Terra Trevor: We are heading into the season I love best. Cool and steady, dependable

We are heading into the season I love best. Cool and steady, dependable

Winter arrived early here. We’ve had days of rain and yesterday the low was thirty-eight, with a high of fifty-eight. Soup weather. At night I hear the waves in the distance pound the shoreline. Winter beach grows wild. High tides claim the sand, fog and wind are my steady companions. Up on the mountain, a twenty-minute drive from here, frost glistens in gentle sunlight. On my morning walk through the redwoods, I zip up my jacket, and enjoy the chilly shade, and the freedom of being without a hat, without sunglasses. Patches of soft sun find me as I traverse the path, and I feel the warmth for a few moments, and then on the next stretch of the road, above me the trees are so tall I can barely see the sky.

We are heading into the season I love best. Cool and steady, dependable. Around these parts there is strong identity with either the beach or the mountains. Folks near the sea are beach oriented, and on the mountain where I spend much time the culture is all-mountain identity. I’m both ocean and mountains, and the mountain part of me is strongest.

It occurs to me that I have always been a border person, half this and half that.

At the moment, I have a winter root vegetable soup simmering, and I can't put the book I’m currently reading down.

What have I been reading? Just finished “In Love” by Amy Bloom. It was a staff favorite at my local bookstore, and I agree. And last week I fell in love with “The All of It” by Jeanette Haien.

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

Pushing up the Sky: A Memoir