Terror and Alchemy moving Flesh and Bone

“Everything was broken; his ribs, his head, his joints snapped and undone. Yet he didn’t die."

I fought thistles clawing my way out of bed this morning to write early, thorns that poked and prodded me across my curled up body. The bottoms of my feet were heavy with sharp. My arms and legs get prodded as I forced my way through, pokey efforts to keep me in a soft and large bed under multiple wool blankets on a frosty morning in the prophetic half dream state as the first light shone through my short Mongolian yurt windows, beckoned me to peel forth through the fierce thistle patch.

I spent much of the night awake and wanting to get up and make something, envisioning a vest I want to make myself out of a gray sheep shearling I am tanning with a patch of leather I tanned with Oak and Fir, along side a stripe of Madder dug at Grey Owl dyed red buckskin, with a layer of contour lines sewn by my neck of dogbane thread I spun slowly, the edges covered with my linen fabric, the vision of it came forth strong, like it does when you’re an artist and you finally have the physical space to make, or the inspiration swells like an addiction of sex or drugs you cannot say no to and consumes you until you partake in the thing—-but I told myself I must rest until dawn, rest until dawn. Dream what will be dreamed, even though my dreams often take me where I long to be and cannot, or spaces I find discomfort, or rooms of death, adventures I am gathering my things for that never end up happening.

I also felt the urge to get up in the night, when rolling around in bed, on stomach, leg splayed open, curled in fetal, with a soft linen pillow, on the back with hands folded on my chest plate. It became a cadence of shifting every 15 minutes or so, a wind gust creak against canvas and wool, maple steam bent in lattice and lashed with rawhide and horse hair. I felt the urge to take care of the things I’m behind on, like bottling herbal medicine or making tallow soap, or sewing leather wallets or pulling my deer hide in braintan solution out of the open so a coyote doesn’t drag it away, but I stayed in bed, drank water from the spring water jug, put desert salve on my face, back to sleep.

Or write something, I spent an hour or two with words moving in my head, from half dream to half awake, on the meaning of ‘terror.’ How terror is literally horror itself which is what the oppressor forces every day on all of us to consume and objectify, de-animate, is literally used to gaslight the oppressed from standing up to the powers at be, to the actual terror, the status quo, the shadows on the cave walls in the Allegory, often the Kali, the Coyote, the land itself in character, as ‘terrorist’, fighting biting back, with skins and sleuth. For those who are threatened by the resistance and agitation to come back 10-fold, how dare you not let us oppress you passively, how dare you not sit and let us. Oh how many West Virginia coal miners advocating for better working conditions and pay and to not be enslaved to a company were called terrorists, agitators, a problem, disrupters of power and illusion, oh how many indigenous people on Turtle Island we’re seen as the enemy for ‘dangerously’ fighting back and protecting culture and land and home and family, to be be twisted into terrorist. How many women saying ‘no’ to men were called crazy and hysterical when they bit back after fawning over and over to domination out of fear. Anything that doesn’t buy in, antifa, punks and those that question whether God in a man or a woman or something in between, Socrates and his Hemlock poison, he was called a terrorist who was killed for spreading the truth, or being a danger, or just being. Biting back gets twisted and de-humanized, and distilled down into a formless ‘other’ who just disrupts for no apparent reason. And, so anything is justified if the ‘Other’ is formless evil. It is easier to call them a terrorist than to see the terror of everyday life. Of enslavement and consumption. And yet, those who have experienced terror, make terror on others while calling ‘them’ terrorists. And then we are all in terror, and horror, and how humans can do such things to one another, fearing even children. The Heart-eating monster at work, as oil is found off shore, ancestral trauma looms over a people, and God says land has borders, so the monster churns forth. Burn more fossil fuels, shoot more children, bomb more ‘animals’ and yet calling humans mere animals, gives us a lot of perspective on how we must value animals outside of humans.

I would also lie awake emboldened by my emotions around a situation in my personal life, what would I say about this or that, how this wasn’t ok, and this was ok, or my boundary was crossed here or there, or I failed to have a boundary at all in this case and shaming myself for it, how all those feelings come when distraction isn’t present, and yet I kept myself in bed to eventually, fitfully, fall into series of dreams where I’d wake often and fall back, as my sleep has been lately.

I’d dream of food I want to eat, curries, and opening a container of homemade sausages to make with eggs over easy, my grandmother’s sweet potato pie, bubu’s marinated backstrap I can’t seem to recreate, raw milk and chocolate chip cookies I even suddenly realized I can make since I have an oven to bake them in right now and live somewhere raw milk is abundant.

Watching the war online, helpless as we all feel, the images of death and ‘terror’, horror, imprint on my brain and in my body, a kind of violence I have never seen before, yet I’ve seen plenty of death in processing animals and tanning hides, plenty of blood and guts and stench and fat. The imprints swirl into my dreams, which caused me last night to experience my own death, and to be crying for myself, knowing I had died, yet I was in my dream alive crying about my own death, you know how time really isn’t linear even in waking life right, neither is it in dreams, and neither are dreams states of reality just for when our eyes are closed and in our own minds. We were told once that reality is just a series of mental projections, and yet we can connect to future events, hug our dead ancestors, pet our long lost dogs, and empathize across vast geographies, in our dreaming minds in ways that cannot be explained away by science.

I awake to start writing early, so much I have in me to pour forth and often don’t know where to start, but starting somewhere, and to prioritize writing, and myself as a vessel for alchemy, even if it is to explain my process of fighting off thistle pokes in the jungle of warm bed, my deer hide worries as if they are my children, dreams, screams, longings and craving for milk and cookies and love-making with soul mates to get there. And the sun rises across the hills towards the distance of the Uncompahgre Plateau, the direction of the warm winds, the vast canyons of all colors hidden in deep crevices, the home of Single-Leaf Ash and colorful desert Milkweeds, Sand Verbenas with white flowered umbels and Biscuitroots with light blue-green leaves and fat purple flowers.

I made the fire in the woodstove from Aspen and Juniper, and the smell of Cedar fills the yurt, a space handmade using barely any metal or fiberglass, the wool felt protecting the nest of this womb I’m grateful to get to inhabit and hold me at this moment in time. I go outside to find my paper stash in the airstream for starting the fire. Frost settles on the ground, I see my hide on the beam; it’s frozen and fine, getting softened by the elements, the liquid expanding into ice inside of fiber layers criss-crossing every direction glued together less every day. It is in the process of transformation using my body and attention and directing the elements at the right time and moment. Oh what else can we do with death when its all around us, but to give attention to our minds, our steady hands, or ability to nudge it a certain direction towards rebirth. We cannot always control the death of something, but we can turn that state of being into something else, move it with our attention.

When sitting with ‘terror’ I turn my body to moving my hands to scrape flesh, stretch hide and buff skin, washing salt and blood, hair and mucous. I mix soap and fat, put the skins in, pull out wring and repeat. I pet and massage the muddy hair, movement, friction, accumulating, carrying forth some incarnation of spirit, just a director, of grief and guts, in dreams and cravings. Hard feelings and trauma responses. Animalistic bliss and ego-bursting connection. Life is betrayal and love. Nose to the grindstone, wake early and tend to the vats, to the heart, to the boundaries between life and not, self and land, dream and wake, thistles and soft bed, horizon and canyon as soft red light illuminates that the lines are never solid. When is the hide ever fully tanned? Ancestral trauma ever fully healed? Terror ever made into Care? Trust broken ever truly moved into healing mending? Sex be actually making love? Does peace between humans actually exist?

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What I’ve been up to lately:

Reading ‘Stealing Benefacio’s Roses’ by Martín Prechtel. I started reading this when I went to camp in Dominguez Canyon last week, needing some time to sit with some loss and betrayal, and turning back to myself and my land relationship as first priority. In the daze of a multi-day, barely eating, sitting in the sun, never taking off any of my wool layers, wandering up canyons and micro-dosing solo period, I opened this book, which I grabbed frantically when I left, knowing it was time to start it.

