00:00:00.000This episode is brought to you in part by the Calliopeia Foundation, and listeners like you.
00:00:06.720Calliopeia supports projects interweaving spirituality, culture, and ecology.
00:00:12.220We are grateful for their support, and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners.
00:00:18.340To learn more about the Calliopeia Foundation, visit calliopeia.org.
00:00:22.800To make a donation to For the Wild, visit forthewild.world slash donate, or support us through Patreon.
00:00:33.420Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:00:37.820Today on the show, I'll be speaking with Leila K. Fagali, an ancestral remembrance practitioner, herbal medicine maker, storyteller, and archivist.
00:00:48.860She has a background in traditional and ancestral healing practices, plant-cestral, aka herbal medicine, community organizing, and mental health, and incorporates her knowledge in all these fields to support healing and education in her communities.
00:01:06.060Our plants are our ancestors, yes. What does that mean? They evolved before humans. They've been on this earth for a really long time.
00:01:15.580They have consciousness. And we literally depend on plants for everything, even if we don't consciously acknowledge that.
00:01:26.500Layla's work is dedicated to reviving Earth-based ancestral knowledge with a special emphasis on the remembrance and restoration of sacred ancestral wisdoms from the Suwana, a.k.a. Mena region, where her own ancestors originate.
00:01:41.580originate. Her approach emphasizes relationship building, ancestral healing, and honoring the
00:01:48.080embodied knowledge that lives deep inside our bones and the body of the earth. She is currently
00:01:53.900based between her ancestral village in Lebanon and her diasporic home in Tongva, aka Los Angeles,
00:02:01.460California, where she was born. You can learn more about her work, her herbal medicine offerings,
00:02:06.880Plancestral Remembrance Classes, Embodied Research Project, and her other offerings
00:02:12.960at www.RiverRoseRemembrance.com and visit the online community archival project she hosts at
00:02:21.360www.SwanancestralHub.org. Well, Layla, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today.
00:02:30.240I feel really excited and just relaxed to be speaking with you about this range of topics
00:02:47.020So before we delve into the many facets of your work around plancestry, remembrance,
00:02:54.220and storytelling, I want to begin by recognizing the term swana, which stands for Southwest Asia
00:03:01.720and North Africa. So I'd love if you could talk a little bit about why the use of swana is important
00:03:09.060and how it refutes colonial understandings of the quote Middle East. And also, how does it
00:03:15.680acknowledge the abundance of languages, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that are otherwise
00:03:21.720erased under the title of Arab? Yeah, thank you for that question. So Swana is the geographical
00:03:29.200way to describe the area, as you said, known as the Middle East and North Africa. And the reason
00:03:36.240that I and others have started to use that term is because the Middle East positions us in relation
00:03:43.720to Europe, middle of where, east of where. So Southwest Asia and North Africa is a less colonial
00:03:51.280way to sort of geographically place the region. And it's a very diverse region, which straddles
00:03:58.700different continents, it straddles different racial groups, different ethnic groups, different
00:04:04.400linguistic groups, different religious communities. So, you know, Arab actually doesn't even represent
00:04:11.280the whole region, even ethnically, not even remotely. And well, I could really dive in deep1.00
00:04:19.120on this one. And it's a little bit of a controversial topic for some people, actually. But
00:04:23.420even many of us who are identified geopolitically as Arabs, contemporarily, aren't necessarily
00:04:31.600ethnically Arab. We've been Arabized. And so it's a tricky thing. So for me, Swana is a language
00:04:40.040that allows us to include a lot of the communities and the histories and eras of our lineages that
00:04:50.480can be erased in other language about the region. Yeah, I could see that from just your brief
00:04:58.460explanation so far. And if there is anything else that you want to dive into under this topic,
00:05:03.720I'm really excited to hear more about that, if you do want to take a little more time.
00:05:08.660Well, I will say that, you know, for me, so my ancestors, at least in recent generations, come from Lebanon, or probably more accurately for me to say, which is the Arabic way that we refer to the Levant, which includes Palestine, Syria, parts of Jordan, and Lebanon, for the most part.
00:05:33.840And before European colonial borders were drawn around that region, we were kind of a borderless region with a lot of migration and movement in between.
00:05:46.640And like a lot of places in the world, we're more organized around small localities like villages or tribal identities or even families that live in certain areas, but all kind of had relationships and movement between one another.
00:06:04.520And so what I'll say is that when we talk about the culture ancestrally of that region, that those countries are all considered Arab countries right now. And we are, you know, we speak Arabic, we live the geopolitical realities that it means to be an Arab, you know, in the political sense in this moment.
00:06:28.060And most of us have Arab blood to some level or another, but we also, that part of the region is not the origin place of who are actually Arabs that come from deeper in the Arab Gulf regions.
00:06:44.820and because we've had so much migration and movement I surely have Arab blood but I also
00:06:52.120have a lot of other blood that I just feel like has been colonized so many times over over the
00:06:59.500past 5,000 years that it's almost like people from the region don't even acknowledge or remember
00:07:07.500that anymore so it's it's very deep layers of amnesia or erasure or just having forgotten
00:07:17.340or become kind of disconnected from who we were and who we are thank you leila for going a bit
00:07:26.260deeper into that with us now on the river rose remembrance about page you write quote our work
00:07:33.360is dedicated to remembering, reclaiming, and restoring the original belody, ancestral
00:07:39.840wisdoms, and paradigms of practice across our respective communities. Our approach is rooted
00:07:45.900in healing relationship, unveiling stories, and awakening embodied memory, resilience,
00:07:52.740knowledge in collaboration with the natural world, end quote. So I'd love if you could begin
00:07:58.980by speaking to the work of remembrance as it relates to our liberation and earthly restoration
00:08:05.280and then how is remembering also deeply tied to the rewiring of our thoughts gathering of memory
00:08:12.500and the work of repair which is to say engaging with something that is uncertain i feel like for
00:08:20.360me remembrance it has layers so on one hand for me the work of remembrance is connected to
00:08:29.380remembering ourselves just on a really personal level remembering who we are what our soul was
00:08:37.940brought to this earth to do remembering our essence when we drop in deeper beyond the kind
00:08:44.460of social identities and pressures and experiences and things that inform and are part of who
00:09:06.820Just like every other being that exists on this earth, we are part of the natural world
00:09:14.400and the natural world operates in relationship and every ecosystem and every little tiny organism
00:09:21.640in any ecosystem has a really specific function that we require in order for everything else in
00:09:30.240the ecosystem to maintain balance and so for me the work of remembrance is kind of reconnecting
00:09:39.740to that specific role, that specific life function and purpose and spirit that we carry,
00:09:47.340that basically, when it falls into place, allows our whole communities to be thriving and working.
