I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.