All We Have
Are moments
Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. I would like to introduce this latest edition by welcoming all the new subscribers to this newsletter. I don’t know what happened but there’s been quite a recent surge and I am grateful to have you here reading. Hopefully you will find it interesting enough to stick around. I thought about saying a little bit about who I am but everything you really need to know can be found on the About page. With so many other places to direct your attention, it means a lot that you have chosen to direct some here. To this I offer miigwech, which is to say: thank you.
I’m sitting on my front porch in a cedar chair not really made for how I’m using it and typing on an iPad perched on a TV tray. I’m not that physically comfortable but existentially, for the moment and with all grim things considered, I’m pretty solid. The sun has just settled behind the ridgeline to the west and the change in temperature is immediate and profound. I can almost feel the entire valley sigh. A puff of breeze rises, just enough to make the little temple bells hanging above me start to clank, unless it is my imagination. Nookomis, Grandmother, the Moon, is just above me and isn’t far behind in following the sun across the sky. She is thin tonight, a tiny crescent fingernail shaving in the vast cloudlessness of the evening, and it won’t be so long before she too is invisible behind the horizon. Until then she reflects brighter and brighter as it gets darker and darker. At this moment birds, and a distant train, are the only sounds. A dog barks nearby as if to say, “Hey, what about me?!”
Six weeks to go until Labor Day, which means we are in the stretch run for summer’s end … and just like that summer heat, which has bedeviled most of the continent for weeks now, has arrived here in Western Montana. Nothing but triple-digits and mid-to-high 90s for the foreseeable future and the land is dry, dry, dry my friends. River and stream flows are dwindling – in some places historically – and hoot owl restrictions are popping up across the state. All of the lushness of May and June is now brittle tinder and fires are beginning to flare up all around us too. The Missoula airport and the smokejumper center are not far at all from where I write here in the Old Mill District and there has been a lot of air action the last couple days. There isn’t any smoke yet in my vicinity, for which I am grateful, but it is only a matter of time.
I am only hours away from throwing all of my gear in the back of my car and pointing north and east for my Good Ancestors workshop on the Missouri River, where I will be joined by ten or so other hardy adventurers as well as some guides. Given how hard it was to fill the canoes with intrepid butts I didn’t expect the trip would even happen but then, as these things so often do, it all came together in the end. It’s a dream-come-true opportunity for me in a way some folks woolgather about running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Different landscape and totally different water, of course, but similar in big dealishness for me. None of my ancestors made a riverside living via axe and cottonwood in the dwindling days of their independence on the Colorado the way they did the Missouri and that makes all the difference. We will get to travel through a landscape not so different from what it was a couple hundred years ago. How often do we get to say that?
The travel day to get to Fort Benton for orientation and the first day actually on the river are both forecast to be around 100°. The subsequent days are hardly better. It will be a seasonal challenge to endure and I have to say that is a large part of the attraction for me. I like hardship. I like embracing the inconveniences certain to reveal themselves. I like the euphoria of coming out the other side of these kinds of struggles. Last year, on the Blackfoot, the hardship was near-hyperthermic cold and rain until we were rescued by the Summer Solstice and temperatures rose thirty degrees and we welcomed and worshiped the sun like people used to do around here, when the Solstice was a monthlong ritual of community so powerful that the settlers made it all illegal out of fear for our riled-up and merciless Indian savagery when the reality is we would have happily shared this Turtle Island if they hadn’t been such jerks about everything. What would it mean to make a return to that again, a series of celebrations not bound by nationalistic bullshit but of global experiences of togetherness as solar events are? Is everything teetering on the brink of ruin because of the decisions made by cowardly dudes in distant polished chambers to disconnect the people from the land? Of course it is.
Chandra: Do you need a new sun hoodie?
Me: My hide is my sun hoodie.
Chandra: Haha holy shit your poor hide.
I recognize I am coming at all this from a place of extreme privilege. I can feel excited about these challenges because the risk is pretty low. Yeah, I could feasibly drown or succumb to a heat injury or suffer any other manner of unanticipated malady on the Missouri but it’s highly unlikely given all the support I will have. Even this just-arrived summer heatwave which I confess to largely be enjoying is made bearable knowing I have means to mitigate it that others don’t. I could be in a river within ten or fifteen minutes of pretty much anywhere I find myself during my day-to-day life. I have a little room with a window AC that is just fifteen paces, at most, from where I’m sitting right now. That makes it easy to say, “I’m just going to enjoy living in a temperate landscape that flexes all four seasons!” even when facing the more extreme turns of that elemental wheel. What of the people who don’t have a choice, or don’t have the ability to find shelter and relief whenever it even begins to flirt with being too much? What about the people not fat and happy in the aftermath of having just devoured a pair of greasily delicious bison brats slathered in nuclear yellow mustard and washed them down with an ice cold glass of filtered water as I just have? What in my privilege is actually making it more difficult for those who go without so much?
