Old Growth ++ AMENDMENT

 

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Depression has been a part of my life for a long time. There have been moments of deep despair and loneliness, fueled by shame and self-contempt, grown up through an emotional isolation and physical separation from land and culture and kin…a missing-of belonging-to. I know in my heart that I am part in a lineage of people who have been in intimate relationship to place and ways of being, rooted in reciprocity and inter-dependence, and that the long history of colonization has separated us from this, as it has and continues to for Indigenous and Black People in this country.

My depression is not separate from time or from place. 

I feel it to be a longing to belong again, to something much deeper than this world and all the imposed ideas of supremacy and duality and war I have been taught to accept from childhood on in so many different ways. In me shame has developed into depression - shame of not belonging to a culture connected to Land, of being the beneficiary of systemic violence, of being without a long story. Untangling from this shame, and the idea's and systems of oppression, has become a deeply healing work for me - reckoning with my history here and these feelings of un-belongingness...as so much of the sadness in me I deeply feel is connected to the unreckoned with experiences of my ancestors being committers, and witnesses, of violence over the centuries, as well as being victims of targeted dispossession and land theft in the old country's (that led us here to become complicit in the same against others).

My depression is not separate from other people’s pain. 

I will never know what it is like to be Black in america, but I feel the tightness in my stomach every time a police officer is acquitted of murdering a person of color, or a trans gender person, or anyone this death culture of white supremacy deems in any moment as “other”. Depression has parts of empathy in it, I feel it. For those who are sensitive and embody the energies of violence and loss and destruction unfolding around the planet, disassociation and other numbing practices become mechanisms to cope and just get by…but at much expense to the spirit, and to a collective liberation.

Depression, I am coming to know, rather as a tough-love-kind-of invitation to make room for the wonder and mystery and play that I, as a child, was shaped by, and am shaped by still…to not move away from the darkness, away from that right-now unknown, but with trust and a longing to live in right relationship, to lean in closer to it. And in so doing re-member the things that have been taken away from us collectively, and begin to work in support to reclaim them.

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