REORIENTING TO EARTH

The steelworks is where my grandfather worked. It’s also where my other grandfather worked. It’s also where my dad worked. This was common for thousands and thousands of immigrant families. It’s the whole reason we were all there. The steelworks is a part of my life story as a settler. It’s part of my destructive legacy to wrtle with, integrate, and own. We all have this work to do.

So-called Australia is a colonial project still getting started. The last 240 years of European occupation are a drop in the ocean of time-immemorial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Songlines and ongoing Dreaming here.

How do we non-Indigenous settlers (wherever you might be based) wrestle with the displacement, damage, and devastation of colonialism? How do we make sense of our duty, as uninvited inhabitants of a place we, regardless, call home? How do we, as witches, pagans, or otherwise mystics, reorient to the land as a foundational step in a committed caring for it?

While these are philosophical questions, they eventually require actual pragmatic answers. Only you can answer them for yourself, and use those answers to honour the land you’re on and accomplice the people who own and belong to it.

Right now, I’m interested in how we as spiritually, politically-engaged settlers reconnect with and find belonging from our own cultures and places of origin. This is important, challenging work. Challenging, because it begs another question: how do we invest in our ancestral connection and divest from the modern social construction of whiteness *while* not denying our position within its matrix and the ways the social characteristics of whiteness have been internalised by all of us.

Because those characteristics (defensiveness, individualism, the right to comfort etc) can play out insidiously in all the earnest and flawed ways we attempt to invest and divest. One way this manifests is the act of running from the reality of one’s complicity in settler life, society, and in the processes of power—named whiteness but reaching well beyond the categorisation of complexion—it upholds.

No matter how great our struggles, we all have a greater obligation to place. Especially in the face of climate catastrophe. We all know how to seek out the example of Indigenous peoples of the unceded land we call home, and amplify it. We all know how to pay the rent, even if it’s not as much as we’d like. We can pay in other forms of listening, learning, and supporting. We can pick up rubbish. We can plant. We can read. We can offer help. We can do whatever small, quiet thing within our power.

I believe we can learn to forget everything we thought we knew. We can learn reciprocity and real care. We can commit to the practice of entering into right relationship with nature, without ever assuming we’ve “got there” or we’ve figured it all out. We can learn from our own unique ancestral histories, including the heartbreaking ones, and we can firmly situate ourselves in the present colonial project we’re inside of and benefitting from. And we can trouble it. This is our magic.

We can find a shady spot to sit, get very quiet, and listen. We can reach out to the earth and sky and sea of the place we live, as a form of meditation. Of prayer. Of situating ourselves. We can whisper “Here I am. Do what you will with me”. And listen some more.

This is a short excerpt from the latest edition of ☆THE DREAMER☆, my free newsletter and online space dedicated to exploring creativity, magic, the occult, neurodiversity, and mental health . Read more from this article at the link below!

Xo Jerico

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