What the Tides Can Teach Us
They Art of Belonging
Notes from the Inflection Point explores ways to process and express climate-related emotions like love and fear together. With a voice dedicated to seeing things afresh, again, and with agency, we offer readers grounded reflection on most Thursdays.
Look beneath you. Where are you now?
An afternoon walk through the forest, just after a light rain. The smell of wet grass, lichen. The slight stickiness of mud. The sound of the early birds claiming first back, mixing with rain still trickling through the leaves.
Artist and shaman Maria Mison recently told me the land beneath our feet informs our daily life practice.
People are a little bit more intuitive, more fluid when the land is at peace. We absorb energies via the land, right? So sometimes when people feel disoriented and not belonging somewhere, it's because their energies haven't been dug down.
She describes spirituality in the Philippines as "soupy" and "syncretic." Her spirituality exists in the liminal space between colonizer and colonized, creating something entirely new from the fragments.
The Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta dug down, into, through, beyond. Forced into exile as a child, she embodied St. Francis of Assisi’s guidance to wear the world like a loose garment.
Her silhouettes in the sand, mud, grass marked the intersection between body and place. Being and absence. Impermanence.
Her sand sculptures evidenced dialogue among indigenous memories, colonized landscapes, her presence. All with the explicit knowledge the tide would still come.
Digging down: recognizing ourselves in the fleeting sculptures of soil and sand.
This, too, is me. And Ana. And Maria. Our fragility is our most honest quality. The way we hold our innate vulnerability is a testament to who and how we are.
We are stronger together.
We become the care we practice.
We cannot force the warming winds to change.
But even in concrete circumstances, we can honor our interdependence, proclaiming our relation to smell of pine sap, birdsong, and even the rain.
For more on spirituality, play, and joy during difficult times, please read my recent interview with Maria Mison here.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee, and everyperson at Light Hive, a newsletter that shows how Buddhist frameworks and play can help navigate identity and the polycrisis. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies and find collecting spruce sap without damaging the bark a very satisfying endeavor.