Shedding what no longer serves, and embracing the new


We moved in last week, and I met a new neighbor this morning. Turtle Friend, crawled up from the lagoon and was sunning near the sidewalk. The lagoon is just beyond the eucalyptus and oak trees behind my home, close enough that I can see the water rippling when I stand at the edge of the trees. Bedroom window faces the lagoon preserve, and the ocean is half a mile away. 

It’s lovely here, a peaceful condo neighborhood, with kind neighbors and I’m beginning to feel at home. I’m unpacking, nesting, and I’m overwhelmed with how many things I have deemed useful, necessary and loved. Apparently, I’m not as minimal as I thought. After de-cluttering and downsizing before we left Santa Barbara, my stuff still won’t all fit in my 790 square foot condo. More giveaways and trips to the thrift store are in the making. 
 
It’s slow-going to move our stuff from the barn where it was stored in the mountains. Yesterday a load of old garage stuff from our former house in Santa Barbara accidentally was moved into our living room, and I had to help it get back up the mountain and back into the barn. Big smile. It’s only a 25-minute drive up to the mountain where our family lives. My life will now be divided between the ocean and mountains, Monterey Pine and Redwoods. 
 
I love my new home and neighborhood, it’s right for us in every way, and yet I’m feeling dislocated from myself, feeling the loss of how interconnected I was before. The friends I would see at the market, and they knew my name. 

I’m growing familiar with the new trees I drive under, learning how they catch the sunlight at different times of the day, and yet I’m lost in my new place without anyone really knowing me. Yet I have the great advantage of getting to re-know myself, without any long-held opinions from others getting in my way. 

This move is hard, disconcerting, and yet it's freeing too, very freeing.
 
Someday, maybe soon, I will make new friends who will see me in new and beautiful ways, a new community gathering around me, and they will recognize me, while my old friends who are circling with me into this new place and into a new me, form a bridge from my past to my future. 

Meanwhile, I’m behind with my writing work, overly busy getting my new paper trail in order with new medical, automobile, home, details needing to be done, the stuff of life. Still, every day I stop midstream in the middle of whatever I’m doing and walk to the ocean. I feel the wind. Cold sea air embraces me, wild and wonderful and I am restored. 

I’m holding faith, knowing I’m finding my new rhythm by observing, following my curiosity and by heightening my intuition. I know I’m on a good path because my dreams are abundant, clear and insightful.

Happier with Less Follow along with me.
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