They Tried to Bury Us...
Seed Keeper’s Harvest
It was once said, “ They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.” All the generations of people who came before us, who in their own ways prayed for the sprouting of our deeply connected lifeways again.
I return with my beautiful children in hand to the traditional earth based traditions of our people, the first in many generations in my bloodlines to follow the sacred ceremonial calendar, renewing time-honored relationships with all around us; eating our traditional foods and caring for their seeds. Those ancestors prayed for us, in many ways….in diverse tongues and in small humble everyday ceremonies of patting babies to sleep, stirring the cooking pot and sitting in the shade of an oak tree to make a basket; rowing such baskets across the mighty rivers to market..in the songs that honored the births and the deaths, the planting and the harvests...these prayers of our ancestors, in their own special ways, sowed seeds of resilience and vitality that they knew would take a few generations of laying dormant in the dark soil of our hearts, carried down through our blood memory in the rivers of our mothers sweetwomb water that is held in our spines, our veins, our marrow. Seven generations or more, these seeds of prayers were tucked into the safety of the soil of our underground mycelia of cultural and ancestral memory. Tucked deep into the earth that is our own bodies, connected through tributaries of rivers of bloodlines... These seeds are finally sprouting, in their own time..the seeds enduring the scarification and weathering of decades of struggles and challenges, and also the spirit fire of our mothers and grandmothers tenacity for ensuring that our lifeways stay alive amidst the confusion. What they endured so that we could be here alive today, tending these shiny faced green sprouts of life, that they so diligently tucked into the safety of dark soils, hidden from hungry and greedy hands until generations later they could emerge with renewed vigor and vibrancy. It was such scarification that has given the prayers the courage to sprout into our lives. We are their wildest dreams sprouting and coming to life. They tried to bury us...