September 24, 2026

What Softens The Heart

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature's softening influence.

Luther Standing Bear was a Lakota chief who survived the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where he was forbidden his language and forced into the ways of white civilization. He wrote Land of the Spotted Eagle in 1933 to explain, for a wide audience, the depth and order of the philosophy he had been taught to abandon. In this passage he describes a deliberate practice of the old people, one built on a discerning observation of cause and effect between the natural world and human character. His insight still matters because it names a chain we often miss: what hardens in us toward the living world eventually hardens how we treat each other.