This week is the third anniversary of (be)longing and only now I feel I’ve properly stepped out of the hole.
Summer of 2019, the last summer before the pandemic, was the summer I dug holes with my friends and buried myself at dawn in what ended up being a trip to the underworld.
In this reflection I want to make explicit the collapse between art, life and devotional practice; and stand in the space in which my art practice is my site for veneration. In most of my writing around (be)longing I’ve shared my ongoing question around the migrant body’s relationship with the land they occupy, a question that continues to inform my steps. However I have been less explicit about how the burials in (be)longing were part of my ancestral healing lineage work, and how doing those rituals had consequences that I had not foreseen.
The call of the ancestors is louder for some of us, this comes with its perks and its hindrances. There’s beauty in that intimacy, infinite support and wisdom. There’s also the need to assert strong boundaries while remaining in constant veneration and saying: with my life I honour yours and exercise my free will in right relationship.
My free will.
In right relationship.
:
An ongoing practice of discernment.
During January of 2019, and again in July of that year, I went on several pilgrimages around Perú looking for the graves of my eight great-grandparents. My travels took me to old cemeteries in Mollendo, a small town in the coast of Arequipa, and to Tarma and Jauja in the central Andes, where I encountered Puyhuán, a small and unassuming hill that's known locally as the Heart of the Universe, not far from the river Yacus.
I was taken to Puyhuán by Jimena, an old family friend that’s also a healer and lives in the area. It was her idea to make offerings there after doing healing work together. We went on her motorcycle until the the tracks allowed it, and then we hiked. On the top of Puyhuán we found wild potato plants and the remains of a fire. We had a small picnic and made an altar with roses and offered kintu. I had told Jimena that I was planning the (be)longing burials in the UK soon after returning and that I was still trying to understand what was the actual offering. Through our conversations she reframed value for me in quite foundational ways and suggested that my pain, which I knew intimately, was a jewel I could offer the ancestors of blood, land and place, whether that was the land where I was born, and where my ancestors laid, or the land that hosted me now. I started offering my pain and sorrow as jewels for the first time in Puyhuán, the Heart of the Universe, stewarded by Jimena.
On our way down from the hill, still a little high from ritual and with a numb mouth full of chewed coca leaf, we got completely lost. We had no drinking water —under a blazing Andean sun— and angry guard dogs chased after us at every new turn on the dirt tracks.
Jimena was bewildered and mortified at having gotten us lost. She was the guide after all. I was too dehydrated and on the edge of heat stroke to try to make much meaning of it. In order to find our way back we had to climb the huge rocks on the river bed (it was dry season thankfully, so there was no stream), but oddly, I never recalled us crossing the river in the first place.
At the time, I did not dwell on the Puyhuán incident much. All through that period I had met many ghosts and cleansed myself regularly, so I just took it in my stride. But the memory of that small ceremony and the subsequent (and dramatic) loss while being hunted down by rabid dogs has been returning vividly.
Rage and rabies in Spanish are the same word. A rabid dog is a raging dog. Now I think of the raging dogs preparing me for what was to come afterwards. Jimena trained me, she threw a stick at me and told me to hold it against them. Use your deep voice, she said. Shout at them. Swear. Stomp. You need to show them you're in charge and they shall not intimidate you. Do not flinch.
As I reflect on (be)longing now that I’m looking at the images and getting ready to exhibit them again as part of the Trans States Conference in Northampton in a couple of weeks, where I will be speaking about the ritual aspects of the work, I’m all too aware of how much I did not know at the time of embarking on this experience.
Little did I know at that moment that every time I emerged from the ground to be wrapped, warmed, fed and cared for by friends, a part of me delved deeper downward.
Little did I know that upon finishing my last burial I would attend an ancestral healing retreat, fall inexplicably ill, meet the most kick ass ancestral spirit guides and also start an epic journey of descent towards the caves of the human soul. Little did I know that trickster gods will have me chasing my own tail, and that the lesson of meeting what dwells in the human heart would entail witnessing and enduring its capacity for cruelty.
It’s been three years and I only now feel like I climbed out of the hole. As I look back I can see that we summoned so much through those rituals. We summoned Tiller Star, the most beautiful otherworldly bitch, and we lost her tragically and prematurely too. I summoned the most profound (and gruelling) lesson on how to exercise my free will in right relationship, and I lost my innocence about love. And yet I have met my own capacity for love anew. I have met my ancestors and I have felt their pain. I’ve been wrapped in blankets by them and by my friends unburying my body. I understand trust on a whole other level.
But it took a while, and I’m still integrating and practising discernment, with barely two feet out of the hole and on the edge, still, I return to the ongoing question:
What anchors me for now in my free will as I nourish right relationships?
All of the Wild Unknowns
Summer (Alchemy) The Pilgrim (Archetypes)
Fire Ant
The Lovers Sea Serpent 9 Pentacles Lizard
Gazelle The Sun
(The mash up of WU tarot and animal oracle)
There’s so much fire in these cards! And The Sun managed to squeeze into the reading last minute as I stood up and found it on the floor.
There’s a song by Joan Manuel Serrat based on a poem by Antonio Machado. I used to love this song as a kid and I would sing it constantly with my cousin Maite, it was our Sunday family entertainment.
Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar
Golpe a golpe
Verso a verso
Yo amo los mundos sutiles
ingrávidos y gentiles
como pompas de jabón
(Pilgrim, there’s no path, you forge the path as you go
Hit by hit
Verse by verse
I love the subtle realms
gentle and weightless
like soap bubbles)
The pilgrim forges their own path while holding the knowledge that seasons change and fruit is most juicy and abundant in summer.
Don’t expect to move at the same pace all the time, don’t expect to have a coherent direction either.
What is a free will? How accessible can it feel when under siege? Are you free to run or to be eaten? What does will have to do with anything when one’s under attack by an army of poisonous ants?
Some conditions are not conducive to life but to survival, that’s not a free choice.
The anchor is in the knowledge that the path is flexible, and will is circumstantial, responsive, relational.
We aim to fly in formation, together, towards the warmth of life giving light, in right relationship.
We aim to honour the ancients, by seeing the patterns that have us biting our own tail.
Remember your reptilian brain and honour it, it’s there to protect your life.
You’re not above the will of your body to survive and to protect you. You are not above the conditions that trigger your nervous system. Sometimes the only option is to flee for your life, and then rest under a tree, make a fire to deter predators and pests. Put your efforts and your offerings in the altar of now.
Soak up summer for it will not last long.