PROFESSORS OF PRACTICE--EPISTOLARY PRACTICE--SESSION 3
During the month of April, Jeff Chang and myself co-taught the module “Living Democracy: Image and Culture” of the Professors of Practice course at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley.
Below is the epistolary practice I closed each session with—entitled Love-Lectures—in hopes that these letters could bleed from my heart to yours. Here is letter #3
Favianna Rodriguez, Mother Earth Demands Action, 2018, Collage
Beloved Children,
I come to you today to share a bit about our journeys together because, as one of your siblings has put it, “you know so little about the worlds beneath your feet.” (Robert Macfarlane, in Underland) You also have difficulty in accessing what lies billions of miles away or what has been overlaid through cycles of hundreds of thousands of years. I have noticed you have this tendency to see what is only on topsoil, on the surface… But I want to help you see is underneath this shell that you stand on. In the deep recesses of the earth, there lies an amalgam of stories, histories, and memories of peoples, lands, your sibling rocks, woodlands, and animals, and fungi, and bacteria, viruses, and fluvial systems, spirit worlds, and the traces of their engagement with one another. Though these systems and geological epochs may seem sedimented, the tales they tell are not inert: they await the precise opportunity for engagement and I hope that you feel invigorated to look for these stories because it is not like the past subsides or goes extinct. It resurfaces and re-emerges, sometimes spectrally, to haunt the site of its omission. And in being so, Beloveds, the past is right there beneath your feet.
I am writing this letter to you because I would like to urge you to seek an under-standing of what is beneath the surface of your present moment, of the places upon which you settle your feet, your heart, your prayers, your homes, your communities. I know that there are bodies, stories, lands, ecosystems, ways of knowing, and memories that continue to breathe beneath the surface of concrete you have built your homes. I can see them pressing up against the shell, waiting to be heard from below. You see, as you can probably guess, by now, this crisis that we all find ourselves in reveals, to me at least, that your ways of under-standing the world have little to do with an exercise of going deeper, of sinking low. And in order to develop a more expansive vision of what is emerging right now, you must lower you bodies. You must put your ears to the very shell of this earth, to the skin of this planet. Only then will you be able to hear the message we are attempting to relay to you for hundreds of years now. What I am trying to urge you to do today, in this language that is not mine and that seems less than capacious (for our eyes speak, the ways we move speak, the humming of birds speak, where you place your heart speaks), is to get curious about the genealogy, the histories of choices, decisions, and actions that you have taken. They have privileged some bodies and epistemes to the detriment and obliteration of others. And this is not my mode of being or speaking at all. I speak through the emergence of plants, the swarming of birds, the eruptions of volcanoes. There were at least seven major eruptions last month. Did you pay attention to them? An earth in heat.
I bet not.
But I know that you find yourselves right now in this strange place of academic-learning-taken-to-zoom, so I will retrieve some of the folks who have, within these disciplinary boundaries, engaged with me, with us.
One of the things I must point you towards is that many of your kinfolk have long been enamored and seduced by this idea of progress, of unlimited use of resources, and, in being so, you have hurt and desecrated me in unutterable ways. This illusion of progress you have is based on other deceptions: That I can be used and abused as an infinite resource rather than THE SOURCE of your being. Because many of you do not under-stand that everything is circular in this here place, you have projected a life that is based on the accumulation of these resources, despite your incredibly short journey on this planet. Your idea of “a maximum of profit with minimum investment in the shortest possible period of time” is lethal, Leonardo Boff warned us in Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor.
