Modernity: The Mother Tree of our Lineages’ Futures
She stands so tall, is rooted so deep. She feels as if she is the forest. As if she is time immemorial — like she’s been here forever before, and will be here forever after.
She’s been growing for centuries, reaching up high to fill the sky with her branched leaves and buds, and grasping down deep, carving her way into the soil with her tendrilled roots.
She is alive, and so much more.
She gives life. She is life.
And one day, she will die. One day, she will fall.
And with her death, new life will be birthed. Light will peek through the canopy in new ways, illuminating new sprouts of life. The soil that nurtured her roots will welcome in new beings in the cracks. Different trajectories of living beings and evolutionary co-existences will emerge.
And most importantly, with her fall to the ground, she will become something new herself — a Mother Tree.
As a Mother Tree, or nurse log, she will become one of the fallen trees that give life to the new — an embodiment of death and rebirth simultaneously co-becoming together.
With her death, she will offer herself up to the ecosystem and steward in new possibilities of life that were unimaginable before. She will lie down in her final resting place, and a line of new trees will sprout. Different compositions of nutrients will enter the soil. Different configurations of elements and microbes will recombine in new, and old ways.
Years later, one might walk through the forest and see a grouping of trees in a straight line, all birthed from this Mother Tree.
For that is what she is. A mother to so much — a guide and gift the will birth new life to emerge through.
Welcoming Modernity as a Teacher
Modernity is dying.
We can’t ignore it, or deny it any longer. The only questions left to hold are how and when. Or more importantly, what do we need to do to prepare for life after?
There is no need to usher this death into being. It is happening around us already , as an inevitable part of this cycle of life and death that we must all surrender to.
Modernity has been built on foundations of violence and unsustainability–it’s pillars of being based the lie of our separateness.
This separateness has created an unstable, forced human system that relies on extraction, expansion, and domination to exist. A false human nature that can’t be sustained within earth’s interdependent, interconnected, and symbiotic ecosystem.
I used to try and believe that if we just changed certain parts of modernity — how resources were allocated or how power was distributed, that we could cocreate an equitable, sustainable, regenerative future together from this foundation. That if we just dismantled and overcame racism, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy that we could salvage modernity and bring about the change we are needing within this human experiment of civilization and development. That we can just get rid of the bad parts and keep the good ones.
But these “symptoms of separateness” are interconnected and unavoidable on top of this foundational essence— modernity’s intrinsic roots of instability, mistruth, and ungroundedness.
From modernity’s separateness sprouts this ever-striving need, this insatiable hunger, for control, certainty, security, and uniformity, that has made it impossible to navigate one of the basic truths of life, which is that everything is complex, emergent, and a nuanced pluralism of multiple perspectives all being valid, true, and worthy — layering and weaving reality together beyond any rational, singular story or understanding.
Modernity forces us to try to impose a singular story of progress, knowing, and being that is actually counter to what is true around us — an incongruence that keeps us from integrating the brokenness in our world back into itswholeness.
As Bayo Okomalafe calls it, we are in need of an “ontological mutiny” — a revolution that discovers ways of being and knowing beyond modernity, beyond this cultural contexts, mental models, and foundational belief systems that modernity envelopes us into.
That is what our kin and ancestors, mother earth and spirit, and all of life are needing from us — a radical shift in our ways of being and knowing, something beyond what we can even imagine while living within modernity.
With this convergence of the ecological, economical, social, spiritual, and communal crises around us — the inevitable impacts of modernity, things are starting to, and increasingly, crumbling around us. Even if many in the global north have been able to comfortably live without seeing and feeling modernity’s harmful impacts on others, life, and this planet’s resources, it is catching up to us faster and faster each day.
And while this truth can feel scary and overwhelming, it doesn’t bring me hopelessness, despair, or apathy. It actually fills me with a fire, a sacred responsibility that we must all rise to now. Each moment I spend, healing back to feeling my interconnected nature with life and spirit, I surrender and trust this unfolding as it emerges.
It is a scary, unknown, and potentially beautiful, future ahead. There’s a lot of pain, trauma, and injustice behind, around, and ahead of us —irreconcilable harms in our bodies and lineages, in our land and water and air, and all the living beings they each hold.
There is grief and rage unmetabolized, unprocessed, and stuck. Tears and screams trapped in our minds and hearts, untended to in our bodies and spirits.
Around us are unjustifiable murders and rapes, extractions and destructions of our ecosystems, marginalizations and decimations of countless cultures, languages, and communities. Our birthrights of the village and community, of ritual and spirit, of space to become our gifts and medicine, have been stripped from us. The cultural waters we are swimming in have been contaminated and tainted without the proper acknowledgement or respect of our truth as an interconnected part of this ecosystem of nature and life.
