WARD -- Leaf Running-rabbit has lived in a completely off-grid property in Ward for 34 years, moving in when he discovered a squatter’s shack, a cabin built as a temporary camp for miners. He ultimately lived with his family in the cabin for 17 years before being required to build a house to legal code, receiving his certificate of occupancy of the new house in 2009.

In the late 1990s, he attended the University of Colorado Boulder tuition-free for five years through a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, earning a double major in poetry and Spanish. He feels that true poetry is an art form that can articulate feelings and experiences beyond the words written on the page.

He has particularly focused on a form he calls photopoetics, where he takes photographs and writes poems that go together. He loves that the photo and poem can both say things that the other can’t and work together to leave an impact on the reader (and viewer) of the work.

Through his writing, he aims to use words to communicate experiences that can’t be described with words, such as spirituality, enlightenment, and consciousness. He believes that using the right words can allow people to understand concepts beyond words.

He didn’t connect to the poets he focused on as a CU Boulder student as much as he did spiritual masters and teachers, those who can communicate possibilities through their words that others might be unaware of. Through his work in spirituality, he’s come to understand the human being as having two sides—their identity, descriptors, and feelings as a person, and their experience in reality as a conscious presence.

He believes that a person’s conscious presence is primary, and their identity is built from their experiences over time. Originally from Oklahoma, he says that moving to his current home was the first time he fully realized his conscious presence through the sense of place he experienced.

He describes his first experience of the energy of the wildlife, smells, sensations, and memories of the environment as an “overwhelming feeling of walking into my own body for the first time[...] walking into the essence of who I was.”

Since moving into the area, this feeling of belonging has allowed him to embrace writing completely. He has since published a poetry collection, Wild Be, through Middle Creek Publishing, and his writing as a whole resonated with enough people that he started performing ceremonies for the community.

Facilitating ceremonies including equinox or solstice acknowledgements, birthdays, weddings, sweat lodge, and coming-of-age and naming ceremonies amongst his close circle, word spread about the resonance of those ceremonies.

Now, he’s started sweat lodges, he makes ceremonial tools, and he continues writing and facilitating ceremonies for the community. He hopes that through his writing and through his ceremonies, people can recognize, with or without words, the feeling of place.

For Running-rabbit, no person should have to try and fit in. They’re a conscious being; they already belong.