What kind of delusional thinking is this? This machinery of production, of unending doing-ness, places you ABOVE things and not ALONGSIDE all living and nonliving beings on this planet, which is actually where you have always been. You are very latecomers to this place; do you ever remember that? And as latecomers, Beloved Children, you have to ask yourselves whether the metaphors and images and knowledge systems you have envisioned and protected bear the fruit of affection, reciprocity, and continuity or whether they overlay and weigh planet with images of accumulation, destruction, trauma, and violence. You must wake up from this self-deceptive and selfish dream you are dreaming of! (See Ruther’s, Gaia and God)
You are living through a pandemic right now. And I want to remind you that you have access to vessels from your ancestral kin that contain holy wisdom, codices, of who you have always been and who you will continue to become. You are capable of reinventing realities, transforming worlds, lest you forget. This historical and sacred knowledge is inscribed in your DNAs, your skins, your bodies, your gut. Remember the seismic force that was Gloria Anzaldúa? She wrote pages and pages of poetic and shape-shifting recipes that teach you how to develop a capacity to reinvent life through sweat, pus, tear, blood, joy, touch, art, and bodies that move and breathe and commune and eat and love. With me. Through me. If you go back to her Neplantera art, you will re-member yourselves and all that links you to life, to sensation, to place, to me.
Did you have a chance to connect with your breathing today?
To the energy that surges up and down through your body?
Can you hear the whispers of the land?
The gentle noise that travels from a humming bird’s wings into your ears?
And can you imagine, imagine freely, what life could be after this moment of deep hurt? A world post-capitalism, post-pandemic? You may be hurting today, Beloveds, but you are “not impoverished of experience!” as Anzaldúa said it so well in Border Arte: Neplanta el Lugar de la Frontera. Artists and images help you access your histories, your knowings, roots, strength, medicine, that which you have lost, forgotten, disposed of. You are vested with the ability to make art, to find the sound of your voices, the sound of God. Art will help you touch one another in times of isolation. Art is, in her words, “the locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion, explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage.” Arte cambia el punto de referencia, as she puts it. It disrupts the neat separation between you and others. Eres mi otro yo. Art bleeds, is porous, tears apart, rebuilds.
Indigenous symbols and myths like Coatlicue contain wisdom, knowledge systems of how cultures and prophets and bodies and peoples have survived diabolic forces. They are technologies, mechanisms of resistance that work against oppression and assimilation, and erasure. They provide continuity across time/space/place. They should compel you to sift through the debris, the discomfort of pain so that you can activate an imagination that is ancestrally rooted and sacred. Art is the materialization of the Nahuátl word Neplanta—the terrain of uncertainty and suspension that you find yourselves in. They have helped you set traps against coloniality, imperialism, corporatism.
Take a look at this image from Mariana Ortega. Have you learned to have thoughts that feel and feelings that think? As Carvalhaes urges you to do? To wear your hearts right there on our minds? Can you identify what this bird medicine is doing to you? Do you listen to their teachings?
Mariana Ortega, Cómeme el Corazón, 2007 (Detail).
Do you know that some of these birds live in ancient forests, that these forests have roots go deep and spread outwards, that their medicine heals, and support your life on earth? That these forests help you restore your heartbeats to a healthy cadence?
And how about this image from Yadira Cazares? What does healing look like for you?
Yadira L. Cazares, Invocation, 2018.
