I keep coming back to John Trudell’s appreciation of what it means to be a human being, and from that, to understand how this world we belong to by right of birth actually operates. I was gifted to have my mother be Elizabeth Adda Robinson Ratcliffe. The youngest of three children, Elizabeth’s father, Harold Wesley Robinson, was a minister and her mother, Mary Elizabeth Stambaugh, was a teacher. Born in Barre, Vermont in 1923 while her family was on furlough in the U.S., Elizabeth was raised in China from 1925 to 1940. Growing up “third culture” she came to perceive and know this world through a wider lens than her contemporaries raised in the United States.

Born in the mid-1950s and the youngest of four children, my own coming of age trailed behind the bursting open consciousness of the post-World War II generation who did not experience the 1930s depression, 1940s global war and dawn of the atomic age as our parents had. Instead, we found ourselves alive in a world of nuclear weapons-power, the false mystery of President Kennedy’s assassination—with the same dynamic operative in those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Francis Kennedy—and the U.S. war against Vietnam.

Last November in National Day of Mourning and the 4th Industrial Revolution, I reflected on ancestral inheritance and illuminated souls informing this life by further widening the lens my mother fostered in me:

Ancestors in my Father’s and Mother’s family lines were variously involved in the genocide, dispossession, subjugation, and cultural colonization and assimilation of Original Free Peoples of Turtle Island, extant here for millennia before the arrival of Europeans. Living with this inheritance, it is life-affirming and life-honoring to psychically acknowledge and find ways to atone for the misguided and Life-negating actions of my ancestors.

A way sought to mend the Sacred Hoop is to amplify voices exercising intuition and creative intelligence expressed by human beings devoted to honoring and serving Life’s needs here on Mother Earth including—and not limited to—such illuminated souls as Steven Newcomb, John Trudell, James Douglass, John Gofman, Elisabet Sahtouris, Jerry Mander, John Judge, Vincent Salandria, Richard Grossman, Ed Curtin, Marty Schotz, Fletcher Prouty, Oren Lyons, Helen Caldicott, and Mary Lou Williams to name but a few.

Along with playing piano and sharing my love of music this instrument creates through teaching children and adults, I find great meaning in amplifying the intuitive wisdom, intelligence and understanding of souls highlighted on ratical.org and ratical.earth.

Conscience and the Nuremberg Code, Informed Consent, Censorship, and Inalienable Rights, Oct 2021