Writing (with) Olive (Join us on July 16th)

– A blog written in co-creation with session co-hosts Youssef Mahmoud, Konkankoh Joshua, and Olive

Here in the south of Portugal, we are readying for an online session of writing (with) plants on Thursday July 16th, and this time we are going to write with Olive trees.

As we prepare to tap into their centennial wisdom, we wonder what signals may these ancestral creatures transmit to us? Can we ask the types of questions that may enlighten us on how to navigate the turbulent in-between worlds we’re in? As we foreground these ancestral voices on the land, as we sit quietly beneath its generous canopy touching its gnarled, twisted bark, we allow our own, linear-time-bound preoccupations to subside. We slow down and let our human concept of time unravel.

An online space, connected with an on-land hosting space in Portugal

This online space is part of a long-standing series of writing (with) plants sessions lasting 120 minutes, a format that was born out of humans’ communing with plants. My first session I participated was with pumpkin in Denmark. A long story short: pumpkin got me to Portugal.

Here, now, we get a chance to intersect our practice onsite the African Peace Village, a hosting space for transformational learning practices with plants and the rest of the more than human world in the Barlavento region of the Algarve, in SW Portugal.

The African Peace Village is also an Ecolise Demonstrator space – one of fifteen in Europe. Our migrant-led regeneration project focuses on rebuilding the abandoned farm infrastructure and revitalizing conditions – through renewal and remembering of old relationships – that are required for engaging in regenerative livelihoods, taking up occupations that align with life.

“There is no community without communing” (Nora Bateson)

Now drenched in heat like much of Europe, we spend breakfast, lunch, and siesta under the olive trees, where a mystical breeze keeps us from collapse. Here we reminisce a time in early June (last month) – when we sat together as a bunch of humans under these local giants, founding a “Home for Humanity” within this African Peace Village project, letting the first humans on this land enter our imagination, with the olive’s roots leading us to ever deeper time horizons. 

The lingering is a savouring of simultaneous welcoming, an appetizer of the space that we are creating as the African Peace Village in Algarve, Portugal. In the plant time sense, we can see ourselves as a more-than-human assembly en route, on tour, entangling each other with our stories in contexts, travelling with our roots loose, active, alert to the tickling in our root hairs, receivers of signal, vigilently listening to the space between silence and sound, noticing life touching life as we edge together surfing with plants in spacetime through a galactic soup of wonder and mystery.

We are inviting you to become impregnated by the spirit of the Olive beings, these African ancestors, guardians of the Mediterranean, healers, time tricksters, keeping the score of history flowing through their cooling water pump systems on which we rely in our entirety these days in this village.

Our writing (with) plants accompanies the intention of hosting co-creative spaces for mutual, inter-species, inter-generational, and inter-cultural un- and re-learning, engendering a fuller re-inhabiting of this bioregion. We look toward active restoration of the ecological, spiritual, and social divides in need of mending for a liberated life in a recovering planetary water cycle.

With Olive we stand as African messengers at the edge of Europe. 

How could we honestly and fully embody land-based story without first witnessing these beings as space-makers whose atmospheric aura we inhabit in our hardly fathomable water-based carbon bodies?

Now we will invite the trees to share their own perspective, and if we are lucky, they will speak to us as equals, and they may tell of the times when we were not yet walking as humans – a perspective that I feel is so healing in this time of destruction of all living breathing sanctuaries

… because it could be again that space where we humans have no footing on this Earth

… and because it makes our time here now so special and beautiful an opportunity to relearn the co-breathing through Gaia’s umbilical chord called care for the generations yet unborn. 

Olives constantly entertain the unborn generations. They carry them within. Don’t we? 

Writing(with)plants as a relational practice

O stands for open. Are we to olive trees an open book? What would it read? Can we ask for the voices of olive to pour their light as day vision through our writing onto paper? Like we do drawings into sand? Their dark as clay knowing, breaking news, mobilizing mineral messengers of geologic time, how our veins and hers intertwine? What of trace elements? It is not any olives we are writing with. Some of the ones we are invoking are on Algarvian soil, their lived memories so much more present in what we humans like to generally call the past. 

In the transient days of our African Peace Village, we invite our human roots to travel as deep as the olive memory of this land…

… when forests still ruled over Iberia

… when Catholic popes drew lines across soil

… where ships sailed on so-called voyages of discoveries, stealing African people and enslaving them across the world.

We are on land here west of Lagos, Portugal, where Europe’s first slave market fronted a mass grave onto which today a parking garage is placed, but not even a plaque is engraved. 

We ask grandmother olive to share her stories.

We explore what space feels like with our roots dipping into sumptuous mud? Which memories relax themselves into being? When all we need for the care economy is to roam these lands, for the waters to reclaim their flowing birthright, and reciprocity to regain the ‘upper hand’.

We succumb to the trees holding our gaze in mutual wisdom seeking, breathing, and for the memories of these lands from which we write to re-inhabit the pain and thus the joy, in multiplicity we let go of the clenched fist, jaw, eyesocket, and release the flood of held-back justice we owe ourself as individuals to live to the fullest this life in liberty.

What if the olives held this key, for us this coming week?!

“Olive! You’ve stood here for centuries, watching empires rise and fall. What is the secret of weathering the worst storms? What questions should we ask ourselves so that we can be architects of the emerging futures rather than the victims of the present?”

As humans we listen while the trees share their stories. Radical renewal. Rebirth after disasters. Branches becoming emblems of peace following turmoil, and symbols of peaceful resistance. We may hear stories about the quiet patience required to process trauma and hardship. We invite humans to write leaning their back – if imaginatively – on an olive’s trunk, invoking their own lived memories of soils inhabited to this day, islands visited, branches held, oxygen breathed, mutually sharing each other’s carbon dioxide.

Learning through memories and other stories

My first olive tree I believe I saw on Cyprus. Travelling with my sister, visiting a friend and en route to Israel. Full circle for where I had ever first heard about Olive. Biblical stories, sacred symbolisms. Noah’s Arc witnessing signs of life on land. What will our contexts reveal as we root these hours with olive? 

As we explore various aftermaths and their confluence in the now – we ask questions together. Aware our human imagination has been severely colonized, our connection to source severed, we ask our elders, the olives to re-embrace us, re-entangle us in kinship and play. In light of life.

(In an nutshell…) In an olive pit:

• The duration of the session is two hours.
• An online writing(with)plants session includes an introduction by the host(s), sharing storytelling circles about your relationship with the guest plant and relevant topics, and a creative writing invitation.
• The session happens on Thursday 16 July, two days after New Moon.
• We begin at 2pm Tunis / Lisbon time | 3pm Brussels | 9am Eastern US
• The hosts of this session are: Heide, Konkankoh and Youssef.
• The doula taking care of the zoom space and technicalities is Lisa.
• Bring paper, pen and/ or paint brushes, and a cool drink.
• The session is for free, but we ask you to register beforehand via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/5mga4TG1Tq2cw3ei-FsiuA