Welcome, dannché, for sharing my experiences from my northern home. I attempt to live here with humility, respect, humour and grace. I try daily to be a good neighbor to citizens of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nation and the Kluane First Nation. This is their traditional territory. They govern here. My other neighbors are people like me, and other-than-human denizens.
I was born and grew up in country that its Indigenous people called “so beautiful that we wept.” But I cannot go home to my birth and growing up places. They no longer exist. Humans out of balance with other species destroyed them.
I first came through this country when I was three years old. Some of my earliest memories are from that journey. Many years later, as I crossed this land between work and home, I wondered: what do I have to do to live here?
Now I live here. Like most adults, I’ve had hard work, many good times, much joy, much pain, much contention. Essayist Jane Shapiro calls these “quick, interesting years.” Here, I work at good relationships, and a quieter life than I’ve lived so far. I work to learn, to take only what I need, to shepherd what the world calls resources. I attend to these as individual, significant parts in this ecosystem: squirrels, sparrows, grizzly bears, water, soil, wildflowers, berries, spruce, sunshine and rain, wind that scores mountains and ice. My own body, my health. My mind and my spirit. All are nurtured in this place.
I’m off to work. The work of experience, and of imagination.
Thank you for visiting. Mahsi cho.