There Are Four Trees on Your Stone

When you are a 28-year-old white woman reporter, with a newspaper editor husband and a college administrator father, and you find a stone on a holy Lakota mountain, and a Lakota holy man says, Do you see the four trees on this stone? you look and see only four fern leaves fossilized on the stone. When he says You will meet four men in 9,2,4, and 8 and points to some fossilized numbers in the corner of the stone, you are skeptical and offer to give him the stone. When he says, No, it is your stone, you do keep it. And over the next two years, when in September, February, April, and August, you meet four men of the bloodlines of great Lakota (Sioux) and Apache, you start honoring the stone, and the mountain you found it on. You start paying close attention to the holy man, Frank Fools Crow, and his wife Kate, who is the mother you never had. This book is the story of finding the four men, the four trees. It is the story of what they and Fools Crow taught me as we traveled several states together. There were powerful adventures at North and South Dakota and Montana reservations and universities, a Minnesota sacred pipestone quarry and Minnesota maximum security prison, a California publishing company, and Alaska cities. These are places where September, February, April, and August brought four holy men. The skeptical just the facts, man white woman began to see the connectedness of all of life. On Bear Butte near Sturgis, South Dakota, where Crazy Horse had fasted, she gave her life to the Great Spirit, because her energies were being miserably unused and the world was going by without her doing something she felt she should be doing. In exchange for her offering up her life, the stone glowed, a tree gave a loving message, stars fell, and she would never feel alone again. Fools Crows prediction also brought Native American women to me, and we wrote their books and traveled their lands in Minnesota and Alaska. It was fun to travel them again in this book. Also crossing my path were people of black, white, and Asian American cultures. The book tells of the exciting events with these people. I am writing this, my story, so that all these people can live on.