Some Healing Lessons and Reflections I've Learned From Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara
Xochitl #earth/being
An energetic moment in time where water and other cosmic elements occupy a human form. Our relationship to this world and consciousness is tied intimately with the thousands of other energies working around, throughout, within time and us. There is woven density, multiplicity, multiple dimensions to being that make up how we exist; internal realms to dive into and pull from. The energies around us are always working to converge - create, imagining new futures and reenacting sacred spirals. Being in community necessitates us to foster vulnerability, love, and joy. Alters are a place we can come to in ritual, in community, in communication with spirit—to be healed. The altar-punto is our connection across worlds, life-times, and ancestors. The situation of living under neocolonial social and economic rules has bound our ever changing selves within oppressive confines, such as gender, which were never meant to hold, uplift, or define us but continue to be imposed as a means to bury our love, potential, and freedom. There is the chance for us to heal each other.
Our body-lands are sources of and windows through which power moves. Power is not individual. Individuals operate and move within a variety of collective structures which define, limit, and enable power, identity, and agency. Our agency is manifested with and through each other. We can gain agency, identity, and power through community building, knowledge gathering, and radical honesty/trust/love.
Place-making encompasses our ability to be honest with and honor our selves. The self, how we see and know and think and take care of or mistreat our being, intimately knows how we relate to and interact with all other earth beings, those who hold us and those who oppress us. To hold and embody our truest selves is to make space to see and honor others’ truths. Navigating both body-lands and place-making is a habitual and intentional orienting. That is to say we must commit to the practice of seeing, listening, understanding, and communicating with ourselves, other earth beings, and the invisible cosmic forces (“dark matter”) that literally hold our solar system and universe together.
The emphasis of decolonial feminist values necessarily centers the importance of our relationships with our kin. We are of the earth, the land, our plant and animal relatives. To liberate ourselves we must rely on our connections – our ability for interdependence. Our love for ourselves/this world can be nurtured in all we are and do. We must turn to our knowledge keepers, our healers, our visionaries, our artists and learn from each other constantly to grieve, imagine, and create free futures.
The Altar-punto is the spiritual and physical manifestation of a space that translates our being and our relationships with the world/ourselves/others/ancestors/decoloniality. As we navigate this world we become/deconstruct/create. As we navigate this world we inventory methods of survival. For Brown/Black : Queer people we are constantly intaking information, sharpening our senses, noticing how the colonial world perceives us and evolving our response. As we begin to honor our body-lands as Altars-puntos our power, divinity, agency, and truths become more visible to ourselves and others; our ability to transverse across and between multiple truths, identities, boundaries, realms, etc. is widened.