00:00:00.000Hello, and welcome to For the Wild. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Laila K. Fugali.
00:00:10.060How do we connect to the power in the land and the stories and the resilience and the strength
00:00:17.800and the wisdom in our land when we cannot even touch it? I have found that working with our
00:00:26.540ancestral plants is like a really powerful way that our bodies and spirits realign. It activates
00:00:34.840the land in our bones because those lands are in our bones and the plant sisters help wake up
00:00:40.680that power, that kinship, that love, those places of connection inside of us no matter where we are.
00:00:50.160Leila Kay Fagali lives between her ancestral village in coastal Lebanon and her diasporic
00:00:55.880home in California where she was born and raised by her immigrant family. She is an author, cultural
00:01:01.420worker, and plancestral medicine practitioner focused on the remembrance of Baladi, land-based
00:01:08.580folk indigenous lifeways and ancestral wisdom from Sawana. Her dedication is to stewardship
00:01:15.760of our earth's eco-cultural integrity, sovereignty, and the many layers of relational restoration and
00:01:22.480transformation that entails. Fagali's upcoming book, The Land and Our Bodies, documents ethno-botanical
00:01:28.660and cultural healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its
00:01:35.860lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world. The book remaps Canaan, the Levant, and
00:01:42.220the Crossroads, the Middle East, while engaging nuanced conversations about identity, loss,
00:01:47.200belonging trauma and rematriation it features her plancestral remembrance methodology as an
00:01:54.020emergent pathway towards cultural repair for diasporic and colonized communities and highlights
00:01:59.980the critical importance of tending the land and life where we are to restore the fundamental
00:02:05.380integrity dignity and regeneration of our earth's multi-species communities you can learn more about
00:02:12.260Gali's work and visit the community archival project she hosts at RiverRoseRemembrance.com
00:02:18.020or River Rose Remembrance on IG and Facebook. Swahana stands for Southwest Asia and North
00:02:24.460Africa, a less Eurocentric way to describe the region commonly referred to as the Middle East
00:02:29.880and North Africa. Leila, thank you so much for joining us again. Gosh, our conversation
00:02:40.560in 2020, crazy to think about, was so enlivening, so thrilled to be welcoming you back onto the
00:02:48.960podcast. Thank you so much. Wow, I can't believe that much time has passed, actually.
00:02:55.000Yeah, a lot has happened in the world. And as we begin to settle into this space,
00:03:01.220I want to ground in how you're feeling and grieving and a comprehending life right now.
00:03:11.320If you'd be open to sharing any reflections and what are you exploring in this present moment?
00:03:19.640Yeah, that is such a huge question right now.
00:03:23.580And as well, I will remind folks and for those who don't know me from before, but I'm Lebanese and I grew up in California and I live half time in my village in Lebanon.
00:03:39.940And so, you know, Lebanon is an extension of Palestine as I see it.
00:03:46.700And so what's happening in Palestine right now is deeply intimate to my lived reality. And in fact, south of Lebanon is also being bombarded by the Zionists right now.0.86
00:04:01.180And so, you know, for me and my community, this time has been, it's honestly, like, it's impossible to verbalize feelings. Every moment is its own set of, you know, of emotions.0.99
00:04:21.520And, you know, it's interesting. I've noticed that our Western allies talk a lot about grief right now. But to be honest, I don't really relate to the experience of grief in the Western sense of the word right now. There has been incredible loss, but we really haven't had the chance to grieve.
00:04:40.840You know, I don't think that we've arrived there. You know, we haven't had the opportunity to bury our dead, nonetheless, take a moment to even process completely what's happening.
00:04:54.240And I think, you know, I can speak for myself knowing that so many others that I speak and connect with feel similarly, but we're really in the fight, you know, we're really just in, you know, full responsiveness to the needs of this moment.
00:05:12.420And we haven't had the privilege to really truly grieve, to be completely honest. Perhaps at some point we will have that space. But yeah, it's just been an unbearable and unfathomable time.
