Nature & Animals Quote by Black Elk

Ecstasy is described here with the blunt calm of someone reporting weather: the horse dance ends, and ordinary physics no longer applies. Black Elk’s line works because it refuses metaphorical garnish. “It seemed” keeps one foot in humility, but the rest of the sentence lifts clean off the earth. The effect is less “I felt happy” than “the world’s rules briefly changed,” which is exactly how ceremonial experience is meant to register in many Indigenous spiritual traditions: not as private mood, but as altered relation to reality.

The “horse dance” matters. Horses were not just animals but engines of Plains life, status, and mobility; a ritual centered on them plugs the body into communal power. The subtext is that the dance is doing something to him, not merely entertaining him. His lightness reads like a sign of being carried - by song, by ancestors, by collective belief - rather than a triumph of individual will. Even the awkwardness of “did not touch it when I walked” intensifies the sensation: walking is the most grounded act imaginable, and yet he reports it as floating.

Context sharpens the stakes. Black Elk’s remembered vision-life is braided with the trauma of dispossession and the late-19th-century assault on Lakota ceremony. A sentence about levitation becomes, quietly, a sentence about sovereignty: for a moment, the colonizer’s world of fences and gravity can’t quite hold. The line preserves an inner jurisdiction where spirit still has authority over matter, and where a leader’s credibility is measured by what he can carry back from that height.