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Since returning from Guatemaya, I've been spending our winter's long nights dreaming and slowly setting up for the coming year. I feel full of Sun after coming back from the equatorial latitudes after spending time with my community, friends, and Indigenous elders. Some of my local friends in Northern California look at me strangely as I tell them how I spend my mornings or weekends. As I share details of my muddy adventures in the westernmost parks, I can never predict how they will react.

"What were you doing out in the cold at 7:30am?"

"Having a great time," I say.

"But on the weekend?"

They look at my hands and see remnants of dirt on my fingertips that I couldn't wash off before sitting down with a cup of tea. Thank goodness they can't look in my pockets because, like Bilbo Baggins, I don't want them to know what I have.

It feels awkward trying to explain that I have changed this much and I am no longer the person they assumed I would be. Why I don't do "normal things." Why I felt my last job wasn't changing anything. Why I'd rather be in the woods or teaching someone what I've learned rather than comparing notes on careers over coffee. I observe that people get a lot of questions when they change this much but never when they don't.

My story is I've fallen ever so deeply in love. In a spell, as it were, with color. Not just any pallete either. Only those made by flora, fungi, insects, and the earth itself. Let me tell you about the colors of tree bark ground into bright orange, or pine needles after rain, or leaf stains on pavement, or mushrooms on tree stumps. I love the way they appear in water when I work with them. The way they feel on fibers, on clothes, and on me. I carry them with me, their essence, their beauty.

I feel like I was lied to for years. I thought colors came in cans or school pencils - like they had to be made with chemicals to exist. No one told me they were all around me. That I could make them into art or clothes. I poured over books and asked a lot of elders questions. I discovered this was old knowledge. So old, sometimes all we have is oral memory of it. A knowledge so exploited it is one of the many legacies of colonialism. I mourned this knowledge in silence. I wondered how to process the continuing legacy of who profits and claims "discovery" of this knowledge.

In meditating on this, however, I realized I have a number of friends who are medicine makers and are BBIPOC (Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color) from every continent. Inspired by their powerful reclaiming of ancestral knowledge, I resolved to continue my path. That is why you'll find me among the trees most mornings, wandering with Marin (my dog) and looking under fallen branches and old tree stumps. I ask permission, I ask ancestors to guide me, and I try to be a good steward of where I walk. The debris in my pocket is the icing on the cake.

I put my cup on the table and slip my hand inside my jacket, retrieving a bundle of red leaves. They seem like just eucalyptus leaves but they're tied to a knowledge more valuable than the "one ring."

"Do you want me to tell you what these can do?"