Finding My Sea Legs

 

I have been finding my sea legs this year, not just for the storms and high waves but also for the impermanence of the waters of life.  My ancestors were island people, surrounded by water and accustomed to tides. Being surrounded by water made them vulnerable to invasions and for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years their story was one of being pawns in the grand chess game that the nobility of Europe played.  Eventually, my ancestors took to the seas and created a huge navy to protect themselves and then to invade countries all over the world and re-create their own experience in the bodies of other people.  They came to Turtle Island and devastated the land with the greed of extraction that decimated and imprisoned those peoples who were Indigenous to these territories. 

My parents came to Canada from England in the 1950’s by sea and I was born here a little later.  They brought some stories on the journey but didn’t pack most of them in the large trunks that they brought to their new home.  Stories of family members who brought shame on the family were kept secret until they could no longer remain submerged and then they were passed to me. 

Over the past two years I have been learning more about my ancestors and the lives they lived.  I have learned about the home town of my parents, grandparents and 5 great-grandparents, Oldham, Lancashire.  I have learned that my great great-grandparents were drawn to this town to find work in the cotton mills that sprung up like dandelions during the Industrial Revolution.  The land around Oldham is hilly and not suited to agriculture while full of coal that was extracted to drive the steam engines of the mills.  The weather is damp which is good for keeping the fluff of cotton mills less airborne.  The cotton came from America.  We now know that for part of the time, it was grown and picked by slaves to keep it cheap.  My ancestors who worked 12 hour days in the mills 6 days a week were paid by how much they produced and lived in quickly thus poorly constructed housing erected for the influx of workers.  Not slaves and yet not free either.  A few men got exceedingly rich. Most lived hard, short lives.

Thomas Hubl who has pioneered work in healing ancestral and collective trauma describes the past as something that is frozen.  The traumas that my ancestors couldn’t cope with were pushed down into the unconscious where we couldn’t see them.  However, they still effected how we saw and see life like a filter that we see life through.  Discovering Hubl’s work this year has been very transformative for me.  He describes healing as the liquefication of these frozen traumas.  Once they are liquefied, we can begin to digest the now conscious information and eventually integrate it.  This seems like good work for me to do at this point in my life.  This seems like essential work to be doing for our world.  Frozen, unconscious traumas effect everything we do and make it impossible to create healthy change.  One can see traumas being repeated and perpetrated everyday on the news and in our personal lives.

As the traumas become liquefied, the ground, like melting permafrost heaves and sinks.  We are not who we thought we were.  I am not who I thought I was.  Personality traits suddenly transform into ancestral responses to trauma with long histories behind them.  The undigested traumas of our ancestors live within us.  But, of equally importance, the resiliency of our ancestors lives within us.  With this resiliency, perhaps it is possible to liquefy, digest and integrate these traumas.  This is not easy to do on one’s own.  Hubl feels it is in fact the work of groups that consciously witness and support each other in healing.  He feels that the energy field created by so many people (the “we-space”) is the fuel to allow for the healing of these ancestral and collective traumas.

This work excites me and I am learning more about it.  I am experimenting with doing it myself and with groups on-line that Hubl’s Pocket Project  hosts.  I am reflecting on how this work could impact the work of Truth and Reconciliation in Canada.  I can see how non-Indigenous people here have a lot of work to do to heal these ancestral traumas that drove people from around the world to these shores and airports.  This is part of the truth work and I believe it is necessary so that we can impress upon our governments that it is not okay to maintain systems and laws that oppress Indigenous people.  But, if we still believe unconsciously that we are about to be invaded, that there is not enough to go around, that we are fragile victims, then we will easily accept governments keeping Indigenous people living with no potable water, with substandard housing, education and health care.  It will look as though there is no solution because we are looking through the unconscious filter of being invaded and imprisoned ourselves. 

Liquefying these traumas can feel like rough seas where the horizon is hidden.  We don’t know what will happen if we melt the solid ground of trauma.  What sea monster may arise?  Who will we be if we do this?  Perhaps we will become good ancestors if we do this.  Perhaps, we will be the ones who bring healing to our ancestors and to the futures of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  We have to summon up our courage and all the love we can muster to do this work.  We have to find our sea legs.

Gifts for the Earth

 

This is the time of gift giving.  I imagine that gifts were given once upon a time to build and strengthen relationships between people and groups of people, between people and animals, water and the land.  However, capitalism and its inevitable child, the consumer society has managed to make gift giving a stressful and sometimes wasteful exercise.  Many businesses rely on Christmas giving to stay afloat.  Black Friday, in which these businesses get out of the red of debt into the black of profit is a notable example of this.  Giving Tuesday which follows on its heels is another day to give gifts to people and causes who need donations.  And then there are the Boxing Day sales.  It can all feel a bit much.

