Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond
- Old age surfaces regrets for abandoning an infant vision and becoming an ‘good girl’, a compromise that silenced her truth.
- Plants and trees sustained her, communicating, comforting, and keeping her alive when human relationships failed.
- Visions predicted environmental loss: plastic smothering forests, polluted air, and the looming possibility of human extinction through consequence.
- Mycelial networks reveal an underground library of life, offering pathways to resilience and rekindled hope.
- She urges blending Western science with Indigenous ways, privileging relationship and feeling to rewrite our cultural story and act.
the circle
repeats
tightens
with age
crushing
an
aging heart
I cannot
breathe
through
these lifetimes
of
loss
instead
I relive
old
pain
4AM
lasts
an eternity
each mourning
behind
the scenes
the king
steals a mind
that ruled
a child
who had
already
been
gifted
with
a vision
of grace
the trees
and plants
would
support
her
when
no one else
would.
If only
she could
have believed
they could.
Working notes:
Old age brings regrets into the foreground – we all make so many mistakes. Mine began when I couldn’t believe the vision I had as an infant. The emerald grass on which I lay open to bowl of blue captured the heartbeat of the earth that pulsed to an ancient rhythm as the giant sunflower expanded and contracted to All Seeing infant eyes.
The plants were calling me, but family and culture buried the song.
I gave up myself for a good girl who wasn’t real; a girl whose need to be loved by people who were blind to who she was.
After his death she couldn’t leave the house and the plants she loved. Her plants began to speak in a language she did not understand but because they flourished under her attention and care she wondered how much they knew. Her loneliness was assuaged by these loving relationships that kept her alive and yet she couldn’t believe what she knew.
When the torment broke three hundred old apple trees held her in loving embrace but one day she had to leave them to answer another call to a wilderness that was already disappearing though she lacked awareness then. She went to a place in the mountains where bears still roamed free. Oh, the trees took her into their great green needled arms, her gardens flourished. She befriended wild bears and let them teach her how they lived. But from the beginning nightmarish dreams haunted her – the trees would be destroyed, and the animals would leave.
First, she dreamed, then she witnessed all that has come to pass.
Prescience and precognition rule her life but it was only after the suffering began that she began to believe what she knew, and even then she spoke to no one for years.
Today I no longer care what people say or do. I no longer attempt to penetrate the denial that is written into our present cultural story. The ‘knowers’ may relegate me to the outer track but that won’t change the ending.
If humans make it through the earth’s next transition those who have always loved and respected the ways of nature may have a chance. I do not know.
The last vision I had of earth was that she was restored to emerald and gold with lush forests and clear blue waters. Animals were pouring out of a wooden craft situated in a forested wilderness. Not a human in sight. I felt a burst of wild joy. The earth would survive! Hope re -entered my life. It wasn’t until later that I remembered the earth in my vision was encased in plastic
A few years later polluted air dulled the fragrant scents in the last of the forest fragments. Oh, how I missed the sweetness, and I noticed my own labored breathing on hot summer days along with a putrid smell.
Mycelial networks called me into relationship with them helping me to re-kindle hope by learning that an entire library for life was hidden just below my feet. Then the meaning behind the plastic veil struck like a tolling bell. Plastic smothers the breath of life. The catastrophic loss of the trees that I loved and wept for, leaned upon, learned from, communicated with, advocated for meant consequences not just for me but for all. Without oxygen humans and animals cannot breathe. Animals have been here for millions of years, so they have survived a few extinctions. Plant life evolved more than a billion years ago so the rest of nature will rebirth herself, but humans have not survived any extinctions, and if my vision manifests as the way earth chooses to snuff out the species that has harmed her so, through simple consequences I will not be surprised.
Ironically the more carbon dioxide we spew into the air the faster trees and plants will grow. Some species will die out but others will erupt from the magical mycelial networks below and emerge from patterns that earth holds in ancient memory of all there is. Did you know that the same neural patterns present in trees are also present in human brains? The radical conclusion drawn by some (mostly women) scientists is that trees (and plants – like animals) have memory, think, feel, act, hear sounds and are always listening. Of course, Indigenous peoples do not need western science to validate perceptions; they already know that they are related to the rest of nature in the most intimate ways.
Ideally, if we could blend western science with its useful tools and soften its ‘objective’ (no such thing )parameters with Indigenous science that privileges relationship and feeling this marriage would allow us to access to our bodies, minds, souls, spirits and hearts we might yet be able to rewrite the story.
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