the dance of the ant people
our smallness, our medicine, our threads
Upcoming offerings
April 27th, Huntington | grief & rage ceremony
May 11th, 20 Rock Point Road | offerings & needs mutual aid circle led by fire and song
Here we gather to sing songs amongst the trees and fires, share words, and prepare to form an organized community
We seek to create the relationships and rituals necessary to form communities of care, to support one another in our projects, and sustain webs of mutual aid
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Apologies that this next one will be on Mother’s day!
the medicine we carry
I haven’t written for some time; this has been the longest break in publishing I’ve taken since starting this newsletter. I’ve been out west, deep in nature, taking a break from technology. I feel tempted to apologize, and also I am going to refrain from doing so. I think that we have created a system where creators feel obligated to produce offerings with a reliable, clockwork cadence in this culture-world of machines and deadlines and “sorry for the delay” email introductions. We live in a world where subscribership or money is a transaction that guarantees the same type of delivery of goods as would an Amazon toilet paper subscription.
In an orphaned culture lacking ceremony, I sense the deep longing for reliability, commitment, and discipline. But my feeling is that too often we find these traits through the highly pressurized artificial obligation machine of the capitalist hellscape, the one that leads with the carrot of wealth and a stick of poverty. I don’t want to find my grounding in reliability, commitment, and discipline for writing in my fears or selfish hopes.
I want my source of inspiration to come from the earth, from my intuition, from a seductive relationship with curiosity, from a deep sense of connection and a longing to share. I want to push myself to write even when I don’t necessarily want to, even when I feel too “busy,” but to have that energy of push come from a discipline that is inspired by something other than fear. Writing from this place of inspiration is my commitment to you, which I suppose means every now and then I will skip a month. I hope that you stick around. I hope you’ll still look for me in your letter box.
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I recently returned from a trip to Tümpisa, also known as Death Valley, where I participated in a vision fast ceremony. I went with the School of Lost Borders, and if you have never checked them out, I profusely and lovingly recommend them. From my perspective, the mixture of simplicity, humility, reverence, and skill with which they structured their container held deep medicine we were all longing for.
Some seeds of clarity floated on the current and landed softly in my silent, slow, hungry body as I sat alone in the desert. They just begin to germinate.
And in this moment, the soils they land in: the oligarchical governance machine imposes crushing tariffs, threatens medicaid, strips funding for hospitals and research, squeezes the freedom and funding of education, unburdens corporations from duties to act with transparency or with any regulation, and generally plans to systematically dismantle any remnants of the raggedy, dwindling safety net we have been clutching.
And also at this moment, I have been trying my best to tend the delicate seeds of vast space time perspective that my fast gifted me. I hope to translate, even if in just some fragmentary, crude form, at least one seed here, over time.
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Each day of my fast, I awoke to the sunrise emerging from the crest of a red ochre mountain, and each evening I entered the realm of dreams after a blanket of stars emerged in a cloudless sky.
In this place, I began to better discern the hubris I was tending within myself when it came to making any "real" contribution in the efforts to slow climate change, to heal earth mama, to fight for rights. The magnitude and responsibility and urgency I felt in these efforts was the place from where the hubris sprouted, not the efforting itself.
The rhythmic cycling of the sun and moon and stars reminded me of my inability to comprehend the earth’s age and the universe’s origin. The oceanic fossils in the sandy red desert reminded me of the vast eons of change that have taken place many, many times around me, and that our ancestral bipedal primates have only been around for a miniscule, infinitesimal fraction of that time.
In this place where the sea once rocked, I now stood at the rocky base of sandstone cliffs and such parched dryness that not a single insect tasted my skin. For perhaps hundreds of millions of years this place was a bed for water. And now it was a place of dryness and heat. A place of beauty and violence, a sacred land recently stolen from the hands of the Timbisha Shoshone, placed in the domain of a domination culture, her summers soaring above 120 degrees fahrenheit.
The smallness of my lone, fragile body roaming clumsily amongst the magnitude of the mountains, the resilience of the songbirds, the ancientness of the rocks and sand, reminded me of my breath-takingly brief visitation on this planet. Barely to be registered in the sands of time.
She reminded me again what a brief visitor homo sapiens are; we have only just arrived on the scene. It’s estimated that dinosaurs inhabited the earth for 165 million years before disappearing. Comb jellies are estimated to have emerged on this planet 700 million years ago, and still hang out today. The earliest primate fossils we have found first appeared around 55 millions years ago. Our modern homo sapien bodies, by some estimations, are estimated to have emerged around 300,000 years ago
We just showed up one super hot minute ago. We are small, we are fresh, we have barely been here at all.
This is not a new thought. Not for myself, and likely not for you. But with the felt sense of this thought, I feel new clarity arising. And with the timely reminder of this zoom-out, I hope I can take you on a little ride with me.
Through felt sense, I was able to integrate more of an understanding -- small and humble as it was -- of the way that we humans are such a tiny, miniscule blip in the history of self-governing life on this planet. Even the fragmented beginnings of domination agriculture, estimated to have begun around 10,000 years ago, barely registers in the span of human life here, let alone all life.
The sun-worshipping masculine tribes, the emergence of hyper masculine cultures, the industrialization of the planet, the resource-ization of our relations, the spiraling down towards hyperproduction of trauma, all seems within the last eyeblink of earth time.
Yes. I need to fight (unfortunately) for my/our basic rights. I need to fight for our planet. I need to stand up against genocide, and use my voice, and be aware, and participate. Yes, I do. And yet, and yet, and yet…
And yet, I need to be aware that these “fights,” are an epic dance battle that’s happening in this miniscule moment in time. This is a dance scene in a billion-year long performance I was born into. This is not the enduring, wide lens of reality I am sensing into when I feel the urgency, guilt, shame, fear, and magnitude of the chaos and pain of our times.
