The Absence is Part of the Teaching
An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
Interested in learning more about the animist oracle deck described in this essay? You can visit Shante’ website at www.earthpoetedgeweaver.com/oracle.
Revelation
Underneath the underneath is the place where realities connect, where gravity curls inwards to embrace remembering, where you will know the clear tangibility of truth only through its intersections with others’ risking story. Narrative disintegrates into this primal sea awash with storm-wrecked certainties and decomposing paradoxes. The truth is in the in-between, vibrating between intricate patterns of crossed threads, order springing from the touched places resonating across distance into trust.
The Absence is Part of the Teaching
Reading aloud a sentence, I hold onto the felt sense of it as I pour paint across the thick paper, moving the viscous liquid with my brush in sensuous flicks. You get to be loved here, in this enoughness, this listening… The painting is like a dance. Each sentence a difference angle, swirling in pinks and grays… meet me where I am at home, give me space to unfold… as I speak each poem I turn, moving my body around the table where the canvas rests, mixing green with amber, speak to me with all that crawls haltingly out of familiar ways… Sometimes I sing, a low humming as my brush swishes oranges in circular motions, the lingering resonance of a lullaby.
When I am finished, I stand back in the stillness of my studio space, taking in the painting.
Afternoon sun streams in the windows and I hear the subtle murmuring of the maple leaves outside. Continually turning the canvas as I read each of the poems, I have hardly been noticing what I am creating. Now, looking down at the finished painting, a landscape unfolds in myriad textures before me, emeralds and lavenders furling open a seedpod, dazzling azure water pouring down from the green-gold marsh reeds, while below bright russet sparks travel their own journey within black soil. My channeled poetry has become an ecosystem.
It is at this moment that the phrase Long Body Prayers arrives as the name for the oracle deck I am in the process of creating.
I have been using the term Long Body frequently in my practice as a way to describe my approach to ecological perception. I first heard the phrase in an essay by trickster-poet Bayo Akomolafe:
The ‘human’ isn’t a fixed thing at all, ready, sure, already there; it’s…replete with loss and disappearances and monsters and secretions and microbial transgressions. ‘It’ is an undiscovered continent with an outline that is markedly different from the shape we are used to. Not drawing the line too closely around the humanoid shape we are used to allows us to see a vast body…what the Iroquois⁄Haudenosaunee call the ‘long body’. But every ‘body’ has ecological consequences and makes its own world.1
Feeling into the phrase Long Body, I imagine my animal organism as a kind of fruiting body, the tip of an entire cascade of roots, sensing into the wider ecosystem of relationships, inextricably entangled with all of the beings that sustain my aliveness.
My core practice is about moving from this attunement with the relational field of the Long Body, learning to align with the same kind of networked perception through which trees create a microclimate that nourishes the forest.
But when the oracle deck that I am in the process of making wants to be called Long Body Prayers, I realize that I do not actually know the relational context through which the term Long Body emerged.
I began to research the term’s origins, trying to find the original words that Long Body was translated from and what mythology was attached to the term within Haudenosaunee culture.
I search for several weeks and am amazed to find almost nothing on the internet. In all the citations of the phrase online, nowhere has there been a description of how white academics came to learn this concept from the Haudenosaunee people, an absence that effectively invisibilizes the process of indigenous knowledge transmission and the particular cultural context from which the term emerged.
Besides Bayo Akomolafe, all of the people I see using the term Long Body are white. All of them cite other white scholars as their sources for the term. The furthest back I traced the phrase is an essay from 1986, “Psi and the Phenomenology of the Long Body,” which cites an earlier university lecture from a Dr. Joseph Lyons. That’s where the trail runs dry. I try writing to the Haudenosaunee confederacy website and several other indigenous scholars but I do not hear back from them.
Eventually I turn to my community of animist practitioners to seek their advice for this conundrum. My teacher Dare Carrasquillo writes back:
all words are spirits that point to spirits, these spirits that point to spirits also come from spirits (i.e. the original receivers/creators of the words, the persons that heard the words and shared them in books etc). Therefore, all words can be related with as spirits directly (spirits who have many relations and many "parents"), which can allow a "new" direct experience/dream of contact/encounter that is “yours."
