One of Tobasonakwuts favorite phrases is andopawatchigan which means seek your dream but is lots more complicated. It means that first you have to find and identify your dream often through fasting and then that you also must carry out exactly what your dream tells you to do in each detail. And then the philosophy comes in for by doing this repeatedly you will gradually come into a balanced relationship with all of life.

Every word you speak is a prayer or meditation of reinforcement which creates permanence.

Strive to follow your big dreams. If you fail cherish the valuable experience gained during the process. Theres always a second time.

I prayed to a mystery.Sometimes I was simply aware of the mystery. I saw a flash of it during a trip to New York that David and I took before we were married. We were walking on a busy sidewalk in Manhattan. I dont remember if it was day or night. A man with a wound on his forehead came toward us. His damp ragged hair might have been clotted with blood or maybe it was only dirt. He wore deeply dirty clothes. His red swollen hands cupped in half-fists swung loosely at his sides. His eyes were focused somewhere past my right shoulder. He staggered while he walked. The sidewalk traffic flowed around him and with him. He was strange and frightening and at the same time he belonged on the Manhattan sidewalk as much as any of us. It was that paradox -- that he could be both alien and resident both brutalized and human that he could stand out in the moving mass of people like a sea monster in a school of tuna and at the same time be as much at home as any of us -- that stayed with me. I never saw him again but I remember him often and when I do I am aware of the mystery.Years later I was out on our property on the Olympic Peninsula cutting a path through the woods. This was before our house was built. After chopping through dense salal and hacking off ironwood bushes for an hour or so I stopped exhausted. I found myself standing motionless intensely aware of all of the life around me the breathing moss the chattering birds the living earth. I was as much a part of the woods as any millipede or cedar tree. At that moment too I was aware of the mystery.Sometimes I wanted to speak to this mystery directly. Out of habit I began with Dear God and ended with Amen. But I thought to myself Im not praying to that old man in the sky. Rather Im praying to this thing I cant define. It was sort of like talking into a foggy valley.Praying into a bank of fog requires alot of effort. I wanted an image to focus on when I prayed. I wanted something to pray to. but I couldnt go back to that old man. He was too closely associated with all Id left behind.

Dont talk about it be about it

I had a dream about you. You said you wanted to grow your hair long and I wondered how long long is. I thought the Nile river is long so thats probably what you meant. I offered to build a Pyramid on your shoulder and you offered me tax exempt status when your hair was long enough to start flooding.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

As there has been given dreams are of different natures and have their inception from influences either in the body in the mind or from the realm of activity without the body through the desires and purposes of the soul itself.

Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.

Less than twenty-four hours ago I had a family and a home and a dreamworld I thought was as close to heaven as you could get without dying.I have none of that now.My brother is dead. My parents threw me out of the houseagainwith barely enough to fill a small suitcase. And my dreamworld I was right when I figured that if God ever did exist he turned his back on humanity centuries ago.