our stories are our map back to self, & all of us are map makers
a decade ago, at 21, I had returned to my hometown in southern Alberta from a gap year around so-called Australia. I was freshly sober, after years of polysubstance use, and a few years out of a tumultuous, painful and abusive relationship. While it would take me another year to fully overcome my substance use, this time in my life is a touchstone for the beginning of my healing journey, of returning again and again to centre, to heart, to the hearth of this home / body.
Like many of us, I have experienced my body not feeling like my own, I have been viciously stripped of my autonomy and sovereignty by strangers and people I was in relationships with. When I committed to a life lived sober at 22, the trauma and pain of these abuses was no longer dulled. I felt it all.
Inspired by artists such as Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Birdee & Corwin Prescott, I began taking photographs of myself, bare body and soul, deepening my relationship to the sacred lands and waters I occupied. What emerged was a remembering, a blood memory of ancestral somatic practices of self and sovereignty. This was the beginning of my (re)storying, a reclamation.
basking in the light makes shadows darker, deeper. in these deep shadows, my creativity bloomed, a fire in the belly. I wrote, poem after poem, searing story after story, I ran, wild and brave through brush, bog and bramble. Camera shutter capturing the stippling of skin, the ache deep in the bone, the alchemy of pouring out my grief onto the land to digest and transform. life/death/life, connecting to a sacred, ancient cycle that is our birthright to know deeply and dearly. Shapeshifting from small pup to snarling wolf, fur slick with blood and burr. paws beating against earth, the heartbeat of the mother, the one who knows. wise mama wolf. she is a beloved guardian of my spirit. apart of me,
of all of us.
Throughout this journey with her I have been hospitalized, my pain story medicalized, medicated, & minimized. being diagnosed with complex PTSD in 2018 helped me for a time, however, the concept of a diagnoses stored all the grief in my individual body, keeping me stuck in a state where I could not sing myself back into fullness, where I could not connect fully into the collective.
. This grief, these experiences of corrupted power and oppression, the invisibilization and attempted erasure of queer, non-binary, trans, two-spirit and femme bodies and spirits is collective, it is a living history we have entered into, inherited. There are many stories, across cultures, the Well Maidens, the Wolf Mother, for some of us the sounds of these stories are forgotten, but they are always felt.
We feel it all. Across time, across spaces, we feel it, the land feels it, for what is done to the land is done to our bodies. We feel her, we feel them, and they feel us.
let us follow our storylines back to centre, let us make maps, make meaning, build bridges to decolonial worlds together. let us (re)weave and remember what has always been there.
to reclaim and believe in our belonging
This work of mine, of ours, is an answer to the Call. The Call of the Wild ones, the Wise ones, the Wolf
inside us all.
