970x125
Winter is the season of retreat. Bare trees mark the retreat of green, short days announce the retreat of light, and bitter cold broadcasts the retreat of warmth. It can feel as if life itself is withdrawing from the world.
There was one winter when this withdrawal ran too deep, when what was lost that season never fully returned. It began the morning of November 29, 1864, at a bend in Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado.
Here, among leafless cottonwoods, among buffalo grass turned still and pale, 20 tipis stood in a wide circle, smoke rising from a fire at their center. Most of the men were away hunting, leaving behind the women, children, and elders. Chief Black Kettle and his wife were there, leaders who’d spent their lives working for peace. They had signed treaties and trusted the promises these treaties held.
When soldiers appeared on the horizon that morning, Chief Black Kettle did what he had always done. He raised the American flag, the one given to him with a promise attached: Raise this, and you’ll be protected. No one will harm you. Then he raised a white flag beside it.
But Colonel Chivington ordered his soldiers to attack anyway. Two hundred people died that morning: elders, women, children. History would give this bloodshed a name: the Sand Creek Massacre. It was the day the village fire went out. (Kelman, 2013)
When I hear this story, I feel a deep sadness. I feel the weight of what was taken from these people, and from indigenous peoples everywhere. Perhaps you feel that, too.
But something else was lost that winter, something taken from not just that village, but from all of humanity. It’s something that is easy to miss.
Two Million Years
At the dawn of humanity, two million years ago, we were born, raised, and lived our lives in villages. And soon, these villages were everywhere, tucked into forests, spread across plains, nestled into river bends like the one at Sand Creek. And what lived inside them wasn’t just shelter, but something far more essential.
In these villages, everything was shared. Children weren’t the responsibility of just two parents; they belonged to everyone. When grief arrived (and grief always arrived), the village set down its tools and gathered around, and the weight of sorrow was carried by many hearts. Joy was shared too, around dinner tables and evening fires, in dances and in stories told beneath the stars. Life itself was shared, its beauty and suffering held collectively.
This wasn’t just an ancient way of life. It was a sophisticated answer to the most fundamental human question: How do we take care of each other?
It was here, in these villages, that our brains took shape. They became wired for connection, built for belonging, born to anticipate community. Newborns entered the world with minds ready for 40 pairs of eyes to greet them, ready for the quiet hum of belonging to surround them. (Fowler et al, 2012)
Then, over thousands of years, the villages began to disappear, Sand Creek among the last. Each village had a different name, waved a different flag when yet another empire approached, but each suffered the same fate.
The Miss
Now here’s what is easy to miss. The loss of the villages didn’t just happen to them. It happened to us. And it is still happening to us now.
We arrive in this world with minds that don’t know the villages are gone. Our young minds arrive ready for what they’ve always known: a circle of 40 people ready to say without words, You are wanted here. You are not alone. You are ours, and we are yours.
Instead, only two pairs of eyes meet ours. Our parents love us, fiercely, completely, but two drained, overburdened people simply can’t love us the way 40 people once did. It’s just not possible.
As children, we feel it: a low, persistent hum telling us something is missing, a sense that the belonging we crave is always just out of reach. It’s our young minds aching for what they were born to have, aching for the village and the connection and care it brings.
James Coan’s research tells us that our brains treat this absence as an emergency. Jean Twenge’s research shows us what this emergency looks like: anxiety, depression, and disconnection.
Spring Begins
With all this in mind, here is a ritual to truly welcome the arrival of spring—small enough to begin today, but large enough to start welcoming back the village.
Try this in the moment someone approaches: Slow your breath, slower, slower still, until your eyes soften and your body settles. Without uttering a single word, you’ll become someone who says, I’m not going anywhere. I’m here for all of this.
Then, strike up a conversation, linger, and become a lounger, the kind of person who follows the conversation wherever it wants to go… into deeper waters or along the surface, without hurry, just riding alongside, fully present. When you do, something happens.
The person across from you senses nothing is being asked of them, not their cleverness, not their effort. They can just be themselves. And in this space, trust blossoms, connection blooms, and, for as long as the conversation lasts, the heart of the village returns. Spring arrives.
And now, having named it, it’s time to act on it.
Because this is when spring truly begins.
