Episode 4: A Harvest For The Heart

Welcome to My Mother’s Trauma, a podcast exploring feelings about families, what to do with what’s passed down to us, and how to break the cycle for more justice and liberation. I am your host, Kim Loliya. Let’s take a moment to breathe.

Hey folks and welcome. I hope you’re landing softly into autumn or depending on where you are in the world if you’re in the southern hemisphere I hope you’re landing softly into spring. I’m recording this episode during the equinox and I’ve been spending some time exploring

a theme of harvesting and what that looks like when we live in the diaspora.

It’s a time of reaping what we sow and enjoying the fruits of our labour and to me that sounds like a beautiful and sacred intergenerational healing practice but it also feels like only a small number of people have access to that practice because they have access to land and that’s a real shame.

because that means that many folks who don’t have land struggle to take part in harvesting work.

So I’ve been wondering what we can do about that and this idea of harvesting without land, whether it’s possible and what it might look like if we’re able to think creatively outside the box. Land loss is a huge intergenerational wound within global majority communities. Being disconnected
from our land is like not having air to breathe or blood in our body. Land is so integral to our sense of self, our sense of place and belonging.

and there’s a magic around land that isn’t fully even possible to describe so it’s a huge huge loss when we don’t have access to it. Recently I have been talking to folks about the mental health benefits of being on the land and how special it is when

someone brings back a pot of earth in their suitcase when they return from an African or Caribbean country. Having that kind of land it just hits you differently even if you’ve been away from the land for decades it’s like a siren song or an invisible pool to return.

It’s kind of an indescribable feeling and that’s why I love doing ritual work outside because at least for me the land is an amplifier. It doesn’t really matter where I am in the world or even who owns that land. Just including land in ritual is like an upgrade.

whether that’s ancestral work or any other kind of ritual work. But I have had to grow this relationship with land really intentionally because I grew up in big cities and there were parks nearby but it just wasn’t the same as having a wide stretch of open land. Land is wild, it’s majestic,
it’s organized chaos and it’s miles away from the manicured pieces of grass that we see in the city. You can’t really compare parks to wild land and land isn’t just about who we are as individuals. We’re also having to contend with the belly of the beast when it comes to oppression.

and that belly is often situated in land.

It’s just so ugly the way white supremacist governments have appropriated land for centuries and then trashed it so that we now have a climate crisis. And that’s exactly why land justice is so important and it’s an integral part of every social justice movement.

And it’s also not just about the land, it’s about the people who tend to the land as well.

The American Farmland Trust found that for every BIPOC farmer there are more than 26 white farmers and the numbers are going down every year. So that deeply affects our ability to organise and cultivate land collectively.

and if you can please support your local BIPOC farmer and buy produce from them as much as possible. If we think about rematriation and re-indigenising of land as practices of resistance they also happen to be practices of disrupting intergenerational trauma.

both for our generation as well as for future generations.

It’s tapping into a knowingness that, once we return to the land, our children and their children can have a place to rest and heal and I don’t just mean that figuratively our bodies literally recover from surgery way faster and we need less pain medication when we can see nature.

Our bodies and nervous systems also recover way faster from acute psychological distress when we see nature, which many of us have probably felt intuitively but we also have research to back it up and I’ll link to those studies in the show notes in case you’d like to have a look.

It’s all well and good knowing that we need to be back with the land but in the diaspora many families haven’t rematriated, they haven’t been able to take back possession of their land or they’ve tried but haven’t been successful.

Sometimes we might not even know where our land is or we want to buy our land back but we can’t afford it and I don’t think that that should mean that we should be left out of harvesting during the season. Harvesting is our ancestral right just as much as being rematriated with our land.

So let’s look at some options for how we can do this physically when we don’t have land and I’ll also explore some emotional harvesting that we can do within our heart that’s available to anyone and include folks who might not want to or be able to physically harvest

So what is harvesting? How do we define this term?

For some people within an inner city context it might even be hard to know exactly what this means so I’ve googled it and I found that harvesting is a process of gathering a crop and according to the Cambridge dictionary it also involves picking and collecting

whether that’s crops, plants, animals or fish. So in context it looks like going around with a big knife and with a big bag or a container and filling it up with your food and taking it home. These days we also have machines that we can use to do our harvest.

but some people still do it by hand and that’s because they might not have access to machines or they might prefer the intimacy of the process when it’s done without a machine being able to fully touch the crop to pull the grain, grab the fruit and it’s also emotional because

It’s exciting to know that you now have food for the winter, to know that you can preserve what you’re harvesting so that your family and your community can be okay. It’s knowing that there’s an enoughness, an abundance and it’s also a high energy time because

suddenly there’s a lot to do so if you don’t have your own land have a think about whether you could be involved in someone else’s harvest whether that’s a local farmer, an allotment, a horticultural center or a food growing hub

You might not be able to be immersed in the entire process from start to finish because that’s quite time consuming but you might be able to pop in for a few hours a day and that could be a nurturing act of self-care.

Think about what you can grow at home as well on your balcony because that happened a lot during the pandemic when it felt like many folks were talking about the chilies on their balcony or that suddenly they were growing herbs and it felt like we had a bit of a moment in terms of cultivating home growing so that’s something we could still have right now.

And if you’re in London and looking for a space to do some of this work you can check out Wolves Lane Centre that offers the most incredible horticultural space where you can volunteer, buy-produce and join in with community events. You can find a link for those folks in the show notes.

Okay so we’ve reached the limit to what I can impart about horticulture because I know very little about it, I am not really a plant person and I hope to have some conversations with folks who are plant and land people who can illuminate me further but in the meantime

Let’s move on to exploring the emotional harvest or how we can harvest within our heart. This felt like a sweet practice because we all have a heart and imagining that we’re gathering from that heart space sounds like a gentle opportunity for self-connection and intimacy.

