June 11th, 2024

This is an update that covers a lot of the last month. I am noticing that I prefer to work on these longer updates when I am in a place with a computer - aka a library. This means I am in Cortland, NY and took a day off before heading to Ithaca just so that I could chill with this computer. I will likely say this every single time that I send one of these but my GOD - free public libraries. Please PLEASE may they continue. 

This is a long update and it’s broken down like this: practical reflection about the last month including my upcoming route, a reflection on fear and the wild dark forest and books I’ve been privileged to review. 

Practical reflection

A lot has happened over the last month - in the broader world, in your world, and with this walk. My family gathered in NYC to celebrate our daughter’s graduation from college and then, shortly after heading back to Massachusetts to restart the walk, I got the flu. Or I think it was the flu. It wasn’t COVID as the trail of tests proved. Five tests from three different companies because I was feeling fierce about not being some version of a super spreader. A friend of mine who is a doctor told me that there is an ever increasing array of names for the viruses that bring fevers and coughs and aches and shivers and snot. Whatever this virus's particular name, I had it. And while I had it, I was well loved. Mega thank you to Dulani and Leigh in Greenfield who did not drop a beat as I kept showing up at their doorstep, bedraggled and sneezing. 

After I left western Massachusetts, I wandered up the Hudson River Valley towards a few days with beloved friends. Being in the Hudson River Valley tied me to a series of conversations I had at the start of this walk, while still in Maine. Jack Tchen and Kerry Hardy are part of something called the Public History Project and they are working - in alliance and relationship with elders from two different Lenape tribes - on a book that details the last 20,000 years of the mouth of the Mahicannituck/Hudson river, or the place where the island of Manahatta/Manhattan is located. My friends, my FRIENDS, this book is going to be so powerful.  You can get a preview of it here, but this talk only starts to touch on the depth of their work. As I sat at Kerry’s house and looked over his shoulder at some of the graphs and perspectives in this book, I felt shivers go up and down my back. I am starting to work on a guide for the book to share with beloveds because I think this work can be a tool for a lot of local deepening.

While I haven’t written a lot in blog form, I have done a lot of posting on Instagram (the most) @raffosusan and Facebook, also raffosusan. Those places have most of the detailed day-to-day reflections: like reflections on moving through decimated rural infrastructures, and on the painful lack of children playing in the yards, fields and playgrounds I pass. I also share photos of some of the folks who have stopped me along the way, including one person, Aaron, who is biking across and who trailed me for 54 miles to share a scone with me from a baker we both met in Sharon Springs. 

Being on this walk is one of the first times I’ve been happy to have this little computer in my pocket. I can call beloveds, map out routes, and post things that I am experiencing. I was a late adapter, waiting to get a smartphone, and I have largely hated it in daily life. I am surprising myself to feel so grateful for what it makes possible. A few times, I’ve had long walks with a beloved - Aurora Levins Morales - as she sits at her farm in Puerto Rico and follows me on the map. We chat with each other, weaving in and out of conversation and observation. It’s the closest I have felt to walking with someone. And I have also been grateful for the days when there isn’t enough data to access my phone. I know that is going to happen more as I move away from the populated northeast. I imagine there will be long stretches where the signal doesn’t get through. I love those days as well. Then I am focusing only on the sounds around me and not the sound of a beloved’s voice.

I am always but ALWAYS looking for places to stay for free. So, here is my route for the next month. This is the route, not necessarily where I am staying. It gives you a sense of my path and what other towns I am likely to pass.  Let me know if you or someone you know is nearby:

• Ithaca, NY to Geneva,  NY

• Geneva to Canandaigua (have a place to stay in Canandaigua)

• Ganondagan State Historic Site

• Buffalo (south of the city)

• Fredonia, NY

• Erie, PA

• Cleveland, OH (I am from here - most of my family these days is on the West side/suburbs, even though we all lived east - looking for places between Erie and Cleveland on the east side)

• Valley City, Ohio and Oberlin, Oh - I have places to stay here

• Oberlin, OH to Fort Wayne, Oh via places like Norwalk, Tiffin, and Findlay, OH.

