four days of straight rain and a spiral is born of the dirt. i watch this soil for hours on end. i imagine digging a hole. i imagine placing the drum inside.

a burial could be a laying to rest; a burying could be a fantasy of disappearance. the difference is made by looking. before i bury you i must open you up and see what’s inside.

inside my drum are three long leagues of sorrow. a relentless question of where did that terrifying dream come from and did i imagine it after all. blackness’ blue lake mirror the european-descendant is programmed to fear rather than feeling how her body quakes in the face of her own true nature. the grunt of heroism and the sense of unloveability it attempts to conceal. the reaching for a distant horizon of mystical indigenous home and the rejection of the mundane self who is no better or different than any other human born somewhere somehow of this earth. years and years of wandering, falling in love and lashing out, endless mirages of home.

when i tell my uncle-grandpa about burying the drum, he grimaces and cries out, “dame da yo!” don’t do that. he tells me the drum is my inochi, my life force. he tells me the drum is my seimeiriyoku, my vitality.

inside my drum is the small round of heat who had always considered just laying down and dying. who found that beneath her charisma and achievement was a small wavering current, at sunrise swelling into manic grandiosity and at sunset dispersing silently into dense mists of shame. inside my drum is the small round of heat who felt one day the wind wrap like a shawl around her shoulders and willed herself to coax it into one tiny gust of breath, blowing herself into form clinging to a warped and waxy wick.

sometimes you go and you craft an inheritance from your own hands. sometimes you decide what’s been passed to you has been so warped and weathered, that you decide to go and make something you’d be proud to pass on. sometimes you recognize the clear steady pulse at the center of a festering wound and you build your life around that lone radiant sound.

my mother was a great woman who pretended not to be. i do not remember her teaching me with words. instead I watched the movements of her strong hands, the way she wrung wet rags and held the fat of my baby brother’s bottom. my whole life I watched my mother yawning when it came time to confront what caused her terror. she and her sister lived their life in hiding from what terrorized them, their brother who raged with the festering wounds of the hurt implanted in him from a young age, a child born special in a world that forces rivers into cement canals, (my grandma swears she had a demon inside of her as he grew in her womb).

mom had taken great care to deny me membership to the scar clan that was our family legacy. later in life, she’d call me a snoop. i was a hungry child who became a hungry woman, digging through boxes and underwear drawers to find uncle’s prison letters whenever the house was quiet. i found them hidden beneath expired condoms which were buried beneath modest underwear. in a household where the erotic was neither discussed nor expressed, finding evidence of it shook my little body. but mom didn’t hide them well, the letters, the condoms, and other facts of life never spoken of. maybe she had wanted to be relieved of the burden of those secrets, which were not even hers. she had taken them on, on behalf of a country which thrives on silence, feeds on collective deprivation internalized as individual failure.

our crying table seemed to be the only ceremony we had left after all the industrializations, migrations, incarcerations and assimilations we had lived through. somehow after all of that coercion to lay our sacred things down, we found ourselves beneath the steady roar of the 101, flowing together on the same stream of memory and sorrow. i related to those shared moments of grief as food for my spirit, a bowl I waited beside like a hungry dog, waiting for it to become full and eat from it.

a person without a living culture will always be a child upon this earth. into adulthood, i imprinted onto other women, my spirit trailing theirs like a duckling, trying to remember how to pray, how to rest, how to anger, how to feel. my eyes were always up on the horizon, hungry for other women to raise me up out of the endless spiral of dirt, to tell me who I was.

we are not meant to be born into a vacuum of knowledge, to spend a lifetime scratching at the surface of this existence. there are pathways into the center and to the outer expanses, and those pathways are our ancestral inheritance. the most effective way to drive a people toward self and planetary destruction is to lead them away from those origin stories that anchor us firmly in the center of creation and the cultural technologies that guide us back when we go astray.

i see it all in an instant. i say, it’s no point of shame that i built you to save my life. it’s no point of shame that all four of my grandparents wanted to be somebody different, all two of my parents too. it’s no point of shame that i carved and scraped and polished you and imagined you something on earth i could be proud of. it’s no point of shame that at times i hid you behind my back, embarrassed of how desperately i wanted you to be praised. and no point of shame that i left you in the mountains for a full turn of the sun, preparing my heart to leave you behind forever, striving to evolve beyond needing material proof, allowing our umbilical cord to grow pale.

in your body you kept memory of our oneness. in your body you held the potential for sound.

the particular strain and great privilege of being born a woman of vision to a family teetering on the brink between the riches of natural mysticism and the poverty of upward mobility. the strain and privilege of being the one to make the drum and to insist on its name and to wince at its regular dismissals and to make and remake its mallet and to beat it steadily, sometimes alone, often in the dark. the one to play hostess to doubt and its many persuasions, the one to again and again make pilgrimage to the great stone standing alone at the center of our territory, a living embodiment of something indefatigable in the spirit that remembers where on earth we’ve always anchored. the strain and privilege of being the one to walk the road marking evidence with my own footsteps.

this week i dreamt of falling into an ancestor’s tomb. knocking over her bones, making a mess of the place. no one was mad and there was nothing but silence and warmth. i set the bones back upright and just felt the dead chuckle at the clumsiness of the living, grateful for a moment of contact in a long stretch of solitude.

four more days of rain and three days of quiet and two days of light and the spiral begins to grow whiskers of horsetail and i know i’ll never leave you alone in the soil, nor in some dusty shrine where you’ll sit patiently through the decades, waiting to be touched. you dreamt me into form, you gave me shape. (i dreamt you into form, i gave you shape.) you sat me upright, you ordered me into this valley. you called back the women, and polished that old man’s shoes and told him to ask me to call him grandpa. soon they’ll all gather around you. you are nothing less than a small powerful earthly thing, a vision that was honored. soon we’ll soak you soft again, we’ll stretch you loud, we’ll dance your flesh into tautness, we’ll celebrate ourselves whole. you’re the meditation bell and the call to prayer. the mountains show me my true face in their sun bronzed mirror. and something in you will ring out through the generations, and something in each of us will answer. it already has.

prophecy, a word too self-aggrandizing. kotodama, the spirit of sound. each word a conjuring, not a calling forth from no-where and no-thing, but an erecting of the already-known from the wordless place, to the realm where a mouth can touch a living ear.

as the planets of growth, dreams, change, and shadow form their cradle in the sky, this valley receives my limping body. the body has grown accustomed to carrying the bones of many ancestors with an air of pride and purpose. the bonesetter asked the body, are all these bones yours to carry? the thinker responded, these bones gave shape to my bones and so i carry them because there is no one else living to carry them. the bonesetter grows quiet because his hands speak to the bones, and there will be no moving of this mind until the body inevitably gives way under the weight of rusted belief.

in spring, the body came to rest in the care of real love. unsought, two stars recognized a similar quality of light. july came and the body staged a refusal to depart. but the mind pried the bones from the arms of the lover and trudged forward on its epic journey. a prayer cultivated across five solar cycles, to be finally completed within three months’ time. three months, an easy season some said. a prayer tended for so long that the path came and picked me up from my own doorstep—the prayer in the driver seat, my temporary whims and desires the passengers.

then the pelvis gave way. and the urethra grew raw and bloodshot. and the sits bones grew ancient and weary. and the coccyx yearned for soft ground. and the anus grew numb and uncertain. and the skin grew nervous, averse to touch.

i rested in the home of my grandmother who knows little of rest. 90 years stubborn. out in the heat day after day. always something to buy, to make, to package, to mail, to undo and do again, to iron the bedsheets, to make smooth what will soon be ruffled. i could not rest in that home.

but there’s a river nearby. i give of my blood and receive the mugwort. i wash my sore skin and muscles in the water. i go home and thresh my old lady with the bundle. she says, “akuma haraite!” “evil spirits be gone!” she says she remembers old folks doing purifications with bundles of mugwort when she was little and chanting these words. sometimes she comes forward with the lucidity to tell me something like that, memories she stored away as useless and irrelevant. i think it’s the smell of mugwort that reminded her.

baachan. i call her my best friend and my worst enemy. surely she is entity possessed. her breath smells rotten. i tell her to make ginger tea and it helps. logic tells me to stay longer and rest in her home, where i can be cooked for, cleaned for, lay in bed all day. but intuition tells me she’s the one sustaining the spirits of death in our midst, that they cling close to her, hover around her hair. half her heart is warm and living. the other half necrosed as her knee, a nucleus of death within an otherwise living organism, cut off from blood, from the source of life.

ailing, i board four trains.

home territory sets me alight, upright. hands and forehead pressed up against the window, smiling someone’s old joy. the valley receives my limping body and the grandmothers encourage me to rest. my obaachan asked me continuously in the weeks leading up to my return to Hippo, why are all these people extending so much care to a total stranger like you? i’d tell her, because i’m Hippo’s great-grandbaby. the village grandmothers and grandfathers feed me like my own grandmother would, for three days.

in this time of rest, depression pulls me under. someone inside is tantruming, “why did i come here? i want to leave this place, i hate it here.” the quiet of this valley. actually, the endless trilling. the forest’s chaos, cacaphany.

it’s not quite my own voice, the one that tantrums. my loneliness and despair somehow connects me to every elder in this village who drinks themself to sleep. their children have gone. their grandchildren are in tokyo or america. my obaachan would always say to me, “why do you want to go to Hippo? there’s nothing there! only mountains and rivers. there’s only darkness.” i’m now closing my eyes to this darkness, and i’m confronted by the sound of these waters, and i’m intimidated by the dense undergrowth of these forests, and vigilant of the bears and wild boars i once longed for. i imagine crawling into one of the traps the villagers have set for them.

love has rearranged me. i’m not the same as i was when i first made this prayer, nor when i traced it again and again, reifying its blueprint. love has rearranged me. i no longer want to be this lone wolf woman doing what no one in the lineage has done before. i want to be together. i am not wandering the earth for home anymore, driven forward by hunger and possibility. i’m just lovesick—even my grandma and auntie say so when all the hospital tests come back negative. he tells me it’s beautiful that we have this opportunity to feel so deeply in our lifetimes, joy ache & all.

lovesick, i have this 5-year prayer to fulfill. i devoted myself to untrace the removal of my great-grandmother from this place. she who was carted away from Hippo downstream to the house of a man she did not know or like or love. she who ran away many times back to this place in the cradle of mountains. homesick, she tried many times to return. lovesick, i’ve returned out of duty, coccyx ailing with the weight of many skeletons. my body rebels, asking me to refine the prayer.

shō provides this reading of Mother’s Milk, card 22 of the dakini oracle: “spiritual homesickness, the desire to get back to the primal source, just as a baby longs to suckle the breast of the mother.”

dokudami is my only relief. heart-shaped leaf lined in red ink or blood. white flower giving way to skyward pistil. doku meaning poison, dami meaning stop. grandmother remedy, a culler of poison. also known as juyaku, or 10 medicines in one. obaachan tells me her mother, grandmothers and aunties always had some plants drying in the darkness, always had mountain herbs simmering on the stove. she doesn’t remember their names. obaachan horrified by my nakedness in her kitchen. obaachan begging me to tame my hair from wildness. dokudami. your scent on my fingers. i squat over you daily and let you pull the poison out. you touch the hard-to-reach places. rusted corners of a watery lake. you counter oxidize. you pull the poison out. you restore.

my prayer is changing. i don’t yet know what to. i report from this basket, this rare alignment of stars. i ask that this basket hold my faltering faith, my grandmother’s loneliness, my resistance to stillness, our ailing tailbones, the devotion that led me here, my lover’s reassurance, this sudden venereal dryness, the rainfall the clouds gather, the company of cicadas, the tenor of my drum, the songs the fire offered, the kindness of this village and the hope they’ve placed in me. my capacity to disappoint. my courage to disillusion. the fresh spring truth knocking at this hot summer door. the conviction to escape. the wisdom to endure. the command of the body. horsetail succulence. the scent of poison descending downward, swirling into earth.

(there’s the dead that cling to this body, shō echoes)

i see the snake grinding its body against stone, a final song

flesh unbecoming into powder, vanishing into wind,

dust uncursing to bless the earth

i rub so hard against this stone i begin to bleed, the laceration the shape of a star, and this blood is my humble offering as a human woman to the quiet streams that miss our tantrums and rough reliance, and through the perforations in my flesh, the songs of the cosmos that travel on water find the inroads back to the center of our crusted-over generational heart.

so-called spirit doctor tells me the jade around my right wrist is full to the brim with memory and is ready to go. the jade—my cuff, my tether, my bone bond, our axis.

when i first dreamt of this drum, i saw a copper fish with jade sphere in its mouth, a call to wholeness. so i went to see the tibetan auntie in the tenderloin and set up her venmo business account in exchange for two discs of jade — one we set into your silver maple wooden body with gold, the other we slid onto my wrist nearly breaking bone (i think of the delicate feet of growing girls preparing to be wives) with vegetable oil and a plastic bag

from that point onward we were bonded together, you at the eastern gate, me in the west, our dragon body snaking void between dimensions of wood and flesh, across earth and water, linked through stone.

at the beginning of this long snaking prayer, i wrote,

how do i explain to you what i mean by godstone? sometimes a shrine is a small wooden temple with a wooden or thatched roof, and sometimes a shrine is simply a stone. in our lands, we do not even call them godstones. we just call them god.

what is the god-spirit housed in this green-blue stone, and what would it mean to release its weight from my wrist?

spirit doctor says, that damn jade, and i say, it’s heavy, i know. and he says, well stop knowing and do something about it. he says i am allowing the ancestors to use my body without consent, allowing them to latch on to me, hitch a ride and weigh down my body, my spirit, my mind with their unfinished business. the little girl in me is inclined to do as he says without a thought of my own, go home and send him a picture of my clean wrist severed from the stone.

i justify my obedience a thousand ways. why would i continue to carry this burden? those ancestors i’ve been revering are rife with suffering, why do i chant their names in prayer? someone afraid in me turns around and says i hate those women. those women are not my gods. those women are discolored by domination, those women are shadowed by the bends in their backs, those women live with a bruise in their tailbone. the little girl in me is nearly convinced that she will not hurt anymore if she removes this heavy stone from her body, like spirit-doctor tells me to do.

but the mother in me knows that to remove the jade is nothing short of a blood sacrifice, a mutilation. and the midwife in me refuses to arrive at ritual severance without clarity of prayer, without a firm conviction in the life made whole by cutting.

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Magatama • 曲玉

the most ancient human-carved presence of jade on our archipelago is magatama 曲玉, or curved jewel. a kidney or embryo-shaped amulet of jade is found in burial mounds throughout the island chain. is carried by medium women in the north and the south. a talisman of protection and preservation for the body and spirit undergoing states of transition, jade’s durability is known to carry the medicine of longevity and survivance across the weather of time. 1

there is a wisdom i am feeling for in the dark, tucked within the ancestors’ choice to marry the material of jade and the shape of the kidney.

“The kidneys in Chinese medicine relate to: the water element, to the water in our body… to the root energy in our body, our subconscious experiences, the colour of the night sky, black holes in the cosmos, the cosmic womb deep in our memory, our mother’s womb which is the first watery environment from which we emerge into our life on earth, the empty void and the fertile void in our bodies which births new life. In our body, the kidneys also relate to…our bones and marrow…our ancestral lineage, our reproductive system, the emotion of fear, feelings of awe…to a mysterious substance in the body named jīng in Chinese (精), often translated as “reproductive essence”, or simply “essence”.”2

“From a modern biomedical understanding of the body we can think of menstrual blood, ovum, semen and sperm as containing jīng. The quality of the eggs and sperm is governed particularly by the functioning of the kidneys. The cerebrospinal fluid is known to be the foundational matrix from which new life forms.” 3

the waters of the kidneys are where vast swaths of time coalesce and shape the future. ancestral inheritance—abundant and/or deprived. it will all make itself known in the building blocks of life — the seeds which carry the genetic material, the bones which carry our flesh.

the jade and the kidney, the burial mound and the embryo, the bone and the water — this coalition between what stays and what flows on, one feeding the other, making future possible, choking on or coughing up the past. we can never escape the reality of our inherited essence, but in turning toward it we can offer replenishment.