00:05:29.560Yeah. I could imagine that it's hard to grieve when people are in survival mode. I can imagine
00:05:38.060there not being a lot of space to grieve because so many folks are having to deal with moment by
00:05:45.600moment issues. And I know for myself, I find the grief comes later, like after the adrenaline,
00:05:52.880after that fight or flight nervous system response has settled and then it's like,
00:05:57.940Yeah, exactly. And I don't know, for me, I've honestly felt so much more rage than anything. I think I've felt more rage than I have in my entire life. And I think that's part of the survival response because we need to fight.
00:06:16.060You know, we are being put in a position where we need, you know, our righteous rage and our full spectrum of feelings in the face of just so much just sheer violation of life that's just going unchecked really by the world.
00:06:38.860So, but I, but yes, I, you know, I sometimes say, you know, the wound is still open as an herbalist. You know, you can't really start healing a wound while it's still gushing with blood, you know, and right now we're still bleeding. We're bleeding and we need the attention of the world to stop the bleeding, you know, and then, and then we can talk about or feel and just be with the immense loss.
00:07:04.640mm-hmm i'd like to hear a bit more about the rage the righteous rage you're speaking of
00:07:12.180of course maybe share the general sense of what that is but even if you would be open to
00:07:18.800getting more detailed for your own rage or maybe even a collective rage what you're tapping into
00:07:25.840Yeah, you know, I feel like rage is a very taboo feeling in the American public, especially as an Arab, you know, it just like screams terrorists, I suppose, I don't know.
00:07:40.760But I feel rage is a deeply, deeply fundamental life affirming feeling. You know, it is a life affirming feeling and it is an innate function of our intelligent bodies and systems and as parts of this earth to respond when something is just fundamentally wrong.
00:08:08.680And for me, the righteous rage just really signals that there is a type of injustice that is truly a threat and a violation to the life of the collective, to the life of our lands, to our own lives in a way that needs a fierce, fierce energy of response, of defense.
00:08:38.680of protective, whatever it requires, by all means necessary, really, to intervene with it,
00:08:46.800to interfere with it. And so I think the rage is a call to action. And it's a part of my body and
00:08:55.500my being that tells me that I am still alive, despite all these things, that my heart is still
00:09:02.500alive and awake and that I have incredible love and an incredible trust in the righteousness and
00:09:12.120the integrity of life and my responsibility as an active agent who can be part of its defense
00:09:19.940and must be part of doing whatever I can and finding my agency to just be a part of it actively.
00:09:28.680and it's a I feel like it's a really healthy mechanism and um and it's when we need to learn
00:09:35.280this these times are calling us to truly harness and channel more instead of shy away from in
00:09:42.380discomfort or seek to um to ease you know because it's really it's intelligent and it's in place
00:09:52.420it's called for. Yeah, there's so much there. And I wonder if we could understand
00:10:00.460rage and the release of these feelings a bit more through your forthcoming book,
00:10:09.300The Land and Our Bones. And if you could also talk about the path that led you to writing it
00:10:15.040and investing so deeply into the concept of remembrance. Yeah, thank you. You know, I
00:10:22.100really did not know when I wrote this book that it would be born into this particular moment
00:10:28.780in the world. I had no idea. And I often think, had I been writing it right now,
00:10:36.700how much would have changed? How would it have looked different? What would look different? So
00:10:41.600my book, The Land in Our Bones is about these lands. It's a book about the herbal and earth-based
00:10:51.140healing traditions and cultures in the lands between Syria and the Sinai, which include Lebanon,
00:10:59.760where my own ancestors are from, and of course, beloved Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, and the
00:11:08.860Sinai region of Egypt. And in a lot of ways, you know, the Righteous Rage is in there because,
00:11:17.660you know, the book is truly, it's kind of an homage and a love letter to my ancestors in many
00:11:27.120ways, to the things they've passed down to me, to our lands, to what I've learned from our lands,
00:11:35.740to what I've learned from my grandparents, to my real devotion to making sure that our
