At the beginning of October I did a ceremony on my own in the mountains.

A bowl of water, some stones I gathered from the land, a few feathers, many tears.

In the closing, I wrapped a strap of leather around my wrist, three times, and tied it with a knot, repeating out loud to myself, ‘I matter’ with each wrap.

The last 365 days were a spinning compass needle of disorientation for many of us. An unwelcome yet necessary awakening, a horror film, an unraveling of certainties, a loss of innocence, a barbaric feeding-frenzy, a mystical, slow-moving choreography of chaos. And they were the days of listening to sounds never-before-heard in my suburban backyard and imagining that THIS – the sounds without the noise – is what the world sounded like to my ancestors. Birdsong. The slightest breeze. The whispers of my neighbors talking over coffee in their backyard, being carried over to me, as the field grasses, waking up to the warming sun, rustled against each other’s crisp winter stalks.