Tatteishi • 立って石 • standing stone

when we last spoke, i was invited to cut the grass surrounding the fertility shrine. i arrive to the shrine at 7 am, and spot my one blood relative in the village, my grandma’s cousin’s son, among the crowd of grass cutters, leaning on the back of someone’s truck, chain smoking cigarettes. he gestures me over and asks me if i’ve ever visited tatteishi, or standing stone. i tell him i’ve seen it on a map but never been there, and he says he’ll take me after we’re done with the shrine.

he needs to make a pit stop at his house to change his clothes, which is the house my great-grandma grew up in. he tells me he’ll just be a few minutes, and i let him know i’m going to pray at the stones that border the house and the cedar forest.

my grandma used to tell me that in the village, each family is the guardian of a particular mountain. a 12 year-old in the village once guided me through the trails of her family’s mountain, instructing us to pause at each carved stone along the path, bowing and making offerings, these stones her family gods.

i approach the stone gods of my family mountain. in the tall grasses woven together by spiders, i see a rippling like water. a snake with a yellow and brown jaguar-like pattern glides along the ground just ahead of me, making its way to the row of shrines. it’s a small snake and i feel at ease, following closely behind. the snake climbs the stone platform, coils up against the base of one stone in particular that reads

— 山神供養 — mountain god memorial offering — and turns to watch me.

i kneel, grateful for the company, and begin balling mugwort from the pouch around my neck into cones. i place them at the base of this mountain god offering stone that the snake has chosen, put a flame to each one and we watch together, the snake and i, as the smoke swirls up. i’m singing my great-grandmother’s name.

god is here within these stones, no number of stones too many. gods are always being born into a fresh opening, gods are always escaping or being released through fresh ruptures and perforations. there are too many gods dwelling in too many stones tucked in too many mountains for the state to destroy them all. there are old gods everywhere camouflaged in moss, crumbling into sand, sinking below the soil.

grandpa uncle cousin and i drive through neighboring villages until we arrive at the base of the mountain that hosts tatteishi, our standing stone. it’s a steep mountain trail and his footing is unsteady, breath ragged and rattling. we take rest often, and he softens toward me as he is witnessed in the vulnerability of his aging and ailing body. i offer him my hand again and again, and he begins to take it.

tatteishi begins to emerge over the ridge of the mountain we ascend, rising over the horizon crown first. black stone speckled with galaxy, there is no question to me that this stone is a gift to the humans from the star people. i circle the stone laying down tobacco. i kneel before the stone and light mugwort. my grandpa uncle cousin is crouching nearby me, watching, unquestioning, patient. i am safe enough to close my eyes. sinking into the black lichen that blankets the stone, i see the human ancestors of the land circling tatteishi round and round throughout the ages, offering smoke and song, bowing into the grass, strumming harps held between their lips, keeping this column between earth and stars coursing with marrow—keeping this spine alive.

after the mugwort has burned down to ash, i show my grandpa uncle cousin the video of the snake that guided me to the mountain god offering shrine at the house where he lives. he looks at the screen and up at me in disbelief. grabs the phone, zooms in and plays it again. he tells me that the snake is a Mamushi, ichiban doku na hebi, the most venomous snake in the archipelago. the japanese moccasin, pit viper. looks at me with a crazed look in his eyes, bewildered, overjoyed.

he tells me my ancestors are protecting me.

on the way down from the star rock that stands on the earth, we are holding hands. he turns to me and says, i see now; you have a kind heart. i tell him, it’s because i’m sayo obaachan’s great-grandchild.

Mamushi • 真虫蛇 • japanese moccasin

Snakes are one of the creatures most frequently perceived as kami, kami’s messenger, or nushi (powerful creatures that have long been living and have control over areas)…Villagers…believe that the kami of the mountain is a giant snake who protects the mountain, village, and water sources. In villages…snakes are considered a kami of mountains and cultivated fields, and the villagers are said to chant before burning for slash-and-burn agriculture: “Mountain-kami, giant snake, beg your pardon, beg your pardon.”

Snakes are also believed to be the reincarnation of the deceased, especially those people who had a strong presence….It is still believed that if a person kills a Japanese Mamushi, all Japanese Mamushi living on the mountain will come to kill that person… Yanagita (1999) documents another case in which a person killed a Mamushi … and his child became terribly ill. According to a medium, the snake he killed was the reincarnation of his family’s ancestor and was watching over the family. Snakes found in or near houses are commonly regarded as kami or nushi that protect families and bring forth divine curses if the snakes are not treated appropriately.4

i carry the yin earth snake in my mother pillar of the four pillars of destiny, or bāzì, the chinese astrological system. kai tells me the mother pillar represents the unfinished work of the maternal lineage. the shared pain in my and my grandmother’s coccyx signals me toward matters of the root, the waters of fertility, the reproductive essence. some outlet has been disconnected from the source, some site of discontinuity is inflamed within us. the women before me have left something for me, have buried it in the tailbone. some gift, some treasure, some wound, some terror.

grandma has moved back to her country of birth after the death of my grandpa and she’s more homesick than ever. she lives alone in a city far from the village where she was born because “there’s nothing there for me, only mountains and rivers.” she left the village at the suicide threat of her husband, my grandpa who thought himself a holy man and followed a false prophecy to amerikkka, demanding for his wife and child (my mama) to follow. my grandma insists that she is better than her siblings who never left, who still earn their living by growing peaches in the summer, persimmons in the winter. she lives on the 8th floor of an elder home now, many stories removed from the earth. so many stories. i can sense her tailbone searching for the ground.

i want to dig my fingers into the flesh of her coccyx and tilt it upward, tilling the soil.

Obba Nani • Obaa Naoe

“When the kidney energy is not repeatedly activated by fear and is expressing balanced health, there are feelings of deep connection to all of life, feelings of awe and wonderment, deep feeling of contentment and comfort in the body, and what might be called a feeling of the embodiment of self, or in other words the meeting and infusing of our spirit in the flesh of our body, so that our soul’s experience of living is felt in the present moment.”5

my fear body is wandering the streets for our lost dignity. so-called spirit-doctor has told me that i’m lost and i’ve believed him. i am one half sphere of the earth away from my drum child and i am nearly convinced that i must sever our bond from my wrist.

i stumble into the botanica on macarthur, and the magnolia scent of someone i can’t see immediately enfolds me in hues of yellow, orange, dusty pink. gold thread, the silk of the sun. she comes to greet me in a mist named belleza, whose bottle reads:

“Obba Nani is the orixa of matrimony and the home. Her color is pink, and she resembles both strength and femininity. Her power to bring stability to the home is reflected in her own pataki or story. She was once tricked into mutilating herself to show her love for her husband, only to be humiliated and driven to live in the cemetery. It was during this time that she learned to truly love and respect herself, vowing to never hurt herself again for the sake of another’s love.”6

“She was once tricked into mutilating herself to show her love for her husband…”

they say Obba Nani’s act of mutilation was the severance of her own ear.

“The ears are the sense organ which have a deep relationship with the kidneys. The ears as a sense organ are highly sensitive and help us to hear sound, the silence beyond sounds, to perceive danger or threat in the environment, to connect deeply with others through language, voice, melody, prosody and emotional and bodily expression.”7

the severance of the ear is not just a physiological mutilation, but a dismemberment of one’s relationship with her ecosystem, web of relations, and inner knowing.

my great-grandma was severed from her land through marriage ritual (bound up in silk and carried downstream on a horse-drawn cart away from her mother’s home in Hippo where the spring water once flowed straight through the house). grandma was severed from her land through marriage ritual (bound up in american clothes and carried overseas to clean up after my grandpa’s grand illusions). Obba Nani now finds me with the blade to my wrist, prepared to sever from the drum seed i’ve painstakingly replanted in the hole left by our uprooting.

Obba Nani splashes water on my face and it’s scented with magnolia.

spirit doctor has just severed from the mother who birthed him, disowning her name. i know a mother wound when i see one. my grandfather was the child of a devastated mother. Obaa Naoe was her name, a silkworm farmer who involuntarily shared her husband with her younger sister and lived her life in wordless dissociation. my grandfather said he was never able to feel his mother’s love, and came to believe himself a god sent to rule over women and lost people. i see how he abandoned the needs of his own children and inflated his collapsed heart going door to door, selling himself to the community as god’s divine messenger. i accompanied him at his deathbed and saw how he thrashed, having spent his adulthood preaching about enlightenment but arriving at death’s door completely unprepared, his only solace at the sunset of his life, the care of the women who miraculously chose not to abandon him.

grandfather, spirit-doctor, medicine man, messenger of god. the impulse to dominate through severance the legacy of hurt in your heart, that place of vulnerability where the love of your mother was meant to fill you like milk, nurture your heart into a faulty capable muscle that pumps blood with strength, wonder, humility, awe. instead you are obsessed with the phantom image of your greatness, an illusion which glitches in the face of true substance, like the body of a human woman trying genuinely to love you, like the members of a flawed community trying genuinely to embrace you, like your own death trying genuinely to unmake you.

we’ve allowed men to cast doubt across our eyes. become my wife or remain lost forever, he told me. but i have a child in the sky world, i have a child in the mountains. i keep telling you her name and you won’t listen. i have a child in the sky world, i have a child in the mountains. i keep telling you her name.

i’ve ridden backwards on faith/horseback for three years straight, suturing the severance of three generations. my needle made of devotion, my thread made of jade. hand-embroidered drum seed, your life weighs heavily on my body (the onus of a mother’s love). you slow me down and i’m in no rush. you anchor me to earth.

Kokorozashi • 志 • willpower

you see i once had a rotten root. the coccyx ailed and ailed.

the body of the taproot was 12,000 aching women. 9 of them had mouths, ravenous.

when the coccyx is ailing and no seat is comfortable, sit with your back to the glowing stones and let the steam soften your tissues. know intimately the cause of your grandmother’s pain. a tailbone that feels like a living bruise, sore and blue where our bodies touch the earth, or where they long to. see her as that child she still dreams of, wandering the mountains of her home region, an 89 year-old child of too many minds, churning this way and that, trying to find her seat in this world.

in chinese mythology that became japanese mythology, there’s xiangliu 相柳 and then there’s nüwa 女媧. both are human-headed beings with the bodies of a snake.

but where xiangliu is a 9-headed force of watery devastation, the bringer of floods and typhoons, turning workable land into swamp and marsh, leaving any earth they touch infertile—nüwa is a single-headed creation deity, the original mother of the human people.

in the chinese classic of mountains and seas, it is written that xiangliu was a minister of the water deity gonggong. xiangliu was insatiably hungry, each of his 9 heads consuming an entire mountain. his blood was so foul and carried such a stench that “where his blood flowed, nothing grew, and no grain could be planted.”8

nüwa is a fertile mother goddess, who, from her loneliness at being solitary on earth, created the fist humans from clay. “she pulled a rope through the mud, lifted it up, and each drop of clay that fell off became a human being.” she chose to create from the great void within her. she is also known to have restored the earth and the sky to balance in a time of great calamity.

“In antiquity, the four extremities [the four corners of the earth] were in decline, the nine continents were cracked, the sky did not cover the entire earth and the earth did not fully support the sky, fires blazed unextinguished, waters flooded unchecked, fierce beasts ate the people, and birds of prey seized the old and the weak. Nu Wa therefore melted stones of five colours to repair the azure sky, cut the feet of the celestial tortoise to set upright the four extremities, slaughtered the…dragon to rescue the people of Ji province, gathered ashes to fill up the flooding waters, and rescued the land.” This fragment undoubtedly consolidates her role as the repairer of the sky and the guardian goddess of human life.”9

something about going from nine heads to one. something about the unseverability of a historical taproot, the undeniability of our jīng, our reproductive essence, our ancestral inheritance. something about not slaying the demons of our lineage but parsing out their minds from our own. something about the nine-headed/one-bodied becoming nine distinct bodies. something about choosing my route forward with my own sovereign mind. something about repairing the sky through the mending of the generationally ruptured human psyche. something about the power we carry in this very moment to suture the rift between heaven and earth, to restore the four stone pillars one by one, to set our world upright.

to walk in dignity, aligning each vertebrae. one root, one spine, one mind.

“The aspect of the spirit related to the kidneys is called zhì (志) in Chinese ...and has been translated as will. It is the aspect within us that is focused, with intention…with ambition for what we desire to bring forth in life.

In the character for zhì, the lower part is the heart/mind (心) and above, a character that is classically explained as a small shoot (士) . This represents something that can form a base from which it is possible to grow and develop in the right way”10

jade was the root i chose. jade my star root. jade my future root.

my head is poking out above the ground. the snake body weaves below for centuries.

the body of the taproot was 12,000 aching women.

one of them lives at the coast.

she becomes clearer and clearer to me in the silhouettes of dreams, always where the land meets the water. i call her engan baachan - coastal grandmother. she is engraved into the tailbone of a whale washed up on an ocean stone, deposited by a tsunami. she is guiding me out of the forest of abstracted ideas, and up the coast to ainu mosir where a distant they becomes an embodied we. she is watching me dive through the gateways of aquatic shrines11 with a look of pride on her face.

let the bonesetter shape you like the very forces that thrust the earth up through the ocean, giving each vertebrae its place. when he glides his fingers along the length of the oldest trade route and points the ancient bone in its destined direction, the water will flow from your eyes and you’ll see in an instant the spring above your great-grandmother’s house. mute for years, the outlet disconnected from the source, you will sense the water watching and waiting below the ground. know that when the tailbone roots down again into the soil from which it was disjointed, the water will remember how to flow once more and the baby spirits will stream in, riding on that current.12

kanzeon bosatsu • 観世音菩薩 •

view world sound bodhisattva

when i return to my great grandmother’s house the following week, my grandpa uncle cousin has cut the grass surrounding the god stones. for the first time, he invites me inside the house, which he says he has cleaned. it’s definitely the dirtiest house i’ve ever seen in my life and i’ve seen and lived in some dirty houses. but the candles on the ancestor altar are lit and there are fresh offerings.

he begins telling everyone in the village about my encounter with the snake with a glow of pride. we find ways to laugh together, my attempts at the local dialect becoming an ongoing joke between us and a place where trust grows, meeting him in his language which is also mine, and we are knitted even closer still in our silence. he brags to everyone about how good i’ve gotten at japanese, telling them that when i first arrived here i couldn’t speak at all (not the facts) and that he can now fully understand me. this seems to be his way of making sense of the stream of psychic connection that has opened up between the two of us by seeming miracle, water having found a way to bore through stone.

i learn that he in fact doesn’t drink and has been sober since he was 25. he is punctual and arrives five minutes before each appointment we make. every time we pass a vending machine, he insists on buying me something to drink. he teaches me how to harvest fuki, a native mountain vegetable from beneath a sacred cherry tree and pickle it the way he learned from his mother. he shows up most days at the house where i’m staying, bringing fruits like peaches, watermelons, and grapes, wrapped like treasures. my friend who’s hosting me and now receives this man daily at the door jokes that my uncle-cousin-grandpa has finally found his ikigai, his reason for living.

on my last day in the village, he takes me to see his auntie, my great-grandma’s favorite sister’s daughter. she’s a shrinekeeper, tending the same shrine our women have for a long time. she guides me up to the shrine on the mountain above her home and tells me the story of the tiny stone bodhisattva to whom the shrine is dedicated - Kanzeon Bosatsu - perceiver of the world’s sounds, the one who hears the cries of the people.

some years ago, she tells me, a fire claimed the entire shrine for ash.

the ash was carried down the mountain and used to fertilize the rice fields.

during one rice harvest festival some autumns later, the shrinekeeper saw a glint in the soil - the intact stone bodhisattva who had been scooped up with the ashen remains of the shrine and deposited in the field.

after she was found, the shrine was rebuilt as a home for the stone goddess, the one who survived the fire. stone goddess with ears for the world of human suffering, with compassion intact. goddess who waited out many seasons in the flooded fields, who retained the memory of her seat, her purpose, her root, across many seasons underground, lost, forgotten.

now i’m asking my shrinekeeper auntie where her mother was born, and her mother, and hers. the answer is always Heppo. we are just born of these lands, there is no memory on earth before here. i can smell these women who were here before we were japanese and whose very life force was used to churn up the state out of the dust, out of the mushrooms and loquats, out of the rivers and boars, out of the wolves who don’t walk on land anymore but are always with us in spirit. i can feel them breathing hot in wait and salivating in the darkness of an underground cave. the reindeer too—in the winter, i can feel your cool quiet breath on my face.

when the bone setter returned the base of my spine to its seat, when i turned my back to the stones bubbling in water and allowed their memory to soften my grip on an unbearable posture, a tail tucked under, i glimpsed us returning to our dignity. it looked like Heppo—our little nothing place, our little nothing View Sound World, among the potent sorcery of nothing mountains and no one rivers, nothing our everything, nothing enough to erupt us in tears of remembrance, nothing enough to become willing sacrifice of earth pit viper, dragging us down into the warm dark nothing at the crosshatch of bones, returning to the first cradle we longed for without knowing it all those long splintering years, stuffed with the so much everything illusory promise of elsewhere (expansion, empire, emigration, escape).

anyway, the spirit of the women of the land waits patient in the ash. the snake coils at the base of the god stone. the jīng resides in the kidney. the water pools in the dark cavity of the mountain, as the skeleton rearranges itself, connecting root to atlas in an undeviating course.

