A Self-Introduction Without Use of the Infinitive

They call me Chloé, my mother named me Chloé, she gave birth to me almost 28 years ago, I have many feelings all of the time, I study permaculture, sometimes stress fills me, sometimes happiness overtakes me, sometimes loneliness haunts me. I want to surround myself with people who often radiate beauty, I want to put my hands in the earth and pull up roses, I want to reconnect life to itself. I want to focus on helping people I call my friends, I want to write with my other hands sometimes, I want to walk backward with those who have passed into another realm, whom have faded into beauty as the Sufis say, and sing to them. I want those who call themselves Other to find me, and meld with me sometimes.

Easter Sunday

Happy Easter Sunday. I’ve been thinking a lot about companionship, and community, and how romance plays into that. This is my Chiron in Gemini in the 11^th house speaking. Many people have read my chart and told me that the best way for me to manifest a partner is to come into my own creatively, and establish myself in my community of peers. The rest will come from there. Or sometimes close relationships with teach me more about the best way that my community and career can manifest.

A lot of changes have happened in my life lately. Trevor moved to Florida. Listening to him describe his life down there is so enriching. Walking around barefoot on the grass, talking about hawks and geckos and tropical plants, building a relationship with nature for the first time, is so beautiful. Listening to him noticing a cute customer while he was at work, or becoming devastated at the realization that he has moved from one violent neighborhood to another…it’s all so moving and real. He has a real penchant for storytelling, in his own way. Trevor was telling me that he met a guy who was a coroner, who traveled to Miami to inspect some bodies, and upon arrival the coroner realized that they were the bodies of his cousin and his barber. I have a feeling that people share their pain with Trevor in these ways.

I just feel like people want to talk most about the thing that’s hurting them, or maybe the thing that brings them the most joy, and because the continuity between the personal and the professional, and the personal and the political, and the personal and the social, isn’t always there, people end talking about themselves a lot. But my pain is and always will be related to the pain of the mother, of earth, and all her creatures, and also all of the energies back home that guide us and give us life.

We, Blueprint-Makers

There is no blueprint for people like us, or there barely is. I feel so sensitive to the world that my fingers feel pain even typing these keys. Bright lights hurt me; certain fabrics leave lesions on my skin. Certain foods will leave me in pain for days. Resensitizing is a process that this noiseland tries to forget; but it can’t. The earth is made of sensitivity, and it always has been.

I want to be the goddess with a silent spine, a calm heart and a peaceful mind, with open hands and feet—antennae trained on the world. And I am her, sometimes. After sex with my lover I sometimes am. After a shower I sometimes am. During meditation, feet rubbing each other in a fetal memory, toes and fingers sliding along the texture of the sheepskin rug I call my bed, skin enjoying the sense of it—I am her then. But she curls back up again, out there in the street, where the noise dulls my ears and ads push my eyes away.

There are no blueprints for people like us, or there were, and they are almost all gone now. Blueprints grown in temples filled with priestesses “taking the war out of men,” or in the thatched-roofed homes of medicine women spending their lives in relationship with the natural world, learning her secrets. Blueprints in the form of gods with breasts and penises, or goddesses with beards, told to us by the most sacred hybrids in our infancy. Blueprints etched in the wrinkles of ancestors who never grew old, for they died of disease for loving each other, or they dared to reclaim the feminine in ways that threatened the oppression of the world. In those places, with those lovers, we would have been taken in early, to learn the ways of the gifts growing inside of us. Nurture would have replaced fear and forcefulness. We would have made more sense back then, with my path laid out for us, lined with roses. I would have made more sense back then.

Now our world stands on the brink of madness, as it has for hundreds of years, and I look back from the edge, at my “power-over”-driven brothers, sisters, and siblings, who are recovering a sense of autonomy in themselves, but slowly, oh-so-slowly, and I with them — and for what? It can seem so hopeless to strive for a relationship to power-from-within when we, the collective “we,” have seemingly forgotten all but our base humanity. There is so much to unlearn, to try to remember. We are the Forgotten Children, or perhaps The Forgetting Ones. And yet…

I see now, or I want to see now, a turn toward the Remembering Ones, and I know why I am here: to Remember. To Remember myself and to Remember our earthmother and our relationship to the natural world. To Remember that we are pieces of earth, given as gifts to ourselves, to nurture and protect, to tend and steward, as we might the land upon which we stand. We are mountains, all of us, and rivers. We are oceans. We know this, deep down, somewhere. Our hearts know this. Yet it is so easy to forget when the Square World, the Grayscape, would have us become images at the expense of our own humanity.

I read today that a dam was broken and salmon are coming back to the rivers, to spawn. I read today that an entire state in India is now certified organic, after twelve long years of committed and collective retraining and unlearning. I read today that we now have apps that identify plants for us, that people are tweeting about “nurturance culture” as the opposite of rape culture, that plants have developed strategies of forgetting in order to bounce back after times of drought. Hope surrounds us for the sensitive ones, for the ones who lost their blueprint in the Great Forgetting, who sing notes that are not sung back to them by the loving Foremothers who should have been there. Those notes are there, though. The earth sings them back to us. She sings back to us in the form of salmon swimming upstream, after 102 years of absence, to spawn. She sings back to us in the faces of children, nature-raised, who identify plants for unlearning adults. This world, this life, sings back to us every time a lover looks us in the eyes and says, “Thank you.”

