Bi-regional

Dear friends, as this tumultuous political season comes to a head in a few days, I sit looking out over a flaming red, orange and yellow (yes, all on the same tree) sugar maple tree in Ohio. The trees are in their Autumnal glory, spectacular in their last gasp before the winter winds blow away their stunning costumes.

Ohio, this place of my birth, is the Mother Root of my life. The place where I learned all the contours of the creeks and riverbeds on our farm. I walked the gentle warp and woof of the land and its undulating meadows—a girl and her dog. It was the childhood home of my acquired love of all four footed, thickly furred creatures, large and small, that roamed abundantly long ago. The animals continue to be evicted from their homes as development of the land and decimation of the forests takes over their ancestral hovels and hiding places. I notice so many small animals along the side of the road, their bodies splayed out on these ribbons of death. The farmers, including my grandfather greatly reduced their numbers by hunting and trapping. But unlike grandpa Benny, hunting has now become big sport for outsiders, not just a major part of the subsistence food culture.

I live in Northern New Mexico now. I have grown to love the landscape and the culture there. Yet, I have always felt a twinge of imposter syndrome on this land. The big sky, Rio Grande gorge and thickly forested mountains inspire my spirit. This has been my writing home. Yet, I am only one more anglo whose presence has colonized the land, the water, the economy. While I identify with the wildness of this place and the fiery heart of independence and strong land based peoples, I wonder how to commit to this place. How do I forge relationships in this strongly rooted and tightly bound culture of Indigenous and Hispanic generations?

When I come back home to this Ohio landscape— my own Motherland— I also feel like an imposter after 40 plus years away. I find myself uncomfortable in a sea of Trump/Vance signs. I grew up in a blue-collar, working class family and town. Our neighborhood was populated by good church going folks, an historically Republican area—staid in its views, financially conservative, morally and ethically upstanding. Now these small towns have been upended by the endless diatribes that seek to divide the country along race, sex, culture, class, religion and whiteness. The GOP spends its time endlessly spewing hate about the “other” as the enemy. “The Enemy” is all that is different. With the advent of artificial intelligence, climate chaos, transgender and gay rights, the rise of women’s rights as human rights and everything that is different than a “leave it to beaver” 1950’s worldview, people are scrambling for certainty and pat answers to “make America great again”. This leaves me reeling. I no longer feel at home.

Then I go to church with my parents, and realize that “the other” is the person in the pew next to me. It is the shop owner I bought my shoe polish from yesterday. The “other” is the small business owner, farmer, pastor, elder, neighbor whom I’ve spent a childhood and with whom my parents continue to navigate relationships.

It is a weird thing indeed to be bioregional. I find my soul in two different places, always carrying a burden from one to the other. In Northern New Mexico I feel the weight borne by the original peoples, who have been colonized and disenfranchised of their land. I see the way colonization continues today in my beloved New Mexico. Ongoing destruction of the precious land and water by the economic “boom” of fossil fuel fracking—despoiling aquifers and rivers for their industry. It is the U.S. Department of Energy in it’s abominable and ongoing nuclear development. It is the multinational corporations come to “buy” the water in the high desert that hasn’t been polluted yet. These legacies grip the people of the land, holding them in hostile takeovers, despite the strength of their witness and voices.

Here in Ohio, where I hold so much affection for the gentle rolling hills, the Amish and Mennonite culture, the neat and tidy farmland, I pick up the burden of a people who also have been colonized somehow by the “American Dream”. Somewhere deep in their bones— in a sea of drug addiction, isolated from the halls of power and struggling to keep up with the Joneses— there is some feeling of lack, deep in the bones of the hinterlands of rural America. A rust belt people left behind, whose land and water resources have been used up, defiled and polluted with no financial gain. I see a generation who has aged out and are bitter. Small town America has been left behind— angry and unheard. It is the lie of an Industrial Dream, a utilitarian economy based solely on profit and demand, not people, that continues to colonize everyone and particularly the land in rural areas. It leaves behind most everyone but the billionaires of Wall Street—the Trumps, the Elon Musks, the Jeff Bezos of this country. The humans here feel so much righteous anger that they have latched onto the falsity and hubris, the darkened imagination of a political machinery whose empty promises are just that. A selfish, mean, greedy, rageful politics that is willing to lash out without any emotional guardrails or social civility. Anger feels good…until it crashes.

And so, how do I tend my soul as a ‘tweener of cultures? As a bi-regional person whose “place” is two rather than one?

I will be in Ohio with my family during the actual election—far from what feels like the sanity of my blue hub of Northern New Mexico. It feels ridiculously ironic that I am out of state and in the middle of the swing state madness as this political season reaches a crescendo. So, I ask myself, “How do I soul tend myself here in the middle of trump country and care for the humans without the hubris? How do I find solace in the land without the signage that mars the sightline?”

My recipe for sanity is to go walking in the forest and watch the black squirrel dance around the wide Beech tree trunk. I bike through the countryside and breathe in the fresh air of pungent fields of drying corn shocks. I sing. I go to the public library and pick up good books. I do my yoga. I dance in my bedroom. I linger over tea, at breakfast with family. I stay connected to what’s real and what’s here in front of me. Evening scrabble games with my father. Grocery shopping and hair cuts with my mother. Long talks on the phone with far-flung friends. I keep on a strict political diet— away from the eternal and infernal noise of the pundits and commentators on t.v. and social media.

May you find your soul’s ballast and a place of solace for these times we live in. Keep the faith. Sing. Rise up with Love and equanimity. Talk to your neighbors. Listen to “the other”. It is the only way forward. There are no enemies. The enemy rampages in the unenlightened and frightened mind.

Lord have mercy.