March 1, 2026, Waxing Gibbous Moon before the Blood Worm Moon, Turtle Island, Land of the Osage, Kansas Settlercity
For 10,000+ years, people lived on this continent in relationship with the land, many who migrated regularly and maintained complex trade and land stewardship treaties. Here in the Great Plains some people migrated alongside other species like the buffalo. Borders didn’t exist. Mass imprisonment of people for the act of migrating did not exist. I hope more European-descended people can soften into respect, grief, and collaboration for and with the people who passed so much more time than us right here. I hope in softening we can receive wisdom from the old, mature species and societies already all around us.
When I was 26, I underwent a 10 hour surgery as part of my rectal cancer treatment. During the time I was in surgery, my friend and her 4 year old daughter painted watercolor paintings as a form of prayer for me. To this day I have those paintings and return to them in seasons of grieving the changes made to my body that day and in seasons of celebrating my soft skin, breathing lungs, beating heart, and digesting semi-colon.
I hosted a collage-making meditation to honor and grieve those who are, as the community defense network says, are experiencing an ICE-induced crisis. People migrate–as we do, as many other mammals do; but now a group called ICE attacks, abducts, and puts in group and single cages as many migrating people as they can. It’s roving groups of unaccountable armed men and women, often from other regions of the continent. And it’s an alt-masculinist subculture that hoovers cash from the government and invents it’s own currency in exchange for surveillance and weapons. And about 9 moons ago, the largest and most armed institutions in history flooded this effort with over $1 billion in funding and are pressuring fast expansion.
So people are being killed, detained, separated from their families, and forced to migrate after being attacked for migrating. People are passing time stuck in cages and behind closed shutters. This collage is a prayer that they can be free. Free to move, free to stay. (Why not let emigres’ home cities become sibling cities and city governments collaborate on flows of resources? The effort put in to any relationship would reflect the volume of migrating residents.) I meditated on the image of offering relief as tangible as cool, refreshing, glistening water. Using my hands to first muster refreshing love in my broken heart and then extend it towards those who have lost family members, to those who are trapped. May we remember forward to new freedom for everyone.