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Coming Down Off The Trail, I Am Lost In My Own Thoughts And Unprepared When A Bear Chugs Across The Path Just Before It Gives Out On The Gravel Road. I Am So Distracted That I Keep Walking Towards The Bear. I Only Stop When It Rears, Stands On Hind Legs, And Stares At Me, Sensitive Nose Pressed Into The Air, Weak Eyes Searching. I Have Never Been This Close To A Wild Bear Before, But I Am Not Frightened. There Is No Menace In Its Stance; It Is Not Even Curious. The Bear Seems To Know Who Or What I Am. The Bear Is Not Impressed.

-Louise Erdrich

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Coming Down Off The

Louise Erdrich

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Coming Down Off The Trail, I Am Lost In My Own Thoughts And Unprepared When A Bear Chugs Across The Path Just Before It Gives Out On The Gravel Road. I Am So Distracted That I Keep Walking Towards The Bear. I Only Stop When It Rears, Stands On Hind Legs, And Stares At Me, Sensitive Nose Pressed Into The Air, Weak Eyes Searching. I Have Never Been This Close To A Wild Bear Before, But I Am Not Frightened. There Is No Menace In Its Stance; It Is Not Even Curious. The Bear Seems To Know Who Or What I Am. The Bear Is Not Impressed.

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We Started Dying Before The Snow, And Like The Snow, We Continued To Fall.

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But If There Was Embellishment, It Only Had To Do With The Facts.

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Where Was I?""a Different Island," Said Old Tallow. Her Voice Was Stern, But There Was An Ache In Her Look That Omakayas Had Never Before Seen. "an Island Called Spirit Island Where Everyone But You Died Of The Itching Sickness- You Were The Toughest One, The Littlest One, And You Survived Them All.""you Were Sent Here So You Could Save The Others," She Said. "because You'd Had The Sickness, You Were Strong Enough To Nurse Them Through It. They Did A Good Thing When They Took You In, And You Saved Them For Their Good Act. Now The Circle That Began When I Found You Is Complete.

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Hunger Steals The Memory

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Her Clothes Were Filled With Safety Pins And Hidden Tears.

Society Is Like This Card Game Here, Cousin. We Got Dealt Our Hand Before We Were Even Born, And As We Grow We Have To Play As Best As We Can.

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He Had A Thousand-year-old Stare.

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Women Are Strong, Strong, Terribly Strong. We Don't Know How Strong Until We're Pushing Out Our Babies.

She Had Always Been A Reader… But Now She Was Obsessed. Since Her Discovery Of The Book Hoard Downstairs From Her Job, She’d Been Caught Up In One Such Collection Of People And Their Doings After The Next…the Pleasure Of This Sort Of Life – Bookish, She Supposed It Might Be Called, A Reading Life – Had Made Her Isolation Into A Rich And Even Subversive Thing. She Inhabited One Consoling Or Horrifying Persona After Another…that She Was Childless And Husbandless And Poor Meant Less Once She Picked Up A Book. Her Mistakes Disappeared Into It. She Lived With An Invented Force.

I Think She Is Confused By The Way I Want Her, Which Is Like Nobody Else. I Know This Deep Down. I Want Her In A New Way, A Way She's Never Been Told About.

...which Causes Me To Wonder, My Own Purpose On So Many Days As Humble As The Spider's, What Is Beautiful That I Make? What Is Elegant? What Feeds The World?

People Forget The Good, Because The Bad Has More Punch.

We Are Conjured Voiceless Out Of Nothing And Must Return To An Unknowing State. What Happens In Between Is An Uncontrolled Dance, And What We Ask For In Love Is No More Than A Momentary Chance To Get The Steps Right, To Move In Harmony Until The Music Stops.

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I Want To Remember What Bullshit Looks Like When Weapons Of Mass Destruction Are Diagrammed Out And Whacko "intelligence" Is Delivered In An Ominous Way To Strike Fear Into People And Especially To Pull On The Idealism And Zeal Of The Young.

Mass Destruction

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When Small Towns Find They Cannot Harm The Strangest Of Their Members, When Eccentrics Show Resilience, They Are Eventually Embraced And Even Cherished.

Every So Often Something Shatters Like Ice And We Are In The River Of Our Existence. We Are Aware.

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Your Life Feels Different On You, Once You Greet Death And Understand Your Heart's Position. You Wear Your Life Like A Garment From The Mission Bundle Sale Ever After - Lightly Because You Realize You Never Paid Nothing For It, Cherishing Because You Know You Won't Ever Come By Such A Bargain Again.

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History Works Itself Out In The Living.

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I Tried Out The Unfamiliar Syllables. They Fit. They Cracked In My Ears Like A Fist Through Ice.

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Numbers, Time, Inches, Feet. All Are Just Ploys For Cutting Nature Down To Size.

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There Are People Who Are Always, I Think, Going To Remain People Of The Book, To Use Another Author's Title, But People Of The Book, Who Really Must Be Around.

Here I Am, Where I Ought To Be. A Writer Must Have A Place Where He Or She Feels This, The Place To Love And Be Irritated With.

You Know, Some People Fall Right Through The Hole In Their Lives. Its Invisible, But They Come To It After Time, Never Knowing Where.

Life Will Break You. Nobody Can Protect You From That, And Living Alone Won't Either, For Solitude Will Also Break You With Its Yearning. You Have To Love. You Have To Feel. It Is The Reason You Are Here On Earth. You Are Here To Risk Your Heart.

What Is This Life But The Sound Of An Appalling Love.

