An anti-capitalist motivational meditation drawn from science and mythology and personal encounters with the larch tree; a message filled with hope and resilience. This Kinship Episode calls for ending poverty and building a collaborative, supportive society, drawing on the strength found in togetherness and nature’s wisdom, urging us to rise, grow, and flourish... even in cancerous times.
Larch are an overwhelming, undeniable presence all across the landscape, glowing gold down every hillside, demanding that every witness recognize that the times they are a changing.
<Be a witch, be a witch, you must be a witch>
Much of the year you can forget they are there. They blend in with the evergreens in summer and with the deciduous in the season of the sticks.
Walking in a kind of lockstep, growing to the same height as other larches in their stand, growing in poor soil, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and making sweetness in their very marrow bones, partner-dancing with ice, wind and fire, they quietly flourish, and they do it together, sharing sunlight.
Larch trees grow best when they have plenty of space. If they’re too crowded, they don’t grow wide very well.
Larch pull back to share the light so every tree can grow. Survival of the fittest just doesn’t sum it up, larch demonstrates a species-wide wisdom - if we grow together, we all can grow tall.
Listeners, we insist upon this: we are larch kin. If we go together we can grow tall.
I started chemo last larch season. I drove down my little mountain highway and they stood bright yellow and waving.
I did four rounds - two months of biweekly dose-dense Adriamycin and cyclophosphamide chemo before starting my three months of weekly Taxol. That first round consisted of a combination of a drug developed from mustard gas, yellow warfare in my veins, and a drug developed from red soil, bacteria specific to an ancient roman fort on the edge of the adriatic, blood soaked, an older war consumed and consecreted by the living soil. All this injected in me, even though the tumour that had taken up half my breast and the secret tumour on the other side were gone, lymph nodes too, cut out, clear margins. You don’t have cancer anymore you just have a high probability of future cancer. Secret microscopic seeds of future death. Warfare was brought to my cells as we battled possible futures, what strange magic is this?
You have to believe in a future to keep going in cancerous times, to do the work that tips the probabilities. You have to believe in a beautiful future, not a perfect one, but one where your chance of being alive to see your kid finish elementary school is the same as the next parents waiting in the snow at afterschool pickup, looking out eagerly for their small downy head, their own flicker of love. You have to believe you both will survive and you have to show up for the beautiful future they represent despite the heartbreak and terror of the world.
Breathe and believe in beautiful futures. A future where a tide rolls through human hearts that says: it is possible, it is possible to awaken loved ones lost to rhetorics of loneliness, lack and hate, it is possible to end poverty even, there is wealth enough here on this blue glowing flickering fertile home, we can choose a life like a stand of trees, an ecology of aid, instead of endless garbage, endless war, endlessly falling for the greedy manipulation blaming jews, arabs, immigrants, black folks, asians, indians, endless others for harm caused by wealth hoarders.
To stay alive, I had to believe in beautiful concatenations of centuries of effort tipping towards breakthroughs like the one I am living in, because even though chemo and radiation and mastectomy are grim pathways to drag your lifeforce through, the glittering reality of it is: they fucking work. Breast cancer used to be a guaranteed death sentence; the black tumours would eventually push through to the surface of your skin, showing the cellular psychopathy that had eaten its way through your organs and bones, and then you’d die. We hardly ever see it now, so it sinks into our subconscious. So many people I met told me they feared the cure more than the disease, this is the privilege of our perspective in the bell curve of cure, but I get it. I want to be rocked by gentle breezes, held by branches, I’d prefer all my medicines to be natural, that sounds nice, I am suspicious of cures that seem to have so much in common with the lurking unclear causes of the disease - poisons and plastics.
But humans and every thing we make are inescapably part of the natural world, we are of this planet, and not the first species to overproduce, if we shift from seeing ourselves as other maybe we could learn a little about growing together.
And the fact remains, after filtering our cancerous selves through every recommended step of the protocol, we breast cancer patients have a strong statistical likelihood of arriving on the other side alive and with the same probabilities as the average non-cancerous person.
We drag our bones and veins and lymphatic systems through death passages following the labour of countless researchers, nurses and technicians, mostly women of colour, and of all the patients who did anything they could to grasp at life, put their hopes and body parts on the altars of countless clinical trials, moving the needle step by step, carving the tunnel through the dark death by death, the ground a soft hummus of fallen yellow needles marking the years.
