Back on Familiar Soil

When I arrived back in the land of the Peoria, Kickapoo, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations of Turtle Island (aka the Midwestern USA), the trees and flowers waved to me. This is the place I lived for decades of my young and middle adulthood. The Brown-Eyed Susans nod their welcome. The maples swing their branches hello. Along the train tracks and highways the Queen Anne’s Lace bob and sway. I feel waves of love and affection as I reunite with the plant life here. I am filled with somatic memories of the middle third of my life, the joys, the lessons, and the sorrows.

Gone are the succulents and bromeliads of the monsoon rainforest of Chittaranjan Vatika, siblings of the plants of my subtropical Waimānalo home. Now I am among the drought-hardy, deciduous plants of Illinois.

The people have also turned over. Gone are the airports populated with Muslim families and Arab voices. No more Marathi and Hindi filling the air. Most of the shades of Brown and Black skin are gone. For the first time in what feels like years, I am among majority white folks, a situation rarely occurring in the occupied Hawaiian nation. I’m no longer used to the rounded r’s, pale white calves, blue eyes.

When I left my marriage in 2010, 95% of my friends stopped contacting me. It’s not like they broke up with me or rejected me, they just quietly stopped reaching out to me. I was deeply established in my white community, as a poet, dancer, mother, and Iyengar Yoga teacher. I had “achieved” a certain level of status and respect in the city of Milwaukee. Frankly, I was valued as a safe POC. Not too radical, not scary, but middle class, educated, and assimilated. But when I left my marriage, after some years of becoming more visibly and vocally radical, the community—mainstream, white—seemed to know that my decision to divorce my husband signified something much larger than a personal relationship. It represented a decision to leave behind the dominant culture. Not just the stability of my marriage, but my foothold in capitalism, the status earned in white culture and the arts, plus the trappings of neoliberalism.

I told one of the few friends who stuck by me, a Black woman, that I felt abandoned and alone in the absence of my marriage, and all it represented. I told her I felt like I was on a boat, all alone, in the middle of an immense ocean. She said, “But the rest of us are on another island, waving to you, saying, come on over, you can do it, keep paddling!”

I have devoted myself to that island, a place of resistance, a place of revolution. We have rejected many of the teachings we were indoctrinated into. We embrace interdependence rather than individuality, radical abundance rather than competitive scarcity, solidarity rather than charity. Currently, I live on a farm in solidarity with the Southeast Asian community. In truth, it’s messy and imperfect, but it provides a framework to live more intimately with the `āina, surrounded by mountains, forests, ocean, and the Kanaka maoli community.

So to be back in Potawatomi nation feels….awkward, like coming back to a past relationship. Yes, it’s beautiful, I love it and appreciate it. But neither do I feel completely at home.

Besides the land, the people represent a different matter. Can I re-adapt to white culture? What does that look like and what does that mean? I feel reluctant and cautious. Can I relate to white culture differently than I did when I was younger? Can I overcome the internalized pressure to assimilate, and instead be fully myself, without fetishizing or exoticizing or capitulating? This is the first time I’m back in Urbana since March 2020, right before the global shutdown. So much has happened since then.

We have all grown much more intimate with death. The COVID pandemic has not truly ended, and may never completely wane. We all have friends and loved ones we have lost to the virus. We are all that much closer to our own mortality. Additionally we survived the election of 2020 in the USA, which brought an end to the Trump rampage, but revealed a failed democracy, resulting in an evermore split and polarized society, an extremist Supreme Court, and responsibility for the current war crimes of the worst genocide in ages, sending USA bombs to Israel. Yesterday alone, 66 Palestinians were killed, including 36 at a field hospital full of refugees.

However, denial and individualism persist as the trademark of the dominant white culture. Urbana remains an idyllic university enclave. I rode my friend’s bike through the loveliest of neighborhoods, filled with 100-year-old houses, mature trees, even cobblestones. But on some level my body experiences it as violence.

My most superficial outer body feels at ease, surrounded by beauty, calmness, and spaciousness, especially in comparison to the bustling crowds of Pune, India. But the somatic layer below that feels suspicious: why is it so quiet and seemingly peaceful here when so much of the planet is being devastated? What imbalance do I need to discern and address?

The deepest layer of somatic experience recognizes our unity as living beings, the graciousness and regenerative power of the `āina, and the inner infinite, puruśa. But I cannot deny that middle layer of consciousness which perceives the extreme imbalance and unease among the people.

This week of Lois Steinberg’s Iyengar Yoga intensive will be a study of these layers for me. I vow to never forget or disregard my siblings and cousins in other parts of the world, who are suffering. I vow to direct whatever healing power I can muster, not just to my own healing, but also to the greater cause of solidarity. I strive to recognize more and more ways I can direct my energy to the alleviating of suffering globally. We each have more power than we recognize or utilize. Collectively we can achieve anything, if only we could prioritize our greater communities over individual comforts. May it be so.