I may not be the most refined writer, yet, but this is what I can give to the cause of permaculture, of rewilding, of reconnecting to the earth so that we may regenerate the land, each other, and ourselves for ages to come. I can give writing—my words. Verbal language is a transitional technology, barely 50,000 years old—written language an infant by comparison—and I hope to goddess one day that we won’t need it anymore. In the meantime, it is here, and I am here with it, and I will wrestle and dance with it until I can say to you what I really hear in my heart; what I can hear the earth say, which is:

“I hold you close to me because I never once turned my back on you; face me now, after your time away, with the knowledge that we are, and always have been, suspended together in an unknown place, miraculously in existence, for this one moment, and our togetherness depends on each other.”

Sleep now, siblings; release your fears and sadnesses into the earth, who will gladly take them from you. Goddess-willing we, the blueprint-makers, will greet each other in the morning.

Dowsing for Inspiration

Where can I get my inspiration from?

Going into a deep meditation, pulling up imagery, getting back into my bodily sensorily; relaxing; going to nature; sitting in the bases of trees; connecting to the nature in my apartment; asking for guidance; sinking my hands into the worm bin and the earth; singing until new energies are around and through me; painting and drawing, focusing on particular colors, holding them, meditating with them; moving around my apartment; caring for and cleaning up my apartment, circulating the energy; rubbing my feet on my sheepskin; stretching; spending time with sacred objects in people’s houses and museums, listening to the objects and talking to them, learning about their stories; likewise with trees and landforms too, but start simple, quiet, singular, and work my way outward (an object or a simple tree is a good place to start). Holding Trevor, talking to his soul and his body, finding the history there, the intimacy there; likewise with other people where that is available to me; earth mandalas; offerings to nature; communion with nature; ask PLL (Pure Love and Light) to safely connect me to whomever and whatever I can be connected to at this time.

The Bioremediation Center for Soil and Soul

I’ve been sick all weekend. I feel kind of empty, either because I’ve been sick or because the beginnings of a play are coming to me:

The main character’s name is Diana.

Polyfaces

I met Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm this week. He was at a New York screening of Polyfaces. He emerged after the screening for a talkback. Joel’s body brimmed with joy; his cup runneth over with the energy of a man who spends time doing only what he loves to do, and he said as much. “True freedom,” Joel said, “Is doing only what you want to do in a day. And I’ve just about reach a point in my life where I’m doing that.” He smiled broadly with his whole body.

Rob and I met Joel after the screening. Our time together was brief (and rapturous!), so I followed up with an email that night:

“To Joel,

My name is Chloé, and I just met you with my friend Rob after the 9pm screening of Polyfaces in Manhattan. We were the two permaculturists (Rob spent some time telling you about his business growing mushrooms in basements). I wanted to say (because I missed my chance in-person) that it has been really inspiring seeing you in Food Inc and again in this film. Your work really touches me. I wanted to ask you how much you’ve felt that the food landscape and the Regrarian movement has changed and grown between those two films, though I suppose I will be left wondering!

I feel that you have a deep access to enjoyment that is so rarely found, and I feel that you have it because of the life you lead. My permaculture business is about helping urban clients to permaculture their whole lives–from sourcing food, to exercise, to community-building and garden-growing, etc–and meeting people like you who have such an interconnected, reciprocal lifeway with human beings and the earth, which brings them so much joy, is a big inspiration to me. Thank you for your work.

I hope to visit the farm sometime soon. Maybe I will apply to the internship someday!

Take care and much love,
Chloé Rossetti”

A mere eight hours later Joel wrote back:

“Hi Chloe–

Thank you for your kind words and gracious reach out.

I think what I call the integrity food tsunami is definitely growing.  On the other hand, so is the push back from the industrial food community (the Monsantos and Tysons).  The push back is not just emotional; it’s physical, with more regulations, squeamish insurance companies (afraid of compost and pasture), etc.

Meanwhile, the culture seems to be whining, being a victim, and engaging in more celebrity worship (Kardashians) than ever–more bread and circuses, if you will.  So overall, I’m extremely optimistic about what individuals can do within their sphere of influence and passion; I’m not optimistic about the direction of the culture.  

As a result, I tend to not engage in politics, but focus my energies on inspiring individuals to bloom where they’re planted, to leverage their passions and values, and build righteous things from the ground up.  The top is too vested in the system, too ignorant of integrity innovation, to make any real changes.  All the top can do is prop itself up.

So, carry on.  The mushroom idea is wonderful and I can’t imagine a better place to pull it off than in New York City.

