Last night I dreamt that you were still here. You were very unwell again, something had gone wrong, mismanaged, and I had to leave to get to you immediately. This time it took chartering a plane to reach the wilderness North of San Francisco where you live.It was cold, snowy, a storm coming. The terrain in my head is a bit more clear now, this combined wilderness in my dreams, where my life story arc has a set of locations, wound into one imaginary region. The wilderness is a blend between the Redwoods of the North and the Pines of the Lake Placid.

One of the best days of my life was spent there, around Lake Placid, on the rolling roads of the New York State highway, going up, around, and to the left, around the region. I can feel my aunt’s spirit now, that day we spent together just in the presence of God and nature. My aunt, like my grandmother, is very conceinscious of how someone is feeling, and doesn’t force words. The silence speaks for itself, that’s where the truth lies. This is the Indian-ness that I spoke to Camille about as she has it too. I think I do too, it’s why I nervously chatter sometimes, or even try to may people feel more at ease.

I feel it so strongly, the silence. I feel the squirming of others in it. So I fill the space, as I really don’t know what to do either. Why speak unless you have something of value to add to the conversation? Mind your manners, be polite, but what’s the point of it all? Well that’s polite society, without these exchanges we would just be savages. So what if we are mean’t to be so? Perhaps that is the whole point of it all. Maybe trying to get back to the land is just that, to return to where we should have been all along. Not in cities, or on air bases, or travelling from town to town. Maybe we never should have left in the first place, been moved, or taken. Did anyone I come from leave the countryside for a better life? Or did they leave the city to come to America in hopes of a bit of land of their own?

Some of these questions can never be answered, that is sure. Though I know there are records, and documents, how can one know the intention of the people of the past? Maybe this summer I will find some answers, when I go back to California to a home that is now mine, though it will forever be the home of my mother. For that I am truly grateful, to have a place to go to, as it has been so long that any of us have felt at home. I don’t know how this was so difficult a concept for our Uncle to understand, that we now had a home, together, as a family, and nothing in the world, in our world, was more important than that. Now he sends us emails to help him find a contractor as he wants to paint it. Not sure why he must be so involved, but thank goodness he is.

There are so many clues in the house, so many boxes as yet unopened, which have answers hidden here and there. It is a house and an archive, one which has had no secretary to take charge for 20 years or more. There are at least two books about my Mother’s side and her sister has done research as well. The questions remain about my Father’s side, the past, my childhood. Hopes, dreams, fears and worries all swimming around together in a pool of yuck. The more I wake up to myself the more questions I have about where I came from, why I am this way, and where else I could have ended up. I guess everyone feels this way on some level. The question is, how much of this can you let seep into your daily awareness, and change who you are when the insight comes? To break free from the past, to move forward as an integrated and whole being, in thought and action – this is all I want to understand.