Living Resistance by Kaitlin B. Curtice

Author:Kaitlin B. Curtice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Social Justice;Spirituality;Spiritual life;REL062000;REL012110;SOC072000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

The firefly, or wawatesi in Potawatomi, is one of the most magical creatures in the world. Fireflies use their glowing lights to communicate with each other in the summer months when it gets warm enough for us to swim in the rivers and listen to the frogs sing at night. But they are elusive—to see them, you have to gaze into the darkness and wait, with patience, for those little lights to appear. And no matter how old you are, you cannot stop the rising excitement in your chest, the childlike magic that takes over—the firefly, the lightning bug, is there, lighting up, and you get to experience it because you believed the wait would be worth it.

I believe kinship works in the same way. Kinship can be defined simply as close relationship or as a sharing of origins. And sharing of origins—relationship—that takes time too. It takes waiting in the silence, in the dark, in the quiet spaces, for trust and companionship to blossom. It takes communicating with one another along the way to make our communities and healing networks successful.

Our relationship to Mother Earth should be based on ideas of kinship, that we belong to one another, that our love is reciprocal, as Robin Wall Kimmerer so beautifully writes about in Braiding Sweetgrass. We should, at some point in our lives, decide that the journey of kinship is worth the waiting to understand what it means to belong to another—to Mother Earth, to the creatures around us, to the people in our lives, to all our relatives.

And I am not just talking about our blood relatives when we talk about kinship. As many of us have learned, a blood connection is not always enough, and is not always safe. Many queer and transgender youth can tell you this, those who have been pushed from their own homes and deemed unworthy of a religion built on white supremacy and colonialism. They know full well what it means to have chosen family, as many of us do. Kinship is about that chosen relationship, the origins of who we are as sacred and beloved beings all across this earth.

Even our relationship with the Divine, Mamogosnan, Creator, the Great Spirit, God—this is based on kinship, on shared origin, on ideas of what it means to be loved and to love. When I was little, I used to ask God how they were doing. I thought that caring for the entire world, the galaxies around us, must be so exhausting, with so many painful stories to hold—so I’d pray, How are you doing with all of this? I never really got an answer, but the answer wasn’t necessarily the point. I asked because I wanted kinship.

The ironic thing is that for as long as I went to church, people would pass by one another, their smiles plastered on for a few hours each Sunday morning, asking, How are you? We would answer one another, Oh, good! How are you? as we made our way to the worship service.

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