The answers are in the work

Are we healing?
Meeting?
Writing?
Doing?
Creating?
Doing a chemistry?
Mixing proportions?
Learning new precautions?
Refining our hypothesis?

Elder S reminds us
-the answers are in the work-
That is
Knowing our helpers
Knowing our spaces
Knowing our gifts
Know that you and circle are one
-don’t forget you are medicines –

You are not a ”sinner”
You are not a binary
You are nana’s kitchen/grandpa’s workshop*
You are awe
You are.

Remember yourself
Find old loves
Thrill your soul
Create something just for you
Cause you are healing.

Pehiw Awakening 2022

*Insert your safe place.

Star/primordial truths.

I never expected
TV to see me
To tell my story
My star/primordial truths.
I can never be the person you love.
That potentiality died.
You can’t love me.
I am only a place holder for “other*”
No!
I am somethings else
New transformed
trying to love my twisted places
To see the beauty they bring
Tell the story.
Maybe I don’t need your love
And maybe you don’t need theirs

Pehiw Awakening 2022

*Add your truth here. For me this other is a blond, blue eyed, beauty, uncomplicated, traditional mother/wife, easy fit, normal.

Sometimes eyes

Sometimes
I can’t meet your eyes
As my mind
Has set up camp
Down the end of a long hallway
Down to treasures
A tomb
Not yet plundered.
I worry – how could people
Who venerated their dead
Who sent them off with treasures
Rob their god-kings?

Don’t need need royal proclamation
To tell the peoples hurting.
Economist not needed.
This shit is pretty clear.

We gotta take back all our futures
Invent languages of reciprocity
Empty tombs
Bring those ancestors home
Bring them to work
Listen x2
Learn
See ourselves
See our truths
Meet our own eyes.

Pehiw Awakening 2022

Untitled

You are
NOT
Your womb/seed
You are woman/person
You create life
In so many ways
Each day
Each gathering
Each hug
You mother
The motherless
You listen without judgement
You wipe our tears
And help us imagine
Learn
And hope

Pehiw Awakening 2022

Vibes

“Human trafficking.”
The Elders pull us from our joy
Remind us to widen our circles
Who is missing?
Who is hurting?
Who is haunted by ghosts?
Dead babies kill the vibe.
I joke cause it hurts too much.

Suicide makes me freeze
Even as I lean on my sorrows
To make THAT call to another mother.
No wonder some days hurt.
Mine made it through
-for now –
Until someone decides.
They still steal us
Missing and maimed families
Kills the vibe
I don’t always celebrate – it hurts too much

Dis-ease
Claims our bodies, our Elders and our lands
It draws it’s payment
In paper and forms
In discrimination and assumption
Taking it’s pound of flesh
In more scarred, harmed, disappeared.
Is it “progress” that you now give back our dead?

Racism.
That kills the vibe,
But I don’t always get mad – it hurts too much

Shame.
That one haunts many.
Good/Bad
Sinner/Saint
Ruler/Ruled
It takes payment in currency of the self
In midnight recriminations
The jailer is gone
The doors may be heavy
But together we are strong
Together we are enough
Together we can heal
And hold each other
When we must traverse spaces that still hurt too much.

Pehiw Awakening 2022

Economic Development

Let’s start a business with Nanabush.
Imagine!
Economic development
Where we are all better off?
The greedy self-immolated asses
- All the trees give a giggle –
The river shares cool relief
An occasional duck
Gives an angry quack
Birch shares her healing
And the story spreads.

“Watch for that one – who has so little he must trick others.”
He is so self-hating
He can’t believe community –
He thinks he can survive alone.

Petal to stem
Roots to earth
All pity
All are warned.

Pehiw Awakening 2022

Behind our desks

How many gifts do we hide behind our desks?
What
If we
Set them free?

What if
Your words
Inspired painters
Who gifted
A new language
To Makers
Who dance with medicines
Make a rhythm

That resonates with our drummers
That activates hearts

A song of we
A new language of wonder
That embodies our thinkers
Who take us on journeys
Future/past
To re/pre member
Our languages
Our rhythms
Our hearts
And our gifts.

Pehiw Awakening 2022