Repair, Part 1

Written By Casey .

Repair: To fix or mend (a thing suffering from damage or a fault); to restore to working order (Oxford Languages)

The basic premise of this Thinking Like A Seed project is nature connection in service of cultural repair. It is our belief that remembering ourselves as natural creatures who belong here on planet earth will guide us in reimagining and building a world that nourishes and cares for all beings, human and otherwise. But what does cultural repair actually mean? 

Most people alive in the US today would agree that our culture is broken. The obvious next question is whether something whole, unbroken, ever existed in the first place? 

Our country was founded on the violent severing of people from land—from their knowing themselves as natural creatures who belong to and with and on the earth—so that both could be exploited. Millions of Indigenous people already living on this continent were killed and millions of others were forced from their homelands by armies of settler colonialists, many of whom were themselves displaced from their own homelands during prior waves of colonization in Europe and who were paid as mercenaries to advance the Western front of empire as it annihilated its way toward the Pacific. Millions of Africans were captured and—if they survived the cross-Atlantic journey—sold into slavery, where they and their descendants were brutally forced to build the infrastructure of the eastern and southern US as well as other countries to the south. 

This violent severing wasn’t a singular event that happened and then was complete. Rather, it has materialized and shapeshifted over hundreds of years—for at least 16 human generations, we and this land have collectively been living through the horrific reality of this ongoing severing. The ways this intergenerational trauma shows up for each of us of course depends on the particular lineages of our ancestors as we navigate the systems created from it, but there is not a single one of us who hasn’t been affected by it in some way. We are currently inhabiting its throughlines, whose every vestige impregnates our diasporic cultures in what Mohawk Seedkeeper Rowen White calls “The Diaspora of Disconnection.”

“There was a time when all of the peoples of the world were indigenous. So if you cannot call yourself indigenous today, it is only because your indigeneity was disconnected from you so long ago.” -Norma Wong

Rowen and others also remind us that, if we go far enough back into our own lineages, every one of us is indigenous to somewhere. We all come from people who knew themselves to be intimately intertwined with the natural world around them, who were embedded within cultures who felt this connection on a cellular and communal level and who organized themselves around that knowing. It’s up to each of us to find ways of reconnecting with that ancestral knowing, to help each other explore and tap in, and to be a part of what can come from that collective reorientation. 

 “Put your lifetime in service of undoing the work of your ancestors, earning the respect of future generations, and being willing to be transformed in the service of the work.” -adrienne maree brown, A Word for White People

The first step to repair is admitting that there is a wound in the first place. We are living in a time where acknowledging the collective wounds that form the foundation of this country is being actively criminalized or legislated out of existence. We’re being told that all of that is in the past, even as we’re literally steeped in the toxic tea it produces every single day. This past election cycle was one more instance where—talking to our fellow white liberals here—we were appalled by the fact that we can’t just skip over the hard reckoning and get to the “everybody’s holding hands and moving forward together (with our personal comfort still front and center)” phase of cultural evolution. Why is it, in the backs of our minds, we still somehow can’t accept this foundational truth? Wanting it to go away doesn’t make it so. 

"Just as a fish can't conceive of water, we often don't know about or consent to the visions around us. They become the measure for what is true and what should be. These visions set a path for our lives, opening up channels of possibilities and foreclosing many others. Within their grip, it's difficult to know who we really are or what we might become." - Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes To Heal

That’s why we at Thinking Like A Seed love the concept of repair. Repair implies active engagement. Letting the reality settle into our bones—the enormity of how truly disconnected we are and the massive consequences we’re experiencing as a result—is the first step. 

The second step is a lot easier. Breathe. Drink water. These basics provide a starting point to remembering our interconnection. Don’t underestimate their power. 

Every drop of water you drink came from stardust billions of years ago. It has cycled over and through this planet countless times, and it will continue to do so far beyond what our imaginations are capable of comprehending. When you drink water, you are drinking a glass of rain, a sip of snowflakes. That same water has traveled through the trunks of redwood trees and the slimy insides of earthworms, housed humpback whales and cradled coral reefs. It has journeyed through the bodies of your ancestors and through countless billions of people you never knew, and this sip will flow for a few hours through your own blood and cells, joining the 60% of “you” that is actually water before you send it back out into the world and it continues its infinite, life-giving journey onward…during which, eventually, it will come back inside your body once again. 

“Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc”.  -Neil Degrasse Tyson

The water moving into and out of your body is not a metaphor for interconnection. It is a literal, visceral river that flows between and within and among all of us, that rises sky high and coalesces into clouds that rain back down on our beautiful little planet. We are never separate. We are always together, linked by water. 

Similarly, every breath you take is an active relationship with the world around you. The plants near you adore the carbon dioxide you effortlessly exhale. They gladly take it into their bodies and release back the oxygen that keeps you alive. This exchange isn’t an effortful attempt at collaboration. It is simply the way things are. With each breath, each of you elegantly nourishes the other.  

Invitations for practices to try: 

  • Drink water. As you drink, feel the water enter your mouth, feel it wet all of your mouth’s parts, touch your teeth, and cascade down your throat as it heads further inside your body. You might ponder the epic journey each drop in your swallow made to get to you, or how it will continue onward as it leaves your body again. Is there a way that you might thank the water for nourishing you?

  • Breathe. Consider going outside and sharing air with a plant. You might notice how your exhale ripples across the plant’s leaves. If it is sunny and light outside, chances are, your plant is actively taking in your exhale and re-releasing the oxygen from it through their leaves. With each inhale, you bring that oxygen into your body, and breathe out carbon dioxide, which your plant will take in. If you can’t make it outside, the act of consciously breathing—of actively noticing your inhale and your exhale—can be done anywhere...and it still finds its way into the open pores of a nearby plant!     

Soil:

Casey .
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Repair, Part 2
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October Pollinators