resurge/alight/burrow Action 3: burrow

“burrow brings forth the insular qualities of the lodge. It cements the necessity of gestational spaces and womblike safety within this work.”

And we land on burrow.

It has been years since I’ve written about the camp, with the third element hanging, waiting for love and word-shape. It was meant to wait until now.

burrow is the third piece of medicine the camp offers in its quiet stillness. The third action that is and is not an action, and the one that most ensures balance. The rest.

In order to live through resurgence, in order to dance in trickster footstep, in order to live as resistance, come back to ourselves, embody survivance, we need the pause in between.

We need to replenish our stores, we need to converge and share strategy, we need to collapse and laugh and cry together.

We need rest. As Indigenous peoples, as Indigenous people, we need rest and safety. The time to fully exhale.

And we need insulation to protect it. That insulation is burrow.

burrow is pause in a body that’s been trained to believe that pause is not allowed.

It’s the largest lodge, the east facing lodge, the lodge with the door, opened for ceremony and closed with loved ones inside. It’s Native land holding, rocking, humming to Native bodies.

Sometimes, burrow is naming the sensations inside of hopelessness. Raging at the freeze that paralyzes forward motion. Sometimes it’s jokes, and gifts, and laughter. It’s underground, warm womb, cool earth, easing open the casing of a seed. It’s lineage of muskrat den and inheritance of grandmother medicine.

It’s feeding our loved ones. It’s the recipes we feed our loved ones with, tucked away into safety and projected into the now, into the future, into the forever.

burrow is the stillness in the tornado.

The moments before and after birth.

It’s warm hands, holding the babies. Sister hands, mothering sisters.

Naps showered with sunlight and crow song.

White buffalo born once, and again. Again.

Sleeping right side up in a world that’s upside down.

It’s the rest that makes way for repair.

Repair, work, rest.

resurge, alight, burrow.

None without the other.

Depletion to preserve the backward is not normal. I reject it. We must. Stubbornly.

In this moment, the camp is suspended and bracing for a brief occupation (the settler-colonial kind) from a music and arts festival which has shut down the entire island that the camp rests within for a week. During this time, access to the camp is fenced off, and the ability to advocate for it comes with a several hundred dollar admission ticket. This moment is spring loaded. Full of kinetic potential.

It’s time to see the camp’s medicine in action. Breathe.

We take our first breath and see the ache. See Indigenous creation, for Indigenous gaze, locked away on museum land the way it was never meant to be. There is alarm. Grief. Camp is home to us, and we feel the sharp harshness of the bars breaking our physical connection to it.

We take a second, deeper breath. Pause. Another breath. We feel the collective fight response gathering around protecting the camp from harmful hands. This response, sharp as it is, is the sign that the camp is as alive as ever. As potent as ever. When do we immediately act upon a fight response? When it’s healthy and active.

The medicine is working.

This is burrow—this is the CAMP—nested in us.

We sense imbalance, and so quickly we move through the muscle memory folded into the teachings at the camp. resurge: we feel that warrior energy swell within us. alight: we move quickly, in/out, we are light stepping and exact, forming in murmuration for a collective push, and lapping back like a wave on a shore. burrow: we feel the rhythm as we reach toward each other, into and around this protected space. We know what’s at stake.

The magic of burrow, is that once we get a taste of the rest, and safety, and insulation; once we get a taste of that underground germination, the moss-damp mycelial dark—once we know we CAN have it, we will fight for it. We can, for a moment, shift our inward energy to rotate outward, standing shoulder to shoulder to defend the nest from invader and exposure.

THIS is the medicine of burrow, coming to life not only in the little spark of the camp, but in the glow burning within everyone it loves. These are the new camps lighting off in the distance, ready with fire, softening the ground, gathering the poles. The collective compressing inward and rippling outward in gorgeous, soft-sharp fractal.

The medicine comes when we call it. It never looks the way that we think it will.

It came quiet, under the new moon. Burrow is here.