[Soils and Spirit] Ghosts in the Soils | Late Autumn Newsletter | 2024 | #4
A powerful healing liberation of Brooklyn soils will take place on March 23, 2025. Join us!
Dear ones,
This is an exciting update on the Soils and Spirit project — with an invitation to join a collective soils movement meditation on Sunday, March 23, 2025 to liberate the soils underneath the largest fossil fuel facility in NYS. (read more below, in the second half of this message.)
Between my last update in June, and this one, that election happened. I will say this about it: America has never attended to its ghosts, and now we are fully haunted.
The work of tending to the ghosts in the soils of this country, and in our imaginations, is the work of our lifetimes.
Here are two big updates about the ghost-tending that
Soils and Spirit is doing:
1) LIVING SOILS RISING Community Manifesto
LIVING SOILS RISING is a series of workshops I launched at the 2024 NYC Urban Soils Symposium to develop a collective, multi-vocal political poem/manifesto for the soils.
Powerful conversations took place in working groups, divided by four themes:
Disabled Ecologies: Disability Traumas & Wisdoms
BIPOC Ancestral Traumas & Wisdoms
Queer, Trans, LGBTQ+ Traumas & Wisdoms
Settler Traumas & Responsibilities
You can listen to one of the profound conversations — it’s a 10 minute audio recording of the closing reflection from Day 1. (Please let me know if the audio isn’t accessible and you need a transcript.)
Each conversation opened with vibration, ritual, movement and ceremony. The experience was led in collaboration with these amazing humans: Journei Bimwala, Margaret Boozer, Vale Espinoza and Gisela Sanders.
If you would like to bring a LIVING SOILS RISING workshop to your community in 2025, please be in touch. Virtual workshops are possible, or in-person in Lenapehoking/NYC area.
The biggest take-away I have after these two workshops is the enduring feeling of how much we need to gather and listen to one another in this time. To give voice to the politics and poetics of the soils that the dominant culture is so desperate to suppress.
Which brings me to the main update…
2) LIVING SOILS RISING: MOVEMENT DREAMING
SUNDAY MARCH 23, 2025 | Greenpoint, Brooklyn
(Image: April 2023, Robert Zimmerman, Duke Arts)
A group of dancers, puppetry artists and community participants are shown in various body positions (laying, standing, reaching) as they hold and animate rounded soils puppets/objects.
Mark your calendars for Sunday March 23, 2025 — right around the Spring Equinox.
Back in June, I wrote: “For the next year or so, the focus of Soils and Spirit is on launching site-specific performance encounters - Movement Dreaming with Soils.”
The first place where Soils and Spirit will occur will be with soils poisoned by oil extraction, near a brutalized body of water with whom I (and many others) have had deep spiritual encounters.
This is an invitation to listen deeply, and to connect your body, heart, mind, spirit and imagination to the hurting, oil-seeped soils harmed by legacy industrial extraction in Greenpoint, Brooklyn through a guided soils movement meditation:
LIVING SOILS RISING: MOVEMENT DREAMING
On these same soils currently stands the largest Fossil Fuel facility in all of New York State. It is also here, that the Fossil Fuel industry was first born.
Soils and Spirit is partnering with dear friends and the brilliant grassroots organizers behind No North Brooklyn Pipeline Alliance and Sane Energy Project to organize a large, participatory event around the largest Fossil Fuel facility in NYS. (It’s right in the North Brooklyn neighborhood that has been my home for 10+ years.)
You are invited to be part of this powerful healing liberation of the soils:
To be a participant in the
Living Soils Rising: Movement Dreaming collective experience - to be one of the Soils Movement Dreamers - Sign Up Here.To contribute to the making of 125 soil puppets [“soil phrases”] Sign Up Here. [We will be working with Natural Dyeing, Painting and Sewing through community art builds.]
If you would like to partner and involve your community in this event, please Sign Up Here.
For accessibility questions —- Sign Up Here or Reply to this message.
Have you added March 23, 2025 to your calendar yet?
with fierce embrace,
Marina.
P.S. I’ve finally updated the formatting of this newsletter — no more sending via my personal Gmail. Yay!
As I only send 4 Soils and Spirit emails per year, this is a reminder that you are receiving this Soils and Spirit newsletter because:
You signed up for project updates via the project website, or via my interview in Orion Magazine.
You auditioned for Soils and Spirit in January 2024.
We are connected through the puppetry/performance/theater, disability, activism, soil or environmental communities.
If for any reason you no longer wish to receive these seasonal updates, just unsubscribe. No hard feelings! But, I hope you’ll keep connected to the project — and bring your bodymindspirit to join us in remembering, honoring and meditating with these disabled living soils in Brooklyn on March 23 while building momentum for New York’s renewable energy future.
P.P.S. YES, if you have the financial means, please donate to support LIVING SOILS RISING: MOVEMENT DREAMING and help us create a powerful and equitable event! $8,000 is needed to pay artists & musicians, 3 months of studio rent, equipment rental, and art materials to create 125 soils meditation objects. You can make a tax-deductible donation at the Soils and Spirit donation page. [Thank you to Culture Push for fiscally sponsoring the project!]