summer tour stop moment

hey, i have been on summer tour now for several weeks. please accept that i cannot post regularly from the road, as i am trying to live off line for the three months of tour stops. thank you for any interest you have had in this weblog.

32 years ago, i wrote this report of my 2nd vision quest

I awoke in darkness, but the darkness was no longer a void. It was filled with gifts of night. The moon and stars showed me their ways and the patterns that they reveal as they make their circles on the spirit path. I Iearned all of these things and was eager to learn more. When the sun made it's way across the sky, it illuminated all of the earth and warmed all things on the Earth. A large cloud formed about the sun as it reached its zenith. The cloud was truly magnificent to behold. A billowing cumulus, rising many thousands of feet, opening and closing its doors and windows, growing larger and constantly changing, multiplying, living. This cloud descended upon me, caressing me in a manner that only one who has experienced clouds could understand. The cloud lifted me above the earth; first very slowly, then faster and faster. I rocketed skyward travelling inside the cloud, uplifted so quickly that i lost consciousness for time and space. When i stopped my movement i was perched atop this cloud. I sat amidst a cushion of soft, brilliantly white down. Then the cloud spoke to me. It did not speak into my ear, it spoke from inside my heart and mind. It roared and whispered in the same breath. It raged and comforted like the constant changing cloud itself appears to do.
The voice or sound or whatever mechanism was utilized to invoke symbols in my being, told me the story of what had happened to this island of GAIAN crust, crushed between the great oceans, called by its conquering heros the United States. The symbols told of the Indian, who was in harmony with this land and with all the things that lived in this land. Visitors came to the Indians and made the Indians unconscious of their relationships with all things and the order and peace they once had. These visitors then took the land from the Indians and left the Indians to suffer for their unconsciousness. These visitors did not know the land nor did they know the proper relationship between men and all the things ofthis land. They ignored their ignorance of this and proceeded to fight against all things. They destroyed the relationships like they destroyed the Indian. They created for themselves a universe and an environment that did not relate at all to any natural reality. They have now gone so far as to control the powers of the Thunder Beings, the Wakinyan, and the white gift of purity. These visitors, who were welcomed as brothers by all things, now kill all things, because they have created new non-living, non-spirit things that walk the Black path. This new reality is backward and frozen, and it will evevtually lead to the end of both the Red and the Black Paths.
The symbols showed the end of the relationship between the animal beings and the plant beings. To end this relationship is to kill everything; it is done everyday by the visitors, not only on the land they claim to possess, but also in the spaces they want to control and dominate. All plants nad animals share a fundamental gift that must always be. The plants give to the animals what they need and the animals give to the plants what they need most. This giving aways brings new freshness to the Whole Earth. Without this giving the air would become stale and die. The visitors forget this. They take from the plants and they take from the animals, but they never give back life. They only give poison, and that is given not as a gift but as a result of discarding waste, the byproduct of their behaviors. These visitors have days that they are to give to one another. These days are special to them, but even then the gifts they give are perceived only as trading for what they receive in return. The Indian does not know this way, nor do all the living things. The red spirit path is a giving path. The Indian lives this giving path, sharing everything with everything, never owning or possessing anything. Above all, the Indian never possesses the land. The earth and all the living things are the greatest gift ever given, and in the spirit of this gift, the Indian gives it all back and shares it with all. The visitors do not understand this. To them the land, like the plants, is there to do with whatever they want. They own it, fight over it, rape it, kill it, pollute it, but they never know it, nor share with it,, nor find harmony with it or all of the relations living through it.
These visitors do not even understand the need to communicate with all nature, rocks, trees, birds, insects, animals, fish. If a visitor is seen communicting with any of these, outside the privacy of his own little environmental shell, the visitor is considered crazy. The more the visitor attempts to find harmony and oneness with all things, the crazier he is called. If the controllers of the visitors, those visitors that have the power to keep the new reality in order and to assure its continuation, deem a visitor crazy, they lock him away and use him for play. To all nature and the Indian, there is no craziness; there is only the harmony of all living beings. Behavior that my have been seen as eccentric by visitors is seen by the natives as merely another relationship of the whole circle. The natives understand that each being and spirit has a center, and that each must find that center. When it is found, order will be had, and harmony and peace will reign.
The visitors believe that harmony and peace can only be maintained as a by-product of conformity, competition and gamesmanship. It is rather amusing to know that the shamen, the holy men of the natives, undergo life experiences that the visitors would call very sick and very crazy. These men must pass through this phase because they have great power, and it is a a great ordeal to center oneself with so much power. But when they are centered and know the Truth, these men can perform healing and can make rain and are one with the great powers of the universe, the Wakinyan, the Thunder Beings, the healing plants, the calming waters, and Wakantanka, the Great Mystery. If visitors show signs of this experience, they are removed from the rest of the masses of citizens and are dealt with as misfits and wrong, sick, crazy, people.
As all of these symbols danced in my being my spirit beheld the urgency of the message. It is becoming too late to teach the visitors the ways of the land that they are visiting. They merely ignore these attempts anyway. They even play games at it. Muir believed in preservation of natural lands and environments, yet the followers of his teachings, the Sierra Club, confess faith only in conservation. To most Americans the notions of setting aside large bio-regions as laboratories for observing the raw processes of the natural world are unthinkable and obscene. Conservation is merely a delaying technique to give special interests first chance at special ripoffs. Ecology is a game to play, simply to understand what health foods and homeopathic techniques will apply to individuals, while still retaining the overwhelming economic benefits for the greedy ‘hippies.’
I cursed my own involvement in the visitors games and swore to fight against the destructive systems. The cloud and its voice bade me to calm down and showed me patience and serenity. I was carried to a creek and my anxiety was washed out of me. My temper, cooled by the chattering stream, flew away on the wings of a blowing leaf. The cloud then carried me above the stream and showed me some beautiful cottonwood trees. The cloud touched the trees and they lived through their seasons before my eyes. From deadness in winter to rebirth in spring, from adolescence and young adult in summer to middle and old age in fall, and back to death and rebirth.