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Peace Talk September/October 2010

Men's Hollow Bone Dance

The Hollow Bone Dance is danced with no drumming, no singing, and very little support from outside the dance arbor. It is a dance for men to recognize the ways in which men are like one another and to remember that we as men are here to serve, the Hollow Bone is open to all men who seek the inspiration to live a life of greater spiritual awareness and service.
 
This dance is the first weekend of September. If you wish to dance, register for the Hollow Bone online, or call Steve Citty 865-300-4424.
 
Or, you can light a candle and send prayers for the dancers.

Calling All Drums

Saturday September 11, 2010
beginning at 3 pm
 
 
Calling All Drums - Commeorating 9/11
 
 
Featuring local drum facilitators
Tuatha-Dea
 
3 to 4PM ~ Open House at Center For Peace 
 
Followed by ~ Drumming in the meadow and
   Release of locally grown Butterflies
 
This event is an opportunity to invite your friends to experience the beauty and loving atmosphere of the Center For Peace with a drumming experience.  Shorty and Sandy Palmer will have drums available for playing if you do not have one to bring.
 
AND there will be a raffle for a drum with the proceeds going to ????.
 
You are encouraged to come for the open house. Bring camp chairs, blankets and coolers for cold beverages. As always there is no alcohol permitted at our community gatherings.
 
For more information contact Tamy Brown Tamy@centerforpeace.us
 

Download Flyer for "Calling All Drums" (big file)

Drum Dance

 
 
 
Drum Dance 2010 
September 24th-26th
 
Chiefs:
Candy Barbee
Colby McLemore
 
 
As chief of the 2010 Drum Dance at the Center for Peace, I wanted to invite a long-time Drum Dancer to come chief with me, so at the Sun Moon Dance I was led to ask Colby McLemore who has graciously said YES! ~ Candy
 
 
Colby says:
    I have danced five Drum Dances, a cycle of four Sun-Moon dances, I don’t know how many Long Dances, and many of the various other dances that have come and gone over the years. I don’t really think this is overly important. What is important to me is that I try as hard as I can to dance every day of my life.
 
    I have served more dances than I can possibly remember as a Fire Keeper, a Dog Soldier, a Sun Father, a Kitchen Angel, and even for a round or two as a drummer. I don’t feel this is overly important, either. What is important to me is that I strive to be a man of service wherever Spirit places me.
 
    As a visionary dance, the Drum dance has helped me focus on what I am to become as opposed to healing what has happened in the past or giving me conformation of who I am now. It gives me a view of what Spirit has in store for me, what I have the potential to grow into, and what work is on the horizon for me. I would feel blessed and honored to explore the future with you.
 
In my second Drum Dance Colby and I danced across from each other in the Arbor where Joseph had us dance that year. It was a joy to see his smiling face each time I danced to my feather, so I am very excited to have him lead this Dance with me.
 
Colby and I hope that you are called to come dance with us on September 24-26, or be on the crew. 
 
 
 
 
Joseph Rael, Beautiful Painted Arrow, wrote of the Drum Dance:
 
“I was given a vision in which I saw a Drum Dance. Men and women dancers were moving rhythmically back and forth on an open field from inside a giant drum that was being played . . . 
 
“The drum was made from a hollow log with a skin on it. The people who were playing the drum said that when doing a Drum Dance, the dancers would bring forth greatness because the wood is greatness and is what the drum is made from. The dancers would dance the vibration of the sound, bouncing back (present) and forth (future) and returning to past memory, like the sound waves which were bouncing back and forth inside the hollow log of the drum being played. This would be a way by which all physical life would pick up the resonating vibration of sound by which to shift consciousness. This could create the necessary planetary changes because the planetary energies wanted to dance effortlessly between the present, future, and memory of harmony …” 
 
The Drum will call you!  If you feel the call of the Drum, come.
 
 
Drum Dancers' Information
 
Plan to arrive by noon on Friday. It is important for every dancer to be here for the beginning of the dance. 
 
