Hello again,
It’s so nice to be back on the page with you.
I write to you tonight with electric palms still ringing from the handful of stinging nettle I accidentally grabbed while preparing tonight’s dinner. (I actually love when nettle bites back, and am a grateful recipient of this topical medicine.)
It’s the time of year when the forest and the front yard make their way into nearly every meal, this season in the form of beloved and prolific stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), big leaf maple blossoms (Acer macrophyllum), miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), dandelion greens (Taraxacum officinale), chickweed (Stellaria media), morel mushrooms (Morchella esculenta) and dozens of other flowers, leaves, stalks, roots, and fungi who generously offer their nourishment this time of year.
I write to you tonight with fingernails stained dark with soil, granules tucked so deep in my cuticles they could grow gardens of their own.
It’s the time of year when the garden beckons us back into its arms, tells us to lean in closely and whispers—“Work.”
I write to you tonight with forearms pumping loudly, scratched and utterly exhausted from back-to-back days of shoveling, wheelbarrowing, raking, grading, hauling, digging, lifting, throwing, mowing, sowing, growing.
It’s the time of year when the ground has warmed and the land is still soft and the daylight stretches so long we lose track of time until our stomachs rumble and my arms cannot hold a glass of water without shaking and I remember to come inside because I still need to write a newsletter.
I’ve returned to the blinking cursor on this blank page numerous nights, each time staring down at my hands as a diary of the day. Each time brimming with inspiration, yet too damn exhausted to move the energy from my heart up to my head and out of my fingertips.
But today is Earth Day. When you’re reading this, it won’t be. (Though that hardly matters because, well, if you’re a subscriber to this newsletter I probably don’t need to explain.)
Anyhow, today there is heightened collective attention on the Life-giving Source upon which this newsletter draws its deepest inspiration, and the sparrows swirling outside my window remind me that it’s time to let it fly.
Earth Day, first officially celebrated in the U.S. 54 years ago in honor of a planet 4.5 billion years old.1
Earth Day, which has its origins in the righteous rage of protest, first organized as a teach-in on college campuses, inspired by student protests against the Vietnam War. Inspired by the same force and solidarity spreading across the country as we speak.
Earth Day, which reminds us to listen to and learn from the courage of our youth, and to those who have the most to lose.
Earth Day, which had its fire fueled by 4 million gallons of crude oil spilled from a drilling blowout off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969. (It’s since spilled again, as they always will.)
Earth Day, which scaled rapidly across the country and mobilized more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to take to the streets and demand the nation address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. In its first year, it remains the largest demonstration in U.S. history.2
Earth Day, with rhizomatic roots that stretch across political lines. First initiated in 1970 by Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, co-led with conservative Republican Rep. Pete McCloskey, and organized by activist Denis Hayes.
Earth Day, which helped build public and political will that established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of several first-of-their-kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and 10 other significant pieces of "green" legislation during the Nixon administration—a Republican president with a Democratic-majority Congress.3
Earth Day, which, yes, catalyzed landmark environmental protections that we likely take for granted every day, and which, yes, united people in a starkly divisive time not unlike our own today, and which, also yes, gets credit for inspiring the modern American environmental movement which, oh no, yes, has actually been grown and tended to by the Indigenous, Black and Brown communities and leaders the movement has historically and actively overlooked, harmed, erased, and displaced.
I’d like to borrow from the incredible Leah Penniman’s treasure of a book, Black Earth Wisdom, to name just the tip of the iceberg of Black environmental leadership:
Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) – seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa when she was seven years old and enslaved in Boston, where she was permitted to read and write. She became on of the best-known poets in pre-nineteenth century America and was published in 1773, making her the first published African American poet. She wrote about the divine in nature and influenced the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) – born into slavery, escaped to freedom in 1842 and went on to write an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, arguably the nation’s first work of environmental justice literature.
