Curating Smoke

I wrote this about a month ago and forgot to post it...

The smoke has cleared, here, for now, so I’ve been puttering. Mostly,I struggle from one appointment to the next and manage whatever practical stuff turns out to be possible in between that. Due to a brief reprieve from that for a combination of reasons, I’ve been tidying and organizing (inside and on my little piece of verandah) and taking care of my little potted garden. I’ve watched some shows – recent Star Trek series, the Battlestar Galactica remake, a bunch of dystopian series whose shortness seems ideologically appropriate even if it was probably due to other reasons – to keep my brain quiet so it can settle a bit… and during the more settled bits, I let my mind wander through to debris of the past few years.

It’s a process of collecting and curating.

I left Jamaica almost this time seven years ago. It was one of the most valuable and beautiful experiences of my life, and it was time to go. Peru is somewhere my heart could have stayed, but not my pocketbook. These days, sometimes, I still hope to go back, but the black hole of being stuck in Calgary squashed that out of me for a few years. The highs – and heart attacks – of walking to Ottawa and camping at the PMO brought me back to life. Even the pandemic didn’t kill that; instead, it brought about the realization of my dream. I had a sailboat, and I was going to find the world and help make it a better place. Before the dream even began properly, it was violently curtailed. Maybe it was time to stop trying to do things I can’t really do, and time to stay put and find answers and heal.

Just over a year ago, before launching my Climate Emergency Sailboat, I was assaulted… at a hospital, by hospital staff and police, all because of one small piece of botched inter-staff communication. My body and brain are much more damaged, and my psyche too. The proceedings to address this will take a long time. So will healing, as it’s knocked over my carefully curated collection of past trauma and sent it all smashing through me again.

Sorting through the broken matroishka doll that is currently me, I find the expected pieces of those who came before me. I sweep their DNA together with their pain, classify it and clean it and plant it carefully with the rosemary and sage.

The pile grows – now I find pieces too old to date, pieces connected in ways beyond genetics, pieces from everywhere… pieces of everyone.

For a while in Jamaica, a pretty young neighbour was dating a high ranking police officer. While he waited extraordinarily (and extraordinarily patiently) long for her to get dolled up, we had several long interesting discussions about how unhealed genetic trauma plays out in everyday life on social and cultural levels. Wanting to figure out better ways of healing than locking up the sickest patients, he’d been studying genetic trauma from a very academic perspective to inform his experience… he wanted to draft proposals to redirect policing along more constructive lines. Basically – he wanted to “defund the police” as the catchphrase now goes (just my own two cents, but maybe that catchphrase ought to appended with “re-fund humanity” to be more accurate).

We inherit trauma directly, genetically, ancestrally. From beyond our immediate lives, the materialized miasma of racial trauma manifests in ways like the Jamaican crime and policing scenario. Trauma also informs our inheritances from cultural sources, and spiritual and through other groupings we integrally relate to.

Our species is saturated.

Those who understand that the least seem the most comfortable for now, but whether they’re buying curtains or countries, their facade of unscathedness is only serving as an inevitably flawed and failing foundation for power.

The only way to heal trauma is to work through it. It can’t be swept under rugs or brushed off or dyed. It can’t be bought and sold, or even handed away. It’s part of our patterns; the threads must be untangled, the fibres rewoven and incorporated into new designs.

It’s true of individuals and of myself… I will work through these frayed and smouldering threads that have been pulled from my warp and weft, and the pattern will evolve like a grounded theory study or a painting (poetically said, though you’ve already read how my days are shaped).

One of the ways unhealed trauma metastasizes in the psyche is through self-damaging. That can be seen in unhealthy eating (be that disordered or general poor nutrition choices), addiction, mental health issues, and a myriad of ways still disguised as normal. Trauma is also intimately related to suicide.

Is that what we are doing? As a whole? Is the human race overwhelmed by cumulative trauma? Is there a limit to how much our DNA can manage? Theunfolding global ecosystem collapse and all it’s social accouterments is certainly parallel to humanity imploding under the weight of countless generations of unhealed trauma behaviour.

It’s also the long term result of that behaviour. We invested in things and status instead of the planet and the future. We bought purses and perfume and pipelines and privilege instead of investing in psychologists and healers. It didn’t work any better than shopping cures trauma.

I think the trauma of global ecosystem collapse – the trauma of all affected lie, of the planet – is also a large part of what informs our personal trauma. Genetic trauma is scientifically accepted… so is the mycellium network connecting all life on the planet, including ourselves. So it stands to reason that we are now feeling and cumulatively processing, together, the sum total trauma of EVERYTHING, all of it, ever.

No wonder the human race is behaving suicidally. We’re dancing on the rails so we can unfortunately and surprisingly and through no fault of our own – get hit by a train. Or blindly walking into a peat bog. However you choose to analogize it, it’s suicidal. It’s the action of a being – in this case, an entity beings, humanity – collapsing under trauma.

The only way I’ve been able to start working through my own is to stop… draw back from active damage and from as much negativity and stress as this world allows - and learn to keep dreaming of walking farther than that. Stopping is not an action, though, and even for a gypsyhermit (or this one), withdrawing is not the destination. Stop, yes. Then turn, and look around, evaluate, and use that mental map to walk in a new direction.

Walks like that don’t happen alone. Every epic solo has intimate connections of some sort, be it technical, practical, logistical, and even spiritual or otherwise intangible.

We do all have our own journeys, but we can also shift direction as a whole. From that birds’ eye perspective, a sweeping paradigm shift can look like migrating geese; the first few flocks starting the shift, followed by more and more, until they are all safe. Some don’t finish the route for various reasons, but for all intents and purposes, geese remain a viable species with a sustainable – regenerative, even – way of life and place in the ecosystem. Most of them continue, because they do it together.

We are all connected. Love and respect hold life together, for each of us and for all of us. Isn’t that a good enough direction? I try to follow that in my own life, and though I lose the path, I keep following the map. For such an adaptable creature, humans traditionally have remarkable trouble changing direction, let alone swinging paradigm shifts. Maybe that’s for the same reason traumatized birds don’t fly well. Or maybe it’s because humans historically have cartographic issues. Maybe it’s too late, but we can still go in the right direction anyways because it’s better than going farther in the wrong direction. The fringe flocks are already out there trying the route and finding directions… familiar comfort zones feel safe, but they burn well, and I don’t want to be one of the stragglers in the smoke, the ones who don’t make it.

Even when we don’t feel loved or loving, we are still part of that same entire network which the layers of accumulated trauma followed into our souls… and that is made of creative energy. It is love. Whether we believe it or feel it or not, we are part of it.

I guess it back comes down to loving ourselves through our own trauma so we can live, and loving life itself enough that it will live.

Love,

Ann