We kept our poverty in our hair and our woodland boots on by Luce Howell (Lumpen #11)

We kept our poverty in our hair. It was always tangled, down to my waist; huge clumps of fraid knots felt the brush's punishments on a school morning before my tongue had felt the breakfast in the cereal bowl. My morning rituals unfolded as I would wait for my sister to walk with me and slowly let the radiator burn the back of my knees, gathering  the smell of smoke on my trousers and scorching my knees pink. I joke now that we keep the poverty in our English teeth too. Wonky, yellow, distained. But what I really know is that poverty is felt so much deeper in my body. I experienced sexual abuse and emotional neglect thoughout my childhood.  I found myself disconnected from the world for a number of reasons on a daily basis. To put it simply, my brain felt at war. 

I often wonder what paths of survival I sketched out in my childhood self to get the version of myself I am today. How many times I had to let myself turn to dust and reshape in the form of a human though it felt impossible to be alive in the act of embodying when so much violence entrenched my environment.  What I return to, again and again, is nature. The stretch of green space at the back of our flat felt sacred to me. We lived in a pale green block of flats with a stretch of woods cocooning our estate. These woodlands served as a transitional attachment as I moved between the liminal spaces of puberty and finding oneself. I would hop over logs. Hold leaves up to the light and bare witness to their veins.  Watch squirrels climbing barks and birds nestle in tree branches. I would sink my feet so far into the mud as I was convinced my feet could feel the earth’s pulse. I was a poor, traumatised kid. But what I also became more importantly was a forest protector and a nature dweller.  The woodlands allowed me to feel a sense of home, playfulness, joy and form human/earth connection. 

Nature allows for us to feel rooted in our bodies and connected to our surroundings with present moment awareness.  Like the way nature controls and powers our eco systems, we too can transform powerful, and traumatic, emotions with nervous system awareness, allowing them to become productive and unstuck.  Trauma emotions stick in our body, and becoming unstuck from these emotions means coming into a present, grounding into the now. Healing, like anything else ecologically-minded, is something that's never fixed in place or in time, it is always changing and influx. As are the seasons that guide us through growth, regeneration and decay. Nature is resilient despite humans fragmenting ecology, as our bodies are, even after experiencing the complexities of trauma. 

As we move forward into a better world, access to nature and migration is everything. A friend recently talked to me about the importance of movement in creatures' lives, and with urban areas becoming more in community control,  how we must tear down constructed borders between humans and non-humans. We can dissolve the idea that poor people don’t deserve to have or be in nature.