I am a compulsive acknowledger.

I acknowledge people passing me with a wave or nod, or a greeting. I greet a tree or take a photo of a little plant or a bird hoping to find out later what its name is. I acknowledge the little painted stones someone left around the trail sign, or the trail sign that has been written also in Ucwalmictws, or the art on the hydro box. This morning I was waiting to meet someone by the Visitor Centre and staring at my phone, as is the posture of the 21st century home sapiens, and then thought, isn’t that a willow behind me? Wasn’t I just saying that I wanted to be more flexible like a willow? What does that even mean? I pocketed my phone and looked at the willow and her branches danced and I felt almost so overwhelmed I could have cried, because it’s so beautiful and it felt like she was greeting me, and I almost missed it with my head down scrolling through emails, trying to get a jump start on the day by deleting what I don’t really need to pay attention to.

It’s not the most endearing quality to everyone around me, this compulsive acknowledging. It’s not efficient. My kid kind of hates it that we can’t pass through a Christmas craft fair or a garage sale or Slow Food Cycle without me acknowledging people and wanting to talk to them and he’ll tug on my arm or refuse to even leave the house with me unless I PROMISE not to talk to anyone. It must be a bit embarrassing to be with someone who is so emotionally messy, so overt about their willingness to connect to everyone, from old friends to strangers to trees and other beings.

There are a lot of ways to practice acknowledgement and I’m interested in unpacking and exploring that word and idea of acknowledgement as a practice over the next 30 days.

I love a 30 x 30 experiment but so many of them err on the side of heroism: ride or run or write 1000 pages or do other things in the end of quest for self improvement every single day for the next month. I find summer to be more of a time for languishing, and dodging mosquitoes, heat, smoke, crowds, bizarreness and other apocalyptic thoughts, so I’m opting for tiny delights and small achievement moments, rather than heroic enterprises.

In a podcast I was just listening to, in a conversation between the singer Abigail Bengson and host Adrienne Maree Brown, Bengson spoke about having a practice of songwriting, even though the best songs come through her almost as if she’s channelling. She likened her songwriting practice to preparing yourself for birth – there’s not really anything you can do that actually prepares you for that experience and yet, the preparation is important. She equates it with trying to become as well-shaped a pottery vessel as you can so that when the fire comes you won’t crack.

So, I like the idea of a 10 minute practice of turning my mind every day (for less than the length of time it would take me to drink a cup of tea or coffee or water) to the practice of acknowledgement. What is it and is it a way that I can move into right relationship with the land, the territory, the people of this land?

June is National Indigenous Peoples Month and I’ve been pondering how to acknowledge that on the Wellness Almanac. But, to be honest, every idea I had felt like it required a heroic effort – an effort of going out and interviewing people, of somehow single-handedly inviting and transcribing stories, of creating some kind of opportunity for people to see each other.

But my friends, you all have eyes in your head. To see each other, you just have to look. You just have to slow down, pause, nod and smile. It starts there.

And so I thought, what if I started a movement, of bringing the land acknowledgement into our daily life. What if I wrote and researched and philosophized and proseltysed about the land acknowledgement and what it means and where it came from and how we can do it better… but I got stumped by my own ignorance, again. Where does one start?

And then, I landed on this. A 30 day practice of acknowledgment, for myself. Each day in June (with the knowledge that this month is Indigenous Peoples Month and summer solstice is Indigenous People’s Day, and this land that gives me all my blessings, all my life support systems, so much of my joy, is St’at’imc country, had names and connections long before settlers came and planted flags and handed out blankets and staked claims and named things for their patrons without any real insight into the place, without really ever listening), I’ll go and acknowledge something. I don’t want it to be a political statement, although politics is about power and when we root deeply into your own attention and our relationships, power is invoked and so it will probably be political, in the end. But it is just for me. And I’ll share what I see and sense and stumble with. And I genuinely invite you along for the ride. What shape might it take for you? To practice acknowledgement? What does it even mean? Shall we begin?