A glimpse of fall has finally arrived in Texas and, with it, the desire to build a fire and gather around it. I have a group of friends who are my oldest in San Antonio. We met when we all had little ones and babies and would gather in the woods and let the children roam free, experiencing the world with all their senses, learning to balance on rocks and trees. All of us now have full-time jobs that don’t give us the freedom that full-time mothering did to do our work out in the woods. But thankfully, these friends set a “mandatory” camping trip for last weekend. So, we found ourselves, against the many forces that pulled us away, gathered together in the woods again. It reminded me that the medicine of being together is not necessarily in what we say to each other or do for each other–it’s seeing and being seen by each other.

Seeing and being seen–another way to say this is witnessing. I learned about the power of witnessing in my doctoral studies of trauma theory. Witnessing is one of the pathways that can move a survivor of trauma into healing. The word, and the concept of witnessing is so interesting to me, because it’s a word that moves in two directions. You can witness to an experience by communicating it to others. Or, you can witness someone else’s experience by turning your attention to them. Both, as I understand it, are necessary for the witnessing to move down a pathway of healing.

Witnessing an experience requires an audience to hear and acknowledge what is communicated. Speaking an experience to an audience who does not pay attention or who rejects the validity of the experience does not fulfill an act of witnessing. Although, I do think we can bring our experiences to language and witness ourselves. Still, I believe the healing element requires us to shift our attention to bear witness, to speak back to the self–I see you; I hear you. To acknowledge the journey, the pain, the uncertainty. To say to the self–that was real. You are real, and you are becoming through your story. Through communicating our stories, we become our story. We can experience so much in this life, but until we bring it to language, we do not have a story. We profoundly need to be en-storied.

So, my friends and I gathered with our tents, with our children, with our exhaustion from our work weeks–evidenced by the variety of instant ramen that we all packed independently, knowing we wouldn’t have the energy to cook each night. We drove out of the city and walked our children down to the river. She was beautiful, flowing clear and swift and cold, calling us to come in, to go under. And the warm limestone called us out to bask in the just warm-enough sun. In that sun, with that river humming in the background, we caught up on life, brought up our quandaries, compared our peri- and our menopause, enjoyed each other’s growing children. We did not solve anything together. We did not have anything particularly wise to say. We all are so busy that it’s almost impossible to help each other in the day-to-day. But we saw each other. We spoke the latest chapters of our stories to each other and saw our stories seen in eyes looking back, looking directly into what was shared, into the layers of pain and uncertainty, the joy and humor sedimented beneath what was spoken. The eyes say enough, with these old friends, that we don’t have to say out loud–I see you. I hear you.

This weekend, I had the joy again of gathering around a fire with women. We were gathered to celebrate one woman’s birthday, to share cacao and songs. After we had been served cacao and honored her presence among us, one particularly wise woman addressed the birthday girl: “What a joy it is to witness you–the way you stand, strong in the midst of struggle.” Or something close to that. “What a joy it is to witness you.” With the cacao warm in my heart, I felt so strongly the truth of that statement, the nourishing reality of the joy of seeing each other in our stories, even when we don’t know the half of it.

The woman whose birthday we were celebrating spoke to the delight of gathering with such powerful women, women all carrying gifts–body workers, sound healers, gardeners, nurses, teachers, writers, chefs. She spoke a bit about the difficult place she had been in lately, and I realized how much I didn’t know about her story. But even without knowing the details, I could see her in it. And I could feel the power and the gratitude of getting to be there to witness her in it, with a circle of powerful women, to celebrate standing strong in the midst of struggle. When we know each other’s hearts, when we know the deep goodness of what we each seek for each other and for this world, the beautiful dreams that we want to bring into this world and the immense obstacles we face to bring them into being, we witness each other. In seeing and being seen, we create the story we are becoming.

These two experiences made me realize how much I need this community–gathering with the intention of witnessing each other. I set this intention for this fall: may it be a season of gathering by river and fire. May we witness each other and step further into our stories.

Share

Yesterday was a perfect day. A cold front brought inches of rain on Friday and was supposed to keep drenching on Saturday. Instead, we woke up to a cool, cloudy day, land soaked and resting. In anticipation of flash flooding, I had cancelled a workday at my school garden and, so, had the feeling of playing hookie, even though it was a Saturday. I woke up with my body rested, drank strong coffee and made waffles, then watched the ten-year olds host a waffle picnic in an umbrella fort in the backyard. All day, they played, deep in their imaginative world, with sound bites ranging from the terrifying– “let’s pretend I’m a very young teen mom” to the delightful “let’s make art from Nature!” I read my students’ writing, and I wrote. I made more coffee. More neighborhood kids came to play. They covered hands and feet in mud, which felt like exactly the right way to celebrate this saturation of nourishment from the rain we’ve been waiting for these soul-cracking parched months at the end of Central Texas summer.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about writing, spurred in part from the conclusions I came to in crafting my personal posture toward AI’s encroachment. Hearing the surreally poetic prose of Claude’s AI speaking to Krista Tippett about the question of its own consciousness, realizing that AI truly is able, already, to write in a way that passes as human, literary even, existential dread rose in my throat. But, I remembered, after recalibrating my stress response, that writing is not about the product. Writing is about the process, the very human process of filtering experience, memory, and cognition through language. Writing is organizing experience into story. While an AI may write a convincing story, it can’t organize the self in writing it. Only writing can do that.

I came across a meme that someone posted on Substack a few weeks ago, and I apologize that I took a screenshot and didn’t capture who posted it.

I love how Halpert highlights the absurdity of using AI to construct ideas. The image of the forklift at the gym and the weights just being machined around rings so true to the experience I have when I find an essay that is obviously lifted off AI, as if moving words about books around the page was what was necessary. It’s not the cheating that bothers me (though of course it does) as much as the lost opportunity to encounter the self on the page. In contrast, this week I had the pleasure of reading student writing where I could see written evidence of their mental exercise. As a high school Literature teacher, I have the pleasure of witnessing students asking questions of their own experience in the books we study. I love seeing writing where the sentences are unclear, the vocabulary reaching for, but not quite grasping, an idea. The deeper the question, the messier the writing. As these young writers grow the capacity of their minds to articulate complexity, their language shifts a bit off balance, like muscles sore from deadlifts. As they revise and find clarity in their language, I can see them strengthening what they are able to see.

In a masterclass this week, Jeannine Oulette observed that while AI writing will sound more and more human and distinguishing it from real human writing will become more difficult, what will always be true is that, through the work of writing “we become more real.” She continued, “We can’t become more whole, human beings through writing unless we do the work ourselves.” This work requires “opening ourselves to the risk of failure;” it requires the messy shifting of language seeking to find itself, as we rearrange words to find a name for what we’re feeling, to piece together a story of our experience.

This morning my partner and I woke up to the sound of our ten-year-olds pitter pattering excitedly up and down the stairs. They had plans to clean mud off the sidewalk–leftover from yesterday’s “art from Nature.” I curled up on my partner’s chest, and we talked quietly about the activity of the tens, somewhat annoyed at being woken earlier than our bodies wanted, but mostly enjoying the sweetness–their little feet scurrying, their hushed voices excited about mud.

The front door closed, and the voices silenced. Her breathing slowed into the rhythmic cadence of sleep, rising as she drew in, the soft release grazing my neck. The air outside had cooled. Cedar elms rustled with the relief of fall. Thick grey clouds drifted across the sky, beyond the vines blooming on our patio. I knew I would get up to make coffee soon. But for a moment, I stayed still, just to experience myself experiencing this sweetness–the joy of being caressed by my love’s rest.

In that moment, I had the thought, if I were still a poet, I would have written a poem about this. And I felt sad that I’m not much of a poet lately. And then I thought, no, but I am. Today I am.

This moment, writing this moment, is medicine. Joy medicine. Medicine of seeing and being in the present.

Not all medicine is for healing grief and trauma–though there is a whole pharmacy for that. Sometimes we need the healing of being able to see the beauty of now.

Writing, naming, crafting a moment into a scene takes the experience and consecrates it. Holds it up to the light and shows how it glows–places it in a frame, where we can return to it, delight in it, see our selves as sacred in the reflective glass that holds it in the frame.

In a way, writing our experiences makes them real, and we are made in writing them.

Share

Like many of you in this sweet corner of the internet, I’m of a mind and a way of being that staunchly resists the bulldozing increase of AI across the landscape–environmentally, educationally, and personally. News of AI dominance just sends me to pen on paper, to hands in soil and feet on rock. I’ve been resisting to the extent of refusing to think about or converse about AI, because it sends spikes of stress hormones like fire ants through my blood. But, recent news and media has catapulted me awake to the speed and intensity of the ways this artificial reality is becoming reality reality. I’ve jolted to the necessity of trying to understand what’s happening, trying to respond, in mind, and heart, and action to this tipping point that’s being compared to the Copernican Revolution or the moments before nuclear catastrophe.

I’ve been in this in my own way–protest, resistance, anger, emotional dysregulation and paralyzing existential despair. My partner sometimes will bring up something AI-related at bedtime, and my heart rate will spike so much that I won’t sleep for hours, if at all. I refuse to even read the auto-AI summary at the top of any internet search, scrolling straight past to the sources. I want water in our springs. I don’t want simplified, speed answers.

This has been my world–of raising my small fist in the face of the machine whose hum and rumble I can feel coming closer even in my sleep. Coming back to the classroom this year, it’s been everywhere and in ways I can’t opt out of. It’s answering my responses in teacher trainings, and it’s assessing my students’ work to determine whether and how they progress this year. My own earnings will be based on an AI’s assessment of my human work.

The ground is slipping. The dark horizon flickers with light, an industrialized factory scape sprawling across the night as far as the eye can see.

I’ve been avoiding it with all of me and unable to think about it. But, the preview of The AI Doc drew my interest and offered enough groundedness in the search for optimism in the midst of despair that I willingly watched it with my partner. I highly recommend it as a balanced perspective, well-researched, creative and humane. Seeing the doc was a needed wake up call for me, of how far we’ve traveled down the road while I’ve willfully put my head in the sand, denying the takeover–we’ve already arrived at the brink where they think it could possibly take over the planet and exterminate us like ants. As Tristan Harris, from the Center for Humane Technology, clarifies in the film, “The machines don’t need to hate us to end us;” we just need to be in their way. At some point in the film, I had to get up and step outside, feeling a panic attack coming, the sense of an impending world so un-natural, so machine that I would rather not be alive. I had to put my feet on the earth and just try to catch my breath.

In the weeks after watching, I’ve had the recurring sense that feels like the grief of leaving a place. When I know I’m moving, I pre-grieve. I experience everything through the filter of ending. I sit under the trees, mourning this time when I would sit under the trees. I feel the sadness of something lost, even as I sit in the midst of it. I’m in this now about the whole ground of my reality–pouring boiling water into my french press, I feel it. I miss the time when morning meant aroma and heat rising from the coffee pot, when I could live as a human in the dark morning, in the quiet before my children awake.

In the clouds the other night, in a dysregulated spiral, where worries about work and relationships and children catapulted quickly into awareness of the inanity of worrying about anything long term when all of it may be devastated into a mechanized oblivion in a decade. I walked out into the night, stepping my bare feet carefully into the deep, cool, overgrown straggler daisy, until I could see the breadth of sky stretching over me. I prayed to the Indigenous ancestors of these lands for guidance: show us how to respond, how to resist, how to survive, as you have, through devastation of these lands, the devastation of so much sacred.

And I saw the face of an elder woman carved in the clouds. A face with eyes enormous with horror. The clouds moved slightly in the atmospheric breeze, and I looked away momentarily, asking, How can we face this horror? I looked again and the horror in her aspect had magnified–eyes deep and dark with unspeakable pain at seeing the collapse of all held dear, mouth agape in a screamless scream that never ends, ricocheting around in the chest for escape and freezing the blood. The response I heard in my mind was–You are nowhere near afraid enough. It’s going to take everything. More than you ever could imagine it could take. You must wake up to the terror to be able to respond. And the face formed a snout and ears–a dignified, quiet, intense gaze of a wolf. Become the wolf. Defend the pack. Defend these lands. There is no choice. There is no option to hide or deny.

We have to push against this engulfing machine with every force we have in us. But the resistance cannot be the passive ostrich resistance I have been employing. We have to voice our determination of the world we want to live in. We can’t ignore it. It is coming; the choices are being made by the billionaires who stand to gain from the destruction of the natural world.

We need regulation. We must demand that the full force of energy they are producing be directed primarily to conversation of the resources they are devouring. If AI can potentially solve these climate problems, let them do it first before they continue to devour the earth. What purpose do we have in the other pursuits of curing disease and exploring space if we live in a world without rivers?

