On one of the bookshelves in my bedroom there's an abalone shell. It serves as a vessel to hold the smudging herbs (like sage, sweetgrass, cedar, or tobacco) while they burn for prayer or ceremony. Practically, it has natural heat resistance making it good for holding burning materials. Aesthetically, it's iridescent, with a beautiful sacred interior. Spiritually, the shell represents the water element, complementing the earth (herbs), fire (flame), and air (smoke). The shell is a gift from the ocean, connecting ceremony to the natural world.

My Dad had one, I'm pretty sure he used it as an ashtray. The one I have was gifted to me from an ex she got at a renaissance fair. I'm not sure which is more profane.

When I write here to you, tonight, as I have been for over a dozen weeks now, I think: what can I offer? Writing and storytelling are sacred medicine, no different than sage or sweetgrass, just a different substrate. But I falter in grasping the tangible use of my writing, right now.

I hope I've been giving you something worthwhile over these past few months, as I continue to somehow figure out something new to say. Since I've begun writing full-time, I've been spending a lot of time in this bedroom, igniting herbs in the shell while I keep track of meditation minutes with my Apple Watch.

Let me try to share medicine with you, reader.

The best worst time to be alive is now. When magpies still raid garbage bins at dawn, when strangers hold doors for strangers, when we fucking try. The cynic can keep his sophisticated despair. Give me the holy fool's courage to believe in tomorrow. Give me the strength to love this broken world not despite its cracks, but because each fissure is space where light sneaks in. I want to make medicine from morning dew and parkade puddles, want to heal everything I touch.

I tell myself I'm doing enough. That I'm still good at practising non-attachment, still vegan, still Mahayana properly. The magpies in the back lane know better. There's so many of these birds here in Calgary. Squawking tricksters with iridescent tails. Picking through my garbage, finding the truth in black plastic bags beneath my carefully constructed stories. I am hungry, I am human, I am here. The magpies know our sacred texts are just letters to what we've lost. I am my discarded principles. Coping mechanisms for the sober. Love poems disguised as theory. The birds know my secrets, watch me try to smudge away desire. The magpies build nests with pages from my journals, insulating with words I can’t write. I tell myself that, well, at least there's always next season's migration pattern.

Matches scratch the universe into being. Smoke curls in cursive. In the light morning, when I've been awake since midnight, I light the sage bundle. Cedar. Tobacco. Rosemary from the grocery store wearing a barcode. The alarms and detectors glare with a single red eye. I remember when the cat used to sniff disapprovingly.

Ceremony is doing something over and over until it becomes true. Peel an orange and it’s a ritual. Drink water and it’s a prayer. Walking the red road means paying attention. Everything is relatives. Even the student loan statements and being an asshole and drunken unsent texts. Spirit-walking between worlds. Be careful to not let the holy smoke choke out the profane lungs, or trigger colonial panic. Respect everything, waste nothing. I eat the leftover bannock I microwaved at 2 in the morning. The ceremony is done right.

When I go into the bathroom, I see a stranger’s face. I am everything I attempt/pretend to dismantle. I am performance, not practice. A shell. My inland ancestors knew how to read pressed grass, interpret broken twigs, follow paths invisible. Tracking deer through morning, reading stories in muddy riverbanks. In the present, I have a collection of decolonization in my Zotero while my Mamere’s language dies in my mouth. I write essays about anti-Neoliberalism on a MacBook Pro. I speak land acknowledgements for institutional events while paying tuition funding colony, funding genocide. The smoke from store-bought herbs reach the fire alarm, not my ancestors. I am a softened, unrecognizable, theory-drunk bastard of their bloodline.

I tell myself sharing pirated PDFs is praxis while my brother works real jobs, lives in the real world. My nostalgia for children’s commercials is deeper than my knowledge of my own culture’s stories. The digital archives of capitalism hold more of my memories than the oral tradish. I perform authenticity for white professors mistaking my academic vocabulary for wisdom. The best thing I could do for decolonization is shut up and listen, but here I am, writing more words, taking up more space.

The Coastal Indigenous Peoples lining the Pacific harvested the abalone directly from the ocean. Diving into the deep, cold saltwater or collecting them from rocky shorelines. The sophisticated trade networks, stretching thousands of miles, were how the inland Nations obtained them. Traded for warm hides, dried salted meats, or tools. The more inland you got, the rarer the shell became.

I remind myself I still have wild sage I forged from Nose Hill, untamed and feral. Gathered from wind-swept slopes instead of purchased at a crystal shop. I burn the dried leaves. The world needs more tenderness, not less. Needs surrender to possibility. I breathe. I remind myself each handful in the shell is a God-gift. Still sacred. Still a good offering.