April 5, 2016 Daily Feast Of Wisdom (Tsugitsvnvda Danalisdayvhvsgv Agadohvsdi ) (ᏧᎩᏨᏅᏓ ᏓᎾᎵᏍᏓᏴᎲᏍᎬ ᎠᎦᏙᎲᏍᏗ)

2016

April
Kawani
ᎧᏩᏂ

Tuesday
Talineiga
ᏔᎵᏁᎢᎦ

April 5 - Daily Feast

Think for yourself. Stop living by tradition that promises you the moon and gives you a rock to carry. Think things through - if one way looks easier than another, take the bolder way. Don't think what it is going to get you but what it is going to build in you. Some things feed the body and some the spirit. Go with the spirit - it already knows what you need to know.

~ Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers. ~

TECUMSEH - SHAWNEE, 1808

"A Cherokee Feast of Days, Volume II" by Joyce Sequichie Hifler

Elder's Meditation of the Day - April 5

"As we plunge ahead to build empires and race for supremacy we should stop and listen to [the female] song of life. For without the female there is no life."

Oren R. Lyons, Spokesman, Traditional Circle of Elders

Women are created with the ability to produce life. Women have a special tie to the Earth Mother. They have something in common. They are the source of life. The Earth Mother gives songs to the Woman to sing. These songs are about life, about beauty, about children, about love, about family, about strength, about caring, about nurturing, about forgiveness, about God. The World needs to pay attention and listen to Her. She knows.

Great Spirit, let me listen to Her songs.

'THINK on THESE THINGS'
By Joyce Sequichie Hifler

Are you one of those people who degrades yourself in idle conversation until it becomes a fact within your mind? Has it become your belief that this is true humility, talking down your abilities, hiding your light, refusing to accept your rights as a child of God as being meek and humble?

This thing called life is given to us for a purpose, never to downgrade; no more than we should blow it out of proportion by thinking too highly of ourselves.

Each life is important, each breath for a purpose, each moment a time for learning. Walt Whitman has written in "Leaves of Grass": "Whoever you are! Motion and reflection are especially for you; the divine ship sails the divine sea for you. Whoever you are! You are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid, you are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky, for none more than you are the present and the past. For none more than you is immortality."

By our words we reveal our minds. It is so easy to refuse to be a channel through which the best can reveal itself. And it is so easy to forget that our song of life, as Whitman has written, "The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him. I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete!"

Human beings worry a great deal about what others think. It is a nagging worry that somehow the curtain that protects our privacy from the eyes of the world will suddenly drop and allow us to see all the things our pride has hidden.

Why is it that we seemingly need to be clever in order to handle the world? Why can't we just live honestly and openly, without scheming and trying to appear that we are something we are not? The world is so heavy laden with priggish pride that the clean simple truth is lost in playing it cool. Why can't we quit being something pent up inside and be something like sunshine or showers right out here where we can enjoy it or get over it?

Socrates said that the shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be. And we may just as well, because if there isn't a good cake under all that frosting, someone is going to know it anyway. To drop all pretense and say with genuine honesty, "This is the way I am" would be to find a whole new way of enjoying the simplicity of being ourselves.