Hello y’all, how are your hearts today? Mine feels weary and anguished at the end of this week. I almost considered not posting this weekend, but then I remembered what it is I write about here and why. I show up to contribute to the chorus, to be in community with you all, with my heart as held as the sunflower is, in the grief and the joy of this Earth.
Sunflowers still bloom despite it all, and the sunflower spark of the brave Ukranian woman I speak about today called me to you all this morning. I am so grateful we have each other.
“You do not, in fact, have to choose between American and Russian imperial aggressions. Better to bear witness to what is being done in your name.”
- Spencer Ackerman
I feel how the current crisis in Ukraine, amidst the infinite crises of our time, is condensing and congealing into rigid formations, slotting into clear categories to perpetuate the plot line that life on Earth is an inescapable duality of war versus peace, evil versus good. This way of thinking has rarely been a salve to me. It suffocates my imagination. It sinks me to the bottom of the ocean, claustrophobic in its density.
Where do we go in an inescapable polarity? Because even if you're on the "good" side, you'll spend your life directly or indirectly fighting the bad, and that's not exactly breath, not space, not flow. That's not thriving. When I'm feeling anxious, I try to see where I'm backed into cognitive corners by the pressures of reductive narratives and hot-takes that collapse the world into fear, into terror, into only one way (which is largely what the news is). I try to remember that trauma patterns and survival strategies get triggered and spread vicariously through the collective precisely because we are connected, interdependent, because we all have cell memories of war whether we've lived them in this lifetime or not, because there are wars happening here, there, and everywhere, taking many shapes.
As a student of Bayo's, I look for cracks. Cracks create movement. Cracks queer reality. They show us where things are not quite what they seem. They rupture and distort the field and offer more possibility where once was constraint and confinement.
Well, I found the crack I sought.
“What the fuck are you doing on our land with all these guns? Take these seeds” said the Ukranian woman to the invading Russian soldier.
“…put them in your pocket so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”
The video of this woman’s message has spread like wildfire. It’s been called a curse. I wonder, is it a curse on this man, or is it a prayer for the land? Is it both? Is it perhaps a blessing for his soul, too, that he may be redeemed by the inevitability that no matter how much carnage he causes, he too will become sweet soil again? That his body, like all bodies, will not only be grave but garden, too?
Ultimately, she says, life will always win.
This woman's work is holy work. She, a Bodhisattva on the battle ground. This is divinity in the profane. This is magic in both the extraordinary theater of war and the mundanity of a conversation between two human beings, two parallel universes, coexisting and confronting and converging in this singular moment in time that also exceeds time itself.
Immediately upon reading this, my heartbeat ripples an echo back to those lands she stands on now, where hundreds of thousands of women and femmes were murdered for their connection to the otherwise, for their ability to be conduits, like all humans are, to source consciousness, to cultivate their gifts as shamans, healers, teachers, divinators, witches.
My heart ripples out here too, across the lands I’m a guest on now, and I think about the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) clan mothers whose wisdom has too long been suppressed. It was the clan mothers that held the power to nominate male chiefs who went on to represent their clans in the Grand Council. Their unbroken custom required that these men: "... cannot have committed a theft. Second, they cannot have committed a murder. Third, they cannot have sexually assaulted a woman." What a world that might be. What a world it could become when we rehydrate those seeds, those ways we once knew.
There are few things that make me burn as much as this: that we have been severed from the ineffable and profound quality of Earth-based, femme-conscious wisdom for so long. As another war explodes, I yearn to see more flowers bloom. The feminine is the seed, not the bomb. It is the sunflower, not the rifle. The feminine is held in all of us regardless of gender and it calls us back into a direct, ecstatic, sensual, free, open-hearted experience of wonder of creator through creation. We are all creators of creation, creation of creators.
To me it invokes this sacred image of Ieshia Evans at a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge.
It speaks for itself. It glitches the system. It shows you something that exceeds language. It is spiritual practice where it matters most, it is a non-dualistic rupture in the condensed, reductive story empire tells to justify itself. It transcends good and evil by invoking something greater we all belong to.
A curse is a crack. A seed is a prayer.
Those lands on which the Ukranian woman, the curse/prayer weaver, the gorgeous witch, stood in confrontation with that soldier are where some of the oldest traces of my lineage once lived. In 1939 my great grandfather returned to Ukraine to rescue my great great grandparents from the most recent invasion on those soils: Hitler and his Nazis. I feel all of this in my blood and I wonder, what is the responsibility I hold to this blood memory? What is the ancestral prayer I’m here to live into, knowing that my ancestors were saved, knowing that the blood still hasn’t even dried from that conflict, knowing that the memories and the terror still move through alive and breathing?
Maybe it is to make war a memory.
From womb to world, from world to tomb, from tomb to womb, from womb to world... We cycle, we spiral.
From great great grandmother to great great granddaughter, may we remember memory as past, present, and future, may we remember ourselves as future ancestors, may this wide wingspan of intergenerational consciousness spread seeds of liberation in the wind, in the fire, in the blood, in the body, in the garden, in the grave, in the womb, in the tomb.
If you feel moved to share a bit of your heart in the comments, please do, I’d love to hear from you. These are not “business as usual times”, these are not “keep on keepin’ on times”, these are times to find new/old ways to be with the bigness of these times. Times to listen.
May comfort find you,
Rach
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"A curse is a crack, a seed a prayer."
How often have curses in our life or lineage, been the seeds of some greater soul becoming. In times like these, and when I think back to times such as the Holocaust, it's difficult to feel the curse of these moments could be anything other than curse. And yet as you remind, cycles upon cycles of natural progressions of death and rebirth illicit a deeper emotional response than just outrage, and beg me to wonder about where God/The Mystery/Beauty lives in all this too, and I can trust in patience for an answer surely could not be given now.
My curiosity moves towards your ancestors, and what became of them, and a longing to know more of that story, and how it is woven with your own.
Thank you for this powerful short post and prayer Rachel <3