windthread

Deep watering this morning and just now again this evening.  Neem has been applied.   All plants that had been chewed.  Tomatoes,  Bell and Hot Peppers,  Kale and some of the squash.   Early in the morning to John Lewis and the Avacado.  We Wait.

 

This cloth has been hanging in the Morning Tree for weeks now.

re: Ancestors

each chapter ends with a synopsis called Rememberings.  This is Chapter 4  European Trauma and the Invention of Whiteness   

"Trauma was not invented in 1619.  For thousands of years before that,  human beings murdered, butchered, tortured, oppressed, abused, conquered, enslaved, and colonized one another.

By the late 1600s the English controlled nearly all the colonized territory in what would become the United States.  In England, the 1500s and 1600s were not gentle times.  People were routinely burned at the stake, tortured, hung, and otherwise brutalized.

Many of the English who fled to America were victims or first hand observers of this brutality.  Others were desperately trying to get away from poverty, starvation, overcrowding and the Great Plague.

It seems likely that many of the English colonists who made their way to America were deeply traumatized…and brought their trauma with them.

Throughout America's history,  white bodies have colonized, oppressed, and murdered Black ones.  But well before the United States was founded, powerful white bodies colonized, oppressed and murdered other white ones.

Our concepts of whiteness, blackness, and race were invented in the seventeenth century.  The terms white person, white woman, or white man did not appear until the 1680s.

It was only in the late seventeenth century that white Americans began in earnest to formalize a culture of white body supremacy.

This culture was designed to blow centuries of trauma through millions of Black bodies and to attempt to colonize the minds of people of all colors.

For America to outgrow the bondage of white body supremacy,  white Americans need to imagine themselves in Black, red, and brown bodies and  ( experience,  italics)  what those bodies had to endure.  They also need to do the same with the bodies of their own white ancestors."

Resmaa Menakem  My Grandmother's Hands

This seems to be an intersection of things for me.   Yesterday was Emrie's 3rd birthday.  I fell asleep last night being sad because she cannot be a  "normal" child…cannot go to a toddler gymnastics class,  and really,  doesn't even know that classrooms and gymnasiums of many others her own age exist.  She can't go to the Farmers Market with me,  take her basket and choose her own fruit.  She can't…on and on.  I woke this morning remembering those thoughts and thinking….when she is of age to remember,  how might she perceive all this?  But i then thought that what she may remember of being 3,  is running naked with a herd of Goats through a forest.    

I am absorbed by My Grandmother's Hands.   and today i found the 1619 Project.  I'd read reference to it but today,  it suddenly was FOUND and  i listened first to the 5th podcast,  while giving water at the Wall Garden.  i cried at the end.  Tears.  And when i came back up,  i began with the first podcast.

it is an intersection…a synchronistic intersection of the decimation of the Earth,  the opening to a reckoning of the power of Denial  in seeing the reality of  the toxic delusions of Amerika that will bring us all down.  There is a pandemic that some say is due to the destruction of interface between wild and domesticated which circles us back around to the first.  Synchronicity.

so these are what hold my heart.   How i hold these things is to LEARN the needs of the Plant People as best i can.  LEARN  true history….and TAKE IT IN….FULLY.  SEE how it is forming the now.   It is so clear.   Give all i can to Emrie and Julian and Giana in Colorado and Brinley and Fate.  How i do that is to witness my self and  be the best i can one moment into the next.  The "best" being Open.  WILLING.   WANTING TO LEARN.

and still,  through all this…i am needing to sew.   So..this maybe is time.  I placed a center piece with pins.   Tomorrow,  i'll take it down and stitch that piece in place.  I will sew a blanket Cloth.  Ok.