Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. You're listening to Deeply Rooted: Grounding Practices to Weather the Winds of Uncertainty, a series devoted to inviting stillness, balance, and abundance into our lives during these troubled times. We invite you to slow down, breathe, and connect deeply with your inner self, with community and with Earth. 

We've asked friends who are wise stewards of Earth, spirit, community, and bodily wisdom to share grounding practices and coping tools to empower you and nourish your inner sanctuary. Every Monday morning, you will experience guided meditations, poetry and prose readings, questions for deep inquiry, storytime, music performances and more. 

Today, my dear comrade MillA Prince will transport us back into the wild web of life bursting forth all around us in this time of Spring Awakening. Milla is a writer, folk herbalist, and noita from the boreal forest of Eastern Finland near the Arctic Circle and Russian border. She is currently living in Coast Salish territory, where she co-runs the North Sea Apothecary.

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Milla Prince  Your body is part of the body of nature. Your body is adaptable, but also forever tied to the primordial rhythms of shifting tides, moonlight, pollen taking wing from a catkin, a green shoot knowing when to begin unfurling in the dark of the soil. 

Your body is at least one part a wave returning to the shore, a crawdad diving down to the river bottom, a hollow bone, and the iridescent gleam on an earthworm’s skin. At least one part from a thousand.

It is high time to remember that. 
It is past time to remember that.

No matter where you live, there are thousands of small sign posts directing your way back to the soil of your body, water of your body, the fire of your body, the air of your body. If you follow the deltas of city streets and highways they inevitably lead to deer trails and underground rivers. Everywhere you look there is hidden life, within and without.

Look for, each day: The furred backs of pussy willows in city parks, next to the obscene ripeness of magnolias. The weeds in sidewalk cracks greening. Birds finding the strange geography of canyons of buildings passable places to begin raising their young. Your houseplants straining to get out of their pots, demanding water and nutrients in the most neglected corners of apartments. The garlic and potatoes in the cupboard growing new eyes and shoots, eating themselves inside-out instead of letting you eat them, in a final act of holy cannibalism: They are destroying their present form in order to be born anew. 

You too are a seed of something new. We humans think of creating new life only as the act of linear ancestry: my life springing into the life of my children, but in the great chain of being, new life is born from our bodies every day. We scatter the seed of plants, we breathe out tree food, we breathe in the atmosphere made by them for us but not only us.We build shelters for the babies of small, opportunistic mammals, we harbor birds under our eaves and spiders raise their young on strings in our rafters. 

You too are the seed of something old. Once upon a time you were many other beings. You didn’t just get here. You have been here a long time. You have been lightning, you have been a trilobite, you have been a tooth. No, really. You can feel it in your bones. Is it an ache? Is it a tingle? Is it a memory of something half-forgotten? Is it a dream? You tell me.

I will tell you this.

When we die, our bodies return to the biomass of the world. If we choose our rites wisely, we can become a tree, an ant, a potato bug. And then, in a trick of non-linear ancestry again: a bird, a deer, a rat, another human. 

Brush your hair and release the lost parts of yourself into the wind. They will become nests for birds outside an office window on the fifth floor. 

Feed the crumbs of your meals to the soil, to the hungry micro-organisms. Feed a part of your food, your paycheck, your sweaters, your secret stash of the unnecessary to sustain the life of someone else besides yourself. 

Offer up what you can, when you can, and do not be stingy. Offer up your time. Some of us suddenly find ourselves possessing more of it. It is a miracle, to not have enough time, or too much of it. How could we quantify such a thing. Time is not money, time is not precious, it is what we make of it. It is time yes, and high time to do all these things, but also, time is not linear, or real. It is not anything but seasons and tides, rites of spring, summer, fall, and winter and hundreds of others seasons we have chosen to forget, ignore, or carry on in secret. 

Time is Moons. 

Relearn their names. Look up and find each of their phases. They are faces of your grandmothers mothers mothers mothers mothers. Each of your ancestors has bathed in their cool waters. Has asked them significant questions about blood and strawberries and first frosts. Has by their pale light tried to discern the tracks of a Moose on the spring snows, the flicker of fish returning from the summerlands to their summerlands and watched the shadow of covey of geese travel over that light. In the beginning, there were only three lights at night: Moonlight, Starlight, Firelight. They are all still here. Are you? Are we? 

If you catch your breath now, and draw it in deep, and hold it, and let it all the way out again, you will maybe hear in your ears the rush of your own blood. It will sound like the ocean, it will sound like the wind in the pine trees of a primeval forest you have never visited. It is made of the minerals of this earth, out of the iron oxide of the first artists, who’s handprints are your handprints, flickering on the cave wall. Remember that when your breath catches in your throat. If you press your ear against the seashell of you own self, you may hear the voice of every being you are made of, breathing with you. What do they whisper to you?

Once you were an amphibian. Once you were an egg inside your parent’s body, inside your grandparent’s body. Once you were weightless like a bird. Do you still dream of flying? Don’t stop. 

There are many things to do each day, just to feed and house this body. You may not have a choice in them. You may not have freedom. You may not be able to gather, or hunt, or grow, or harvest your warmth, food and home. You may not feel a belonging, or a purpose. You may feel alone at times, you may feel disconnected. Remember that you are not. You are a part of, not the internet of things but the mycelium of the world, The Web of Life. Whether life is incredibly rare in the Universe or as common as a passing meteor trickling dust over your head as shooting stars, you are part of it. Part of them. Part of Us. Your body is the body of nature: a piece of basalt, a root, a flicker, a salmon with a magnetic compass in your bones, the true north star of your own being, a lodestone of a map, yours to navigate together with all of your relatives.

Declare interdependence. Declare a state of emergence.  

Declare your love.

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Milla Prince  My name is Milla Prince or Milla Anatolia Kotima. My mother's name is Ola Kotima and my father's name is Mohammed Suleiman. I was born and raised in the south Arctic taiga and by the subarctic tiaga in Finland. I'm Finnish and Palestinian. I'm an immigrant to these United States. I live on unceded Coast Salish territory off the coast of Washington on a small island where I grow food and tend to land and run a small herbal apothecary. I'm a folk herbalist, a storyteller, a practitioner of old ways. English is not my first language and in English, I use she/her pronouns, but in Finnish, we don't have gendered pronouns. I'm a big fan of For The Wild and when Ayana asked me to do a root meditation for them, I was honored but I thought to myself, "I'm not really a meditation kind of person, I'm more a manifesto kind of person." So, what I read to you earlier is called Declare Interdependence. I hope that you are well and take good care.

Ayana Young  You've been listening to Deeply Rooted: Grounding Practices to Weather the Winds of Uncertainty. I hope Milla's manifesto reignites a fire in your bones, and may you feel inspired to shed old parts of yourself and remember that no matter what crisis rattles your world, you are home when you are with Earth. 

You can follow Milla Prince on Instagram @thewomanwhomarrieabear and sign up for her newsletter by visiting https://www.thewomanwhomarriedabear.com. Stay connected with our community on social media and sign up for our newsletter by visiting https://www.forthewild.world/subscribe. If you've enjoyed today's offering, please rate us on iTunes and consider supporting us on Patreon. 

 Our theme music is the song home by Pura Fe and you also heard music from the Baltic Moonshine Band. Declare Interdependence was written by Milla Prince. I'd like to thank our wonderful podcast production team: Aiden McCray, Andrew Storrs, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Eryn Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, and Melanie Younger.