• I will say the next part of my route in detail when I get further along but it more or less goes Fort Wayne and then walking through sites related to Tecumseh’s Uprising and the violence of the United States government against tribal nations in this first large scale pantribal indigenous uprising - Plymouth, IN, Prophetstown and more.

Oh and one more practical thing. My body is getting stronger. I am more able to do between 17 and 20 miles a day for a lot of days together. I am marveling at this.

On fear and the wild dark forest

Dear ones. Dear ones. I am not even sure how to move into this part of the conversation. This is some of what is weaving and unweaving through me as I walk. Some of the underlying pieces that rise up in relation to this question: what gets in the way of living on this land together and in a good way? And as I shared at the front of this update - and as I go into much more deeply in At the Fork in the Road - how do I/we contend with the truth that as the prophecies name, the light-skinned ones and those who follow the ways of the light-skinned ones are not to be trusted. It is not always clear if we are friend or foe and in the words of the prophecy, you will know we are foe when the rivers become polluted and the fish begin to die. We are, of course, past that.

“We knew that the White Man would search for the things that look good to him, that he will use many ideas in order to obtain his heart’s desire, and we knew that if he had strayed from the Great Spirit he would use any means to get what he wants. These things we were warned to watch, and we today know that those prophecies were true because we can see how many new and selfish ideas and plans were being put before us. We know that if we accept these things we will lose our land and give up our very lives.” Dan Katchongva, Hopi Elder to Congressional Committee, 1955. Quoted in As Long As Grass Grows: the Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Beacon Press. 

I am someone who in my Minneapolis life spends lots of time outside and listening. I walk and can sometimes feel the currents of water in the air and below my feet. I go and sit in the same place alongside Minnehaha Creek or down by the Mississippi River so that I can build relationships over time, noticing changes, comings and goings. I had some romantic idea about this walk that this sensing was just going to deepen - be bigger and more real. After all, I am outside almost all of the time. It’s just me and trees and wind and birds and water. What surprises me - and I mean literally truly I am surprised  - is the amount of fear that I usually feel instead. The amount of terror.

Walking is not slow enough. Walking does not give me time to build relationships with any specific local place, the weave of all kinds of kin who are rooted in that valley or on that hillside, or those who migrate through as birds or deer. Walking like this can feel like walking over places or through spaces rather than with the land and people that surround me. I meditate on this, looking to be in the present moment with the land I am moving through and with, even as I am not intimate with this set of relationships and kin.

My first understanding of the fear that rose was to understand it as an ancestral fear of exposure. This fear of exposure comes up in bodywork sessions that I give to people back home: the feeling like your skin is not thick enough, like your insides are too visible to the outside and that this vulnerability is potentially dangerous. As I wrote about in Liberated to the Bone, humans are like coyotes. We can survive on our own or as part of a pack. Most species have evolved to survive in one of those ways but not both. While we can do both - and here I am, walking across a country where most people I meet are strangers - human kin are most likely to survive when we are not alone. It’s generally our preference and it’s why our survival responses begin with orienting. If there is a potential threat, we scan our environment, assessing the threat and also seeing who is nearby that we could join with. We are almost always stronger together. 

Fear of exposure, which is both ancestral and based on experiences in our lifetime, is the fear of being left alone and visible to those we are not sure of, to those who have the potential to cause harm. It’s about not being big enough or collective enough to overcome whatever it is that rises in front of us. Some of us come from people who are constantly being surveilled by the state and/or by other groups of people and so we have developed ways to live with and survive this constant potentially dangerous exposure, even as it still has an impact on our individual and collective health and safety. But while it is not the same, the fear of exposure for those not targeted by the State and systems of oppression is still there in the shadows.

