As We Bear Dance

Kicking up stardust as we Bear Dance. / Our heartbeat beads / threaded by drumsong / connect us to primordial times.

They are right here with us. / The Ancestors come in the lightning. / They come in the wind. / They come in the rain.

The roar of the growler. / The phosphoric chants of our men. / Buckskin rhythms beneath our feet.

Quantum physicists and mycologists / are beginning to catch up with our / electric science. / One part particle. / One part wave.

Tapping into the energy living inside us all. / Footsteps sending messages of relationship / to the underground networks of life. / Ions in the air catalyzed by compassion. /

Prayers transmitted at the speed of light. / Through this dance we exist in two places at once. / The stars send their love to us at 3 million meters per second. / The perpetual motion of the cosmos expressed through our feet.

Our minds unlock doorways to the spirit world / with the keys of reverence and reciprocity. / From the Milky Way we came. / To the Milky Way we will soon return.

For now, though, we are teaching the world about alchemy. / The missing variable in all your equations is Love. / We’ll help you understand how / the physical realm mixed with / the spirit of kindness / yields a world of beauty.

This dance is a love letter to our indispensable relative, the Bear. / We dance to teach the children to be humble before Creation. / To sense the subtle energies of the Spring morning air. / Come feel the things English doesn’t have words for, / such an impoverished language.

As Greg Cajete says, / Remember what is important. / Remember what is sacred. / Remember what we stand for.

This is not just a dance. / This is our story written into the sand. / A living codex transcribed from the past into our present hands. / A standard curriculum encoded in the songs / in the smoke / in the ceremony of life / for the children today, / for the children yet to come.

The snow of our ancestors / doesn’t come now. The willow for baskets / harder and harder to find. I see chokecherry islands shrinking. / The piñon pines thirsty and dry. Our white brothers and sisters / tricked by Coyote / duped by their own greed / to walk off a cliff / and bringing everyone else / along with them. Many worlds have come and gone before. / The ruins of collapsed civilizations lay strewn all around Turtle Island. / They remind us of the times when we too walked off a cliff. /

When we too wanted to be masters of Creation, instead of children of Creation. Hubris cannot stand / on sacred ground / for long. It always eventually eats away at it’s own mother until it / eats itself. What the climate scientists don’t tell you, though, / is that there is life after death. They don’t tell you that sometimes catastrophe / is the only way humans / Learn. They don’t tell you / (they don’t understand) / that this is / Creator’s world. Creator holds it all in their great hands, / even our collapse.

When he has run out of places to run, / when the riverbeds are nothing but sand, / only then will the white man’s “civilization” / remember to cry, to care, and to pray again. Yes there is great suffering.

But the silver lining is this / eminent rebirth, / the soul’s long awaited exhalation / finally released / in these times of reckoning. The snow used to come. / It doesn’t come now.