The pain body

If you ever wanted to know what real pain felt like, you only had to walk through the desert. There no solace, nothing to comfort you, only the bare rocky ground, desert cacti, and the occasional scampering lizard, maybe a vulture circling overhead. You know what they're circling for.

Yet, there's always something that stays with you, the gentle voice of the Spirit. If you're cursing your situation, you never hear it, but it's the voice that the Natives knew.

To live with only the minimal it takes to live, of water, food, love will burn everything else, every false comfort away. Indians lived like this for thousands of years. Made relationships with the wind, the animals, the grass. They related to the Spirit of all that is, tuned their awareness to each sound of the Spirit, until they always knew what was happening.

It couldn't tell them about gunpowder though, or guns, or about the lack of connection the white man had to the forces they lived and survived by. It brought them internal conflict, for they hadn't made the land, the thigns the White Man wanted to own: do they allow the continued intrusion and contamination of their homelands, or do they fight to the bitter end?

The end was the loss of Spirit, the spirit to fight. One can only take only so much blood, before one loses the taste of it, with nothing gained and nothing to gain.