68. It was never just Berry-Picking
My Spirit knew the way home.
The feeling of being seen and welcomed as I was with Jessie is signature of Spirit. The joyful validation of my world view and beliefs. The love and desire to spend time with Jessie and her family are Spiritual guidance return to the Truth of Being.
Let’s talk about ReEnchantment.
Transcript
Lezley (00:00):
I had no idea how wrong and shameful my friendship with Jessie was going to be. Hi folks. A warm welcome to all my relations. Is mise Lezley MacDhaibhidh. Is mise shliochd nam Gàidheal air Turtle Island. I am Lezley Davidson. I am a Gaelic descendant on Turtle Island. I belong to the land of the Michi Saagiig Nishnabek. Welcome to Radical Reenchantment. I'm moving in a very specific direction now of Braiding Roots. My focus has been and will be braiding the roots of Celtic reconnecting with rooting on Turtle Island. And those two things can be explored independently, but ultimately have to come together for us, for for Gaelic descendants to root honourably on Turtle Island. So that's what we're doing here. And I have a story. I have a personal story that I want to share. I think it illustrates so much about my own journey and what and why I'm doing braiding roots.
(01:40):
It is such a revealing story. And it's something that I knew happened, but I really glossed over a lot of the details. And it wasn't until last summer that I really, not even last summer, it was two summers ago. It's taken two years for me to feel like I've processed enough for me to share this story with you. So when I was 10, I went to spend the summer with my grandmother in Saskatchewan. My whole family is from the prairies. We are the only members really of our family that live in Ontario. I was born in Ontario, specifically Scarborough, if you know, you know. And all the rest of our family live in Saskatchewan. My parents were raised in Saskatchewan. Their parents were from the prairies, Saskatchewan and Manitoba anyways. So my brother and I went there for the whole summer and I met a girl on the playground the second day that I was there and we got along like a house on fire.
(02:52):
She was amazing. Her name was Jessie and she had a little brother named Joe and Joe tagged along with us everywhere. But she was such a great kind of leader friend because she always had really fun, good ideas, but was very willing to hear other people's fun, good ideas if they were fun and good. If no one had any ideas, she always had ideas for games to play and things to do. She taught me how to swing on the monkey bars properly, how to hang from one arm and swing instead of doing some weird grabby thing that I was doing. Anyway, I loved her. She was fantastic and fun and I enjoyed her presence a lot. And there was a moment where she changed my life and she sparked connection to spirit that I didn't know I was allowed to feel in the world.
(04:00):
Being with her and talking with her and hanging out and just being around her vibe, I felt confident and comfortable enough to tell her, "Do you know what? I love animals. I love them." And she said, "Of course you do. They're your brothers and sisters. What?" 10 years old. And I was like, "What?" Because that was not my experience growing up in my family. My mom was raised on a farm and animals were not your brothers and sisters. No one that I encountered thought about animals as brothers and sisters as part of your family, which connected directly into my heart and was like, "Yes, my family, my brothers and sisters." You could say, "I like animals," but it's like you liked cats and dogs and you liked animals like pets. And I don't know, I felt like a weirdo because I loved them. Anywhere we went when I was a kid, if there was an animal in the vicinity, I would see it.
(05:18):
All right. I'm just stepping in right now and I'm horrified and I apologize that I've been calling animals it. What? What are you doing, Lezley? Them. We call land them. Animals, plants, all beings, water, wind, them, them, them, them, them, them, them. They're people. They're people. I would be aware of it. And it made it awful if there were strays or hurt animals or the worst thing was driving on the highway and seeing animals on the side of the road. I am able to handle that now. I could not handle that as a child. And so I would stare at it and be glad that it was like a rag or something. And then I just started looking away. I couldn't handle it. Anyway, this was the first time in my life that my heart connection to animals was received without comment, without like, of course you do.
(06:22):
No big deal.
(06:26):
No like, oh, you're too much, you're too sensitive. Oh, Lezley and her feelings. I was just allowed to love them because animals are our brothers and sisters. That hit me. I can still remember it. We were walking across the field. She said that and I stopped. They continued walking and I had a moment of permission to feel how I felt in the world, permission to be who I was and to perceive the world and feel about the world the way I do. So quickly caught up with her and we played on the playground and I had no idea what kind of fucking shenanigans this was going to be for my grandmother. I had no idea how wrong and shameful my friendship with Jessie was going to be.
(07:40):
The first time I realized something was afoot with my friendship with Jessie and Joe was when we were thirsty and we ended up going to my grandmother's little senior's complex to get water. That's all we wanted, water. And as we got closer, Jessie said to me, "Is it okay that I'm coming over?" And I was like, "Yeah. Yeah. I don't see why you wouldn't." But as we went into my grandmother's house, the rage and hate on her face when she looked at us was awful, but also familiar to me. This is terrible, but as a child, I was quite familiar with faces of hate and rage on parents. So that was not new to me and nothing to be overtly concerned about unless they were coming after you. And so my grandmother in her hate and rage stepped aside as I got water for us as she slammed cupboards and mumbled and looked at us as scants.
