Dancing with Earthworms and Tree Aunties
These days, when I am unable to lift my body out of bed, or when light twists into something monstrous and my vision morphs into warning, I ask to borrow other senses. It isn’t that I fear my body, or that I ache to replace it with one more able, stronger and with more capacity, a body that is by all estimation different.
No. I want to extend. To experience and be animated by life’s magic. To choose into a world that isn’t rewarded for its tireless attempts to melt away wonder.
Each day, I wake up listening deeply to the Earth, for its answers and questions and prayers and jokes. I listen to its losses too. Amidst all the noise, car horns and freeway happenings, children being dropped off at the daycare center four houses down, trash pickups and neighbor sounds, a baby crow caws for more food or attention from its carer. Maybe both. It sits on the second of three phone lines, closest to a tree pole, packed with metal armor and yellow, reflective plastic.
This is how I begin my mornings, listening to the magic of the world. Accepting that, if given enough time, an experience can morph into another like a soft rope-cloud gliding through air. It can travel beyond one place into another, and somehow be in all places at once.
Today, I look at the crow and caw, imagining myself snuggled along the telephone line as we talk sounds together. The call alerts the crow, but it does not fly away. And so I ask it a series of questions: How can I be in a deeper, more interdependent, consensual relationship with this alive world? How do my actions work in congruence with (and in contradiction to) the commitments I have claimed? What do the tree aunties say?
Crow prepares for flight, and then, as if remembering something, dips its body close enough to kiss the ground before leaving. Initially, I think of the motion as a ceremonious bow, a visual recognition of my trying — in short, a thank you and goodbye. But that’s the thing, I’m in constant search of meaning. I don’t know what that crow was thinking or signaling. All I know is that I want to be a better listener, steward, beginner.
Early on, my grandmother Audrie introduced me to the idea that love can span generations. That it can dip, and circle, and change position. After she passed suddenly, I began searching for her everywhere. A bird would tap on my window, a cat would follow me home, a hummingbird would say hello, the smell of wood burning on a rainy day would greet me — and they’d all be her.
There are universes everywhere. Galaxies expanding and contracting, asking to be noticed, or at least not be destroyed.
It’s interesting that now I find myself marveling over (and asking to participate in) cross-species relationships that span generations and lineages. I imagine my nana in Louisiana’s backroads skipping with tree frogs instead of being exposed to the terror of lynchings, the threats of her joining the dead if she didn’t look up. All of these imaginings are wound up in each other. They are all true. They all happened.
It isn’t that I want to whisk away history, or that I want to replace it with a kind of egg-pulp sheen that makes these truths less horrid. I want to always remember that I come from a magical people. From folks who were excellent at actualizing and stewarding joy.
My people prioritized cross-species connections grounded in reparative action. It is in these sacred passages that we are invited to dip further into the world. To see it and ourselves differently. In a way, each living thing becomes a traveling altar. A delicate point moving through the fog towards a light tower and gathering at grief’s soil.
Perhaps because of where I am often physically positioned in bed, I spend a lot of time looking up. Noticing corners, specks, calls, sounds, skies. Taking special notice of flying, gliding, and climbing beings. Looking down, for me, is an action of practicality. It is the opposite of being in conversation with the tree aunties, whose branches often spread out in greeting. At any moment, the world that is my brain can misfire, creating newer and more prominent electronic communication systems that (inadvertently maybe?) cause me to seize.
There are universes everywhere. Galaxies expanding and contracting, asking to be noticed, or at least not be destroyed.
Johns’ Hopkins Medicine defines a seizure as: a burst of uncontrolled electrical activity between brain cells that causes temporary abnormalities in muscle tone or movements (stiffness, twitching or limpness), behaviors, sensations or states of awareness.
I prefer to imagine that I have jumped through space instead, that neurons in my brain got bored and wanted to take me on adventures ancestors have journeyed. (And yes, even in this adventure, archer fish, warblers and chipmunks come along.)
There are things that my partner and I have learned and done in the house, like baby proofing it in case I hit my head. Or reminding me where I am when I forget. And doing more emergency hospital prep than either of us could have imagined.
Will the shoe in the middle of the hallway cause me to trip, or is it a seizure? How sharp is the corner of that table? Should I put an edge protector over it? When was the last time the floors were cleaned? Am I able to walk down the stairs today?
Sure, those considerations are happening.