“The kidneys in Chinese medicine are considered of foundational importance to the root energy in our body, providing solidity and strength through the bones and the will power. They provide an anchor for our connection to earth, our ancestry, but also our destiny through the relationship to our spirit…”13

I have a child in the sky world (絆)

I have a child in the mountains (絆)

my child’s name is kizuna 絆. it’s a translation i will transmit again and again, until unwilling ears shed to dust and i’m left with my own inner hearing. it’s not a name i chose but one that was given. essential as kidney, relentless as water, enduring as stone.

“The first part of the character, meaning rope or thread, shows weaving together or connecting. The second part, meaning half, represents two halves that become stronger when they are connected.” 14

sky above us, earth below us, jade between us.

two green rings interlocking, an infinite roundness.

i’m haunting the empty shrines and teeming cemeteries of our nearly forgotten home, vowing to love my life from its very first seed. green, unfertilized. before wanting.

i picture us returning to our seat, my grandma and i—standing still with our god stones, babbling with the women weavers like water. fingering dried cocoons, spooling out their fibers, catching hangnails on the rough murmur of silk. no more nightmares for the lost child who left home too soon, wandering forever, unable to settle. i picture our root descending straight into the ground. each being on this earth is worthy of a place to sit and know that what they have is worth giving.

wholeness in the beginning. wholeness in the middle. wholeness at the end.

kizuna, this prayer of my life. a bond that can never be broken.

she was flung in a spring fire
(picture the pine preserving progeny)
ashes emptied into rice marsh
summer came then autumn
and her body was dug up
tiny and metallic
spotted in a sea of grain
now she’s the guardian
of a lonely sacred place

there’s a small cup for his spirit to drink from, at the base of a slow blossoming peony.

second cup

reflection ripples in my tea, or the freshwater lake that guarded his birth. the dead peer back at us with total trust. only the living tremble. my sister weeps beside me, our snot dripping out of one spigot.

third cup

to have a body that can relish this simple warmth. some like him walk this earth with full knowledge of that value. some who have recovered from what he’s recovered from. some who’ve veered off that well-hammered path of destruction, and have committed to the road of savoring. those ones know how to relish and will never envy the living, though they may miss this world of touching. for you beloved dead, i will savor, while i have this tongue. even if scalded, i will savor.

fourth cup

i know what to do with this body i’ve been given. to start, i’ll call my grandma and cook for the one who carries your pipe. you’ve left us passing your gifts between our hands, back and forth as the tobacco and choke cherries run out. small pinches of the way you loved us to carry us through this long season on earth without you, a new kind of winter.

fifth cup

the tea becomes orange like the sun’s last glow before the sky recedes into indigo. each new year is more than we were promised. abundance means having more than you needed, enough to share. you left us with more, even your death a gift spilling gifts. i hear the call to rejoice—much of what we inherit is still alive.

sixth cup.

he will begin again on the winter solstice (i did the math). weaving back through the seven sisters from where his people came. the willow branches severed from their source are somehow budding, my senses attuned. you put up many lodges and the willow will some day bend around your living memory, your growl a hot spring bubbling up among the iyan, touching every stone.

seventh cup

it all returns to water in the end ((mni wiconi)) before the tint of leaves, after the tint of leaves ((mni wiconi)), water the interstice

you made your sound for the people. we’ll make our sound because of you. water will carry. and the dead won’t yearn. in that ancient warmth of first darkness, we’ll hear you in the stones.

tókša koda

photos of manzanita berry stringing by kylie tseng, morning star.

thank you goddess1 tamu for pouring tea.

chushichi-san is in his 70’s and burns bamboo to make the charcoal that keeps the homes warm in winter. my first time in the village, he told me that the spirits of ancestors remain with the land for 400 years after they pass away, and so mine are still here, witnessing this return. he’s interested in the histories of the ones who have lost the battles against empire, and has gone to hokkaido to ask questions of a childhood friend who studies the northern words. ひっぽ is not a japanese word, he tells me, but derives from the ainu word ヘッポ meaning 子供住みやすい所 — a place easy for children to live.

a place easy for children to live. when chushichi-san hands me this linguistic key, i think he understands the way i thank him. i think he’s waited for someone to receive his knowledge like this. i think we all long for our gifts to be sought after like water.

from where i had sat alone in america—head buried in my hands, stitching arduously a multiyear prayer, pleading with god that, out of the raw materials of a life unseated1 and made shallow by the many insidious ways empire cuts off/makes singular/nuclear /isolates/nullifies prayer/preys, i could weave a community life that could cradle a child—some lasso in me had propelled itself across the foam like those spiders webbing homes that span the widest of rivers and fixed itself to some flickering lamp post in my great-grandma’s hometown.

heppo - a place easy for children to live.

once, from a hole in the ground, i saw an opening in the sky. infinite rays of light, each one a thread of dna strung through the eye of the needle. ōmankoten, great vagina heaven, rainbow star. source of life, aperture in the heavens through which our lives incarnate, transitioning from pure energy to human form. slit through which the women gods continue lineages, condensate like dew on the leaves or tears from an eye duct, rolling down through the insides of mountains, getting filtered by stone silt and moss, finding a willing outlet on the surface of the earth, pouring out as spring water, as fiber, as children, as life.

a mother of three children and i walk a mountain trail and come across a tori gate with a broken shimenawa hanging down limp on one side, nearly brushing the ground. shimenawa is the sacred rope braided from rice grass that marks the threshold between the realm of the humans and the realm of the gods. the men in my family craft them, son following father. i’m drawn to broken things and move toward the entrance marked by neglect, weather, and something less innocuous, but my friend is cautious to enter and we return to the silkworm farm.

that night, tomiko-san opens up the photo albums and begins to tell us a story.

1993, she tells us, the year after my birth, marked the first year in known history where not a single baby was born in the village.

the community gathered in the silkworm farmhouse and discussed what could be done. it was decided to build a new shrine in the village solely dedicated to calling in the future generations of the community; a shrine to call the baby spirits, the mothers-to-be, the young families, keeping the prayer of continuance alive.

it was this moment of thumbing through these photographs as old as my life—seeing the faces of community members in the prime of their lives who now can barely walk, witnessing the pride in their faces as they felled cedar lodge poles and strung up the freshly twisted shimenawa with the sweet fragrance of that year’s rice harvest, the same shimenawa now frayed and lopsided—when i realized that my prayers do not exist in isolation, but are a continuation of legacy.

is it coincidence or the natural order of life here that silkworm farmers were the ones to spearhead this community initiative? that they are the same parents who lost their young son and now watch over the drum body of my baby ancestor? do we begin to understand why the fertility shrine is guarded by the god of silkworm husbandry? could one say that the process of raising silkworms for silk is both a gestational and abortive practice? a practice some would call violent, and others, a destiny diverted in service of the living?

the web shows me its nodes, points of connection elusive to a modern mind but leaving a trail of scent, some texture of meaning and interconnectedness i’m left rubbing like resin between my fingers.

my midwifery teachers in the Andes remind me that pregnancy, childbirth, and the fiber arts are intrinsically connected within our original cultures. aya maria tells us about cotton being known as the solid materialization of water, which holds memory. the fiber which remembers is then woven into textile which captures the frequency of the time, place, emotion, thought, and spirit of its weaver.

water in my ancestral lands is understood as the element of preconception, conception, and gestation. our unborn are referred to as mizuko, or water children, those who are still afloat within the cosmic waters. my friend senna points out that in many cosmologies, the goddesses of childbirth are often weavers. i think of orihime, the star being who weaves the amanogawa, the river of heaven (aka the milky way) in japanese folklore, the one who brings all of creation into form with her needle and thread alone.

gestation is a time when the mother’s body weaves the fibers of life within the womb. digesting the raw elements of the earth and spinning them within the sacred uterine water wheel into the body of a child, the mother creates the sacred garment for an incarnating spirit.

who are we now, the people of hippo?

a village seeded with the purpose of providing a safe nest in the cradle of mountains for children to grow up within; an aging population that has watched their efforts to call back the children fall flat, some growing jaded and cynical, and some holding the prayer flame alight within the hearths of their homes; myself, birth guardian in training, carried here by the spirit of my own lineage’s continuation, a barely audible drumbeat traveling muffled through crosscurrents of muddied water, teetering often between the confidence of a horse with eyes focused on a single destination, and the doubt of my prayers as mere delusions.

but the water insists, and the cat god insists, and the rice grass insists, and now i know that the prayer current of the ones before me did enter my heart and pull me close by a thread of silk, delicate and unbreakable.

celestial transmissions, earth-based manifestations.

i’m a woman pregnant with the legacy of my people,

weaving ancestral prayers into form with this body my mother gave me

i’m two cycles of the moon away from the land that gave me these stories, and i must become like the celestial messenger who carries memory in the body, making aspects to each terrain, depositing what can’t be swallowed (translated, digested), burying certain conversations for later in the blue-grey of pine ash, knitting together below the ground those mountains whose heads know different clouds.

i cover the hole and above it light a small fire. some key at the hinge of the worlds turns and i have permission to tell more, out of order, tell it again, get it all wrong.

i’ve been missing my drum heavy. my drum was too heavy (i carried this for years, the twins sing), so i made a mineral deposit (silver maple, steel, and cowhide). it happened not because i was ready but because the weight gave out. my strength crumpled into the dirt and the land caught the baby. the drum now sits at the ancestor altar of one of the three remaining silk farming knowledge keepers in our region, a woman in her late seventies named tomiko-san.

my first day in the village fortuitously coincided with the first day of the harvest festival in tomiko-san’s mulberry fields, and someone had the good thought to invite me. hosted by the hippo kuwakurabu, or village mulberry club, the festival gathers community members together to collectively tend to the abundance of mulberry trees left without use in the wake of the collapse of the local silkworm industry. in the (translated) words of mulberry club leaders:

tomiko-san’s husband has passed away, her children and grandchildren have all moved to urban centers near and far, and she is not shy to tell us she is lonely. she pours her familial love into those who come to help with the harvest, cooking us three meals a day and pulling stacks of bedding out of her closets, covering the entire ground floor of her home with futon for everyone to sleep on after a long day of work, and in preparation for the next.

sleeping on the floor of her altar room, i witness her devotional ancestor practice each morning, offering fresh cups of water and sake, bowls of steaming rice, sounding the singing bowl, lighting the incense, clapping her hands together in prayer. i notice the black and white photo of a young boy hanging above the altar, beside framed pictures of whom i assume are her deceased parents and grandparents-in-law. i ask her about the young boy and she tells me that her son passed away when he was a child.

one of my favorite customs of our home place is that when guests arrive to someone’s home, the first thing they will do is greet, make offerings to, and prostrate before the ancestors of the home they are visiting. we come to know each other in this way, weaving not only in present time but in acknowledgment of the multitudes within and behind us that meet when we touch living hands. in a 300 person community, it is known that our ancestors harvested together, ate meals at each other’s tables, tolerated one another, upset each other, violated each other, overlooked one another’s strangenesses, got drunk together, built community centers together, processed mountain vegetables together, fed snacks to each other’s children and grandchildren, prayed and conspired together, shared dreams and fears for the future. we, the living, pick up their relating where they left off.

in our region, silkworms are referred to as ōkaikosan—kaiko means silkworm, and both the prefix and suffix connote the profoundest levels of respect and reverence, no different than how one would speak of a god.

i remember my neurodivergent grandpa telling us grandkids about holding living silkworms in his mouth as a kid, and the way we’d laugh and cast it off as another one of his strangenesses. i tell this anecdote to a table of grandmothers at the mulberry harvest festival and immediately they all nod and giggle, saying, yes this is what we did as children, brushing imaginary silkworms against their lips to show me how it’s done, saying フワフワ, フワフワーfuwafuwa, fuwafuwa—an onomatopoeia conveying the soft texture of the silkworm’s flesh.

i understand now that my grandpa carried them in his mouth for the sole reason that they kept him company, were his relatives and dear friends with whom he perhaps shared more intimacy than he could with any human. he loved them with a tenderness that could only be told between the soft wetness of his tongue and his cheek.

when i tell tomiko-san about my baby ancestor who lives inside of my drum and ask her if she can guard it while i return to amerika, there is very little need for questions and explanations. she says that she will keep the drum next to the picture of her son, and tells me that her mother-in-law used to help women in the community with abortions. so the daughter-in-law of a village abortion doula, who herself doulas silkworms from larvae to cocoon, who grows the mulberry leaves that feed them, who hospices them from husk to silk fiber, at present guards the part of my body that lives outside of my body. knowing this, though i miss my fat phantom baby, i can walk through the world with a lightness of being.

place your seed in the soil and enact a belonging beyond thought or even faith. a placenta in the ground is nothing short of a promise. some things keep sensing long after the pulse has dried up. a placenta maintains the consciousness of each fiber knit together across the long tapestry of time. these traditions are intact within my familial memory. my grandpa’s placenta was buried in the rice fields along with those of his seven siblings. do not underestimate the gravitational force of blood, even across the generations. do not forget the pendulum that swings within the core of the body, and the way it will circle with narrower and narrower focus around the center. if you cannot return now, because the borders or the forgetting are over-strong, because the entity that consumes water, oil, mineral and blood with an insatiable violence squats over the territory of your heart, i promise that one day, if not within this lifetime then through the body of another who swims in your blood, you will.

last we left off, i was kneeling in the dirt before the big pussy heaven ōmankoten, cutting the grass, watching the earth yawn open, waiting for more shutters to unlock.

in the meantime, the 91 year-old ōmankoten shrine keeper katsuko-san taught me about ōmakura, a conception and pregnancy ritual of our region. ōmakura translates to sacred pillow—rice hulls from the land sewed into a pouch of red cloth. a person praying for pregnancy visits the shrine keeper, retrieves the ōmakura, and brings it home. the ōmakura keeps the mother-to-be company as the baby is conceived and begins to grow in the womb. throughout the pregnancy, the mother stitches a new ōmakura and fills it with fresh rice hulls. after the child is born, the mother returns both ōmakura to the shrine. where there was once one, there are now two.

sometimes i forget the meaning of red. my mind is in two places, or many more. my mind is like twins with their backs to one another, unable to place the knowledge that rests just against my spine. i forget the meaning of red, like i forget why kannonsama (kuanyin - bodhisattva of compassion) sometimes presents with the neck and head of a horse, until reminded. the neigh of the horse is one of the rare sounds on this earth that can disarm a demon, a sound that punctures illusion and cuts through to the the seed of knowledge.

