I love you Mother Earth

Letter No 1
Today, according to the traditional Mongol calendar, is the fifteenth day of the middle month of winter. The wild steppe of Mongolia is brooding beneath the white, white snow. The sun is setting in the west, the round moon is in the east. On the fifteenth day of every month, the sun and the moon watch each other from across the wild steppe, and right between them on the steppe are the ger of groups of nomads. I am there right now. It feels as though it is the center of the universe. From where the sun is setting, a man appears, singing a song, his horse galloping along and kicking up the snow. From where the moon is rising, a camel train appears. Cattle is in a pen. Soon the stars will come out and, in these gers beneath the sky on this silent night, stories and traditional longsongs and the sound of the horsehead fiddle will sing out. In the sky of the broad and wild steppe, the moon is moving northwards, followed by the stars, her many daughters.

When one sees the land from the height of the birds in flight, it looks as if here and there single stars have fallen on the blue-tinged, white, broad steppe, which, in fact, are the lights that appear through the roofrings of gers. Nomads on the wild steppe set up their encampments close by or on excellent pastureland with fresh water and sappy grass for their livestock, yet far away from one another to allow each other the space for pastures. In the eyes of those who are accustomed to the busy city life, the life of a nomad is extremely dull. But nomadic life is far from boring. The nomadic life goes back thousands of years. Nomads have been composing their own stories and epics, have been communicating with their hills and waters, have been drawing up their astrological charts, have been writing their books, have been singing their longsongs, have been playing Morin Huur - the horsehead fiddle. And through the melodies of Morin Huur they express their love for, and understanding of, the natural world and their livestock, they raise their children, they race their horses, they hold festivals and celebrations, they serve out airag…. They have little or no free time.

In big cities a mass of colored lights cast rainbows, cars and trucks rush back and forth, electronic music rumbles, young people sing and dance, and glasses clink, while the nomads move quietly across the steppe, riding their horses and making their female camels weep with Morin Huur melody.

Wars break out, the earth shakes, high buildings collapse, the oceans pulse with storms turning into typhoons, tall pylons collapse, traffic comes to a halt, and TV screens compete with one another to show all of this, and meanwhile the nomads are still moving around, transporting their gers on their camels. For thousands and thousands of years, small nomadic gers have moved through windstorms and floods and freezing cold and fierce heat. Nomads arrive in a new place, erect round walls without wounding the earth, and make stoves out of the local soil. They treat trees and bushes with care, and thus collect animal dung to make fire. Although they nail things like stakes into the earth to fasten the tethering ropes for their cattle and to put up the tethering posts for their horses, when they move away, they sow plants in these holes and thus heal these wounds. The clay stoves which remain are dismantled and leveled out on the earth. After the group has moved away, the place where they had been is soon covered again with the rippling grasses. In this way, the wild steppe has remained untamed for millennia.

It was in this modest nomadic way of life that the nomadic longsong, or urtiin duu, was born, and the elders’ desires are sung and recited in the abridged versions of the Mahayana epics for a whole month.

On the border between the urbanized life of consumption - this so-called progress, by which the riches of the world are dug up and collected - and the nomadic life, of carefully protecting and looking after the world with love, here we stand with heavy hearts, sad for the fate of our mother the earth.

In a story about the creation of the world, it is said that in ancient times a drop of water fell from the sky into the air, and that a pitcher of dust accumulated around it and formed a ball which gradually grew bigger and bigger, and that after a period of hundreds of millions of years, the world was formed, and that with the growth of plants and grasses then life began.

We Mongols view that the sky is our father, and the earth is our mother, and that the hills and the mountains, the waters and the springs, the grasses and the plants and the rocks and stones all are alive, they all possess souls and wisdom, and thus we treat them like humans.

When I tell you all about the abovementioned, not only I mean to tell you about the fact that our harmonious existence and mutual respect with the natural world, our apprehension of it and discussion with it, have been preserved and remained in the nomadic civilization on the wild Mongol steppe to this day, but I also would like to raise questions on how can we protect and preserve the valuable aspects of this civilization and make them our guidelines for the future.

