Dancing Waters Consulting

These words from poets, artists, and native elders
have touched my Spirit and inform my work and life.
May they be as inspirational to you in your life Walk as they have been for me.

Haisv Uwoduhi Gesvi !
May you walk in Beauty!

Ron Patrick
Asgaya Tawodi Digadoli

“Your work is to discover your work and to give your heart to it. • Budda

The greatest danger is that we will wake up one day and find we have not lived our own life, but someone else’s. • David Whyte

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation. • J. Krishnamurti

Kingfisher - Danny Bigay	You may wish to listen to Danny Bigay's beautiful Native American Flute music as you read these words of wisdom. Bird Songs 2005 Indian Summer Music Award nominee for best Flute recording. Native American Flute Music by Daniel Bigay
Blue Heron - Danny Bigay

Listening

What Do I Do When I’M Lost in the Forest?
From the Native American tradition

Stand still
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.
Listen.
It answers, I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.

• Unknown

“Hearing each other into speech.”

• Ron Patrick

Listen ...

I do not know if you have ever examined how you listen; it doesn’t matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing waters, or how you listen in a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or husband ...

If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulse; when they dominate we hardly listen at all to what is being said….
In that state there is no value at all. One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence, in which this whole background is held in abeyance, is quiet; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate.

Real communication can only take place where there is silence.

• J. Krishnamurti

Listening

What is the deep listening? Sama is a greeting from the secret ones inside the heart, a letter. The branches of your intelligence grow new leaves in the wind of this listening. The body reaches a peace. Rooster sound comes, reminding you of your love for dawn.The reed flute and the singer’s lips: the knack of how spirit breathes into us becomes as simple and ordinary as eating and drinking. The dead rise with the pleasure of listening. If someone can’t hear a trumpet melody, sprinkle dirt on his head and declare him dead.Listen, and feel the beauty of your separation, the unsayable absence.There’s a moon inside every human being.Learn to be companions with it. Give more of your life to this listening. As brightness is to time, so you are to the one who talks to the deep ear in your chest. I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears when that one steps near and begins to speak.

• Rumi

How do geese know when to fly to the sun?
Who tells them the seasons?
How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on?
As with migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.

• Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Silence

Cherokee Silence Prayer
O’Great spirit
                        Help me always speak the truth quietly,
                        To listen with an open mind when others speak,
                        And to remember that peace may be found in silence.

Sharing Silience

Within each of us there is a silence ... a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it ... and we long for it.
When we experience that silence, we remember who we are; creatures of the stars, created from the cooling of this planet, created from dust and gas, created from the elements, created from time and space . . .created from silence.

Silence is the source of all that exists,
The unfathomable stillness where vibration began --the first oscillation, the first word, from which life emerged.
Silence is our deepest nature, our home, our common ground, our peace.
Silence reveals. Silence heals.
Silence is where God swells.
We yearn to be there. We yearn to share it.

And yet in our present culture, silence is something like an endangered species . . .
an endangered species . . . an endangered fundamental.
the experience of silence is not so rare that we must guard it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.

Sharing silence with others is a political act.
Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,
to our selves. It locates us.
Without that return we can go so far away form our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside our selves.
We live blindly and act thoughtlessly.
We endanger the delicate balance with sustains
our lives, our communities, and our planet.

I believe that each of us can make a tremendous difference.
Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life.
That will be done by ordinary men and women who gather neighbors and friends together and say,

“Remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care. Remember life. Let us do this together for ourselves and our children and our children’s children.”

• Gunilla Norris

Paradox

It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise
when we first try to sit in silence.
It is a paradox that experiencing pain releases pain.
It is a paradox that keeping still can lead us
so fully into life and being.

Our minds do not like paradoxes. We want things
To be clear, so we can maintain our illusions of safety.
Certainty breed tremendous smugness.
We each possess a deeper level of being, however,
which loves paradox. It knows that summer is already

Growing like a seed in the depth of winter. It knows
that the moment we are born, we begin to die. It knows
that all of life shimmers, in shades of becoming –
that shadow and light are always together,
the visible mingled with the invisible.

When we sit in stillness we are profoundly active.
Keeping silent, we hear the roar of existence.
Through our willingness to be the one we are,
We become one with everything.

• Gunilla Norris

Wonder

“How do we encourage people to listen, communicate, and think together in ways that support wholeness?”

• Ron Patrick

“The world is not as I one imagined it or hoped it would be, but neither am I.
Neither revelation is a total disappointment.
We are finally, our intention, and we will be known by the footprints those intentions leave.”

• Peter Coyote

To the extent that it is possible,
You must live in the world today
As you wish everyone to live
In the world to come.

That can be your contribution.
Otherwise, the world you want
will never be formed. Why?

Because you’re waiting for others to do
What you’re not doing;
And they are waiting for you.
And so on.

• Alice Walker

We join spokes together in a wheel
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot
but is the emptiness inside that holds
whatever we want.
We use wood to build a house
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being
but non-being is what we use.

• Lao Tzu

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and the sun and the animals;
despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks;
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others;
hate tyrants;
argue not concerning God;
have patience and indulgence toward the people.
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book;
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your very flesh shall become a great poem.

• Walt Whitman

And I said to my soul,
what have you done with the garden
that was entrusted to you?

• Antonio Machado

Something we were withholding
Made us weak—
Until we learned
It was ourselves we were withholding
Fromm this land of living—
And thereforth
Found salvation
In surrender.

