Jada Jackson interviewed me for Well + Good! Wanted to share an excerpt:
In our hearts, in our spirits, we know that connecting to that which creates and sustains life—the Earth itself—is restorative and nourishing. We know that doing so helps us feel joy.
My work is about building connections. That can mean helping someone learn to identify the plants that grow around them that are labeled weeds—but are in fact powerful healers—and make their own herbal preparations from them. It can mean supporting someone to remember that aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent, or other person in their life who, when they got sick, went to the cupboard to make a plant-based remedy. It can mean helping people identify the things that they have in the cupboard at home that can help them address stress.
At the same time, we owe a debt to the Earth for our being able to live at all. Were it not for all of the elements, oceans, trees, air, and tiny microbes, we could not exist. We owe a debt to the animate and inanimate world around us for our lives, yet within late capitalist modes of being, we zoom around without contemplating these connections… We live in a culture that does not acknowledge them.
There’s the bigger project of the work we need to do to decolonize and compost imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy—all of which are destroying the Earth—but from my way of thinking, this has got to start with a very heart-centered position of “I have gratitude to the Earth for giving me this tomato that I grew from seed.”
Land-based healing practices are also about working through trauma [Black people] inherited from being descended from people who were forced to work the land through the institution of chattel slavery. How do we work through it? Farming on our terms. Growing on our terms. Growing with love and reverence for the land, rather than for the express purpose to extract as much value as possible from the land.
Visit Well + Good to read the full piece.