Who and Why

Do you feel like we’re all in a tunnel running toward the light in the far distance, but you’re the only one who can tell that it’s not the glow of paradise but the headlights of an oncoming train?

And yet you’re being swept toward it inexorably by the momentum of the crowd?

Do you see it?

Knowing Our Place offers the hand that pulls you into a bolt hole so you can catch your breath and take stock.

Embarking on the journey of reconnection, learning to rekindle our relationships within the web of life, is an antidote to a particular type of disconnection. It’s for the person who is keenly aware of the severance, or who, at a gut level, senses that there’s something to strive for, to calibrate to, that’s more expansive.

Very little of modern society’s trajectory seems to make sense, and you feel connected to or drawn to other things that maybe you can’t explain. Stuff you can innerstand (a term I learned from my teacher Marilu Shinn) that no one else does.

It’s not just the frustration of feeling like you’re “standing in the middle of a crowded room screaming at the top of your lungs, and no one even looks up” — it’s also what you’re screaming about.

It’s not just that you feel trapped, and overwhelmed, anxious and boxed in and want out. It’s that you want to escape toward something meaningful and energizing and life - affirming.

That’s how my journey started, how Knowing Our Place came to be.

Before I forget, let me introduce myself. I'm Kiki. My sisters gave me this nickname when they were little.

My pronouns are I, she, her, hers… also they and them… or shey (rhymes with they).

I have degrees in architectural design and art history — a BA from Yale, an MArch from UC Berkeley, and an MA from Brown. I am a historian of cultural landscapes — as well as the family genealogy geek.

For the past four years (and counting), I've been learning to speak, understand, and think in Alnôbaôdwawôgan (Western Abenaki), one of the original languages of the ancestral homelands where I live (the northeast woodlands of Turtle Island, in the area otherwise referred to as New England).

I am also a student of the Q'ero Inca tradition of indigenous energy medicine from the high Andes of Peru.

I’ve always loved to travel, and learn languages, and to write… and read… and think.

In my teens and early adulthood I wrote pages upon pages of journal entries about how I wished people really understood me and about trying to figure out my true path in life. I spent a lot of time doing deep writing and deep thinking, pondering and researching all sorts of questions.

My brain reveled at the mirroring of patterns in atoms and apple cores and asteroid orbits, and my imagination took me everywhere my brain wanted to explore. While my mind — creative and analytical at the same time — could provide infinite entertainment and allowed me to get along in life pretty well, it wasn’t until late in my graduate school career that I began to see how aspects of my neurodivergence made it challenging for me to keep pace with everyone else.

Yet I still tried, for a long while, to fit myself into one box after another, hoping to find one that fit.

So, if you’ve always felt that you’ve had your own beat, your own rhythm, I get you.

Just like you may feel, or may have felt — that your beat doesn’t always blend well with others’ — I even started to believe that my beat was out of sync.

But recently I started to clue in that my rhythm wasn’t out of sync.

And I’ll wager that neither is yours.

Rather, we’re just trying to sync with the wrong beat.

If you’ve been feeling like there’s something out of balance, almost broken, about the way modern society expects us to function — so have I. And I can’t help but wonder about the Whys behind it all.

In trying to figure out some of these Whys, I’ve found myself drawn to reading histories. Most have been histories of this land (what’s called the United States), but told from the perspectives of the original peoples of this continent, and also histories told from the perspectives of people whose ancestors were brought to this continent without consent.

And, I’ve been researching my own family’s histories, trying to trace my ancestors back as far as I could. Within the histories of the larger society, I saw threads of my own family’s story woven through. I also got a sense of how much had been missing from the histories I’d been taught before. And not just missing, but conspicuously absent, as if by design.

At the same time, I’ve been feeling a strong pull toward the land and the rhythms of nature and a deep urge to connect and strengthen my sense of place.

And so I began to follow the call of the land, and the call of my ancestors — both of which probably had been whispering to me for a long time, but I hadn’t known how to listen.

Any of this sound familiar?

When the land and my ancestors started calling me to learn from the land itself, I followed with eager curiosity the way I always do — by listening, watching, researching. I started to learn, through explorations in Druidry, about the geological history of where I live, and the ecology of this region.

I was inspired to learn how to speak and understand Western Abenaki, an indigenous language local to this land. I felt called to learn a language of the place where I am as a way to honor some of the original caretakers of this land. Their descendants are still here — present, resilient — and reclaiming and rebuilding their languages and cultures despite centuries of efforts to snuff them out.

And, to me — and this is my personal perspective — it feels as important for the land to hear its languages as it is for the original peoples of the land to have their language back.

I am also learning this indigenous language as a nod to the indigenous languages of my own ancestors. Due to centuries of cultural elimination, it is difficult — hopefully not impossible, but likely so — to reconnect the dots to know exactly which languages of place belong to my lineage.

I am descended from Africans of many cultures, peoples of Turtle Island and the lands to the south, as well as from Europe and beyond. But so few records exist — and that erasure was intentional — that I may never be able to trace the exact paths back.

Grappling with this fact, I came to understand that maybe all is not lost, that I could begin from where I am now. The land where I live — and have lived — is the land that holds my life, so perhaps I can start here, and, by getting to know this land better, I could work my way backwards towards appreciating my ancestors’ relationships to the lands they knew as well.

Image: Marcellus and Cornelia Coleman, parents of my grandmother, Edmonia, whose birthday I share

An important thread helping me to hold the elements of Knowing Our Place together is the cosmological framework of the Q’ero Inca tradition of energy medicine.

I have been learning about the Q'ero cosmovision since the fall of 2023 and began training in the healing modalities in the spring of 2025.

My teachers are Marilu Shinn and Dra. Rocío Rosales Meza — ñustas (medicine women) initiated by the elders of the Apaza lineage of Q’ero healers (more about their work, and that of all my teachers, can be found on the Lineage page.

My studies in indigenous language reclamation and indigenous energy medicine help me recalibrate and sync to a beat that deeply resonates, and these experiences illuminate what I now know has been missing all along.

Relationship. Reciprocity. Responsibility. Connection.

And so this is the “Why” of Knowing Our Place. Because remembering our place — geographically, historically, linguistically, spiritually, ecologically — is the work of healing. Healing our connection to the earth. Healing the earth herself. Healing the fractures in our histories. Healing our sense of belonging in a society that is too good at convincing us that we’re supposed to go it alone.

My hope is that you’ll discover — through journeying with me in Knowing Our Place — ways that you can begin to connect more deeply to wherever you are, to feel more grounded, rooted, and related to the vast web of life.

My intention in Knowing Our Place is to help you see that we are all integral parts of a much bigger whole than modern society would have us believe.

Knowing Our Place is not about “love and light.” It’s not about spiritual bypassing, vibing high all the time, or dodging reality.

It’s actually the opposite; it’s about digging deep and sitting with our stories, recognizing patterns and systems, paying attention to the world around us.

It’s about traveling an intentional, cyclical path toward embodying our truth. Learning to spot the distractions, external pressures and fears that clog our attention and worry us away from what we feel drawn toward deep down.

It’s about giving ourselves space to untangle ourselves and strengthen our ties to what sustains us and gives depth and substance to our lives.

Knowing Our Place is not about reaching a destination, obtaining a cure-all, or discovering a shortcut to our dreams.

Rather, it’s about recalibrating our instruments, dialing back in, expressing our gifts, and syncing back with the frequencies that resonate with our own.

I invite you to come walk with me.

Stay close.

This work unfolds the way all real things do — slowly, in layers, in relationship. If you'd like to follow along — essays, reflection prompts, invitations to gather — leave your name here.