https://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=8698 

Be The Change

Make time to explore the memories of the land you currently live on.

PSY: You said that at a certain point you knew that land had memory, or you had a feeling, intuited, that land had memory before you knew that that was so. Do you have some particular memories of how you learned this? 

CM: When I was about nine years old, we took the only road trip of my childhood to see our relatives in Phoenix. My mother’s sister lived there with her family on this little piece of land, right at the foot of Camelback Mountain. They had a few acres, a couple horses; my tía kept her jardín. They were living a more traditional life than us, closer to our Sonoran Desert origins. And I remember driving back to Los Angeles, riding through the desert in the back of our Buick station wagon. It was so hot, we had the tailgate down and all the windows open. And I’m just sitting back there, watching the stars in the sky, the mountains, black shadows in the distance. And I get this feeling . . . that I’ve been there before, not just been, but a sense of a whole life. It was like I just knew it, you know? And it was the weirdest thing for me because at the time, I didn’t really know anything about being from that place. I knew that my grandparents were from Sonora and that we had relations in Arizona. Later, I came to learn that all of the mestizaje that is Moraga is from that area, from northern Sonora and Southern Arizona. Later   I wondered, What was that? Since then I have returned many, many times to the Sonoran Desert, and each time I remember that nine-year-old moment: the smell was right, the heat was right. It’s still unshakable for me.

In the ’80s, I spent a good amount of time in the Southwest and Texas, where I encountered native women, Chicanas, having a ceremonial life. I began to witness more and more women of color just being out on the land, working it, enjoying it, cultivating an honorable relationship to it. Suddenly it was somehow “cultural” and collective to be out on the land — not like I’m just singly taking my young lesbian self out to the mountains and backpacking. During those years, the sense of land somehow holding memory began to grow for me.

I have to say again that I am ignorant. I don’t know a lot, but I know what I experienced. That intuitive sense that “I’ve been here before” reminds us, tells you again that you’re not crazy. This invisible place of knowing is actually quite visible, made manifest through the natural world. That’s what I now understand as an indigenous point of view. But at nine, I just knew it was so — and how does that happen? How do we allow for people to know at that deeper level when the pace of things grows increasingly fast? You have to slow down for that to happen.