As I have been surprised by this fear rising during this walk, I’ve decided to be intimate with it. Well, not at first. At first I just tried to distract myself with podcasts and telephone conversations but then that changed. Pushing away that fear is not exactly about being awake. 

This fear of strangers, this fear of exposure, is one of the things that gets in the way of our ability to live on this land in a good way together. It is the same fear that is shaping anti-immigrant policies, anti-Black racism, the controlling and ownership of life whether in the form of land or genes: this fear is where anything perceived to be different is seen as a threat. Rather than over-riding it and toughing it out, I am instead sitting with it, letting it be visible to me, to creep along my skin and cold shiver along my spine. I am very aware that in choosing to be afraid, I am telling you something about the actual threat to my body. So far, even with the police being called and strangers trying to pick me up because they like my ass, I have not been under threat. I walk up to a stranger’s front door to ask if I can camp on their land or fill my water bottle and sometimes they say no and sometimes they say yes. I am letting the fear rise freely even as I know that my light-skinned self, my gray haired older woman’s body, my English and my Leo personality are protecting and shaping each moment. I know this and I know that this fear is older, deeper and could give a shit about rationality. 

I was recently listening to someone explain that what we call stress is actually fear, but western thought sees fear as a weakness and so has shapeshifted the experience of fear - which is internal - to the narrative of stress - which is more about how the outside environment impacts our sense of self. It’s a kind of subtle collective override. And so I want to name my sped up heartbeat as fear: the fear of being visible to a stranger and uncertain about what might happen in our encounter. The fear of being alone when the weather turns intense. The fear of not knowing where I am going to sleep at night. The fear of giving up and disappointing people. The fear of dissociating and somehow wasting this experience. The fear of the semi trucks hurtling by a few feet from where I am walking. The fear of not having enough water, food or warmth.

The word “fear” is an old German word which first meant “danger.” It’s older root means to try, to risk. In the 1400s, the word fear started to mean a feeling of dread and reverence for God and I have no idea what to do with that. Everything about what I just wrote is a poem, a story, an arc of memories. The word terror means “great fear, dread, alarm, panic” and the word “horror” comes from an old word meaning “to bristle” and refers to the gooseflesh and hair raising that happens when we are truly frightened. And finally, the word “scare” is an old Norse word and means “timid, shy, to shrink from, to avert.” 

A few days ago, I was walking down some side roads through county and state parks. The woods came right up to the pavement and they were thick and dark. I couldn’t see much beyond the forest’s edge and it was raining which made it even darker. I could feel my skin goosefleshing - bristling. I looked at the plants and trees I recognized - plantain and skunk cabbage on the edge, maple and fir and oak close together and in front of me. I reached out with my heart - hello, plant friends - and felt some resonance, especially from the plants along the edge, but as I tried to sense into the big dark complexity of the woods I kept getting lost. I reframed and retried and still, fear kept rising up when I peered into the forest and only saw darkness. Something old was here, lodged in the pit of my stomach. As I was experiencing this throughout the day, I was chatting with my friend, Aurora, narrating what I was feeling. Here, I said. Here there is a split. This fear feels like mine and it feels like it isn’t mine. If my mind comes in to talk me through scenarios - what I would do if a bear tumbled out of the woods or if I started walking through the trees to get to the other side - I had all kinds of skills and responses to keep me safe. But as soon as my mind stopped looking at the woods as a kind of strategy, something else rose and it was cold and shivery.

