The Shape of Absence
The Shape of Absence
an excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
A few housekeeping notes:
I’d love to know how this writing lands for you as you are reading it. You are welcome to use the comment box within the substack to share any resonances or questions with me.
A note about formatting—the original thesis is designed with a lot of empty space in it so that poetic statements can be metabolized more slowly before moving on to the next thing. I’m not able to create that clarity of aesthetic within this substack, but what I have done is to use divider lines to indicate the areas in which there would have been a page break.
You are invited to use each divider line as an opportunity to pause, take a breath, and let the words reverberate for a little bit before moving on to the next layer of text.
Also, you will see that footnotes start to appear very densely at some point within this essay. In the original thesis the footnotes were on the same page as the text, making it easier to go back and forth, but since here it is a more intensive process to click the footnote link and then return to your place in the essay, I recommend just reading the main text first and then visiting the footnotes afterwards for any places that need clarification.
And now, without further adieu, here is the essay…
The Shape of Absence
And we start without words.
For only the silence listens.
It begins with absence.
A pause. A womb. An empty void.
The hollow of an ancient birch tree.
A ritual in the winter woods
Small stones warmed by cooling hands
Breathing clouding whispers
Imbuing river pebbles
With the feeling of the pain,
The loss, the raging longing.
Each pebble dropped a place of rupture,
A gap of missing nutrients,
A hole where the support should have been.
They say the elders were supposed to be here.
The ones who would have rooted us into the earth,
Tending culture, teaching us to grow.
The fallen shards of stone mark the betrayals:
Numbness and overwhelm. Merging and separation.
Child-birthed into a consensus reality of running away.
Is maturation a form of remembering?
Crossing the threshold between child and adult
How can we become initiated if we don’t even know that we exist?
It begins in absence. Because what is here
Cannot be held by words alone
In the forest, in the ritual, I arrive
At the roots of an ancient birch tree.
Her trunk is wider than my arms.
In her center is a hollow opening.
She listens.
“Oh grandmother, oh my grandmother birch tree,
How do I sing of an absence thousands of years in the making?
I don’t know how to trust other humans anymore. I’m so afraid of the pain.
I don’t believe there can be such a thing as elders in such an attachment-wounded culture. So many of my relationships with teachers and mentors have ended in rupture. In somebody else’s trauma exploding sideways into shards I absorb within my own body.
I feel like I am always doing something wrong, always feeling too much, wanting more than anyone can give me. I feel like the trueness of my existing is never actually welcome.
I am so rarely at ease in my own body. I am so distanced from the feeling of home.
I never knew my father, his family of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine. A whole half of myself I still don’t have access to, so many recipes I never tasted, traditions I didn’t get to experience. I don’t know any of my people’s ancestral stories of diaspora.
My mom’s family is so fragmented. Protestant settlers who came on the Mayflower, German and Swedish immigrants. Not a single lullaby passed down in the original language of their cultures. So much hidden trauma and abuse fracturing the experience of intimacy.
My people complacent in the nightmares of land-stealing treaties, indigenous starvation and genocide. My people entangled in witch trials, Roman invasions, colonized again and again until they became the colonizers.
How can I ever begin to feel myself when the wounds my people carry—impacts given and received—remain unfelt?
How can I learn how to mature when the culture that is capable of holding my maturation no longer exists?
What is there left to feel held by?”
This didn’t used to be the edge, says the Birch Tree.
Ontological-Epistemological Interlude
Note to reader: for this and all other interludes, it’s recommended to read the main text first and then to visit the footnotes afterwards for clarifications. This is a dense seed-packet of information that I intend to expand upon and create more breathing space within during subsequent edits.
For most of human ancestry, original cultures have perceived the self as a fruiting body emerging out of an ancestral-ecological field of relationship.
This field is the foundation of reality. Its unshakeable nature is an acceptance of what is, nothing is exiled from it, everything belongs.
This field has been called by many names.
In this moment I will call this field: Primordial Nourishment.
The field of Primordial Nourishment is accessed within each person by an attunement with their “center,”
an internal convergence of relational fields that allows for creative responsiveness with the wider ecosystem.Learning to perceive this felt sense of discerning center is a trans-generational maturational process.
