There is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples.
Let’s kneel down through all the worlds of the body like lovers. I know I am a tree and full of life and I know you, you are the flying one and will leave. But can’t we swallow the sweetness and can’t you sing in my arms and sleep in the human light of the sun and moon I have been drinking alone.
It has seemed so strange to me that the larger culture, with its own absence of spirit and lack of attachment for the land, respects these very things about Indian traditions, without adopting those respected ways themselves.
Sometimes there is a wellspring or river of something beautiful and possible in the tenderest sense that comes to and from the most broken of children, and I was one of these, and whatever is was, I can’t name, I can only thank. Perhaps it is the water of life that saves us, after all.
Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit.
A spoken story is larger than one unheard, unsaid. In nearly all creation accounts, words or songs are how the world was created, the animals sung into existence.
Between earth and earth’s atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself.
Death is dancing me ragged.
There is a language beyond human language, an elemental language, one that arises from the land itself.
We are full of bread and gas, getting fat on the outside while inside we grow thin.
I resented my mother for guessing my innermost secrets. She was like God, everywhere at once knowing everything.
Perhaps it was the word “God” that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon.
I think of that word, power, and what it means. It means you feed your people, you help the world. I never understood what else there was to it.
Humans colonizing and conquering others have a propensity for this, for burning behind them what they cannot possess or control, as if their conflicts are not with themselves and their own way of being, but with the land itself.
Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.
There are so many beginnings.
All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.
There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.
The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.
Now they were merely trying to fill themselves up but not with the heart, not the soul. They’d lost both those along the way...