Wendigo

I remember reading pieces which align the original idea of wendigo as a spirit that can possess a human to make them cannibalistic to wendigo as the spirit of consumer capitalism. It's a nice analogy. Wendigo as a the mode of being which destroys that which we require to live.

These are extracts from a piece on Aeon:

The historian Jack Forbes puts it brilliantly in his book Columbus and Other Cannibals (1979):

I can lose my hands, and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live … But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body.

Disassociation is a trauma response. It’s the body’s attempt to hold itself at a distance from a painful experience. If we are to understand land loneliness from a similar perspective, then to move toward healing we must integrate our human bodies with our land bodies. We must commit ourselves to the care and protection of the land we inhabit, including the human and nonhuman creatures who live there. The point isn’t to ‘re’-connect to the land so much as to recognise that we never stopped being a part of it.

Land loneliness rises from fear, helplessness, silence and isolation. To heal land loneliness, we must return to those root wounds and listen to the stories that are held there. This means re-shaping the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, about human relationships with land. It is about building solidarity not only with fellow human community members, but with the land itself.

This connects very well with a piece in the sister journal, Psyche, which suggests that attachment patterns are shaped not just by the natal family, but by the environment, which you can take to mean, the community or, indeed, the actual environment. Vanessa Chakour, the writer, suggests that we moderns have an attachment disorder when it comes to our relationship with the earth.

I think, as I consider the rite of passage into Cronedom, what I wish to let go, what I wish to step into, that these ideas offer inspiration.

Recently, I have been thinking of my neurons as mycelial hyphae leading me deeply, connecting me ever more closely, with the earth.

But none of this explains the photograph. It's a jasmine flower caught on spider silk hanging from a branch of the lilac. There's something magical in this. Magical too in the stout jasmine. Those oh-so delicate flowers; the fine fingered leaves. And yet the stems have untold strength, twining and binding, climbing and holding. And such vitality. I asked the jasmine for her support when I was working on the Olympics and thanked her at the end of a three day stint with a scary shift of producing preceded by the ongoing insomnia and made more challenging by the drives and the hours and my naughty cats.

There must be some plant person who could help me sleep?