I started to run again. It’s been 20 years, or more, since I ran anything further than a trip around the bases in a slow pitch rec league.
My people say that there are seven hills to life.
Each represents a stage, a period, a time frame where you gather experience and add it to the pack…
There’s a mountain to the south and east of us that humps up like a buffalo.
From the Paul Lake road heading west from Pinantan it sits there…
There is a medicine bowl in the living room.
These mornings when the sun eases across the top of the mountain above the lake are medicine times.
You come to touch the skin of this planet like you touch a lover.
There’s a tenuousness at first that equals the desire you feel, a quickening…
There are foals on the rangeland. Against the high sky heat of midday they are flopped on their sides, tails twitching and soaking up sun on their…
You walk this old timber road as if you were dreaming.
Ahead of you the dog splatters footprints in the fresh snow and the curves and undulations of…
Some musicians are like surgeons. They wield their soulfulness like scalpels and when they play they slice through the fat of our living to reveal…
From Kamloops you climb out of the arid valley onto the flat, prickly belly of plateau. Then you steer into the hard slant of curve before climbing…
There was a time, my people say, when the animals prepared to abandon man.
A time before time, when their role as teachers in living with the world…
There are times when something as simple as the rain that freckles slate grey water can bring you back to it – that feeling you discovered in…
I write in the dimness of morning. Outside the world is a shape shifter.
Light eases things back into definition, their boundaries called from…
The stars are flung across the breadth of the heavens like seeds of light.
They wink and glimmer in their bed of darkness and against the wobble of…
There are silences that come to inhabit you, fill you, colour you, reside in you like a dream undreamed.
I learned to drive when I was 10.
It was an old grey Allis-Chalmers tractor and my job was to pull the wagon where the men of my adopted family…
I can navigate this cabin darkness by feel.
It’s like a second skin to me now and I move through it casually, stepping around the islands of…
I didn’t have any native heroes when I grew up.
When they took me from my people and dropped me into the non-native world of foster homes and…
I saw my first movie in a theatre in 1964.
Back then a movie cost a quarter and for an extra 15 cents you could get popcorn, a handful of Jujubes…
We saw wolves on the ice. There were two of them, a large dark, heavy male and a smaller duskier colored female.
I became a long-distance, cross-country runner when I was 15.
Back then my life was filled with turmoil and running presented me with a sense of…