Originally posted on Facebook in June 2020
My word for this year is boundaries. I even bought a tiny armadillo ring to remind me to check where I stand.
The forest is teaching me a lot about boundaries this year. No one is here full-time anymore except me and a neighbor, and we don’t communicate. Are we neighbors or simply residents of the same small holler? It doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things; all the words and definitions slip away in this humid nest of trees, creeks, animals, and stars.
The forest is teaching me boundaries to define where I stand. If I give way, it devours me. If I stand firm and cut down the creeping vegetation, I feel guilt. Guilt for taking up space. Guilt for not wanting to share my indoors with mice. Guilt for letting the possums and raccoons eat leftover stray cat and wild dog food. Guilt for removing the food when black bears ran them off and started sniffing at the pet flap. Guilt that I fed hummingbirds one season only, and they still come back to check but again, black bear wins.
Black Bear and Coyote and Fox and Bobcat.
Hawk and Cat and Dog.
Goldfinch and Chickadee, and Titmouse.
Vines choking the trees. Holly encroaching on the path, sometimes drawing blood as the price to pay for refusing to prune. Mimosa out of place among the pines. Seriously, where did it come from? A bird’s butt, I assume.
Me, having to decide where I stand.
The trees talk to me, and my approval-seeking brain still struggles with that. It’s helpful to know I’m certainly not alone in hearing their words that come in images and pulses in my heart. They point out the big picture and the small. The macro and the micro, the mirrors and fractals of this small space and the wide world.
The Raspberry canes are waging war this year. It’s as if they’ve decided they’ve had enough and are taking over this house and everything else from the road across all the way to the creek. As if they have a plan to drown this holler in canes so that no human can exist here.
I get it. We are a noxious lot, and we have created an enormous mess. I don’t blame them. I imagine sometimes lying down and being overgrown by canes and honeysuckle on a bed of Plantain and Dandelion.
Is there room for me here in this world?
Where do I stand?
I hate chemicals and poisons. Round-Up is verboten, and yet when dripping sweat cutting and cutting back canes, I contemplated it.
I stood there stuck, and the trees showed me fences. In my literalness, I feel confused. Fences will not prevent this rapidly advancing army from taking my home. And then I hear it: my home. My.
I see a slideshow of every living thing carving out space to breathe. The space to eat, sleep, and reproduce is a daily battle in the woods. Fox claims her space and eats what enters it. Turkeys claim their space, clucking and warbling a warning to the dog trotting toward my house lest she gets any foolish ideas in her brain, the one that’s only focused on getting leftover cat food. She ignores them, but they tell her anyway.
Where do I stand?
They offer me the teaching that if I want to live, the life all around me shows me how. I have to claim the space.
Mice, you have all the woods; my house is not your house.
Fox, you may not eat my cats.
Raspberry canes, you may not have my section of the holler.
Honeysuckle, you cannot drown the propane tank.
Black Bear, you may not eat my trash and make a mess all over the hillside.
My mind has no qualms claiming where I stand on issues out in the world, and yet my body still stands down, stands aside as if I have no right to breathe if something else needs the breath more. And yet the canes will tear me to bits if I get in their way. They understand life better than I do, but I am learning.
As white people who can longer fall back asleep to the issues all around us, we will have to decide where we stand in a whole other way. We are used to being first in the line, even if we were poor or abused or raised to think of ourselves as worthless. Worth. Less. Even so, we know now that there were others behind us getting even less. Less than less.
Where do we stand?
I don’t think we can know that yet. I only know that these are times to stand aside and let others come forward because we aren’t Raspberry canes, and we don’t have to move ahead, taking over everything in our path. We can prune away the privilege, and we can choose our fences. There are times for Oneness and times for Definiton and times to be in the Middle, making a mess of it all.
I’m aware of too much and too little. My DNA carries strands of oppressor and oppressed, of taker and taken. My white ancestors took and destroyed and raped and pillaged. My Native American ancestors were ripped away from their homes and fled the madness of the East to the West, making it as far as Mississippi and Texas and stopping, only to bounce back and forth as if the Atlantic and the Appalachians kept calling them to return.
Most of us are a stupefying mixed bag, and now what? What do we do? How do we help without harm? Brains are looking for labels like ally and helper and activist, but those aren’t right either, and in the scrambling, there are white-to-white word attacks and mayhem, with some wading in deeper and others withdrawing.
Where do I stand?
I like the middle way, but Raspberry canes don’t allow it. Racism doesn’t allow it, either. Choices have to be made and made again and made again as knowledge grows and enlightens. We can never give up.
I stand in my heart, and I make mistakes. I see this life always through a kaleidoscopic lens that makes the world strange and words useless. It can be tricky to find any way at all, much less the middle, when I feel like Coyote the Trickster dogs my heels daily.
Here’s what I do know, and it’s the best I can offer you for now. Listen to the voices and ask your internal and external world to show you the next step to take, the next word to write, the next boundary to set, the next bite to eat, and the next heart to love, and it will show you the way.
Sometimes…
You must cut down some canes if they refuse to stop drawing blood.
You will need to soften, humble your ego, and step aside.
You will need to hear blanket statements be made about you and those you love and not let them smother the whole fire.
You will make blanket statements and then want to call the statements back and eat them for dinner in Crow soup.
You may march in the streets with milk in your backpack for teargas treatment.
You may send money to organizations or buy books and art and send food and prayers for courage and strength.
You will cry, rage, have survivor guilt, steep in confusion, and burn with emotions that defy definition.
Sometimes you will need to sleep and sleep and sleep some more.
Where do I stand? In my heart.
Where do you stand?
XO,
LMW
Original Facebook post 06.16.2020