In those years, I was driven by anger. People would often tell me, “Richard, you have to have faith.” That irritated me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to have faith in, and it seemed to me that faith was a show of weakness. A man needed to act without advice or aid from anyone, I thought. So I created what I thought was a clever response. When someone told me I needed to have faith, I ’d retort that the word faith was actually an acronym for Find Another Indian To Hassle.
We militants had a mantra in those days that was reputed to have come from the great Lakota Sioux war chief Crazy Horse. Everyone in what we called “the struggle” used this mantra. The words were, “This is a good day to die.” We believed those words meant that, as warriors, we should be prepared to lay down our lives for the people, to fight to the end. We wore our red headbands, camouflage clothing, fringed buckskin vests and moccasins with pride, bearing that brave statement before us. Everywhere I met young Native people, that mantra was what brought us together.
One summer during that time I attended the Indian Ecumenical Conference in Morley, Alberta. A large number of traditional teachers and medicine people came there to share their teachings and ceremonies. Morley was the place to be seen if you were any sort of radical. Those teachings and ceremonies were what we had pledged to protect, and being there when they were practised was the ultimate proof of your worthiness.
The spirit and energy of the gathering made me uncomfortable, though. I felt wrong there—that was the only word I could find for my anxiety. As I sat in sessions and participated in rituals, I felt invalid. So, because I was not a brave person, I reacted out of my adopted militancy. Whenever I felt challenged, I simply repeated the magic words of inclusion: today is a good day to die.
One of the teachers overheard me one night. Albert Lightning was a Cree, a highly regarded ceremonialist and teacher. He approached me when there was no one else around and asked me to sit with him. Once we were comfortable, he looked at me for a long moment. “What are you so afraid of?” he asked.
He asked it directly, without an ounce of judgement in his voice. Instead, he sounded concerned and compassionate.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” I said in reply.
He nodded and looked down at the ground. When he looked back up at me again, there was an earnest expression on his face. “What you said over there, those words, do you know what they mean?”
I gave him the stock militant answer, and he nodded again. “When Crazy Horse was with us,” he said, “he was a great leader. He spent a great deal of time with spiritual people, and he learned the principles and values that make a leader great. He took the time to learn that the foundation of the warrior way is always spiritual.”
Albert paused for a moment, then continued. “When Crazy Horse used the words ‘today is a good day to die,’ he did not mean that he was so brave he could give his life in battle without question. He meant that he had considered the questions. Before he took up his war lance, he spent time in meditation and prayer. He looked at the issue that might cause him to go into battle and asked himself if that issue was a worthy one. He asked himself if he was prepared to continue his spirit journey in another form over that issue.
“But most importantly, he thought about his foe, a man not unlike himself, with a family, loved ones, a tribe, a community. He thought about how the people of his foe would feel if that man were taken away on the battlefield. He prayed for their well-being, for their prosperity, for their happiness. He prayed for their future.
“If the idea of going into battle was just as strong once he had done all these things, Crazy Horse said to himself, ‘If I can pray for my enemy and want those things for him that I want for myself, if I can consider him as a sacred part of Creation, like myself, then I am ready to go to battle. Today is a good day to die.’
“So when you use those words, you must know that they are spiritual words. They are not militant, angry or vengeful words. Nor are they prideful. They are the words of one who has reflected on the sanctity of life. They are the words of a truly brave person who is able to face the foe with integrity.”
Albert Lightning was a very wise man. It would be years before I really got what he had told me. There was still a long time on the merry-go-round of drunkenness ahead of me. I drank because I could not defeat the foe in myself, could not shake the conviction that I was unworthy of happiness. That belief was at the core of my being, and drink washed it away momentarily. Bravery is spiritual energy, and fear is a spiritual lack. As long as I reacted out of fear, I could not face the foe with integrity. Without integrity, the battles you fight are based in ego and pride. That is the essence of what Albert Lightning told me that night.
Eventually, I found a teacher who helped me explore the dark channels of my feelings of unworthiness. She was a therapist named Lyn MacBeath. She guided me back to the days of my childhood, and together we traced the roots of my wounded psyche and spirit. She taught me that I had the strength to move beyond those primal wounds if I would allow myself to work at it. I did, and I healed. I did that work with the belief that I was born as a sacred part of everything. I did the work out of bravery, and in the process I discovered the true meaning of faith.
Ever since then, I have striven to fight any foe with integrity. Every time I am successful, I recall the words of Crazy Horse: “Today is a good day to die.”
The Roller Coaster
THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH on my desk that was taken in the fall of 2003. Every time I look at it, I smile. Snapshots capture those tiny electric moments you want to save forever.
My girl and I are in that photo. We look like excited children. Deb has her arms raised in triumph and surprise. I’m sitting beside her with a fist pumped, obviously thrilled. We were both approaching our fifties at the time, but you wouldn’t know that from our faces. We were on a plummeting roller coaster, in the full pitch of that belly-dropping fall.
