To my Asian & Pacific Islander Community…

With a birch tree 🌿

The week of the Asian Hate Crime Attacks in Georgia, I was away at an Herbalism and Writing retreat. These were my words at the time that I shared on the Sacred Warrior Instagram where I am an herbalism teacher and apprentice.

“This week I've been at a private writing and herbalism retreat with @vchakour on ancestral Nipmuc Land. Even so, with the way we ingest news in our modern world, I could not escape learning of the attack on my AAPI community in real time. The day before the horrific racist attack on Asian American women, I had received and celebrated wonderful news. My capacity to feel great joy and great grief is equal, a reflection of the depth of our human experience. In passing from my feelings of joy to pain to grief, I take a pitstop at numbness. A pause of survival when something traumatic happens.

I decided to take a walk alone in the forest that morning and felt held, I could breathe easy without my mask on knowing I was alone together with the trees. The forest knows my pain, knows my loss. I wonder what stories this Land knows that we do not learn in books that gives her the wisdom to hold me in my sorrow. There must be many accounts of displacement and severance of family ties for both the human and non-human creatures that occupied her dirt. I have a moment of feeling seen, of being safe.

The great pines will rinse away guilt and shame with protection and birch reflects light. The water of the stream helps my emotions flow through the stages that it must in order to heal old and new traumas. The sun warms my skin and seeps into my core like the magma bubbling below the river. I remember that the entry in the guest book from March 2020, just before coronavirus shut everything down, was from somebody else with Filipino/a/x ancestry. That's not a coincidence. I feel my ancestors are here with me strongly and I remember their survival.”

Sending so much love and care to my AAPI Community ~ J