1

red carries the seeds as life multiplies; red accompanies the generations as the tides of conception, gestation, and birth wash in and out. red is the pouch passed between elder shrine keeper and young mother to be, between the shrine (the house of the spirits) and the home (the house of the village people). red hangs in wait until it is called down, to beckon life through the doorway of the holy place.

i remember now. the meaning of red is always blood.

soon after meeting omānkoten, i’m granted access to the inside of the shuttered fertility shrine for the first time, which is also the shrine of bato-kannon (the horse-headed bodhisattva) and neko-gami (the cat-bodied god of sericulture or silkworm husbandry). doors are opened, doors within doors within doors. we sit sheltered from the rain and the mountain mayor peels back the red bib that conceals the stone baby held closely to the stone chest of Koyasu Kannon, the bodhisattva of fertility, childbirth, and the protection of children. he tells me about the 49 days after the loss of a baby that the mother must pray at home, not entering the sanctuary of the shrine. 49 days for the spirit to pass through the bardo, the passageway between the lifetimes. i ask him why this prohibition exists, and he says something about the uncleanliness of death.

it doesn’t make sense to me, that the grieving mother would stay away from the place of prayer in the time that grief is the sharpest. i have much more to learn, study and experience about the forces that shape these customs, but i intuitively sense that they reflect the influence of the japanese state’s codification of local folk cosmology into imperial religious doctrine. state shinto’s emphasis on notions of pollution (kegare) as applied to birth, death, menstruation and sickness, and practices of purification (harae) have been used to justify the subjugation and erasure of indigenous ways of life throughout the archipelago and beyond. 2

In TE AWA ATUA, TE AWA TAPU, TE AWA WAHINE: An examination of stories, ceremonies and practices regarding menstruation in the pre-colonial Māori world, Dr Ngahuia Murphy writes,

“We are warned of the danger of the blood to ‘pollute’ sacred space…I argue that the blood contains the power to overwhelm, not pollute, and that the idea of menstrual pollution is more about controlling women than ritual transgression…

Andrea Smith in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide…draws attention to the way Native bodies have been equated with dirt and constructed as a ‘pollutive’ threat to the ‘colonial body’ in colonialist imaginings. Native women’s bodies in particular “stand in the way of the continuing conquest of Native lands, endangering the continued success of colonization” (p. 79) because by giving birth they ensure the continuity of the people. As such they are “bearers of a counter-imperial order and pose a supreme threat to the dominant culture”…

I locate the perpetuation of menstrual pollution narratives here as an act of war against Native sovereignty. It is an act of violence to speak of the blood that symbolises the continuity of the people as ‘pollutive’. Such language is couched within discourses of cultural genocide that rely on the erasure of Indigenous peoples for the success of colonisation (Smith, 2005).

Central to our survival is ‘the house of humanity’, the womb space of women and the blood that represents its fertility.”3

there’s no one the mountain mayor knows of in the village who holds the rituals connected to abortion and miscarriage, but, he says, there really should be, there really should be. he tells me about the monasteries nearby where women can spend time fasting, walking the sacred mountains, receiving teachings, to become eligible to carry out the rituals on behalf of others.

before we leave, he begins to shut the doors that guard the stone mother and child, and i ask if i can pray to Koyasu Kannon. he nods. i kneel and clap my hands in prayer and hear a cascade of claps behind me. i turn to see the two men who accompany me kneeling at my back, their hands pressed together, responding to the call to prayer.

after we shutter the doors once again, he looks at me and his eyes have changed, like a shield has been lifted, revealing their grey-black wetness. he tells me i may be the first foreign-born person who has ever prayed before her, and invites me to come back the following sunday at 7 am to help cut the grass.

it’s a story that requires a fire to be made before reading.1 it’s a story that requires the cover of clouds to be told. it’s a story that has not yet been stolen and it’s up to us to keep it that way. i tell the story knowing the risk of language, and i tell it with the necessity for breath. if you squeeze the story, it will dissolve in your hands, or become a marble and roll out of your palm, i promise.

either suspended in sky where earth is a lovesick memory, or seated directly in the hearth of her holy combustion, let that be where my words find you, let that be where the story allows herself to be known.

my grandmother has a recurring dream that she’s a lost child wandering the mountains of her home region. she recurringly tells me about it. i understand now the urge to tell and retell. there’s a bottomless feeling to the hunger that drives our recovery of knowledge. there is a piecing together we require for basic sanity, a quilting impossible to stitch within the span of a single mind-spirit-consciousness. this mending of the fragmentation done by colonization necessitates a teller and a listener who is not an passive receiver but one who participates, with their imagination, intellect, psychic ability and willingness to feel.

every time my grandma tells me the dream, she asks me what i think it means.

a name is a conjuring spell, as indicated by the name of this writing project - kotodama. kotodama means the spirit of language, the evocative power of words sounded through the mouth to draw, dispel, or reorganize energy.

the name of our village drew me close when i first heard it remembered through my grandmother’s mouth—roused my curiosity, sat me upright, and conjured me across the great distances of time.

i already told you about the wind rippling through the mane of a horse no one can see, and the rumor of the stone carved horse god which drove me forward with a wild and illogical conviction into the heart of a mountain region my matrisphere had not touched in three generations, and the arrival to discover the earthquake that had cracked the stone in half and diverted the mountain spring that had once irrigated my great-grandmother’s kitchen before the fire, and the priest who had come to perform rites to fully release the god from the broken stone.

the story continues with my bid to the mountain mayor to carve a new god stone, telling him that because the stone sits guard over a fertility shrine that now sits mostly shuttered, idle in a community with a median age of 70, it may be supportive for the calling back of children to this region. i may have told you about his noncommittal laughter and cynicism about the usefulness of such undertakings, though i hear that he once poured himself into efforts to restore young life to the village. what life-worn wisdom may his shutteredness have to offer?

just up the mountain road lives my only remaining relative in the village - my grandmother’s cousin’s 76 year-old son and the sole steward of the land that raised my great-grandmother. he seems to be a recluse; his wife and children have left him and i’m warned by community members about the mess of his home. he is wholly unwelcoming to me and appears to be always drunk. his favorite and only known english word appears to be, “NO,” always accompanied by forming his arms into an X in front of his face. he tells me NO when i ask if i can see inside the house, and he tells me NO when i ask if i can help him cut the overgrown grass, even when i tell him it would be a favor to me, to let me tend to my great-grandmother’s garden.

admittedly, i feel discouraged, but in the space beneath my mind, i can sense the temporality of it all. here and now, more than any other time or place, there is a trust that if i continue to meet the shutters with prayer, some way will make itself known, the way water will eventually bore hole through stone or find its way around it.

so i make the cracked god stone my altar, returning season after microseason, and place wild blue hydrangeas within the cradle of the fracture, and burn mugwort within the cavity of the laceration, and smear bear root honey into the rough edges of the wound. I offer moonblood preserved in rice wine to the cherry trees that bear witness, twice.

the ground responds within several days. a 91 year-old grandmother in the village named katsuko-san learns of my presence on the land and my interest in fertility shrines. she invites me to visit her home and the shrines she caretakes. she lives alone in the family farmhouse as her children and grandchildren have scattered to cities near and far. this trend echoes across nearly every household in the village. in her neighborhood, 鷲の平 or eagle’s plain, the youngest resident is 66 years-old.

she brings us before a simple stone standing alone on a hill, engraved with language i can’t read, overwhelmed by grasses and ferns. she knows each plant by name and the medicine it offers. katsukosan and my friends yukari-san and takeshi-san have each brought with them a hand sickle and begin to cut the grass surrounding the stones. i’m learning that for us, grass cutting is the most basic act of care for the land, for the people, and for the gods. if there is no other offering to be made, the growth can always be cut back, clearing and marking sacred space.

how do i explain to you what i mean by godstone? out here, sometimes a shrine is a small wooden temple with a wooden or thatched roof and clay or stone totems inside, and sometimes a shrine is simply a stone. in our lands, we do not even call them godstones. we just call them god. god is here within these stones, no number of stones too many. gods are always being born into a fresh opening, gods are always escaping or being released through fresh ruptures and perforations.

there were beehives in the cavities of language. we clawed out the clods, revealing the words ー 大満古天　ー ŌMANKOTEN - great vagina heaven.

“…[eroding] Japan’s indigenous nature…the Meiji Restoration (1868- 1912), a radical modernization and westernization project by the Japanese government with invited foreign advisers…changed virtually all areas of Japanese life, including the way people perceive nature, and has brought about substantial environmental changes. These changes include, among many others, the extinction of the Hokkaido Wolf…brought about by an extermination program that aimed to establish a modern livestock industry (lead by Edwin Dun, an Ohio rancher…); conversion of much old growth forest into American-style agricultural land in Hokkaido; demolition of numerous local shrines and their sacred groves and natural areas as a result of the ordinance of shrine consolidation…In a religious reform, the government prohibited the practice of locally unique beliefs and traditions that are different from those of the State Shinto, including phallic beliefs and worship of local ancestral kami…”2

that night, i cried down into the root of my memory. the people had made a fire outside and i went in the darkened house to rest. my spirit was humming and restless like there were ghosts clawing from the inside. to soothe myself, i listened to a song called Taūa by MĀ, and though i’ve listened to the song hundreds of times, for the first time i translated the words. when i read the words, i began to wail.

i’m not sure if i can touch with words what contacting ŌMANKOTEN, that sacred portal in the earth, unlocked within my ancestral memory. i felt my many great grandmothers shoulder to shoulder with me, could see in the darkness, through the force of the deluge of my tears, the clarity with which they had pulled me here, and the inevitable hard-won miracle of my arrival. i felt the immensity of a historical rupture i did not yet have language for, rattling like a ghost train through my skeleton and quaking the earth of my body, redirecting my root, aligning it with a greater cosmic opening, clearing a path for water’s continuation. i wailed and my tears too poured into the cavity of each stone that had been cracked by the forces of history, and those tears like a cosmic adhesive began to suture the tears in the fabric of our memory as women of these lands.

“…the Meiji administration’s approach to modernizing and making Hokkaidō more Japanese served as the blueprint for its colonial campaigns overseas, in Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto, and Manchuria. Mid-nineteenth century racial discourses served as the ideology behind the occupation of these nations, as well as the justification for Japan’s dissemination of ideology via the establishment of state Shintō, the construction of shrines throughout the colonies, and the promotion of Japanese language as the means of acculturating “native” populations. Officers and scholars who had trained and worked in Hokkaidō were recruited to carry out Japan’s policies throughout the empire, where they subsequently drew on their previous experiences.^”3

there are too many gods dwelling in too many stones tucked in too many mountains for the state to destroy them all. there are old gods everywhere camouflaged in moss, crumbling into sand, sinking below the soil.

i blew lifetimes of snot into tissue paper, and went outside to join the people around the fire. they said that my wailing could be heard from where they were, through the shuttered windows and doors. the sun went down and we ate rice that had become sticky, cooked within the fibrous hollow of bamboo stalks.

it’s raining here in gaza, i mean abya yala, i mean ainu mosir, land where humans are tuned to the frequency of water. it’s raining here and the monsoon-time humidity is trapped within the pelvic bowl of snow-laced mountains by a thick canopy of clouds, and lightning whips the wets of my eyes, piercing crests of imperial castles swallowed momentarily by mist, each strike followed by the loyal growling of gods, and out in the distance, i hear the unmistakeable sound of drums.

this morning my sister came to me, my sister who speaks life into me, she came to me as a wolf lashed by the stormwinds of life, snarling of her light dimming and of no known ancestors worth knowing, of herself better off childless, of her lineages better ended so that the pain they contain need not continue. i told her, i will now speak life into you my sister because right now it’s in me to offer, and because i believe that each lineage is in fact a circle1 guarding a pinpoint of light2 without which our universe is fractured and incomplete.

soon my niece will turn one, marking a year since i howled into the altar i’d just erected to a future that dissolved as she slid into form, her emergence marking my descent into a personal underworld where in the cover of night i became a child again tumbling in hell, devastated by betrayal before language or even thought to give it dimension, only to become it entirely, let it consume me and narrate the stories i’d come to live into, too young to know a membrane that separates, membrane that protects, a body still an annex of mother’s body, this body a vestibule for the coalescing of many lineages’ untended pain.

i folded up the image of the self i desired to project out to the world, one older than her age who held the skill and capacity to support others through grief or loss or transformation, avoiding her own cellar of untended suffering. i slunk down into a familiar den of codependent grasping at security, all the while managing, by some miracle, to continue holding pressed between my thumb and pinky finger a golden thread strung throughout and between the edifices of time, connecting me to the place of worship within which my own life was prayed for, generations before my birth.

3

when we abandon ourselves, we grow distant with god and find ourselves godless. when we fail to embody our principles, the bridge between us and living creation shrivels. when we betray our knowing, the world grows dim and prayer loses meaning.

some weeks ago i arrived on the land i’ll never again know as japan, but an archipelago forged by wind and water, fire and ice, spanning from the territories of ainu mosir to the ryuku islands, recognizing that these lands are bound together as nation only through japanese imperial and colonial conquest and imposition of borders through military enforcement; recognizing that these lands are woven together through intricate webs of ecological kinship and the cultures that arise from the particularities of ancestral innovation and land-based technologies. i came here with the intention to continue nurturing relationship with the fertility shrine at the base of the mountain on which my great-grandmother was born, at the headwaters of the Abukuma River, to receive and offer medicine to and from these lands and waters that may very well have been effaced from our lineage’s memory were it not for my carrying of this prayer of remembrance and rebridging during this lifetime.

several days after my landing, a new sister named Sondos came into my field, seeking material solidarity with her family of thirteen in Gaza, including her three children. we began to exchange messages sifted through google translate, arabic to english, english to arabic, photographs of her family before and after october 7th, photographs of me with my nieces, morning and evening check-ins, video calls, and prayers for one another’s safety and wellbeing.

Thanissara’s4 invocation of “both sides” is the only one i’ve heard that bears any substance whatsoever, one that does not “flatten views into false equivalency,” but recognizes both “the hellish karma of perpetrating mass harm” and that of “being annihilated by it.” in alignment with this thought, we must also extend protection to ourselves, who in many cases include prismatic reflections of both the perpetrator and the annihilated. protection has nothing to do with the preservation of shields that separate us from the suffering of being human in an epoch marked by genocide and ecocide, from which no living being can be truly sheltered, but protection from soul loss through principled action that expands and sustains our access to our spirits.

5

i’ve joined a team that is working with Sondos to help carry the weight of keeping her family alive amidst the holocaust being carried out against the Palestinian people. we just launched a new Chuffed.org campaign on behalf of her family - please consider becoming a monthly sustainer by making a recurring contribution. recurring contributions support Palestinian dignity by ensuring regular monthly income and relieving those experiencing genocide of the labor of continuously begging for their survival.6 Sondos’ family’s monthly costs to survive in Gaza surpass $10,000, due to the zionist entity’s blocking of all aid entering the Gaza strip as well as the economies of exploitation they have precipitated in which the desperation of Palestinians to survive is being taken advantage of by those who can profit. From Sondos herself:

"Hello, I am Sondos from Gaza. I lost my mother and my home in the war and everything I own. Our dreams are gone and now we sleep in the streets and there is no food for us. I support 13 people: Jaber, Sahar, Bahaa, Sundos, Shaima, Duaa, Ahmed, Mahmoud, Mohammed, Dana, Moatasem, Walaa and Hamoud. We need $300 for food every day because of the high prices we are experiencing in Gaza. We also suffer from chronic diseases. Jaber, Sahar and Bahaa suffer from high blood pressure and we need medicine every day. Also, Mohammed has diabetes because of the war. His pancreas stopped working and he has type 1 diabetes and needs insulin twice a day. We need medicine every month, about $400. This is because of the high prices we are experiencing in Gaza.”

