“I walk in and out of several worlds every day.” —Joy Harjo

Link: Poet Warrior: A Memoir, By Joy Harjo

Some mornings, I wake unsure which world I’ve landed in. My body is here, jittered, somewhat grounded, pressed to the cold skin of earth, the taste of coffee lingering at the back of my mouth. But my mind is scattered across dream and daylight: one part drifting through old stories, the other scrolling the infinite blue of my phone, looking for a sign that I still belong to something older than algorithms.

Dreams have always been more than private flickers behind closed eyes. Among my people, dreams are the braids that bind us—to land, to each other, to those who came before and those not yet born. Dreaming isn’t solitary; it’s a communal current, threading through ceremonies, firesides, and quiet dawns. The dreamers are weavers.They return with gifts: stories, warnings, laughter, medicine for the waking world.

Joy Harjo calls these dreamers “poet warriors.” I read her words in Poet Warrior and feel the braid tighten around me, a gentle, insistent pull. She writes, “We are evidence of love, the burdens and gifts we carry,” and I sense the weight and the lift of that inheritance. She reminds me that story itself is a braid, never a single strand, but three, four, a dozen voices woven together. The dreamer listens not just to their own heart, but to the wind rattling the cottonwoods, to the ancestors whispering through the river, to the coyote slipping through the dawn.

I often reflect on what it means to be part of a story that is bigger than just myself. Poet Warrior isn’t a book that moves in a straight line. Instead, it circles and returns, built from fragments and spirals. Harjo’s chapters loop back on themselves, weaving together poems, memories, songs, prayers, and prose. Each layer adds meaning, like a river building up silt or a petroglyph deepening with time. Reading her work gives me permission to let my own writing roam, to braid together poetry and memory, image and reflection, to trust that the story will hold together, even when I can’t see its full shape.
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I can’t do anything
but talk to the wind,
to the moon
but cry out goddamn goddamn
to stones
and to other deathless voices
that I hope will carry
us all through.” ― Joy Harjo

The first time I pressed my hand to a petroglyph on the basalt cliffs above the Columbia, I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. The stone was warm, almost oscillating. The spiral carved there was older than any story I’d heard in English, older than the language I never learned but sometimes dream in. It felt like a conversation I’d arrived late to, but could still lean in close and catch a word or two. Stepping into a circle already formed, voices looping through the centuries, I pressed my ear to the stone, caught a word, snagged a thread, and let myself be woven in. Even if I had missed the beginning, somehow, I belonged.

“Remember, you are this universe and this universe is you.”

I think about craft, what it means to make a mark meant for someone you may never meet. The old petroglyphs were not just art, but message: I was here. We hunted here. Water came from this place. The salmon ran strong. Maybe a prayer layered in, or a bit of trickster mischief. The tools were simple. The intention was not. Harjo teaches that poetry, much like petroglyphs,is a way of listening as much as speaking. She writes, “I follow the spiral to the core, to the source, to where dreaming and the story begin.” My own tools now are a cracked phone, a battered notebook, a keyboard sticky with coffee rings. My marks are digital, ephemeral, a tweet, a story pinned to a map, a GPS breadcrumb trail a cousin left to show where the old berry patches still grow. But the intention remains: to reach someone beyond my sight, to leave a trace that says,

This is what mattered to me. This is what I saw.

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I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk.”― Joy Harjo

When I read Poet Warrior, I recognize the mark-making urge in myself. The need to leave something, not just for remembrance, but for renewal. Harjo reminds me that every mark was new once, every story is a risk, every dreamer in danger of being erased or misunderstood. The work is not to guarantee permanence, but to show up with intention: to carve, in whatever medium, a story that’s honest, open, and willing to be found. “The story is always ahead of you, waiting to be found,” Harjo writes. Her words invite me to experiment with form: to let prose and poetry flow together, to create layers a future reader might sift through like sediment, discovering pieces of what was meant.

The best marks, I think, are collaborative, layered with meaning the maker never imagined. In Harjo’s words, “We all become ancestors in training.” What we leave behind is not only for remembrance, but for renewal.