Written: March 11, 2023
I travel a lot these days, and pretty much everywhere I go feels like home. The other day a friend akws me to tell him something funny, and I told him I’d tell him something funny/sad. The funny part is that I fall in love with pretty much everywhere I go (except maybe Vegas) and before I leave I usually find myself on Zillow looking at places to buy or rent, thinking maybe this is a new place to call home.
The sad part is that everywhere I go feels more like home than home. My life and home in Kentucky have become the most uncomfortable place for me to be. I have less community here than pretty much any place I visit. I feel less myself here than anywhere else I go.
Why is that?
I have some theories. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with my ole Kentucky home or the people living here. It is a beautiful state with many beautiful people and an interesting culture. Rather, both simply seem too full of memories of prior versions of myself for the new and emerging one to flourish.
These thoughts were on my mind as I made the twelve hour drive down to Tampa, Florida recently to pray with some people. During that long drive I found myself listening to two different but similar books that seem to capture the mood of where I'm at right now.
The first book, which I finished along the way was “Blue Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson, the second book in his “Mars Trilogy.” If you aren’t familiar, it's a science fiction classic that chronicles humanities’ colonization and terraforming of Mars in the not too distant future. The second book, which I’m still listening to, is “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This latter book is an earthy autobiography of an indigenous woman, botanist, and mother’s account of a life lived in intimate and sacred relationship with the Earth and all of its inhabitants.
Both books are ultimately about ecology and learning/relearning how to be indigenous to a place and belong to the land, whether it be Earth or a distant Mars.
In “Blue Mars” humanity is fleeing an Earth that is overcrowded, used up, and trapped in the seemingly inescapable inertia of history as it hurtles towards self-destruction. Mars is an opportunity to create something new. A new society unbound by the past. A chance to create something more beautiful than has never been before.
Yet the past followed our new world colonists all the way to Mars. Because the past lives inside of us, we can never truly escape it - only learn from it, lest we be doomed to repeat it. In order to create something new we have to heal the perspectives within ourselves that created that which is not preferred. There is no such thing as running away from the past, but perhaps sometimes we can run far enough away to escape the center of its gravity. Perhaps in the lighter gravity of a new place we can finally learn how to fly free from past mistakes.
“Braiding Sweetgrass” has a different but similar message. Like in “Blue Mars” Kimmerer weaves a tale that embraces both science and a mystically intimate relationship with the natural world. She encourages colonists and their descendants to stop living with one foot still on the boat and to instead put both feet firmly on the ground and live in an intimate sacred relationship with the Earth. She invites us to live in this world like we belong to it and believe in having a future together.
When colonists arrived in the Americas they encountered a natural world that was more abundant than they could possibly have imagined. Fleeing overcrowded European cities, famine, and political/religious oppression they stepped foot on the “new world” determined to make something new.
Yet that story isn’t exactly true. The Americas were not a new world. Nor was it uninhabited. It is estimated that 60 million people lived here when Columbus arrived - that is roughly a quarter of humanity at the time. Nor was the abundance the colonists encountered a quark of fate or merely a boon from the divine. The abundance of the “new world” had been carefully cultivated by the indigenous peoples by living with reverence, gratitude, and reciprocity with the land. Rather than live in a way that depletes the natural world, they knew how to live in harmony with the land in a way that enriched it.
The colonial encounter with the indigenous peoples of the Americas was the worst genocide in history. With many native people dying soon after contact from the colonial mind viruses, which manifested as physical pathogens.
My ancestors are Celts, who were some of the first indigenous peoples to be infected, killed, and converted to the program of relating to the natural world through a paradigm of separation and control. First the colonial pathogen infects us and makes us a carrier, then a co-conspirator, and ultimately a crusader and converter of people, places, and things into commodities. The colonized becoming colonizers within only a few generations.
As a descendant of colonists and settlers I’m working with the medicines given to us by our Earth Mother, and learning from the indigenous wisdom keepers who remember how to say “thank you” and live with gratitude and reciprocity with the land. I’m trying to recover what my ancestors knew. I’m trying to live with both feet firmly planted on the ground, and with humility and gratitude listen and allow the Earth to teach me how to live.
I’m still a baby in these ways. I’m still learning how to be humble and present enough to be teachable. I’m still figuring out what it means to live with both feet fully on the ground. I’m still figuring out how much distance I need from the gravitational well of the past to create something more beautiful and true. I’m still figuring out what it means to get well.
But I’m infinitely grateful for the blessing of this life and the opportunity to learn. I’m grateful for the plant teachers, medicine carriers, and brothers and sisters on the path. I’m grateful to have the blessing of being able to live a beautiful life in service to the good of all.
Infinite Love,
Zachary