PRISM: Wedded To The Land
by Chaney Williams
At the grotto beneath the statue of Mary, I spent several weeks writing and reading every day at the Loretto Community in Nerinx, Kentucky. I was there as an Artist in Residence through the Kentucky Foundation for Women. I sat on the stone bench and prayed for the collective liberation for all. Surrounded by the crab apple trees one morning, I walked in my mind to a place where I am free–where we are all free. I dream of it constantly: universal healthcare for all; a home I own, where I am surrounded by trees and a creek; and a place where the rich do not get richer, and the poor are not one sick day away from losing their homes.
We shall overcome, we shall overcome
We shall overcome someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.
I believe that wholly but not just someday, one day soon. In my lifetime, I will be as free as the goldenrod in the fields of Gethsemane and the deer in the woods of my family’s homestead in western Kentucky. I know in my heart we will be free.
With my queerness and biracial identity, I still know I am safe to be myself here in Nerinx–which is not a feeling I feel frequently in Kentucky where so many of our rights to exist are under threat.
When I was thirteen, I left the Catholic Church. I refused to be confirmed in a church where one of my religious education teachers told me: “If uncivilized people in Third World countries didn’t know Jesus or the Christian faith, their unbaptized souls would go to hell.” This was not the Christianity I knew, not the Christianity was shown in my family–both chosen and kin–who loved every being on this earth so deeply. Where we were taught that God loved all of us, no exceptions, no despites–whether you are queer, trans, poor, rich, black, or white I knew we were “all precious in his sight,” as my mother sang to me and my siblings at bedtime.
When I attended religious education classes, I was shocked and horrified to learn that most of the people who attended our church did not believe what I had been taught in my home. I could not understand how or why they would use the words of the Bible for hate and discrimination–words that were not reflective of Christ’s love for all. At 13, I refused to actively participate in this cycle of harm, and I refused to be confirmed in a church that manipulated the words of the Bible for hate.
For most of my adult life, I have longed for a community that understood my spirituality and how I find God in the natural world–and in the ritual that exists when I pray for all of
humanity when I am walking in the woods. How Spirit exists most for me there–not in a church but when my bare hands are deep in the soil as I plant calendula, rosemary, and yarrow. I return to myself in the woods where I am rejuvenated with hope repeatedly. My need for stillness in this chaotic world is nourished and the Earth becomes my touchstone to bring me back to center.
My relationship to the natural world–specifically Kentucky–is a deep soul tie to this land from birth that goes beyond me. I belong to this land, but it does not belong to me–and because of that I am a dutiful steward of this place. I am a visitor to this land, and I will fight for her with every inch of my being because it is my duty. To preserve the bobcats that live amid the woods of our farm, for every at-risk medicinal plant that grows here–I fight for them because it was their home first. When the water dries up, when the great trees that circle my homestead are gone because of the ignorance and pure destruction of humans due to climate change–when they are all gone, so are we. I am wedded to this land, but she does not claim ownership to me because she is free.
Chaney Williams (she/they) is a full spectrum doula, ritualist, and writer. She lives in small-town central Kentucky and has been a southerner since birth. Chaney strongly believes that all people deserve access to trauma-informed, intersectional, and sex-positive reproductive care. For Chaney, writing–specifically their poetry and creative non-fiction essays–is confessional in nature because they create what they know and what haunts them because it is the way they make sense of the world they exist in. It is how she finds belonging in the universe and connects to her ancestors, future descendants, and the collective.
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