Rain Hastings
Apocalypse is but a colonial dream ~
I’ve spent all night drinking coffee at Denny’s, wishing I could buy a Grand Slam, smoking cigarettes stolen from 7-11, hitting the high school at six A.M. when the janitors opened the doors. Sleeping on the floor of the heated bathroom until the clamor of other students woke me ninety minutes later.
I’ve slept out in the rain and snow. Some nights standing and stomping around a barrel-fire under a bridge. Some tucked into ancient trees. One waking up to a man with a gun. One in the company of a spotted owl.
More than one summer, on various beaches and in forests, I’ve kept a secret stash in bushes, poaching driftwood for fires, sleeping under the stars.
I never felt unhoused. There was always a choice to conform to paternal or societal demands. I’m privileged that much.
Fierce feral resistance to colonial pressures. Attempts to reject humanity’s apparent insanity. Dislocate myself from the terrible machinery devouring this holy Holocene.i
Spending a summer on Maui, and when in the vicinity of Lahaina, I’d always catch heart of sunsets from the library park near the capacious banyan tree. Even though it was tough to find places to spend a night sleeping in peace, the coming together to bask in sunset was a novel taste of hometown. And that banyan taught me something about homeness too: Forever branching out to new turf, sending new roots down, creating labyrinthine networks of spaces for others to dwell.
I took to likening myself to a banyan tree after that. I have no home. A place I was born, but I just kept branching out and putting down thready new roots everywhere I went becoming brief home: Shaping me as a place I love as part of me now. Banyan helped me feel there were some substantial roots in my meandering. Maybe even a purpose.
Then I discovered, in my love of banyans, another name for this majestic tree is strangler fig. That they colonize their host tree, terminating their host with neither consultation nor free prior and informed consent.
I had to reflect on that as the mirror my own treasured metaphor offered up.
Became concerned with finding a home to which I might belong strangling no one.
Including myself.ii
Longing for belonging. To be long in a home place. To learn the radical, relational intimacy of such living.
In my forties I got a taste. An eight year home from which to experience the escalating crux of this extinction event. A sanctuary ghost of old growth forest rich in springwaters run dry. Fire and flood and unseasonal freezes shared with my bark-skinned and winged neighbors. Knowing where and when Sun and Moon will rise and set any day of the year. Telling time by the stars. Witnessing the disappearance of abundant myriad fashions of bedazzling, iridescent insects. And then a frightening dearth of birds. Witnessing the mountain slopes charred, shedding all soil to send out to sea. Channeling waters into inaccessible gorges.
Here I began a tentative practice of taking responsibility in relational ecology. Collaborative prayer and labor with Water, and sediment. Listening to stories of stumps with young trees like me. Sharing with forest and waterscape the bewilderment and promise of efforts to regrow old growth culture.
It’s here that I’ve come to recognize the most impoverishing homelessness.
I knew about this homelessness all along.
That’s why my earlier escapades without a house felt liberating. Why housing in this reality feels a burdensome responsibility of privilege.
The more I come to know my local landscape, the greater the sorrow that I don’t fully belong.
The more intimacy I cultivate with my ecological setting, the more vast the chasm between myself and home and the birthright of life as original free people is revealed to be.
Belonging to home—to a place on Earth—takes generations, and something more.iii
Intensity of arising questions amplified by every new discovery.
Where to turn to learn to make home.
I reflect on the year 1492 when my ancestors bore witness to something new from both shores of the sea we call Atlantic. And Tikkun Olam budded in the prayerful heart of Isaac Luria, whose family was removed from Spain to Palestine sparking the future of Israel. It strikes me as prophetic potency that this Jewish man, on being dislocated, reimagined the story of creation in the same year that launched the colonization of the Americas. Repurposing the repeopling to set mythological tones of restoration purpose in place.iv
And I discover something new of the banyan: this Ficus does not always strangle. Is not required to strangle. Has the capacity for mutualistic benefit. Is capable of providing the scaffolding to protect the original free host tree. In fact, does not require a tree to colonize. With only the gifts of Water and Sun, Soil and Waxwing, and precious nook or crevice to settle in, a banyan may thrive and offer her many gifts to life’s complexities. Be of generous benefit to many.
With all this homelessness at play, I’ve become a lover of maps with their infinite chronotopal layers. Mirrors that sparkle in their reflective wisdom. Revealing the sherds of ancestry we now have a chance to piece together into an integral future iteration of creation.
Reading this shattered chronotopal map it’s apparent Turtle Island and Palestine are reflections of one another in this contemporary historical scene. The U.S. and Israel, one and the same, right down to their natal charts. Brothers in arms—theory & execution—the genocide is ongoing even here on Turtle Island. Lakes. Rivers. Manoomin. Salmon. Disappeared women.v
Here we’re living the crux of this extinction bottleneck and barely—but yet—ride the fringes of time for repair and restoration to participate in creation of this infinitely unfinished world. Determine our historical becoming.
If free is what we want to be, we are response-able.vi
If you find yourself, like me, with nowhere to go that’s not stolen, there’s always the opportunity to begin behaving as if you’re a considerate guest crafting the scaffolding to protect your host from violent storms until perhaps one day there’s an invitation to make home. To be a long neighbor. That’s what I’d like to see go down in history. It’ll be generations from now that settler colonizers are the ancestors of free Peoples of belonging. If there are future generations to be ancestor to, that’s how it will have happened. There’s always the path of extinction to choose but any other option has winnowed itself on the gales of hungry ghosts.vii
Imagine the joy of caged animals set free!
i We’re allowing this beast to devour our knowledge from our own inherent breath.
ii If we want to be the land of the free and home of the brave, we’d like to act in camaraderie with urgency.
iii We still hold the potential to piece together a dazzling tapestry of biodiversity in ecological integrity to care for our descendants—we can choose to be this type of ancestors.
iv Every colonizer is descendant of ancestral free Peoples who fought generations to protect us all from colonization.
v If we don’t know what to do for Palestine, we can take action to revivify treaty agreements here on Turtle Island. Solidarity in protection.
vi We can end this thousands years war, if we recognize it as such.
vii We want to fight back against this insidious beast. Purge & heal it once and for all. Pick up that ancestral thread.
This piece is part of a collection that will be published on the blog through April and May 2025 leading to the release of Bombay Gin Literary Journal Issue #49, in the strangler fig.
