August 2 – Daily Feast

August 2 – Daily Feast

It is not easy to forget the hours we spent as children along some sparkling stream – and there were more sparkling streams then. It is not hard to remember every sound that carried up the creek, how the fishing was, and how it tasted fresh from the water and cooked in an old tin skillet over an open fire. There were a nv s tsigi, violet flowers, blooming in clusters along the banks – and poison ivy we had to avoid – and didn’t always. A cardinal sang a fishing song and the sound of oars dipped in warm water with a soft splish-splash. Bugs, like people on water-skis, slipped over the surface of water. And as we passed, tsisdvna, crawfish backed into holes in the mud. Every moment was a thing of joy and knocks softly on our minds today when the need for solitude is there.

~ What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night….the breath of a buffalo in the winter time….a little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ~

CROWFOOT, 1821

‘A Cherokee Feast of Days’, by Joyce Sequichie Hifler