Being 'Out of Place' & Tending To Our Relationship with The Land
Illness, cursed lands, attacked by spirits, and finding a home. Why our relationship to the land matters.
“When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you, it is you who belong to the land.”
―Native American Proverb
Being Out of Place
Years ago I was deeply sick. My body was falling apart. A decade of living and working in ‘The Land of Enchantment’, also known as New Mexico, at a wolf sanctuary that was nestled in an unwanted pocket of native territory, combined with a variety of other factors, took its toll on me.
Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary was located at high altitudes in a tundra-like environment. The place: a 27 square mile area known as ‘Candy Kitchen’, a name it was given during the prohibition era, due to it being home to a candy store that was actually a front for bootlegged liquor.
As the legend goes...Candy Kitchen was a cursed land.
It resided within the Navajo Nation and yet was home to no Navajo. Why?
Well, the story goes like this: 115 years ago, two tribes, the Zuni and Navajo were exploring the prospect of purchasing this land ‘back’ from an Anglo-Saxon man who was in ‘possession’ of it.
Negotiations became strained, and in response to this, a group of powerful Navajo shamans decided to severely curse the land, which in turn made it an unwanted plot of expanse, of largely wild territory, to both tribes.
This of course did not stop the ‘rational’ non-natives, because they probably felt they ‘knew better’. Whether or not this is a true story, is one that I cannot confirm, but the lack of natives living there was certainly telling.
The area was also known to be home to an ancient tribe called the Anasazi, who just disappeared out of nowhere a thousand-something years ago, leaving behind shards of pottery, which could still be found milling about in the dirt throughout this area. Ominous much? The truth of the curse, or lack thereof, must lie in the stories of Navajo families.
In all honesty, I never ‘got along’ with the land there.
I was born in raised in Miami Florida, a city kid birthed from tropical and Mediterranean genetics, and thus always felt like a fish out of water in this dry, desolate, and harsh environment. It always felt like nothing worked, intentions always went astray, and I was perpetually pushing against an unseen current that was weighing me down.
More than once, during particularly difficult periods (which in all honesty were not purely related to the land) I exclaimed ‘I hate this place’, which was a truly unwise, and short-sighted assertion born from desperation and feeling like I was being ground down to the bone
...bones that were becoming dust in the piercing winds of the Zuni Mountains.
In truth, I did not hate this land, so much as I felt deeply out of place, an important concept we will return to. From my vantage point now, I feel utterly lucky and grateful to have spent a decade in the wilderness of New Mexico, and the challenges were really more akin to the dissolution a caterpillar experiences inside a cocoon.
To be fair, I also did not know then what I know now. Despite having grown up in an Afro-Cuban magical and shamanic tradition, 2/3rds of my time in Candy Kitchen was characterized by a period in which I had divorced myself from the practice of engaging with spirits (a story for another time).
It was not until the tail end of my stay there that I began to once again re-engage with the traditions of my childhood and teenage years, beginning the study of magic and shamanism in earnest with multiple teachers.
However, my focus was still ‘out of place’. I paid zero attention to my relationship to land, practicing magic, while perpetually bashing the place in my heart and mind. Foolish.
Attacked By Land Spirits
It was after one particular potent ritual that the ‘shit hit the fan’ as it were. Now, to offer some context, in my youth, I was exposed to very serious magical work, that included animal sacrifice, deep trance states where gods fully possess people and ritual formulas that are thousands of years old.
It is as real as it gets, and yet I had not been exposed to poltergeist-level activity...until this day.
After this ritual, speakers that had been playing a music track made by my teacher to elicit deep trance states, started to crackle and then warp, making very odd sounds I had never heard before or since.
Well, within three days I felt like I was dying: pipes burst, propane went out, car troubles, appliances broke amongst other retaliations from the land, and more importantly, I felt like I was being attacked.
It was then that direct experience showed me an enormous gap in my practice and my awareness:
My Relationship to The Land. The Spirits of Place. The Geomantic Forces.
