my friend of lakota and kickapoo ancestry is to come to my house exhausted from speaking up for mother earth and would collapse on a bed in my guest studio always sprinkling tobacco in honor of her and saying to us mother earth is so tired, so weary, so disrespected and ravaged i can hardly bear her suffering. sometimes in sorrow he would weep. it always felt as if he were talking about his very best friend as well as his mother. he was. he died talking and singing and drumming to her preying on top of -- where corporations were stripmining cool or chanting beside pristine rivers into the polluted from every conceivable contamination caused by mine fracking and other grotesque forms of ecological ways. he was always thinking of her, always in prayer full alignment. he was her son. he did not forget this for a moment. we must all learn to know her as bill did, to feel with her, to know she is alive, that she is alive and needing affection, caring, love. that she gives us everything. who are we to give her nothing but basically grief? massive amounts of faith will be required that we can