Blessings and best regards,

Joel Salatin

Polyface Farm”

An Inflamed Earth of Humans and Octopi

In a meditation today I was reaching out to PLL, asking how I could patch all of the disparate impulses in my life together. I was developing a healing modality and a permaculture business; I was attending somatics classes; I had just started singing lessons with an amazing teacher; I was singing, going to yoga, cooking and writing every day; I was partnering with plants and communicating with them; I was continuing my healing sessions with Eva…Since I cracked open (like a dam bursting) a few years ago I’ve just let myself go where I want to go.

I was feeling torn so I called Eva. I lay down and she led me to the healing meadow, where Deanna wanted to go. We found out that Deanna (my soul) wanted to know how to connect all of her seemingly disparate talents together. She asked to go to the Healing Library that is sometimes there. PLL led her there, flanked by Eva, George, and a few others. Inside Deanna was guided to take what she needed. She ran through the halls for a while, and then picked up a few books and manuscripts; she hung from the banisters and monkeyed around; then she entered a hallway of music, and picked up and played every instrument she’s played in my lifetime, spiraling down the stairs as she played. At the bottom of the stairs she started doing frontflips and backflips, and then kung fu moves, and then yoga moves, and then booty-dancing moves. This went on for a while.

Then Deanna took she back to the healing meadow. She wanted to show me a puppet show; a lot of elaborate characters dancing in a Punch and Judy-style booth with red curtains. I zoomed in more and the puppets were all of my friends. It was a play about nature, set in a field somewhere. I was to write it, and somewhat orchestrate it, but collaboratively. I stepped into the play and it was sort of this immersive field environment, almost like a festival or a pagan dance. I then saw images of a Bread and Puppet performance that I’d seen in Glover, VT this summer, on their property; the audience was sitting on this hillock next to a field of trees, overlooking an expansive field, with a vast left-to-right orientation, like a huge stage. These enormous stork puppets were making their way from left to right, bowing every few steps; giant multi-person-puppeteered clouds migrated on the grass from right to left. A giant sun was carted diagonally from back right to front left, led by a three-year-old girl in a yellow costume with a sun-wand.

I told Eva I didn’t understand. She led me and Deanna to Pure Love and Light with her and George. PLL showed me a keyhole; there was some information that I needed to make sense of all of this. The key was floating around. I plucked it from the air, unlocked the door, and walked through. Suddenly I was being electrified from all sides, and I turned into a sort of hologram. I checked with PLL and I was completely safe as this was happening. Then PLL spoke to me, in images and sensations, in a single moment—I will attempt to paraphrase what I “heard” here:

You are concerned about making art from a limited perspective, from just one particular place. You are concerned that that might somehow limit you. But don’t you see? All of humanity is just one perspective to me; you are one point in an infinite expanse of my dreaming, of my imaginings; you perceive time moving so slowly on earth, but to me it’s a flash, a moment, a single point. All of time is to me. You know that time doesn’t exist up here. And yet, in this infinitely slow motion evolution of a single moment, look at how much art humans have made! From every single perspective, at any moment, from this one polyfaced human perspective, a world of art has been made. Know in your heart that all any of us ever can do is create from where we are. That is what I am doing with all of you. You are my creations and I love you; creating is your destiny.

The electricity went through me for a while. I was a mere outline of myself. It was so clear how much of a dream I was to Source consciousness. I felt the infinite of it, and also the intent of it, the purpose of me being in this form at this time, experiencing these limitations of physical embodiment on this beloved, troubled earth. The impetus to create from this moment, from this place, had never been so clear.

I saw these…what were they…pockets?…opening up in my DNA. (Were those rivers and branches my DNA?) It was almost as if my DNA were being…unpacked. Like space was being made for more and more information. My capacity was being…increased. PLL was giving me the capacity to understand more of my capabilities, to wean me off the veil of illusory human-time, and more into PLL time, so that I could actually be more present in human time with such an intense attachment to it. All worldly issues felt so far from this place. I was a hologram of learning.

***

Life on earth has become toxic enough to disconnect people from their source, both from the earth and from Pure Love and Light. This is the rather obvious state of affairs and yet how insane does that sound? That human beings, a species that has been co-evolving with the earth for 150,000 years, but really two million years, but really 380 million years, but really four and a half billion years…could be disconnected from that experience in a period of 12,000 years or less?

During a meditation Eva told me that the earth is becoming inflamed from both the toxicity and toxified people. She will attack those things, like a body attacking itself when it doesn’t recognize itself. This made total sense to me. I thought so much of the amount of times that I had heard, The world is out to get me. That was, in a sense, true. I had felt that way so much when I was younger. It was only recently that I had felt the opposite; this intense wave of support from planet earth, in big and small ways. If I misplaced my metro card in my room it would turn up in my pocket. If I needed a cab one would pull up in front of me. My subway timing was excellent. I would have positive interactions with people in the street. Amazing human beings would lend their support or reach out for help in the most mutually supportive of ways. Anything I needed to support my health would make itself visible to me.

People sometimes talk about synchronicities as if they are internally generated as a result of positive thinking; I think that’s true. But I think it’s also deeply biological, and related to toxicity and connection with the earth; when the earth recognizes you as part of herself, the metaorganism that is her, you have access to all of her resources and support as if they are a part of your own flesh and blood, because they are. The communication lines are back up. Everything and everyone is working together again. The “internal positivity” is the essence of earth consciousness connecting to the essence of human consciousness, nestled within PLL consciousness. As I always say, this is our Eden.

