Friends. Family. The Natural World. Spirituality. Books. Reading. Writing. Music. Race. Culture. Ethnicity. Love. Discoveries. Understanding new things. Hearing Stories. Being in the moment. Letting go of expectations, the outcome. Dreaming. Tender Memories. Water. Rivers. The Sky. Trust. Faith. Vulnerability. Prayer. Ceremony. Seeing the Spark and the Pain in each person I meet. Listening. Deep Listening. All things ethnic and working class. The margins. Borderlands. Raw, unedited versions of music and writing. The ordinary. The Monk's Journey. The Rez. Feeling connected to my Sharecropper, Indigenous, Indian, Mixedblood, German, Jewish, under educated, hard, hard, hard life ancestors. Meeting people of great privilege and hearing their stories. Learning. Becoming real.
What Brings Me Joy?
Sunrise. Twilight. Sunset. Owl sounds pressing against the night. The moon. Rivers. Mountains. Trees. Laughter. Sleep. Black coffee. Dark chocolate. Fiddle music. Banjo music. Live music, all music. Reading. Writing. Walking. Rough draft journal writing. Organizing. Day dreaming. Puttering. Lizards. Garden spiders. Dogs and cats, all animals, and wild life. Friends and family. Home comfort. Making soup. Clean sheets. My online group of women friends, all 65 of us, from all over the world, gathered together in one conversation. Our annual community powwow with 40 years of memories in my soul. Clouds. The night sky. Memories of my son, memories of Luke. Good wine. A great pair of jeans and sandals on my bare feet. Solitude. Ceremony. The serious, silly and just having fun. Astrology. Learning about Tarot Cards, a new found joy. This moment. This day. Yesterday, and thoughts of maybe tomorrow.
My Big Secret
I'm shedding things from my life. Old habits, old thought patterns, old wished for positive behaviors that I no longer want to reach for. Goodbye Balance, you no longer serve me. Now I'm blending. Blending this with that in my life, because if we take care of the moments the years will balance themselves. And I'm tossing out the fear of it being discovered that I'm afraid. All that I'm afraid of, is getting smaller, shrinking as I walk into the unknown. I'm tossing out old emotional patterns I wanted to grow past. I pointed all guilt out the door. Go! Leave! You are no longer welcome here. The wide open field of me, is marked with boundaries.
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
