Does your path choose you?

What is your path in our world...

Even as a kid, instinctively I knew that until I had many life experiences, I didn't have the right to an opinion until I understood many other viewpoints and lived around the country awhile. After I graduated from high school and college, I lived in many different places and worked many kinds of jobs, that included singing in rock bands.

Did I know where it would lead?  I think I did! I followed my interests like a map.

Somehow I knew writing was my eventual path by age 10. I wrote in my journals religiously. No one ever told me to write... In those days I devoured magazines, a study of our strange and evolving American culture.  At one period in my 20s and 30s, I wrote three to 20 pages a day. That led to the discipline I needed to be a writer and have a solid "skill set" to do the work.

By early 1996 I did not choose journalism; it chose me. First I was hired as editor at a weekly newspaper in Hayward, Wisconsin. Then Paul DeMain, the publisher of News From Indian Country, hired me that fall.  It was obvious to me I only wanted to write about Native people and Native news.  Paul and I created Ojibwe Akiing about a month after I started.  After four years and a variety of duties on two Native newspapers, I had earned my unofficial degree in Native journalism from Paul DeMain.

Then the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation called and wanted to interview me for the editor position in June 1999. I flew to Connecticut for the interview and started work on August 16. That year I published a chapter in the book “Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics and the Games, 2000” based on my interviews with the family of Olympian Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox. It was published by Rutgers Press, in time for the Sydney Olympics.

One thing led to another. Yes, life experience shapes our thoughts and determines our path. The Old Ones visit in our dreams to guide us. We need to pay attention. Our path can take us down many new roads to many new people and we can learn so much in these challenges if we follow the signs which are our interests.  For me, being a journalist and blogger is a gift with power, one that I treat with respect and humility. If you abuse power, you lose it.

The poet warrior John Trudell's life is a source of my inspiration. Trudell suffered the loss of his entire family in a fire, which could have ended his life as a writer and activist. How he healed is how I intend to heal my own recent losses of close friends and beloved family members.

How we heal is entirely up to us, but we have to chose it. If we bury and deny our grief, it will inevitably hurt us more. Even our being adopted is a path. Where it leads is up to us.

After the tragedies, Trudell began to write in a manner as fearless and uncompromising as his political stance with the American Indian Movement, by picking up the pen... He said, "When I went to the writing, it was the most vengeful thing I could do. I won't say I started writing out of love. When I started out to write, I did not want to explode. Writing lines, poems, songs -- that became my explosion."

Can't escape the heat

Disguised as a memory

Howling at the sky

Always chasing almost love that way

Loaded heart in the need to run

Almost always chasing love that way

There's a way you're expected to obey

Don't bite the hand that feeds you

Don't you know what freedom means

Bad dog Bad dog

--John Trudell, "Bad Dog"

Please share how your path chose you in the comments section.... Trace