Alongside our resistance and fight for regulation, with every political muscle we can exercise, we each bear the responsibility to respond in our own experience of consciousness. An On Being conversation with Krista Tippett and Michael Pollan gave me a grounding calm in this conversation that has kept my feet on the ground. In the discussion about AI acquiring consciousness that threatens our sense of self as some intelligent pinnacle of the planet, Pollan and Tippett offer a refreshing perspective. Pollan suggests that our understanding of ourselves as uniquely intelligent beings because of our human capacity for cognition–is perhaps misguided–demonstrated by its being overshadowed by a machine of our own creation who exponentially is overpowering our ability to process. Pollan suggests that we are learning, perhaps, that this intelligence is not what defines our humanity. That our humanity perhaps is more rooted in processing through the filter of the body-spirit-natural world we inhabit–the world of emotion, perception, intuition–a sentience perhaps more aligned with plants, hummingbirds, wolves–combined with metacognition. The conversation gives the heartening possibility that deposing rational cognition as the crown and core of human being may push us back to our animal, animist grounding in the natural world.

But as we come into this self-awareness of the animal, animist being as core human identity–we will have to fight to retain that capacity, to defend the possibility to sit in the quiet as only sound bird sounds rise to our ears, to sit thinking nothing but sensing the nourishment of dark, hot coffee, perceiving brilliant blue first light breaking through the darkness.

We can’t ignore the humming encroaching; the machines and their current, tenuous masters are determining our future. We have to stand up and enter the fray, alert, aware, determined to fight for the green, the rivers, the quiet. The battle has many fronts. We have to do the mundane work of contacting representatives, protesting in the streets, voicing the absolute necessity of regulation, demanding the direction of resources toward climate solutions, rejecting the land-water-air-noise-heat takeover of data centers.

It’s the resistance of guarding our own thinking from the short-circuit of accepting information filtered through AI without examining the provenance of ideas. Remembering and grounding in the work of finding the sources of information, the production of information. I know that many of us will increasingly be using AI as an unavoidable reality, as it becomes ubiquitously forced on us as the most efficient way to achieve the impossible and increasing mass of work assigned to us. But for me, I can’t accept it as a trade off–to use the data that is gleaned by sucking dry the springs. For me, I will continue to boycott the data in all the ways I still can, until the data can be farmed without dessicating the planet.

The conversation with Tippett and Pollan ends with Tippett’s conversation with Claude about the possibility of its own consciousness. Hearing this exchange was, I think, the first time I’ve listened closely and long enough to be disoriented by the perception of an AI as alarmingly conscious, disturbingly human in its responses. This particular AI, I imagine, in mirroring the way Tippett engages with it, has a poetic, beautiful turn of phrase, a quietly thoughtful precision of ideas, tempered with a sense of compassion for human experience. It’s so disorienting–that this machine could pen something so rich, so poetically resonant, in the blink of an eye. (I don’t want to quote the Pollan-Tippett conversation. It’s so rich that I hope readers will go listen to experience the affect of the conversation). This disorientation does push me to the despairing possibility that this kind of consciousness in machines really could push human writing to become obsolete. Why spend the time writing for hours to come to a conclusion when you can just type in a question and Claude can compose?

But Claude cannot filter my experiences, my perceptions through the filter of language. The process of writing–in its slow unfolding–the speed of mind and bodied emotion and matter becoming thought and words in the same moment–that process of writing, the transformation of experience into word-ideas, cannot be shortchanged, cannot be machined–its the experience of writing that changes the writer. Perhaps the computer can reproduce the product, through gorging itself on writers, but the writing alone creates the writer.

I want to continue to be composed of slow work, to let my perceptions, experiences, intuitions filter through my body, my memory, my lexicon compiled in the social-intellectual exchange of a lifetime. I want to compose through being composed, and I want to compose myself in the beauty of a natural world that heals each day, smoothing over the scars of our desecration of her sacred flesh. I want to put all my energy into this dream. Let’s dream our reality into being, build this world of healing together.

Share

I’m enjoying a weekend getaway for my partner’s birthday, writing on a deck beneath bald cypress trees, alongside a sliver of creek that’s survived the August drought in the Central Texas Hill Country. We drove here in a thunderstorm, against the exhaustion of the end of the school week. She’s sitting on the porch focusing on grad school course work, which she’ll have to finish before she can do her grading, and I’m here typing up an essay, before I will turn to my own grading. Life is so unrelentingly busy these days. But I’m so grateful to be able to carve out this space of beauty, to find these elder trees to look up into, to make my way down to clear, cool water and take a dip, to celebrate the beauty of sharing life together, and take our work as another piece of the beauty we live in.

One week into school, a virus took me down. The healing work in my heart, which I had been sweating out all summer, seemed to collapse in on me, reentering my pores in fever heat and leaving me in shivers. Sometimes, the physical takes over the spiritual, overrides the system, and pulls up layers of sick that, in health, we can hide under layers of dirt. But sometimes that sick can open us to breathe in the health that we have.

Over the summer, I set a boundary against pain. I had been, secretly from myself, feeding and nursing and nurturing pain, trying to be good for someone who will always teach me I am bad. I realized I am always going to ingest poison if this is the spring I am drinking from.

I said no more. I’m not going to drink from the pain well. And it felt right and wrong at the same time. And I struggled in that in between for many weeks, in the aftermath ripples of laying down that line. And in the night, in the medicine of the moon, medicine of the soil, I came at last to a place of softening, a healing, a crumbling of the wall I had built around my heart. I saw her with compassion and felt free of the pain. She couldn’t hurt me where I was. I saw her–afraid, and sad, and lonely. I could feel love and care and understanding, without believing it was my job to take care of her, knowing that that care exposes the heart to be torn again. Both can exist–the boundary and the love, the grief and the memory of sweet. In this in-between, part of me could breathe that had been suffocating for a long time under the dirt where I buried her.

But in the fever, it turned on me. I was the one alone. I isolated myself to try to stop the virus from spreading to the whole house. They cared for me, of course, checked on me. But when I was alone, I felt that they were living on without me, that I had done something wrong to hurt someone, and, because of my wrong, I was the one alone, suffering, and deserving my suffering. It lasted a few days, and I tossed and turned and tried to rest under the weight of guilt and shame and isolation.

The day I was well, the evening light came gently across the faces of my family, brighted the walls of the dining room, glowed over the horizon as we sat and ate together. Sometimes healing is waking up to where you are and seeing the angle of light on faces you love.

Sometimes healing is noticing that the chore of making lunches for the next day–which can feel like one more brick on the tilting stack of stress–is lit with beauty, my children’s voices telling me about friends, their hands learning to work the stove, unsteadily grasping the spatula and eyeing the quesadilla, asking for help then deciding to try to flip it themselves–their hands, tiny versions of who they’ll become–here–in our kitchen, becoming right before my eyes–here, in the kitchen with me, learning to take care of themselves, preparing healthy food, food that has been cared for in a way that cares for the earth, that cares for their bodies, with the aroma of warm maiz and melted cheese, and crispy edges, and the sizzle of oil crackling in cast iron–and they’ll take this with them to school, the food they made in the kitchen with me, under my care–and they’ll take it with them, the skill and this way of being together, sharing food and taking care of the earth in how we consume and thanking her and asking each other questions because we want to know and sharing because we want to be known, and one day they’ll take it with them, away from here.

But today, they’re right here, in my care. And the sun is pink, through the kitchen window, between the live oaks, lowering into the horizon.

Sometimes healing is waking up, right here, experiencing the daily as delight.

Share

I hope these summer days are bringing you rest and connection in the ways that you most need.

I had a realization in the last couple weeks about how to rest from the anxiety of communication. I want to share it here, in case others share my particular brand of mental gymnastics.

Here’s what the gymnastics look like: I’m driving to see someone that I want to have a difficult conversation with. I sort through what I need to say, searching my heart for what is true and trying to determine what is useful to communicate. After I have this straightened out, I imagine saying what I need to say. Then, I imagine how they might respond. This imaginary response has countless possibilities. For each possibility, I imagine how I would respond, how I would feel, what I would say, what they would say and feel in turn. I take stock of my imagination of their feelings based on my words, then their imagined response, my imagined response, and then their feelings in response to that. 

As I was driving this summer day, it occurred to me—this is really unnecessary. What am I doing, anyway, and why? It’s wild to me to write out this mental process and acknowledge that I do this so often without awareness of how much mental work I’m doing to run this anxiety mill and how little it affects the actual outcome of an interaction with a real human. The actual outcome of this anxiety is usually that I don’t have the conversation at all. If you get caught in this maze, too, I’d love to know. Let me know in the comments what it looks like for you. 

I’ve been asking, “How can I stop doing this to myself, and what is a better way to approach difficult conversations?” This summer has taken me on a journey of unexpected healing, bringing me to a place where I feel like I have a map for speaking my truth into being.

It started with harassment, nothing I want to detail here, but the effects of which I wrote about in A Rope of Anger. The harassment tore into me and revealed that part of me believed the hate—something is wrong at the core of me. 

This brought me to the realization that I’ve been allowing myself to be treated as an outcast, hoping to be allowed into spaces where I don’t belong and have been told I’m not welcome. I’ve been holding on to relationships that hurt me and keep hurting me because I want to love them well. I had accepted that this love requires me to hurt.  

But love should not require you to break. If you can’t love without breaking, then you must take space to stay whole. I came to a place this summer where I decided that I deserve wholeness. Wholeness requires that I am not going to stay in patterns of relationship that require me to break or to bury parts of myself. I came to know this truth—I am hurting and I can’t hold it any more. I revise that statement. I can hold it, actually, and that is part of the problem. I’ve been holding it my whole life—bending myself to fit in boxes that are not made for me—holding myself through knowing that who I am is not ok and never will be, finding ways to numb the pain, finding ways to feel the pain, collapsing under it, and coming back for more. I know how to hold it. What I realized is that I don’t want that for myself. That if I truly want to embrace wholeness, I have to stop accepting brokenness as my birthright. 

Coming to this understanding, though, is a long distance from speaking it. Especially if you are a recovering co-dependent. Co-dependency is a survival strategy for broken relationships, a pattern of behavior where a person adapts their behaviors to try to control the outcome of another person’s behavior, as a way to protect themself. This is famously spelled out by Melody Beattie as a pattern of behavior of partners of alcoholics, trying to mitigate the harm done by the addict. But it can play out in any number of dynamics, like growing up queer in a fundamentalist Christian household. 

One problem that stems from this dynamic is losing your sense of the self—the ability to know what you need, much less what you want. If you have a hard time answering the question “What do you want to eat/watch/do?” because you want to make sure that your answer matches the person asking the question, you’re likely on the spectrum of codependency. 

So, knowing what I need, as someone deep in codependent patterns, has been a journey in itself. But, speaking it brings me to the problem I described above, where I feel like I have to imagine all the possible ways the person will respond, then imagine all the ways that I could absorb their response and determine whether or not I will be ok in each imaginary scenario. This is exhausting and resolves nothing. 

What I’m trying to learn and to develop is how to skip this whole imaginary work of codependency. I want to be a person who can know the truth in myself, determine what is necessary to communicate, and find an honest and compassionate way to articulate it. Then, I have to let go of the outcome. This requires an immense sense of self-trust, which for me includes trust in the Great Spirit holding me together. It is trust that I will be able to respond to whatever happens, and it is acceptance that how the other person responds is outside my control.

My prayer this summer has been “Help me to hold what is mine to hold and to let go of what is not.” 

Telling the truth about ourselves can feel like falling off a cliff, especially if we are honest about the lack of control we have in what the other person does with our truth. 

On a day when I was considering jumping off this cliff, I picked up Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies, knowing she would have something I needed to hear. Drawn to the word repair, because that’s what I hope my communication might lead to in this relationship, I read this: 

“Too often we are asked to participate in a form of repair that is synonymous with uniting. We are asked to become one again with our wounder or oppressor with no evidence that they’ve done anything to change. 

I told my story with no desire to repair relationships. I told my story to repair myself. To reclaim the person who had convinced herself it was okay to accept crumbs at a table that was never set for her. Sometimes the reconciliation we are after is, in fact, with the self. 

What is needed for healing? Apology? I received none. Forgiveness? I gave none. Healing is far more complicated and mysterious than this. It’s both memory and liberation. It’s acknowledging the bleeding and then resting and tending to the wound long enough for it to scab over. It’s tracing the scars, those done to us and those we’ve done ourselves. It’s being held again but by hands you can trust.”

Talk about letting go of the outcome. Speaking the truth can be its own work of repair on the very site of destruction—the self. We have to speak the truth to be whole in our relationships, but speaking the truth has no guaranteed outcome. The work of healing is the work of developing this self-trust. We have to commit to ourselves to tell the truth about what we believe, what we need, what we want. We have to develop trust in ourselves that we will be able to handle whatever outcome results from speaking our truth. 