There will be an afternoon orientation, teaching, and sweat lodge on Friday. The Drum Dance and fasting begins immediately after the sweat lodge and ends sometime on Sunday.
 
A food and water fast is recommended for the duration of the dance. Those who have special medical needs and/or who are taking medication may discuss it with the dance chiefs prior to the dance.
 
This year the Drum Dance is once again offered as a give away.  When a Dance is offered as a give away, it is not that the cost of the Dance changes, but the manner in which the dance is supported.  The Dance is a Gift of Spirit; and the give away is a way of allowing Spirit to support the Dance in Its way.  All who love and appreciate the Drum Dance -- including the dancers -- have an opportunity to give to the Dance.
 

Corn Harvest Dance

CORN HARVEST DANCE
 
OCTOBER 22-24, 2010
 
 
In 2002, Candy Barbee was given a vision of war arrows being shot into the sky. As the arrows neared the apex, they turned into corn arrows and fell into the earth as planted corn. In the Fall of that year, the vision came into being as the Corn Harvest Dance. The Energy of this Dance is about Harvesting that which we have planted as well as transmuting any energies that prevent us from receiving these gifts. It is about rejoicing our abundance; dancing gratitude and praise for all we have harvested in the past year, and setting intentions/seeds for what we hope to harvest next fall.  The Dance Arbor is unique in that it is a square within a circle within a square with 4 directional fires, which assist in connecting with the Energy of the Stars. Although there are Firekeepers and Drummers, everyone sleeps in tents around the arbor, dances, fasts and participates in the ceremonies. All traditions are welcome and we will begin the dance by asking all of the traditions to play together for the weekend
 
So that her vision could expand and evolve, Candy received the guidance to pass the service of Dance Chief onto Robbie Warren, Otter Woman Medicine in Charlotte, NC and Margarita DiVita, Center For Peace in Seymour, TN. In honor of the vision, Robbie and Margarita will serve as Dance Chiefs as we dance the 7th Corn Harvest Dance in 8 years. We invite you to join us with an open heart and mind as we dance in JOY the Harvest of our Gifts of Abundance. 
 
For further information contact: Margarita DiVita at Margarita@centerforpeace.us  telephone #: (865) 767-2701 or Robbie Warren at rwinterior@aol.com.
 
 

Corn Harvest Dance

Native Nurturing Overnight

NATIVE NURTURING FALL WEEKEND 2010
 
Saturday, November 6, 3 pm
Until
Sunday November 7, 1 pm
 
Workshop Leader:  Nan Citty LCSW
 
     On Saturday November 6th  Native Nurturing will hostits fall overnight weekend retreat for young people and their parents.  It will begin at 3pm and will end on Sunday, November 7th  following a young people’s Sweat Lodge and Feast.  
Everyone will sleep in the Peace Sound Chamber.  The Center for Peace grounds are beautiful and the land speaks to our hearts.  
For many years now teaching regarding how to honor our Mother Earth have be offered on this land. One of the lessons I’ve received from this is the blessing we receive in tending to our children.  This weekend workshop is created to offer to our children teachings based on native tradition blessed and given to us by Joseph Rael, Beautiful Painted Arrow.  
These teachings will focus on: 
  • The Meaning of the Medicine Wheel 
  • Making of Prayer Ties
  • Drumming
  • Fire Tending 
  • Chanting
  • Dancing 
  • and Story Telling  
  • There will also be a fun craft activity.  
We are again focusing on learning our connection to our brother and sister animals: the four legged, and the winged.  
 
As we face turmoil in our news, we can remember that out of Chaos comes Truth and Awareness. It will be the young people who will be leading us; and helping them express their true visions is one of the many things we can do.
 
This is not to mention how much fun it is.  I’ve met some amazing story tellers during these weekends and their dreams become my dreams. I dream of a future of peace and the honoring of our Mother Earth and our children.Then we will be carried forward.
 
