Plants as Allies, Ancestors, and Guides – A Vigil
I am writing to you from Berlin, a city named after its swampy origins: Berl in Proto-Slavic means swamp, and the suffix -in marks it as a place. The swamp place. Before the Prussian settlers drained the wetlands, Slavic communities had named and shaped this terrain. Berlin carries layers of history in its soil. It was once home to the largest Jewish German community before the Holocaust. Today, it is the homeplace of Germany’s largest Palestinian diasporic community—folks met with violent repression as the genocide rages in Gaza. Protests for Palestinian human rights are led by Arabs, Muslims, anti-Zionist Jews, regime-critical Israelis, and their allies—queer folks and migrants mostly from the Global South. We are silenced here, in this city that we moved to because it felt like a liveable place.
I was invited to co-host a vigil as part of Living in the Liminal—Let’s Metabolise, curated by Lucy Powell. It took place in Hildegard Garden,[1] located in Hohenschönhausen. Once part of the swamp, this neighbourhood became the city’s sewage fields during Prussian sanitizing projects, then the site of a transit camp under Russian administration post-WWII, and later a Stasi detention centre for political prisoners. Now, it is a quiet suburb with right-leaning tendencies. This is the time and place I am writing from.
Holding a wake.
In the wake of what are you breathing?
What do you want to be awake for?
These questions reverberated as we gathered in the garden, holding space for grief. The land itself is humming with layered brutalities—ecological, historical, human. Some goldenrod was still blooming, its roots weaving through dried up soil, tethering it to unstable ground. This summer the vegetation cycle was disturbed. Everything was either earlier or later than in other years.
erotics of grieves
The earth is quaking, and our hearts are breaking in the face of genocide, ecocide, and overlapping layers of brutality. In this moment of profound grief, how can we hold these multiple grieves collectively, honouring both their shared resonance and their differences? “Grieves” is a term I coined to suggest that there is no universalist concept of grief, but that there are as many grieves as there are bodies and situations. I prefer writing grieves with a “v” to highlight a conceptualisation of “grieves” that has more to do with the verb, the ways in which we “do” grieving and how we are being “undone” and “done” by grieving than with a state of a pre-existing subject. The vigil was an offer to practice collective grieving that would allow us to move with grief rather than striving to overcome it. To grieve collectively is to weave threads of life and death, pain and joy, anger and sadness, isolation and interconnection. It is an invitation to spend the night together listening to what reverberates, to value the knowledge and medicine stored in our bodies and lands, creating a practice of resistance against the structural violence that seeks to fragment us. Plants, as allies, ancestors and guides, offer pathways into these practices. Their architectures and ecologies teach that grieving can be a way to hold space for, metabolizing and responding to ecological and social collapse in ways that are deeply relational—personal, collective, and planetary. Grieving with and through plants opens a space to listen somacoustically[2] to the Earth and to each other. It invites us into an erotics of grieves,[3] where grief is not just endured but experienced as multiple visceral, relational forces that bind us to the rhythms of decay and regeneration.
In collective grieving practices, plants become more than medicinal resources; they are companions, allies, and ancestors that guide us toward a deeper understanding of our entanglements—within our social bodies and with the Earth itself.
In an erotics of grieves we practice being undone and done by grieving. Recognizing ourselves as always already entangled, intimately co-constituted and viscerally accountable for our kin. Erotics, here, is not confined to pleasure or desire. It is about the vitality and vulnerability that grief brings forth, the way it cracks us open to old/new possibilities of connection. When we grieve with plants, we engage in an embodied dialogue with the Earth’s grief. The soil, air, and water hold memories of what has been lost. These losses resonate in our bodies, reminding us of our metabolic entanglement with the planet. Through this lens, grieving becomes a portal—a way of being with the Earth and our human and more than human kin that resists the numbing effects of apathy and disconnection. This kind of listening creates a space for “co-sensing not being a single being”,[4] where we can hold the multiplicity of existence without collapsing it into sameness.
What grieves are you moving with?
What grieves are moving you?
