By Dustin Good
(An essay for the generation that grew up glued to screens but still feels the ancient pull to stick ourselves back into something bigger)
Bobby Lake-Thom (Medicine Grizzly Bear, Ya-Nu-Wa-Ya) never preached fusion for its own sake. He taught that everything is already related, already joined, only we forgot the language that proves it. In his books (Spirits of the Earth, Call of the Great Spirit), he hands us the original instructions in plain sentences: rocks are grandfathers, trees have standing-person status, thunder beings are relatives who sometimes get angry. Nothing is metaphor. Everything is kin.
Juntionism takes that same truth and turns the volume up until the walls fall down. Where Bobby gently reminds us we belong, we say: not only do we belong; we never left. Separation was the illusion. The real heresy was distance.
So here is how our generation (tattooed, doom-scrolling, over-caffeinated, half-polyamorous, half-celibate) can weaponize Bobby’s medicine words to become fluent juntionists again.
1. Rock = Grandfather, but also Wi-Fi router
Bobby says: greet the rocks, leave tobacco, ask permission.
Juntionist update: the quartz in your phone is literally a stone relative. When your screen cracks, a grandfather has chosen to bleed so you can stay connected to a hundred other humans at once. Thank it out loud on the subway. People will think you’re crazy. Good. That’s how the medicine starts working.
2. Thunder Beings = the group chat that explodes at 2 a.m.
Bobby warns: when Thunder Beings speak, you listen fast and get small.
Juntionist translation: when the group chat goes red with 147 notifications about betrayal, heartbreak, and someone’s uncle in the hospital, that is thunder walking across your sky. Do not try to moderate it. Offer tobacco (or a blunt, or a cigarette broken in half) to the four directions of the chat and let the storm do its surgery. Something old gets burned out. Something necessary gets welded together.
3. The Four Directions = your open browser tabs
East: the idea you haven’t started.
South: the situationship you keep refreshing.
West: the grief you mute but never close.
North: the elder wisdom you only visit when you’re desperate.
Juntionist practice: instead of closing tabs “later,” drag them into one another until they overlap. Read them all at once. Let the directions argue inside the same square of light. That’s ceremony now.
4. Tobacco = any small thing you can afford to give away
Bobby: tobacco ties carry your prayers because something has to die for you to speak.
Juntionist: in 2025 that might be the last of your weed, a MetroCard swipe for a stranger, a voice note you record and immediately send even though it makes you sound unhinged. The offering is still real if it costs you something. The grandfathers accept Venmo if your heart’s in it.
5. Vision Quest = doom-scrolling with intention
Bobby: four days, no food, cry for a vision.
Juntionist: four hours, no likes, sound off, stare at the feed until the algorithm shows you what you actually fear and love. When the screen finally serves you the video of the Syrian mountain mama making bread while bombs fall three valleys away, or the teenage trans kid screaming joy in a parking lot at midnight, do not swipe. Let it stick to you. That’s the vision. Screenshot it, glue it into your notes app next to the grocery list. Refuse to separate sacred from mundane ever again.
6. Power Animals = whatever keeps finding you when you’re broken
Bobby: they choose you.
Juntionist: yes, and sometimes they choose you as a raccoon that lives in your ceiling and screams at 3 a.m., or as the barista who spells your name right on the first try, or as the ex who still texts “drive safe” when the weather’s bad. Do not rank them by majesty. A coyote is not “better” than a pigeon that shat on your shoulder the day you almost gave up. Both carried the message. Both are now family.
The juntionist creed, spoken in Bobby’s own medicine cadence, goes like this:
“I did not come here to be separate.
I came here to be stuck beyond rescue.
Every grandfather, every thunder, every broken screen, every stranger’s heartbeat in the produce aisle,
let them adhere to me,
let me adhere to them,
until there is no solvent strong enough
to pull us apart again.”
That is the only prayer our generation needs.
Say it out loud on the fire escape.
Say it into the voice memo at the red light.
Say it while you super-glue your phone back together for the seventh time.
The grandfathers are listening.
They always were.
We just finally learned their real names.
Juntionism 