…this is a flow of thoughts, a rushing river through my mind, thoughts that are hard to hold onto, because like water they are on the move, constantly recycling. I had a particular teacher at age 19, an indigenous man who introduced me to indigenous authors and literature from North America/Turtle island. He was the first to introduce me to the concept that wherever two elements or entities exist, there is always a third, and the third is a portal, often unseen and unnamed by the western mind. Reality was altered by this perspective. It became part of an unraveling, an opening of new neural pathways, and even now, 26 years later I continue to strive to learn from this. It is a devotional practice, often lonely, as devotion in a nihilistic era can be, one of living into questions and tuning into my senses to feeling and seeing beneath the surface of things. As I confront whiteness–the unearned privilege and power, the ease, the silent complicity in violence against and oppression of others, the intersections with marginalized othered parts of me– I encounter a wound at the core–it feels like a dark abyss, a gaping void, a severance of my ancestral roots. A series of displacements resulting in amnesia. A loss of a people, language, land, culture and spirit. Colonization and subjugation manifesting disease and addiction. The grief is so acute, I buckle and I weep. I cannot hold it, alone. I do not know where to begin or who to turn to, and yet I do begin, again, every day.