Together We Rise
Seed Keeper’s Harvest
I wrote this piece in honor of all those who have come before me, who have helped me to find my way home through the pathway of food and seeds.
In this zine, we honor the long lineage of women who have sustained life in the form of seeds since original woman danced upon the back of a Turtle, singing the Earth awake. May this inspire you to bow to the green shining faces of our plant kin, and explore all the ways in which we can honor those who came before us as we learn to carry the seeds again.
Together We Rise
I have magnificent teachers, ones with hands who are like shelf mushrooms, blessed with a cartography of lines from years of earth in hand prayers.
I feel blessed to know these wise ones who each morning face the sun to whisper words of praise that have the fragrance and sound of spring water bubbling up against damp granite stones…to do what must be done to feed the children, whose faces look up at us from the rain soaked path we walk.
these humble ones, both human and not, who have reminded me that what makes us great and powerful comes from the earth. It is where She dwells. No one, human or otherwise, can take that away from us, those of us who love the Earth as Mother.
For it is She, who made us in her likeness…with stones as bones, rivers as blood, wind as breath, spark of lightning as mind and nerves; rich little ponds of the sweetwater of our mothers womb held in the memory of our spine; all woven together by this mycelial web that connects us to our ancestors, our descendents, the grand family all around us who feast from the benevolent rays of the sun each morning.
Let us not forget that which makes us great, that which gives us our Life. As the broken hearted people lash out in their loneliness, in their misconception of disconnection, let us weave them back into wholeness with our breath and our song, and our prayer.
May we call upon those alchemical beings who live inside the earth beneath our feet, who receive the death and decay, the tears and the pain and return it to earth to be ground and composted into renewed life; Rich earthy loam from which the dreams of our ancestors unfurl into shiny speckled beans and smiles and prayers from the lips of our grandchildren who know no hunger.
Water that seed planted deep inside the earth that is your own body, a tiny seed that sings an achingly beautiful song of remembrance, resistance, resilience, redemption, reconciliation. It was this powerful seed song that kept our grandmothers upright, who whispered to them to get up amidst the sorrow to do what needed to be done to tend the earth and feed the children. It was these melodies that guided our grandfathers under the sea of stars as they made their way into new lands to protect the young. This map is written in the seeds, and the stars and the waters and the Earth….this song is now your heart beating fiercely in promise to uphold the agreements to feed the Sacred hungers of Time.
Grandmothers, grant me the strength to pray for those who have forgotten, who do unspeakable things in their grief of their perceived disconnection. May we choose to find the place inside our own hearts that may have stumbled and forgotten along the way..and may we fill those chasms with beauty and art and song and craft…this is a debt we cannot “buy” our way out of, it is a mountain of service to circumambulate, again and again..carrying the bundle of treasures handed down to us, making our lives purposeful in leaving the bundle in better shape than when we found it…our knees sometimes weak in this walk of Life… May we continue to be the embodiment of " kintsugi" and may our words and stories and songs be the gold and silver lacquer that repairs these shards of ancestral story that are held in our hearts into a magnificent seed vessel of resilience, that perhaps in some ways is more beautiful and exquisite for being nearly broken and courageously put back together, in our fierce and determined ways in which we find our way home.