Healing Us Both

By choice I have returned to a place I swore up and down I would never return to. By choice I decided to live on land that has endured so much grief and pain. Two generations of my lineage have lived here, including myself. This land has seen upheaval, poisoning, deforestation, senseless feuds, and abuse. She has been cut down, molded, and reformed. Her waters run red with clay as if she is eternally bleeding. Trees have grown to contort around cold metal structures. Her soils stripped of nutrients. Amphibious life can only temporarily exist before being choked out by excessive iron deposits. Fungus is limited; community severed. Yet she has lived on. She seems to thrive but has only merely survived.

I have learned to slow down by being in relationship with her. The more I sit with her the more I understand my own grief. The more I understand my own severance from authentic care and support. She has a unique voice and at times I find myself becoming her mouthpiece. I can now see deeply how the pain and poisons of this land seeped into the people who existed on her. How generations went on learning how to mute her rather than hear her heartbeat. Her pain did not start with my family. Before she supported us she supported corporate greed. Her layers were ripped into. Her heart poked and prodded. Her rich nutrients were stolen to line the pockets of empty men and she was left stripped and disheveled. This is how it started. When my father’s lineage bought her (it’s ridiculous that we think we can buy her) she was tended to. Her fields were replenished and introduced new plant life. My father’s family slowly met her basic needs but her poisons still remained. The memory of her grief resided. She was angry. And she still wasn’t being fully heard. Her anger extended into the emotional and mental field of those who consumed from her soil. Her humans took on her pain. And her humans already came with their own pain. They rarely felt hands with the intention of care. Rather they felt hands of trauma. Of anger. Of grief. But grief was not spoken of. Grief had no vocabulary. Grief became depression masked by achievement. Achievement was validated. Greif became social anxiety masked by a deep need for external approval. Approval was achievable when love was absent. And in some cases greif became suicide because there was no space for love.

The land had come to realize she had only swapped one form of abuse for another. It was not an improvement, just a shift in category. She was defeated. She had no tools or weapons to liberate her. She felt isolated from the rest of Mother Earth. Nobody heard her cries. Nobody was coming to help her. She succumbed to the cycle. Until one day a human was born. A human who spoke her language. A human who radically decided that what they were taught was horseshit. This human tuned out a culture that severs what supports and sustains. This human offered her compassion and companionship. She was heard and seen and shown real care.

Finally she was breathing again.

But this human was only one small being. They could not hold the walls up for long all alone. This human had to leave. Eventually this human lost their breath and all they could do to survive was to escape. This human left a piece of themselves deep under her surface though. Asking her to hold it for safe keep; a promise of return.

Time moves different for her. New humans came. There was no more upheaval; the time moved by more peacefully but still there was a loneliness. There was a deep disconnection. The echoes of severance still rustled through the leaves of her forest.

And then many years later HER human returned. She realized all of this time she had been holding her breath. It had not effortlessly filled her lungs for over a decade. Her human came back for her. And together they sewed back on the missing piece. They sowed her soils with seeds of joy and compassion. The waters became clearer. The air became lighter.

And together they healed.