So I’ve had to remove ‘Plains Woman Song’ from here, just for a little while, as it has found a publisher! It will be appearing in Yellow Medicine Review (http://www.yellowmedicinereview.com) in the Fall 2012 edition. I’m pretty stoked. It will be the first creative piece I’ve had published in over a decade. I started out writing creatively pretty young, and I had pieces published by the time I was in the 4th grade. I feel as though this is moving me towards my center; I’ve spent a number of years now writing academically, which granted, is great and pays the bills - but my heart is not in it. A number of things have happened in my life over the past year which have convinced me that I can’t wait for my passion to find me, I have to pursue it. At any rate, that’s where I am now. I look forward to seeing it in black and white, straight up, honest to Creator ink.
Be blessed.
T
"I am convinced that most people do not grow up… We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as Magnolias."
— Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter (via growing-orbits)
(via thelandlockedmariner)
Today is my dad’s 74th birthday; thus it is a day worth celebrating. Because he survived, despite the concerted effort made by this country you’re celebrating, to exterminate him. He survived boarding school, the attempted robbing of his language, physical and emotional beatings, hunger, crippling poverty, the deaths of his parents when he was a child, and eventually alcoholism and the emotional turmoil that was produced by these circumstances. He survived, and even managed to obtain a college degree, and served in the very same military that had tried for hundreds of years, to eradicate his kind. He survived to father me and my brothers, and raise us to value education and learning as much as possible, because to ‘defeat your enemy, you have to know his ways’. He became a hard man, to be sure; but he did the best he could with the tools he was given - which consisted primarily of his own intelligence and sheer will.
So today I celebrate him; I celebrate the generations who are here, who would not be, if these systems, this country, had had it’s way. I celebrate my brothers, their families, and my children, who will carry on his legacy and who will listen to stories about my dad, so he will be remembered, always. Happy 4th, everyone.
