Beginning Again
Flagstaff coffee shop
November 29, 2024
The week of Black Friday is when I notice that I subscribe to an awful lot of nonprofits and small businesses, all worthy entities and all sending daily emails promoting their sales. I open what looks like a nice greeting, subject line “Happy Thanksgiving!” from an online business owner, and below the yummy pumpkin pie photo and a short paragraph of good wishes is the headline “Black Friday Special.”
I used to work in marketing for a local nonprofit and my main job was writing promotional emails. This was in the mid-aughts, when email marketing wasn’t exactly new but hadn’t yet grown to the massive size it is now. Back then, there was strategizing to cut through the noise, various calculations of the best time of day to send your email to give it the best chance of getting opened. I don’t know whether marketers still do that. What I can tell you, though, is that the deluge of Black Friday through Giving Tuesday promotions has a paralyzing effect on me. I’m not buying or donating anything online until the onslaught ends, or at least slows down.
Flagstaff street. Yes, that’s a mountain peak in the background.
I’m in Flagstaff, a charming small city in northern Arizona, with streets lined with quirky buildings and tall spruce and pine trees. To the north rise the stately San Francisco Peaks, just beyond the buildings, seeming almost close enough to walk to. The peaks are a volcanic mountain range sacred to thirteen local Indigenous peoples, including the Havasupai, Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni. The winter solstice is calculated by the way the sunset aligns from these mountain peaks to Hopi villages on the Black Mesa of northwestern Arizona.
The winter solstice, for the Hopi, signifies the beginning of a new year, bringing soon the new planting season. The peaks are also the home of the katsinam, or kachinas, the ancestral spirits of the Pueblo peoples. The katsinam are ethical and spiritual guides who visit the mesas from midwinter to midsummer, blessing the people with rain, abundant crops, fertility, good health, and knowledge.
I’ve made it through another round of the problematic American feast of Thanksgiving Day, without benefit of spiritual guidance. My heritage honors neither ancestors nor the Earth. Walking Between Worlds writes about these issues with humility and hope.
This year I let myself honor my desire to let myself be nourished by fall harvest and gather with people that I love, while also letting this be a day of mourning and reflection on what it means to call a stolen land home. Letting it feel messy and alive. Finding new ways to be together without it being a celebration. — The alchemy of lineage
In this essay I find so much to identify with, from my own ancestral heritage, and from my present communities as well. The writer continues:
[T]aking the moral high ground was a huge privilege, one that wasn’t true for most humans throughout history. In unhooking from the binary of good and evil, I can see that many of my ancestors sat between one shitty choice and the next. The actions they took were likely normalized in the culture that they existed in. I say this not to give anyone a pass, but to contextualize the difficult history.
Kaitlin Curtice is an author, poet-storyteller, public speaker, and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. This week she wrote, “I want Thanksgiving to be a beginning, not a destination. In other words, I want us to show up tenderly to this moment, whether it’s in our personal lives or in our collective ones.”
As Wordsworth said, “To begin, begin.”
This week, we begin. We decide where we want to start from—the truth about Thanksgiving, holding nuance and complexity, honoring the sacredness of Mother Earth, or all of the above.
We begin here, knowing that the journey is lifelong, that it isn’t just this holiday season, but the coming cold winter months that will guide us home to ourselves, the sacred Earth always tending to our wounds with us.
That is where we begin, and that is how we hold space for a destination beyond and above us.
We have arrived, but we are still arriving.
May the coming winter months guide us all home to ourselves and bless us, as sacred Mother Earth begins a new cycle.
