An offering: eight hours of it

Hello, all. Hello.

Back in 2019, I wrote a piece called Words Like Sonar which then came out in Liberated to the Bone. This piece still haunts me because of how strongly I feel it. Maybe this is ancestral memory, a feeling from the time when we used echolocation to communicate. Or maybe it’s because, in moving through the world, I, like you, am surrounded by the vibes and energies and life expressions of so many other beings and I, like you, am constantly responding to these sound or life waves, even when I am not aware. I wrote that piece and it settled me. It gave shape to something. Helped me to find my way.

So, here is a moment of echolacation, dear ones. But first, a share. The perfect share. A kind of preface to the preface.

If you have read any of my work, you have heard me talk about Marcie Rendon because she is a friend who also teaches me. Unintentionally, I think, but still. I remember her words for the long term and so I often quote her. She also interviewed me about the walk for a local women’s paper and in her write up, she foregrounded that which deeply shaped the walk for me. I talk a lot about the Prophecy of the Seven Fires in the book I wrote before the walk started. I talk about it less - not at all, really - in what I am sharing here with you, these eight hours of conversation. Although it is woven through every sentence and every experience. As I was about ready to post this, I remembered her interview and thought yes, I want to share this here. Because this, too. So very deeply, this, too.

So, I finished this walk across Turtle Island in January and came back into my life in Mnisota Makoce. Since then, I have been trying to make meaning of the walk. Well, not trying as in efforting with skull sweat, but listening and waiting, feeling some kind of clarity that there is something that matters - to me, to someone - and waiting for that mattering to take form.

So, echolocation. Making meaning while I am a few days shy of 62 and, like you, living in the world at this moment. This particular specific moment, tangled with the threads of climate crisis/chaos, buffeted by the erosion and grasping of empire, the offloading of fear and worry onto the bodies of others by those with the power to do so, and living, like you, in this moment where authoritarianism is on the slippery slide towards fascism. Like all moments in time, it is a specific moment. And maybe this specificity is about the end of things or the beginning of something new and maybe it is just a long drawn out shitty shittiness.

So I have been writing, going through journals and listening to the walk while, at the same time, working still as part of Relationships Evolving Possibilities (REP), helping coteach a cohort through Healing Histories Project, showing up at care clinics to give bodywork to those frontlining or most impacted by this moment, working with a friend on a series of workshops called Stronger Together where we mix together physical training with somatic and political awareness to build practices around being strong TOGETHER as in fuck you survival of the fittest, showing up with some specific family needs, gardening my ass off and putting up food and all of the things that mean family and life and collective care and on and on.. in the midst of all of this, I have been writing. I have been moving along, listening for and following the bread crumb trail that you get when you listen to Creator, the ancestors, your internal sense. Following these bread crumbs means not being completely clear on the direction but following one movement, one word, one breath after another and then, a few weeks ago, the bread crumbs came together and I got a big old muffin. I love when that happens. And I heard this: you’ve been in the vertical line of self, that deep listening inward while you’ve been writing. You’ve been listening in the backward with ancestors and forward with descendants, in that circle of time. Now you have to widen. Take what you have been thinking and building and put it together and then send it out - like this - to folks and then wait and see if anything comes back.

Echolocation.

So that is what this is. I have spent the last week creating a series of videos where I share with you what is currently the arc of a book, of a kind of thinking. I have got support from beloveds while doing this, have talked a number of friends through what I wanted to do and have been deeply grateful for their claws as they have torn it up and asked me hard questions. If anything makes sense, it is because of them. And it is also still me, despite their best advice. Too many words. Not visual enough. Rough and ragged and in need of editing.

It’s something like eight hours of video, and it is horribly incomplete. There is so much that I wanted to say, that I would put into the book, but this is what wanted to come now. Eight hours of it. I just keep laughing at myself.

A few more things. A friend of mine, Tommy Lee Woon, recently offered me this concept: returnment instead of retirement. It resonates with how I started Liberated to the Bone, the story offered to me by Marcie, a friend of both Tommy and myself, about how life experiences are gathered in our pockets like stones and one day, you stop gathering as many and start handing them out. Returning them. You get older and enter the returnment age. I love this so god damned much.

So that is what this offering is. Another moment of stones shared out for your perusal.

And here is the reciprocity I am going to ask for. First, if you do listen to any of these, even if only one and then you stop, I am asking for you to fill out the google form that is linked at the bottom of the video list. You don’t need to say much, it can be a few words or a single sentence, but for me it is the bounce back. Or one of the bounce backs of the words that come out of my aliveness and then bounce back to me from yours.

And if when you listen to this, what wells up is gratitude and you want to give, it is not expected but I know how this happens so the easiest way is through Patreon, and venmo also works.

And with reciprocity, I want to thank Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation (hello Alfonso Wenker) for a gift that has enabled me to have time to write these past months. Something that has been a first for me, this kind of writing time, and so deeply luscious.

And now here we go: echolocation…. what is below is the access to a series of videos complete with passcode and a link to the google form at the end. Even just recording these and sending them to you has already started a deepening with this material. It’s amazing how that happens, this sense of connection, of bounce back, even before the words are said out loud. Thank you for that, for being on the other side of this screen, no matter what happens next.

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How do we live on and with this land in a good way together?

Part One: Introduction and Orientation, About the walk and What I learned from the walk

Passcode: ?+eRf^$6

For this first one, I hadn’t fully understood how the whole thing worked so there is a false start but just stay with it. 1 hour, 12 minutes

Part Two: There has to be a different way: the separation of democracy and land

Passcode: x8UxwM*0   51 minutes

Part Three: More lessons from the walk and moving across relationships

Passcode: Hkis!p$2 45 minutes

Part Four: On bodies and attunement and risk 

Passcode: dd4%@AbB 1 hour 15 mins

Part Five: On bodies and land

 Passcode: jr%J.Y5q 53 minutes

Part Six: On disconnection, shards and coming back together

Passcode: 6L%R094a 56 minutes

Part Seven: On relational balance

Passcode: LY%TbsL1 55 minutes

Endnote: The limitations of this material

Passcode: 3fgSu9.a  16 minutes

For Practitioners: A reflection and invitation to people who have a trade that works with listening to bodies, minds, the land, etc

Passcode: g66+4%Kf  24 minutes

Reflection Form: A short reflection that I am hoping that folks who listen to some or all of these videos will fill it so that I can learn from the impact of these stories.