We were all seeds once
reflections and conversations on storytelling, land custody, and human life.
In the last few days, I have been reflecting on how we can have conversations that hold the nuances of existence on this Earth. When holding difficult conversations, I remind myself of the need for common ground, because if I preach a vision that is non-binary, then I also must apply it in my every day. Our society tends to separate us, urging us to forget that the relationships we have, not only with each other as humans but also with every living thing, are at the heart of what can truly heal the systemic oppressions from a place rooted in beauty. We need to find that again. A few years ago, without even having much knowledge of the term ecology, I went on a quest to find out what the plants on my balcony, my dog’s neighbour, Donald Trump (you’ll get it), and I have in common. I am currently a bit overwhelmed with a new job, travelling, and the pressure of getting new content out there regularly. But when I planted the seed of this newsletter I told myself that I would not give in to this pressure, that I could be present with this community in many ways, and not only through weekly original poetic antidotes. I write these essays truly from a heartful place, and they require a lot of dancing with my own creativity, doubts, and joy.
This week I am sharing an essay I wrote for The Tilt called We Were All Seeds Once where I speak to writer and thinker Aura Cumes, and Indigenous writer and professor Genner Llanes Ortiz.
Enjoy! 🌻
I found this place on my favourite island, it is a bench made of rocks, framed by two beautiful pine trees. It overlooks the vast sea and there is a natural smell of rosemary, sea salt, and pine that invades the nostrils. Sunsets in ‘El Pulpo’ are unique. But how did I get from admiring the sun to becoming mad?
I was associating my humanity with the destruction of the planet, taken by a whirlwind of emotions that made me feel extremely powerless in the face of climate change and the obliviousness of certain politicians around the topic. As I mentioned before, this society seeks to separate us, not only from each other but from our bodies and the land they inhabit. We are bombarded with stories that speak of a hierarchal relationship between nature and humans, these are the stories that need rewilding.
In the research to access and incorporate a philosophy of life that was culturally tied to nature, I shifted to find the answers in the people mainly responsible for the preservation of this earth: indigenous communities.
Indigenous guardianship is one of the most effective approaches we have for protecting the planet’s vital ecosystems. This is obvious considering that indigenous people makeup 5% of the world’s population, and occupy 25% of the world’s land surface, yet support about 80% of the global biodiversity.
I do not wish to say that all indigenous cultures are the same, but many hold the values that I was seeking to understand, and the people I spoke to gave me huge insights into how to shift my narrative and rewild my stories.
Tribal attorney Tara Houska describes on Vogue the distance there is between our life source and its survival when she explains the feeling she has when walking into the halls where high-level decisions and legislations about climate change are made. In these corridors, she says “the land that sustains every life on earth becomes a sum of degrees Celsius, carbon emissions, forest acreage, and economic impacts. Water is reduced from our literal lifeblood to a policy concern, a partisan issue up for debate.”
The language around climate change is harmful not only because it is built to instill fear, but because it only focuses on the scientific and the numerical, leaving behind the emotional side delivered by storytelling. We are bombarded with statistics about land destruction, climate migration and global warming, and these are hard to relate to.
“Narratives are not only told orally,” says Genner Llanes Ortiz, a Mayan anthropologist living in The Hague, “they exist on many levels”. Llanez-Ortiz is currently dedicating his field of studies to investigating Mayan storytelling in festivals, rituals and performances. “My view of narratives has changed a lot, I would think of narratives as stories maybe rooted in the past,” he told me “but now I see stories as movement, stages, moments”.
“Identities are built on stories” adds Pitso Tsibolane, who is studying ways to centre indigenous voices and narratives in the study of ICTs and development at the University of Cape Town. He tells me that most of the stories that he grew up with as a young Mosotho boy had to do with the preservation of the land, violated by land grabbers and corporate interests.
The importance of storytelling in the West was highlighted in the teachings of one of the forefathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, who theorised that characters and archetypes in stories are part of the human collective unconscious.
Tsibolane reinforced the importance of storytelling when he told me that as a boy, the way of living and stories of his people contributed to building a narrative in him where the earth’s times and needs were respected. “The land in Basotho culture needs to rest, but commercial farming doesn’t let it,” he said, as we discussed the unnatural character of capitalist expectations (of both land and humans).
I also think of how the privilege of many, and the loss of tradition and food culture under capitalism, have detached us from the very obvious role that food plays in our life. How have we become so detached from the simple notion that food means survival? And how do we come back? I think we need to face the reality that having our own garden and growing our own food is a privilege for many, a lot of us are bound to cities for every day life. But storytelling can bring us closer.