Who or what do you feel co-shaped by?
listening to plants
Listening somacoustically to plants and to the Earth is an act of resistance against the structures that seek to numb us. It is a way of reorienting ourselves toward entanglement, away from the brutal fantasy of the individual, acknowledging the grief that flows through our bodies and the planet. Grieving makes it possible to co-sense that we are not separate even when we are different. Listening to plants is an act of relational attunement. It requires slowing down and paying attention to their architectures, ecologies, and the ways they thrive within their environments. What stories do their forms tell? What support structures do their ecologies model? What modes of life are encoded in their adaptations? Listening to goldenrod means attuning to the rhythms of its blooming, rooting, and interconnectedness. It teaches us to listen differently, to hear the multitudes within our grieves. My grief is not mine. It cannot be possessed nor contained; it accumulates and intersects the personal with the collective and the planetary.
How might goldenrod guide you in listening to the multitudes in your own grieves? In collective grieving, listening becomes a practice of holding space for the fullness of grieves—their contradictions, their multiplicities, their messiness. How do we metabolise these layers of grief without turning away? Collective grieving as solidarity moves from the edges inward. It unfolds slowly, sometimes painfully, and resists resolution. Collective grieving requires structures that hold this process, allowing us to metabolize human wrongs without rushing to get over it. Goldenrod grows in clusters supporting its neighbours in the same way collective grieving practices create spaces where individuals can lean into one another sharing the weight of sorrow, rage and vulnerability, holding space for each other to break open yet not apart.
making of belonging
I find myself drawn to Solidago Canadensis again, or goldenrod. It is a plant that thrives in difficult conditions, a migratory species often dismissed as invasive. Its long stems reach upwards into the evening sky, crowned with yellow flowers that bloom in clusters. Goldenrod never grows alone. Its rhizomatic roots spread and connect underground, creating a network of support that allows the plant to form groups on the terrain. There is a large group of them just by the fire in the Garden of Hildegard and I sit down between the two.
Sometimes their abundance is perceived as taking over. Its migratory nature challenges static notions of belonging. But let’s not forget that next to winds and birds, colonizers are the main mode of transport for migrating species. Native plants are those that have evolved over millennia in specific regions, adapting to local climates and ecosystems. Goldenrod, with its ability to thrive in new environments and on wasted grounds, raises questions about who belongs and how belonging is negotiated. Its spread reflects resilience but also causes discomfort in those who see it as invasive. For humans, migratory processes—whether voluntary or forced—require negotiation with new environments. Goldenrod’s rhizomatic growth teaches us about creating home in unfavourable soil. Its interconnected root systems provide mutual support, showing us how to stand together in adverse winds. Goldenrod reminds me that making home is not about possession, but about working with the soil in relational adaptability and support.
How do you create belonging?
What enables us to stand together on crumbling grounds?
How do we create networks of solidarity and support in the midst of crisis and catastrophe?
Goldenrod’s resilience teaches me how to metabolize sorrow not as an individual burden but as a shared practice. Grieves can feel messy, because they crack and undo the structures I know. Grieves can be layered, and unresolved, and yet regeneration has all to do with decay, as the swamp used to show us.
What structures are cracking around and inside you?
What needs to decay?
How are you practising to be awake for generative forces and constellations?
How can you practice holding the complexities of grieves without collapsing them into one? Sitting with goldenrod, I notice how its blooms seem incomplete when viewed individually, their fullness emerges only when seen in their multitude. It blooms slowly, beginning at the edges and moving inward. This rhythm feels familiar to me. Grieves often announce themselves first from the margins and for the marginalised—a tremor demanding attention. It unfurls in relationships, across bodies, between histories and ecologies. Goldenrod reminds me to listen to this process, to pay attention to the edges where grief begins. Its flowering pattern teaches me that grief doesn’t need resolution; it needs space to bloom. Listening is not passive. It is an act of visceral accountability, a way of being present with the grieves that are moving in you, to take the time to sense the connections with grieves moving in others. Take the time to sense how this plant, here and now, holds histories of colonisation, soil degradation, displacement, exclusion, and oppression. And sense into its capacity to hold space for others and to let itself be held. It asks you to stay in the discomfort, to feel the vibrations of grieves that move through the planet and yourself as pain, rage, and the capacity for solidarity and regeneration.
