Ukraine Faemily Table! (Part 1)

amazing black soils of the Ukrainian steppes.  Lands now called Ukraine have been a crossroads of empire builders for millenia, and a Home of peoples for ages before.  This region was likely one of the first to witness the domestication of the horse!  Anyone else feel like whinnying?

Ukrainian foodways reflect not only a legacy of cultural sharing across the River Danube's basin, but strong Russian & Slavic legacies (as the place was subsumed by the Soviet Union), and also cross-pollinations with Ashkenazi Jewish foodways, whose peoples long co-habitated there.  

Thank you for helping to make this shared journey of discovery feel so appreciated & relevant!  This foodways adventure started out a seed of an idea.  We have often now been moved by this seed's growth & our shared, growing relationship with it.   

We recently enjoyed a fruitful conversation with Farmer & Co-director Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm, at their awesome Clark Park Farmers Market stand, about a strong need for so many of us to realize & become again tribes of the Earth, in part, through re-connecting to ancestral foodways. The (white)washing over, or washing out, of deep cultural practices that have had so much to do with humxn survival over millenia leaves us dangerously vulnerable to perilous disconnection. May we all remember that many of the dominant concepts that pervade our lives today (race & biological essentialism generally, Nation States, capitalism) are relatively new, and definitely impermanent. We have the power to reclaim what has been lost, and to nurture a new way forward, hand in hand, rooted on this Earth. We hope that no matter the shape of your own journey, you find rich & nourishing ways to dissolve those identity categories that do not serve your whole being or Life, and find your way back to the elemental cultures that understand our oneness with the Earth & with one another.  

*Would you like to share a breath with us?* (Thank you)

Around our Faemily Table, we honor the movements of cultures, plants & animals across this Earth & time.  We celebrate the ingenuity of humyn survival, and the continuous attention offered to nourishing selves & faemilies.  We seek to uplift stories of resilience & earth-connection, as we acknowledge the complex herstories & spirits of the land, beneath & beyond modern political boundaries.  

Some blessings, upon which to close...

May we remember the essential light, endemic to Life, that flows within each of us impacted by imperialism & capitalism, and hold in the light of compassion humyn choices made under difficult-to-impossible circumstances.  May we hold also an unflinching gaze raised at systems & forces drunk on power & greed, as we co-create visions of a better world.  May we remember our shared humynity, and the gift of this lived, earthly Life, around our Faemily Table & yours.