Like many of you, I grew up hearing fairy tales about the dangerous dark woods: Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood,  Beauty and the Beast, Rumpelstiltskin and more. I am not sure if that tells you my age - as well as my race and culture. I don’t know if children read or have those stories read to them anymore. But they were a big part of my school and home culture. I have read and learned all kinds of things about these fairy tales and fables; how they carry forward the stories of a people even when the people can’t admit those stories to themselves. These European stories are a kind of cultural pass through that says be careful, there are dangerous beasts and unknown terrors in those places of darkness. You are safer, say the stories, remaining in the towns with your family and friends. I know and have long known that this fear of dark unknown lands is part of what shapes a range of cultural forces including anti-Black racism, anti-indigeneity and colonization, and urban responses to what is rural or wild. I know these things, friends, there is nothing new here for me and yet, as I walk down that road, waves of terror keep rising and falling. The fairy tales feel real in parts of my body, even as my mind is chattering away about how silly it all is.

The fear of the dark woods is, as far as I am aware, a Eurocentric or urban-centric pattern. Books about these fears talk about them as part of being “human” and this makes me want to push back… hard. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s part of being descended from Europeans, it’s part of being a particular shape of Christian, but it is not universal. 

In talking with a beloved friend, Irene Ammar, about this, she reflected on how this fits with the other thing that I have been noticing constantly - the absence of children playing outside. The absence of children. The absence of children. Outside. My god, this has been grieving me. Irene named this grief about the absence of children alongside this fear of the dark woods and let them sit next to each other.

“When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don't chop down trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The trees say, "Don't. I am sore. Don't hurt me." But they chop it down and cut it all up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast up trees.... they saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything but the white people destroy all...How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched, it is sore.” Katie Luckie, Wintu, recorded by Cora DuBois, 1920s.

I welcome this fear into my body. I ask it to increase, to show itself to me, to help me understand it. This is not just my fear, it is our fear, something I share with a lot although not all of my kin. This is our fear, even if we refuse to let ourselves feel it. It’s why my people cut everything down, plow it under, destroy it or commodify it, sticking it dead with pins into glass cases and assuming we now understand it. It’s what has shaped so many forms of violence, all of them following some part of the chaos-wildness-savage-dangerous description as the opposite of the ordered-controlled-civilized-safe opposition. This fear is old and there are hundreds of books written about this fear of the dark woods, each of them offering theories that run from the impact of colonization on the indigenous nations of western Europe, the fact of wars and extreme violence that emerged through the woods, fear of death or survival, fear of isolation and exposure, fear of animals, fear of wildness, fear of being out of control. Fear of being out of control. Recently, I heard Brad Melle, in comparing the difference between flavors of Christianity, name Western Christianity (including all Catholic and Protestant faiths) as centering control and order which makes it different from Eastern and African Christianities. Fear of being out of control.

How do we live on this land in a good way together? What needs to change, transform or be told so that something other than the fear of wildness and chaos determines next steps?

The Center for the History of Emotions & Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience in Germany has pulled together a task force to look at what they call forest anxiety. They are looking at historical attitudes to the forest - largely European but not exclusively and found through fairy tales and policy statements and songs and other artifacts of cultural memory - and noticing how these attitudes are changing in some places in relation to climate change. They are looking at this to understand the forest anxiety more deeply but also to look for how this might or might not be changing in the present moment.

“Have forests, on the apparent brink of their planetary collapse, become unambiguously positive in our minds? Have our fears of the forest been replaced by anxieties for the forest and its survival? The study investigates precisely this point: namely, whether emotional relations to forests are entirely positive today, or if instead we can still find traces of the forest fears and arboreal anxieties of the deep history of human psycho-cultural history.”

