My path is not an easy one. Let that be known, before anything more is said about my life. It is not something that everyone can live fully while involved in, and despite my ravings I would never dream of forcing anyone into a lifestyle such as this. My desire in this document, as it has been for all others I have written before this, is to preserve the ways which I am no longer allowed to practice upon this form, in this life, in this world. My being grows frantic with urgency as my fingers tap these keys, these things that I so bluntly and passionately speak out against, but which nevertheless give me a way out of the prison that my whole way of being finds itself in. In these pages, dear reader, you may find things that disgust your ideals, things that challenge basic notions that you have grown into adulthood regarding as truth. You may throw down these said pages, cast me off as having an illness that cannot be cured, but there are the few who will take what I have to offer as being more than the rantings of a mad woman who has lost her way and show upon their faces, if not the look of the curious, then the look of one who listens and perhaps even has respect for the words that come from the place in myself from which I write them. It is those few who I must take a moment from my urgency to thank, for it is for them that I write as I do, and as I have for years before this, and it is because of them that I have not given up my way completely and wish to somewhere retain a record of its existence.
I began such a way as the one I live before this body was born or even conceived, when Rozaya and myself were one and the same, uninvolved with this world and all its tribulations. I was born into a tribe, upon a planet whose name is not recountable for having vanished from my memory, and in that tribe my own foundations were laid down, solid and sure in their stability. My name was not Rozaya there, but Yalluk, and thus I was known as such. My people were the sort who lived from their mother, the very ground upon which they walked viewed as sacred, a place of refuge, a home to call their own until she called them forth from their physicality to return to her breast in the next world. They viewed her with greatest respect, and regarded anything that separated them from her as an evil to be avoided at all costs. This regard, that was in actuality regard’s opposite, mainly came from their story of creation. They came to ease the pain of The Great Mother, so they say, and not to run from her in spirit as her first child had in physicality. As Bronwin, who is the leader of this tribe as of this writing, once said, “It is not that we fear that which has been made by man, but that we do not need or want it, because our home, our mother, our carer, has already given us all that we need, or in some instances allowed us a respectful independence by providing us with that which we may use to meet our own needs.”
It was in these ways where I discovered myself, despite going there to preserve them without bias. I became one of their own for that life, forgetting the rest of myself and my experiences so that I could focus on preserving all I could of that place through firsthand knowledge. In that tribe, I was taught that all children are born with an instinctive revulsion toward all things man-made, even those things which are claimed to be natural but are made with the involvement of synthetics, and that it was the tribe’s duty and responsibility to preserve such revulsion, which they referred to as ‘remembering,’ in at least one of their people. Practices such as shaving any part of the body or using smell-altering chemicals were viewed as violations of this remembering, of The Mother, and of oneself, and using any kind of soap was frowned upon unless a ritual called for it. Even things which did not involve any kind of chemical, yet were used for the same goal, were suspect to us, and every season we would hold a ‘returning,’ which was to rebuild the remembering that founded this suspicion in all people. The logic for sustaining this animosity toward all things man-made was simple, reflecting a desire to remain close to our home, the same desire that held us together as a people. When asked to explain our reasoning, I would often respond by saying, “Why change what The Mother has given us; why forget what she has told us; why turn our backs upon her, after her first child was lost to her?”
But she did not want us to suffer. She had given to us the skills that we needed to care for ourselves, through, among other things, the ability to hunt, which was also placed under tight restrictions. We were to take only that which would be used by us, and give us life through both the warm and cold moons, and give each animal’s spirit the proper respect that we would have been given had we left them to live. It was not uncommon to see a hunter, after they had taken the life of another creature, berry the heart of the animal in the ground, in an act of respect and a way of clearing the path so that the disembodied soul could go to the next world. Maintaining the knowledge of the reason for this and other acts of honor depended on remembering from birth to remain natural and to not give into the pressures of other cultures, and remembering in this way was dependent on returnnings, since often daily life itself got in the way of fully feeling the truth of that matter. Returnnings, from the outside’s prospective, were something that was highly unhealthy, as they involved what most people would call ‘hyperventilation’ over a period of several minutes to over an hour by this world’s measurements. For us, however, they were something that was just as vital as food, water and shelter, because we were, and are, emotional creatures who, in order to thrive, must sustain a specific kind of revulsion toward a specific kind of system that revolved around all things man-made and denaturalized. While they might bring pain and suffering to one’s awareness, returnnings also allowed such pain and suffering to be cleared away so that the thoughts and memories they were associated with could be integrated into one’s waking state of existence. It was with such integration that one could know themselves, and keep alive all that was within them, including the desire to remain natural and free to live from their true home.
