Moving through Spires: Fake Peace is Violence Underneath
When will the giants wake back up, and are we meant to be ready?
(I recommend listening to the music I feature in this post while reading it, if you choose to visually read it, or listen after if you have to) 🎵
Exiting Hell’s Hole required hauling several extra gallons of water, and walking straight up the dusty edges of where two ancient calderas meet, geodes scattered across a steep trail cut over 75 years ago. The canyon below is mazes of impassable spires jutting straight towards the heavens, some in the shapes of giants that are frozen waiting for the right time to come to life again and build or terrorize humans, pull up trees or knock down boulders forever to erode in the river below. Perhaps they are waiting until the right time when they are needed, or when they simply feel like unfreezing from their grand watching stare. To find a route up and over these spire mazes on ones own would be madness, incredibly dangerous, a life threatening decision. Once you’re in deep, you have to trust those who in the past figured out the easiest ways up over from one fork of the river to the other and take these hand cut foot paths, even if built as steep stumbling switchbacks through loose volcanic seams.
Putting your body in this landscape on purpose is not for the faint of heart. Every time I go out here, all the dreams come back from sleeping on the earth, away from the egos of people, and I only have to contend with my own. The aches and pains are familiar, that part of my neck that hurts from a pinched nerve, the tight shoulders, swollen hands, the backs of my calves and achilles tendons, my lower back injuries working out what it means to carry the weight of everything I need out here again. It’s all very familiar, and I know the terrain of this place of physical pain well— and know what my body is capable of doing. Coming back here to this place of intricate pain is a ritualistic suffering, bringing me closer to my own capacity and memory, relationship with self dissolving into the terrain where I walk. My friend who I walked with told me I was strong, as if maybe surprised. I told them that physical pain at times can be easier for me than emotional pain by a long shot. Though they aren’t really separate things, the body and the spirit are not in different compartments as much as the powerful would like you to believe so. It felt good to hear given I’ve been told I ‘made someone too soft’ as it was a bad thing before, as a criticism of me out of many different criticisms, but at the end of the day I am trying to keep in check my need to prove anything to anyone. Breaking down, being ‘soft’ is being strong. Brave, fierce. These days, I keep a lot of my heart strings inside, and the softness hides away some, and the stoic pushes forth, not crying from the physical pain until it breaks me. Its one of the tricks and illusions that a patriarchal society hands us, one form is the lone man in the wilderness myth- that being strong and good and respectable is not breaking, not showing emotion, or empathy for self or anything else.
While out this time, pushing myself really hard for a few reasons, walking for hours in my own thoughts and the passing feelings like the blooming clouds above that one cannot ignore, I decided that I wanted to start telling the stories of some of my past walks and others versions of what one would call a walk or journey. It might take awhile. The passing memories jolt through like shooting stars on Pleiades night, of which I saw many on the evenings sleeping under the stars without a tent opening my eyes between roll overs to push against my friends body in their sleeping bag next to me, so clear without a dash of light pollution. The shooting starts form constellations within that cannot be separated, the body a map, a map a body, as it is all the time. Every place, smell, experience is a spell and route, and cannot be teased apart from the mass of wool that makes up the skin of hair. And when the skin rots, it all rots together. Out here, it is ever more obvious when the noise is quieted, it profound how little time it can take for the clarity to emerge when stepping aside from all the societal illusions we are fed about how we’re supposed to act, what we are to buy, the debts we are told to take on, the mirage of security or alliances, constant pressure to self brand and individualize. The illusion of ‘coolness’ and hierarchy and egotistical empty efforts.
I walk out of the desert to the heartbreaking news of Emily Pike, San Carlos Apache teen girl found dismembered on the side of the highway near Globe, AZ. I was just at Oak Flat supporting the Apache Stronghold’s fight to save the sacred land that makes them who they are as people for the 4th year, and participating in the prayers for the land and these people. The Apache Stronghold are made up of folks from different Apache tribal groups and beyond but is mainly ran by families from the San Carlos Apache tribe. They bluntly tell their story. That their oppression is not in the past, but is now, and ongoing. The stealing of Oak Flat is blatant and a part of it. Young indigenous women are still stolen like native children were stolen from their families for years and unimaginable things done to them. And ironically but not so ironically, indigenous women go missing more often near heavy resource extraction areas like the four corners and the Dakotas. These are places that anger the giants. These are places where we take the earth more to feed a monster that will never be satisfied. Women’s bodies are seen as the property of men to have whenever they want, and especially native women’s bodies. Just like Oak Flat’s mineral deposits are seen as the property of businessmen who will do whatever it takes to rape and pillage, take and dispose. I’ve said this before and I will keep on: the thing is— people cannot do this to the land or to women’s bodies if they actually intimately connect to the humanity of people, or the aliveness of the land or the aliveness inside themselves. One could not actually go through with it, if they were listening. If we were listening. And currently it’s all ramping up, the taking, the dehumanization, the ignoring of land spirits. People whose ancestors were violently separated from their land spirits, will try to do it to others and are possessed by the spirits that cannot get enough to eat. And we’re all a part of the hunger— sometimes planting seeds in the giant’s footsteps despite the unknown future, the contradiction of being a part of a monster we’re also fighting off, is all we can do. As an elder I met in Mexico told me and Samuel, my friend who has been on my podcast many times— Rock Woman will have her food. What will we do to be good food? (I’m working on the last podcast episode recorded there in Oaxaca before coming back to the states, where we mention this more, but I haven’t had the time to finish it yet, hopefully super soon it will be out in the world)
I am also sitting with the pressure to keep things quiet that come from all realms, to keep things non-political, to not speak up, to not speak truth to power in order to keep the illusion that everything is fantasy version of good and beautiful. The fake peace is violent underneath. When we tell people to stay quiet, to not raise their voices, to keep abuse a secret to secure positive public reputations, to keep people with power comfortable and overfed, what are we perpetuating? I certainly think about this with my personal relations. With going to Wintercount ancestral skills gathering before going to Oak Flat, where everywhere is encouraged to not talk about politics though it is glaring the contradictions found in doing land-based craft without talking about the culture and politics of land. Why are we even here in the first place? Without connecting to the deeper intentions of why and how, our efforts are pointless. Without sitting with uncomfortable truths and being curious about our feelings in response, we are perpetuating the violence on the land and native women’s bodies and so many other bodies. I was glad to see many Wintercount folks show up at Oak Flat after the gathering, to support even for a few hours, before jetting to the privately run Eden Hot Springs, which one can go to only by invite. A hot springs where Apache used to live and no longer do. Where the land spirits are loud. Just that more people thought it was worth their time to juxtapose the experience of the skills gathering with the reality of what’s happening to the land and the people whose ancestors were and are violently taken from it, was encouraging. But still, a friend announced Oak Flat during a public circle at Wintercount, and were shamed afterwards by an older man there, saying it was too political. We should not even have to tell people that the tailing ponds for the mine that they want to put at Oak Flat would be almost bigger than the mine itself, miles long, and would directly affect the archaeological site where the skills gatherings occurs on private land. We should never have to beg for empathy, and yet, I have. It doesn’t work, people have to search for it within themselves. Despite all this, I still go to many of these gatherings and participate in them and comply to a degree. I grew up Southern Baptist, and am used to being told to comply, much to my chagrin. And yet in my own way, I find avenues to subvert the narratives from underneath by connecting with people I disagree with, and it doesn’t always make people happy. And other times, we are changed by one another.
This story I will tell more fully one day, but once I walked the Camino de Santiago, in 2008, a pilgrimage in northern Spain that got a lot of media attention a few years after I did the walk, and I imagine is full of peregrino tourists now and very different from when I was on the path. Aside from the when’s, why’s and how’s to my time there— one theme during my month and a half walking and studying pilgrimage as a liminal space is that the journey IS an initiation. The physical pain is a relationship to self and is not separate from self-trust, from societal narratives, from disconnection to land. Day in and day out I walked, and for this walk, you are not just in ‘wilderness untrammeled by man’ all the time, but walking through civilization in northern Spain. Small towns and big cities, you walk from one end to the other. You walk through poisoned farm fields, deserts and vineyards. Spanish version of suburbia, highways where cars zip by. It’s hard to not feel stress by taking it slow when everyone else is going so fast. The pain and discomfort felt, by walking day in and day out, is the uncomfortable truth. It is the pain of feeling the earth’s body instead of avoiding it out of discomfort, and the self’s body connected to it intimately. Love is pain, and pain is love. There is no love without pain. No pain without love. I cried many times during this walk in Spain. There was nowhere to go but forward, feeling. It broke me open, and whenever I feel those pains again, I remember how I made it that time. I made it before, and I could make it again. It becomes a signpost when in blizzards alone walking up mountains at 20 below or lightening storms at 13,000 feet or when heartbroken and in bed unable to enter the world.
During this walk a few days ago, the familiar sensations of suffering brought me time traveled to places where I loved, I got through, I witnessed with the vessel of my body, where I entered liminality without knowing what was on the other side. My right achilles tendon became swollen and painful and I know I’ve walked it out before, I’ve felt this already. It wasn’t new terrain. In these moments we can choose anything, to rest under a tree and dream all the dreams that stay tucked away with the distractions of the world so ever present and loud. Or keep going and walk slow. We have nothing to prove in how we go on the journey. We only have ourselves in the end. And out of the pain blossomed other worlds possible. The voice of the ragged and still living ancient Alligator Juniper where we dry camped, not a drop of water found anywhere, came out loud in a snow storm falling momentarily on our sleeping bags on a strange warm night under a sliver of a tiny moon. As we moved our beds back and hung a tarp at midnight, the winds died and the stars came back out. What stories do you know from clinging to life, from the journey of slowly entering death, wind worn arms and water so deep it is impossible to search for? What do we become when all we know is resilience?
Where do dark bard stories lie, of future telling, and when the giants wake back up, when we are willing to listen?
Housekeeping.
Trying to get my Spring/Summer/Fall teaching schedule sorted out. As usual, some things are taking longer to solidify. Any day now I should have some of my schedule public. There will be craft classes and field ecology classes- and some new in-person experimental land-based offerings in collaboration that are in the works.
One class I do have on the schedule right now (april 18-20 in Paonia, Colorado) is a long awaited hide tanning class: brain-tan buckskin tanning. I have been tanning since 2013, and am just now deciding I am ready to fully teach. I’ve got a lot of dirt time on tanning for gifts, for trade, and more recently for sale. I have taught for Jim Croft in the past, a bookbinder in northern Idaho I studied with for several summers while teaching parchment, buckskin and bark-tan leather using materials from the land there— (2017-2019?) but other than that, I have taught a few sheepskin tanning classes, done one on one teaching and consults for folks, but never an official brain-tanning class. I scheduled this on Easter weekend which is inhibiting for some folks but not for others- but perhaps you’d like to do this hide camp with me by the river to celebrate easter, and the rebirth of the sun, and all of the plant beings that follow the sun. If you come to this hide camp, I’ll be also inevitably talking about plants along the riparian area where we will be tanning, with a view of the rapidly flowing north fork of the Gunnison.
My Birthday gofundme still going to support the Ground Shots Podcast. Contribute here.
I have been planning for months experimental archaeo-ecosystem research river trip(s) with a group of geology and botany nerd friends on the Green River in Utah, where some lithium mining projects are projected to be developed on the shores. Its been a dream of mine for years to do walks with groups of comrades where we look for plant populations and tell stories of place in different ways, and also do this on the water, which in some areas of the west (but also the swamplands of the east where I grew up), especially canyon country in Utah and Colorado is the best way to access certain areas. The Ground Shots Podcast episode we aired last year on the Colorado River watershed was a huge hit with the podcast audience, and this trip is a part of the non-funded on the ground work that I’m often doing alone or with others that I don’t always share every detail of publicly. The Colorado Trail Project I started years ago with Gabe Crawford was also inspired by this idea of an intentional journey to plant first foods seeds, record plant populations, tell stories and listen to stories, while walking and navigating doing the work within the current paradigms of the unpeopled wilderness myth, thru-hike consumer culture. And the river is no different- most people float these rivers as vacations to party and don’t mind leaving trash on the land. We are doing one section of the Green in mid April, right before the hide tanning class, and are trying to do another section in June, but it’s a highly sought after section that you can only do when getting a permit by lottery. So far, given that we’re a rag tag crew without university backing though many of us have degrees or even work for universities sometimes— we don’t have support to do the trips with permits specifically for research (we tried). This kind of research doesn’t fit neatly into science or humanities paradigms, but it isn’t unheard of, especially in some regions with tribal support. One of the readings I give my field ecology and online class (when I offer it) students for us to discuss together, among other readings visiting the topic, is this one on university backed surveys of archaeo-ecosystems at Bear’s Ears in Utah. It is catching on, seeing ecosystems as co-created and managed by humans and what we currently see on the land at times is archaeological evidence of that intentional tending, but there’s a long ways to go in undoing the colonizing of the fields of archaeology, anthropology, botany, and even history. (We also read pieces from Canyon Gardens, a book put together on research of the ancestral Publeoan gardens of the southwest found near dwelling sites) One of the uncomfortable truths is that indigenous peoples left legacies of their large scale tending and management practices in the landscape, and by making it pristine ‘wilderness’ without looking deeper, we are violently erasing that past. Often times, you’ll go on a wild foods plant walk, or a native plant society plant walk, and people do not mention that these plants may very well be here because of human tending. For Ground Shots Podcast listeners, you have heard me explore these ideas with guests for years. It’s an ongoing exploration not just on the ground in the dirt, but of the mind. I’m not the only one doing it. But also, its not being done enough. When we learn about the land, ecology, plants, wild foods and medicine, we have to study the mind’s relationship to land filtered through the society we live in and how we got here as a culture.
I’d like to record and do photography during the float, or us have someone else do some recording of what we’re doing. Support through monetary donations through the gofundme, or through connections you might have along the Green River than can enable us to continue to float and record the intentional plant populations we might see— or a grant we might be able to snag- would all be helpful support. Or, donations of camera gear! Currently our group is not opening to folks we don’t know well to come along with us, but perhaps in the future, other opportunities might be possible if we can continue the scouting and trips.
little sheepskin sale happening early April in my store, tanning a few this month at at favorite river in New Mexico with friends in an intentional hide camp. My dreams of tanning with others, I revel in it when I get to do this. If you want to purchase one, stay tuned during that time. I donated my recent ones I was going to post to a friend at Apache Stronghold to take to Black Mesa elders.
Support and raise awareness about Oak Flat, here.
Last podcast episode recorded from when in Oaxaca this winter coming soon, with Samuel Bautista Lazo and Mandalin Sattler.
More writings from plant research in Mexico coming soon when I can finish writing and editing the pieces. The next piece, will be mostly behind a paywall, and will be exploring ideas about culture and gender, colonization.
Grateful and excited to learn to tan buckskin with you