"It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth... The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing."

Chief Luther Standing Bear  Oglala Sioux

 

 

 

 

He talked for hours. Childhood memories rose before me. I could almost hear the sound of the preacher's voice as I sat, on still Sundays, way over there on the hillside; there was that proffered temperance pledge I never signed; my grandfather's good natured contempt of some church folk and their doings; his insistence that the spheres really had their music; but his denial of the preacher's right to tell him how he must listen; his fearlessness as he spoke of these things just before he died; these recollections welled up from the past. They made me swallow hard.

Big Book  pg. 10

 

 

 

 

I saw my friend was much more than inwardly reorganized. He was on a different footing. His roots grasped a new soil.

Big Book  pgs. 11 & 12

 

  

 

Creator help us to feel the strength of the earth.