Tending Our Mothers’ Gardens Community transformation in the time of earth changes by Jessica Dolan
Note : The title of this contribution is a tribute to the great healer and poetic visionary author Alice Walker, who published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens in 1983.
The year 2020 has been a year of great transformation — a year of paring down to what is most important, of grief and healing. For so many people, it has been a time of reflection and going within. Some of this has been chosen, and some precipitated by necessity and circumstance, as we face mortality and grieve the loss of friends and loved ones, and life as we knew it — perhaps of jobs, or homes, or hopes or expectations of what we might want in life versus what is actually possible. The cultural philosophy of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, which I have studied for years, has profoundly influenced the way I experience the world. In Haudenosaunee traditional knowledge, the legacy of the Peacemaker is the history of how the Five Iroquois Nations built a peaceful and abundant society together out of a shared experience of intense violence and suffering. At the heart of the philosophy is the practice of condolence, which contains the wisdom that grief,