00:09:56.440And because we're all part of nature, I believe that it's pretty simple, like without even getting
00:10:03.320too heavy about it it's pretty simple and clear that if we all reconnect to that it will naturally
00:10:09.940match with just the ecological integrity of our world because that's how we're designed that's
00:10:18.560how we're designed and that's not to say that in the modern world we don't have other functions
00:10:23.380that are evolutions of this moment and this era of technology and just all the realities that exist
00:10:30.480in our contemporary world. But I think that life is true and intelligent, no matter what,
00:10:38.020we still all drink water to survive, we still all breathe air, we still all eat from the earth.
00:10:46.260So that's a truth that doesn't really change. And it doesn't really shift. So on the other level
00:10:51.980of just liberation, and how that plays into our social fabric, our political realities,
00:10:58.240all the oppressive ways that humans have chosen to conduct things in many times and ways throughout
00:11:06.360the more recent eras and probably throughout history to some level or another of course
00:11:11.660I don't want to romanticize the past but for me the work of remembrance and when I say
00:11:17.200reconnecting to our original ancestral traditions and paradigms and ways of being I believe that
00:11:25.360the earth has its own laws. And there are universal laws that are basically designed to
00:11:35.040affirm and protect the integrity of life and its cycles. And so I think the work of remembrance,
00:11:43.520it embodies the dignity that we really seek when we're speaking about liberation,
00:11:48.640it just gets to the root of it. Because if we really remembered in that way,
00:11:53.420we would start to be keyed back into the laws of the earth instead of the man-made laws that
00:12:01.640are kind of running amok in this contemporary moment. I think that's why I like to emphasize
00:12:08.440our indigenous ancestors and relatives, because those are the laws that our indigenous ancestors
00:12:15.680and relatives, both contemporarily and throughout history all around the world, have been heeding.
00:12:23.420I definitely agree with you on that. I want to explore the terminology of Plancestor, which you're responsible for popularizing and coining. I guess I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about how this understanding came about and why is it so important to give it recognition through definition?
00:12:45.740and then maybe perhaps if you could speak to the relationship between us and plants as it relates
00:12:52.300to memory you know I think about why or what do our plant ancestors remember and in what ways do
00:12:59.320they act as vessels I don't know how the term itself came about it was just like my ancestors
00:13:07.640just put it in my ear, you know, and it felt like the culmination of things that I had been
00:13:15.960learning and being taught by a lot of my teachers before that moment. So I do want to acknowledge
00:13:23.800that while I think I popularized the term and I never heard it, and when I did research, I didn't
00:13:31.400read of anyone else using it before me, the concept itself of our plants being our ancestors,
00:13:38.000it's definitely one that does not belong to me. I think it belongs to Indigenous people all over
00:13:45.100the world. So one of the first teachers and friends that talked to me about this concept,
00:13:52.020and I just remember really clearly a conversation we had about it, was my friend Atava Garcia-Swayzecki,
00:13:59.640who attends ancestral apothecary in oakland and i was in a dream circle that she was facilitating
00:14:08.580and we were working with plants intermittently within that dream circle and i remember there
00:14:15.600was like a conversation before class or after class and some of us were just sitting around
00:14:20.240and we were talking about plants and she just said well our plants are our ancestors and we
00:14:26.660got into this conversation with whoever was there about that. And of course, she probably learned
00:14:32.880that through all of her teachers before that too. And so for me, I feel like that understanding and
00:14:40.500then when my ancestors kind of gave me the word plant cester all together, it felt like it turned
00:14:48.700into more of a paradigm than just a language so in terms of why is it important to recognize
00:14:56.860it's not really about ownership it's more about the fact that I think that that language speaks
00:15:04.720to a whole paradigm of understanding a whole relationship a whole body of knowledge and
00:15:13.120and relationship really that probably extends beyond me and that I've also I feel like I've
00:15:20.440grown in my relationship to that word and the spirit and the energy it carries and it's informed
00:15:27.480a whole practice that I facilitate for remembrance in my community personally but when you talk about
00:15:35.700what do our plant sisters remember so that's the part that this term kind of speaks to me
00:15:41.860around a lot our plants are our ancestors yes what does that mean they evolved before humans
00:15:48.800they've been on this earth for a really long time they have consciousness and we literally depend on
00:15:56.840plants for everything even if we don't consciously acknowledge that we're breathing oxygen that they
00:16:04.340are creating for us everything we're eating comes from plants even animal products come from plants
00:16:10.600they eat plants. Our medicine is still made of plants. Even pharmaceuticals originally come from
00:16:16.740plant components. A lot of our houses are made of plants. Our clothing until recently has been
00:16:23.200all made of plants. We are in very deep, intimate relationship with them. They literally create
00:16:31.260the foundation of our cellular and physical beings and bodies. So what don't they remember?
00:16:38.940And I like to really emphasize the importance of working with plants from our ancestral and our bio regions. So where we live, the plants native to where we live, and the plants native to where we come from, because plants eat sunlight, they photosynthesize, they consume, they live through digesting light.
