“The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” ~Joan Didion

The dashboard glowed faint and useless, the numbers flickering with a tired rhythm that offered no comfort. The gas gauge hovered above empty, the check engine light a steady, accusatory orange. I stared at the dash, willing it to tell me something, anything. But it only pulsed with the stubborn life of a machine too old to trust. I cut the engine. The silence that followed felt heavy and broken, pressing against the thin, dinted glass of the windshield.

The mesa unfolded in front of me, open and exposed, stretching endlessly under a bruised sky. The sun was already swallowed by the horizon, leaving only a thin line of fire on the edge of the world, burning away the last warmth of the day. A chill crept in, sharp and insistent, curling beneath my jacket and into my bones. The desert air tasted of dust and old dreams.

I sat still, knuckles pale against the steering wheel, watching as shadows drifted along the roadside. Out here, the distance wasn’t just space. It was a presence, looming and impossibly broad, a kind of emptiness I couldn’t drive through or leave behind. It was the kind of quiet that made you think of everything you’d ever lost.

A River runs through me.

Was anything left back home? Did the fog still roll in off the water, thick and forgiving? Or had even that faded, leaving behind only dry riverbeds and brittle grass? I tasted nostalgia like iron on my tongue—sharp, metallic, unyielding. Memory flickered, unreliable and distant. I tried to recall faces, voices, the weight of belonging, but the details slipped away, replaced by the drone of cicadas and the endless sigh of the wind.

Had I ever really belonged anywhere? Or was it only the illusion of belonging I missed? Or the comfort of a place that remembered me, even as I tried to forget it?

I opened the door, letting the cold rush in. The air outside was thin and empty, charged with a restlessness I couldn’t name. I stepped out, boots crunching on scattered gravel. My shadow stretched long and distorted, a thin echo on the faded earth. The land was silent except for the wind, which carried the faint smell of sage and something burnt.

I wandered a few steps from the car, eyes searching for some sign: a familiar rock, a twisted juniper, anything that would anchor me. But every landmark felt strange, hollowed out, as if the world itself had shifted in my absence. The land offered no comfort, only space and silence and the slow, creeping dread that whatever I was searching for was already gone.

Sunset on Columbia River from Bridge of the Gods. 193?

Time felt heavier here, pressing down, flattening hope, flattening memory. I kept scanning the horizon, looking for signs. Anything that would tell me which direction was forward, which was back. But the desert gave nothing away. The world was pared down to essentials: rock, sky, wind, and the slow ache of longing.

I found myself thinking about the people I’d left behind. Friends I’d promised to write. A sister who never answered the phone. The neighbor with the old dog who always barked at dawn. Had they changed, too? Did they remember me, or was I just another name lost in a stack of mail, a number in an address book never dialed?

The stark beauty of the mesa cut deep. It was a beauty I couldn’t carry with me, only endure. I stood by the old 4Runner, staring west, wondering if the Gorge remembered me. Wondering if the dust there was still dark, still alive, or if it had turned to ash, scattered and lost by time and wind.

The wind shifted, colder now, bringing only the scent of stone and emptiness. I slipped back inside, shivering, my hands trembling against the cracked vinyl seat. The darkness outside pressed closer, hungry and vast, and the world I once knew felt impossibly distant, receding in the rearview.

Circling in dreams.

“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.

“Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.” – Joy Harjo

Introduction

Sometimes I think of this blog as a basket. A basket I’m always filling with fragments of myself. Land and water have their own ways of holding onto what matters, even as everything else shifts and slips away. Longing and belonging run through these pages; old stories keep surfacing, no matter how often we’re told to let them go or leave them behind.

Home Guard on the Columbia, by Benjamin A Gifford (1899) (photo- courtesy The Valley Library, Oregon State University)

Writing all this has been my way of making sense of what’s been lost and what still survives. Of finding the places where grief and hope sit side by side. Some days, the words come easy, like Coyote slipping through the brush; other days, it’s just sitting with the ache, waiting for something true to rise up.