Dr. George Washington Carver (1864-1943) – a pioneer in regenerative agriculture and one of the first in the U.S. to advocate for the use of leguminous cover crops, nutrient-rich mulching, and diversified horticulture.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Lucille Clifton (1936–2010), Jayne Cortez (1936–2012) – authors whose work advanced ecofeminist theory and trailblazed the field of eco-poetics.
Dr. Robert Bullard (1946–) – widely considered the father of the environmental justice movement by taking Southwestern Waste Management to court for endangering the health of the majority Black residents of Houston’s Northwood Manor. It was the first court case that charged environmental racism under civil rights law.
Earth Day, not so revered by those who knew and know there has never been separation between people and land, between land and race, class, gender, and health long before the movement became intersectional.4 Not so revered by Indigenous peoples whose worldviews, rituals, and practices supported harmonious and kincentric living for thousands of years, only to see those views outlawed, then co-opted, greenwashed, and sold back to them every April 22.
Earth Day feels increasingly strange each year, estranging one day from the rest while our hearts beat in our chest to a metronome of ticking time.
When confronting the future, I like to return to the past. To think about what existed long before Earth Day, and long before this country or this world ever needed it. To find the center of silence within the noise, and follow the spiral inward.
Let’s start 400 million years ago.
This is when Life on Earth first used sound to communicate.
“The evolution of insect wings opened the door to song on land. Flying insects could rapidly escape from predators, and so, making sound was no longer so risky. Wings also turned out to be excellent sound-makers. Their papery surfaces were connected to pulsing flight muscles, like loud speakers hooked up to amps.” – David Haskell, When the Earth Started to Sing
The first animal known to sing was a cricket called a Permostridulus—alive 270 million years ago. New forms of singing insects appeared over the next 100 million years. Somatic instrumentalists, they made noise by rubbing and clicking their body parts together.
The evolution of the larynx changed everything by creating the instrument of voice. We have the leadership of the frogs, 200 million years ago, to thank for that. Reptiles joined in next—hissing, clicking, and harmonizing.
The rise of flowering plants between 150 million and 50 million years ago triggered a mutual flourishing between flora and fauna, and the nectar of song became sonic honey.
“Flowers and fruits are rich in sugars, oils, and proteins—bonanzas for animals. This abundance created new ecological connections among plants and the animals that pollinated flowers, dispersed fruit, drank sap, and nibbled leaves. Co-evolution between animals and flowering plants fed the diversification of both groups and created reciprocity...Biologists refer to this period as the terrestrial revolution, a burst of evolutionary creativity.” – David Haskell, When the Earth Started to Sing
Soon, feathered dinosaurs evolved into birds, some with a syrinx (a unique avian vocal organ) and some without. A massive asteroid hit the planet. Only the birds with a syrinx—those with a song—survived. The birdsong we know today would likely not exist were it not for this space rock colliding with our own.
Finally, we have mammals. Furry, warm-blooded, and birthers of live young—how did we gain our diverse range of howls, barks, yips, and yells? To whom should we thank for the gift of our verbal expression?
“Mammals owe our voices to great great great grandmothers—the protomammals who started lactating about 200 million years ago. The gift of milk necessitated a reworking of the throat and jaw. To suckle, young mammals needed muscular throats and mouths. Mammalian throat bones and muscles thickened, strengthened, and elaborated. Evolution wasted no time in putting these innovations to work in the service of sound-making…the bugling of the elk, the call of the coyote…
…the subtlety and range of human speech, and the resulting triumphs of vocal culture, are bequests from ancient mothers. Mammalian femininity gave us speech and song. Or, gave us the potential to use our voices.”
– David Haskell, When the Earth Started to Sing
A moment of silence for the matriarchs of voice.
To let the sacredness of suckling settle in. Before nursing was banished to a bathroom stall, and silencing women changed it all.
There is so much to be done in this world, so much requiring our precious attention, so much of it deeply bound within the system of patriarchy. If women across the world had full rights, equity, and greater access to power—and if we took far better care of the mothers in our society—I believe (and the data shows) we would get to all of it a whole lot faster.
