Many of you are familiar with my trilogy, Neither Wolf nor Dog, The Wolf at Twilight, and The Girl who Sang to the Buffalo. Fewer are familiar with Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way and Native Echoes: Listening to the Spirit of the Land.
Voices in the Stones is my attempt to offer you some of what I have learned in my 30 years of working with Native peoples. Native Echoes is my quietest, most poetic literary child. It is the echoes we don’t quite hear and the voices we can’t quite make out as we listen to this land we call America. It is story and metaphor, while Voices in the Stones is personal experiences and the lessons drawn from them. Each speaks, in its own way, of the blending of our western ways with the ways of those who occupied this land for centuries before the arrival of the European.
I am very proud of each and have arranged with wolfnordog.com to offer signed copies of them as a package. In the next few weeks I will be blogging more about each. They fit together in a very unique way. I hope you will consider this package for any of your friends who care about my work, the Native American way of understanding life, or the power of the land to shape our hearts and spirits.
Of course, you can order each separately, or any of my other titles, as well.
Mr. Nerburn,
Perhaps, as part of your blogs, you might talk some about “silence”. If it is not relevant now, then perhaps you might talk some at a later date. I think that often the native way of silence may have been a response to being ignored, but certainly not always. I think of it often, in these strange times. When might one have a duty to speak out against the crazy things people say so often now?…when can one be silent and still have an untroubled conscience? What does one do when it is friends and family, with people they otherwise love? And, how might one add in something I heard today, “When given the choice of being right or kind, be kind.” When does silence play into the tactics of those that would take advantage of others for power or greed. Of course, these are individual and personal choices and very dependent on the people and situations involved. Nevertheless, you have a way of finding key distinctions and zeroing in on essential considerations…which I think your readers might find very helpful and which you may find useful for your own thinking.
An interesting challenge, and perhaps one I will take up as I begin to blog more frequently. I addressed the issue obliquely in probably my least known book, “Calm Surrender: Walking the path of forgiveness.” Don’t be put off by the title. That was a publisher’s decision. In the book I wrestle with exactly the question of how to stand against wrong in a moral way. I don’t come to any clear answer, but the struggle is well documented in this book that was too soon forgotten. Thanks for writing, Bob.
Thanks for the suggestion, Ken. I’ll get a copy and read it. A good place to start and maybe keep the topic down to earth, person to person, and not too abstract. If you put more into it, I’m sure many will find it very relevant to their lives.
“Calm Surrender” I must read! SILENCE – even the word is healing.
I haven’t gotten a copy of Calm Surrender yet…so I picked up Letters to My Son to read again. When I read from the Introduction, “Yeats’s ominous warning that the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity seems to have come to pass.”, I was struck. It seemed, there was the issue I had asked about. Then, reading on when I came to, “Try to find this strength in yourself. It lies far below anger and righteousness and any impulse toward physical domination. It lies in a place where your heart is at peace.” It seems that this is the answer succinctly put, or a great part of the answer; a place for me to begin and a long time coming.
I think you have addressed my question a number of times and in a number of contexts when I think about the various things of yours that I have read. So, knowing better where to look, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open as I read on!
Best wishes.
Calm Surrender is a great read and it’s one that can only come from within the heart of the holder choice! Each of your books and writings offer us a new lessons each time. But then again, the message means so much to me at a personal level. At one time in my life may have had the some same experiences, connections, in my own path! I can say what you said about your father’s burial placement and also the girl who sang to buffalo very hard hitting on a personal level. Native echo’s (Listen and learn) arrived yesterday. It was a long journey of 10,000 miles and just when I needed it most…That I will tell you after taking the path ahead – this will guide me with solace and and reflection on this difficult journey of ones that are very close and personal!
Thank You Kent for sharing what you used during the past 20 plus (wisdom) carry in one hand and share with the other, “keep sharing”! 🙂 & 🙂
Kent,
I read Calm Surrender. I enjoyed it very much, but I couldn’t see my way to progress on silence vs. speaking out. In reading Letters to My Son, I found something there in the story of Florence and Haines; different kinds of strength. I have moved on to Road Angles and there I saw your own confrontation with this issue when you met that young logging trucker at the washed out section of road (on your way to the old cabin, p. 155). The way the trucker went off on a rant about trees vs. corn and bringing in a grand world view culminating in “us” vs. “them”–that is exactly what I see as so prevalent now. It is certainly part of the gun arguments. It seems we MUST, by our very existence, be “better than a war between dead children and the constitution”. And yet, we cannot get past this, we can’t even talk. It isn’t just guns, this attitude seems to be in a plethora of issues.
This seems to have been brewing for decades, but it is so vicious now. Yet, the more history I read, the more I see it in the past. For example, I am currently reading a book on the Korean War and the politics surrounding the firing of MacArthur could read like the news of today. Yet, in our present times, the repeated shootings of children seems unprecedented. Yet again, however, there is no shortage of past tragedies to fill the history books.
How do we communicate? How does one deal with that young logging trucker when talking is tantamount to civil war? How do I talk with fellow hunters who see just about any restriction on gun ownership as the end of the world and the most despicable unpatriotic thing one could utter? I often feel the ONLY thing that changes some people is when tragedy knocks on their door.
It seems that sometimes one’s view of life is so different from that of another that silence only leads to destruction of what one believes to be the good. I have often wondered if this forms a great deal of what happened to the Native Americans. And yet and yet…arguing and battling with friends, family and acquaintances is not my idea of “the good life”. And yet, and yet… do we have a choice? And how do we balance this against love, friendship and living a good life? When I look at my kids, I am optimistic that they are bigger than these problems, but when I look at us adults, I have serious doubts. I wonder, very often, what happens to us as we age. So many become better and angry. I see old high school friends angry and bitter about issues that have no impact on their lives and I wonder why, what is happening to them?
Well, thanks for your insightful considerations and continued work.