Where Am I?
I’ve been spending a lot of time wandering through the Wild Within Woods, poking around on the deer trails, getting to know what’s out there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we—as individuals, within communities, and throughout the human experience—are impacted by our sense of place.
When I say “sense of place,” I am thinking about questions such as:
Where am I from? Where am I now?
What do I know about where I live?
What grows here? How has this changed through the years? Decades? Centuries?
Who has lived here? How has this changed through the years? Decades? Centuries?
How well do I know who lives near me?
Am I only thinking about humans when I answer this question?
How am I defining “near”?
Am I thinking in all directions, including the air, water, and soil?
Am I thinking in terms of geography? Identify? Both? Something else?
What is my relationship with where I live?
What impact(s) do I have upon it? How have I interacted with, guided, or impacted it?
What impact(s) does it have upon me? In what ways has it taught, guided, or impacted me?
In what ways am I in active communication with the world around me? What barriers to communication exist between me and the world around me?
These may seem to some folks to be questions that are kinda interesting to think about, but of no real gravitas given the heartbreaking crises that permeate the human experience at this point in our history.
I, however, would argue the opposite.
In my experience, the more deeply I am willing to grapple with the answers to those questions, the more I see connections between the answers that I find there and clarity regarding how to respond to the continuing harmful impacts of colonization, white supremacy, systemic oppression, and widespread levels of isolation and estrangement from supportive community.
These questions—and my willingness to sit with them without rushing to quick, feel-good answers—provide important perspectives in relation to my ancestor work as well as the ways I show up in relationships, environments, and communities. I do my best to have the ways with which I interact with the land be in alignment with the answers that I find and the feelings that swell forth when the questions linger hauntingly, longingly.
I write this as the ancestral lands of my Palestinian friends and comrades—under colonized occupation since the 1947-1948 Nakba—face ethnic cleansing, genocide, and cataclysmic destruction of the indigenous people and ecosystem of the area between the Jordan River in the west to the Mediterranean Sea in the east (the proverbial “from the river to the sea”).
(Side note: I prepared a document of some vocabulary that can be helpful for understanding some basics of the history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as well as for recognizing, talking about, and calling out anti-Palestinian propaganda. I received guidance from a few of my Palestinian friends regarding what words were most important for more people to understand, and got an enthusiastic thumbs up from them to share this final draft.)
I write this as an active shooter—trained by the United States military and espousing cissexist, alt-right hate—who has killed 18 people and injured 13 more remains whitely unapprehended.
I write this as it is 68 degrees fahrenheit during the morning of October 27—four days after the first frost date—at our location in western New York State, just across Lake Ontario from Toronto, Canada.
I write this as I and so, so many people navigate feeling our hearts breaking in so, so many directions at once.
I am resurrecting this long-stagnant blog to offer something that folks have requested— information regarding the unfolding early development of The Wild Within Acres farm and the ever-evolving, ever-changing, ever-growing focus of the work we do and the services we offer.
But as may be expected by those who know me, I am not going to do so with the polished, linear panache of a sales pitch: rather, I want to share my thoughts, musings, and questions with you all in ways that connect to the tender, authentic, vulnerable, curious, spirallic experiences of life in the hopes that by doing so I will invite a bit more tenderness, authenticity, vulnerability, and curiosity into your spirallic experiences of your own life.
So stay tuned for posts that connect with the questions I asked at the start of this post… and that also incorporate thoughts and musings about about everything from chickens and abolitionist apples to hard truths, long contexts, and stumbling attempts at foraging for food and hope while living in a tender, breaking world.
And thank you all so very, very much for being here… wherever here is for you.
—Lore
