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240 pages, Hardcover
First published July 22, 2008
Stories are meant to heal. That's what my people say, and it's what I believe. Culling these stories has taken me a long way down the healing path from the trauma I carried. This book is a look back at one native life, at the people, the places and the events that have helped me find my way to peace again, to stand in the sunshine with my beautiful partner, looking out over the lake and the land we love and say � yes.
There are times when something as simple as the rain that freckles slate grey water can take me back to it � that feeling I remember from my boyhood when the ragged line of trees against the sky filled me with a loneliness that had nothing to do with loss. The land sometimes carries an emptiness you feel in you like the breeze.
It's not a sad feeling. Rather it's a song I learned by rote in the tramp of my young feet through the rough and tangle of the bush that shaped me. I come to the land the same way still, expectant, awake to the promise of territories beyond the horizon, undiscovered and wild. All those years in cities never took away that feeling of tremendous awe.
All Canadians have felt time disrupt them. Everyone has seen the culture they sprang from altered and rearranged into a curious melange of old and new. So the country between us is not strange. We all carry a yearning for simpler, truer times. We all crave a reaffirmation of our place here, to hear the voices of our people singing on the land.