writing prompt
“‘the one’s’ bad reputation”
-
things we do on new year’s day
there’s an old superstition that goes something like “the things we do on new year’s day will be the things we do all year”, and there’s also more superstitions about things we “should not” do.
today is new year’s day and i was feeling a lil superstitious today so i didn’t do the laundry or sweep the house. i didn’t cook food or wash any dishes.
instead i took a drive and listened to music. i went to the thrift store because it was open for some reason and it was oddly busy like maybe other people were feeling restless and strange like i was. i bought a book at the thrift store about ancient history. i took the highway through the reservation to see my mother and took her a gift. she made me toast and honey.
she has been sitting at home doing indigenous beadwork and watching true crime on tv. she is beading beautiful amulets and baubles while someone on the television describes the grisly murder of a teenage girl. “people are sick,” she declares while picking up red beads with her long thin beading needle.
i told her that new year’s day superstitions say that the first visitor to the home should have dark hair and bring gifts and she eyes me warily. in the superstition it’s supposed to be a man, but that sounds like sexist horseshit to me but the guy who delivers my vegetarian pizza later has dark hair so i guess i’m good.
“сука” my mother says as she drops some beads on the ground.
she likes the gift i have brought her, a framed photo she took of me. i look a little ghastly in the photo, pale with my long hair a mess around my shoulders, but i am smiling in the photo because i am in love. i hate the photo when i first get it back from the film development lab, but as i’ve studied it, i realize that i look, maybe not ghastly, but simply, achingly human.
i stopped wearing makeup last summer after attending sweatlodge. i took out almost all my piercings, too. i still have all of my tattoos because those are harder to get rid of, but you can’t see them in the photo anyways.
i ask my mother if she would make me a pocket altar i saw on instagram because my mother is an excellent seamstress who is constantly making something. she studies the photos i show her and by the time i get home she’s already made a prototype. she’s even done beadwork on it.
she told me once that doing beadwork makes her feel closer to my father, who grew up on the reservation and was his kokum’s favourite. his kokum did beadwork and made moccasins and could skin a rabbit faster than the boys she raised.
i tell my mother about my bad day at work and she takes it in while smoking on the porch.
“suffering is a constant,” she says after a while and she shakes her head.
i go home and have a bath and wash my hair and drink water because i realize i’ve been running on diet coke and black coffee and that’s probably why i feel weird. i order vegetarian pizza and read. i write poetry and work on my blog.
i burn candles and incense and tonight before bed, i’m going to do a big smudge and really sit with that.
life is strange, sometimes and it’s painful and weird. i reach out to some people i know and tell them i love them. maybe i could tell the world, too.
so – i love you.
happy new year.
i hope this year is a kind one and i hope that we all find the rest our bodies are seeking through the darkness of january.
-
medicine for 2026
December 31, 2025
it seems like everyone’s got their list of the things they want to accomplish for the new year. all that new year new me type of vibe.
i dont know if im about all that kind of stuff because i don’t want to make promises and i dont want to say crazy shit like how im gonna go the gym everyday and hustle for dat bread.
when i was young, new years eve meant getting drunk and partying and now, i feel is a time to sent intentions for the things i wish for myself as another year turns ahead. but, i don’t want to hustle and i don’t want to be a boss and i dont want my intentions to be ones consumed of avarice.
so let’s talk medicine. i like big medicine in small places.
- i want to pray more, to smudge more and to continue to look for, find, and appreciate the numinous in my life
- i want to continue to write and to write even more and to just keep writing because i feel most like myself and most at peace when im writing. i started hospital vespers in 2025 and it’s been one of the best decisions ive ever made.
- i want to continue giving myself the freedom to be myself in all of the ways i would like to be, even if those things don’t make sense, aren’t aesthetic or could be seen as cringe. the personal branding programming that is fed to us by social media is toxic and harmful. i wish to continue to reject this.
- i wish to embrace curiosity and a gentle questioning spirit in my quest to understand others and also myself.
- i will endeavour to attend as much ceremony as i can in 2026.
- i will endeavour to continue to uphold and assert my personal boundaries and release what no longer holds me.
- i wish to read more and i wish to learn more and to approach both with a gentle spirit and curiosity. having duolingo taught me that i can gain progress even in small amounts. even if i read a few pages a day, it is better than nothing at all. writing has made me desire reading.
- i will fall in love again.
- i will endeavour to go out more and challenge myself to do different things, make new friends and allow myself to experience wonder, again.
- i will go back to therapy, regularly. ive taken a break of several months that has been needed from regular work and im ready to work again.
- i will continue to talk about grief and loss and mental illness and trauma and spirituality and love.
- im gonna find really cool stuff at the thrift store this year.
- im gonna send more mail to people just because
- im gonna tell more people that i love them and that im grateful for them.
- im gonna make more memes
- im going to laugh a lot
- im going to continue learning swedish (sorry in advance to anyone who has to listen to it)
- im going to make playlists for each month and post them here
- i am going to send more voice notes
- i am going to make more phone calls just because
- i am going to continue to fill sketchbooks and journals and not listen to the voice that likes to say that my sketches and writing aren’t worthy to sully the pages of a book
- i will endeavour to love and use the things i own completely and accept the change in them and in myself. i will not save the good perfume or the good clothes or anything else for a “special occasion”
- i will learn to make something new.
- i want to allow myself to feel happiness in times where i would not have previously allowed myself. i let myself feel joy during christmas 2025 for the first time since my father died and it was extremely meaningful and healing.
- i will endeavour to stop over explaining.
- i want to learn how to dance and make regalia and do my beadwork. i want to learn to drum and sing and do all the things my ancestors had taken from them. i will live for them in ways they could not.
-
photographs found in a book in a thrift store in december
scotty’s castle, death valley, california i am restless, as i usually am when i am working. in my work i am often exposed to humans and their humanity, and sometimes the weight of human emotion and often human suffering can be a heavy load to lift with my own psyche.
i go walking when i feel restless, i find a lot of peace in hitting the pavement in my blundstones, with my headphones on, because then i can just think and when i’m thinking, i can let things go.
kitt peak observatory, arizona in my walks, i often end up at the thrift shop – there’s one downtown that i love and i go there frequently. i like to visit the ladies there and say hello. i’ve written about this thrift shop before here and here and also here.
i love this shop. i love the piles of papers and cards and old books.
bisbee, arizona i find a stack of photographs tucked into an old book at the thrift shop. it is december and snowy outside. i am moody and listening to a pensive swedish hip-hop song about forgiveness.
the photographs are not dated. printed on fujicolor paper. there’s no indication of who took them or why – i don’t immediately recognize the locations, either. using google lens, i am able to place the photographs as a trip to california, nevada and arizona.
death valley, california i am, of course, as i always am with the photography of others, fascinated. i begin to romanticize who may have taken these photos, what drove them to the desert? what called them there?
maybe it’s because i live in a desert myself, that i know this call of the heat, the dry, the dust, the coyotes shrieking to the sky, rattlesnakes sleeping on red rocks. i know this desire, the murky darkness and scorching heat.
club legacy, reno, nevada as a canadian, i also know the fascination with the vastness and the loneliness of the united states and it’s american dream. i feel like, we have traces of it in canada as well, this loose sense of loneliness that pervades our iciness here in the great white north.
father misty lookout point, rainbow canyon, death valley, california it’s a little romantic for me to find someone’s photographs like this, such an intimate look into the life and dreams of another, this anonymous other. they’re beautiful.
i love moments like this – just the briefest feeling of connection with another human in our shared humanity, in our shared little lives.
(if these photographs belong to you, let me know here if i can reunite you with them)
hospital vespers 