one place

Later today our first retreat at the new Mobile Homecoming Retreat Center also known as Soul Sanctuary, begins! A dozen Black Feminist Breathing participants from around the United States will be breathing, chanting, meditating and writing together on this sacred land, cherished hunting grounds of the Occoneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, colonized and desecrated by the Cameron empire as part of one of the largest plantations in the US history of slavery and now reclaimed for and by the spiritual elevation of BIPOC and especially QTPOC people! This day has been more than a decade coming in the history of the Mobile Homecoming project and centuries in the making in the dreams of the old ones, the first loving stewards of this land.

Yesterday as I was walking the land in between one-on-one sessions with retreat participants I took a picture of this one rose among many thorns in the medicine garden next to the main building of the retreat center. As I continued to walk I noticed that sprouting up out of the land, which still holds the shape of old cashcrop fields, rows of rape, ridged evidence of forced labor, there are green thorny shoots everywhere. This land, survivor of generations of extraction, holder of the blood sweat and pain of enslaved ancestors, record of the transformation of sacred tobacco from medicine into a vessel for capitalist poison, is healing. And at this stage of the healing, there are thorns.

Me too. I said aloud.

I have so much love and respect for this land. I feel loved by it already. My breathing has shifted thanks to the trees and vines and wild muscadines and blackberries that grow here. And the strong green, the sturdy stalks, the armored thorns growing up here are so justified. After such a long time of violent cultivation the stregnth of these thick thorny shoots says, never again. Never again.

Me too.

I stood still and thought about the ridges and ruts in my life, my most fertile soil still shaped by the harms I have survived. Evidence of what has happened here, in the brown place without my consent over time. Evidence of the violence of capitalism that cuts and ties back and burns away my wildness with a million daily acts of surrender. I am growing something different, this retreat center is the most tangible evidence of that, but yes. My new green shoots have thorns. I have made it hard for you to touch me. I have razor clarified the terms of my never again.

The gift this sacred land offered me yesterday is compassion for how I’m growing. How I’m prickly even though I long for collaboration. How my areas of newest growth protect themselves instinctively. And if amidst all of these thorns I can offer you even one flower, one place of unapologetic blooming, one place where I am so alive that you can smell it, one place where love unfolds me layer by layer then this is that place. I love you. I love your thorns. I love your red. I love your soft.

Love,

Lex (in bloom)

P.S. If you want to support or sustain the Mobile Homecoming Project as we take this big leap you can donate here: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/donate