It takes me a while to get up the courage to enact this implicit suggestion.
In the meantime, I cut up the oracle painting into twenty four squares and I write the channelled poetry on the back of each card.
There are eighteen poems, three from each of the six beings who have been guiding me.2
A fourth card for each being remains blank, and I practice channeling poetry for it as I complete the deck, tuning in to the presence of each guide and hand writing an oracle poem raw in the moment. Underneath the underneath is the place where realities connect…the words emerge without editing the flow.
Eventually I realize that I can do the same thing with the term Long Body. Curling up in my studio, I attune to the place inside of me where I hear the voices of my guides, and I listen for what wants to come through my hand and onto the blank expanse of page:
The Long Body is the gestation of soul, the wider unfolding outside of the human womb. The Long Body is the tree within the seed. The imprint of forest giving birth to new life, the energies and shadows that sustain your remembering, the full cycle—the journey of water gushing forth underground and back to the source.
This was always known, whispered by flames. It only came into being as a concept to be given to the ones who didn’t have it anymore. A perception of the frozen absences —an insight into those who had forgotten their own belonging. It was already a translation, whispering a memory into the bones.
Of course the transmission is invisible. It is one of those portal places, the absence that both obscures and illuminates the pattern in itself. Why cry for the loss of this direct knowledge? Maybe it was never yours in the first place. As soon as it passed it transmogrified into the shape that was needed.
Wolves devouring the carcass, it is here to meet a hunger. The word was always an offering, a prayer for remembering, a seed to plant in the soil of your own becoming.
What emerges for me out of this journey is the knowing that the absence the Long Body carries with it is also a part of its teaching.3
Over the next few days, I notice that I can feel this absence all around me, a palpable energetic field haunting the materials that sustain my life.
I realize that part of the dissociative spell of my kin’s ancestral trauma is the creation of absences that trail with us everywhere. Nora Bateson speaks about this pattern of dissociated extraction in a conversation with Stephen Gilligan on YouTube:
My clothing, probably my breakfast, most of the technology and furniture in this room, the way each of us got here, all of this—is made possible through exploitation and extraction. The institutions of our world have allowed this to happen. That is our moment. This has been true for decades, maybe centuries, but there’s an acute sense that the time is up. And that it’s not comfortable, it’s not do-able to continue in that way. But to pay attention to it causes an unbearable broken heart that has the risk of debilitating the creativity to respond.
I dump the twenty-four completed oracle cards onto the table.
Even this table, I realize, a thrift store find from a few months ago, is an object displaced from context. I do not know who built this table, the kind of tree it’s made from, or the specific texture of that tree’s bark against my hand.
Instead of a nuanced specificity of context, relationship in my people’s culture is delivered through an industrial scale dissociative complexity, outsourcing survival to supply chains—leaving little space for response-ability in a tangle of extractions so massive there is no way for me to respond to all of the impacts that my existence is making on this earth.
How do you notice an absence? A dissociation? How do you even begin to notice that a gap is there where a relationship should have been?
I spend hours trying to reassemble the painting from the fragmented oracle deck, finding the places where the edges touch, pink streaks of softness brushing against the vibrant green of a burst open seedpod. Finally, the painting is whole again beneath my hands.
This quote was originally published in Bayo’s essay “I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist.”
These six beings, who I channeled at my sit spot while communing with the local ecosystem are:
“Wild Land Dreaming” (a quote from Martin Shaw)—the living body of the land who is holding me
Four ancestor beings who are aligned with my four main ancestral lineages (I met them as ancestral guides during Ancestral Medicine journeyings): “Medicine Carrier,” “Life Praiser,” “Mycelial Weaver,” and “Threshold Guardian.”
“The Soft Animal of My Body” (a quote from Mary Oliver)—my sensitive body in its processes of perception and attunement
These six beings began as specific guides to me but have also morphed into the more archetypal relational textures of eco-somatic support that I now play with in my practice as Contact, Choice, Connection, Context, Coherence, and Creativity.
This is in alignment with the fourth texture of eco-somatic support: Context. Something shifts in a system when there is the ability to sense wider lineages of relationship. Context is another quality that Deb Dana describes as necessary for bringing the nervous system into a felt sense of safety.