Art by Si Matta

If you find yourself anywhere in this tangle—wondering, remembering, searching for language that feels like home—just know you’re not alone. There’s room here for all of it: the old stories, the quiet resistance, the new ways we find to belong to ourselves and each other. This is just another piece of the gathering. Let’s see where it leads.

I.Where the Story Glitched

As the onslaught of settlers to the Columbia River Basin dredged a new paradigm of disease and displacement, there was what Hunn describes as a “spiritual apocalypse” among the River People. (Hunn & Selam, 1990, p. 241) A “spiritual apocalypse” where animist cultures struggled with the biological reality of disease, for there had to be a spiritual reason for the trauma- something must be out of alignment with the spirit.

There are stories older than the fractures we inherit. Before the missionaries, before the epidemics, before the thunder of Coyote’s mischief echoed up the river, there was a different kind of order—one in which Tsagaglalal kept her eyes on the people, and the world was alive with spirit. But when Coyote turned her to stone and declared an end to women’s leadership, something was set in motion. Later, when settlers swept through, bringing disease and displacement, the River People faced not just a physical apocalypse, but a spiritual one. My ancestors, like so many others, searched for meaning in the devastation, believing something must be out of alignment with the spirit. I feel that search still, running like an undercurrent beneath my own questions of belonging, faith, and truth. The fracture didn’t end with them. It runs through me, too, and through the stories I’m still learning how to tell.
In my family, and in the memories that float up around shared meals or linger in the quiet after a prayer, I sense the echoes of this original break. There’s a hunger to explain why so much was lost, why the world my great-grandparents described feels so different from the one I grew up in. The old stories say that when Coyote came upriver, laughing and clever, he brought change that was meant to keep order, but instead left us with a wound that never quite healed. Tsagaglalal—She Who Watches—was given a stone body so she could see forever, but her voice became something we had to listen for in the wind, or in the pause before an elder speaks.

When settlers arrived, carrying new gods and new diseases, the ground shifted again. The River People, rooted in animist ways,where stones, salmon, and even the wind carried spirit, were suddenly forced to face loss on a scale that felt impossible. Hunn called it a “spiritual apocalypse,” a time when the breach between body and spirit became impossible to ignore. When whole villages disappeared overnight, when familiar ceremonies failed to keep death away, my ancestors,like so many others at the time, searched for answers in the only places they could: in dreams, in stories, in the uneasy sense that something was out of balance in the world.

It’s strange how trauma moves through generations. The original fracture—the turning of a matriarch to stone, the erasure of women and two spirit people from ceremony, was just the first. Every wave of missionaries, every epidemic, every law forbidding ceremony or language widened that split, until the silence itself felt inherited. I grew up catching glimpses of what was missing: a grandmother’s hesitation before telling an old story, a tightening around the word “queer,” the careful folding of hands before a meal, as if trying to keep the sacred from spilling out.

I wonder sometimes if this is why shame comes so easily—why depression feels built into the

My Sister and I, circa 1979

bones, why addiction and silence become so familiar. Colonial violence didn’t just take land or language; it planted silence deep in our blood, teaching our ancestors to guard their words, to tuck away what was sacred or strange for fear of punishment or loss. When you’re told that spirit and body are separate, that who you are or who you love is out of alignment with what the world expects, the original wound gets handed down- wrapped in shame, caution and grief. That kind of silence settles in quietly, showing up in the hesitation before a question, in the way stories are stopped short, in the careful ways we move through spaces that never felt safe for all of who we are. It’s a fracture that isn’t just history. It’s lived and relived every day, quietly shaping how we see ourselves and what we’re allowed to speak aloud. In this haze, the birds whispered my name.

II. The Birds Whispered My Name

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all.- Stephen King

The birds whispered my name,
As I fidgeted on a cold chair,
Learning of a god dressed in thorns.

As they talked in righteous dictation,
I would pull thorny brambles from dirty hands-
Finding god in the splinters.

I remember how the rain tasted-
Dry in safe beds made from synthetic fibers.

Yet I could hear the birds whisper my name,
Telling me stories,

We forgot to tell ourselves.

A very early drawing my sister, Jadie Russell, drew in church. 1980′s