SOILS AND SPIRIT: Into That Ruptured Place

From the LIVING SOILS RISING Collective Manifesto (audio)

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Call back all that you think you know
And begin to remember otherwise

Your breath, enfleshed
The soles of your feet, dreaming

Forget definitions of thought
Release all hierarchies of being

Go to that place
Where you were told
That you were kicked out
From belonging

Go to that break
That broke
the earth
From you

Bring yourself where
You feel unwanted 

Bring the palms of your feet
Into that ruptured place
And wait there. 

Wait.

Wait until 
The patterns of this place
This one, the one that is Holding you 
Begin Quietly expressing,
With no declarations.

Wait in the break, 
As if discarded
Listening to patterns
dancing, humming
Each pattern 
Thinking 
Each one 
Speaking    

Each pattern imprinting  
Songs that you do 
Not yet know.
Do not yet remember.
Songs that are older than you.
Songs that are not for you. 
Songs not about you.
Songs that teach you 
That you are of these songs 

In this break,
Between flesh
And earth,
Call back
Your forgetting 
Call back
Your terrified aloneness
Call back
The hunger
That robbed
You from hearing
How this place
That holds you
Speaks 

Call back your terror
And futility 
Call back your arrogance
Sow humility 

Call back the palms of your feet
From grabbing these soils
Soils that can
Never fully be possessed 
Yet can be destroyed 

Call back possession and forgetting
From your breath, eyes, tongue, throat, arms, stomach, fingers, feet
Ache
Ache in your creaking 
Stumbling unknowing 

From the stumbling break,
Call back the waves, 
The rocking of the docking ships, 
Of those men
Whose young names
These waters and soils
Miscarry  

See them! (Columbus, Hudson, Verazzano, and all the rest)
Walking back in time,
Flags in hand, 
Rowing their ships back
And back 
And back
And back
Rowing into the deepest parts of themselves
Into the parts suffocated dominated and discarded 

Let them know
That you too
Are here
Waiting
Waiting in the break
Waiting.
These soils Waiting
for you to learn
The laws and songs of

this Place.

This one the one, 
who too 
has to learn 
How now to hold you.

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On Sunday May 4 2025, join Marina and hundreds of artists, activists, neighbors, ecologists, dancers, healers and dreamers for LIVING SOILS RISING, three creative acts to seed-the-future for climate justice and healing at Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn NY. Join a walking tour, water & soils ceremony, and a seeding-the-future activation. Hundreds of us will gather where Indigenous land was taken for the birth of the fossil fuel industry from 1867 until today. We will witness, remember, and honor the harmed land and envision a livable energy future together. Register here! (Free)