An Interview With Sun Bear
Meeting a Chippewa Indian medicine man on a speaking tour in 1982, what do I expect? The images get confused. Three-year-old Lucas comes shyly into the room asking, “Where’s his bow and arrows?“ I’m aware of my own prejudices against celebrity medicine men, with easy answers and exorbitant fees. Sun Bear fit neither mold.
Excerpts From Rising Sun Neighborhood
The Rising Sun Neighborhood is a book of words and pictures by Anne Herbert and Kathleen O’Neill that will be published by Random House later this year. Portions of it have appeared in The Next Whole Earth Catalog and in CoEvolution Quarterly, where Anne and Kathleen work. Anne sent us this excerpt, which we’re pleased to print. She also writes:
(Part I)
I have so much to tell you of the new life that grew out of a windy fall day, half-way through the century, on the banks of a soft brown river, turned foaming with the storm. I am abed, on a porch, beside the moaning camphor trees. The screens oh and sigh, canvas cords cry out in the wind, and Icannot rise. The doctor comes, with his black bag, in the storm, to tell us what is happening to that part of myself Icall body. The doctor comes, with his bag, to give us that black knowledge, of the virus, of the body dying, on that day when the wind tears Spanish moss from the long-leaf pine, and the camphor trees howl, and the branches of my body come crashing down, turning slowly in the wind gone mad and wrong.
*NOTE: Original copies of this issue are no longer available. Unbound, laser-printed copies will be provided for print orders.
As an outsider, it is probably presumptuous of me to comment on a “good marriage.” On the other hand, outsiders have different eyes.
Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Instead of relying on advertising dollars, we rely on donations from readers like you.
