🌑 Sacred Land

The Moon is Earth’s celestial anchor in a vast and mysterious cosmos. Honoring lunar phases reminds us to feel our connection to nature’s rhythms & cycles. Welcome to this moonly missive…

Happy New Moon! 🌑 This phase begins the monthly lunar cycle and supports intention setting & seed planting.

Listen to me read this essay:

Hi friends

We’re now solidly in the second half of this year. 2026 will not let up on the global chaos factor, and there’s still a disaster-full El Niño expected this autumn. I’m leaning hard on my spiritual practices to balance feeling the truth of what’s happening in our world with feeling my own truth of writing & teaching about love & freedom.

Thank you for being here. How are you balancing as things devolve?

I’ve been prioritizing rest, meditation, study, digital hygiene, contact with my favorite people (near and far), and local connections, including the Tenants Association in my building. We literally share walls and shouldn’t act like strangers, even though it can be easier not to engage with the transient rando-kids here who use this neighborhood as a cute-for-now stop on their way to wherever—yes, they are my neighbors too. I’m also balancing making things for pleasure (I’ve started my first zine and restarted work on my book) with getting my business finances in order, because the end of so-called democracy doesn’t seem to mean the end of rent or health insurance premiums… for now. The only rule is make!

As I mentioned last full moon, I’ve been thinking a lot about land. I’m obviously not a social scientist (much to the disappointment of my law and politics professor father). Still, I’m a nerd who often thinks about how we got to this point of nonsense and how much of it stems from our disconnection from land. Most post-colonial theory focuses only on people, when colonialism is largely about using people to extract and exploit land—for resources, crops, development, profit… ownership. I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ new series about the American Revolution (so many talking heads!) and, for the first time, understood how directly land issues fueled that rebellion—particularly the drive for westward expansion after the British banned colonists from moving past the Appalachian Mountains. George Washington personally acquired over 50,000 acres of western land, much of it through speculation and military bounty.

I have a fraught relationship with land and home (I mean, I wrote an entire ass book about belonging). I think most of us who live somewhere other than where our Indigenous ancestors lived have, at minimum, a complex relationship to land. All of us living on stolen land should.

While in British Columbia, I kept seeing people with “Land Back” paraphernalia. Besides sparking hoodie covetousness, it clued me into how much farther along the Land Back movement is in Canada. My friend Chris tried to explain the complexities of recent B.C. and Canadian Supreme Court rulings and appeals around a recent landmark (hehe) judgment in which a court recognized Aboriginal title over privately held land. One main contention comes from non-Indigenous property owners who argue that Aboriginal title cannot co-exist with private property. This won’t be resolved anytime soon, partly because we’ve been duped by a society that, for many people, ties land ownership to financial security (along with the stock market, which is basically forced, legalized gambling for anyone trying to save for retirement). Humans are such a mess…

Commerce is not the same as capitalism and, of course, like many of you, I try to limit my consumption inside a system designed for maximum extraction and exploitation. I aspire to buy local, used, and little. I told a friend recently that the most expensive things I own are my two computers—laptop and desktop Macs (I was happy to later remember that artwork I’ve bought from friends cost more… many things I have are worth more). And there’s no getting around the fact that every single last thing sold to me comes from or through land, much of it destructively—including, and especially, all the resources required for me to tap and swipe on my gadgets.

I told Chris about the system in Ethiopia, where all urban land is publicly owned and leased back to people. I only know this because that was the case for my mom’s house—the one I mentioned cleaning out in my last post. What I never realized is how rare that model is. Then, I synchronistically came across this recent newsletter all about it. The Ethiopian model is highly imperfect. I won’t go into all the challenges I encountered, including major corruption. But, that model (and other approaches referenced in that article) points to creative possibilities beyond speculation and profiteering. Maybe Indigenous title and private property can co-exist (until we finally get rid of the idea of anyone owning land altogether).

In my Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy (IFOT) training, I learned that land can mean much more than property. Land encompasses the entire relational ecosystem of a place: ground, waterways, sky, animals, plants, culture, elements, ancestors, cosmos, spirit, mystery. Understanding land this way gives Land Back a whole other meaning: all land is ecosystem, is home, is sacred.

