"There's a war going on. A war against mother earth. I wonder whose side you on?" Clayton Tommy, an Okanogan Indian elder asks the author, who has lived for many years in the Pacific Northwest. Tom Harmer, an outdoorsman and hunter, reconnects with this spiritual teacher after a close encounter with death one night in the forests of Washington near the Canadian border. The elder agrees to share with him the "old power way." And so the journey begins as Harmer becomes attuned to a "numinous, knowing feel for the earth that was disappearing from people's hearts."
Harmer lives under the influence and protection of a spirit animal, learns power dreaming, tries his hand at foretelling the weather, and participates in sweatlodges and healing ceremonies. It is a new way of being that connects him with the earth and all living beings. And this power has nothing to do with control over things or knowing in the head: "Power didn't have anything to do with the part of me that thought and decided about how things worked. Power crept along unnoticed under the floorboards of things, moved behind the curtain of what was in front of me, and only showed up on the periphery of what was at hand."
This spiritual memoir will leave you with a deep respect for the Native American path of power that acknowledges mystery as the source of the natural world.
