LOOKING FOR A LISTENER

It was like gramma, said, so long ago, “You’ll learn to listen, little by little.”  And just like that, little by little, I walked away from the “Rez.” where my people are held.  I thought I’d have to escape, break out or talk my way out.  Now after all this time, I just walked away.  Crossed the borderline made on the ground around us that marks a boundary we call home.  In reality, it holds and makes us prisoners.  It’s a cruel reality, discovering that the reservation home is a “holding place” for Tribal Americans. In a short space of a few hundred years, the land of opportunity is shrunken, depleted, and named “Reservation.”  Today, it may be the greatest influence that now determines who Native Tribal People, become.

Outside the reservation, free at last, I am one Indian man, who wants nothing more than to look for and find my way home.  After all, this is the land of the free and the brave, isn’t it?  And if nothing else, it is true I am a son, native to the land, from coast to coast and from northern to southern tip. It’s also true, it’s hard for the newly arrived who made the reservations for us in the first place, to accept or acknowledge the scale of what this means for the world.  Ahh, we do have our burdens, don’t we?

In spite of this buried truth I’m steadfast. Step by step, I cross this vast land to search carefully even as I struggle to remember the hunter I know me to be.  Somewhere out there, North, West, South, or East, as the land stretches must be the ones I’ve been told about and that now I hunt: The Listeners.  I am looking for one.  A listener I can share the “slow story” with.  I’ve discovered it’s the only way I know to find home.  When I share the slow story, I get to listen, one more time.  And maybe when I listen this time, I’ll gain all that the story has to give. Maybe even remember… as in “re—member” to put all the parts, all the members of who I am together again so I can clearly hear and see the wonder of all that is home on this beautiful, incredible, created Earth.

How do I know this?  How can I be so sure?  When I listen, I can hear all the stories of “Starting Over.”  What is a starting over story? How do people start over?  When people lose their way they have to start over.  Then as people learn or re-learn to listen inwardly, they rediscover that they have choice and now they can choose.

The “world-wide climate change” that is already happening and that everyone is becoming aware of today could become an opportunity for learning to listen.  Living in the drought of this Southwest region, might be the safest place to learn how to become a listener.  It happens because the slow story is told in times like this.  What’s required is one, who’s willing to learn to listen.  Anyone?  Anyone.