Embers

Embers • One Ojibway´s Meditations
By Richard Wagamese

140 pages • ISBN 978-1-77162-133-5

“Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on –and I have become a comet. I arc cross the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It is a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end.”

Richard Wagamese (Buffalo Cloud) was an award-winning writer, journalist and author and a TRU honorary degree recipient (2010). He became the first Aboriginal Canadian to receive a National Newspaper Award and published 12 works about Indigenous culture from the perspective of his personal experience of Canada’s former residential school system. His acclaimed novel Indian Horse has been incorporated in English course curricula at TRU and several other universities. An inspirational, spiritual and dynamic storyteller, he received the Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award (2015) for his distinguished lifetime contribution to Canadian literature.

In this carefully curated selection of everyday reflections, Richard Wagamese found lessons in both the mundane and sublime as he considered on the universe, drawing inspiration from working in the bush –sawing and cutting and stacking wood for winter as well as the smudge ceremony to bring him closer to the Creator. Embers is perhaps Richard Wagamese´s most personal volume. Honest, evocative and articulate, he explored the various manifestations of grief, joy, recovery, beauty, gratitude, physically and spiritually –concepts many find hard to express. But for Wagamese, spirituality was multifaceted. Within these pages, readers will find hard-won and concrete wisdom on how to fell the joy in the everyday things.