I always knew I was going to save the world.
I was born with this kind of conviction. A knowing deep down within my belly that stirred every time I thought of the future. It’s as if I had always known how to be spiritually ready and understood how to navigate the world’s collapsing, and thus its eventual regeneration, its courageous recreation in a purer, fairer image of itself.
This knowledge was instilled in me via the cosmos and it has been pulsing through me via generations, prolonging my childhood cruelty to teach me lessons on death. I had to learn to foster myself while I held the entire universe in my tiny body, yet rejection and its sinister impact left me ravaged again and again by my circumstances. I was a child of abuse, genocide, and mass migration. To believe in myself, I had to break out of every ugly constraint that had ever held me back.
I had always been drawn to Kali, the goddess of the ancestral lands I came from, the destroyer of all worlds, who was also Mother Earth. I was obsessed with her iconography as a child, tongue out, brazen and loud, a look of madness on her face with the severed head of a man limpid, dead, dripping with blood as she held the head of his roots with her fisted grip. It was the carnage that was illustrious to a child who had seen much violence, so Kali’s severity was something I understood. It’s something I saw in my mother, who was also the destroyer of worlds, my world. Yet she was also the metaphorical fertile ground, a place of rebirth, the sacred soil of life and my creation. I understood through both these symbolisms, that life could occur after death, and that I could survive, we could survive… anything.
To know that you are going to save the world is quite a knowledge to possess, yet, I held onto it and fostered the wisdom I was given to let it guide me from one decision to the next. You must embody the teaching for people to trust your knowledge. So, I remained steadfast all those years and worked on myself daily to break myself from the binds of my own story. Suffering is the makings of the mind, I told myself. And I knew this because I understood young that I had to become the bodhisattva, there was no other way.
All I’ve wanted my whole life was to be enlightened. And, I don’t know why I was given such clarity on how to do it, but I knew, even as a little child, that my mission was set. I was here to help liberate us all. But I had to start with myself first, it started with me. So that’s how I began my attempt at nirvana, in this lifetime.
Obsessed since childhood, I found solace in Jeanne d’Arc, my comrade in divine spirit. I related to her understanding of urgency and the power of using your energy for God. It felt that those two things felt inextricable inside of me, the urgency and the spirit,m. I knew there was something bigger, beyond me here that was worth my attention. I was here to teach people that. To remind them that there was another way, a different way to do what we had been taught to foster.
We were once soulless, forced to lose our connection to Earth and spirit, through tactics of dehumanization, humans lost their perspectives and their values for the sake of empire and capitalism. I began to understand that we collectively needed to acknowledge this was our sickness, but the cure was simple: connecting to the land was the anecdote to depression, connecting to the land was the anecdote to oppression. It felt, and became, inevitable for us to see the reality this way. So we had to teach the people to choose distraction less. If there was a commitment to bear witness to the truth, then we could bring people to empathy again. And so, that’s what we did. We had to remind people that distraction was a curse in consciousness. If you have but one life, why waste it away? Why not use that energy for your community, for your well-being, for your education? People got used to the ways pettiness is wielded and they forgot there’s something powerful in caring for each other, in giving more, in trying every day to be more human, kinder and more present.
I was never a hateful child, so watching all the places people will go in their minds to fit a narrative that is usually vast and illusory, and then hate based on internal deliberations (that may or may not be wrong) has been a shocking enterprise. Nothing is interesting in spinning the same wheel of fortune, the same fate of your ancestors, the same grooves, the same stories, the same betrayals, the same “do you know what they said to me…” Simply, no. I wanted a story my mother didn’t write. One where I could be a valiant, principled person, as well.
I had studied closely the extraordinary mycelium, the networks of circuity, and the habitual cycle of life, death, and rebirth. In every species outside of humans, there is no austerity tied to the idea of death, and there is no sentimentality, you simply are and then one day you are no more. Death was a cycle, just as important as life itself. I saw how there was a freedom there, in just being. In accepting the totality of it all. Humans lacked this humility when it came to death, yet it seemed like a fundamental part of living.
Similarly, seeing how lichen could be many bodies in one lifetime, fungi with its multi-purpose use, also convinced me that there was profundity here, in the ugliness of it, in the decay of it, there was still life – incredible, potent, life. There was also beauty there, sensuality, a ripeness ready to have a new beginning, pulsing, waiting, enduring. Pruning in the edges to transform into the next stage. Witnessing this on trees, but especially every morning as I opened the fungi-covered lid of my two-toned plastic compost bin, I saw there was the possibility of a different narrative, one that we hadn’t allowed in human consciousness. One where decay was a new beginning, a place of rebirth and change, a space to create and envision something different, something new, something changed.
