"A Territorial Phenomenon"

When feelings don't belong to us (with thanks to Bayo Akomolafe)

At regular intervals and without fail, the prairie must be burned. Its existence depends on it. No burning - no all-consuming fire raging, leaving a black and smoking ground, literally scorched earth - no prairie. The people who lived here before colonization knew this and set intentional fires from here in eastern Illinois to the Rockies like clockwork, to make space for the bison, to keep this holy animal’s preferred habitat intact, among many other foodways and lifeways. And after the fire, green shoots. After all of it is decimated: new life.

This is the story I’m holding close when I think about about moving away this summer, leaving this part of Illinois. We’re heading to Bloomington, Indiana in July which will be our fifth big move in about fifteen years, leaving beloved places, routines, geographies, and friendships across the country in our wake. I wouldn’t change a thing, I am so grateful for the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had, but there is also a deep grief about always being the one who leaves. It has really changed my relationship to place in general; it’s made me live with one foot out the door. When we first moved here, not knowing how long we’d be staying, I vowed to live like I was going to be here forever. I planted trees like I was going to live here forever. But overall that has turned out to be a lot easier said than done, and I’ve stayed aerodynamic, kept my roots trimmed, filing down the site-specific parts that grow into me like burls on a tree so I can glide on out of here when I have to. But that’s easier said than done too and I know I never get out unscathed.

Meanwhile the prairie paints itself gold with Golden Alexanders, aka Zizia aurea

When we arrived in 2019, I had been so ready to leave Atlanta - ready to feel relief from city life and being surrounded by people all the time, hearing the neighbors’ conversation through their open window, and relief from my own inability to say No and hold space for myself, which had stretched me far beyond my social capacity to the point of snapping. I’d been living like that for years by then. I was exhausted and overwhelmed and an absolute mess of chaos and rage and seething resentment. Let’s move out to the country where no one will bother us and we can get away from All This, we thought. At least one friend said some version of Be careful what you wish for, but of course we didn’t listen to him - we couldn’t even hear him.

Instead of relief I found the adjustment difficult and painful. The primary feeling I had was one of exposure. After the steep, forested hills, skyscrapers, granite outcroppings and undulating piedmont of Atlanta and its environs, the land here seemed to stretch in every direction without interruption and the sky came down to fill in everything else - an amount of sky that felt too big and too much for my body to exist inside of. Nothing in the way of the wind, just acres and acres of corn and soybean fields surrounding a blank green lawn surrounding the old farmhouse with all those lovely big windows we’d just moved into, which contributed to my ambient sense of being watched.

Away from the city and its endless streams of people and stimuli, where I rarely if ever worried about my physical safety, I became hyper-vigilant: staring down every car that drove “too slowly” past our house with frozen panic. I had frequent home invasion nightmares, waking up to what I was sure was the sound of someone coming in through the window in the middle of the night (but it was always just the wind). I’d look out the window after dark completely certain I’d see a man standing Michael Myers-style in the barn’s flood light. I would lie in bed and imagine drawing a bright line of energetic protection around the house and then pray it would hold. I looked into alarm systems that I never bought because while I was terrified I also felt insane.

Closeup on Golden Alexander / Zizia aurea: you can tell it’s part of the parsley & carrot family (Apiaceae) by it’s compound umbels, which look like little umbrellas

Bayo Akomolafe said something in an interview that I can’t stop thinking about: “If we saw ourselves as between bodies, then there might come a place where we say, well there’s nothing to do about that, there’s nothing to fix here. The feeling that I just experienced is not mine, it’s the web’s, if you will…maybe what we rudely call depression is a seed dropping to the earth and experiencing discombobulation, and maybe we partake in these experiences more than we know, because emotion is not ours, it’s not a brain phenomenon - it’s a territorial phenomenon, and it enlists bodies in how it comes to matter.”

In hindsight I can see the way that living in Atlanta was a territorial phenomenon that radically altered the geography of my interior, but it only became visible to me when that interior was thrown into sharp relief against the contrast of rural, prairie living. The territory in which we live works on us, changes us in ways that perhaps don’t become clear until after the fact. How will the prairie have changed me after these years of wind and wind and wind, of watching thunderstorms roll in from miles away? Years of the witnessing that goes both ways - for if I am always being seen here, by the animate world or God or whatever you want to call it, then I am also looking back, and the difference between 2019 and now is my feeling of agency about it.

I started practicing nephelomancy a couple years into living out here - watching the clouds and trying to open myself to receive whatever messages the clouds wanted to send back. But lately when I look at the clouds in this way the only thing I can hear is GOD. Or more accurately: GODGODGODGODGODGODGODGOD. I watch the wind tossing the branches of the giant hackberry trees it’s the same: GODGODGODGODGODGODGODGOD.

See what I mean?

I think about what all of the plants do on the prairie: they root deeper and deeper and deeper, shockingly deep, and they hold on through every kind of weather, through grazing and fire and the relentless wind, and they come back year after year. The land doesn’t shelter or protect them, it is only by virtue of being able to dig in and hold on that they are able to survive. I am extremely jealous of this deep-rootedness, of people who have lived in one place most of their lives, and perhaps the fact that I haven’t been able to root somewhere for the long term means I’ve turned to friendliness to compensate, I’ve attempted to become like charismatic megafauna.

So now I wonder what the transition to Bloomington will feel like after acclimating to eastern Illinois. That part of Indiana is much more like the rolling hills and forests of the eastern US that I grew up around. We are swinging the pendulum all the way back in the other direction and are going to be renting a little house in the middle of town. I notice that I am anticipating relief in a similar (although much less extreme - I’m grateful that my mental health is in a much better place than it was five years ago) way. It sounds so nice to have neighbors, to be able to walk or bike to literally anything. To not have to worry about a hundred year-old farmhouse inevitably falling apart piece by piece, or a crop duster cutting a power line while it rains poison down from the sky.

Will I feel claustrophobic nestled in those hills and forests? How has the prairie changed me and where does it live inside me? I can theorize about this endlessly but ultimately it’s all just an intellectual exercise until I’m already gone. In that same interview, Bayo Akomolafe advises that these territorial feelings should be externalized and ritualized in community. What does that mean for me, in this specific context? I think I’m going to have to sit by the river for a while until I think of something (by which I mean, until she tells me what to do).

But I will tell you one thing I’m looking forward to with this move. I have talked a lot on here about all the trees I’ve planted and tended, the asparagus bed, the pollinator patches, the hugelkultur herb spiral, the huge garden full of vegetables - but one unintended side effect of all these things is that I am always beyond my capacity to do everything that needs to be done in a timely way. I am one person laboring on three acres, so I don’t have time or physical energy to volunteer on the local garden projects that I would really like to, like Solidarity Gardens. So while I will miss growing my own vegetables, renting frees me up to be able to join a community of people who are working on food justice and food sovereignty projects. I am very, very excited about that kind of move from individual work to collective work.

And on that note, I’m officially soliciting all your hot recommendations for Bloomington, Indiana! Drop the goss in the comments if you got it.

Thanks for reading & see ya next time. <3