The sand paintings of the Native American Indians are medicine. They chart our inner world and help us find our way in life. The Navajo Indians have good reasons for making their paintings on sand. Much work go into them, many details. Each one of them, like us, is unique. Yet, a moment later, the painting vanishes. Nothing remains but the sand. Why go through all of this work, if it is not going to last? One good reason. By making the painting, one reaches a unity with the moment. We step into timelessness, or as some Indigenous groups prefer to call it “dream-time.” The painting lives for that moment, and like all life will move on. We get to see it take shape and return to the sand. It is life in motion, and in order to be alive it changes. There is no attachment of the painting. It’s particles, one by one, rise and dance with the wind. No resistance. Only the flow. Then we see that the Grand Canyon in all of its majesty is nothing but a sand painting. Even the stars and the galaxies are a sand painting. Medicine people tell us that every moment that we live is a sand painting, it comes and goes, and no matter what we do, we cannot repeat it. Most of us put the moment that we live into past experiences. The hands of life attempt to lay a sand painting on us, but we have frozen the painting of yesterday, we have not freed ourselves from the past, and we go forward, missing moment after moment. The older we get, the more our experiences keep us from meeting life. The sand that now shelters me as a body, how many mountains has it build in the past? How many trees? How many deer? And when I am gone, how many flowers will rise from this sand? For the paintings do not end with me. They go on. In a sand painting, there is no distinction between our environment and us. We are part of the same life. The sand of our environment is the same sand of our body. In this regard, to take care of rivers and lakes, is to take care of our blood. To take care of the air, is to take care of our lungs. To take care of the words that we put out there in the world, is to take care of our heart. That is why most sand paintings are drawn in the form of a circle. We are connected to the world. An elder lady of the Ute tribe, having drawn a circle on the ground told me: “This is the way I greet each day. I make a circle. That is me. Then I see the sun. Every day. And I say, ‘may I be like you through out the day, with light in my heart for every one.’” The elder lady told me that we all form circles around us. When we have fear, or anger, our circles carry these emotions. But, strong as these emotions may be, the circles do not have a wide range. However, when we experience a strong feeling of love, then our circle can be as wide as to go beyond our world, all the way up to the sun. “My grandfather” said the elder lady “said that many tribal members use to talk to the sun every morning. The love in their hearts was strong. Now few are the ones who can reach the sun. We need to change this. It is our destiny, as children of the Earth, to return light for light, small as we are, we can reach the sun every day of our lives.”