I also saw this in the ability to live amidst and amongst nature, a natural step towards degrowing from the peril of over-arching capitalism. What I knew we needed, above anything, was to begin to extract ourselves from our mechanical lives, and start re-introducing the natural world’s radiance and beauty, so that we could understand how vital it is for us to protect her. Encouraging us to start individually doing all that we could to motivate that connection.
I believe apathy is contagious. But I also think, like Mencius once said, “A sense of shame is the beginning of integrity.” Yet shame is lacking in a society that takes no heed to reflect on itself. You have to inspire people to be courageous. This was the beginning of a huge transition, the moment people understood that there was something sexy in caring, that devotion had its own pleasure principles, and that the ying and yang of giving/taking receiving/offering was a natural order that couldn’t be forgotten, something would be liberated within us. Not everything is a power play or a forced extraction. Two entities can also find common ground to coexist. There was something erotic in being, in the ritual of it all. Yet, we had been forced as meaning making people to become devoid of meaning, and therefore we had lost our lust for life. Truth is tough, you can only take so much until the rumble of the Earth begins to shake. It was about time that the end had to come to a halt.
Facing consumption allows one to consider their actual presence on Earth outside of the disassociation we have all been forced to embody. When you tell people to take control over their lives, to begin to understand their own life force and how it works, it changes people. All of a sudden, they’re less malleable to the surface-level distractions of consumer capitalism. We had to begin to understand that all of this was by design, and therefore it was our civil responsibility to disrupt the status quo and demand true equality for all by being cognizant of how we participated in the dance of empire. I didn’t want a good life at the expense of another, and it became about how to live with integrity, which meant I had to be honest with myself. This was another beginning.
What of freedom, of true unadulterated freedom? I understood the word freedom in the way that Nina Simone explained, “I’ll tell you what freedom means to me – no fear!!” And I knew many who felt that they were longing for that sense of freedom. Harnessing this energy was key, to show people there was value in the world they wanted to create, together. We were a mass, therefore we had power in numbers. I started to see that more than anything, what many of us wanted was true connectivity. When you have true connection, you are scared less. Love emboldens you, it gives you courage.
To be fearless meant we had to find a way to collectively and individually face our fears. In ourselves and each other. This was one of the hardest parts to engineer, to encourage people that their unfounded ideas about others, these prejudices that they held so close to their hearts, despite being ordinarily kind and good people, were not anomalies in their personalities but rather unfortunate byproducts of a society that teaches and militarizes hate. Hatred has a currency, especially when it is tied to war. Understanding that there is another way takes knowing that sovereignty can be a shared principle that doesn’t need to be coerced. All people have a right to be free, and this was something worth fighting for.
And of course, amongst many, especially those who identified as men, there had to be an unlearning of the aggressive kind of masculinity that had restricted most men from the true pleasures of having equal power, of being open to the feminine, focusing instead on the destruction of life, not the creation of it.
I knew this was key, in teaching all people how to love women and womanhood. To turn to all of us and ask us to do a deep dive into our lives and interrogate how we hate women. I was always an observer of people. That was partly by circumstance because I was sexually abused as a child, and I’ve come to understand that when violence besieges a child, sometimes the reaction can be hypervigilance, where the child tracks everything that everyone does around her. It’s uncontrollable, I can’t help but know, understand, pay attention to, and pick up on the emotional changes of everyone that I am in relation to. Yet this curse can also be a blessing, and for me, it’s revealed itself in a superpower I call hope.
I had to digest the cruelty of what had happened to me as a child, and all the ways that I was abandoned time and time again, all the ways I wasn’t protected, these were important realities I needed to come to terms with. The more I alchemized the grief that was in my body, each time I felt freer, released of something in a physical way. I began to see there was a power in naming and acknowledging pain, trauma, hurt, extraction, betrayal – all of the griefs our bodies hold – and I started to see that this was the ultimate way people could begin the process of loving themselves.
So much of the root of our pain is in our lack of experiencing love. People needed to be shown, that despite the grave loss of war, violence, sexual abuse — what was most profound was how we remained open despite these parts of ourselves that hardened through challenging experiences. Within this softness of being, love could exist as a remedy.
Yet love can only come from forgiveness, from releasing. Believing in its power and profundity was the natural way we were able to move toward cooperation but it took confronting ourselves, our insecurities, our pasts, histories, and lineages. Love is seen as feminine, a trait of weakness or vulnerability, but rarely what it is: the most radical tool on Earth. Finally, we were able to understand this through honoring the sacred feminine within, as well as the sacred feminine of this Earth. The power of masculinity is that it masks its own bravado, its own performance, but we developed humility, finally. We understood that it had become a moral imperative to heal our egos.
You can’t perform love, in order to feel, you must. And in order to feel it, you must begin to realize, with all your might, that love is the only way.
Our cooperation came to pass when we realized this was the beginning and the end of it.