sondering return home
welcome to sonder taller/workshop ~ an intro to what this emerging practice is all about and the winding rivers of returning
written by: christie wong
“lenta, pero profunda…como la lluvia (slow, but profound/deep…like the rain)”, she said as we sat on tiny chairs in the only children’s library in a remote town in the outskirts of Oaxaca City (Santa Catarina de Minas is known for its mezcal production by generations of families).
We were talking about building community after being and living in other worlds and what it meant to return home to a place that was at times, resistant to change.
Encountering Proyecto LAM by Real Minero through a workshop created by Pocoapoco, carved a landscape imprint on my soul; the kind that rivers would flow through.
Over the rolling mountains and layers of communities between the valleys, were sprawling stories of necessity and containers for dreams.
(view from one of the classrooms in construction at the time; a communal space under a terrace roof and open windows on the side of a hill in Santa Catarina de Minas drawn by Christie in her sketchbook)
Peering from inside the library, I could see the big open arid hills through window slits along the walls. It was the dry season after-all and water was scarce. The floor to ceiling slits were perfect for keeping cool in a hot climate. Children’s books and toys were on the shelves, most of them looking worn and read.
The visionary of this space, Graciela, is the eldest in this generation from a long line of mezcaleros (mezcal producers) that this town was known for and this biblioteca was part of Proyecto LAM. I was sitting there enraptured by her honest sharing and process of bringing new ideas into a small town that is sometimes resistant to change and newness.
Oftentimes, the younger generation who go to the big cities don’t return or return to only to see family during summers; while their minds are left to pursue new ideas and possibilities. There is a distance between the carving out of new space (by the younger generation) and the continuous shaping of ancient legacies (typically by the older generation).
But some of them do return, such as Graciela, to bring something new to a community she felt she always belonged to. She expressed her struggles and insecurities of having a body that was welcomed home but a mind full of ideas that some in the community did not understand how to approach.
There was a dissonance and discomfort that she leaned into with the hope that bringing more expansive possibilities into a small town would actually allow for more freedom and love for home.
lenta, pero profunda…como la lluvia (slow, but profound/deep…like the rain)
I think a lot about how as a 1.5 generation Hong Kong immigrant in Canada, the idea of returning home is laden with layers of nuance and non-linear processing. Colonization, change, choice, rage, and assimilation roll off the tongue when trying to explain the nuanced feelings of grief, displacement, exile, unease, longing, displacement and hope that exists.
We live a political existence as diaspora and even the term diaspora doesn’t quite explain it. It’s more like a diaspora without a full possibility of returning home even when we do physically return to the land our ancestors came from. This choice (made by our parents) continues to be honoured, a raging rejection of a place that we have inherited as their children and reinforced by the colonized land we grew up in.
We are both landless and land-full, just as the trees, rivers, mycelium and root systems would beckon us to remember.
The truth is, ‘returning home’ for us means stepping on new waters every time we return; a constant river muddled by expectation and negotiating narratives.
As the raging salt of our twenties rolls off our backs, we are learning to become rooted in the stories of our ancestors, in dreams of generations to come, building of villages, and expanding our palates for mycelium networks that feel like home wherever we go. But most of all of true nourishment and not sprouting from soils of monocultures.
lenta, pero profunda…como la lluvia (slow, but profound/deep…like the rain)
I think about the conversations we’ve had with our friends in Oaxaca who share with us how inaccessible water has become, not just in price (due to inflation) but because of access, privilege and scarcity. For half the year, Oaxaca is in dry season, where sources of water are only remembered by the ghosts of rivers under bridges.
Most travellers and global north immigrants (they call themselves expats) never need to think twice about affording pure filtered water from giant blue jugs or plastic bottles.
Back in one of my homes, Toronto, the blue freshwater lakes are always abundant and our ravine system seemingly upholds the booming population (whether it actually does, is another story). New condo developers waiting impatiently for their generic buildings to be filled with investments aka, the tenants. There is very little thought in these constructions to human connection, facilitating belonging or a sense of a bigger world outside of our own.
We are in a “relating and connecting” drought right now. There are some patches that are well watered but many parts that have been neglected for the progress of things humanity and societies have chased.
lenta, pero profunda…como la lluvia (slow, but profound/deep…like the rain)
Sonder is our emerging communal space and an emerging thesis borne out of our heartfelt reflections, travels, stories and struggles in this world. It is our return home and an exercise in loving and nurturing our individual biodiversity while understanding that inner thriving only happens together.
It is also a tapestry being woven and many gardens being nourished. There will be food, conversation, art and the holding of expanding possibilities through breathing into new spaces together.
We will be exploring the incredible stories imbued in different expressions of collective being. Food, culture, material, art. At the end of the day, these are expressions of our shared relationships with the land, with all-living and non-living things, and ultimately with one another.
land. expression. hospitality.
Sonder:
We recognize that each person has the capacity for connection, with land, and with others, it’s already within us and all around. We are multitudes of remembrance; the sacredness of our ancestors’ dreams and the Now. Let’s dream them out loud and water these dreams together; slow but rooted, like the rain that seeps into subterranean land.
Seed with us.
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