-The Elder continues his ‘tea time’ conversation-

     “To digress a moment.  In the old days we  ’smoked’ a person. When we would gather like this to hear a new person we would take out the pipe, put Cuna in and smoke a little as we listened and studied them. Not just his words but his demeanor, his bearing.”

     The Elder sipped at the hot tea. “Furthermore, when the pot of tea came in, we would talk until the tea was gone and then we retired to ingest and digest the evenings events.”

     I began to feel the glow of the cedar and a love for this man and this place. I wondered if everyone felt this. I looked and saw the men in the door. They had sat down, just inside, without interacting overtly. No one seemed to care.

     “ We are a tight group. The Neishte Kiva is old.” He said. “You posed an interesting point of knowing how the moon became where it is. The knowing of these facts is not a belief. Here we go back, each one of us, to the beginning, to the ones who kept the Kiva before we did. If they did not know something they would have told us as much. They spoke factually not mythologically. So, in Spirit, we are able to join them.”