Standing on First Stone
Excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
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REPAIR
The stuck places hold the forgotten gift of rain. You are the medicine catcher, each rupture a portal to be seen by. You linger at the edge, what is stone in you relaxing into air. Feel the contact and pressure of holding, of being held within. Study the medicine, study the innocence embedded in the sorrow. Put forth your own life into others’ unravelling, visit the tangled places, the feral snarls of colliding ghosts, the shame monsters slavering for blood. And bring them water.
Standing on First Stone
(Elements of this essay were originally published in Dark Matter, Women Witnessing Issue #14 and subsequently adapted for my thesis Make Your Body the Prayer.)
Driving through the monolithic asphalt roads and gray concrete underpasses of the city, I think about the nearby spring, how this road was once a forest. Highway 55, a paved over indigenous sacred site covering the roots of ancient oak trees. Right next to here is Mni Owe Sni, Cold Water Spring, one of the first places my ancestors colonized, building a military fort right next to the Dakota people’s sacred waters.1 The pool of the spring is stagnant now, a sign above the water warning that it has been tested for pollution and found to be contaminated.
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