"It has always been the Native American way to bond energetically with things rather than to work against them. In order to do this, we have to listen to their vibrations with our whole bodies.
"Perhaps my listening started before I was born. I remember flying, coming very fast up to the house at La Boca, and circling. I was like wind, and maybe not even wind. I came flying into the house where my mother and father and brothers and sisters lived. Some force was pulling me to these people, this house.
"It was winter. I floated in through the walls of the little house and wandered the rooms. I heard my mother complaining about relatives who borrow garden tools and forget to return them. The memory ends there. The next time I arrived, I was in her womb. I couldn't hear her speaking, but her thoughts became like words for me, and these thoughts were the first of many gifts she gave to me. . . .
"Planting her garden was a pleasing experience for me in her womb because I could become the energies of the plants she loved so well. I knew the physical size of the plants in the garden as well as what they were feeling. I had no concepts yet on which to base my perceptions. I was just listening randomly, experiencing the essences of things. Turnips were different from carrots in that they protested loudly for more growing room, and I think Mother heard them because she always planted them properly along the furrows. I perceived the energy of things around us. I knew when my older sister and brother were near because they generated a vitality I could feel in my body when they entered the room.
"During the 1960s when we were training Vista volunteers at Picuris Pueblo, we would have them sit with the elders without speaking so that they could simply feel the energy of the elders through their bodies. That way they could get the rhythm, the syntax, the flow of that energy. Energy, when it's transmitted that way from body to body, is the essence of communication.
"Maybe that's why the philosophers say that I am my brother's keeper. When I am helping someone, it is really myself, but in another body or in another context. When I was experiencing the energies of my brother or my sister, I was reacquainting myself with myself. This was happening because they were in close proximity, and we were all transmitting energy back and forth via vibration. Perhaps that's an ancient form of communication, without words."
