In devotion to the primordial waters, I orient the canoe of my life

gestating worlds of our dreams

Words and phrases that arise on the crustacean shell of this invisible moon:

Origins, ancestry, home, nation, mothering, birth, nativity, indigeneity, birthplace, blood bonds, gestational waters, amniotic fluids, blood memory, ancestral lands…

In devotion to the primordial waters, I orient the canoe of my life. Sometimes it spins in circles. I am the only one responsible for holding the direction steady. I know where I’m going. When I write all my goodbye letters and cleanse all death from my womb, what is left before me is a broad luminous waterway, awaiting my craft. I am working my way toward a center, threading my prayer through the eye of the needle, entering the eye of a storm of a crisis of collective consciousness, sharpening devotion to a path I know to be true. Not for logic, not for proof. But for a deep stirring in the base of my body where all fat settles, for breaths that arrive full and billowing, for relaxation of shoulders and a sweet sigh that feels like it could balance the world, or at least this world right here, the one I nurture within my own sphere of thoughts, feelings, relationships, actions, behaviors, decisions, movements.

Listening to womb has redirected the entire current and cadence of my life. Womb belongs to many timelines, not just the one unfolding visibly before us. Listening to womb means to move along time-ways and water-lines that may appear incomprehensible, asynchronous with this moment. We must trust ourselves to know that we move in ways that are true and responsive, not escapist but ultimately integrating so many realities, tending to wounds left open for generations, in the prayer to mend our collective soul quilt, to deep clean this collective mess that has been splayed out and spreading across this earth for thousands of years.

I am moving toward the next leg of my journey. I’ll never again doubt how spirit weaves - one assignment after another, each requiring an almost tunnel-vision-like focus, requiring the identification and release of distractions, including the sweetest and most nourishing ones. This is part of becoming mother, of preparing for birth - to visualize the birth canal, to see it dilating wide, to sing it open, to guard and activate this gateway between worlds, to descend into that darkness, moving toward a small aperture of brilliant light.

In preparation for a return, I began to peel away the layers of illusion that had grown around me like a stiff bark. That illusion was that my family had given me healthy imprints of loving. It was not so. Everything in my experience attempting loving relationships outside of my blood family indicated otherwise. bell hooks had written, “Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. However, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.”

I am an artist, I’m a creator. I am also a healing practitioner, meaning I’m taking full responsibility for the healing of my lineages, and dedicating the merit of this practice toward our collective soul and earth repair. The worlds of creation and healing meet at the intersection of birth and death within me, the intersection of ancestral repair and the cultivation of strong root systems for future generations. This intersection is bound together within my heso, my bellybutton, the scar memory of my umbilical cord. Water memory, blood memory. Wounding and medicine.

This memory was activated through the spirit-body-stirring alchemy of pregnancy and abortion in 2021. At that time, I began to receive an influx of information about my bloodlines, as well as instructions to bring my drum Kizuna into the world, to be birthed alongside a film of the same name, the film as the vessel through which to honor and amplify the medicine and teachings of this star being. This film is the container for the lineage healing that is my dharma, unwinding from legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and violence against our connection to origins through gender-based abuse and displacement from land. Kizuna is my protagonist and my guide. The point of her arrow is the direction in which I orient my canoe.

I did not know yet how tied up my grief over the loss of this baby was with my grief over the distance from my ancestors, from the earth, from the cosmos, from all we have ever been and all we have ever known. It was like their arrival in my body reminded me of that ongoing miracle into which my life, my body, my breath, has always been woven, and losing them was a crystalized emblem of the pain of the loss of that consciousness.

This fall I will be continuing the journey, carrying my drum with me as I accompany my grandmother to move back to Ainu Mosir, or so-called Japan, at the age of 88. I’m aware of the immense privilege of returning to homeland when we are living in the present-time and past reverberations of ethnic cleansing, thinking of Palestinian and Sudanese relatives, thinking of descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, and so many indigenous others, denied their inheritance of unbroken intimacy with the lands of their blood. It’s an opening I step into with a sense of collective responsibility, thinking of Caddo and Lenape artist River Whittle’s visual artwork which reads, “The land needs its people.” It feels to me like indigenous land everywhere is nourished by indigenous people anywhere rooting into their own soil and lifeways. And nourished, too, by settlers everywhere doing their work to divest from settler colonial projects, tending to the deep ruptures within their lineages’ relationships to place, and taking aligned steps toward internal and relational repair.