***

During the BMC workshop I took about the organs with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the groupmind turned to talk of octopi. I love octopi and could talk about them forever.

One woman talked about octopi squeezing through one-inch cracks in an aquarium to eat fish in another aquarium. Another woman talked about interacting with an octopus in an aquarium where she used to do some work, and how it would wrap its legs around her arm. Yet another talked about how the “brain” of the octopus was actually in its limbs, because what it can do is deemed too sophisticated for its “tiny” brain. This made perfect sense to me; most of our intelligence is in our distal body, I’ve always felt. The brain is always the last to know. I wanted to add, then, something that I’d read in Vilém Fluser’s text about the vampyroteuthens: when these octopi, whose habitat is at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, are brought to the surface, the stress of a new environment is so much for them that they commit suicide by biting off their own arms. How deeply equivalent to us shooting ourselves in the brain or face, I thought. Their limbs are their brain; it’s so clear to me.

Bonnie contributed the following, paraphrased:

“I was at the aquarium in San Francsico and there was a large octopus in a small tank. We looked at each other…and I had to look away. It was too deep for me. It was too much. So wise…so ancient…so much knowing…I thanked him, and then I left.”

“I remember hitting the water but it was so slow…”

I was chatting recently with doula couple—one birth doula, one abortion doula—about how acquiring a sense of “doulaness” allows us to shepherd other beings across all sorts of transitions. I had completed my death doula training the year before, but I hadn’t put it in action yet. The training was very mystical and humbling. A room full of sixteen people talking very actively and presently about death is in itself arresting in its rarity; add to that fact that all bar two of us had experienced firsthand the death of one of more loved ones, and the communion becomes very sweet indeed. At the time of the conversation with the couple I was on a break from the program because I had received word, through my own healing work, that I wasn’t really ready to provide that service at this time. Did this make me a “lapsed doula”? Was that even possible? I was discussing this with the other doulas and we sort of came to the conclusion that it wasn’t possible; it was my edge-dwelling tendencies that both made me such a good ferryman for others and brought me to the program in the first place. Once a person knows how to provide support as others travel from one energetic state to another, that never really goes away, I think.

My healing work makes me very attuned to something that Matt Kahn, one of the spiritual populists of our time, refers to as “ascension”—that mode when somebody starts to transition from a “setting sun” (to borrow a Shambhala term), scarcity, nihilistic, taking, destructive lifeway to a “rising sun,” regenerative, giving, “walk-in-beauty” lifeway. This ability leads me to the others and leads them to me. So it is for all others who live for the rising sun; they are like a ship headed to shore that, upon arrival, becomes a lighthouse for others to follow. I’ve yet to meet a rising-sun person who is not also a sign pointing home.

Ascension, to me, is roughly equivalent to rewilding—the industrial myth, whether consciously or unconsciously, starts to fall from a person’s eyes, and they long to commune with the earth on which they stand. All forms of ascension that I have seen have some element of that, and that is the element I hone in on to support those transitions when I see them. I suppose that makes me a “rewilding doula,” among other things, though the same medicine also works in reverse; I have learned, over the years, to spot a wild person who is struggling to adapt to “civ-life,” to the dismay of their family and friends, who at a loss as to why their friend will disappear for long periods at a time, or sit in communion with plants in nature, or live in places deemed “uninhabitable” by most, or have one or more really acute senses, or push their body to some sort of limit, if they are not already completely overwhelmed by the toxic chaos of contemporary life.

My friend Rob is a wild person attempting to adapt to civ-life; my friend Corley is an industrial nature at the foothills of an ascension-awakening about his place in nature. They could not be more different.

Rob is one of my soulmates in this life. I use that term without romanticism; it is a term that was revealed to me, with which I have a very pragmatic relationship; I would say that a soulmate is somebody who inspires you to grow, and vice versa, for your entire life and beyond. That inspiration is at times beautiful and at other times heartbreaking.

Recently, I was hanging out with Rob in the kitchen of his current living situation, a loft in Bushwick that was in peril of being sold by a landlord with gentrification money to make. Every surface was painted white, and filled with precious objects. The other residents were cherished friends of ours, though also folks who were certainly, and admittedly, not living the lifeway that Rob has been cultivating his entire life. There was a party going on in the other room; a bunch of artists, mostly Cooper Union graduates, were drinking, smoking, and talking about their various projects, and exhibitions and film they had seen, books they had read. One of Rob’s roommates, Ana Cecilia, and I had just made a big paleo meal and fed most of the attendees; the dishes had been piled haphazardly in the sink and the rest of the food left out on the kitchen counter.

I was talking to Rob, as he sat on a stool and faced me, about how I felt unable to contribute to the culture going on in the living room. Rob concurred, saying that he was not even sure how a person like me, who stands for the things that I do, could even have anything to contribute in that space. I tell him that I’ve spent a lifetime learn how to chameleon myself to any given situation; more specifically, I am a wild person born of babylon, who has learned how to cope in a civilization that I feel has no room for me at all.

