the wild and the tame

worshipping and fearing the virgin..

(started in Mexico early February 2025, finished end of March 2025 in Arizona)

(voiceover is for the public version of this piece, the part behind a paywall is read-only)

The world is intense right now, and I am not in a bubble unmoved by it all.

My body is a landscape like yours, and the terrain of my nervous system reflects the discord of the swirling world. The political ‘out there’ can be found in the subtleties of the moments right here. My inside work reflect my interpretation of everything around me, that it isn’t at all separate from my body’s being. I am not sure how to talk about all the contradictions I’m feeling, in my personal landscape as it interacts in layers to the beyond. From my immediately intimate, to the community level, to the professional, to the global. Right here in the contours of this Substack publication, I am interacting with the global, as readers subscribe from all over. Half of you open these letters, and half of you read them through. I’ve been known to be brutally honest, but I also keep a lot to myself, as there is a time and place for many things. I pivot with the peeling revealing and keeping close.

I find myself in Mexico, a country with SO many diverse cultures and languages and customs that contain layers of beauty and contradiction. While at ‘home,’ folks from Mexico or other Central or South American countries or even folks indigenous to what is now called America, are being demonized and on scripted and mind control point with the click of the fingers from someone with hypnotizing powers to move the minds of masses. In Mexico, I find people incredibly nice, friendly, vibrant. I hear about crime and corruption here just as much as I do in the states. The dynamic between men and women is just as complicated and engrained as in the U.S., some beauty, some toxicity. Land relation is multilayered. Its interesting to unwind assumptions, just like I would in any scenario in the states, and also feel the reality of how gender and our relationship to land and the body of the land as the mother, is intertwined. We cannot romanticize cultures who seem more connected as perfect, nor can we assume we understand fully by the surface view. This is how we get into messes of ‘othering’ and demonizing what we don’t understand in the first place.

I gotta talk about gender for a second, and some other crusty edgy things that intersect, and I find myself, an amorphously androgynous animal in a very gendered culture in the midst of movement in the U.S. where moving outside of the binary in thinking, existing, is being weaponized and magnified as a problem when it has always existed, is the way of things. Being a lot of things outside of one bland straight line is being weaponized as a problem.

I study and teach about culture and people’s relationship to land not just through plants and crafts but through observing food, what customs are normalized or taboo, how people make their homes, how they like space around their body or not, how they talk to one another….resolve conflict, joke, help one another.. its all woven together. I do this observing and taking in everywhere, not just when I go to a foreign land. I suppose anyone could say they are a curious student of life, but I hope to swim through intentionally, even though I mess up plenty. The layers that affect our perceptions of things, and every place and space is not without its contradictions. Our bodies are biological morphing evolutionary reflections of our interactions with our environment, but so much of how we move about in the world, and the culture that blooms forth from that (cultures within culture within culture as I’ve said in recent past posts) is socially constructed, down to the ways we dress our bodies or the colors we associate with specific genders. Society is made from the way we relate to the land. It is made from trauma, power over or power with. It is made from relationship with the unseen world, even if we aren’t aware of whats going on under the surface.

I have some bigger thoughts I’d like put together that weave some feelings and ideas I’ve been sitting on while being in this place, while we’re basically experiencing a coup in the U.S., about the deeper layers of why the systems of social organization are disintegrating in the first place. I want to stick in this post to some private reflections on gender and power and land, which I’ll get to in a second— as I want to prioritize my time today getting out the next Ground Shots Podcast episode, which will take a little more time of writing and technical work to finish up (since this was written, the episode I was referencing has been live- the episode I posted with Samuel and Damien in English and Spanish). The current powers that be in America are deciding right now that the multitude of people who came and took land cause they were told they could after they left a place they were removed from likely, genocided and raped not that many generations back are here legally, as long as their skin is lighter in color, and mainly speak English.

Legal-ness is culturally constructed on the bones of millions of dead bison, a now prairie-less great plains, the stench of thousands and thousands of dead wild horses, dead coyotes bodies piled up hunted for hate and fun, extinct passenger pigeons shot en masse out of the sky, lone long leaf pines 1% of their glory populations cut to build the boxes of those who thought they could claim a land that wasn’t their’s, it is built on the disturbed souls that haunt the stolen and buried indigenous children taken from their parents to civilize them and make them more ‘proper.’ Its built on a lot of demonic and evil energy¹ The construction of legality, is based on an illegal settlement of America in the begin with, but the thing is, when capital and debt is our religion, efficiency and profit the highest good, and white supremacy as culturally accepted with scewed and manipulated science to prove it— when our bodies are disgusted by what we don’t understand, in the land, in women’s bodies birthing, in the textures of gender non-dualism, brown or black skin, it all can be justified. Normalized. Seen as God’s work. This is what Jesus was meaning this whole time? Jesus wanted all the stench and death and hate and decay?

And yet here, everything is about the Virgin Mary. More on this in the private part of this piece.

In my work teaching about ecology and plants, researching plants and landscapes and land connection, featuring people on my podcast, its glaringly imperative and woven into everything to address the baselines of our relating— the foundations of our approach to one another and place. Its messy, at every corner there is a contradiction. We can look at it. It’s a contradiction for me to be here in Mexico. It’s a contradiction for us to pay each other to learn land skills. It’s a contradiction that marriage is a contract you pay for that an entity deemed ‘legal’ decides the conditions of. It’s a contradiction that women are objectified and abused and yet worshipped in the form of a earth-mother in iconic Virgin form. After the absurdity of how America got to decide to tell itself it was legal in the first place, named after an Italian explorer ironically, how can we be surprised that what’s happening now wasn’t coming eventually? Natives were demonized and the stealing of their land was justified because it was strategic to call the land they were tending wilderness, a no-man’s land of no-thing. That they were savage and not doing anything important. A danger. The xenophobia and othering was strategic, and connected to the inability to see outside of a binary, outside of boxes within boxes within boxes. The fucking power grids. The normalization of beating women and children, animals and poisoning the landscape. This is all legal. We cannot talk about ecology without talking about why we’re even here in the first place. We cannot talk about ecology without looking at the cultural layers of the words we use to decide who is legal and not, who belongs and not. We cannot talk about ecology without talking about the relationship we have to women, to people who are brown, or people who are themselves in a world that normalizing beating women or joking about how they all lie [todos la mujeres mienten was on the bullriders shirt last night at the rodeo]. (Since writing this in February and as I am going through editing in late March- my Spring ecology class details are now live)

As we speak about in the podcast episode last aired with Sameul and Damien, the trade routes amongst indigenous peoples stretched from Alaska to Patagonia. The Ancestral Puebloans- whose historic territory I have been recently teaching more within— alone encompassed a cultural geography that influenced from Western Colorado and eastern Utah down deep into what is now called Mexico. The cultures of mesoamerica influenced their way far north. This continent was made of brown skin. The border wall is a new political construction wasting millions of dollars and fucking up the sky island ecology, and the flow of life. All this is about power and capitalism as religion, but I digress.