This work introduces readers to an Indigenous worldview that offers fresh and novel ways of engaging with reality. Drawing on the author's own symbolic experiences and years of study, it explores key concepts such as a shamanic bone-soul and mandalic walking—approaches that unite awareness and action. The reflections are grounded in two recent interpretive projects: markings on a stone tablet found by the Shenandoah River in Virginia, and a stone formation at Penn Bluff, Alabama—both resonant with Eastern Woodland symbolism. Through these studies, the reader is invited to encounter another way of viewing and acting in the world—one that broadens our understanding of existence and our place within it.
The author, an independent scholar, has degrees in Philosophy and Counseling Psychology. For many years, he taught a college course on Indigenous symbolism with an emphasis on imagery found on stone and in the landscape. Having experienced gifts from the Indigenous related to sites that Native Americans inhabited, and having studied their narratives, he offers this work.