relational organs
We made a shelter/altar, a fire, and a soup, and set our intentions for the night, and then we sat. One by one people voiced their dedications. We hummed together to amplify the dedication. As the warm yellow liquid of the goldenrod tea entered my system I felt its strength and remembered that in traditional European medicine, goldenrod was used as a wound healer. This is where its name comes from. Solidare means to grow together in Latin; like a wound does when it heals. Solidare is also the root of solidarity, of course. Later, its role in kidney health became recognized: dissolving kidney stones, regenerating tissue, and restoring flow. The kidneys, as filters of the body, detoxify. They discern what to keep and what to release. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the kidneys are tied to ancestral energy, which makes them a site of intergenerational trauma, but also intergenerational resilience and ancestral joy. TCM links every organ to a specific emotion and for the kidneys it is fear—an emotion rooted in relations, arising as we navigate safety and danger. Goldenrod, with its ability to support kidney function, offers more than physical healing. It teaches us how to metabolize the fears that accompany forced separation, helping us find flow in the discomfort of being undone, restoring flow where stagnation established itself because of fear. Our ancestors share their traumas with us, but also their resilience and capacity for joy.
What needs unblocking in your life?
visceral accountability: filtering and flow
The kidneys’ work of filtration offers a metaphor for grieving. They release waste while retaining what nourishes, maintaining the delicate balance of the body’s internal systems. But what happens when the kidneys are overburdened? Stones form, creating blockages that impede flow and generate pain. Goldenrod supports the kidneys in dissolving these blockages, restoring movement. Collective grieving also allows us to address those relational blockages—unspoken fears, unresolved histories, systemic disconnections. Visceral accountability asks us to confront these blockages, to metabolize the discomfort of our entanglements. It is not about erasing pain but about creating the conditions for flow, for connection. In Berlin, I feel the pull of this accountability. The city’s histories of violence and displacement are its undercurrents. We need to discern what to release and what to carry forward. Collective grieving pries open spaces for movement and flow, where the weight of history doesn’t calcify into immobility.
metabolic intimacies
Throughout the night someone starts humming, massaging their own insides with the vibrations of the hum. Then another one joins in and another one, holding and receiving at the same time. Humming with the vibrations of your own heart and of another person, of the goldenrod, of the vibrations travelling around the planet through soil and waters. Metabolic intimacies remind us that our bodies are always porously leaking and receptive, co-constituted—with the Earth, with one another, and with the systems we inhabit. Goldenrod, with its interconnected roots and unblocking properties, embodies this relational flow. It teaches us that intimacy is not about merging or sameness, but about sustaining connection in difference. In grieving, metabolic intimacy means staying present with the discomfort of destabilisation as entanglement, recognizing that grief is a shared process. It asks us to acknowledge the ways our bodies metabolize the dis-eases[5] of this world in our bodies of knowledge and flesh and sociality, holding the tension between in-dividual[6] and collective experiences. And at the same time trusting the sense of entanglement that grieves give us.
a prayer a plea and a protest
Some fell asleep, but there were always some to carry on: to hear the sounds of the birds quieten and get louder again, to feel the darkness, sense the winds change, and feed the fire. For me, collective grieving practices, the erotics of grieves, and listening to plants are about world-making. They invite us to imagine and enact ways of being that refuse the logic of extraction and exploitation. Through these practices, grief becomes not a burden to be carried alone, but a shared experience that binds us to one another and to the planet. When we grieve with plants, we learn to move with grief rather than against it. We learn to sit with the unfixable, to hold the tension between loss and possibility. This is not about finding answers or solutions, it is about staying present with the questions that grief raises, and to sense the energy of interdependency and regeneration that lies within.
How can you live with what has been given to you?
What do you want to pass on?
How can you metabolize the pain of the world into something that sustains life?
Plants teach us that grieving is a process of transformation. Just as they adapt to new conditions, finding ways to thrive in the face of adversity, through grieving we too can find ways to move and to honour our connections to the Earth and to one another.
