What holds the world together?
What gives her form and shape?
What protects her heartbeat, her bloodflow and her breath of life?
Our peoples have always known that the Earth is our mother, that she is a spirit, a living breathing being unto herself. She is under attack now: bodily integrity and autonomy, personal sovereignty compromised; she has been fed poison for too long, her body out of health and her spirit out of harmony.
And yet, she endures.
She lives and breathes, eats and sleeps, renews and rebirths and dies a thousand small deaths a day, and yet, like us, she remains.
The land is her body — the trees and plants her limbs, the grass her skin, the deep rich soil below the surface her womb from which all life emerges. Her hair is blue and black, the colors of the sky, the clouds her headdress, and she adorns her locks at night with beads made from the stars. Her form changes, alters, in texture and color as we traverse it: In some places, her robes are green year-round; in others, six months of snowy white; in still others, the ashy brown of permanent desert.
Here at Red Willow, she changes her dress with the seasons. Over the course of a year, she will wear the whole spectrum, and in the rainy season, she will toss the spectrum itself casually over her shoulder, the rainbow the sash of her midsummer dress. But beneath it all, her body, her essential bone structure, remains steady and true.
In this place, her limbs are the gnarled and twisted branches of the cottonwood, the long curved boughs of piñon and fir, the slender silvered fingers of the aspens, the graceful golden fronds of the weeping willow. At this time of year, they should be spangled with snow, encased in ice, like the web of willow branches above.
Instead, they are bone-dry, a skeleton uncold, warmed too much in the early winter sun.
On this day, our world here looks more like this, pond ice melting rapidly in the overheated air. The willows’ web of bones and branches is uncovered, arms bare to a nascent sun, reflection emerging fast now from the once-frozen waters.
And still, they hold the world together.
What the earth here teaches us is how to live, not merely by the prescriptions of the old ways, but something more fundamental: how to exist, how to survive, how to be, no matter the weather or the season or the change inflicted from without. Like any good parent, she gives us training and tools alike, but her greatest lesson is the one she shares by example — the one that shows us how to glow in a winter too warm, how to shine when spangled with ice . . . and how to cast a shadow, st4rong and brave and tightly bound, upon her snowy surface.
The trees are her limbs, and her children, too; so, too, the shadows they cast upon her skin, her dress, her winter robes.
This is what our mother teaches us, and what the outside world has failed to learn. Air and water, rain and snow and clouds and sky, tree and shrub and grass and flower, dark and light and shadow in between: Each is its own limb, its own organ, its own cell and platelet and bit of breath that makes up Mother Earth’s body, and each is her child, too. So it is with the animal spirits . . . and so it is with us.
We are her children, too, emerging from her womb at birth, returning as dust to her embrace at hoop’s end. But we are also her, part of her body, and her spirit. And this is what those outside our cultural and spiritual borders fail to understand: We, humans, are part of what holds the world together. It is our abdication of our responsibilities that has led to her overheating, led to her dehydration, led to the tissue necrosis that is dying habitat, led to the amputations of her limbs that are each new extinction.
It is time for us to look up, and down, to look at the web of her limbs in the skies overhead, in the reflection upon the waters, in the shadows upon her skin, and to find ourselves in its spaces. Because these webs and cradles of bone and branch? They hold a place for us, too — a place for us to hold her up and hold her together, and all of us with her.
~ Aji
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