july reflection
From Cleveland across Ohio
Western Lake Erie wetlands
Something shifted while camping at Lake Erie State Park. Sunsets on the Ohio side of Lake Erie are amazing. So many colors, so many textures. I was sitting on the beach, tucked behind a bluff. There weren’t a lot of people there yet, still a good hour from when the sunset got spectacular. I was sitting with the waves, thinking about how the really big lakes have small tides, spring tides, twice a day. These are the same tides as the ocean’s but they happen less frequently and are less notice-able. I sat there listening to the lake, comparing it with Lake Superior, thinking about freshwater and about what these lakes will mean in the coming generations. All of us who live along the shores of these fresh water glories are living with a resource that others will covet when water gets harder to find.
Breathing in the incomprehensible truth of acres of fresh water, asking the lake to show me its older memories, its dreams of glaciers and melt, something started to well up inside. You know those moments when your entire body begins to organize around something… something big that wants to pass, but there aren’t feelings-feelings or stories or images, just this physical bigness being exhaled from your cells? Well, that’s what happened - my whole body arc-ing and crumbling, sensations like ghosts and winds winding through the present moment heavy-gravity of being in a body. Old stale winds that have been trapped in soft tissues, shaping body and life with what they get in the way of.
For 45 minutes, tucked there along the bluff with peregrine falcons flying overhead and wind blowing in off the lake, my body writhed and released and sobbed without gallons of wet tears, just old and ancient tired ones. And when the movement was complete and there was stillness inside, I looked around and realized that I was no longer afraid. Deeply, rootedly not afraid. And that since first starting to walk in early April, I had been afraid. Avoidantly so. Quietly so. Determinedly so.
Sitting there, it got clear: here is how I have been afraid. Here are the ways I have used survival strategies that are likely as old as that wind that rose up in my body. Here is how I have tried to be close to strangers, to have them know me as their own. Here is where I got lost. Here is where I leaned into the things available to me, my whiteness, my quick cheerfulness, my cis-ness. Here is where my queerness almost disappeared and here is where it was visible.
***
I want to listen for how we might live on this land in a good way. Together.
Each time I say this out loud, something in me opens up and softens. It’s the right sentence, the right prayer to move me through each step. I thought that I would be walking and having conversations, all kinds of reflections and meaning making moments among strangers, but that is not what is happening. Or, not what is happening most of the time. I notice how hard it can be to go deeper than surface with people I have just met. That is not a bad thing. It is just a thing. I think about how often I am in my own life in Minneapolis, rushing, distracted, and someone tries to stop me on the street. I always stop and talk for a bit but really going there… really going deeper than the top layers? I don’t do it that often either. By this third month it mostly tickles me that I was thinking there would be a constant stream of deep intimacies.
Did you know that the word “stranger” comes from the word “extra” and means “outside of”? A few days ago I had a small event in Oberlin, Ohio and started with a body practice focused on noticing where the line is between the feeling of our own aliveness and then what is outside of that. I used the word “aliveness” on purpose rather than boundaries or skin because aliveness, that is a connected thing. But most of us, myself included, tend to only feel it in relation to our physical bodies, not the body of the land or the body of the stranger.
I sat there on Lake Erie, feeling this wind and intensity rise up and through, coming in waves in the way that things held in the body move, while I sat on the lake shore and listened to the waves rise up and then fall. When I say that for the first three months I was afraid and then that fear slipped away, this was the background ribbon spooling through my mind and heart: I am all alone. Who is going to help me? Who is going to save me? Who is going to help me find a good place to sleep? Who is going to notice me? Who is going to care that I am walking through here? Who is going to be kind to me? Who is going to want to know me, who is going to care? Friends, saying this was the background tape for those first three months is somewhat untrue. I expect it is the background noise for much of my life, ignored when sitting in the middle of habits and known friends but suddenly loud when the familiar was removed. How will I be with those on the outside of my aliveness, those I don’t know, can’t feel connection to?
