On Rhizomes: What Does It Mean to Dream?
ancestors - rage - ginger - black trees - prayer
This question came in fragments, with a flavoring of futility that tastes like doubt and hesitation, when it can feel like our dreams have no space to exist. What does it mean to give myself permission, to step into the realm of imagination, with a question ringing persistently louder, ‘what right, do I have to dream?’
In a time where every second that passes, there is another law, another life that is taken from us—where our lands, our bodies are treated like a commodity to be dominated and discarded, as if our waters, our blood was never sacred. In these moments, my rage can finally emerge, flowing—a constant current of magma, bubbling below the surface of the Earth.
My rage is as old as the first [ black tree/ 黒木 ] to be cut down without a prayer—as old the first and every time after, that my choice of when and how my body was entered, or how I wanted to leave this world, was not my own. My rage is as old as our first ancestor, the perfect conditions for water to be warm enough, to become the first breaths of life.
I ask that you do not mistake my rage for violence, for I am not born of a body that only knows a kind of rage that equates to destruction. I am born to a body that knows that rage is a spectrum of emotion, feeding many rivers, a flame of imagination, flickering between yin and yang. I am born to a body beyond binaries and borders, one that understands, that rage is the rawest form of creation.
As I sit with myself and my own story, my mother’s and my father’s–the story of my grandparents, I come to realize, they all had a seed of a dream. I am born to a Hakka and Taiwanese father and a Japanese mother. In my corporeal time on this Earth, I have felt in my depths, that we expand so much farther than the lines drawn for us, forced into shame, silenced and hidden in order to survive. I have come to know, that we are from the Steppes to Southeast Asia, from Buryatia to the Altai mountains and they are calling for us, to dig deeper, so that they can become more alive.
On my father’s side, we come from a lineage of farmers who originated from the last name, 薑 (jiāng)/Ginger. This character, in traditional Chinese, starts with one, above that, lays a field, another one, then comes another field–at the very top—a grass radical, sprouting from the Earth. This character is a testament to; how from one piece, an entire field can grow to infinitum, that there is resilience within just one seed of a dream.
This name came before dynasties existed in China—a time where our cosmologies came to us on the back of a turtle and horse, leaping out from the Yellow River. A given name that belonged to the Flame Emperor of the South, to 神農 Shén Nóng, the Divine Farmer of herbal medicine. With a body of transparency, he helped us see where herbs travel, which channels and organs they treat. He gifted us with agriculture, tools for farming and slash-and-burn methods. He blessed us with cannabis, irrigation, and seed-saving. He was the father to the Yellow Emperor, guiding him to refine the arts of acupuncture, pulse, and moxibustion.
It is said, that the harsher and more wild the conditions, the more potent the medicine. He empowered us with these offerings, that are all a piece of my name, a piece of rhizome that has been re-planted in all of us, growing laterally with the Earth and the sky—serving as a reminder that we are undeniably connected through the lattices and roads of silk, the gauze that protects and heals our wounds.
The rhizomes of dreams are conceived through nodal clouds, silently connected through an underground network, where one piece can bud and give birth to many others, completely on its own. They do not need others outside of what they’ve created, to tell them what they need to grow. They effortlessly share nourishment and minerals between them, with tender and telepathic communication. They have no central root, seed, or stem where their life can end with just one pluck. They proliferate endlessly, because there is no single origin, co-existing as a web, as one massive heartbeat.
My mother came here with a dream, at 21 years of age, to leave her homelands of Japan, lands that, I imagine, felt stifling to who she knew she wanted to be. Here, she had no family, no friends that she could look to, she had my father and his family, where she may have felt just as alien. Although I know little of her past, she pushed against paradigms and constructs that were imposed on her, ones that she never asked for. She just wanted to live as herself, freely.
I’m reminded of how her dream, allowed me to live freely. How, she birthed me out of obligation, because in her world, society told her she was a woman who needs to be wed, to give birth and start a family, to be the wife of a husband…and she never wanted any of it.
She is now an ancestor and I am grateful to be here, to be born from her. The energy of an umbilical cord, still vibrates after its cut—it is a portal, a tunnel, a spirit gate, that connects us to all those who came before. They are why I dream of rhizomes—to dream of a way, where we are not oppressed by systems of phallic fallacies and hierarchies, because once one pillar breaks, one by one, the entire structure will fall.
They are afraid of us, their personhood threatened by how whole we have become. They are afraid that our bones will remember, because when broken, they create bridges made of blood, only to return stronger. They are afraid because now we have realized, who we are, where we come from, and why we are here—and we are already indestructible.
Time and time again, they have tried the same methods to silence us, to erase and stomp on who we are—but our fields been planted, our grasses are resilient and our stalks have grown tall. We have grown into a forest of bamboo—thick, lush, and as high as the clouds. We have always been our medicine.
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To dream is to tear open the fabric of illusion—to create something, collecting the wisdom of rhizomes that have been planted throughout stars, space, and time. To dream is to travel, through the chariot of our hearts, to other versions of ourselves, other stories that yearn to be told. To dream… is to listen deeply, finding another way, as we always have.
I pray as we move through the unknown, that we know, we are connected through this rhizomatic universe—we are supported, we are protected. I pray we continue to deepen with our bodies, our medicine, and our people. I pray we remember to listen to the lands, to return to what is right on this Earth.
Each one of us in this space, comes with our own auditorium of ancestors, they are here with all of us. They stand with us, fight with us, chant with us, laugh, cry, and heal with us. We are all here, together—in the billions, for the number of ancestors surpass the number of the living.
May we continue to dream—because to dream, is to live beyond death… to dream is our resilience.
