In his book Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon, tells of meeting Kendrick Fritz, a young Hopi, in Utah.
When explaining his values and beliefs, a young Hopi, Kenneth Fritz, told of his Spider Grandmother, the Hopi version of the Great Spirit. “The Spider Grandmother gave two rules“, he explained. “ She gave them to all peoples, not just Hopis“. Look at these rules and you will see that they cover almost everything:
1) Don’t go around hurting each other. Roughly parallel to the Golden Rule, this reminds one of the futility of anger and the wrongness of revenge, and keeps one aware that hurt can take many forms besides the purely physical. We can hurt one another with gestures, with looks, with lies, with gossip, with our tone of voice and even with our silence.
2) Try to understand things.
This urges one to go beyond merely restraining one’s aggressions, exhorting us to make the effort necessary to see what the world looks like through different eyes. In a time when many seem contemptuous of viewpoints at variance with their own, this view seems especially valuable. It is easy to disagree, but takes genuine effort to try to understand what one disagrees with.
The verb to understand comes from the Old English understandan which means to stand under, to take a stance of humility and respect rather than one of arrogance or presumption. The impetus to understand grows naturally out of a sense of the sacredness of things, as does the urge not to go around hurting one another.
The young Hopi continued “Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren’t just will and thoughts. We are also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
