this morning I woke with a feeling. A reminder. It wasn’t always about ripping-off Indians and making (coercing) way for the railroads carrying bankers & fat-cats of early industry & self-indulgence. There was a period there where it was about imagining a windmill to pull water up from a hundred feet beneath famishing prairie lands, so that farm families didn’t just die off for all their hard work. It was about people rich & poor having some basic morality that didn't [doesn’t] require laws of state but comes from the gut & from the heart. It was about white Christians visiting their Plains Indian neighbors with open minds invited to experience the sacred circle ceremony for winter solstice; with curiosity about & eventual esteem towards smudge & sweatlodge & drum song & dance. The fact that these small circles of real people were over time obscured by the powers that be serves only as testament to just how invaluable those notions were and still are. They still exist in us. Deep. You can feel it. I feel it. If you, Heath, an elder statesman of this dbis nation (if I may be so bold), can continue to carry the torch of hope & civics & illumination after all you’ve seen and done, then the rest of us would have to be blind by our own loathings to not lift that good energy up and tote it around for a while longer, see what gives

Happy Christmas, Yoko

Happy Christmas, John