On Being Whole

How to Love Me

First of all, I love. I love a lot of the world - the seasons, the rain, the days of -40 where everything is still, even the exhale as it suspends in the air.  I love mud and birdsong (of course, who doesn’t), and the way people laugh together when it’s whole-hearted, slaps on knees and heads thrown back. And music - is there anything else that holds more harmonic, more resonance, more ability to climb as high and low as our truths go? Is there anything more than music? And the way a body can move and lithe and ripple in response to this resonance. Is there anything more than this? Perhaps in tracking and hunting, perhaps in prayer and in sex…I know! Murmuration. In pods of whales and dolphins as they trace fluid lines through the earth’s waters, in caribou and bison runs across wide prairie floors. The ways of bodies, together and alone.

 But never truly singular. Porous at best, our edges fugitive, our selves in constant exchange with other. “Sun, soil, water, tides, seasons, archaea, bacteria, viruses, animals, plants, fungi, and the rest of the teeming world.”[1] We don’t contain multitudes, we are multitudes. We are contained by multitudes; our microbiome, fascia, bones and marrow, brain tissue, spinal fluid, heart organ, taste buds and more become us. We (me and you); You and I (we).

Perhaps the most amazing part of human evolution, to me, is how these multitudes come together to create and hold the beings that we are; persons that laugh, sing, cry, hurt and wonder at the world. That these complex systems making up our body-minds have evolved to hold memories and emotions in their living tissues. Can sense threat, intuit next moves and intentions - not just our own but those of others around us - are multilingual and weave rich living stories to teach us in the form of art, stories, poetry, mathematics, myths, and dreams.

How can we not be in awe. All of this I need to tell you, so you know how to love me.

Meeting in Love

      Tidepools, shorelines, valleys and the rivulets of sweat that press between two bodies. What of us is breath, oxygen, molecules upon molecules? What of us stops, what of us goes? In the place we meet, is there another kind of air? Is it charged differently because we are (both or all) here? The electrons, the lines, the vibrations, the echoes. Which ones are yours, which ones are mine? Listening closely, I am sure I know the difference.

Then again, when a child not mine dies here or in another land, I am not so sure of anything anymore. I cannot find my edges, except that the child could be mine in another skin, in another while, in another world.

Because here is the thing - when we touch, when I watch the sheep on the hill from my window on the train rushing past, when I observe a woman walking on the crowded sidewalk, watch my friend washing dishes, when I hear the frequency of your voice through small speakers in my phone…what is the texture of space between us? Its colour must be interstitial, multihued, opalescent, dark and slimy, light-filled becoming…emerging only there, because there we are.

What happens when we turn away from this togetherness? Is it then that otherness, like dark water, rushes into this vulnerable and raw forgotten space? Filling it once again, never empty, always becoming, always home to someone, something.

Being Whole/y in Love

Meet me there, in the space between, in the interstices, the place where interlopers find their home. Meet me in the middle of the road, holding flags. Take my hand as we raise our fists. Meet me with flagrant sounds and open arms. Meet me at the monument and we can ask how it is we never saw those fences before. Meet me barefoot where the highway ends and the foot path begins. Let us have our autonomy; let us not assume we know. Hold me in your listening ears, your seeing eyes. Breathe me in and all the textured space between us. My body cannot possibly know yours without this. My self cannot know your self without stepping through the tide pools together, recognizing this is where we live, together. Here, where species gather because it is fertile and abundant, fecund and ever becoming. I am happy to know you here because it means I too can arrive naked.

It’s not nothing to admit this to each other - that we are scared and whole and full of holy mis-takes.

[1] Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. New York: MacMillan Publishers, 2021, 496

Motherwort: An Urban Monograph

Motherwort’s Latin name is Leonurus Cardiaca, meaning Lion-hearted. Vigorous and beautiful, this herb (wort) is traditionally used to support those born in a female body, those who mother (hence its common name), and is a primary plant for heart health. The medicine this plant carries shows us that mothering is intimately related to strength-of-heart.

Brought over by colonists, Motherwort is a settler on North American lands. Being adaptable and self-sustaining means this plant is naturalized, offering her medicine for those who are in need. For other settlers like myself, there is a deep lesson to be learned from this, in how to become useful and live in reciprocity with others and the lands we were planted on.

Wonderful for grief, this herb calms and nourishes the heart, bringing relief for the anxiety and fatigue that often accompanies mothering. She is a tonic for supporting hormonal fluxes from puberty through menopause. She gently calms and nourishes us through and out of burnout.[1] Tincture is easiest, but it can also be taken in teas, although bitter. This medicine is an especially profound metaphor for the support needed at this time of the climate crisis - eco-grief, anxiety and burnout are valid reactions to the unprecedented transitions and heat we are collectively facing. Not to mention that the movement for climate justice – an overwhelming task of care-taking - is being led by women over 50.[2]

The bitter taste and the prickles on late harvest flowers make me think about the pain and discomfort that can accompany both mothering and being mothered. At the same time, bitterness and prickles can act as protection, teaching us about discernment and clear boundaries[1] , and how we can improve these qualities as we age. Clear, healthy boundaries create space for deeper reciprocity and interconnection with what most nourishes us. Knowing our limits, and learning resilience within them, is necessary for living well together.