Rich companies, having received licenses to look for mines and mineral deposits, have been rushing here and there, all across the pastureland of the homeland where nomadic herders have kept the last great riches of nomadic civilization. Below the earth on this broad wild steppe, where the grass ripples and the antelopes flash past, there is gold and coal and uranium and petroleum. “Stories”, telling us that “attractive towns will be built up on the steppe while extracting the enormous riches located deep in the earth and by doing so, the “backward” lifestyle of nomadic herders will change for the better”, are invented and circulated. Mongol political oligarchs - considering how to get some of the spoils for themselves, ingratiate themselves with these wealthy companies from the rich world by securing licenses for them - bring up another fantasy story of turning the “backward” system of nomadic pastoral herding into enterprises nurtured by atomic power stations. What happened at Chernobyl? What happened last year in Japan? We need to put our foot down and preserve the lifestyle of Mongol nomads in their pastoral homeland, which remains in but a hair’s breadth section of the earth’s flanks.

Right now it’s midnight. In a small ger of a herder, the dungfires are blazing, and we are connecting with the world by computer, powered by an electric generator charged by the sun.

This original power supply of the sun and the wind will never be exhausted on the wild Mongol steppe. Let uranium, one of the riches of the earth stay in the earth where it belongs. Our little world needs this inner power, and this is not inexhaustible. The world needs its gold and precious metals! They are near to being exhausted!

We must not victimize our mother earth for our own easy and well-off life. Our Mother the Earth must live forever.

People of the Earth! Let us embrace our Mother the Earth with our love, and let us protect her from the danger and calamity she is facing! Only love will save the world.

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people of the Mongol steppe, this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No 2
There is an ancient Mongol saying which goes, “A stone taken far from its home weeps for three years.” This saying is a constant reminder that every stone and tree should remain in its own place in the natural world. Stones weep. Stones have life, they have hearts and minds, they have wisdom. All the trees and grasses and plants are likewise alive. The mountains and the waters and the wild steppes of the landscape in which the natural world is contained are themselves also alive. The sphere of the world is, in its entirety, a single living creature. The rivers, streams and springs, that are nurtured from and flow out of the inner power of the world, i.e. the depth of the womb, are its veins. The globe has its lung to breath with, a heart to beat, not to mention a mind which feels sadness and joy, and a brain to think.

Everytime the mountains, the water and the earth are cherished, the mother earth is pleased and, gratefully, sends forth gentle rainfalls, beautiful rainbows and colorful flowers. Everytime the land is dug up, the rocks ripped away, the forests laid waste, the wild animals slaughtered, the mother earth is furious and expresses her displeasure through earthquakes, seastorms, floods and desertification.

Danzanravjaa, the Mongol Gobi nomadic poet, saw the characteristics of the wild steppe and his homeland of the Gobi desert with his inner wisdom in the universe beyond, and discovered the umbilicus of the earth which holds in its depths the powerful qualities of its immense riches. He built there a center for pure Buddhist education called Khamar Monastery and Demchig Monastery, which today is a site where the world energy is circulating.

The valuable qualities of the gold and mineral riches that are stored in the womb of the land are taken up and absorbed in the human body through the waters, the soil, the plants, the herbs and the milk of livestock. From ancient times, the nomads have recognized that the human body and the mind are, in this way, charged with positive waves of immense energy. Seeing the characteristics of the grass and the structure of the land, the nomadic herders recognized which riches are located beneath the land. They kept this knowledge to themselves from generation to generation, naming the locations in codes like Oyut, Erdenet, Tömört. The hills and the trees and the waters all have spirits, and we have to understand that words, thoughts and actions should be in harmony with these protector spirits. And we need to behave accordingly, otherwise it is believed that the spirits will poison you.