When I say this walk isn’t slow enough, I am talking about the path to relationship. I am a single person walking with a backpack through landscapes of people who have their own lives. Humbly, I don’t expect anyone to change or shift their routine just because I am walking by. Most folks don’t know why I am walking through their town or in front of their home and to find out would be to pause and to ask questions. There are people who do this, but not many. Most are older than I am. Retired white folks who are curious about the gray haired one walking down the road. Sometimes they are younger and they are people with an open curiosity and open heart, two words that share the same root. I have been thinking about how different this would be if I lived in a time that had protocols. I know these protocols existed pre-contact on Turtle Island and I know they still exist in many places. I know that some of their last dregs in urban western spaces included the existence of receiving rooms or parlors on the first floor with the private family space being separated away. Protocols are ways in which you enter a space of people who are either strangers or not-intimate-kin. Many years ago a friend of mine from a small village in Sierra Leone described it to me this way: the village is surrounded by relationship zones. The furthest away point is where everyone stops. Passers know how to read the sign that there is a village not far off. They can keep on moving or they can stop and wait. If they stop and wait, eventually someone is going to go investigate. Investigation means finding out who they are and what they want/need. Investigation also includes water and food, some kind of refreshment for the traveler even if that is all that they are stopping for. Sometimes, though, during the conversation, the traveler is invited to enter the village. That is, for lack of better words, passing the first test. The root of the word witness means “to see and then know.” Meaning, that when we observe for a period of time, using all of our senses to investigate what is being observed, we begin to know some things. I am imagining the witnessing happening there on the village edge. Once the traveler is invited into the village, there are still different levels of intimacy. One is not invited into the private home or area of a family without more witnessing and knowing. I think about how much this is the practical meaning of the word “belong” - when you are in this process long enough - you are being in the long - that your edges start to merge. You develop a field of trust and culture between and among yourselves that continues to deepen and grow.

Oh how I wish such a thing existed. It would make this experience of walking completely different. The boundaries would be clear. The kind of support that is or isn’t available would be obvious. And what I carry with me - stories and news - could be traded or shared if there was interest from those whose lives I was encountering. It would mean that as I moved through the dark woods, I would be meeting people who knew this area of the woods as intimately as an old friend. I could ask them stories and they could share news. We might click with each other in the way that you sometimes do with strangers and maybe it would make sense for me to stay a bit longer, learning and sharing before continuing. Travelers or walkers in this way are some of the connective tissue between communities, even as many of those communities migrate and move themselves.

I keep remembering what a friend of mine, Marcie Rendon, teaches. She says that rather than worrying about futures that are complex and layered, rather than trying to track and understand the shifting of climate change, turn your focus to the land. Turn your focus to building up our shared capacity to care for each other and the land, to be ready to receive the waves of refugees as they come to where I live, in Minnesota where the water is fresh and the air will be cooler than the growing heat to the south. Build your circles of relationship around your home and community. Where is the space that you offer food and care to all who pass and where are the more intimate, protected places?

As I have walked, I have passed three homes that had been turned into military fortresses. Surrounded by walls made of wood and scrap metal, they had holes for their guns to poke through. Plastered on the walls are signs that call for Trump in 2024 but also call for war, for a second insurrection, for closing borders, for different shapes of violence and more. They are truly fortresses and I have not taken a photo yet because the first two startled me so much and with the third, I hung around outside hoping that someone would come talk to me. I also think about the wealthy neighborhoods I have passed through that don’t need wood and metal walls - those are the neighborhoods where I have most often had the police called on me. I think of racial/class invisible fencing when I walk here, knowing that I am setting off all kinds of alarms - but not as many as some of you would set off.

I don’t have an easy way to end this, some period at the end of a finished sentence. This is part of the conversation that is walking me, the listening for what gets in the way, the listening for what is possible, the listening for where the harm is still inflamed. Right now as I walk, I am following and listening to the stories of the Oneida forced march to Wisconsin, knowing that in my move west I am overlapping with this path and so walking while honoring what is unfinished here..I am walking through and within the lands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and listening to the stories of the Great Peacemaker and others, to how Seneca and Mohawk and Oneida and Onondaga, Cayuga and Tuscarora have been in deep practice about living on this land together and in a good way. I am deeply grateful for the generosity of what has been shared. Every day is a different one… and alongside the fear there are other warmer clearer things that keep emerging.

