Martín Prechtel - Rescuing the Light: Quotes from the Oral Teachings of Martín Prechtel

Each little seed of eloquence that came before me bloomed off the page with such riotous exuberance that it couldnt be contained, and how do you turn the page from that? Its like looking out the window to see a dragon eating your car and turning to finish the dishes... This is truly a miraculous text, like a hatful of magical castles and horses! Please be warned: This is not a book of wise sayings designed to make you feel better, to make your life better, or feed your soul. Its really not even a book at allits more like a bag of holes to throw onto the wall of the box you have been trained to think was your life, and if you dare let the light in, and maybe even summon up the courage to peek out, you may just find a path to becoming a useful being, capable of feeding something far grander than yourself...

Chris Robertson, cinematographer and president of the Fairgrounds Neighborhood Association in New Orleans

The experience of Rescuing the Light is a calling to remember the deepness within, the reminder that sage we all have with our ancestors who have never left us. And therefore we are never lost, but only a thought away from knowing the fire without end. Martn Prechtels experiences have captured the friendship, the relationship that we arent so far away from the light and yet dont have the language to know we may be overthinking everything. Light the fire.

Pta ki yule yo. Ia wana hakh tayuttapi. Pta ki kin yi na ille higl.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota, host of First Voices Indigenous Radioall-Native hosted, all-Native produced

This is a very powerful soul-growth book, one of the most powerful in recent years. The ideas here for renewal and reorganizing are so fresh and new that they quicken the taste buds and put an expectant readiness in the legs!

Coleman Barks, author of The Essential Rumi and Rumi: Soul Fury

In a time of immense cultural insanity, Martns inimitable spirit echoes out through the words on these pages of Rescuing the Light, as he helps us reseed our imagination of an abundant future where we apprentice ourselves to the beauty, seen and unseen, here on Earth. As an Indigenous woman who has had the great privilege and honor of being a student of Martn, his generous and benevolent words have had a profound healing impact on the generations in my bloodlines... they have offered shelter, grace, mercy, guidance, reflection, nourishment, navigation, strength, nascent remembrance. My heart leaps in excitement like a newly formed seedling knowing that others will have this book of wise words as a trellis of hope. Rescuing the Light will reverberate across the grand loom of time, a true gift for the transformative times we find ourselves in. This book helps us remember how to be good future ancestors and responsible descendants.

K:ken iewennahnothkhwa. Ionkwaienaw:se aonsaionkwehiahrhkwen oh n:ioht ahonnonkwetiihake tsi nn:we ne ionkhihsothokn:a aknhake tnon aionkhinihese tsi nikionkwathwatsir:non.Rowen White, Mohawk Seedkeeper, farmer, and storyteller of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network

Listening to the Maestro Martn Prechtel is to be permanently sitting on the horizon, now and then becoming a lightning flashed in awe and amazement or a rainbow of tears pouring from a crystal-clear heart weeping her loss, grief, joy and love.

Through glimpses of the Maestros teachings, this book is the echo of his poignant voice reaching each and every persons unique horizon. Journey alongside in walking this skyline of wonders in beauty.

Through savoring and digesting so many sparks of wisdom, perhaps you will discover that Rescuing the Light is in essence about beautythat is, about the light that resides inside all things and all people, visible to those who dare to look.

Iaki Zabala, international EU worker and Basque thinker

Text and illustrations copyright 2021 by Martn Prechtel. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Cover and interior art by Martn Prechtel

Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak

Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Rescuing the Light: Quotes from the Oral Teachings of Martn Prechtel is sponsored and published by North Atlantic Books, an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publishers Services. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prechtel, Martn, author.

Title: Rescuing the light : quotes from the oral teachings of Martn

Prechtel / Martn Prechtel.

Other titles: Quotations. Selections

Description: Berkeley, CA : North Atlantic Books, [2021] | Summary: A

collection of quotes and sayings from the oral teachings of Martn

Prechtel, writer and teacher of Indigenous spirituality Provided by

publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020052499 (print) | LCCN 2020052500 (ebook) | ISBN

9781623176273 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623176280 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: SpiritualityQuotations. | Conduct of lifeQuotations.

Classification: LCC BL624 .P7265 2021 (print) | LCC BL624 (ebook) | DDC

299/.784204dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052499

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052500

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

This book is dedicated to those courageous beings, both in our pasts and still today, who have dared to imagine and work ceaselessly to cause a time of hope beyond their own to sprout into existencea time they will never see, but whose labor towards has made them ancestors worth descending from.

Dear Highly Esteemed Reader,

This is a little letter from me, Martn Prechtel, by way of a prefatory note, to say hello to you and to bless you and all your people, your plants, your animals, your artistic endeavors, and especially your efforts toward the eventual appearance of a diverse compendium of real human cultures that could learn to live again in the arms of our true Natural Mother that has always held and fed us all: The Flowering Earth.

This book, Rescuing the Light, is meant as a gift to all of you who are trying so hard to keep your minds and souls afloat in these tense, amazing times. It is simply a very small grouping of sayings and quotes I have spoken during the last fifteen years of Bolads Kitchen sessions; my non-school school of everything here in New Mexico. I asked those students who for the last fifteen years or more have been coming and making Bolads Kitchen school the amazing phenomena it has become to send in any sentences they heard me say that helped them to remember what was being taught, when the disjointed worldwide noise of modern life came crashing in on them when they would go back to their lives. Though only less than one quarter of the deluge of what they sent me is included, each quote represents the small child of a much bigger ongoing teaching, which is his mother.