Good morning, y'all. How are you feeling? As the human world overwhelms us, this piece intends to be a soother. To find my footing, I keep gesturing toward a continual trust in the (re)generative source of strength within and around us. I see so much fertile ground for building anew in this chaos, which is what this post is about.
~ ~
As a brief note before diving in, I've received feedback that these posts are like “a nutrient dense meal”, like “kale and more kale”, like “eating lamb for dinner every night”. I’m grateful to hear it because on one hand it’s affirming, and on another, it’s constructive critique. I know not everyone feels this way, but enough of you do, and I’ve sensed it too. Here are my takeaways: 1) food really is the great unifier and I think it’s the path to world peace; 2) these posts could be more digestible and balanced; 3) I’d like to sometimes write more like french fries; 4) there’s something delicious for y'all at the end 😉. Thank you to those who shared this with me. I’m integrating it actively (…clearly not quite yet but trying!!…😅) Please don't hesitate to holler in the spirit of growth!
Ok onward..
Grounding into presence
I feel fortunate that one of my most steadfast companions these days is this lemon tree living in the garden outside the cottage I'm renting. There is something unique about her, a sight to behold. When guests come over she captivates their attention. Everyone who’s had the opportunity to taste her fruit reflects a reverberating echo of praise.
I have known her for a full year now, and I’ve learned in parallel on the farm that accompanying the land and its beings in your particular geography for a whole cycle of seasons is an essential part of intimate stewardship. How are you in the summer / fall / winter / spring? Each being’s unique rhythms, needs, and yearnings change seasonally, annually. They reveal this to you through commitment and presence.
The more I observe my lemon tree companion, the more I seek to be her. I want to lay out flowers to greet loving visitors. I want to be a host of interspecies solidarity. I want to be in the sovereignty of my timelines – budding, blooming, fruiting, and resting in different places in myself all at once. I want to live in reciprocity with the sun and the soil.
I want to take the time it takes. I want hundreds of days to transform flowers into fruits, knowing not all of them will ripen to full form, knowing that some will peak into divine exquisiteness, knowing that each will be precious to the wholeness of me no matter what. I want to be perfectly imperfect. I want to exceed the confines of comparison and competition, to laugh in bewilderment at the confusing quality of those manufactured conundrums and make them irrelevant simply by existing. I want to alchemize death into life, and release life into death with effortless trust.
I say with great pleasure that the more I pursue this practice of becoming the lemon tree, the more I notice her qualities and embody them, the more I realize I already am her. The only task is to remember that in my human-bodied ways, this is also me. I ask this as an offering: aren't you this way too? It takes practice to shed all the layers, constructs, and conditionings that keep us from interdependence, interspeciesness, interbeingness1.
Practice as art as life
There is something exceedingly and increasingly important about the word “practice”. It has become a fixture in my life. I recently reflected in conversation with my beloved sister (hi Em!) that insights seem to be landing quickly these days, but... then what? How do we change? That’s where practice comes in: to re-place and re-pattern toward more life-affirming possibilities. Practice is how we express our humanity. Practice is how we retain choice-fulness, autonomy, and agency. Practice is a restorative concept. We live in arrogant times, fueled by internet avatars and progress narratives riddled with projections of perfection and fool-proof certainty through powerfully curated performance. When I think of practice, I think of re-humanization, re-integration into the family of beings. I think of soul care, soul retrieval, learning, growth, and freedom.
Many brilliant minds have talked about these themes in beautiful ways:
“Education is the practice of freedom” said Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator, philosopher, and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire also advised us: “… to begin always anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not spoil, to refuse to bureaucratize the mind, to understand and to live life as a process—live to become."
... Freire’s quote opens bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress, who expanded on education as freedom by saying the work of educators “...is not merely to share information, but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students... that respects and cares for the souls... where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”
French philosopher Michel Foucault also spoke of “freedom as a practice, a kind of positive resistance... to participate in the self making, in the process of defining [one]self."2
...and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs has re-iterated these words in her well-known quote: “Freedom is not a secret, it's a practice.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore's conceptualization – “abolition is life in rehearsal, not a repetition of rules” – breathes so much life into the practice of more possible futures. Gilmore asks us to imagine violence-free realities through a future without prisons by living the truth that “life is precious.” (i.e. life has enough value that we no longer perpetuate a punitive, violent, life-annihilating way toward people who hurt people).3
Practicing the future we seek is practicing love, practicing every way we can honor the sentience, aliveness, spiritual growth, and soulfulness of all beings, practicing whatever we can to enable and affirm the fullness of life, for and with all beings everywhere.
