On conflicting truths, community, mothering & authenticity
October reflections
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I’ve been having difficulty sleeping, and an even harder time focusing. There’s a new energy that I’m learning to live with. It’s a type of integration that requires me to be with the wholeness of my own power. It feels unfamiliar and scary. It requires a lot of patience, attunement, and deep breathing. Like many of us, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all of the terrifying chaos of the world. Our awareness of it grows, as does our responsibility, and alongside that my desire to be fully inside of my own body— no one else’s. I listen to music that triggers something inside of me that feels like thick smoke. The smoke travels up my core and wraps around my neck from the inside out. It crawls up into my eyes, cleans them, and joins together at my crown, releasing into the ethers. The smoke feels somehow cool and soothing. It’s whispering away the ghosts of my past and clearing out energetic space for a new me.
It’s just past the Fall Equinox, entering a time of harvest. The weather is starting to get colder, though in LA that hardly means much. Still, I can feel the seasons changing. The desire grows to take stock of things and pay attention to what of my labor is ready to be gathered, and what didn’t work ready to be offered back to the soil for renewal.
I read a chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I’ve been reading slowly, savoring each chapter with the sweetness it deserves. This last chapter was called “A Mother’s Work”, and tells a story that spans across years. In it, she describes an ongoing project cleaning out a pond in her home, determined to make it swimmable for her daughters. In the process she finds herself relating to the inevitability of death and the inherent connection between all species. She ponders the displacement of the tiniest particles in the pursuit of her human desire.
“I peered inside and there were three eggs the size of lima beans lying in a circlet of pine needles. What a treasure I had nearly destroyed in my zeal to “improve” the habitat. Nearby, the mother, a yellow warbler, flitted in the bushes, calling in alarm. I was so quick and single-minded about what I was doing that I forgot to look. I forgot to acknowledge that creating the home that I wanted for my children jeopardized the homemaking of other mothers whose intents were no different from mine. It came to me once again that restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 92).
Over the weekend my friend and fellow diviner, Sanyu Estelle, held a workshop at the Philosophical Research Society in LA. She talked about humanity, naming that its fundamental problem is with itself. We cannot seem to accept that multiple truths can exist at once, and we continuously try to eradicate other people, systems or beliefs that conflict with our own. She describes her personal Utopia as one in which folks would come into contact with one another, recognize that they didn’t like each other, and simply respectfully turn in the other direction. Instead, it seems we spend a lot of energy trying to impose our beliefs on others, and erase forms of humanity that conflict with our perceptions of truth. On a spiritual and energetic level, those efforts will always be futile. Because, in her words, the nature of existence is to exist, and nothing can change that. We may change form, time may pass, but energy will always replace itself.
In the workshop I asked Sanyu for her explanation of people who impose their energetic truths on others (ie. folks who abuse others, and so on). She said, those people are trying to eradicate themselves. They have a problem with their own existence. Why is it that mass shooters will often kill others and then kill themselves?
So what responsibility do we have in a world that can feel chaotic, dangerous, and unjust? How do we handle inevitable instances of encounters with negativity or harm? In a perfect world, people wouldn’t impose onto others, we would simply encounter it and have the opportunity to turn away. I feel, however, that we have a strange chance at spiritual mastery when we recognize that no matter what is done to us, we must continue to be who *we* want to be, and not let ourselves become consumed, eventually turning into the thing we hate most.
This makes me think of Vampires. If you’re bitten by a vampire, you either die or turn into one yourself. Is there not a secret third option? An option where through community support, inner strength, and spiritual vitality, we become stronger, wiser, healed healers?
Last week I shared the October episode of Loose Leaf tea. In it I talked about celebrity culture, Diddy, and what’s at stake when we pedestalize anything or anyone. I talk about heavy hitter shadows like sex trafficking, sexual abuse, and m*urder, all of which Diddy is under investigation for. I discuss all of this from a spiritual and energetic standpoint, in hopes of finding root answers that might heal us and guide us through it. One of the points I make is similar to Sanyu’s— that you cannot erase negative energy, and when we suppress it we give it power. The goal we should be striving for is not to annihilate anything, but rather to create balance and harmony so that we can exist with the sovereignty that all humans long for.
