august 10 walk update

This is something I have always done: I apologize to the land as I move through it. I apologize when I see the scars of development, the new bulldozers and concrete. I apologize when I pass by acres of mono-corn. When we are driving down a highway in northern Minnesota, I put my hand out the window and let it flow over the passing land, imagining my touch loving and soothing the inflammation, the overwhelm, the constantly expanding suburban developments and the places where old industry is rusting away. 

I am driving in a car. Burning fuel. On a road. Part of the problem and still, I let my hand move along with wind tides, feeling this grief right where heart and lungs come together, feeling the helplessness of it all.

***

The old meaning of the word “apology” is to make an accounting of a thing, to tell its story. What happens after that is based on everyone else involved.

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I am walking down a dirt road in DeKalb County, Illinois. There are cornfields and soybean fields on either side of me, but about half of them have other weeds growing in them, other plants, and the other fields are monoculture, no weeds allowed. It tells me that different people use different pesticides or seed mixes and the wild plants sort themselves out in reply. I am curious about ragweed. Even in the monoculture fields, the ones where the corn stalks root into naked soil with no other plants around, the ragweed grows like a guardian along the edges of the fields. I have long heard stories of ragweed, mostly told by people whose noses were bright red and running. Allergies and achoo. As I am walking and talking to it, I actually have a moment of fear. Or really, more like intimidation. The plant is so tall. I use the word “guardian” on purpose. I feel assessed and measured as I walk by. While it’s hard to feel into this corn, its reproductive system and immune system scalded by science for both ownership and high yield, I can feel the ragweed but I can’t hear it. All I have is the feeling of being watched. I wonder if it holds too much memory of those who look like me and have filled in the wetlands and scraped off the top layers of soil. I am not sure if it is guarding and protecting the corn, a fragile overwhelmed seed that must remember its ancestors, the old and beloved sacred ones of this land, or if it the ragweed is holding a line,  stopping the pesticide-infiltrated corn from spreading. 

When I look deeper into its medicine, I learn that ragweed is, as all medicines are, able to treat many different things: anti-inflammatory, anti-nausea, anti-fever. I remember that the way plant immune systems work is that they have the capacity to generate specific molecules which can either repel a predator or attract a predator that might then attack whatever is attacking the plant. As I walk by and feel this guardian-nature, this feeling of protection and caution, I wonder what molecules the ragweed might be releasing into the wind. What stories are floating in the air that I can’t sense.

It doesn’t feel random that this county is called DeKalb, a chemical company bought by Bayer Seeds. DeKalb, founded in 1912 as a Farm Bureau program when the American government was assessing how to make seeds more profitable. Prior to this, farmers just saved and traded seeds, most brought over from other lands and some learned or stolen from local tribes. The Farm Bureau first worked with farmers to build strong hybrid seeds and then, over time, shifted to centering private agricultural companies who then moved from privileging certain kinds of seeds - which is why we have a standard type of tomatoes in most grocery stores along with some called “heirloom” which were the types not “selected” through Farm Bureau monoculturing. Now DeKalb works on genetics as a subcompany of Bayer, the German company that rose to prominence by producing the gas used during the Holocaust of the Second World War. All of this chemistry is what shapes so much food and medicine, unless it is resisted.

Hey ragweed, or I believe Pexhuta pa in Dakota; Canhlogan wastemna and canhlogan onzipakinte in Lakota and M~k~,hikikuru~a in Hochunk. (I take responsibility for errors here).

There is a sports club on the other side of the cornfield on my left. It is a Sunday and a lot of people are shooting guns. There are single shots and what sounds like machine guns or whatever the word is for those guns where when you pull the trigger, they send out a stream of bullets. I keep thinking that this must be what it was like when this land was being taken by American soldiers. The sounds of guns just behind the hills, one minute sounding far away and the next sounding close. As I am walking, I think of all beloveds currently living in places where there is gunfire sometimes behind the hills and sometimes right there, in the school grounds. Ah Gaza…..

When I hear all of these competing gunshots, clearly shot in different directions and with different firepower, it feels like chaos. I assume that there are no shots headed in the direction of this road. I feel pretty safe with that. And at the same time, the sounds are chilling. Disorienting, particularly when the sound is of the repeating shots going so fast, one after another. I keep thinking that this really is the clue. Because when I look around me, most of our collective fight responses, our various strategies for building collective power, and creating change are somewhat like this. Actions at different speeds, different tempos, going in all different directions and sometimes crashing against each other. 

I am listening to Martín Prechtel as I walk. His voice is helping to steady this constant thrum of gunshots because it is so quiet here and the sounds carry for miles. I am walking so miles take hours. Martín’s voice reminds me that we have to work at being alive, we have to work at being awake and staying awake, he says. He shares that some of the ways we work to stay awake is by filling our lives with relationships that help us to stay awake. I listen to him and think: relationships and stories. I remember that our first attachment should be with the Land, the slowly evolving and changing land that is made up of our ancestors, that is our ancestors and is our body, our breath, our capacity to be alive. As I walk through these fields and wetlands where I have never been before, I still recognize these lands as home. This Great Lakes basin, this place where the ice was thick until about 19,000 years ago and then first came the mammoth and elk and other animals in search of fresh new grazing and hunting grounds and then, likely, the people who followed next. Remember, there have been people on these lands for 20,000 and 50,000 years and likely longer. Way before the Bering land bridge. I recognize wild carrot and indigo and clover, echinacea and prairie sunflower and butterfly weed. Oak and sycamore and white pine and so many other growing kin. I have said that walking is not slow enough. It is not slow enough to learn the specific stories of the land I am moving through, the stories of the people who live here now and what happened with each layered generation to arrive at this present moment. I don’t know why a town was built here and what the waves of people are who have built other towns and the gossip of who has recently passed or slept with whom and what the Friday night football games are like. Walking is not slow enough to even begin to understand why this particular community has more Trump signs on their houses and why, a few miles down the road, there are hardly any at all. To know those kinds of stories is to belong to a people, to a place. And that takes time to learn, to embody.