00:11:45.600life-affirming cultures are which are really being eroded intentionally by empire every
00:11:55.160generation a little bit more to make sure that they're not that that they're not erased that
00:12:00.360they're not that they don't disappear um and that and just to do my very humble part in in sharing
00:12:08.760and sharing my pieces, what I have been honored to gather, to understand, to connect to
00:12:16.960in the land-based kinship of our region. And the rage really exists in that, you know,
00:12:26.980in order to really talk about herbalism and healing cultures of the land, you know,
00:12:33.680it requires a reckoning with colonialism and these legacies of empire that have severed our
00:12:40.780sovereign relationships to it. And it's really an interrogation of, of colonialism as much as it is,
00:12:49.380you know, an archive or sharing a retelling of, you know, of our, of our traditions and our
00:12:59.880relationship and our kinship to place that perseveres and persists, despite all and every
00:13:10.420effort of every empire that has crossed our region for the past thousands of years, really,
00:13:18.640to dilute or erase that. And so, you know, and why I wrote it or what inspired me to
00:13:29.860to write it, really, it's twofold. On one hand, I, as a child of diasporas, and our diasporas
00:13:39.260make up one of the largest in the world, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, respectively,
00:13:46.420have over 50% of our populations living outside of our homelands. I mean, if you could just,
00:13:54.580you know, absorb for a moment how immense that is. And that's a direct result of, of war and empire.
00:14:03.740Nobody leaves home just because. And so, you know, on one hand, it's, it's, you know, my experience as
00:14:12.200a diasporic person, you know, I've, I'm born into sort of a, a reckoning with, with those legacies
00:14:22.200And just my, you know, most simple effort to place myself to understand who I am, where I come from, what belonging means and how to heal all the incredible ruptures that I've witnessed, I've felt, I've just known in the stories of where I come from.
00:14:47.120And also the incredible love, you know, the incredible resilience, the steadfastness and the love.
00:14:57.740Our culture is incredibly generous and abundant.
00:15:03.640And, you know, it's just, it's incredible.
00:15:06.480It's incredible to have watched my grandmother in diaspora, just watched her create a world of, you know, plants and foods and traditions that somehow she could carry with her across oceans.
00:15:24.460that I knew the smells of my homeland before I could even go there because of her, that in eras
00:15:33.220of displacement and so many different generations and ways of struggle that there is so much life
00:15:42.380and persistence and healing and connection to the earth that she and my parents had managed to
00:15:52.080just embody by the nature of who they are. And so that's kind of what remembrance is about to me.
00:16:00.820I use the language of remembrance because it's both, you know, to remember, which is to return
00:16:08.200to a fundamental part of our essence or our internal sense of knowing, of being a truth,
00:16:16.280a truth that does not waver. And it's also to remember, which is to collect the dismembered
00:16:25.580pieces to, you know, restore a cohesive form. And I don't mean that in the like, we can just
00:16:34.640pick up the pieces and it becomes how it used to be kind of way. But I mean that in sort of
00:16:40.920the quest and the liberatory quest, really, to realign with the wholeness and just the
00:16:52.220fundamental integrity within our relationship to land. In all my seeking and in all my
00:17:02.040searching for truths or for wisdom or for healing, really, the only thing that has
00:17:10.000been explicitly steadily clear to me is that as a species the the steadiest truth the the steadiest
00:17:20.260thing that that we can rely on and that determines who we are is our relationship to the earth0.96
00:17:29.140and I think that remembrance for me is a return to kind of the indigenous attunement
00:17:39.140that all of our global ancestors have to these fundamental elements that make our lives what
00:17:48.780they are. And that means liberation from all the systems that have disrupted that. Because
00:17:57.740colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, all of these systems that have tried to kind of rearrange
00:18:05.940our sovereign relationship to the life-making elements of this planet as species who are in
00:18:14.940communication with other species have been to disrupt that innate power, the power in that
00:18:24.000innate connection, and rearrange it around profit and control and domination and greed.
