"To come to nature, feel its power, let it help you, one needs time and patience for that. Time to think, to figure it all out. [But] YOU have so little time for contemplation; it's always rush, rush, rush with you. It lessons a person's life, all that grind, that hurrying and scurrying about." "We Lakota spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things which in our mind are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life.” "The Lakota have a name for white men. They call them wasicun - fat-takers. It is a good name, because you have taken the fat of the land. But it does not seem to have agreed with you. Right now you don't look so healthy - overweight, yes, but not healthy. Americans are bred like stuffed geese - to be consumers, not human beings. Fat-taking is a bad thing, even for the taker." "You have raped and violated these lands, always saying, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme,’ and never giving anything back. You have despoiled the earth, called things dead that are alive (rocks and minerals) but also ‘domesticated’ animals to the point they have no power." “You have not only altered, declawed and malformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves. You have changed human beings into chairmen of the board, into office workers, into time-clock punchers . . ." John Lame Deer Lakota Medicine Man Photos: Badlands National Park, SD, May 20-21, 2016 "When I go up on the hill to pray I don't just talk to God. I try to get the talking over quick. Mostly I'm listening. Listening to God - that's praying, too . . . So that's how you pray to God. You LISTEN." Mathew King (Noble Red Man) Lakota chief and elder Photos: Evening-Primrose flowers and the Badlands, Badlands National Park, SD, May 20-21, 2016. The fourth picture is of Mathew King. "In our [Lakota] philosophy, individuality is very important. Individual dreams and visions are very important, and they have a purpose. They always say that everybody is different. Everyone is unique and has a purpose. It's interesting today when I talk to the young people who are coming back to our traditions. Sometimes I worry because they are all coming back from a very structured view of religion, the religion of the church, and so they bring that structure and form back to our ways. They take Indian spirituality and make it into Indian religion, with all the usual religious laws. They will tell you that if you don't do things a certain way or if you do something wrong, then something bad will happen to you. I think this comes from the idea of committing a sin. This is something we learned from the church. It's not part of our traditional philosophy . . . A lot of the time, what the church calls sin is simply a mistake. It's not evil and wasn't meant to be. To the Lakota a mistake is simply a mistake, and it's one of the ways we learn. We learn from our mistakes and go on." Albert White Hat, Sr. Lakota elder Photos: Badlands National Park, SD, May 20-21, 2016 For Spiritual Direction or Workshops, please visit:http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ Yesterday I mentioned the fact that whenever I visit Lakota country - especially the Badlands and Bear Lodge (Devil's Tower) - I can't help but feel that I am encircled by an ancient sense of presence, and that even my own thoughts and emotions are arising - like echoes - from a very distant past. This experience adds a sense of sacredness to my life, and encourages me to treat my own thoughts and emotions with more loving care and mindfulness. During the past six months, my life has undergone a radical change since I acquired my first smartphone. I avoided getting one for years, but then finally succumbed for business reasons. I find however - like everyone else - that the increased sense of being almost continually "plugged in" to the societal network, and the impulse to check messages quite frequently are a difficult adjustment to make. I know that this same challenge occurs with people of diverse cultures all over the world, and for all of us it can often lead to the addictively obsessive habit of checking messages. For a while now, I've wanted to find a way to practice my message-checking more mindfully and with less frequency. However, this past weekend, while camping, it occurred to me that even my message-checking - and the messages themselves, along with the people who send them - also have an ancient, echo-like quality to them, and that they too carry an innate sacredness. In order to facilitate this sense of sacredness and also encourage less compulsive cell phone use, a fresh idea occurred to me. While in South Dakota, I discovered some beautiful Lakota beaded bags - used traditionally for tobacco employed in chanupa (pipe) ceremonies and in offering a pinch in prayer to each of the four, six or seven directions - and suddenly a light went on in my mind and heart. I realized that if my wife and I each had a bag to store our smartphones, we would treat our message-checking and texting more mindfully. In addition, having the phone hidden inside the bag would discourage us from using it as much, forming a kind of barrier to compulsive message-checking. Also, associating the phone use with the sacred directions would help in connecting Facebook messages, "Likes," Instagram "hearts" and email messages to the larger landscape, and to the sacred Native cultures that were here long before all of this technology ever came about. When I returned home, I gave my wife hers (the larger bag, since she has the larger version of the iPhone), and we've both been enjoying using them. When in the car, I hang mine on the rearview mirror. Every time I glance at the beaded pattern, it serves as a reminder for me to live in a sacred way . . . Photos: Lakota tobacco bags (Joanne's is white; mine is brown), with our cell phones, made by Dawn Yellow Bank; Bear Lodge (Devil's Tower, WY) and the Badlands (SD); May 20=22, 2016 For Spiritual Direction or Workshops, please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ ”All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish . . . God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses . . . All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of one religion only.” Sri Aurobindo “I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another’s creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged.” Thomas Jefferson “No religion is absolutely perfect. Yet not only do we fight for religion, but also are we often willing to sacrifice our lives for it. And what we hopelessly fail to do is to live it. A true religion is that which has no caste, no creed, no colour. It is but an all-uniting and all-pervading embrace.” Sri Chinmoy Springtime in the Rockies - at 5,000 feet, 5,500 feet, 8,500 feet, and 12,000 feet - has a completely different look. And yet ALL are Spring! Photos: Canada Geese at Watson Lake, CO; Pasqueflowers at Vedauwoo, WY; Cottonwood trees near Bellvue, CO; The Never Summer Range in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO. All four photos were taken May 12-17, 2016 For Spiritual Direction or Workshops, please visit:http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ "I came to the conclusion long ago that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them. Whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become Hindu. But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian."
