Richard Wagamese - Embers: One Ojibways Meditations

Mornings have become my table.

At dawn each day, I creep from my bedroom down the hall to the kitchen, where I set my tea to brew and then move to the living room to wait. In the immaculate silence, I watch the world unfurl from shadow. I listen to the sounds of birds, the wind along the eaves, the creak of floorboards and joists and rafters in this small house I call my home.

When the tea is ready, I cradle the cup in my palms and inhale the scent of lavender. I place the cup on the living room table. Then I rise to retrieve the bundle that holds the sacred articles of my ceremonial life. I open it and remove my smudging bowl, my eagle wing fan, my rattle and the four sacred medicines of my peoplesage, sweet grass, tobacco and cedar. I put small pinches of each together in the smudging bowl, which I set upon the table. I close my eyes and breathe for a few moments. Then I light the medicines, using a wooden match, and waft the smoke around and over my head and heart and body with the eagle wing fan. When I am finished, I set the fan on the table, too.

There are certain spiritually oriented books I read from each morning. I lift the books from the couch beside me and read from them in turn. Then I place the books on the table as well. I close my eyes and consider what the readings have to tell me that day. When Im ready, I settle deeper into the burgeoning pool of quietude, and when I feel calm and centred and at peace, I say a prayer of gratitude for all the blessings that are present in my life. I ask to be guided through the day with the memory of this sacred time, this prayer, the smell of these medicines in the air, and the peace and calm in my heart. I pick up the role Creator has asked me to play in this reality.

The small meditations in this book come from my early mornings at that living room table. Later, at the desk in my writing space, I write the meditations as they come to me, before turning to the writing that is my life and passion and career. A meditation doesnt come every morning. Sometimes one doesnt arrive for days. But when my connection to those things on the table has been strongest, when I have been joined to those things completely, the meditations rise unbidden and form themselves on the page almost as if I were taking dictation. I believe they have been conjured in me. Everything I have come to know and rely upon as centring, spiritual, real and valid has its place on that table in my living room. The table is like my life: dented, scarred, battered and worn, but rich and full nonetheless, and singing its histories. In that way, mornings themselves have become my table. Enveloped in Ojibway ceremony, protocol and ritual, ringed by strong words on faith, love, resilience, mindfulness and calm, I reclaim myself each morning. I walk out into the world in a position of balance, ready to do what Creator asks of me that day.

The words in this book are embers from the tribal fires that used to burn in our villages. They are embers from the spiritual fires burning in the hearts, minds and souls of great writers on healing and love. They are embers from every story I have ever heard. They are embers from all the relationships that have sustained and defined me. They are heart songs. They are spirit songs. And, shared with you, they become honour songs for the ritual ways that spawned them. Bring these words into your life. Feel them. Sit with them. Use them.

For this is the morning, excellent and fair...

I am my silence. I am not the busyness of my thoughts or the daily rhythm of my actions. I am not the stuff that constitutes my world. I am not my talk. I am not my actions. I am my silence. I am the consciousness that perceives all these things. When I go to my consciousness, to that great pool of silence that observes the intricacies of my life, I am aware that I am me. I take a little time each day to sit in silence so that I can move outward in balance into the great clamour of living.

I am a dreamer made real by virtue of the world touching me. This is what I know. I am spirit borne by a body that moves through the dream that is this living, and what it gathers to keep becomes me, shapes me, defines me. The dreamer I am is vivid when I fully inhabit myselfwhen I allow that. Meditation is not an isolated act of consciousness. Its connecting to the dream. Its being still so that the wonder of spirit can flow outward, so that the world touches me and I touch the world. Its leaving my body and my mind and becoming spirit again, whole and perfect and shining.

Alone in that country where poems are born in the stillness of things. Light is frail now. Purple is the colour of the world and the day becomes a stretch of open water freckled by rain, depthless and pure. Alive. Ready for the challenge of being.