STORY TELLER ~ NOODIN by James B Beard, author

STORY TELLER ~ NOODIN

JAMES BEARD aka Noodin [wind]

I never would have envisioned myself following Native teachings. Not being Native. I really didn’t understand why I was taking that turn in my life. I was a businessman, successful, family and there was no reason for me to walk away from all of that.

From the Summit - Grand Monadnock

As Spirit guided me I came to see that there were answers I was looking for in my life that I wasn’t finding in our modern society. I grew up in the sixties. The fifties and the sixties. I watched the transition of our society of our young people from a people who seemed to be very respectful of their parents and of government and of all things to a people who seemed to think that everything was wrong and they had to change everything. I watched the hippie movement and I was in the service. I watched the Beetles come out and then they grew their hair long, I couldn't believe it. I couldn’t understand why a man would want to wear long hair. I saw values change. I saw women become more loose. I saw a society that didn’t seem to have any respect for anything. I watched drug use become an almost natural daily thing in our society.

I don’t agree with all societies’ rules or all societies’ values or even all of society’s political ways of running the world. As a matter of fact I probably disagree with most of them. But, in watching, I also watched our cultural structure break down and it has continued to break down over the years to a point that we no longer have that respect of one another. We no longer have that feel that we are all together. We are separated by being of different countries, by being of different languages, by being of different colors, by being of different politics, by being of different religions.

Ojibwe Elder ~ Larry Matrious

What I have come to see through my native teachers is that we are not different because of any of those things. If anything, we are more like one another. We need to look for the similarities rather than look for the differences and then build on the similarities so that we create a strength of oneness and go forward as a better people in this world.

We are only one of the peoples of this world. We two leggeds, we humans. The people of the four leggeds have different tribes too. There’s the deer, there’s the moose, there’s the bear, there’s the wolf and many others. The people of the winged, they have many tribes. The Crane, the Eagle, the Loon. The people of the waters, the finned ones. They also have many tribes as do the tall ones of the forest. All of these people have their own tribes but they are all like us and we are like them. We need to treat them as equals. Not as something that we are charged by some great power to oversee and take care of but as fellow people on this earth and we need to all help each other. We need to look at what all other life does that helps us and look at what we can do to help all other life.

To Native teachings that goes even deeper. Even that stone that is sitting on your desk has life. Even the desk has life. Because all things of creation were given the life and spirit of creator. Creator put life into everything and everything is of the creator. Including us!

Excerpt from: Wisdom of the Wind – interview by Hannah Thomas ~ HeartRising

James Beard aka Noodin

Cultural Storyteller, Educator, Speaker,

Author

Walking Spirit in a Native Way

James Beard is a speaker on topics such as traditional living and natural spirit teachings. His topics address many concerns to do with wellness and balance in life. He is a student of native teachings from Ojibwe Elders, Algonquin language based people, living throughout the Great Lakes Region of the US and Canada. The audiences for his presentations vary from youth to elderly.His work is dedicated to telling anyone who has interest about his native brothers.

-- James B. Beard