Written Feb 01. 2019: #VillageCulture
This is what a dying village in the forgotten third world nethers of the world in sweet home sweet Bulgaria looks like.
It's where my grandparents were born and their siblings and their parents and on and on. A place of poverty with electricity as the only trace of a modern society's amenity. Yet a place of an unmatched hard working good hearted people living of the wealth of the land they so diligently nurtured day in and day out from dusk till dawn. And the land nourished them back in return.
If it wasn't for this land and my hard working grandparents, my family in the big city would probably have starved to death many a Winters when I was growing up, if the bags of beans, potatoes and jars of butter and meat weren't regularly sent our way.
I've probably spent collectively a total of over a year in this place throughout my childhood, coming in the weekends and spending sometimes as long as a month in the summer helping my grandparents, learning how to tend to the land, sow seeds, plow the earth and harvest the fruits she generously gave. From picking tobacco leaves with dew drops still on before sunrise and processing by stacking leaf by leaf all day, on long needles to be hanged to dry, to eating strawberries galore directly from the field, to digging potatoes out the earth, to turning milk into butter in a tedious churning process, and baking round home made bread in the wood stove and eating it with fresh butter and fig jam and drinking that glass of sour kefir.
And of course playing hide and seek and all the chasing and fun games with the rest of the kids coming to visit their grandparents from the city. Frolicking around the river that would sadly almost disappear every summer, picking wild flowers, and organizing theatrical performances of dance and song and spoken word for the grandmothers in the abandoned long ago school's yard, to climbing cherry and apple trees and eating sunflower seeds directly from the flower.
And the miracle of watching thousands of baby swallows learn to fly before they venture out south.
Last there was only about 35 elders over the age of 75 who live here. Houses that once stood now open views I had never seen with their crumbled stone walls to the ground, of the surrounding mountain tops from that certain vantage point. One man told me "my kids want me to go live with them in the city an hour away and I tell them what am I gonna do there?, it's so noisy there and so peaceful here".
Three years ago I asked my grandfather to come here with me and show me where the water sources are in case one day this dream of mine that seems so far away may happen, of rebuilding this place into a conscious self sustaining community again. And we did, we hiked in the lands surrounding the village with him and my sister and he showed us the places he had built wells and sinks for the people and animals to quench their thirst when out working in the fields all day long. A sweet memory to savor.
I actually come here every time I am back in Bulgaria. There is an extremely potent medicine for me that so deeply nourishes me here. Every time I sit with Aya I am brought back here and I cry tears of joy for the connection I have with this land and sometimes tears of pain and relief as I heal an ancestral wound imprinted in my DNA.
There was a time I felt ashamed and was conditioned not to speak of where I come from. A place so bare bones and people so uneducated with no privileges with their heads down and hands and feet with calluses focused on digging earth, cutting grass, gathering wood, taking animals to pasture, season after season, living in houses with crooked dirty walls that haven't seen a remodel since built primitively a century+ ago. And yet this is what a village life looks like. This is what the original permaculture self sustainable experience looks like and comes from.
This is the place where when I visit, the conversation goes like this "you are so and so's granddaughter, right?" "and so and so's daughter? "and your sister she now has a baby?" and what about your cousin where is he now?"
Simple right! Yet I've pondered on the diamond of deep wealth hidden in the notion of being recognized by a whole village of elders and their families, spelling out your lineage name by name down to your great grandparents and their siblings and more.
I've worked sooo hard, soooo hard... To try and fit in to the rest of society, to try and find my place, to try to be like this person or that other person or be a mix of what seems a good combo... Worked so hard devoted to try and get in touch with who I am and find my medicine by learning from all these other different cultures and modalities, and priestess paths and vision quests and you name it.
When all along it has been the earth and the blood right here that I am made of, that has fed and nourishes my witchy medicine priestess heart. 💖 It a fine Alchemy!
A Love Alchemy that was never meant to escape my contemplation. So much so that is embedded in the root of my name. Diyana Emilova Alcheva.
And here the words of my medicine woman Andi Wadsworth repeated over the years for me I have partly been deaf to are finally starting to ring louder as truth I am allowing to drop deeper within me now: "The power of your medicine and work is in the pure blood of your lineage and the earth you were made of."
There was a time when grandmother Aya showed me that I have been trying to cut the roots and fully disconnect and forget where I come from. And that the path to love and truth is not in cutting off the roots but in nourishing the roots.
Are you nourishing your roots, beloved?
I share all this from a deeply nostalgic space of healing and connection with my great grandmother Minka who was the medicine woman in this village called Kushla. She died when I was around 10. The most pure hearted, loving, graceful wise woman.
I honor the ancient witch doctor medicine passed through her to me through this blood lineage and this land. 🙏🔥🌹☀️💎🌍🌛
In reverence to the original #villageculture.
May it be a phoenix rising from the ashes. May it resurrect and flourish in bigger and better ways for the love of humanity and her Mother Earth. 💖🌍💖
#SovereigntyUniversity #SovereignShakti #ClaimYourSovereignty #AwakeningYourLove #LoveAlchemy
