What warriors do

It’s been rainy and cold in the mountains this spring and early summer. Mornings have dawned dismal and dark. When evening has come, the world has been a gray place and our house is so chilled and damp that we’ve had to burn wood in the fireplace. It’s odd. We’re used to dry heat in the summer and I never thought I’d see me lighting a warming fire as the summer solstice nears.
Then again, I take a lot of things for granted. Weather is just one of the smaller ones. I suppose the act of aging entitles one to become somewhat set in his ways or expectant of things as times has allowed them to be. Change was never an easy thing for me to accept when I was younger. In fact, I did everything I could in my younger years to try and maintain things as I knew them.
When I thought about my life as a younger man, I thought about a lot of things. I thought about big money, big cars, and fancy homes. I thought about all the shiny things that a person should be able to surround themselves with. Back then I believed that a good life was shiny and gleaming with wonderful toys and pleasures. I wanted that. I wanted big evidence of a life lived in a big way.
Back then I carried the notion that success and happiness, as its corollary, meant that life was meant to be a Technicolor dream. I surmised that in order to be happy I needed to have all the shiny things that people everywhere take to represent a full and expressive life. Nowadays, at fifty-six, I still hang onto that idea – but the difference is that different things shine.
When I was in my twenties I never thought about lugging armloads of wood through three feet of snow to a cabin in the mountains as indicative of having arrived. Never thought that the warmth of a wood stove could come to mean security. I never imagined that a simple, modest house overlooking a lake could come to means so much and that I could grow to want nothing more.
I also always thought I’d turn out to be a total Ojibway. I’d wear long hair that I sometimes wore in braids. I’d speak my language fluently. I’d hunt and fish and know something about trapping. I’d dance powwow and go to ceremonies and spend most of my time out on the land before returning to a home filled with all the shiny things I thought would make me happy.
Back then I never thought I’d see myself banging nails and sawing wood, hanging pictures or planting flowers. I never imagined myself happily washing dishes, cleaning floors or the dozens of other small ceremonies I do in my home. These hands are meant for fluting stone to points for arrows, hauling gill nets, or skinning a moose. That’s what warriors do.
I never thought I’d ever come to see myself as fulfilled. To me there was always a need for something more, for better, for bigger, for newer. I struggled a lot in my younger years and peace was something I thought would always elude me. Now I understand that being fulfilled means knowing that there is more to the territory of my being than I have come to see so far.
I’m older now and quiet feels better on the bones than noise and the only fight in me is the struggle to maintain it all, to keep it close to my chest, to give me another heart to beat against the cold. I never thought I’d see that. I never thought I’d welcome it. But like a change in expected weather, life sometimes eludes prescription. Change is what life itself determines and I come to rest in it.
These days the land beckons like highways used to do and I’ve learned to step outside the door and be here, rooted, anchored by words like love and home that drop from my tongue like beads of light, the shiny things that show me the path to the door.
Behind this door is a wife and a partner I never thought I’d see either. When I touch her and feel her skin against my palm, I sing an honor song to the energy that wraps itself around us, surrounds us, protects us. I’d carry the world to her like those armloads of wood, one sure step at a time. That’s what warriors do.