Instead of touching our crops we’re sensing our feelings and extracting nourishment that can sustain us over the winter months. It’s like doing an inventory but that sounds quite clinical so we can go with harvest instead. And this idea of

harvesting within the heart acknowledges that we gestate within our heart for months and we can gestate thoughts and feelings or realizations and suddenly when we’re ready we need to grab our bag run around and gather

and I was talking a bit about that in the first episode because that’s really how this podcast came about, it was just dating for nine months in a way that was mostly invisible, other things came and went, the seasons changed, I even forgot about it and did other things and then suddenly it was here

and I was running around recording in a cupboard under the stairs and that’s where I am right now so ‘Hi’ from under the stairs. When I initially thought about it all those months ago I had some ideas for episodes that have since been scrapped and instead I’m harvesting

all of the things that I hadn’t even realized were in my heart that now want to germinate and be shared with you so I’m really grateful to be harvesting and that you’re here as part of the process thank you and outside of the podcast in the deep winter months I planted some other seeds that have germinated recently

and one was a deep knowingness that I and we could explore how to widen our gaze away from collective pain and towards dream work and at the time I was writing a research proposal that was going to be about intergenerational trauma and I had this really big feeling

that I just needed to stop thinking about trauma for a bit.

With racial trauma it felt like we’ve had these conversations for so many years, we’ve spoken about how it harms our mental health and still despite all these conversations not much has changed and we’re still suffering because of racism and other aspects of oppression.

It’s like we constantly need to justify our pain to systems that don’t care and even within our communities the amount that’s shared about trauma is completely flooding.

And it’s okay to talk about trauma, it might even be healing. But we need to do it with care. These are sacred wounds and when they’re dumped onto others it might not be kind, it might not be an act of community care. And then it’s kind of like spreading the trauma around.

One person triggers another person who triggers another person.

So being aware of this process and seeing it happen in real time I started researching the healing potential of Afrofuturism instead.

and the minute I started thinking about it and reading about it I could almost feel a spark of liberation in my body it felt like Afrofuturism was changing my molecular structure but it was kind of subtle and invisible as well for many months

until I harvested this feeling a couple of weeks ago where the proposal had been approved and I ran two focus groups where we sat in community with Afrofuturist art and explored how we felt about it, how it was impacting us, what it meant to us

what we found challenging, what we found exciting, what we found repulsive, what we wanted to embody from the art that we could see on the screen.

So that’s an example of a seed that was planted in the deep winter that has germinated and been really nourishing not just for me but also for the folks that I’ve journeyed with as well.

and the heart can be a space where we do that work of planting and waiting.

The heart can also hold our feelings, our intuitions and it can hold them for decades before we harvest.

In nature we harvest once a year but in the heart we might need to gestate something for decades before it starts to come out as a feeling, a thought or an intuition and the heart is really timeless like that it has its own rhythm, it does its own thing and it’s quite mysterious as well

like a physical harvest we don’t quite know what’s emerging until it’s there, we don’t know how our crops are, we don’t really know our yield until we finished our harvest and we can’t really have expectations because we might be really anxious that what we’re harvesting isn’t great

both physically and within our heart but then when it comes out, when we’ve gathered it can be really beautiful or really abundant and nature can do that, it can surprise us and we’re part of nature so our heart can surprise us as well and if you think about a physical harvest

You might need to use some tools to do the work which can be gloves, knives or machinery and I’m wondering what tools we might need to do when we’re emotionally harvesting, is it alone time, the support of someone we trust

a nature space? Do we need to eat or sleep?

so that we have the energy for our harvest because a harvest can be demanding as I was saying before it’s quite high energy and if we’re not eating or sleeping it might be really hard to stay in the process and harvesting is also about clearing the land

and preparing it for new seeds to be sown so we could think about it within the heart as an energetic clearing of sorts a cycle that completes itself so that a new cycle can begin

and I’m wondering what that’s even like within the heart. Is it the cultivation of emotional space so that we can reinvent ourselves or reinvent an aspect of our lives? Is it about emotional sustenance?

and thinking about folks who exist at the margins that emotional sustenance is the deep winter months that we talk about within the cycles of nature

But often oppression is way longer than a winter season. So harvesting is a clearing process in order for us to survive a much longer winter.

In so many ways we’re living in harsh conditions and don’t we know it?

An invitation from this episode that you’re fully welcome to accept or decline depending on how you feel is whether there’s anything within your heart that you’d like to harvest is there anything that you’re ready to gather any realizations, feelings, decisions

what’s emerging within you, what’s been under the surface since the winter that’s now ready to be picked.

and do you have the tools to gather and enjoy the fruits of your labor? Do you have your jars so that you can preserve your nourishment?

So this is it folks, I never thought I could cram so many agricultural metaphors into one episode but it’s happened and it turns out there are many metaphors that overlap really well so thank you for being here and thank you for exploring this with me

And if you decide to do a harvest, whether that’s physically on your land or within your heart, know that you’re not alone. Enjoy the knowingness of co-conspirators who are also harvesting right now, whether in the physical or ancestral realm. And trust that you know what to do because this is embodied knowledge

that we’ve had within us for millennia. Wishing you a sweet, abundant harvest for you and for those in your community. Enjoy.

If you’d like to learn more about intergenerational trauma, as well as decolonial and anti-oppressive ways to heal, check out blackpsychotherapy.org. We offer classes, programs and talking therapy for individuals, couples and groups. If you’d like journal prompts, decolonial musings and special discounts,

You can sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes, where you can also find a link to submit a question for me to answer in a future episode. I super look forward to connecting with you again and take care.