Description:
Here are some Stories (Traditional
Native Legends) and some stories (personal history.)
I am a professional storyteller and a
therapist. Coyote Still Going retells the mostly Sahaptin and Twana
traditional legends I was taught by my relatives. It's also a memoir
of how I have told these stories, from celebrating the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Mr. Rogers to using the Sahaptin legend of the
Butterfly at an International AIDS Conference in discussing grief and
loss. Traditional Native American legends are powerful teaching
tools.
The book also contains recipes. Food,
spirituality, and community are always woven together
Here are some Stories (Traditional
Native Legends) and some stories (personal history.)
I am a professional storyteller and a
therapist. Coyote Still Going retells the mostly Sahaptin and Twana
traditional legends I was taught by my relatives. It's also a memoir
of how I have told these stories, from celebrating the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Mr. Rogers to using the Sahaptin legend of the
Butterfly at an International AIDS Conference in discussing grief and
loss. Traditional Native American legends are powerful teaching
tools.
The book also contains recipes. Food,
spirituality, and community are always woven together--you can't
understand one without the others. I was raised with the importance
of the sacredness of food and the legends that explain why we
celebrate the First Salmon Ceremony, or why we understand taking a
sip of water before a meal is a type of prayer.
Many Native Nations begin a Coyote
legend with some variation of "Coyote Was Going There." Trust
me--Coyote? Still Going. It's about time Ebooks caught up with
that crazy Trickster.
Excerpt:
Long ago, the Creator watched children playing. He watched their
sheer joy, and enjoyed their laughter. In the four directions he
looked, he saw beauty--before him, behind, him, above him, and below
him. He smelled the sweetness of flowers, heard the song of birds,
saw the bright blue of the sky, and tasted the first touch of the
coming cold on his tongue. This reminded him that time was
passing--that winter would come again--that these children would all
grow old and pass away as he had watched human children do over and
over again. The leaves would turn brown and fall from the trees, and
the flowers would fade to replenish the Earth.
He decided to create something to
memorize this moment, something that would be a part of all this
beauty. And so he gathered the blackness from the hair of the
children's parents. He took the orange and reds of the falling
leaves. He grabbed bits of sunlight, and the colors of the flowers.
He took the evergreen needles of the pines. He took the soft
whiteness of the clouds, and added all these things into a bag of
buckskin. He smiled and after a moment, added the songs of the birds
to his bag.
When he finished, he held the bag close
to his heart, and called the children to him. He handed them his bag
and told them to see what was inside. When they opened the bag, a
cloud of butterflies emerged. They were like winged jewels. They were
all the colors of the rainbow. It was as if flowers were flying. The
spirits of the children and the adults soared like hawks, for they
had never seen anything like this before. The butterflies, light as a
lizard's lick, touched on the heads and shoulders of their grateful
audience. The butterflies swirled around and began to sing.
But then a bird flew to the Creator's
shoulder and began to complain. "Why have you given our precious
songs to these small and pretty beings? You have already made their
wings more beautiful than ours--why give them our songs as well? You
promised us that each bird would have his or her own song. It is not
right to do what you have done."
The Creator looked at the small bird
and nodded. "You are right. I promised one song for each bird, and
it is not fair to give them away to others." So the Creator made
the butterflies silent, and thus they remain today. But their beauty
touches all people and opens up the songs in our own hearts.
It is said the world is a reflection of
itself--the world of dreams and the world of work. It is taught these
two worlds are like the wings of the butterfly. The dream world is
one wing, and the working world is the other. The wings must connect
at the heart for the butterfly to fly and live. Real life - true
life--happens because of the movement of the wings. And this is what
marriage is like. It mirrors the butterfly's heart, kept alive by
the love of the spouses moving together.
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Manufacturer: Coyote Cooks Press
Release date: 7 December 2013
ISBN-10 : B00F7NBWIO |
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