If you have never been attacked by land spirits and a slew of dead Native Americans, it’s hard to appreciate the somatic sensation it creates. As soon as I was able to come up for breath, I began to address this issue to the best of my ability. I built a shrine outdoors for the spirits of place and began giving offerings, doing my best to appease the forces of this territory.
The pressure did let up, but ultimately, at that point, it was clear that the best I could ever hope for was to be tolerated. Thus was the cost of my actions. Yet, the somatic sense of being tolerated, vs. being at war with the land, was light-years apart.
An important lesson I came to learn was that you are immersed in the land, as surely as a drop of water is in the ocean, and your body is perpetually being recreated inside the soup of geomantic forces where you reside. How you relate to the land, is going to affect your very sense of being alive, for you are alive by virtue of the place you exist in.
At Home in The Hawaiian Islands
After a few years of feeling like an outdoor cat who was barely ‘tolerated’ by the spirits of the land in New Mexico, my wife and I took a leap of faith, moving to The Big Island of Hawaii. We followed our hearts, sacrificing much to be here.
In nearly every way, my experience in Hawaii thus far has been in direct contrast to my time living in the Zuni mountains, for this is a land that I have loved since the first moment I stepped foot in it.
Within five minutes of exiting the plane, I felt like I was home. Although I cannot speak for the land, it seems like the feeling is mutual for the Big Island of Hawaii has a notorious reputation for brutally kicking people out when they do not belong here. For these people, everything goes astray, nothing works, and they feel like they are a ship taking on water. Sound familiar?
I got sick in New Mexico, and I have healed in Hawaii. It has taught me that if you feel out of place, you will be displaced, dislocated, and dispersed. The body is literally a part of the land.
Although health-craft is a skill I have cultivated for many years and practice in earnest every single day, I know firsthand that without having the land as an ally, it can be utterly difficult to feel vital. In part because you are out of place.
+You vibrate out of tune.
+You can’t anchor into the body as deeply.
+You create disruptive ripples that reverberate back towards you.
For those who do not belong in a land, or who do not have a healthy relationship with it, it is possible to:
1. Attract greater levels of entropy
2. Feel like nothing works for you
3. Experience an inability to feel ‘at home’
4. Feel disconnected from the world around you
5. Feel perpetual somatic resistance like you are moving against a blowing wind
In contrast, having a healthy relationship with the land can facilitate a much deeper sense of being in flow, at home, with the wind at your back.
For you are being created and recreated daily, inside of and side by side with, the spirits of place. This is a major factor in why indigenous and traditional cultures pray, feed, and honor the land. For you belong to the land, the land does not belong to you.
How to Begin Building a Relationship with The Land
For anyone interested in engaging with the spirits of place, the two primary practices I would suggest you begin with are:
1. Acknowledgment
2. Offerings
This can be as simple as offering a handful of bird seeds, pouring out some water or dedicating a few breaths, combined with a simple prayer of thanks to the land for allowing you to exist. This can done a few times a week (or daily) to great effect. Coincide this with a somatic sense of where you are in real-time, like feeling the wind blowing on your skin, breathing in the scents it is carrying, and you are now cooking with fire as the saying goes. If you have never done this, you may be surprised at the palpable shift it creates.
*And for a bonus… visit sacred places of power, which may require some research to find, once in a while ( say every 1-3 years), to give a bigger offering like (meat, fruit, flowers & liquor).
This is a starting point.
There are more in-depth sensory practices that have to do with learning to listen to the land’s rhythms and reading its patterns. This often takes time, and at least multiple seasons to notice the ebb and flow of the land speaking. If one has the appropriate energetic skills, it is possible to directly tune into Geomantic forces on a more subtle level, allowing you to enter into direct dialog with the land, but that is way beyond the scope of this article. The key, is to start.
This article talks to my soul . I dont feel at home where I live actually. Im not sick but I can feel in my body that Im not in the right place .