Crazy Horse, My Teacher – plus a heartfelt gift from me

Today I offer you a gift.  Crazy Horse gave it to me, and now I pass it to you.  My story of his life, STONE SONG, is free to all Kindle users for the next three days, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, December 21, 22, and 23. 

I send it to you from my heart.

A story: In the 70s I was possessed by an impossible attraction.  I wanted—as in an obsession, or infatuation—to tell the story of the life of Crazy Horse, the great warrior of the struggle to save the Lakota people’s way of life, the one they called Our Strange Man.

It was madness.  We were opposites.  He guided his life by visions.  I was a hard-nosed rationalist who thought visions were a crock.  He devoted himself to the sacred.  I was secular all the way.  He took guidance from an ancient stone he fastened to his ear lobe, so he could hear its wisdom.  I scoffed at such foolishness.

Yet every day, on waking, on my morning run, while driving along the ocean, I felt him beside me, or inside me.  I had every reason toignore this pull.

He had been dead for a century, and documentation of his life was sketchy.  To understand him, I would have to come to understand a culture not my own, and half-hidden.  I would have to develop empathy for his people’s mysticism, which my head resisted.  And more.

Stalling, I set out reading scores of books about all the lesser-known Westerners, including the Lakotas.  White and Indian, miner and Mormon, trapper and emigrant, anything beyond the cowboy fables of the Saturday afternoon matinees, I sought the stories.

I drove thousands of miles across the mountains, plains, and deserts of the West, including the Lakota reservations, exploring.  I ran its rivers, climbed its peaks, and everywhere took its pulse.  I wanted to heap its stories on my plate and gorge myself.

Everywhere I went I felt Crazy Horse with me.  He didn’t seem to speak, but simply to abide in me, waiting.

So I surrendered and took the big jump.  Whatever else I did in this life, or left undone, I would tell the real story of this mysterious man.

It would be a biographical novel, not a biography.  The facts of what he did were less than a skeleton of his life.  Why did he live as he did?  What were his great joys, his soaring hopes, his terrible griefs?  I must become fool enough not only to write about a culture I didn’t know, but step inside his mind, look out, see the world as Our Strange Man saw it, and tell what I saw truly.

Problem: Somewhere in a region of my unconsciousness I had never explored, I could sense his truth, even smell it.  But I didn’t know it in a way that could be put into words. Still, I started.  And for sixteen years, draft after draft, I pecked out pages and threw them away.

But always I hoped for understanding somewhere ahead, an awareness not of my intellect but my whole being.  I kept searching. Then the sea-change.  I went into the sweat lodge.  As a doubter, I could not enter as a seeker, merely an observer.   What I found there changed not only my so-called mind but my life.  The wakan, he called it, the mystery, the sacred.  I could not name it, but I could feel it.  And I began to believe, to know, that I could put my feet on the path he walked.

I began to find guides along the way, descendants of the Crazy Horse family and other people steeped in Lakota ways, most particularly the fine Lakota writer Joseph Marshall and my great friend and mentor, Clyde Hall.  This was not luck.  When you walk the path that awaits, guides will appear.

Many sweats, and becoming a leader of the sweat.  Many vision quests.  The sacred pipe.  Becoming a pipe carrier.  The sun dance.  Dancing with my face raised to the tree of life.  Experience of vision after vision.  Learning, in the end, the great Lakota truth, to look not with the two eyes of the head but the single eye of the heart.

Finally, I came to telling the story not from fascination but love. A last obstacle.  The end of his life came as betrayal, and I could not finish his tale in that ugliness.  Without a fit ending, I was stuck. I set forth anyway, an act of faith that somehow I would see the truth when I got there.

Approaching the final chapters, still blind to the ending, I went into Yellowstone on one of my annual vision quests.  As I waded thigh-deep across the Snake River, the final pages of the story drenched me like a waterfall.   Then a bald eagle flew toward me and dipped low over my head, almost within reach, a winged messenger.

Bursting with gratitude, I sat down on the far bank and wrote the last two pages in my notebook.  Today they stand as the end of the book, almost exactly as they came to me in the middle of that river.  For me they are so emotional that I have difficulty reading them aloud.

A publisher rose up to take the book, an editor became enamored of it, and the publisher thought highly enough of it to submit it for the Pulitzer Prize.

All that seemed less important than what came next.  During the week the book was published, I went to sun dance at Wounded Knee.  There a miracle unfolded.  One of the dancers, blood running down his chest from his piercing sacrifice, came to me and held his pipe out to me with both hands.  I stood mesmerized.  How on earth, out of about two hundred people, did this dancer choose me, a complete outsider, for this great gift?

Overwhelmed, I accepted it, and the promise and obligation it bore. “Ask for whatever you want,” he said, “and the pipe will give it to you.”  A pipe dedicated with blood.

I quavered.  I could not ask for anything self-centered.  Not sales, not prizes, not fame, not money.  Something more worthy. At last the words tumbled from my mouth.  “I ask that my book change a million hearts.”

That is why I make this gift to all of you.  I do not know, will never know, how many people have been touched, perhaps changed, by Stone Song.  I do know that it has gone steadily from bookstores into the hands of readers for almost two decades.  I believe that Americans will keep reading it for more decades, beyond my lifetime.

My great wish is for it to change a million hearts, and many times a million.

May this give-away be a step along that road.  Pass the word along.

–Win

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