Nomads erect ovoos, or stone cairns, on high ground. They make prayers at these cairns, they whisper to them, offer the very best of their white milk products, and let spiritual souls inhabit the ovoos as nomads regard them as humans. The hills and the rocks, which over millennia have been imbued by the power of human wisdom, hold in their living souls the response of human behavior. When the nomads make their offerings, the living souls call the clouds and the rain, and make the springs filled with fresh water, and bring forth plants and flowers. Establishing this agreement with nature and with the world for thousands of years the nomads of the steppe have received what the nature had to offer; they have herded their livestock, they have written their history, they have composed their songs and they have moved across their nomadic homeland.

In the meanwhile towns are built and destroyed, airplanes and cars and steel towers and rockets are made, oil is drained from the womb of the earth, the power of uranium is produced from deep in the earth, nuclear missiles and atomic power stations are built in great numbers, some of these missiles are tested in the oceans, some on the earth, and thus the development of human civilization brings with it natural disasters.

Mankind lives in beautiful and elegant palaces, travels in fancy vehicles, overdresses with gold and diamonds and other precious stones, sees nature on screens, connects with each other not by heart and mind but through electronic conductors, and thus splits away from its primal and natural quality. And it is this life - separated from its natural quality - that mankind keeps striving for.

On the wild steppe and in the harsh desert of Mongolia, a few nomads have distanced themselves from the rapidity of the world. They honor the earth, they cherish their homeland, and they carry on their nomadic lifestyle while keeping and protecting their own human roots.

Although the gap between sedentary society and nomadic society is increasing, both exist on a single sphere beneath the sun and moon, moving through the galaxy in cyclical time.

People of the world! Let us renounce atomic power! Let us use inexhaustible solar and wind power that cause no harm to the natural world!

My people! Let us embrace our mother the Earth with our love, and let us protect her from the danger and calamity she is facing!

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people of the Mongol steppe, this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No 3
Mongols like to say, “The river water flows through the human heart.” Human beings are a fragment of the waters and the earth, and they suck and drink down the waters of the world like mother’s milk and, having experienced one life, they are absorbed back into the earth.

Mongol nomads understand that all springs and lakes and rivers are occupied by spiritual beings invisible to the eye, which they call lus and whose existence they honor. They try not to put milk or blood or dirt into rivers and springs, for they believe that, when water becomes dirtied they will become sick with a disease called “lus poison.” Rivers are rare in our homeland’s wild steppe, so the local people dig up a well for drinking water for both men and livestock after placating the earth and letting the local spirits know that they turn to them because there is no alternative. For this reason, we like to say, “water is a precious jewel.”

Today the springs and rivers are becoming polluted, and the flow of water is lessening. Over the last decade, greedy gold diggers have been digging holes everywhere and extracting the ore, washing the gold and thus muddying the clear spring waters. They cause a wound to the earth and they poison the livestock. Taking advantage of the tough times during the Mongolian economic and social transition and naming us, the people of Mongolia, as “beggars sitting on the gold”, and making promises to turn the country into a rich country by extracting its gold, a few people of political power closed a deal with their partner foreign companies. The deal was only lucrative to themselves and their partner companies as they got even richer than the whole country itself. The common people did not prosper. Rather, the majority became poorer. By digging up the gold , they pollute the rivers and waters. When they leave, they will leave a wounded land behind forever.

In 2007, a count of bodies of water in Mongolia revealed 18,610 rivers, lakes, streams and springs, of which 5,479 – a third of all the waters in the country – had dried up by 2011. Since then, this latter figure has been increasing. The companies that are mining for gold in the basin of the Orhon river - a tributary of the Arctic ocean that has been flowing for thousands of years - pour off the water with which the gold is washed in the Orhon and pollute the river immensely. Nowadays, the once crystal-clear Orhon is seething and red. Those who caused this irreversible disaster belong to the same business network as the influential politicians, and thus they go unpunished and are still seizing the opportunities in Mongolia.

