how i want to live my life

“Carved out my lane and chilled.”

There is this idea I return to all the time, talk about all the time, that comes from a quote by one of our late elders, Eddie Benton Banai. He said that to live an Anishinaabe life, to live according to our Seven Grandfather teachings, is to live a life where every footstep becomes a prayer. Isn’t that beautiful? You know how when you walk through... See more

I feel my life has unfolded in a way that prepared me to do this work and along the way, especially so in the last decade, so many doors have opened that shouldn’t have and I feel the weight of the hands of all of my ancestors on my back urging me through them. So the essential part of this work is to show up. Show up when asked to represent my peo... See more

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh i... See more

I liked mattering. I can live with less money and with “regular” cars and without a job title ... it’s very possible to live a very nice life without those things. But mattering ... yeah, I miss that. I want to figure out how to matter again1. Let’s put a pin in that one, consider it a work in progress.

If you’re committed to adopting a Brat mindset this summer, know that sometimes you have to ditch the resumé building and manifestation journaling in favor of just staring in the mirror and feeling really hot. To be a brat is to bypass the bogus treadmill that women are placed on in order to achieve. In other words, you don’t fucking care what they... See more

We create our own reason to live, not a meaning to life. If life has no meaning, it is entirely up to us to determine how we want to live, what purpose we want to fulfill. As Jean Paul Sartre would put it, we define our existence by determining our own essence, or the things that make us us. It is also up to us to grapple with the terrors that come... See more

Again, the idea of manifesting your own ideas of success, your reasons for life, plays a huge role here. It allows ego to be put to the side in favor of accomplishing a common goal, an idea that we can do it differently this time.