My mother collects photographs. She has more than I could ever count stored in antiquated albums and now in a nebulous electronic cloud somewhere in the sky. She says they remind her of people long gone or perhaps just far away. Memories that she holds dear. Flies in amber, frozen in that precise moment when the button is triggered and the lens opens, turning life into hundreds of little pixels.

I once asked her if she knew her ancestry, hoping to find the threads that I was sure connected me to something bigger than myself. A reason for the bear cloak that I sometimes wear when I need to be fierce, strong, and courageous. She has no answers. Nor does my dad. Perhaps my lineage can be traced back to Scandia.  A descendent of a valorous shield maiden. Perhaps my ties are to the indigenous people of my country, here in the northernmost part of the Americas.  Perhaps I am the great great ever so great-granddaughter of warriors or chiefs. Or perhaps that of the hunters who traveled the wilderness.  

Then again, perhaps my origins are more mundane. A simple girl living a simple life devoid of magic. I am content with that, strangely enough.  Today, I am sore, having ridden many kilometres through blustering rain and sometimes cutting winds. Sore and cold, my cheeks chapped and my fingers stiff, watching as the people I have guided to this warm cozy cabin share the pictures they have taken over the course of the day. Pictures of open plains and magnificent skies. Pictures of swollen rivers and trees that have seen generations of people passing through in the very same trails we follow.

And once again, I am back to my mother’s photographs.

Like many, I have taken my share. I still do from time to time, despite their nature. A moment in time captured, perhaps, but a moment later they become lies for every moment of every day the world changes around us and whatever has been captured has changed with it. I smile and try to look playful or perhaps serious and am captured as such, but it is not really me that is captured. Just a memory of me. A shadow perhaps, for I have already moved on. It is a chronicle of my journey, but not of who I am. Rather, it is who I was.

Some tribes, and we are all members of some tribe or another despite that we sometimes forget, believe that a photograph steals your soul and shun them. There are places I visit where I have to remind people to be respectful of that and to take only their memories with them. That is something I have learned to do regardless of custom or belief, whether it be with people or with Mother Earth and the gods that still walk her surface or swim her lakes or take flight in her skies.

For me, it is not spiritual, but rather the knowledge that photographs tell a false story, one that is static. One that is unable to move on and evolve. It is not a journey, but a place to rest before continuing and we are all on similar journeys whether or not we know it. I spoke of ancestors. I have someone in my life who prides herself in being descended from great warriors who served a king. I can see them in her blood. She has their fire. Their strength. Their loyalty. And she can be cruel like warriors must be. But she is also generous and kind. A balance of light and shadows as she tends her gardens and shares her knowledge and wisdom, passing it on to future generations who will walk in her footsteps on their own unique journey.

Today I came upon a fox. She was lame, walking with a limp. I paused for a while, sitting near her on a fallen branch and spoke to her of my journey north from the city of bright lights and noise to the quiet of the northern plains. And she told me hers. Of how she had run with just grand designs, wishing to reach the top of a great hill and see what lay beyond but stumbled and hurt her leg before she could reach the top.

She seemed saddened by her failure, or so she called it. Frustrated that she had to pause in her journey and seek shelter from the wind and the rain beneath in the woods where I discovered her.

The hill will always be there, I remind her. And what lies beyond as well. Perhaps it will all change, but so will she and that is not always a bad thing. Maybe what might have been grey skies and cold winds will be blue skies and rainbows when she is able to finally reach the top.   

Or perhaps not, she murmured with a heavy sigh.

Perhaps not, but had she made the climb we would never have met and I think I am rather glad that we did.

That moment is now a memory. Nothing more. There is no photographic evidence of it. But it happened and I feel fuller for it as I do each time someone touches me, each imprinting themselves on my heart until it has grown impossibly large. Once I had the heart of a small girl hiding beneath a magical bear cloak, shivering when I heard the storms raging or the wolves howling, sniffing at my tent, their eyes red and full of bloodlust. Just a very small and very frightened rabbit in a very large world. Perhaps I still am, but I take heart that my journey is only begun.

And now, I sit upon a small cot, the gentle flames of a fire keeping me company and warming me as my eyelids grow heavy with sleep and my thoughts turn, not to the memories I have made today, but to those I will make upon waking.