The movements who are struggling in many ways to protect bodies of water in Mongolia are too weak to face up to the political oligarchy. The only power which can oppose them is the power of cause and effect. Who knows that the lus who occupy the many springs and rivers, and who are grieving and suffering, will not one day get furious? The tsunamis and terrible earthquakes and atomic power accidents in recent years are perhaps important warnings from Mother Earth for human civilization! Those who manage atomic power may say that the plants are powerful, but how insignificant are they before the might of nature? While many make the technology which delivers the whales, hunted for food in the Pacific, onto the dinner table, and which the next day sends the food as garbage down the drain, nonetheless we see everywhere how small this manmade technology is against the powerful waves of the raging oceans. The metrological probes in Japan, which lead the field in current research into these calamitous oceanic phenomena, recorded what was happening some minutes beforehand, but it had been observed by Mongol nomads some ten days earlier!

Nomadic herders observe the flight of birds, the running of antelopes, the character of livestock, and the placement of the stars and the moon, and so they foretell the weather and natural cycles for the coming days, months and year. The pitch black color of the clouds, the mass like a fiery ball when the sun is rising or setting, the wind howling like a wolf, smell of sulphur emerging from the earth, the turbidity of waters, and the barking of dogs are all considered as phenomena prior to earthquake or other natural disasters. Thus the nomads move and change places after having observed the behavior and actions of the antelopes and other animals, cows and the rest van the livestock.

The living water of the natural world holds the riches present under the local soil and the wisdom of the local people, and the Mongolian saying “the land on which I fell, the water with which I was washed” has to do with this mentality of Mongolians. “Motherland” and “homeland” are not only words in poetry and literature which reveal the speakers’ pride. It is even recently scientifically proven that the biological structure of the people is similar to the structure of the waters in their homeland. On many occasions a foal sold abroad while in the womb of the mother has returned galloping to its homeland. This is what is called the power of attraction between the living creatures and the land with its waters. This elucidates the intense power of attachment of the Mongol nomads to their homeland.

By mirroring on their surface, waves and the droplets, the rivers keep an eye on what is going on along their banks and edges, and subsequently they weigh up what is good and what is bad, and one day they will give their reply.

My people! How are we to save these few nomads along with the their wild steppe, the nomads who are born in a secluded, small space on the sphere of our world and have preserved their traditions, untamed wild nature, and their wisdom and intuition of nature.

We should intensely recite and repeat these words, for the sake of our Mother the Earth:

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people of the Mongol steppe, this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No 4
It is said, “A drought takes place for three years on the land where the tears of birds in flight have fallen”.

These words pierce through the heart like a nail, when one comes to the homeland and sees the land from above like the birds circling and searching for their lakes and waters. Certainly, the waters where the migrating birds come to land have been decreasing in number. Some of the few left are polluted. In recent years, these creatures used to fresh air and water have begun to suffer from a disease called “bird flu”. They have been dying all around in great numbers. People, too, have been infected with the desease; their fear and horror manifested in the shunning of close contact between birds and humans instead of developing a close contact between the two.

In Mongolia, many wild animals were certainly exterminated during the years of social change. As soon as the golden marmot skin became fashionable in Russia, our neighbour to the north, and sold at high prices, the marmots were slaughtered in great numbers. The hides of this “yellow petroleum” were - and still are - smuggled through customs and across the border, sometimes even in conspiracy with the customs officers. The velvet and shed antlers of stags are also secretly brought into China, the southern neighbour. The stag’s penis and testicles, and the doe’s tail and uterus, said to be aphrodisiacs, are taken abroad. As a result, in Mongolia, deer are being wiped out.

In recent years, the nouveau riche in Mongolia have begun to dress in the fur and skins of wolves and otter and sable and snow leopards. As soon as spring comes, they go out with their rifles “to drink gazelle blood”. They shoot the gazelles and - like wild carnivores - they rip open the animals’ bellies, eat their raw livers and serve out the still warm blood in cups, swallowing it down as though it were water. This is supposed to be good for phyical strength. It seems not to matter to them if nature is wrecked, as long as they themselves benefit from it.

