I remember learning to walk through the northern Ontario bush. The bush was comfortable for me. It was where I’d learned to play and my walking was strong, purposeful and intent. I could hike alone for hours and I felt powerful striding through the bush.

            When I was nine I was moved to the city by fostercare  and I learned to walk on pavement. My walking became purposeful, cautious. There were strange , fast, noisy things everywhere and I was stunned by the sudden change

As a teenager I walked inconspicuously. I was the only Indian kid anywhere and I was shunned for the oddball. And so my walking was tight and joyless.

            When I left that home at sixteen it was the early 1970s and there were still hippies around, great rock music and girls. I was young and lean and I grew my hair and wore blue jeans, t-shirts and leather for the first time. It was glorious. I strode through those next years unencumbered.

            Then, suddenly I found myself a young adult with a future to face. I became purposeful again. I learned to walk measuredly. Evenly. Time became a vital stuff again and I learned the to-and-fro shuffle of work and responsibility and I walked less freely.

            When I became a journalist, my walking became deliberate one more time. I walked to think, to construct, to build. I walked by rote. I seldom noticed anything and despite moving through some of the most beautiful Canadian landscapes I walked almost oblivious to it all. Engrossed. Removed.

            Then somehow it all changed. I became a storyteller and a weaver of worlds. I published books and found a woman whose spirit I could wrap around me like a coat from the cold. Together we found a home in the mountains and began to cobble it together one piece at a time. I found the sky again and the trees and rocks and the wonder of open spaces.

            I’ll be fifty-six soon. The age I am is wonderful. The territories I’ve walked through in this time allow me to meander. All those varied landscapes, loose around my shoulders, make me blithe, uncaring how I’m seen. Aw shucks.

When I visited the Kenora Public Library way back in 1960 when I first learned to read, I was amazed. Through the back door where the kids section was, existed a world of color, dream and image that captivated me. When they told me I could take as many home as I could carry, I did. Lugging them back passed the mill into Rideout where my foster home sat was thrilling. I couldn’t wait to get to my room.

Not much has changed since then. A library card is still my most prized possession. The stacks of the library are where I feel challenged, engaged, motivated and curious. Three are always more worlds to explore and inhabit than I have time for. But I’m still on the lookout for something new to fire my imagination or simply aid me in understanding more of what I do know.

As a writer I live in the culture of books. I have for most of my life. When I open another book there is a whole new world for me to enter and inhabit. I’ve traipsed through a lot of worlds in my time and my real world has been increased by every journey. I never tire of making those journeys. Maybe it’s the kid in me that still hungers for the lure of a real good yarn, an adventure, a fantastic experience where all I know of this world is forgotten in the spell of a created one.

            But I come from a people whose world was ordered without the need of books. The Ojibway, like all native peoples in Canada, had a literature that was oral. We spoke our books. We talked our teachings. Our storytellers framed the universe for us and we had no need of printed language. Within our stories was all the stuff of great literature; pathos, tragedy, journeys, romance, great battles, heroes, villains, mystery and spiritual secrets.   

They say that at one time in our history we set our stories on the skin of birch trees. We etched them there on the bark with the blunt edge of a burnt stick or pigments formed of earth and rock and plant material that has never faded over time. Sacred scrolls holding stories meant to last forever. Books. Unbound but for the leather thong that held them, unprinted but for the hand that shaped the images, unedited but for the protocol of storytelling that guided them.  

I only ever saw a birch bark scroll once. The old man laid it out for me on a plank table top in a cabin tucked far away in the bush and traced the line of history with one arthritic finger, telling it in the Old Talk that I didn’t understand. But I could translate his eyes.

In those ancient symbols was a world where legends were alive, where an entire belief system was represented in teachings built of principles that were built themselves of rock and leaf and tree, of bird and moose and sky, and Trickster spirits nimble as dreams cajoling my people onto the land, toward themselves, toward him, toward me. Here was an entire world, a cosmology, an enduring set of principles laid down in a time long passed that promised a learning unsurpassed in my experience. Here was the magic that sustained a people.

This is what I understood from the wet glimmer of his eyes. When he looked up at me with one palm laid gently on the skin of that living scroll, there was pride there, honor, respect and understanding of what I came for, what I needed. He was telling me that words cannot exist without feeling. That a text is only as useful as the truth its holds. That dreams and reality are the same world. That what I know is less important than what I desire to know.

