She is a wild, tangled forest with temples and treasures concealed within
It’s a beautiful spring morning. The scent of mountain sage and lavender are fragrant with their healing. Orange California poppies are reaching toward the sun. We are healthy and well and remain at home during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Disease pandemic. Now I have time to reflect and let all of the things I haven't had time to ponder settle within me.
Worry takes up residence in my mind. I push it away and instead think about the memoir writing workshop scholarship I was awarded in late January 2020 from a writing teacher who could see into my soul, understood what I needed most right now. She gifted me two full days of discovering, learning and gathering with other writers, new friends I fell in love with. The writing retreat lifted me from the despair I was feeling following the two new cancers my husband is facing. Left me knowing I will rise.
I was also able to complete a final draft of a memoir I have been working on for the past few years. Days later on February 1st my husband and I were on the road, a few miles from home, when a driver on the wrong side of a two-lane highway raced toward us. Without a moment to consider we swerved violently and fortunately there was a shoulder to catch us. Our tires did not screech and the car didn’t roll and we lurched out of the way, as the wrong-way driver sped by, inches away from our car. I could feel the velocity, the rush of wind, or an angel, move us out of danger. We sat on the side of the road, stunned. Aware we were now forever changed, on a different trajectory.
An hour later I received a phone call telling me Joy Harjo would be in town, giving a presentation on February 5, 2020 and would I like to have dinner with her?
Although it was supposed to be “just a dinner” with a small group of writers gathered, were the others aware? Could they feel it too? The healing energy that began to surround me, and this healing took hold, began to carry me.
The next day I gathered with my friends in the Native community, along with Joy. But this time at the University, with the Native Students, a place I frequent. Laughter, relaxed conversation, prayer, ceremony, outside on the grass, with the trees and birds on a sunny afternoon. The Coronavirus was not on our mind. It was out there, we were well aware, but it wasn’t here, not yet. Later that evening Joy played her music for us. Read to us. The student lounge was filled with Native people, Native students and the Elders, and I was comforted with our common Indigenous bond, our shared essence, with the jokes that didn’t need explaining. It was a good day to be alive.
The memoir writing workshop in January 2020 and the dinner and other gatherings with Joy and my friends in early February was the last time I gathered with people.
And then in late March our cat had a stroke and died. Charlene. The cat that rescued me. We met in 2012 when I worked at ASAP Animal Shelter Assistance Program. She came into care semi feral and sweet. Happy to retire from outdoor living at the young age of four and was thankful to move indoors. She taught me cat behavior, how to sleep with tigers and I followed her rules. She was a patient teacher. She raised me well. Her only agenda was me, always by my side. My best friend. A feral girl grown tame. Encouraged me to claim my wild and to lead with sweetness.
Now it is April and we are still home, following the required "Safe Distancing" due to the Coronavirus rapidly spreading. It means that I have been hunkering down at home for some time now. But I don’t mind. For me it is much like a vision quest.
I’m holding space for family and friends who are feeling too isolated, with too much time alone. Holding space for the pain they feel.
Yet for me, solitude is my friend. I need time to process all that has happened. I study the night skies. The stars give off a gentle light, softer than moonlight and I listen to the wind at dawn. The wind comes up from the west, smelling cool, like wet clay washed smooth by rainwater. Wind tangles against the foothills and this is when I discovered that I will never evolve into the soft, gentle, calm earth mother temperament I’m always reaching for. Instead, I’m like the wind blowing wild through a tangled forest.
She is a wild, tangled forest with temples and treasures concealed within.
―John Mark Green
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.
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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
"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
