Early January 1978

On a quiet and listless night at the hotel, a friend showed up and asked if I would like to accompany him to Heart Butte the next day. I didn’t have to think twice to say yes

Heart Butte is where the flatlands heave themselves up into the mountains: a land of fierce winds and constant change. The Blackfeet call it the “Land Where the Wind is Born.” Since the first time I passed through I have felt a strong energy emanating from that place.

Sensing something big, I asked if Maureen could accompany us. Ron, Maureen and I set out early the next morning in a light snowfall. By the time we got to the East Side, the winds were blowing badly and there were drifts. We rammed the van through the first two drifts, then got stuck in a third. A snowplow came by and dug us out, admonishing us not to go any further. Twice we tried to get through on different roads and were forced back because of the snowdrifts. Discouraged, we drove back to Browning to recoup our morale, and there learned that the southern road was passable. We decided to go for it.

Forty miles through a barren, windswept land to arrive at a house at the foot of the mountains. The van gave out at the entrance to the ranch, and after a few attempts to get it running again, we walked through the wind to the shelter of the house.

Walked through the wind to another world. Where the passing of time is not marked into fractions of hours and days. Where people think about themselves in relation to God and the Universe instead of their neighbors, and do not try to force either to bow to their will. Instead, they listen quietly for the lessons life offers.

Reality and illusion. Reality is the mountains, is God, is nature. Nowhere can you feel this stronger than in these mountains, which, try as we might, humans cannot conquer. The mountains have been here before us, they will exist long after we perish. They are the constant in a world of continual flux.

Illusion: false reality created by the devil, by evil forces, by mankind. I cannot help but see as false, as somehow not real, the brick and concrete of the cities, those places of desolation on earth. They are man-made realities, our dreams turned against us. Hellholes of misery and despair. Do not laugh at me when I say that sometimes I feel that if I were strong enough, if I carried enough right power in my heart, I could walk through those concrete walls as if they didn’t exist. They are prisons that people choose to see as real, while ignoring the truth around them. But I am digressing.

The young people spent many hours discussing good and evil forces and how to deal with them. We talked of knowledge, of how one becomes responsible for the knowledge one acquires. Of pain and suffering and how it is necessary for growth and creativity. Of the world inside, of nature; and of the world “out there,” which is doomed to destruction. Many concepts and theories that I’ve had crystallized for me in those two endless days. I feel as though I’ve come upon a beam of light in the darkness. Now to hone in on that light.

While we young ones talked in one room, the elders Agnes and Alfred, healers in the Blackfeet nation, prayed and held ceremonies in the next. People came from far way to be healed by their power. One young man who came was possessed by an evil spirit. At night, when he slept, he would turn into an angry bull. I did not understand the meaning of the words they chanted, but they prayed for him, and I heard the names of Jesus and God invoked. Half Native, half Christian faiths.

In the next room, Ron, Dan, Maureen and I spent much time talking together. Dan is of the Ponca tribe, originally from Oklahoma. He has spent time with many other tribes, learning the legends and powers of each. A very wise young man. His eyes burn with a pure light.

January 29, 1978

Heart Butte, Heart Butte, you are still on my mind. I fear the machinery of the white man’s world will put into a box all that I learned from you in those timeless days.
Quiet days and solitude. I am moving about in a world that may end at any moment. Pretending that it goes on forever, but sensing doom in each passing second.

I wish I knew how to describe the difference between Native and white thinking. One thing would be that Native people deal much more on a spiritual level than we do. They seek Truth at a conscious level, actually work at coming to an understanding of God and the Universe, while we, here on the outside, struggle with money, acquisitions, with material things. We put the cart before the horse. And they are humble. They bow down before the Creator, instead of trying, as so many of us do, to pretend that we are the power and the glory.

Waiting through
the leaden hours
before my birth.

There comes a time 
when you must turn your back
on yourself
and your previous existences.
I am walking out
My own back door.
Saying goodbye to old dreams.
Letting them go their way.
Passing down below my window.