"What do you see here, my friend? Just an ordinary old cooking pot, black
with soot and full of dents"
"It is standing on the fire on top of that old wood stove, and the water
bubbles and moves the lid as the steam rises to the ceiling. Inside the pot is
the boiling water, chunks of meat and bone and fat, plenty of potatoes.
"It doesn't seem to have a message, that old pot, and I guess you don't give
it a thought. Except the soup smells good and reminds you that you are hungry
Maybe you are worried that this is dog stew. Well, don't worry. It's just
beef---no fat puppy for a special ceremony. It's just an ordinary, everyday
meal.
"But I'm an Indian. I think about ordinary, common things like this pot.
The bubbling water comes from the rain cloud. It represents the sky. The fire
comes from the sun which warms us all---men, animals, trees. The meat stands
for the four-legged creatures, our animal brothers, who gave of themselves so
that we should live. This steam is living breath. It was water; now it goes
up to the sky, becomes a cloud again. These things are sacred. Looking at the
pot full of good soup, I am thinking how, in this simple manner, Wakan Tanka
takes care of me. We Sioux 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. We have a saying that the
white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. You could notice if
you wanted to, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of
symbols and images where the spiritual and the com
monplace are one. To you symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book.
To us they are part of nature, part of ourselves---the earth, the sun, the
wind and the rain, stones, trees, animals, even little insects like the ant and
grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart,
and we need no more than a hint to give us this meaning.
"What to your seems commonplace to us appears wondrous through symbolism.
This is funny, because we don't even have a word for symbolism, yet we are all
wrapped up in it. You have the word, but that is all."
(John (Fire) Lame Deer & Ricard Erdoes, 'Lame Deer, Seeker of
Visions',PP.107-108)
___
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