 As I am walking, the land does not change quickly so the stories of the swamp milkweed and other plants, these stories are steadier, surrounding me as I walk. And the ragweed keeps watching and I am not sure what to do with the feeling of its attention. I am realizing that one of of the impacts of colonization, both of these lands and also of my people much further back than arriving here, is to assume that belonging is a feeling that I only have with other people. I forget that I know and am also known by the oak tree and by the tall bluestem. I have been talking with them for a long time and so there is relationship here. I am only learning, just now and all over again, how to trust and center those relationships when I feel afraid or alone.

If you are living somewhere, and you don’t know the stories of where you live, the layers of time and history, who was there before you, what happened before you and what the impact of your kin’s life has been on the land where you close your eyes at night, then it is not possible to belong to a place. Instead, we belong to an idea, to something without roots. And that is what western thinking generally foists: this belonging to ideas and ideals. Things that we can’t touch and be accountable to.

Hello Joe Pye weed! I love this plant so much and I have always wondered who the hell Joe Pye was. Recently I learned that it was a settler rendition of the Anishinaabe word “zhopai” which means to pass through. Yes, this beloved has its own life and is also medicine for loose bowels and high fevers. 

I was recently talking with a friend of mine and she shared something that Tyson Yunkaporta names in his book Sand Talk. Yunkaporta is reflecting on this Western story that humans only use 20% of our brain capacity. He laughs and says, well that tells you something about our ancestors. If we have that other 80% then we must have used it at one point, otherwise why would our ancestors have evolved all of that brain? My friend and I are talking about this and we begin to wonder: is this true for everyone? This is a western belief and so maybe that 20% refers to those of us who have been generationally shaped by hyper-individualism. Maybe that other 80% is our collective brain, the part of our brain that is about sensing and connection rather than individualism and our capacity for being both rational and literal. I know that as I have been walking and meeting people, sometimes I feel a kind of boundary in the other person, a boundary around how far a thought is allowed to go. I don’t know. I could be so wrong because again, walking is not slow enough, but there is something here. A sensing. As people ask me why I am walking - because I want to know if we can live on this land in a good way together - I sometimes come up against what feels like a door that says no, my thoughts won’t go there. At least not now, not in this context.  

I also have had people, after hearing why I am walking, say, oh, that’s too deep for me. I am waiting for the next time someone says this because I want to say no, of course it isn’t. We live here on this land together. Why does it feel too deep? What does that mean?

Some of the ways we wake up and stay awake is by filling our lives with relationships that keep us wakeful.

I remember that thinking freely, following creative lines and wonderings, is a facet of liberation, and there are many beloveds who have all kinds of system or institutional protection but who might not have been given the space to be curious without fear. To not be afraid of where their minds and senses take them.

This is not just about someone else. This is also about me. Self censorship, this kind of caution is so very real.

Someone recently asked me what I am noticing about the land and how it changes. They wondered if I was noticing things that I wouldn’t usually notice in a car. Thank you for that question, beloved one. It keeps nipping at my brain. I told them that the land changes slowly, but also quickly. Meaning the big pattern changes are slow and emerging. Here is where the glaciers went through and there is a shared story in the plants and shape of the land, this mix of wetlands and woods and then the override of farm fields and towns. But within that slow evolution and shift, there are constant new and different microclimates. Small and constant change, back and forth and sometimes with something unexpected in the middle. As I left Oregon, IL and moved along the Rock River, the land felt and feels rumpled. Like through here were massive rushing rivers of ice melt and the shape of the land snaked and wove, piling up glacial drift and then arcing flat again. All of this has made me think about how change happens overall. All change.  Political change, cultural change, mental change, emotional change, physical change, spiritual change. The large scale change evolves so slowly, even glacially, but in the midst of this larger slower transformation are a thousand and one constant changes, some that last and some that shift and move all over again. And I remember that land shapes culture and culture shapes land, that evolution includes this deep slow and this faster shift. In craniosacral therapy, we talk about the different tides of the body: the long tide, the mid tide and the cranial pulse. 

The question is, which arc of change have we learned to pay attention to? Only the faster upper layers or also the slow evolution underneath?

***

It was while listening to Stephen Buhner as the trucks flew by on Route 30 that I heard this: it is a western lie that we only have five senses; touch, taste, small, sight and hearing. It’s a strategic lie, he says, and the sixth sense which has been ignored is the sense of feeling.  Not another version of touch, but that thing that happens when you walk into a room filled with people and can immediately tell that they have been fighting. This feeling of being watched by the ragweed and of relaxing into home when the clover suddenly surrounds me on a quiet road. 

In a day or two I will meet the Mississippi River again and then turn north, heading towards a few weeks with my family. I am so excited to see them. I am so excited to have a period of being with people who know me well enough to call me on my shit. Please, person reading this, never be afraid to call me on my shit. Even when sometimes I get a bit tight in response, that will pass quickly. 

And here is what I know of my route: Route

More soon. Tomorrow, I think, the big river.