My child and I walk through the forest as often as we can get out the door before the daily ritual of survival turns the day into night. When we walk out there we stop at certain trees saying, “Hello friend,” touching their bark, resting our fingertips in the edges where lichen grow.
I have a synesthesia with the world. I call it witchcraft at times, Autism affect at another, a spiritual realm in which I can touch the delicate threads of time and space feeling my shoulders merge into orchard groves or wings. The synesthesia is most alive when I am in prayer (or close to orgasm… are they hardly different?) I say this prayer when I am out there in the woods. I hold my body a certain way and let my mind slip out of my body so spirit can talk through me. That is the prayer. When the prayer is spoken I see things. Certain images or scenes. I smell or sense other places.
Since September a poem or prayer has been moving through me. Sometimes the talking feels like sunshine. Sometimes it is images. It is slow and the images are repetitive they don’t get more detailed but wood has been huge theme. Wood that is smoothed and polished. Beams of wood holding up houses. Wood shining leading into a sunlight kitchen, my bare feet silently walking across the interior. An entire bank made of wood holding money as if it were my body. A window looking out at the sea; the wind and waves coalescing into the same rhythmic dance. Salt enters my nostrils from the windswept oaks… but I am still walking along pine needles in Virginia, no where near the sea.
Synesthesia effects the senses, blending together color, sound, smell to reroute information through my body - interpreting the everyday as a cosmic encounter. In many ways this is also culture: a blending of otherwise meaningless inputs attached to specific expectations and outcomes. If you are a Westerner non-pleasure is the root of depression but in Eastern culture pleasurable attachments are the root of suffering. We are our culture, we bear its name, its conquests, no matter how we’d like to reify it.
The prayer practice has taught me the importance of saying the prayer correctly and believing it in my body. My mind and body have to be in harmony; dancing the same dance; colliding particles of thought and energy need to meet between the realms mind/body. If not, the prayer either doesn’t feel real because the words do not resonate or the words cannot be heard because the mind resists. My culture tells me that the experience is impossible by any standard except that which is non-ethnocentric. The trees cannot be my friends - they are not human. I cannot feel or hear words, prayers, or songs, yet creativity constantly proves this theory wrong.
Yet, when I believe my culture, I suffer. My culture looks to divorce my mind and body so they are separate entities.
Subtle things in our society like high paying jobs use the mind, low paying jobs use the body teaching us to view others who labor (or ourselves when we labor) with contempt and those who use their minds with (or when we use our minds) superiority. In a reversal, mental illness is often not treated with dignity (both by the doctor or the patient) until it manifests with physical symptoms or erratic behavior. When the mind is revered for its authority over the body it is supposed that is should always be in control, always be healthy, and that it is the individual who causes their own illness by not being in control. In a system where the mind is revered and the body is not we (as the people) are forced to seek care inside a power differential. This makes us feel vulnerable, nervous, and scared about our bodies continuing to resent our bodies for not being a good body (and our minds for not controlling our bodies). Culture has defined the role of human to be of mind and not body. Reliance on our mind control and the exorcisms of our bodily attachments defocuses the issue: a power loss between ourselves (first in our own body/mind) then between ourself and the system. Thus, the morality coupled to the mind and the immorality coupled to the body keeping us in line - in formation. But what happens when we stop being the good solider? What do we do when our bodies or our minds wander?
The Ender’s Game series does well to plumb the human psyche, delivering our limited human culture onto the movements of war between humans and aliens. It is enough distance to touch the grief of our culture without becoming absorbed by it. In the book series Ender, a six year old boy, is selected to join Battle School where he is tested through rigorous games to determine his aptitude for fighting against an Alien Species which they understand by the “four orders of foreignness [in the Nordic Language]. The first is the otherlander, or utlanning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the ramen, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it." By the time he is twelve he is commanding a battle fleet to the alien’s world.
In our culture everything that is not human by creed, class, color, sex, and belief (of our own) is varelse; true alien. America is xenophobic and territorial over what it will claim as a true American. U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement refers to human beings who come to our country seeking citizenship as aliens. Why does this matter? It is just a word choice, no? Robin Wall Kimerer shows in her book Braiding Sweetgrass how the english language scorns the living world. “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.”
