Observations placeholder

Lame Deer Seeker of Visions – John Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes

Let's sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can't see a highway or a fence.  Let's have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs.  Let's have the grass for a mattress, experiencing its sharpness and its softness.  Let us become like stones, plants and trees.  Let us be animals, think and feel like animals.

Listen to the air.  You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it  Woniya waken – the holy air – which renews all by its breath.  Woniya, woniya waken – spirit, life, breath, renewal – it means all that.

Woniya – we sit together, don't touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, a presence.  A good way to start thinking about nature, to talk about it.  Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives