love is a necessary ritualistic indebtedness to spirits seen and unseen

I’ve been thinking about writing again since my latest 7 day ecology class ended a week ago yesterday. I appreciate all of the comments and notes I got in response to my last piece, ‘the coyote and the dust’ written after my first week long class ended. I write this sitting at my handbuilt table, the wind blows pollen and dust around the green fields, whipping my canvas awning around.

I honestly didn’t expect the response to my last piece. At times, I wonder if people read. Or if my more vulnerable work is actually compelling to folks. And at the same time, I write for myself, not really for anyone else, as spells for life and making necessary works of art, for alchemizing my somatic body as it is married to the earth, and the world as it plays out, this dying society on a planet we are killing, I need it. And of course our human relations are fucked, we are fed a contorted view of reality, and even us who want to see it differently, are not immune to its distortions.

I remember when this kind of thing used to be uncomfortable for me.

Any vulnerability at all. Or perhaps it was only ok in a zine, or a poem I’d only read for a selected audience.

Things are different now.

I’ve ventured close to death and back many times and now I understand that this state, of utter destitute, giving up on everything is a magical realm. I understand now, and feel more empathy. Tears are easy to invoke, feeling what someone else is feeling is easier. Truly. I feel like being provoked to this point is a gift, a gift of hell, a secret gift given, in order to access a magical realm I never knew existed. One that many a being lives and plays and exists in, that need honoring and reverence and are actively being ignored as we live in a culture that encourages us to numb and keep our eyes fixed, to the shadow puppets, Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave be damned. Avoiding pain is keeping eyes fixed, and being given the gift of grief is being given the gift to see away, to step out of the cave and realize what is really going on.

I’m tired of hiding this part of my spirit that has been encouraged to be suppressed my whole life, by many forces. If I don’t do that, I can’t live this life. I go back and forth on what I feel comfortable being vulnerable or forthright about, and think deeply about what it means to share and why. Some of my writing mentors for me this year have given me good advice on that too, so I’m keeping some of the things they shared with me in mind as I unfold works that might be more emotionally challenging, triggering, or vulnerable. (Thanks Susan Tweit, a podcast guest from this winter, on giving me memoir writing advice, listen to her episode below, if you want to hear her advice, too)

Think talk about addiction and the perverse ways it creeps into the lives of the empathetic and traumatized, sexual abuse and how it teaches us to abandon our own bodies, hungry ghosts of the dead and how they use us to feed what they weren’t appropriately fed, autism and neurodivergence and how the greatest stigmas that we actually end up facing is being told that our experience and perception of the world is not ok when no one else can actually experience it but you.

(most of this ‘talk’ is for future posts, and some of this will take a lot of courage to talk about. the connection between addiction and trauma and how it affects my life, the relationship between trauma and neurodivergence, psychological abuse and autism— and ecological destruction—, sexual purity and control, patriarchy and dominance, polarities and sexual shame, the relationship between monogamy and oppression of true spiritual practice — and how this can be convoluted by the patriarchy into abuse of trust and a space that exists without boundaries at all)

There’s been a string of events that have kept me from writing since my last class. I had some of my dearest friends visit and teach classes in the area this weekend where we wove baskets, told stories and tracked animals. (Their school is called Lightning Tree, by the way)

Another friend came to bring seeds to another friend and stopped in. I got sick after weed-wacking a ton of grass while it had fresh pollen hanging from monocot branches, heavy yellow sacks, beautiful in their vibrance, trying to be helpful to the folks’ whose land I am staying on right now— an organic farm with dozens of different kinds of medicinal herbs.

A lot is swirling in my vessel, and spells spinning out from moments and signs that i’m sitting with that come in like illuminated nodes, a memory for a moment, a thought that connects one idea to another.

Some big stark intuitive realizations have bubbled forth about what I’ve chosen for myself much of my life which emerged out of realities I didn’t have choice over.

I stay in that space between dream and awake a lot when I can, especially after one of my students in my last ecology class who meditates using a particular style, told me that this brainwave state is the most healing one for our bodies and minds. It is in that state that storylines play out that which we can’t totally control, some lucidity happens, but often our minds take our seeds and process them out as they need to be here in this mode.