To be an American means that I must view my own body as varlese, spy on others - examining them for proof of their humanity (by my ethnocentric lens), and to deny the otherworldly connection - the synesthesia - as no more than a spiritual totem.
The prayer in contrast to the probing of my culture leads me to this question: How can I belong to a culture that defines my belonging on mine and other’s subjugation? I belong most when I am useful, productive, able-bodied, and most importantly the head of a household: ruggedly alone. Being a woman automatically reduces my usefulness, my invisible-to-most-autism reduces me even more, my very visible motherhood reduces me the most. I belong to a man, my husband, not to society by all terms of our culture. This is the story I must yield to in order to belong.
Such thoughts have often plagued me as, over the past fourteen years I have oscillated between remarkable self-reliance and extreme disability.
Gazing at the pearlescent pendant stalk of Monotropa uniflora, otherwise known as Ghost Pipe, I recognize myself. Ghost pipe, those spectral white flowers that surface through shadow and leaf rot, can grow in the dark because they do not need to photosynthesize. The “parasitic” flowers of the blueberry family are “mycoheterotrophs”, meaning they are totally dependent on carbon from an underground mycorrhizal fungus. Ghost pipes typically pair with Russula or Lactarius species. These fungi receive sucrose from their symbiotic associations with trees while providing this sugar to the parasitic flower that by quantitative analysis gives nothing in return. Articles and essays about mycoheterophic plants and Ghost Pipe usually say the plants “fools” the fungus or “steal” the sugar.
Mycoheterophs like Ghost Pipe confuse our ideas about partnership. We immediately characterize the Ghost Pipe as lazy or as a villain. This same language is used to describe the elderly, the disabled, and, worst of all, children. The abstraction of the term “codependency” from the psychology of addiction has led to a flawed and simplistic argument that we all “attach” incorrectly and that we need to define ourselves by our own worth, our own ability to provide for our needs and wants.
— Make Me Good Soil by Sophie Strand
My autism made me different from the beginning; a beast who cannot be riden leaving the last of biological warfare — expulsion. When you are a part of the ramen in society (children, the elderly, the disabled, the queer) you are in the least stable part of that society. You are reliant, dependent, and that is seen as bad, immoral, straddling between ramen and varlese depending on the caretaker. As Sophie points out our word choice says more about our culture than we intend that the ghost pipe “steals” or “fools” but what if we flipped these ideas on its head?
In a society that places folks like myself at the edge our society I have to grapple with either believing I don’t belong or centering myself and thus finding stability.
The plastic nature of our brains has proven that what we believe, what we think creates a landscape in our mind. “That beliefs are the neuropsychic product of fundamental brain processes that attribute affective meaning to concrete objects and events, enabling individual goal setting, decision making and maneuvering in the environment.” I have always felt a kinship with the living world beyond other humans and man’s best friend. But the culture I was born into did not agree and forced my assimilation. When I did not fully comply it forced through systematic expectations of all humans (and thus our relations to each other) this belief: I am utterly alone and I do not belong. It is impossible and yet, in the mind they become true and they give us death: Death in the mind, death in the body, death of the soul.
When I come back to nature, she consistently reminds me that my culture has indebted me with beliefs that are false. Beliefs that when I look to nature for proof of truth blare that the truth. Even in our culture, people believe there are only two genders - two sexes - yet nature defies this over and over with beings that are hermaphrodites, beings that are sexes we cannot even wrap our minds around, beings that are multiple genders, multiple bodies, even. Even our own humanity defies that belief in the truth of intersex humans. Yet, culture still pushes these truths to the fringe.
I have never felt been a valuable person in my society. In nature, I feel fully whole; my value contextualized from nature’s perspective makes sense. Ram Dass says that, “We are nature. We are the trees and the clouds and the waters. When you hug a tree you're hugging yourself.” The prayer I have come to the woods with is, “please make me worthy.”
“By whose standards?” asks the trees.
By whose standards… whose standards do I want to weigh my value to culture in, by, and to? Who and where do I — do we — belong? Are We All Ender, Commanding Fleets in the Battle of Belonging?
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My first retreat is coming March 17th
Details will be revealed shortly but oh my god! Two other women and myself are dreaming up a special day-retreat here in Richmond, VA that will include breath-work, astrology, acupressure and dinner. As Substack members to How To Be A Whale y’all will be invited to come first. In fact I am inviting you now.