Moving and a Traveling Song
In March of 1978, I put the things I wanted to keep into storage, gave away other belongings, packed my backpack, left Los Angeles and spent two months traveling throughout Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England. We spent days visiting my husband’s family, and weeks wandering alone.
When we returned to the US we moved to Santa Barbara, where we remained for forty-three years.
Forty-three years of dogs and cats and children loved and raised. Newfound friendships forged. Years of jobs, some treasured, others tolerated, favored community-volunteer-work, favorite neighborhoods, bookstores and cafes.
Now it is March 2021 and I am on the move again. Giving away many things, packing up only what is beautiful, useful and necessary. Still, I’m leaving with a lot more than we arrived with, letting me know that I’m not as minimal as I once thought.
We are moving north. Our tiny temporary home is located in the mountain with family nearby and redwood trees line my morning walks.
Meanwhile, I’m reacquainting myself with the young woman I once was, age twenty-four, who packed her backpack with three pair of jeans, three shirts, three sweaters, a Lanz flannel nightgown, warm socks, an extra pair of shoes, an umbrella, a small purse, and put on her coat
and took a red-eye to London. With an open heart and my pockets filled with faith I began a long journey that I am now completing.
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
