What is real and what is fantasy?

Sitting on a bench mindfully meditating in Penn Treaty Park is real. But what of the feeling that grace or qi is very strong here, perhaps because the natives who were once here first held Nature and Mother Earth sacred?

On this plot of earth about 350 years ago, an English nobleman named William Penn brokered a peace treaty with the natives who lived there that was just, honest and sincere. So trusting of Penn were the natives, that Lenape Indian Chief Tamanend once said, “We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”

Unfortunately the love affair didn’t sustain through the next generation. Seems the native people were cheated out of 1,200 square miles of land and they were eventually forced to migrate to the reservations of Oklahoma.

For certain the reality of the pain, destruction and death this forced march effected cannot be denied. It’s tragically far more real than the imagined peace the senior Penn so greatly desired and formulated. Trying desperately to allow the natives to keep their own customs and live alongside the intruding Europeans, he was dead less than 20 years when it all started to come apart. Greed, intolerance, betrayal and “Manifest Destiny” would have their way and Pennsylvania became just another state/commonwealth who would eventually uproot and/or kill the “savages.”

So what of Penn Treaty Park and the ‘qi field’ there? Do Penn and Tamanend’s good wishes, dreams and spirit live on in spite of the sad ending for the Lenape natives? Did the bad ending negate the powerful feelings of connectedness my meditation seemed to instill in me this day? Does love have the stuff to transcend the awful march of human nature? Are Penn and Tamanend today part of that connective spirit I felt sitting on that bench? Likewise, are all those natives who did or did not make it to the end of the march to Oklahoma sitting with me as well?

On a website called A Trail of Hope, a Fishtown resident who was born in Poland blogged about his 2,000 mile walk from the Park to Bartlesville, Oklahoma — the eventual destination for the majority of the Lenape Tribe. He speaks of the Great Spirit that will protect him along the way. Apparently that Spirit did protect the Fishtowner and he made it to Oklahoma. The walk was in 2011 and he was there at a park reception that I stumbled on a while back – I wish I’d made it a point to go and talk to him that day.

The park was crowded today on one of the first days it was warm enough to be out there. Diverse to the max, folk fishing, kids on swings, on bikes and scooters, dogs flying after Frisbees… a gentleman and his inquisitive little Boston terrier sat down the next bench over. The owner said his dog stopped over to check me out, but I was in meditative mode. He checked me out a-plenty when I was through. When I asked for the dog’s name the owner replied Hope….