When in “conditions of vitality,”
a child coalesces a sense of center through mediated experiences of Primordial Nourishment that flow through the nervous systems of their adult caregivers as if from a portal.We learn our belonging by being held by beings who are also held.
This isn’t the first time that a tree has spoken to me.
Years earlier, another winter in the same Abenaki land in the Vermont woods, another residency for a graduate program at Goddard College.
Another birch tree, hardly older than a sapling, bringing me to a standstill to admire the swirls of its peeling bark, the delicate patterns of moss across its torso. It was also shedding skin, like me, in a process of metamorphosis.
That day I was in a ritual too, coming out of an intense period of depression as I began to turn towards the immense backlog of unmetabolized trauma that I carried from my ancestors. The year before, the yearning for a different sense of woven belonging had drawn me towards participation in community grief rituals, through which I began to feel the sense of the relational webbing that was so absent in my culture.
The grief rituals spoke to a bone-deep intuition in me that human emotions are not meant to be held within human bodies, they are nourishment for the wider field of life.
Within weekend workshops, gathered with groups of strangers, I began to touch into the fractured places within my lineage, caressing the wounds with breath and sound, held within ritual containers of rhythm and song. Always after those delvings into such intense intimacy, I would have the sense of having received the basic social nutrients of collective ritual that my soul so deeply longed for.
When I was traveling after ritual experiences, away from my “ordinary” habitual patterns, perceptual cracks would open in my sense of “reality.” I would have experiences of nature speaking through my body, other beings speaking into the moments of stillness when I’d drop into the felt sense of my contact with the earth, speaking into the place in the center of me from which poetry bubbles up to be heard, sending me embodied knowings about the shape of what my people had lost.
That day in the Vermont woods, as I made to turn away from the birch sapling, its branch tapped on my shoulder, gesturing towards a mitten I had accidentally dropped on the ground at its roots. I turned back for the mitten and realized the tree wanted me to stay longer, to listen.
I sank to the earth there, resting my back against its solid trunk, my thighs cooling against the snow as I felt the roots spreading below us, a neural network rippling outwards across the forest.
Never forget you are connected to us, said the sapling.
Ontological-Epistemological Interlude
When in contact with the field of Primordial Nourishment, bodies have access to a nuanced range of expression from deeply resting into the support of gravity to playing within the spaciousness of buoyant expansion.
Once the nervous system learns how to access a coherent relationship with this field, through the sense of discerning center that can modulate intensity, it is possible to grow the capacity of the system to integrate experiences of threat.
As children, our dependence on human relational fields for survival means that when the adults around us do not have the capacity to drop into their felt sense impulses or the fields of wider body support, our learning nervous systems will attempt to prevent relational abandonment by limiting how much we are able to feel love as the primordial foundation of reality, cutting us off from the felt sense of Primordial Nourishment.
Without the felt sense of the nested system, the holding does not carry through the same kind of flow and is flat. What can’t feel itself being held becomes a closed system.
Ecological culture ruptures when the cultural technologies for nurturing relationship with the wider body of the earth are not able to be passed on to the next generation, leaving trauma with no way to be metabolized by wider elemental forces. Trauma begins to accumulate in individual bodies instead, over time shaping a culture based on a pervasive sense of nervous system threat dissociated from an awareness of ecological belonging.
Left untended for generations, the accumulation of unmetabolized emotional impact becomes calcified into Domination Fields of institutionalized violence and oppression.
Although the experiences of being spoken to by nature beings were deeply meaningful to me, when I returned from traveling and re-entered the ordinary reality of my life in Minnesota, my perceptual system would clamp shut again into numbness and distraction.
Within my daily life, it was often impossible to remember the felt sense of my connectedness.
I would frequently disappear into periods of deep depression as I realized how much of an absence there was of vital relational process within my own life.
I wrote my MFA thesis on the intersection between grief rituals and ecological imagination.
