The Land Within Me

This week’s #NaPoWriMo share is in response to

Paul Hawken

’s entry, “Indigeneity” from Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, and it draws from two passages that particularly stood out to me:

“In the West, students are steeped in a scientific method of learning that separates and isolates people, plants, animals, species—life itself—into distinct parts disconnected from habitat, river, grassland, or forest floor, as if one plant or species could exist without everything else.”

- Paul Hawken, “Indigeneity,” Regeneration

And also this:

“There is an extraordinary teaching about the earth that is needed, a way of knowing that erases the separation between people and nature, a disconnection that has caused the climate crisis. The knowledge is here.”

- Paul Hawken, “Indigeneity,” Regeneration

The idea in this chapter is that we have so much to learn from individuals who are native to the land on which we live, because their relationship with the land is very different and more intimate than those of us who are of European descent. I respond to this idea in this poem today, thinking about my own connection with the soil and with the land around me.

Photo by Dylan de Jonge on Unsplash

Here’s this week’s offering:

The Land Within Me

I come from the humus of other countries
shaped in human form and hauled here 
on ships across several centuries. They fled
or sought fortune, fueled by promises 

of coal and soil, a long line of farmers 
down one side and miners on the other.
Bronislawa, Augusta, Sara Elizabeth,
and more bore the fruit of homeland

in their wombs and delivered us all
to the New World, without our mother 
tongues. There is nothing indigenous 
about me. The land I own—no—occupy, 

was once Shawnee, Miami, Modoc, 
Ottawa, Peoria, Seneca-Cayuga, Quapaw, 
and Wyandotte, tribes that form 
the Kaskaskia Territory and names 

I know from county maps, rivers, 
school districts, and towns long purged 
of the First Nations who ceded this land,
in 1805, peacefully, supposedly. I’ve been 

here ever since, with my pale skin so prone
to burning, my Eastern European face, 
my fences, declaring land and trees 
and lawns and water mine when I’ve been 

a transplant for such a short time, believing 
the lie that I am somehow not of but owner 
of this land, preeminent, as if one plant 
or species could exist without everything else.

I am now formed of the dust of this earth,
in this place, in this time. The land I am
is not mine. There are words for my home
I need to know to understand how to be

with the river, soil, birds, and trees 
around me, but I still don’t speak 
the language. Native neighbor, 
please, teach this refugee to sing.

I've been thinking a lot about immigration, because it's in the news these days, and citizenship, because it's complicated, loving the place that you live, but not loving the decisions of your government, and then also considering citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, which is ultimately so different and other and yet completely here.

At least the way I understand the kingdom of heaven.

A song that I have shared in my newsletter in the past keeps coming to mind as well, called “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. You should listen to it.

It deals with these complex feelings of grief and confusion and frustration and desire to be part of the effort to bring about the kingdom of heaven, here, while also acknowledging and appreciating the not-yet-ness of union with God that awaits us in the beyond.

I need to know there is justice, that it will roll in abundance, and that you’re building a city where we arrive as immigrants and you call us citizens and you welcome us as children home.

- Jon Guerra, “Citizens”

Anyway, I've been thinking about this stuff, chewing on it. I don't have any answers of course because there really are only more questions when it comes to these kinds of things. How do we live into this season, present in the challenges and the tension and the chaos all around us without letting it rattle and shake our foundations.

I guess that's the thing.

I'll also be honest with you that I am in a mood this week.

I would like to just quit everything. No offense to all of the things that I'm connected to because none of them have done anything to make me feel this way.

I just think it's the weather and the season and maybe I'm coming down with a cold.

Who knows? But that's where I'm at right now. So there's a little bit of overcast skies in my palace in time.

Whatever.

That's just where we're at. I will be grateful when there's new mercies tomorrow morning.

One final note: Sunday begins my daily posts for the Holy Week.

So you'll see a pretty substantial shift in tone.

I guess not a substantial shift in tone.

It's still me.

I'm just sharing more overtly faith-based work this coming week.

So if that excites you, look for my daily emails.

If you'd rather not deal with Sarah and her Holy Ghost,

then maybe just ignore them for the next week.

One way or the other, I look forward to presenting some other work in the coming week.

Blessings on you all.