So inhabit what you read. Allow it to fill you. Let the intent of the spirit of the story take you where it will. Stories and books are tools of understanding on the journey of coming to know. Pick them up. Carry them. This is what I carried away. This is the message I brought to my own storytelling to here, to this page, stark in its blankness, waiting like me to be imagined, to be filled.

Smoothy and I have been pals for about six years now. When I got him he was filled with Kraft Smooth peanut butter, one of my all-time favorites. When he was emptied, I washed him out and started save coins in him.

The first time it took quite a while to fill him. I wasn’t really working then and every nickel I had was needed just to survive. But every time I had something spare I put it into him and eventually he got filled.

I took my girl out for a good dinner on what I saved that first time. It was about seventy-five dollars and the meal was fabulous. Things got a little better for me after that and I worked more and had more spare change to throw into my faithful friend.

Nowadays I work steady and money comes along regularly. Every time we go shopping I make sure to ask for my change in coins if the amount is small enough. When I get home I go right to old Smoothy and drop them in.

He fills up quicker now and each time I roll the coins up and take them to the bank to exchange them for bills, it’s a special occasion. We’ve been out for great dinners, or bought memorable books and music, gone to the symphony, a play or a journey in the car. Whatever we spend it on, it always feels good knowing that we saved for it.

Lately, I’ve taken to dropping loonies and toonies into old Smoothy and when he’s full, there’ll be a lot more to splurge with. The thing is, it never feels like a sacrifice or a chore. It’s become a habit and it’s a good one.

See, I was never good at saving money. Like a lot of us, money just seemed to trickle through my fingers and I was on the short end a lot more than I was in plenty. But old Smoothy has taught me that a little can become a lot and in these hard economic times that’s a good thing to remember.

It’s the same ting with life, really. A spot of good energy put in the right place returns to you ten fold in no time at all. All you really need to do is to get in the habit of putting it there. A return on an investment that doesn’t really cost anything in the first place…

            See, his dad’s a drunk. When we spoke to him he and the boy were camped out in a low-end hotel until they could find suitable housing. He came to us to scope out a room in the rooming house we run for the marginalized, the destitute, the disabled and the forgotten and invisible. Sadly, there’s a always one more.

            The kid had seen everything. You could tell that. He spoke quietly. His voice was low and even, and there were no signs in it of feeling or attachment. Instead, there was resignation and it made me want to cry.

            We made plans for them to take a room. We made the choice for the kid. Both of us felt his pain. Both of us wanted the future to represent something more than it had and both of us could see ourselves in him because both of us had been through the pain of a dislocated life.

            For me, at fourteen, life was a bombardment of pain and I was trapped and alone. There was no one I could tell because I thought no one had ever lived that same way – and I learned to live with unspoken pain. I felt all of that in that fourteen year-old boy.

            And that’s the thing of it, really. That’s how we grant peace. We need to come to recognize that it’s our brokenness that allows us to heal each other, not the stoic fronts we display. Life is difficult. It leaves scratches and cuts and bruises on all of us. Sometimes it leaves fractures. Sometimes, like that kid, and the kid in me, it leaves confusion that requires listening to help sort out, hearing, and an earnest sharing of the similar.

            So he’ll come and he’ll stay. He’ll have a place to set his feet down, a place to rest. It won’t be perfect, but it’s a beginning, a fresh start, and hope has thrust down roots in lesser soil. We give what we can and stand beside people. That’s how it works.

            Peace.

See, I’d been a northern kid. The schoolyard was tucked in the scrub bush behind the lumber mill and there were great stones at its perimeter and not enough room for anything but a game of kickball. We played tag, Red Rover, hop-scotch and marbles. No one dreamed of a bigger game. But when I was adopted I was moved to southern Ontario just outside of Toronto. The first day I went to school they played the game at recess. I was astounded. I was also flummoxed. When I was chosen for a side I had no idea how the game was played and I was laughed at and belittled.

I went home that night very ashamed and embarrassed. However, the man I would become lived in the kid I was. So I went to the library and got a pile of books on baseball. I sat in my room and read everything I could about it and then when the idea of the game was set in my head I went outdoors. There was an old sheep barn beside my new house. So I took a can of whitewash and painted a rectangle the size of a strike zone on the side of it. Then I paced off sixty feet six inches, the distance from the pitcher’s rubber to home plate and I threw India rubber balls at that strike zone.

Then, I taught myself to scoop up the grounders when they bounced back. Later, I would throw the ball high against the wall with my eyes closed. When I heard it hit I would open them, find the ball in the air and run to catch it. It was how I learned to track fly balls. I did this every morning before school and every night following. In the evenings I would take a ball and toss it up and try to hit it with the bat as it came down. It took a while but I got so I could whack it far our over that sheep pasture.