Not to mention the utter luxury of getting to make a river adventure such as the one I’m on the cusp of. It all works away at my conscience, the utter exclusivity of it all – not just my trip, but the exclusivity of the ability to experience the outdoors at all, which is gate-kept in a way that keeps so many other folks out, not to mention the gatekeeping and exclusivity of having enough to eat and a place to live – and I’m trying to think of ways to contribute to changing that, if only in my tiny, hummingbird-fighting-a-raging-forest-fire-one-beak-full-of-water-at-a-time way.
I’ve been working on a post about compromise. How the moment I step out the front door to go do much of anything at all I am almost immediately compromising how I’d really like to live, how I’d really like to contribute to the world. I suspect a majority of people reading these words right now feel similarly. What are the challenges you readers face? What makes you decide what you are willing to compromise, and when? What are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? Those are questions I want to explore a little deeper … just not today.
“All we have are moments. So live them as though not one can be wasted. Inhabit them, fill them with the light of your best good intention, honour them with your full presence, find the joy, the calm, the assuredness that allows the hours and the days to take care of themselves. If we can do that, we will have lived.”
– Richard Wagamese, from Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations
The risk in devoting ourselves to the better world we want is that we miss out on the beauty of the world we are in. I don’t want to spend so much time wringing my hands over the future that I fail to enjoy what is right in front of me now. I hope you might consider doing the same now and then. Devote some time to love, and to beauty, and to reflecting on the world we are all so fortunate to be living in. Make an offering of some kind; a prayer, perhaps, or some tobacco, or anything that is part of your tradition, even if it is a made up one. The universe doesn’t care so much about how we do it, just that we do it. Know that I will be out on the water under the sun and stars doing exactly that for the coming week.
Have a glorious seven days, my friends. Comments are on in case anyone wants to share your plans for any of this, I just won’t be around to see them for at least a week.
I am in Spain for a workshop I helped organize and was feeling similarly conflicted. Then I spoke with a young person in our group who is doing some incredible work in Mexico. He said how being here and part of this experience had saved his mental health, as the work he does is very important but emotionally draining because there is so much suffering it’s hard to bear. Because of being here, he will return feeling stronger and able to throw himself back into his work, and he’s been able to connect to others who can further his goals of changing the circumstances of his community. I share that to say, you never know what ripple effects your workshop on the Missouri may have. I wish everyone could experience the power of the river and your workshops, but maybe this one will inspire the people who attend to do similar (or other great) work in the world and contribute to making that happen. I know the workshop on the Blackfoot did that for me, and many others. As you say, nearly everything we do in this capitalist hellscape is flawed and exploitative in some way, but I truly believe that this particular adventure will do far more good than harm. I hope you can find some peace in that. Thank you for all that you do.
As usual, welcome and timely advice. Thank you for the helpful perspective.
I say so as I enter a junction, professionally, that I have chosen in perhaps a similar spirit...one that scares hell out of me but also lightens my heart because I may be able to pay more attention to the daily graces of my life more fully instead of being unproductively preoccupied with shit that doesn’t change, no matter how much will and expertise I apply.
To leave a (teaching) career a little bit unfinished after 30 years is a kind of crossing that involves both compromise (I have no idea what comes next, but it’s time to go.) and the enforcement of hard boundaries in the initial decision to step away.
So when I think of compromise, I wonder about a compromise of compromises, and I think you’re onto something important here - that we clearly need to compromise our daily expectations to get along. But there’s a choosing, isn’t there? We all have hard lines that we should not yield or rarely yield. I suspect the energy to keep those lines is probably sourced from flexibility and tolerance in other places.
Like the infinitely flexible river you are about to encounter. It perpetually yields. But when it speaks, it speaks with the force of ages.
Consider the Yellowstone: as I floated it a couple weeks back with my wife and a pal from Colorado, I noticed the flotsam of house parts along the stretch near Point of Rocks. Other signs of the massive waters of last year’s spring were all along the 10 miles we floated.
My perspective is continually informed by moving water.
I hope your experience on the water is transformative and the fellowship sublime.
-Nigel