The Secrets of Earth
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Film: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Screenwriter and Director: Raven Jackson
Starring: Moses Ingram, Charleen McClure, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Chris Chalk, Sheila Atim, Preston McDowell
Dear Warriors,
Do you know the difference between a warrior and a fighter?
A warrior has a code of ethics, and a deeper reason for their work.
A fighter just throws punches, without cause, without reason, or is in defense mode just to stay alive. A fighter survives. A warrior thrives.
I say this because we are in the midst of some fierce and groundbreaking changes in American History. It certainly does not make us safer, but who has been safe? What the earth, and what mother nature, teaches us, is that She is an equalizing force. She does not choose who she loves and who she doesn’t love. She just acts. She flows, and she is powerful.
This force of Mother Nature is a presence—the predominant presence, in my opinion—in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, by Raven Jackson. While the film has characters who speak only seldom, it is the oneness with the divine flow of nature and time that makes it a visual poem worth praying with.
While the characters have names, and their placement in the script and film, they become divine messengers and embodied human beings.
How can a filmmaker grapple with time, earth, and love so that you feel time, earth, and love?
You have to be an artist and poet to manage it. You have to be intuitive and in tune, and deeply one with your own knowing and the knowing of the All. That is what Raven Jackson demonstrates through the beauty of scenes where lovers hold and look at one another, and look at nature. It is what she accomplishes in the suggestion of scenes we don’t see, in the subtle nods to what goes on offscreen—like death, terror, and destruction.
The movies holds a brilliant tension in the nature it shows, rather than a freedom or vastness—showing that earth holds the secrets of the past, and it also allows for our cleansing. Not just the cleansing of some, but the cleansing of all.
What one does to another, is done to all on an energetic level.
Toward the end of the film, as two different generations of women sit on the earth, the older one says to the younger—”Do you want to know a secret? It never ends or begins. It just changes shape.”
As the viewer, we wonder what she is speaking about. My immediate thought was that the statement was about love and hate. Finally she reveals that she is talking about water.
Like water, love and hate seem to be threads we all grapple with in our lives at a personal and a collective level. What is healing in this scene of the movie—and other scenes—is the rain. With the water came my own tears, and through the wisdom and knowledge inherent in the making of this film, my aura or body seems to know all that has been happening off-screen, without the auteur having to tell me the details. I can’t quite relax, my body knows and feels something is off—something is not quite right around the women. There is beauty everywhere in the scenery, and yet there is also deep pain, anguish, and things not spoken about or seen. They still find moments of sustenance and connection.
In general, I don’t consume a lot of images or media or information. I learn, but I try not to get too lost in our modern culture’s saturation of information. That saturation distracts me (and us) from our body’s wisdom, and from our own discernment. As an empathic person, I feel what is being sent out from another person’s energy, and I have to sit with that to know if it’s something I want to come back to. Is someone coming from hatred or love? Do I want to get entangled with hatred or love?
And there is a lot I don’t know, and won’t know. I can only show up and do my best, and listen, and learn, and advocate—when advocacy is called for.
The women in this movie have eyes that see, hands that know. They have smiles that know sorrow, and sorrow that knows grace. All I feel from every corner of this film is love and knowledge, depth and wisdom, an honoring, a cherishing, a savoring of life and Source. The film itself becomes the goddess, the Mother, and it knows the Mother, too. It knows life. These artists become Life.
We need this. We need Raven Jackson.
Humbly Yours,
Ms. Wonderful