This work needed today starts with this — the acknowledgement and awareness that modernity is what it is. We can’t have its benefits and securities without embracing its harms and injustices. We must name the unnamed, feel the unfelt, and shed light onto the shadows we’ve tried to keep secret in the dark corners of our closets, backyards, and bodies.
There is death ahead — inside and around. How can we welcome this death as a teacher? How can we welcome the hardest truths to accept as our guides for what’s ahead? How can we take a sacred responsibility for how we are living, being and knowing, and rise to what is needed ahead as this system we’ve been living in dies?
As Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls it–how can we “hospice modernity”?
As modernity dies, can we welcome it into our hearts as a Mother Tree? Can we embrace it as a teacher and help it die with dignity? Can we harvest and learn all we can from it and shed all that we need to, as we best prepare for what’s ahead?
A Graceful Death — Inside and Out
There is so much here that words can’t do justice to. This isn’t about putting things in boxes to simplify things. Even trying to bring solutions to this sensing is part of the problem — part of modernity’s impact on how we be, do, think, and know.
The paradoxical dance that I am choosing to frame this with, is something like the death of a family member who has caused great harm in their life.
Think for a moment about the complex, nuanced experience that a child, harmed by their father, goes through as their father is dying. There may even be things that the father doesn’t deserve to be forgiven for; but is it still possible for this child to help him die with dignity?
Is it possible for them to welcome him into their heart as a complex, hurt human who was doing the best he could within the traumas, individually experienced and culturally molded, that caused him to be the human he was?
Can this child welcome their father not only into their heart with compassion and forgiveness, but also as a teacher? To hold space for and never diminish their truth, their angers and griefs, and still welcome in something transcendent in their relationship with him?
Can we all rise to be life this, to be death doulas of modernity? To come together and help modernity die with dignity and grace, even as it causes deep harm to us as individual, interconnected living beings?
Can we release the anger and sorrow we need to at modernity AND create space to celebrate and thank it? To hold complexity for all the nuances and truths of its existence as we hospice it towards its final breaths?
Can we allow modernity to die inside each of us as it dies around us? Can we compost all the ways we’ve internalized modernity and alchemize it into something new, into birthing something different — just as a forest does with a Mother Tree?
This starts with acknowledging all of modernity into our awareness — the good and the bad, the the beautiful and the ugly, the comforts and the harms.
We have to accept that we can’t have one without the other. We can’t have certainty and security as an input, and not have extraction and domination as an output.
For many of us, we’ve been able to ignore the violence and harmful outputs modernity has created as we’ve created bubbles within bubbles of comfort, safety, and ignorance around us. We’ve numbed ourselves to not think about where the trash goes as long as we make sure it gets in the can and is left on the curb every Sunday. To not actually feel what our bodies feel from the food we eat, the poverty we walk past, the entertainment we consume, the impacts of the products we buy.
The other day, I was eating a banana. I love bananas. And it was hard for me to accept that this banana I was holding in my hands — a gift from nature that nourishes and pleasures me deeply, comes to be in my possession through violence and harm. From how the land it was grown on was colonized, to the injustices and pains leveed out to the bodies that grew it, to the impacts of the energy required to transport it to me, and on and on and on.
This banana is a product of modernity through and through, and it comes to be enjoyed by me through a foundation of harm, disconnection, and separateness.
We might donate $5 to assuage an indescribable feeling of pity and guilt when we see an advertisement asking us to feed a child in Africa for a day, but we won’t actually evaluate how the ways we are living and being are the reason they are starving in the first place.
Modernity has gotten us good.
Just think for a second how it feels to “own” something? To have the security and entitled possession of something, even a living thing or piece of land, and then have laws, enforced with violence, that protect that ownership?
What happens to your brain chemistry when your savings account grows? Or when you buy a guaranteed insurance policy? How does your nervous system react when you get a raise in your monthly income?
Are you able to let those parts of modernity die? To let go of the certainty it tries to instill in your being and surrender to something beyond that? To go back to trusting in relationships and community, not the transactional nature of capitalistic, colonial security?
Even our pursuits to make meaning and sense of the world, deducing something ununderstandable down to a singular way of knowing feels good. It’s clean and easy. Right and wrong. Proven or not proven.
Even as this pursuit has destroyed cultures, languages, religions, communities of people, and entire ecosystems, at least we have believed we are rationally progressing towards a more civilized, technological, logical way of living, being, and knowing.
