From the time I can remember, my grandmother, Arlene Coffin Leftin, always talked about “the land Down Maine” and how she kept paying the taxes on it. It felt important to her to keep this land…All the time that I knew her, up until her death in 2005, she never visited that land. She loved her home in Danvers, Mass and didn’t stray very far. She was pretty old fashioned, she cooked, cleaned and quilted. She also smoked a ton of cigarettes and drink beer occasionally. She’s the only person I know, who never in her life wore a pair of pants. She had a bit of a Victorian air about her. Proper, she was. . . dignified, sometimes you’d see her with a crisp white blouse with a little raised collar and a brooch or cameo at her neck. And of course a long A style skirt that went to mid calf length.
She spoke fondly of her childhood down Maine. The natives spoke like they stepped out of the King James Bible, with thee and thou and “Thou shall… Thou shall not”. So dictatorial, now I understand where my mother gets her attachment to external authority.
They had chickens when she grew up, so when I was a child there in suburban Danvers, just 25 North of Boston, she had a very neat and tidy (what looked like it could be a dog house) but was a chicken coop for one bantam hen. It was a token memory of the past. A nod to Maine and her humble beginnings from a very backwoods type of place, which was ripped away from her at a tender age.
Her mom, my great grandmother Edna Dorr, had about seven children; my Nana and baby Joe were the youngest. It’s natural as children that we idealize our parents, but there must’ve been some super dysfunctional dynamic to cause Edna one night toput on all of her dresses in layers under her overcoat. We don’t know how many maybe 6or 7, who knows. We just know that her sister and brother-in-law picked her up in the middle of the night. She didn’t dare take the baby or any of the children for fear of waking up her passed out drunk husband Willie Coffin. Do I know for a fact that he was passed out drunk? No, it’s an extrapolation based on a journey that I had with my great grandmother and my mother’s mothers lines in front of a hearth fire on a cold winter’s eve after an Imbolc celebration in Montague, Mass. I received downloads about my great-grandmother, so I feel fairly certain that she was feeling some kind of abuse. I mean, what woman in her right mind would leave her children? Most people don’t leave places where they feel happy.
I feel that there’s a lot of healing needed in my matrilineal line. Healing all around really, but I know that there was some incest between one of my mother’s brothers and his children. And I don’t think it’s isolated. I think it’s a learned behavior passed down from generations that have been traumatized by war and other atrocities. My ancestors lived through such dense times and now it’s a new dawn, new day, a new life for me.
I’ve been getting clear messages from Spirit to take some actions to pray for healing for the land. Recently in an automatic writing session I heard, “make a medicine bundle here and pray with it.“
“What should be in this bundle?”, I asked.
“Select the things that have meaning to you. Your own hair, crystals, feathers, herbs – of course Tulsi and Rose, Sage, Cedar – things that come to you naturally – you’ll know what to do.”
So I found a cloth to hold the bundle and I’ve been making prayers with it. I took it to Haleakala and I’ll take it to Iao Valley. I take it here and I take it there, I put it on alters at ceremonies that I do and places that feel significant. Pray, just pray to heal the lines of the past – to heal the patterns in the present that are attached to control and domination. Pray for all those who use sex for personal gain or to enslave others. Pray for the Waters that they may be free and that mankind sees through the greed of controlling a water source for personal profit is not true abundance at all. The sun gives its energy and warms freely beaming for all to receive, the Earth same – giving of her lands and waters for all humans and animals, all beings. Somehow our society has developed in such a way that we’ve reinforced the ideas of competition and beating each other up instead of lifting each other up.
Our species has ideas and plans of how we can use the resources. I myself have dreams and visions of Tulsi Rose Gardens, Temple’s, and teaching spaces. What does the land want? Does the land in Maine want humans to interact with it, or does it want to be habitat for nature? As far as my own personal gain, I wonder if this is a place to build from? A home that I can go back to that nobody can take away? Maybe. I’m in a place of deep listening; listening to my heart, listening to Great Spirit, listening ti the land. I know that it was extraordinary for my Grandmother, born in 1919 to actually own land.
In 1771 New York passed an act that gave women some say in what her husband did with their assets. Massachusetts passed a law in 1787 allowing married women to act as “Femme Sole Trader’s”, allowing them to conduct business while their husband was out at sea or away for other reasons. By 1900 all US states recognized women’s property ownership rights, but a key barrier remained; access to credit, bank accounts and mortgages without a male co-signer.
It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t until 1974 with equal credit opportunity act that granted women the right to apply for loan and credit and we are still talking about white women here. Discrimination in housing for other skin colors is a whole nother story. So when I think about the possibility of working with a piece of land, I remember that to be an unmarried woman creating with the land is a big deal and I pray for guidance as I carry this bundle and listen.
tulsirosegarden.org 