Who Is the One Asking?

I woke up one morning out of the deepest, most contented sleep I've had in years, and the first thing that came was not a thought. It was a question.

What AM I?

Not who — I know who. I have a name, a truck, a laundry pile, three part-time jobs, a stack of unpaid invoices, and a birthday I'd rather not discuss. Who is easy. Who is what other people call you.

What is a different animal altogether.

I'd been sitting with a simple old practice — breathe in and let the mind say I am not this body, breathe out and let it say I am not even this mind. Nothing exotic. Nothing you have to believe anything to do. It is thousands of years old and free, and I'd recommend it to anyone with twelve minutes and a place to sit comforably.

Here is what I want to tell you about it, and it's the part nobody warns you about: when you set the body down and set the mind down, you do not arrive at nothing.

Something is still there. Something is awake. Something is pleased.

And it's been there the whole time.

The wave and the water

A light bulb cannot shine light on the electricity that powers it. It can only be lit.

A wave cannot go looking for the ocean. It is already made entirely of ocean. There is no seam anywhere on a wave where the ocean stops and the wave begins. The wave is not part of the sea, in the way a fence post is part of a fence. The wave is the sea, doing a wave.

So when I woke up asking what am I, the honest answer that came was not a doctrine. It came as a feeling with no argument in it: love, and a kind of amused joy, wearing a 77-year-old woman for the afternoon.

You can call that whatever your own tradition calls it. I'm not here to name your ocean for you. I only want to report that I checked, and it's water all the way down.

The word we've forgotten

Now here is where this gets practical, and where I'd like to hand you a word that has been badly used.

Sovereignty.

You have probably only heard that word in a fight — on the news, in a courtroom, on a bumper sticker. It has been dragged around by so many arguments that most people flinch when they hear it.

But the older meaning has almost nothing to do with winning.

I keep returning to Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Onondaga, who carried his elders' teachings all the way to the United Nations. 

In the cultures he speaks from, the greeting was not how are you. 

The greeting was closer to “thank you for being well.”

Sit with that for a second.

Thank you for being well.

Wellness was the expected condition. Not illness. Not struggle. Not “hanging in there.” Being well was the baseline, the normal state of a human being, and it was worth thanking someone for maintaining.

And a sovereign person, in that older sense, was not someone who answered to nobody. A sovereign person was someone accountable for their own integrity — trusted to keep their word without supervision, to govern themselves so the circle didn't have to do it for them, and to weigh every decision against the seventh generation coming behind them.

And the seventh generation is already in the room; they have been reading over your shoulder this whole time.

That is a much harder job than being right. It is also the only job I've ever found that doesn't run out.

You cannot be handed that. No board approves it. No election confers it. It comes from the same place the answer came from that morning: from what you are, underneath who you've been told you are.

What sovereignty looks like in a body

Which brings me to my teacher this season, who does not talk.

The red-tailed hawk.

I asked what I was, and a bird answered me. I am not going to apologize for that sentence.

Watch one long enough and you'll notice she does something almost insulting in its simplicity. She does not flap harder. She reads the thermal — the invisible column of warm air rising off the prairie — and she leans into it, and she goes up for free.

She'll sit on a fence post for forty minutes doing apparently nothing, which is not nothing at all. She is seeing eight times farther than you are. She is waiting for the right moment, not the soonest moment. And when she moves, it looks effortless, because everything difficult already happened in the watching.

She adapts to desert, mountain, ditch, and Walmart parking lot without ever becoming something other than a hawk.

And every so often she lets out that cry — the one that goes straight through the back of your skull and stands the hair up on your arms. It isn't a threat. It's an interruption. It says: wake up and look at where you actually are.

Hawk has been watching this town far longer than this town has been watching hawk.

Hawk never once asks permission to be hawk. Not from the crows harassing her, not from the wind, not from you. She is not defiant about it. She simply is not confused about what she is.

That's it. That's sovereignty. Not louder. Not harder. Clear.

The part that's yours

Here is the thing I most want to say, and then I'll get out of your way.

You have already done this. You did it as a child.

You asked why the sky was blue, where babies came from, how many stars there were, and why the grown-ups said one thing on Sunday and did another on Monday. You weren't being difficult. You were being sovereign — accountable to what was actually true in front of you.

And somewhere along the way, most of us learned to stop asking out loud. Not because anyone forbade it. Just because a room got quiet once, and we understood.

I am not going to tell you what to conclude about any of it. I don't know what you'll find. I only know that the asker never left, and that everything I have built since — every song that came in a dream, every stone I've heated, this whole Circle — got built out of the one question I was too stubborn to stop asking.

So here's the invitation, and it costs nothing:

Find a quiet place. Wrap up in the softest blanket you own. Take one long breath in and let the mind put down the body. Let one long breath out and let the mind put down itself.

Then ask, gently, with no hurry and no expectation:

What am I?

And then — this is the important part — don't answer it.

Leave it open. Let it sit there like a hawk on a fence post, doing apparently nothing.

Something in you already knows. It has been waiting a long time to be asked directly, by you, out loud, in your own voice.

Next time in this Circle, the other half of it: what a sovereign person owes the circle they stand in — and why the old societies sent riders out to make sure nobody hunted ahead of the others.

You are always welcome here. There's nothing to join and nothing to buy. Just come and be well.

Mitakuye Oyasin — we are all related.

Bunny Sings Wolf

Nine miles from Mato Tipila

Three companions for this teaching are being prepared for the Open Circle Library — a Cosmic Consciousness teaching, Oren Lyons on sovereignty from the Council Chambers of the Lummi Nation, and the twelve-minute breath practice. They’re coming by December, free and ready for you. Watch here at IndigenousHealing.io and in the weekly Circle Letter for when they arrive.