Empire Is Young. Earth Remembers Other Worlds.

Spend sufficient time among redwood, stone, and lichen elders and Empire begins to feel like a temporary administrative error, or a nervous system glitch.

A futile attempt at paving over
and filling up with all the wrong things.

A hungry ghost.
An ungrieved wound.
Maybe one day it will be made sacred through collective tending.

The voracious maw of settler culture
got almost all of the old growth elders in California.

Almost.

There are still redwoods standing who remember worlds before highways, property lines, parking lots, nation-states, wars, and the stories we mistake for normal or necessary.
(the poem ‘Old Survivor’ in Watershed explores this subject)

Lichen remembers another pace. Stone remembers another scale. Water carries memories we can only faintly fathom. As Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek says, “Water doesn’t need us to save her – she needs us to remember we are her.”

And I think of the ancient olive groves of Palestine, some tended by families across generations, as supremacist settlers and soldiers uproot and destroy them. I think of the old cottonwood trees people are defending at the so-called border in Arizona, one named Grandmother, where an Empire is trying to erect more monuments to domination and separation.

Different trees. Different lands. An old colonial appetite.
Empire always attempts to destroy beings who remember.

Forests.
Languages.
Ceremonies.
Names.
Villages.
Seeds.
Stories.
Bodies.
Burial grounds.
Ways of relating that reveal its own arrangements as neither natural nor inevitable.

Memory is dangerous to domination.

And yet: Empire is young.
Earth remembers other worlds.

I keep returning to this. Not as reassurance that everything will somehow work out or an invitation to passivity, but as a foundational ecospiritual orientation.

A continuous reminder that the world we have inherited is not the only world humans have made, nor the only one we are capable of making.
Empire is not our original instruction. Extraction is not the oldest story. Property is not the deepest relationship. Supremacy is not the inevitable shape of human belonging.

A reminder that beneath and beyond the architectures of domination are older practices of:

kinship, reciprocity, ceremony, commons, care, resistance, relationship, grief, gift, and belonging.

Ways of knowing ourselves not as conquerors standing over a dead world, but participants inside a living one.

With so many others, I feel our struggle is simultaneously to compost the spell of Empire and to grow new/old worlds.

To become kin to what survives it.
To remember ways of being that Empire works very hard to make us forget.
To keep our shoulders to the wheel.

To stay vision-hearted.

Perhaps this is part of the practice now:

Spend time with beings older than the stories and patterns trying to convince us they are permanent.

Sit with an Elder Tree. Touch stone.
Watch lichen take centuries to write a sentence.
Recline at River’s edge reading the grammar of Water’s flow – glyphs of slow swirls and quick sentences.

Ask what they remember. Keep our ears open for what they refuse and what kind of world they are still quietly practicing into being.

And listen.

Pavement cracks as weeds shout Life.
Borders move. Governments implode and vanish.
Empire’s scripts become archaeology.

And all the while life keeps emerging, relationships coalesce, deeper memories surface seasonally.

Sending old growth strength and living waters,
Ryan

What beings help you remember that Empire is not permanent?
What helps buoy you in the work you are called to do to birth possibilities beyond Empire?