Rob looks me in the eye and recites back to me an image that I had given him, around six months ago, as a coping mechanism for him, as he learned how to navigate the social contracts of a city that made no sense to him at all:

“I feel like I’m in drag here.”

Six months ago, Rob was deciding whether to just sleep outside or sublet a place for a month in July. I told him that it wasn’t about survival, in civ, it was about social norms and constructs. Perhaps it might behoove him to think of civilization as a sort of drag.

I looked into his eyes. Rob looked like an animal in human disguise. Except that we all are that. But Rob let me know it. He was sitting on a stool in a kitchen in a loft in Bushwick and he looked like he was sitting by a fire in a campsite in a forest in Oregon. He looked naked when he was clothed and outside when he was inside. Those were qualities that we were both cultivating; I had a more inside/outside quality and he was a natural at naked/clothed. We washed the dishes together.

***

Earlier that day my friend Victoria, one of the party attendees and a dear friend in this particular group of humans, texted me a dream she had had:

I had a dream last night I was in an airplane only it was an open airplane and the runway was positioned over the ocean and the sun was setting and I wondered if the plane was going to go down and the plane did go down, and I was falling in this machine

What does it mean?

I remember hitting the water but it was so slow

I projected this onto V’s dream, via text:

I would interpret thusly: industrial people will fall when industry falls. If you wed yourself too much to this industrial complex as-it-is you will be helpless as it collapses. There is no ground beneath the industrial person and no protection overhead; they are exposed and threatened by collapse at all times. The only protection is a petrochemically-powered metal shell, discomforting and dependent on a system that destroys nature. The only way to save yourself is to birth a new culture in the shell of the old; prepare for the secession or go down with the airship. Or get off the plane by the way things are there is no “off the plane” anymore. Nobody lives upstream anymore.

On a more personal level this could mean your relationship to your own body; if you pump it full of synthetic chemicals and cigarettes you are polluting your own corporeal resources, your only earth. Replenish and regenerate or perish.

P.S. The flavor of every movie made by this culture as-it-is is the flavor of your dream. This civilization is obsessed with its own demise which is forever imminent. It’s sort of like a Godard film or something.

X

V wrote back to me:

I love you 

Can we dance soon?

The plane spiraled. I want out but I want into the water

I responded:

The spiral/fractal is the shape of how all things grow on earth, our own bodies included. A spiral is also what happens when we “spiral out”—when we lose our connection to source and go into a feedback loop of negative reinforcement. It could very much have been your body processing out whatever chemicals you’ve ingested lately.

The ocean is the birthplace of all life on earth. We remember the primordial mother, both from in utero and genetic memory. And now industry is threatening her destruction. We long to be annihilated back into source consciousness but we have much more work to do here first. This is our Eden we just have to remember

The next day, Rob, his lover Casey ,and I went to the Underscore. To explain via stolen text from Nancy Stark Smith’s website:

The Underscore is a long-form dance improvisation structure developed by Nancy Stark Smith. It has been evolving since 1990 and is practiced all over the globe.

The Underscore is a vehicle for incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational dance practice; for developing greater ease dancing in spherical space—alone and with others; and for integrating kinesthetic and compositional concerns while improvising. It allows for a full spectrum of energetic and physical expressions, embodying a range of forms and changing states. Its practice is familiar yet unpredictable.

The practice—usually 3 to 4 hours in length—progresses through a broad range of dynamic states, including long periods of very small, private, and quiet internal activity and other times of higher energy and interactive dancing.      

There are 20+ phases of the score—each with a name and a graphic symbol—which create a general map for the dancers. Within that frame, dancers are free to create their own movements, dynamics, and relationships—with themselves, each other, the group, the music, and the environment. Each Underscore is unique, providing rich and often inspiring experiences of the human and artistic phenomena of dance improvisation.

There was one hieroglyph in particular, Bonding With the Earth, that forever resonates with me. It depicts, symbolically, a person’s kinosphere coming into the contact with the earth, and giving and receiving feedback to and from it.I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen a person somatically bond with the earth, before; it’s a beautiful thing, like a seed sprouting beneath the earth, or a baby reuniting with its mother. I have taken that symbol to representing my modality and wellness metaorganism. I loved seeing it again.

About halfway through the Underscore ,y body backed up again Casey’s, and we began a slow, small dance—the first time we had ever danced together—and I was inundated with kinesthetic information. Casey had been dancing without a break since she was two years old; she was a professional dancer now, in Doug Verrone’s company, and a pilates instructor and dance teacher. Her body was so organized that I could barely think; I felt my own body becoming more organized just from light contact with her.

