Amidst a global swell of change, we are taking the cue to slow down where we can this week and lean back into the healing arms of our community, seek loving accountability rather than fragmentation, and ground ourselves in the great wisdom of this Earth. In this timely work, we find particular resonance and resource in our “plantcestors” (plant ancestors) — the leafy and thorned ones that have co-evolved alongside us humans, digesting the patterns of the stars and sky, mingling with pollinators and soil-dwellers, and giving life to material creation. 

Cellular impressions of our ancestral bioregions and the places we call home, our plant and herbal allies carry the potential to awaken memories, untold stories, pantheons, and paradigms of knowledge should we choose to tend our relationships with them. Unfurling from our tender conversation with this week’s guest, ancestral re-membrance practitioner, medicine maker, storyteller, and archivist Layla K. Feghali, we turn to our beloved flora to aid in our collective restoration, the revival of our ancestral ways, the reclamation of earthly kind, and the great global project of healing. 

Layla K. Feghali, MSW has a background in traditional + ancestral healing practices, "plantcestral" (aka herbal) medicine, community organizing, and mental health, and incorporates her knowledge in all these fields to support healing and education in her communities. Her work is dedicated to reviving earth-based ancestral knowledge, with a special emphasis on the re-membrance and restoration of sacred ancestral wisdoms from the SWANA* (aka MENA) region where her own ancestors originate. Her approach emphasizes relationship building, ancestral healing, and honoring the embodied knowledge that lives deep inside our bones and the body of the earth. She is currently based between her ancestral village in Lebanon and her diasporic home in Tongva (aka Los Angeles, California) where she was born. 

You can learn more about her work, her herbal medicine offerings, plantcestral re-membrance classes, embodied research project, and her other offerings through River Rose Re-membrance and visit the online community archival project she hosts, SWANA Ancestral HUB. 

As we seek meaningful ways to gather this week in spirit and online space, this episode offers the portal of plants and a practice of remembrance with the animals, fungi, fruit and ferns, seedlings, and weedy ones around us. Join us in tender conversation, as Layla and Ayana explore borderless ecologies, stories from the SWANA* region, what it looks like to embody relationship- rather than performance- culture, native plant revival, and the wealth of diasporic memory. May we plant, harvest, root, give, honor, notice, tend, and empower the subtle ways of knowing that exist in all of us—we are all worthy of this work. 

*SWANA stands for SouthWest Asia and North Africa, a less euro-centric way to describe the region commonly referred to as the Middle East and North Africa.

♫ Music by Zikrayat

Action Points from Layla

Learn about the local ecologies you live in, and the Indigenous communities from these locales. Acknowledge the leadership and names of these tribal communities, as well as any efforts to take care of the native fauna and flora in the region.

Build a relationship with one native plant in your region and commit to getting to know it more deeply and actively tending it in the wild (rather than harvesting it, find out what it needs to thrive and offer it that regularly - removing invasive species that surround it, helping to spread its seeds, etc.)

Learn a creation story from your ancestral lands.

Practice deepened listening to yourself, your relationships, your environment.

Start building a relationship with one plant from your ancestral lands that calls to you (maybe through cooking with it, taking a flower essence, learning its stories, drawing it, or any practice that can allow you to listen more deeply to its energy). 

Tend your relationship to your family - including transforming the patterns in your family that you do not want to continue.

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