My trail name is Tribal Queen. There’s a story behind that, which, has practically become family lore, and, if I didn’t have the picture to prove it, most would find unbelievable. But here I am, eight years later, with a nickname, a memory, and a picture. But names are important. Sometimes our names become who we are. Sometimes we become our names. I am becoming my trail name. I am slowly processing and connecting to being a Tribal Queen.
Trail names are organic in that they usually originate from an entertaining story, habit, or personality trait. The only hard and fast rule is that no hiker may name themselves; another hiker must knight you with your new name. (My dear friend Kyaera gifted me Tribal Queen while we hiked in Custer State Park.)
I’ve learned to embrace this knighted trail name, even accepting my nativity during the actual event. But what I’ve learned from this name is not the care you must take in gifting baseball hats in certain cultures, but rather the importance of tribes in life and how to embrace my tribes, cultivating and helping them grow. Those are the people in our lives which surpass the acquaintance level, the casual friend even. It’s bigger than family. A tribe is a group of people who choose to be together. They live their lives together, work through problems and pain together, rejoice together, experience life—together.
There is a permeating idea in modern thought of otherness. Separation. Judgement. Projection. It’s the opposite of a tribe; it’s the separation of tribes. It’s the disassociation from other humans. Severance of ties that once connected us. But does this idea of a tribe feed into this otherness? Does finding our similarities yoke us to pointing out our differences? I’d like to claim certain of my tribes (I count probably four in my current life) are better at this than others. But, logically, I know we’re not. There’s always judgement of some kind, a statement that we or our choices are better than other choices. When I truly believe ‘Love God’ and ‘Love your neighbor’ should be the tenants I live by in life, how do I combat this otherness in choosing my tribes? My neighbors, according to the parable of the Good Samaritan, are the people outside my tribes. I’m asked to choose love, not the easy honeymoon stage of love, but love despite despising what someone stands for and the choices they make. I have to choose to still say verbally and actionably, “I love you.”

The only way I comprehend doing this, is by seeing another person. To remove them from these preconceived or loudly stated, chosen or given, groups, and see them.

“The thing is, when you meet people, all generalizations fly out the window.” Maira Kalman