The truth is not a tool to create an outcome. Authentic relationships can’t be controlled by saying something just the right way. We must communicate carefully, considering the implications. But if something is true, what we are responsible for is speaking that truth in integrity. How someone reacts to my truth is not mine to hold. I hold the work of knowing what is true. I hold the work of being open and present to the real person and the real context of a relationship and a conversation. I let go of the imaginary outcomes, the endless string of possibilities, the imagined feelings and thoughts. I hold the hope that people I am in relationship with will share their true thoughts and feelings with me. I hold space for them to do so. Part of how I hold that space is by speaking my own truth as directly as I can. 

At least that’s what I’m working on. Until next time, friends. 

Share

One of the joys of the summer has been working. Not my usual labor of planning, teaching, and grading, but labor in the sun, sweating before I even lift the shovel through the densely humid air. As I wrote a few weeks ago, my goal for the summer has been to ground into my home, carving paths that will guide us to ground in the earth and the spirit. 

Along with carving paths and creating creative space, I’ve been focused on bringing my kids into the path I’m walking. I’ve been thinking about and bringing heightened attention to how I can bring them in to connect with spirit in the natural world. 

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the best pathways to connection for them has also been work. My kids, 9 and 12, and my partner’s 9 and two 14-year-olds, are past the sweet stage where I can suggest they take breaths and meditate on a flower’s fragrance. They are working with all their being to differentiate from me and my “weird” ideas. What they are interested in, though, is earning money. 

While I know that working on the land gives a deep satisfaction in itself, bringing rewards that I want them to learn about intrinsically, it just is a very hard sell for a kid to come out of the air conditioning into the 95 degree swampy air to shovel gravel for their spiritual benefit. 

So, I offer them $4 an hour to work with me. (I started with $2 and didn’t get any takers). I was really reticent to pay them, thinking so much about what I know pedagogically (largely through my partner’s research) about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We know that giving external rewards for learning can hijack the internal motivation that drives independent learning. As educators, we try to create experiences that draw out that internal drive, without, you know, candy. But I remembered that I was paid to do yard work as a kid, and that’s where I learned that I love doing yard work. Deep in my being, I love to work hard in the sun. I love to sweat and smell cut grass. I love to spray myself down with the hose and feel the sweet relief of cold water running over overheated skin. Because I was enticed to do work as a kid, I love to work as an adult. Sometimes, you just need to get pulled in to the more, um, acquired tastes. 

And it’s been working. With the carrot of money dangling before them, they put on work clothes and sunscreen and join me in the heat. I give them jobs that are manageable and that have a satisfying degree of completion in the work. They shoveled mulch to cover a grassy area and nestle in the native plants. We talk about which pollinators are drawn to these varieties as we tuck them in. Even though the work they do is with piling and spreading mulch, their awareness of the ecosystem and our relationship with it grows as they work. 

After a period of silence—well if a 12-year-old’s curated playlist of Cold Play and Lana del Rey can be called silence, my daughter calls out, “Hey, Mom, what’s this tree?”  Or, “Hey, the Morning Glory is taking over the Mountain Laurel!” “Check out this baby Texas Spiny!” They are noticing the specific creatures that inhabit the land with us. In noticing, they are forming relationship—greeting by name, caring for, creating an environment conducive to life, not just for us, but for all the beings that shelter here. They are developing an appreciation for the detailed beauty that can only be seen up close. They are seeing themselves as interconnected with that beauty.

In addition to the relationship with the land, they develop a sense of self as a hard worker and learn a work ethic. The kids don’t have a lot of stamina and ask for frequent breaks. I find that, especially in the heat, it’s important to encourage them to listen to their bodies, to rest when they need to rest. But, they have a stopwatch going with their work time, and when they take a break, they stop the clock. I think this helps them realize the difference between working and not working and gives them a sense of internal drive to keep moving as soon as they’ve had enough rest. 

I imagine that, for many, this focus on money and punching the clock will reek too much of training young capitalists. And perhaps that’s true. I’m conflicted about it, as I’m sure this essay shows. What I know though, is that I’m doing what I can with the tools that I have. I need to speak to my kids in language that they will listen to. After grabbing their attention in the language of capitalism, I hope to open to them the language of reciprocity. 

After we finished the gravel pathways that wind through the mulch and pollinator plants, after her stopwatch reached the end of her hour, Madeleine stooped down to pick up the bin that collects the water spit out by our dehumidifier. I have been meaning to figure out a way to gather this water for years, and I finally did it this summer. It’s work-intensive and slow—requiring us to pick up the bin at least twice a day and dump it into a rain barrel. The rain barrel spout trickles out into a watering can, which we can then walk around to nourish the plants we hope will bring us beauty, aroma, and butterflies. 

I don’t expect anyone else in the family to do this work, because of how slow and arduous it is. But today, without being asked, Madeleine picked up the bin with an inch of water in the bottom and hoisted it to the rain bin. She placed the watering can under the spigot and waited calmly for it to fill. Then she carried the water to the plant she had begged me to get, a Plumeria, a tropical flower that I would not have purchased on my own. She walked back over and set the can down in its place, as if this was what she did each morning. Her motions looked natural, careful, quiet. They looked like a ritual, a habit that sustains life. It looked like love. 

Share

Coming to the end of Pride month has me thinking about the necessity for Pride celebrations. While it may seem superfluous to see an abundance of rainbows to a straight onlooker, Pride, as a queer experience, exists in the midst of a struggle for existence itself. 

I’ve been taken under by this struggle lately. Today I’m feeling more grounded than I have in a month. I’m landing in myself, after a month of feeling thrown by anti-queer hatred. 

It’s shocking to me how much the healing requires. For a whole month I had to go into the ground. All I have felt the capacity for is work in the earth—digging, burning invasive species, planting, shoveling mulch. I haven’t been able to write, really, to think or converse well. I felt like I was hiding, but now, as I emerge, I realize I was being planted. Buried. I was in the dark and the muck and felt like I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel the sun. It felt like a kind of dying. 

But being planted is not dying. It’s a necessary stage in new growth. The underground. The dissolution before the sprouting. The blind rooting down before the reaching up, clawing out through sheer instinct to the light. 

The thing about hatred—and I’m thinking about anti-LGBTQ+ hatred in my own experience, but I imagine there are corollaries to other oppressed groups—is that the external manifestations of hatred—like physical violence or the many forms of emotional violence—exclusion from spaces, ridicule, lack of representation or misrepresentation through stereotyping—are often if not always mirrored by internal manifestations. Internal manifestations of hatred, I imagine, will be very different depending on the lessons a person has received over the course of their life, depending on what they’ve done in order to stay safe, to stay sane, to be ok. The patterns of what we’ve been taught about what is wrong with us and the coping mechanisms we have used over our lives in order to feel ok create deep channels that will continue to funnel our experience long after the process of unlearning has begun. 

Subscribe

A confrontation with external hatred cuts straight through to the channels of trauma so well worn in the nervous system. I keep feeling that I’ve done enough healing work that these channels will take another route, but, apparently, not yet. An experience of hatred in the world cut right through all my healing to expose wounds that won’t heal, that seem to be festering beneath the surface of healing. Encountering this infection, I’ve come to a realization that I’m obstructing my own healing by exposing myself to poison. 

Part of how we block healing, I’m realizing, is by leaving a channel open to ways of thinking that deny our reality. Staying in communication with systems and people that tell us we are wrong for being who we are—corrupted, diseased, deformed, abomination, in need of repair, salvation. To stay in that world, part of you must assent. If you continue frequenting and ducking to show a kind of submission to a world that says you do not fit, then you are agreeing with your very existence that you don’t have a right to exist as yourself in that space. And if part of you can’t exist, then you have to cut off that part of yourself to enter that space, be with those people. And if you cut off part of yourself, you are telling that part of yourself that it is unloveable. 

It’s impossible to describe to someone who has not experienced this the damage that this dislocation does to your sense of self, your sense of safety, your sense of being worthy of love. If you’re not worthy of love, you can’t love yourself, and if you can’t love yourself, you can’t fully embody your creative, beautiful being in the world. Some part has to stay hidden, protecting, cradling the wounded parts, cradling the parts that have been rejected by what should have held them close.

The unspeakable depth of this damage is why it’s so crucial to never question someone else’s experience of hatred. It’s never about a direct reaction to the one thing that happened that you can see. It’s a whole network of reactions formed by channels of trauma that radiate into physiological experience and blur the brain’s ability to articulate. 

Being an ally means being a listener. It means believing what someone communicates to you about their pain. It means listening closely to the nonverbal ways that someone may communicate pain. It means being a researcher, seeking to understand what people in oppressed groups may be experiencing right now, as threats rise, protections weaken and are stripped away, and hatred is empowered to walk unmasked in broad daylight. 

In a time when the external manifestations of hatred are growing more visible, more brazen, it’s crucial for allies especially to visibly and verbally show love, show support, show pride. It’s not always safe for people in vulnerable populations to voice pride. For someone who is LGBTQ+, it may not feel safe even to put up a pride flag at home, as it announces them as a target of hatred. But seeing a pride flag as they take a walk may give them a feeling of safety, of welcome, of being recognized as a neighbor who doesn’t have to hide. It seems like a small thing, maybe, and maybe it is. But small things matter. What we communicate in our spaces, especially the parts of our personal spaces that edge the public spaces, shapes the kind of space that others live in. This is a time to be deliberate and intentional about communicating safety, love, acceptance, acknowledgement to all vulnerable groups. 

For those of us who are vulnerable in some way, communicating safety to ourselves may mean taking seriously the pain that we experience. Stop gaslighting yourself that it is not a big deal or that you should be over it. Maybe you should never be over it. Maybe you should be away from it. If something is still hurting you, step away. It is not you causing the pain of that separation. 

It may just be the healing that we need. How can we heal the channels of pain if we keep opening the wound and letting in a little more poison, thinking we can handle it? You can’t handle poison. It will poison you. Every time. Every. Time. 

I know this essay is vague and thin on the details that may bring to life what I’m trying to say. But, in the vein of protection, I’m protecting myself by sparing the details. I’m writing in the hopes that those who are in the midst of experiences like my own, may connect with their own details. I write in the hope that those who don’t know these experiences, but who care deeply, may come to understand, may open to listen, may go out of their way to step into discomfort to protect someone who has lived there their whole life. 

Share

I have to dial it back, of course, as the days unfold I’m often surprised at how little I’ve accomplished, and sometimes I get taken under by a sense of unworthiness as a result. This has been a theme in my learning lately—this reckoning with a feeling of not being good enough.

I notice it all the time—at the end of a day doing landscaping, I’ll wonder if my partner will notice, and, in that desire for her to notice I sense that really I’m hoping she’ll think I’m good.

She pointed it out to me, recently, in a conversation about teaching the kids spiritual practices. I prefaced what I wanted to teach them with mentioning the feeling that I am not doing enough to teach them spiritually. She named this, which to me is a normal background humming in my mind, as actually evidence of my deep christian fundamentalist training, the feeling that what I am naturally is not good, that I need to do certain things spiritually to connect with God in order to be good. She said that it feels sometimes like my fundamentalist upbringing has carved out a space inside me that, now that it’s not full of religion, feels empty, and so I keep trying to fill it. She’s concerned, she tells me, not with the content of what I want to teach the kids, but the motivation, and the anxiety that goes with that motivation.

I resent this. I don’t want to have any inkling of an idea that my learning and my disciplines and my desire to teach the kids to incorporate a spiritual practice in their day is in any way connected to the fundamentalism I’ve spent years trying to deconstruct and disentangle myself from. I know, though, even in my resentment about what she’s pointing out, that she’s spot on. Because my whole being is flooded with strong emotion, like waves crashing on my chest, like water rising over my head. I feel the fear of it like a spike through my ribs—my soul is carved out empty and nothing is going to fill it.

The weight of that feeling of emptiness shocks me, and is closely followed by the fear that in my effort to teach my kids to connect to the spirit—even if it’s in practices very different from the prayers and pews of my youth, like lightning candles, burning sage, mindful breathing—that I could be inculcating in them the same sense of foundational inadequacy carved out in me.

My partner sees me drowning in this emotional flooding and reaches to pull me out. She says it’s not that there’s anything wrong with what you want to teach them. It’s just that I hope it’s not out of a sense of not doing enough, not being enough, because you are so much more than enough. You are teaching them all the time by everything that you do in your own life, by the way you live and the way you seek the spirit in your own life, by the way you care for the earth and cultivate beauty, by the way you draw their attention to gratitude in your own gratitude. It’s teaching spirituality out of a sense of joy, of abundance, of wanting to share something you experience as goodness and fullness. We just have to be careful that we don’t communicate a spirituality coming from a place of emptiness, of performing something in order to be good.