00:18:30.940So remembrance is as much kind of a quest to reclaim connection to home in the personal, cultural sense as it is a quest to realign our earth, our collective, with values of life affirmation that ensure the integrity of our existence as a multi-species planet.
00:19:00.940I think it could be helpful for our listeners if you could situate us in the Sawana region and what it means to participate in the Baladi, the land-based folk indigenous lifeways and ancestral wisdoms of that region.
00:19:18.860mm-hmm swana stands for southwest asia and north africa and is a term that um you know some
00:19:28.800activists from our region have kind of reclaimed as an alternative to the middle east and north
00:19:36.720africa um it's a less colonial way to to refer to the geographic placement of the region because
00:19:44.460the Middle East, as our Palestinian scholar, uncle Edward Said said and taught us in his book,
00:19:53.500Orientalism, really beckons the question, middle and east of where? And, you know, places Europe
00:20:01.780as the center. And so, you know, in an effort to sort of de-center Europe, you know, our activist
00:20:14.340communities have begun to popularize that term. And I have, you know, participated in that. But
00:20:21.640actually, in my book, I also choose to step away from the term swana. And I refer to our broader
00:20:31.760region as the crossroads, which was a word that actually was offered by Sanyu Estelle Nagenda,
00:20:39.460who's somebody who was involved in a series of conversations I had been having with people in
00:20:46.860our communities around how do we really grapple with remapping this region, and especially my
00:20:56.540own desire to actually move away from the colonial continental bordering altogether.
00:21:03.340You know, people might wonder why our region is such a hotspot for empire and for war.
00:21:11.780And it's not because we're terrorists, obviously, I hope to the listeners of this podcast that
00:21:18.160that is true. But it's because we are geopolitically located at the intersection
00:21:26.020of Africa and Asia, at the threshold of, you know, the Mediterranean, which crosses into Europe.
00:21:36.260So I think the relationship between our region and the African continent in particular has really
00:21:44.660been manipulated by European colonizers over the generations to leverage a proximity to the,
00:21:55.440you know, quote unquote, cradle of civilization. And, you know, it's all, it's honestly deeply
00:22:03.220wrapped up in, you know, anti-Blackness. And there's a lot of critique amongst our
00:22:09.440African siblings and scholars that, you know, share a lot about the problematic nature of
00:22:16.880also severing the continent of Africa into North Africa, you know, delegating some kind of
00:22:24.400proximity to Europe or to whiteness. I personally would like to, you know, in the effort to remember0.72
00:22:33.140and to really grapple with colonial legacies on our region
00:22:40.800like I kind of mentioned in the remembrance concept that I follow,
00:22:46.040which is, you know, and the source is the earth.
00:22:48.560And so what are ways that we can reconceptualize
00:22:52.760and remap our geographies beyond, you know,
00:22:56.460the continents were also created as colonial constructs,
00:23:00.700the names of them, where they start and end,
00:23:03.140Our region is, you know, connected by land to the African continent.
00:23:08.600Gaza, in particular, is the literal bridge between the African continent and so-called West Asia.
00:23:14.940And so what are ways that we contend with and reconceptualize, really, the paradigms in which we orient our lands when the earth is the center,
00:23:28.680When our relationships culturally and genetically and cosmologically and ecologically for generations and migrationally for generations define how we narrate the relationships and who we are on like a more borderless kind of earth.
00:23:49.120So I actually move away from Swana and try to, you know, rest in a language like Crossroads, which kind of depicts a little bit more of the actual like story of our land also as a threshold, really.
00:24:07.840And I think that the way I see what's happening in Palestine is a very profound indication of that threshold, because I also think that we are also a threshold of profound liberation from empire right now.