I’m in a clinical trial and I’m dedicated to playing my part in the dance of discovery, I feel protective of the scientific method these days as its underattack, and it is part of my craft to dance with the moment I am in.
We take the medicine that shows up, witches are pragmatic and strategic, we waltz with the world as it is, in order to conjure beautiful futures forward like wild buds on reaching branches in the spring.
To stay grounded against the tide of brutal injustice in a political context where the cruelty is the point you have to put your back against a tall tree sometimes and breathe with it. Remember and believe that gentle dark will follow garish day, and then after deepest dark the dawn will come again, and that it will go on like this for millions of years. Love and tenderness and laughter will outlast every dictator. To make magic here in the cancer present, you have to root yourself deep at the cliffs edge in the knowledge that generations before have discovered medicines, shed cruel beliefs, taken apart unjust systems and made them incrementally better. Among our complicated complicit kin are also all those who cultivated hope, courage, resistance, and kindess out of the soil, out of the blue, and we can too.
There have been countless heroes, and they didn’t know they would be, and we mostly don’t know their names, but when the cold time came they showed what they were made of.
Witches, we are larch kin.
“Its thick bark resists ground fires, and its open crown architecture allows the heat of a fire to pass through rather than ignite the foliage
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Larch is a “pioneer species” in that it is one of the first species to come in after disturbances, such as fire, landslide, flood, or clearcut harvest.
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Larch’s deep and extensive root system enables it to withstand high winds… the lack of foliage and light branching causes winter gusts to filter through the crown, further reducing the chance of wind breakage or uprooting. Larch is able to withstand ice and snow…
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“Larch is also relatively resistant to many insects and diseases… the wood itself is high in chemicals that help it to resist root-rot and many wood-rotting organisms.”
(source)
Larch and their kin are nurturing rot resistance in our very cells, teaching us to tailor our shapes and relationships to let the wind and ice and fire flow past our branches, causing no harm, stepping into places of destruction to reclaim the soil. Even learning to let parts of ourselves die to strengthen our hearts.
“Larch effectively translocates nitrogen from the foliage back into the tree tissues before dropping its needles in the fall and it does this more efficiently than any other tree genus, the needle litter of most other regional conifers has about 1 part nitrogen per 16 parts of carbon, whereas larch has only 1 part nitrogen per 50 parts carbon in its needle litter.”
(source)
Larch is a teacher in the magic, not just of letting go, but of taking everything you need from a state of being, drawing all the nitrogen in, and then releasing.
What needs to be shed? And what lessons, nutrients, resources can you harvest before the letting go?
Larches only light up with their brilliant uniqueness in the fall, you could be forgiven for missing them before then, then blend in with the evergreens, they hide in plain sight.
I have, in my own life, hidden in plain sight. I have downplayed my electric instinct and woven it into acceptable PowerPoint presentations, kept my flashing needle-sharp edges concealed until needed. I have demurred. I worked in corporate America and played nice, though my hem and hairs were always slightly askew. I seeded community dreams there, insisted upon spaces of inclusion, thought outside the box and read the metrics like so many tea leaves, and drew every bit of value, pirated every learning and lesson I could, to add to my quiver and stores.
I have at times even hidden from myself. I have given credence to an internal litany that repeats heartbreaking insults on a loop for hours: “I am a nothing person who contributes nothing who is a fraud and not even a good one because everyone secretly knows and nods and smiles at you but behind closed doors they speak of your paper-thin successes and they laugh at your arrogance and no matter what you accomplish it will never be enough because the edges of the sinkhole always widen and you are always there, slipping in, trying to keep up your juggling and your grin and no one reaches for you. You are nothing now but a reminder of failure and death and no one will miss you when you’re gone” Bad magic words making sad shapes of reality.
I rode out of the mountain last larch season with this branching brain chemistry worming its way across my identity and the landscape.
Larches with their last show of gold down the mountain confirmed the story I told myself, that the season had slipped over the edge, time to mourn if you haven’t yet for everything you promised yourself you’d be this summer, it’s all gone.
The thing about chemo they don’t tell you on the long lists of possible side effects that include heart disease and more cancer is that it makes you chemically depressed. Partially, that was the hormones out of wack as chemical menopause came on hard, partially it was the way chemo kills everything fast moving within you and you lose hold of your quickness, it becomes hard to feel the hum of green wood within you. I began to feel like a chemical person, a new species entirely, and only people past the red warning sign in our wing of the hospital, only people who are toxic like me, who are bald like me, faces fat with steroids, only we are the same species and we didn’t see each other before, but now we’re everywhere. Mostly though it was just the low end of the swing, it was the collapse that resides in everything, I think you have been to those dark places in the mind though you haven’t had cancer, I think we are more alike than we ever realize.
