Tonight would be a simple ceremony because the day had been a big one, made almost impossibly hard by Citrine’s violent death. Walking slowly, holding Citrine’s beautiful just-feathering body, her stripes and dots, her opulent creamy breast, her long strong prehistoric legs and talons, her bill made exquisitely for scooping, shoveling, crushing and filtering. As we walk in silence I remember that my people, the North Norse, (and particularly my first-generation father, his parents and their parents) have worked hard for my right to grieve. Allowing and feeling grief isn’t practical, or even possible, when you are struggling to make ends meet, to assimilate, to belong. But I imagine this quiet sojourn out into the fields to be one that my ancestors would be grateful for. To care for a thing and grieve its loss is the sign of a well-enough nervous system. To enact the necessary rituals and ceremony to keep the grief generative – as opposed to stifling it so it becomes toxic – is a sign of a well-enough life.

After years of reciting prayers that meant absolutely nothing to me, prayers meant to indoctrinate me into a sense of meaning and order that is ultimately demeaning and demoralizing, the prayer that came out was to the bees, to the horses, to the fields, to the water and to my own body. After that came my love for them all, and more…for the lake that these fields poured themselves into and for the fish who swam in that lake. For the raspberries digesting in my belly. Then, one by one, I began ceremonially removing the stingers of the bees (in some heartbreaking cases, with the dead bees still attached), who had sacrificed themselves to protect their hive. Under the branches of a tiny Balsam tree just sprouting on the bank of the stream, I made a small altar, arranging the bees and stingers in the shape of a heart.

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.