Please consider bringing your children to this event.  I look forward to seeing you there. 
Love,
Nan Citty
 
Suggested Donation: $50 per person, $100 for four or more in a family
 
*for more information contact Nan Citty
Nan@CenterForPeace.us

"Messiah" Training

Tuesdays 7-8:30pm
 
"In September of 2009,  I began leading a weekly seminar at the Center for Peace around the subject of 'Messiah' Training.  These are on a continuing basis [until they are not] and everyone is invited to participate.
 
"If you have read and liked such books as Richard Bach’s ILLUSIONS and/or are intrigued by the teachings of A COURSE IN MIRACLES and/or follow the visionary path taught by people like Joseph Rael, you already may have been studying up on this subject – already a 'messiah in training'. 
 
"Please do not let the language throw you!  These times together are very little about doctrine, demands, or nice ideas and much more about self discovery, personal power, and mutual support."
 
Perry Robinson

More Information on Messiah Training

Fire Ceremony

7th of each month, 7 pm
           ~ led by Katy Koontz

The purpose of the FIRE CEREMONY is to heal and purify both the planet’s physical oceans and the oceans of cosmic thought.

At 7 pm local time, fire elders light ceremonial fires at  each of the Peace Sound Chambers around the world. Those present watch the fire in silence until it burns out, giving to it what we want to transmute in our lives and staying open to the messages and teachings it brings. All are welcome. We suggest you arrive around 6:45 pm.

Donations are appreciated.

Sweat Lodge

Sweat lodgeA sweat lodge or "Purification Lodge", is an intensely rewarding experience. By entering the womb of Mother Earth (the lodge), we seek purification and a deeper spiritual awareness through prayer.
Generally speaking the experience is to deepen spiritual awareness. The steam, heat, and darkness intensify prayers and personal introspection. The lodge leader (pourer), with help from the fire tender, hold an energetic space of safety and security while setting the intent of the lodge. The medicine of the lodge leader and of each participant helps to enrich the lessons of the lodge.
There are composting toilets in the meadow. You may change clothes in these toilets or at the Peace Sound Chamber. There is no nudity in our lodges.
Suggested Items to Bring:
• Two Towels
• Men are requested to wear swim trunks, gym shorts or something similar.
• Women are requested to wear a skirt or dress. (Something for inside the sweat that is modest and you don’t mind getting muddy.)
• Change of clothes (Preferably long sleeve and covers all of the legs to keep from getting the feast area dirty).
• Covered Dish for the Feast.
It is appropriate to bring tobacco, a small gift, or monetary gift for the fire-keeper and lodge master, both of whom offer their services to the people as a gift.
Cash donations are used to support the Sweat Lodge.  We use lots of wood for the fire; supplies like herbs (sage, tobacco, cornmeal, etc.), drinking water, and more. If you are feeling abundant, a donation would be appreciated. 

There is never a charge for Ceremony. If you are not feeling abundant, PLEASE do not allow this to prevent you from coming.
 

Drumming Circle

Every Friday @ 7 pm
~led by José and Tamy

Drumming is a powerful, sometimes dramatic, way to break into other levels of our mind.  Sensitive instruments can measure the way that drumming affects the brain waves.  That’s the reason for tens of thousands of years the shaman has journeyed with the drum.

This drumming is not specifically for journeying; but you get to use it whatever way you wish – including having a good time doing it!
So, on Friday of each week, bring your drum, and come join us.
Donations are appreciated.

Perry's Ponderings

 
A Dream: The Awakening Team
 
By Perry Robinson
 
In my dream [a couple weeks ago] there was a small group of us who were overseeing the delicate process of reviving and awakening people who had been frozen for a long time.  The metaphor was cryogenic preservation of life, wherein life is preserved for long periods of time by freezing.  The critical point in this process is the time of awakening.  We who were to serve life by overseeing the awakening process had been awakened first.  We had been commanded, instructed, and preprogrammed to oversee the awakening of these other people according to a rigid protocol, carefully worked out before the initiation of the cryogenic enterprise a long time ago.  
 
