The Story of the Little Plant with Paul White Dress

One of my favorite stories that I shared with my grandkids and my children when they were growing up was a… it was a story about a… it was a story about, um… a young girl who lived with her grandmother. In the story, she was moved away from the camp because of sickness. She started getting sick, but prior that… in the camp was… it was a camp… and it was a group of our people living together. There was lots of… abundance of everything. There was abundance of food… there was abundance of good weather, good Spring… when spring was supposed to be spring and fall was fall, winter was winter. And time went on like that and eventually, people noticed that they were getting more sickly… which is something that they weren't really used to. So this girl, this young girl, and her grandmother…when she got sick, she got moved away from the camp because it looked like she wasn't gonna make it. This little girl had no other family other than her grandmother. So she got moved away from the camp. So, at that time they were kind of like… kind of like afraid that they were gonna get everybody else sick… But yet people still took 'em food, but they didn't get too close to them. And every night this little girl would go up on the hill and pray. She would always pray… and she would always go down there and nurse her grandmother and go to sleep. In the morning she would do the same thing. This continued on, and her grandmother was getting weaker and weaker. And as time went along, it looked like she was on her last days. And one night she went up to… she went up to pray and she heard this voice talking to her. She heard this voice talking to her and she looked around and there was nobody there. There was nobody… there was nobody else around. And she noticed that it was coming from a plant on the ground. And this plant started talking to her and started talking to her in really comforting words. How… how the Creator heard her prayers to save her grandmother. And he also told her that the Creator was angry with the people because they were being very wasteful with the abundance around them. They were, you know… they were being greedy and they weren't sharing. They were taken more than they needed, and they were… they were becoming so where they only thought of themselves. And as time went along, you know, the Creator was, you know… life wasn't supposed to be that way. All the people, when he created the people, he wanted them to all share… to love each other… to help each other… to look up for one another. And the warriors to protect their people and to respect the elderly… the children… so that this little plant talked to her that way. But he said that he wanted to help her, and he said he told her that he gave her instructions to go home and that her grandmother was gonna make it. And they chose to help her because she had a lot of faith and she had a lot of strength. So, in her instructions, they told her to come back the next morning. So, the very next morning she came back right at sunrise. And when she got done praying, she was waiting for that voice to appear to her again, but it didn't appear. So, she was getting kind of… kind of worried… kind of wondering if she… if all that was a dream that she had. And when she looked around… when the sun came up…when the sun showed his itself and the sun started shining on that hill, she noticed something that she had never noticed before. And on that hill, the hill had turned into a… it looked like a big field of flowers that popped outta nowhere… and everything turned…. was green. Everything was full of life. And this voice came back to her, and that voice and other voices started coming. And that voice gave her instructions that all of these plants had come to help her… to make medicine so her grandmother could get well. And when she got done getting her grandmother well… to take these medicine…she got out into the village and helped all the ones that were getting sick… to reunite the people again. And so, she did that. She did as she was told. She went home and took some of the plants that sacrificed themselves. And one of the reminders was that every living thing that we see, that we yearn for in today's world… material things… whether it's televisions… whether it's everything that we work so hard for… that we long for… it comes from Mother Earth in one form or another. And so, she went home, she went back to her grandmother and nursed her. When she got well…when she… her grandmother was healthy… and they both became healthy. When they walked into that village, all the people were just amazed that they were healthy and had survived. And so she gave them instructions that she was gonna help heal them… and that the people should be united and not be greedy anymore. And she told him that. After that, she became a very respectful person in her community and in her life… and her commitment to helping others.