Love Letters A Dance Of Fire And Ice
Traful Stakelbeck
I think about you always from across the ocean. Thankful for how you hold me in the darkest soil and clay. Under the moon, I hold you in my memories you are standing happy beneath the mountain. In my dreams, I watched you dance. I saw fresh woven Guagua overflowing with your laughter. Children arrived and climbed up your branches. All of us laughing together in Guagua. I watched you start to smile as they cartwheeled again and again and again. Your daughters planted with them. All of us golden and pink and placed in Guagua by mango loving hands.
We talked about coconut trees. How they give us everything we need to live. How they too are affected by militarization but also show us connections beyond it. We talked about rhino beetles, how they eat the heart of leaves till they cannot be woven. We talked about the feelings of despair and how when plants are sick we need patience. We talked about Belau, how their women teach us resilience. How when beetles came to their islands they kept planting coconuts and encourage us to do the same. How planting more can be the best medicine.
So much more than a thing in the ground. Plants gift us: sustenance, hold our memory, offer us a connection to places and people lost. Plants our creators of islands. A way to go home and grow home. They are moʻolelo. Medicine and healing, hope and resilience, adaptation and generosity. They are history, a way to remember childhood and family. They teach us navigation. They help guide our paths. They help us hold the connection we need to sustain resistance, the bravery to act.
Our list was long, but it was difficult to write about them while honoring their spirit and the relationships they create for us. We decided to write to them instead, expressing our love, offering gratitude, asking them for help with conflict and pain, for their wisdom, and trusting them in their thousands of years, that they know a better way.
My favorite thing about both my grandparents and mango trees is that they are sweet and generous. In recent years when I have been able to share mango with friends I now understand that joy and appreciate my grandparents even more for not only teaching us how to be generous but also for growing the mango trees which allow us to practice generosity in abundance.
Our mango trees where the first of many ways that my grandparents taught us to love and appreciate the land. They taught me that when we take care of and love the land it will feed not only ourselves but our loved ones, and our community too. This to me is one of the sweetest forms of love we can experience.
Bashofu taught me that a cultural art form is a way of practicing and remembering loving and committed relationships between people and plants. Bashofu depends on the soil, the air, the rain, the memories of generations of women, the dedication between people and banana to create something.
I am looking for my grandmother in a book by K. Hendrickx called Bashfu: banana-fibre cloth and its transformations of usage and meaning across boundaries of place and time in the Ryukyu archipelago. She writes about another grandmother, Toshiko Taira. After the war, US forces cut down many banana plants to avoid the spread of malaria. Because Okinawans wanted to be American, traditional textiles were being lost. At that time, the desire for the crisp lightness of bashofu was fading. Into that silence, Toshiko Taira called women together to become weavers. Women who had lost their husbands during the war. These women wove and wove into a present reality where bashofu is a national treasure, a bolt of cloth something fine and even more precious than before.
My grandparents came from the WWII generation. There were a lot of big changes during the post WWII era and there was a lot of focus on eliminating our indigenous language and traditional practices. Much of this elimination process was conducted in schools where speaking Chamorro resulted in shame, embarrassment, fees, and physical punishment.
They would share pieces of knowledge like putting aloe on our cuts and burns, and eating certain foods for their health benefits but Amot was a conversation I felt I had to forced out of them. I was afraid to ask them at first, afraid to request it from their silences. I would tiptoe around the question by bringing books about plants of Guam and asking them every question I could think of. I would sit with them for hours working up the courage to ask for the information that I really wanted.
One belief in traditional medicine is that the plants have a spirit and will grow where they are needed. Medicinal plants are especially found in sacred spaces. A lot of our sacred spaces are also places that are desirable for military and tourism.
What do we do when we are faced with losing a place we love? I am remembering the lesson we learn from Aunty Pua Case and the Mauna Kea protectors: how we fight with aloha to protect our sacred places. How this fierce commitment to aloha is what will save our own lives too.
Meeting you was like dreaming of an old friend. As if part of me has always
been here waiting with you. You sit in this valley calling
to the mountains, singing a gathering song. You hold and you hold us.
In ancient and sacred space. I feel your resilience and breathe it in.
Thankful. You offer me your ocean in a shell. Waves roll back
and forward. Futures and past
But above all else, I find this place when sorting through Black history, art, and culture in order to access something that the world often attempts to steal from us: Black futurity.
The idea of a Black future filled with comfort, and that is undoubtedly liberating.
I see Black artists engaging in future-forward thinking in even the simplest form of declaration. Edgefield, South Carolina, is a three-hour drive from the plantation where my ancestors worked on Jehossee Island. There, many years before my grandmother moved from South Carolina to Philadelphia, David Drake was making clay coils for his vessels. A prolific Black potter (who was also enslaved), Drake is known for inscribing his works with sweet and playful poetry, along with his name. From what I gather, the poems range from warnings to follow the Bible to instructions on what the vessel would be best used for. As we know, this is all during a time when enslaved peoples and their descendants were not allowed to read, let alone write.
There are so many Black artists whose works, just like the celebration of Juneteenth, are love letters to both the future and the past. They are not always the kind of love letters that are laced with perfumes or flowers. They are sometimes ones with ragged edges, missing names, and no return addresses. These letters have drops of blood, were written in dimly lit corners, and in a hushed secret.
While I will not be going to church this Juneteenth week, I will be setting an altar. One with honey, heirlooms from my great-grandmother, and artwork from my friends. I will call my mom and we will talk about our little home together in Philly, where we grew tomatoes. I will light candles and wash my dishes to Leontyne Price and Beverly Glenn-Copeland. I will tap in with friends to see where the barbecue is at.
I will imagine my feet are rooting with every step. Connecting to the land my ancestors worked in South Carolina. Remembering that those roots supported David Drake as he fired his July 4th vessel, that those roots find my great-great-grandfather tending to his own tomatoes as a boy.
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I\u2019m going to be sharing video newsletters such as this more frequently from now on as I used to teach in a pre-school and loved story time, and this reminds me of that. I wish we were right now sitting around a circle together, eating snacks and prepping for Show & Tell.
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I love the use of rituals in our lives. Rituals cause us to take pause, giving weight to things that are significant for us. They help our brain focus and pay attention, and they help us orient ourselves emotionally and spiritually.
Sit in front of your pot or burning space, hold the images/paper in your hands and just speak from the heart about what this represents to you and why you need to let this go. Finish with the words I release you. I am done.
I literally the fire tended to it for Abit until it was raging in glory but controlled in the for ring. I said my goodbye, made my peace and burnt the frame and pictures.
The second that frame turned to Ash in this bonfire a gust of wind sprung up and spread the fire out into the yard.
The fire then took off rather quickly consuming dry grass up the hill towards the garage. I found myself with a hose and 2 buckets battling this raging brush fire. . .
I am a spritual person more drawn to pagan. I was married for 18 years but now im very nearly divorced. Im in a new relationship & so much want to draw a line under the past so on all hallows eve i intend to burn the original marriage certificate & all court paperwork in the garden in a metal bucket i bought today as an end to the past & new beginnings
Having looked at the best day to do this i have now decided to change the day to Saturday the 29th of October. My reasons are because Saturdays are good days to perform this kind of ritual & also because the moon is waning almost dark which is an excellent combination ?
Joann, I am so sorry to hear of your continued pain. I will include you in my daily prayers and healing meditations. I also recommend metta or loving kindness meditation. It is proven to help with easing physical and emotional pain. A good book that might help is The Last Best Cure by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. I think that book will help a lot, actually. Sending you all my love, Nicole xx
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