Feral Freinds,
A few months ago we were asked by a local museum director to present a poetry workshop on Black Elk Speaks. But he objected to my proposed title, ”Through the Rainbow Door,” because we would not be permitted to promote a “gay” agenda. Of course I was referring to the “Rainbow Door” in Black Elk’s Great Vision — the center and axis around which the entire vision and the Lakota cosmos revolved — as entrusted to John G. Neihardt. (Neihardt, the first poet laureate of Nebraska, had been given the name Flaming Rainbow.) I changed the workshop title to something less dangerous but that didn’t matter; the director had no idea what we really had in mind.
Beyond embracing diversity and treating all persons with respect and dignity, our agenda was even more radical. As Black Elk rides a singing horse through the Rainbow Door, he enters a cosmic reality in which barriers are breached and healed; all living things sing together and in so doing, call forth a renewed reality of kinship and peace. The cosmos burgeons forth in birth and rebirth in the passionate flowering of fertile Earth — with the Sacred Hoop spinning around the Tree of Life in a musical, tie-dye dream.
It was an outrageous day of yoga and barefoot incantations, cicadas and birdsong and making art, of laughter and food and little catnaps under maple and ash and mourning doves, a woodpecker wearing medicine feathers and a phoebe chasing a swallowtail. The wild things of the neighborhood drew near as we conjured and called upon ancestors and animal spirits. We read indigenous poetry and wrote some poems of our own, made a rainbow of souls on the museum lawn. A perfectly subversive day.
Happily for us, one need not be a mystic or shaman to find the Rainbow Door, or even a young Lakota boy in a fevered vision. A sacred portal might reveal itself in a full moon or eclipse, in equinox or frogsong, under a Grandmother Oak, at the center of a spider web bejeweled at first light or between the flutish notes of a sexed-up thrush. In Black Elk’s words: “the center of the world can be anywhere.”
But not just anywhere. A sacred hoop is made of desire, of hunger for love and friendship and kinship and healing, of honor and respect for Earth’s creatures in a place where sacred songs can be heard in crickets and rainfall, in rustles and grackles. Tadpoles and turtles. In sticky mud with duckweed ankles and dragonfly rattles. On holy ground where we can feel the lusty beat of the cosmos in the soles of our feet and the fires of sacred love within our wildest selves, a door opens. In a fertile place where the primal presences break through, make a sacred hoop with your radical companions or alone with the creatures who will meet you there.
See you ‘round,
Jack Phillips
*Photos: Sacred Hoop gatherings with The Naturalist School, 2023/2024. Photos by Jack.