Practicing the future we seek is manifesting in digital landscapes right now as well, through the work of a collective that has taken up the cause of re-imagining the internet itself. They’re calling it the Pluriverse and they’re helping us find our souls online again too.
A little context: as you may know, the internet is entering its third incarnation. As someone with absolutely no technical skills but enough proximity to these seismologies, I've felt deep angst watching from the sidelines as internet re-birthing continues to be hijacked by privatization and profiteering (i.e. NFTs, Zuckerberg's Metaverse...) , when we hope that waves of progress can offer more liberation, more collective autonomy, more Earth care, not less of all of those things. That's why I AM SO EXCITED THAT THE ZAPATISTAS ARE ON IT, y’all !!! (Well, their spirits are.)
“We gather here to affirm that meaningful alternatives are possible. ...We imagine the digital pluriverse as a space that can make way for a mosaic of communal, alternative, and autonomous cultural and economic worlds.” - Pluriverse.world
As someone whose ancestors kicked it with Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, two turn-of-the-century peasant revolutionaries fighting capitalist dictators, I feel the wisdom of long-held freedom dreams re-awakening, the divine rhythms pulsing in underground currents about to flow to the surface and fill our wells.
This also stirs in me that advancement is inevitable, and it is shaped by those who participate. It is essential to ensure more inclusive, equitable participation in future-shaping. If this feels overwhelming, confusing, or uninteresting I get it. I do encourage you to check out this site even just to read their framing (i.e. keep it simple, avoid the footnotes if it’s too much) which ripples out through so many different dimensions of life. They do a great job of helping us find ourselves in this moment.
Turning back to my lemon tree companion, she shows me how crucial soul retrieval is. She reminds me to get down low with the Earth to remember that. I feel a deep reverence for her spiritual resonance.
She teaches me that relationships are forged through the fire of difference. Kinship with fellow earth beings offers the ultimate cross-cultural complexities, the steepest of language barriers, the deepest of humblings. We exist in separate worlds. And we share the same world. To honor her dignity means to respect this plurality. Worlds within worlds. As the Zapatistas said, “a world where many worlds may fit”.
If life is a practiceground of possibility, what would we dream together? What are some of your small and big practices that help you move toward life-affirming ways of being? I would love to hear your ideas and reflections in the comments.
Ok as promised, here is the dessert after all this kale (I wish I could bake it for you. Maybe one day!) ((Also if you hit the NYT paywall, please reply to this email and I’ll send you the recipe. Trust me, it’s worth it.)
Big love to you all,
Rach
If you value what you find here and would like to support my work, consider leaving a heart/comment on this post below and/or sharing this with a loved one (both mean the world to me).
If you’re not a subscriber yet, join us! And if you feel spacious, please consider contributing for a monthly or annual membership if you haven’t already. 10% of all contributions go to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. I’ll share the total donation amount for each year on the Winter Solstice. THANK YOU AND LOVE YOU!
The gorgeous concept introduced by Thich Nhat Hanh to describe that we are each a superorganism within a superorganism, "the whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis." https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/insight-of-interbeing/
Source: Freedom in Postmodernity: A Foucauldian Understanding + more: “Care of the self constitutes a lifelong practice of self-formation and ethical exercises as a means of creating what Foucault calls an 'art of life'. It is a way of examining and freeing oneself not by socially-constructed norms and standards, but according to one’s own ethical code. Foucault deems this practice as an essential element of maintaining freedom from oppressive power dynamics. As such, his ethics evolves not to a withdrawal from the world but instead into an intensified relation to its politics." (source)
Thank you Makshya and Kendall for infusing RWG into my life so nourishingly lately.
You ask about life affirming practices and I think you hit on it squarely here, in addition to your beautiful prose - cooking and feeding people!