Books

Over this last month, I also got to read and review or endorse three different books. This is part of everything I have already written, chances to feel not alone, to feel aligned with others living into similar questions.  It’s been a pleasure to read these, feeling their alignment in my bones. There is so much about this walk that feels like a kind of walking with - people, the land, histories. Reading these just strengthened that feeling. For those of you who have read the book I wrote before this walk - At the Fork in the Road - you know that one of the core heartbeats of this walk is listening to the Anishinaabeg Prophecy of the Seven Fires. Because this is not my prophecy to be the source for, I won’t briefly summarize it here but you can read about it in At the Fork in the Road, where I can take the time to - I hope - be in respectful relationship to the prophecy. It is this prophecy that shaped the question that this walk moves with: how do we live on this land together and in a good way? Reading these books below is part of sitting with that question.

The Story is in our Bones: How Worldviews And Climate Justice Can Remake A World In Crisis by Osprey Orielle Lake, New Society Publishers. Friends, reading this feels like me and Osprey were in each other’s heads over the last year. One of the things I love about it is that we are both sitting with versions of the same question - how do we live together on this land in a good way - but we are part of different communities with slightly different frameworks as we ponder that question. That feels good and important, a mix of different insights and positionalities that help strengthen some of what are deeper beliefs. In particular, Lake weaves together direct conversations about her white cisgender woman-ness with respectful listening and learning to ancestors as well as to indigenous and Black women. She lifts the importance of story and truth-telling and does this by telling stories about her own experiences and about the people around her. Founder of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network in 2009, this book is a telling of that history: what has been learned, what mistakes were made, and where for Lake, hope and possibility lies. One of the things I love is that Lake is strongly rooted in a womanist, anti-patriarchal core which then shapes the stories she is telling. This is not how I tend to frame things and so as I read similar questions and practices to the ones that shape my days, I could feel them deepen and broaden with the specificity of her approach. One of the many things I appreciate about this book is that it is a practice: how do those of us who are white settlers deeply listen to the words of indigenous and Black people without commodifying or objectifying them? What does it look like to let ourselves be changed in ways that root us more deeply into our own ancestral traditions, to the land where we currently live, and to the unfinished histories of that land? Lake’s book is a practice in what I hope will be a long and ongoing stream of practices. 

Della Medicina: the tradition of Italian American folk healing by Lisa Fazio, Inner Traditions Publishing. So first, Lisa is a beloved friend of mine. I got to spend a day with her during this walk as I passed near her home. She has also been a teacher for me in recent years as I have deepened my relationship with the ancestral and cultural practices of my father’s Italian lines. This book represents the work she has been building for the last few decades. In my first class with Lisa, I could feel my skin soften and my heart open as I heard her name her relationship with the land where she lives and the indigenous nations of that land. Too often people living on Turtle Island who do various European cultural reclamations ignore or only pay lip services to what it means to be doing that work on this land. This awareness and commitment - as well as relationships - are woven throughout Lisa’s work and this makes me purrr. And then there is the book itself: weaving together stories, practices and reflections that walk the line between Italian and Italian-American experiences with joy and integrity. And the book makes me happy because as well as providing good story-telling, it’s so practical! Like here, here is information but that information only becomes who we are when we practice it. So here, here is how you make this charm, listen to your dreams, and work with rue or rosemary so that you can heal. Here is where these practices come from, here is how they have  been impacted by time, here is how they are different or the same in Italian and Italian-American cultures, and here is how they weave with other cultural stories about the same or similar plants and practices. 

