“Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on–and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It’s a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end.”

Richard Wagamese died in March 2017, at the age of 61.

He had recently released Embers, a book of his meditations.

Six weeks after his death, the book was awarded a BC Book Prize, the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award.

Here is Wagamese’s take on what it means to be spiritual:

“There are motions of the heart that occur only in quiet rooms, in the splendour of solitude where nothing and everything exists at the same time. Being and becoming have their confluence in these moments of touching your essence. You feel yourself a part of the great wheel of creative, nurturing, loving, benevolent energy that is spinning around us all the time. This is what it means to be spiritual – to feel your spirit moving. Take to quiet places, then. Immerse yourself in them. Feel your energy merge with that timeless, eternal energy and be made more.

In this stillness, I am the trees alive with singing. I am the sky everywhere at once. I am the snow and the wind bearing stories across geographies and generations. I am the light everywhere and descending. I am my heart evoking drum song. I am my spirit rising. In the smell of these sacred medicines burning, I am my prayers and my meditation, and I am time captured fully in this now. I am a traveller on a sacred journey through this one shining day.”