(08:56):
But I grew up in an alcoholic household. Who knew why people, adults were angry about things? Who knew? There was never any clear rules or ways to be safe, so I didn't think much of it. Jessie, Joe and I had the water and we continued on. There's such a contrast between the household that I brought Jessie and Joe to and the household they brought me to when Jessie brought me to her house for snacks and refreshments. I went into her home and her mother was just the embodiment of nourishing. She was kind and I'm going to cry because she was just so loving and kind and warm and she welcomed me in without a thought. And Jessie had kind of my personality. She was very outspoken and opinionated and loud and very animated and charismatic and her mom never once wanted her to shush or tone it down or be ladylike or any of the ways that I experienced people in my life wanting me to be less.
(10:29):
Her mom didn't do that at all. I'm not saying she never did it. It's just when I was there, she didn't. She accepted her children as they are and accepted me. And I was given a popsicle and juice and welcomed into their home without hate and rage. Probably the way you should welcome children into your home, not with hate and rage. Now I'm not telling you right away why there was hate and rage. Maybe we'll learn together. I hung out with Jessie and Joe every day on the playground, but my grandmother very, very quickly stepped in to put a stop to that. The first time, aside from the hate and rage on her face, she pulled up to the playground and yelled at me to get in the car like I had done something awful. I didn't understand. This whole story is basically me just not understanding anything.
(11:34):
I didn't understand a thing. And I was like, "All right, time for me to go." So I left and that was it. Okay. I didn't put two and two together. And I consistently went back to the playground to hang out with Jessie and Joe because why wouldn't I? They were amazing. Jessie said I would be invited if it was okay with my grandmother to go and pick berries with her and her family and go on excursions to places with her and her family that we could go camping and we could go fishing and specifically berry picking was a big deal to me. And I wanted to be with them. I wanted to spend my summer outside with Jessie and Joe and their family. And it was a deep desire. It was a deep need. It was a spiritual need to be there and be amongst people who honoured and understood my way of seeing the world where animals are your brothers and sisters.
(12:54):
I wanted to be there. I just wanted to be there and it was not meant to be. With my mom, if she said no to any kind of outing or sleepover or hanging out with a friend that she hadn't met their parents, that was all very easily solved by my mom going to meet the parents. And so the day that my grandmother took me to Jessie's house to speak to her mom, I was thrilled because I thought, hooray. All of my grandmother's resistance to me spending time with Jessie and her family or going berry picking or going camping or doing anything that Jessie said we were going to do that summer would be solved because my grandmother would meet her mom and see what a wonderful caring woman she was and I would be allowed to go.
(13:50):
And that's not what happened at all. I remember coming into their house and to the doorway of the kitchen and looking around and seeing Jessie's mom being just lovely and kind and warm and gentle and seeing Jessie and both of us beaming to see each other. Do you remember those friendships when you were a kid where you met someone who just vibed completely with you and you just had so much fun together? That was her. And I was so happy to see her and I beamed. And then my grandmother started saying things that I didn't understand.
(14:33):
I didn't understand what she was saying. I don't even remember any of the words. I just remember not understanding and saying, "I don't understand. What do you mean I don't understand?" And I looked at Jessie's mom and she looked at me with pity and she looked at my grandmother with pity and my grandmother was enraged that she would be looked upon with pity. And I looked at Jessie. I don't know where Joe was. I don't remember him in this. I looked at Jessie. Jessie was enraged. Her face was... Jessie understood what was happening. I did not understand what was happening. I did not understand. And my grandmother got more and more angry. Jessie got more and more angry. Jessie's mom got sadder and sadder, and I got more and more confused because I didn't understand what was happening. All I understood was that this was not going well and this did not look like I would be going berry picking or camping with them.
(15:46):
And my grandmother grabbed my hand and dragged me outside and I just said, "I don't understand what's happening. I don't understand. What's happening? What's happening?" I wasn't allowed to hang out with Jessie anymore.
(16:07):
I didn't understand. I kept asking why and no one could... She couldn't tell me why. She couldn't tell me why. They're not our kind of people. I said, "What does that mean? What do you mean? I don't understand. What kind of people is that? They're not our kind of people. What does that mean? What does that fucking mean?" I'm 10. I don't understand. God, this makes me so sad. So my grandmother couldn't stop me from going outside. And when I went outside, I went to the playground and I saw Jessie and my grandmother couldn't stop Jessie from being at the playground. So we would hang out there, but then my grandmother asked, I guess, a friend of hers for her grandchild to come and play with me. We were around the same age. And so her European descendant white granddaughter came to play with me on the playground.
(17:11):
This girl, I forget what her name is, we'll call her Kylie. Kylie wanted to play a game of hide and run from the Metis.
