The other day after a glorious morning in the wild orchard near me, birds flitting from 
gnarled tree to tree, teasel stalks blowing in the wind, the sweet earth laden with apples, surrounded by bright red rosehip sisters…I brought home a little sampling of hawthorn, rosehip and snowberries. I poured them out on a plate admiring the contrast of the deep reds with the white snowberries.
When I first met snowberries I had learned they were toxic and have always just admired the way they appear to float on the bush when the leaves have fallen away and they remain. Recently I read that they were edible so this time I harvested some. I nibbled one, thankfully they are not tasty so I didn’t eat too much. As I was looking at my pretty little harvest, Sabi came over and said “those are poisonous, don’t eat those!” “That’s what you told me” I said yes but I recently learned they are edible. But because of his concern, I went over to my plant book and read things like: also called corpse berries, ‘the serviceberries of the land of the dead’, children have died from consuming and so on.
A further look into the book and I found that there is a creeping snowberry that grows along the ground that is the edible one, but this one that I had harvested is the bush kind. So Sabi saved my life :)
This is actually the second time I have nibbled a toxic berry mistakenly, and I promise I will not do it again. I’m not reckless, but both times I misread book information.
But what it brings me to is the heartbreak that I/we are often doing this reclamation work in an isolated way without elders to guide us, without community to engage in the land together, without the wisdom of the mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers that went before. I feel this keenly for my own roots and especially with these plant sisters, for the many tribes that had this ripped away. Thankfully in this area many local tribes are reclaiming and teaching this wisdom. But they are not my tribe, so I remain on the outside, wandering around earnestly learning but almost killing myself.
Recently, I was sharing my heartache about feeling split between living in town/modern world and being on the land that we are tending part time (for now). And how my children often do not want to come with me to the land, so then as I have had to do for too many years, I am having to choose between being with land or my children.
A mentor of mine suggested I had to recognize that my children ‘are not interested in it’, they are not choosing it, and I needed to focus on the choice I do have and take loving action for my little girl to be on the land even if it means leaving my children.
While I recognize that ultimately in each moment, there is a choice and finding that consciously makes much difference, this situation illustrated for me the illusion of choice in the cage of the modern world (or nation state paradigm) we are living in.
My children not being interested in living on land is not really a choice if they never had this option, if they did not learn to walk with the silence and teachings of all our relations, if they did not have as a deep default that life is engaging with each other, around a fire, making useful crafts, playing, creating, expressing, being present with all of life and our intact community. If they have never known the fullness of this ancestral life, then their ‘choosing’ of the modern world that they have been normalized to is not an actual choice, it is an adjustment.
Everything we consider a ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’ are basically limited options within a colonial/conquest/domination nation state driven situation. We have all already been ripped away from real connected life. Anything we ‘choose’ is a distortion of our innate birthright of interdependence with all of life cultivated by living in relationship/direct connection with Mother Earth.
We are standing on ashes, telling our children that the spoils of genocide, conquest and extraction are their life choices.
To be clear, I have tried very very hard, homeschooling for decolonization, engaging in so much ‘nature connection,’ keeping our ceremonial ways, honoring their expression, to show this to my children, but because we have remained in towns/cities they have been pulled as most youth are, by media, corporate marketing, etc.
As the lone holder of indigenous ways in my family I was never able to fully steep my children in community and earth connection. So as much as I honor whatever direction they choose, I do not consider it a full choice.
I know other families who have been able to live on land with community or held within their indigenous culture by elders, and their children often do choose these life giving ways because the aliveness they have experienced helps them to see the flatness and limitations of the modern world.
Lately, my 20 year old son who is at university has been thanking me repeatedly for the way I raised him, even though he resisted it. He says that at school he can barely communicate with anyone because they are plugged into their devices. Their ‘life’ is on their phones. He says that knowing how to relate in a human way is giving him an edge in his field because he has interpersonal skills that others do not.
These youth, whose parents were pressured by technology and media marketing, were given the ‘choice’ to engage in this false life and they have ‘chosen’ it because they are being psychologically manipulated and because this is the only place of connection we/they have left in a landscape of colonial/capitalist slaughter of all of our communal, relational, human ways.
It is not a choice, it is a human in a cage being given Option A or Option B decided upon by the cage master.
I will never forget this commercial for a granola bar that went through the generations and showed kids out in nature, then playing video games, then plugged into phones. The colonial myth of progress, the default to ‘well this is the world our children are entering’ has perpetuated this. I have always held that my children would figure out the technology when they needed to and what I needed to preserve for them was knowing how to honor their soul/essence, walk their path, be in respectful relationship and interdependence with each other, all life and Mother Earth.
It is very very sad that so few have this felt sense in their bones now.
They really don’t have choice, they (and their parents) have conditioning.
And for me to have to choose between the land/ my Mother, and my children is not a choice. It is a settling for crumbs that we have all become accustomed to.
I refuse to accept this.
Unfortunately when ‘healing’ is held within the default to this modern world/western context, it can be harmful to blithely use terms like ‘we need to surrender’ or ‘you have a choice.’ Even ‘trusting your intuition’ is questionable when you are trusting it within normalized adjustments to domination culture with its inequity and inhumanity.
Trusting our heart and intuition can certainly cut through some programming and get us closer to our primal imprint of innate wisdom but we have to see the context we are swimming in. Deconstructing the harmful conditions and expectations that we have been socialized to accept, is essential for truly reclaiming ourselves and our families and returning to wholeness.
Honoring our grief at feeling so alone in the process is also important.
I sat with my grief after the snowberry ‘mistake’ and felt tender compassion for my inner little girl that is so focused and earnest about land tending and relationship. I felt the grief of the thousand years of empire that displaced and disconnected my ancestors and all of us.
And I also felt the regenerative reminder that there are potent and accessible threads of reclamation. We can’t change the history, but Sabi reminding me with his own knowing and relationship with the land was enough to ‘save me.’ And my eldest innate knowing of human, embodied communication will help guide his path. Even if we don’t have an intact village, we have each other.
Like mycelial threads, each thread cultivated, each choice brought back into awareness creates a web that holds us and knits us back together with the real, alive, collective that remains.
*Beautiful art by curanderismo healing arts