00:24:24.000And, you know, our generation is being given the incredibly profound opportunity to be part of the largest collective healing and liberation project of our time, really, potentially.
00:24:43.300because I think that when this threshold becomes a liberatory one, when the possibilities of
00:24:50.660liberation in Palestine become materialized because of our participation, because of our
00:24:57.560reinforcement, and by way of our reinforcement, that empire itself has the opportunity to fall
00:25:06.820all over across the earth and i feel like our region is a threshold in so many ways
00:25:14.440both energetically and just literally and that i'm i'm inclined to lean into the power and the
00:25:24.640mystery and the the holiness of that and the relationships of kinship that it embodies beyond
00:27:41.000musicians alongside with these journalists.
00:27:45.040And the reason why is simply because our culture is born out of our
00:27:52.160relationship with place for thousands of years for generation after generation and this is what
00:27:58.980makes indigenous cult this is this is a defining attribute of what indigeneity means it is
00:28:06.680indigeneity you know is born out of place-based relationships anchored in the elements of place
00:28:15.460And culture doesn't come from thin air. Culture is born out of land, not the other way around. The land is what intonates the colors and the patterns on our traditional dress, the dialects of our languages, the metaphors and cosmological meaning and importance that defines who we are and how we move in the world
00:28:43.720And why we extend generosity in this way. The land is the origin of our culture. And this is proof of our indigeneity.
00:28:57.100Our culture, there is no song, there is no dance, there is no expression or form from our region that does not mention or emerge explicitly from our relationship to land.0.76
00:29:15.860And because Israel is an ethnic cleansing project, genociding our actual bodies and people as they are in Gaza right now is not enough.0.66
00:29:27.820They want to ensure that there is no testament, that there is no legacy of our cultural existence, of our indigenous existence to place.0.78
00:29:43.560because our mere presence, our mere existence is a threat to their myth of holy belonging
00:29:50.980on our backs or of righteous displacement and statehood that does not include integrity
00:30:03.160or respect for the people who have stewarded the place and been there for generation after
00:30:11.920generation. And so we are the land. The land is our literal bones everywhere we go. And that is
00:30:23.180an ultimate threat, especially because due to the damage and the constant aggression of empire
00:30:31.320in our region, we are one of the largest diasporas on this earth right now. And it's impossible to
00:30:38.780erase us. Even if you eliminate every single Palestinian from the land of Palestine and then1.00
00:30:43.740move on to Lebanon and then move on to wherever, it is impossible to erase us. And they know that1.00
00:30:51.280our culture carries on. It carries on. And in fact, every time they target it, it becomes more
00:30:59.000eternal. So, you know, it's a threat. We're a threat. And I believe that the journalists being
00:31:04.560targeted right now, it's particular too, because not only are they showing the news, but we're in
00:31:11.720a new era of journalism, where journalism are regular people with phones who report on social
00:31:18.700media, who are not dependent on the media to make palatable our realities. And we have reclaimed
00:31:27.400our power in the face of their effort to narrate us. I guess as my head is spinning in the grief
00:31:42.780and discomfort and the desire to figure it out, how does this get fixed? How do we as a collective
00:31:53.720move out of this constant barrage of violence and trauma over and over again. As I'm like in
00:32:02.040that whirlwind, I'm thinking back to herbal and practical support. Yeah, maybe if we could go to
00:32:09.060the plants for a moment, I'm like, help us out here. And you've created herbal guides and
00:32:14.960resources for crises previously. And I'm wondering what herbs and resources you're turning to now.
