“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
– Linda Hogan, Dwellings
Kith & Kin
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Tending the Dead and the Living Through the Longest Season
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The Two Words
We say them as one phrase, the way we say odds and ends, or peanut butter and jelly. In common parlance they mean everybody.
All my people.
But once upon a time they each had their own meaning.
Kin is blood, and what goes beyond blood. The ones you come from. The line that runs back through your mother and her mother, your father and his father, and the ones before that, the ones you don’t have names for, and the ones where the connection is spiritual, not biological.
Kith is the ones you know, right here and now. It comes from the old word for what is familiar — your people by place and acquaintance, the ones you share a table with, the ones who know your face and your story.
Two words that mark out two kinds of belonging. Two different claims.
And in the months ahead, we all sit down to visit with both of them.
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Two Tables
The first table is the ancestor altar. Marigolds, photographs, sugar skulls, a glass of water, food, burning copal. The wind picks up, the veil thins, and those who came before us return once more for communion, conversation, and blessing.
The second is the holiday table. The living feast table. Where your uncle sits across from your brother, where the an argument waits under the gravy, where you will be asked the question that you do not want to answer, where you have the opportunity to pass a kind word of acceptance along with the salt.
This is the season where we focus on our Beloved Dead. And typically our ancestor work tends the first table and forgets the second, but that’s not how the Ancestors like to roll.
We honor our Dead in part because they show us how we can best care for our living.
The stories, challenges, and successes? They are all shared.
The patterns at our holiday tables came from somewhere. The things that cannot be said, the roles everyone resumes the moment they walk through the door, the grief nobody names — those are part of a lineage. They were handed down. They were inherited. And they can be healed. During this time of the year, the healing often happens at the table.
So this offering tends both tables at once.
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Three Workings, One Season
Devotional Candles to Light the Way — Beginning at the New Moon
October 10 through November 3
Each week, a devotional candle burned on behalf of your ancestors. You name them. The ones you know, the ones you only have a surname for, the ones you don’t know at all.
Four weeks of steady flame carrying you toward the Days of the Dead. We begin by building a rhythm.
This is how the relationship gets built. Not in one dramatic moment, but in the showing up, week after week, until your Beloved Dead know your face.
The Opening of the Roads
October Full Moon — Halloween
At the height of the season, a ceremony performed for you to open the roads between you and your Beloved Dead.
Roads get blocked. By distance, by estrangement, by the ones who died before you could ask, by the simple fact that nobody taught you how to do this. The ceremony clears what sits in the way.
Then I take three questions to them on your behalf.
You write the questions. I carry them into the work and bring back what comes, delivered to you in writing. This is not a reading about your ancestors. It is a reading with them.
The Peaceful Home, for the Holidays
October 10 through the end of December — a Mercury Retrograde edition
A Sacred Vessel, created for you and worked continuously from the New Moon through the end of the year, for peace in your home through the holidays.
This one is for the living, your Kith.
So that the conversation does not go sideways…or if it does, its for the best. For the sibling who arrives already braced for battle. For the home that can hold everyone, and make room for everyone in all the ways. For Mercury’s own season of things said wrong and heard worse. For judging most mercifully – our people and ourselves.
Your ancestors are not the ones we light candles for. We also tend the people at our tables, carrying the same lineages we do, participating in the same stories, the same challenges, the same aspirations. This vessel is for you and for them.
This is for you if…
✢ You have been meaning to begin ancestor work for years and the season keeps arriving before you are ready.
✢ You have questions for someone who died before you could ask them.
✢ You know the holidays are coming and you can already feel your shoulders rising.
✢ You have done this work alone and want someone tending it alongside you.
✢ You are carrying a lineage pattern you would like to set down.
✢ You want your dead and your living held in the same working.
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The Offering
✢ Investment: $1,800: In a single payment or two payments of $900.
✢ Thirteen spots. That is all. This is individual work from the October New Moon through the end of the year, and thirteen is what I can hold while giving each one what it asks for.
✢ Enrollment deadline: October 8, 2026. The candles begin on the New Moon, October 10, and I need your names and your questions in hand before the first flame is lit.
✢ What you bring: The names of the ancestors you wish to honor, your three questions, and the petition for your Peaceful Home for the Holidays Sacred Vessel…write it yourself or send me bullet points and I can create it for you.
✢ What you receive: Four weeks of devotional candles. A road-opening ceremony performed just for you. Three questions carried to your people and answered in writing. And a Sacred Vessel worked for the peace, health, and wealth of your home, family, and loved ones through the end of the year.
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The Season Is Already Turning
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The light is changing. It does every year, and every year it catches us unprepared.
Your people are closer now than they will be again until this time next year. The ones at the altar and the ones who will be sitting across from you in November and December.
Thirteen spots.
Enrollment closes October 8 at 10:00 am Texas (central) time
Purchase securely with a credit card via Stripe by using the following links:
One payment ($1800)
Two Payments ($900 now and $900 in one month)
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