That highly organized contact reminded me of a quote from a video I saw featuring Emilie Conrad, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen and Judith Aston—the quote was from Emilie:

“Another way of looking at certain things is the issue of cancer cells. From a movement point of view, the cancer cell is completely incoherent. If you looked at people going down the street, if they were cancer cells they’d be walking on top of each other. There’s no spatial relationship. There’s no anything, with a cancer cell. It’s all over the place. But, what is very interesting is—okay, get this—with a highly coherent system, guess what? The cancer cell can become coherent. So let’s just say, if there was a group of people who had a highly coherent field, and you had a couple of people who had cancer, the opportunity for the cancer cell to receive that level of coherency is extremely high. So we’re talking about a kind of community medicine…”

I felt that, in this Underscore in particular; that this was a kind of healing meadow; later on the majority of us would be patchworked on the floor, heads in laps, some people dancing more vertically like peaks jutting up from a fertile earth; we would be singing, toning, interchanging language and sensation; for sure this was the most organized my body has ever felt. A corporeal healing meadow.

For the moment, however, Casey and I were back to back, and then rolling atop one another; Rob caught one of Casey’s feet and pulled her to him; she held onto me and I came along for the ride. I ended up in Rob’s lap, looking up at him. Rob had avoided dancing with me for a long time because he had felt that it was too charged, but lately we had been a little more open; I closed my eyes. Rob picked up my braid and placed it over my eyes. I moved my head and it fell down. He placed it again and held it there. Then he slowly, slowly, pulled my braid from side to side and my head moved from side to side. We did that for a while, the movements getting slower and slower, until we stopped. My braid fell away again and I looked up into his eyes. There was no language there. Rob’s eyes were glinting like some animal in the dark, watching, sniffing, all hair and reflexes.

Rob’s eyes reminded me of the eyes of Fern, a pet wolf hybrid I knew. Fern’s owner told me that if anyone fed her raw meat she would turn completely wild and run away. Whatever bridge of obedience that had been built would be lost. She would be reminded of her wildness again.

It was so clear, then, that Rob’s neurodivergence was not the source of his isolation, though it certainly compounded it; it was his wildness. This was for sure the wildest person I had ever seen.

A few days later I watched Casey’s dance reel on Youtube. I felt really sad watching it, and filled with love. I had been so out of my body my whole life, and here was a person, a body, who had been dancing her whole life. What a bittersweet transmission to receive.

 

Hoopwalking, Rewilding, and a Body-Scan for the Forest

 

There is this thing called Zone 4 Permaculture, or Rewilding Permaculture, and it involves developing a relationship with a zone in nature that is not meant entirely for humans and their basic needs; a place where humans ought to share this territory, nonhierarchically, with the other creatures who dwell there. Think of a forest, or a desert, or a coral reef. Ben Weiss and Wilson Alvarez, two well-respected permaculturists based in Lancaster, PA, have developed an entire system of working in zone 4 environments to tend to the wilderness and obtain a yield. Imagine that you lived in a home that backed onto 50 acres of forest that you and your dozen or so co-inhabitants took turns spending eight hours a day walking through and observing, noting which plants should be added and which should be removed, and what can be harvesting and what needs to be planted back, in order to ensure the greatest health of the ecosystem while generating a yield for yourself. Like a body-scan for the forest. The harvested products could then be transformed into useful objects, foods and medicine that could nourish the entire household and be sold at market for money or exchanged for needed items. Or perhaps they are circulated through a bioregional network via gift economy. It is so easy to imagine this and yet there are so few examples of this that exist on this earth at this time. Why?

Well, if we decolonized ourselves enough to even get to this idea, let alone set about bringing it to fruition, we would still then be faced with all of the industrial programming in the world. Those who are born in Babylon are children of the industrial complex until they return to nature. Borne from a death-obsessed taking-machine we carry within us the seeds of our own failure, shame, demise—all of those things that don’t really exist—until we can turn to face the rising sun again.

Finisia Medrano and Seda Joseph Saine—two hoopwalkers who have kept each other company for thousands of cumulative miles in The Great Basin, “planting back” on private property and Bureau of Land Management land, and in National Parks—have watched the dissolving of Babylonian thinking from their hoopwalking cohorts’ minds in real time. Confronted with a wild nature that one starts to hear talking back, in the middle of nowhere with scant resources and minimal shelter, in the company of fellow vagrants who started decolonizing themselves long ago—that is when the magnitude of our inverted relationship with the earth is probably felt. Breakdowns ensue. For this phenomenon, Finisia has coined the term ethnotrauma. Since almost all the hoopwalkers seem to have some significant measure of white ancestry, and Finisia is herself white, this “ethnotraum” that Finisia supposes is an ethnotrauma of whiteness. Though I have never heard her read or define it, I would then say that “ethnotrauma,” by Finisia’s definition, is something like the realization of the magnitude of oppressions that one’s own race has committed, and continues to commit, unto others, both human and nonhuman, in order to maintain a lifeway that can only exist because of slavery.

One of symptoms of ethnotrauma, according to Finisia, is “double-talk,” where you say one thing and do another, and self-sabotage while on the hoop. How painful to know that the option to “walk in beauty,” as Finisia says, is both readily available and at threat of extinction because of a lifeway that is inherently destructive and lifetaking?

