Beloved Wild

I’ve been diving deep into my ancestry using ancient spiritual tools and modern technology, and I’ve been astounded at the stories of my foremothers. How young they married, how many children they had, how long (or short) their lives were, the environments they survived and raised children in. I am so humbled and grateful. And yet, I am left with so many questions about who they were, how they felt and what thoughts they had. Questions that cannot be answered in a linear fashion. Questions that only lead to more questions, that lead to an ocean of probabilities. How did they survive? How did they survive the brutality of America?

Healing is not linear. It twists and turns like a vine, falling into darkness and then I reaching for the light. I revisit this book to forge the “link no between self-recovery and political resistance,”in the words of bell hooks, to chart the locations in my history that are riddled with questions that cannot be answered by knowledge, to lean instead into knowing. Healing invites us to remember how our ancestors survived, to weave survival across generations into a web of resistance. We are here because of them. They didn’t beat the odds, they beat back oppression just enough to conjure love out of Black bodies, hated and despised and brutalized. This is our first magic. Claim it. Cast your web. Carve out a space for love to exist in the chaos of white supremacist capitalism.

Heal yourself and heal your mothers. Heal your mother’s mothers. Heal your mother’s mothers mothers. Heal to severe the ties between our bodies and suffering. Heal to break the bonds of violence and abuse. They are not our identity, our story or our legacy. They do not belong to us. Lay them at the feet of your oppressors. Let it poison them. We heal to break the spell. We heal to cast new spells. We heal to survive. We heal to resist, to construct new ways of being, to return to our ancestral blueprints, to leave behind the scraps handed to us and grow abundance from the wilderness. We are the spell. Our bodies, our love, our thoughts and feelings are holy. Purify them. Prepare the way for your ancestors to shine the light, so that you can find your way out of the darkness. You will find that you are never ever alone. Heal to re-member who you are.

More on ancestral work to come…

With love,

Brandi Janaan