In their effort to strengthen their “friendship”, ministers, members of the parliament and the nouveau riches - armed with rifles and binoculars - set out on the warpath against the white wolf of the steppe, calling their pastime drinking from the horn of plenty, or as the Mongolians would say: “awakening the windhorse”. Can you believe that one parliament member was described as a “heroic genius” for slaughtering 270 of these noble wolves?! Wolves are in fashion in the land of the southern neighbour, and they are given as gifts to ministers and leaders. The throats, stomachs and livers of the wolves are all said to be in some way physically beneficial to humans, and thus the hunting of the wolf in the wild has been intensified. So, is this the policy of the government, or are these acts of violence by shameless and casual idiots? This is only the Mongolian example. In India the Asian elephant, in America the California condor, in Africa the mountain gorilla, in Indonesia the orangutan, and worldwide the blue whale are all being eradicated by hunting.

I should like to go back to an earlier time, when animals were domesticated as our companions. At the time of the Emperor Ashoka in India, they established a clinic for the treatment of wild animals. And many countries have over the long course of history forbidden the hunting of rare animals. We should wake up and consider the examples of earlier times, when they did not err from a harmonious balance with the natural world. In one story, Buddha was travelling to the mountain called Jimseglen with his students. They met an old man with a long white beard, supporting himself on a stick carved with dragons. He was being followed by all kinds of wild animals and birds, and the Buddha - recognizing this man’s deep and percipient wisdom - instructed his pupils how they should pay honor to him. In Mongolia’s temples and monasteries today there is an image called “Old Whitebeard”, as a constant reminder that humans and animals must enjoy and take pleasure from the benefits of Mother Earth and exist in harmony side by side.

Mongolian myths tell how ancient tribes worshipped totems which took such forms as the swan or the wolf as they consider themselves to be originiated from these animals. In one story, a Hünnü chief, believing his daughter to be claimed by a boy from heaven, places her in a high tower on a lonely mountain. No heavenly boy shows up to claim her. Instead, she marries a wolf and thus begets a powerful clan. In another story, a prince marries a swan princess and thus too begets a powerful clan. The one important idea basic in all stories is that animals and humans have a single origin and a similar destiny. Through his superior automatic weaponry and wilderness techniques, man has dominated and laid waste to the animals in the wild nature. As he holds nature ransom in this way, man exploits it so as to beautify and please himself. It is as though man is returning to his original savage state.

My people! Let us end the tears of birds in flight falling upon the land. The birds are weeping as they look down upon the pain and sadness of the natural world.

My people! Let us give up the business of “sport hunting” tourism, where people go out to kill wild animals for their pleasure. Do hides imbued with the anger and pain of the dying animals please you, you dressy gents and fashionable ladies? Will you give up parading yourselves in the furs and hides of wild beasts?

My people! Let us treat the animals, the children of Mother Earth, with mercy! 

We love you Mother Earth.

On behalf of the nomadic people of the Mongol steppe, this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No 5
The nomadic view is that “gold is valuable in the human world, but it is needed more by the earth”. Man has known about gold for many aeons, and he has become accustomed to its magical qualities. In moderation, he has learned to enjoy those qualities. In excess, however, gold becomes dangerous. Such great wealth comes laden with the heavy burden of great responsibility.

It is said that the human body contains traces of gold. And, as much as there is gold in the human body, we hear also about there being traces of diamond and copper and silver too. These precious components, then, are delicately connected with the precious and valuable riches which reside in the womb of the earth. As the stellar bodies and the earth connect and interchange their energy with each other, this energy also passes through the precious bodies of human beings. As for why this is so, it is because the human and the stellar bodies are in tune with each other’s energy waves.

If it is gold which works to keep the earth in check, then copper maintains the balance between human reasoning and earth’s inner energy. Coal, petroleum and uranium are said to regulate the interaction within the womb of the earth between the inner heat of the earth and the light from the sky. It is also said that precious stones such as diamonds maintain the earth’s position amid the movement of the stars and the planets!