Which is why I said a few paragraphs ago that this was - and is - all about whiteness… and gender….. and age……. and being a mammal…. and how histories are woven through the present moment and what is unfinished and the fear of the dark woods and the fear of the stranger and every single story I told about people around me - the kids are not outside, people don’t hang out, people are cautious with what is unknown - was here, breathing through my cells and tugging on neurons to remind my nervous system of the way to act that will most likely keep me safe.
A few days before sitting along Lake Erie and having some of the old solid places inside start to soften, a friend of mine was asking me good and hard questions about how I am going to navigate walking in light of the Supreme Court decision that makes it illegal for unhoused people to sleep outside when there are no shelter beds. What my friend was asking me about, both directly and indirectly, was this; how much am I going to rely on my privilege, on being the exceptional traveling white body doing a “brave” thing that is all about how kind people still are, traversing the kindness of white bodies hosting other white bodies, and where am I going to try something different? Or at least be open to more than what my privileges can control?
***
While I was in Oberlin, I stayed with another craniosacral therapist. It has been so good to remember along with them the beauty and strength of what our work teaches us. One of the things I want to practice on this walk is moving from a biodynamic approach or walking with what that training and practice gave me. Listening without defining, attuning to what is real in the present moment rather than my idea or strategy of it. As I walk near the reservoir with this friend (hello Silvija), they ask me how I am trying this. I laugh and say that I am mostly forgetting, pulled by fear and the desire to control and know the steps ahead. I root my resolve again… when I start walking tomorrow, I am going to listen, attune, walk, wonder, and not know. This is much harder than I thought. I notice for the zillionth time how much I am attached to safety. The old meaning of “safe” means whole and well-kept. And so I remember for the first and five thousandth time, what does it mean to live on this land in a good way together? It definitely includes the expectations I have around my safety, around what it takes for me to be well-kept.
How far can I let go of my expectation of safety so that the boundaries of my aliveness connect out further than they were before? I write that being deeply aware that I walk with my specific list of social protections no matter what expectations I keep or let go of. I know this. It’s why this body has to practice this, to be with what comes up when it is 4pm and I am in the middle of a residential area, everyone is in their homes and no one has signs up that say, hey stranger! Welcome!!! Like you, this is the millionth time of practicing discernment: when do I feel unsafe and when am I actually unsafe?
****
How we are going to live on this land in a good way together begins with the land. On every level, it begins with the land. I keep forgetting this, looking for the two legged people for validation and safety. This gets me into the mess of things; assumptions and projections and the very real truth that some of our human kin are just shitty people. Everything always starts with the land and this walk is bringing me up against more layers of where my body has forgotten how to trust this.
The land where I am now is different now from when I was in New York, walking in the places still loved by Haudenosaunee folks. It is different from when I was in Maine where Wabanaki love freed the Penobscot River and so many other waterways. And it is different from where I moved along with Nipmuc people who are deeply loving and remembering the slant of the hill and the upsurge of spring water. It is definitely different from the lands I have called home for the last 40 years, land that is loved and tended to by Dakota, Ojibwe and other indigenous people.
I am currently on land that was the focus of the first great removal of indigenous people. Before the Indian Removal Act in 1830 when Andrew Jackson (god, I hate him) built federal policy focused on moving Native people west, there was the expulsion of tribal people from the lands that are now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and parts of Michigan. In 1763, all of the lands from Ohio to the west were supposedly forbidden to settlers and deemed as Indian Country. Generations of squatter settlers, corporate entities and missionaries kept betraying any land agreement. One treaty after another was signed and each one then broken by settlers and/or the US government. It is only now that I am learning things I never learned about the lands that raised me. I know the plants, the shapes, the sweet humidity of the Great Lakes Basin but I didn’t know that these were all wetlands, filled in by colonial land spectators wanting more farmland. Filled in because the wetlands were where people could escape to: those fleeing enslavement, those fleeing removal.