But when I began to facilitate grief rituals myself, the emotional intensity became too hard for me to integrate back into the experience of daily life. Even though part of the training process for grief ritual facilitation involved creating a central altar and calling in the support of the directions, my embodied experience as the facilitator was still a lot of pressure and overwhelm, as if my system had unconsciously learned to hold on to other people’s emotions even when the intention was to release them back to the earth.
My discomfort with grief rituals reached its peak when a friend and I co-facilitated a ritual during a weekend workshop and had a relationship rupture between us in which seemingly small differences led to both of our deep attachment woundings being activated in a very intense way that we didn’t have the relational support to metabolize.
Around the same time, I had also had a rupture with someone who I saw as an elder, which amplified for me the utter impossibility of colonial cultures being able to embody such concepts as “eldership” and “initiation”
in any kind of healthy way while still struggling with such an intensity of attachment wounding and the utter lack of developmental modelling of how to meet experiences of nervous system activation without destroying the threads of relationship.I chose to stop facilitating grief rituals and focus on learning about the nervous system. Which is how I found myself in a ritual in a Vermont forest for the second time, at a residency for my second graduate program at Goddard College, this time in Embodiment Studies, listening to the voice of a grandmother birch tree.
This didn’t used to be the edge, says the Birch Tree,
standing at the boundary between footpath and forest.
You make your own threshold by seeing the context.
Open yourself to the beauty that is already here.
Ontological-Epistemological Interlude
The maturational crossing from childhood into adulthood is learned coalescing that sense of center through oscillation between mediated and direct experiences of Primordial Nourishment. The shift into primarily direct relationship with Primordial Nourishment is called by some cultures: Initiation.
As adults with agency to continue the interrupted processes of maturation, we can learn to perceive the field of Primordial Nourishment through the mediation of skilled practitioners who are attuned both to their own internal experience and to the wider relational fields which support them.
As we internalize the sense of being supported externally, we can also begin to learn to practice sensing into the present moment impulses of our systems while we are alone, shifting to a direct relationship with Primordial Nourishment that we are learning to sense into at anytime as the basic foundation of reality. In that way we can learn to internally expand our awareness so that we are simultaneously holding and being held.
This oscillation between mediated and direct experiences of the field of Primordial Nourishment supports our process of maturation into a widened capacity to relate to experiences of change, allowing us to metabolize our reactivity to threat and deeply nourishing our systems through a harmonizing of impulses for rest and play. This process of maturation, which continues throughout the full span of our lives as a never ending exploration, opens up nuanced possibilities for Creative Response-ability
on behalf of the ecosystems we are embedded within.In the book The Runes: A Deeper Journey, Kari Tauring describes the birch tree, Berkana,
as the symbol for the sacred cycle of birth-life-death that holds us all.Ecologically, birch is the tree of regeneration. When the old forest is cleared of hardwoods by lumbering, fire or ice flows, birch is the first to return. Because of its ability to give birth to a new habitat, the birch is called the Mother tree…
Forest researcher Suzanne Simard tells the story of how, in old growth ecosystems, the oldest trees in the forest help the young trees to thrive. From the moment the young trees unfurl their roots and begin to seek relationship with other relatives in the soil, these Mother Trees reach out into communication with them, passing on nutrients until the young trees are old enough to begin to give back as well as receive. The cultural wisdom of the mother trees might be one reason why old growth forests are able to create their own microclimate, the trees becoming a larger organism that collectively modulates the temperature the ecosystem needs to thrive.
On this day in the forest, I stand with empty pockets, a trail of scattered river pebbles in my wake, as this elder birch tree speaks again in silence.
Continue to follow the ground,
Let it shift you, let it change you.
Like a stone thrown over water,
you will find yourself in the throwing.
At a time in my culture where we are lacking a human equivalent of mother trees, lacking the cultural webbing that will support our maturation, perhaps nature beings can help to hold that space of relationality that my people have lost.
Perhaps Grandmother Birch Tree can guide my journey as I undertake my own initation, learning to come into deeper intimacy with my body, inviting a curiosity about what a kind of relating would look like that honors the wild ecosystem within each of us. That honors that part that is still connected. That part that senses, that moves from the river beneath the river, the mycelial root system that creates the microclimate of the forest. The part of us that still knows how to feel that we belong. The part of us that claims our existence here, in this moment, in this context, our feet fully touching the earth.