But in truth, this all has to be let go of. This all has to die inside of us for something new to be born.
It won’t be easy — to let go and release ourselves out of this delusion that modernity has instilled in us. It has rewired our brains and nervous systems to keep its progress alive.
But through giving it a dignified death, can we rediscover ourselves in relational, communal, and mutualistic ways of meeting our needs and wants, instead of individualistic ways? To surrender to and trust in community and emergence instead of hoarding resources in ways that have convinced our brains and individualized egos that we are safe and secure?
Can we welcome uncertainty, complexity, and multiple truths into our ways of being and knowing, instead of trying to control, simplify, and fix everything?
Can we accept ourselves as not having control? Can we hold space to become the sacred witness in these dying throes of modernity? To accept our complicity fully, to feel all that that truly means, and then forgive ourselves and others as we reintegrate back into this natural world?
Can we even accept that although modernity is built on foundations that deny natural truths of this world, it is also of this natural world because we are, and it is born through us — natural beings of nature?
And from all of this, can we welcome modernity into our hearts as a Mother Tree?
It is a living entity unto itself, birthed through our ancestors and own ways of being.
It has been and is beautiful. It has been and is horrible. Its branches and leaves have grown to take up most of the canopy above. Its roots have spread out towards the edges and banks of the soil below.
Modernity has grown as a living thing that affects most of all life on this planet.
And as with all living things, it will die, just as we will.
Cycles pop up in ecosystems all the time that end up being naturally culled when it reaches a tipping point of instability. Modernity is no different.
And in its death, it will be composted and alchemized into something new — something unimaginable from within modernity. It will become fertilizer for an ancient future, a remembering and reimagining, a rebirth of cycles that started long before we walked this earth.
In a future we can’t imagine yet, so uncertain, uncomfortable, complex, nuanced, and layered, we have a sacred role to play, a sacred, humbling responsibility.
We are the sacred witness. A death doula and midwife at both ends of the cycle — death and birth.
We must hospice modernity as it dies. We must listen fully and see modernity wholly, as we welcome it into our hearts as a teacher, in life and in death.
And as modernity dies today, we can then shepherd the birth of what is coming tomorrow.
The Beaver and The Dandelion
In this moment, as modernity breathes its last breaths, I like to imagine us becoming the beaver.
Modernity is a river — flowing ahead. It may be drying up at this moment, but let’s forget about that for a second. For now, just imagine it’s current.
It flows, beginningless and endless, without a start or a finish we can see. Always new, always the same. And once you’re truly caught in its flow, no matter the rapids, falls, or treacherous terrain you encounter, you are lost in it, unable to see outside it as it consumes you.
Until along comes the beaver.
The beaver is an adaptive species that not only dances in the water, swimming up, down, and across the stream with ease, but also plays and lives on the land. And through this unique way of being, beavers leave their mark on the larger ecosystem simply through their being.
When the beaver is ready to build their home, they search the river for unique, unexpected spots to build a sanctuary from. Places in the river with cracks in it or at the edges of things — a spot where a tree fell last winter, or an area where the water slows down because a few boulders ran into each other and piled up, or where the valley’s landscape offered a unique topographical opportunity for a log, rock, or mossy outgrowth to create a possibility only the beaver can sense into.
From that marginal, liminal noticing, the beaver builds their dam. They use the resources available around them and create a refuge, a fugitive sanctuary where a different flow of the river emerges, allowing life to relationally evolve in new and different ways. The river doesn’t cease to flow completely, but a little pocket of stillness comes to rest where something new is born.
Even if this temporary, liminal, micro-ecosystem dries up when the larger river does, or gets destroyed by a flood and landslide that alters the river’s landscape forever, what is birthed from this emergent sanctuary, evolves in and of itself.
In this moment of living within the river of modernity, how can we become the beaver?
How can we find the unique bends and boundaries of modernity’s river and make a dam there? How can we cocreate fugitive sanctuaries where something new can evolve and grow from — something outside our current mind’s capacity to imagine but is possible still?
Alongside these learnings from the beaver, I like to also think about us learning from dandelions.
To modernity, a dandelion is simply weed. The fact that it has deep roots in both medicinal and nutritional traditions for humans is ignored in this monocrop culture. And those human benefits are just the start of what makes the dandelion so special.
One of the most resilient and adaptive plants around, dandelions find ways to root, sprout, and blossom in some of the harshest soil conditions around. And as they do, they bring healing to the soil. They find spaces in the cracks and break through hard dirt to nurture soil back to life with nitrogen. Their roots make room for microbes, mycelium, and other nutrients to bring life back to the land.
