Professor Moriarty in his YouTube lecture, imagines the original great people who settled in Ireland and they brought with them sacred objects. Then he imagines a new settler coming to Ireland and bringing a sacred Navajo cradle. He said, “A Navajo cradle is different from our cradle but it is still a cradle.”
Three is a Navajo Cradle song about a man making a cradle for his child.
“A Navajo Cradle
I have made a cradle board for you my child
May you grow to a great old age,
Of the sun’s rays I made the back
Of black clouds I have made a blanket
Of rainbow I have made the bow,
Of sunbeams I have made the side lopes,
Of lightning I have made the lacings
Of river mirrorings I have made the footboard,
Of dawn I have made the covering,
Of light on high horizons have I made the bed.”
Like Professor Moriarty, my wife Christiane and I have experienced stories from Navajo story tellers. I think in particular of one who gave us a spectacular jeep ride through Canyon de Chelly in northern Arizona. We learned a lot from him. Professor Moriarty also learned a lot from the Navajo.
As Moriarty concluded about that Cradle Song:
“This is a cradle that all of us need. No matter what age we are, where young or old, male or female, it is a cradle we should all be willing to lie down into. We would be lying down to great creative nature. We would be lying down into the creative genius of the universe. In this cradle we can experience ecological second birth. We Europeans who think of ourselves as belonging to the first world and look upon the Navajo as belonging to the third world. It sometimes appears to me that we are living in a spiritual third world. Instead of having potbellies we have pot-bellied hearts and minds because we aren’t being nourished any longer by our culture. We aren’t being spiritually nourished and our seals breathing holes have closed over. Think of this whole evening [he was talking to adults listening to his lecture] as a journey to this Navajo cradle. A cradle in which we might all lie down in and be born again…God bless the first peoples of the world if we are willing to listen to them. Then we might listen and learn to stand and walk beautifully on the earth.”
You can see from Moriarty’s words that he is as much a poet as a teacher or professor. We learn a lot: We can be born again. We can walk beautifully on the earth again.We can make America and Canada great again, but just not the way some politicians claim