Some three decades ago, one of the most prophetic voices that has walked upon me, Vandana Shiva, exposed that this idea of progress, of development, was never a liberating project because the movement affirmed the “neutrality” of capitalism, when, in fact, it harvests dispossession, violence, deprivation for most while very few accumulate power and affluence. Her essay was published in Women Healing the Earth. She spoke plainly: progress is a colonial project that “emerged from centers of western capitalist patriarchy,” reproducing patriarchal structures within families and their relationship to land, subjugating, exploring, and devaluing women and their efforts to maintain life on this planet. Disregard for women’s bodies and to me walk hand in hand. Around the same time Anzaldúa and Shiva were putting words to paper, so was Winona Laduke, Anishinaabe leader, and thinker. If you are not familiar with her work, I urge you to learn from them because her Indigeneity is also a container for ancestral knowledge you need to drink from. Her people, who have been systemically subjugated to this day, know in the bones. No. in their marrow, in their ceremony, that animals, fish, rocks, water system, fauna, flora are “brothers, sisters, uncles, grandpas.” She wrote: Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives are what bind our cultures together. The protection, teachings, and gifts of our relatives have for generations preserved our families. These relations are honored in ceremony, song, story, and life that keep relations close. . . . These are our older relatives—the ones who came before and taught us how to live. Their obliteration by dams, guns, and bounties is an immense loss to Native families and cultures. . . .” (see her All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life) In the same vein, Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan also reminded you that what you have rendered absent, buried, and secretly obscured is manifesting as presences through pandemics of catastrophic proportions. In her book Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, she writes “The underside of our lives,” she writes, “[g]rows in proportion to what is denied. The darkness is made darker by the record of light. A screaming silence falls between the stars of space. Held inside that silence are the sounds of gunfire, the wailings of grief and hunger, the last, extinct song of a bird. The dammed river goes dry, along with its valleys. Illnesses that plague our bodies live in this crack of absence. The broken link between us and the rest of our world grows too large, and the material of nightmares grows deeper while the promises for peace and equality are empty, are merely dreams without reality.”
The Indigenous perspectives from these two women are asking whether you are able to envision and to live all your relations as kinship, as sacred familial bonds. And I ask you today, Will you continue to other nature as though you “stand” somewhere outside of it? You must ask yourself continuously: “what value can ever be spoken from lives that are lived outside of life, without love and respect for the land and other lives?” Hogan envisions an insurgency rising, “the people of the earth are reaching out,” she writes. “We are having a collective vision. Like young women and men on a vision quest . . . We want to live as if there is no other place as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life that dwells above our tin roofs.”
“Relatedness,” Ivone Gebara writes in Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation, “points to the vital power of the interconnection among all things,” while opening up “Eco-justice is the kind of justice we seek and live out when we affirm our bodies as part of the Sacred Body of the universe.” That is my body, your body. Melanie Harris, another prophetic voice, has written in her Ecowomanism: African American Woman and Earth-Honoring Faiths that in order to resist the logic of domination, patriarchy, environmental racism, and a culture of violence, ecowomanism is asking you to honor my complexity and to recognize that all life and non-life within this home I yield to you are sacred and that you all bear eco-memories, and eco-stories that can reinvent your relationship to me, that can resist systems of oppression and terrorist patters of white supremacy and cishet patriarchy.
To Ailton Krenak, you have got to recover your profound bonds with ancestral memories. These memories sustain your identities and subjectivities that Capitalism has tried to steal from you. To him, the very idea of humanity is wrong. It’s an illusion that alienates you from me. And creates the myth that we are not one and the same. He is part of the Krenak people in Brazil. Kre means head and nak mean grounds. They are the people whose minds have never left my grounds, the earth. They are profoundly connected to place. Their identity and history and subjectivity are determined by place. Their world ended in 2019 when a dam that broke completely killed the land and biotic that composed their ecosystems. He says that the river, that is, their grandfather, is in a coma right now. And to think of a river in any other abstraction is to relate to it not as a living being but as a consumable thing. Beloved children, I urge you to resist being part of machinery that kills your subjectivity, your alterity, that makes you into clients in transactions, not as spirit beings that you are, with meaning, with the right to a dignifying and fulfilling life. Full of imagination, creativity, art; that bears the right to desire, to care, joy, and pleasure! The arts are one of the most profound ways for seeing, for taking the blinders off of your eyes. It’s how you practice resistance, you stop the bleeding, you imagine what recovery and redemption may look like. Collective acts of creativity put you back in touch with me, with creation, the breath, the courage, and all that is HOLY. May you find me in your dreams and may this dream allow you to commune, listen, and create sanctuaries of remembrance, safeguarding the cosmic nutrients that will sustain your and our life here on earth.
With all my love and affection and vigor,
Your Mother.
Earth.