Rain. Essays. Journal Writing and Mountain Roads

Days of rain and the sea is wild. The rhythm of water falling on land or water changes tempo and quickens with the wind. I love the ocean in December. This morning there was a pause in the rain and my long walk took me out to the wharf. We have a large herd of sea lion who take shelter under the wharf. At high tide the waves were knocking sea lion off the wooden planks and only the most fierce, dominant, aggressive hung on, biting, fighting, barking, wounding each other. Dear heart… 
 
Then at the end of the wharf in the open sea I discovered a raft of about 50 sea lion huddled, pups in the center, surrounded by adult sea lion, floating, bobbing together, peacefully. 
 
While walking home the rain started up again. The water felt good on my face and my thoughts were washed clean. I made a big pot of split pea soup yesterday, and it will taste even better today. Soup already made also means I will have extra time to finish up a writing project and write a December journal post. Thinking about writing a post in my online journal here at Earth and the Great Sea, that’s when my thoughts begin to scatter. 
 
Weather forecast calls for rain again tomorrow and the day after. My dog has an appointment tomorrow with her vet for vaccinations. A trip to the vet’s office, seventeen miles away, requires driving the mountain road, in the rain. Yet to go anywhere away from the coastline where I live requires driving through the mountains. It’s fast going in good weather and without traffic, and a journey that can take any amount of time with traffic, when there is a car crash, or in the rain with downed branches on the highway. 
 
Lately, writing journal posts to publish here feels a lot like driving our mountain roads in the rain. I know where I want to go, windshield wipers and the yellow line guide me, but it requires faith, and the act of driving requires getting it right. 
 
Hitting a creative bull’s eye sentence that precisely expresses what I feel flickering in my mind also requires faith, and yet I don’t need to get it right when I write pages in my journal. I don’t have to chase the sentence. The purpose of journaling is to create a net to catch thoughts, feelings, rememberings, ponderings, before they disappear, or take flight. When I write in my journal it always takes me on a path I didn’t expect or plan to travel and always leads to something good, better, and like driving the mountain road in the rain, it requires faith. 
 
But for the past few weeks I have not been able find anything in my hard copy journal; meaning the spiral notebook where I scribble my thoughts to later chew on, the place that is always a rich unorganized mine and often a source for pulling writing topics that I can later spend hours and hours fully developing into essays worthy of publishing. My hard copy journal is also the source I pull ragged thoughts from that can be cleaned up, edited and made coherent for publishing here, in my online journal. 
 
This is when my mind begins turning over the difference between writing an essay and writing a journal post. They are not the same thing. Essay and journal writing are wholly different genres of writing. 
 
The fog in my mind lifts and I discover I’ve wandered off and lost my way. The goal when writing in a journal is not to produce a complete essay, with a fully developed beginning introducing the situation, the middle, where the story is developed, and the end, which brings the events to some kind of satisfying conclusion, and do all of this with perfect sentence structure and punctuation. 
 
Now I understand why I’ve been hesitant to post here. I fell into a dark hole, thinking I needed to offer up beautifully written and carefully edited monthly essays, of the sort I find worthy of publishing and spend many hours writing. I do write those essays. But I never, ever, planned to publish them here first. What I do is occasionally reprint them here, later, after they have been published in books, anthologies, in literary journals, other venues, some online or hardcopy. 

Here, within this journal my goal is to offer fresh, underdone, unprocessed, unfinished journal posts. 

Now my thoughts float light, free. I am a feather, drifting in the air. And I’m a writer, scribbling thoughts in her journal. 
 
Dear readers, thank you for dropping by and for holding space for me. I'm an essayist, the author of two memoirs, a contributor to fifteen books, and a devotee of soup-making, sunrise, sunset and moonlight. And this is my journal (my online journal) my open field to explore, tell stories, think out loud, chew on thoughts, find inspiration, write willy-nilly, and offer up incomplete drafts of essays that might, or might not, later be fully developed and published elsewhere. I live with my family in California, based between the ocean and redwoods. Morning walks and journal writing are my practice, mediation and prayer, along with open spaces of stillness and solitude. 

Thank you for wandering along with me. May beauty surround you.
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