I GET A lot of letters and emails from people who have read my books, seen my television commentaries or heard my radio segments. It’s gratifying to receive them. So often a writer is lost in those undiscovered territories from which stories, songs and poems emerge, and it’s good to hear that my work is affecting folks. Most of the correspondence is congratulatory, people let me know how much they’ve appreciated my words and my stories. But sometimes the channel runs deeper. People write to me about the whole gamut of the Native experience in Canada, tell me how much they care about achieving equality and harmony, share their thoughts on the efforts we need to undertake to build a better country. I love to read those messages. They show me that the spiritual impetus to change neighbourhoods, communities and nations is alive and well out there.
Some of the messages I get are darker. People write to me about feeling lost, about feeling cut off from their identities, about the lack of a true cultural linchpin. They tell me how much they crave a respite from the travails of trying to “find” themselves. Some non-Native people write me to say they’ve found something in the spiritual ways of Native people that resonates with them. Sometimes, they feel guilty about appropriating something that’s not their own.
Those letters and emails are all hard to read. They remind us of Thoreau’s words: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and they go to the grave with the song still in them.” None of us is immune to the pain of dislocation. All of us long to make peace with our identities. Perhaps the problem is not so much connecting with our cultural selves as feeling solid in the idea of ourselves as human beings, as men and women. Everybody has a song they want to sing.
My good friend Jack Kakak away always maintained that it is our brokenness that leads us to healing. Each of us, in our own way, lives a fractured life. There would be no need for spirituality if this weren’t so. By the time he was an elder, Jack had learned that the search for spirituality is the great bond that joins us. The problems of the world are not political in nature—they are spiritual. The difficulty comes when we try to solve those problems with our minds alone. Our heads can’t lead us home, though; spiritual matters must be resolved with the heart. The head has no answers, and the heart has no questions, Jack would say.
Following our hearts may sound simple, but it’s incredibly difficult to do. I’ve come to realize that living up here. Some days I do better than others. Some days, I’m able to see teachings in every leaf and rock.
It took a lot of work for Debra and me to get settled in our mountain home. We struggled with confusion and doubt, lack of skills and our initial lack of vision. Renovating this place required a large measure of faith and a bushel of desire. Neither of us is handy with tools, or even comfortable with them, but we were determined to learn.
We decided to start with the deck. The view from there was spectacular, but the stairs were wobbly, and most of the wood had rotted. We bought some home-repair manuals and studied them. We figured out how we wanted that deck to look, and then we set to work. We sawed supports, screwed them into place with our new power drill and cut lattice work to size. We managed to build a new set of stairs. We were pretty proud of ourselves when we were finished.
Next, we tackled the living room. The old bachelor who had built the house wasn’t big on décor. We ripped out musty old carpet and an ugly pair of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The walls hadn’t seen paint in two decades, the ceiling fan was on its last legs, and the hanging lamp desperately needed replacement. We laid new laminate flooring, installed new patio doors, and replaced the questionable woodstove with one that met current safety standards.
We redid the kitchen the following autumn. There’s a new floor in there now, too, new baseboards and fresh paint. After that, we converted the old garage into an art studio and office space. That was challenging. But I write in there now and Deb crafts fused glass. The confidence and skills we’ve gained will soon go into finishing the master bedroom.
Sure, some of our work looks amateurish. The paint is less than perfect in places, and the joints aren’t always flush. But there’s something special about shaping your own environment. I’d never experienced that before. It’s not the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval we’re after. It’s the good feeling of working together to create a place where our spirits can rest, where our creative energies can flourish, where peace can be found in a cozy chair.
We changed our house from the inside out. That’s the only way it ever really works, and that’s true for spiritual matters, too. It takes perseverance and commitment; no doubt about that. As Jack Kakakaway told me, to change you need a quality that is best expressed through an Ojibway word: yah-gotta-wanna. He was funny, that Jack. And he was right.