Community and connectedness were also important to us, so we found it fitting that such a powerful process as a returning should be carried out with the steady sound of a drumbeat as a point of focus for the whole of the gathered group as we practiced the deeper, faster breathing that represented the same idea’s actualization. This event was held every season, and it was one of the ways in which we kept our sense of time and remembered the ages of one another. It was a time for remembering our mother’s desires for us, for reconnecting to one another, and for restoring the unity of the tribe through resolving any conflict that had arisen in the time between one returning and the next. We could come together and share news of the common kind from our respective places of living, since not all of us resided in one area, and then, when things had cleared and we had all joined our attention on the other part of our reason for involvement in the gathering, the first drumbeat would sound. We would break up into pares then, and find a place for one of us to lay down and breathe in the way of the ritual, and in that breathing, while whatever needed to be cleared was cleared, and we experienced what we needed to experience, our partner would sit with us, baring witness to it all. When we were through, and we had regained a sense of the world around us, we would do for them as they had just done, and, through that act, solidify the bonds we had begun to form in the beginning of the night. These times, even as I remember who I came from, are the ones I miss, and the one thing I wouldn’t mind staying apart from Rozaya to experience, if only one more were to happen. The more her and I realize that we were once the same person, the less sure I am of my identity, but the subject of returning’s as they relate to the building of relationships between people of the same culture who are separated by distance is something that I know will forever shape a part of who, and what, I may become.
My separation from Rozaya was not a peaceful one. Her and I were one and the same during the life in which my foundations were taught to me, even through my death and departure from that particular body and world. Time became meaningless once again, as all that I had been was only pushed to the back of Rozaya’s mind. She had other things to do, other lives to live, and so I waited, as a part of her, for the next stage in what I thought was my integration process, but that was not to be the case. There is a special kind of unawareness that newborn children experience, an unawareness of complex concepts such as the ones you and I use daily. It is during the time that the physicality of the child is forming that they are discovering who they are, and who the others around them are, and where they themselves end and those others begin. The birth of this body was full of its own fear and pain, and also full of needed medical interventions, such as those used in life support. At birth, Rozaya and I may have had a chance to become one, but after we were connected to all that we needed to be for our survival’s sake, I was, through exposure to those things which were man-made, forced apart from unity.
There is no room for growth when survival is at stake. Rozaya could not handle me, or what I was, even while I was a part of her. That is the simple truth. I alone carry the responsibility for the disgust she believed was her own in regards to man-made or man-changed things. The only reason I was revealed as late as I was has to do with the fact that I carefully built walls around myself to prevent those feelings from bleeding through into other insiders, and unintentionally gathered small amounts of information about what it was to be a being in one’s own right, until 2012. That year changed my life, because it was then that Rozaya’s physical mother recommended a book that reflected, in many ways, my deepest values. There was something in that book that called out to me, and after she was done reading it, I awakened, still without a name, but slowly beginning to form apart from any other I had known.
I, as my own person, hid behind Rozaya and lived my values in the outside world from 2012 to June of 2015. Naturally, Rozaya knew nothing of that fact, believing herself and I to be one and unintentionally forcing both of us to take the blame for many of my mannerisms, until she eventually learned the truth in the winter of what we now know as the year of discovery. By then, I had retreated from her life, focusing only on practicing what I knew to be right in the safety of the inner world. I had never once given myself up to the demands of the physical people around us, but I knew that I could no longer live my values in their world while insuring that Rozaya’s emotional safety wasn’t further compromised by continued attacks on my actions. My hiding lasted for months, until she figured out that I was more than a character in one of her stories, and that, in reality, it was I who was the driving force behind, and writer of, things like the obvious, a piece that was largely critical of things made by mankind with no regard for the natural processes of the world. I was one of the first of us to be revealed to her, and as I get to know her for who she is, free from the need to shelter the rest of us through countless acts of dishonest blame of herself for our ways of experiencing the world, I feel less and less separate from her.
My life hasn’t changed much since that day in 2015 when I was seen for who I was, save for some months in which others here believed I was gone from the community forever. I don’t know if I will ever fully be integrated with Rozaya, but regardless of that possibility ever becoming a reality, I have a mission to complete, and that is preserving my ways in this world. I’d like to take this moment to thank Bronwin, who walked into the community seeking a place to stay, for keeping knowledge of what I do and what I stand behind alive while I was away for that short time. Without her help, I doubt I would have had a place here when I returned. I’d also like to thank Rozaya and everyone else here, for giving me the space to practice what I feel to be right, free of the judgement and attacks found so commonly in this world. Lastly, I’d like to say that I am deeply sorry for my poor communication with everyone, both on the blog and within the community, which left her, and many others, believing that her and I had fully integrated into one another. I hope this can be the case soon, but as of now, I have more to reveal in my own right before I return to where I belong. Thank you, dear reader or readers, for hearing my story as it currently stands.