And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the centre grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy..."

Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, 1863-1950:

Because part of my ancestry is of the Sioux I looked to and learned from Black Elk,
the Oglala Sioux elder that spoke his wisdom in a book called Black Elk Speaks. The title
for this series is taken from a quote of his : Seeing In a Sacred Manner the Shapes of
All Things In the Spirit as They Must Live Together as One Being To me this is a
profound statement and it was when Black Elk was sick and lay dying as a young boy
that he had this vision from way up high, looking down. He saw the world as it should be,
but it is 2005 now and the world is not living together as one being and although
everything has spirit, we are not living in a Spiritual way or in a Sacred manner. But to
see in a Sacred Manner the spiritual shapes of things as they should be is powerful for we
know that what man has envisioned he has in his turn, created. Every single man made
thing you can see and touch now was at one moment in time, in somebody’s mind’s vision
first. So it is here that I honour what Black Elk envisions as I created my hope I have for
our dreams, our stories, our songs, our dances, our universe, our Mother Earth in my mind
that they will become manifest because I thought it, because I said it, because I created it
from grains of wood who grew as their creation and because I envisioned it, they became
my creation in word and paint. Because I choose to See in a Spiritual way that would
rather embrace life for its beauty and hold it clean then to dirty and sully it with
negativity. I would rather see the truth in everything than to hang onto the comfort of lies.
Because I promised myself to honour the Sacred in life with reverence to it and it is seeing
in Sacred Manner that frees me from the banal and the materially bloated to see things in
their simplistic form that inspires me.

Our life is a series of perceptions. How we perceive our experiences can change over time, making us realize our rawness, our naivete and sometimes we understand a wiser way to see; a spiritual way. This series of work contemplates that spiritual way of seeing. Black Elk's quote above, was from a dream he had when he was very young, sick and almost dying; he was able to see life in a spiritual way. It is with this view that the mind understands without judgement from the intellect, without disruption from the physical wants and needs and without bias from the emotional, that the spiritual self thrives in knowing. I have put together poetry that use his words: "Seeing in a Sacred Manner..." for all the paintings in this series, as I seek this Sacred way of seeing.

LauraLee K. Harris