03/08/2026
The dust holds the day’s heat long after the sun drops, and I feel it rise through my bare feet as I walk out. Crowdog’s Paradise, Rosebud, South Dakota. Four days of purification four days of the tree, the arbor, the singers who never tire, the dancers who go without water under a sky so big it rearranges what I thought I knew about scale… and at least four to come down.
This falls at the cross quarter, that hinge between the summer solstice and the fall equinox when the year turns its face toward harvest. The light is still generous, still warm on my skin, and already the chokecherries hang dark and heavy along the draws, ready for pounding into wasna. Sage and sweetgrass and prairie coneflower grow up through the grass where the old people have always gathered them. Cottonwoods line the water, their leaves turning silver when the wind moves through. Meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds call across the arbor all day, and three times now I have watched an eagle ride the high thermals, slow and certain, right over the ceremony ground.
I come to a place like this thinking I’m beginning to understand ceremony, and I leave understanding I am simply a guest at something older than my understanding or anyone else’s…
The six directions get named. The elements do their work, the way weather does. Reality… That is the whole point, and it takes a while to feel it settle in.
What stays with me is the ordinary miracle underneath all of it.
Air moving through cottonwood. That eagle holding its line against the blue. The quiet of people who have done a hard thing together and carry it lightly now. Gratitude that a tradition this deep keeps its shape, generation handing to generation, out here where the land insists I pay attention.
I ripen the same way the season does. The wild green rush of midsummer settles into something with more weight, and this is my moment to ask what in my own life is ready to be brought in.
Two weeks with the phone off. Turns out the world keeps its rhythm just fine, and so, mercifully, do I.
crossquarter lammas firstfruits chokecherries eagle gratitude sixdirections unplugged