dreamed indian dreams sunday night and then dreamed 'em all again while working out this morning. sweating with a new rhythm, could almost feel the colors pulsing out of me. and now these bright indian dreams are wafting in on the breeze, singing and drumming in the late afternoon.

never been to a powwow deal like this before and well it is such an emotional thing. there is a great heart breaking heart pulling beating drumming heartbeat thing going on. can't avoid being seriously moved. but also am shy and felt sort of concerned in that self conscious way that as a basic waspy sort, maybe i shouldn't be allowed in or even welcome there. but was pleasantly surprised that instead, there was a huge sense of family and love and community.

that is, although our family history is a bit sketchy, there is probably little chance that there exists much, if any, native american blood in me. still i have always had a great pull and fascination for all things native. a longing for connection. for me, it's just impossible to feel close to the land and nature and watch the mountains and the light and the clouds and trees and not feel the ancestors of the land and sense both their loss and their presence. their energy is still so very strong.

brings out in me a respect for the people who loved and cared for this place long before we were here. and my ancestors loved this place too, in their own way. but they were surveyors, and they played a big part in mapping this place, gridding it out, turning the earth into a commercial commodity that was to be bought, sold, developed, used and disposed of as its "owners" saw fit. my ancestors cut down trees and burned things up and changed the landscape and the animals and the vegetation and irrigated the desert and built and built and constructed and paved and all that.

yeah some white person guilt, no doubt. feel something more akin to great longing and sadness for the native american indians though. my dad would say to me that they were "conquered fair and square" and that's how the world is, will to power and all that and we all wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't left europe and made this place.

i mean, such a wise and beautiful and strong and proud people lived here, and then white folks just pushed their way on in and took it from them in some of the most horrendous and unsettling ways. so easy for me to romanticize indians now i suppose, though. like what if i lived a hundred years ago, with my great grandparents homesteading in colorado, would i be afraid of indian attacks?

all i know is my heart connects to them somehow, in a very big way. and truly, forgive me for i am not a typical white person on an indian trip. that is, not claiming to be one, or trying to steal rituals and re-make them into a commercial new age commodity or anything like that.

nope, from me, only respect and awe. and also probably a wee bit of white person shame i feel. sure. but most of all a tremendous love and longing for them to return and show us how to take care of this place before it is too late.

that is, we've been in a terrible drought here now and it?s going to get worse. way over crowded and way too much construction and expansion going on. the smog is so bad you can barely see the flatirons, and all the glaciers that science teachers when i was kid told me would be here for the next 40,000 years have all melted in the last five to ten years and raw bare rocks are exposed that had previously been covered in snow for eons. you can feel the life just being sucked right out of the mountains with the water and the trees and the forest fires and the rising temperature. the place is choking and wilting and coughing. it is painful to watch each year as it gets worse. hotter and drier and more and more arid.

and i grew up in love with this place with such a sense of the sacred here, it is so magnificent. there is a feeling that gods dwell here. although it also feels like they might be leaving and moving on, maybe even giving up on us. i mean let's face it, we probably don't deserve their love and protection. we've trashed the place. each year this presence feels thinner and more faint, drier, dustier, trees dying in forest fires, plants choking, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. and meanwhile enormous mountain palace homes with a view continue to spring up and huge SUVs chug through the canyons and the smog and congestion thickens. and the place is on fire, it's burning up and still they build more stuff. and the deer are all suffering from chronic wasting disease. and now the elk are all sitting down and not moving and starving to death, just dying in some sort of sad slow paralysis from eating this weird lichen because of the drought conditions.

the thing is, the native american indian thing that is, it is such a fragile thing -- like the presence in the mountains that seems to be fading.

a few summers ago we drove up to south dakota for a brief camping trip to see things. and to me, mount rushmore about said it all. so hideous that thing is. total graffiti, with this steel and glass industrial government monument with a gucky cafeteria inside planted at the foot of it to show off itself in arrogance of its own magnificent achievement. i mean they might as well have chiseled a dollar bill into what once was a beautiful rock face because that's what it's all about. traded this beautiful sacred place for a quick buck and left us with a dollar green and grey institutional pile of metal from which one can gaze up at this amazing tribute to the glory of presidential heads and all that is material and this technological feat of engineering and so forth.

nearby of course, is the monument to crazy horse that is being put up in response, and the tiny little indian museum. very tiny. all that's left. the minute i walked through the door something grabbed my throat and the tears squeezed out. it was so beautiful and so touching and so tragic and so sad and so amazing. and they don't give up and they don't surrender and still they continue to keep the spirit alive and share it with anybody who bothers to care. the sheer bravery in the face of the giant carved dollar sign across the street just yanks at the heart and soul.

and when we walked into the coliseum for the powwow on sunday, they were right in the middle of a great flag presentation with warriors and veterans of wars and it sort of grabbed me in the chest and choked tears out of me right at the very start. if they can still be proud of this place and fight for this country and display american flags with such a sense of pride in spite of everything, man what a statement. what love, what undying unwavering love, what spirit. a lesson for all of us.

and in the hall, in all the dancing, there were very little if any specific tribal distinctions. there were categories like grass dancers and warriors and fancy dancers and jingle dancers and buckskin dancers. but it wasn't dissected or labeled into ute and arapahoe and cheyenne and lakota . . it was all one melted multi-colored indian conglomeration. like this is the show thing, and the communal thing, the thing that white folks like me get to see.

outside in the booths and stalls there were more specific kinds of things, like different strains of pottery and traditional things, lots of cool handmade things, beautiful things and art things and serious earrings and magic flutes and of course some touristy things. outside on the rim around the circle, each booth spoke of the individual artist?s bloodline or native geographical location or family clan.

but inside, it was all one thing. one great big funny thing. the microcosm and the macrocosm. the unity and peace that humanity longs for. and the powwow ran late. and they changed the program schedule right in the middle of it. and at one point a small child was held up by the announcer stating that the little girl knew exactly where she was, but her parents seemed to be lost. there were costumes draped over chairs and everybody was dressing and undressing and eating and dancing at the same time. and they sort of tried to keep it organized, but it just sort of all happened when it happened and took as much time as it took, and everybody was taking it all in stride without fuss or significant adherence to structure. we were on indian time. if they called out to a specific drum group to do the next song and there wasn't a drumbeat in response, they just moved on and asked the next available group to go, constantly adjusting and flowing accordingly. the whole place was electric in the most relaxed laid back sort of way. an organic mellow chaos. color and costumes and kids playing everywhere and such love and good will and sharing and this great party thing going just grooving together in a love fest.

there is a tremendous longing within me to see so many indians in one place all together, so powerful and so precious and so free. like being embraced by a beautiful old ghost of great grace. and there is also this sense of a spark of life reawakened. a sense of happy tragic glorious life renewed. of continuation. of rejuvenation and rebirth. the celebration of the spring equinox. hope. spirit.

so dreamed indian dreams again last night. and just now while calling in the cats from the backyard, the old trees outside, they knew it. they smiled at me and for just a few blurry moments the cement drainage ditch in the park morphed into a rocky weedy creek with scraggly bushes and sagebrush and tall grass and crooked trees and the clouds looked like buffalo and longs peak looked like a beaver crawling up the side toward the notch of the mountain and a hawk circled overhead and a coyote dashed across the highway through the traffic and i could smell the spring on the breeze. and maybe it will rain a little.

and i felt overcome with gratitude.

and happy. and touched. and blessed. and alive.

and free.