The surfacing of symptoms that have patiently held their breath while I ricocheted from one place to the next has made me gratefully mortal again.

My thyroid spiralling out like a butterfly beaten off a window pane too many times.
My intestine tied in knots and rubbed up against another harbour wall, another leaning gate, another walked-through boot.
My eyesight is bleached out by the scrolling of screens and the rolling of horizons.
For a time my skin was peeling so rapidly that it felt like disintegrating, like salt flakes being blown back to the ocean.
Now in my bones and organs there is a jangle of trinkets hung from the rotting wood of a barrel top caravan that has halted for what a nomad might call ‘good.’

I’ve devoured the world, aware it was wasteful and still summoned back to her table again and again.
I’ve been stuffed to my pockets with life beyond habitat.
Another patchwork bag of treasure, another bone carved by hand, another mendicant friend, another strange incident, another set of fears shed.

And now;
I am rotting in the soils of home.
Buried in the earth. The terrain where I know what plant to fetch for a mucusy chest, what tea treats parasites, what blossom lifts a broken heart, and what ones break it cleanly.
Where I can curve my tongue along the land and lilt or keen or craic with the skittering of vowels and consonants.
Where I can seedling, shelter and shuck.
Where I can hold, witness and show.

I am where ‘I can’.

In the shade of Eiriú, Fódhla and Banba, a friend and I discussed regenesis.
A word that hums to me not with a buzz of a handy bypass but a deep mortal insistence.

So I utter it once, respectfully.
And I am answered;

‘It is not for your mind to think your body healthy, it is your body who will choose or refuse to digest your mind.’
Of course.

It is not for the earth to accept us, it is for us to become assimilated to the earth.

We spun on how what cannot be digested within a certain time is not regenerative to ‘us’, the humans and how the increasing abstraction of the world, the bio-mimickery people seem possessed by, their will of imitating life beyond life’s capacity, is indigestible to a body.

The urgency to create processed foods for the soul.
The need for monoliths and zero-sum convictions.
The salt-fat-sugar political and cultural media cycle of the dissociated body, mind and will.

Can we digest it?
And what do we pass into the earth as this moves through us?
Can this rot?
Or isn’t this a world of relentless mastication on the ideas of mostly dead rich men?

Is that success?
That people are chewing on your impact for millennia?

My friend and I spun about how the pursuit of legacy seems often to be marked by being unassimilated. To stick out in the world like a glittering shard. There is a wound suggested.

The ideas that created the most trauma, the philosophies that carry chronic debate, the religions that insist on supremacy. The swallowing of a person as being indivisible from their ideas or art and them having to gullet them in their entirety or else treason to the legacy.

The imperishable strata of this earth began before plastic.
It began in our psyches when we were disallowed forgetting.
Disallowed the rot of time, distance and memory.
Why aren’t these harmful ideas decaying?
Can they really be earthly if they aren’t regenerating anything?

Isn’t decay the explosion of the next life?

Isn’t death?

I think of the mourners of Manchán Magan at Uisneach ag ithe arán agus im ó a chab fhéin, eating bread and butter from his own loaf, and I see an ancestor who asked that we digest him, so his body of being, of work, of offering, be assimilated into the bodies on this island.

Do we launch ourselves into the world hoping to be totally inimitable, beyond comparison, famously indigestible?
Or do we place ourselves at the table between the potatoes and the casserole, a big long spoon tucked in so we can be reached without spilling the wine? Allow our bones to be picked over, boiled down, blended and kept for the week where the winter cold comes?

What’s true now to me is that I have feasted and fattened myself on the world, and now I am to be devoured. I have wanted to choose who comes to the table that I lay my life on, but does any animal have that choice in this world?
Why would I be different?
The great intimacy of being picked over by the creatures that we will never meet as our bodies wilt down into rich nourishing earth was something to anticipate in death, yet we can also be nibbled at willingly now.

Oh Bean Uaine, Green Woman, make me a feast for the people.
Make me a broth, a brew, a decoction, make me a stew, a roast of bones and rootsy jewels. Make me herby salty, sweet and fragrant, make me gamey, gnawy, melty, smooth and savoury. Mash me, braise me, ferment me, knead me and bake me.

Just please, let me nourish you as you have nourished me.
Let me feed the world that has fed me.
Let me be digested in rumbling bellies.
Let me rot wherever there is a need for fertility.

And may what I’ve taken be replenished.
In this life and those yet to come.

Green Women let me call your belly my home.

To all those I have feasted on thank you. I begin now the return the fat of this landed woman to you, nourish yourselves deeply and be plump with the love of life and living.

I honour ‘The Body is a Doorway’ by Sophie Strand, this piece is an homage to the book that leaped at me as soon as I got sick and helped me quickly understand some of my own wild symptoms, this a tea to thank her for the tincture.

And to the ancestors, thank you for the quiet legacy that I see in the shape of the many folk I’ve known and loved, their tongues, their humuors and the colours that scatter among the eyes, the skin, the hair, the souls of all these beautiful humans.
Thank you to all that dies, digests and rots to let us thrive.

katie x