June 25, 2026

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power.

Luther Standing Bear wrote this in 1933, near the end of his life, as Lakota land had been broken up and his people had been forced into a way of living completely disconnected from the earth. He was describing something specific: the physical habit of sitting on the ground, not as a symbol, but as a daily practice that kept the body in contact with something real. He wrote it as a warning about what gets lost when that contact disappears. For anyone living indoors, in chairs, on concrete, it is a direct challenge to notice what the body is actually touching each day.