maybe i just

maybe it happened when i was hanging off the back of a golf cart going too fast on the reservation on my way to the big pow wow with my sisters. 

maybe it happened when i met her for the first time ten years ago. my mentor, my sister. 

maybe it’s because she believed in me when i didn’t believe in myself yet.  

maybe it was the first round dance she took me to and how she corrected me gently and taught me protocol. 

maybe it was the office i cried in at work when things got out of control or the deerskin drum i donated so others could access culture and songs. 

maybe it was realizing that i had been missing something, something i told myself that i didn’t deserve, something i told myself was reserved for other people. maybe it was the jealousy in my throat when the beautiful girls at work would talk about weekend adventures with girlfriends and girl gangs. 

maybe it was that i didnt know what to ask for because i didn’t have the name for what i was missing, what i needed. 

maybe i just needed the land and the sagebrush and my sisters and a free pancake breakfast and screeching through a pow wow and taking phone calls on a broken pay phone. maybe i just needed them. maybe they need me too. 

and what a privilege to be in community to bear witness and to laugh and eat and connect and have a grizzly bear summer. 

and i feel it alongside my sun pink skin looking out into the valley of coyotes and medicine – maybe this is what home is. 

maybe this is what connection is. 

maybe this is what joy is. 

i look back, as i often do, to the girl on the kitchen floor with hands twisted into claws, full of grief. she could not have ever imagined the woman i am now, this all would have been a distant and impossible dream. 

maybe that’s what resilience is, but fuck it, i don’t know if all i want is resilience anymore. i want sweetness in my mouth and my heart – the taste of haskap berry ice cream and warmed cherry flesh between my teeth and i want the drum to guide my heart. 

i want weekends that reek of sunscreen and a bag full of cedar and smokes and roadside snacks and the eagle overhead and the creek water on my feet and lemonade and new jewelry and songs and stories and jokes told over malt vinegar and french fries.  

and i would go through all that grief again to feel this alive and this wild and this young and to feel this grateful to god and creator and my sisters and the land and my mother and my lovers and this time and this space and the woodland in my blood and the desert in my heartbeat. 

life really is beautiful, you know. 

miigwech for these teachings.