May 29, 2026

The power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.

Black Elk spoke these words after witnessing the near-total destruction of Lakota life — the massacres, the forced relocations, the deliberate erasure of his people's way of living. He was describing the sacred hoop, a symbol of wholeness and continuity, which he feared had been broken forever. What makes this resilience is not that he denied the breaking, but that he held onto the underlying pattern even when the visible world said it was gone. He trusted that the shape of things had not changed, even when everything around him had.