#269

In the culture of my upbringing, which was something like Judeo-Christian, suburban American, we didn't believe much in reincarnation and past lives. (Note: I'm mostly a Western European mongrel by ancestry, with a touch of Native American.) My world has diversified over the years, into a melting pot without a predominant shade. This has been M 'n' m's reality from the beginning. Their schools are a great assortment, although I suspect they don't even notice. For kindergartners, the differences are minimal between Sikhs and Swedes, for example, or Koreans and Kenyans, Hondurans and Hindus, and so on. But my youth was less heterogeneous than M 'n' m's. Technology had yet to shrink the Earth. Needless to say, my childhood never exposed me to things like karmic cycles or Dalai Lama incarnations. The first time I heard of a lama was in Caddyshack. "Big hitter, the Lama." I am Christian. But speaking with certainty about the afterlife, or lack thereof, teeters on hubris to me. It seems there are limits to what we can prove and disprove. I know why mustering even a mustard seed, to echo Jesus, is truly enormous. I believe there's energy in our thoughts and memories, and if we've been somewhere before, even ancestrally, there's a faint, informing imprint somewhere, in our souls or minds or DNA. I watched "Legends of the Fall" repeatedly – looping it while I studied in college – to hear One Stab's voice. I don't know why I was fascinated with Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Black Elk, Chief Joseph, Tecumseh, Quanah Parker, and books like "Last of the Breed," all before I learned of my native ancestry. Meanwhile, Papa Mike is more intrigued by the Founding Fathers, General Patton, Davy Crocket, Rasputin, and Carlos Castaneda. And Holden Caulfield! (Papa Mike's a paleface; my native ancestry comes from Grandma Barb.) And so I think about M 'n' m.... What 'memories' or energies will inspire them? What histories and biographies will resonate, what stories, and why?

"Crazy Horse, about this time, was grieving for his little daughter They-Are-Afraid-of-Her, who had died, probably of cholera. When he returned to his camp and found that she had died, he located her burial scaffold and stayed with her for several days.... He loved her deeply. Her loss took some of the fight out of him for a while."