00:17:04.860They digest the patterns of the stars and the exact way and formation that they, you know, move above the skies of where we are or where we're from.
00:17:15.940All the interactions that they have with their pollinators that change from ecosystem to ecosystem of the soil and the water and all the memory and all the wisdom and all the intelligence of life of like just the raw material of creation goes into them.
00:17:36.760And they're basically the bridges between us and those worlds in such an immediate way, because we then consume them into our body. So I feel like for me, the plant sisters, they are our memory. They are the reason that we know and remember things.
00:17:57.040they have literally made up who we are. And all the kind of raw creation wisdom that feels
00:18:06.600disconnected or forgotten, I really feel like they wake that back up in our bodies when we
00:18:13.360relate to them with intention and respect. I have experienced what you're talking about
00:18:22.860in my own life with plants and that remembrance and and having that element of respect and
00:18:30.000integrity and attention to them is mandatory to allow the remembrance to start flowing and
00:18:36.920yeah it just makes me curious too about plant memory and climate change or plant memory amidst
00:18:44.160places that have been clear cut or poisoned or extracted from etc and I know you often talk about
00:18:51.140the Lebanese cedars who have historically endured mass clearing throughout changing empires and and
00:18:58.360so yeah I'm interested to hear if you have anything to speak to about the Lebanese cedars
00:19:05.820directly or the plants that have been gosh really raped and and poisoned and and I I guess also
00:19:16.500So maybe another part to that question is if you think plant memory, if there's a correlation
00:19:21.860between, let's say, the age of an individual species, like thinking about old growth species
00:19:26.880and what they may be able to hold compared to the newer ones.
00:19:34.340Yeah, that's a deep one to contemplate.
00:19:39.960I do experience on a personal level that old growth species have something, I mean, they're carrying memory that is just older.0.99
00:19:51.480So I guess that it makes sense that there's something really special there and that it opens a portal into other worlds.
00:19:59.900And most old growth species, I guess, are trees. And I feel like I think of trees like the cedars and other trees, redwoods, other trees, they carry so much life inside them beyond their own life, because they become homes to animals, fungi, smaller plants, they kind of are like these mothers that sort of nest all this other life inside of them.
00:20:29.020So I really think about how whole ecologies get erased when an old growth species is cut down, not just that species, every single species that has depended and revolved around it for their life.
00:20:45.500So your question about cedars makes me want to just say explicitly that beyond the kind of more physical reality that I was speaking of around how plants make who we are, I subscribe to the beliefs of a lot of indigenous peoples around the world that these plants are also they're not only part of our consciousness, but they're part of our actual existence on a spiritual level, on a cosmological level.
00:21:15.500level. And I have an elder that I have been so honored to build relationship with up in the old
00:21:24.100growth cedar forests in Lebanon over the past several years. And recently on one of my visits
00:21:31.540with him, he quite simply said to me, basically, when the cedars cease to exist, we will cease to
00:21:39.240exist they are us especially the cedars because they're a creation site for us they're not just
00:21:47.580important trees that have spiritual value even or social or cultural value or whatever it is
00:21:56.900they are our literal creation site our cosmologies begin there so in some spiritual way we're bound
00:22:06.440to each other. And the fact that they've been clear cut, but never completely exterminated
00:22:14.040is really powerful. It's as powerful as the fact that they've been clear cut and the immense grief
00:22:22.060that that could cause. But the fact that they still exist and that some of them exist and that
00:22:27.260there's starting to be a consciousness coming back that is really pushing people to reforest them
00:22:36.800in a mass way to me it's a direct reflection and expression of us as a people and it I don't know
00:22:46.140I feel like maybe I'm being a little abstract about answering your question so let me know if
00:22:50.500This doesn't feel direct enough for you.
00:22:52.900But quite simply, we can't exist without them.
00:22:56.760And when we exterminate these natural habitats, we're really exterminating ourselves.
00:23:20.500hey for the wild community ayana here as appreciative as we are of the sponsorships
00:23:27.460we receive throughout the year we can't continue to produce the podcast on their generosity alone
00:23:33.300i know i've mentioned this before but i just want to take a moment to express how much time
00:23:39.100effort and care goes into the preparation and production of our episodes from research
00:23:45.220writing, production, outreach, and social media content. With the format that we work in and
00:23:52.400other forms of emerging digital media in general, it's hard to demonstrate just how much work goes
00:23:57.960into the product that listeners have come to expect. Over the years, For the Wild has grown
00:24:03.180into a small, dedicated, and loving team of individuals who are committed to the work that
00:24:08.520we do. We all consider ourselves lucky to be able to do this work amongst each other
00:24:13.380and create unique offerings each week.
00:24:16.600However, For the Wild also wants to make sure
00:24:41.960or consider making a one-time donation directly to us through our website you can do so at
00:24:48.040patreon.com slash for the wild or by visiting our website at for the wild.world slash donate
00:24:54.860all right thanks so much for listening now let's get back to the interview
00:24:59.240these topics that we're speaking about together cannot be spoken about with a direct linearity
00:25:09.760to them. They're too big. They're too vast. They're too powerful for us to understand in
00:25:18.740those ways. And I don't even think it's a respectful way to speak to these topics. So
00:25:23.480I'm really enjoying the way that you're inviting us into being with these questions. And I'm
00:25:31.240wondering if now more than ever, we might need to really call upon the power of co-creative
00:25:38.060cultures. And I also imagine that co-creative culture really must play an important role in
00:25:44.860navigating ancestral inheritance and remembrance. And so I'm wondering if you would share a little
00:25:50.820bit more about this, especially as it relates to the Swanna regions. Historically, I'm wondering
00:25:57.080how has colonization conflated notions of homogeneity with safety? And why is it vital
00:26:04.200to uplift the histories of migration exchange and relationship well gosh since we're talking
00:26:11.060about ecosystems and ecologies i guess i'll just leave it at that because migration is very natural
00:26:18.560this actually gets back into the conversation about arabness and indigeneity within the context
00:26:25.320of the swanner region and identities and the terminologies that are used and all of that
00:26:31.100Because I think some people have this concept that when your bloodlines are mixed, for example, if I carry Arab ethnic blood, but I also carry blood that's native to the part of the Eastern Mediterranean that is called Bilay Desham, does that mean that I'm not indigenous or that my ancestors or people are not indigenous or whatever?