When I feel into the urgency and fear of our times, I am mistaking the miniscule moment I am in for Big Time. For Space Time. For the Big Picture. The Big Picture is that we are here to experience consciousness, to be vessels for spirit to emerge through us, to learn, to cultivate the infinite shapes of love that can dance through our bodies.
I cannot change the Big Things. I cannot shape time, or change tides, or reshape global patterns in this small lifetime. We cannot stop the oceanic tides of greed from ravaging the earth and acting out their dance -- not even with violent revolution, y’all. Because what does the violence birth? What nutrients does her placenta hold?
The picture is too big, and we are too small. We are ants who cannot see beyond the tips of the grasses we march beneath. We think we understand the earth, or the universe, but we have barely seen a thing. And like the ants, we accomplish almost nothing at all alone.
But each of us is here for a purpose.
Each of us carries medicine.
This is true.
Each of us carries medicine like the ants carry tiny nuggets of fluff and food. They build enduring and ephemeral intricate cities under the earth and towers above the ground. They create rooms and structures and societies where they all feed and birth one another, each carrying their own tiny packet of medicine on their backs.
And in this context, I feel a more grounded sense of our roles here. I feel the mission to carry threads anchored back to the knot of truth at the core of things, and to offer those threads to the future ones, creating the pockets of awareness & consciousness that feed our craving for having lived good lives here.
I feel the knot of truth at the core of things calling us to experience intimate lessons with love, with grief, with gratitude, with community-building, with ritual making, with initiation, with rites of passage, with conflict and repair, with earth tending, with right relationship with all living things, just to name a few.
I feel our mission to rediscover, cultivate, and tend these threads in a time when many of us were born into cultures and families where most of the threads have been buried. The empire has burned, smashed, and threatened the wisdom threads we have carried for generations into hiding, and we may be tasked in these times to experience what it’s like to rediscover the places where we can knot our threads to the truth at the core of things while swimming in a soupy era of warped mirrors and illusions and distractions and fear. We may be tasked to experience the heroic task of holding onto these threads while getting thrashed about as the soup begins to roil.
Maybe, in time, in emergent pockets of life, there will be a sufficient number of us with ancestors who gave us their own hard-won, sufficiently anchored threads, to weave enough of a tapestry to form a village or two. Perhaps these villages will have what they need to survive, adapt, and flourish within the landscape of a changing planet.
But even if not, carrying the threads knotted back to the core, one at a time, are the job of the ant people. This is our life purpose. To bring one small crumb home to the ant hill at a time. Sometimes the crumb is ten times the weight of our bodies. But as we know by watching the ants, we can carry them. And they are small pieces of a much larger, inconceivable thing.
We try to learn and remember what is true while we are here and give those clues to our loved ones and descendents, to try to cultivate vaster and deeper pockets of life amidst lifelessness. Even if the pockets succumb to pollution and violence 1000 more times before the earth shakes us off, I feel us as the ants, here on this plane to build and build and build while serving the earth, one heavy little thing at a time.
When I found out, while skimming books in a bookshop in Moab, that the ant people are central to a sacred Hopi story within their creation myth, I felt the vibration of this truth resonate through me. The Hopi know about survival, know about space time, know about Big Picture.
Sweet one, you may not be able to stop the ravaging madness of greed. But if it is your medicine to organize the resistance, please dance this way. If it is your medicine to unionize our workers, please show us your dance. If it is your medicine to teach us how to give gifts to one another, to teach us how to receive, please let that flow move your body to the rhythm of the earth. If it is your medicine to teach us how to pick up arms to defend our threatened siblings from hateful attack, please show us your moves.
But please, my friend, do not feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. We have barely arrived, and we are barely here. In only a couple of breaths, we will all leave the world again, and return to something more timeless and connected. The waters have carved out canyons for millions of years and have dammed and released millions of times in the span that it has taken us just to get this far.
In the desert mountains, I felt that you are here to give your medicine and live out the lessons your consciousness seeks to experience during perilous times. These lessons are heightened. The dance is frenzied. It is intense. The intensity of the moment is real, and it feels possible to me that it’s because this is a moment for our consciousnesses to learn the blindingly saturated colors of grief and praise which can only accompany dramatic, high contrast times.
I hope you can bear it. I hope you can bear it beautifully, and feel its truth and its fleetingness all in one breath. You are almost gone and have barely just arrived, and yet every moment of presence, deepening into the experience here, is a gift to the dance that we are experiencing together. What can you bear to feel? What can you bare to give?
Can you step back into the embrace of the trees and the buds and the mountains and stars and remember that the human timeline is so magnificently short, and that you are so magnificently small, that it all doesn’t even really matter?
And that it all matters so much.
Petra Lentz-Snow, one of my guides on my vision fast, wrote recently:
“Many of us tap into the mother root of this [healing and wholeness] wellness at the source for the first time when we venture into solo time on the land. This is the core of our work: to create a space where the noise of our lives can subside long enough for us to hear the ancient imperative of our belonging singing us back into her bones.
Because no matter how separate we may feel, healing and wholeness have been with us since the beginning of time, moving and shape shifting through every birth and death and every new adaptation. And they will be with us always. We can trust them. Not our idea of them, not any particular outcome, including our own survival, but healing and wholeness themselves. Where and when we do, resilience is born. Where and when we do, freedom rings.”
I suppose, at least in this moment, I have trust. I have trust that we are not here to survive, but to feel. And that when we surrender to listening for the instructions of the medicine inside of us, we know how to give ourselves, and to live our lives in full. I trust that we can carry our tiny packets of medicine on our backs and live the interconnected lives of the ant people.