As of yet unwritten, The Wilderness will be the third and final part of the Rewilding Triptych. The poem below shares some of the themes the performance will be exploring. Enjoy! — Walken Schweigert

We were witches once.

Who healed through story,

Relationship with the land,

Performing alchemy,

Vessels for change,

For transformation,

In alignment with

The sacred energies that animate all life.

I’m not trying to romanticize

the past,

Strange and cruel as it was,

Probably incomprehensible to me now.

Just that it’s no surprise

That where we are today

Came from the destruction of

The Commons.

The purpose of the commons

Was for all to have equal right

For use and relationship

Of and with the land.

All needed it for survival

So all cared for it

And had access.

This was in Europe.

Why am i telling this story

Starting here? Centuries ago?

Because the story of where we are now,

Of how i tried to make a living as an artist

And ended up becoming a grant writer

Begins here.

One ancestral line of my family

is from what we now call Tyrol, Austria.

Before it was Austria,

It was Suebian Land

The Suebi, the “Celts of Germany”,

The Pagans of the Black Forest

Defeated Caesar and in 1525

Had a system of self-government

That stayed in place until

the 19th century

When it was destroyed by the Witch Hunts.

Over just a few hundred years,

Hundreds of thousands of people

Were killed

As witches

across Europe.

First they took the land

To do this they had to divide the people

(who were resisting)

So they demonized women, queerfolk,

Then they demonized

the body.

To rest was sinful

It was Descartes who was made holy,

And his idea of the body as a “work machine”.

I struggle to remind myself now,

As I navigate Google Calendars and Zoom meetings

That my ancestors did not accept

This sacrilege easily.

They murdered hundreds

If not thousands

Of my family and ancestors in Europe

Forcing, through penalty of death,

Exile, humiliation, torture, rape,

To accept a system of wage labor

To accept the body as a machine

To accept that what was once

Held with care, in common,

Was now owned by just a few.

Just a few.

And you had to believe

Or be devoured by the gallows

That Jesus is your savior

That women, once holders of the sacred

Mysteries and connection to land,

Are inferior,

That queers are disgusting,

And that your life is meant for labor

And your struggle to have what you need to survive

Will be rewarded in Heaven.

This project

This violent erasure of local knowledge and lore

This violent erasure of women and queers

Thought to be animalistic, basic, savage

Not human

Was so successful

And made so much wealth

That the belief system

Of private land

Of christian values

Of the body as a machine

Of the white man as superior in all ways

Was forced upon every continent

With the same brutality

The same violence

With which it was felt across Europe

And the Black Forest.

But my people have forgotten

And believe these myths so utterly

That I was never even taught to grieve

For the land that was stolen,

For the grandmothers, crones,

That they hanged

No one in my family says prayers

For my ancestors

Who were faggots, used to light

The stakes where the witches

Were burned.

So successful

Was the capitalist experiment in Europe

Which began with the eradication of the commons

That there is no record of it

In my family lore.

I don’t know how to heal this grief.

But it is somehow encouraging to know

That even though they were killed

In horrific ways

My ancestors fought so hard,

For so long

To try to stop the onslaught of the powerful few

Whose only care

Was the accumulation of wealth

(and you cannot have philanthropy

without the accumulation of wealth).

They did not accept

This utilitarian worldview

The attempted destructions of their sacred and their magic

Passively.

THEY. FOUGHT. BACK.

And others, so many others in Africa, Asia, the Americas,

FOUGHT. BACK.

And we are fooling ourselves

If we think this is not the same struggle.

Capitalism was never separate from racism.

From conquest

From misogyny

From a supremacist worldview

Especially one that claims it can save the world

With 5% payout of Net Assets annually.