Become a monthly sustainer

soon we will approach the 7th day of the 7th lunar month, a time in which three stars form a triangular constellation in the night sky for a fleeting moment, creating a portal and an opening. when i envision these three stars forming a triangle, i think of the spirit-protecting nature of mutual aid - a constellation of stars, each shining in its own sovereign dignity, their annual alignment affirming life’s cyclical continuation, their alignment creating an entity with a magnitude greater than its individual parts.

an elder of the Konko faith with whom i trained for several years, Kawahatsu Sensei (川初, his name actually means headwaters, or river’s beginning), would tell me about the concept of aiyo kakeyo 相与かけよ, or mutual reliance, symbolized by multiple people carrying a felled tree together for the ceremonial rebuilding of a shrine.7 the tree, a conduit between earth and stars, is sacrificed in order to become the wood used to build a shrine; the shrine, in turn, becomes a conduit between humans and divine. humans, giving their strength and vitality to fell the tree and carry the wood to rebuild the shrine, offer their labor as a sacrifice but also as a gift unto themselves as they bear the honor of carrying forward a life-affirming ceremony. the weight carried is lightened by the presence of many arms, and by the honor itself. the tree’s death is exalted in its death and new life as a place of worship.

my friend Angela Kim reminds me that the word inspired can be remembered as “in-spirited”. what of ourselves are we in-spirited to give forth, wherein our giving is a sacrifice and an affirmation of life that also nourishes us on the level of our spirit?

my sister in Gaza has in-spirited me to rise into my own dignity as she and so many others challenge us to take part in materially and relationally affirming theirs. our refusal to fall into the sticky and untenable dynamic of saviorism, requires that we come to embody the wisdom of Kizuna, the reality of our belonging to this web of both bondage and life-affirming interconnection, with the responsibility to choose which threads to tug or release, at what time and in which direction. Sondos’ request for material solidarity has activated me to call upon the child within me to rise up out of hiding and despondency, to activate my creativity which is our deepest power and ask, non-reduntantly, what resource do i have within or around me that i can offer at this time? what act of offering frees me too?

June Jordan tells us, I must become the action of my fate.8

asking these questions has in-spirited me to pull from that golden thread that has anchored my own life to this earth. as i approach the fertility shrine at the headwaters where my great-grandmother was born, i track the three stars as they move steadily into alignment. i believe that my movement toward the headwaters feels so deeply inspired within me because it will also nourish, hydrate, and resource life beyond my own. i am relieved by circuits that close, wherein each act nourishes in mutuality, unwinding generational circuitries of extraction (more on this next time).

my second night in my great-grandmother’s village, my ancestors woke me at 3 am. my head was thick with dreams. my dreams were full of Sondos. i tried to go back to sleep but the sky was beginning to lighten and so i gave in to awakenment and stepped outside into the warm bright blue darkness, tiny frogs making way for my feet and the ground spongey with rain. somehow, in language beyond word or image, i could feel in my body the karmic link between being here in the mountains from which my great-grandmother was displaced 100 years ago, and building relationship and solidarity with this woman currently surviving genocidal displacement against all forces of destruction. this is never to collapse the two experiences as they bear no comparison. but to sense a bond being woven greater than this moment, that somehow carves healing codes into the dna of each woman and the tenor of the earth herself.

the offering i share in the images down below is a practice and experimentation in the embodiment of mutual aid - action that nourishes my need to offer my gifts to my community; action that animates a sacred shrine that has gone under-activated due to rural depopulation; action that generates tangible sustenance for a family acutely impacted by my government’s brutality and the politicized distortion and manipulation of my jewish ancestors’ trauma; action that meets the prayers of someone seeking tools or models for transmuting loss or absence into life-affirming connection and belonging within the web of life. i want to presence that in addition to the specific themes of care i detail in the images below, i am open and receptive to requests of different but related natures as well. i’ve been receiving messages from people seeking support with ancestral work and early life work, not specifically related to abortion, miscarriage, and conception. please reach out if you feel called, we can discern if working together is a beneficial fit.

i come here before you in the cradle of this past-ripened moon, rife with contradiction and imperfection, looking out upon the wreckage of this life, ours and mine, trying again to love in a way that hydrates the life force surviving along the edges, to love in a mutual way, that sustains your life and mine with a generosity that cannot designate giver and receiver. i share all of this knowing very little, willing to protect the collective spirit through making this ego increasingly vulnerable to annihilation.

god flows between us, from headwaters to sea.

And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.

-June Jordan

---

You circling infinitude. You dancer with all death and each demon. You edgewalker, you reaching toward the furthest bounds, dancing off the dust.

You the one your ancestors chose. You who died many times, you who returned each time with more life to share salvaged from each underworld. You who carried proudly your parents’ promise.

You who stretched this heart. You who keeps stretching. How wide you challenged me with your love. How pitiful you revealed my heart. You who tumbles in god’s bounty. How worthy you found the seed in each one of us, however shriveled and obscured. You who always located the root.

You survivor. You survivor. You memory keeper. You who fought for this life, you who won each vertebrae one thousand times over.

You honoree of the sun. You friend of water. You are forever. It’s our duty to embody a fraction of your freedom, the kind that dissolves real and imagined cages.

You who glisten amongst the earth’s native minerals. You in gilded carriage crossing over, crossing over, I see you in gilded carriage crossing over the vesak moon, enshrined in the love you spooled from that infinite source within you, most generous weaver, I see your own generosity coming back to anoint you, weaving your next cocoon.

You who touched down with the earth of your homelands, you who unbound your ancestors’ stickiest riddles, you are free. You live within us. You who we touch now through the sincerest acts of creation and courage.

I wish I told you again and again and again. I wish I told you once more. You already know. We love you for absolutely ever.

🌜🌜🌜with love for all who are grieving. in private, in public. in community, with no one. with everything, with the ancestors. in silence, in song, in a place beneath language. i am with you🌛🌛🌛

If you’ve been touched by the pulse of this precious soul’s journey, please consider contributing to their blood and chosen families’ call for financial support.

Support Hodari's blood and chosen family

have you held a prayer between your lips across many seasons? have you summoned a reality without any evidence of its materiality? have you anchored yourself in faith and allowed it to guide the current of your life, refusing doubt and all its messengers?

and have you ever come face to face with your prayer come to reality? and let die the self who prayed for all those seasons. and let die the self who thought that to pray meant to hold tight to knowing. and let die the prayer itself, the one that once billowed out before you like a road of red silk, the one plodded down to arrive at this wall of stone — a dead-end; a gateway.

pt i.

for my grandmother’s 88th birthday, i took her up the mountain she had not visited since she was 8 years old. to the place she used to return to with her mother, when her father was drunk and angry. a four hour walk winding up through cedar forest, bamboo grabbing at ankles, seeds planting themselves in the fibers of clothing. my great-grandmother would ask my grandmother to sing songs the whole way to keep the children awake, to keep the children walking.

my great grandmother was born there. my great grandmother was taken from there. accompanied by a horse, as is the custom in the northern mountain regions of occupied ainu mosir, for a young girl to be bound up as a bride and pulled in a horse cart down to the valley. the abukuma valley, where my mother and grandma were born, where the clear waters begin their snaking toward the great ocean, beckoning change.

for years my grandma has resisted my invitation, my plea really, to go back to Hippo with me, always saying the same thing - “what do you want to go there for? there is nothing there, nothing but mountains and rivers.” she who grew up ashamed of her family’s pre-imperial dialect, she who grew up ashamed of calling her own grandmother the word bappayan, a word that is not japanese, not japanese.

i brought us there to the mountain village of Hippo at the southernmost border of miyagi-ken. 400 people live there among the cedars and maples and the winding abukuma River. 12 children live there. not a single pregnant woman lives there.

i did not grow up knowing about this place. i came to know about this place in the last handful of years through persistent questioning, through the refusal of patriarchal record-keeping, and the insistence on the reality of a family history i knew only through oral tradition, dreams and visions.

first vision.

my ancestors in their home in the mountains. their home surrounded by animals. reindeer, wild boars, foxes, raccoons, bears, wolves. a most tender companionship. mountains, water, earth, the hearth of the home. the sweetness of the intimacy with the creatures. i wept and i wept. somehow, in the unspoken current beneath the known human history, i knew there had been a breach of belonging, a stealing away, a loss so immense that my entire soul quilt rattled.

i thought of myself as the changeling turning around, gathering all of time in my skirt, marking the seasons with the ink of my grandmother’s blood, straining my neck to see the mugwort lined with frost, the crater of a distant volcano cradling snow, to hear the pheasant trumpeting leaves down from the maples, sweeping the insects belly up from the floor of the shrine, tracing back histories on the verge of dissipation, arriving with the simplest offering which is our presence on lands that have given us life.

in the months leading up to our pilgrimage to hippo, i would dream of approaching the lush forests of the mountain, only to find myself facing an immoveable wall.

first nightmare.

a series of walls. interlocking and inter-latching. i’m the enemy outside the fortress. i’m on the outside looking in, clawing at the walls. an imprint of banishment, a deep-seeded belief that has shaped the contours of the mind, projecting itself onto the curvatures of earth. i have seen the mountain of green but been unable to touch it. i have put my hands up against the cold glass, frosting it with my breath. how do i come close to you? how do i take you up in my hands?

there is something to be said about the role of prayer in the life and healing of a survivor. the mind recreates prisons of perception, replicating an early experience of inexplicable exile. the mind of a child internalizes and encodes the incomprehensible, the unacknowledged and unspoken harm planted as the seed of sorrow in a bright and fertile mind. the harm becomes the locus around which the child’s mind constructs its impression of reality, permeating all situations, spreading like sickness. the mind coils in on itself, constructing safety through the familiarity of isolation and paranoia. the walls invade all circumstances, seeming to advance across the entire globe of the survivor’s world like an empire’s borders expanding their reach of control and domination. loved ones appear to be enemies, and the earth herself is out of reach, beloved stone contained within a glass sphere, beautiful and distant, untouchable, other. mother.

i remember once asking a mentor, what does it mean when you say “thank you for my life”? i could say the words but i could not access the feeling. what does it mean to feel gratitude for your living? she said you begin with what you know for a fact is true. you begin with the water. you begin with the fire. you begin with the earth. you begin with your breath. you begin with what you know you can touch, you begin with that which keeps you alive, and that which has kept your ancestors alive. that’s where you begin. as many times as you need to. that’s where you begin.

second vision.

the shrine of the horse-headed kami. bato-kannon, the protector of all of the animals within creation. a horse that i am riding. a horse that is following a single dirt road. a horse with hair bristling, rippling. a horse that knows where it is going. my hands on the reigns. a rider who knows where she is guiding. from the valley, up into the mountains. a single dirt road that knows where it leads. a single horse, a single rider. a mind that is focused, determined. a life that knows where it is leading.

the survivor desperate to heal attaches herself to new images, new stories, a sense of purpose, mythologies of ancestry, a notion of destiny. she frightens herself, sometimes, with the single-mindedness of her own conviction. the depth of her need for it all to be true, unequivocally true. she comes to frequent the phrase, “my life depends on it.” she wants freedom from suffering. she believes she has found her pathway to liberation.

i have to write it down. i have to remember. the order doesn’t matter. i just have to write it down. i have to see it spelled out. if i don’t remember then who will? i am fighting against all amnesia. i am traveling now beside an 88 year old woman in the country of her birth and i am so tired, more tired than i have ever been in my entire life. who can help me understand this fatigue, bone deep, like i am lifting the weight of a thousand years?

today i hold the reigns of the horse in my mind clear and direct as the tobacco. holding the reigns of this horse, i am no longer walking in circles, distracted and doubtful. from my grandmother’s mind i summoned the memory like thread. she resisted for so many years but one day she simply remembered that this is also her longing.

today we are returning to the land where her mother was born. she says when we get there, she will surely cry. through the colonial order and rigidity of this nation state, through the quietude and cleanliness, i am rippling in the blood of my ancestors. when she was just a crescent in the sky, i stared at the moon until she became real to me like i could drink her milk and her voice spoke through me like water—i know those northern lands; in my soul, i know those northern lands.

we recount how we are no different from the salmon, pushing against the current with a body-spirit memory that overrides all doubt. the journey to the origin is worth the profound exhausting effort, and we know that when we arrive, we will certainly die.

at some point in time, i would have let the narrative rest here. a story of homecoming, experiencing the long-anticipated embrace of ancestors, finally returning to a place of refuge upon the earth. magical, triumphant, simplistic, predictable.

but illusions don’t last long in the year of the snake.

pt ii.

in hippo, i dreamt of holding a green snake in my hands in the bathtub. i submerged the snake in water and they bit me through the flesh of my thigh. i knew i had only a short time to act before the venom set in, calcifying my muscles to stone.

in hippo, an 11 year-old girl named lily-chan appears. she spends the days with us, letting herself in each morning through the doors of her former preschool, now guest house where i stay with my friend and producer kai, and staying through dinner when her grandmother picks her up. she is one of 12 children in the village, as evidenced by the vacant preschool. she takes us up the mountain behind her family’s home and shows us how to bow to each kami that protects her family, represented by moss-covered stones, some almost fully disappeared into the soil and foliage.

lily-chan’s grandparents are the stewards of the shrine of the horse-headed bodhisattva, a place i had visited hundreds of times in my prayers. she brings us to their home, where we are welcomed inside and offered persimmons in all their forms—ripe, overripe, beginning to dry, fully crystallized.

i’ve known from times before that in our region, persimmons are the primary currency of ancestral and kinfolk love and hospitality. lanterns that glow in the trees with the abiding adoration of the ones upon whose lives the sun has already set, glimmering on the mountains throughout the descent into winter, reminding us that through the dimmest and dampest seasons of our lives, we are not alone. the vitality of the sun stored in the roots of trees in summer, fruiting into small gems of encouragement and survival in winter.

i ask lily-chan’s grandfather if it’s strange that i’ve returned to this place, despite my mothers and grandmothers not touching this land for 2 generations, that i’ve returned to bury my unborn child in the form of a drum. lily-chan’s grandfather assures me that it’s not strange. he tells me that for 400 years after they pass, the ancestors’ presence is still known on the lands on which they lived. he tells me that my ancestors are happy that i’m here, that it brings them pleasure.

the familial generosity of the people of hippo is something i hold like a love letter to my chest, a gift that never will lose its newness. when I tell lily-chan’s grandfather that i wish to lay my drum to rest at the shrine of the horse-headed bodhisattva, he makes calls to elementary school classmates, asking everyone if they know of my great-grandmother and where she lived. eventually the chief of the neighborhood where she lived arrives in a tiny truck to bring us to the northern mountain.

when we arrive at the shrine of the horse-headed bodhisattva, we find that the stone is cracked. the chief tells us that two years earlier, the earth rumbled and the stone split in two. he tells us, when a god-stone cracks, the god is no longer in that place.

he takes me to the site of the home of my great-grandmother, where a fire had raged 20 years prior, and new house had been built. he takes me behind the house, and shows me where the mountain spring once ran clear and strong through the childhood home of my great-grandmother, providing the water that nourished my ancestors, the water that made my own life possible, now dry.

first landing.

sun is rising over my homelands, melting the frost. i’ve seen a god-stone cracked in half by earth tremor. i’ve seen a field of hydrophilic golden rod revealing where there once was water. or where water still is, beneath the ground, with no outlet to emerge.

it is morning again and i am trying to pray but i am touching a wall. i am where i’ve dreamt of and though the land and people welcome me as i’d hoped and dreamed, i know that something in me now must die. hippo, i have dreamt of you so many times and now the dream must decompose so that i may look upon you with eyes that open. my eyes open upon you and my mind is shattering. i once left the earth in all my dreaming. i am no longer that dreamer; i am now the one staring at the true story told by the tops of cedar trees, asking what is the true medicine of these lands? how will coming to know them body-to-body change the very nature of my prayers?

i am the one who stands here dissolving, the changeling, the yin snake undone by the earth’s loving tremor, its head disappearing, its tail whipping air, its body becoming fibrous, coiling down.

truth is stripping and slipping. the snake year incoming, slithering sinews, insisting on nothing at all, insisting on shedding. all i had reached for, all i had grasped for. i know the snake as an interlocutor between dimensions, the one unknowable, weaving between dream and waking realms, binding and unbinding realities.