As we were about our work, we began to notice that there were some on our team of overseers who were approaching this delicate and sensitive work with fear, anxiety, and mixed emotions.  Some saw the physical beauty and living potential of these awakening people as a threat to their own wellbeing and to whatever security and comfort they had been able to establish since their own awakening.  Others took advantage of them in their vulnerable awakening process.  Rather than assist the awakening ones and reintroduce them to awakened life – as was the plan – they selfishly interrupted the process for their own purposes.  Our hearts went out to those who awakened from the deep sleep into confusion, distress, and potential death in the hands of those who were to have been their caretakers.
 
For the rest of us our job, thus, became very complex:  First, we needed to do our own jobs and protect the innocence, beauty, and great potential of those in our charge who were in the process of awakening.    Secondly, we desired somehow to stop these renegades from hurting or killing the vulnerable awakening ones.  Thirdly, we needed, if at all possible, to preserve and restore the life integrity of the renegade members of the awakening team.  Furthermore, we needed to do this without falling into fear and anxiety ourselves!
 
In the dream I was personally filled with a sense of wonder and privilege to be a part of the awakening team.  Intimately aware of the delicate process these people pass through as they awaken from the long sleep – for I had passed through it so recently myself – I was super-keen to protect those who were awaking under our care.
 
I was deeply aware that, if their awakening was mishandled, many of humankind could end up awakening to the same, or worse, conditions that we had needed to escape long ago, when the cryogenic process was initiated – thus wasting the very purpose for the whole enterprise.
 
In the dream, even facing this renegade situation, I was continually drinking in the power and wonder of the life which was emerging, its beauty, worth, and deep significance to the future of humankind!
 
I was aware that even those renegades who were betraying the awakening process were somehow a part of this wondrous awakening and would potentially “get it”.
 
I remember in the dream thinking how my sense of responsibility for these awakening ones could easily cause me to flip into a warrior mode to do battle with those who would betray the trust vested in them.  But, to do so, I would be abandoning my own duty post!  People dying in sweat lodges, people “ripped off” financially by people in the “spiritual awakening business”, people manipulated by “emotional leeches”, and – in the midst of it all – the resistance and anger of those still holding on to the past, the old ways, plus natural disasters . . . thoughts about all of this zipped through my mind in the dream.  I had to let these thoughts just fly right on past and maintain my focus upon the love, beauty, and rich potential of those I was watching over as they awakened.  
 
In this work the focus must be upon the care and nurturing of as many as come under our influence.  If we do our job, we won’t have time to pay very much attention to how well others are doing their jobs.  Ours is to trust that devoting to our work and doing it well will show some others the way they too can serve humankind.
 
In my own dream state, I was aware of several friends who were confronting issues of sickness and death.  I felt blessed to see them doing so while so deeply aware of the presence of Grace with them.  I was struck by the feeling of how powerfully the Love of Life draws near to us when we confront either our own death or the death of a loved one.  Like the rest of life:  we can use it as proof either that this world is evil and full of tears or that this world is rich and full of the radiance of Divine Grace.
 
How hard it is to comfort those who refuse to be comforted!  How blessed when I am allowed to share the tenderness of transition with my friends!
 
When I awakened that morning, I felt both euphoric and humble.  After a couple of weeks now as I look back at this dream, it feels to me as if I experienced a “training session” to be a part of the Center for Peace.  [It became very clear that, though I am a founder of the Center for Peace, yet I am still in training to be a part of it.  That’s the way it is.]
 
One of the Center’s functions in this world is to be a place to which many of us can gather, who are now ready to break out of some binding factors from our past, to transform our lives, and to create a new future.  For us it is a sensitive, delicate, and intense process.  People are doing their spiritual work, sometimes stepping for the first time into a sense of personal worth and direction from within.  
 
And we “old timers” are still personally engaged in that same process.  [Lord, deliver me from any who “have arrived”, who already have the “answers”, and are now ready to “set me straight”, right?]  In our relationships here most of our job is to keep each other safe – mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually – while we are here in process.  The rest of our job is our own personal on-the-job-training.
 
