I received a gift from a member of a book club I facilitate at the library, as did everyone who attended the last meeting. That alone is a lovely gesture and a thing to cherish. Having read the book, I now completely understand why it was gifted, and I plan to pay it forward and gift a few copies of it myself. 

The book? Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations by Richard Wagamese, so sadly and recently departed. It's a lovely volume, filled with photographs and quotations and best read a few pages at a time as a morning meditation. 

My two favourite (of many) meditations / quotations from the book appear, one at the beginning, and one at the end. 

“I am my silence. I am not the busyness of my thoughts or the daily rhythm of my actions. I am not the stuff that constitutes my world. I am not my talk. I am not my actions. I am my silence. I am the consciousness that perceives all these things. When I go to my consciousness, to that great pool of silence that observes the intricacies of my life, I am aware that I am me. I take a little time each day to sit in silence so that I can move outward in balance into the great clamour of living.”

– Richard Wagamese 

“I am not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I'm here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times. I'm here to pray and chant and meditate and sing and find Creator in a blues riff, a sunrise, a touch or the laughter of children. I'm here to discover ME in all of that. I'm here to add clunky, chunky and funky bits of me to the swirl and swagger and churn of life and living. It demands I be authentic. So when you look out at the world, that's me dancing in the fields...”

– Richard Wagamese

What a gift this is, what a kindness. I'm looking forward to reading it more slowly the second time, just a few pages at a time.