The Flowering Tree — The Sacred Hoop
The Teaching
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
But anywhere is the center of the world.
Commentary
Black Elk's great vision gives us perhaps the most beautiful image of the perennial philosophy in the Indigenous tradition: the many hoops, traditions, peoples, perspectives, that make one circle, with one flowering tree at the center.
'Anywhere is the center of the world', this is the Hermetic sphere, this is Indra's Net, this is the Taoist insight that the Tao is equally present at every point. The center is not Rome, not Jerusalem, not Benares, it is wherever a conscious being stands and opens their eyes to the whole.
The flowering tree as the axis mundi appears in Kabbalah as the Tree of Life, in Norse tradition as Yggdrasil, in Hindu cosmology as the cosmic ashvattha tree. The same image encoded in every tradition.