Finding other ways of being
For a time, I rest my head down right on my desk. The piles of papers and stray notes press and form ridges on my cheeks. My head is heavy. How can so many thoughts— those airy wisps— weigh so much?
As I lie in a half-bend, at my desk, my chair threatens to run across the wood floor when my eyes, matted, morose, see the spine of a book. Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden accounts how Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa American Indian born in the 1830s, and the other woman of her family raised huge crops of corn, squash, beans and sunflowers in the bottomlands of the Missouri River.
I sit up and hold the book in my hand. First published in 1917 by an anthropologist, it details the intricate methods and activities essential to those full, abundant harvests.
It offers recipes and rituals, stories and songs. Photos and sketched site plans.
In the pages, her plantings, nothing like the whipped straight and tamed gardens I know, seem to sing in response to calls from the earth. I think of her listening. I think of her singing and tending, reaping and giving thanks.
I think of the author too, his dedication to unearthing her stories. His listening to her descriptions, his careful notetaking. His drawings and footnotes. His patience in transcribing the Lakota words. His assembling and finding a publisher.
And then, I think of someone else, decades later, caring enough to gather this story and place these pages into print again. All so that I, someone wearied by the day's dark news, could somehow pick up this volume and be reminded that, without a doubt, there are other ways of being.
May you too find moments of rest and respite during the week ahead.