July 10 Daily Feast, Elder’s Meditation, THINK on THESE THING

July
Guyequoni

Wednesday
Tsoineiga

2013

July 10 - Daily Feast

New trends and new ideas interest us, but how we love the familiar. We like to keep those things that are dear to us, old songs, familiar places, the good faces. Most of us don't want to recapture the old times. They have served their purpose and we have put too much into what counts for us now. But when something familiar comes to our ears, or a certain fragrance touches our memory, we are suddenly back there and reliving old times. It is tiresome to be forever striving toward the future. The road is unfamiliar - and every inch of it will have to be tested and tried. And then something we know by heart rises to the top and it buoys us up and we are ready to go again. Sometimes it takes the familiar to help us appreciate what we have today.

~ Grandfather, Great Spirit, the good road and the road of difficulties you have made me cross; and where they cross, the place is holy. ~

BLACK ELK

'A Cherokee Feast of Days', by Joyce Sequichie Hifler

Elder's Meditation of the Day July 10

"Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new, sweet earth, and the great silence alone."

Charles Alexander Eastman, OHIYESA SANTEE SIOUX

Each morning a new sun for a new day arises. Each morning the sweet perfume from the Mother Earth spreads across the land. This combination of sun, earth, smell and quiet is a magic door for me to enter to kneel before the Grandfathers. The sacred time to commune with the Great Spirit.

Oh Great Spirit, I humbly stand before You along with the new sun, the Mother Earth and the smells of the morning. I ask You to direct my thinking today. Let me live in the silence. Teach me Your wisdom, Teach me to love my brothers and sisters. Let me respect the things You have made.

'THINK on THESE THINGS'
By Joyce Sequichie Hifler

Good ideas are the flower of the mind, waiting to bloom for the benefit of the thinker.

We are constantly in the process of manufacturing ideas. Every waking moment we are thinking continually, making mental images of that which we desire or need. Everything we see was first an idea in someone's mind.

Ideas are fleeting messages that pass rapidly through the mind. Some of them are strong enough to impress the thinker. Many are not worth saving, but a few are very precious. They have to be sifted, sorted and analyzed for value. Then they must be acted on immediately, for they are very perishable. Once we lose an idea, it is seldom if ever recaptured.

Everyone has access to a better and happier life through ideas, if we can trust the Lord to give us the will and courage to follow through on them.