Quotes from Joy Harjo

Home is elusive. It shapeshifts with the currents of my heart and its will. Home is a trickster changing according to the medicine of the season and its lesson. -Prodigal Daughters (Kimberly Wesnaut)

Let's not shame our eyes for seeing. Instead, thank them for their bravery.

She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow.

I have a cat, a stripedy cat with tickling whiskers and green electric eyes. She has the softest fur in the world. When I pet her she purrs as if she has a drum near her heart.

Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind. If I think behind me, I might break. If I think forward, I lose now.

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.

There are always flowers, Love cries, or blood. Someone is always leaving By exile, death, or heartbreak. The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage.

It hasn't always been this way, because glaciers who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth and shape this city here, by the sound. They swim backwards in time.

We become lost, Unsteady. Take a deep breath, Pray. You will not always be lost. You are right here, In your time, In your place.

I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn't your real husband, he was a bad dream - an alien of sorts - who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.

All for that welcome home dance, The most favorite of all-- when everyone finds their way back together to dance, eat and celebrate. And tell story after story of how they fought and played in the story wheel and how no one was ever really lost at all.

I never got to wash my mother's body when she died. I return to take care of her in memory. That's how I make peace when things are left undone.

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense.

All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation and challenge—those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding.

Poetry keeps the door open to awe and ensures that we will find our way through the broken heart field of wars, losses and betrayals to understanding, compassion and gathering together.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking I't the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing. The door to the mind should open from the heart. An enemy who gets in risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child. Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

To the destroyers, Earth is not a person. They will want more until there is no more to steal.

Moonlight I know when the sun is in China because the night shining other-light crawls into my bed. She is moon. Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque— Fourth Street, or from similar avenues in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also awakened, the night thrown back and asked, 'where is the moon, my lover'? And from here I always answer in my dreaming, 'the last time I saw her was in the arms of another sky'.

Eventually, we all make it home, and we each make an individual path by any means.

My path is made of poetry and music, characterized by rowdiness and sunflowers, and given life by everyone I have met along the way in this process of becoming human. (When I say everyone, I don't mean just us ornery two-legged beings.)

And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.