As a post-colonial, middle-aged, Black immigrant, baby witch, reconnection to land is vital to my re-ensoulment.

I’ve mentioned before that my new book project is a hybrid, experimental memoir integrating many themes, primarily indigeneity, imperialism, and identity (but also, individuation, illness, and the infinite… you know, simple stuff). It may take me another lifetime to write it. One of its many challenges is that I know almost nothing about my maternal grandmother and there’s no one left to ask. That part may require fiction, which I’ve never attempted. Another issue is my complete lack of firsthand knowledge about Ethiopian/Eritrean Indigenous practices. That part will require research.

Current wars (yes, multiple) in Ethiopia have devastated land and people for years now but did not begin with the recent conflicts (which have caused over 600,000 deaths since 2020). All of the wars, like most wars, have been about borders and territory. Only humans make “war.” And when we do, we spread destruction. In the past seventy plus years, eighty percent of major armed conflicts across the globe have taken place in biodiversity hotspots. We are able to destroy the natural world through war exactly because we’ve lost our deepest knowing of land. And water. This video, exploring some of the roots of the 50 plus years of crises in Ethiopia, begins with a map of previous political boundaries, those that predate current border struggles. All of those boundaries followed rivers. Waterways defined communities. When Ethiopian empire and feudalism created land ownership, it also rejected natural boundaries in favor of political borders.

Water is life.

My new friend, Aaron, gifted me a book called Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and artist. In it, she talks about Nibi (water) as a form of Indigenous internationalism. Nibi cycles throughout the globe in the form of clouds and rain and mist and streams and oceans, water circulating and interconnecting, nibi carving hard rock and nourishing dry lands.

When I’ve taught retreats in wild nature, I’m always drawn to trees. Also, in Brooklyn. The other day, I was catching up on emails, and a set of synchronicities led me to this article about a sacred sycamore tradition from the Beja people of the Horn of Africa. I learned that the goddess Hathor was called “lady of the Sycamore” and that Isis and the sky god Nut could also personify this tree.

“The sycamore’s importance in Egyptian religious lore dates back to the earliest phases of Egyptian culture. The tree features heavily in the Pyramid Texts as an abode of the gods and also as a landmark in the sun’s mythic solar journey.”

Later that day, I was watching a private preview version of my auntie Salem’s documentary about Awra Amba, an egalitarian intentional community in the Gondar region of Ethiopia. In it, there’s a moving section highlighting an ancient sacred sycamore that protects the community during a period of exile. There are large sycamore hybrids all along St. Marks Avenue, just a couple of blocks from me. I now plan to regularly make offerings to them.

As you may remember, I taught at Hollyhock at the end of June, which is what took me out to B.C. I had an incredible time with beautiful people, both on the retreat and off. Also, trees. I enjoyed teaching there so much that I was certain I’d go back next year. However, the more I connected to the land there, the more I realized how much I long to land here, in Brooklyn. [Though I will likely be at Hollyhock in 2028. Both/And.]

My friend Shawna wrote this gorgeous post/poem about making love with the land which starts by referencing something her teacher, MawuLisa, said to her after she expressed a longing to be in nature in order to feel herself. MawuLisa asked Shawna to consider when she is “outsourcing her divinity.” 😮

My friend Lin and I talk about how, as immigrants, we often feel rootless, but that New York City is where we feel most at home. One of my favorite feelings is my happiness on coming back from somewhere, taking a taxi home from JFK, and spotting the first bodega on Atlantic Avenue. I adore the magnolia tree on my corner. I enjoy watching people across the street stopping to wonder at the glorious, giant sunflowers that bloom in a sidewalk well (likely from seeds discarded from someone’s snack) and the people getting out of their cars to snap photos of them. I don’t want my devotion to land to be dependent on hours of air travel to far away places. I long for my connections to waterways to include the East River, my contemplations on nature to include pigeons, and my meditations on the elements to include the blast of wind from an arriving subway car.

May we experience our re-ensoulment and remember the sacredness of land as water and trees, as people not property.

With love,

Sebene

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