I clutch a tincture of Pulsatilla in my sleep that someone sent me recently as that medicine of mine keeps breaking for whatever sign that is— and I pray for my heart to heal.

For me to be able to maintain strong boundaries but an open heart.

I still feel like my heart is closed and my boundaries suck. I’m getting there.

No one can tell you— that you need to feel a different way than you do.

If someone tells you that your hurt should have a timeline, is unattractive because somehow you should be happy all the time or ok with anything they do to you or else *gasp*— you are unattractive which must be the end all goals of being socialized a woman in this society or I have no value. Or if someone tells you that your pain is an exaggeration of harm done, is not humanizing you, is not sorry, is avoiding changing their own harmful actions.

It is not love as a verb of honoring, ritual and commitment to the beauty and complexity of another or the world itself. It is easy to shut others down and oversimplify what the problem is. That’s a cop out. It’s a route towards continuing patterns that don’t serve. Continuing to harm. And not having strong boundaries means that the pattern is continued too by the person, culture or people who is scapegoating.

Who would have thought that loving would be so hard. It’s such a beautiful thing to live for.

Love is all there is, and what do we do when we love those that have hurt us and continue to? Anyone we love, will hurt us eventually. We are more likely to be hurt the deeper we love. It’s a fact. We have more tendrils woven, more at stake. It’s a question I have been asking myself for many years. It’s a spiritual work to notice the thoughts that come up in the process of loving with boundaries. To notice the endorphins, the euphoria, where it doesn’t belong. And the fight or flight, gut pitted experience, where it doesn’t belong either. Just observe, the say. Tracking, inner tracking.

Turning away, stepping away, means we can still love to our fullest without being subject to as much harm. I feel like I’ve had to learn this lesson my whole life, and it hurts me to have to shut down my honey nectar from those I love, but deep down I still do, but it is no longer available to those who refuse to fully appreciate, show up and love me. I would rather stay true to my heart, than have to accept being abused. And this is abuse no doubt. Realizing this is very hard. It’s lonely, but there’s peace in choosing to surround ourselves with people and spaces that honor us. Why it takes so long to realize this is understandable, we had a president after all that said things like women are being crybabies and being difficult if they aren’t ok with him ‘grabbing them by the pussy.’ I was taught to put up with this kind of talk growing up. With people, especially men, talking down to me, over me, making inappropriate comments to me, touching my body in a way that they didn’t have permission to- and me having any boundaries or advocating for myself was being ‘difficult’ or ‘stirring the pot’ or ‘exaggerating harm'.’

I was recently sexually harassed in the liquor store last week by an old man, when I was just coming out of the woods, fresh and yet dirty, worn by soil, sun and sagebrush resin. One perspective would be that I should take it and let men be men, and for me to speak up puts my own body at harm. It could have certainly put me in harms way. Also, what would have happened if I had punched him in the face? Would he have gotten the clue then? Coddling and softness sometimes does nothing to get a point across. Do I hate all men then? No, I hate what the patriarchy has done to men, men I love, the masculine, to love itself, to the earth. I said nothing as is the formulaic reaction I’ve been taught. And he knew he could get away with it because he always has. He is comfortable in his position of power over me and in that moment he knew he could remind himself he has power by acting the way he did towards my body. I swallowed my pride, felt stick to my stomach and tried to brush it off. I came out of the store with so much anger that I wanted to punch something. I’m not usually one that is provoked to violence. At least, I haven’t been pushed this direction in a very long time. When boundaries are crossed, violence is an appropriate reaction actually.

A Datura tarot card I pulled the other day. I’m on a farm with Datura everywhere, the owner specifically cultivates it as an intentional relationship. I tattooed Datura on my foot the winter before last. I grew up with Datura in the fields of my grandpa’s farm. My friend told me this weekend that Datura represents the strongest of boundaries. I’ve felt a draw to get tattooed over and over lately, especially with this plant. We haven’t been modeled healthy boundaries. And it gets worse- as the overlord creeps in, our phones by our bedsides, our every waking moment meant to be monetized with dings, blings and efficiency tricks and tips. Our relationships must benefit us monetarily or be convenient in some way. The hard ones are the ones we learn the most from, and we must stick with them in order to grow, and to flee entirely, is to refuse to fully live.

