Essays

As I know it, being “Indian” – as Indigenous People have been called in the West – means being deeply aware of one’s relationship to everything. Knowing that an unseen force appears when we live this way. One begins to understand that the divine lives inside of relationship – which means that everything you are in relation to is sacred.

While difficult to practice in every moment, just striving for this ideal creates a better world.

So what has disrupted the Indigenous way …

Let’s start with the assumption that we are all born into two other people’s stories. Which continues backwards in time, of course.

At the level of DNA – whether you believe in “past lives” or not… we literally carry our ancestors with us. And at an “energetic” or “vibrational” level…. here’s my theory…

As infants, we are super sensitive to the energy around us and take it in through very fundamental and subtle vibrations in the environment. Almost as if – in the …

I helped bury a friend’s dog recently. I’d never personally buried an animal that I was so close to. I had never sat with someone I knew so well as they lost the animal that got them through so many emotional points in their life.

This dog had absorbed so much pain and joy from my friend. He was his trusted link to life. So when he became ill, my friend had to look outside his insular world built around him and his dog and realize that he had a community of friends that wouldn’t abandon …