Round and Round

Black Elk’s vision as told to John Neihardt colors the cosmos in yellow and blue, red and white — round corners of the Sacred Hoop — and Native American medicine wheels throughout. These sacred colors imbue the spiritual imagination of our planet and brighten our local woods and haunts. And when the morning reflects and our celestial orb rounds just so, we get purples and oranges and hues in between.

_{Gray hairstreak on bee-balm at Pahaku, sacred Pawnee site in Eastern Nebraska. Photo by Neal Ratzlaff.}

And sometimes the Sacred Hoop makes a garden. The Naturalist School celebrated Neihardt Day where Joelle Sandfort and I read our Sacred Hoop poems in the garden designed by Neihardt himself. The hoop is cosmic and ever local, never bound by present time and space, but always found in the present. Find it where wildly you walk.

Round and round,

Jack Phillips