Flowing with Eglė: remaining open for bittersweet deaths

Where can we live? Where can we thrive? There’s a million and one mysteries to be explored in life, but in this blog I want to write about my foundation for joy and thriving. In reference to Nora Bateson’s essay on words to be careful with¹, I must however first elaborate around what in the world I mean by we. I am, I guess, part of this we to care with. Our culturally coerced individualism breeds many assumptions. Especially about them. Are we curious with our gut bacteria & skin mites, our carbon changing hands, making us more non- than human?

Cultivating many senses of belonging

Positionality-wise, I experience my we-I as a fluid interspecies concept that mingles with some and rejects others. My immune system knows. Yet is it even mine? My being in charge of 65 trillion or so cells strikes me with awe. An inner permaculture garden, putting a new spin on the notion of gut feeling². I am one huge conversation, vibing. Maybe a song in a concert hall? An echo chamber?

A mysterious painting encountered in a Lodge in Boulder, Colorado, Turtle Island. Who is who?

I am reminded of systems transformation researcher Otto Scharmer³ who famously – well, in my bubble – references the symphony conductor who anticipates, opens space, steps in, turns towards, and just-in-time ignites the emerging future. But who is the conductor in this, our concert played only to 43% by human cells?

Our body‘s intelligence within which we-I dwell – discerns who can pass, must stay out, be muted or simply devoured. At any given noisy moment around our membranous, breathing, informing self, it must be the mage of discernment, taken as a metaphor, who holds the key to the ability to behold and conduct joy? Attending to being, the music of life. Demanding silence, enacting rest. What does it take [for] be[-come-]ing porous to bliss?

Stained wood cross section of conductive tissue with large vessels showing annual ring boundaries of *Amorpha fruticosa*, a small tree in the Legume family I first encountered in a Croatian flooded forest. If you long for more microscopic insights into the cells of these beauties, check the Inside Wood Database for your favorite tree sisters! https://insidewood.lib.ncsu.edu/description?3

Celebration of the death of certainty

At the water’s edge, Eglė, the protagonist in the Queen of Serpents, now roots with her offspring. I postulate it was a certain kind of death that allowed her to escape the patriarchy – prerequisite for a life of bliss and self-determination. A ceremonial death, a sacrificial honoring of her old wants to fit into a society pitted against life and thrival. Instead, she takes her unique root space, addresses her needs, releasing those tears and untended grief which had held her body hostage. Her rooting as tree becomes a final accept of Stockholm syndrome. As a tree negotiating the river banks, Eglė steers clear from what V (formerly Eve Ensler)⁴ calls the PATRIX.

V is best known for her play the Vagina Monologues, having founded V day, and co-founding the City of Joy in the Congo. Her description of the Patrix is our “societal, religious, and cultural construct or mandate” that acts as a self-debilitating system (see eco-, geno-, epistemicide) normalizing, encouraging, and/ or invisibilizing violence against the feminine. By upholding a normopathic notion that it were the role of girls to please the rest of society, the latter undermines its own transformational power (the girl cells in all of us).

This blog circles around processes of dumping – letting go – exiting the Patrix crap trap and making space for joy – regrowing our girl cells. I am aware it can be the job of a lifetime, somewhat even several, when considering cross-generational inheritances. PTSD, flashbacks, brainfog. Identity deaths taste bittersweet: who am I when I am no longer here to please the patriarchy? Even if that is all I ever learned to be loved for?

A fresh state of mind akin to turning into a new species entirely. So much compost, I offer Gaia the smell of sweet decay, my death of a being trapped. Together, like two felines purring a relaxed dream, we celebrate. Rematriation complete.

Stories slipping through our open pores

With our collective of artists, we walk, sit on rocks, stare down the proverbial abyss, and rewrite Baltic stories by giving them a hydrofeminist touch. Weaving old forgotten cultural realities and myths into our own lives, we meet bittersweet deaths in the embrace of benthic eelgrass. It’s exciting to conjure mythological figures from the waters depths for mutual conspiring. It’s like trying on new superpowers we have always known were ours.

Connecting local histories, such as young girls secretly giving birth to children out of wedlock in my basement (I live in a 14th century castle). We imagine the plant powers they had to enlist, river sprites aid to cross the moors and deadly realms of societal exclusion, or disappear, shapeshifting into a new entity altogether, just to go on living. Whatever happened to the newborns? Did they too meet eelgrass’ embrace and turn into trees? Those women’s courage is contagious, their fluidity liberating.

On one of my regular digestive river walks, fathoming the audacity of normalized daily violence – be it rape, slavery, biocidal agro-industrial extraction (“culture” under gaslit terms) – and feeling so alone, exhausted from this never ending “facing the brunt” I stopped at a grove of fallen poplar. The noise of their shaking leaves cradled my grief-fed sobs. This addiction to servitude to the trauma repeating itself had to go. Yes, talk therapy can help, but real exorcism happens when plants give medicine.

I badly needed a cleanse. Wanting to immerse in the sheer magnitude of water flow trees pull through their open pores, a symbiotic moment transpired: I climbed on top, shapeshifted into the trunk and let it all wash out.

A grove of beings at Bøjden Nor, south westernmost point of Fyn, Denmark, where the chatter of thousands of rare birds meets incurable proposals for a motorway project for more & faster patrix.

Eglė and her dancing midwife

Eglė becoming tree symbolizes to me her transcendence to a next developmental stage. Caterpillar-being cells have to die first for the butterfly-being cells to be-come. Sadness has to be faced for the joy to flow free. Identifying with our mythological hydrofeminine queen goddess, we allow shame and vulnerability to wash through our open pores and flow with river. Eglė’s surrender to what is meant liberation from what was. The zombie caterpillar capitalist⁵ scarcity mindset remains contagious only in fear-based states. The antidote? Dance like nobody is looking!

Becoming receptive to bliss required cleansing those clogged up patrix pores; poplar, oak, and alder became midwives to my deeply buried tears. Now, after the rain, I courage (it’s also a verb) to root softly within the unfamiliar banks. Amazing Grace. I recognize the smell of my community. Filled to the brim with gratitude that extends to the stars, I commune as water body in human form I flow.