And of course, as they bloom open to share their beauty with the world, they then close to take all they’ve received and spread their seeds far and wide through the wind, finding other spots of malnourished land to root in and heal.
All around us, mostly on the margins, in communities and projects most often ignored within modernity, we can find “dandelions” that are alive and thriving. We may not see them, but they are there, just on the boundaries and in the cracks, being and healing.
How can we support and tend to them?
These two teachers, the beaver and the dandelion, are where I choose to play as I hospice modernity and welcome it as the Mother Tree it is.
It’s about finding the liminal places growing from the cracks of modernity — in the fault lines and margins, the spaces between and beyond.
Here, we can play, dance, and flow between an edge and a boundary — in a blurry uncertain space where emergence, desire, and need are sensed and felt into, birthing something new in its wake.
Paradox is held. Nuance is honored. Complexity is witnessed. Surrender and choice becomes a dance of elegant structure and ecstatic freeform.
There’s no need to sensemake or make sense, just to feel and explore, to live the layers and multiplicities of truths and experiences that shatter any singular story of progress or universality.
Who knows what could be possible from there?
To try to imagine it and impose a vision in any way, limits the range of what actually is possible. All we can do is show up and play there, then see what emerges.
So, that’s what we cando. Become seeds in the cracks, decompose alongside the compost pile, and melt fully inside the cocoon that breaks us down so deeply that something unimaginable grows wings and takes flight.
We can become guerrilla artists illuminating what’s possible creating sanctuaries in these liminal in-between spaces — bringing light to a reckoning beyond separability, beyond individuality, beyond binaries — queering the lines and the self into circles and compositions.
We can become death doulas — welcoming into our hearts the natural cycles of life and death, hospicing death as it comes inside, between, and around us.
We can become grief tenders — raging and releasing with no purpose beyond just feeling, cultivating villages for beings to be seen, cared for, and witnessed in their truths and feelings in.
We can become wild again — fugitives beyond fences who build their gardens in the sidewalks, creating pockets of rewilding and decivilizing ourselves, embracing the unknown, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable break downs, break throughs, and becomings.
We can both be like the beaver and tend to the dandelions.
There’s Only Ahead From Here
As I am on this journey myself, breaking down the belief systems that guided my meaning and sense making within modernity, I am reconnecting with my intuition in deep and whole ways.
I might not be able to take more than one step at a time, but my body guides me by telling me what feels right and what doesn’t as I move forward.
It’s full of seasons and cycles. Things that feel right today and wrong tomorrow. But as my intuition and I, being guided by so much more than just me, grow to be in deeper and deeper alignment, integrity, and right relationship, I trust we will end up at the horizons we are meant to.
In this moment, I have come to accept that I cannot live in integrity within modernity. It is simply impossible to live in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and life around us from within this system and culture.
It is simply not possible. I am complicit in its harms by my existence in it.
And, there’s no going back. We can’t simply burn this all down and re-indigenize ourselves back to a past no longer there.
We are different now. We can only go forward.
Modernity has left its mark on all of us, as all great and powerful things do. The wounds and blessings, the traumas and gifts, all that modernity has imparted and imprinted on our bodies and souls, our DNA and cultures, is a part of us now.
There’s no going back.
The journey down this delusional rabbit hole of separateness — this experiment of idolizing the individual mind and self over the heart, body, spirit, and community, has both caused some of the deepest harms life can bring onto itself and brought us many gifts, learnings, and understandings. Technologies and perspectives are in and around us that weren’t possible before.
And now, as it all has the opportunity to be reintegrated as we are reintegrated ourselves, something new and unimaginable will emerge.
We will die to be reborn again.
We will resettle and rebuild trust with our nervous systems, stepping into a scary and challenging future together.
We will reset and rewire our brain chemistry, helping us navigate the complex, uncertain, nuanced, and plural truth ahead.
We will reculture our gut biomes as interdependent, interconnected, symbiotic beings ahead.
We will relearn what it means to be human and a part of nature and spirit — tending to and unleashing the wildness and queerness that is calling us towards something different and uncivilized.
We can only go forward from here.
We will remember. We will return back to our roots in many old ways. And, we will reimagine and create the future in many new ways, pulling on all of what we’ve experienced.
This may be all we can do for now — dance in the cracks, bring love and care into our relationships and communities, and do our best to keep outselves accountable and show up in the world in integrity as we welcome the death of modernity in and around us — as we embrace modernity as a Mother Tree.
