The Butterfly Effect with Ella Noah Bancroft

GetInTouch Byron Bay Art Resident 

"Written after I had felt the fullness of being fully held and being able to access that which I would normally never give myself."

 

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What is it to be well, to be connected, to live within a world where we are expected to succeed.

Does this stress equal success in a world that tells us, we are nothing unless we are something. 

Fake it till we make it, they say.

What a way to live, to be filled with fakeness. 

I lay in a space of liminal in the in between and in this reality my pure purpose of my existence here on earth is for me to hold my peace.

Hear the piece in this writing stating release my stories.

Not forget them but not allow them to be the leading way in which I see the world.

I lay not quite awake, not quite asleep but somewhere in the inbetween and there in the inbetween I can finally see. 

I feel peace in my heart and here starts the healing of how I relate to my relations, to all my relations.

Peace being linked to patience. 

Peace being a privilege that I can reach. 

Finding patience in every moment can only happen when I am well rested, regulated and rejuvenated and that happens to people in places of privilege. 

I recognise that even being able to find peace is a privilege. 

That is how far we have come as a society that our peace has become a privilege. 

That our inner worlds have been compromised with so much trauma from the systems of disconnect that even peace is a privilege. 

My work is to hold my peace even when frustrated.

That actually even though my society upholds stress as success, what I see in my reality is that my friends and family don’t love to be around me when I’m stressed, they love me when I'm peaceful. 

When I bring peace to them, they feel peace.

Our bodies have a way of moving energy between other living beings, we are the ones who carry the ability to move and transform, to absorb or expel, to be seen or unseen. 

The butterfly effect. 

Remember that? 

Where even the smallest things can create non linear impacts on our precious complex system. 

That our whole existence carries wisdom. 

Allow my body's wisdom to live outside of the colonial systems of thought that dictate how I see my worth.

I am worthy. A woman who is not entitled but just worthy of rest. 

Worthy to not be stressed.

Worthy to not carry stress and pass that stress on to my babies. 

Butterfly effect, Is feeling outside of our own logical existence.

Imagine if every time we bought a plastic packaged object that we had to pray for the animals that this packaging would kill, the impacts that packaged item had on our environment and a prayer to the next generations, an apology for leaving so much trash behind.

Physical, mental and spiritual trash. 

My ancestors didn't have a word for trash. 

Not a word for cash or dash and somehow I think these rhyming words relate. 

That cash and dash has created so much trashing of our earth. 

There has to be a line and we have to draw it in the sand for those to come so they are not overwhelmed with the chaos of this system and what we have left for them.

I’m finding ways every day to step more and more into peaceful ways of relating, moving away from individual expectation and allowing the liminal space to activate my pace of remaining peaceful. 

Pace and patience create peace. 

The soul sings as I expand my wings and really allow this beingness to fill me.  

I, this body, myself, kinship ties, past, present and future, deserve peace. 

We all deserve to feel the ecstatic stillness and expansion of pure peace within our being. 

A place that I feel when I'm supported, nurtured and cared for by those who love me deeply.

This is why I live within the community, because I know the hands of my healers. 

I know their children's names. 

I know the faces of my community who hold me and their stories.

Because we are not silos, existing in isolation, we are actually being of deep relation.

Relating takes peace and there is a pathway through pace. 

A constant reminder for me to not chase.

Allow our relating to reflect our creation in the world as we build less walls for us all to access each other, nature and our more than human kin and the spiritual world we all live within.  

Find peace to create peaceful relations. 

 

This can only exist within the understanding that nothing needs to be fixed, that all is as it should be and it that way of being, I am free.

 

– Ella Noah Bancroft