Journeys From The Journey -
Textile Narratives
What is the Weight of a Family Tree?
Mother plus Father,
raised to the power of
generation plus silence.
Measured in
pounds of pain,
grams of guilt.
Addition and subtraction as a
function of capacity.
The limits of theorems.
The familiar
lighter than the unknown.
The sacred courage to
question the equation,
to change the formula.
Division by disclosure.
Subtraction by seeing.
Periodic becomes slope
Circles become arcs.
Generations of mental health struggles collided in my marriage. A wife who was never a child brought codependency and sacrificial caretaking, and a husband with untreated manic depression brought emotional violence. The child of this marriage only intensified the violence and dysfunction, and twenty years ingrained this dynamic deeply in my soul.
When I finally found the courage to get a divorce, sacrificial caretaking resulted in me signing away parental and financial rights in the interest of our child - a divorce agreement signed without reading.
Spiritual practices found in nature, the alchemy of earth, heat, and touch in my ceramic art, and the Buddhist practice of witnessing the divine in all gave me strength to challenge the divorce agreement, to face a system that wasn’t on my side, to stand up to an angry person.
The image of the lotus, grown from mud and resulting in a jewel of beauty, gives me the strength to let go of my perfectionism, turn my caretaking inward, and preserve my dignity and boundaries to assure my relationship with my daughter. -E.P.
The Wisdom of the Forest
My father and I were extremely close, and we would spend hours in the woods around our home. One day, my father took me to look at a fallen tree that was starting to decay. He explained how the tree was giving back nutrients and pointed out the little trees growing from the fresh soil it produced. I’ll never forget this lesson about life and death, and it has given me strength as I navigate my relationship with mortality. -M.K.
Taking the First Step
My hardest journey is only just beginning… It’s the journey down the path of reparations.
I had already embarked down the path of reparations, optimistically but somewhat glibly, perhaps, when I learned of the Two Row Wampum Treaty.
Had our ancestors honored the Two Row Wampum Treaty, the first treaty made with the inhabitants of Turtle Island, and lived in harmony and mutual respect with the land and the fellow (prior) inhabitants of the land, perhaps none of this would be necessary.
But profit-driven as we were in our mistaken "discovery" of these lands, shared resources and mutual respect were never in our ancestors’ plans.
Land was divvied, demarcated, and slowly destroyed; people displaced and erased. Every form of nature imaginable—including fellow human beings—extracted and exploited for the benefit of the first corporations’ shareholders.
The profit margins on an African body would make today’s Wall Street traders, blinded as they are by the same forces that brought us here in the first place, cry with envy.
But the same night I learned of the Two Row Wampum Treaty, I was also called in to honor that treaty, as it is still binding in the eyes of at least one "signatory." And in that moment, I decided that my only path forward in life was trying my damnedest to honor it as best as I can as one sole individual, while inviting as many people as I can along for the journey.
This realization came with an understanding that reparations cannot be limited to the knee-jerk, colonial reaction of cutting a check and forgetting about it. Beyond the monetary, reparations must address the systemic, socioeconomic forces that brought us collectively to this point.
So I feel I’ve only just embarked upon the hardest journey of my life and I often don’t know how to take the first step. More often than not I feel trapped in my own paralysis, barely able to move at all.
However, I am encouraged, inspired, and (hopefully, perhaps, if even a little) emboldened, knowing that there are others taking those steps that I can join on a path, others doing the work who I can help in their efforts. The walks will continue, both literal and figurative, and I know I won’t be alone when the time comes to follow that path.
-A.M.