As long as we can remember them, our families will always be with us.

We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.

A journal is a very personal thing. As far as possible, to write this sort of book you need to know and feel your character as a person and then put yourself into that person's mind, place and time. Trying to stay in that person, place and time is a challenge when surrounded by this very different world of the 21st century.

Do we make ourselves into what we become or is it built into our genes, into the fate spun for us by whatever shapes events?

Guilt can make you doubt yourself at the very moment when you need to proceed with certainty.

If it wasn't for good," my mother says, "we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.

One of the things I've been taught by Native American elders is the importance of patience, of waiting to do things when the time is right. As an Onondaga friend put it to me, "you can't pick berries until the berries are ripe."