I move in the direction of Ainu Mosir, where my family’s roots are, in the mountains of Fukushima and Miyagi of northeastern Tohoku, holding central the complexity of Japanese imperialism in speaking of indigeneity as it relates to our lands. Honoring the Ainu, Emishi, Okinawan peoples, and other indigenous peoples of those lands who have been detribalized, their names unknown to me, their lifeways and cosmologies seeping into what is now known as Japanese culture and tradition. I approach this journey honoring the parts of my maternal ancestry that are indigenous to those lands, and the unknown parts that may have arrived there through vast webs of migration and/or colonialism from the north, from the east, from the south, from the west.

In that time, bed no longer cradled me but swaddled me concave and I moved to the hard flat floor, as we had slept for many thousands of years. I was taken back to times when my family had touched sacredness even in amerika. Of course sacredness could be accessed in any place at any time, as it is the entire quilt of which our lives are just stitches. But in this country there were obstacles around which we learned to weave our sacredness – around walled single family homes and rivers diverted under the ground, around the numbing sterility of the country’s finest institutions - universities, hospitals, asylums, prisons. When I lay on the ground I returned to so many winter seasons at Obaachan’s house, when the cousins would come up north to visit, and the tatami mats were covered by thick lumbering futon, which we’d unfold at night and fold back in the morning. At night it would be transformed again into a play palace for our bodies, the whole room a bed without any risk of falling, our limbs threaded between one another, our sweat co-mingling and our dreams weaving in and out of the same nightmares.

The many directions and confluences of my blood, I am still remembering. But I know that Japanese homogeneity is a myth and imperial construction. I know that the empire first detribalized the many communities who knew that land as home, attempting and in many cases succeeding to consolidate them under the same flag and governance, before going across the water to terrorize and exploit neighbors in China, Korea, the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, and on and on. I am currently being shaped by the writing, activism and scholarship of Okinawan diasporic poet Sho Yamagushiku, who offers vital and necessary criticism of Japanese nostalgia for homeland based in a “[refusal of] relationship with Japanese imperialism while at the same time worshipping “japaneseness”.” It is this fixed national identity which is built upon the rubble of peoples rich in the many textures of culture and blood memory, as we see in so called Israel. When the time is ripe, I will offer this same care to my paternal homelands in Romania and other places where my Yiddish ancestors have called home. Despite the complexity of my Japanese lineage, I have also been shown that there is more spiritual resourcing readily available to me through my maternal lines, that is supporting me to cultivate the capacity, wisdom, courage, and compassion, required to tend skillfully to the healing work of my Jewish lineages.

Now, finding myself again on the floor, I found I was no longer alone. The floor itself was a kind of deep company – my spine met the wood like visiting a relative I had not seen since childhood. There, my neck still pained me but I was not alone in the pain, and knew it was not mine alone. I lay with my feet to the altar.

A friend told me that feet are connected to past lives, and I told them that my first memory of this lifetime was a dream from another lifetime–a dream of having my feet amputated in a public execution in europe. Since then I had had many recurring dreams of being shoeless, losing my shoes, going back for my shoes when everyone was leaving some place urgently in crisis. Something about feeling vulnerable in my feet, like they were unprotected, exposed, almost as if they were not fully a part of me, like I could forget them somewhere, have them stolen, lose them. Some severance from the ground, from rootedness, from origin.

This fall, my grandma’s living body will be returning, my grandpa’s ashes returning, and their first great-grandchild Kizuna - not human but animate indeed, leather and wood with a voice that resounds through time and space, seed of the stars, seed of our future - will be returning, all of us returning to homelands, carrying prayers of restoration, carrying prayers for healing, carrying prayers for wholeness.

With my feet to the altar I looked up and saw my great grandmother Sayo Obaachan smiling down at me as she had night after night in my ancestral home when I had been brave enough to visit. I saw in her smile a grimmace and in that grimmace I saw a waterfall of loss and sacredness pouring from the basin of the volcano in her home region, which heated and purified the water, which threaded through the rock and silt, which threaded through the home in which she was born to the hands of a midwife, her home protected by Bato Kannon, Hayagriva, the bodhisattva of horses, silkworms, and all animals of the earth.

In the coming months, I will be sharing much more and also asking for help. I will need witnessing, accountability, resourcing, and prayer. I’m writing today as this new moon is born, beginning to hone in on the eye of the needle, that bright luminosity pouring through the abdomen of the spider’s silk pouch, showing me how to weave dreams into form. I will learn how to ask for the help that I need, and I will help myself by sharing clearly about this path that I’m on with Kizuna the drum and Kizuna the film, reinforcing the realness of this creative prayer-work to me and my bloodlines, my matrispheres, and the coming generations I’m here to nurture. Life has never stopped and it never will. We are here to gestate the worlds of our dreams.