Dancing Through the Chaos: The Sacred Black Hills

Our first camping trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota was nothing short of epic, full of wonders great and small. One day we passed through a thunderstorm that pounded the land furiously with hail stones the size of golf balls-- the largest any of us had ever seen. Even half melted this stone was an inch and a half in diameter. There seemed to be a metaphor in this simple white ball, which had been thrown about so violently high above in the great black storm clouds, falling thousands of feet to land in the mud, and then recognized as a thing of great beauty and passed reverently from hand to warm hand. It was easy to see why the Native Americans have always held these lands to be sacred.

We're abounding in good news and sweet blessings today! We just returned home from a week of camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota, our first ever camping trip with Gideon and Audrey. It was all planned by Justin's sister Carmen, whose birthday it also just happens to be today, and her husband Jared, who together took care of nearly every detail so that our only job was to tag along and see incredible things with them, their three children, and Justin's parents! Thank you Jared and Carmen, Diana and Michael, and Lynn for your hard work and generosity making those magical experiences possible! We and the kids will remember this forever. My feelings about this trip can be summed up in this quote by Johnson Holy Rock, a Lakota tribe Elder;

"If a man was starving, he was poor in spirit and in body, he went into the Black Hills. The next spring he would come out, his life and body would be renewed. So, to our grandfathers, the Black Hills was the center of life, and those areas all around it were considered sacred, and were kept in the light of reverence." To me that rings true of our family's experience this week.

In the past seven days I have slept in a place where the precious minerals are so abundant that the ground was littered with chunks of beautiful quartz, white agate and mica and even the dirt sparkles, in the stillness of the early morning I have listened to thunder rolling deep from one end of the wide sky to the other, I have stood in a crowd of people from all over the world honoring US Veterans and singing the National Anthem at the base of Mt Rushmore all lit up by night,

I have held a hail stone in the palm of my hand that was an inch and a half in diameter, watched the sunset from a boat on a serene mountain lake, shined our flashlight into a secret cave behind a waterfall, was spontaneously given 15 freshly caught trout for our dinner, pulled a handcart at the Martin's Cove memorial and wept for the lives lost in that historic place, driven down a curving mountain road lined with side streets with names like "Ghost Canyon" "Smuggler Lane" or "Grizzly Gulch" only to come to an intersection of "Gideon's" and "Playhouse",

and I have watched Audrey wolf down handful after handful of foods she has never been able to swallow before in large pieces-- burritos, sausage and eggs, potatoes, watermelon, strawberries. I've been afraid to jinx it by saying this out loud, but she seems to have turned a major corner and must be staying much more open in her esophagus recently. I have had the opportunity this week to feel things on a deeper level with fresh perspective, to examine our life, our family, and myself from numerous angles, to feel or observe nearly every human emotion come out of the process as though someone were shaking out a blanket after a long winter, and to re evaluate things and come out with a fresh and renewed energy and hope. Thank you, especially to Carmen, for making all of that possible, and for your kind and patient understanding that we could never have done it if you had not sorted out all of the details from campsites to food to cooking and equipment and sleeping arrangements for everyone, and for putting up with the craziness of having seven extra people along and all the crazy that went with it. None of us knew for sure until practically the day of departure if it was actually going to be possible, and I'm so glad it worked out in the end that we were all actually able to go! Happy birthday sweet friend and sister, Audrey is blessed to have you for her auntie!