Someone I met shared this information about the wetlands with me. I was trying to understand what feels different, why it is that something in the feeling of the land surrounding me changed as I moved further west into Ohio. He reflected that the extent of colonial interference on this land is high and it started a long time ago. While he was explaining about the draining and filling of the wetlands, I wondered if the soil below my feet is hungering for that water.
I will visit the lake again tomorrow, pausing at its western edge where cattails and lily pads still grow. I was told that there is still one stand of wild rice there at Pickerell Creek. I doubt that I will see it but I will love it just the same.
***
It matters that the words “land” and “earth” in English are words that have largely remained with the same meaning for at least 6,000 or 7,000 years. There aren’t many English words where this is true.
****
So here is one of the binary things that my EuroChristian kin do. We focus on the land and forget that the land includes people. We focus on people and forget that people are the land. I forget this all of the time. When I say that everything starts with the land, that I want to listen in a way that is about attunement and trust and not trying to control what is happening in front of me so that I feel safer, I am talking about all of it: about the relationship between the soil below my feet, the countless deer whose paths I keep crossing, the way that wild grape vines and mugwort swirl along these country roads, and about the ways in which us two legged ones are either with the land around us or barriered away. After a bout of poison ivy - I am very allergic and at one point, sat my ass on a plant - I started thinking about the benign toxicity of poison ivy compared with how I perceive the toxicity of someone who has barricaded their home with hate-filled banners. If everything starts with the land and we are the land, what can I learn from these two different ways of being ouched?
In central New York, I stayed for an evening with a Christian farming couple. They are Christian in the way of strict gender roles and literal Biblical interpretation. She makes all of the dresses for her family and she and her daughters wear these homemade dresses and have a commitment to modesty. The labor on the farm is traditionally gendered and their church community is the center of their lives. As we were talking, I asked them how it was to invite someone like me to stay on their land. They told me that as Christians, their responsibility is to love and serve everyone. Period. No exceptions. We talked about how their belief system meant that some of the choices I have made in my life keep me out of their heaven but those choices are mine. They were - and are - incredibly warm and loving and have continued to text me now and again to check in on how I am doing and to hold me in their prayers.
I remember a story that Urvashi Vaid told in the book Virtual Equality. If I remember the story correctly, she describes a moment when then-President Jimmy Carter invited a group of gay and lesbian leaders to meet with him. He shared that as President of the United States, it’s his job to ensure that all citizens (ok, so it’s all about citizens..) have access to equal benefits. He wanted to talk and brainstorm about policy changes that he could make that would move towards gay and lesbian equality. What Urvashi shared was that the gay and lesbian leaders he gathered told him that his Church spoke out against homosexuality and so they could not trust him. He explained that his responsibility as President was to protect and care for all Americans and that with a separation of Church and State, his faith didn’t matter in this conversation. As I remember Urvashi telling it, the leaders could not accept that and left without working with him. They needed him to leave his Church or speak out against it before they felt safe enough to imagine a different future.
Safety - discerning what is an actual threat from a fear of its potential.
***
I pass by tree after tree that has been overwhelmed by vines. I know that an overgrowth of vines will overwhelm a tree, making it more susceptible to disease and diminishing the resources that both tree and vine need. I remember that if the trees are all overcome, the vining plants will not flourish. I remember that this is always about balance and relationship and that sometimes in striving for that balance, we can go too big or too small.
Everything written here is about how I assess safety while walking among strangers. Everything. My people have gone to great lengths to clear the vining plants from the trees they value, including using chemicals that destroy everything and harm the tree but keep the rest of the land clear. I have learned for generations that safety is an all or nothing deal. This is what shaped me, it is what rises like steam from the generations before. All or nothing. I think of how both large scale systems and collective nervous systems are riddled with trigger alarms. For our brains, discomfort can be a warning signal, a sign that something worse is up ahead. And so discomfort becomes a potential trigger for danger and then being safe becomes not being uncomfortable. These instincts evolved in different times, when life didn’t change that frequently. Most of us live in different times from this, faster times, times filled with strangers - both living people and even more frequently, strangers who talk to us from screens. A very common survival strategy is for a body to commit to being the one who destroys rather than risking being the one who is hurt.
