The room is unheated and on chilly days I wrap the wool blanket around me. I write the first draft to find the meaning. In the second draft I put in everything I left out. And then I take out everything that doesn't fit, in order to make it sound like I just thought it up.
All those wonderful hours writing, with my dogs sleeping at my feet, while a pot of pinto beans simmered on the back of the stove, and afternoon sun poured through the window, with tiny dust particles floating in the sunlight. Years of indigo hours of early morning rewriting and revising, while my three sweet teenagers slept and the cat walked across my keyboard.
I always begin with three pages of raw, rough draft writing. But I don’t always save it. The process is the product. Although my friend Luke tells me there is no product, it’s all process.
Today I write with my grandchildren about, while the world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts, reverberate in all of us. What guarantees do we have that the future will be any better if we neglect the present.
Time slips softy. One morning I will drink my last cup of coffee after a night of dreaming my last dream. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. I feel the tides as they answer the moon.
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
