re-Sourcing self through Earth-body relations

i believe we are all human-body and Earth-body all of the time

these pieces recount three times that i moved toward the Earth to feel for myself as a small cell embedded in a larger organism with an unbreakable spirit and unyielding heart. this is who I speak of when I say Earth-body. we can understand Earth-body both as us and as the ultimate life-Source. 

i share for sake of connecting. enjoy!

.:. 1: LAKE MICHIGAMI

I went to Lake Michigami at daybreak to feel for my aliveness, belonging, lineage, truth and web of relations before taking in news reports on the atrocities of the day. 

When I presence my body to the lake, listen to the gulls overhead and notice the other people that get up early to greet the day here, I imagine the shores of Gaza. I feel for the somatics of home. What it is to be an extension of a place, to trust I am held in my complexity and authenticity, to feel reminders of self through the right combination of water, sand, heat and air, and to have a spirited commitment to reciprocal care. These shores have not held my people forever, but they have always held me. I am grateful for the generous offering of this place as my hometown, and can only imagine the depth of connection with a native homeland. I offer honesty, humility and solidarity with the Earth in reciprocity.

I feel for the somatics of genocide while I am here. Sensing in my own body for the shattered hearts, weathered and persisting spirits, thirst and hunger, pain and withering, fear, wavering wills to live, exhaustion, cries, betrayal, flashbacks and nightmares, resistance, fierce love, loyalty, faith and prayer.

I feel, too, for the embodiment of internalized imperialism in people that collectively create and maintain empire: the devastated imaginations, corrupted minds, fear-induced grasping, poisoned spirits, hollowed out life. For some, the sensations of discord, grief, disgust, tension, remorse and shame; a bubbling resistance, the sparks of rage, a sense that they are something more than this.

I feel for both my own complicity and resistance in my lineage of imperialist, settler colonialism. My ancestors re-imagined this land as their God-given material resource, conquered, stole, and ravaged to make space for descendants like me. I have been shaped by sickening notions of supremacy. I feel for it so that I can disrupt the culture and infrastructure built to uphold it, and release that which lives inside of me.

I let the names of the tribes that I know to have stewarded this land roll over my tongue: Potawatomi, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Peoria. I feel for countless others that are extensions of these shores as well. My body experiences flooding sensations, heaviness in my legs, a rock in my stomach, a seeping sensation in my heart. I feel connected and supported noticing the waterways below my skin and beyond my form. My lungs draw in a deep breath and my eyes gently scan this particular scene before closing. There - behind closed lids - images of a decolonized future float by. The pictures are fuzzy but the sensation of unclenching is clear. I am more available to life this way. So is everyone else, it seems.  
I look back to Lake Michigami; those at-once alluring and haunting hues of turquoise blue she turned as the Native eco-system collapsed under the pressure of species introduced by colonizer’s ballast waters. Breathe.

I then feel for the sturgeon who successfully returned to their spawning grounds after being re-introduced to Lake Michigami by local water protectors nearly twenty years ago. Over the past two decades, we have restocked their community every year without not knowing whether or not they would make it to reproductive age. I hear the voice of the elder guiding us in opening ceremony and the giddy children sending their sturgeon down little slides to the water. Wherever there is violence there will always be resistance. 

I hold the tension of hope and despair, acknowledging the unforgivable truths of imperialist, settler colonialism worldwide. Somehow my heart is full, spirit intact. I am reassured that we hold this grief and fight these systems together. With that I can hold more. Soon enough, I will read today’s news. 

.:. 2: BOX ELDER

Someone carved a heart into the Box Elder’s bark. Though I have sat under this Box Elder any number of times, I happen to notice this on my post-surgery debut into the outdoors. I’m hurting in this moment because someone cut through my tissues, too. The Box Elder’s heart-wound stuns me and leaves me short on words for days. 

I can feel for the love in this heart shape. I can also feel for the gross normalization of causing harm to bodies due to a general disregard for life. I leave, return, leave, return several times over the next week to get to know this somatic shape my body is taking and notice what it needs.

What is it to feel stunned anyway? 

It feels - to me - like a sleeping bag stuffed into the compression sack of my lungs. Billowing clouds of black smoke rolling behind my eyes, unaccompanied by any sounds of fire. There is a numbing through the core of my body. Making contact with my spirit feels like making contact with my belly after lidocaine cream was topically applied to reduce the pain signals to my brain. When the smoke clears behind my eyes, I watch a graphic reel of systemized ways humans inflect needless harm on one another. My arms tingle with an energy in search of a new home. The solid earth beneath my feet suddenly feels more like that goop I made out of elmers glue and borax during fourth grade science class in the nineties. Slime that cracks into pieces? For what it’s worth, you can imagine that. Some voice says: “You’re alone in this / You need to sit down and carry on in spite of this.” 

