76. rhizomatic

I check “the news” once a week, and no more. 

I brace myself when I check it, knowing that it will be full of horrors. 

This week, I watched the “leader” of my country of origin bully the president of Ukraine, taunt him in front of the entire world, make a mockery of the highest office, and once again, sow chaos, division, and violence in the world through his unique breed of idiocy, inhumanity, and ignorance. 

As a European resident, it hits differently now, with a broader recognition of how much the ripple of that kind of violence impacts the globe; I am bracing myself for the changing tides of what it is to be an American living outside the USA bubble. 

Even though we know people are not their governments, I understand the hurt, hostility, and greater mistrust of people from the US in the wake of every spectacle of barbarism and buffoonery enacted from the oval office. Sometimes, when I meet someone new, and they find out I am a US citizen, their first question is: “What do you think of T**mp?* I sigh, and profess my disapproval, and beyond that, shame for being an American. 

I wonder about my generation, we who grew up reciting the pledge of allegiance, singing songs about ‘our land, your land,’ but never really experienced anything of substance to justify the sentiment we were spoon fed through society, culture, media, and educational institutions: that we ought to be proud to be an American. 

Astrologically, we are heading into a great storm, which impacts no specific nation, but the world as a whole - all of us. We are headed into an entirely new epoch, and I raffle through my memory banks, my haphazard knowledge of “history,” and consider what the ‘ends’ looked like before the new epochs began. It’s hard to say, but when we look back, we talk about the rise and fall of civilizations, the cataclysmic natural disasters which reshaped the world and contributed to the evolution of species, the eras and ages, and categorize them by their tools, customs, practices, religions, values, and often, by their events of mass death and destruction. 

There are too few - at least in my limited awareness - stories about the flourishing of civilization, the thriving periods of human creativity, the generative, peaceful, and beautiful times. Perhaps because the stories of those were destroyed in the floods, fires, wars and intentional desecration of holy spaces that followed during the destruction times - times, perhaps, like those we are living in now. 

Yes, yes, there is beauty, too. There is goodness, too. There is life, too. I know. You know. We know. Perhaps it’s only ever been about attuning to those things amidst the horrors, which persist amongst, between, and through every age, era, and epoch. 

Perhaps it’s just about how we orient, identify, and establish ourselves within the times. Tonight, I’m sitting with that idea, and my heart is beginning to stretch itself across the globe, feeling through the web of relationship for those who are deciding to write beauty within the violence. 

For us, for all those lacing up their boots, planting their seeds, strengthening their alliances, doing their core work, leaning into their communities, and doubling the fuck down on their spiritual practices… I see you. 

This poem is for us. 

***

Rhizomatic Loti

by Amelia Travis

We are rhizomatic women,

unfettered by the patriarchal gardener

wielding the spade of 

misogyny, who chopped 

our juvenile shoots

as we strove toward

the sunlight of our being.

⠀

Resilience personified; 

thousands of years 

of subjugation

schooled us in the arts 

of death, burial,

and underground rebirth,

growing stronger, longer -

a powerful network

of connected roots.

⠀

Biding our time in the darkness,

we won’t allow 

decapitated fledgling

blooms and saplings,

cut off at the knees,

to have grown and died

in vain.

⠀⠀

We draw remnants of their courage 

the vestiges of their valor 

deep into loamy soil

through mud of the lotus

to the nourishing, cooling quiet

healing heart of the earth.

⠀

For each assailed, assaulted limb

martyred for the light of truth,

our roots respond,

tender tendrils extending

below the surface,

germinating new seedlings,

sorority in sacred soil,

preparing to sprout again.

We fortify, connect,

collaborate and cooperate,

for the day has dawned

in which we must rise,

charging through the surface,

an army of blossoms -

new growth en masse -

indomitable in our unity,

impenetrable in the depth 

and the breadth of our roots.

⠀

With reckless, avenging abandon,

we will overrun the garden of this world,

fierce and abundantly fertile;

One billion 

thousand petaled 

lotus flowers unfolding;

no man-wielded weapon 

will be able to cut us down.

***

It is time to once again form council, as we have done in countless lifetimes, in the way we know like the backs of our hands, the backs of our eyelids, the way we sense in vision and dreams. Each of us has a role to play in this time, and to do so, we must strengthen our roots and weave our web stronger. 

Whether we are here to change things, hold the red thread of connection to sacred feminine, or serve as death doulas for the next way of being for this planet, we need greater spiritual maturity and to recognize ourselves as part of a greater whole; not necessarily to fix it, but to abide in the continual devastation unfolding around us, tend restoration gently and with commitment, and continue willing to live. Becoming agents of change means opening to ancestral and intergenerational healing, changing the values and belief systems we’ve been indoctrinated into, and figuring out how to align ourselves with the inherent spirituality of Earth, to be an accomplice and ally for human life to continue.

Our separation from earth as mother, perception of having dominion over all other forms of life, commodifying relations as ‘resources,’ and valuing infinite growth (while forgetting death) causes us to harm ourselves, our more than human kin, increase fragmentation of the psyche and creates disharmony amongst the totality of life. 

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and widespread ecosystem disruptions are symptoms of spiritual immaturity. Genocide and ecocide, committed by humans, endorsed and perpetuated by cultural norms, capitalist ideology, technologies and social institutions, springs forth from the ignorance, delusion, egoism, greed, attachment and aversion of human nature. For the sake of life itself, this way of being needs to die; in so doing, it can be composted, transmuted, and alchemized into the emergent spirituality that Earth needs now.

Woman-bodied people, bodies of the global majority, transgender and non-gender conforming folk have heightened awareness of the necessity of midwifing a new paradigm of planetary ecological spirituality, because we live under the direct bodily experiences of the oppressive nature of patriarchal ideology. Our bodies, like the body of earth, are fracked, exploited, consumed, extracted, commodified, and used as vehicles and vessels for the perpetuation of the domination machine. As Paula Gunn Alan writes in The Sacred Hoop, “Wars of imperial conquest have not been solely or even mostly waged over the land and its resources, but they have been fought within the bodies, minds and hearts of the people of the earth for dominion over them” (p. 214). 

The constant, incessant, subtle and overt communication about most aspects and qualities of feminine being is a message of guilt, shame, fear, commodification and worthlessness. Feminine intuition, magic, connection to animals and nature, and innate reproductive abilities are qualities to be feared and controlled at all costs. What is deemed holy reflects the highest values of a society. Therefore, to move towards partnership-based egalitarian values which center all forms of life, including women, children, and our more than human kin, we need to collectively remember them as sacred. For women, this means we need to consciously release, compost, and alchemize the beliefs that prevent us from embracing ourselves as holy. 

People who menstruate have an innate understanding of the cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death, as these seasons are lived with each moon, through the body. We are cyclical beings who must evolve or die. We share the fate of the earth, as bringers of life, and in sharing Her fate, we are called to stand and speak on all of life’s behalf.

Activating women to speak on behalf of Life requires us to first see and know a deep, personal awareness of the sacred within creation so we can begin to right the primal imbalance that lies at the root of our present predicament.

Women engaging with our natural rhythms, reconnecting to the seasons and cycles of the wheel of life, and reimagining ourselves as one species among many, rather than dominant beings, is a vital part of the process of remembering we are part of the land and unseen worlds both, and engaging with anima mundi (the soul of the world) once again.

The oaks, ash, rose, pelicans, crows, lavender, owl, snake, spider, moon and stars are all speaking, telling me it’s time to gather, hold council, and remember why we came. They are saying the revolution is mycelial, rhizomatic, and hinges on Not Forgetting.