The brilliant German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once raised the question “How is it that I can meet someone who grew up in a completely different culture and home environment, maybe even with another language, and yet we can talk to one another, and over time we can even come to understand each other deeply.” His poetic answer was to suggest that actually we all inhabit the same house, a vast house with many rooms. Over the years we have come to know some of those rooms, the rooms of our childhood, or our family, of our studies, but many we have never visited. When we meet someone new they invite us into their rooms, which we also have, and through their experience illuminate our own being. This means that there is no one we can ever meet who does not help us deepen our understanding of ourselves. So I think it is with the powerful poem written by Black Elk, sent to me by Faye and Jim Mihuta. What Black Elk’s spirit sees is what I saw in the harmony around me on the sunny day that I have written about on this page. How could Black Elk and Jeremy Sykes have seen the same thing, across all our cultural differences, unless what we saw exists?
Sacred Hoop
Then I was standing
on the highest mountain
of them all,
and round beneath me
was the hoop of the world.
And while I stood there
I saw more than I can tell
and I understood more than I saw.
For I was seeing
in the sacred manner
the shape of all things
of the spirit
and the shapes
as they must live
together like one being.
and I saw the sacred hoop
of my people
was one of many hoops
that made one circle,
wide as daylight and starlight,
and in the center grew one
mighty flowering tree
to shelter all the childen
of one mother
and one father.
And I saw that it was holy.
