Free One Native Life by Richard Wagamese

what pulls us together, ties us into a shared destiny, is the straining of our human hearts—the secret wish for a common practical magic.
    That magic exists. It lives. It sails across the sky once a month, as fat and round and free as a dream. You need to step out on the land to see it properly. You need to walk away from all that binds you to a city, to a desk, to a job, and stand where the wind can get at you. When that moon comes up and begins to sail across the sky, there will come a point, if you watch closely enough, when the earth starts to move, to race that moon, and you can feel our planet spin in the heavens. It doesn’t matter who you stand with or where you’re from. It happens for everyone. And what kind of a God, I ask, could make that happen?

A Hand on the Lid of the World
    . . .
    IN THE MORNING, watching the light break over the lake and the trees and the long, sloping curve of the mountain behind them, I understand what my people say—that the land is a feeling. The silence is tactile. You can feel it on your skin. It becomes, in the end, as comfortable and familiar as an old pair of moccasins.
    Life hasn’t always been like this. My search for identity, for meaning, for an Aboriginal definition of myself has been deafening at times. When I feel the mountains and the land like I do these days, I remember where it was that I found peace through all those desperate years.
    Libraries have always been my refuge. As a kid I met Peter Pan there, Curious George, the Bobbsey twins and the great Red Rider. It was stunning to discover that they’d let me take those characters home. I loved the smell of libraries, too, a combination of dust and leather and the dry rub of paper mixed with paint and wood and people.
    The library showed me the mysteries of the world. There was always something that I’d never heard of or imagined, and books and stories where I could learn about it. I read wide-eyed, tracing the tricky words with a finger until I could sound them out and discern a fragment of meaning. The library was like an enchanted forest. I explored every inch of the stacks, fascinated by the witches and goblins, fairies and trolls, great wars and inventions I encountered there.
    Life changed as it always does. By the time I was seventeen I was on my own, struggling to find work and enough money to feed myself. Times were often hard and empty. But there was always the library. I spent many a cold and rainy afternoon hunched over a book they let me read for free.
    Back then some libraries had listening rooms. The library in St. Catharines did. You could take a record album into a small room with a chair and put on headphones and listen and study the liner notes. I was reading a book about Beethoven, amazed that he could compose symphonies despite his deafness, could put a hand on the lid of the piano and recognize the notes by their vibration. I was curious about his music, so I took a record into the listening room.
    It was a dull day in autumn, just leaning towards evening, and the colours and shapes of things were beginning to lose their daylight definition. There was a stillness to the world. I sat in the chair and waited for the sound to emerge from the headphones. When it came, the music was a trio for piano and strings in D major. “Ghost,” it was called, and it seemed like the perfect title for that time of day.
    There was a burst of activity from the strings, with the piano underneath, and then the gentle waft of a solo violin before the cello took it away in an elegant note that was all melancholy, regret and yearning. The mathematics and the science that held the world together vanished in the cascade of notes from the keyboard and the wash of the strings. Something in the creative magic of Ludwig van Beethoven touched something in me, and things were never the same again.
    After that, there was no stopping me. I first heard Duke Ellington in that listening room. One foggy Saturday I played Ella