"And when I breathed, my breath was lightning"
About this Quote
A child-visionary on the plains remembers a moment when body and storm were the same, when breathing itself flashed with sky power. Breath marks life, rhythm, relation; lightning marks revelation, danger, and the sudden joining of heaven and earth. Bringing them together turns a simple act into a sign of vocation. The most ordinary human motion becomes charged with other-than-human force, suggesting a person remade as a conduit rather than a separate self.
Lakota thought ties breath (ni or niya) to spirit and vitality, and regards thunder and lightning as the work of the Wakinyan, the thunder beings who grant power to dreamers and healers. Black Elk’s Great Vision, received as a boy and later recounted to John Neihardt, gave him the horses of the four directions, the gifts of the Grandfathers, and a mandate to help mend the people’s sacred hoop. To say that breath was lightning is to say the vision had moved inside him so completely that every exhalation carried its charge. Speech, song, and prayer become acts of weather; words do not merely describe the world but strike it, illuminating, purifying, sometimes burning.
That image also names the shamanic role as mediator. Breath moves from within to without; lightning moves from sky to earth. The holy man stands in that path, translating power into healing. When Black Elk led the horse dance, storms broke and people were cured; ritual breath became rain. Yet lightning is not tame. It reveals as it blinds, gives life as it kills. The line therefore carries both empowerment and burden, the exhilaration of being animated by the sacred and the weight of responsibility that follows.
Spoken from within an era of conquest and dislocation, the sentence resists diminishment. It asserts that the vitality of a people and a world still courses through the body, that even breathing can be an act of connection, clarity, and change.
Lakota thought ties breath (ni or niya) to spirit and vitality, and regards thunder and lightning as the work of the Wakinyan, the thunder beings who grant power to dreamers and healers. Black Elk’s Great Vision, received as a boy and later recounted to John Neihardt, gave him the horses of the four directions, the gifts of the Grandfathers, and a mandate to help mend the people’s sacred hoop. To say that breath was lightning is to say the vision had moved inside him so completely that every exhalation carried its charge. Speech, song, and prayer become acts of weather; words do not merely describe the world but strike it, illuminating, purifying, sometimes burning.
That image also names the shamanic role as mediator. Breath moves from within to without; lightning moves from sky to earth. The holy man stands in that path, translating power into healing. When Black Elk led the horse dance, storms broke and people were cured; ritual breath became rain. Yet lightning is not tame. It reveals as it blinds, gives life as it kills. The line therefore carries both empowerment and burden, the exhilaration of being animated by the sacred and the weight of responsibility that follows.
Spoken from within an era of conquest and dislocation, the sentence resists diminishment. It asserts that the vitality of a people and a world still courses through the body, that even breathing can be an act of connection, clarity, and change.
Quote Details
| Topic | Native American Sayings |
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