Rev. Lucy Waechter Webb
she/her
Rev. Lucy Waechter Webb is a somatics coach, politicized spiritual leader, mom, land-tender, ritualist, writer and organizer. She is the descendent of peoples from Germany, France, Ireland, Wales and Britain which include many Christian clergy. After ten years as a pastor and community organizer, she is now focused on weaving together cultural and material change, with the body at the center. Rooted in the lineages of the Strozzi Institute and generative somatics, embodiment is woven into all of her offerings. Recent expressions of this work include a project called Weaving New Ritual, creating community grief ritual space, and tending a local song circle called Rooted. She resides on unceded Anishinaabek territory colonially known as Leelanau County, MI. Her children are some of her best teachers, as are the trees and garden.
Artist statement: This is a poem I wrote during a course with Susan Raffo on land, land connection, and repair. It illuminates the complexity in us as colonizers, the way we’ve been trained to be predators, and the work of seeing ourselves in each other and in land as we unravel from these cultures of violence we’ve inherited.
This poem was originally published on a firetender’s notebook on Substack.
a message from one colonizer to another
Lessons from the land
The ritual and embodiment work I do is an invitation to reconnect with body, which includes the body of the land. About once a month I offer a short reflection, sometimes a poem, about what is coming through in my own listening to land.
The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) was first detected in the United States in 2014 and is considered an invasive species that originates from the lands we call China and Vietnam. They have spread voraciously since, and it is common practice in affected areas to “see it, squish it, report it.”
This month I spent a weekend with a teacher and mentor, Susan Raffo, and a small group of folx at Kirkridge Retreat Center where we were in practice listening to the land. We were also working with the lineage we have as descendants of white settler colonial people on Turtle Island as people who were shaped to be predators. (I trust those of you who are not white to be in choice about whether you wish to keep reading this post.)
As I listened in — I received a visitation.
As I listened in — I received a visitation.
The lantern fly
comes to the armpit
straight to the stench
I am slow enough to greet
the tickle with a nudge
and I turn to see who
is visiting.
A fellow colonizer
I feel the
sinister joke catch the
breath in my chest.
“I have been trained
to kill you,”
I say.
She turns about face,
looks me dead in the eye
walks toward me and
stands at the edge
my curiosity is enough to
keep me from the violence,
or perhaps it is my
self pity.
She didn’t ask to be
carried here.
But I still fail to extend
a finger
a bridge to connection.
She turns to walk alongside
me, pausing to lift her
own arm
a wave
a love song
before leaping into life.
My belly has swelled
with grief.
My heartbeat has
co-regulated
with the drum of gunfire
in the distance.