From ancient times, wise sages in the Orient have been cremated. From the ashes, precious stones - ringsel - have been extracted as relics of these sages. Later, rainbow-colored stones known as Buddha’s relics were collected from damaged ancient reliquaries, and nowadays these stones, considered as the remains of Buddha, are kept under special protection. It is easy to understand that the more gold and riches are stored within the earth, and thus the more we are connected with the spiritual energy of the cosmos, the greater is the human spiritual wealth. In other words, the wealth stored beneath the earth is directly related to the spiritual wealth of the people on the earth. The richness beneath the earth forms the holy temple of the natural destiny of man.

Mongol nomads understand that there exists a strong connection between the mineral wealth collected beneath the earth of their motherland and their own sharp clarity of vision, their quick-witted focus, their adaptability and their patient endurance. For this reason, then, the Mongols place within statues of the Buddha earth, plants and items which have been blessed by spiritual teachers, together with sacred texts, and they consecrate it by placing gold as an offering upon the eyes of the Buddha. Through the waves of energy of the gold and the precious stones, there exists a mutuality between the Buddhas and humanity. We should abstain from an overindulgence in gold and precious stones, yet enjoy the precious qualities of our own bodies.

Today, however, people are plundering the womb of their mother the earth. Humanity is digging up the gold and the precious stones which belong beneath the earth, turning them into weapons of profit, and thus commit serious crime.

Gold is necessary for people, but it is far more important for the earth as it keeps the earth in check, purifies and energizes water deep beneath, and balances energy currents of the cosmos.

The riches beneath the land, represented by the word gold, its ore and rocks, emit their own special frequency of waves. These waves form the source of the information and energy that influence the plants, the weather, natural phenomena and even the character of humans and animals.  

An old herder said that the plants and flowers and insects are all in proper relation to one another on the earth. One autumn, when the wormwood was vigorously spreading across the steppe, he told us “gather up the wormwod, dry it out, and store it away, you’ll need it coming spring”. Indeed, the following spring, when influenza prevailed the land, the preserved wormwood was used to suppress the desease. Another old herder, named Bööjöö, later explained that “the plants have self predicted that they will be needed” and I have never forgotten what he has said. For a green mother Earth, mankind should come together to grow and propagate the trees and plants, that they might produce seeds which are scattered and take root.

My people! Please, repent your sin of emptying the womb of Mother earth of her precious riches! Let us offer green forests, groves and gardens as gifts to our Mother the Earth!

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people on Mongol steppe this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No 6
The nineteenth century poet and a great educator, the 5th Noyon Hutagt Danzanravjaa, once said: “I myself have been the universe”. It seems that if you see the stars and the stellar bodies located in the boundless space of the universe in a minimized and compressed form, they look similar to the human body structure. On the other hand, if you place the magnified human body structure in the boundless space of the universe, it looks like the stars and the stellar bodies. The human is the embodiment of cosmos.

The stars in the sky above the wild steppe are sparkling now, like a fortress of tens and hundreds of millions of luminous gems of beryl, diamond and ruby. Night on the steppe is a paradise amid desires, dreams and epic stories. On such a night on the steppe during his long journey, three hundred years ago, the monk Luvsandanzanjantsan finished writing his master piece on astrology, bringing together his knowledge of the ancient texts, his wisdom, and his own observations of the nomadic movement of the stars across the universe. And he wrote:

The stars and the planets which reside in the sky
affect the creatures of the world for good and ill.
I have written this book of astrology
to point out what we have forgotten.

When the nomads applied the astrology of the monk Luvsandanzanjantsan to their nomadic way of life throughout the seasons, they determined - with the thumb and fingers of one hand – the date in the twelvefold cycle of time (rat, ox, tiger, sheep, hare, dragon, snake, horse, monkey, chicken, dog and pig). Thus their nomadic way of life took nature and the weather into account.