00:26:55.200And I feel like, no, that's not what it means. There is absolutely nothing that is not natural
00:27:03.460and indigenous in every species of life beyond humans that does not migrate. Migration is so
00:27:13.300much a part of the way that life functions. Plants and animals and sand from the deserts
00:27:21.260and waters and everything, everything in our world moves beyond fixed borders and travels
00:27:31.540back and forth and moves in things that are not lines. We are not stagnant. Nothing about life
00:27:38.000is stagnant. And so in some ways, it's just colonization, first of all, just even cutting us
00:27:44.880into lines and borders is the first place where that fallacy kind of begins. Because some people
00:27:53.980actually take controversy with the language of Swana, because splitting Africa into North and
00:28:00.260not North is offensive in a lot of ways. And splitting just these different regions up from
00:28:08.100each other is problematic to people. And I can definitely hear why. But on the other hand,
00:28:13.560Those borders, those continental definitions mean nothing. The land defines how we relate and how we don't relate and who we exchange with and where we exchange with and what gets created through those relationships.
00:28:29.520And so I think that's the same on ethnic fronts and across racial lines. All that being said, I am not a proponent of appropriation being masked as cultural exchange. That is not what I'm saying. I absolutely do not support that or condone that in any way.
00:28:52.880I think I'm more of the mind that when we acknowledge the ways that who we are and where we come from is informed by the land it's a part of, not in a stagnant way, but in a moving way, a lot of that stuff makes sense.
00:29:09.820And when we root ourselves in the specific place and culture and people and origin that we come from, the way that we exchange and relate and co-create becomes more respectful by itself.
00:29:26.960It just becomes that way because we are something. We're coming to the table with something. So I think that's part of the work of remembrance for me in terms of how it also rebalances some of the really problematic quote unquote cultural exchanges that we're having in the contemporary world.
00:29:47.980It's that it repositions us in relationship to home, but not in a stagnant way, in a way that creates more possibilities for reciprocity and mutual recognition within exchange that happens along natural lines.
00:30:04.880So in the Swana region, for example, I come from Lebanon, most contemporarily, and we recognize the ancestors of that region about four or five thousand years ago to be the Phoenicians or the Canaanites.
00:30:21.460and the Canaanites are believed to come from the Eastern Nile Valley, which would probably be around
00:30:28.960like Ethiopia or Eritrea or Sudan. And I think about the fact that the Nile River runs all the
00:30:39.540way from the depths of East Africa up through Northeast Africa into North Africa, Egypt,
00:30:47.560into the Mediterranean. And all those places along the Mediterranean have pieces of the Nile
00:30:55.420River inside of them. And culturally, people have moved in the same direction. So that feels really
00:31:02.500old and remote in some ways. But when I went and visited, for example, the Nubian communities
00:31:09.400in the south of Egypt. And I started to ask them for their oral histories about lineage and where
00:31:18.160they come from and who they are and how they define their own tribal and historical terms.
00:31:24.640Because I really think it's important for us to ask people for their local version of history and
00:31:30.540not just rely on what we read on Wikipedia or whatever. And when the elders who I was speaking
00:31:37.300with started to talk and share with me. Eventually I asked them, and what was your relationship to
00:31:42.880the Canaanite civilizations of my ancestral region? And he looked at me and he said,
00:31:49.060you guys were one of the tribes of Nubia and you traveled North. And it was like a big dramatic
00:31:56.740thing. And there was conflict about the decision to do that. And that's it. You were a tribe of
00:32:04.320Nubia. And it reminded me that I was like, oh, so when people say, oh, you guys are Canaanites and
00:32:10.500you come from the Eastern Nile Valley, and then you go and visit people who live along the Nile
00:32:16.000and still have their indigenous language and their stories and their histories to a greater
00:32:22.920extent than a lot of us. And they corroborate that story and say the same thing. And then I go up to
00:32:28.920The Sinai Valley, which is a Bedouin area in the north of Egypt, basically northeast of Egypt, that kind of is like the landmass that bridges Palestine to Egypt or Africa to southwest Asia, if we want to speak in colonial continental terms.
00:32:50.100And I spoke with the Bedouin elder there, and we talked and we connected. And I said, you know, who are your ancestors? Like, what do you guys, where's your lineage from? What is your origin? And I had always been taught that Bedouins originally are Arabs, they're ethnic Arabs that mostly come from the Gulf Arab region, and that's their ethnic lineage.
00:33:12.400And so he looked at me and he said, well, who are your ancestors? He turned the question back to me as elders do sometimes. And I said, well, our ancestors are Canaanites. And he got a big smile on his face. And he told me to turn my head and to look at this mud brick on his wall.
00:33:33.860He lived inside the valley. He was still living in the traditional way off the grid in the middle of a valley inside the Sinai region in a house with traditional mud blocks that he constructed the house of.0.92
00:33:47.080And written on the mud block, it said in Arabic, which is Canaan, aka Canaanites. He said, I want you to see that that was there before you got here. So you know that I am being honest with you.
00:34:03.860When my children ask me who we are, I tell them that we're Canaanites.
00:34:13.840I thought that most Bedouins come from the Arab Gulf originally.
00:34:18.300And he said, yeah, there's four different tribes, main tribes, and our lineage in this region comes from Canaan.
00:34:26.780And so I could see the map and the oral histories of moving up the Nile to the Sinai, which is the bridge between the continents, and up into Palestine and Lebanon and Syria, all of which were part of the land of Canaan.