Many many years ago, we lived in a house with a neighbor who was afraid. Between our home and theirs was a set of lilac trees. One day they told us they were going to find out if the trees were on their property line and, if so, they were going to cut them all down. I knew that the trees were on “our” property line but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I asked if we could talk about a compromise, some way of dealing with her desire for wide open sight lines and our desire to protect the life of the growing beings around us. This neighbor had already cut down a huge and beautiful pine tree at the corner of her lot. When my daughter got off the bus from kindergarten and saw the tree had been removed, she was inconsolable. My neighbor got angry when I asked if we could talk together about different scenarios. “I was just trying to be nice by letting you know,” she said, “and now you are making this difficult.” I tried to have a conversation with her about this that lasted way longer than what she was comfortable with before I gave up and went back inside. I knew she would find that the trees were technically ours - what a fucked up concept. And I knew that we would keep them growing and this meant that she would feel safe. For our neighbor, clearing away anything that might conceal a danger was how she could keep track of what was around her. For us, protecting the lilac trees was also important. These should not be contradictory desires.
***
Recently, I have been thinking about belonging as the muscle memory of a community, of a culture. Muscles are the system in the body that are the slowest to learn and the slowest to change. This is why you can pick up a bike and ride it after having not been on it for 10 years. It’s the same with swimming, dancing, driving a car, and playing a musical instrument. Your muscles remember and they take over, even if your mind is otherwise distracted. Belonging, like muscle memory, is slow to emerge. The word “belong” literally means to be-in-the-long. To be in the span of time, to become over time. Belonging has nothing to do with whether or not you like a person or are comfortable with them. Belonging is about a kind of familiarity, a field of relationship that remembers who you are together. It’s that feeling you get when you talk with someone you haven’t spoken to in years but it’s as though no time has passed at all. It is about how we are shaped and what we shape, about ancestral patterns and who we share those patterns with, and about a sense of something that is deeper than the stories our brain can tell. I have been filled with this muscle memory of belonging these past few weeks as I have moved through Cleveland and seen family and then met with friends from high school. So many years have gone by - over 40 in a few cases - and yet there was something there. Something familiar. A feeling of belonging, of knowing and being known. Not completely, not with the details that are true in the present, but still… the feeling was of being familiar with each other. Relationships grow and emerge and change over time. If I were to move back to where I grew up, we would have to learn each other all over again - the details of our lives, our likes and dislikes. Maybe we wouldn’t be as close in 2024 as we were in 1980 but this sense of each other, this feeling of knowing and being known, this would remain, even if we only fed and watered it occasionally. Muscle memory.
Muscle memory works in all directions. And it can layer up. We can have that sense of familiarity but we can also have the feeling of betrayal. When someone has harmed or disrespected our relationship, this feeling of harm and betrayal can be woven through with the familiarity of our belonging. It’s why betrayal and harm and frustration and anger can actually be part of the muscle memory of belonging. There is still intimacy and relationship here, even if it is not comfortable or kind.
One of the many lineages of this walk includes the multiple times that I have heard beloveds say: white people, go get your kin. I think about this daily, about how much fear has been woven into the muscle memory of belonging among and between white kin, as well as familiarity.
Walking through Ohio, I am daily-stunned by how “normal” everything feels, even when I don’t like it. Muscle memory. Yesterday I was walking along a quiet untraveled road surrounded by fields of corn, uniform in their planting. I kept extending my senses towards them, trying to feel their aliveness in the way that the oaks and cottonwoods over on the field’s edge were strong and clear about themselves. Even as I write this, I feel my lungs get tight and a low anxiety starts to hum through me. That was the feeling I had yesterday as I stood there, seeking to sense-meet this descendant of sacred corn. I recently listened to a Seneca seed keeper describe one of the collections of seeds given to her by a Cherokee elder. She had not finished cataloging them but she had already counted over 3,000 varieties of corn that she had not previously encountered. She also counted thousands of varieties of beans and squash. I think of how the United States has turned two of the three sisters into cash crops, although the corn and the soybeans grown and supported by US agriculture are not the indigenous plants of this land. They have either been genome-plucked or imported. I asked a friend recently, what is a word for a thing that is alive but has been wounded and rearranged and scalded and controlled for so many generations that it can’t feel its own life anymore? I think of how so many of my kin share life experience with genetically modified corn; we barely remember our wildness except in dreams. I wonder if this corn, modified so that it is protected from pests and pesticides and now with expanded sweetness, dreams about its ancestors and freedom.
