The Wheel Is Turning: 7 Years of Talking Rock Tours
For seven years, if you looked closely at the O in Rock on the Talking Rock Tours logo, you would find a cross inside it. Four lines meeting at the centre. Four directions: East, South, West, North. The medicine wheel, one of the most ancient and enduring symbols in Indigenous culture, hiding in plain sight inside a single letter.
I placed it there on purpose to represent not only rocks, but stones as well for acknowledging the importance of medicine wheel and petroform cultural teachings. In hindsight, I didn’t fully understand all of its teachings in my personal journey. Now, seven years later, Talking Rock Tours is making a small but meaningful change.
To a geologist, seven years is not even a fraction of a blink of an eye in the rock record. The rocks beneath our feet in Alberta have been here for hundreds of millions of years. But a business is not a rock. A business is more like a stone: something actively being shaped for a purpose. Talking Rock Tours has a meaningful purpose of reconciliation-in-action that takes place on the land for the people it serves, and together our hands, hearts, and minds pass on knowledge and wisdom learnt to other family and friends.
I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the past 7 years of Talking Rock Tours, and show you how the logo changing will reflect Talking Rock Tours for the years to come.
“…a business is not a rock. A business is more like a stone: something actively being shaped. By the land. By the people it serves. By the hands that hold it and pass it on.”
The Wheel Turns
Talking Rock Tours has been shaped by thousands of hands now. And after seven years of walking on the land with curious, open-hearted people (our 2 legged relations), I recently reflected on the logo and knew something had shifted.
The cross in the O represented the four directions to me. The foundation. The orientation. An homage to my Roman Catholic upbringing and my service in the Canadian Armed Forces (i.e. cross hairs). This is where I originally came from. This is where I am rooted. But roots don’t mean stillness. Ask any tree!
The medicine wheel is not a static thing. It is a cycle. You move through each stage. You begin as the infant, then the child, then the adult, then the elder, and somewhere in that turning you begin to understand that the wheel was never about arriving anywhere, but our entire journey in life. It is the same with the logo. Perhaps, in another 7 years, the medicine wheel inside of the O will move again.
“The wheel was never about arriving anywhere. It was always about one’s journey during the different stages of life.”
And that turning is the whole point. Mother Earth does not hold still. The rock cycle never stops. The medicine wheel turns. The seasons continue to change. A symbol that honours all of that should turn too. An X better suits the four directions meeting at a centre. It is still a medicine wheel. It is the same truth, seen from a new angle, the way you see a landscape differently depending on where you’re standing, what season you’re in, how many years of walking you’re carrying in your legs.
A New Season for Talking Rock Tours
When I started Talking Rock Tours, I wanted people to look down at the ground beneath their feet and feel something real. Awe. Curiosity. A connection to Mother Earth that no classroom ever taught them and no screen can replicate.
That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the depth. The intention. The way I share knowledge with you on every discovery tour.
“Every person who walks with me is not a customer or a tourist. They are an active participant on a meaningful learning journey.”
Every person who walks with me is not a customer. They are a willing witness. To the land, yes, but also to the idea that reconciliation doesn’t only happen in boardrooms, classrooms, and legislation. It can happen when someone picks up a piece of Precambrian rock and realizes, maybe for the first time, that someone else’s relationship with that rock is older and deeper and richer than anything they were ever taught in school. That is the kind of knowing that I want to share with you.
The Past Teaches us about Our Future
Neolithic Peoples built stone monuments and many of them are still standing today. They didn’t build them to only last forever in their human construct. They built them to mean something to the people who made them, and to every generation that came after and looked up and wondered. My goal as we welcome the new summer season of Talking Rock Tours is to develop a relationship with Mother Earth that gets passed, hand to hand, like a stone, and continue to share that knowledge for generations to come.
Thank you for joining me on this journey for the past seven years. I can’t wait to see what the future will hold for us with Talking Rock Tours.
Are you interested in listening to what Mother Earth has to share with us? Book your tour at www.talkingrocktours.com. We are now booking our spring/summer/fall/winter 2026 discovery tours.
I would like to proudly acknowledge and welcome you to the ancestral homelands of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis: the peoples of Treaty 6, 7, and 8 territories, whose relationship with this land stretches back since time immemorial.
As a proud Métis, I am grateful every day to learn not only from my own culture, history, and language, but from the many Indigenous Peoples whose knowledge and traditions continue to enrich and shape our diverse Canadian communities. That knowledge and wisdom are gifts that I proudly carry and share more each year on every discovery tour.
Welcome to our sacred land – May we walk together with curiosity, respect, and gratitude.
May the LAND be with you!