But I have always been a child of wonder and wander. My non-human relations have underscored the importance of seeing and experiencing myself (and other humans) within Earth’s landscape. Not as an outsider, but a native who is welcome home.
I want to always remember that I come from a magical people. From folks who were excellent at actualizing and stewarding joy.
Though colonialism and white supremacy have so thoroughly disconnected us that humans are now perceived as outside of nature, home is always within me. The salty earth, birdsongs, mountains, oceans, stars, octopuses, moss frogs, golden retrievers, caterpillars dancing atop and inside purple corn.
When I cannot venture outside, I surround myself with things from trips, open windows to the brim, have rooms that are painted forest green, watch every nature show available on the streaming platforms I have access to (literally) and always have soil nearby for grounding. These are the things that make me feel most alive.
There is a photo of my maternal great grandmother, who was bed bound for most of her life, sun bathing. In the photo, she lies on her bed, smile beaming, her hand dangling towards the ground. I return here, to this photo and this place, often. And even though I have never been there physically, I feel the wind in her smile, the wet grass breathing, and laughter.
When I first started asking to borrow other senses from more-than-human beings, the practice felt silly. I hadn’t seen an animal in weeks, having spent all of my time inside. And even then, thinking it so ridiculous a request that if it was felt/heard, it would go unanswered — a wide, fluttering, one-dimensional aperture.
Then, during winter’s peak, when insects do the dance back into folks’ homes for warmth and food and other things, I began to notice that my room smelled different. I say this as someone who has a very strong sense of smell, but is often riddled with allergies, and weirdly enough, stretches my nostrils to smell more unpleasant scents even as they disgust me. I thought that the rotten, citrus-like scent might be coming from a piece of fruit dropped underneath my bed that lay out of sight.
But it was ants! Ants that I’d crushed a day before. I counted them all: eighteen. Eighteen now carcasses that had come inside for warmth and food and maybe mayhem. Crushed. Ants have always bothered me, when I see them I get that crawling sensation over skin. But as a child, ants were a curiosity. To be explored, followed, hypothesized, eaten (yes, I ate ants for a while and they are spicy, maybe you already knew this?).
Not once had I considered being in friendship with these fascinating and highly intelligent beings. Beings that have designed systems grounded in expert and specialized care. I think the ants, the ones who lived, wanted their dead remembered and thus offered me a heightened level of scent perception in order to remember who I killed.
Maybe all of them smell that way. Regardless, the lesson felt like a reminder to look down for connection, not just caution. In that moment, I had stepped out of a world into one that was aware. I was close to something and deeply animated by it, to the point that I wanted to work in concert to preserve, to listen, to take notice of it.
I return here, to this photo and this place, often. And even though I have never been there physically, I feel the wind in her smile, the wet grass breathing, and laughter.
And today, today I walked down the stairs and made friends with an earthworm. This queen recycler of the planet was hilarious! Together we wiggled and held weird (to me) sensations in our bodies, noticed the warmth of earth, and reflected on how swimming through water or soil can feel like the same thing. QR (Queen Earthworm) signaled, “There’s wisdom in being out of rhythm, of letting salt touch a wound, something dazzling about spiraling. Be in the dance.” And then she patterned out a reminder to visit her kin more often, to bring them and myself back to the soil when I’ve wandered too far. Then she told a joke that isn’t transmittable here but went something like twist, lay, tap tap, bend forward, lift, tap tap fall, wiggle.
In moments when I am unable to physically wander, I let my spirit do it for me, a temporary untethering. It isn’t just sense organs gathered within me — but scent and ancestor memory, of acorn and eucalyptus trees, of birdsong and palm wine, of stardust and clay, of delicious truth and riotous story.
These are the whispers from stewards on the wind, sharp, resolute, conscious and spreading down down down into the roots of earth, and up and over into the rainbow galaxies, and out beyond the stretches of imagination and limitations, and then in again.
Through these more-than-human connections, I have learned to greet the living and the dead in the same moment, to recognize scent trails, the sound of movement across space, hidden warblers, hundreds of trees, chipmunks, swamp creatures, crows, spiders, cats, gazelles.
It isn’t just sense organs gathered within me — but scent and ancestor memory, of acorn and eucalyptus trees, of birdsong and palm wine, of stardust and clay, of delicious truth and riotous story.
These are what keep me most alive. This is looking upon a storm and finding it already knows my name. Chaos being the shaper of life.
