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Showing posts from August, 2016

Can You Name the Moon Today?

Header from Pixabay, Public Domain. Today I can name the moon. Once I could not name it. When I can name the moon, I know that I've been living a healthy lifestyle. I know that I've paid attention to the Mother Earth, or Pachamama,  my family, and myself. When I'm unsure which moon shines through my bedroom window at night, or how the sun lights her face on a particular evening, I know that I've missed out on something and need to pay attention. Most of us have lost track of the lunar calendar. Even more of us have lost track of the lessons she teaches. Can you name the moon today? Our Gregorian Calendar A predecessor to Rome's Gregorian Calendar Image Source: Kleuske (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)] on Wikimedia Commons Today's most widely used calendar, the Gregorian calendar, came to us from the ancient Romans. By the time the Old World invaded and took over the New World, our calendar, with its blocky months of rec...

Celebrating John G. Neihardt, Black Elk, and Their Followers

John G. Neihardt - Source: UNL Newsroom The words of  Heȟáka Sápa  (Nicholas Black Elk) first came to me through  Dr. Paul D. S ø rensen , of the Department of Biological Sciences, of Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, Illinois. In his Biological Conservation course, we discussed the causes of loss of biodiversity from  Paul Ehrlich's book, Extinction , and we came to know several Native American philosophers. Later, those of us who participated in S ø rensen's American Ecosystems course in the Great Plains, which took us west through the Dakotas to Wyoming, traveled through some of Oglala Lakota lands and learned more of the Oglala medicine man. The collaborative work by Neihardt; Ben, his son; others of Neihardt's family: Black Elk, himself; Standing Bear; Flying Hawk; and others spoke to the world. According to Wikipedia (2016), the "...prominent psychologist Carl Jung read the book in the 1930s and urged its translation into German; in 1955, it was...