One email that was asking for donations came from the group O.N.E. (Organization of Nature Evolutionaries).  The author of the email wrote about the importance of reciprocity in any relationship.  We all know what it’s like to give time, attention, help and perhaps gifts to someone who never seems grateful.  For a relationship to flourish, reciprocity is essential.  Indigenous worldviews stress that point in relationship to the land.  O.N.E. agrees that reciprocity with the land who gives us everything we need to live is crucial.  They provided a list of ways to reciprocate this generosity to the land, to Earth.  Here is their list.  See if any of these ideas spark your imagination.

“the ways of giving back are as plentiful and unique as each of us — like 

·      singing,

·      Earth art,

·      rights of Nature,

·      land stewardship,

·      Nature gratitude ceremonies and offerings,

·      forest walks,

·      fostering relationship between children and Nature,

·      composting,

·      eating local,

·      caring for our water,

·      herbalism,

·      ecological design,

·      knowing our rivers,

·      creating sanctuaries,

·      being part of regenerative heart-based economy,

·      reusing,

·      honoring our food,

·       listening and speaking to Earth and her creatures,

·      being in co-creative relationship with our landscapes,

·      stopping to smell the flowers,

·      loving mycelium,

·      renewable energy,

·      healing the web of relationships within our human family, \

·      and all the many other creative ways, often inspired by the Earth herself, that we know to give back and honor her.”

Perhaps as an antidote to the consumerism of Christmas, you can pick some of these ideas of reciprocity and give gifts to Earth, our mother. Perhaps, you can do it with friends and family. I guarantee that Earth will appreciate it.

 

 

Rerooting Ourselves in Connection

 

I am currently reading ReRoot: the nature of change through the system of trees by Māori author Louise Marra.  In the introduction, Marra writes, “Disconnected people and systems will always create more disconnect… Often fueled by superiority, survival energy, fear, and trauma, we have found ourselves in a world that is orientated around humans being separate entities and not an intrinsic part of the natural systems we need to live in. (p xiv)

I was pondering this idea at a recent rally to protect green spaces in our province.  I am part of an Indigenous drum circle that includes non-Indigenous people like myself.  We were asked by the local Field Naturalist club to come to the rally to drum.  Members of our group already drum every Friday (April to October) at the end of a road to a gravel pit.  The gravel pit is using the purest water in the world to wash gravel for roads, draining this pristine aquifer at an alarming rate.  We drummers, drum for the water and to bring awareness of this to passing motorists.  So, we are used to being outside drumming to protect the water and land.

Louise Marra

Marra goes on to write, “Separation itself is one of the primary traumas we all face.  We cannot be well as individuals within an unwell world.  Trauma isolates, and when isolated as humanity from the web of life and from each other, it means trauma leads the way, leads the solutions, unconsciously.  We then stay on trauma highways and our solutions are from this unhealthy place.  We need our connected selves to lead the solutions, but many lack the confidence, skills, and even the belief that it is possible.” (p. xiv)

As we spent time at the rally, I thought about how the government’s idea to build lots of houses on protected green spaces was an idea that came from disconnection.  There are lots of spaces in the city for housing.  However, speculators have bought up some of the protected land and want to turn a quick profit and they seem to have the premier’s ear.  The trauma of seeing land as money is one that comes from disconnection from the land and from future generations.

We drummers stood in an arc facing the people with the megaphone and signs.  We drummed between speakers and when asked to lead the procession down the main road, we did so, singing and drumming all the way.  Once we returned to the square, one of the protesters took a long green ribbon and began to wrap it around us in a way that gently formed us into a circle.  She said that she wanted us to wrap ourselves around the Greenbelt the way she was wrapping us in ribbon.  I noticed that the energy in that space changed once we were in a circle in which everyone could see each other, in which there was no hierarchy.  Speakers spoke from within the circle as the ribbon connected us.  I could sense that solutions that came from within that connected space would be different than those that came from the premier’s hierarchical power structure.

People who were already connected to the land connected to each other, listened to each other and were uplifted by each other.  This felt very hopeful to me.  It was more than symbolic.  Our bodies are our first access point to nature.  We are nature, not in nature.  As we positioned our bodies in relation to each other, in a connected circle, we changed our embodied presence there.  It was like we got off the trauma highway for a moment as we connected to each other and to the web of life.  This gave me hope that we can gain the skills and the belief that this is possible.

I choose to see the disconnected solutions of the government as offering us the opportunity to connect with each other and with the land to co-create new solutions.  People are figuring out how to stand up for what they believe in.  They are figuring out how to connect with each other to protect what they love. These are skills we need to hone to deal with the challenges ahead of us.

There is so much more to reflect on in this fascinating book.  I will return with more stories of Rerooting.

Louise Marra (2022) Reroot: the nature of change through the system of trees. Empower Press: Colarado Springs, CO.