my mother pillar or yin fate is that of the yin earth snake, and kai tells me that the mother pillar corresponds with the karmic inheritance through the maternal lines - what my mothers were unable to complete or achieve within their lifetimes, becomes my own yin fate. yin earth, the archetype of the earth mother herself, the all-embracing earth who receives all the toxicity we give unto her, folds it down into her dark dampness, decomposing our failures as well as our celebrations. earth snake, the mystic, who learns through the process of shedding and transmutation, earth snake who can touch all things across all dimensions, gently and persistently.

yin snake, like candlelight, the holder of evocation, of prayer, who moves without sight, who embodies stillness but pierces through the dark quiet when it is time.

i know very little, but i know too much to ignore the earth’s omens. i cannot lie for long. i have seen a god-stone cracked. i have seen a freshwater spring stopped from springing forth, a lineage redirected, the outlet disconnected from the source. strange wonders are at work, speaking a language that cannot be heard beneath stories with a clear narrative arc narrated in official languages of conquest, english or japanese. the ground itself is speaking, in tremors, in shards.

here in this 12-child village, here in this no-more-preschool country, here in this land of no babies, the shrine i trotted towards over the long-winding course of two years, the shrine of the horse-headed bodhisattva on the same north-facing mountain of my great-grandmother’s birth, turned out to be a fertility shrine. i peered inside and saw the baby jizo with stone head in bonnet and handmade clothing by a woman who loves. the chief tells me this is where women come when they are pregnant, trying to conceive, or struggling with fertility. they come to the shrine of koyasu kannon, childbearing bodhisattva, who cohabitates here with the bodhisattva marked with the head of a horse, among others. carved into one of the stones in the cedar forest surrounding the shrine is a baby footprint, chiseled by hand by ancient people.

the chief says nobody comes to this shrine anymore, because no one has pregnancies to protect or pray for. which came first? the cracked god stone or the trouble with fertility? the export of mountain women or their homes engulfed in flames? the divergence of springs or the forgetting of the names of gods, or grandmothers, or villages, or mountains?

i am traveling now beside an 88 year-old woman in the country of her birth and i am so tired, more tired than i have ever been in my entire life. who can help me understand this fatigue, bone deep, like i am lifting the weight of a thousand years?

it’s a strange time for a journey, isn’t it? under the waning light, as the suns sets across the northern hemisphere. it’s a strange time to pursue origin, isn’t it? when the heart is already scorched with thirteen months of genocide and 500 years of genocide and thousands of years of genocide and the knowledge of toxicity leeching into every stretch of sand and soil, including this psyche, hungry for home and clawing at a deserted mountaintop and untended shrines for wholeness.

kai, whose name my grandma says means the armor surrounding an honored warrior, divines for me using the i ching:

gua 63—after the ending. a completion gua.

though i didn’t before, i now know what ending i am approaching from both sides. as i begin my descent down the mountain, i find that there is unfolding within my heart a necessary demise of those anchors i had put in place to save my very life. experiencing the world as a series of walls, i learned to gaze above the horizon line and fix myself to a belonging that could never be challenged, in the cradle of distant mountains and nonhuman kin, in the dreamlike space between the milky way and earth’s rivers.

it’s not untrue, but carries the unmistakeable scent of fantasy. the imagining of a perfect belonging somewhere beyond, somewhere behind, if i just keep walking with my eyes fixed on the horizon — as a way to survive what has felt like a ceaseless and inescapable sorrow — a sense of being unloved and unchosen by my own kind, a sense that has lived with me since the age of 5, when i found myself on the other side of the wall of my mother’s awareness, and experienced the first soul loss.

surely i am not alone in this - surely our collective can understand the power of generational accumulation of unaddressed harm, the power of our mechanisms of distraction from and avoidance of the pain and its sources—the firmness of our beliefs, attachments, identities, and stories. taking different form and shapes across the generations, but caught nonetheless within the looping cycle of this spinning wheel, always thinking we are moving toward greater freedom and happiness, but actually locking ourselves out of our own belonging within the mystery.

first nightmare’s antidote.

i see the edges of the walled fortress. i see the fortress floating in space. the fortress is no longer the all-pervading universe, but a moment in time, a passing thought-form, an imprint of a childhood wound. a choice point reveals itself.

in hippo, i met a wall and looked up. it was just how i’d seen it in my dreams. this time, a loved one reminds me not to try to tear it down. just meet the wall, Cakes tells me. place your hand up against the stone. know the stone itself as an elder, a grandmother, grandfather, as the oldest living ancestor. i saw in my mind’s eye the vibrato of the drum or the gong, rippling through stone. i remembered this had been my prayer alone - to bring my drum to this place, and to offer our song, before placing them in the ground like a seed for a renewed relationship with this life.

in the village of hippo, i embraced the wall and found it dissolving. i walked through its passages, each gateway presenting a new challenge, each challenge a confrontation to my ego, each breath melting the ego to slush, slush to water, water to air. with acceptance came dissolution of the solid, sublimation of the liquid. with embrace came an opening. there is no where to go that is more important than meeting this wall right here. in the village of hippo, i opened to the wisdom of stone.

when i arrived, i laid down every tool and weapon. i was nothing but a lump of clay, vulnerable to weather, loosened from form. it’s from this state that i write this reflection, at the time when dragon gives way to snake, adrift between dimensions, tired from traveling, taking a long silence, coiling down into the cool earth, beginning once again the work of liberation—the work of cultivating refuge at the center of our own being.

“Instead of finding a permanent safety within a specific identity, I realized I am actually working to reject the premise that creates those identities in the first place. To me, these identities are traps, sometimes beautiful ones, that temporarily hold something that ultimately can’t be held. I’m trying to figure out how to use those traps in a way that works towards liberation rather than holding me further entrenched in the violence that I’ve inherited, violence that I have become an active conduit for as a living vessel who descends into being on this plane. And so, I feel like even the most alluring identities have come to fail me, and similarly I fail them. Failure is often looked at as an overwhelmingly negative thing, but I think that there’s actually a lot of freedom within the ways that we fail. Creation is failure.”

-shō yamagushiku

i let the snake wear me down, i trust in the fallow

Through all the shedding, some things remain true.

i surrender all striving to become again the no-self

May those truths sprout up through the ashes of burned illusions.

sitting in silence, i am no body at all, no body special

May they rise up and blanket the ground.

i am the ground itself, with small buds sprouting

May they people the new earth.

All quotes by Shō Yamagushiku come from “On Failure, Silence and the Kingdom: Interview of Shō Yamagushiku” with Wesley I. Ueunten which can be accessed here . Much gratitude to Shō for the permission to include these excerpts within this piece. You can deepen with Shō’s work here .

I make three stops on the way to my new birth.

The first is within the red blood that flows.

Fragmented thoughts on the dawn of my moon

come silent, clamoring in stillness 

rocking toward the center.

With a single breath, I find you at the beginning, which never ended. Sister, twin, lover, cousin, mother, granny, child, descendant. With you, together, we are kneeling. We are kneeling at the beginning of all time, on the cusp of departure, before severance, with full knowledge. Intact, we prepare for the inevitable. We prepare for birth.

Fragmented moon in the dawn of my blood

I can only stand where my feet are

Waiting for a curse to be lifted.

In a current of red we harness ourselves to meet a changing world. Belly wrapped, a silk of ancient love holds our organs together as we fumble inside of new body, at risk of prolapse, of falling apart, or falling through.

Fragmented blood in the moon of my yawn

Touching god in the face of the water

Touching god in dim morning immaterial

We make prayers with the plant who holds the light of the moon. The one our mothers have always known. Strung up in the thresholds, pressed into cones and lit at every gateway. With the glow of smallest embers, we know we are never alone. The boat that moves across the moonlit water, surviving a small flame. The boat that follows a single star.

Fresh dawn across the yawn of my land

In the center of her suffering a little light floods in.

Makes a pool. Body naked, dips below.

Old beds agitated, thankful.

The water cooling. 

So, surrender. 

I am the child of each celestial luminary.

It is time to walk the path of the moon.

When the waters call, we answer.

Every woman that I met had a name to her.

I fought for my name beneath

the one-legged kitchen table

in between the lies I constructed

out of partially-told histories.

Little by little, you learn to weave a life. Sometimes inheritance is buried and you cough it up praying in the darkness. Sometimes you catch it in the palm of your hand and use it to light a narrow corridor. Sometimes you just barely make it. Sometimes you forget but you never start from the beginning. Each moment you’ve ever remembered is a rung on a ladder. Sometimes you find that you’re higher up than you knew, and all it takes is conjuring one word to see the broad horizon, and that word is your name, and that name shapes your life.

The pregnant mother’s mind comes forward in the shape of the name Uta 歌, and rocks there, and lands there, and rests. Uta, meaning to sing, to chant, to praise. Uta 歌, understood in the backwoods of her mother’s culture as a kind of oral alchemy, a vibrational incantation, an utterance able to alter the air around the utterer. She imagines her child speaking their own name— introducing themself to other children, guiding others in pronunciation, showing them how the tongue flicks the back of the upper teeth, teaching them a new sound. She imagines speaking the name of her own child—rousing them from sleep, calling them back home. With each vocalization, she imagines that clusters of denser matter cascade up and out of the lungs and give way to music, reverberating through the cells of mother and child’s bodies and generating heat in their bellies. As all heat does, this heat disperses outward from the axis, unraveling tight knit coils of tension, giving rise to a sensation akin to joy.

The summer I became an aunt I clung to a childhood name. I missed its softness, its sweetness, its invitation. An open door for anyone to walk through, speaking childhood, spilling candy. Yoni is stuffed, overfed, saturated, foaming, caramelized, unwell. Something is inflamed you see, something is itchy. The summer I became an aunt I withdrew from this world. Memory awakened. I could no longer feign adult. Whose life could I possibly care for? Someone in me was screaming, someone in me was battling for her life.

I kneaded the pain and I kneaded the pain and I kneaded the pain until it broke into a collection of crystals. From those crystals I removed the names. I crossed off each word in the dictionary and replaced it with a sound made any place but the mouth. I returned to the forest where I first lost belonging and placed a small intention for every hundred paces. My liver slowed to the pace of the river which ran beside me. The death all around me was undeniable, as was the eternity. I promised not to betray you, whoever you are. You created me and I have not forgotten yet. I promised to bury the gold back in my earth from where it came.

Is it possible that we must unbecome the one who was hurt in order to help them heal? Nakatatanda ng balat, elder of shells. Reception, the one who holds so the held can access freedom. Image after image of big hands cradling little body, and I lean toward a big name that can hold a little name. How can I be big body when I am still living in the little body that ails? How can I nurture the one who was hurt when I am still the one hurting?

An abuser lives with you always, until the pilgrimage is made. Until support is sought. Not from anywhere, not from anyone. At the site of the wound, the antidote is administered. At the very site of the wound, the seed of all distortion. At the very center of that seed is planted a seed of restoration.

I’m beside the birth hole again but this time I’m holding mommy’s legs and blowing lavender smoke into her mouth. This time I’m watching my head squeeze out like the whole moon being born, covered in black moss. I’m cupping the skull, still so soft, and tracing symbols of undying love and protection into the crown. I’m that spirit at the bedside of my own birth, swimming back to live it all over again, this time as my own protector and guide. I don’t leave my own side, not for even one moment, as long long long as I’m alive.

With the spell of a name, I distinguished myself from you so that I will never betray you. By betrayal I mean, get lost with you, enmesh with you, believe the stories that crystallized in your mind to protect the heart from future pain. You is the younger self, the one with the hollow for a heart, the one who aches with her entire body. You is the one who clings, and the one who hides. You is the one with the clipped wing, the one no different from the owl who died of mysterious causes on the shoulder of the highway, feathers like toasted caramel, decadent in the softness of your flight, you who glides out of cages, you who escapes the pitbull, you who is still panting, rushing, evading, haunted by an inner predator, you who internalized danger, you who has never felt safe, even when alone. You with a maze for a mind, a place of tricks and mirrors.

When my body was born my eyes opened to three black haired women fanning the panic from me with the wide wings of a downy feathered bird. Fear was like salt on my skin or sugar from a slow-drying fruit and the gasping rushed out of me, frantic for a place to rest. I took stock of my body and felt horror at the responsibility of living among so much disorder. How would I do it? I longed to become formless again, to return to the shapeless energy of which I’d been constellated only a moment ago, quickly dissolving from my memory like a dream interrupted. I came into a human mind and assumed disaster. These women quickly swept me up before that program took hold, these women intervened at that tender moment between waking and remembering, and wrapped me up in their owl wings and the brown of their skin. I followed them with my eyes, learning how to be in this world. I found they were no different than the mothers I was born to, except that they had recalled the word ceremony from the recesses of their own genetics and lived into the word with a conscious knowing. But their movements, I knew them from the mothers that had raised me and the homes they kept. These mothers of mine woke with the sun, one cooking while another trailed closely behind her, washing every pot she used, wiping every surface, maintaining an unbroken hum of conversation or laughter or bickering. Though they had forgotten the word ceremony, they carried the motions of their mothers and grandmothers in their bodies and imparted those ways of being upon me in a place so fundamental it could never be wiped clean, for it could not be cleaned of its essential nature. 

When I choose to be born again, my name is Uta. I hold the wing in my hand and I remember how the owl died without ceremony, fallen to earth with hundreds of her siblings, perished without impact wound, death by an invisible pollutant, an atmospheric predator. There’s no proof of harm, except for the stillness, the breathlessness, the loss of life. Teacher holds me by the wing and brings me to the moonlight. She tells me, “You and the owl, there’s no difference between you, is there? You heal yourself, and she receives a healing. You don’t need worry about whose healing is whose.”

Lunar being, whisperer of untold truths: whose song do you sing? Your mourning song is our triumph song. You play the drum and return to present time, you return to consciousness. That hollow in your heart, you know only you can fill it. Nothing outside of you can replace the parts of you that departed at the time the trauma struck you. With a name, you call your essence back, but a name is only the beginning. A name is a path to walk and a story to weave. Soon, your prayer will be solid in the palm of your hand. A clay figure you animate with your breath, your prayer becomes a plea you make with your voice to the ones who can help you. Where you spoke to god, you now speak to mother, and grandmother, who were always your gods. And you tell them your prayer. And their healing is your healing. And so the prayer becomes real. Fleshy, textured, and complicated. Real.

I wake up to the promise of another chance at life to the sound of this prayer:

In search of new sounds, I give us a new name

I adorn my baby with a sweet song, and sigh out the sorrow

I adorn my baby with a sweet song, and sigh out the sorrow

My name is Uta and I know where I’m going.

…I had long sensed we were broken….A dream had nudged me toward repair….Trust is an inkling caterpillar. We could long for each other through a whole lifetime and still never meet long enough with our courage to stretch in the direction of love….A spider in my dream, a swollen bite on the back of my calf. You asked what I sensed they were weaving. I told you we were the woven, and the weaving….

We meet chest deep in an ocean cove off shore of an evergreen wooded, mossy place, of crags descending into water of gray granite speckled with mica, kelp bobbing around us like umbilical cords. We have traveled a long ways to arrive here, a place we have not seen for some thousands of years.

You bathe naked and my eyes are nightshade, drawn into the glistening of water, familiar with the midnight sun. Will you always break me open with incantation? Will I only ever write poems for the ones who hold their wombs with dignity, enduring scarification, listening for dawn? Will you always wail your gratitude? Will it always draw blood from my eyes?

The longing I felt for you was always for this moment: this moment at the end of time or the end of water after water, with someone singing of god in an island language of distant ancestors, with the house empty, full of spirits.

I wrote of us once as lizards, losing one another across every continent, love expanding to span an ocean. Do you remember? Because I do:

Before time, we were lizards in the sun. I remember my body was a long organ thumping for our lives. I could not feel the distinction between our skins, leathery wrinkled callus draping our spirits, a living suit alight with sensation. We groomed one another for an entire lifetime. You and me, the distinction irrelevant, us, we, one body stroking itself, preening itself, eyes closed, chin toward the warmth that moved our blood. The sun too was an extension of our bodies, as without it our blood clotted, cold. And so we never wanted for love. For the sun was not a distant concept but an intimate bodily function, the very warmth that animated us, the same warmth we felt in between our two bodies and that feeling between in fact making us one, erasing any illusion of betweenness. At night we would curl into a single spiral and hold the mini sun we had inherited from the big sun throughout the day between our two bodies and become ourselves a great luminous body, a star upon earth to be witnessed by all other stars and all other bodies on other sleeping planets. We had nothing to fear. Flies sacrificed themselves upon our acidic tongues and we gave thanks for them and they gave life to our bellies and our way of life was nurtured.