I had a Facebook discussion with Finisia recently, after she shot down a photo of my permaculture classmates and I graduating with our PDCs, commenting “…It’s all slave planting and permafarm,” the last of last-ditch efforts to stay in this lifeway even though we know we are all doomed. Finisia pointed out, also, that this doomsday mindset has been around for as long as this organization has been around, and I don’t disagree with her. I tried to explain that I felt like permaculture was a bridge between the old way and the new way, birthing a new culture in the husk of the old, a bridge that could touch the hoopwalkers from the jaws of Babylon, and she said that unless the bridge actually reached the other side, the walk-in-beauty side, then it was just an import dock for the empire. This thought was like lightning down my spine.

I abhorred the idea that all of this work I had done to understand our systems as they are might just effectively turn me into a smarter neoliberal, burning through fossil fuels as I blogged on about how our time on earth could be if we just changed our lifeway, etc. It was then I realized that no matter how approachable my modality might be, it also needed to have its feet in a lifeway that eclipsed it altogether. That if a walk-in-beauty lifeway was available, my modality would cease to become useful and would annihilate itself. For that I would need to spend time in the wild with wild humans beings.

***

Recently, I found myself holding my lover, Trevor. I’m asking if he would like to do an exercise with me: I breathe in, and then I breathe out, and with that exhale I send a color to Trevor, into his body, and he has to guess what color it is. We try it. He immediately guesses “Green,” correctly, and without hesitation. Trevor is shocked that he got it right. I’m not at all because I can feel how deep his intuition goes. I also associate Trevor with the color green, and I wonder if that helped at all. One time I saw him in a meditation and his soul was a beautiful emerald green, and it was intertwined with a terrible sludgy-colored thing. Those, I’m sure, were his restrictions, the toxins in his body, and whatever wayward energies hang out in his field as well. To drink alcohol in spaces that are already vortexes is a terrible thing. It scared my soul a little bit—a lot—to see that sludge. But I wasn’t ready to let Trevor go yet. Not at all.

Human Suprematism, Or, The Way We Came

Recently, I found myself listening to a Derrick Jensen interview, where he touched very eloquently on the insanity that a city ruled by human suprematism can generate. I looked up from my computer screen to jot that phrase down: human suprematism. I said it to myself—“Human suprematism…”—as I looked out my window, on the 19^th floor of a building on 29^th and 7^th, gazing, sky-god-like, at a smattering of heavy-coated humans holding umbrellas and cigarettes. I contemplated the aloneness of being shouted at by only human perspectives from all sides. I imagined this modernist metropolis covered in vines. The only vegetation to be seen from my office chair, however, was on the window sill: a lone Christmas cactus, the only plant-based life form, cut flowers notwithstanding, on my entire side of the office.

I was sitting in the advertising section of the Artforum offices, working away at a mammoth project of digitizing their archives for public access. My third year into the job had left me well beyond with the days when the snippiness of a late-90s Bruce Hainley or an early-2000s Wayne Koestenbaum would fill me up, as fun as those writers could be. At this moment I was scratching the surface of a 1500-episode-deep treasure trove known as The Permaculture Podcast. The creator of this little digital gem was a patiently inquisitive soul by the name of Scott Mann. Scott was like a divining rod, slowly and evenly moving over endless terrain in the search for that which nourishes life. I owe much of my ecological awakening to those archives, tucked away at my desk, cleaning up images from two decades earlier, and uploading articles about bygone exhibitions, or the denizens of a long-dead East Village, or the blazered gallerists of a burgeoning Chelsea. I would listen as Scott carefully and judicially witnessed and supported interviewees on subjects ranging from restorative justice, faith and earth care, urban planning and homesteading with equal aplomb. I could scarcely recall a moment where I had ever felt that Scott was not giving his interviewee his full and deep attention. And when he had nothing to add, or would notice that his interviewee had been struck by an impassioned tongue, he would let them talk uninterrupted, for more than forty-five minutes at times.

Such was the case with Derrick Jensen, a storied radical environmentalist and writer, with a mind like a fractal, spiraling outward while folding in on itself. He had a disheveled appearance in the photo accompanying the interview; a mop of dark curls spilling over the edge of a lined face with a bitter, loving gaze. This interview with Scott centered heavily on the relationship between social and ecological violence. Jensen had this way of talking that generates a flurry of images in the eye. My mind felt that delicious permission to wonder. This building doesn’t recycle—ecological violence—but even if they did that recycling would just be shipped to the two-thirds world on petrochemical barges—ecological violence—to be sorted by underpaid employees—social violence—in unsafe work conditions—social violence, ecological violence…

…something that Derrick was saying snapped me back to his voice: “When you’re in a city especially, all of your perceptions are either created by or mediated by one source: by other humans. That creates this incredible—not only loneliness but also insanity. It’s a sensory deprivation tank, because you are only getting echoes of your own voice, as opposed to the voice of the meadowlarks, the voice of the wrentits, the voice of the grasshoppers, the voice of the wind…and you come to believe that only human things matter, which is how you can end up with lots of people caring about the stock market, as opposed to, y’know, there are scientists who are saying the oceans could be devoid of fish within 35 years, and this is not front page news. You come to believe that only the human matters, because it’s only the human you ever see, and there’s this huge hole that’s created by that, that then leads to these further violations, and further violations, and further violations.”