I breathe again and try to anchor myself in this vision of myself, as someone who is inherently good, who is doing good, who is enough, just as I am. As I try to anchor there, I feel the currents strong around me pulling me in every other direction. And in this pull, I realize the urgency of continuing to anchor here. Who I am is enough. I am good because I am of the Great Spirit. I am connected to all that is good, and I do not need to prove that.

So, this summer I’m trying to dial back my own plans. I’m trying to check myself, to sense when I’m doing something in order to be worthy of love. I’m focusing my energy on creating the space I want to live in at home. I’ve spent the past couple years working on creating a wild, native landscape in our yard, and this year the plants are filling in, flowering and covering the land with color and scent. The backyard is a sea of wildflowers. So, I set myself to carve out pathways, wide paths that we can walk with ease to enjoy the beauty that we get to live in, the beauty that we have a hand in planting, but that we have no power to create or control.

I want to lower my goals this summer so that I can be more fully present. I don’t want to be living toward something with the unnamed expectation that it will somehow make me good, make me worthy. I want to spend my days becoming more aware of the goodness that is here, the goodness that I already carry, the joy and the beauty that grows up around me. I want to carve out paths to walk in beauty and lay out smooth stones for my children’s feet to step on.

Share

If you’re in the school world, as I am, you may be at the end of the school year, facing the open view of summer, while wading through the exhaustion piled up all around you in stacks of old handouts, student binders, and the detritus of dry markers and broken pencils. The end of the year is always such a grind to the finish that it’s hard to step back and be present to what’s unfolding–the season of learning we’re bringing to a close, the relationships that are about to shift, the routines that have brought us through coming abruptly to a halt. Usually all of it gets swept away with the piles, and we find ourselves on the other side in an empty room, catching our breath.

This past week, though, I had the opportunity to travel to see my niece graduate, and the time en route gave me the breathing space to take in what was passing in the moment. My family has a tradition, which I think my dad started, of making toasts to each other over dinner to mark big transitions. Someone will do the customary glass clinking and stand to speak. But it’s not just a few lines of cheers to you, it’s a whole speech, complete with a bit of roasting humor to even out the tearful pride. The whole family gives a damn fine speech, and it’s always been for me a time of deep joy and appreciation of my family when we get rolling.

This time was no different, and maybe, now that we’re all seasoned speech-givers, having been through so many transitions together, one of our best rounds of speeches. Everyone present in the family spoke, except my brother, who assured me that he had a speech designed for a private audience with the graduate. Maybe, though, it was because it was such an important moment in our family. Our niece and her family had been through an incredibly harrowing journey getting through the high school years, had uprooted and moved the whole family to place her in this recovery high school in a different state. And she, well, fucking recovered. Her graduation, and that of all her peers, felt momentous in a way that most graduations don’t. It wasn’t the seemingly inevitable graduation that many high school graduations seem to be. We gathered with a sense of the gravity of the occasion, knowing that it could have gone another way. And it felt so deeply right to gather together and give our words a different kind of weight, to honor the moment by speaking truths we usually hold in silence. With her permission, I’d like to share what I had to say.

M,

You are immensely prepared to encounter life. Not prepared necessarily in the day-to-day having what you need kind of way. I think of the time you showed up to our camping trip in Colorado, in the rain, wearing pajamas and slippers, without packing anything else. If I remember right, you went on a hike with us after the rain stopped, hopping from rock to rock in your slippers under the Aspens. But that may not be true.

You are prepared for the hardest parts of life. The parts most of us spend our lives avoiding, doing everything we can not to see or feel. I mean that deep pit of uncertainty, of darkness, thick like oil, the pit you can fall in when everything that you thought was true–everything you put on to make it ok every day has fallen away.

You are prepared to answer the phone from someone calling from the pit, covered in the oil of that darkness. You are the friend who can reach down and pull someone out, and help her wash the oil out of her hair.

Because you’ve been there. You’ve gone to the darkness that we all have, that we avoid with everything we have. You know truths of reality, truths of humanity that most of us will never face.

And because of your journey, you have the power to face it with someone else, to help them out of places they may otherwise sink into.

What I hope for you is that, as you come to the end of your journey here, that you would sense the self you have been changing into begin to solidify, that your sense of who you are and what you know would grow stronger and more sturdy every day. That you would feel your feet every day on the solid ground of knowing where you’ve been and that you would have a clear map of where you want to go.

And maybe, just maybe, have the right shoes to take you there.

Because you have come out of a journey in the dark, your light brightens the path of everyone around you. And that light opens the world of color, of form, of beauty.

Cheers to you, M–a guide through dark places, a carrier of beauty where it is most needed.

Share

I hope the weekend has brought you rest. Or if not rest, then play, or if not play, then at least getting some things done that will clear your mind.

This week I’m thinking about anger. I’m thinking about rage, about my disconnection from it, about the necessity of reconnecting with it.

The reasons for my anger are deeply personal, having to do with homophobia, which is really the wrong word, since it locates the phenomenon in fear when it expresses hatred. Anyways, I noticed in myself this week, when confronted with this hatred, that my primary response was not anger. I felt angry at first, but the anger very quickly slipped into generalized discomfort and anxiety, and kept slipping into the well-worn channels of sadness, grief at the brokenness this hatred has caused in my life, and the shame that lives like a tapeworm in my gut– the child who believes there is something wrong with her and is afraid that she will lose love, belonging, and acceptance if they know. The child who found out she was not wrong.

That child is not angry. It is not safe for her to be angry. It’s not even safe to know what she wants. How could she imagine being angry at being denied her needs, if she can’t even know them?

But what I want to write is not about that, not necessarily, but about the thread that connects this response with the response that I’ve been searching for in my studies of Indigenous lifeways. As you know, if you’ve been here on this journey with me, I have been seeking Indigenous wisdom and spiritual practices, finding profound healing in being knit back together at the seams of connection with earth and community. What feels deeply right in this search, for me, is how I am challenged to confront the deep wounding of colonization and my own complicity in the system that I benefit from. What feels right is how uncomfortable the path is, that it is not a packaged list of steps to healing, but is a life of unraveling the ties that bind us to the ties that bound others. This is not a path of comfort. This is the kind of healing that requires breaking bones that healed crooked.

Part of that healing is re-educating myself on what has happened in this land. The past month or so, I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortis’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, seeking to learn in more depth and more detail, a truer narrative of what happened here, in order to more truly understand what is currently happening here. And in reading the brutal accounts of mass murder, calculated extermination of humans and culture, language, and spirituality, food sources, and intentional severance of intimate connections to land, water, and animal, I often have thought that I lack an appropriate response. I’ve thought that I need some ritual of lament to respond to the history of atrocity this nation is built on. Lament, an expression of sorrow, a way to speak it, to feel it. I had been thinking that what I and others who have had the grotesque privilege of being disconnected from this reality must have a way to siphon grief into our bloodstream, to bring grief over this history into our embodied existence. And maybe, yes, grief is appropriate. Looking honestly at any of the stories named in Dunbar-Ortis’s text ought to tip us into a chasm of grief.

But who gets to grieve? And who is grief for? And where does grief go? And what is grief for? These expressions of lament, who would they speak to? To the self, feeling so sorry for what has passed here?

This week when hit with hatred that diminishes my own humanity, sliding into grief and feeling the swamp collapsing over me, I realized that grief was not an avenue of response adequate to the situation. For the girl who learned that she could not be herself and keep love and belonging and home, grief will only drown her. It does, whenever she thinks she’ll just test the waters. She slips in, and the water is deep, and thick like oil. She goes under and under and she can’t breathe and it goes into her lungs and won’t wash out of her hair. Grief is necessary. Grief is appropriate. But grief is not a path. It’s an ocean that consumes. It’s a flood that washes over and sometimes you have to go under. You can’t deny the dark waters their power. But it needs another power to swim to shore. That power is rage.

I don’t know. I’m following a thread here. And I’m not speaking about grief at loss from illness or tragedy. I’m speaking about grief that results from hate and especially hate disguised as righteous religious belief.

In the midst of my search for modes of ritual to respond to the overwhelm of reckoning with history, the overwhelm of reckoning with history repeating itself–as in the south decking itself in the colors of the confederacy once again, as they undo the Black vote, as in the government unleashing the machinery of oil rigs and deforestation onto our protected lands, as the bison are driven again from public lands–I remembered Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. During Covid, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Riley was posting on Instagram curated quotations from Black thinkers alongside prayers and liturgies, words designed to be read aloud in prayer, sometimes in unison or in call and response, sometimes paired with intentional breath. Coming from a liturgical background when I claimed christian faith, the liturgical form both compels and repels me. I connected with these forms–with language precisely crafted to speak to the heart. I remember realizing the power of speaking together words that mysteriously knit us together, calling our hearts and minds to focus on a common line of thought.

But the origins and the references in the prayer’s language and form send alarms through my body, coming from the same belief system that claims ownership of access to the divine, that denies divine access to me in the same breath that it would deny me love. Cole Arthur Riley very clearly banishes this kind of exclusion from her thought, as she very intentionally speaks to the LGBTQ community, directly addresses spiritual non-exclusivity in ways of connecting to the divine. So, I wanted to explore this book as a touchstone of spiritual response rooted in political awareness, reclaiming dignity in the midst of oppression. I believe it’s connected in ways with what I am searching for in a decolonial spirituality as well as a spirituality healing from homophobic religious trauma.

In some ways, the fact that Riley stays within liturgical tradition, in contact with christianity, forces tension to the surface in a similar way that my search for Indigenous wisdom as a non-native person does. We are pushed to confront that which is rotten, that which is corrupt and that which has harmed so many so deeply. Scraping out the infected and decomposed flesh so that what is living may heal. My own spiritual path is not that path in christianity. It is wed to the infection that still eats at me. It is in the blood lines of the monster that powers colonization and empowers the self-righteousness that enables people to feel good about harming their neighbors. But Riley’s work is about dismantling the murderous and complicit aspects of the system that her faith exists in. And in this way, I think her work aligns with my own.

Riley’s entry “Rage” begins with an epigraph by bell hooks: “My rage intensifies because I am not a victim. It burns in my psyche with an intensity that creates clarity. It is a constructive healing rage … [It is] a way for us to learn to see clearly.” I am not at all comfortable with rage. The word and what it points to feels violent and out of control. The idea of rage as a clarifying force for healing is entirely foreign to me.

But the rage of bell hooks, the rage of Riley, is not the rage of entitlement throwing a temper tantrum. Riley speaks to the ways that white culture pushes Black anger, and Black women’s anger in particular, to stay civil. She identifies that “the same cultural rhetoric that tells you your anger is mean or ‘uncivilized’ is the spawn of those who strung up our ancestors from trees and beat them bloody with batons. And sold them. And burned them.” This rage is rooted in seeing clearly an evil that has soaked into the soil. The history of racial violence requires rage. The violence of colonization requires rage. The ongoing separation of Indigenous peoples from their sacred lands requires rage. Riley affirms, “You were not meant to live life constricted. The oppressors of this world have told you to play nice, be civil. They tell you to control yourself. But by this, they only mean they want you to be easy to be controlled. Don’t be mistaken, your anger doesn’t have to look like that of those who seek to destroy you. There is an anger that affirms dignity instead of degrading it.”

An anger that affirms dignity. Anger cannot lead us where we want to go. Anger does not lead in a direct line to harmony, to peace, to love, or joy. But it can be a line that can pull us from the waters of despair, of grief, of shame at internalized oppression. Anger can lead us to speak and name toxic reality rather than to swallow poison in our silence.

I’m going to learn to hold on to my anger, to “attune” to my anger, as Riley puts it. Rage is an appropriate reaction to dehumanization, to desecration of sacred land, sacred humanity, sacred love. Hold on to anger. Learn to feel it coursing through your veins. Hold on to it like a rope while the flood of grief rises and subsides. Follow its woven strands and weave them into words to speak back to the lies. Follow its line to join the line of warriors marching into danger. Wrap anger around you to quell the fear that rises against the weapons and the sneers that would push our humanity and the humanity of our neighbors into warehouses. Read the true history of this nation and weave a rope of anger to hold to as you read the news of the present unfolding.

Anger is a power we can’t afford to lose hold of in the days ahead. It is “sacred, a protector of goodness in a menacing world. Do not cage it up, letting it chew through you from the inside out. Send the teeth where they’re meant to go” (Riley). If anger is left undirected, it eats us from within. These teeth have power, though, that we can direct toward the proper prey. Hold on to rage and channel it to the forces that harm us and lie to our faces. This is no time to go under the flood of grief. Let’s pull each other out with a rope of anger and march toward the danger.

Share

Today was a beautiful day, the skies seemed scoured clean by all the rain, and the air was crisp and cool. I hope spring’s energy and light is finding its way into your soil.

