In Kinship Story I shared part of my own story about the semi-wild bushland that held me through lockdowns, the kookaburra who always seemed to arrive at the right moment, the shifting water, the birds, the quiet relational web that surrounded me whether I noticed it or not.
That story was personal but not private. All of us live inside a kinship field: a web of relationships between human and more-than-human beings, between body, place, air, soil, memory, and story. It’s just that most of us have been trained to forget.
This week’s practice is an invitation to remember and to begin mapping your own kinship field, not as an abstract exercise, but as a slow, sensory re-entry into relationship.
There’s no right way to do this. Some of your kin may arrive immediately, they could be a tree you’ve leaned against for years, a creek whose sound always brings you back to yourself. Others may be quieter, waiting for you to slow down enough to notice. The Kinship Noticing Practice Card below is a simple, open-ended way to begin.
Practice: Mapping your kinship field
This week’s practice invites you to begin noticing, or remembering, the beings, places, and forces that have been quietly accompanying you. Some might be obvious: the tree outside your window, the stretch of water you return to, the bird whose call always stops you mid-thought. Others might be more subtle: a gust of wind at the right moment, the scent of earth after rain, a feeling you can’t quite name.
There’s no right way to find your kin. This is not a spiritual scavenger hunt. It’s a slow, sensory remembering, allowing the world to become a conversation again, instead of background noise.
The Kinship Noticing Walk practice card guides you through a simple process of arriving, opening your senses, and letting the world show you where the threads of relationship already exist. It includes prompts for noticing who or what is already present, and an optional reflection space to begin building your kinship map over time.
This is the beginning of a personal record of the beings, places, and relationships holding you during this season of unravelling.
Find this in book form
The Season of Unravelling has its own home beyond Substack now. It’s the first in a four-part Almanac, the expanded long-form telling of this whole year-long inquiry, with Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding, and Resonance each becoming their own book.
This first one, The Season of Unravelling, is 59 pages: longer than a single Substack post, shorter than a commitment. It weaves the original posts into one fuller arc, with the threads, the practices, and the reflections that the weekly format never had room for. It’s available to purchase on Amazon.
The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.