Then, the earth began to shift. Underneath the stone that seemed it would hold us forever, god ached for change like how a child’s gums cast out its tiny teeth. Our stone split in two and my claws which seemed borne to caress you began to grasp and clamber after your departing body. But it had been decided. You would go away from me, and I would grasp at the memory of you for millennia. Still, it was that very grasping that would urge us forward on our evolutionary path. for it was our destiny to grieve our closeness for all of time, but also to peer into the folds of that grief to discover the reality of what can never be taken from us, the discovery that our souls came here to be forever transformed by, and in turn, elevate the consciousness of the entire cosmos. 

Your love continues to humble me and awaken me. Your generosity with your own pain continues to stretch me wide. I am holding you again, your flesh soft and warm. Your body is alive and mine is seasoned, smoothed down like river stones that have endured a fire. I come to you with the safety of my calm, that is the survivance of many storms, that is the knowing I will survive again. I bring this strength to you in the outstretched palm of my hand, this is what I have to offer you. This time, I do not offer to save your life. This time, I meet you in my broken, I meet you in my whole.

Someone in me remembers this place, and has chosen this cove to lay my placenta down. There is anxiety among my kin and comrades. We are still connected to that first earth we incarnated through, that the doctors handed to nurses who placed in plastic and threw down a chute to await incineration. We wonder if we can ever recover that part of us that turned to ash. But nothing on this earth truly vanishes, for this universe is one great continuous chamber out of which there is no exit, no entry. We have always lived here and we always will.

This is how we gather ourselves again, through collecting the scattered dust and ash of what our ancestors knew to keep contained, wrapped in silk, embalmed in box that mother keeps with her precious things, social security cards and stash of money, where things are kept that she can grab quickly and thoughtlessly in case of disaster, and the stub of the umbilical cord is among them, something not to be forgotten, something never to be left behind. It contains the imprint of what we must remember, in a matrix of forgetfulness. It tells us something of our destiny–that in our moments of greatest lostness, wandering the halls of this crosshatched earth, preferring to disappear into a dark ditch in the soil and never return than to choose between such a narrow offering of options for our lives, we can return to this piece of material, formed at the meeting of flesh and spirit, formed in collaboration between mother’s earthly womb and spirit’s cosmic origins, together sewing a nest for landing, a place where celestial information and planetary nutrients come together to nurture the growth of a human body that will live out a universal purpose.

I consider, what is the state of a world in which this piece of material is disposed of, rather than regarded as sacred, important, a map of who we are, a map to how we become? And then I look around me and take in the evidence of that world— it’s the one that raised me, and so much of the confusion and glumness I experience is not mine to claim but a reflection of a world forged in deprivation of ritual meant to remind us of why we are here and how to live. 

We have been given another chance– for us, there are so many chances. Our creator is not punishing. Our creator is not coddling. Our creator moves always in the direction of continuation. We dream of holding our placentas and they appear in our hands, in glass boxes, jiggling like jellyfish, clear as ether, sparkling with stars. We place them in the water and the ocean lights up, streams of lightning. Sky is sea and sea is sky, we may be flying or swimming, our bodies know how, at home in air, home in ocean, bridge beings with wings or gills, sewing heaven and earth with our diving and twirling, we soar between, and there is no between, no here and there, there is only all at once, here and now, and we are home. 

The stone will always hold us, the water will always sing our pain. The stone will always grind us to dust, the water will always forget us. The water will never forget us. How can I explain? When I leaked stars from my eyes, I survived only because the river swallowed me whole. When the river rose up to drink stars from my eyes, the water never paused to consider. The water gathers her own. 

i .

your mother wants to follow you

the night before you’re born,

a string of learned children

snaking up a verdant mountain

us three siblings, we’re sweet again

just this one time, just for you

back in our childhood shoes

three heads of a soft bellied serpent

weaving again as we used to (our limbs)

before harm, or remembrance of harm, 

or disclosure

we’re bridging silences just

to greet you, just to find you, you 

among backpacked children, racing

toward the top, grunting at sun, guiding us 

to the source of all water.

i’m in my little brother’s footsteps, he’s faster than me

doesn’t know he hates me yet, doesn’t know he loves me

doesn’t know how much both, together, shakes you

dissolves your edges, encases you in fury, rocks

you into acquiescence, confuses time for 

absolution—

will the silences 

unbridge us one day

and all too soon?

ii.

vermillion beauty, a secret name only i sing

in quiet, all night burning low on the altar, 

resurrecting a promise, becoming the prayer 

so i need not lose sleep to pray it

all night i’m stitching stifled love into cloth 

for your mother’s belly, even though 

her root did not yawn open, even 

though they chose to pluck you 

for your insistence on standing,

you chose your time

you inverted melody, 

you broad-faced rider—

in the saddle of your season,

you chose

iii.

vermillion beauty 

your name is a cloth i picked up just yesterday

for $6 dollars a pound

a color i wore to hammer my grief into form

when i myself insisted      on a blood 

worthy of celebration

vermillion are the stories i keep alive 

in the den beneath the clamor of temporary mansions, 

your great great grandmother’s fingers

wielding the glint of a needle, 

your great grandfather’s 

dolphins, weaving

water and light

poetry’s the only sound who can hear me now

so i’m poring over its caverns

waiting for the voice

that boomerangs

a cauldron of bats

flickering membranes

wingspans gathering shadow

family escapes me but i follow you vermillion one, 

preparing for you though you’re already here 

coated in vernix and i’ve run out of time

iv. 

i love you and i don’t know love yet—

can we meet in the time beyond time?

in a realm after family, and before conquest?

your life has already slowed me 

to the pace of the oldest wound

developmental arrest, the moment

i froze and kept walking, reaching

for the next sunlight, thinking

i was growing older

all the babies are grown now

except you vermillion 

and sometimes me—

the first of your season

the second of your flock

the inflection of sunrise in blood

the strength of your birthtime

a life among lifetimes, 

some dead, 

some forgotten,

all humming

v.

vermillion and i are always chasing, around 

a bend, up an island, vermillion a sound

ringing in my ear, not green but lush,

a procession of memory

the hue of life 

insisting

insisting

vermillion

“imagine being twelve and teaching yourself to love these people unconditionally even though they never loved you the way they were taught to do. imagine that and like me you’d never want her to internalize other people’s ideals. like me you’d love her the way you’ve been taught to. because maybe she’ll need you to. that pit at the center was as hard and glimmering as a crystal ball, not grey hair, not dirt, not copper wire, not dead bugs. perhaps she fears bitterness within her, but most of the time i can see none. not grey hair not dirt, but only crystal and only crystal, crusty, sweet and clear.”

- ancestor, a friend i loved, then feared, then missed — lan anh le

I carried a camera with me at that time, and I look back now and observe what drew my attention six years ago, before I moved through a series of ruptures that opened up the sky and revealed the aperture through which light streams in, weaving this world into form. My camera often pointed in the direction of child tombstones, and in one of the clips, the one I hear narrating at my side is my Ojiichan, explaining the enlightened being who ferries the spirits of children who have died across the great river to return to the peace that is their essential nature. Those are my words, not his. His words, translated, were: “You see all of these children here? The Jizo Bodhisattva of children helps the spirits of those who have died to find their happiness.”

I don’t know about that word happiness, and I wonder how he related to it, that man who was always smiling but deeply discontented, dissatisfied, in deep quarrel within his soul until his very last conscious moment. I saw it with my own eyes - spirit brought me down to southern California at that time. I came down to weave a quilt in which to carry my drum to the mountains where my people come from, but that’s a story for another day. My grandpa entered his death portal, and I was there by his side. In the mornings I’d bike to the ocean to catch my breath, and I watched the dolphins every single day in the dawning light, weaving between air and water, above and below, opening up the interstices for my Jiichan to slip through, out of this world and into another. Since the day he passed, I’ve never seen another dolphin at that beach.

My Ojiichan was a scorpionic neurodivergent man of god who lived in the realm of spirit and intellect, sought self-importance to fill the void of his wordless mother’s love, caused harm to his own children by his own neglect and aspirations to grandeur, spoke easefully and gently with animals and plants but resented that his fate was to work with land which he imagined himself above, indoctrinated with japanese nationalism while also holding curiosity and longing for his indigeneity. I say all of this to interrupt any tendency toward romanticizing elders and ancestors, especially those shaped by patriarchal imperialist overcultures, while receiving with gratitude the knowledge and love they transmit, holding them as complex expressions of culture, history, and spirit.

I miss him and his memory haunts me. His life, to me, is a cautionary tale warning of the consequences of spiritual bypassing, at every level of one’s life. I wrote about him once, years ago:

Sometimes it feels like I have inherited his karma - the opportunity to walk close to spirit within the teachings and traditions of our lineages, and the responsibility to engage those traditions in a way that opens us into the fullness of reality as it is. A reminder that walking a path of intimacy with spirit will never come at the expense of presence with what is unfolding right before us or within us, requesting or begging for our attention.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a former Buddhist monk and writer, Matthew Gindin, about invoking Jizo Bodhisattva in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. In January 2024, I collaborated with clay studio Artillery Gallery, political collective Nikkei Resisters, and artist Champoy, to create a fundraiser and ritual mourning space, Mizuko Kuyo for Child Martyrs of Palestine. Mizuko Kuyo is a Japanese Buddhist/Shinto ritual that translates literally to “water child accompaniment service” and calls upon Jizo Bodhisattva to caretake the spirits of deceased and unborn children into the realms that follow this human life. I shared about how we created statues of Jizo Bodhisattva with clay, praying with our hands and earth, circling around the fire to imbue the clay with spirit and calling on Jizo-san to take care of those child spirits who had been denied the right to life, the right to a dignified death, and the right to traditional rites and ceremonies that support loving transition into the afterlife. Funds from registration were directed toward Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, a collective of Palestinians in diaspora gathering and distributing funds to community members on the ground in Gaza who are providing meals and life-saving infrastructure to those surviving this brutality. They are still welcoming monetary contributions to their work.

Michael asked me a question I found relieving to receive. He said, “So I’m hearing that you all were calling on Jizo to literally take care of these child martyr’s spirits. But what about within yourselves? What did this ritual call upon within you?” What I shared with him was that engaging in these ancestral rituals is our insistence upon remaining awake (conscious), feeling (living), emotionally, spiritually, and politically engaged as the months roll on, as life and death through each new season, as the death tolls rise, and old estimates are replaced with numbers in the hundreds of thousands, as we are pressured to normalize the genocides and ecocides we witness, to integrate them into individualist capitalist productive lives. Holding these rituals is by no means a replacement for organizing and direct action, but it does ensure that we do not lose our own spiritual and political aliveness amidst systems that prefer us numb, dissociated, and resigned.

Transformative grief activist, movement strategist, and writer Malkia Devich Cyril said it best on Prentis Hemphill’s podcast, Becoming the People (I highly recommend listening to this whole episode):

Devich Cyril talks about how we must be “radicalized by loss, and transformed by grief.” We know that radical means relating to the root, and the roadmap we are offered is that attending our grief is to “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside [ourselves] and touch that terror and loathing…that lives [there]” (Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House).

Devich Cyril uses the word accompaniment throughout their interview to describe the communal practice of attending our individual and collective grief, which is the same word included in the kanji characters that spell Mizuko Kuyo, 水子供養 - water, child, accompaniment, nourishment. Who and what can we call on to accompany us in our grief, in our reckoning with the unbearable within and around us?

Michael Gindin, the former monk, told me about an essay he wrote about relating with bodhisattvas as archetypical energies we each hold, and less as external forces to whom we make petitions. He writes, “Throughout Buddhist stories, [bodhisattvas] have been mythologized, prayed to, depicted in Buddhist art, worshipped, channeled, and even identified with. Some Buddhists think they are real, and others view them as products of the mind—focuses of meditation or imagined embodiments of archetypal forces. Still others refuse to make a clear distinction between them being real and being unreal, as in the case of one Tibetan teacher who, when asked if cosmic bodhisattvas are real, replied, ‘Yes, but they know they are not.’” Michael goes on to share his own understanding of bodhisattvas: “They become a way to access the wisdom we hide from ourselves—the wisdom that is unconscious.”

Hearing this perspective has stimulated something in me, and reminds me of the teachings of another relative of mine. I remember sitting in ceremony with her, holding cedar in my hands, making a prayer for my life. I’d seen something within myself that horrified me, my own embodiment of the energetics of colonialism in close relationships with loved ones, insidious ways that extractive culture had seeped into and caused harm within friendships I cherished the most. Disgusted by what I’d seen within myself and wanting to rid myself of it, I made a prayer to eradicate every trace of white supremacy from my psyche, offered the cedar to the fire and brought the smoke over my body, hoping it would cleanse me of this poison. My relative, watching and listening, told me, the cedar isn’t a magic wand; it’s not going to magically rid you of anything. I remember feeling embarrassed, to have exposed myself in the fantastical thinking that it would be so simple, as effortless as asking something outside of myself to transform me. I asked her, so what do I do? And she told me that we do not approach our programming like something to get rid of. It has, after all, hooked itself into our deepest core wounds; that’s how it works. So we must approach it as we would approach any other trauma. We must be willing to sit with the pain to understand it, and over time, apply the antidotes of wisdom and compassion.

The truest and most effective medicine is that which we cultivate within us. I think of the influence of growing up in a consumerist society, that conditions us to believe there is always something we can buy or steal or externally act upon in order to alleviate a painful or uncomfortable feeling. We become removed from the actual and natural processes of change. There is a diminished tolerance for sitting in the discomfort long and patiently enough to listen for how it got there in the first place, and what may be needed in order for it to begin to move or transform, not by force, but because a need has been met, a hunger has been nourished, on a root level. Change is a process that emerges through agitation like the formation of a pearl, the irritation of salt and sand stimulating an ongoing process of refinement, giving rise to a luminous consciousness.

I think of the times I have called on Kannon-Sama, or Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. These have been some of the most desperate moments on my journey, when out of nowhere an inkling has arisen to call upon that holy embodiment of compassion, to invoke her into my own body, my own consciousness, to feed myself with her medicine, to protect myself from the fires of self-hatred and self-cruelty, to shield myself with her divine love. And her love has never not been mine. And her name has never not lived within me.

Who do we need to become in order to embody the prayers we speak? In what ways is prayer a devotional practice of inner alchemy? Of bringing into alignment what we speak, what we long for, and how we act? A teacher of mine, Rachelle Garcia Seliga, offered this as a definition of integrity: when what we say, what we feel, and what we do, are all the same. When people criticize “thoughts and prayers” as all some can muster in response to the suffering of others, it’s not prayer in its truest essence we are criticizing. That is prayer only in name, and in reality is a bypassing of reality, a refusal to engage our full humanity in relationship to the suffering we witness as, conveniently, apart from us. Joy Harjo in her “Eagle Poem” writes,

To pray, you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

To pray is to refute separation.

I think about my Jiji, a man who thought himself on a spiritual path, wrestling with his demons until the literal day that he died, the musculature of his resistance to the reality of this life stronger than three of us with our youth still in us combined, his entire body refusing rest. His last seven days on this earth were spent gripping to life, begging for death, haunted by internal monstrosities, his consciousness suspended somewhere in the in-between. My Obaachan tells me that he is in heaven now, and everything I know about our journey after we leave these bodies tells me it’s not true. Heaven is not a place we simply arrive; it is a consciousness we cultivate over lifetimes. Of course, I won’t tell my grandmother otherwise. Sometimes to love is to shake awake, and sometimes to love is to allow what comforts.

