The Elders wanted me to tell you this: Anything you think of thinks of you.
It feels you, is a part of you. Look at the sunset and say it is very pretty and the sun
feels this, feels happy. When you’re hot, a breeze cools you and you say, Oh that
feels good. This makes the breeze feel good. Maybe the breeze is only a baby, just
some air crawling before it touches your skin, and you saying, Oh that feels good,
makes the moving air understand who it is.
It feels your joy as a part of itself. As it moves down across the mesas it carries
the part of you that felt it. When it blows over the skin of the next person the
breeze joins the two of you and reminds you of how close you are. That breeze
touches many people. It marries them, shares that good feeling it gets with what
you and the others get from it.
By the time the sun is down and the air is still, the part of the air that
touched those people sleeps and dreams of them. That part that is them, and the
part of them that is itself. Maybe the next day it wakes up and it is a wind, and the
people that it touches bend against it, put their arms up over their faces to keep
from being bit by the sand it blows against them.
That night when it gets a chance to sleep again, it dreams of people it
roughed up, the sand people, the calm air people, the coyote people, the sheep and
rabbit people, the water people. Maybe the wind had a little rain that day. It was a
dance. You could see it like a dark curtain blowing against the big sky and it fell in
love with the rain. It dreams of this. It has this good feeling that blows back to all
the people it touched. It laughs, too, in its sleep as it remembers and weaves a
blanket of all it feels and remembers that’s got lots of people in the design.
The rock you throw at the rabbit is you. When you just think of picking it
up and trying to get the rabbit, it is already a part of you, and if you know this it
will fly true and knock that rabbit down. And the rock will remember what it felt
like for you, and that feeling of flying from your hand. The rock never flies before.
It never is picked up, it never hits a rabbit and knows that rabbit. So now it knows
some more about what it is and what you are. It will see you in its own way when
you pass by after that. It will call you warrior brother. It has different dreams now.
It sees more and feels more. It is part of you too from when you touched it and
asked it to help you. It was with you only a little while but it’s going to be with you
forever. In you is the rock and everything it knows and feels.
This is the way it is. When you see something or think of it, which is the
same thing, you marry it. That is what the marriage vow is, knowing that this is
the way you understand things, and saying it. When you killed that rabbit that
rabbit was your bride, it married you and your need for it. It gave up being a rabbit
person to become part of you through its flesh and through your prayer to it
carried by that rock. If you married well it jumped into the hole of you and felt
safe. You had the rabbit, the rabbit had you.