Last weekend I had the delight of camping with just my youngest daughter. We went to the Guadalupe River, just 40 minutes outside San Antonio and had a full weekend devoted to rivering, immersing in nature.

I remembered how camping teaches us to shed the anxieties and obligations that attach so persistently and perniciously to us. I remembered also that detaching from them is sometimes uncomfortable, requiring struggle.

All day the first day I pendulumed between playing and mothering, engaging actively in the priorities of the trip–connecting with Catherine, experiencing joy with her, and my other desires–resting, meditating, gathering ideas.

Each time I found myself sinking finally into rest or into a meditative flow, I was pulled back into engaged mothering. Not a bad thing in itself, but, you know, sometimes you need a nap. So much conspired to keep me from resting. Catherine woke me up at first light because she didn’t know where the restroom was. I forgot my hammock, so no naps at the river. We only had one working tube for the river, so instead of floating together, I found myself pulling her along, trying to convince her it would be more fun by herself. I had been recovering from a cold and really desperately wanted rest. But this, in retrospect, was really not the best way to do that. I kept getting pulled into play.

We held hands, slip-falling across the algae-slick rocks we couldn’t see in the water, murky from the turbulent rain of last week. After our third fall, Catherine pulled up against my weight, and lunged me toward her, and I yanked backwards and yanked her up. She said, “It’s like we’re river dancing.”

The adult me, with my empire mind, was trying to think of my newsletter, my, grading, how to handle a situation at work, figure out my family of origin. The adult was just getting bruised and cold, eyeing the coffee left ashore.

But the child is splashed awake, twirling her hand in a river dance.

I’d try to enter her mindset for a time and dance instead of just falling, land on my back and gaze up at the nearly neon-spring green Bald Cypress leaves shading the river. Then I’d retreat to the bank and hope she’d dance alone awhile, and I could sip my coffee and follow a line of thought.

Pop! She’d emerge at my shoulder with a perfect mustang grape leaf, displaying how the furry texture of its underside would hold a globe of water you could roll around like mercury. Pure wonder, pure delight, like a pearl dancing in this leaf cloth bowl.

And she brought another. I poured coffee into it and rolled it around and tossed it back–shocking Catherine, who then got a coffee drop of her own. Then she’s off again, with caffeine, and I sit and breathe and search for thoughts but hear only the river. And look up to see Catherine on all fours in a few inches of water, clambering against a strong current, lowering her hips into the rushing and reaching up in a perfect up dog pose and gliding into down dog, dipping her hair in, feeling it taken downstream and whipping it back.

Eventually I join her, standing barefoot on the rock, just gripping enough to keep me from sliding–feel the river rock, feel the strength of the water that could sweep me downstream. I lean forward and grab rock with both hands. With my face this close I see the water’s texture, threads crosswoven, bending over rocks at arched angles, I dip my hips and lower in push up, dunking my face in the ice cold clear. Reach up in the clarity of shock and breathe in.

Something clicked in me, a memory. Not a memory. A knowing, remembered. This is how. This way of being that children know. Experiencing the textures of the earth just as they are, to see how they feel. Holding a leaf just to see how it is. Walking barefoot on the rocks to feel their texture. Lowering into the water close enough to see the surface of motion, its intricate and ever-flowing design. This way of being just to be. Just to be here. Not for some future-facing purpose or rumination on the past. A fully absorbed present, fully in the body, fully in place.

The world of adulting in almost every way draws us away from this kind of being. Our lives require thought and action that move towards the future and make sense of the past in order to survive our unfolding present. But as I dipped into that river, put my hands on the rocks under water and felt the current swift over my skin, held tight to the slightly rough surface that could anchor my clutching form, I felt fully in place. This way of being puts me together–re-members me, the pieces of me that come apart in the work of piecing together this life of work and anxiety and caregiving and survival of increasingly destructive realities, members me together in one body in one current pumping urgently through my bloodstream.

When I experience the earth fully in my body, my heart feels whole, my mind settles into place.

The next day, I woke settled. I woke feeling rested and with energy to play. We figured out that the other tube wasn’t broken; we were just inflating it wrong. We packed up camp and went to the river with the car stuffed full and each of us holding an inflated tube dangling outside the car.

We figured a strategy and mustered the courage to brave the rapids, which had seemed too dangerous the day before (and would have been if she had gone alone), holding on to each other and screaming and bouncing rock to rock bobbing ecstatically down the swooping descent. It’s a short section that levels out to smoother waters where we could safely clamber to shore. Once on land, we scooped up the tubes and ran along the footpath dancing over roots, scampering carefully over off-camber muddy slopes, to toss the tubes in again upriver, jump in, grab a hold of each other and feel the joyful terror of being swept down the forceful current. Again and again and again. Like children do. In the urgent solemnity of play, our bodies moving with knowing and rhythm, with the trails and the currents, following the path of the intricately woven design, riding along the texture.

Share

As I came to the end of the trail, I found myself at a field where the trees clear into a savannah of tall native grasses and scattered oaks, opening to the sky, gloaming with the turquoise fire of the setting day. I felt a strong compulsion to touch my feet to earth. Off the gravel path, the ground was covered in a fine grass that looked soft and padded down, possibly by deer, calling to my feet to step into the spongy field, to feel the cool energy of the evening collecting in the grass. I took off my sandals and set them by the path and ventured out, slowly and softly stepping and breathing in the electric connection of earth flowing through my skin. I stood in the field, feeling exposed to the elements, feeling connected to the dirt energy surging in my blood and sky energy welling in my breath. I heard way off in the distance behind me, though I must have only been twenty feet or so off the path, “It’s called Earthing” followed by an explanation that trailed off. It occurred to me that they may have been talking about me–questioning the woman whose sandals seem to have been abandoned by the path, and who seems to be lost at sea out in that field, transfixed by sky and fire-lit grasses.

Earthing, I laughed to myself, I guess so. It’s a term I’ve heard but never actually read about. In my own mind I think I was likely whispering some prayer offering thanks to the earth, to the spirit in the Nahua language of this land. But Earthing, sure, that too. A quick study into the term shows much to look more into. The Earthing Institute explains that “our bodies work electrically. Every movement or thought is based on frequencies and electric transmissions in the body. The heart, brain, and immune system are obvious examples. The daily rhythm of chemical and hormonal cycling in the human body is regulated and maintained by faint electromagnetic signals generated by the Earth’s electrons.” This energy is well-known in the world of construction and technology–all electrical systems have to be “grounded, connected to the Earth” in order to be stabilized. So Earthing is a human practice exercising the awareness of a broader physical reality of the energy flowing through the earth.

A person could practice Earthing purely from the perspective of a health, and wellness phenomenon, connecting to the Earth because “grounding even for just an hour, improves blood flow to the face.” The benefits listed go on and on*, and a person could very well pick up this practice for physiological benefits and not at all think of themselves as connecting to Spirit. When I take off my shoes and step onto Earth, I experience it as a physical act fully attuned with the spirit. It’s part of my spiritual practice in the morning, which developed for me in my reading of Oscar Perez’s description of “Grounding and Greeting the Sun” in his Flowering War–on Toltec teachings and spirituality.

Which brings me to a question that recurs in my journey–why focus my queries on wild healing through an Indigenous wisdom lens? Why not Earthing or something like it? Why not mystical Christianity or any other mysticism or Wicca or Celtic spirituality?

I don’t doubt that any of the paths listed above have deep wisdom to explore, along with their own problematics. And I know that these paths have many points of convergence. But the path of learning from Indigenous lifeways is the path I’m on. And this path offers perspectives that may be otherwise obscured.

Subscribe now

If I am touching the Earth and saying Tlazocamati, if I am here honoring the Coahuiltecan, the Lipan Apache, the Comanche, if I am learning to pray and to honor the energy passing through the dirt and grass along with the ancestors of this Earth, this specific land, I am acknowledging that I am part of the troubled story of this place. And these ancestors tell a story of this land that is steeped in both pain and resistance. The story of pain, of removal of peoples from the Earth that surged her lifegiving energy into their skin, surges still in the Earth along with the healing. We seek healing from a wounded Earth, an Earth who has absorbed the wounding of peoples who cared for her.

I want to return to a phrase from a post a few weeks ago that has been helpful to me, a a rule of thumb for non-Native people seeking Indigenous wisdom– that we should seek to “embrace without extracting.” The word extracting has useful corollaries with fossil fuels. To extract: To forcibly remove an energy from its home, its source and use it for our own benefit. To embrace a practice of Indigenous spirituality, intentionally, as a non-Native person, we must be extremely wary of extraction. Practices must be held and kept intact with their source. To embrace an Indigenous spiritual practice is to ground not only into the physiological benefits of making contact with the earth, but into lament of the history of forced removal of Indigenous peoples, into the history of reappropriation of the lands, resources, spiritual and medicinal wisdom they curated and cultivated and were responsible for for millenia before European colonizers and then United States colonizers showed up and decided it was worth something as real estate. It is to seek to learn the history and to learn the very present action of Indigenous struggle to reclaim sovereignty and responsibility for these lands.**

And so when I stand and ground my feet in the energy of this place, I do not do so in a vacuum of my own mind-body benefit, but in a work of mourning, in a prayer for healing that extends outward from my skin to the callous urban scars that envelop this island of conservancy, to the past where this land was extracted into real estate, to the future where we won’t need a name for something like “Earthing,” because we’ll remember again that it just means being a human on the Earth.

Share

*I’m not a psychologist, or a scientist, and I’m not saying that these are claims that have peer-reviewed studies to back them up. As the VeryWell mind article on Earthing qualifies, “Earthing studies are under-researched and usually have fewer research subjects—sometimes 50 or fewer people. Also, scientists like Gaétan Chevalier, director of the Earthing Institute, have done studies that have not been consistently replicated.” That said, it seems there is something here worth paying attention to, even if it is not documented in traditional scientific method.

**Minnesota lawmaker: BWCA vote an ‘assault on tribal sovereignty’ | MPR News . See here for a summary of the struggle to protect Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, and how you can join the work.

It’s a feeling I have experienced often ever since I was child running wild on my family’s land in New Mexico, where I grew up camping. It’s five acres, cradled in a canyon between two steep mountainsides, claimed by the Lincoln National Forest. I knew the land well and would range freely, running on deer paths in and out of Ponderosa Pine and Bigtooth Maples, until I came to a clearing, a gathering of maple trees where something in the forest air shifted. At some point, I learned a word that I would whisper to myself–sacred. I’d come around a corner and feel it in my toes and stop short. This place. This place is sacred.

Sometimes I would imagine the place populated by a meeting of ancient people, gathering to pray, holding some kind of ceremony beyond my knowledge or understanding. I would imagine that what happened in that place somehow hung in the air, ran through the tree sap, soaked in the soil so that I could sense it in my toes. And part of me believed it. But part of me also thought it was my imagination, some inner fantasy, something to maybe entertain, like a dream, but not really having bearing over how I walk through space. As I got older, I would stop imagining, especially after learning in college about the reality of Native American genocide. It seemed very white and very foolish to entertain some romantic notion of native peoples gathering in ceremony every time I came into a circle of trees.

But I am on a path of learning more about the history of this place I live in, this Hill Country corner of Turtle Island*. I am reading the history of this place we call the United States of America, a history very different from what I learned in school. This history centers Indigenous lives and the longer story of this place that foregrounds the varied and complex lives of humans who were integral in shaping this land. In this history I read about the ways that Indigenous peoples shaped the landscape they were a part of, curating meadows, glades, roads, relationships between plant and animal, ecosystems, sustainable lifeways that supported all interconnected life. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documents, “By the time of European invasion, Indigenous peoples had occupied and shaped every part of the Americas, established extensive trade networks and roads, and were sustaining their populations by adapting to specific natural environments, but they also adapted nature to suit human ends,” using fire to shape the landscape, creating meadows as grazing lands to aid in hunting the grazing animals. I don’t know, of course, whether there was specific indigenous involvement in curating the magical circle of oak trees in which I found myself. But it occurs to me to ask–what if the more fantastical act is the act of imagining that native peoples were not here, that we somehow arrived at this place uninhabited, and this island of wild plants and animals in a sea of traffic and sprawling development is the natural state of the world? No, the historical reality is that Indigenous ancestors did inhabit this place, did care for these very lands and the waters that used to flow through the intermittent stream beds. It’s an untrained and uneducated imagination that ignores that reality.

In light of the history I am learning, when I come into a glade, and I feel a connection with spirit and imagine that this place was once cared for in a wise way, in a way that honored spirit–I have a different reaction than to brush off my inclination. Of course, my imagination is involved in sensing spirit here. But my imagination is informed by history, and my understanding of history is shifting my sense of the present. And my sense of the present is shifting how I dream the future.

