I began to get a clearer picture of why I came to teach and travel in Europe.  This is the source of the way of thinking that separates humans from each other and from Mother Earth and all her beings.  Transplanted around the world, this culture has caused violence and aggression against its own people, between ethnic groups, against Native people, and against the beauty and balance of life.  My work is to help people to create circles of a new people, the Osh-ki-bi-ma-di-zeeg' who will live in a different way, think in a different way, with greater awareness of their underlying connection to all things.   

After returning to Minnesota for a month, I went north to visit my friend, Josephine, an elder on the Ojibwe reservation.  There I met the people who would make my stories available to the Ojibwe people through the Anishinabe Center in Detroit Lakes, I did my first healing work for the Ojibwe people, and I learned of the tradition of manidoog'.  A few days later back in the Twin Cities, I was going through my storage locker when I found a brochure of the floor.  It described the Prophecy of the Seventh Fire of the Ojibwe people.  This prophecy, given to them over a thousand years ago, told of a time when the stories would be returned to the people.  The Light-skinned race would be offered a way to walk in balance between mind and heart. If this was refused, their way would destroy them.  According to ancient legends, Creator was unhappy that the beings of earth had forgotten their Original Instructions and the first earth was flooded with water.  Three animals were part of the story, the eagle of dawn, the great bear, and the turtle.  Before I had come to Europe Indian people had given me the red eagle of dawn (Morning Star), a bear claw (Da'wasi, a Hopi elder), and a turtle (a vendor at a powwow). Later I discovered that the Dream Dancer is another lost tradition of the Ojibwe.  Each of these events by themselves seem to be quite ordinary.  Behind the ordinary beauty of each moment is an unimaginable beauty, a sacred Truth, a Spiral Dance.  I've learned to listen to sissagwaad.  The soft wind of spirit uses "normal" events to whisper in our heart and guide every step on our journey.   

I would not be surprised that it would be difficult for Ojibwe people to understand that I've been prepared to be a Dream Dancer to fulfill the Prophecy of the Seventh Fire.  A spiritual counselor among the Ojibwe told me that the politics of the reservation and among the traditional people would make it almost impossible for a full-blood to bring the Prophecy of the Seventh Fire to realization.  If I felt that I could do it, I should.  It was needed.  

I would rather be tending an organic garden and orchard in a beautiful place in the quiet of some rural countryside.  This is a very strange story.  I'm even more amazed because I'm in the middle of it.  If it were not happening to me I'd be very skeptical.  There's so much more at stake here than I could have imagined.. I suspect that what lies ahead of me is even more strange than that which I've already lived. This is far outside of the common frame of reference.  

When I was invited to attend a workshop by an Austrian mystic, the first evening, the woman who organized her workshop, asked me if I knew of ways to open the heart chakra.  I realized that I had learned and used several methods and that this was necessary to teach the way of the circle and the circle way is essential to walking in balance between the way of the mind and the path of spirit. 

Heart Dreams Dream-Catchers are on a leather thong so that they lay next to the heart.  Dreams shower upon us from the Dreamkeeper even during the day.  When we dream at night we are asleep, and when we receive the dreams of the day we are fully conscious.   If we walk lightly on Mother Earth we are able to feel the sissagwaad, the soft wind of spirit, and we receive guidance and teaching directly from Giidzhii Manidou, the Great Spirit.  This tradition among the Ojibwe people is called manidoog' and it is the source of all the stories and traditions.  We can learn from Spirit directly if we are ready to listen with our heart.   

Sylvia's ceramics teacher called to ask if she would drive him to Ljubljana, Slovenia to pick up several pieces of his ceramic sculptures from an exhibition to take to an exhibition in Denmark.  He wanted to meet me and asked if I would go with them.  I've learned not to turn down invitations because I have learned to listen to the soft wind of spirit the Ojibwe call sissagwaad.  After loading the sculptures in the car Boris and Borjo invited us to a cafe to eat and drink.  As we walked up the street from the ceramics gallery I saw a shop ahead named Gaia.  The lights were on and a Dream Catcher was hanging in the window.  I went in and asked for the owner.  She would be in the shop the next day.  I got the telephone number and her name--also Gaia.  We talked and I suggested that I send her a copy of my book.  She called me a few days later, very interested but she had no money until after Christmas.  I suggested that perhaps I could come to Ljubljana to do an evening seminar.  She said that her shop was quite small and she was going to be very busy until January.  The next day a bar owner spontaneously offered a back room if she ever needed space for an seminar.  She replied that she needed such a space before Christmas.  He wasn't so sure he wanted to give up any space during December, but his wife, a Native American from Canada, intervened--of course he would permit the use of the space, even in December.  Gaia called and gave me the number of Katerina, who had spent nearly 1 1/2 years with native people in Canadian reserves before returning to Slovenia.  She was excited about my coming to Slovenia and set up a seminar in Koper.  Then she called her friend, Jana, in Kamnik, a few kilometers north of Ljubljana, and Jana set up another seminar in nearby Krisz.   

The week before Christmas I held three seminars in Sloweneia, in Lubjanja, Krisz, and Koper.  I saw more than one hundred twenty people in three evenings.  They seemed unwilling to leave at the end of three and one-half hours of talking.  They were wrapped in an energy that they had not known.  They wanted the Seventh Fire workshop as soon as possible to weave Dream Catchers and hear the stories again.  Some came to Gaia's shop the next day to see me.  Others came to the nearby seminar in Krisz the next night to hear me again.  There was such an outpouring of love and support. The Prophecy of the Seventh Fire had come to Slovenia.

Bawaudjigaeaun wae-ondji manitouwiyaun. In Ojibwe this means, "To dreams I owe the mystery."

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