An Anti-Zionist Jewish Path to Embodied Jewish Healing by Wendy Elisheva Somerson, North Atlantic Books. It is always an incredible honor to be invited to read and reflect on cultural and political work that comes from roots I don’t share. It is always deeply supportive to read how our understandings of healing and somatics are shaped and then practiced in relationship to who we and our people are. The link above brings you to Wendy’s website because the book is not yet publicly posted but I wanted you to know where you could find it. Many years ago a friend of mine - she is an anti-Zionist Jew - got very angry at me when we were talking about Palestine and I shared that I didn’t know how to talk about this politically without also talking about the impact of 2000 years of oppression and violence on Jewish communities. We argued over this quite a bit, her focus only on ending the violence of the state of Israel with less interest in where that violence comes from. Wendy names the truth of all of this right away, in her title. This is a book about bodies and somatics and Jewish healing and it is a book that speaks directly to what it means to be Jewish right now. It is about collective healing, about interrogating the impact of a cycle of violence and being in relationship to that cycle while looking forward. Wendy names many things that are not specific to Jewish communities - weaponizing historical trauma, resistance to body-based work when the body is frozen or afraid, and the broader political weaving through the collective fact of healing. I also adore the way they talk about building collective power as a form of collective healing. Healing is both global - we are all mammals, our nervous systems largely respond to fear and stress in the same way - and specific- what we and our people have experienced and how those experiences inform and are informed by the present moment is unique and complex. This book brought me to tears multiple times and it also continues to shape how I understand what is possible in activated high intensity times for collective healing.

As I shared above, each of these books is part of this ongoing music, this evolving and emerging listening for something other than the constant objectification of life, its valuation based on one group’s standards, and the ongoing cycle of violence that moves forward the further destruction of land, of our kin and of ourselves. 

And on to the next step

I am going to end like this. Yesterday I spent an hour or so sitting in Dwyer Memorial Park, taking a rest on a long walk day and watching the waterbirds and wind play on the top of the lake. At one point, I wandered over and sat next to a small stream, listening and feeling my way through much of what I just named above. Fear. Separation. Control. As I was sitting there, two chipmunks - tiny ones - scurried across the meadow to the tall grasses and then back again. They did this multiple times, tiny bodies fast moving between the stream and the tall grasses, their bodies exposed on the flat ground. I thought, hmmmm, a hawk could show up at any point, and if I weren’t here, a fox or snake or coyote. But here is the chipmunk, someone who in western frameworks is only prey to a range of predators. And this is how they have learned to survive, by avoiding predators. They can turn on you and bite if cornered but their teeth are wee and the bite is more for the startle effect than for actually doing any damage. While watching these two chipmunks scurry, I saw someone else out of the corner of my eye. A baby rabbit, tiny and awkward, hopped out from below the shade of a tree into the corner of the meadow and then hopped back again. I started laughing - quietly because I didn’t want to startle anyone. Of course, I thought. Of course. After years of admiring those who can attack in a moment - eagles and hawks, wolf, bear, coyote - I am sitting here marveling at the bravery of these tiny creatures. They are species whose kin are always going to need to watch out for those who are bigger and have sharper teeth and here they are, living complex and full lives, side-eyeing me as they race between grass and water. Here, I said. Here. May I be unafraid to be like the chipmunk and baby rabbit. May I live with the fear that is here in ways that don’t prevent me from crossing the dark woods, the stranger’s yard, the places unknown and uncertain. May I do honor to the life of these littles who just showed me some part of who they are.

While I am walking, a beloved friend is in the West Bank, visiting shared friends of ours and also acting as an international witness to the violence and surveillance that has been there for generations and is now ramped up. My friend sends stories to us about what they are experiencing, including stories of targeted violence against Palestinian villagers and more. These stories are horrific both in their detail and in the ways in which they are unceasing over time. My friend’s stories and every other story that is crossing my gaze, about people whose assertion of their own lives is an act of facing the kind of fear that my life doesn’t directly experience…. this is also underneath and woven through everything written in this piece. There is no reason to dance with these older ancient fears except to unweave them so that they are never again used to control or destroy bodies and land so that the afraid ones feel safe even if at the cost of someone else’s life.

(as an aside, if you have an extra $5 or more dollars a month, please consider signing on to my Patreon. It’s helping pay for the walk as well as a range of things that happen along the way - from donations to offerings to gifts).