"Talking With the Sun."
This is actually a short essay.
But it seems like even if I put a short essay,
everybody calls everything I do a poem.
[LAUGHTER]
But I was thinking about climate change, about changes.
And if you think about it, everything--
we're always in a change.
Everything changes.
We change.
Every day is different.
Every moment is different.
"I believe in the sun.
In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed,
and forgetfulness, the sun gives clarity.
When explorers first encountered my people,
they called us heathens, sun worshippers.
They didn't understand that the sun is a relative
and illuminates our path on this Earth.
After dancing all night in our circle,
we realize that we are a part of a larger
sense of stars and planets dancing with us overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony,
we are renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection,
though Walmart might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindness
of Earth and sun.
We exist together in a sacred field of meaning.
Our Earth is shifting.
We can all see it.
I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives
up north that everything has changed.
It's so hot.
There's not enough winter.
Animals are confused.
Ice is melting.
The quantum physicists have it right.
They are beginning to think like Indians.
Everything is connected dynamically
at an intimate level.
When you remember this, then the current wobble of the Earth
makes sense.
How much more oil can be drained, without replacement,
without reciprocity?
I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn
to find the sun.
It was the fourth morning since the birth
of my fourth granddaughter.
This was the morning I was to present her to the sun,
as a relative, as one of us.
It was still dark, overcast as I walk through Times Square.
I stood beneath a 21st-century totem pole
of symbols of multinational corporations,
made of flash and neon.
The sun rose up over the city, but I couldn't
see it amidst the rain.
Though I was not at home, bundling up the baby
to carry her outside, I carried this newborn girl
within the cradleboard of my heart.
I held her up and presented her to the sun
so she would be recognized as a relative,
so she won't forget this connection, this promise,
so that we all remember the sacredness of life."