For example, Llanez Ortiz told me about the Mayan myth about the creation of humans through maize. “This is a story that is represented in different visual forms; in archaeological artefacts, ancient murals,” Llanez-Ortiz says. He then tells me the tale of the gods that tried to make humans with different elements; first wood, then stone, but none of them worked. It was when they mixed different types of maize that humans were created, he tells me. “So it is about self-realisation and reliance, and interestingly it also translates like that when you retell the story in a context of preservation and biodiversity.” The Mayan peasants, he says, can connect with that story and think “we are made of maize because we grow maize. Maize is what we are made of.”
I see parallelism with the relationship that my people, Italians, have with food and the land it is grown on. I will never forget the taste of a tomato sauce made with tomatoes grown on volcanic land under the Vesuvius near Naples. It was the simplest most delicious dish I have ever had. When I tasted that tomato as the farmer explained to me how he grew them, I felt the sun on the fruit touch my skin, saw the blackened soil next to the volcano and saw human hands picking it. The story created a direct connection with the land for me, and it made me appreciate it more.
As a young scholar, Llanez-Ortiz spent periods of time doing research in remote areas in Mexico, and he told me a story that put into perspective a duality that I myself feel, and he gave me a hint on how to overcome it. He told me that one day he was taken to the middle of a field to kneel and ask the soil if it was ok to farm there and to ask for her blessing. Llanez-Ortiz explained that his Western educational curriculum at university did not teach this side of things, that the forest was seen as leaves and wood, and not as a live entity that could listen to a man’s wishes. That respect and empathy for the land he learned from the indigenous people in that remote area, he says, created a vicinity to nature that inevitably integrated into his being, therefore making him feel part of it.
What I found really interesting about Mayan storytelling, was the timeline they often use that brings the story from the past into the present. Llanez Ortiz told me “There is a practice in Mayan storytelling where an elder will be telling a story from ancient traditions and often finishes the story with a sentence like “yes and I just passed by the protagonist’s house right now, today”’. I can only imagine the gasping faces of people feeling so close to their own history with this plot twist. This method of storytelling keeps the young generations engaged and connected to ancestral and traditional cultures.
Tsibolane told me that living on the land where his people have fought and hearing stories about it growing up created a sense of pride and belonging that was very special. Years ago I wrote an article about the Ogiek people in Kenya, and when I visited their village I experienced this sort of storytelling of the past into the present. An elder told the story of how they harvested honey traditionally, and he showed me the land where his ancestors, and him, used to keep the bees. This was a land he no longer had access to because his family had been evicted by illegal loggers corrupting government officials. He pointed to the land and I saw the story of the past unfold into the present.
“Indigenous narratives are by nature transformative,” says Tsibolane, “they are built, or practices are developed about stories that tell of changing a behaviour or maintaining a good behaviour for example. That is a big role they play,” he said. Western society values coherence, consistency, and logic over many things, and I think that this is the danger of a story that is not allowed to dance and transform, it keeps us stuck with it.
Something I want to add before I finish this story is to point out the romanticising of indigenous narratives in the Western world. The word indigenous has somehow become attached to being ancient, rudimental and even extinct. “Narratives of indigenous people should not be romanticised because they are also very rooted in practical methods that have made the land thrive for thousands of years,” said Llanez Ortiz.
One way to deromanticise indigeneity is to look at the etymology of the word indigenous. The word essentially means native; it comes from the Latin word indigenous, “born or originating in a particular place,”.
Llanez-Ortiz proposed an interesting principle: that Western Europeans find their ‘indigeneity’. And this is not to mean to find the connection to our nationality, a discourse used by many right-wing politicians to excuse violence and xenophobia; but to find our connection to the land, and consequently to our own culture.
Appreciating a sunset, or a tree, and finding that connection to nature, is a graceful and elegant way to present an individual with what is at stake. I would rather be bombarded with beauty and informed of the threats to it, than with negative news about the newest climate threat. I don’t mean we should ignore the facts, but that we should leave our powerlessness behind because even if we don’t live to see it, we can have an impact on creating a different culture around nature.
To put it as Llanez-Ortiz did in our conversation “Western Europeans need to rediscover their indigeneity, in the sense of what is the other side of Western European modernity?”
As I pondered how to approach climate change without anger, I began to think about seeds. I couldn’t help but realise that the one thing humans, animals and plants have in common, is that we were all seeds once, and I found that to be beautiful.
Call to presence 🌱
I do this little ritual sometimes with the cacti on my balcony and I always find a whole world. It draws from a practice that David Abraham speaks about in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, where Balian people offer food to their land, for the ants to eat, giving back to nature what nature has given them.
Here is goes! If you can, go to a place in nature, or simply find nature wherever you are (trust me, it’s there, either between the cracks of concrete, up in the sky, or under a tree on a busy street, she is there). Then simply spend some time in this place without distractions, and engage with it: how many species are living in the place you are looking? Are there insects? Birds? what noises do you hear?
Once you have spent around 10 minutes there, take a notebook and write what you are willing to offer this piece of land. It can be as many things as your voice, your caresses, or simply your attention? Connect, and give back .
Thank you!