Motherwort takes up space, grows wild in alleys and fence-side as much as in proper garden beds. Being rhizomatic means this plant’s roots grow down and outward in a non-linear, decentralized and widespread fashion. It is an example of how lineages of mothering can and do work in our world. This kind of matrilineage teaches us about growing power with, instead of over, each other.

Due both to her tenacity and a general ignorance about bioregional plant medicine, Motherwort is often only considered an invasive weed. Likewise, the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual load carried by mothers is widely devalued and overlooked. This is especially true for non-white mothers, who face higher rates of maternal death and whose lives and those of their children are seen as less important.

As well as growing wild throughout Montreal, self-seeded Motherwort grows in the corner of my mother’s own garden, growing tall as my son by summer’s end. Becoming a later-in-life mother was a wake-up call for me. Until then I had not fully recognized the profound work women around me were doing on the daily - my sisters, cousins, friends, my mother, aunties, grandmothers.

Together, Motherwort and I are shining light onto the gift of mothering and the mothers who surround us, especially those whose lives are in danger, including the Earth herself. Equally, we uphold the ways of the heart and heart-led leadership. Leonurus Cardiaca, Lion-heart is courageous and brave. We are speaking out about how stigma, trauma, repression, and oppression take up residence in the body, manifesting as physical ailments or disease. And finally, we are reminding everyone that humans and plants have a relationship that has co-evolved over thousands of years: indeed, plants are the original medicine.

[1] Herbal Academy. “Example Monograph: Motherwort.” Accessed November 15, 2024. https://theherbalacademy.com/motherwort-monograph/

[2] Solitaire Townsend. Women Over 50 Are Leading On Climate Action. Nov 14, 2024. Forbes. (Website). https://www.forbes.com/sites/solitairetownsend/2024/11/14/women-leading-on-climate-action-who-are-over-50-years-old/#.

Strolling under the Skin

Last night I watched the incredibly strange and wonderful short film Strolling under the Skin by Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau. Using videoendoscopy, the film examines the live connective fascia system of the human body, walking us through a medical journey through the deep complexity that holds the human body together. The soothing narration is poetry at times, and the classical music in the film alongside the visuals reminded me of a 1970’s science fiction movie. The imagery is fantastic - from the viscera of muscle, tendon and skin in live surgery, to digital 3D renderings exploring how these systems might work together, to the wet, crystalline webs of the fascia. In my understanding, the fascia was poorly understood and largely ignored in medical understandings of anatomy and the body, until Dr Guimberteau’s pioneering explorations literally brought it into the light.

Dr Guimberteau was not prepared for what he found, and this prompted him to dedicate his research to understanding what his unexpected foray into fractals and chaos, saying: “Very often people think that chaos makes no sense. But in fact if you look to a tree in your garden, try to find a sort of order along the branches. There is no order as humans consider order. The branch repartition is chaotic. It’s a disordered pattern. But it’s a tree. And it’s a perfect tree.

We have to accept how our body is made with a similar architecture.” (Moving Mountain Institute)

Much like the mycelial networks that hold together entire ecosystems on land, our fascia is the system that holds together - both through mechanics and functioning - all other systems within our bodies. Fascia can liquify and stack itself, can separate and remake itself in whatever direction needed to allow elasticity and strength, and can be hollow and transfer liquid through its lines. The images in the film show us a dewy web that is in constant emergence, pearls of clear liquid both inside and along its pathways. It is complexity at its finest.

When I think about all the ways that interconnection manifests among life on earth - our sensory abilities to transfer information from exterior to interior, resonance and the law of vibrations, the trillions of microorganisms we share life with just within our own bodies - I imagine that this fascial-mycelial system and structure may exist throughout everything alive on our earth, everything/everywhere, whether we can see it or not. We can see the ‘pseudo-geometric’ structure of fascia repeated throughout the natural world - stag horns, tree branches, our nervous systems, river systems, lightning bolts. What if this complex fractal system-structure of chaos and efficiency exists throughout all of what we call ‘life on earth’, making up the passageways for all transference of energy, electricity, nutrients, all information that makes life necessary.

This structure is what I have actually been intuitively groping towards in my research. When I think about (and engage in) dreamwork, prayer, ritual, local and non-local healing work, when I ask how are we interconnected, and what role does the body play in this - I am really asking: Is there a structure to our interconnectedness, and how does this structure link us as humans to other living entities? Further to this, is it something that goes beyond what we visualize through any contemporary tools? This enters the realm of quantum physics, quite beyond my scope as an artist-researcher! But the great thing about my role as such, is that I get to propose new links and imagine outside the lines.

I took out many quotes from the narration that held the concept of interconnectivity as I have been studying it - as a wide web existing between all of life on earth: Fascia as a structure of global dynamics, a consistent space system, a stratification of virtual space, a tissue fibre of pseudo-geometric form, fractal chaos, a shock absorbing system, a tissue continuum of non-linear connectivity with collective equilibrium in mind. Further to this was the incredible explanation of the skin that by its structure and its role of enclosing the other organs, the skin is more than just an organ, it is a set of organs that are anatomically, physiologically, culturally and psychically complex, in a permanent, constant exchange of signals (@ min 8:09).