• Robert Frost

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

• T. S. Eliot

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

• Mary Oliver

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

• Rumi

Who looks outside, dreams;

Who looks inside, awakes.

• Carl Jung

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know,

what you know will never become wider, bigger or deeper.

• Milton Erickson, MD

CHANGE

The simpler way summons forth what is best about us.
It asks us to understand human nature differently, more optimistically.
It identifies us as creative.
It acknowledges that we seek after meaning.
It asks us to be less serious, yet more purposeful, about our work and our lives.
It does not separate play from the nature of meaning.

• Wheatly and Kellner-Rogers

To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

• Mary Oliver

Silver Star

To be a mountain you have to climb alone and accept all that rain and snow.
You have to look far away when evening comes.
If a forest grows, you care; you stand there leaning against the wind,
waiting for someone with faith enough to ask you to move.
Great stones will tumble against each other and gouge your sides.
A storm will live somewhere in you canyons hording its lightning.
If you are lucky, people will give you a dignified name and bring crowds
to admire how sturdy you are, how long you can hold still for the camera.
And some time.

They say, if you last long enough you will hear God; a voice will roll down from the sky and all your patience will be rewarded.
The whole world will hear it: “Well done.”

• William Stafford

Always in the deep woods when you leave familiar ground
and step off into a new place there will be, along with the feelings
of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread.
It is an ancient fear of the unknown and it is your first bond with the
wilderness you are going into.
What you are doing is exploring.

• Wendall Berry

We dance round in a ring and suppose.
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
• Robert Frost

Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and
behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is
strength undefeatable.

• Helen Keller

Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.

• May Sarton

Change requires learning, and all change involves coming to understand and be good at something new.

• Michael Fullan

Patience

A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation and
How one gives birth to oneself slowly.

• Rumi

BE PATIENT TOWARD ALL THAT
IS UNSOLVED IN YOUR HEART
AND TRY TO LOVE
THE QUESTIONS THEMSELVES.

DO NOT SEEK THE ANSWERS
WHICH CANNOT BE GIVEN YOU
BECAUSE YOU WOULD NOT
BE ABLE TO LIVE THEM.

AND THE POINT IS TO LIVE EVERYTHING.
SO LIVE THE QUESTIONS NOW ….

• Rilke

The Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of peas soup
he is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plans flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen:
Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
After the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

• Marge Piercy

Do you have the patience to wait till your mind settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?

• Lao Tzu

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in it’s deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

• Rainer Maria Rilke

LOVE

With one mind we address our acknowledgment, respect, and gratefulnes to all the sacred Cycle of Life. We, as humans, must remember to be humble and acknowledge the gifts we use so freely in our daily lives.
• Audrey Shenandoah
Onondaga

Love is the way messengers from the mystery tell us things.
• Rumi

Turn as the earth and moon,
Circling what they love.
• Rumi

These are our times and our responsibilities. Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our Mother Earth, from whom all life comes. In order to do this we must recognize the enemy—the one within us. We must begin with ourselves…

• Leon Shenandoah
Iroquois

Good words from a Cherokee Elder….

An old Cherokee is telling his grandson about a fight that is going on
inside him. He said it is between 2 wolves.
One is evil: Anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity,
guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is good: Joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness,
benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his
grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one I feed.”

Cherokee Prayer

Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the gentle night to you.
Moon and stars pour their healing light on you.

…may what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

• Rainer Maria Rilke

The white man talks about the mind and body and spirit as if they are separate. For us they are One. Our whole life is spiritual, from the time we get up until we go to bed.
• Yakima Healer

Breathe in the light of the new day, the dawn.

            give thanks for the new day, for those around you,
            for life, for everything.
            Then you will become whole again.
            • Navajo Healer

We are not alone.

The spirits of those gone before guide our steps, our traditions, our beliefs.
The care of those around us lead us to healing and wholeness and comfort.

We are not alone.

• Mokawk/Onondoga Healer

Speak, move, act in peace, as if you were in prayer.
• Unknown

Nature has no expectations.
• Cherokee Healer

There is in all visible things...a hidden wholeness.
• Thomas Merton

Teachers are those who use themselves as bridges, over which they invite their students to cross; then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.
• Nilos Kozantykis

The Way of Small Things: When Small is Beautiful and Simple is Enough

When we feel called to do our good and necessary work in the world, we hope our contribution will be useful. We want our efforts to grow, and take root. We measure the fruits of our labor by how they spread and multiply. The more noble our work, the more we desire that our gifts and offerings will achieve the greatest good.

Yet, seeds of healing are often planted in the soil of small things. A word of kindness, the touch of a hand, a well-timed visit, a simple meal prepared with love. What if the healing of the world utterly depends on the ten thousand invisible kindnesses we offer simply and quietly throughout the pilgrimage of each human life?

Mother Teresa said, “We do no great things. We do only small things, with great love.” Many of us, weary of trying to do so many good things, at times end up doing good badly. We groan under the pressure to do more and more, to get more accomplished, to meet ever-growing goals and expectations.

We cannot live this way; our natural generosity can suffocate under the weight of unreasonable speed and expectation. In the work of healing, there is a time to add, and a time to subtract. There is a time to pick things up, and a time to put things down. There is a time to allow things to grow, and there is a time to thin and prune away. A time to work, and a time to rest.

Perhaps now is the time to pour our love into the next small thing we find, the way the sun pours its light into the crack of an orchid’s seed, helping it to open. More often than not, doing small things with great love not only spreads kindness throughout the world, but living this way often opens us to a deeper, more authentic experience of ourselves and each other.

Dancing Waters Consulting

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