Saturday Substack: On Fermentation, Mother Culture & Becoming Fallow
preparing to lie fallow
Saturday Substack: On Fermentation, Mother Culture & Becoming Fallow
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.”
— Octavia Butler
During the acute phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself turning toward kombucha—a fermented tea that arrived on my porch during the no-contact season when touch felt dangerous and everything tasted like uncertainty. Kombucha became my small ritual on therapy days, a fizzy companion to the deeper fermentation unfolding in talk therapy. Something in me was breaking down, transfiguring, softening toward repair.
Lately I’ve been thinking about that word: ferment.
Ferment as Metamorphosis
On my walk this afternoon, I wondered what it means for a trans, Brown body like mine to be a site of so many fermentations—some chosen, others imposed. I’ve been composting violence and ancestral anger for years now, mostly failing and watching it all break down into something like an eloquent rage, but I realized I’ve also been fermenting inside cultures that never intended for me to thrive. Thanks, Tiffany for this insight of culture being a fermentation!
I have lived—and been shaped—inside a culture that trains us toward aggression, toward competition, toward the brutality of class warfare. The academy colonized my mind long before I had the language to resist it. These fermentations—white supremacy, patriarchy, empire—settle into the body like an old brine that curdles the imagination. They compromise us. They compromised me.
It strikes me now that white supremacy is one of the great cultural fermentations we sit in for a lifetime, unless we develop the practices and the companions necessary to unravel its conditioning from our bodies.
Toward a New Ferment: Mother Culture
We need an interruption of what Riane Eisler calls Mother Culture—a generative, tender, life-honoring ferment we can surrender into, fallow in, and be born from, again and again. Thank you, Kim, for teaching me about Mother Culture.
Because while we are not our worst day or our worst memory, we carry shame and fear like sediment at the bottom of the vessel. And sediment tells its own story.
Jeff Sharlet was right about the slow civil war. But nothing feels slow anymore. Everything feels like a slope slick with grief and disorientation, and the only handholds we have are the ones we make by practicing right relationship—first with ourselves, and then with one another.
I am preaching to myself here.
The Question of Fermentation
As I compost my ancestral anger into eloquent rage, I’m also asking:
Into what Mother Culture am I fermenting now?
What vessel is holding me as I break down and reconstitute?
What ecosystem am I metabolizing as I become more honest, more merciful, more attuned to the soft underbelly of my own becoming?
On my walk today, I found a simple answer:
We ferment Mother Culture by befriending our pain.
By making kin with our shadow side.
By letting Pachamama hold us when we cannot hold ourselves.
By organizing our relationships—not through patriarchal domination or the violence of supremacy—but through networks of trust, care, and repair.
Culture is not an abstraction.
Culture is what we make of each other.
And so I return to fermentation: slow, alive, transformative.
We are each brewing something with our days.
The question is whether we will allow ourselves to fall fallow long enough for new life to rise.
Today, I am choosing to sit in the vessel of my own becoming and let the right ferment do its quiet work.
Closing Ritual: A Fermentation Blessing
Take a breath.
Place a hand over your belly—the warm center where fermentation happens.
Inhale: What is breaking down within me?
Exhale: What new life is rising?
Whisper a quiet blessing over your own becoming:
May I compost what no longer serves.
May I surrender to the slow work of change.
May I trust the Mother Culture emerging in and among us.
May I fall fallow long enough for mercy to take root.
Let this day be part of the ferment. Let this life be part of the repair.