“Humanity must shift from living ‘on’ the Earth to living with her.”
— Tiokasin Ghosthorse
This week I had the precious opportunity to learn from Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse who spoke of living from our heartset not our mindset, of recovering the indigeneity within all of us, of putting all other beings first, of appreciation as the highest form of intelligence. (I look forward to passing forward more of his guidance in future posts.) His wisdom was the piercing truth of Earthspeak, channeling the Earth's wisdom through the integrity and clarity of his spirit and his culture that has loved this Earth longest, no matter how ferociously destructive the forces of decolonization and dispossession.
There is no superior technology than the Earth. The answers we seek are beneath and around and with us always, all ways, as Ghosthorse guides. The antidote to every wound humanity faces will always be Earth. It will always be coming fully home, fully present, to the fire in our bellies and the fire in her forests that unite us as one. Earth is not lost to those who know how to love. Love of Earth will bring us back to ourselves, back to one another, back to sacred source.
In reverence for our beloved shared mother, I share a poem that I have been refining over the last few months (some of you have seen).
With full heart,
Rachel
"The garden grows you. Respect that."
— Tiokasin Ghosthorse
[photos in this piece by me <3]
This is not a metaphor. This body is Earth body. The chainsaws of "never enough" slash through flourishing forests once abundant, now flattened. The bulldozers of "always too much" plow into thriving soils once fertile, now barren. The cement of grind culture pours over meandering trailways once adaptive, now constrained. The dams of exploitation brace against rushing rivers once potent, now strangled. This is not a metaphor. This body is Earth body. This human body, mutated into capitalist machine, converted into commodity, adorned into uniformity, reduced into productivity, rationalized into conformity, is a site of deep trauma. This body is Earth body. This human body's internalized destruction is the tyranny of resource deprivation, is the tragedy of manufactured scarcity, is the injustice of inescapable survival mode, is the violence of separation and fragmentation. As destructive storms and endless wars rage on, it is the soil that guides our highest actions, it is the heart that holds primordial truths, it is our own wild, complex, primal body ecology that mirrors our Earth's wild, complex, feral body ecology. As internal storms rise and cleanse, as volcanic eruptions form new lands, as dormancy gathers energy for emerging potency, as full bloom brightness bursts forth, our bodies and Earth body are geologic possibilities, biological novelties, and cosmic synchronicities. This body is Earth body. This human body is more virus, bacteria, fungus, mineral, water, than it is whatever we call "human". We are a cosmology of beings infinitely alchemizing with us, us and them and everything always becoming. This is not a metaphor. This body is Earth body. Active presence prevents dispossession. Attention prohibits desecration. Awareness promotes decolonization. This body. Earth body. Sentient, edible, animal, microbial. Consciousness incarnated into form. Conduit of creation, sacred miracle. Home. Body. Earth body, our body mends and heals, repairs and recovers, responds and receives, composts and sheds, blooms and provides. Earth body is our body. Earth births us into freedom. We are blooming in Earth's garden. I trust Earth body. I surrender Earth body. I only want to get closer to you.
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Earth body, our body