*by Tábata Gerk( ), Psychotherapist, Medicine Woman, Psychedelic Educator, and PPC Collaborator

Sometimes we forget that we are not alone. That the air entering our lungs is the same air that once passed through the leaves of trees, the wings of birds, the breath of the sea. We live as if we were apart from the Earth when, in truth, we are the Earth itself breathing through a body.

This is the remembrance that the concept of “kinship” brings to us. More than ancestry, kinship is a way of seeing, a relational awareness. It’s the understanding that life is woven through networks of interdependence and that our well-being depends on the well-being of the whole, including humans and other natural intelligences. 

The ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, describes the world as a web of gifts and responsibilities. For Kimmerer, the beings of the Earth are not “resources,” but relatives. She speaks of the duty of reciprocity: the act of giving back to the Earth what we receive from her, as part of a sacred cycle of acknowledgment. To plant, to thank, to care. To receive and to return, with beauty and respect.

Ailton Krenak, indigenous leader from Brazil, says that humanity can only sustain itself by remembering its belonging to the living planet. In his words: “When we lose the sense of belonging to the Earth, everything becomes an object and the other ceases to be a relative.” For Krenak, the crisis of modernity is a crisis of kinship: we have cut the threads that once connected us to the cosmos, and now we must learn to weave again.

In this sense, kinship is also an ancestral wisdom. The recognition that the “self” is a temporary mirage inside a living web, and all lives are interdependent. When we return to the understanding of interconnection, something heals. Not only within us, but between us. We also reconnect to our bond with the planet Earth and the presences that don’t speak in human language: the river, the mycelium, the wind, the stone, other animals…

And when we remember that everything breathes together, self care and care for others is no longer a duty. It becomes natural again. May we re-enchant our kinship with the Earth not only as a beautiful metaphor, but as a way of living.