There is this place that’s hard to navigate from where the tendrils of culture are thin and wispy connecting back to the root. The harm colonialism and whatever more ancient call to cut folk from their land, language and culture and instead root them as dependent cogs in a wheel of destructive taking. The absence is felt but the eyes to see are gone so instead there is a blind grasping to try and feed the need but raised in lessons of taking instead the violence and crimes of the machine perpetuate itself, as all that shines is appropriated and twisted to serve the machine a wretched facsimile of its true nature just as the humans who serve the machine are to their true nature. There is no escaping the atonement for the harm done and the choice to continue harm in face of the awareness of it. The machine is large and mighty but the dismantling of it is as much the work of those born to it as those whose tendrils to the earth are strong and long and rooted in resisting.
I see you disconnected from the land, the ancestors, the cultures that sustained the line grasping blind in the dark. I will make mistakes but it is how I own the part I play in those mistakes that will reflect most upon me. So even as I feed those tendrils follow them back to their source I see that a new tree has grown and I have a duty to honour it as well. The tree planted on foreign soil needs to honour its home as well. So it feels there is no safe place to rest in to know that more harm will not come from merely being a symbol of the machine from within which I was birthed. To be both colonized and colonizer in turn and witness the deal made by my ancestors to buy their sense of home and safety at the cost of becoming the very monster they were fleeing. Well schooled in the tools once and still used upon them.
Such it is that every lesson I receive I must acknowledge I cannot fully see. That I must question it all against the lies of the world of the Machine I was born to that I carry within me unaware to their presence until in hope one day through humble Grace and kindness they rise to be transformed, atoned for and composted to be no longer carried further. Shifting from service to the Machine back to service to the Earth not as a savior or chosen one. Just one among many with their own eyes to see and act upon the knowing that rises from cultivating those broken tendrils, returning to the gift of receiving that is not taking, instead an exchange rooted in something greater then I can see today.