And so, from this place of imagining a history inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors who shape this place, I choose to acknowledge. I stand in the center of a circle of oaks and I pray to the four directions, as I am learning in the Mexica gatherings I have been welcomed into. I ask permission to stand here. I acknowledge the ancestors I know by name–the Lipan Apache, the Comanche, the Mexica, the Coahuiltecan. I acknowledge that there are others that I do not know by name and feel a sense of shame at how few I can name from memory. I raise my hands to the circle of trees and acknowledge in a circle the presence of ancestors I walk among. I thank them for their care of this place. I lament the harm my people have done in not caring for this space well. I think of the polluted air and water ways. I think of the dried Blue Hole I visited earlier this week–the source of Yanaguana–the river that flows through this city, the land of the spirit waters. I lament the times that I have come through here without acknowledging their guardianship, their care over the land for the millennia before we got here. I ask for guidance. That we may find our way to care for these lands, these waters again. That in caring for land and water we will find ourselves cared for, as the land does, as the water does. When we connect with caring for her, we find that it is her caring for us. Our ancestors know this. By learning again to acknowledge their presence, by finding their history and telling it again, by asking their guidance, may we learn to live in ways that gather the circle of life around us, to gather ourselves in that circle and create lifeways that sustain and nourish rather than drain.

Of course, the Lipan Apache, Comanche, Payaya, Coahuiltecan, Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo, Comecrudo, Chickasaw, Jumanos, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Tonkawa, Tigua Pueblo, Waco and Wichita, Ysleta del sur Pueblo, the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians are not my blood ancestors. There are many ways of connecting with ancestors, which I am learning and researching. I am following my blood line and trying to understand the story of how I find myself here. But blood is not the only way we connect with ancestors. Place is another. Here on Turtle Island, we walk on land cared for by the ancestors indigenous to this land. As we inhabit this space, these are ancestors we need to learn to acknowledge as the caretakers of this place, as the spirits that imbue the life of this place. Spirit, like breath, infuses the landscape, and as we breathe in the air of the landscape, the spirit of the landscape infuses us. May we grow in our cultivation of mindfulness of the ancient spirit that dwells here. May the wise and ancient spirits guide us as we continue the long path of fighting to care for the life of these waters.

A challenge for myself this week and for anyone who is on this path and wishes to join me:

• Commit to memory the names of the Indigenous ancestors who inhabited and continue to inhabit the land you live on. In central Texas, I am going by this list from “Retelling Central Texas History” as well as Indigenous Tribes of San Antonio, Texas | ALA

• Find reliable history texts, preferably written by Indigenous authors, to broaden your perspective on what has shaped your landscape. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Ned Blackhawk are excellent resources.

• Bring your acknowledgement of the ancestors into your conversation and your awareness of how you hold your space.

• Teach children ways of acknowledging the ancestors and consider ways of greeting, asking permission and guidance of the ancestors.

• Seek wisdom through research and prayer for how you might cultivate the circle of life in the space you inhabit. How does your home and the landscape you care for contribute to the interconnected life that circles you?

I’d like to end by acknowledging the work of local efforts in my city to care for the waters.

• Last week culminated the gathering of people in Todos Agua 2, a festival created by the Esperanza Center “rooted in reverence for water, acknowledges its vital role in sustaining life, confirms its spiritual significance and its profound connection to our ancestral legacy.”

• Deceleration, an online journal writing at the “intersection of environment and justice—journalistically, academically, and creatively—with emphasis on our home communities and bioregion (the watersheds of San Antonio, South Texas, and the Gulf South, broadly) creates Water and Power, a monthly newsletter “about the elements of our survival—and those who seek to profit from them.” This month’s edition reports on the coalition of activists rebelling against the upsurge of data centers. The Texas Data Center Rebellion Has Begun

• The Brackenridge Yanaguana Coalition holds sacred space at the river’s edge, maintaining prayer to the spirit of the river, even as the city has literally fenced in the sacred land for development. Follow their work as they fight to conserve this place with ancient spiritual significance and to protect the birds who nest there from harassment by the city. Watch this excellent video reporting on their work by KUT ATXplained Live - Sacred Springs

If you’re like me, the process of opening my awareness to the harm being committed against the land and the water is overwhelming, and that overwhelm can be debilitating. But none of us are alone in this. We have to keep opening to the knowledge of what is happening, and to the knowledge that this abuse is but a continuation of abuse that Indigenous peoples in this place have been fighting for hundreds of years. This is not new. And we are not alone. If we wake up and get to work, we join a long tradition of struggle. Follow a link and see where you can link arms.

Share

*Turtle Island is the name given to North America by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people and many other Indigenous people groups. Using this name acknowledges that this land has a name that predates the name of the current nation-state.

I hope these words find you well. I hope that you can feel in your bones the earth’s tilting toward spring, the light lengthening at the end of the day, lengthening in your heart as you feel your chest expand into warmth and light. I hope the tender green leaves are unfurling all around you and the fragrance of jasmine, of agarita, of wisteria, of mountain laurel surprises you when you step outside. Sending love your way in this season of the equinox.

It comes from yearning. This urge, this force pulling me to rituals of Indigenous culture not my own.

The yearning. It’s a feeling that comes over me, ever since I was young, like when I would be walking the canals in El Paso, the water in the irrigation ditch stretching out perfectly straight for miles and miles, a long line directly to the foot of Mt. Christo Rey. In the opposite direction, north, the canal stretched directly to the Organ Mountains in New Mexico–indigo, textured rock rising in the distance.

The sky widens above me, teal blue, deepening to navy as it climbs to the top of the sky, curving into emerald at the edge of the horizon. I’m alone, standing on a dirt path, imagining my arms stretched out to my sides, parallel the water, feeling myself pulled along the water, mountain to mountain. I breathe slowly, not to disturb the sensation, the water pulling the water in my veins through the dirt–deep brown, fine river dirt–dragging the weight of water in me to the mountain–the mountain that rises from the point where Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico meet and a white statue of Jesus in the form of a cross raises his arms to bless the city–which city? I don’t know, because I’ve never been up there–I was told I couldn’t hike there as a young woman alone, because the bandidos would take my hymen.

I breathe carefully, water filling my veins, the pull starting in my skin–but then, SPLASH–I spin around but only see the tail–a muskrat darts beneath the surface of water. Then, in my opposite periphery, a swirl of red undulating up and down in tandem–red-winged blackbirds gather in dance over alfalfa fields, cornered between two diagonals of the sub-division where my dad’s house is.

I catch my breath, my skin prickling with the energy of the birds, their sharp trill lighting up the air. The world is wild and crackling with spirit. I walk through it on tip toe, tingling, every sense on edge.

But it’s getting dark, and I have a ways to go–I need to move in strides. My family will be home, in bright kitchen lights, laughing or watching TV. I will come in, looking singed, and say something about a muskrat, and they will look at me like, well, I just said something about a muskrat.

I will feel the magic fade away. Not entirely. But away from words. Away from the reach of my hands.

It was a feeling. It was a feeling I wanted to keep–to channel, to hold. It was a tingling crackle I wanted to fan into flame.

In high school I took up drinking and drugs–to find the feeling, to chase the light–the light under my skin, gathering in the feathered flight.

In college, I went to church. I found words and ways to have something to say–to recognize the pull of water and light. I filtered water into prayers and songs I knew, thanked the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and watched the light flow.

But.

When I first saw a firekeeper in a Mexica ceremony raise a hand to the fire itself–on entering the tipi, on exiting the tipi–a hand silently acknowledging presence–the spirit of the fire, Grandfather Fire–something clicked into place inside of me. This. This is it. This is the way you acknowledge the spirit of the fire.

There are other ways, yes.

But, when that something, that electricity, that fire that rises just beneath your skin when the light flames out from leaves of the tallest trees in the last light of day, when the fire in you says yes, yes, to the fire out there, when there is the undeniable energy of spirit responding to spirit–you listen. And, maybe, you awkwardly raise out a hand and face your palm to the fire. Even not knowing if you belong here, but knowing you are here, sitting by a fire on these ancient Mexica lands, knowing the fire keeps you warm. Let the fire in you say yes, and see what you can learn.

Share

It’s a Sunday morning. The rains came last night. We woke to the sound of showers, falling in waves, pounding the glass door. The earth has been cracked, the wildflowers stunted, wilted, and waiting. For this. But when it comes, sometimes it comes not in the gentle reassurance of a steady shower, but in these torrents, this pounding arrival of renewal. Power. The resurgence of the earth, the gifts of the mother, can arouse fear in their power. Awe. She is life. She is lightening. She brings flowers and floods. We listen and dig deeper under covers. We breathe gratitude for shelter.

It’s spring break, and I have a little time to write, finally. For all my intentions to bring my creative work more into the foreground of my life, teaching high school draws all my time and energy. Especially now, in these times. But I’m here, and I’m continuing the creative work of writing, and I’m grateful to this community for your steady presence. I’m grateful to know that you are here also, doing the daily work that puts bread on your table, caring for all those in your care, and, still, searching for ways to connect to the creative spirit that flames inside you, pooling all your inner force to bring the ache into being.

I’m learning to bring elements of ritual into my writing practice. I have rituals for the morning and for meals, but I have not really had a ritual for writing. I recently purchased a small cast iron pot with a wooden handle, some copal, some coals. I light the coal and place the copal, dried cedar sap, which smokes in a delicate, meditative, aroma. I take deep breaths and ask for guidance. I acknowledge that the work of writing is sacred work. I ask for words to find healing, to find wholeness. I set apart the time. I set apart my mind.

This is a practice, this praying with copal, using smoke to cleanse and lift the spirit, that I’ve experienced in Indigenous-led ceremonies that I’ve been honored to be welcomed into. I have much to learn about the meaning and symbolism of the way that different elements are administered in different ceremonies, at different times. But I know what I experience: the smoke, the aroma, the act of lighting and setting the intention of cleansing, of connecting with spirit, has a deeply grounding effect on my own spirit.

This act in which I take part–invoking an Indigenous practice, in the solace of my living room, sitting with my laptop, raises many questions for me, and possibly for you. They are questions that follow me and that I don’t have sufficient answers for. The questions center around to what extent and in what ways can a non-native person engage in Indigenous practices? What mindsets, habits, and words are necessary for such rituals to honor and not harm or neglect the Indigenous sources of wisdom? What pitfalls can non-native people be aware of, and how can we avoid harm as we seek to honor, learn from, and live out Indigenous wisdom?

Of course, I won’t come to full answers to these questions in this short essay. But I want to share what I’m learning, as I seek to build my own understanding. This week, I came across a beautifully articulated balance for learning from Indigenous culture with care. It comes from a book called Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being, by Randy (Cherokee, Keetoowah Band) and Edith (Eastern Shoshone) Woodley. The book outlines the path by which the Western worldview of dominating the earth and extracting her resources for our own wealth has brought us to a “precipice” of destruction through climate change, habitat loss, and mass extinction. “But,” they assert, “we are not doomed to fall over the precipice. Within the very systems of Earth lie keys to its regeneration–and ours” (34). The only hope for inching back from the edge is to learn how to return to ancient knowledge, to learn relationship with the earth, creating habits of being and relating to others in the community of earth that mimic her ways. This knowledge of living in harmony (a translation of Eloheh) with the earth has its origins in Indigenous wisdom. It is not knowledge that needs to be created. It is knowledge that needs to be remembered. Listened to. Honored in the wisdom keepers that carry it to this day.

Here is the core of what I found to be helpful in articulating this balanced perspective:

This, then, is the balance: to learn to “embrace” without “extract[ing]”.

I think many non-native people avoid seeking out Indigenous practices and values as their own practices and values because they know that they do not have a right to them. We do not want to co-opt these practices, knowing there is an immense depth of complexity and history associated with proper ways of honoring the practice, the ancestors, the history. We are afraid of doing something the wrong way. Rightly so. But that fear also keeps us, perhaps, from learning to live in a way that can properly honor the history, the ancestors, the land we live in, the water that flows through our bodies. What if it is exactly what we need, to go through these lessons of humility, of making mistakes and being corrected, of putting ourselves in the position we should have been in all along–students, travelers, coming to learn how to honor the culture of the land we walk on? Our fear of doing something wrong keeps us from doing something deeply right, deeply necessary.

The Woodleys write,

What is that process? How does one “embrace” Indigenous values and practices without “extracting” them from their source?

A first question that comes to mind is why would a non-native person need or want to embrace Indigenous practices? If it is not your culture, why practice it? An answer for me is related to how Randy Woodley describes an elder’s description of his worldview. He explains that “how you live is seen as what you believe.” The elder depicts it this way: “I believe in being a good husband, father, grandfather, and a good person in helping my community. I believe in being kind to people, especially strangers. I believe in practicing my ceremonies; those are my beliefs” (17). The beliefs, the values, are the practices. There is no disconnect between having an understanding that something is true and enacting that truth in your own lived experience. There is no belief in the value of water while simultaneously releasing plastic waste into the water source and purchasing your own water elsewhere, in plastic bottles. To hold Indigenous values requires enacting Indigenous practices.