00:32:21.200mm-hmm yeah we did we created an herbal guide called libeirut an herbal and healing guide
00:32:30.220actually for proof that there's constant crisis in our region it was in response to the beirut blast
00:32:37.220the port of beirut was it exploded and also it damaged large portions of our city killed many
00:32:46.200people. We too were pulling our dead from under the rubble with absolutely no support from
00:32:52.280our own state and so on and so forth. And so we had created the Liberut Herbal Guide,
00:32:59.680as well as some trauma regulation videos, resources for folks dealing with the incredible
00:33:08.120shock at that time. And the enduring just layers of systems collapse, an economic collapse that
00:33:18.820continue to multiply and become more and more severe in Lebanon as people are forced to find
00:33:28.020ways to survive with incredible, all kinds of new limitations constantly to the practical just
00:33:36.960things the practical things that you know most of us in the west take for granted um so that that
00:33:45.680guide is still available um it's available for purchase and print and it's also available for
00:33:51.300free on um our hub website as well as the videos and you know i i have to say that as an herbalist
00:33:59.440who often turns to the plants to support in times of crisis, this time has challenged me profoundly.
00:34:10.160It's the first time where something about just putting out healing resources, so to speak,
00:34:18.660for my broader community just has not felt right yet. It doesn't feel right because I do not
00:34:25.600believe that, you know, I think that in the way that the West relates to healing and to herbs
00:34:33.740is that somehow it's going to take away what hurts. And I don't believe that that's how it
00:34:42.680works. But I also, I don't believe that that's what this time requires. I don't believe there
00:34:48.440is a remedy for this time. I don't believe that we should be seeking, um, we should be seeking
00:34:56.100to comfort the feelings. Kind of like what I was saying before, I think our task right now is to
00:35:01.900harness the grief and the rage towards action. I really believe that that is our task. That being
00:35:09.120said, I know, and, and I, and I'll say about that also, that, you know, when people talk about
00:35:16.660trauma. You know, trauma is not just because of what happens to you. It's not just because of the
00:35:22.920violence that you experience. Trauma is about your lack of agency in the face of violence.
00:35:29.540And I want to just remind people that our bodies are intelligent and our impulse to act and our
00:35:39.420desire to act should be enacted both because it's righteous and it's needed right now,
00:35:45.760And also because that is what protects us. That is what protects us from the enduring impact, from the ways that our agency is taken from us. We have incredible power. We have incredible power.
00:36:01.640I am watching young children in Gaza. There is a nine-year-old journalist who has found the power amidst unfathomable violence and loss and the active displacement of her family from one part of Gaza to the next to the next to use her voice to report what is happening at age nine.
00:36:25.980we who live in in the belly of the beast who do not fear bombs on our heads every moment
00:36:35.680we need to completely destroy the way that capitalism has indoctrinated us
00:36:43.700with attachment to comfort and privilege and feeling good and it's it's so oppressive
00:36:52.020We need to allow our bodies and our beings to feel what we feel and to harness those things and to see them as a form of power and responsibility and to really enact them.
00:37:08.280So I just want to name that. And within that context, I want to say that yes, herbs can support our endurance. Herbs can support our sustenance in a very practical way.
00:37:23.080And one thing, the way that I've been leaning in on the land, land is a partnership of incredible power. It is a lifeline to our fundamental nature as a species who has everything that we need on our earth to exist, to survive, to do well.
00:37:46.540And I think that leaning into land and the plants are this immediate and this constant way that we in our bodies kind of wake up the land inside of us, the elements of life and activate the kinship and the power of our generational relationship to land in our own beings.
00:38:12.280And I think that starting to really look at this partnership, this partnership of love and life as one of both strength, possibility, and revelation is something that I'm interested in and trying to actively lean in on with the plants.
00:38:36.780This might sound a little abstract, but what I know is that my Plancestors, which are the plants of my ancestral lineage, are plants who are our ancestors, are plants who have evolved and helped us become who we are generation after generation.
00:38:55.800And the plant sisters of place that give me life, that endow me with life every day, that bless my body with the miracle of existence every single day and in this exact moment as I breathe the oxygen that they create for me.
00:39:14.520Um, that they are, um, that they realign us, that they remember us towards that access of fundamental truth.
