Dis-Ability is Power

I've been sitting with humbling reflections on what it means to inhabit a Body on Land that is changing. The Body and Land speak to each other so intimately. I am being asked to accept how my body mirrors the oppression and struggles my Ancestors and the Land have and are experiencing. History, Herstory, Hxstory are not to be ignored, they tell me very much what I carry.

Adapting to new flora and fauna as immigrants, the US food and medical system, the violence of the policing and prison systems, genocide, and the pesticides and chemicals of working and growing up near fields. No matter what I change, these experiences live with me.

"To be here" means to fully accept this. The Mountains would be very proud that even in the power of my radical immigration that I am present with the truth I carry, rather than escaping with my head in the clouds into a fictitious reality (it's a fine line between delusion and vision as I have also been coming to learn and unlearn). 

I have been sitting with disability as an identity of empowerment that lovingly embraces my experience of being in a body. Hot take the land is disabled. Oppression, colonization, aging and living under capitalism is a disabling experience. I have often lived with the delusion that the more able-bodied I was the closer to Earth and #healed I existed. There is nuance with everything but I would venture to say that disabled homies are a deep truth of the Land echoing out over and over again. That's hot. I feel it even as I write it.  

I have been sitting with my own ableism and transforming the belief system that says "I am an imposter"  as an embodiment practitioner and artist because of my experience of a body. And in the same breath, I will confess that I am learning to love where I come from, this body home, where I have learned shame. It's written into me, it's all connected.

In reflection of my transforming body as a site of power, I wrote this and I would like to share it with you:

"I will honor what I need and do so in collective networks so the weight is carried evenly so it is not a weight at all. I will operate in a non-linear pace and expression of time that honors the power of biodiversity and the diversity of ways to inhabit time. That honors the power of my rest, embodiment, and slowness, and ebb and flow of pace. I will ask and receive support and share it gratefully when I can, because community care is sacred. I will tend to the strength and roots in my relationships because that is where my real security lies- beyond the changing forces of our ability and disability, sometimes predictable and unpredictable. I will be proud of my unique needs, all our unique needs.

I will see disability as a dis- to the unnatural way of doing and being that capitalisms asks of us, I will see it as revoluntionary, I will see it as a state of empowerment to step into ways that can fully sustain life. Disability is the queering of body, time, and pace. Disability is freeing our bodies and freeing the Land."

That is to say, disability is visionary, it is an evolution for the future. If it teaches me anything it teaches me "we need each other, we can't do it alone, we are allowed to need".