On this visit, I am distinctly not alone. Beyond the flora and fauna, I am with some really wonderful new friends - two parents and their three month old baby. I do sit down. My arms use that tingling energy to hold this precious baby, all wonder-filled eyes and gleeful smiles in this moment. We coo along with them, talk about all our bodies have been through recently, and sing praise to the incredible impact of receiving humanizing, consent-based medical care.

When someone carved into the Box Elder, they went through the tree’s bark and vasculature; like someone cutting through my skin and blood vessels without care or consent. The tree felt that because trees feel. The wound was left gaping open, inviting airborne pathogens to get in. The Box Elder inevitably told their community they were under attack because trees communicate in order to warn and ask for help. 

The carver must have forgotten trees live lives. 

Truth is, it would take a lot for them to recall the livelihood of trees after hundreds of years of effective white Christian supremacist propaganda promoting dominion and control of bodies of all species across the globe. We are all vulnerable to this. It is precisely what we resist.

White Christian supremacy teaches that Black, indigenous, immigrant, disabled and beyond-human life is only valuable to the extent that it can be utilized to uphold empire, and that what cannot be utilized should be eliminated all together. This is how we lose cultures, languages, healing systems, magic, diversity of self-expression, our sense of dignity, and each other. It is how we get racialized capitalism, eugenics, genocide, habitat destruction, endangered and extinct species, and climate crisis. In a world shaped by such things, of course a park-loving community member carves a heart into a living being. That is a symptom of how these systems live inside of us. It illuminates our bodies as sites of imperialist-colonial reproduction. 

I now realize that when I saw the heart, I saw myself in the tree and the carver. 

I recall that voice inside of my own being that said, “You’re alone in this / You need to sit down and carry on in spite of this.” That was the voice of the empire inside of me. It wants me isolated, docile, obedient and self-maintaining. It works to corrode my spirit so that I might go ahead and carve into life with disregard, too.

Returning to the tree and the carver changed me.

Relationship and feeling are the antidotes to supremacy culture. They lead us back to reverential love for each other, and that love fuels the resistance that promotes life.

.:. 3: DAWN CHORUS

Rain finally breaks the heat wave we’ve been experiencing around the Great Lakes. The evening air is cool on my skin. I sleep with my windows open and wake to the sound of the dawn chorus of birds. At this time of year, their song fills the air around 4:30am. This happens to be the time of day that I was born. I love transitioning from the dream realm to waking life with the spirited melodies of birds. It is as if I am arriving to Earth’s abundance for the first time all over again. 

I think to myself: “it’s no coincidence that my first word was bird.” This love is inherent to me. It brings about a diffuse warmth that I recognize as hope. 

I’m lured outside as easily as a shifting tide. When I arrive to my sit-spot at the river’s edge, I hear the songs and clucks of robins, a mama wood duck with six ducklings, red-winged blackbirds, common yellow throats, a yellow-billed cuckoo, indigo buntings, a great-crested flycatcher, ring-billed gulls, baltimore orioles, a sora, wood thrush, and warbling vireos. There are also amphibians, wind through branches heavy with leaves, insects, and drizzles of rain. This is the sound of midsummer. A swell of life, not unlike the masses of you with your surging aliveness in New York, Chicago, and LA. Bless your cacophony of sound!

Here in the park, mid and long-distance migratory birds add their voices to those of year-round residents. Together, they bring forth a robust, vibrant and evocative musical offering. As I listen, I remember the way the colors meld on the map of indigenous tribes of Turtle Island (link it) and imagine all the different ensembles of humans these trees have heard over their lifetimes. Have  they, too, felt an inherent love as they listen? A diffuse warmth known as hope?  

I remember the tangle of dialects in the hum of the crowd before the start of the last anti-ICE protest in town, and the eruption of language and vocal expressions that came from a mass of kids released from the school bus back to their neighborhood lives. Yes, that same inherent love is here when I listen to a chorus of humans. The diffuse warmth known as hope comes accompanied this time by gentle tears. 

I cry because there are no walls, cops nor customs, reservations nor detention centers nor nationalist schools in the sky. While birds face their own set of alarming, human-induced challenges, they pay no mind to geo-political borders. No one removes, divides, contains, tortures, stops them, nor subjects them to forcible assimilation. That is here on land characterizing our lives. 

The birds singing this morning have followed the stars here from lands colonially known as Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico (to mention just a few). My imagination whirls with the crisp images of the faces of my beloveds who are of these lands, memories of Black and indigenous ancestors mapping the sky to freedom, the geographical range in which the birds weaves panamerican diasporas together with their serenade, the people in my own lineage who once looked to birds as auspices. I hum their sounds back and mirror their movement patterns with subtle shifts in my own body.  I feel for the notes and rhythms that have long inspired language, dance, migration, and resistance songs. That diffuse warmth is just divine. 

May we return to kinship with these star mappers, resistance weavers, message bringers, counselors and allow their song to softly decolonize our imaginations and minds.