I felt that, viscerally—that feeling of drowning in the human perspective. That feeling pushed me back into myself, deeper…That’s not even just a social and ecological violence, that’s an aesthetic violence too, to strip the soil of the cacophony of forms that give beauty and vitality and gentleness to this earth…and I was gone.

Where was I? Some time in elementary school, in Perth, Australia, putting on my school uniform for the first time. According to the uniform shop, it was a white “aboriginal print dress” with navy trim and tie, with Clark shoes, knee-high white socks, navy blue blazer, and “boater’s hat.” I looked and felt strange, hair tied back with navy blue hair ties and scrunchies—as it was longer than shoulder length—my aboriginal print dress sitting awkwardly on my pudgy frame. At uniform checks we would be lined up and inspected to make sure that we only had, if ears were pierced, only one set of studs or sleepers, with no stones, gold or silver only, place symmetrically in each ear. No bracelets, no rings…only a necklace on a simple sterling silver chain was allowed, featuring either the cross or the Star of David. Our socks had to be exactly knee-high, and our dress had to be longer than our knees, otherwise our parents had to buy us another one. We’d slip on our blazers and march two-by-two, Madeleine-style, to the on-campus chapel twice a week.

Coming home, my family and I would eat dinner in front of television; the vegetables often defrosted, the meat often generic, the sauces often sugary, the taste often the same. Our au pair would make dinner; usually some early-20s northern Euporean cis-female throwing dinner together with dreams of going to the bar with her friends when the shift was over. I felt scared to pick up a knife in the kitchen, or handle the kettle. Turning up my nose at broccoli, my parents had to regulate my consumption of box-made muffins and cupcakes, because I was overweight with a high heart rate and an irregular mood. Mostly I was just eating my feelings, a temporary escape from the sadness pouring out at me, source-unidentified and multivalent, but at least partially attributable to relentless bullying at this private all-girls’ school of would-be Madelines, so well-adjusted to a world of slouching and fat-shaming, marching in pairs from the classroom to the chapel, lined up for uniform checks, dresses measured relative to knee, excess earrings and necklaces removed, remaining earrings placed symmetrically in each ear.

Our front lawn had a jacaranda tree that I loved, that pushed out purple flowers once a year, and dropped them all over the lawn. There was also a tall eucalyptus that shot into the sky forever. The lawn was always short, mowed regularly by our father. In my mind I remember him wanting to take down the jacaranda tree because of the flowers on the lawn.

When all’s said and done, what could be more aesthetically, socially and ecologically violent than a perfectly manicured lawn?

As with so many other middle class white girls in suburbia, I became some sort of mentally ill. My symptoms ranged from mild to severe, depending on the day. I cried daily; I screamed daily. When ten years passed and my irregular, sharp-and-rough mood hadn’t improved, and my anger had deepened into my bones, and my crying was loud and daily, my mum took me to see a smattering of what she dubbed the “suburban witches.” All magic aside, his would be the first in a series of nudges that would eventually save my life.

For the purposes of this story I want to focus on one “suburban witch” in particular: Katrina Yull. Bless her soul. I was seventeen years old.

[Katrina Yull]

***

Thinking of myself as a six-year-old reminds me of another six-year-old I met recently, Juniper. She gives me a deep and profound sense of hope for what loving parents, ecological richness, adequate nutrition, somatic safety, and open-minded schooling can do.

Juniper is the daughter of Andrew Faust, predominantly a father, permaculture practitioner and teacher, and Adriana Magaña, predominantly a mother and herbalist. She lives with her parents at the Center for Bioregional Living, in Ellenville, New York—a permaculture homestead on fifteen acres, with permaculture projects riddled throughout the house and grounds. Juniper attends a Waldorf pre-primary school. Adriana feeds her a bioregional diet, partially from their own land, that is inspired by the GAPS diet and the Weston A. Price Foundation. Juniper’s level of participation in property affairs is high: she often helps in the kitchen, of both her home and school, and regularly accompanies her parents out onto their land to forage, explore, and work on various projects together, sometimes even with power tools. Juniper almost never watches television, and is very comfortable around kitchen knives and peelers. Nature is a friend to her; she knows the best climbing spots and apple trees for miles around. This child is no stranger to the soil.

This multitude of support gives this little being a level of self-possession that I rarely encounter in most adults. June knows how to fill her days in many different environments and in many different ways. A boisterous level of creativity is very alive in her. She is constantly asking questions, and demanding better answers. Most of all, June knows what she likes and what she doesn’t like; already a huge accomplishment that most humans may not attain in their lifetimes, Juniper has the rare distinction of knowingly liking things that are good for mother earth, and disliking the things that are not. I am humbled in her presence. June gives me hope for myself, in a way. In the words of Amy Matthews, after I more or less integrated my midline—which usually happens at three months old—for the first time as a 27-year-old after watching babies roam around for an hour in her infant development class: “You can’t get it back, but you can get it now.”