Underneath the gorse shroud - a lyric essay
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Flowers flooding down slopes
The people say the gorse is marching
Like an army
Like the colonisers they see reflected in gorse's impenetrable thicket.
But gorse whispers to me
In the quiet misty morning
And in her thick and subtle scent
As she lines the pathways my friend and I trace
Walking our babes to sleep along the riverside
And gorse says
I follow the damage.
Time
Colonial humans think in different timelines from the living world
Which they inhabit as surface dwellers
Landscapes heal in time frames outside our world of five year plans
Time for us is something to mark days, weeks.
Shaping them into work days and weekends
Shaping us into labourers
In the demolition of the ecosystems we rely upon
Time is something we offer up,
A sacrifice for the money god
Who endlessly feasts
On our days
Until they are done
Ecosystems do not exist in this colonial kind of time
Latin names and laboratory experiments cannot fathom the depths of what it is to exist
Momentarily as one form or another
Atoms that were this become that
Gorse laughs at our concepts of time
Where a human lifetime is the measure of lengthyness
A forest takes 1500 years to grow
And atleast half of that is repair
We want it now
And kill the plants that we think do not belong
Without realising that the plants we think belong cannot thrive yet
That a forest is a great collusion of cyclic thriving
Each being giving itself over to the greater health of the cycle that comes next
Gorse heals the dying soil
Then provides nurse canopy to the baby trees that will one day be the canopy of a forest
Cornerstone species
That house and feed and protect all things
Only possible because gorse came first
Feeding each other
The ordinariness of infinity
The aliveness of deep time
1500 years is nothing in the time of a landscape
And yes, gorse is not of the landscape and she doesn’t know how to collude with our ecosystem members
But why do we loathe a plant for shrouding a landscape for 10 years?
When that has always been her job
To hasten the time of healing towards a forest that doesn’t belong here
Like she longs for the hills of Ireland
And this is her lovesong of homesickness.
Aliveness
Gorse trails aliveness with her
As she traverses over-grazed landscapes
If only we looked to gorse as our teacher in spreading life.
She tumbles over eroded soils
Marsupials seek safety amongst those impenetrable thickets
Safety from those metal and plastic beasts we throw across the landscapes in our attempts to get somewhere faster.
Beasts whose thirsts are never quenched
Thirsts for ancient living things
Fossil fuels
That they burn in their bellies
And come back
Wanting more.
Gorse invites insects and birds
With food in times of hunger
Bright and yellow
Feeding bellies
Making sure there are pollinators next year for the farmers
Who point at gorse like a scourge
Gorse holds the land
Nitrogen fixing roots lace through the exposed clays and sands
Holding them in place
Shade for microbes to return
Pumping plant food into the soil for their plant kin.
For the next generation
Gorse tells us we may not pass.
No large animals may.
Like a "no entry" sign and barricade
Ecosystem under construction
Gorse blocks out the compactors
Holding off the weight of our poor choices
Clearing landscapes of vegetation
And trying to make only shallow rooted grazes grow
For heavy compacting animals to over-graze
Like we are allowed ro push landscapes until they are barren
And then move on to somewhere else.
Taking until there is nothing left to take
Mining the land until we cannot inhabit it.
But we do not like to be told we are not allowed.
So we bring weapons of ecosystem destruction to prove our worthiness
Heavy machinery that we churn up damaged soil with
Poisons that kill soil biology and create scorched places where soil microbes cannot live
Then lace the soil with the very nitrogen gorse was trying to gift
And throw grass seed down
Forcing it to grow
So we can leave grazing animals there
And eat them later.
Gorse invites life in, to build more life.
To create healthier, deeper soil, made out if the bodies and blood and shit of the many animals that come to shelter and live and die in gorse's protective arms
Until one day a forest inhabits the land where gorse did
And gorse, a servant, not a greedy hoarder,
Cannot live in that forest
The soil is too rich
The shade is too deep
Gorse's gift is to do herself out of a role
To serve towards a more thriving ecosystem
So thriving that she cannot live there.
She moves to the periphery
To spread the forest
But the coloniser, the pioneer, looks to take as much as they can
Until it is all gone
The mirror
My friend Miriam asks if I think we speak of gorse as an evil coloniser to assuage our own colonial guilt
To place the parts of us that we hate and cannot look at outside of ourselves
We are sitting in a circle of women.