I wonder if the corn feels safe and comfortable or if, even as it now has pesticide protection written into its genes, it can no longer discern between a real danger and the stories of danger that have been encoded within it, passed down to its children and grandchildren.
How do we live.
On this land.
In a good way.
Together.
******
I am sitting in the library in Oberlin, Ohio. I just spent a week with my cousins in Cleveland where I also saw folks I know from high school. Most of us haven’t seen each other as a group since we graduated in 1981 - 43 years ago. I have got lost on roads that don’t look anything like they used to and also startled by things that haven’t changed at all. I went visiting ancestor’s graves with my cousins, tracing them at Woodland and Calvary and All Souls and Holy Cross. The first generation in the United States are buried in one of the older cemeteries, close to downtown and filled with German names. Each successive generation is buried further away from downtown. Most of the graves had not been visited in years and a few of the really old ones were clean and had young plants growing along them. Some unknown third or fourth cousin with shared great great grandparents has been visiting the same remains.
I start moving again tomorrow and will be moving with a few stops towards the Mississippi River. I am starting to get into a different kind of rural from the rural of the east. I just joined a group called RVing women to see when and if I can find places to stay in the middle of big rural expanses and for the rest of it, I am planning on practicing everything I wrote above. After all, the lake took away a bunch of my fear and while I expect it will wash back - fear can be SO tidal - and so it is time to keep practicing.
If you are curious and are looking, here is what I know about upcoming stops and/or routes:
Up until Fort Wayne, IN, I am all good.
Fort Wayne IN to Plymouth IN - moving along past Columbia City and Warsaw
Plymouth IN to Shabbona Lake, IL - part of Shabbona Lake was just given back to the Potawatomi people and I will be at or near the lake for my birthday
Shabbona Lake to Prophetstown, IL
After this, I am heading towards the Mississippi and then upriver a bit before my family comes and gets me for a few weeks in Minneapolis.
I am now in Fremont, Ohio. More chatting: I got the dreaded skin yeast infection that can rise up when you are sweaty and damp and have folds on your body for those fun-guys to party within. This last month has been a month of itchiness: poison ivy and now the skin fungus. I wanted to say these things here because this is also what the walk is about. Not taking a shower for a bunch of days after I sweat and get sticky and then the ecosystem of my bodys rubs its hands together and starts making new plans. While I don’t love the itchiness - I really really don’t - I do love that it adds a layer of understanding to what my, your, our ancestors probably lived with more often than not, to what so many folks who don’t have access to showers and coolness and dry clean towels are living with right now. It’s hard to get rid of the itch when day after day there is more sweat.
I recently joined the network RV-ing women and through that, have identified a few places to stay in Indiana and Illinois that are off the main roads. I love that RVing women includes women who are tent camping. So many networks out there that are intended to make traveling easier for folks either don’t include walkers in their list of travelers (Warm Showers and other networks for people cross-country of long distance biking) or are no longer active even though they are still technically alive (couchsurfing.org etc). Your ideas of networks like this are completely welcome. Accessing folks this way is one of the ways that I can move past the stranger-caution a bit more quickly.
***
The only upcoming event that I know about is a conversation I get to have in Fort Wayne, IN. I will be in conversation with Kétu Oladuwa who in 2016 traveled around the country on a motorcycle. I am so very much looking forward to this with gratitude to my friend, Emmanuel Ortiz, who is making it happen.