Deb and I had been together for six months by then. Our lives were a rollercoaster ride of discovering each other, finding each other’s rhythms and feeling the world shift beneath our feet. We’d both been through a pair of marriages and a rolodex of other failed relationships. It was our emotional resumés that brought us together, actually. We both knew and appreciated the difficulties of the journey.
We didn’t come together in one of the awesome emotional and sexual explosions of our younger years. Instead, we eased together in a confluence of streams. I was a First Nations man, and she was the progeny of some of the transplanted miscreants who built Australia. Her great grandmother was a West Indian slave bought on a Fremantle pier. Both of us had struggled to find our identities, and then to express them. We had both been adopted as kids. We bore similar wounds from that and both of us had drunk too much too often. Finding each other was a breath of fresh air.
Neither of us was a very conventional person. I ’d spent years on the street, behind bars and working a host of dead-end jobs. She’d worked on West Coast fishing boats, studied fused glass art with a renowned craftsman, lived in New York and partied through the hey-days of Vancouver in the early 1980s, when it was a thrilling cultural and entertainment hot spot. We both knew thieves and whores and strippers, drug dealers, bikers and madmen. We’d come to call some of them friends. We’d also rubbed elbows with financiers, celebrities, entrepreneurs, politicians and other high rollers. Somehow in that exotic mix of influences, we’d become ourselves.
The roller coaster in the picture is the old-fashioned coaster on the grounds of Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition. It brings to mind the days of nickel candy floss, twenty-five-cent midway rides and a fifty-cent admission charge at the gate. The roller coaster’s wooden frame and the small tin-can cars that shake and rattle along the track promise adventure. The romantic kind, not the gut-wrenching thrill of more modern, gravity-defying rides. Even so, it took us a few months to screw up our courage. We talked about the old roller coaster a lot, imagining how it would feel to ride it, remin
iscing about the carnival rides of our youth. But whenever it came time to head to Playland and make it happen, there was always something more adult to do. We could see the roller coaster from where we lived, however, and in the evening sun it beckoned to us. Finally, one day there we were, walking up the ramp with our tickets in our hands.
The pleasure started as we waited in line. The faces of the people getting off the roller coaster were flushed with excitement. Their ride had lit up young and old alike from the inside. I was fascinated to see such joy. I shifted from foot to foot, amazed at how quickly the kid in each of us comes to the fore. Neither Deb nor I spoke as we handed over our tickets and stepped into the car. A 1/22/2011 spear of excitement pierced my belly. Deb and I were laughing, but it was that high-in-the-throat laugh of nervousness and tension. Anticipation gripped us as the roller coaster began the long, slow pull to the top. Then came the drop. Thirty metres almost straight down, then back up in a whoosh of air and energy that drew screams from us. The next plunge was even more of a rush.
We whipped around each bend and turn, giddy with uncontrollable laughter. There was none of the usual adult need to appear composed or proper. It was pure experience, and we felt totally alive.
We’ve been back to the roller coaster a few times since then. On each visit, I feel young and wild and dumbstruck with joy all over again. Each time, my girl and I return to our child spirits as we let go of everything that keeps us earthbound.
Staying in touch with that kid within is the secret to becoming a wise and more centred being. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. Maybe I’d have been a tad less grave, taken life’s sudden turns and drop-offs less seriously. I’d definitely have had more fun if I’d allowed myself more freedom to howl with laughter and be filled with wonder. Whenever I look at that picture on my desk, I remind myself to do that from now on.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
IT WAS ROBERT FROST who wrote that “Nature’s first green is gold.” In that glorious eight-line poem, Frost went on to assert that “nothing gold can stay.” The majority of Western critics have taken Frost to mean that anything beautiful must fade, that nothing can remain pure. When I first read the poem in the early 1970s, that’s what I figured he meant, too. But our understanding of poetry, like our understanding of life, transforms with age. Standing here today, at fifty-four, I no longer think Frost’s poem is about fading glories. Instead, I believe it’s about triumph.
When I first encountered Robert Frost’s poetry, I was living on the streets of St. Catharines, Ontario. The library was my home then, and one day I came across an old copy of New Hampshire, a collection of Frost’s that also contained “Two Look at Two” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Something in Frost’s words and phrasing caught me. New Hampshire was published in 1923, fifty years before I first cracked it open. Frost’s world and mine were vastly different. My life then was defined by concrete, mission beds and meal tickets. But the way Frost wrote about the land called to me. I sat with his book at my favourite library carrel by the window for days. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” made me sad when I first read it. My own life seemed composed of nothing but endings, fade-outs and disappearances. Now, with Deb and I having just spent our first Christmas together as husband and wife, I see life much differently.
Our first few Christmases were celebrated with other waifs. One year we celebrated with a retired British diplomat and his wife. Another year we shared a meal with a friend whose family could not afford to get her and her boyfriend home. Deb’s kids always joined us, sometimes with their dad and their great-aunt, but for the most part these affairs were patched together.
