Your moment of Everglades zen: Rev. Houston Cypress and “What Endures”

We know the bad-news reel gets old. It’s good to stop and remember what we’re working so hard to protect. Here’s your dose of Everglades zen.

“Speaking to the world, and listening deeply for her reply.”

We were so moved by this short video written and produced by Reverend Houston R. Cypress.

In it he expresses a generational relationship to the greater Everglades that is so clearly palpable, the viewer is transported to a place of deep connection — by the views, the sounds, and smells — fostered and shared with us by the enduring culture of the Miccosukee Tribe.

“We all grow so elegantly when spoken to so gently,” Rev. Cypress says, reminding us of the fragile yet persistent forces of nature surrounding us. In return for a landscape that continues to sustain and inspire us, we must collectively feel a duty to nurture and honor it so that it may continue to endure.

In the Everglades, you are on “lands that have been cared for by innumerable generations of original peoples of the past, whose memory we honor. Today these lands are cared for by the indigenous sovereignties known as the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and the Sovereign Miccosukee Seminole Nation.”