It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.*
Nan Shepherd

Your big break. Some people get one. Most people don’t. But if you’re reading this, it means that you’ve received more than one, perhaps a countless number of, little breaks.**
Seth Godin

I guess we’d all agree on how
it’s important to live before we die,
Given the biggest break of all –
That of being here.
The odds were stacked against us, but here we are
with daily options on how we want to live.
The Windigo is a Anishinaabe legendary monster that
exists to consume and consumes to exist,
But the more the Windigo ingests the hungrier it becomes:
Windigo is the name for that within us
which cares more for its own survival
than for anything else.^
Robin Wall Kimmerer sees the Windigo’s footprints
in all of our corporate and personal destructiveness:
industrially-blemished lakes, deforested
hillsides, coalmine-wasted
countryside, poisoned
waterways,
New kitchens replaced with
newer kitchens, Clothes
we never wear, food
going to waste.
The Windigo does not live, perhaps does not even survive, but
only exists:
What native people once sought to rein in,
we are now asked to unleash in a
systematic policy of sanctioned greed.^
None of us have failed to be taken in by this monster, but
there’s another part to our story –
Perhaps we have noticed how we recover when we give,
When we notice our talents, energies and values, turning
these outwards in giftedness to others, we find
life is richer.

*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Your big break;
^Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.