(17:29):
I was like, "Okay." I didn't know what Metis was. I didn't know that Jessie and her family were Indigenous. I don't even know if they were Metis. They could have been Cree or Oji-Cree or... I don't know. I grew up in Scarborough where there were people from all over the world there, and I grew up with a lot of Caribbean immigrants, so from mostly Jamaica, there's people from Guyana, there was people from Vietnam and kids from Hong Kong. People came from all over the world. Having a diverse classroom was not a weird thing for me at 10 in Scarborough. So meeting Jessie on the playground and her not being white was not weird, and it definitely wasn't a reason to not be able to play with her or hang out with her.
(18:28):
I didn't think that she would be Indigenous or First Nations because unfortunately in the '70s and '80s in Scarborough, First Nations and Indigenous history was history. It wasn't taught to us as a presence, as something ongoing. It was taught as something that was passed and over, which that's not true. That's not true or real. When Kylie said, "Let's hide from the Metis," I was like, "All right, cool, because I'll be Metis next and you'll hide from me." Joe ran and hid. Kylie and I ran and hid, and Jessie stood there and looked around and realized, "Fuck no, I'm not doing any of this bullshit." She told Joe that they were leaving and she took Joe by the hand and left. I knew when Kylie said, "Let's hide from the Metis, run, run. The Metis are coming. Hide, run from the Metis." I did it. I knew there was something a little fucked up about it, but I didn't know what.
(19:42):
And so Jessie left with Joe and I stood up from my hiding place and I was like, "Don't go. I'm sorry. I don't understand what's happening. Don't go, please. Sorry. I'm sorry." And poor Joe, Joe and I were on the same level. He was like four. I was a four year old in understanding what the fuck was happening because I didn't at all. Joe kept looking back and kept saying, "Let's go back. She's sorry. Let's go back." Jessie was like, "Nope." I never saw her again. I spent two or three days with Kylie. Boring, by the way, nothing compared with spending my day with Jessie and Joe. Kylie was boring as hell and definitely no berry picking or loving animals like your brothers and sisters. Then she was gone and I spent the rest of the summer by myself. My grandmother was pleased and I was alone trying to figure out what happened.
(20:53):
How I responded to it was I spent the rest of the summer shoplifting and I shoplifted makeup and fingernails and this was a unintentional pushing of me into identity in this culture that I was born into, this colonial white supremacist culture where I instinctively understood or tried to fit in and I could do that with my appearance. To me, it was such a deep sadness for me to recognize and understand and then process what had happened when I was 10 with Jessie and Joe and my grandmother and the colonialism, the colonization of my own self within my family to be appropriate, disregarded the real truth of what's really important to me in spirit, which is land and spirit, woven and sewn together forever. I knew that I wanted to spend my time and be taught by Jessie's family, by her and her family. I wanted to spend time with them in the world and learn what I could from them because I felt safe and I felt seen because of the way I saw the world.
(22:33):
They accepted that fully and understood. I kept asking about Jessie and wanting to go berry picking. That's how I kept phrasing it. I wanted to go berry picking with Jessie and her family. And instead I was allowed to go to my grandmother's friend's house alone and pick berries by myself in her raspberry patch.
(23:03):
That's sad as fuck. When I think about what my soul and spirit wanted, what I wanted as a 10 year old child to be embraced by people who are connected to the land and could teach me how to reconnect to the land, picking raspberries in a garden by myself was not nourishing or fulfilling. So Jessie, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't understand. I'm sorry I didn't understand and I put you and Joe in harm's way. I'm glad you got out. I'm glad you left because I wasn't safe to be around because I didn't understand, but I do now and that is a catalyst almost for understanding what this means to me. This is Braiding Roots, understanding and reconnecting to my Indigenous roots, my Gàidhlig Indigenous roots, my Irish and Scottish Indigenous roots, which are connected to land and have their own wisdom and and love for land and animals and beings.
(24:30):
Reconnecting to those roots, to ancestors and to everything that they offer and then rooting that here on Turtle Island is the only thing that's really important to me. So that's what we're going to be talking about going forward. If you're interested, November 1st, Braiding Roots opens in the Cailleach Ken Library. It's free for the next 11 months or whenever you join up for 11 months, it opens up for whenever you join for 11 months. There will be a teaching every month around reconnecting to your roots, reconnecting to land and practicing listening to spirit, listening to the unseen and experiencing the unseen and experiencing the presence of spirit in the real world. Okay, that's Braiding Roots. That is bringing together Celtic healing of roots and Ancestors and then rooting here on Turtle Island. If you're into it, check it out. I'll have a link around, but thank you for listening to me and reach out if you want to respond or have anything to say or have similar experiences or different experiences or know what I'm talking about.
(26:02):
Reach out if you love animals as your brothers and sisters because that's the stuff. That's Tìr agus Anam Fite Fuaite Gu Bràth. Manito Aki Inakonigaawin. land and spirit woven and sewn together forever.
(26:22):
Okay, love you. Bye.
You might also like…
My Spirit knew the way home.
The feeling of being seen and welcomed as I was with Jessie is signature of Spirit. The joyful validation of my world view and beliefs. The love and desire to spend time with Jessie and her family are Spiritual guidance return to the Truth of Being.