00:34:43.340And I see how my ancestors migrated. And so to think about myself in relationship to only the landmass of Lebanon, it would be false.
00:34:55.640It would erase so many expressions and origins of my lineage. And I'm just stopping at that area. But then, you know, you go to Sicily and Malta and the northern coast of Morocco and Tunisia, and they were all places that had Canaanite influences because we're connected through the waters.
00:35:18.600whether it's the nile all the way up through the mediterranean we're connected through the land
00:35:25.780so i i feel like the land ultimately not the borders but the land and the way that our
00:35:33.840ecosystems and ecologies move they are what we as humans follow and they determine the realms of
00:35:41.480exchange and interaction and co-creation that we have just like they do with everything else in
00:35:47.660nature. Well, thank you, Layla, for that description. I was following your words
00:35:53.560through the map of my mind, and that was really lovely to be transported to your homeland. So
00:36:00.340thank you for that. And now I'd be really remiss if I didn't bring up plancestry in context to
00:36:06.600earth renewal. And in preparing for this interview, I came across something you wrote
00:36:11.180quite some time ago on the swana ancestral hub about nefertum or the egyptian blue lotus and so
00:36:19.080i was wondering if you could talk about how you've been guided to protect and revitalize
00:36:24.740plancestors through your work with river rose and perhaps share the story of nefertum as an
00:36:31.200example of the ways in which others are caring for plancestors with purpose well it's so
00:36:37.620interesting because you're bringing up all these creation plants. So Nefertum is a deity of the
00:36:44.680Egyptian pantheon, who is the spirit of the blue lotus. And I believe it's the only plant that
00:36:51.480actually is a deity in that pantheon. And not that there aren't plants associated with other
00:36:59.440energies and but that nefertum is a deity and in some of the cosmologies in egypt is a creation
00:37:07.900site similarly to the cedars and i won't go geeking out too far on that but there's a relationship in
00:37:15.740our cosmologies even between those plants so in 2016 i made a pilgrimage that was something that
00:37:25.300had been calling me for a really long time to kind of expand beyond Lebanon and really start
00:37:32.280to travel other parts of my ancestral region in an attempt to remember and just to really
00:37:41.160immerse myself in the memory of the land in a different kind of way.
00:37:49.600And speaking of relationship across places and cultures, just an acknowledgement and
00:37:54.220recognition that there's been so much migration and interaction that there are pieces that I have
00:38:01.000lost that I might find in Egypt or in Iran or in Morocco or in wherever it is that are related
00:38:09.460to what I seek and what is feels lost in Lebanon, for example. So when I went there,
00:38:19.480That was my only goal. It was really to immerse myself in the sacred places and make offerings to these different ancestral lands and be receptive and really listen with my being.
00:38:35.540And yes, talk to elders and people along the way if they presented themselves, but it was really more of a spiritual journey.
00:38:43.520So I actually wasn't thinking about connecting to Nefertum or the Blue Lotus in a conscious way,
00:38:51.000or it wasn't like part of my plan or my intention or what I was seeking, but it just kind of came
00:38:58.440to me. So it came to me through a woman who is an elder, who is interested in remembering and
00:39:06.220reviving the ancestral pantheons and paradigms of knowledge in Egypt, and had been relating to
00:39:14.640one of the last botanists in Cairo, who she said was basically protecting seeds and plants
00:39:21.000of the old, old grain in Egypt. And, you know, Egypt is different than Lebanon and other parts
00:39:29.140of the levant in that it's a different landscape it's desert it's it's nile river beds so it's got
00:39:36.840different plants different energies and and in a lot of ways it doesn't have as many plants in
00:39:42.720in the city in particular it's not like a very plant-rich place so actually talking about plants
00:39:48.440in egypt was it didn't get very far there were very few people and very few plants that people
00:39:53.080we're talking about, except in the Sinai region, really, and probably in the Nubian territories,
00:39:59.000where they have a little bit more fertile and agricultural and planting cultures, because
00:40:06.040they're still along a part of the Nile that's really lush. And so this woman, basically,
00:40:12.220when I met her, I was really excited, because there just weren't a lot of people who were
00:40:15.860talking about that. And she basically said, my mission is to resurrect and revive the presence
00:40:24.060of this plant because she believed much as we were talking about with the cedars that
00:40:29.400the consciousness carried inside the plant is an important part of reviving and restoring
00:40:35.780our people and the conditions and the social realities and the spiritual and the physical
00:40:42.120and all the realities of how people are living in Egypt and in our region right now.
00:40:49.480And so she just felt like the further this plant goes,
00:40:54.220the more its consciousness will be present on this earth.
00:40:58.420And that is my responsibility to tend.
00:41:01.680And she asked me to take one with me to grow in Lebanon, which was a great honor.
00:41:07.400And she gave me instructions about how to plant it in a sacred way
00:41:11.800that honored and evoked the spirit of Nefertum, the deity that is embodied by that plant.
00:41:18.820And I obviously felt like the mystery within that flower and that particular effort to revive our
00:41:27.340sacred plants, which is something that I, I'm just lucky that I found her, but it's not luck.
00:41:32.280It was just that our destinies are synced up in that way. The understanding and the intention
00:41:37.920around, you know, these sacred plants having a place in supporting the consciousness of our
00:41:43.700people, as well as our lands and, you know, restoring on that level is, it's growing in
00:41:51.720our region slowly and quietly, but it's growing. And so she really honored me with the gift of,
00:41:59.220you know, being a part of that and bringing that plant to Lebanon. So I actually, it's interesting,
00:42:06.060The way that I have wanted to work with this in terms of not just the hands-on plant seeders and lotuses in the earth and in the waters, which is really important, but I really wanted to use the tools and skills I have, especially as a diasporic person.
00:42:24.700I knew that flower essences are a really powerful way to capture the consciousness inside these really sacred plants.
00:42:35.100And I feel like part of the reason she wanted Nefertum to be planted was because the consciousness of its presence needs to be present in our beings.