Unlike other trees who change colour, larches are conifers and covered in needles. Unlike evergreens who look similar to larches in the fat green summer, larches lose their needles. They become skeleton trees as they wait for spring. In the winter they look cold. Next to the firs, pines and cedar, they are naked and silent.
I wrote my feelings all over the trees, while the whole mountainside glowed golden, I made up a story that was all about sadness and dying. And it’s true, the wheel will turn and we will have to let it all go. It's not even a choice, you will get brought bare at some point in your life, you will leave who you thought you were behind. Shed everything you don’t need, even the trappings of your triumphs, even your most beautiful accolades or salaries or golden gowns. At some point we will put it all down.
But it wasn’t death for me then and it isn’t now. Though so many of our loved ones are gone, and we were startled into the wide eyed awake at night knowledge that death is a close glacing thing coming for us all in a timeframe so tight its like a speeding train, the larch story isn’t about that, not exactly, it’s about how we remain the ocean through the tides of change. How we get to live seasons. Relativity exists and here on the speeding train we get to watch the buds grow gently, we live still in the tree world, one breath at a time, we witness a million rebirths. The great choral wisdom of the cycle itself - marching in undeniable collectivity, a riot of yellow, a celebration of all we are and have been. When it’s time, pulling our resources into ourselves so effectively each death season makes us better medicine, more brilliant caretakers, a golden tide of fierce and tender survivors.
Witches I’m here now with you in the green grass and birdsong, in the cracking pavement and on the picket line. The spring still comes. Larches are fully, newly adorned. And that’s us too. We are still “under no obligation to be who we were five minutes ago”, larches brim with medicine about the cleverness, the irresistability of change. They are alive with adaptation.
Most trees only do "free growth" when they’re young, usually for the first 20 years or so. But larch trees keep doing it even when they’re old, all their lives they can push past what was planned to surge into new heights.
I’m still alive, my community is still here, still needs me, so like a larch I’m still growing, still shedding, determined to make lamp light instead of poison from the sap of my magic.
Witches we are larch kin, we show the world our brilliance. When the time is right, we signal the turning of the tides.
Maybe the depression went with the hormones, or maybe it was the fuck it all fire of surviving, either way i’m not going to play with that bad brain magic anymore. I’m determined to shed it as I walk through every door. I’ve been repeating a spell adapted from Robin Wall Kimmerer in The Serviceberry:
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
Repeat it with me, join me in muttering this at subway turnstiles, gates and crossroads. Every doorway, every gate forming a portal to better brain magic:
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
“Planted as a bulwark against avalanches, rockfalls and erosion, they are one of the main species in mountain protection forests. Firmly anchored by powerful roots, they fix the forest floor, which efficiently absorbs water from rain and snowmelt. Climbing the highest mountains, they seek the light, uniting heaven, earth and the land of the dead. It is the cosmogonic tree for many civilizations, and one of the most sacred in Eastern Siberian mythology, where it is used as a ladder to visit the divine powers.”
(source)
Larch is a teacher in the magic of reaching what is divine within us by showing up for each other.
Larch, also known as “Tamarack is a “nurse tree” which allows it to produce shelter and biomass to allow other shrubs and smaller plants to grow in otherwise inhospitable conditions... Tamarack is also a favorite nesting site for Great gray owls…”
(source)
I stop in the door and push my arms hard into the frame, do it with me, pushing, repeating:
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
I am flourishing and all flourishing is mutual.
Push with all your strength into the hard resistance, and then step out of the frame and feel the way your arms rise of their own volition, feel the way uplift just happens, trees grow like this and so do you, we will dismantle the cages of the world that insist upon the lie of poverty and inequality and we will flourish. Hold up your arms, imagine the grey grey owl fierce and wise finding safe nesting place in the open space between your arms.
When the time comes, larch are an overwhelming, undeniable presence all across the landscape, glowing gold down every hillside, demanding that every witness recognize that the times they are a changing.
We are larch kin, keeping a flame of gold in our secret hearts.
We are wild and rising.
This or better, for ever and ever.
Blessed Fucking Be.