00:39:24.280And that fundamental truth has the power to unveil pathways of resistance, honestly, of resistance to the forces that oppose and that try to dismantle the integrity of this earth, of our living existence, of our cultures, of our power.
00:39:52.000And that that power is so accessible to us because plants are a part of our life that I'm interested in leaning into my plant sisters and listening more deeply and really leaning into the relationships as kind of an aid towards practical action.
00:40:12.740I think often about how Harriet Tubman realized the pathways of the Underground Railroad in her dreams. I think about the fact that she was a community herbalist. I think about the fact that I know from my own relationship to the land, from my ancestral stories with the land, that the land makes way and gives way to strength.
00:40:40.960I know because we're watching people who know their land. They know their land. Their intimacy with place has allowed them avenues of protection, you know, of survival, of self-preservation that is contingent completely on, you know, a relationship to place.
00:41:04.680And that our grandmothers, you know, our grandmothers have survived on, you know, the herbs that grow around them for thousands of years, that they have nourished survival for me to exist.
00:41:23.100There are so many generations of empire and exile that precede me and my lineage alone. For me to exist, that kinship with the land and with the sustenance of the land, but also the strength, the power, the guidance that that partnership with place endows, it is our literal lifeline.
00:41:49.180and so these days for me when some plants that have been um present with me a lot have been
00:41:57.520um hawthorn has been really present with me in fact um i was in the cedar forest in lebanon
00:42:04.500in june and this hawthorn tree i i spend so much time in that cedar forest but
00:42:10.200it's like i this place that i have walked past and through a million times um this hawthorn tree
00:42:18.440caught my attention this year and kind of was under the radar for so many years before that.
00:42:25.700And it just was glowing with flowers. It was just glowing with flowers. And I knew, I was like,
00:42:33.200oh my gosh, this is one of those moments where I need to make a flower essence because this tree
00:42:38.000is calling my attention. And, you know, months later, my feeling has been that the land has also,
00:42:46.280was also communicating with me beforehand that the land has been taking care of me,
00:42:54.820that the past is taking care of our future, and that that hawthorn flower essence that I made in
00:43:01.740June is a remedy that was made because my community would need it now. And so when I
00:43:09.920sit with the Hawthorne and, you know, I'm planning on sharing it with our communities more soon,
00:43:17.060hopefully, in some remedies that can support. It's not just for, it's not for the comfort.
00:43:23.240It's not for the comfort. It's for the clarity. It's for the land that knew that there was a need
00:43:31.340and what the land knows, what the land in that forest that has almost been extinct from the
00:43:37.260face of this planet, that specific place, what that place knows about surviving, about
00:43:44.780resisting, about freedom, and about persistence, and how that knowing can fill my own body,
00:43:54.940my own spirit, through this threshold towards liberation.
00:44:01.660That feels very comforting to hear you speak about the plants in this way.
00:44:06.620And if you would go into the Plancestors a bit more, I would really love that.
00:44:20.040They've been on this earth evolving and surviving for longer than us as a species and our plants
00:44:26.960of place of our lineages in particular have literally made the fibers of who we are.
00:44:33.480And so as a diasporic person, especially one that has kind of been reckoning, because I grew up in an era where Lebanon was in war for the first 13 years of my life or so, something like that.
00:44:49.960And it was a big part of my generation's experience and the ruptures that got created by that. We're still reckoning with today.
00:45:01.380And so the Plancestors for me have been a way, you know, I know that our land and the specific land of our lineages, it carries stories and memory and power and life for many eras before and beyond, hopefully, these moments.
00:45:22.380moments. And that when I haven't been able to go and be in my land, so much of our region are not
00:45:31.980only in diaspora, but in exile. And so how do we connect to the power in the land and the stories
00:45:40.940and the memory and the resilience and the strength and the wisdom in our land when we cannot even
00:45:49.220touch it. And I have found that working with our ancestral plants is like a really powerful way
00:45:57.180that our bodies and spirits kind of realign. It activates the land in our bones because those
00:46:04.500lands are in our bones. And the plant sisters help wake up that power, that kinship, that love
00:46:12.140to kind of activate those places of connection inside of us, no matter where we are.
