Days ago my short story “The Matriarch” inspired by my grandmother was published on our SWANA Ancestral’s Patreon Member Site Ancestor Hub.
Here’s more about the project…
in arabic, hub means love. this is our ancestor hub, our ancestor love. it is through this love that we re-member ourselves home. we. a multi-ethnic group of SWANA* folks in diaspora and motherland, re-collecting ancestral stories, memories, and wisdoms alive in our bones. waking up. thawing out. {remembering}: returning to a knowing from our past – the very essence and origin of us, and of life itself and {re-membering}: gathering the fragments of severed things back together- to unity, wholeness. mending the broken. relocating the displaced, forgotten, and left-behind. reclaiming the forcibly taken, erased, violated, and lost. restoring the integrity of our relationships and relatedness. we affirm the stories and memories that live within the stars, plants, sands, waters, winds, and all sentient beings. the life-affirming medicines of our earthly and cosmic origins. we soften ourselves to them – let them merge with us. teach and re-member us. this patreon is our space to share & cross-pollinate pieces of our SWANA re-memberance, and to cultivate relational and financial support towards a deepening of our work. the funds raised here are dedicated to providing scholarships for more accessible participation in our plantcestral re-memberance circles, building our archival platform, and conducting co-creative residencies and retreats. together, we can create abundance. our first offering of {and towards} collective re-memberance: an invitation for you to enter and open this relationship with us through an intentional and ongoing act of reciprocity by becoming a patron. patrons unlock access to varying types of creative, instructional, and informational posts from us every New + Full Moon plus other perks as listed in the “tiers” displayed on the side column of this page. patronage of this project is also a chance to practice a special kind of resource reciprocity: each time we reach a new milestone of patronage to this project, we grant a new layer of access to broader groups of people until eventually, your collective patronage opens access to this sharing for the public at large. if you find yourself here, it is not by accident.
we are SWANA* folks co-creating, dreaming, and collaborating to revive roadmaps of ancestral inheritance so we may contribute our part to a more free and dignified world. this practice is our ritual of re-memberance. our breath of new life into the ancient places that made/make us, towards a more wise and powerful future. our efforts to rise from the ashes of an era characterized by trauma, severance, and the desecration of life, towards renewal, community-determination, connection, joy, and love. towards dignity and integrity for all living beings. towards alignment with the rhythms of creation, reverence for its wisdom and mysteries, and a restoration of its ultimate justice and wholeness across both earthly and invisible realms. we walk in kinship to and affirmation of our Indigenous cousins and life-tending village folk across the global south. we see you, we acknowledge you, we center and uplift you in our movements towards an ancient future we are weaving together. that our collective re-memberance may honor all the ancestors ahead and behind us and the places we each tend as home. when patrons support this work, you support our ability to return what was lost + stolen and the resilience we weave throughout our region / in the diaspora. you support us to restore, protect, and reclaim our part of what is sacred and crucial for us a l l to survive and flourish in integrity with this earth. *** this space is an extension of the SWANA Ancestral Medicine HUB and the نجمع جذورنا | (re)Gather our Ancestors project, both hosted by River Rose Apothecary.
you can find more info at the Ancestor HUB {{Love}}.
* SWANA stands for SouthWest Asia & North Africa. It is a less colonial way to address the diverse geographical region commonly referred to as “the Middle East & North Africa”.