In this moment, I feel the impulse to offer some sort of vow to the spirit of the birch tree.
As if she is inviting me into an undertaking that is in need of a solemnization.
Around my neck for several years I have carried a sorrow pouch, created on an island that many of my ancestors came from, on a thousand- year-old farm on Dartmoor where I spent a night in vigil near the re-creation of a neolithic roundhouse.
I made one of my first prayers to my ancestors during that vigil on Dartmoor, crying out to the moon in rage and grief at the loss of initation, at the loss of eldership. Enraged at the brokenness my ancestors had created where once had been a culture.
Inside the sorrow pouch is the carving of a turtle out of black stone. A turtle that I am just beginning to meet as a symbol in my own life for the slowness I need in order to drop into my body and listen.
In future years, I will come into much deeper relationship with the mentorship of turtles, spending multiple summers at sit spots by marshes singing to the small heads peeking out of the water at me, ancient bodies sunning themselves on logs. I will live in a trailer park right on a turtle nesting ground where mothers travel from water to land to nestle their babies into the womb of the earth, and where I have the privilege of carrying two newly hatched turtles, shells still soft, across a manicured lawn to the edge of the Mississippi river backwater in an effort to protect them from lawnmowers. But none of this has happened yet. For now the turtle is just a drawing on my wall, a metaphor that is shaping my relationship to time, and the stone carving that nestles into the sorrow pouch around my neck.
Removing the pouch, I approach the birch tree, running my hands along her wrinkled bark, pressing my ear to feel the pulse of sap inside her torso.
Into the hollow of Grandmother Birch Tree, I place the sorrow pouch, with the request that she hold this core part of me as I mature.
I give the tree my gratitude.
I intend to come retrieve the pouch in six months when I’m next in Vermont.
As I turn away from the tree, snow begins to swirl around me in thick flakes and there is a shifting in the air, with a surrealness as if there has been a shift in the fabric of reality…
Returning to Academia
Expelled out of this time-out-of-time within ritual, I am back on the college campus of Goddard College, during the residency for my graduate school program in Embodiment Studies.
My time in the woods has made me late to my advising meeting, where my advisor Lise Weil is waiting for us to share a writing prompt on what our “problem statement” is for our practice, while giving ourselves “permission to rage.” I have transposed the prompt into my own form of embodied practice, finding my “problem statement” by speaking aloud to the forest during this ritual, and I hope my advisor will not be annoyed by my reinterpretation.
As I walk to my advising meeting, the college newly blanketed by snow, it is as if the campus has suddenly become a ghost town. No one is here. Entering the door of Manor House where Lise’s office is, I am again struck by the eerie quiet, and the fact that I see no people at all. No one is in my advisor’s office. No one is in the building. It really feels as if I have stepped into a dream. For a surreal moment, I wonder if I am the only human left on the earth.
Eventually, walking back to the main building, I discover that all the other humans are gathered in one place having a meeting about the impending snow storm, that the residency will be ending days early because of it. I travel home to Minnesota.
Immediately after I arrive home, the pandemic begins and that same kind of eerie quiet I felt during those first few moments after the ritual seems to begin to pervade the entire culture. During the pandemic, my graduate program moved to online residencies. And I have not returned to Vermont in the three years since.
The Practice Begins Closest In
In the past, the only times that I had heard the land speaking was while I was traveling. Through a lot of my early twenties, I travelled, for workshops and trainings, to places I would stay for short intensive amounts of time.
And my relationship with my body, my creativity, my spiritual practice was similar too. I could connect away from home, something about the intensive immersions outside of ordinary life opening the limits of my perception, allowing me to engage more deeply with the land beings around me, with my own aliveness. But then coming back into ordinary life, to my daily patterns, so much would seem dull again.
But the pandemic changed all that. In the isolation, in the staying put, suddenly I needed to find the vitality meeting me where I was. No more running away.
So I began to do something I’d never done before. I began to make deeper relationship with the land around where I lived in Minnesota, sensing outwards towards the ecosystem through a series of sit spots, to listen for the voices there. And I began a consistent embodiment practice of turning towards my own system to learn more about how I am in that moment.
