The Water Your Blood

The Water your Blood
The Rocks your bones
Your Breath the Sky

In the late 1980s I had a very profound experience while sweating with Charlie Thom just north of Lake Siskiyou in his sweat lodge that was then there sanctioned by the Forest Service.

After one round inside the Sweat Lodge I got out and had the "spins" from too much heat in the Sauna like atmosphere of a sweat lodge there so I got into the river to cool down and then laid on the round river rocks (some of which were used for rocks for the sweat "The Rock People" as Charlie would say.

So, as I was trying to have the "spins" pass I was communing with the nature spirits of the river and the rocks and the air when I had this profound realization.

Often when white people for instance live within a culture (or any race or races) they think of themselves as separate from the land, the water and the air when in actuality this is ridiculous.

So, I found myself in communing with the Rocks, the water in the river and the Air in the Sky and realizing just how ridiculous people actually are to think in this separate way when the water, the rocks and the air are always a part of them form the moment they are conceived in their mother's womb to way after they die. Even if people are cremated still the pieces of bones and the powder of bones often remain in the cremains of people.

So, I found this poem flowing out of me to express this in a way we all could relate to.

The water your blood
The Rocks your bones
Your breath the sky

If you actually think about it whenever you breathe air it is a very intimate experience with the earth. If you are in a small room you are all breathing in and sharing the same air with all the other people there. If you are drinking water how many other people have drunk some or all of that water since beginningless time here on earth. The water may be evaporated from the sea or a lake and come down in snow or rain and then you drink it, but even after you urinate it out the soil and rocks filter it and it goes down to the ocean or into a river or lake and may be used again and again and again for thousands of millions of years past and future. You bones may have been a part of the cattle or pigs or birds or fish you have eaten and how many times has this happened over and over again?

The air that you breathe might have been breathed by literally most people on earth at one time or another throughout human history or by an eagle or a bird or deer or bear or whatever. Everything on earth is related. We are all related through the air, the water and the rocks forever as long as any of us choose to remain on earth rather than visiting another world in the future. We are in a sense all one gigantic life form here on earth that really can't be separated in any useful way.

So, everything that lives (and even things we don't sometimes consider to be alive) are all alive together and one with the living being Earth. We are all inseparable. And when I think this way I feel safe, alive and empowered by this.