Psychic Telephone · 31
Steven
When the Lakota are growing up, Steven says, they do what they call hanbléčheya, “crying for a vision”—the vision quest, all that. That’s part of their traditional learning. He’s done a lot. The first one, he thinks he was thirty. He was still young then. And one of the vision quests he went to—most visions, you can go up there and stay four days and pray, and you’re lucky if you have a vision. This one, he didn’t realize they were going to give him a vision he would never forget.
He had what you call really bad stomach flu. Really bad. But, in the Lakota way, he’d made a commitment to be there on a certain day to do what he planned on doing, no matter what. For the vision quest, you find an inner sensor, an iyéska, to put you on the hill. A medicine man. That way they can interpret your visions, your dreams. And he was sick, but he got everything done, and they put him up on the hill.
That first night, he just wanted to go home. He was lying there and he was sick, going, Oh jeez. About midnight he heard a rattlesnake. He was going, Rattlesnakes don’t come out at night. He got up—there’s no rattlesnake. And he kept hearing it, he kept hearing it. It scared the hell out of him. So he prayed, all the directions that he was supposed to do everything. And then he went back in and lay down. About the time the morning star came up, he heard that rattle again. And this time he listened closer. It wasn’t a rattlesnake, it was rattles. He listened and—at four o’clock, and then right as the sun was coming up, then at noon—he heard the rattles. They let him know when it was time, all the sacred times to pray, when he needed to get up and pray.
The next day, it looked like he was going to get a rainstorm. And it rained, just a regular rainstorm, but where he had to go to get out, it was hailing. And then he closed his eyes for a minute, and he opened them up and he was somewhere else. He was on the banks of a river he knew, that he fished. The whole sky was covered with mammatus clouds. High-wind clouds, they look like cotton balls. Very dangerous storms when they have those. They were up there, covered the whole sky as far as he could see. He thought, Oh boy. He was still sick. Some distance away, to the left of him, there was a cabin there and it was flashing the porch light at him. He was going, I could go over there. But he thought no, he’d better hold his pipe and just stay.
And all of a sudden, the thunders—the thunders, they started getting really loud so you couldn’t even hear. It was deafening. And a flash of lightning came out of those clouds. It hit the ground just right next to him. It was a big yellow lightning bolt. But it wasn’t a lightning bolt, it was a spirit whose name is Yellow Lightning Man. And the clouds, they told him, We are your friends and we will come work with you, anytime you need help. They said, You call us and we’ll come. And there have been times that he’s needed help and he’s seen them. In a clear blue sky, they’ll show up.
And this is all—something. You know, it’s something. To experience that. And to understand it. The vision, the thunders talking to him—he was still kind of young and he didn’t believe them. But he did. But he didn’t. In that way. He didn’t understand it at the time. And he still doesn’t understand all of it. But the thing is, when there’s clear blue skies and he goes into a ceremony to help somebody, and he comes out and the clouds are right there, looking at him, watching him—that’s connection. It’s not psychic. It’s connection.