But something happened to me there. Something changed within the very fiber of my being. I came to feel as though I wasn’t just learning the game, I felt as though I were inventing it. Every discovery, every new skill, every subtle technique made me feel bigger, more fleshed out, more real and valid. When I finally played in a real game at school after that, I was a star.

That was 1965. I’m fifty-five years-old now and I still have an overarching passion for baseball. My team is the Boston Red Sox, has been since May of 1965. When they won their first World Series in 2004 after eight-six years of frustration I gave myself rug burns on my knees sliding toward the television in triumph. My wife could only shake her head and smile.

I thought about all of this as I was considering the current shape of things. Our lives are in turmoil. The financial crisis has a lot of us anxious and afraid for our futures and it feels as though nothing is secure. Every week there is more evidence of the natural world altering all around us. Our home, our planet, is in great flux. The government shows itself time and again how disreputable they are, how disdainful of the principles of our democracy. There is a lot to worry for and a lot to consider.

But when I hug Debra it goes away. It always does. When I look around my home and see the things that make up our lives that give it meaning, it goes away too. I don’t mean the big things. I mean the view from our window over the lake, the photographs, the fire, the tiny islands of clutter we create through our living, my guitar, the new trumpet, dog toys scattered everywhere. When I look at those things I feel as though I’m not so much living my life as I am inventing it.

That’s what it takes to get through – allowing the love we carry to alter the world on its axis, spinning us to hope, to clarity, to resolution. That feeling of inventing things. That feeling of being Creators of our own space and hope and destiny.

Or at least, you may. I remember days when mornings were painful haze. Some days were totally lacking in direction, motivation or inspiration. There were times in my life when a morning represented yet another in a line of bleak, despairing days devoid of anything resembling energy. But that was then. These days in our mountain home morning is a reconnection experience like none I’ve ever known.

See, in our home we start every day with meditation, prayer and a smudge with ceremonial medicines. Before we do anything we do this. We use sweet grass, sage, cedar and tobacco. It’s held in an abalone bowl, lit with a wooden match and fanned with a traditional eagle wing fan. It represents the creative, nurturing, healing energy of the universe. Creation. Creator. Harmony. It represents our earnest desire to be a part of that vital affirming energy.

            I bless my wife with it and then myself and then, in slow, measured, solemn steps, I carry that sacred medicine around the rooms of our home. I say a prayer as I have been taught. I offer thanks for everything that is present in my world and ask for nothing more. As I make that solemn walk through our home I connect to everything. I recognize it. I reclaim it. I comprehend that it is all a gift and I am grateful and I am filled with the knowledge that I walk in a particular grace.

            That part of our mornings is special. Not only because we are approaching life in a spiritual manner but because we do it together. Another thing I’ve heard said is that spirituality expresses itself most strongly in community. It doesn’t matter whether that community is two or twenty. What matters is a gathering of spirits, a meeting of hearts and minds in a purposeful approach to the energy of Creation. We are joined. We are made more. We are strengthened.  

            Then when life gets hold of us, when the busyness and the issues of our life lays hold of us and tugs it in wholly different directions, we’ll walk through a waft of that sacred smoke and remember. We remember how we started the day. We reconnect to the idea of prayer, meditation and peace – and we’re calmed.

            That’s the particular gift of medicine – its lingering scent reminds us that we went into ceremony, we went into prayer, we went into peace and it allows us to bring those moments into the ongoing moments of our days and our lives. Or, at least to try our best to. We’re human. We have failings. We are prone to choosing a different sort of energy at any moment and we forget. But the gift of medicine is in our home to return us to that morning place.

            The smoke and scent inhabit a room. It lingers on your clothes. It clings to your hair. When the travels of the day get you weary or irritated or anxious, there’s always that frail scent of medicine to bring you to ceremony one more time. I’m grateful for that. It’s easy to be spiritual in a quiet room. It’s out in the world where the real tests are. The presence of medicine always returns us to our natural state – harmony. That’s not just a natural state for Native people. It’s true for all of us.

Medicine burns when touched by fire. The smoke climbs higher, curling into the corners of the room where you sit watching it, following it with your eyes and there’s a feeling like desire at your belly and a cry ready at your throat. There’s a point where smoke will disappear and the elders say that this is where the Old Ones wait to hear you, your petitions and your prayers, the Spirit World where all things return to balance and time is reduced to dream.

