luya enstoried

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 the tips of my toes.

𓇢𓆸 luya is a plantcestral guide – a form of love and care passed down from the lands that birthed my lola to her hands to my mother’s to mine.

𓇢𓆸 luya is playful, pungent, unafraid to be authentic. as a red-head (ginger), mixed person who is visibly queer/trans, I know what it feels like to “not make sense” to the ascribed labels and narratives society expects of us and grapple with belonging.

𓇢𓆸 luya grows rhizomatically – an undergound network of root body – that can be broken, scattered across seas, and re-emerge where they are planted, offering medicine for the nutrients they receive in return.

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

𓇢𓆸 re-membering my pre-colonial Tagalog embodied 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 find the central node from which these fractaled stories emerge and interconnect with this earth, 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/intergenerational traumas surfacing in shadows and shame, the familiar and ancestral call of luya brings me home to my soma-scape (somatic landscape) – my body and spirit filled with memory, dreams, and place. it is through honoring my conflicts and re-connecting to generative sources of relation that i am wholly enstoried. fully ensoiled. luya entangled.