First the humor of it all:
I know why coboys wear pants. I just keep forgetting.
Everytime I walk up onto the rolling hills and grasslands above the Singing Horse Trading Post in shorts…I remember.
I just spent the last 20 minutes picking tiny, tiny prickers out of my shins and ankles!
One a more thoughtful note…here is an excerpt from my newest Pine Ridge journal…written less than an hour ago on the ridge line above the Singing Horse Trading Post just north of Manderson. No judging it…the words just flow off my pen here sometimes…pure as snow, without really thinking about ego terms like ‘quality’.
EXCERPT:
“I am so still and grounded right now. There is no need to move.
I am planted in the earth, hands free.
Stillness brings power.
I am at this very moment…taking energy from the earth and giving energy back to the earth. There is only one energy, to which all things belong.
To try to understand this sacred source of power we give it human form…GOD…an old white man with a grey beard, knowing eyes, sandals and a white robe. How funny and self-absorbed that is when you think about it. White robes aren’t much more than 4,000 years old. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the Universe 13.8 billion! We try to humanize the energy, when it should be the other way around. We are the newcomers…but it’s all good either way!
I am the only person here…The only person every to see this sunset…from this spot…on this night. What did you see today that no one else every saw or will every see, from where you viewed it? Many things no doubt, when you stop to ponder it.
Meanwhile, the grass and the wind keep dancing. Another timeless rhythm plays its sacred song.
As I stand to leave the wind grows stronger…but of course it didn’t…it was me that changed.”
Later, as I drifted down the hill, past Rosie’s horses, a poem came to me (and I wrote it while standing in the dark):
“The sun is done and so am I…the fence cares not as I pass by.
The grass still blows to its own beat…a dance only broken by my two feet.
The horses graze without a care…be it night or day, they stay right there.
The rhythm of the Plains has its own flow…that a busy man shall never know.
But stop yourself and look around…for that which you seek can then be found.”
Just a little live taste from Pine Ridge! Thank you for reading! Thank you for being you! Wopila Tanka! Love!
Kevin
