cultivating islands of liberation

Let us not forget: So many of us are creating little islands of liberation in our homes, when we pray in the ways and tongues of our ancestors, when we lovingly share the cosmological stories of our original ancestors, human and not, seen and unseen.

  

We tend the possibility of this freedom when we tuck seeds into soil, and sing the seeedsongs that were nearly forgotten but are now returning to our families. When we create delicious feasts from ancestral foods to honor the seasons, to share generously with our community in a love poem of collective care; we tend to this embodied prayer of our ancestors.  

When we rehydrate even a tiny everyday ceremony that was seemingly forgotten in the chaos of colonialism; when we tend to our deep knowing of place, time and our relationship inside of creation in intimate, loving, and quiet ways, that is radical resistance.  

We may only have little bits and pieces of the whole story, we may lean into deep intergenerational pain to have the courage to speak our language with a funny little English accent or learn once again to sew a pair of moccasins or make a bone awl with clumsy hands.  

Make certain:  There is no shame in not knowing,  for we know the colonial violence in which our entire villages were burned, shattered....yet still we rise.  Eating foods grown from the ashes, rehydrating old memories to strengthen our collective spiritual body, the "Orenda" that the old ones spoke about.   

We are not a conquered people. 

Create sanctuaries for those fertile pockets of Indigenous resistance to gestate, sprout and grow inside the center of the hearths of your homes, inside the meandering paths of your gardens.  Remember our true power lies beneath our feet, in the mineral memory of the bones of the Earth. Remember that you are held in every moment by a web of kin who teach us everyday about the natural laws, the original instructions. 

Practice reciprocity with your non-human relatives. 

Apprentice yourself to the soil beings and compost pile, who show us that through a collective mycelial symphony of many tiny ones doing the small work of metabolization and digestion.  It is these places in the forests, soil, gardens and sacred waters where our ancestors divined ceremonies, learned songs, remembered stories older than them.  This was their council of renewal.  This is where true revolution begins and cultural re-emerges.  

This is how we find ourselves home to the hearths and sacred fires of our ancestors.  In little everyday ceremonies of practicing kinship, remembering, and embodying the cosmological stories as they move through us in our everyday lives.  If you exhaust yourself entirely fighting against what oppresses you, it will be hard to find that part of yourself who the Holy kin, ancestors and living, can speak quietly to.  

We must push back against colonialism in all it's violent forms but we also must renew ourselves so that we can listen to the ones who guide this revolution, the kin we often can't see but who give us our strength and power as Indigenous people.  You too can tune the ears of your heart to listen.  You too can find your way home.

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Sending you all Midwinter Blessings on these nights that are getting incrementally shorter as we move towards equinox.