00:42:44.620actually that's what my swana flower essence medicine line is about was really about kind of
00:42:51.520sharing some of these stories and like allowing the reach of these sacred plants to go beyond
00:42:59.060borders beyond locales because and this is something my indigenous elders from here have
00:43:05.780taught me and one Lakota elder of mine specifically used to tell me all the time you know that
00:43:10.840remembrance, she didn't say it in this words, I'm using the language of remembrance, but
00:43:15.820she would tell me basically and reaffirm for me that remembrance is a global project because
00:43:23.400most indigenous people in this world right now have lost pieces of their knowledge or their
00:43:30.580memory, their wisdom. And she really was telling me that within the Lakota paradigm,
00:43:37.200that that the belief was that we all have pieces that each other need and so tending our local
00:43:45.940cosmologies and ancestral wisdoms will feed and like kind of fill the pieces of the puzzle
00:43:53.260so that everyone else can fill theirs and so I remember having dreams actually after I received
00:44:00.760Nefertum that I was gifting a lotus to an indigenous elder here, basically to say that
00:44:08.160I feel like flower essences are really potent, because it's important for people here to
00:44:14.000experience the vibration of the sacred plants and consciousness inside the plants in Lebanon,
00:44:21.500or in West Africa, or in Australia, or in Mexico, or in wherever it is, like we need
00:44:29.460the pieces of consciousness that live inside these energies are needed for all of us to remember
00:44:35.000where we're from and who we are and to kind of fill that puzzle and so yeah my way of kind of
00:44:42.480doing that has really been through the flower essences besides just tending because it's really
00:44:47.660hard to travel with plants these days like tsa is really not about that life so i travel with
00:44:54.300flower essences. And, you know, I hope that that's a way that the consciousness inside these plants
00:45:01.320can just wake up what needs to be woken up in people wherever they are.
00:45:24.300As I'm reflecting on your last response, I'd really like to bring into conversation the topic of indigeneity because we can't talk about ancestry without recognizing its existence.
00:45:43.420And I know on your website, you point out that we have to acknowledge that at some point, all of our ancestors were indigenous to the land.
00:45:51.500But I want to talk about the delicate work that needs to be done around claiming ancestry and indigeneity in terms of the entangled histories and present day manifestations of privilege and oppression.
00:46:06.160And so I would really love if you could speak to how you have navigated this personally so that others might be able to feel a little more clarity in their own journeys.
00:46:18.400yeah that's part of the reason that I like the language of remembrance also because for me
00:46:25.440remembrance is a process so I say that to say that our ancestors were all indigenous at some
00:46:33.340point however that does not mean that we are all indigenous right now and I think that is
00:46:40.680really important so for me remembering is like a process of growing in proximity to and honoring
00:46:48.180the ancestors of my lineage that were Indigenous and the Indigenous wisdoms that exist within my
00:46:54.840lineage and within my bones. But I say that and acknowledge that as a person who did not grow up
00:47:02.980in an Indigenous way. And I grew up in a traditional way. And to some level, the things
00:47:09.980that I was acculturated with in my traditional immigrant family are extensions or expressions
00:47:16.000of aspects of our indigeneity but you know there's also layers around what indigeneity means there's
00:47:22.320a political reality of being indigenous right now as we see and know the ways that people who are
00:47:28.860actively fighting to protect their languages their territories their lands their waters their
00:47:36.280basic dignity and rights as human beings who are connected to a land base and a whole paradigm of
00:47:45.780living that is connected to that land base in this capitalist, colonialist era of time that
00:47:52.840cannot be ignored or conflated with, I don't know, someone like me, for example. I didn't grow up
00:48:01.580in that act of struggle. Maybe my ancestors four generations ago did, but that's not my reality.
00:48:07.920I grew up in, you know, the U.S., responsible for a lot of colonial things on land that the Indigenous people of this area still don't have rights to and never invited us or gave us permission to be here.
00:48:48.180But indigenous also is a whole paradigm of practice.
00:48:51.720And it's people who are heeding the origin stories, the cosmologies, the original ways of living as instructed by the lands that they are from and tending those relationships and basically living in sync to those earthly laws that I spoke of before, that their whole society and reality of life is being defined by those laws and not the laws of the world.
00:49:21.720And that's kind of like where my spirit is at. But I don't know if I will ever really be able to fully claim and embody that because I'm healing. I'm healing from colonialism. And parts of me will never be touched by colonialism, those indigenous parts of me.
00:49:46.360But it doesn't make me indigenous like right now. I think you understand this, but hopefully that makes sense. So for me, that being said, I really feel that the work of reconnecting to our ancestors and our origins is how we come into a better relationship in supporting indigenous people and their struggles right now.
00:50:12.420and I say that as a person who I'm not really a fan of solidarity culture and what I mean by that
00:50:19.260is like I believe that relationship culture is a lot more authentic and powerful I would want
00:50:25.460someone to relate to my struggles from a place that's rooted in understanding the relationship
00:50:32.180between their realities and my own not as a performance of or a gesture of political
00:50:40.480alliance. I feel like while that's appreciated and necessary to some extent, it's also not very
00:50:48.620deep. It can't hold the immensity of what we're up against right now. And so I believe that the
00:50:55.380work of tending our ancestral lineages both allows us to situate ourselves in a way that
00:51:03.320is more authentic and it also addresses some of the you know ancestor work like you can't bypass
00:51:12.040things it forces us to also address the ways that our lineages have been part of violating
00:51:18.520some of those laws and been ways that we also take responsibility for evolving our lineages
00:51:27.320and the ways that we've been responsible for harm,
00:51:32.560as well as the ways that we've been carriers of wisdom
00:52:07.880defined by the indigenous people of our world right now
00:52:11.180with a lot more authenticity and respect and integrity
00:52:16.560rather than the kind of performative way
00:52:20.540that I see solidarity being expressed a lot
00:52:23.060in our current moment, if I'm truly honest.
