Sitting with the Land and Feeding our Ancestors

Grandmother Moon she weaves in the night

Taking all the dreams and spinning in the light

Her fullness fills us with wonder

Her wisdom guides us

The masses flow as they dance to a different rhythm, the beat of the machine telling us how we need to be

The warring missiles of our time land with fear, setting off explosions in the mind

Some retreat to the Wilds

Where souls run free

Set amongst the forests of trees

Some fight,

some resist

Others pursue the electron dream

Our ability to manipulate electricity

Bits and bytes for all to see expressing our in-capabilities

Take care of me says the man in the machine

Where all your dreams are of desire and greed

Resistance is old in these energies

We live a thousand lifetimes

Different versions of you and me

Our ancestors live within and without, guiding our way in rock and play

Feed all your relations with the gift of life on this Earth today

Love is but a cosmic display

Yet It is not what you think buzzes the honey bee

Love is a cessation of our causality that reveals our sacred destiny hidden deep in our Afflictions

Our wounded addictions

The heart takes in the words

The mind exhales the beauty

The seasons sing for all to see

Be love

Be light

Be earth

Sway with the gentle breeze

Hum like the humming bird to open the door

Between wind a glow and those divine realities

Homesteading, farming, living off grid, sitting with the forest. This has been my life for the past 8 years. Following those lifelong dreams, those allurements, those things that pull us, give us riddles and open us to a deep mystery that stirs within.

I often question what brought me to this moment with a sense of curiosity and wonderment.

My time here, as I see it, is about navigating what it means to be human in this modern world and how we have forgotten our connection to nature, the wild community. We live in a time of great disconnect despite that incredible gift of human ingenuity. We can communicate in ways never imagined, we have discovered secrets never thought possible and continue to advance science in ways that could offer a life of peace and harmony.

The machines that we invent give us this incredible ability, however these same contraptions are dismantling vibrant and diverse human cultures. We have a society, we have cities, we have a civilization, however we lack the beauty of a rich and diverse human cultures and are settling for a melting pot of homogeneous people lacking ceremony, unique language and relationship with place.

This life that we have been living here on the farm and in the forest is a journey of connection to place, a process of re-wilding ourselves and learning what the land so generously offers us in her wisdom and guidance. There is often a romantic notion of a life “back to the land” where the social media gurus spin a narrative of the simple life, of freedom and whimsical ease.

The reality in the art of homesteading is filled with hardship, hard work, failures, dirt, mud, and true grit. You need patience, fortitude and perseverance. The tender lessons of life and death guide us daily as you must deal with the death of those you are caring for on the homestead and the heart must be able to negotiate these emotional waters.

There is also that need of resources and capital one needs to entertain such a life, especially as only two people trying to make a living from such an endeavour. There is an illusion of self sufficiency and self-reliance, which to a point is true. However, let's not forget that there are thousands of hardworking folks who give us what we need, from solar systems to plastic high tunnels that allow us to live each and every day and generate an economy that supports us. We still require a human community, and to think otherwise is a story of disconnection from that which gives us life. For us, it has also meant huge sacrifices to be here. We had to move far from family and friends for affordable land. We also live in ways that many would perceive as a state of poverty. Our cabin is the size of a shoe box, unfinished, because we continue to evolve our garden and farming systems and can only build when we can afford to. It has taken us years to clear land, to build structures and learn how to do all the things we need to do to homestead successfully. We live in simplistic ways that put us in direct relationship with our resource and waste systems. Water is pumped from the brook, which requires close attention as it is surface water subject to run off during rain events. Our toilets are composting humanure systems that also require much care and attention. This requires us to be in direct relationship with place. A light switch is not just turned on without power considerations or where the power comes from, water is used with the utmost care, it doesn't simply disappear into some unknown pipe in the ground, and our waste isn't flushed away as someone else's problem. This has been a valuable lesson in living with less giving us the gift and privilege to be immersed in a forest environment on a daily basis. For us, this is an amazing gift, and our gratitude must be fed back to the land daily.

Now I didn't grow up this way, however I was raised by my Granny who was born and raised on a family farm in the wilds of Northern Ontario. A place where the mosquitoes and black flies will eat you alive in summers and winters will test you with bitterly cold temperatures.

Her parents and my grandfathers parents immigrated from the Ukraine, where many other Ukrainian families settled around the turn of the last century. We lived in a residential area, with a wild forest close by. The backyard felt huge, although in reality was rather small. What made it incredible was the diversity of gardens that took up the majority of the space, gardens right up to the door step. They were practicing permaculture not out of some theory taught in a workshop, but rather those passive systems that worked and made sense.

I spent countless hours in the garden, sitting with the plants, and eating the foods this magical oasis provided. It was also a time of post war industrialisation, TV culture and processed food commercialization. Looking back, I can now see the slow demise of a rich Ukrainian culture being slowly eroded and lost to modernity. My grandparents spoke their native language but only between themselves and we ate traditional foods, but meaning was lost to a TV dinner culture. All of our ancestors have been swallowed up by colonialism no matter where we originate from.

There is a grief in this, in that we have lost our ancestral way of being in the world. My deep time on the land over the last 8 years has been a process of ecological re-membering, a realization that the land holds the key to our lost languages, our lost cultures, our lost seeds which can be discovered again when the time and conditions are right.

