Listening to Dylan’s latest and reading a marvelous book I borrowed from a friend yesterday called Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. John Lame Deer was a Lakota holy man who wandered around and did all kinds of cool stuff. There’s a passage in the book which I thought was worthy of inclusion in our on-going conversations here, from page 79:
A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man.
Sickness, jail, poverty, getting drunk–I had to experience all that myself. Sinning makes the world go round. You can’t be stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped up in a plastic bag all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That’s sacred too.
And there’s a quote in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that is relevant to me. This is from section 17 of “Song of Myself”, the opening two lines:
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands,
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing,
or next to nothing
- END -
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One Comment
I read that book. He went on a car stealing spree and slept with housewives. The funniest part was about him learning how to curse and how happy he was, because before that all he could do was “make the bear noise” which I guess is what Indians would do when they got pissed off at people, but they were supposed to fight after they made it.