I have learned so much about relationship through this time of isolation.
Alongside my solitary practice, I was also finding a paradoxical amount of increased connection through participating in group embodiment practices and 1-1 sessions over zoom. I found that when I practiced with other bodies, even through the mediation of the computer screen, I still had the feeling of the energetic connection and perceptual deepening that I would have during the weekend workshops that I used to leave home to travel to.
My eco-somatic practice has become the focus of my graduate research, primarily through learning from Dare Carrasquillo and Larissa Kaul of Animist Arts, Liz Koch of Core Awareness, Kris Nourse of Body Being, and Bree Greenberg Benjamin of the Possibility Program, who all have a similar orientation (through multi-textured approaches) of meeting the nervous system though nuanced attention to the animal body, allowing sensation to be a portal into a sense of embodied support from the wider body of land, deep- time ancestors, and Primordial Nourishment as the container within which emotions can metabolize in the just- right timing for the particular context.
These parallel practices of deepening perception both inwards and outwards, across solitude and community, all within the context of my immediate home life began to ripple through my sense of self, troubling the edges of what was perceivable, of the shape I thought a human should be.
At the sit spots, I began to play the places in me where my “human” bends and shimmers into other shapes of ecological perception, channeling nature beings, deep time ancestors, and the soft animal of my body
during times that I was sitting with the land. Over time the channeled writing began to shape itself into poems, which then coalesced into an animist oracle deck.After three years of practice around this, what I have glimpsed throughout this research are the moments of opening to the sense of a wider body beyond the human, to the rhythm of relational process that invites in new possibilities for existing. I have tasted the moments of that energetic shifting when all the beings in the system can stretch and dance together in ways that allow for more savoring of breath, relaxing into gravity, noticing deeper layers of beauty.
What we call a “nervous system state shift”
is an ecosystem phenomenon, a relational process of what systems poet Nora Bateson calls “mutual learning.” The shift is simultaneously inside of this moment and in all the moments rippling out from here, a webbing of contextual processes that meet and entangle, through their coalescence inviting in a different form of perception to emerge.Grandmother Birch Tree still holds the sorrow pouch in her hollow as I write these words. Or at least I think she does. If the tree has not been cut down. If the pouch has not disintegrated over time. If it hasn’t been found by somebody else. But whether or not the other beings are still physically there, the spirit of the relationship remains. My experiences of the past three years, the ways my life has shapeshifted, the skins I have shed, and the subtle growing of intimacy both with my own body and with the ecosystem of relationships sprouting around me, all of these have taken place within the holding of this ritual with Grandmother Birch Tree. This thesis has emerged from our encounter and I am deeply grateful for her holding of me as I learn.
Ontological-Epistemological Interlude 1
In the Emerald podcast episode titled “Animism is Normative Consciousness,” Joshua Scheri describes how “for 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed and interacted with a world they saw and felt to be animate.” Francesca Mason Boring and Darcia Narvaez also speak of similar time frames.
Including: “the hoop of life,” (Pat McCabe), “biointelligence” (Liz Koch), “Absolute Nature” (Larissa Kaul), “Holy Mother” (Dare Carasquillo), and “the universal indigenous field” (Francesca Mason Boring).
This awareness of Primordial Nourishment is gestured towards but not wholly encompassed by contemporary interpersonal neurobiology through terms such as “rest and digest,” “ventral vagal,” and the “social engagement system,”(see Badenoch, Dana, Narvaez, Peyton) which are all attempts to describe the nervous system capacity for a nuanced moment-to-moment responding to the relational fields that hold us.
Indigenous psychologist Eduardo Duran identifies the center as “the seventh sacred direction” which is “the point where all directions meet.” Conceptual artist Liz Koch describes the center as the convergence place of all the relational fields of energy that meet within the primal core of the organism.
A quote from Nora Bateson in her essay on Aphanipoiesis.
In systemic constellations this is referred to as the flow of love that passes between the generations.