00:46:49.220Oh gosh, it feels so good to come back to the plant world for a moment in the midst of all the
00:47:00.820chaos outside. And also I'm sure for many of us inside our bodies and our heads, and it's a really
00:47:09.060good reminder, I think for all of us, but I'm speaking for myself when I get so trapped by the
00:47:17.020racing mind of the intensity of this time. It's like, come back to the plants,
00:47:24.380breathe with the plants, take a moment with them because I do think they can ground us and
00:47:29.860keep us steady and even able to keep going in a good way. And gosh, Layla, this has been such
00:47:39.360a beautiful conversation. And I have a lot of other thoughts that are going through my head,
00:47:44.400But potentially as we begin to close, if there's anything that I haven't asked or you haven't mentioned yet, I just want to give you the space to choose a direction of how we close out this conversation.
00:48:03.220Yes, there's two things that are on my mind.
00:48:05.800One is on that note of the plants, you know, one thing I will say is that when the genocide began, I was still in Lebanon in my village, and my village shares the same water as Gaza, you know, it's a coastal village that is just 200 miles north of Gaza.
00:48:29.500And every day I was going down to the water to talk to the water and to talk to the elements.
00:48:36.000And I could feel the visceral energy of what was happening in our lands.
00:48:41.700And I felt such power somehow, even though it was so visceral and it was so much less safe because Lebanon has been under threat since the beginning of this constantly, you know.
00:48:53.000But there was a lot of power and I had a lot of grief when it became time for me to return to my home in California for a moment.
00:49:05.100And I had grief because I really felt like, you know, part of my power existed in being in proximity to that land and those elements and being able to attune just being there.
00:49:18.520But as I tended my California native garden upon return, which was completely overgrown and really needed my care and attention, I felt like the plants here were reminding me that they have endured probably the most violent and extreme version of settler colonial violence and genocide on the history of this planet.
00:49:48.520That, you know, 95% of the indigenous populations in the so-called U.S. on Turtle Island were annihilated and that somehow these plants and their people still exist and still persist and still find ways to resist.
00:50:08.100And that these plants also had a message that they know and that they help, they can help, they can help guide and survive and teach us something in this moment about how to become free and how to remember when so much has been lost.
00:50:32.280And so I want to just say that in terms of just reminding people, too, that this struggle is also this threshold. It directly implicates us in so many ways and layers.
00:50:47.500And that decolonization is not just a metaphor in these ancestral ways. I mean this in a very literal way that the land has messages because the land wants to return back to itself. And that includes its people too. And so that's one thing.
00:51:05.580And then the other thing on my mind is just related somehow. But, you know, I keep hearing people say Palestine is freeing us. And I think it's so beautiful and powerful because I think it's true to a degree.
00:51:20.700But I want to caution against the narrative that Palestine is freeing us and that we are somehow displaced from the front lines, specifically in the context of Palestinian liberation, which has always acted knowing that the world must reinforce the actions and be part of the front line because it is a struggle against empire that we are all implicated in.
00:51:48.880And we, you know, one thing that I really feel in this moment is that while the fall of empire is inevitable, we are in a very tenuous and liminal threshold that requires stewardship.
00:52:04.360And I think about my birth chapter, actually. The birth chapter of my book, in some ways,
00:52:10.100feels more relevant to the medicine for this moment than any other part. I think that we are
00:52:16.620in this liminal, tenuous threshold that resembles birth somehow. And that birth is not, you know,
00:52:26.420life is not guaranteed when you're in the midst of birth. A responsiveness to every moment within
00:52:32.680the threshold, a full-hearted stewardship of every single moment within the threshold