If you understand this and desire to be a part of it, welcome to your part of a dream and vision of the awakening to the “new heaven and new earth”.
 
 
When I am willing --
 
To look above the familiar and ask for vision,
 
To hear beneath the noise of this world the voice of Creative Spirit,
 
To allow the Dance of Sacred Spirit to move my soul to know itself,
 
Then I may have begun to shed the chrysalis of the sleep time to awaken into life's new day.
 
 

 

Contact Perry

In This Issue

Men's Hollow Bone Dance

Calling All Drums

Drum Dance

Corn Harvest Dance

Native Nurturing Overnight

"Messiah" Training

Fire Ceremony

Sweat Lodge

Drumming Circle

Perry's Ponderings

Calendar at a Glance
 
WEEKLY  
Tuesday, 7:30 pm
Messiah Training

 Friday, 7:30 pm
Drumming Circle

SEPTEMBER
 
September 3rd-6th
Men's Hollow Bone Dance
 
September 7, 6:45pm
Fire Ceremony
 
September 11th
Pipe Circle 8:15 am
 
September 11th
Calling All Drums 3 pm
 
September 16th
Thursday Night Sweat Lodge 6:45pm
 
September 18th
Work Day for the Drum Dance 9am
 
September 19th
Monthly Council Meeting 4pm
 
September 24th-26th
Drum Dance
 
OCTOBER
 
October 2nd, 10am
Saturday Sweat Lodge
 
October 7, 6:45pm
Fire Ceremony
 
October 10th, 3pm
Pipe Circle 
 
October 14th 6:45pm
Thursday Night Sweat Lodge
 
October 17th, 4pm
Monthly Council Meeting
 
October 22nd-24th
Corn Harvest Dance
 
NOVEMBER
 
November 6th & 7th
Native Nurturing Overnight
Work is Worship
“Work is Worship”
 
Work/activity is one very clear way to celebrate our selves as part of the community by which we are being fed spiritually. And it is always a lot of fun. Time seems to alter into a process rather than a taskmaster and friendships are born and nurtured by our community participation.
Bring gloves, appropriate clothing, water and an open willing attitude. If you have any special skills, please let us know so we can best use your talents. Of course, we will first take care of the pressing needs, but there is a lot of work to be done and all your talents are valuable.
We provide lunch. (So kitchen help is also appreciated.)
Contact:
Perry 865-428-3070 or
Steve 865-300-4424
Chanting in the Chamber
The Peace Sound Chamber is available for chanting, vision quests and ceremonies of many different types.
You are encouraged to come to the chamber and chant, drum, meditate or simply sit (the chamber Spirits love it); please check first that there is not something already scheduled.
 
Please call at least two weeks in advance to reserve our facilities as usage requires council approval.
Council Meeting
 
This is the gathering of the board of directors to discuss new ideas, future projects, and events.  Feel free to come with suggestions and comments.
 
July 11,  1 pm - A special meeting of the Council
followed at 4pm by the
Monthly Council meeting- visitors welcome
 
August 29, 4 pm
Monthly Council meeting- visitors welcome
 
For more information, call the Center at (865) 428-3070.
Directions to the Center
Directions
 
 
Council Members
The Center for Peace is a non-profit religious corporation in the State of Tennessee. Donations to the Center for Peace can be claimed as deductions from income for income tax purposes.

Active Council Members of the Center for Peace:

Tamy Brown
Seymour
865-453-0447
 
Nan Citty
Knoxville
865-405-6809

Steve Citty
Knoxville
865-300-4424

Margarita DiVita
Jefferson  City
865-475-3799

Al Fletcher
Norris
865-494-9950

Katy Koontz
Knoxville
865-693-9845

Dona Polero
Sevierville
865-805-8372
 
Jim Phillips
Knoxville
 
Jeanne Robinson
Seymour
865-428-3070

Perry Robinson
Seymour
865-428-3070

Marcus Weseman
Clinton
865-463-1002
Center For Peace • 880 Graves Delozier Road • Seymour • TN • 37865

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