For a very long time, nomads have known that the placement of the stars and the planets, and their movement, constitute the unifying law of the rhythm of life and the rhythm of the atoms in the human body.

In the traditional Mongol nomadic worldview, the human spirit or wisdom comes from Heaven, and joins the body that is born out of the earth like a seed fruit. Thus arises a universe known as a “person.” An ancient story tells us that at first humans gave off light from their bodies, that everyone had their own tree which never stopped producing fruit, and that no one lacked in anything. But one person got a strange idea, imagining that the fruit from someone else’s tree might taste better than from his own. He let his light out so he could steal from the others, but his light never came on again. In this way, every time a human brought forth an act of evil, the body light was snuffed out and thus humanity lost its light.

For thousands and thousands of years, humans and the natural world co-existed, mutually understanding and honoring and creating together. But humanity has gradually become more powerful and consequently have completely forgotten that the earth is our mother. Over the centuries, we humans have become more and more aggressive and have come to feel that nature is our servant; that we can get whatever we want from the servant. In the present era, we have reached the end of the line of our ravaging of the earth, our mother. We are coming to the point where oil, coal, uranium, gold and silver are moving towards exhaustion. Fresh water is coming to an end. We have reached the point when we are harming, destroying and hanging ourselves!

Man - the precious, powerful, cosmic universe - has turned into a sack filled with data. We are speedily moving towards the point we are becoming a programmed, symbolic creature just like the computers we created! The divine qualities which the natural world bestows are more and more being lost from human civilization, which is more and more being defined by programming.

By plundering the world, humans are also plundering themselves. By waging war against the earth, humans are aggressively harming themselves.

During the socialist period, the wisdom of the early Mongols was expunged from the national consciousness. At the present time, though, the shamanic spirits - which have a deep connection with nature, the sky, the hills and the waters - are awakening, returning and reminding mankind to save the world. This is an important warning.

Will human civilization be destroyed together with their Mother the Earth? Or will mankind save her Mother the Earth, and continue her own existence as well? Not confrontation, violence and fight, but love, only love is the powerful savior of all.

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people on Mongol steppe this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No7

The poem translation by J.Choinkhor

I would like to listen with you all to a single song, as well as I would like to sing it with you all. This song was composed by R. Enhbazar in 1980 and I myself wrote the lyrics.

At that time, the dangers of the Cold War, especially the acute state of affairs which existed between the United States and the USSR, raised alarm and anxiety among the people of the world, and the ideologies were divided into two camps that were fighting “war” against each other.

In those days, Enhbazar and I were convinced that it was certainly not the war, the violence, and the ideological aggression that would save our world, but the love for our Mother the Earth. We created this song because we found it important to share our message with the people of the world.

This very song has been sung in Mongolia for more than thirty years. In recent years, in particular, it turned into a “heartfelt struggle” song for every Mongolian who is genuinely concerned for the natural disasters which are caused by the excessive mining extraction and wrongful actions by humans. The song clearly echoes harder and more often as expression of the desire of the Mongol people to save our land and our world. The theme of this song is the expression of the common destiny of the whole world and humanity.

Let’s listen to this song sung by B. Badaruugan along with its English translation. Let us sing it all together.
Let us repeat this. Let us sing it over and over. This is the magical prayer:

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people of the Mongol steppe, this letter is presented by the poet G. Mend-Ooyo.

Letter No8
We have the faith to believe in the future, we have the love for our Mother the Earth, we have human wisdom, and we have energy and great mental power. Trusting in these capacities of ours, let us strive for Peace! The dawn is breaking now on our homeland, the wild steppe of Mongolia.

The wild steppe of Mongolia is brooding beneath the white, white snow. The sun is rising in the east and the round moon of the sixteenth day of the middle month of winter is in the west. I am in their midst. As though at the center of the universe. Over and over I recite this prayer:

We love you Mother Earth

On behalf of the nomadic people of the Mongol steppe, this letter is presented by the poet G. MEND-OOYO.

Translation by Simon Wickham-Smith and Sumiya Surenjav

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