Something that stuck out to me as I was working my way through the first chapter of the book, when sitting with grief and how over the years I have often experienced shaming from others for feeling grief fully, or shamed for finally having boundaries when I didn’t for a long time, and those boundaries being perceived as an assault or ‘causing trouble.’ Sitting with my hurt and grief, and not shaming myself for it, the red soil and yellow-leaved Willows loving me anyway, I read this paragraph describing the grief of Gaspar Culan when he lost his wife and child:

“Everything was broken; his ribs, his head, his joints snapped and undone. Yet he didn’t die. His heart kept beating. He’d loved his wife and his child and now there was no sweetheart, no food, no village, no baby, no sunlight; there was nothing left and still he didn’t die. Because he felt grief he didn’t die. His sadness needed him alive to be felt.”

After this he transformed into another creature, he died but didn’t, he became an anteater in his grief and roamed the land in new form.

And our sadness needs us as vessels, our rage needs us as vessels for the being-ness of grief itself to have a body to feel it. Just as the Strangling Fig needs another tree to learn to be a tree, grief needs our bodies to know itself.

I heard this bigger story told over a two night period during the August Grand Mesa ecology course I facilitated through Groundwork this summer by Greg Pettys who is a student of Martín and retells this story well. Greg and his wife Ramphai and daughter Suriya came on the August trip to help with the cooking for the class, and also to give a family-story infusion to our time out on the land. Greg writes a weekly Substack that I love reading, and helps me keep up with the family as they spend the next 6 months in Thailand, where Ramphai is from.

Subscribe and read Greg’s publication, below.

I am thinking of starting a book club either getting deep into one book or reading multiple over a several month period. I started a chat thread on the matter, if you haven’t chimed in, please do there. Since there’s a lot of research and story that comes with Ground Shots work, I wondered what it would be like to read books with folks and facilitate discussion on what those books bring up for us, in what they tell and how they affect out lives. I often read books and want to be able to reflect with someone, sometimes that ends up being on the podcast, and currently in my life I don’t have many IRL friends I can discuss books with regularly. This book could be one in a series (the Stealing Benefacio’s Roses), but also, I have other ideas for books that are written by indigenous authors, or aren’t widely read but are profoundly impactful. This wouldn’t be a scenario where we read popular best sellers. It would be a study group getting deep into what these books have to inform us. The group would be donation based to help support my time. Everyone should have access to the chat thread so go check it out. My bookshop account is a place where you can buy books for yourself (or gift me from a wishlist I have made, mostly of plant ID books I have yet to own) and I get a kickback for any books you purchase.

I finished editing and made live my conversation with Sam Zipporah, go give it a listen. I went on a walk with Sam yesterday at sunset on an irrigation ditch where we talked about the complexity and yet simplicity of the war, identity, trauma and heritage. I’m grateful to get to know this human who has fought for the basic rights of people to be in connection with plants and fertility as we always have. She reminded me that I need people in my life who ‘support’ the work I do, not take from it, or inhibit it from happening. Food for thought.

If you feel moved by this episode or any on the podcast, will you do us a favor and leave a review on iTunes?

I’ve been prepping for another apothecary sale, this time smaller and shorter, and I’m a little behind because of moving logistics and personal life stuff that has come up, but there WILL be a sale. I’m hoping things will be live this weekend. I’m not usually a holiday sales person, I never have done one around the time of ‘holidays,’ but this year, by request, I’m releasing a small amount of medicine for the purpose. After the September sales were so successful, I am encouraged by folks’ love of the medicine I make. In this round, there will be some old favorite but a few new items including a few smoking blend varieties, some tea blends, new tincture singles and Tallow Balm (which I haven’t released any batches of in 2 years). I may have a few crafts for sale too, but likely things like hides or hide craft I won’t have available until January when I’ve had more time to create in a flow.

I’m paying rent now so paid subscriptions are super helpful and appreciated as well as Venmo support: @ kelly-moody-6 for the work I do on the Ground Shots Podcast, educational work and beyond.