Falling in love with the land we live on
I wanted to see if I could fall in love with this land that I live on underneath its surface.
This would be a physical pathway of moving underneath–could I sense, could I feel close enough to fall in love with, the land of my part of the world under the grocery stores, and the tall office buildings, and the vast paved parking lots outside of the Targets, and even the train tracks that cross my cities like a system of metal veins? Was there still anything of the land in my part of the world, alive beneath metal and plastic and concrete?
I remember reading when I was pregnant that every baby today is born with plastic already within their system. Microplastics are present in all pregnant people’s food. These microplastics pass through the placenta. We give birth through plastic to plastic. We are birthing synthetic, plastic.
And this would also be a mystical or a spiritual looking underneath. I don’t live on the land of my ancestors. No folks of black ancestry in the US do. Many folks of black ancestry in the US do not even know where their ancestors came from (because, as we know, one of the tools of the oppressor, of the colonizer, is the erasure of indigenous knowledge, language, and lineage). Years ago I did an ancestry test… my mother’s people are from Nigeria, Mali, and other places. Not only do I not live anywhere near the lands of my ancestors, I live on land that was taken from its indigenous dwellers, lovers, and stewards, in this country’s first act of erasure and genocide. Can we find a way to fall in love with a land with so many wounds, so many hurt and broken memories?
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I live in urban New Jersey. New Jersey is not known for its nature. The great nature writers do not usually write about my part of the world. What is there to say, to feel, to find, about the earth that lives under what we call “New Jersey”?
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Sometimes when I am waiting for the train in Jersey City, I put my phone away and give myself away to dreaming. Across the tracks, in the place where the underground was cut to make space for this station, I can see rough cliffs. They are made of a brown stone, with veins of white running through. I see the tops of people’s heads on the platform, frowning faces cast blue by cell phone screens; often I am the only person looking out, looking up. Sometimes also when I am being driven in a car, maybe it is summertime and the sky is vast and blue, and the day is long and feels endless with possibilities, or maybe it is winter and the sky is gray laced with white clouds, and the night will be cozy and long, and I look over and see the same high brown cliffs traced with white on the side of the highway. There was something here, something they broke down and tunneled into to make these smooth pathways for cars.
Out of these observations, as well as my research into ancient “New Jersey,” I wrote this once in one of my novels:
We cross the bridge and enter New Jersey, New York’s neighboring state that I have never been to before. I am not sure exactly where we are going, only that Paloma said, “I have something I really want to show you. I think you’re gonna like it.” Highways with exits to tall buildings and chain stores and strip malls dissipate like noise into silence, giving way to long expanses of nothingness, walls of thick green trees on either side of us, little rivers snaking their way through, rocky hills with ancient veins, the material from which, you can imagine, these roads were carved many years ago. Paloma tells me that dinosaur fossils were found decades ago in great quantities in New Jersey; she says that, millions of years ago, southern New Jersey, where Atlantic City and the Jersey shore are, was underwater, while the northern half of the state, where we are right now, was home to dinosaurs and prehistoric crocodiles and giant mastodons and woolly mammoths. I’m not sure what a mastodon is, but I believe woolly mammoths are the ones with the shaggy brown fur and enormous curving tusks, bigger than elephants.
–check out Mira’s Story, published by Cinnamon Press, right here
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I feel enchanted by creeks. Not the larger, more obvious, better known rivers of my area (the Hudson, the Raritan, the Passaic, where teams row boats on fair weather days; you can watch them from the highway as you drive past; we saw them the day we drove our baby home from the hospital, passing the Passaic from Belleville to Newark)–but the mysterious, nameless tiny streams that erupt suddenly in unexpected places. These trickles of water are a blessing, the smallest and most wonderful miracle. You don’t know when you will turn some urban corner and see one–a rainbow flashing of water. When you see them you remember the nymphs, the mermaids, the naiads. You remember that all of nature is equally enchanted. You may remember, like one of my favorite writers, and a beloved mentor who has passed away, Pat Schneider, learned on one of her spiritual quests–that all water is holy water.
“Pat,” she said. “All water is holy.”
Oh. I was beginning to get it–there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
My favorite such creek is in about the least enchanted place you could imagine–the parking lot of a large outdoor shopping center. It is home to a Barnes & Noble (...well, all bookstores are enchanted, in my opinion), a Burlington discount clothing store that stays open till midnight, a grocery store, a Staples office supply store. You turn a corner and then it happens–a sudden bubbling creek, silver and green beneath a bridge in the middle of the parking lot. All water is holy.
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I know everyone knows that I am obsessed with flowers. They are my most present connection to the spark of nature that lives under the concrete and the pavement of New Jersey.