天の川 - River of Heaven - Amanogawa -Sacred Milky Way - to you I admit: the rites are not intact - we did not pray for him on the 49th day - those rites are a language of love and service - the destiny of an ancestor is in part determined by how those still living choose to honor their memory - we are your karma incarnate - what mark have you left on us? What responsibility have you nurtured in us? I do not know the rites but I have these words and I have this heart - I pray for my Jiichan’s spirit as it has imprinted within me - I tend to those wounds of an unloved child of a wounded and absent mother - I know that pain - it has entered my body - may it be mine to transmute - mine the living - mine the able - may my dedication be one of the laboring oars of the boat that ferries him to his next shore ~

In the picture, he stands beside the boat at the river that birthed him, contemplating his departure. Suspended in the in-between, but not forever. Whether by choice or by nature, we will all leave our bodies on the shore and surrender to the ferrying of our spirits into the next worlds to continue on our journeys of evolution.

And the river doesn’t stop - it never has, and it never will -

What are we to do with our ancestors’ unfinished mourning?

She begins to feel fear falling off of her shoulders like a slippery shawl. The comfort she has grasped so tightly, thinking, always thinking about how to escape the pain, how to fix it, how to rid herself of it—something about this music makes her feel that, even just for a moment, she can let it fall down and rest around her ankles. Not alter anything about it, except for its hold on her and her hold on it. Some of what she feels is sharp and spiny; some of it is sweeping and majestic. Not one bit of it does she resist, observing how resistance worsens the discomfort, and she begins to sway in her body, a moving vessel, carrying an entire cosmos of vital feeling.

Origins, ancestry, home, nation, mothering, birth, nativity, indigeneity, birthplace, blood bonds, gestational waters, amniotic fluids, blood memory, ancestral lands…

In devotion to the primordial waters, I orient the canoe of my life. Sometimes it spins in circles. I am the only one responsible for holding the direction steady. I know where I’m going. When I write all my goodbye letters and cleanse all death from my womb, what is left before me is a broad luminous waterway, awaiting my craft. I am working my way toward a center, threading my prayer through the eye of the needle, entering the eye of a storm of a crisis of collective consciousness, sharpening devotion to a path I know to be true. Not for logic, not for proof. But for a deep stirring in the base of my body where all fat settles, for breaths that arrive full and billowing, for relaxation of shoulders and a sweet sigh that feels like it could balance the world, or at least this world right here, the one I nurture within my own sphere of thoughts, feelings, relationships, actions, behaviors, decisions, movements.

Listening to womb has redirected the entire current and cadence of my life. Womb belongs to many timelines, not just the one unfolding visibly before us. Listening to womb means to move along time-ways and water-lines that may appear incomprehensible, asynchronous with this moment. We must trust ourselves to know that we move in ways that are true and responsive, not escapist but ultimately integrating so many realities, tending to wounds left open for generations, in the prayer to mend our collective soul quilt, to deep clean this collective mess that has been splayed out and spreading across this earth for thousands of years.

I am moving toward the next leg of my journey. I’ll never again doubt how spirit weaves - one assignment after another, each requiring an almost tunnel-vision-like focus, requiring the identification and release of distractions, including the sweetest and most nourishing ones. This is part of becoming mother, of preparing for birth - to visualize the birth canal, to see it dilating wide, to sing it open, to guard and activate this gateway between worlds, to descend into that darkness, moving toward a small aperture of brilliant light.

I am an artist, I’m a creator. I am also a healing practitioner, meaning I’m taking full responsibility for the healing of my lineages, and dedicating the merit of this practice toward our collective soul and earth repair. The worlds of creation and healing meet at the intersection of birth and death within me, the intersection of ancestral repair and the cultivation of strong root systems for future generations. This intersection is bound together within my heso, my bellybutton, the scar memory of my umbilical cord. Water memory, blood memory. Wounding and medicine.

This memory was activated through the spirit-body-stirring alchemy of pregnancy and abortion in 2021. At that time, I began to receive an influx of information about my bloodlines, as well as instructions to bring my drum Kizuna into the world, to be birthed alongside a film of the same name, the film as the vessel through which to honor and amplify the medicine and teachings of this star being. This film is the container for the lineage healing that is my dharma, unwinding from legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and violence against our connection to origins through gender-based abuse and displacement from land. Kizuna is my protagonist and my guide. The point of her arrow is the direction in which I orient my canoe.

I did not know yet how tied up my grief over the loss of this baby was with my grief over the distance from my ancestors, from the earth, from the cosmos, from all we have ever been and all we have ever known. It was like their arrival in my body reminded me of that ongoing miracle into which my life, my body, my breath, has always been woven, and losing them was a crystalized emblem of the pain of the loss of that consciousness.

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This fall I will be continuing the journey, carrying my drum with me as I accompany my grandmother to move back to Ainu Mosir, or so-called Japan, at the age of 88. I’m aware of the immense privilege of returning to homeland when we are living in the present-time and past reverberations of ethnic cleansing, thinking of Palestinian and Sudanese relatives, thinking of descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, and so many indigenous others, denied their inheritance of unbroken intimacy with the lands of their blood. It’s an opening I step into with a sense of collective responsibility, thinking of Caddo and Lenape artist River Whittle’s visual artwork which reads, “The land needs its people.” It feels to me like indigenous land everywhere is nourished by indigenous people anywhere rooting into their own soil and lifeways. And nourished, too, by settlers everywhere doing their work to divest from settler colonial projects, tending to the deep ruptures within their lineages’ relationships to place, and taking aligned steps toward internal and relational repair.

I move in the direction of Ainu Mosir, where my family’s roots are, in the mountains of Fukushima and Miyagi of northeastern Tohoku, holding central the complexity of Japanese imperialism in speaking of indigeneity as it relates to our lands. Honoring the Ainu, Emishi, Okinawan peoples, and other indigenous peoples of those lands who have been detribalized, their names unknown to me, their lifeways and cosmologies seeping into what is now known as Japanese culture and tradition. I approach this journey honoring the parts of my maternal ancestry that are indigenous to those lands, and the unknown parts that may have arrived there through vast webs of migration and/or colonialism from the north, from the east, from the south, from the west.

The many directions and confluences of my blood, I am still remembering. But I know that Japanese homogeneity is a myth and imperial construction. I know that the empire first detribalized the many communities who knew that land as home, attempting and in many cases succeeding to consolidate them under the same flag and governance, before going across the water to terrorize and exploit neighbors in China, Korea, the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, and on and on. I am currently being shaped by the writing, activism and scholarship of Okinawan diasporic poet Sho Yamagushiku, who offers vital and necessary criticism of Japanese nostalgia for homeland based in a “[refusal of] relationship with Japanese imperialism while at the same time worshipping “japaneseness”.” It is this fixed national identity which is built upon the rubble of peoples rich in the many textures of culture and blood memory, as we see in so called Israel. When the time is ripe, I will offer this same care to my paternal homelands in Romania and other places where my Yiddish ancestors have called home. Despite the complexity of my Japanese lineage, I have also been shown that there is more spiritual resourcing readily available to me through my maternal lines, that is supporting me to cultivate the capacity, wisdom, courage, and compassion, required to tend skillfully to the healing work of my Jewish lineages.

This fall, my grandma’s living body will be returning, my grandpa’s ashes returning, and their first great-grandchild Kizuna - not human but animate indeed, leather and wood with a voice that resounds through time and space, seed of the stars, seed of our future - will be returning, all of us returning to homelands, carrying prayers of restoration, carrying prayers for healing, carrying prayers for wholeness.

With my feet to the altar I looked up and saw my great grandmother Sayo Obaachan smiling down at me as she had night after night in my ancestral home when I had been brave enough to visit. I saw in her smile a grimmace and in that grimmace I saw a waterfall of loss and sacredness pouring from the basin of the volcano in her home region, which heated and purified the water, which threaded through the rock and silt, which threaded through the home in which she was born to the hands of a midwife, her home protected by Bato Kannon, Hayagriva, the bodhisattva of horses, silkworms, and all animals of the earth.

In the coming months, I will be sharing much more and also asking for help. I will need witnessing, accountability, resourcing, and prayer. I’m writing today as this new moon is born, beginning to hone in on the eye of the needle, that bright luminosity pouring through the abdomen of the spider’s silk pouch, showing me how to weave dreams into form. I will learn how to ask for the help that I need, and I will help myself by sharing clearly about this path that I’m on with Kizuna the drum and Kizuna the film, reinforcing the realness of this creative prayer-work to me and my bloodlines, my matrispheres, and the coming generations I’m here to nurture. Life has never stopped and it never will. We are here to gestate the worlds of our dreams.

We are greater than any one body or even a collective body (I remember the three of us chanting in the winter desert, i am not the body, i am not even the mind). I find myself sitting at the center of those sticks, the ones I just wrote did not make it to us, were obliterated in the waves of enforced forgetting that happened over the last several thousand years. I find myself at their center now, those sticks that did not survive, bundling cedar. I touch it with my hands which are real, this cedar which is real. And my obaachan calls me, hearing my moaning.

Growing up involves the integration of consciousness into reality as it is, rather than as we’ve been conditioned to imagine it or were enabled to experience it in the care of others. Family offered me a cocoon of safety that was not real. I have now touched and deeply grieved its limitations. I decided I will no longer invest my heart in illusions of safety. Ancestral shame is offered the means of protection from wild winds of being loved exquisitely in the ways only the whole of creation truly can. Capitalism and white supremacy say I will insulate you, you whom my logic spares, from the excruciating expansiveness of fully being here.

A loved one asked me, what does your shame need? I sat with the question for three days and today the understanding arrived. Shame, you protected the belief that to be known is to be hated - I trace it through my fathers line, the long persecuted now cosigning annihilation in reckless rage and fear and festering - this belief protected me by encouraging our isolation - within this fortress we could live without community and without accountability and without joy and without belonging - shame you were the shell that absorbed the impact of the consequences of the lies I told myself and others, thinking the truth would leave me unloved forever - shame you were the love-proof vest that has cracked with the impact of the universe’s fierce and ferocious love that came to blaze my armoring down. The heart, thank god, is still soft, tender, and luscious, blazing quietly at the foot of all wreckage.

I see the prism, it is floating. I see the prism of reality as I’ve known it, that nightmarish matrix that once consumed me as I consumed myself as I was entrained to consume others. I see the matrix, it is floating. Once the entire universe, I see it as an island, one story. I can breathe seeing its edges. Its edges show me there is life beyond it.

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my name is Uta. Uta is the song my mother gave me before I had a mouth. I have been finding my way back to this name for a long time. Restriction in the voice, the throat, the womb, the birth canal, is our karma, but is not our destiny. I came here to transform it all.

I am a womb worker, which is to say I am a water protector, and I tend to the sacred waters of the body (human body, earth body, beyond body) through my drumsong, mystic poetry, energy work, and traditional birth arts. Before I remembered this path, I was a writer. Always a writer. It was the way I knew how to pray before I was guided back into relationship with any traditional prayer technologies. I am no longer waiting to be recognized, as I recognize myself, and my ancestors recognize me. I thank my ancestors for recognizing me, I thank sacred mother Earth for holding me up in the deep-rooted palm of her hand, and I thank my descendants, the buoyant blueprints of life still dancing within me, for celebrating each blossoming and wilting of my emergence and becoming.

here I will share word medicine that has supported to me to alchemize many junctures of healing. I will share word-prayers, or Kotodama - language incanted in order to transmit the transformative spirit of sound. These words are meant to move energy in those who take them in our speak them out loud, as they have done for me. I hope they support your journey.

and the name was 絆 

and the name was 絆 

and the name was 絆.

I woke with darkness, the last star just fading from the sky, and found in my belly a turning of a great mass shifting on its axis. That movement created a surge of energy that rose my body from its weighted slumber. I let it rush out to sea, taking with it the debris of dying worlds. In that great turning, I felt the string that had been floating loose and tangled within me, that confusion chewing parasitically at the feeding ground of my greatest power, begin to unwind from itself and tauten until sharp like an arrow. I found that with the distillation of my mind, I could choose the direction in which to point it.

In the upper part of my chest where my heart meets the conduit of expression, my collarbones hold the keys to the gateway out of a dying kingdom. I allow all that is untrue within me to lay down and die. To be relieved of suffering by the sacred fire, to lose its life in the most blessed surrender, to go back to the center of the earth where it can be forged anew into a form that will serve this world.

The prayer is to keep shedding you. The prayer beneath the prayer is to reassemble my bones to crisscross at the center of me, forming a hoop where a fire can grow. Into that fire gets thrown handfuls of cedar and the many bodies of pain my water has been holding all day, all of life, many lifetimes.

 A body of pain goes toward the absence, a body of pain longs for what hurts, each tributary flowing upward against gravity, toward a cold damp waterless ocean of sorrow. A pain body is ready to die. Crackle under a fire’s purple heat, my pain body becomes brittle, loses its density, is filled with heat until it is fire alone, a glowing ember, then, charcoal with which one can design a new story. 

I invite only what will support me to serve this world back into my body now, at this time. In the spaciousness I’ve created there is a hollow into which to whisper new incantations. The first word will always be kizuna, the creation of a new cellular world older. My rope in your rope, we pull and find that the whole ship tightens, pointed in a clear direction.

And the direction was clear to us. 

And the direction was center.

I see Clarita in the ground

The hole narrows at the bottom like the edges of a prism 

come to meet, destined toward earth’s center, a noble tomb.

The ground is laid with grape leaves and her neck is soft 

and curved in the way of death like a swan peering 

backwards, not just behind but all the way around, 

outside the matrix of time, with whites of the eyes 

rolled back into skull, snaking around architectures 

of chronology, gesturing toward a horizon or 

a black cavern beyond our cosmovision.

José calls me an artist of death–

I remember grandpa with his eyes wheeled back,

mouth lolling open as if making way for a long wind–

I remember my tranquil rolling rush over state lines 

in the back row of a greyhound, green plums in my lap 

for offering and I remember bursting with morning light 

spilling over native land at dawn, folding in to the center 

of my chest the sun’s reflection off the cement of each city,

and the wheatpaste in royal blue that glinted my name

reading, beneath a common three-eyed deity,

Survival is political and 

praise god

I remember arriving just in time to hold him, 

his body already surrendering over to a twilight lagoon

where ugliness is only one language of decay and where 

you remember, finally, that the earth, She always accepted you–

She never brushed you aside and She could never disown you–

and in the grotesqueness of your unmaking, you remember that

humanness was never a curse, not an experiment

nor a heinous blessing, and not even a season

I walked with you til you could walk no further 

You held my hand til the blood ran out 

I fanned your temples til they stole into nighttime 

We reveled sweet rebels in the dusk of forever 

come again see you never i cherish you 

Madrecita

Clara is in the ground

I see Clarita in the ground

billowing and ruffled, thick chested, fat breasted, 

stately elegant woman of the yard, mother of us all, 

a family home held up by sturdy strutting legs, a house 

on stilts, said by western europe to eat children 

but we know she fed them all

Clarita who gave me the gift of song 

when I first found myself in a narrowing place

two men at either side, their hot unconscious like

daggers rupturing my attention, so young and 

having just arrived with eyes black and piercing

still wet from creation, focused on a vertex 

no one could see but me,

and these men, with their 

unburied dead their forgotten 

grandmothers their untended 

graves their unwatered soil 

their skeletal flowers their 

whispers of dust hovering 

just beyond my peripheral 

vision, invisible but casting 

a shadow, blocking the sun.

And Clarita comes

And pats my head with water, 

grandmother water

And pats my womb with water, 

grandmother water

And pats my heart with water, 

grandmother water

And wraps my head tight with cloth

And places drum mallet in my hand

And gives me song of return to sing.

When I sing, I call the waters back. I call the seasons back, and the winged ones back, and I circle within my song as the great water wheel turns and turns, watching birth as it arises, and death as it falls, and breath as it widens, and sun as it slips, and Clara is in my voice, her wings unfolding, holding open the cavern as I slide earthside, making way for my sound, ensuring that it fills the room, unmaking and remaking a walking wound into Woman, cathedral. 

Clara is in the ground

I see Clarita in the ground

We cover the hole and see no more.

There, in the tomb of all blackness

I know a light comes on.