Granny loved her plants, she surrounded herself with them, she spoke to them, she cared for them as her children. I remember her ability to grow any plant, native or exotic. She would often take cuttings of plants from the local grocery store and slip them into her purse to gingerly grow the plant from the cutting she rescued. I realize now that I was privileged to be in this presence, and even though I didn't know it at the time, something was being shown to me and passed along, those seeds of a forgotten culture being kept alive.

My practice of sitting with the land has evolved over the years with many ebbs and flows. I never really considered myself a plant person, however in my ongoing relationship with the land, it has become clear to me that the green ones hold a sentient wisdom that is inherent in the ecology of a place. I have sat with the notion of our planet not being something that is a conglomerate of pieces that work for their own means, but rather we are a co-creative collective working together with a living being from which we are all a part of. We are not individuals but rather a community.

This knowledge was alive in Granny, and in retrospect played out for me as a child. All of our connections with our ancestors are there for us, if we open ourselves up to these possibilities. If we feed all our relations with the gifts of life, they will help guide us in ways that we may never have imagined. The land, the plants, they are navigators to these connections. In my deepening relationship with the wild community I can feel that connection with Granny, I feel her presence which opens up a way of being alive in this world while honouring those who made my life possible. She is helping me understand the plant/human relationship even in death.

My memories of this incredible lady are rich with wonder, as she was teacher and mother. When we loose people in our lives, there is a void that is left in us, a space that must be filled with the grief that comes with such heart breaking loss. If the grief moves through us, it is the bridge between us and them in their new form, turning grief into gratitude for their continued gifts. Should the grief get stuck and not move we lose our sacred relationship with our ancestors and become lost in a multitude of ways. Worst yet, they become lost and turn into forgotten ghosts.

Her time with me was short, and as a child moving into early adolescence it was my first experience with human death, a difficult time to understand filled with tremendous loss. It would be the first of other family members to follow throughout my adolescence, where I have had to navigate the grief that comes when those close to you die. I do feel fortunate to have been part of something that felt ancestral, something that my Ukrainian relatives knew how to navigate. Her funeral felt as though it was from another time, another place, a place that felt like I belonged to. I was part of a culture that knew how to bury their dead.

The funeral took place entirely in the Ukrainian language at the church with which I had never previously stepped foot in. I actually didn't witness my grandmother as a deeply religious person, however a mystery was alive within her that spoke of the holy. Her relatives sang at the ceremony, songs from the old country that filled the space with grief, a reverberation that moved through us, helping guide the deceased on the next phase of the human journey. I experienced my people in that moment as a rich and beautiful culture. These are the ceremonies we have forgotten in our ongoing quest for a technological world.

In my daily practice of sitting with land, the beautiful flowering plant of evening primrose has been showing up everywhere this summer around our house, and along the brook. I have seen her here and there over the years but this year she really grabbed my attention. I had been thinking about plants for sometime, especially in my evolving practice with the land and some of the research I have been engaged in over the last couple of years with plant spirit medicine. On one of my morning walks I was guided to an area that I pass by almost daily. I don't usually go down to this section of the brook, however on this day a couple of ravens were on the gravel bar making a huge racket. A family of ravens have been making their nest close by each year, and the young ones will often squawk through the woods sounding like little old ladies yelling at each other. Two of these younger ravens were down low along the brook, unusual behaviour for them. As I approached the area, I was greeted with a huge display of blossoming primrose, along with many other wild flowering plants. It felt like I had entered through a secret door way leading to a wild flower garden. The Ravens had flown off when I entered however returned to sit in the trees just above me and the primrose.

In my experiences with the land, I have learned to take notice of these signs, especially when they come with awe and wonder and that heartfelt sense of beauty. These are often confirmations or answers to questions we may be carrying with us at the time. A further confirmation was shown when I then noticed primrose growing on the grave of our beloved Howie dog, who had passed on this land a few years back. I usually keep his grave site clear of vegetation as we will often sit with him here, however this year I had left his area grow wild for reasons unknown to me at the time. Again, she was grabbing my full attention.

As I have sat with Primrose over the summer, she has reconnected me with my Granny in that remembrance of her love of plants and the land. I am taken back to memories that are teachings I can access now. It is here that I revisit old woundings where I am in a place of acceptance and relationship building, transforming those traumas into sacred relationships

Beyond the tragedy of death, one's life can become compost for the living where we are invited to plant seeds of hope for future generations.

Evening primrose has also shown the ancestral work that must be navigated in one's life, especially in these times of that great forgetting we all experience as a result of our colonized hearts and minds. As I sit with the land, I allow words and images to flow through, showing ceremony and songs that help to open doors. This is the medicine from the land.

The ability and mystery of the land to connect so deeply is there for us if we choose to listen. Plants were here long before we arrived, they are our oldest relatives, our grandparents if you will. They give us breath, food, fibre, medicine and everything we require to live our lives.

Our journey here on this small homestead and farm in the forest is a continued back and forth where in the shadow of the machine, we are trying as best we can to listen to the teachings of the land. Some retreat to the wilds to learn, some will resist where they are on the front lines, and others continue to remain under the influence of the digital age.

This is where a collective worldly grief resides for many as we face the limits of our mortality. We may not see the fruits of our labour in our time. The hope however is that like a seed that is planted and cared for, there will once again be rich and diverse human cultures grown in the compost of our time, a culture worth descending from. This is an honouring of their sacrifices, to remember our ecological roots.

Inspirational Readings

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic, The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive. Martin Prechtel.

Plant Spirit Healing. A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness. Pam Montgomery.