Doors and Monsters

This morning I listened to a CBC program (The Current) about the recent sales spike of the George Orwell book, "1984", following the revelation of the National Security Agency's capacity to monitor individuals. It was a great program. At the same time, I was finishing reading the book, "The Icarus Deception", by Seth Godin that was talking about creating art and connecting with people without fear or shame.This talk about art and sharing and censorship and the concepts in the book like double speak and thought crime helped me start considering how these ideas are at play in my own little universe of thought and what I am putting out into the world.

What kind of connections am I trying to make? What is important to me? What messages and conversations am I hopeful to share and have? I’ve been realizing that it’s a good idea to revisit these questions every once and awhile. As I look back over the blog, I see more clearly, the things that I care about emerging in themes. Language, Treaties, Sustainability, Art, Community, Family. Education is an important one as well, but everyday, another line of thought occurs to me and my understanding of these things expands and deepens.

For many years, I’ve been my own censorship police and I think this growing understanding is a big part of the reason for why that’s happened. I mostly censored myself because I was afraid of saying something that might hurt other people’s feelings and because I was worried about saying something that might be misinterpreted or incorrect. I was also afraid that if what I said was taken wrongly or as anything other than an opinion or reflection that it would somehow reflect on the work that I was doing or the organizations I was doing it for. Just lately, I have been realizing that there is something silly about my censorship and yet, I don't regret for a minute that I've employed it up to this point.

It makes sense to me that I did - I just don't want to do it out of fear. A lot of what I have learned comes directly from being open to other people’s ideas and thoughts. It comes from their experiences, achievements, failures, dreams, goals, and wishes. And it comes on a variety of environments and platforms – their Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, blogs, conversations, books, articles, journals, legends, stories, jokes and expressions. People who faced their fears, found ways to share and enriched lives as a result.  Moving past the fear of sharing and sharing in a respectful yet super creative way is one of my goals for the rest of the year.  

Happily, the Treaty is also there as the support throughout all of this; peace, friendship and respect - these are the values that can balance and guide me as I continue the learning, writing and sharing process. I also realized that even if I don’t have all the answers and I learn a lot from other places, I don’t want to punish myself for not having them by not creating more opportunities to learn and hear other perspectives.

I want to enrich my life and experiences through sharing and I definitely don’t want to punish myself so much that I don’t share the things that I care most deeply or am most excited about. This seems to happen mostly with the things that I write about, the fiction and the art. Moving forward, I have to keep finding positive and interesting ways to share the things that I have learned or that I think about, and most especially – the things that I create. I think this will be a really exciting part of my ongoing journey.

In other and related news, I have just returned from a short road trip to Kahnawake, Montreal and Vermont. It was wonderful and refreshing. I enjoyed Vermont because I loved being able to travel across the islands in Lake Champlain (not the lake’s Ogwehoweh name), seeing the mountain range and learning about the lake monster. Montreal was filled with artists and their creations - jewelry, paintings, pictures, music and more. I enjoyed Kahnawake because it was another Ogwehoweh community that was working hard to do things, make things, and move forward. Very creative place and they have a great newspaper called The Eastern Door that has an upbeat tone that resonated with that part of me that wants to constantly point out and celebrate good and little things.

Language revitalization also had a really prominent place in their paper. Visiting that community was definitely an inspiration, made me see a few other really cool things that would be fun to do.

It’s been a whirlwind of a week. Here's to opening doors and facing monsters.  I'm excited to jump back into projects after this time away but speaking of whirlwinds, it’s been almost a year since I started this blog! It's been a strange experience writing it, but I'm definitely happy that I did.

I’ll be cooking up something special for the one-year anniversary, stay tuned! Nya:weh,

S 

The Magic of Stories

Stories have always had a powerful impact on me.

Reading is the way that I connect to the world and stories or writing of any kind is one of the ways that I’m able to deepen or broaden that connection.

I have been writing a lot of stories lately.

Writing but not sharing them – at least not yet.

Sometimes, I become somewhat impatient and want the stories to come out perfect and flawless with rich characters and deeply laid and riveting plots.

But this hasn’t been my experience.

My experience has been slow and at times, it’s been agonizing.

Instead of pumping out precisely rendered prose, I’ve been writing and writing and editing and learning more about how this process works for me and for the art of storytelling. I’ve been learning how to tell the truth in my stories even when I can’t tell it to myself, and I’ve been thinking long and hard about how or if I want to share them.

I’m not sure it it’s important that people read my stories. In fact, I’m almost certain that it’s not.

But what is important is that people have a good experience from their interactions with me.

Period.

And that usually happens when I’m able to find peace in myself, with who I am, with why I’m here, with knowing what I can do to help instead of worrying what my purpose is.

I think I’ve said it elsewhere on this blog, but I’ll say it again.

Finding peace and having healthy relationships is hard work.

But it’s one of the things I’m happy and grateful to be working at. Writing brings me a lot of peace and when I’m caught up in something, hours and days can drift away.

The same thing happens when I read.

I wonder often how I can bring these two passions together better.

I’m getting closer I think.

For the most part, I write stories about the things that both interest and excite me, things that I have questions about or things that light me up inside and make my imagination run wild with imagery.

Not writing feels like I’m not really here - not really connecting back to the world.

It makes me feel like I’m missing something.

Luckily, I haven’t felt that feeling in a little while.

What I have felt, is this desire to take another small step and illustrate those stories or compile them into a little anthology and share them.

Even if it’s just for family and friends, I want the experience to be a fantastic one. Which is probably why I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of experience I have when I’m reading a book.

I just finished the book, The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

I loved this book.

I loved it because I used to play basketball in high school and I went to school for most of my life at a nearby community where I was one of only First Nations students.

I loved it because I love reading and writing comics and I understand what it’s like to try and navigate your way in a relationship that no one teaches you about – i.e. the treaty relationship.

I loved it because I could relate to virtually every aspect of it (except the fact that I’m not a dude) - to the close knit family, to the alcoholic family members, to the mistrust and loss of hope. To the kind of systemic racism that some people like to pretend doesn’t exist, that others fight against and that some people believe cannot be overcome.

To the feeling that you’ve somehow turned traitor against your own people because of the path your life takes and for showing how laughing often has the same effect as crying. But most of all, I loved that Sherman Alexie was not afraid to share Junior’s story.

It’s a story that I hope others are able to read and enjoy.

It made me realize that I’m not alone and that I want to let go of my fears too.

To not be afraid of connecting with people and to not be sad when connections don’t work out the way I wish they would.

It made me want to chase my dreams. To hope harder.

To write more.

To read more.

To listen and share more.

To strive for more.

It made me fall a little bit in love with books again and it made me want to read and find even more stories by indigenous storytellers.  This is the magic of stories after all - the way they make you want to share them.

And that is exactly what I will set out to do.  

Wish me luck!

 And if you are a writer, I wish you all kinds of magic as well!

S