It vanishes. There’s a silence more profound than any words you’ve ever heard or read and when you close your eyes you feel the weight of ancient hands upon your shoulders and your brow and the sacred smoke comes to inhabit you and in its burn and smolder, a returning to the energy you were born in – and the room and the world is filled with you.

            That’s the gift of medicine.

            I love to hear the Bach Cello suites and I love to hear them in the dark. I turn off everything else, lay back and listen. My favorite recording belongs to the Russian virtuoso Rostropovich. There’s a magnificence to the playing and the lovely low sound of that cello.

            To me it sounds romantic, wistful, full of emotion and timeless. I can lose myself in that music. Mind you, I don’t know the in and outs the classical music repertoire, I’m not what you might call an aficionado of the music – but I know what I like.

            You don’t have to be an expert to come to love something. Sure, there’s terminology that’s helpful to understand, maybe the history of things or knowledge of how something is done but all that seems to cloud my enjoyment of elemental things like music.

            What I like best is to immerse myself like how a hot bath is better when you lay back and close your eyes. There’s no explaining that feeling – it just feels wonderful. I think we’d all be a lot better off in this world if we all learned to just experience again.

            People ask me “What’s a powwow like?” How does it feel when you sing a song on a hand drum?” or “What’s it like inside a sweat lodge?” When they ask me that I’m always a little taken back. I’d rather be asked how they would experience something.

            How can I experience the feeling of…? What a magical question that is. When it’s asked earnestly our teachings tell us to provide the experience. When we do that we throw open the doors to community building, we allow others into our world.

            That’s’ critical these days. We all need to experience more of each other. Our worlds, our own life experience gets richer when we do. For me, the sound of a magical Russian cello colors my world wonderfully and I’m the better for it. It’s as much a part of me now as my own cultural music – it’s part of my experience, my journey.

            I suppose it’s because we all want a better story than the one we have. What we want more than anything is to be able to tell a rip roaring good yarn about ourselves and our people. Everyone has a literary bone. Everyone wants a captivating tale. So regardless of our cultural origins we want the sweep of adventure, romance and drama in the stories of us.

I believe it’s because we all share a common beginning. At the very start of our histories we were tribal people hunkered around a fire in the night. When stories began to be told no one wanted to listen to a boring retelling of banal events. Stories needed to be rollicking good to keep us awake and proud of ourselves. Not much has changed in all the eons since.

 I was thinking about this the other day while reading an essay arguing the origins of Canada’s Native people. There’s a long standing story about Native people coming to North America across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait. Archaeologists and anthropologists agree in the likelihood of that – but First Nations people get a little perturbed over it.

            To some degree it makes sense. Western thinking tells us that everyone had to arrive from somewhere. Given enough time a scientist would eventually draw us all back to Africa as the place of our origin. Our migratory paths as human beings began in the savanna. So the theory goes that native people must have trekked through Asia and across the Bering Strait.

            See, it’s the idea of a band of hunter gatherers following a herd of caribou that makes it easier for Western science to agree with. As nomadic cultures there’s something normal about that image to them. But my people learned the word logistics from non-native people and the logistics seem kind of fuzzy.

            For one thing, there couldn’t have been one long migrant line of us in pursuit of meat and furs. Someone would have had to go back and tell everyone else. There would have been a runner selected to carry the news of a whole new territory to those left behind. Whoever he was, I feel sorry for that guy.

            That’s like fifty miles. Plus, the area lies just below the Arctic Circle. In winter, when caribou are moving, that would mean temperatures dipping to around minus fifty with howling Arctic winds. Even in more temperate conditions it would be a hard slog. Say, a hundred miles in total through freezing temperatures.

            The poor guy would not have had the benefit of snowshoes. They’re a North American invention. So he was out there jogging back and forth in simple moccasins and wrapped in furs. Would you believe half-dressed, half-frozen man calling you out into the teeth of an Arctic storm? It would take an awful of persuasion to get others to cross that bridge.

            But they did according to the theory. Thousands of them. So many that the land bridge must have collapsed under their weight because it hasn’t been seen since. For all their knowledge scientist haven’t been able to pin point where it was, how it came to be or where it went.

            Yet when Native people say we were always here, it’s discounted as being scientifically improbable for lack of evidence. The mythology doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. If legend doesn’t fit the paradigm, the paradigm wins.

            On the other hand the standard Canadian mythology has early explorers discovering things in a wild and unmapped land. The legend that generations of Canadian school kids have grown up with is Radisson and Groseilliers say, humping it through a raging prairie blizzard to discover things.