Once Deb and I moved to the lake, Christmas became a gathering with the kids. One year, we all walked up into the back country, and I toted back a fine young spruce that we decorated together. Another year, the two girls brought their beaus, and the four of them built a combination yurt/igloo in the front yard. After they left, there was always a residue of sadness. It took a few days for us, Deb especially, to get our emotional equilibrium back. This year, the kids came up a week before the big day, because their young schedules were so full. Deb and I were on our own for Christmas Day, and we made it glorious.
We rose early and exchanged our gifts. Then we loaded the car with fourteen bags stuffed with presents for the tenants of the rooming house. A good friend of ours, Doreen Willis, had spent a big part of the year filling those bags, wrapping each article individually. We also had personal gifts for the two women who live at the house and help us look after the place.
We went from door to door delivering the gifts, along with grocery coupons, cookies and other treats. We had hugs for those who could allow them, handshakes and a clap on the shoulder for the others. The smiles that broke on people’s faces were heartwarming. They were touched to be remembered, included and honoured. Fourteen bags of presents. Fourteen souls. Fourteen lives.
After we left the house, we went skiing. It was a marvellous, crisp sunny day, and we skimmed down the hill with abandon, feeling like kids again. Then we drove to Jon and Irene Buckle’s home to share dinner with their family. There were thirty of them, and Deb and I were soon lost in the throng of sons, daughters, in-laws, grandkids, great-grand-kids and dogs.
Driving home along the pitch-dark road through ridges, valleys and gulches and then along the flats, we were tired but filled with happiness. Alone together. Seven Christmases. Seven years. Seven glories.
There are times when Deb and I envy those whose lives are built around family activities. There are times when we wonder why we are more like polite strangers than blood kin with most members of our own families. But there are also times when we can’t wait for grandchildren, when we look forward to fabulous feasts with people strewne verywhere through our little mountain home.
Nothing gold can stay. Each Christmas leading up to this one shone in its own way. Those seven years aren’t gone; instead, they’ve become the gold of our time here, our treasure, part of our stories. That’s what I think Robert Frost was getting at. Riches are not defined by gold, and a brief moment can remain pure forever in the heart. Life demands that we cherish our memories, that we triumph.
Mrs. Fricke and the Bullies
IN THE SUMMER of 1966, when I was eleven, my family moved to a rented farmhouse in southwestern Ontario. Since they’d adopted me the previous May, we’d changed homes three times, and I’d never gotten a chance to really put my feet down anywhere. As I stood on that farmhouse porch for the first time, seeing the empty fields around me, I felt lost and scared and as empty as those fields.
But once we’d gotten settled, I was free to wander. There were fifty hectares on that farm in Bruce County, a mix of fallow field, hay crop, wheat and pasture. There was a wood at the back and a stream that led to a marsh, a creek and a dam a kilometre away. That land became my playground, and I spent every day out there.
I tramped the fields. I started a creature journal, in which I recorded all the animals I saw and drew pictures of them. I fished the creek and the splash pool below the dam. I watched birds. I sat in the arms of mighty trees and gazed across those wild stretches of farmland and dreamed or read or sang songs to myself. It never occurred to me to feel alone. The world was my companion, and I felt at peace.
But the thing about farms is that you never get to meet other kids. My adopted brothers were either working or uninterested in exploring, so I was left to my own devices. Although I revelled in that, by the time school rolled around I had no buddies, no peer group, no connection to any other kid. I went out to meet the bus awash in apprehension and worry.
My teacher that year was Mrs. Lorraine Fricke. She was an older woman, nearing retirement. She had grey hair, glasses and a kind smile, and she dressed in old-fashioned skirts and blouses. I’d never had a grandmother, but Mrs. Fricke fit the image I carried in my mind. That first day, she seemed to know me already. When she saw me enter her classroom, she walked right over, smiled a
nd led me to a seat beside the window to the right of her big wooden desk.
“So you can look out at the trees,” she said.
As it turned out, there was a bully in that class named Jim. His family owned the jewellery store in town. Jim was also a hockey star, which made him a big thing in that small town. Bullies always find lesser cohorts, and Jim had four other boys who supported him in his meanness. The five of them were unavoidable on the playground.
There was also a kid in my class named Dennis Edwards. Dennis was short, with big ears and around face, and he struggled to keep up with the work. He used wacky, off-beat humour to try to wrest some acceptance from the rest of us. I found him funny, and his attempts to fit in resonated with me.
When I showed myself to be a bright student, Jim targeted me. At first it was the usual name-calling and spit-balling in class. Then it was tripping me in the hallways and bouncing balls off my head at recess. The intimidation progressed to punches on the shoulder and slaps on the back of the head. I took it all without any thought of striking back or getting revenge. I didn’t want to make any waves.
But then the bullies went after Dennis Edwards. Jim took umbrage at Dennis playing hopscotch with the girls. He called Dennis a sissy. He called him a little girl. Then he shoved Dennis, and Dennis shoved back. The rest of the pack descended on him instantly. I’d been walking in the playing field when it happened, but I saw Dennis’s bleeding nose, blackening eye and tears when the bell rang.
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