A friend of mine yesterday while in conversation even noted, that what he has learned at this point, is the worthiness of sticking with things that get hard, with romantic partners in particular, and that no one will be perfect, and what we gain from moving through work of growth together is more valuable than disposing of someone and moving on to the next in hopes they are easier, don’t challenge us, give us that temporary endorphin hit or ask of us to look at our shadows, put up with unhealthy behavior or so on. In an era of swipe dating culture, it is so easy to look at humans as disposable with a world of possibilities at our fingertips. It keeps up from going deep and into the underworld, into the depths of what is possible of love. I am not interested in surface level relating. And I still find myself in surface level patterns, talking too much instead of listening in order to relieve awkwardness, to fill silence instead of letting it sit in the discomfort of less words sometimes, to reveal too much information when it wasn’t mine to reveal because making connections in this way has me avoiding true connection that forms newly in the present moment.

Presence I want, and long term unfolding. In work and play, and love care kinship and friendship. Commitment to combating it together is all I want in a world that is dying. I have no other reason to live other than to be married to the earth and with others loving land with me. There is nothing worth serving in my opinion really, and yet somehow, it is difficult still.

Life feels like a dream. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I still think that maybe the last few years was all just a dream, in part a nightmare, that one day I’ll wake up from and it will have been a long drawn out trip, an alternate universe that played out, from the one decision that sent things this way or that, and that waking up I would come into a different reality where different decisions got made and sent the universe a different direction.

It’s easy to wonder what is a dream when we’re having to decipher daily what is real and not in fucked up ways: I got a spam text this morning that I had to sit with for 15 minutes to decide if it was indeed spam. Your bank account just got charged $756.30 dollars, click ‘here’ to fix. Or else.

One dream this week that came to me, this one last night, still sits with me as I start to forget the details as the day carries on. wild grass pollen blowing around and all.

A ritual I didn’t understand was underway. Out in the hills of northern California on a farm we were, a maze of roads led us there, through gates, darkness and daylight illumination.

There were pots of hot beeswax in the center of this ritual.

I could smell it in the air.

The thick earthy smell of candle-making, of burning the wax extracted from bee hives, unclarified.

Friends from vast parts of my many lives were there gathered together. We were instructed to go find sticks and stalks to dip in the beeswax.

Most found mullein stalks, dried and thick, upright standing, to dip.

Folks enter the center, to dip and walk out, and the stalks remained drippy and hot, yet solid enough to be covered in the wax as each person did it one by one. Some lifted the waxed stalks high— up and down in an arc as they pulled it out of the honey slurry.

Handfuls of psilocybin mushrooms, I remember. I ate a few and felt nauseous.

Some dipped multiple times to make thick staffs. I dipped mine many times, one of the last to go. In the circle, a friend of mine from California who has lots of tattoos in real life, was sitting there shirtless, getting tattooed by another person with the waxed mullein stalk, the heat of the wax mixed with the stalk magically having a sharp pokey point, was what was creating the ritualistic design. I looked at it closely, and the design was beautiful, I can almost remember it. Her skin was red, the lines were very fine and intricate.

I was told that I was to find someone to give me a tattoo with my stalk. To sit next to my friend and be adorned by another. An elder spoke to me: go ask you ex-lover, who sits in a chair across the room, to do it for you. He said he didn’t have someone to poke and wasn’t going to get into the ritual until someone asked. I was hesitant. In the dream, I was scared. I told the elder that I didn’t think he would do that for me. That it would be too intimate, that it would be too close, or two vulnerable for him, or perhaps he wouldn’t care to take the time. I was afraid of the rejection. He was sitting in a chair, with a child in his lap, playing, a friend’s child who loves him. I didn’t want to disrupt their interaction to ask for this offering. I often feel scared in dreams, or want to run away and hide, especially with certain people who come up over and over.

I look at others’ designs. One looked like waves in a pattern across the back. My friends’ tattoo was also a straight pattern across the back, like a Celtic knot going from one armpit to the other. The big mullein stalk, hot and waxy, working away.