Well, Native people have always believed that you can’t discover something when you’re lost yourself. But that mythology stands. This despite everyone knowing full well that they were led to things by Native guides. But it’s better in the telling if the Frenchmen were more heroic than that. Our Canadian cultural mythology demands heroes not addled wanderers asking directions.

So when we compare mythologies we need to understand that the germ of truth in them is minute. All the scientific reasoning in the world won’t change that. Me, for instance, I believe the Bering Strait story. How else to explain the popularity of Chinese buffets with native people? Now that’s scientific reasoning.

            For a long time I had no access to the drums of my people. I was gone for over twenty years, lost in the maze of foster homes and adoption and I was effectively removed from all things Ojibway. But when I found my way back in the late 70s I found my way back to traditional teachings and the vibrant culture of my people. My life became better, happier, more fulfilled and when I learned to drum and sing with it, I found a measure of redemption I had ached for.

            Nowadays, singing with a drum is natural and my wife and I often collaborate and sing and drum together. It’s wonderful. There is a resilient strength in drumming that feels right to us. Maybe it’s the echo of the eternal heartbeat within it that resonates with us so or maybe it’s just the knowledge that we are engaged in something tribal, something real, something ancient and something infinitely healing. Either way we are heartened and happy when we drum.

            But there’s also a traditional African drum, a djembo that came into my life a little over a year ago. Its head is made of goatskin and its body is the hollowed out trunk of a tree. There’s a hefty webbing of rope that keep s everything in place and provides a carrying sling. It has nothing to do with my Ojibway roots or heritage but it still affects me in the same good way.

            I’ve listened to African music over the years and part of my music collection is devoted to it. I’ve always found something similar in the tribal inflections in the music and the rhythms have always entranced me whether in the guitar of Ali Farka Toure or the mande, the gourd harp of Toumani Diabate. But until that drum came into our home I’d never considered how much that form of expression might fulfill me. I mean, I’m a North American Indian after all.

            But when I sit and play that drum and allow myself to just express my emotions through it, the time just slips away and I become transported just like I do when I use our traditional instruments. There’s joy to be found there and nowadays my life would be less without that African drum.

            I sat on our deck one sunny day in mid-morning. My wife was away and I was lonely. But it was a glorious spring day and I began playing a soft, slow beat on that djembo drum. I closed my eyes and just allowed it to flow out of me. I beat out that solitary rhythm and I was swept up in its spell, scarcely able to believe that it was coming from me. I don’t know how long I sat there with my eyes closed and my face raised to the sky and my hands beating out that soft rhythm but I do know that nothing else existed in my world except that sense of communion with the drum and the sky.

            When I stopped and looked around me it was the same day but the lonely feeling had vanished. In its place was a sense of order, of belonging, of being connected – exactly the feelings I get from using an Ojibway drum. There was no place for loneliness in that. There was no place for emptiness and there was definitely no place for self-pity. Instead there was only room for gratitude and a sense that Creation was smiling and that I was an essential part of that glee.

            There are a multitude of spiritual tools in this world. They are thousands of ways to be connected to spirit. I learned some time ago that I limit myself when I tell myself that I can only express myself with Native things. The truth is that there is no one race of people, no band, no tribe that has a claim on the experience of the spiritual or a claim to owning the right way.

Because it’s all about spirit. There’s no color or no race in spirit – there’s only connectedness and celebration and we all need that. So free yourself. Experience.

Medicine Wheel

 I

 When you come to stand upon the land there’s a sense in you that you’ve seen it all before. Not in any empirical way. Not in any western sense of recognition but in the way it comes to feel upon your skin, the way it floods you with recollection. Standing here beside this tiny creek in the mountains you suddenly remember how it felt to catch minnows in a jar. The goggle-eyed sense of wonder at those silvered, wriggling beams of light darting between stones and the feel of the water on your arms, cool and slick as the surface of dreams. You lived your life for the sudden flare of sunlight when you broke from the bush back then and the land beckoned through your bedroom window so that sometimes when the house was still and dark and quiet you stood there just to hear the call of it spoken in a language you didn’t know but filled you nonetheless with something you’ve grown to recognize as hope. So that you came to approach the land like an old familiar hymn, quietly, respectfully, each step a measure, each breath a softly exhaled note. That creek ran out of farmland and wound its way to the reservoir behind an old mill, the voice of it a chuckle, its edges dappled by the shadows of old elms and its light like the dancing bluish green eyes of the girl on the bus you could never find a way to say a word to. So you lay across a long flat stone to dip a mason jar elbows deep and hung there, suspended in your boyhood, while minnows nibbled at your fingertips and the breeze brought moss and ferns and rot and scent of cows and flowers to you and you let that arm dangle until the feeling went away then raised it with minnows frantic in the sudden absence of their world. Oh, you couldn’t keep them. Couldn’t carry them home like a carnival prize, give them names or place them in a bowl upon your desk. No, something in you understood even as a boy of twelve that some things ache to be free and the charm of them resides in their ability to be that freedom. So you let them go. Let them swim away. But when you rose you carried something of that creek, that cold against your arms, the sun-warmed stone against your belly, the breeze, the light and the idea of minnows away with you forever. So that standing here at fifty-five on the edge of another laughing creek you’re returned to there, that place, and you’re surprised to find it here like the feeling of opening your eyes after sleep and finding home all around you once again. It’s a journey, this life. A crossing of creeks on stepping stones where so much comes to depend on every careful placing of the foot.