00:52:26.860Well, I really appreciate your honesty. And when you were talking about the performative quality of solidarity, there was something kind of a chill that ran through my body and a little bit of a perk in my spine feeling of like, oh, wow.
00:52:45.740Yeah, I've definitely felt this type of shallowness, especially around social media and solidarity and the performative nature of that. And I think that media can support front lines people. I think that protests can support people on the front lines.
00:53:05.040But I agree that it is not deep enough to really deal with the immensity of what we're up against. And yeah, I really appreciate hearing about how remembrance and Plancestors, like we were talking about earlier, really offers a way to tend these wounds of severance and separation, whether that was forced or chosen, and just the historical wounds that still echo into our contemporary worlds.
00:53:32.020And there are personal and collective choices, be they ecological or technological, etc. So I really feel grounded in what you were saying. And I am thinking about somebody like you who has a background in somatic work and folklore dance.
00:53:53.680I'm also wondering if we could discuss some of the nonlinear embodied ways to do this work of remembrance as well as the cultivating of the Swanna hub through relationship and storytelling.
00:54:07.720So I'm wondering, how does ancestral knowing exist, not just in research and history, but also in creative and intuitive ways? And how is this way of knowing a remedy for those of us who long to do the work of ancestral remembrance, but may not have immediate access to our histories or traditions and relationships?
00:54:28.080To me, that is the plant ancestral work. That's why I engage plant ancestral work, because I feel like it is an embodied practice of being able to access and wake up those memories inside of our bodies and our beings.
00:54:43.920Because I feel like I'm one of those people, though I definitely grew up in closer proximity to my ancestral culture than I think a lot of people in diaspora have, just by virtue of my parents being immigrants who come from villages, not cities, and who come from a land that we're actually allowed to return to, which unfortunately is not a reality for a lot of people, including a lot of Swana folks who really exist in exile.
00:55:11.960I feel like the task right now and where memory really lives is in our bodies and in the body of the land. So for me, dance has been a part of that movement of any kind and also just direct relationship with the land, even if it's not land of our ancestors, just land itself carries memory and can wake up those memories inside of us.
00:55:37.840I think intentionally relating to plants from our ancestral lands, not in a heady way, but feeling how they are in our bodies.
00:55:49.260I think cooking, doing ancestral recipes and being in the ritual of ancestral crafts or anything that really engages our bodies physically in that way and in a state of intention and listening is the work.
00:56:09.280I feel like that is what remembrance is. I feel like remembrance is for those places where we've
00:56:14.760lost access, direct access to the bodies of knowledge and wisdom. And in a lot of ways,
00:56:20.280it took me a while to reconcile with this, but in a lot of ways, I feel like that's where the
00:56:25.800real answers are. I feel like I have so much respect for my elders and so much gratitude
00:56:32.420for the deep, profound gift of having been given the opportunity to actually relate to
00:56:37.720traditional elders, because I know a lot of people don't really get that. It just doesn't
00:56:43.160come across their path in that way. But I will say that all the knowledge I've collected or that
00:56:50.240has been passed down to me, it doesn't sink in the same way as the embodied practices and wisdoms
00:56:59.420that are engaged through my body and my being directly, which is where I think ceremony is
00:57:07.280so powerful and so central to so many ancestral traditions and ways because that's what that is
00:57:15.020that's exactly what that is so I really think it's limitless I feel like creating a piece of art
00:57:21.960with the intention of connecting to your ancestors or a plant sister can be an avenue of waking up
00:57:29.280that memory in your body and I think it really just comes down to learning how to actually
00:57:34.440listen to our bodies and our spirits and empower the subtle ways of knowledge that exist through
00:57:43.580us, that honestly, patriarchy and colonialism have kind of tried to suppress so much that we
00:57:50.020don't think they're real. So we don't really take our feelings and our sensations and our
00:57:55.440internal, you know, feelings and knowing seriously, because we don't think that they're true,
00:58:02.660but they are yeah yeah I agree that it feels like it's by design that we don't value those
00:58:11.000ways of knowing and I wanted to ask a follow-up question that feels really related to
00:58:21.360what we're speaking about in recognizing the non-linear ways of knowing and I'm
00:58:26.260also thinking about just the many mystical traditions that our ancestors have relied on
00:58:31.080for healing ritual and divination. You were kind of speaking about that with the ceremony. And
00:58:35.660I'm wondering if you could also engage with or seek to revive certain mystical traditions
00:58:42.160alongside your work with Plancestors. Well, it's actually interesting you ask that because
00:58:48.160that's what this work is. That's the center of this practice really for me.
00:58:53.340The Plancestors came after. The Plancestors actually came to me to help me with that.0.99
00:58:59.500So the actual heart of this seeking journey and this body of practice that I've been cultivating is about reconnecting to the indigenous paradigms, which are really embedded in our mystical traditions and practices.
00:59:19.440And my ancestral work on that level preceded all of the work with plants.
00:59:25.260The plant ancestors literally came knocking at my door.
