House Hunting


I'm living on beauty, faith, and hope. I love sleeping in the trailer. The cold night air is renewal, and shadows fold into dim gray light. I've always wanted to live in a tiny house and now I am living in a small enough space allowing me to grow in leaps and bounds. The less stuff I have the more space I gain. 

I'm pretty sure that once we find a house, I will edit my belongings (again) and let go of more stuff. Before we moved, we reduced what we owned by half. Meanwhile, the stuff I decided to keep is in storage and I'm looking forward to the day when I can unpack and discover the things I once thought important and no longer need. 
 
Mountain living has lessons to teach. After forty years in the city, I've grown soft. Now, in my bones I'm remembering, regaining everything that once made me whole. Content, ready to embrace each new sunrise and hold what the day offers. It's a lesson that needs relearning and the good news is every 24 hours I can begin again, reaching, accepting. Any despair I'm clinging to is washed clean by the moonlight. I just need to remember to let it go, and the night sky reminds me. 
 
Growing up my life was divided into two seasons, the city and the mountains. During the school year we lived in Los Angeles, and the rest of the year in the mountains, which is why the scent of mountain air and pine trees call me home. 

Copyright Terra Trevor 2015-2026
Theme:
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