Don Ricardo Lama

Less visible perhaps is the wound that we, the non-indigenous, carry deep in our hearts, where we know that something crucial to our well being is missing, but what? Somehow these men embodied all that we have lost: continuity with our ancestors, the link between oneself and the natural world, what it is that makes us relatives of the other beings with whom we share the creation. They had a dignity and a grace that I have encountered nowhere else, and it is surely one of the great blessings of my life to have known them. Their poverty was profound, their ignorance of contemporary life hard for me to grasp. All they had was dignity and class, real class that permeated every molecule of their bodies, every gesture, every word of broken English. They were, I thought, what men were supposed to be like, and a great deal of confusion fell away from me.

from Dancing the Four Directions by Rick Klein