers to foretell the future. To its peril, modernity has dismissed prophets as scientifically improvable relics of a “primitive” past, and the process of Westernization has eviscerated Native American and other cultures which rely on and spread prophetic tradition. But humanity is failing to resuscitate the power of prophecy even as modernization fails to infuse human life with meaning. Millions may be rejecting Western Judeo-Christian culture for the spiritual tools of humanity’s most ancient ancestors, but billions still fail to see the light. This documentary also postulates that a fundamental shift in human consciousness is possible. But like the rising of the sun and inevitable tug of the Earth’s magnetic forces, the prophecies contained here will show that Earth and Universe will correct our missteps whether we like it or not, whether we embrace new ways or stick blindly to old failures. Prophecy, in other words, may be a window into the inevitable Universal correction that lies ahead.
Another theme is revival of an ancient calling for native connection to the Earth. Popular works such as Joseph Campbell’s book The Power of Myth have spawned a revival of public interest in mythic literature and symbols, some of which point to this theme. This documentary will capture themes espoused, for example, by the Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century German abbess, mystic, author, and composer of music. Her message, as relevant today as in her time, is the need to shift from an egological to an ecological consciousness. What happens when that shift occurs? In the words of Jesse Wolf Hardin, ‘It’s then, grounded in this spinning globe of rock and flesh, we can feel most comfortable shifting our gaze for awhile…. from the living Earth we’re each an inseparable extension of, upwards to the fecund cosmos we and this planet lie forever bedded with and in.’
As Corbin Harney says, ‘We better wake up too it, before its to late’.”
———————-
(please post and forward)