I wish I could say I remembered whether he tattooed me. Or whether I asked. Part of me feels like I did. I have vague memories of hugging and comfort and ease of touch, something that used to come so easy with this person in real life, and something I miss dearly, but I can’t remember if this laying arm over leg or shoulder or leg over leg, or foot touching foot came before or after the tattoo, or was from an earlier dream in the night.

And ironically enough, this weekend I hung out with an ex-partner from when I was around 20 years old, someone who has remained a good friend since then, and the way we can exist together in space is pretty special and easeful. In many ways we have grown and evolved as people over the years. But what remains is a special bond, simple really, of ease and familiarity and knowing. Many times he crossed my bubble to hug me or put an arm around me or touch my leg with his leg. I remember when this was our world, this kind of exchange, but in a different way. But I didn’t feel missing of what ‘was’ with him, but appreciate of exactly what it is right now. I miss having partnership where I have this special space with someone to support, to co-regulate and collaborate with. I appreciate friendships that are long-term, that expand in complexity and bounds without definitions of platonic or romantic. We never even needed to feel like we had to define it— it has always just been love between us. Having a weekend where my ex from long ago and his partner were around, and we spent all day together doing things on the land, imprinted in my body. That it is possible to have this kind of kinship and friendship. The hugs and touch were familiar and comforting. Easy. Safe. Maybe, the memory that this is possible, the training in myself that it is possible to transform kinship bond and strengthen them without trauma and hardship— reverberated into my dreams and pressed onto other realms of my life where this ease has not been the case.

A few nights ago, I dreamed of the burro I bonded with during my ecology classes. A friend and student who is taking all my classes this summer brought her burro she was training, and he became beloved by all the students, and was the gentlest of spirits. I felt like I experienced some profound healing from the trust in loving beings like this. I heard recently that this burro got spooked and ran away and hasn’t been found yet. I dreamed about him two nights after finding out, this past week, and in the dream he walks up to me and my friend on the street, a sidewalk. The burro, who is named Biscuit, took on a half-camel appearance. The burro was very sad. My friend, who is his ‘owner’ and was training him, in my dream was drunk on the street with her friends, all young men. She said she would deal with him later. And then he ran off again very sad.

I dreamed of a friend who died last year of cancer. Another who committed suicide, in their deep loneliness and sensitivity, couldn’t handle the world anymore. Felt like a burden. Visionaries in the other realm now. Suicide is controversial in western society, but I see nothing wrong with people deciding what to do with their bodies in a fucked up world. We should never ask people to continue to suffer, or to numb themselves in order to exist in a world that doesn’t care for them. Or make space for them.

Love is action, even the most micro of them. Love is flowers put on an altar. Is the flowers I grew for my grandmothers graves one summer when I tried to farm with my dad at home. Is the blue corn my friends insisted on offering to the land spirits where we had classes this past weekend. I gave corn to Burdock, one of the first plants I learned and since have grown, gathered seed from, tended to my liver with, eaten pickled, found far and wide across Turtle Island. Love is wanting the best for our human and other living kin. Love is acting for the betterment of others. It is being in service to those around us. We are only who we are in service to others, Ted stated this weekend at the beginning of a class. We should be offering to the spirits, to one another, more than we do for ourselves, and without expectation of direct return, but a gentle indebtedness of giving. Giving in this way is love. I have given in the past without thought of it being seen as manipulative and bad. Are we manipulating the land spirits into having our best interests when we offer them blue corn? Of course not. Love is not manipulation, it is a kind of forgetting of the self as an individual, and re-remembering through ritual acts that we are all connected. All the fluff of hurt and harm and gaslighting and disconnect is the truth behind it all that the cure to our worlds ills is to love through giving. Call your friend and see how they are doing. Give them encouragement. Show up when they need help. Offer your shirt when it is needed. Over and over, these incantations are necessary for a reciprocal world, with the spirits seen and unseen. We must love ourselves, one another, and be in constant debt to giving. That really struck me this weekend— when my friends laid out the reminder that giving love is necessary and a debt, and it is not manipulative but just how the world must work. So we gave offering to the mosquitoes, to the Willow spirits from which we wove with, to the Burdock, the Cottonwood, the flowing water, the Waterleaf. And what will they give us? It is uncertain, and uncalculated. Never predictable.

