Quotes about native-american-wisdom

Nature is not dumb. Humanity is dumb when we can't hear or when we forget how to communicate with nature. Nature is very much alive. Intelligent living beings and vibrant energies are all over the planet.

We travel only as far and as high as our hearts will take us.

The success of my journey depended on whether my heart walked forward—toward my people—instead of backward, away from them.

Mother Earth reintroduced me to my people.

I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart. If I walk far but am angry toward others as I journey, I walk nowhere. If I conquer mountains but hold grudges against others as I climb, I conquer nothing. If I see much but regard others as enemies, I see no one.

The most beautiful thing in the world is a heart that is changing.

No man is as wise as Mother Earth. She has witnessed every human day, every human struggle, every human pain, and every human joy. For maladies of both body and spirit, the wise ones of old pointed man to the hills. For man too is of the dust and Mother Earth stands ready to nurture and heal her children.

Life is a walking, a journey. So, if life upon Mother Earth is a journey, there are two ways to walk. We can choose to walk forward or we can choose to walk backward. Forward Walking choices are rewarded with consequences that light the way to peace, happiness, joy, comfort, knowledge, and wisdom. Backward Walking choices bring to the Two-Legged beings consequences of misery despair, and darkness.

Man's obsession with his own wants is taking him further from those without whom happiness cannot be found. It is taking him from his people.

Mother Earth has never been more crowded, yet her inhabitants have never been more lonely.

There is much to be learned from the world around us—far more than we normally comprehend. The Ancient Ones knew this well—most particularly the wise teachers among them—those who, in the Navajo tongue, were called "Anasazi.

Would it surprise you to hear that man's unhappiness is due in large measure to the way he is seeking after happiness? You know this already from your own life. For when you have been unhappy, you have been unhappy with others—with your father or mother, your sister or brother, your spouse, your son, your daughter. If unhappiness is with others, wouldn't it stand to reason that happiness must be with others as well?

We have found that no modern prescriptions heal the human heart so fully or so well as the prescription of the Ancient Ones. "To the hills," they would say. To which we would add, "To the trees, the valleys, and the streams, as well." For there is a power in nature that man has ignored. And the result has been heartache and pain.

Would it surprise you to hear that man's unhappiness is due in large measure to the way he is seeking after happiness?

At her first bleeding a woman meets her power. During her bleeding years she practices it. At menopause she becomes it. Traditional Native American saying

Each morning offers lessons in light. For the morning light teaches the most basic of truths: Light chases away darkness.

Do you and I allow light to chase darkness from our souls as well?

Light chases away darkness.

The outward light is but a reflection of the inner.

As great as is the light above us, greater by far is the light within.

Attending to your own words and ideas as well as those of others is an admirable trait in any person, but a necessity in a leader.

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even mo

The reality is that every time we manipulate nature's rhythms, we create unintended consequences that then require us to make still further changes."~ Glenn Aparicio Parry

Darkness within clouds the world without.

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so. them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.'In balance.'.'And what is the deal?' I asked.We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We kno

Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch,but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and sp

As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.

There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others.

What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it.

Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.

There is a power in nature that man has ignored. And the result has been heartache and pain.

Unfortunately, modern man has become so focused on harnessing nature's resources that he has forgotten how to learn from them. If you let them, however, the elements of nature will teach you as they have taught me.

I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart.

Whether we walk among our people or alone among the hills, happiness in life's walking depends on how we feel about others in our hearts.

I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more.

In my opinion, it was chiefly owing to their deep contemplation in their silent retreats in the days of youth that the old Indian orators acquired the habit of carefully arranging their thoughts.They listened to the warbling of birds and noted the grandeur and the beauties of the forest. The majestic clouds—which appear like mountains of granite floating in the air—the golden tints of a summer evening sky, and the changes of nature, possessed a mysterious significance.All of this combined to fur

We're three women from two different centuries, trying to save the world from oblivion. I don't know about you, but that's way above my pay grade.

Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers.

Another Chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. "I think you had better put the Indians on wheels," he said sardonically, "and you can run them about whenever you wish.

It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. . . . Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving. . . . The Indians in their simplicity literally give away all that they have—to relatives, to guests of other tribes or clans, but above all to the poor and the aged, from whom they can hope for no return.

I wish I had been more interested or learned sooner, but I didn’t , and now I must face the consequences.

Life moved, as inconstant and fickle as Wind Baby, frolicking, sleeping, weeping, but never truly still. Never solid or finished. Always like water flowing from one place to the next. Seed and fruit. Rain and drought, everything traveled in a gigantic circle, an eternal process of becoming something new. But we rarely saw it. Humans tended to see only frozen moments, not the flow of things.

As chief, I will represent my people in many different ways and might never know which particular action is destined to matter more than another, thus, all my actions should be considered potentially important and worthy of my best effort.

Whatever you do to the animals, you do to yourself.

We need help from above if we are to make progress in our journeys.

Once, when a government agent arrived at her home with a ream of paper that documented the case against her, she asked if that law was more powerful than natural law. He told her that, yes, it was a powerful law, the law of the federal government. Then, she said, it should be more powerful that this, and she threw it into her woodstove.

Any story worth telling has been embellished a little bit, Skyco, but the best stories are born from an honest seed that simply grows a little in the retelling of it.

Before the war, a white man named Jonathan Edwards came to Stockbridge to teach my people about sin, but I doubt very much he could see sin in this. You defended yourself against a man who would otherwise have killed you and your friends. Perhaps you feel no regret because your spirit knows you did what was right.

We who lose our footing have lost our way.