9.29.2024 Dear Anna,
OK, here we go on this next adventure! I am so grateful to be in deep conversation and exploration with you, and planting this new seed of hope for what can come. In this intense time, you are one of the few people I know in real life who want to have these types of conversations—the ones we both believe with our whole hearts are vital if we are to find (or remember) a life-giving path forward here on planet earth. And you are also one of the few people I know in real life who is in an active practice of reorienting yourself toward seeking literal guidance for how to move forward from nonhuman beings as well.
One of my favorite things about you is that you are a voracious seeker of information and ideas. I literally would not be the person I am today without our back-and-forth sharing of new books, podcasts, and other offerings from human teachers we’re finding to guide us and stretch our imaginations. These generous souls are sharing visions that invite us to grapple with gritty facts, to grieve immense losses, to ask impossible questions, and to reimagine a world of belonging for each of us. It is vital for me to be in a community of people who are actively chewing on and metabolizing these radical ideas into tactile acts adapted to our unique place on earth.
And you are so brilliant at developing relationships in place! Equally precious to me as our sharing of inspiring ideas is our time spent wandering through the foothills or the city streets, or scootin’ around on our little cross country skis, marveling at the tiny wonders around us. Mostly the plants, but also the insects and the fungi and all of the other things that I might otherwise overlook without your skillful and joyful noticing. This journey toward an ever-more embodied knowing of our belonging as natural creatures is one of the most sacred parts of my life.
As you know, I have spent the last five years of my life stepping out of the small spotlights that have been shined on me as a regional food- and seedshed grower, and devoting myself to listening and absorbing as much as I possibly can about how to be in right relationship with land and community as a white descendant of settler colonialists both in the larger white supremacist society of the US as a whole, and on an intimate, local level. Over these past five years, arm in arm with you, I have been grateful to have the opportunity to expand my perspectives to encompass not only our cultivated landscapes, but also the wild landscapes of our area, and to consider our right roles within them.
I have begun to feel the call again to stick my neck out and offer my voice to the collective struggle for a different way of understanding and organizing ourselves in a more public way. It feels scary to do this, because I am certain I have not arrived at a point of knowing exactly what to do, exactly how to be helpful. But right now, the choice to remain quiet (at least in any sort of “platform” type way) has started to feel less like allyship and more like privilege. I believe it is time to step back into the arena in a more public way, to try to give voice to these things that we are studying and doing in our private lives that feel potentially earth-shatteringly transformative—specifically for other white folks, but hopefully in service to the larger community of all beings with whom we are sharing this planet.
In naming the potential power in these learnings and practices, I’m calling us both forward to be brave in ways that are not comfortable for either of us. I’m calling on us to draw from the wisdom of the seeds we both adore and are intimately intertwined with. It feels at once too early and too late to be embarking on this new project. But this time is fertile soil. We of course can never know when we plant a seed with love if it will sprout. There is no guarantee that it will flourish even with our most devoted tending. But if we don’t plant it, we can never find out what will happen! Thank you for being on the journey with me!
With deep, deep love and respect,
Casey