 II

weweni bizindan

omaa ashi awe asemaa

listen careful

put the tobacco here

lay it soft upon the Earth and pray

say great thanks to your Mother

for everything she gives to you

and walk this way

in the path of the sun across the sky

for this is the great journey

we all must make

so that we can gather medicine

to make this life a ceremony

anami’aawin – a prayer

to all that is

and everything that will be

upon our journeys end

 a great walking
this trek whose final gift

is vision

III

 them they call it the medicine wheel but us

we never had no need for wheels

so it’s always been a sacred circle

then and now for us

see, wheels my boy, had to be invented

and this was always just a gift to people

something always was

and always gonna be

on accounta Spirit made it

them teachin’s never come from us

but we come to own them

when we make the journey

pass ‘em on then

make sure to honor

the gift they are that way

that’s the medicine way, my boy

gwekwaadziwin – respect

just knowin’ that everything and everyone

has their place here

and us sometimes we need to help

each other find our way

if that’s a wheel

me I hope it keeps on turnin’

 IV

you lay on this slant of hillside

staring up at a sky dimpled

with the light of countless

possible worlds

and it feels like you’re impaled

on it somehow

the motion of the planet

the tilt and whirl and spin of it

easing you upwards

back into star dust

Star People came once a long time ago

to sit at the fires of the Anishinabeg

and bring stories and teacher talk

that filled their world with dreams

the old ones say they were a gentle sort

and they brought the idea of ceremony

like a great and ancient light

and medicine was born

we all of us are energy they said

we all of us are dream and story

and in the end we return to it

to energy, to spirit, to the great

ongoing tale of our becoming

because there is no end, no finality

only a sacred circle spinning

within us

the spirit place we’re meant to travel

to find the truth of us, the song

we carry forward into dream

sung into story, sung into light

sung into spirit that comes to join

the energy of all things, the completeness

of that sacred circle spinning everywhere at once

all things coming true

together

the circle is wholeness

whose first principle is equality

that creates harmony

that creates the balance

that comes to mean

the humility that transcends all things

that evolves into the love

that’s born within and reflected out

to keep the circle spinning

they left us then

returning to the place of all beginnings

as the old ones say

and we began the journey to ourselves

the circle of us turning

into years into time into the history

of our time here

the story of us

all we ever have

all we carry with us

and all we leave behind

so you lay on a slant of hillside

against a bowl of stars

the earth pressed against your back

and the feel of that immense fullness

everywhere around you breathing

it into you until your rise finally

to make your way back

to whatever location held you in place

long enough for you to feel

lonely for the sky

 V

 You come to fifty-five like you came to thirteen. Expectant as a pup at the door waiting for someone to kick it open and send you gallumping out into the world again all legs and lungs and joy.  That’s the trick of it, really. That’s what they mean when people say medicine wheel. What your grandfather and the Old Ones called the Sacred Circle. Wisdom turning into itself again. The journey we make that brings us back to the only place it can – the place of all beginnings – the innocence we are born in and the great, wide, all-encompassing wisdom of that. Knowing that makes it fun to be Ojibway, the understanding that you get to be a boy again, charmed by the simple, the ordinary, the commonplace and seeing magic in it nonetheless. You’d make that journey anytime and the wonder of it lies in bringing others with you, sharing it, offering it to other travelers lost without a light. You stand looking upward at the sky together then, the awe you feel, bringing energy together, the sacred circle of you, joined by an everyday glory you only need to breathe to recognize, to haul into you to join, to hold in your chest like a wish that frees you. Great wheel, spin, spin.