Cells in The Body Of Earth: Living with Violence, Part 2 by Candice Valenzuela

In a previous blog, I wrote about the feelings that have engulfed me and the students I teach at Castlemont High School in East  Oakland, California, following the shooting death of “one of my own,” Olajumon Clayborn.

An indigenous elder told me that I needed to go to the ocean in order to heal. I needed to go to nature, the source, to find the sustenance that will strengthen me in these times.  I went to the ocean yesterday evening after school, though my body was exhausted after running up and down Macarthur Avenue trying to dissuade students from fighting with each other in their anger and grief.

As the waves crashed up and down, back and forth on the shore, and came up steadily to meet me, I suddenly found myself knee deep in water, but I was not cold. And I could see clearly from that place. What I saw was this:

We’ve become a colonization induced cancer. Normal cells multiply according to their code, their purpose, and they coordinate with other cells to make the body work and make it beautiful. Occasionally, there are rogue cells that multiply in disorder and do not follow the code. In normal times, the body has the ability to eradicate these cells and flush them out. But when they become too great in numbers, due to pollution, stress, food toxins and so on, the body loses its capacity to regulate them and they become cancer, which become tumors, which metastasize and bring death to the organism.

Earth is fighting the cancer we have brought. As disorder overtakes the planet, unhealthy cells are determining the health of the overall organism. The earth needs more than recycling and solar panels, though those are great. She needs us to come together. Cells must work in harmony to bring the organism to health. We cannot have solar panels for the elite and gunshots and caskets for the poor, the working class, the youth, the women, the disabled, the elderly, and the people of color–which is what we have now.

Environmentalism that only thinks about land is not environmentalism.  Maybe we could call it earth-focused narcissism. The healing process after cancer requires eradicating the source of unhealthiness- the tumor, the cyst, the cancerous area–and it requires that the body have the space to restore its natural elasticity and bounce back, so that it can follow healthy practices and ways of joyful living ever after. We know that cancer patients who have deep hope, not empty delusions of being saved, are the ones with greater chance of survival. Those who believe they will die, do. This analogy is extremely illustrative.

Every young person who finds quiet and health within and turns away from internalized oppression, and toward healing and community, is a cell of the earth’s body being restored, that contributes to the whole being. Those of us who have been called back to our true purpose on the earth, bring health to other cells and help to spread healing.

For every youth we cannot inspire to remembering, for every racist policy we cannot successfully defeat, for every piece of self-determination that we cannot organize ourselves around, for every rape we cannot prevent, for all of the obscenities being forced upon the earth’s waters, animals, plants, mountains, and lands that we cannot disrupt, the cancer grows.

We don’t know if we will actually win this battle against the “cancer” of the earth–the capitalist, colonialist, misogynistic, patriarchal, hierarchical, corporatist cancer that is eating the planet and turning us against one another.  Don’t get it twisted: none of this violence is natural to our youth. They are reflections of the structural violence being done to THEM as well repositories of the great despair they have been pushed into by society.

This understanding I gained at the ocean helps me see the relationship between the restoration of community and the political, social, and economic battles we inevitably MUST face if we are to survive. You see, the deepest trick that has been played on us is individualism—it shows up in so many ways. We–the cells of the body of the earth–have been convinced that we don’t need each other, that what happens to the one doesn’t affect us all, that we can fight our battles alone or without help.  We have been made into a cancer ourselves- -when we don’t work integrally and critically, and urgently TOGETHER. We must find the harmony of the village within our struggles and rid ourselves of the cancerous mentalities, if we are going to be effective at restoring health to the Body of earth, our mother, and ourselves.

Loving each other and working together are not an option.

The ocean gave me this clarity and I wanted to share it. As I go in to work today, I can see the illness and the despair, but I can also see the purpose we are called to, and knowing that while it’s hard and while it can seem impossible:

restoring the health of our young people and our communities is
as possible as the boldness with which we imagine freedom
and the urgency with which we enact this freedom
and the bravery and devotion with which we commit to this freedom
and the help and love we request and offer on the way.

Ase.

Candice Rose Valenzuela teaches English Literature at Castlemont High School in
East Oakland California, and she has been teaching and organizing inner-city youth for the past eight years. She is currently pursuing a Masters in East-West Psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies, and desires to bring indigenous healing methodologies into teaching and learning in the inner-city.