The flowers, to me, are fire. The flame of their candle lights my candle, effortlessly. There is color, passion, brightness, tenderness, warmth, excitement, new ideas. I love the shocking bright pink neon roses in the park. I love the vibrant redbuds in their tiny profusion. Recently I spent some time with some hot orange canna lilies growing outside a train station, long-stemmed and tall. They reminded me of some hibiscus flowers, in the same tropical hue, that I had spent time with years ago in Washington, DC.
I had taken a trip there. It was my first trip since the pandemic, a kind of milestone, and I was alone. I had booked a hotel room on a high floor. The heat outside was swampy and dense but my hotel and my room were sleek and cool. The silence, my sudden aloneness, was deafening. I was reading a book that I’d thought was a beachy summer read but was actually about a young woman who died suddenly of a rare disease. The book not only broke my heart but made me feel betrayed. After I finished reading it I left it on a table by the hallway in the hotel. At night I sat at the hotel room desk and wrote my novel on my laptop. I don’t remember which one I was working on then. I soaked in bubbles in the bathtub and cried. I lay in bed and touched myself under a nightgown.
During the day I took long walks in the city–the District, as it’s called in the neighboring cities of Virginia and Maryland. Once I sat on a bench to return a phone call. The thick, smooth paint of the bench burned in the day’s heat. The phone call was from my gynecologist. These were the earliest days of our planning to become pregnant with the baby that would someday become our daughter. I didn’t know that, then. I just sat and clutched my phone hot in my hand, afraid and hopeful, years ago on a bench in DC. Next to me was a blooming of hibiscus flowers in a flower pot. The stamens of the flowers cast shadows of themselves on the canvas of their wide crimson petals. The hibiscus kept me company during my phone call.
At that hotel there was also a pool. It was on the rooftop of the building. I traveled during the week and visited the pool early, so no one else was there. In the morning, it was half in sunshine, half in shadow, but it was already hot, the water silky, cool, inviting. The pool was angular and unlovely, but the water was holy, as all water was holy. I swam and felt that this pool was heaven.
***
And I know I’ve written about this before too, but I belong to a yoga studio that sits beside a water mill. During the quiet moments of practice you can hear the river rushing. Back in the spring I attended a breathwork workshop there. We took a journey, though we did not move, lying there flat on our mats in community. The only thing that moved in us was the breath, filling belly, filling diaphragm, filling chest, and being emptied, being exhaled through open mouth. We breathed this way for about 40 minutes, to the pulse of energetic music. This sounds easy, but it was hard.
The workshop facilitator said, during one of the hard moments, as though she had intuited that it was hard: “Nothing good is ever easy.”
I felt these words, this awareness, knitting something back together inside of me. Maybe it was the broken story of my childbirth that I am still healing. Maybe it was something else, deeper or more ancient or generational. Nothing good is ever easy. I mean, your girl loves ease. I love daydreaming, I love rest, I love drinking hot tea and hot cocoa, I love long train rides, I love stroking my way through a silky pool, I love stroking the silky petals of a flower, I love hot and slow and gentle sex. Who doesn’t love ease? Who doesn’t, in this world of ours, need ease?
But I feel ashamed sometimes, with all the dicta of let it be easy, when I find that I am moving through something that is hard. Like, should this be hard? Shouldn’t it be easy? Isn’t it my job to find some way to make this easy?
Some things are not easy or soft. Some things are hard. Maybe there is a time and a season for things that are hard; certainly there are things in nature that are hard, however you want to imagine that word. Maybe it is okay if there are things that are hard. Maybe we can move through them; maybe they are good enough too to be integrated as part of our story. Maybe the hard things, too, are porous; maybe our breath moves through them like air.
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Hey. I’m Mistress M / Nikki Ali. I’m a writer, writing guide, teacher, dancer, and creative activist based in Newark, New Jersey.
I am a person whose ancestors were enslaved people who helped build the structures of this country where I live. I stand with the lightworkers + those seeking the liberation of all peoples from oppression. I live + create most humbly on Mohican + Lenape territory, and I lovingly acknowledge the ancestors + elders, past and present, of the land on which we live.
Do YOU know the ancestral elders of the land on which you live? Check out this tool, Native Land, to learn more. Educate thyself. ♥️
My creative works, outlook, and spiritual practice are all delightfully queer. If you, too, support the beautiful rainbow of all human experience, then I’ve got a table here with plenty of open seats, and you can totally sit with me. 🏳️🌈
I am a creative dominatrix who believes that everyone is creative and that everyone can find the creative rhythm that works for them, and that supports them in reaching their creative dreams.
I am the founder and editor-in-chief of Mistress M’s Community Publishing House, a full-service, boutique book incubator where we hold the values that no matter what our hearts desire to create, there is an audience seeking it; that, by putting our work out into the world, our audience will find us; and that there IS space in the marketplace for the offerings of our hearts.
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I loved this. The questions about how we love and dwell on land that are so far from our ancestors, the hard things that don't bypass and that creek in the parking lot -- wonderful x