You See I Thought Love Got Easier Over The Years So It Didn't Hurt So Bad When It Hurt, Or Feel So Good When It Felt Good. I Thought It Smoothed Out And Old People Hardly Noticed It. I Thought It Curled Up And Died, I Guess. Now I Saw It Rear Up Like A Whip And Lash.

He Despised His Body For Its Boring Hungers, Reflex Anger; Its Petty, Obliterating Rage. But Now He'd Become Detached. He Regarded His Body With A Tender Regret. It Was The Thing His Spirit Had To Haul.

I Thought How We Might Have To Yell To Be Heard By Higher Power, But That's Not Saying It's Not There. And That Is Faith For You. It's Belief Even When The Gods Don't Deliver.

Your Life Feels Different On You, Once You Greet Death And Understand Your Heart's Position.

I Knew Each Person's Delusion, The Places Their Records Had Scratched, Where The Sounds Repeated.

To Be Of Mixed Blood Is A Great Gift For A Writer. I Have One Foot On Tribal Lands And One Foot In Middle-class Life.

To Think About Love And Passion And Political Correctness All Together, It Doesn't Work. Art Has To Go Way Past The Political To Be Effective.

We Are Never So Poor That We Cannot Bless Another Human Being, Are We? So It Is That Every Evil, Whether Moral Or Material, Results In Good. You'll See.

Life Is Made Up Of Three Kinds Of People -- Those Who Live It, Those Afraid To, Those In Between.

I Think One Of The Reasons To Be Here On Earth Is To Finally Be Who We Are, At All Times - To Know And Be Predictable To Ourselves.

Women Are Strong, Strong, Terribly Strong. We Don't Know How Strong Until We Are Pushing Out Our Babies. We Are Too Often Treated Like Babies Having Babies When We Should Be In Training, Like Acolytes, Novices To High Priestesshood, Like Serious Applicants For The Space Program.

Our Songs Travel The Earth. We Sing To One Another. Not A Single Note Is Ever Lost And No Song Is Original. They All Come From The Same Place And Go Back To A Time When Only The Stones Howled.

Death Is The Least Civilized Rite Of Passage.

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When Women Age Into Their Power, No Wind Can Upset Them, No Hand Turn Aside Their Knowledge, No Fact Can Deflect Their Point Of View.

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We Passed Over In A Sweep Of Sorrow That Would Persist Into Our Small Forever. We Just Keep Going.

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In Order To Purify Yourself, You Have To Understand Yourself, Father Trais Went On. Everything Out In The World Is Also In You. Good, Bad, Evil, Perfection, Death, Everything. So We Study Our Souls.

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Native American

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We Have A Huge Struggle For Our Sense Of What A Democracy Is. We're Not Living In Reality When We Think We Have Some Sort Of Democracy. We're Really On The Edge. We Have Two Presidents Who Lost The Popular Vote But Won The Election. This Is Not Working.

As Soon As There's A Crisis, There Are People Who Take Charge And Want To Control Others. Climate-change Catastrophe And Human Migration And Immigration Are Great For Corporate And Governmental Control Over People, And We Have To Contend With That. I Should Say, I See Corporate Control Behind Everything That The Government Is Working On Right Now.

If Life's A Joke, Then Suicide's A Bad Punch Line.

Some People Meet The Way The Sky Meets The Earth, Inevitably, And There Is No Stopping Or Holding Back Their Love. It Exists In A Finished World, Beyond The Reach Of Common Sense.

So What Is Wild? What Is Wilderness? What Are Dreams But An Internal Wilderness And What Is Desire But A Wildness Of The Soul?

We All Got Holes In Our Lives. Nobody Dies In A Perfect Garment.

I Prefer To Have Some Beliefs That Don't Make Logical Sense.

I Might Not Be Able To Use The Word "hope," But I Could Certainly Use The Word "optimism." I'm Very Optimistic. I Don't Feel That It Helps To Be Pessimistic. At Some Point In My Life I Made A Conscious Decision That I Would Try To Be Optimistic - Not Blind To Anything At All - But To Always Hear The Way That Had The Best Chance For Happiness.

I Feel Myself Becoming Less A Person Than A Place, Inhabited, A Foreign Land.

I Was In Love With The Whole World And All That Lived In Its Rainy Arms.

It's Impossible To Write About Native Life Without Humor-that's How People Maintain Sanity.

I Did Not Choose Solitude. Who Would? It Came On Me Like A Kind Of Vocation, Demanding An Effort That Married Women Can't Picture.

Life Will Break You. Nobody Can Protect You From That.

The Greatest Wisdom Doesn't Know Itself. The Richest Plan Is Not To Have One.

Greatest Wisdom

Veils Of Love Which Was Only Hate Petrified By Longing--that Was Me.

Looking At The Shape Of The World, I See How We're In A Time Where Women Are The Subject Of Hatred, Fear, And We Have To Fight That All The Time. I Feel That There Are Fights We Take For Granted. When I Look At The World, I See That Women Are Subject To Cruelty. And That's Why The Global Gag Rule Means So Much To Me, That The United States Wouldn't Stand Up For The Rights And Health Of Women.

It Kills Your Writing If You Try To Manipulate It With Crude Politics.

If Only I Had Discipline, But Alas, It Is Only An Obsessive-compulsive Trait And The Beauty Of Habit That Causes Me To Return Again And Again To My Work.

Obsessive Compulsive

Old Love, Middle Love, The Kind Of Love That Knows Itself And Knows That Nothing Lasts, Is A Desperate Shared Wildness.

Power Travels In The Bloodlines, Handed Out Before Birth.

I Spend Most Of My Time Writing.

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