luya enstoryed

𓇢𓆸 luya was a staple in the arroz caldo (a type of lugaw) i ate growing up – spicy chunks swimming in gelatinous rice, promising to open my lungs and warm me from core to spirit. my mom would cook lugaw when i was sick and home from school, and even sent it with me in frozen blocks to heat up in my dorm room in college.

𓇢𓆸 luya is a form of love and care passed down from my lola to my mother to me.

𓇢𓆸 luya is a rhizomatic body that can be broken, scattered across seas, and root entangled where they are planted, offering medicine for the nutrients they receive in return. this is rhizomatic reciprocity.

𓇢𓆸 when we planted luya in our community garden, what began with small limb-like pieces with sprouted nodes, months later, became a large rhizomatic body with plenty of pungent medicine to offer. the sun and water, the tenders of the garden, the luscious decay of compost, the more-than-human care, all are a part of luya. all are a part of me.

𓇢𓆸 as a ginger (red-head) pilipinx being of tangled roots and fluid gender, re-membering my pre-colonial visayan and tagalog knowledge through myth, ceremony, and healing practices has opened portals for reckoning with and integrating my white-bodied ancestors of celtic, slavic, and germanic descent. as i go further back, deeper into the soils of time and body-memory, i know how their stories are entwined within me, with this earth, with the Indigenous land i am on, and all of liberation.

𓇢𓆸 wherever i am planted, however disembodied i feel by the forces of oppression or past traumas surfacing in shadows and shame, the familiar and ancestral call of luya brings me home to my expansive body. it is through honoring my conflicts and re-connecting to generative sources of relation that i am wholly enstoried. fully ensoiled. luya entangled.