Freaky Winter Grit, United States Of Windigo

Welcome to the February 2026 edition of...
What I'm Into, What I'm Up To
#64

Welcome to the year of the Fire Horse!

I was just telling some friends the other day I like the idea of starting the year in early February because January is such a hard month to get any traction.

It's like there's a natural lull between Christmas and Lunar New Year when the mind, body, and spirit need to go into power-saving mode to recharge and recalibrate. All three still need exercise, but in a calmed down, less ambitious, maintenance-only kind of way.

For our family, the new Fire Horse year began with my sister-in-law coming to stay with us for almost a month. (Hi Liz!) Living with other people is always stretching, but it's also one of the best ways to know yourself better and open a rigid mind to new ideas and ways of doing things.

Like, in our case, Liz has introduced a couple new meals and recipes into our normal rotation, which is exciting and much needed. She's been sharing her favorite Youtube channels about farming and minimalism and rescued animals. The kids have enjoyed coming home to find Auntie Liz on the couch doing her schoolwork and she has gotten to experience enough snow, ice, and winter to last her a Floridian lifetime. I also introduced her and the kids to snow cream, which we have not made since our snowy Massachusetts winters almost a decade ago.

I'm still working hard on learning about video game development and starting a new writing project so I don't have much to report on what I'm up to at the moment, but here are some things I've been watching and thinking about.

• Freaky Friday/Freakier Friday — I thought I had watched Freaky Friday along with all the other Disney family comedy movies I watched with my family growing up, but I had almost no recollection of it while watching.
  
  One of Wendy's favorite movies to watch when she doesn't know what else to watch but wants something funny and happy on in the background is The Parent Trap remake, also with Lindsey Lohan. Freaky Friday feels like a close cousin. We watched the original the other night in preparation for watching Freakier Friday, which just came out last year.
  
  Watching with the family, including my sis-in-law, everyone was totally into it, from the 7-year-old (to be fair, there were a few moments she didn't know if she wanted to keep watching) to the 45-year-old and everyone in between.
  
• The Winter Olympics — We've never been super into any Olympics games, but it's always fun to see highlights or have it on in the background whenever they are on.
  
  None of our family even knew the Olympics were a thing this year until our friends invited us over to watch the opening ceremonies. We had to miss it, unfortunately, and a lot of the individual sports, too, but everything we did catch was always more exciting than expected.
  
  The slaloms were especially crash-heavy, which is not fun for the athletes, but entertaining for us as viewers. Curling is not nearly as boring as it should be. And I always forget about the skiing/shooting combo sport—wow!
  
  There's something great about training so hard for one particular activity on one particular day. The only thing I've done even remotely close to that is my all-day 50-mile ebike ride this fall, but I'd like to do more of those kinds of things.
  
• True Grit — I have decided to go on a Western movie-watching kick, beginning with the 2010 version of True Grit by the Cohen Brothers. It's almost not fair to start with that one. It's so good! I should've started with something worse and worked my way up.
  
  I love a good Western. I used to watch them with my dad on Sunday afternoons, but he watched a lot of John Wayne movies and I always got bored with those. I could usually make it to the end of a Clint Eastwood movie. My brother and I used to love watching and quoting Young Guns and Young Guns 2, both of which I own on DVD. ('Yoohoo, I'll make you famous.')
  
  It seems that most of the highest-regarded Westerns are pre-2000, but there have been a handful of great ones in more recent decades, like True Grit, 3:10 To Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and The Harder They Fall, but I am interested in delving into some of the classics I either never saw or barely remember.
  
  Do you have any favorite Westerns or Western-adjacent movies I should check out?
  
• Legend of the Windigo/Wetiko — As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I finally finished about a week ago. In one of the final chapters, she talks about the Anishinaabe legend of the Windigo, which is a cannibalistic monster that is at its strongest and most feared in winter.
  
