The Land in Our Bones Quotes

“Colonialism not only displaces our bodies from the practices, ways, and places that have affirmed our connection to the earth and sustained our self-determined livelihood for millennia, but also displaces our soul from its connective source and fundamental nature as a compass. This is also why the reclamation of earth-based practices and ancestral traditions is such a deep remembrance. It returns us to something essential, primordial in its truth, connective nurturance, and power, specific in its resonance; it repairs inherent roadmaps for respectful dignified life on this planet so that it may continue in integrity and reverence. Remembrance is not to recreate or romanticize the past, but to build futures anchored in the foundational truths that still determine our lives today, and the generational wisdom that is already in our bones to nurture it with autonomy and sovereignty. These skills have been stripped from us on purpose. For the longevity of our species and the many who live alongside us, we must reclaim them. Our places are what make us, and what teach us who we are and how to live well across the spheres of time. Original wounds require original medicine to heal.”
― Layla K. Feghali, The Land in Our Bones

“Food itself is such a foundational and integrated part of our collective tradition that some people might miss just how meaningful it is as a form of herbal medicine. It is arguably the most tenacious, intact, aspect of our ancestral botanical wisdom alive today. Our traditional recipes themselves are balanced formulations we may not be conscious of, but we maintain in the continuation of our ancestors who first developed them, and are empowered by our union with one another in both their conjuring and consumption.”
― Layla K. Feghali, The Land in Our Bones

“Cana’an is a crossroads of the earth. Be it birds or seeds, humans looking for life and refuge, or empires with a will to dominate for power and profit, this land has been frequented by many over the course of the past several thousand years. Our collective diasporas make one of the largest in the world, and our migrational lines are as complex with layers. Despite constant war, endless stories of exile, migration, language loss, and land degradation, there is palpable vitality and wholeness in the elements of place that still live through us. There is a lesson here—a medicine in this crossroads of rupture and immense resilience and revitalization at once, where loss insists on continuation, and life recreates itself constantly through the persistence of tending what remains, from wherever we are. No matter what has been lost or taken, a way persists as long as we do. Plants of place and origin are an interwoven part of these understated worlds that mend and make belonging. They, like our ancestors, have adapted to the challenges of lifetimes, embedding wayfinding intelligence inside of us. When we are lost or have forgotten, they have the power to re-member us. They wake up the ancestral lifelines inside of us. Every time we eat our cultural foods, harvest and prepare our medicines, nurture the soil where we are, plant ancient seeds in new places, these legacies bless our bodies and guide our beings back into union with deeper sources of life’s fundamental wisdoms and the earth’s unfaltering guidance.”
― Layla K. Feghali, The Land in Our Bones

“We are our ancestors. Their blood, their bones, their sacrifices and relationships to the earth are what have literally made us. It is not only their wounds that carry on inside of us, but their resilience, wisdom and power. Our ancestors and homelands weave a way inside of us that expands as we live and breathe. It is a legacy of love that continues through us, reinforced by habits of stewardship and care wherever we are. Deepening relationship with my ancestors has urged me closer to the land as our kindred source, most of all; immersion in the earth and waters of place has transformed and re-membered me in the most anchoring and ongoing ways, and brought me closer to the healing possibilities within and for my lineages, in the process.”
― Layla K. Feghali, The Land in Our Bones

“The earth is our first and most foundational relationship of nurturance, anchorage, and agency that secures livelihood forward. Earth is our first mother—the generous lifeline every human and nonhuman on this planet shares in common without exception. Our relationship with the earth is a material, unwavering truth that determines our fundamental existence on this planet. In separating us from this relationship or reconfiguring and exploiting it on the occupiers’ terms, colonialism interrupts our deeper contract as sacred living beings of a sacred living planet, and the practical ways we have evolved to navigate and mutually sustain life. It fractures our sovereignty in a multifaceted way. We are the earth. An embodied relationship with the land imbues innate reverence for life, an embedded knowledge of its inherent dignity. We understand all beings have a consciousness, and we are a fundamental part of the ecosystem. It teaches us how to steward life and land, through intimacy with its natural cycles. Our specific landscapes have sustained our bodies and provided for our societies generationally; they have also informed every aspect of our social structures, inspired our ancestral cosmologies, narrated our stories, animated our foods and agricultural practices, intonated our languages and the rhythms of our songs, revealed our gods, and inspired every aspect of our relationships, rituals, beliefs, and identities. These places have guided every aspect of our self-determined livelihoods and cultural formation, including our understanding of ourselves and each other in the universe.”
― Layla K. Feghali, The Land in Our Bones

“Colonialism intentionally disrupts this inherent relationship with the earth and replaces it with an ethos of domination and power that can be manipulated to sustain empires and generate wealth, rather than affirm life on its own natural terms. Severing humans from the wholeness of this relationship is the original rupture, the deepest trauma and most ravaging displacement, which has created space for every systemic and societal wound that has followed. It defiles our generational roadmap to good living rooted in agency and mutual care. The colonial wound creates a form of spiritual exile that dissociates us from the essence of life itself and displaces us from our cultural ways of affirming and stewarding it as a part of the living land that makes us. It shakes our sense of security and home in our own bodies and basics. These relationships are an objective truth that does not waiver despite these intentional disruptions, but we suffer to realize them as a result of them. By displacing us from the inherent connection we have with the earth as a kindred creative and material source of life and nurturance, we lose leverage with reality itself as it becomes reconstructed around something contrary and rootless—something oppressive and damaging to the earth itself, desecrated as we suffer in unison.”
― Layla K. Feghali, The Land in Our Bones