The Knee at the Neck: The Earth Cries Out "Black Lives Matter!"

Life as we have known it is cracking open, the ruptures revealing great potentiality. These cracks—more like crevasses really—are doing the important work of slowing us down. The global pandemic, the critical response to George Floyd’s murder—these are potholes that no longer serve to be paved over, says my wise friend Bayo Akomalafe (follow this powerful and beautiful human being at the the Emergence Network). For too long the Western mind as made manifest through the United States project has paved over the potholes, covering up the rupture, which reveals that something vast was buried, a truth too hard to bear so instead it is hidden beneath the swaths of systemic racism that cover like concrete. The weight is the knee at the neck, a bruising and life-taking posture that keeps brilliant diversity down.

We are being called upon to fall to our knees at the cracks, reaching down into the dangerous and liberating dark that offers to reveal the truth that lies beneath our superficial structures. Falling to our knees is a far different posture of the knee at the neck. When we fall to our knees we do so because the fallacy of the Great Chain of Being has collapsed. There is no hierarchal structure to climb. Instead, we find that our personal sense of freedom comes through the collectively liberation when we are all kneeled upon a sacred earth together, working together to dismantle the concrete cover of racism. The land—the loamy earth that lies in wait underneath the concrete of our culture—holds the seedbed of our truth; the bones of discarded lives speak of enslavement and stolen land. We are being called upon to do the work of the Descent, descending to the level of microbes to be reminded of reparations and restoration long overdue. To come to terms with that which has been covered up so that Whiteness can build hierarchical ladders pursuing the lie of supremacy and exceptionalism.

Through the fractures and fissures that now mark our times (I live and write just two miles south of Seattle’s now notorious CHAZ), we are being invited, called, challenged to find our collective felicity. Through rooting into our ruptures, we can collectively be enraptured. We cannot continue ascending on our own. The truths that lie beneath the pothole must be resurrected so that we all might rise. 

My heart is marching in solidarity and raising my voice in protest along with many around our world. My hand holds a pick axe, willingly prying open further the cracks of certitude to reveal the structures of systemic and institutional racism that perpetuate death and illness throughout the land. It is each of our responsibility to take up the axe, shovel, hoe, and do the heavy lifting work to make the pot-hole even bigger so to reveal the microbial structures that continue to dominate and oppress. 

I am not making light of our times when I align what is going on with the Rewilding Wheel. Energetically, I find it fascinating that just as the novel Coronavirus erupted during the Spring and the archetypal landscape of the Forest, we are now turning towards the high-sun of Summer and the sacred bioregion of the garden/field. This is the quadrant where we are working with the wisdom of the Earth element; the heady heat of Summer; the hard labor of working the garden from seed to fruit; the Descent that leads us on a journey of reclaiming that which we have exiled. Kernels of supremacy and manifest destiny were planted into the soil of colonialism. And, while there have been efforts of racial reconciliation over the years, some would say we were merely covering up the damage with more colonizing concrete. The Earth has a way of ensuring that that which is buried will resurface. Whether it is a seed planted in the garden, or the structures of racism, the shoot will emerge demanding that we do the work to identity it; cultivate it with our complicity; or descend into the earth to uproot that which is causing the cracks in the first place.

Where the Earth body is is dominated, you will always find black and brown skinned bodies oppressed. This is a through-line of truth for millennia. Environmental injustice is done with the same White hands that build the hierarchical ladder of supremacy. To dominate Earth or another human, structures of dehumanization, the removal of one’s personhood, had to be created. This is the knee that is at the back of the neck of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color the world over. The Christian scripture speaks of how the Earth is crying out with pain (Romans 8:22). What does this cry sound like? Certainly not a groan for a kingdom come or an eternity of celestial justice. We hear this cry through George Floyd’s final words: I can’t breath. We hear this cry through the protestors chants for change. We hear this loudly through march’s silence of solidarity.

This season we have work to do, together and on our own. Get your gardening tools—your pick axes, shovels, and hoes. We’ll be needing them to root out racism’s seeds.