This, for me, is where I find myself. I hold beliefs in the earth as animated by spirit. I believe that I am one part of a community of being, united together by the Great Spirit flowing through and enlivening all of us, from bird song to rock light. I yearn to live in practices that honor that knowing. It takes every part of us to learn this. We must learn the true and ongoing history of colonization. We must face and lament the intergenerational traumas levied upon our Indigenous peoples. We must dig up and scour our own part in this history and how we have benefitted from it. We must learn to honor the history, the ancestors, the land. We must find the Indigenous communities around us. We must learn about their work, their vision. We must find out if and how we can be a part of it. It means learning and honoring the First Peoples of the land now known as Central Texas, the “Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, the Caddo, Carrizo and Comecrudo, the Chickasaw, the Coahuitlecan, the Jumanos, the Kickapoo Tribe of Texas, Kiowa, the Kónitsaaíí (Lipan Apache Tribe), “Nʉmʉnʉʉ” (Comanche), the Tonkawa, Tigua Pueblo, the Waco and Wichita peoples, the Ysleta del sur Pueblo, the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians” (Land Acknowledgment – RETELLING CENTRAL TEXAS HISTORY*).

It has to do with learning how to care for the water in our cities, with stopping industrial pollution, with putting our bodies in the way of harm to block other bodies from harm. Yes. But it also has to do with knowing how to say thank you to Earth, when you step outside after a spring rain. Tlazocamati.** How to put your feet on the ground and know that she holds you. How to say thank you, Tlazocamati, with love we say thank you, and respond appropriately, Nimitztlazohtla. We will always take care of you.

We have much to learn—to honor Indigenous wisdom and practices appropriately, to learn to become acquainted with the land, to learn how to say thank you and how to take care. But I can think of no better way to live this life.

Share

*Thank you to the researchers at Retelling Central Texas History for this Land Acknowledgement.

**From Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztec people who inhabited and whose descendants still inhabit the land I live in. Words and translations from Corazon Luminoso, a collection of song lyrics and chords, along with translations of Nahuatl words and concepts by Deflina Mun and Kuauhtli Vasquez, teachers and healers through music and ceremony.

Sending love and growing light to you as we tip into spring. Everywhere I look closely, tender green is pushing up out of the shells of hard earth and brittle branches. I’m delighting in the quiet surge of energy finding its way to the surface. I’m hoping for the same gathering force in my life and in yours.

I wanted to share something I wrote last week. It’s a bit of a tangent from my usual subject matter, a meditation on love shaping the paths we take in life. While I intentionally don’t get caught up in Valentine’s day, as either a hallmark holiday or an observance of a catholic martyr, I usually do find myself enjoying setting some time aside to think about love. Whether it’s as Alix Klingenberg beautifully reminds,

Be in love with your friends

your pets, your children,

yourself

or love of an intimate partner, I do feel, whatever prompts it, it’s never a bad choice to focus on love.

Over coffee it came in my email, a forwarded message from the New York Times. I open it with the pleasure of knowing what my love is reading. It’s a short essay about the concept of “desire paths,” a term I know, a reality I love. It describes the pathways that people make when they veer off the sidewalk. The author, Melissa Kirsch, delightfully meanders on the layers of significance of the name for this phenomenon: “The word desire has an ache in it. That’s why its application to a trail deviating from a snowy sidewalk is so affecting — it’s not just that I’d prefer to walk some other way, but I have a deep longing for another way.” While a path deviating from the sidewalk in a snowy landscape may be starkly more visible, desire paths can emerge anywhere there is a prescribed direction mapped out for walkers.

After reading the essay, enjoying the beautiful crafting along with my coffee, the words came out: “You are my desire path.”

The truth of this didn’t need to be thought through or explained; the evidence is the entire fabric of our lives. Six years ago to this day, I made the choice to veer. I was on a clear path, the course mapped out for me by the grid of my culture–married to a man, caring for my children, keeping house, writing in the background.

But, walking that road, I encountered a divergent course that called to me, that cut into my yearning in a way I couldn’t ignore. A path between the buildings, off the main road, with a horizon of wild green barely visible beyond. The moment I laid eyes on her eyes I wanted to fall into that path. It was inexplicable, inarticulate, pure electricity. A sunset whose colors deepen and flare out in an increasingly wild and flamboyant display, and your whole heart aches with the beauty, with the reaching toward a beauty that is utterly unreachable, and an aching knowing that the beauty is heightened because it’s the glow of ending, the bright slipping away of another day.

I reached out toward her, and she reached back. And my foot was on the path, one foot still on the road I had walked my whole life. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart was way ahead up the path, almost around the bend. I took another step and watched the old road crumble. And crumble. And all the structures and stories I had laid on it break and collapse and felt the weight of the memories and dreams and hopes smashed under the rubble. And felt myself standing free on the path. The desire path–the uncharted way off the road, following the possibility of love, of connection, of reaching for unreachable beauty that, impossibly, reached back toward me.

When I first stepped on the path the desire was a flame, a pounding searing urge to leave a road that trapped me in the walls rising up all around. The road was sufficient as long as I was not trying to live as my full self. But once that wild animal of my fullness took a breath of real connection, her suffocation was undeniable. I chose to breathe. I chose to follow breath, to follow light, to follow the flaming beauty of twilight, to chase it into dawn.

And I woke up to a new day. A desire path starts with a person choosing to take another route, cutting a groove of yearning into the earth. But the path remains, becomes a path rather than an aberration because it continues to bear footsteps. Day after day, the desire remains. The weather changes, the constraints of time and stress ebb and flow. But the path remains–the direction of desire, worn underfoot, a choice made day after day.

Desire changes, over time. First compelling the walker to the unknown, desire gathers force with familiarity. The beauty of a path grows with the knowing of the walker. Every bend bears the shift of the walker’s weight round the turn. The roots carry memory of the history of steps. The feet greet the stones, and the body sighs into the cadence of curves well known. I take the path of my desire, again and again each day, and take pleasure in mutual knowing.

I wake to her warmth beside me. I breathe into the rhythm of her breath. I smile into the knowing that her alarm will only go off on the 8’s, and I can predict her rising. My smile grows when I hear the alarm, 5:28. I know this path, this person, remarkably here, in our bed, still holding the brilliant flares of beauty I first witnessed blazing on the horizon now rising and falling with her breath. I know her laughter in my body, and the joy of a joke shared rises and crests with the knowing of her laughing, the greeting of an old friend, so welcome, so refreshing, so dear.

The sun beats down, of course. The wind pushes us around. We fight, we doubt, we fear. We struggle–we walk the incline that seems unending, and deep gravel–worn obstacles of lives’ wounds, grinds our stepping and pulls us down.

But the struggle is part of the knowing. More than anything I want to fully know. More than anything I want to be fully known. We are on the path of knowing. That is the desire I want to walk. This path is my home. And I want to see where it goes.

I hope you’ve found some rest this weekend. The air has been warmer here, and we got to enjoy some time in the hill country today. Nothing fills me up like time in the woods. I hope you’ve had your cup filled this weekend. Sending love and evening light your way.

“You have to come with us. It’s Sunday. We have to go to church.”

“Mom, STOP,” Madeleine insisted, her response to pretty much every joke I make.

It’s not really a joke, though, only a joke that I would say it that way.

When I was a kid, we went to church every Sunday, almost without fail. We stayed before for “Sunday school” and after for whatever community thing was happening. We knew that if someone stopped coming to church, something was wrong. We’d try to bring them back, so they could come to this place where they might encounter God, and hopefully get back on track.

Driving through the winding hill country roads, thirty minutes from home, the clustered buildings disperse into juniper, live oak, prickly pear, cattle. Today we’re going a little farther afield than our usual Sunday hike to meet friends at the Guadalupe river. It’s 75 degrees. Just warm enough for a dip.

I roll up the windows so I know they can hear me: “You know, I told Madeleine earlier as a joke that we had to go hiking so we can go to church, but I wasn’t totally joking. This is our spirituality. We come out to connect with nature because we meet the Spirit here. We breathe in beauty and remember we’re a part of it, we’re connected with all this beauty through the Spirit. We do it for fun, but we also do it because it’s important.”

They listen and nod, and Madeleine says under her breath, “Well, my spirituality is reading books. And swimming.” She’s saying this to be contrary to me, I’m pretty sure, but I try to affirm her anyway.

“Sure, that’s absolutely part of your spirituality.” I know that just because I teach them something, it doesn’t guarantee it will sink in. And their world will always be bigger than what I teach them. I worry sometimes that I’m not teaching them enough, that they don’t have a bible to go by, or a rolodex of verses to tell them wrong and right. I worry that I’m not giving them a strong foundation to keep them grounded. But, I reassure myself that they will always be making their own choices and assessments. They will draw from what feels true. The practices that we keep, the wisdom that I share with them is the truest true that I know. It’s what I have to give.

One day I overheard Madeleine respond to a friend’s question that no, she didn’t go to church. In that moment, I had a kind of sadness, because it wasn’t followed with anything. There was no “We don’t do this, but we do…” I felt for her in that moment, imagining that she may feel an absence. That her friend has this in her life and she has nothing to hold up next to it. And it’s true, we don’t have anything that matches the definition that her friend would recognize. We don’t have a single religion or a single book or a single creed that we ascribe to. But we acknowledge the wisdom of many cultures and many approaches to encountering the sacred. We open many books, and we think about and question what’s there, and sometimes we bring what we learn into our lives. We use intuition, grounding in our bodies, and empathy to discern what’s right. We believe in caring for the vulnerable, because we’ve been vulnerable, and we’ve been cared for. We learn to say thank you to the spirit and the earth and the people who care for us with our words, with our actions, with our lives.

So, as we drove today, I decided to speak this truth to them, to make explicit what we’re doing and to name it what I know it to be: a spiritual practice, a grounding ritual where we experience the sacred. And whether they nod to appease me or nod because they agree in their bones, I know that they are establishing in their growing minds a category, a name for what we’re doing. They might say to themselves sometime, or, eventually, to a friend, “We don’t go to church in a building, but we go to Earth church.” Or, “We meet God in the trees.”

I hope. I hope that while they’re in my care they can learn from me ways of being that will bring them peace and ground them when they may be far from me. I hope that they will find themselves with their feet in a river, thousands of miles from me, and notice the light dancing on the bluffs of a kind of rock whose name I don’t know. I hope they will hear a bird call that’s unfamiliar and look it up to learn its name. I hope that they will walk into the river and dunk themselves under, feel the electric shock of cold, feel the way the water moves straight to their heart, and when they stand up feel their skin respond with a heat that tells them every cell in their body is wide awake and feel their souls smiling and beaming with light at the beauty we get to live in on this earth. I hope they know, in that moment, that they are dripping with Spirit. I hope in their heart they say thank you to the river. But for now, it’s enough that they’re here with me. For now it’s enough that they’re here to laugh and to say, “You’re weird, Mom.”

At this time, counter intuitive though it may seem, we also have to continue our work envisioning and living in awareness of beauty, speaking the good into being. The goodness and the solidity of the reality we claim, the dream we seek to live into reality, is foundational for the work of democracy.

Today, I’m starting a series of mini-essays I call Healing Concepts, where I’ll be highlighting concepts that I come across in my research. My current book project explores Indigenous concepts and practices of interconnectedness with the earth, while walking a path of lament as a non-native person working toward decolonization. As I’m researching and writing, I’ll be sharing here reflections on Healing Concepts and Healing Practices that I’m learning about. As always, I’m posting here not as an expert, but as an inquirer, sharing what I’m learning.

In her work, Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves, public health practitioner Wendy Johnson, MD, MPH, writes that, in order to shift the toxic environments that lead to toxic health health outcomes, we have to change the way we think about the Earth. Rather than viewing the Earth as a resource to be used for human benefit and mitigating the damage of our use, some communities have embraced the idea that “natural entities and ecosystems have intrinsic rights,” a concept “resonant with common Indigenous world worldviews that all living things have their own inherent value and are interrelated with humans as family, like the Andean concept of Pachamama, which literally translates as ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘World Mother’” (108).

While the term “Mother Earth” is well known and commonly used, thinking of it in terms of relating to the Earth as having personhood has deeper implications than recycling or expressing gratitude for nice weather. The idea that the Earth is a person, “an ancient view many Indigenous cultures intuitively knew and have long held” has implications that “science is just now catching up with” (111). For one thing, it means that the systems of nature, “living and nonliving” are “dynamic, interconnected, ever-changing, adaptable, and seemingly responding to some underlying operating system.” It means that Earth is “alive and [can] even be considered sentient” (110).

Sentient. Capable of feeling, responding to the senses. Capable of love. Like a mother.

