A late night thought…

I do wake most nights around 3am. Since being more land based I have found that I experience two sleeps.

Sometimes I will read, sometimes I will get up and sit at the table for a bit and do quiet work that doesn’t overly engage the brain more. Sometimes I wake already thinking and will sit in the dark and hold space for these thoughts.

And most of what I think about in that time is about community, the land, and deeper aspects of relationship and relationality. I also think about how restoration is a much greater act than forgiveness and a tendency to relate these two muddies the water – what is forgiveness beyond a Christian concept? I am sure I can wander in that for longer but theological musings don’t really hold me. What I do know is that the ability to move forward even from egregious harm has to come in the form of restoration and this is true of the land, I have seen it in plants, and other mammalian kin.

This has been a recent nightly musing: The land as a space of regeneration acts as restoration and restitution all by itself.

Think about it… the land will always find a way to restoration. Where land has been most profoundly abused by industry, where forests have been mowed down, where industrial accidents or damage by design happens, where industrial process strips the land of the living beings that build healthy ecologies, even places where we have created relationships that alter the land from its own design, the land will find a way to restore and create restitutions all by itself.

In a life world this can only be see as a self determination, and this is how I have come to understand it the longer I live and work with the land.

And maybe this is why even though I am an advocate for the removal of invasive species, why I am set on restoration of native ecologies, and why climate change, although it has me preparing for the worst, I do not fret or fear. Indeed instead I can work to understand and even gain knowledge on why the land is building restorations in the ways it does before the determination of plants and other ancestor beings come to their own determination in these places.

The land will create the restoration with all our relations and the only way we stand outside of this is by our own determination. We are included in that restoration. The land teaches us and guides us. It models restorative justice through our own Indigeneity, and calls us to be in relationship. If you are of the type that needs to hold that concept of forgiveness – the land models and calls us into forgiveness, but that this comes through the hard work of restoration and restitution.

This includes reading the plant nations – learning which plants will hold that beginning of a restoration and how they speak to the restitution required for the relationship to return in ways that hold our existence.

Plants that will grow somewhere because the land is too dry
Plants that will take hold because the land is compacted
Plants that will spread because the land has been stripped of nutrients, bacteria, mycelium…

We can read these relationships as guides, teachers that tell us how we need to approach restoration – the land building its own until we come into relationship to understand the restitutional labour we need to commit to.

I have been struggling with seeing young people paralysed sometimes in anxiety and fear over what comes next. This act of hope is sidelining a danger – somehow colonialism taught us some sharply damaging lessons:

Comfort over conflict
Hope over action
Individual acts over restoration
Punishment over restitution and restoration

The land as a teacher will show us time and time again that justice comes through restoration, and the harms committed to the land will find ways towards healing with us working in restoration, or despite us in the ways that land will always find ways to heal and move forward. We can choose to come into the circle that binds all of us as related. We can, and must work towards restoration and indeed even hold conflict with those who continue the abuses. It becomes a duty to address this directly within our own relationships – I actively tell people:

You cannot have a relationship to the land without having a restorative and justice focused relationship with Indigenous people – if you are not in deep relationship here, you are not connecting to the only species that can talk back in ways you can hear. This idea of decolonizing cannot happen without real, truthful and deep justice with Indigenous nations and a recognition that Indigenous people represent every missing part of restoration work from “the major predators were removed from the lands so x animal is overpopulating” to why monocultures don’t create restoration but plantations instead (Europeans have a mighty relationship with plantations and abuses).

That is a lot of meandering, I might get more focused on some of this during another night of thought. These things tend to always be bubbling away in my mind.