All my life I have looked for wisdom, sure that she is standing just behind the next tree or hidden in the rocks behind me.
As a ten year old I wandered from room to room in my grandmother’s nursing home, talking to women who had dusted their faces with flour instead of powder, built cabins by hand from pieces of their covered wagons, and had scars from being scalped by real life ”Indians.” I wanted to learn the old languages, to sing the old songs, to climb up in someone’s mind and listen to the stories of a time gone by.
I tried to build my world on the foundations of ideas, thinking that they would withstand the earthquakes and tornados and battering by storms better than wood and stone and that stuff they call plasterboard.
I have held my dreams close and tried to let my children grow free thinking it is true that what loves me will always come back and, perhaps, never really leave in ways that matter.
I’ve taken a hundred pictures of trees whose faces peer out from behind the wrinkles of soft dark bark and roses who stand elegantly amid their thorns. Somewhere deep within both of them I think I might find myself.
Now I stare into the faces of my grandchildren looking for the child I was and still am, but the search for wisdom goes on.
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