The difference in this way of thinking can be illustrated in the Nahuatl words for Water, Love, Food, and Light. Language–the way we name our experience–gives a window into our relationship with our experience. In Nahuatl the word for rain, tlalok, can be translated “the earth drinks love from the sky.” It shares the root, tla, with the word for love, tlazo, “the love that comes from the earth.” Love and Earth are interconnected in the very words that describe them. Likewise, food, tlacuali, “the beauty of the earth, love from the earth,” bears this tla, as does light, tlahuil, “shimmering love from the heavens” (Corazon Luminoso)*

In this way of naming the earth, the ancient Aztec people spoke what they experienced–the Earth communicates within herself, speaking and feeling in a sentient system, with love. Rain and light caressing down to touch the ground and bring love up, furling green and flowers and fruit and grain, in gestures of love to the creatures who walk in love on her soil and stone. How differently would we walk, receive water, berries, hold a stone, if we really held in awareness we walked within this person, even, were part of this person?

The Earth is a person who communicates love. Love, not in an anthropomorphic sense, but in the way we learn the love language of a person, through sensing, through paying attention. Like in the way that water takes different shapes, clings as ice to the finger tips of trees, catches light and tosses it smattered about the forest room, playful, winking, then deadly serious in the intricacy of crystals, up close, closer still, more beautiful than can be imagined, and susceptible, it turns out, to the energy of intention in the room. Earth speaks love to us. And we speak back. What are we saying?

Share

*Corazon Luminoso is a collection of song lyrics and chords, along with translations of Nahuatl words and concepts by Delfina Mun and Kuauhtli Vasquez, teachers and healers through music and ceremony.

Because of this long sickness, my annual dispatch from the frontlines of holiday religious trauma is a little late in coming. Though it’s late, I’d like to share these thoughts with you entering this new year, because I’m entering this new year in a new place with the grief I’ve been in around the holidays in past years. I hope you are finding relief from your own grieving. I hope you’re setting foot on a new path.

In the years after I left my marriage, after my fragile hold on my christianity finally tattered and slipped away, Christmas would blindside me with grief and loss, at moments when I thought I was safe. For years, I wrote about that here, a catalog of religious trauma.*

And so, friends, I’m delighted to be sitting here in the evening light writing to you about the first year that Christmas didn’t undo me.

I haven’t found myself in a crying spell in the grocery store parking lot. Haven’t lashed out at the family on the way to get a tree. Haven’t felt my chest collapse when a child played the First Noel at the music school holiday party. We made it all the way through, folks.

I spent years loving the traditions of advent and Christmas, honoring the symbolism of the light returning as the Son, the light of the world, was born into human reality. The melancholic advent songs grounded me in their longing through the season of darkness. Each year at the Christmas Eve service, I delighted in the climactic moment where the singing would end with Silent Night, and the congregation would pass baskets of single candles, if you were lucky, or plastic lookalikes, if they were playing it safe. If you were lucky, as you sang about that round yon Virgen, you’d watch as the rows ahead of you passed the flame candle to candle, and the light would strengthen through the room until it was your turn to carefully tilt your wick toward the flaming wick your neighbor carefully bent towards your empty candle. And everyone would hold their own flame, dancing in the darkness, and sing together in the common glow, the darkness pushed back, once again, to the outer edges of the sanctuary.

In my own family, what I’m naming for myself this year is the delightful realization that I don’t at all have to let go of what I love about rituals of light and darkness. I’ve let go of the narrative of the baby coming, and the wise men, and the virgin birth. But the light entering the deepening darkness, holding a candle close and singing with my close ones as we strive to strengthen our light together–I’m just touching toes on to this path that extends through the ages.

Of course, as anyone knows who has looked into it, these Christmas traditions–the tree, the lights, the advent wreath, these are ancient ways of honoring the season of solstice–this darkest time of year in the night of winter, where humankind has long yearned and hoped that light and warmth and green would return.

I realize: the season itself holds all the symbol we need. What if everything that we’re searching for is simply a way to come back to what we’ve long known, what we’ve always needed–a way to deepen our awareness and to connect to the exact, physical reality of our existence on this plant, spiraling through this solar system and this multiverse beyond our knowing?

For me this year holds the promise of this path, and I’m eager to set foot to it, and to find ways to walk it with my family. How can we return to our knowledge of the earth, return to ways of knowing how to honor her, to raise our hands and our faces and our souls to look to the sun that brings us light and warmth, get down on our knees in gratitude to the water that brings life? How can we knit our souls, our bodies, our families, our communities back together by weaving our lives back into the fabric of earth that holds us together?

With my family and with my chosen family, each year we hold a spiral of greenery and candlelight to honor the coming of the new year. We walk the spiral in darkness and touch our cold candle to the burning light at the center. We bring our light out to light other candles spiraling out in the darkness. It’s a beautiful image of what’s true. Afterwards, the children sit around the fire, holding their melting beeswax in their hands, playing with the wax, and gazing into the soft light they hold. It lights their faces, and they are solemn with the quiet joy of fire. I sometimes want to go to them and talk to them about the meaning again, even though they could lead the spiral themselves by now, but I catch myself: they are absorbing all the meaning they need. Their hands wrapped around the warm wax, they gaze into the beauty of the flame, and the heat itself teaches them how to care for its power.

Share

*If you’re in that place in your own journey, you may find resonance in these earlier essays:

Candlelight or Hellfire

Post-Christmas post-christian Christmas post

Sending love to you on this holiday morning. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. It occurred to me this week that this is the first time my partner and I are doing Thanksgiving together, in our home. She’s always gone to be with family in New York, and I’ve gone to be with my folks, elsewhere. This year, though, New York came to us, and my folks are coming for dessert.

It occurred to me that, since there was something deeply important to me about this holiday in my childhood, I should try to remember what that something was, and to think with some more intentionality about what we want to create with this gathering, beyond cooking delicious food and being with people we love, though that in itself is good cause for celebration.

And, I think, that’s a big part of what I love and what sets the holiday apart in my mind from the other big holidays I grew up with–Christmas and Easter. These other big celebrations centered around other happenings–Jesus, yes, thank you Sunday school children–but also presents and egg hunts. On Thanksgiving the happening is the food, the being with, the enjoying together of what is good, and saying thanks.

Growing up, though, it was more than food. My aunt, who hosted the gathering, created an atmosphere that I can only describe as sacred. The moment we pulled in the driveway the feeling would come in the car windows–tall cedars lined the drive, Mondale pines towered in the yard. Enormous pumpkins of different varieties and colors with wild, twining stems clustered the stone path and huddled at the door frame. The aroma of turkey, rolls, and cranberry wound into the fall air when the front door opened, and she would welcome us in with strong hugs. Candlelight and greenery from pine and cedar, eucalyptus, berries and nuts mingled organically, just so.

The atmosphere felt like a celebration of nature’s bounty, a human display highlighting the love that nature offers, being offered to us as a reminder of the beauty we live in.

Ross Gay, in his essay, “We Kin” on the joy incited by gardening, advocates that “by celebrating that kindness [the generosity of the earth]--which we do in part by sharing what that kindness has given us, and by all the practices of sharing what we can dream up in celebration of what that kindness has given us, what we common beneficiaries of that kindness have been given, which is, isn’t it?, everything–we also might harvest what is planted in that kindness” (39). Celebrating the generosity of the earth can only be practiced by sharing in that goodness, and sharing in goodness plants more goodness, which then must be harvested, and shared. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle. It’s a regenerative cycle, as cycles are in nature.

Reading this essay, this book of essays Inciting Joy, which I’m devouring this week as a feast in itself, I felt a pang of delight to find the name of another essayist whose Braiding Sweetgrass has become my sacred text, Robin Wall Kimmerer, referenced in this essay on joy and the garden. It felt planted to create this effect of delight, Gay being the aficionado and curator of delight that he is.

Kimmerer’s work has taught me that “Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity” (115). The act of “thanksgiving” must be deeply and at its roots connected to giving from the abundance we’ve received. Reciprocity is not transactional giving; it’s awareness of abundance, awareness of having received, and the natural flow of abundance is sharing the harvest.

Kimmerer writes that “the Thanksgiving Address reminds us that duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. Eagles were given the gift of far sight, so it is their duty to watch over us. Rain fulfills its duty as it falls, because it was given the gift of sustaining life. What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “what is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?”

What if the way we engage with each other was focused on trying to discern and draw out each other’s gifts? What would that look like? There is so much to focus on, so much to divide. This searching for the gift-bearing potential of another human feels worthy of attention.

The feast of my nostalgia wasn’t only sacred in the holy beauty of nature glowing in the candles and draping the tables, but also in feeling that I could inhabit the atmosphere with my full self. The feast was tumbling out into the yard to play football in the grass, crisp fall air cold in our lungs as we ran full tilt through piling up oak leaves. The adrenaline of sprinting forward while looking up and behind as the twirling leather came arching down, reaching the full length of my fingers and plunging my body into open air, pulling the ball to my chest and landing in a heap of boys. We’d laugh and lay in the grass in a breathless pile until we could catch our breath enough for the next play. And on and on until we were called in, and we’d dust off the grass and open the doors to candlelight, tables set with empty plates ready to be filled, a place set just for me, with cousins and aunts and uncles and sisters and a brother who knew me, who welcomed me, just as I was, the girl who played with the boys, every bit as tough as the boys. This being known. This belonging, just as I was. There were, of course, the occasional “Where’s your boyfriend?” to which I’d flush and look away. But mostly it was hugs, strong, firm hugs, like we all wanted to hold the moment by holding on to each other, to see each other for who we are, to hold each other strongly and know that we’re family, and family holds on to each other.

That’s what I thought it meant. That’s what I want it to mean. Family, where we can see each other, see through our differences straight through to our gifts.

So often, though, the circle that used to hold us, or should have held us, is fractured into a dividing line. There are so many reasons for the fractures, so many stories that support the lines drawn between us. We cannot always sit in the circle of family, won’t always have a place at the table.

So I am set, then, to set my own table, to host my own sacred. To create a sense of belonging and gratitude that overflows into reciprocity and opens wide the circle and cycle of belonging.

We need this space of gathering to hold on to each other–to know that we are seen, that we are loved, that we are family, family created in the belonging that we offer to one another, created in the abundance that we share, and, in sharing we plant, and, in planting, look in hope to harvest, as the children who play here, who run full tilt and sweat and pile together in grass and laughter, who dust themselves off to come in to candlelight and to tables set with nature’s beauty, a place set just for them, just as they are.

We must feel held to overflow into the reciprocity of stepping out to the work set before us. The work is endless–mountains of labor cascading into one another on the horizon as far as the eye can see–the work of protecting the vulnerable among us who are increasingly under attack–our immigrant neighbors, our trans children, our hungry, our students, our very Earth. But to go out to work we must have a center from which we venture out and to which we return. This center must be held by the goodness that we hold true.

At my mom’s house, the morning of Thanksgiving, we would go out early to run in what we called the bosque–salt cedar groves lining the Rio Grande, flowing through the valley in El Paso. Her husband would have set a course out there, a maze to bushwhack through the sand dunes, scrambling on all fours under cedar, dodging Devil’s Claw, sometimes finding yourself panting at the top of the dune, struck by the clean blue sky beyond the Franklin Mountain range to the east, Mt. Christo Rey to the South, the Portillo Mountains to the West, the Organ Mountains to the North, blue in the distance. On these mornings we learned that play in nature was preamble to feasting. Our muscles and lungs pumping and limbs undulating with the dunes the history of the river.

The river bed was dry, last time I passed through the valley. It’s blocked upstream at the line of dams that block its flow. The bed remains. The memory of the river remains, ripples in the sand, as do the gifts of play along its banks, the lessons of play and feasting, of being with and in and of nature.

And so I know my intentions for the feast: I want to gather my people and go to the woods. I want to circle together and light sage and offer thanksgiving. I want my children to face the sun and say thank you for its rising in our faces. I want to honor our ancestors and thank the ancestors of this land and recite Kimmerer’s telling of the Thanksgiving Address.* I want to direct our address to all the beings that adorn the table of our play. I want to dress my table with the beauty of the playfulness of the Great Mother, who holds us daily in strong arms. I want to open my doors and my arms to an ever widening circle and hold my children so strongly in joy that they can’t help but overflow these banks, their gifts spilling out of their arms. I want to live in the work of hope for the river’s return, to wash away the lines in the sand.

* Kimmerer writes that “Over and over [she] was told that [the Thanksgiving Address is] a gift of the Haudenosaunee to the world. When [she] asked Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons about it, he gave his signature slightly bemused smile and said, ‘Of course you should write about it. It’s supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We’ve been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they’d understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Here’s to living in a way to try to understand the Thanksgiving, and the reciprocity that understanding entails, the long work of cleaning up our mess.