  Winter could be terrible for the Anishinaabe people, a time of starvation, and the story of the Windigo told them what would happen if they became selfish and either horded food for themselves, or worst-case, entertained ideas of cannibalism. The Windigo begins life as a human who gives into greed. Once it starts taking more than it needs, the Windigo can never be satisfied and always craves more.
  
  Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the story as a way of understanding modern consumerism. She says Windigo is not just an ancient myth but a living force in contemporary culture and says that an economic system built on insatiable consumption, one that devours the natural world without gratitude or reciprocity, embodies the Windigo spirit. She sees gratitude and reciprocity as the foundation of an alternative relationship with the living world, one rooted in responsibility rather than extraction.
  
  I've been thinking about that a lot, about how much the Windigo represents the entire history of my country, from the beginning of European exploration and settlement here all the way to now.
  
  In The American Revolution documentary series, Ken Burns and company explore some of the darker sides of the founding fathers and their goals during the war. While the revolutionary forces were fighting the British to gain independence, they were also massacring Native American towns and villages in order to expand west during and after the war.
  
  (I also did not realize how bloody the war was among regular white American families, divided between Loyalists and Patriots, who went to further and further extremes in their cruelty and brutality toward one another, which like so many aspects of that era, kind of takes the shine off the greatness at the beginning of our American experiment.)
  
  We may think Americans talking about taking over Canada or Greenland or parts of South America are insane or out of the blue, but it's all just a continuation of our origin story as a country. We have always wanted more. We have always let greed drive at least a good chunk of our priorities as a nation.
  
  If we begin our American story the way we normally do—seeing European-Americans as explorers, pioneers, entrepreneurs, and revolutionaries, it's easy to paint ourselves the heroes of the story. And really, the heroes of the world. We found a mostly empty continent, explored the width and breadth of it, settled the better part of it, and made an incredible number of the world's most significant discoveries and innovations in an absurdly short amount of time. We led the world toward freedom, equality, democracy, justice, and became, in short, the Good Guys. Everyone who opposed us or our progress was automatically the Bad Guys, because to oppose the U.S.A. was to oppose freedom, equality, democracy, and justice. Nuance be damned.
  
  If we instead begin the story of our nation before its beginnings, with people arriving on a continent full of tribes of people living in balance with the land and its ecology (even if the many different people were not always at peace with each other), which was then inundated with waves and waves of immigrants of every kind, color, and shape from almost every other part of the world, who brought not only new sicknesses but also strange ideas about how to best 'exploit natural resources,' including people, and who often believed that the ends justified the means—no matter who got hurt, lied to, or destroyed in the process—leading to a land which has been more and more out of balance ever since, it paints our history as a nation in a different light. Not because the immigrants themselves were evil, but because of the Windigo spirit they carried inside them, which has existed in all times and in all places as far back in history as history goes.
  
  Native Americans had their stories and their dedication to the common good to protect them from the worst of their Windigo impulses. The new Americans had their religions to protect them. At its best, Christianity has always emphasized a resistance to the temptations of selfishness, greed, materialism, and hoarding wealth, and focused on treating others with the same respect, dignity, patience, care, and love you yourself would want to be treated with. But American Christianity has often courted and praised the rich and powerful instead of confronting them, and downplayed the potential evil of wanting more than you have as the pursuit of happiness, the American dream, and a normal part of a well functioning economy.
  
  I believe during this next phase of my country's history, we will have to continue to reckon with the sins of our past and learn better ways to live with the world and the people around us. Fortunately, we don't have to make it all up from scratch. We have ancient wisdom of all sorts to guide us. And I think the native wisdom of this land, and the native peoples still here and still preaching that wisdom to any of us who are willing to listen, are a great supplement to whichever faith or moral framework we start from.
  
  Anyways, this is not meant to be conclusive in any way, just my current thoughts on the world around me, how we got here, and we how get to a better place. I welcome your agreements and disagreements!
  

That's it for this month!

All the best to you, and in the immortal words of Julian of Norwich—

'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'