Dear readers,
I have not written anything for this platform for a long time now. While having my daily routines of journaling and writing, I realize that sometimes, the format of the blogpost is truly interesting. So, here I am, writing about some personal things and the work I have been doing, for a little while now, around water and (some of) its power.
A little about traumas
While continuing my research, inner work and reflections, otherworldly traumas took over a lot of capacities last winter to find my own truth and hear my inner voice, being afraid and lost, into unstable grounds and learning, sometimes badly, the way back into being in relatonships.
Surviving violent traumas, (micro-)agressions and different levels of abuse, without the care and support that most humans are able to get, it is hard to move somewhere that the body doesn’t know... When the body knows only the way to survival, but can get stuck in its patterns. The few glimpses of my true needs, boundaries, were going all away in freeze or fawn responses when I was feeling just a little disconnected.
Finding myself, I realized how traumatic some areas of youth were, developing intense coping skills and how I never had the chance to even find what I wanted, without someone else to tell me. Traumas affects our capacities to find purpose, leaving a gap in the inside. That longing for home, for a voice, was not met as I was focus on the outter, the mundane, the safety or some confirmations of my own existence. I rarely felt what my gusts were needing (having still major guts problems!). I realized that I was only catching glimpses of it, not having the shell to protect. And it's been debilitating, isolating more than anything else. I felt that opening this work would yet feel worse. Working through these pains and unresolved traumas, I went deeper and deeper, not getting to the places of my own darkness.
Retrospectively, the inner work brought me far, far, into the part of the self. Broken world, broken selves.
(And that will be all on traumas for today)
Friendly waters, friendly creeks
Since I was a child, some of my best allies always been some old forest, some that I miss dearly and will meet again. They let me be me, but also part of a larger place. In the spring of 2023, it is in relationship to place of waters that my curiosity was drawn: while I truly resonate with the Ocean (see here Ocean feeling and communist affect), I fell for smaller. First, I played with the Swamp, letting me sink in the earthly, living matter, where my body was decomposing and growing and becoming one with its surroundings. I listened to the sound of the Falls, opened the secrets they had to share into the fear of its power -some poetry will come out soon about this. I’ve been also coming back to some source of water, where the creeks start, the creek of Mont royal also known as the Tanneries river - now mostly underground, passing under Mont Royal street.
As a knowledge digger, a playful researcher, I wanted to connect that to an intention, concrete and clear. I wanted to connect my research with my body. We usually talk about the power we see in the larger structure of power. But being in tune, slowing down, being in my body, without having nobody to tell me what I need to feel, without feeling the pressure of being, has been the most profound and healing place I could find. As small as the creeks can be, a city creek teaches me the way to silence, stillness in movement, emergence and resistance, even with the current domination of capitalistic colonial structures.
As one of the settlers who’s family took possession of ‘’Jesus’’ Island, or ‘’Laval’’, a few centuries back, it’s honestly really sad and heart-breaking to see how the urban occupation destroyed references, anchors, and made indigenous and settlers completely disconnected to whatever was here before (to see a small history of Montreal waters, see here or Dagenais, 2011). Yet what does it mean to find that connection ? But what if we made a pact with these emerging waters, making them our best allies to collective liberation?
Once upon a time, when my ancestors lived on their land in Europe, we all knew a well, a source, a precious sacred place to meet for/with life. With plagues, the institution of the State, the disfiguration of the lands, but also the disparition of folk knowledge, that relationship pretty much disappeared, or became something of the Witches, the wicked, the weird, only. Without too much transgression, there’s this amazing book called Le livre des fontaines (1526), made about the waters of Rouen, that gives us such a glimse of the value of that knowledge: the book was litteraly chained at the city hall of Rouen. If these ways and relationships has been cut, in recent times, I’ve been seeing old patterns of collective actions coming up as strongly as before. Nothing can’t be undone, rebuild, loved again : Nature heals.
As it is especially necessary to build political momentum with our kin, human and non-human, I am going to embark on a new research journey around that topic with the research proposal being ‘‘Making Kin with Water : Urban Lands as Sites of Wildness for Healing and Embodied Resistances’’. It has been almost a year that that idea as grew in me, wanting more free time to research and make that the center of the work I do. I am uncertain where that all gonna lead me, but surely closer to home and my heart.
Hope to hear from you on the otherside!
Solidairement,
N.
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