Winter Count
The light is filtered through the trees and I’m feeling my internal rhythm in sync with winter. I felt the energy begin to shift and it continues to deepen. It’s been a paradoxical time of inner growth. A quiet dormancy followed by spurts of insight.
Three friends have walked on, finished their life on earth. Perhaps this is why I’m more contemplative than usual. Or maybe it’s because I’m recognizing that I’m in the winter of my life.
I walk 3 miles daily and often more, yet my body does not move as easily as it did in the past or will in the future. The year has been a time of quiet and focus and my dreams filled with messages. I’m seeing my face grow fragile, skin wrinkled, resembling soft clay soil, like the face of the earth mother. It’s been a time of assessing, aims. Coming to an understanding of my life, an acceptance of what I have and have not achieved. It’s been a year of peace, a time of power, a time of forgiveness and compassion. A year of giving up old patterns, surrendering to changes, embracing changes in preparation for the major changes that will come. Learning the lessons of the giveaway.
I am more focused and more aware that the reserves are no longer limitless. An awareness that where I chose to put my time matters. Choices. Decisions. What books, projects and articles do I want to put forth? And to be living after I am not living? What do I want to teach? Where do I want to live? I’m thinking about what my friend Patricia said when she was in a similar transition, “That attempting to make everything solid felt like she was braiding smoke.”
I'm thankful for my circle of friends who lift me higher than eagles fly as I move within another transitional period, filled with hard and soft spots, but also gifts. An awareness, an understanding of the importance of blending the spiritual with the every-day, with the practical. To make choices that bring stability and flexibility. Most of all I’m aware that each breath is not a given.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard
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.
University of Nebraska Press | Barns & Noble| Bookshop & IndieBound | Amazon
“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
"Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