This past weekend another friend reminded me how important anger is. Anger is a tool to create boundaries, a valid reaction to violation. I’m so uncomfortable with anger, I felt my childhood was dominated by it, and as an autistic person that feel sensations intensely, perhaps more than most, and emotions in a heightened way, all of them— being around so much anger felt like an constant assault on my nervous system. And yet, I wasn’t allowed to feel anger in response to the anger all around me. I wasn’t allowed to fight back, to hit back, to defend my boundaries being psychically and physically violated. But anger is a part of fighting back. It reminds us that something in there somewhere, we are justified in our reaction to being dehumanized. If hitting back doesn’t get it across, then what do we do to get our point across? How do we reprogram mistrust, harm done, inconsistency, and the possibility that if we let our guard down that someone might violate our honey-ed softness again? Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we can. Healing isn’t a one person work. It also isn’t butterflies and roses, and Samuel Bautista Lazo, a weaver from Oaxaca and friend, often says on my podcast. Love can also mean distance and space, from those who can’t figure out their own boundaries, who cannot sort through their own relations with land spirits. Who have been taught their whole lives that they also aren’t allowed to have boundaries. Sometimes space is where the healing happens, not swimming in a pot of pain and trigger. Sometimes the trigger is the healing, whether we like it or not, and it can look a lot of ways. We are forced to look at what repair looks like when we cannot get away with what others did to us, and what we then do to others that’s not okay either.

All the years of my life I’ve lived, and I look back at times when I could have had better boundaries. With the church who told me curious questions were the devil’s work . With the doctor who violated me who I couldn’t say no to. To the teacher who wouldn’t let me use the bathroom and I bled all over myself and all my classmates made fun of me. To the teacher who shamed me for being left handed and made me cut paper with my right hand. To the boys who touched my body, or told me it was ugly because of my androgyny, to the old man in the drugstore who grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go. To adult friends of my family who would grab me and squeeze me until I felt like I was hurting and wouldn’t let me go when I tried. To my dad’s friends ganging up on me while they were drunk to try to tell me I’m a bad person for being fierce. To others’ expression of hurt manifesting as violence and anger, verbal abuse, and having to take it, day in and day out, hoping that they would change one day, and realizing, actually many people, especially men in a culture that allows them to be children forever, will never change. It does happen though. There is always some hope, and giving up hope is the only way to actually give space for hope that someone will find their own way, and it may mean that your absence is necessary for your own safety and for their own change. And maybe they will demonize you for not subjecting yourself to their mess anymore, or maybe they will realize that it wasn’t you all at, but their own hurt child needing holding and acknowledgement and comfort. Maybe something will happen that will make them realize that life is short, love is great, the spirits hungry, and that our choices change the course of universes. But, sometimes you have to give up that it is possible, because it too is often not possible.

Softness and trust is earned. I won’t ever give my honey nectar, love and softness to anyone again who doesn’t respect me fully or accept me in my complexity. I don’t owe anyone compassion. And yet, I have been trained to abandon myself, like so many of us have been. In order to ‘keep the peace’ or to keep the program going, comfortably, the illusion being fed to us like the matrix pill, don’t question or you get punished. Keep the peace or you’ll be demonized for having boundaries, for knowing deep in ancestral bones, that this isn’t the way and another way is possible.

I’m so grateful for spiritual love. For Love beyond bonds. Definitions culturally constructed. For the debt of love and honoring. For odd dreams, for signs and symbols that float in and out of my life. For friends who love me in my mess, in my ‘unattractive’ grief, who see that it too is a necessary bit of character.

Being married to the earth, keeps me alive. Even if painful. Pain is just a sensation as Maynard James Keenan says, the lead singer of TOOL, whose music brought me so much comfort in a childhood upbringing in the rural south. Whose music speaks to cycles of complexity like the debt of love I speak to, the perpetual paying forward and honoring.