The one thing Mother Earth asked me to tell you

It’s the perfect place to be—to rest, to hold space, to read, to pray, to gather medicine and share it.

A dear friend of mine asked me what my grief would like to say during this week as we head toward the 4th of July, and I keep going back to the first line in my book Native:

Indigenous bodies are bodies that remember.

Our bodies hold memory. The body of Segmekwe, Mother Earth, holds memory. If this is all true, then colonialism has done a hell of a job, because acrosss the world and throughout history, we’ve become disconnected—our bodies from hers.

And this is where so much of my grief sits, and so much of our collective, often un-named grief rests.

I am here leading a retreat with a small groups of folks nestled in the Wind River Valley, the land of the Mountain Shoshone, the Eastern Shoshone & Northern Arapaho. And as I prepared for this retreat, I knew one thing to be true: I wouldn’t be fully prepared until I was on the land.

So I’ve been doing a lot of listening, and believe me when I tell you that when we show up ready to listen, everyone else is ready to speak.

My son and I walked a labyrinth that’s down near the water, one made of stone, one that calls you in whether you’re ready or not.

And as we walked, we simply asked Mother Earth what she’d like to say.

And what she told me was so simple but exactly what we need.

And that’s the lesson she was giving me, the one she gives us—she is the ultimate embodiment of re- re- re-, again again again, in the cycles, the seasons, the way she continues to live on despite the harm we’ve caused her.

So this is the message I give to you, in my own Indigenous grief at America250, I ask all of us to ask to try again, again again, to

reinvest

reimagine

redesign

revive

restore

rejuvenate

relieve.

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