The words in this book are embers from the tribal fires that used to burn in our villages. They are embers from the spiritual fires burning in the hearts, minds and souls of great writers on healing and love. They are embers from every story I have ever heard. They are embers from all the relationships that have sustained and defined me. They are heart songs. They are spirit songs. And, shared with you, they become honour songs for the ritual ways that spawned them. Bring these words into your life. Feel them. Sit with them. Use them. For this is the morning, excellent and fair…
As dawn broke every morning, the late Ojibway author Richard Wagamese would light a candle, burn the four medicines (sage, cedar, sweetgrass, and tobacco), read widely from global spiritual traditions, and take some solitary time to meditate upon those readings; eventually journaling his learnings before getting down to the work of writing that was his “life and passion and career”. Collected here as Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations, the learnings are grouped into several categories (Stillness, Harmony, Trust, etc.), with just one or two passages per page and many beautiful (stock) photographs. There is identifiable truth on every page of this collection — these are writings that speak soul to soul — and if I had one small complaint, it would be that grouping the meditations by category had the slightest feeling of repetition, but ultimately, truths glimpsed by slightly different angles are still truths and a gift to the reader. This is a collection I will return to again and again and my soul cannot give fewer than five stars. I could have shared something from every page, but here are a few samples:
Stillness
In this waking world, I am awakened. In this easing of shadow, I reclaim the light. I am not alone here. I sit with my ancestors, singing this day into being — and I am made more.
Harmony
It is love that brings us all together. This human family we are part of, this singular voice that is the accumulation of all voices raised together in praise of all Creation, this one heartbeat, this one drum, this one immaculate love that put us here together so that we could learn its primary teaching — that love is the energy of Creation, that it takes love to create love.
Reverence
There are times in your life you are flung into an undiscovered country of being, a place beyond time and tide and detail, the full magical breath of you heaving with the indescribable joy of being, and you realize then that parts of you exist in exile and completeness is journeying to bring them home.
Joy
I’m not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I’m here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times. I’m here to pray and chant and meditate and sing and find Creator in a blues riff, a sunrise, a touch or the laughter of children. I’m here to discover ME in all of that. I’m here to add clunky, chunky and funky bits of me to the swirls and swagger and churn of life and living. It demands I be authentic. So when you look out at the world, that’s me dancing in the fields…
From sharing his processes to reaching out a hand in shared humanity to even those who have hurt him and his people, Wagamese was a writer of uncommon generosity. My soul wants to be dancing in the fields by his side — Dance, dang it, that's what feet are for! — unreservedly the highest recommendation.
