Richard Wagamese Quotes

Jimmy used to say we're a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time indians, was all about learnin' to live with that mystery. Not solving it, not comin' to grips with it, not even tryin' to guess it out. Just bein' with it. I guess I wish I'da learned the secret to doing that.

I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are.

Ceremony has become fraught with judgment: the idea that whoever our God might be, He requires absolute adherence to the way, to the means, of approach. But those reactions are based on fear, and they're inaccurate.

The elders say that Creator is perfect loving energy. Within the realm of perfect love there is no judgment. If there is no judgment then there can be no failure. In turn, if failure does not exist, there is no unworthiness. We are all one energy. We are worthy and we always were. We never have to qualify. And ceremony was born to allow us to remember that.

See, when we get sent out into the world we come here carryin' two sets of gifts. The gifts of the father an' gifts of the mother. The two human bein's that made our life. We came here carryin' those two sets of gifts, each one equal to the other. But sometimes the world gets hold of us and makes us see diff'rent way. We get told as men that we gotta be strong, gotta be fearless. Lotta us kinda start ignorin' the gifts of our mother. Go through life just usin' gifts of our father. Bein' tough, makin' our own plans, livin' in the head. But if you do that you can't be wholee on accounta you gotta use both of them equal setsa gifts to live right, to fill out the circle of your own life. Be complete. Gotta use the mother's gifts too. Like gentleness an' nurturin' livin' in the heart.

I understood then that when you miss a thing it leaves a hole that only the thing you miss can fill.

All that we are is story. From the moment we are born to the time we continue on our spirit journey, we are involved in the creation of the story of our time here. It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate. We are not the things we deem important. We are story. All of us. What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can while we're here; you, me, us, together. When we can do that and we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time…

Sometimes when things get taken away from you it feels like there's a hole at your centre where you can feel the wind blow through, that's sure.

We were hockey gypsies, heading down another gravel road every weekend, plowing into the heart of that magnificent northern landscape. We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we'd won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other. We were a league of nomads, mad for the game, mad for the road, mad for ice and snow, an Arctic wind on our faces and a frozen puck on the blade of our sticks.

There was a feeling in him like a bruise, a purple ache that set between his ribs. He tasted a cry building at the back of his throat. It was too familiar and made him fearful.

The head has no answers, and the heart has no questions, Jack would say.
Quoting his teacher and good friend Jack Kakakaway

That open country is so huge you can feel lost and abandoned in it or you can work to feel a part of it, like ya belong to it and it belongs to you. Like a part of you is rock and stone and stream and all the open sky. Ya get past lonesome then...them creatures is all my family and i'm family to them as well.

It seems to me sometimes that seasons leave us in the way people do, never just gone, but degree by degree, fading like the smell on a loved one's favourite sweater, until the vanishing one day evolves into memory.

Actions born of contemplation are wiser than those made in quiet desperation. If all that's true, and I feel it is, then I have grown some in these 61 years. I have learned and become a better person. And from that maybe it's the years ahead that will be the richest of my life. A quiet man moving forward, gladly beyond all expectation.

When your innocence is stripped from you, when your people are denigrated, when the family you came from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backward, primitive, savage, you come to see yourself as less than human. That is hell on earth, that sense of unworthiness. That's what they inflicted on us.

There is such a powerful eloquence in silence. True genius is knowing when to say nothing, to allow the experience, the moment itself, to carry the message, to say what needs to be said. Words are less important, less effective than feeling. When you can sit in perfect silence with someone, you truly know how to communicate.

Sometimes people just need to talk. They need to be heard. they need the validation of my time, my silence, my unspoken compassion. They don't need advice, sympathy or counselling. They need to hear the sound of their own voices speaking their own truths, articulating their own feelings, as those may be at a particular moment. Then, when they're finished, they simply need a nod of the head, a pat on the shoulder or a hug. I'm learning that sometimes silence really is golden, and that sometimes "Fuck, eh?" is as spiritual a thing as needs to be said.

I wondered how people could live with things set in place, fixed, their places determined by the power of the recollection they contained, the memories they held. It was what made a home, I believed; the things we keep, the sum of us.