This Mutual Shaping
Excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
PRESENCE
I begin. I set things in motion by loving. I am always in you dreaming deeper connection. I am the poetic soul. Rest on a log with me, feel the sun on your back. Let your human body yield into earth. Trust the ground, trust the ground, trust the ground. You are in your work already. You are apprenticed to the exquisitely sensitive perception of beauty. Lean your full weight back into the beauty that is enfolding you. You are already here, and here is enough.
This Mutual Shaping
Leaving the bodywork session with Kris, I continue to feel as if I am channeling, connected to the resonance of that supporting stone that is nourishing all life.
I have a sudden longing to stand in water near to Bdote, the mingling place where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet. Bdote is the sacred place of origin for the Dakota people of Mni Sota Makoce, where mothers would come to give birth so that their children could first touch the ground on the same earth their ancestors had emerged into.1
Bdote is the place “where everything began and (where everything) began changing.”2
Currently a state park used by joggers and bikers oblivious to its significance, the island that is the center of Bdote is both a sacred ceremony site for the Dakota people, and also is the place right outside of which indigenous women, children, and elderly were interned in a concentration camp by my ancestors in 1862 during the time of the Mankato hangings, right before the “Expulsion Act" was passed which “forced the Dakota to give up all remaining land in Minnesota and cancelled all existing treaties the U.S. government had made with them. As of 2020, the law has not been repealed.”3
I've felt a lot of tentativeness about relating to this ceremony place as a settler-colonist on occupied land, deeply conscious of the way my kin's perpetration of violence and banishment on the original people continues to haunt the still breathing mystery of this sacred landscape.
Today, instead of going to the island, I’m pulled instead to the other bank of the river on the side near where my home is, to see if there is a place from there where I can go down to the water in proximity to the confluence of the rivers, but without overstepping into a ceremony place that is not my own.
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