What will guide us forward through these impossible-feeling times? I return to the Braiding Sweetgrass chapter “Mother’s Work” and think back on all that I’ve learned from my research on Matriarch over the past years. Through this work, it has become clear to me that learning how to be “good mothers” can be a healing salve for the world. I don’t believe it will come through force, through patriarchal visions of revolution, or through continued cycles of violence. I think it will come from a complete shift in our values, from community building, from safe containers where mothers can heal and bring healthy new beings into the world, and where that sacred work is prioritized.
“Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world, and so I’ve shown the girls how to grow a garden, how to prune an apple tree… That tree has been a good mother. Most years she nurtures a full crop of apples, gathering the energy of the world into herself and passing it on. She sends her young out into the world well provisioned for the journey, packaged in sweetness to share with the world” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 95).
When I began this project, I kept hearing listen to your mother. It’s become clear over this period of listening that there is in fact enough room for all these conflicting truths. Ayé is mother to us all.
“A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother” (97).
This time last year I was arriving in Israel. I was immediately nauseous and throwing up from empathic feeling of how sick the land was, and likely in an intuitive awareness of what was to come. I had a lot of time to reflect and ask spirit, why is it that I am here in this situation? Why now? After all the years that I could’ve visited my family, and chose not to for political reasons, it felt a little bit too specific for me to be there on October 7th. What followed was incredibly challenging, and triggered my childhood wounds around isolation and disconnection. If I show up fully as I truly am, connected to all of my parts, will I be accepted and loved by the communities I’ve chosen? I’ve learned that if we reject parts of ourselves to fit in, our communities will never be healthy.
So instead, I lean into what I know to be true—that I exist exactly as I am for a reason. That I belong to the category of people whose bodies were made to be bridges of understanding—much like the ocean. I spent so long avoiding this part of my heritage, and if I hadn’t been there for that experience I think I would’ve attempted to completely eradicate it. I don’t think that’s what my ancestors wanted for me. Instead, they physically placed me in a situation that would force me to lean into holding nuance, a work that has become so central to my life. In the months since I’ve been home I’ve realized that it is possible to bridge gaps of understanding, and that I can trust myself, my purpose, and my character enough to offer new perspectives and be authentic in a way that might support others in healing towards one another. Or at least in the direction of peaceful coexistence.
I believe I’ve said this before, but I want to reiterate now. In the text The Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts, there’s a section where it talks about how humanity will continue to braid itself back together, however difficult. It’s part of our destiny as humans to do so. It can happen in painful ways, or in beautiful ways through art, cultural exchange, etc. I believe that we are currently experiencing one of the most painful points of that braiding. Trapped in the habits of separation, nationalism, and the inability to recognize the self in the other, we are destroying ourselves more and more each day.
My prayer has been and continues to be that even through the most difficult pain points, we will find a way to see one another. That despite obstacles that feel impossible, we will locate a collective pulse. I am grateful for organizations like Standing Together, that have been organizing around bridge-building and co-existence.
I pray for Palestinian sovereignty and for immediate ceasefire. I also pray for Israeli’s who have had to live, grow, and take form in a fear-mongering, war-state. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Absolutely no one is benefiting from this decades long violence. I pray for all who are harmed and for all who have caused harm, because I know that more often than not harm operates in a circular nature. Our futures are intertwined, and that includes the futures of people whose truths conflict with our own. I pray that we will be able to find balance, accountability, and justice, in ways that don’t turn us into the very thing that hurt us to begin with. I am seeking the secret third option of neither being killed, nor becoming the vampire. It may take lifetimes, but if we are infinite beings as I believe we are— we have the time.
“Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 94).
MUTUAL AID:
Standing Together, Gaza Relief Fund
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