I think a lot of women carry the ancestral memory of witch burnings. We don’t consciously remember it, but somewhere in our cellular memory is the remembrance that women with gifts of healing were routinely tracked down and burned as heretics by the Church, which was the “scientific” institution of the day.

It is this memory which causes us to be afraid of our own innate power and connection to nature. Our own intuitive knowings of our bodies and that of our children’s are suppressed by men (and now women) in white coats, the new keepers of “science”. If they haven’t discovered it, quantified it, and recorded it- it isn’t real. Their established facts are all that is truth- anything that doesn’t align with how they have come to define life is thereby false. If you do not conform to their systems, you are bullied and threatened, maligned and dehumanized. 

The crimes of colonialism against Indigenous peoples by Europeans began in the white folks’ backyard. They lost touch with their own true nature, and those who moved with the natural rhythms of life were deemed a threat and exterminated. They then carried their dis-ease and fear of life with them across the globe and we have all been infected. 

We do not trust life anymore. We do not trust nature. We have waged a war on the very soul of our existence, first in the name of God, and now in the name of Science. Can we not recognize this is the very root of all our dysfunction?

Some of us are awakening, re-membering, relearning the ancient paths which flow through our bodies and the rest of nature. Underneath all the awful noise of patriarchy we can faintly hear the Melody of Life which is calling out for us to harmonize with her. Indeed, it is the most beautiful song we’ve ever heard.

But keepers of power do not want to hear it.

I hear it. I want to sing it out. But the deeply imbedded memory of the murdered witches and slaughtered Indigenous peoples scares the shit out of me.

And so I sit here, silenced by fear, consumed by my own anger.

These words are my feeble attempt to stand up and sing