When the temperature dropped and the sun came up we tried to find an end together. We had drunk lots of cups of solidago tea, had laid and sat with it and the stones by the fire. We finished the salve that we made throughout the night with goldenrod, and we tried to find some words for what we had just experienced together. This is what I wrote:
THIS IS A PRAYER A PLEA AND A PROTEST FOR SWAMP RELATIONS
As they are talking, death is with them and their cousins, loss and grief and love and care. And sometimes one takes the lead, and sometimes another. And they stay together and stand together against capitalist colonial patriarchal powers and winds of functionality and isolation. And they stand together against the claim that it is up to them to get over it, and that it is personal and not political. And as they are walking together in the swamp, decay and regrowth all around them, they think about the blockages and stagnations and undercurrents and flows. And they stand in the swamp seeing it die around them in the fragile equilibrium of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and microorganisms that transform huge biomass and sediments and store nutrients for a future to come. And they feel the vibration of subsounds of earthquakes and bombs surrounding the planet and how it crosses and connects generations and landscapes. And they learn to listen to the swamp, and listen through their skin with more or less pigments, and listen with their gut and with their bacteria in their gut, and listen to lives lost, and listen to sedimented layers of saturation, and listen to voices unheard and voices not listened to. And they learn to listen to vibrations with their whole bodies and flesh. And they attempt to speak with their feet in the swamp and the bacteria in their gut resonating with the bacteria in the swamp. Languaging in ways unknown to themselves, they are curious what will come of these bodies crossed and connected by generations and landscapes. They stand together apart in an entanglement with what was and that which will be, the becoming of new meaning, values and possibilities. Regeneration has all to do with death and decay and intimacy with the unknown.
acknowledgements
This text emerged from the swamp relations I am immersed in. They co-shaped it with their voices, presences and absences. Some of them my whole life, some of them recent, and some beyond time: The participants of Metabolising Human Wrongs, all human and more than human, the land and waters that co-created our learning in Chiao de Rio. The words spoken, sung, eaten, touched, and written. The rich and soulful pedagogies of the GTDF collective. The participants of SocialBodyApothecary,[7] where we practice ancestral medicine with stories and plants for the social body. They are women with lineages from Turkey, Kurdistan, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria. The participants of the vigil and other performances that hold space for collective grieving. All guides, ancestors, allies, and comrades that brought me to an embodied thinking of an Erotics of Grieves. My dead sister who is still guiding me in grieving as practicing futures.
Endnotes
[1] https://www.hildegard.berlin/about_en/
[2] Somacoustic is a term I use to describe listening with the whole body (soma is body in greek). It engages vibrational listening as “co-sensing, not being a single being”—where we listen with our flesh, bones, liquids and cavities across histories, landscapes, and species.
[3] When I speak of an Erotics of grieves here I think with Audre Lorde and Fred Moten for whom the erotic is a power of intimacy and resistance, refusal and care. See: Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audré Lorde. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984. Moten, Fred “Erotics of Fugitivity” Stolen Life. Duke University press 2018 (pp. 241-268). Upcoming: Zacharias, Siegmar: Erotics of Grieves – somacoustic listening towards visceral accountabilities, PhD Roehampton
[4] “Consenting not to be a single being” is a phrase by Eduard Glissant that Fred Moten elaborates in his trilogy of the same name. Shifting consenting to co-sensing opens up the concept to a visceral metabolic intimacy.
[5] In their book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, authors Rupa Marya and Raj Patel explore the intricate connections between health, society, and systemic injustices. They delve into how social, environmental, and political factors contribute to health disparities and chronic illnesses, and thus show the dis-eases of our time cause diseases.
[6] As a critique of the Western subject, the hyphen suggests a break or fragmentation in the unity of the self, challenging the notion of a coherent, autonomous, non-devisable individual. Instead it proposes a multitudinous always already entangled and interdependent existence. See Glissant and Moten
[7] https://socialbodyapothecary.hotglue.me/; https://www.instagram.com/socialbodyapothecary/,