Mahatma Gandhi This would include, I'm convinced, "an Interspiritual person becoming a better Interspiritualist."😊 Photo: Arches National Park, UT "I did not see anything [New York 1886] to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus [white people] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. This could not be better than the old ways of my people."
Nicholas Black Elk Oglala Lakota I am currently [on Saturday] camping in the Badlands in Lakota country, recuperating from a bad flu and finding that the fresh air and breezes are doing me good :) I just came across these insightful words in my morning reading. Black Elk made this statement after joining Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show at age 25, shortly after being confined to the reservation by the government and hungering for some adventure. He returned home to Pine Ridge (SD) shortly thereafter and became a renowned spiritual leader. I pray that his words are not still true today to such an intense degree (this was before FDR and the New Deal), but realize we all are aware of the ways in which they still ARE true. This is election year here in America, and I ask that we might take these words to heart and make our choices accordingly. In addition I ask that we might increase in the sense of oneness and generosity in our own personal lives. Photo: Fremont Culture petroglyphs (ca. A.D. 1 - 1300), near Moab, UT I'm just now (Sunday afternoon) leaving the Black Hills of South Dakota, after a weekend retreat recuperating from the flu. One of the things I love about the Black Hills is the fact that species typical of all four directions meet and live here. The sign in this first photo - posted by the roadside in Wind Cave National Park - shows some of the western and eastern plant and animal species that meet here. Just considering plants, we find ponderosa pine from the west and bur oak from the east. From the north we find black spruce and paper birch, while quaking aspen and blue spruce come up from the south. It's no wonder that the Lakota, whose land this traditionally is, consider The Black Hills "The Center of the Earth." Photos: Sign in Wind Cave National Park, SD; Lakota Medicine Wheel On Friday afternoon, shortly after arriving at Badlands National Park, setting up camp, and then getting right to work doing my photography, I found myself taking pictures several hundred feet off the road. I wasn't feeling very sociable, since I was still recovering from a bad case of the flu, and quite aware that my voice sounded horrible. Suddenly, I heard footsteps behind me and looked up. "Are you Steve?" a middle-aged man asked. Looking at him suspiciously, I answered slowly: "Yes?" I was afraid there'd been some sort of family emergency, and that he'd been sent to find my car - and me. "Well the woman I'm with who's in the car up there" [pointing to the road], he continued, "says she knows you." The woman eventually got out of the car and joined us. As it turns out, I went to seminary with her. I graduated in 1992 and she, two years later. Then, 24 years later - three weeks ago - I met her again at a workshop on Wilderness Mysticism that I gave on a snowy Saturday. I soon found out that this woman - Jeannie - felt so inspired by my presentation several weeks ago, that it inspired her to get out with her husband and do some photography of her own, They were headed back to Iowa to visit relatives, and decided to stop at the Badlands. The funny thing is that Jeannie apparently had just been discussing me in the car shortly before they arrived on the scene. She described my outdoor hat to her husband, and told him to be on the lookout for me. "Maybe he's HERE," she told him. And indeed, I was . . . Photo: Badlands National Park, SD,. May 20, 2016 For Spiritual Direction or Workshops, please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ |
AuthorStephen Hatch, M.A. is a spiritual teacher and photographer from Fort Collins, Colorado. His approach is contemplative, inter-spiritual, and Earth-based. Archives
June 2016
Categories |