A new friend has arrived to enrich my life. Richard Wagamese is speaking to me from the pages of his Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations, a poetic photobook of vital philosophy.
I have welcomed his arrival at La Libélula, a sacred land in Tárcoles, Puntarenas–sacred to me, at least, and to the animate beings that are residing here with me. Here we live, feel, heal, and delight.
We also play. Today Cóllotl, the scorpion, came to live in the house. I gently chased him with a dry leaf from an almond tree, until I tricked him into climbing. It was a game of wits and wills. He tried to run away and, when cornered, recoiled. But finally Cóllotl climbed into the leaf, and I took him out, to live in the stump of the old carao tree. I thought of Wagamese’s metaphor that baseball is a game where all of us help each other to make it home.
During these days of my profound silence, I especially cherish Wagamese’s literary voice in the early morning, while I have my first coffee after meditation at dawn.
As I try to feel-with-the-land, without overthinking life and its winding paths, his words simplify. Here’s a striking example.
Nowadays I figure life is pretty simple: Creator is everywhere and divine light shines through everything and everyone all the time. My work is to look for that light.
I know very well that Wagamese’s life is not mine, and my work is not his work. His is founded upon a spiritual tradition–the Ojibway’s, a First Nation from Ontario–which I can only witness with respect, while I tread upon my own.
Still, I am paying close attention to the light as it illumines this land throughout the day. I observe what it reveals and what it hides, about joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, nourishing and preying, truth and deceit, love and loss. It is all life.
And Wagamese’s words invite me to search for my own ways to simplify, as I try to live a reasonable, sensible life.
Daniel G. Campos 