Let us never forget it is our Mothers who first gave us our voice in the spiral of deep time.
It is my greatest honor and most sacred obligation to free my own, for Her.
I follow the spiral inward and it always leads me to the Mother.
I follow the spiral outward and it leads me back into everything.
It makes sense:
Mater—/ˈmādər/—mother.
Matter—/ˈmadər/—that which you shape things out of; everything.
I recently learned in a lecture with geo-philosopher David Abram that both “mater” and “matter” share the same etymological root in the word matrix.
Matrix—/ˈmātriks/—womb; the environment in which something develops.
“Matter is the womb of all things. It is not inert. It is the very space we’re in in which life and breath is born…The idea that the womb is inanimate or inert is foolish….and this is the baseline layer on which you can construct hierarchy. There are differences between things, but they are not arranged hierarchically.” – David Abram, Emergence Magazine lecture, April 2024
Come with me—if everything is made of matter, and matter is made in the womb, then the Mother lives in everything. If the Mother lives in everything, then everything is alive. Everything moves. (This blog is called Baila, after all.)
If everything moves, then it could never sit still enough for one to build a hierarchy upon it. The foundation of supremacy whereby one life matters more than another, between or within kin, would crumble. If this is true, animism might just be exactly what we need to save us from ourselves. No scripture to scream, no sacred text to weaponize—simply a still, small voice5 to sit and observe.
I am no etymology expert, nor can I claim that the English language comes anywhere close to embodying the living Earth like that of Indigenous languages, sourced from the sounds of the land itself, a song embedded in every syllable.
Yet, when I return to the roots of the words that most frequently dance upon my tongue—I have hope we could get closer to restoring our relations to that which has never wanted to harm us.
Again, She is saving us, even as she spirals.
I want to end this newsletter full circle, unpacking why I began writing about the garden and ended up writing about the Mother.
It turns out that things don’t go according to plan when you decide to actually listen to the story that wants to be told. I love this writing practice because I always come in with an idea and it always results in something more true.
It makes sense—I sourced nearly all of the material for what I thought I’d be writing about while engaging deeply with the land I call home in Washington. I mean head-to-toe covered in its soil, salt, and stings. I thought I would write about shaping land, and how it shapes us in return.
Where I actually sat down to write, however, was from my childhood home near Atlanta, Georgia, on the exact same land that raised me for nearly 20 years.
My garden is not here. My mother is.
And what wants to move through is some kind of ancient breath reminding me that my healing will be found by following the fissures deep into the mother wound. Back into the belly of my own voice, into the history of song itself, deep into this land of milk, and honeysuckle.
A portion of all paid subscriptions goes to Mother Nation, and the remainder directly funds my continued education in somatic-based coaching, facilitation, and decolonization.
• Email: izabellazucker@gmail.com
ICYMI: Last month’s writing wandered between the Olympic Peninsula and Colombia in Early Spring. I wrote about finding silence, balance, and, you guessed it, birds.
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All numbers shared are based in Darwinian evolutionary theory and radiometric dating, i.e. a Western paradigm and only one worldview.
“Nixon himself was no environmentalist…but he realized during a time when there were many other extremely controversial, divisive issues like the Vietnam War for instance, that as American public concern grew about damage to the environment that this could potentially be a winning issue for him." NPR.
“How do I talk to a little flower? Through it I talk to the Infinite. And what is the Infinite? It is that silent, small force… that still small voice.” – Dr. George Washington Carver
"I write to you tonight with fingernails stained dark with soil, granules tucked so deep in my cuticles they could grow gardens of their own." The feeling of contentment within me when my fingers look the same...
This piece just stirs so much within me about the meaning of reciprocity. I lived in rural Florida for 3 years, tended the land I lived on and farmed at an organic farm nearby. It was through these experiences that I finally began to fully know the meaning of true reciprocity, through living it. And then to see how so many live with no understanding or honor of it, just taking and taking and taking, from the Holy Mother, from life. I share the same sentiments about Earth Day. Thank you for these words.