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The word that has been walking with me lately is kinship. Kinship as an orientation that acknowledges our entanglement - with each other, with land, with plants, with histories, also ones we did not choose but are nonetheless shaped by. A reminder that we are constituted in relationships. At the end of January, we finished our Wild Women Wintering circle. With eight plants and trees and thirteen other humans, we met weekly for a little over two months — to be hugged by the yurt, to sing, rest, share stories, process griefs, craft, connect with darkness, and practice kinship in the many different womanhoods we inhabit, and with winter and the plants that guided us. Once again, I was reminded how the fractures of our time live in our nervous systems — how the growth-oriented story of modernity separates us from our rhythms, each other, the land. And how powerful it is to sit in a circle, listen to one another and through this weave ourselves back into the inner and outer landscapes we inhabit. Now my landscape has changed. I am spending February in the Czech–Polish borderlands as an artist-in-residence, working on a project called Borderland Forest Spells, hosted by The Broumov Educational and Cultural Center, together with beloved co-conspirators Agnieszka Bułacik and Hania Grześkiewicz. We are listening with mountains shaped by migration, walking with forests that have witnessed displacement, and thinking about kinship from within this layered landscape. Some of the questions we keep asking are:
- What does it mean to belong to a place not because you are “from” it, but because you care for it?
- What do the plants and trees need from us in these times and in this space?
- How do we listen as the polyphonic beings we are? Working with voice, spells, and tree-listenings — weaving together our ancestries, Slavic and Baltic mythologies, our experiences as Eastern Europeans living in the so-called West — we are also practicing kinship beyond borders. We have been spending much time with Linden here, and what touches me is how myths and memories overlap — how our cultural and personal stories weave together in the presence of these ancient beings, reminding that kinship is embodied practice. And so I have also been weaving — literally — sitting with branches and woolen threads in my hands (the ones in the picture above), sensing hands across time, feeling into the work of repairing and mending both physically and metaphorically. From the commitment to keep creating spaces for repair, also a new offering has grown - a course and shared space to practice kinship and reciprocity with the plants that grow around us, to learn their names, their medicines, and their stories. I will share more about that below.
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