And gorse is teaching us.
We have spent the day with her
Drunk tea made from her petals
We have wound our way up hillsides
And we have watched her patterns
Where she grows and where she doesn't
We have observed the shifts between soil in those places
And between the places where other members of her plant kin grow
Thistles and plantain and heath and blackberries
They all inhabit different soils, different landscape patterns
They all have different means of service.
I call the gathering "land witchery"
Because once witches too were treated like weeds
Still are in some ways
And I feel that ancient plant alliance of witches and plants unfurl in my bones
They burned us
They burn them
And they did not seek to understand.
Yes. Gorse is a mirror.
Our hatred of something we perceive to be "taking over landscapes" which we lay claim to feels like self loathing
Our battle cries of eradication in the name of environmental preservation feel like white saviorism
Placing the land and environment into a category of limp helplessness
And positioning us as its violent hero
Enacting a genocide in the name of the holy doctrine of the preservation of "wildness"
Employing poisons and other violent weaponry in our righteousness.
Kali
Gorse is dangerous. She burns with an intensity that scorches soil and landscapes
With a ferocity of the rage of trauma
Perhaps you will read this and think, this woman does not know the danger of gorse in a landscape. The fire that she invites.
I do know that fuel.
None of this is to say that gorse is necessarily welcome in Australian landscapes.
It is to elucidate the reasons why gorse is here.
In permaculture we call weeds like gorse "pioneer species"
Those species who come into landscapes that can no longer sustain rich ecosystems like they once did.
But I do not have a good relationship with the word "pioneer"
It reminds me too much of colonizers
Who robbed landscapes of riches
Including the people who belonged to those places
Colonisers who, not understanding that the world was a living, moving gift
To which they were obliged to give to first
Took all the parts they wanted
Without so much as a thank you.
An ungrateful child sitting at their grandparents' table
Gobbling everything in sight
Greed is a sickness.
Pioneer feels to me likes someone who capitalizes on the absence of others to hoard gifts
And I cannot talk of my friend gorse in that way.
Far from the self serving and greedy coloniser gorse is painted as, opportunistically taking over land that could grow other things, gorse grows because other plants cannot.
Gorse’s form reflects the severity of the degradation
The extremity of her impenetrability
The brutishness of her functionality
When I see gorse. Regardless of whether I remove her or not, I say thank you.
Thank you for showing me the depth of the damage here.
Thank you for honouring the land with your gifts
Colonisers would be lucky to give half the gifts to the landscape that gorse does. Perhaps we should consider this before we malign her, for desperately trying to clean up a mess that we left.
Coloniser
The genocide of colonisation blares from my phone screen
Last night Israeli forces bulldozed laboring mothers in Gaza
Waving a white flag
Trying to reach a hospital
Babies decompose in humidicribs
After their carers were killed
Or forcibly removed
These words make me want to vomit
May their blood return to the soil that fed them
That they called home
Weapons manufacturers in colonized countries
Make billions of dollars
As humans and landscapes are treated like they are collateral
In the pursuit of wealth
False wealth
A wealth of pieces of a world that we belong to
As if by hoarding
We can bargain with death
Bargain with life
One day all the humans will be gone.
From everywhere.
What kinds of futures will we have made possible with our bodies
Our hands
These minds we wield like they are the beginning and the end of consciousness.
The shroud.
I imagine that I am lying beneath the gorse that carpets the hillsides
But the hillside is our collective heart
The threads that bind all beings into an interwoven web lie beneath me
Scratched and scorched
Unravelling
And I let myself unravel with them
I dissolve into the depths of trauma
That spiral out from colonial thought
From the idea of humans as separate
Of hierarchy
And power as domination
The lie of ownership
Gorse hides me in that grief.
Entangling with the living world that we turned our backs on
The world full of kin that we enslaved with commodification.
Gorse does not ask me
What brought you here
She does not blame
Or hate or refuse the need of another
Instead, she washes over me.
Working in time beyond my lifetime
Like a wave
Falling over everything like a shroud
Hiding it from view
Until the hurt is healed into something beautiful
That carries the stories and lessons of the wounds that we made
Weaving them into a new tapestry
In which we are made and unmade.
A story of people woven to place.
Stitched to the land
Collaborating with all the living world
Allies in collective thriving.
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