Inspired by Rowen White and Martín Prechtel..
One of most inspirational people I follow is Rowen White. I’m also a fan of Martín Prechtel of Flowering Mountain School and Books.
Rowen White is a Seedkeeper, creative director at Sierra Seeds, from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and an activist for Indigenous seed sovereignty. Her beautiful words here, and the selected quote by Martín Prechtel, were posted as a memory by Rowen on Facebook on January 21, 2021
Rowen White said:
”I wrote these words one year ago. Oh I had no idea what this year was going to hold. Maybe I knew I needed to read them tonight….
“On mornings like this, I apprentice myself to the falling rain. Laying quietly on the earthen floor, I soften with her rhythms, her song, rivulets of water seeping into dry and cracked places inside my heart. Places we have armoured up and allowed to turn leathery, in response to the suffering in the world, all the changes, the big and tiny deaths happening all around us. Who said we were supposed to stand unwaveringly? How can we bear witness to the chaos and destruction, the changing of the seasons, all of it without grieving.
“The tears are not yours alone…they come from tributaries of grief laid down by your ancestors, they are the wellspring of beauty and hope and emergent love we have for the possibility of grandchildren coming down from the stars. The headwaters of these tears come from the ache of love and loss combined. Allow them to fall, to soften the collective earth so that this mud can help us shape new vessels, build new sanctuaries, heal old wounds.
“As the tears fall from my eyes forming nascent rivers, winter rivers, rainy season rivers, the kind of rivers that tumble the calcified grief of the ages like granite boulders inside the well worn riverbanks of my own body.The kind of river of tears that exfoliate, gathering driftwood and debris, cleansing rivers that carry what is no longer needed into alluvial plains. To those rivers. I surrender. I hear the shrill cry of the pilieated woodpecker call through the misty morning fog. He who turns the death and decay of forests into beautiful new life. I embrace all the seasons of my inner life, the rainy season, the blistering dry season, and all in between. I return to the headwaters of my breath, and apprentice myself to the falling rain. May the earth of my own body remember. Spring is coming.”
Grief is a shameless dreamer who thinks nothing of healing impossible despair head-on, of reionizing impossible situations, of healing impossible sickness, of depolarizing impossible hardheaded people. Grief thinks nothing of impossibility, only of what makes life more deliciously alive.” ~ Martín Prechtel””
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