I really appreciate this essay and all the thinking and feeling you have done to get here. I'm curious if your friend chose to cut off the locs, but I suppose that wasn't the end point of the essay so much as the lauching point for the deeper questions.

My friend turned me on to Martin Prechtel, and I read all of his books about ten years ago. Later, she did a multi-year course with him called Bolad's Kitchen. Every month there was homework and much of it was about relearning what Indigenous people of Europe would have known before Christianity, in terms of both skills and stories. His point was/is that it is essential that we all "re-indigenize," but not by taking another culture's way of being in the world.

I was an observer of the course from the outside, and I get it, but something bothers me. The piece of connecting to my European peasant pagan heritage sounds good, but I don't live in Europe. I think of the process of belonging to place as recognizing my kinship with the plants, animals, insects, soil, and other humans who share this space with me, so whatever I do needs to be grounded in place. Of course, I live on stolen land, so this is comlicated.

I love how your essay opens the door to complicated questions and contradictions and invites us (white folks) to do better than just throw up our hands.