00:59:28.740they started to speak to me in my dreams. And I realized that they, that's why they just came to
00:59:34.980help me. They came to help me with like a more direct kind of like vessel of information in my
00:59:41.500body that could just support the waking up of those things that felt lost. I will say that
00:59:47.320there's a lot of mystical traditions that still exist in the Swana region, but a lot of them are
00:59:54.200expressions of abrahamic religion which looks really different in the region than it does in
01:00:01.040the west like christianity and islam have their own layers of depth and flavor and the christianity
01:00:09.340especially in the region is not the same as the kind of colonial version of christianity that
01:00:15.440we think of here it's different it's older but i kind of yearn for deeper older stuff even older
01:00:23.500than that just iterations of those mysticisms that came even before that even though i i do
01:00:29.800consider those earth-based traditions too when they're practiced in their in their proper way
01:00:36.020and because i'm a creature of diaspora for me the diaspora has exposed me to a lot of mystical
01:00:43.400paths and lineages that are more intact that have really helped me with that work so i want to
01:00:51.240acknowledge that i i specifically want to acknowledge the african diasporic traditions
01:00:57.280and the afro-diasporic ancestors who have been able to carry and create and maintain
01:01:07.340really advanced and just profound bodies of spiritual practice and tradition despite the
01:01:18.940cruelty and the impossibility of fathoming the transatlantic slave trade so the ifa tradition
01:01:26.200of the yoruba people of west africa has definitely been a major support for me
01:01:35.240and reconnecting and remembering my own ancestral path even though it's not my ancestral region
01:01:43.660But that's the whole mystery of diaspora. And so my ancestors speak a lot to me through that and have spoken a lot to me through indigenous ceremonies across Turtle Island or North America.
01:02:00.500And just really any like solid, grounded, rooted lineage of practice that has welcomed me to sit has been a vessel for direct communication with my own ancestors to some extent.
01:02:16.740well Layla this conversation has been so fruitful and nurturing and in closing I think listeners
01:02:25.600would be so appreciative if we took a moment to honor the role of myth poem and storytelling
01:02:32.380I'd like if if there are any particular moments or memories stories or plancesters that you carry
01:02:40.040especially close to you at this time if you would wouldn't mind sharing that with us oh my god
01:02:44.440there's so many yeah well I shared this one I this is not my first time sharing this one but
01:02:51.920it's the one that feels present right now after what we've talked about and you're just thinking
01:02:57.100about how sometimes you have to leave home in order to come home and collect the pieces
01:03:03.620to find your way back but you know for a long time I just felt kind of covered in the grief
01:03:10.480and the overwhelm around what feels lost and the war and the pain and the displacement and all the
01:03:19.420heavy things that make it feel hard to connect and to remember and to you know be present
01:03:26.560with the ancestral knowings in this paradigm and in this reality and why was it like that and I
01:03:32.580just felt like some shame around it I guess like what's wrong with me what's wrong with us how have
01:03:39.020we just like lost so much value and thrown away so much of the value of who we are in allowing
01:03:48.120ourselves to become this lost and forgotten and and then I started to realize that so much of
01:03:56.180that is written into our cosmologies regionally so I I like to just I'm thinking of a story
01:04:02.900in the cosmology of Egypt that involves Isis, who basically had to go into exile after
01:04:13.580her brother, who was really jealous, basically took over and killed her husband, Osiris,
01:04:24.940and threw him in a coffin and ruined the peace and the harmony and the order that he was creating
01:04:32.160in Egypt. And she fell into this deep, deep grief and went into exile to protect herself
01:04:41.380in the darkness of that time. And after grieving for a while, she mustered the strength and the
01:04:50.080power and the will to start looking for the coffin of Osiris. And she started traveling
01:04:58.960all the way up the Nile and asking people if they had seen the coffin until she arrived to the delta
01:05:06.380area that starts to go into the Mediterranean Sea and she stayed there for a while and she prayed
01:05:14.460and she reflected and she thought and she waited for her ancestors and her guardians and the deities
01:05:21.600to speak to her and to guide her in a direction and she received the instruction to take a trip
01:05:28.840through the mediterranean to find his coffin which had floated up to the mediterranean so she goes to
01:05:37.320the shore she gets on the boat she um gets ready to go on that journey and she asks some children
01:05:44.120if they've seen the coffin and they say oh yeah we saw it floating up there and she's told to go
01:05:49.080to biblos which is a port city that is about 10 minutes away from my father's village where i live
01:05:56.860in Lebanon and basically she goes through this whole process and it turns out that Osiris is
01:06:04.700there and his coffin has become embedded in this tree that's in the house of the palace
01:06:10.340of the king of Biblos and she finds this way to get into the house and to reclaim the
01:06:18.120coffin and all these things happen and she finally gets the coffin after all this grieving
01:06:24.480all this traveling all this work this exile the state of exile of not even being safe enough to
01:06:31.340go home and she gets on a boat getting ready to go back to Egypt with his coffin and she just can't
01:06:39.140bear the thought of waiting to open it so she opens it and at that moment the jealous brother
01:06:46.160sees them and scatters the bones all throughout the water and she has to go through this journey
01:06:52.480of picking up bone by bone by bone and one of the pieces was lost and the alligators didn't
01:07:02.440eat the other ones because they were her allies but she basically goes on this journey of
01:07:06.980collecting the bones to put him back together and then praying over his bones his skeleton
01:07:15.560with her grief and with her love and with her power to resurrect his life and i just feel like
01:07:24.060it's not a coincidence that she collects the bones between the mediterranean and the nile
01:07:31.720on the coasts of this shore she reclaims this precious sacred being her partner this leader
01:07:40.340Or, you know, she reclaims him in this village on the coast of Lebanon, so close to the coast of my Lebanon, in a state of exile, which I'm not in exile, but I am in diaspora.
01:07:53.700And just this whole journey of needing to leave and then having all these trials and tribulations along the process and then having to go and pick up pieces of something that has been spread and scattered all over the place and some that you can never find again.
01:08:12.800And she manages through her prayer and through the support of the spiritual worlds and the earthly worlds that she relies on and forges relationships with to honor that ancestor and bring something of him, of his lineage, of his power back to life.
01:08:35.200And I just feel like that's the work, you know, and that it's just destined and that that is one of the, you know, cosmologies or mythos that my ancestors and our region have left for me as like an affirmation.
01:08:52.760And, you know, the tree that he ended up in was a cedar tree.
01:08:56.500So I feel like we can go deep into the mysteries inside of that.
01:09:01.340But I feel like the work is to go home and to go home from wherever you're from, too.
01:09:10.780And sometimes that means you leave home to come back home.
01:09:13.860But, you know, that work of collecting the bones is just, that's the work.