{"id":22690,"date":"2015-08-27T00:01:54","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T07:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=22690"},"modified":"2015-08-27T00:01:54","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T07:01:54","slug":"tori-isner-poet-you-are-a-vehicle-for-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/tori-isner-poet-you-are-a-vehicle-for-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"Tori Isner, Poet: ‘You Are a Vehicle for Spirit’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Tori<\/a>
Monzogranite rock at Joshua Tree National Park. Photo by Barbara Newahll<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I encountered dozens of\u00a0wonderful people — artists, activists, preachers and business people\u00a0— in the course of conducting interviews for “Wrestling with God.” Tori Isner was one of them.<\/em><\/p>\n

An\u00a0adopted Lakota Sioux who traces her roots to the Eastern Band of Cherokee of North Carolina, \u00a0Tori is an Army vet and a grandmother. But as I edited\u00a0the transcripts of our\u00a0conversations, I realized that she was also a poet.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what — the Whitmanesque — Tori Isner had to say\u00a0about Spirit. — BFN<\/em><\/p>\n

Tori Isner’s Song<\/em><\/h3>\n

It\u2019s a family thing, the spiritual world. It\u2019s a connectedness to everything around you, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, Grandfather Sun.<\/p>\n

Everything is part of the family. The buffalo is your brother. The standing people are the trees. They\u2019ve been here a lot longer than you have, they can teach you.<\/p>\n

Go stand next to a big rock, see how big you really are. Go look at the ocean. That\u2019s Creator, that\u2019s beauty.<\/p>\n

With us, it\u2019s Creator who created the food, created the buffalo, created the rocks, the grass, Mother Earth, and everything we have. Creator did that. And we\u2019re honored just to walk on it, just to live, just to be.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
A Joshua tree. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Creator is in everything we do. And in everything we do, we give thanks. If I eat a meal, I make a Spirit plate. I take a little bit of food from everything that I have on my plate, and a little bit of tobacco, and put it out on the back porch.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s giving thanks to Spirit for the food that I have and for the abundance that I have. It\u2019s just a small thing I can do for the gifts that I get.<\/p>\n

You acknowledge that everything comes from Creator and that none of this is truly yours. You\u2019re just borrowing it.<\/p>\n

Your body is a vehicle. Like the trees, that\u2019s their form. And the plants, that\u2019s their form. And the buffalo, and the horses and everything, those are their forms. These are all vehicles to carry the Spirit around.<\/p>\n

Everything that I am is from Creator. The greatest gift I can give is myself back to the one that created me. I am the only one that can authorize the offering of myself. No one else can. And I do that willingly.<\/p>\n

If you enjoyed this post, you might like “Anne Lamott on Gettting Older — Drop That Rock.”<\/a> Also, “On the Shores of Lake Michigan — A Wild Place Tamed.”<\/a> For more about my book, go to WrestlingWithGodBook.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Tori<\/a><\/p>\n

Tori Isner is an adopted Lakota Sioux and — in my opinion — a poet. We’re honored, she says, “just to live, just to be.” Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22716,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[139,34,1529,141,88,1213,53],"class_list":["post-22690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","tag-creator","tag-dont-miss","tag-mother-earth","tag-native-american-spirituality","tag-nature","tag-tori-isner","tag-wrestling-with-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}