transitions are desperately needed, so what do we do?
“Here is the final piece of my invocation: the ‘fromtheroots’ model proposes that being deeply grounded in the roots of core, calling, community and cycles while we engage healing and creating processes will support us to divest from coloniality and practise regeneration.
Said differently, for us to divest from coloniality and live and practise regeneration, we must engage processes of healing and processes of creating. To have the willingness and stamina to engage in healing and creating sustainably and with grace, we need to be deeply rooted in core, calling, community and Earth cycles.
These four roots create the necessary containers for us to feel safe enough to fall open without fearing that we are falling apart and disintegrating. That is, they make it safe enough that we resist less, and for shorter periods of time each time we are confronted with our own commitments to the State-ic regimes of coloniality. And because transitions imply loss and all loss is accompanied by grief, these roots hold us and witness us through our grief enabling us to relinquish our commitments to coloniality with greater ease and find nourishment elsewhere.
I will unfold each of these roots briefly beginning with the widest one. I invite you to notice, how are each of these roots for me? Do they exist, are they healthy, how deep and wide are they?
The root of CYCLES implies re-embedding into and attuning to cosmic and Earth rhythms of changing seasons and the cycles that all beings, projects, creations, etc go through. Cycles are the larger context within which our stories are playing out and locate us in timespace. Cycles are many ranging from the diurnal cycle of Sun and moon, the local rhythms of what the Earth, animals and plants are doing where you are right now, to the planetary cycle of equinoxes and solstices and beyond to other planets’ cycles which may be instructive. Rooting in cycles invites to re-embed in these larger cycles and also come into relationship with our own cycles of healing and creation.
The root of CALLING is the root of becoming. Tending this root means exploring and coming to know the gifts we came to the world to experience, learn and deliver. A feature of indigenous Afrikan lifeways is valuing each human life and viewing each person as being in the world for a life-giving purpose. When we respond to calling with purpose we engage our responsibility to meaningfully participate in the world. Having purpose as a central tenet of indigenous life presupposes the care that one offers to a life in order that that purpose may be realised, hence,
The root of COMMUNITY, which is the root of care and belonging. This root invites us into healthy relational practice with other humans in one to one and group relationships; with Earth and our Earth relations; all the embodied beings with whom we share Earth; with ancestors, spirit guides and one’s sense of the Divine; with our histories and our locatedness in place. Tending this root is both nourishing and generative and contributes to forming and shaping
The root of CORE implies being, Self-knowledge, awareness and self relating.
Tending this root we come into relationship with the wholeness of who we are as spirit, body, heart and mind. We come into awareness of our dignity, belonging and safety as unshakeable and unquestionable hence enabling us to step out of unsatisfactory colonial ways of being.
Re-rooting ourselves in each of these four roots begins our processes of re-membering our colonially dismembered self and community wholeness so that we can courageously face reality, heal, and create to move towards visions of the pluriverse.
The process of re-membering is somatic, it is relational, it is communal, it is supported both by seen and unseen community (human and more than human), and our deep commitments and intentions towards decolonisation, re-Indigenisation and regeneration. In re-membering self and communal wholeness we make possible again fluidity where there is stuckness of colonial patterns, embodiments, thoughts, stories, narratives. We make life possible again — all of which contributes to shaping visible manifestations in the form of policies, programmes, and projects.
As I finish, I invite you to notice your body again and notice where all this has landed for you. Feel free to place a hand there and to breathe into that place to invite accompaniment and space around it.
In power and gratitude as we revivify the pluriverse.”
Published on Post Growth Institute