Kent Nerburn - Native Echoes : Listening to the Spirit of the Land.

For the children ,

that they may learn early

what we must hope

that we have not learned too late .

Twenty years ago, during the coldest winter in recent memory, I embarked upon a literary journey to give voice to the spirit of the land that I called my home.

This book Native Echoes: Listening to the Spirit of the Land was the result of that journey. It was my homage to the power of the great natural forces that surround us and shape our hearts and spirits, and a bowing before the spiritual insights of the Native people with whom I lived and worked. I loved it as my quiet child.

Though Native Echoes found its inspiration in the land of the north, the same book could as easily be written about the spiritual power of the sun-blessed American Southwest, or the great haunting distances of the Alaskan interior, or the rolling hills and whispering forests of Appalachia and the Piedmont. For Echoes is not about a particular place, it is about the very power of place itself. It is about listening to the land, and learning the lessons she has to teach.

Over the years I have often revisited this quiet work for inspiration, and to remind myself of the power of metaphor to shape a truth that cannot easily be contained in description and narration. Native Echoes was just that pure metaphor a painting in words in search of the living, breathing, presence of the land.

But it was more, as well. It was an attempt to meld the richness and insight of our western spiritual tradition with the Native heartbeat of our American land a search, if you will, for an authentic American spirituality.

All writers, indeed, all artists, know that there are times when you catch something in passing that you will never catch again. Years later, when you go back to that work, you stare at it with amazement, wondering how you managed to capture that moment and give it a form that seems so irreducible and right.

Native Echoes , which was originally published as A Haunting Reverence , is such a work. I am filled with gratitude and humility that I was able to give it birth.

I believe it is time for Native Echoes to be heard again. In a world that seeks spirituality without dogma, where there is hunger to learn the teachings of the land, it offers gentle guidance and quiet reflection.

I hope you will give yourself over to this work. If you still your mind and quiet your heart, it will reward you. It speaks to many spiritual questions in the only way that such questions can be addressed as poetry, as metaphor, as a grasping at a shaft of light.

Kent Nerburn

Minnesota and Oregon 2016

The White man does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and the soil Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers bones .

Chief Luther Standing Bear Lakota

When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength ; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth .

The book of Exodus, chapter 4, verse 12

W e are as children on this land, a shadow on the still life of time.

We measure our presence in generations; we cannot dig down ten thousand years and find our bones.

Our arrival is scribed upon the line of history; it does not drift upon the winds of story, or float upon the shrouds of myth.

We are explorers and discoverers still, seeking meaning through movement and examination.

But we are coming to a time of listening. Our sweat and breath are now upon this land.

Voices rise up, and we begin to hear the echoes in the stones.

T he calm dignity of a rock .

The fleeting fairness of a summer field .

A mountain, indifferent and impenetrable, thrusting through the clouds. They claim us and inhabit us .

By the distance of their horizons they shape our dreams, and by the care with which they receive our footsteps they form our hearts .

Theophany? Is that too strong a word?

To hear the voice of God within the land?

There are prayer fields in our reveries, and we must wander until we find them .

And when your childrens children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone .

Chief Seattle

Suquamish/Duwamish

We do not own the land. We belong to it. And by our sweat and breath shall she know us, and welcome us upon our return .

Pueblo saying

I am standing before a northern lake on a windswept point of land as a young Indian boy I know is lowered into the earth by his friends and family. It is a strange and lonely funeral they all are in their own way. But this boy was a friend of mine, and his loss has struck me with unusual force.

He was a quiet sort who kept his counsel except to joke occasionally when joshed or teased. He had been a boxer, a good one, but had given it up, and had taken, as his grandmother told me, to staying up all night and lifting weights at three in the morning.

He drank, would not talk to her, became sullen and distant. So great was his mask that soon all chose to ignore him. But, as with all hidden faces, his shone with a special grace when in those unguarded moments it opened with a warm and honest smile.

These smiles are what I remember most about him.

The funeral was typical of his native community. Babies cried. People smoked cigarettes. The coffin stood in the center of a dingy community gym, while people sat around the outside edges on bleachers, like spectators at a basketball game. The family and friends honored guests and deepest mourners were on folding chairs facing the casket.

One part of the gym was given over to a potluck, and each person stopped briefly and scraped a bit of food into a box to be placed before the grave so the departing spirit could have nourishment on its journey to the afterlife. The head man of the community, who was also the spiritual leader, spoke only briefly in English before turning to Ojibwe.