Finding Kinfolk

I’ve been thinking a lot about kinship lately.

I’ve been thinking about the people who show up—not just when things are easy, but when the weight of the world is heavy in the chest. The ones who make us feel a little less alone. A little more seen. A little more like we belong.

In the essay below, I share some recent reflections on finding kinfolk—those who feel like family, even if they aren’t. It’s a meditation on grief, grace, and the power of connection in times of uncertainty.

If you’ve been feeling the ache of separation, I hope this helps you remember: you’re not alone.

These past few weeks, in the churn of world-weariness and worry, I’ve been reaching for the things that keep me grounded, whole, and, most importantly, hopeful. When the heart feels heavy, I turn—as I always have—to three things: my writing, the whispered wisdom of my elders, and the quiet and steadying miracle of kinship.

By kinship, I don’t mean only the connections written down in family Bibles or rendered in DNA. I mean the felt sense of belonging with those whose values, heartbreaks, and hopes rhyme with our own. I mean kinfolk. The kind you sit beside in silence, the kind you laugh with over tea, the kind who hold your story as if it were their own. The kind you may not even know—at least not at first.

A few weeks ago, I met with an old friend, a fellow coach, a former monk. Rasanath Das and I first met more than fifteen years ago. I remember one visit vividly: sharing a pizza while seated cross-legged on the floor of his temple on the Lower East Side. Even then, I sensed he was kin. This week, we found our way back to one another, two middle-aged men holding broken-open hearts with gentleness and grace. We shared our fears for the world. We shared our griefs. And in the sharing, we eased the ache.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve said yes to a number of calls in which folks were simply looking to make contact. Each one became a thread that pulled me closer to my people. Each one was a small, redemptive act of saying, “Like me, your heart is heavy.” And each time, in their eyes, I recognized kin.

In Reunion, I wrote: “Walking among the headstones, I whispered to the long dead, ‘You are my people. You are my kinfolk.’” I meant that. I mean it still. Kinfolk aren’t limited to blood or to the living. They include those who bore witness before us. They include those whose struggles birthed our possibilities. As I wrote in Chapter Eight, “We belong to those who came before us, and they belong to us still.”

That moment in the churchyard was not imagined. In 2022, I traveled to Ireland to find the gravesite of my father’s biological mother. I thought I was prepared. I was not. What I found wasn’t just a single grave but a communion of souls—names I recognized and names I didn’t. Neighbors, cousins, children, elders. All kin. All bound by the same windswept hills, the same stubborn hopes, the same ache for safety, love, and a place to belong. I stood there overwhelmed, not only by the silence of the dead, but by the roaring recognition of their presence within me.

And in that sacred silence, I remembered what I have come to believe with all my heart: that the longing to belong is not just about finding our place—it’s about remembering we were never meant to do any of this alone.

In Reunion, I wrote, “To do the work of healing the body politic, we must do the work of healing the body.” This includes calling our kinfolk back to us, across generations, across lines of difference, across the histories of Othering that would keep us apart. We remember them not to cling to the past, but to stitch ourselves back together again—into a whole that holds us all.

The late poet bell hooks noted in her poem, when angels speak of love / they tell us / all is union and reunion / dying reborn again / there is no separation  / no end to paradise

Those words are kin to my own longing. That love—transformative, generative, redemptive love—is the root of kinship. It is the voice of ancestors urging us to keep going. To keep loving. To build what the world tells us is impossible: belonging that knows no hierarchy, kinship that needs no permission.

Theologian and preacher Howard Thurman once wrote, “During times of war hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.” And elsewhere, “Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited.” But it’s this line of his that I return to most in these moments: “When the walls of separation that divide us are finally torn down, death itself will have no dominion.”

This is why we gather, why we risk vulnerability, why we reach across our own inner distances to take the hand of another. Because in finding our kinfolk, we find our courage. We find our resilience. We find a light to guide us through.

Even our music knows this. Tom Petty once sang, “You belong among the wildflowers / You belong somewhere you feel free.” That song, to me, is a hymn to kinship. A declaration of belonging. A gentle anthem reminding us that love—true love—asks only that we be fully ourselves and wholly together.

So if you are carrying fear, reach out. If your heart is heavy, don’t carry it alone. Look for the ones who make your breath come easier, the ones who see your truth and stay. Find your sangha. Find your people. Find your kinfolk.

This too shall pass, yes. But until it does, may you be surrounded by the ones who feel like home. And may you remember, you were never alone. Not really. You belong among the wildflowers. As Petty sang, you belong somewhere you feel free.