Ontological-Epistemological Interlude 2
This contact generates the sense of an ordinary ease with existing, which Larissa Kaul describes as the nervous system state of “relaxed alive” and Dare Carrasquillo calls “the vital space.” Impulses for embodied expression that arise from this field, also called “biointelligence” by Core Awareness practitioner Liz Koch, can be trusted as resources for nourishing one’s system and for metabolizing experiences of stuckness or charge.
In systemic constellations, the “flow of love” passing between the generations can be interrupted by experiences of unmetabolized trauma, resulting in systemic pressure that reverses the polarity of the family system, extracting from the youngest, most vulnerable members instead of nurturing them.
Which I think has something to do with that if the adult isn't receiving nourishment from the wider system, they try to get it from the child instead, and the child’s erotic life force contracts in self-protection.
“Domination Fields” is a term I’ve been playing with to describe the ways that ancestral trauma bodies become enmeshed in the cultural institutions that are mediating our survival.
The grief ritual form I learned from Azul Valerie Thome and Francis Weller is a transplant from the Dagara people of Burkina Faso through Malidoma and Sobunfu Some. There's lots of complexity around what it means to transplant a ritual process from an original culture with many aspects of kinship and ecological relationality still intact, into such an attachment-wounded colonial culture as our own where our nervous systems are shaped so differently and the backlog of unmetabolized ancestral trauma is thousands of years old. I’ll write more about that some other time.
Concepts I felt very connected to after learning about them from Francis Weller.
Ontological-Epistemological Interlude 3
Francis Weller’s Alchemy of Initiation audio series has been a main shaper of my thoughts around this.
Contemporary neurobiologists call this the “co-regulation” that begins to train our nervous systems into an ability to access the “Social Engagement System.” But it is more than that. There’s a portal or an aperture into deeper forms of perception here. The same ventral vagal nerve that we use to connect to other humans also allows us to deepen our relationship with our own bodies, and with the earth, the ancestors, and the sacred. The so-called “Social Engagement System” is describing that discerning center inside of us where the space opens up for connection, while still staying balanced with its own sense of autonomy and choice. This is the part of our systems that can work with and integrate subtle energies, seeing wider context, and actively imagining other ways of being. From here we can witness the internal cues that we're going into a state of defensiveness and listen to what is needed to move the energy through our bodies so that we can return to connection. What psychologists call the “Social Engagement System” is the site of an indigenous presence with the earth—it is our nervous system opening to the relational perception of the web of life.
I later learned that Donna Harraway uses a similar formulation of word play around “Multi-Species Response-Ability” in her writing. Both of us are playing with the embedded meaning within the word: “the ability to respond.” Tyson Yunkaporta has a similar idea of humans as the “custodial species.”
The Norse spelling is technically Berkanan, but I resonate more with the feminized version of the rune.
The farm and roundhouse belonged to Dartmoor artist and ritual guide Carolyn Hillyer.
Traveling to the land of my ancestors in England, I made prayers at the roots of a thousand- year- old yew tree and sang in an apple orchard every day for a week.
Throughout my time at Goddard, my embodiment practice has been called many things: Inner Elder, Bone Knowing, Symmathesy, but always has been about a similar attunement to the questions: What is happening inside of me? What does my system need to be nourished?
Thank you, Mary Oliver.
The deck is called Long Body Prayers: An Animist Oracle. You will see these oracle cards spread throughout this thesis at the beginning of each of the 12 essays and the creation of the oracle deck itself is described in more detail in the essay “The Absence is Part of the Teaching.” I have been in ongoing conversation with the oracle cards about playing with them as the vertebrae for the essays I have been writing, which eventually want to become a full-length book. I have been using the oracle cards as divination for my writing process. This thesis is therefore “half a book” made out of the 12 essays I have completed so far accompanied by their oracle cards.
The term “state shift” is one used by Stephen Porges and others in the Polyvagal Theory community. Interestingly, I learned from somatic practitioner Amber Elizabeth Gray that the term was originally used by her to describe trance states and the perceptual shifting that can alter the nervous system during ritual.
A few housekeeping notes:
I’d love to know how this writing lands for you as you are reading it. You are welcome to use the comment box within the substack to share any resonances or questions with me.
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