Day 16 - Native

Pen Play: A poem-a-day writer's retreat in June

Hey everybody! How are you doing today? Welcome to Day 16! 

It feels like it’s all flown by so fast, and it’s bittersweet to once again be completing another potent creative exchange together. Yet, this is the beauty of the process, for we have come and risen, and we will carry on transformed, moved, disrupted, never to be back where we started. 

I give thanks for this rhythm, and for all of you being here <3 Thank you. 

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Photo by Marcus Wallis

Recently, I read this exquisite post from

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

about navigating her journey with peripartum depression in the pandemic via the experience and nourishment of her garden. The post is honest and intelligent and sensitive to the rough edges of new and evolving lives. 

The land that sings me as its song

It’s also really earthy and calls important attention to land and human existence on it. This is my favorite part: 

This was supposed to just be a simple post about books about gardens. But life does not really work in that way, and books — like gardens—are political things. How we read, how we process that information, what we do with it all— matters.

It is no coincidence that the first work I made after giving birth was about the small stretch of land outside our home; that my first child and my first garden would so deeply permeate my writing.

It is no coincidence that the only place I felt comfortable to howl and bawl; to scream and cry; to trust the world enough with my grief and my fear; my unfolding journey through matrescence— was my garden.

For me, this is the heart of Native, the subtle quality that tingled my cells when I chose this prompt. Kerri so beautifully hits the nail right on the head. 

Native isn’t just a life devoted to our land and earthly living (although it helps). It’s not even necessarily critically dependent on a connection to physical land in the first place (although, again, I think it helps). 

Native is the subtle quality, almost effervescent, of inherent and natural belonging of life to land - all life to land as physical earth and as the core foundation of existence and beingness.

All things living, not only human, possess this quality, and we often recognize this, sometimes value this. But I think this is one of the main points Kerri makes: we need to be clear that this land, our nativeness, “what we do with it all” does matter, very much, for ourselves and our communities.

Native is an energy and experience which never grows stagnant - it is always moving, for this is inherently how we are alive - and must simultaneously always be shared, always engaged (i.e. a component of social obligation). It is effortless to possess because we live, and differs in subtle ways between each of us as individuals, and just like an eternal Labrador puppy, it must be exercised. Because obviously you can’t just keep it at home.

It’s just like this. 

Of course, in our sharing, we reap so many benefits. That’s also inherent. We share, others share, and we all receive and evolve in our humanity. There is a defined blueprint, I believe, to each of our nativeness’ (different to our soul blueprint or life purpose or however you’ve related to this), which means we get a little piece of something new as we receive from more people.

It’s the part of the learning that guides us to open our eyes more and more to our Earth, on our earth. And this is, of course, inevitable to being human. 

I invite you to chew on this today, to engage with your Native and offer your findings to us. I wonder how much you feel the subtleties of what I’m sharing here, and what comes alive for you. 

Many blessings <3 

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Native

Something draws me
Out,
Come outside,
And who am I to fight it, 
Already gazing wistfully out of the window,
Stretching my cheek 
Out
Towards the breeze that doesn’t reach me,
The pane glass in its track.
As though sleepwalking, 
I stand
And float to the door,
Pulled open by an invisible hand
That propels me
Out 
Before I know it.
They never really told me
What was going on,
But when I take my seat,
Wide open to the forest,
The maestro of the trees 
Ready with my baton in hand,
I know they were right.
It feels clearer
Out;
The edge around my body
Sharpens and sparkles
With the frequency of 
One who listened,
One who can hear,
One who Will.
I echo with the hum
Of my native land,
I carry her with me, 
Ambassador of the sovereign
Earth, and she calls me
Native, 
Too. 

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