Film: The Unknown Country (2022)
Director: Morrisa Maltz
Screenplay by: Lily Gladstone, Morrisa Maltz, Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, Vanara Taing
Starring: Lily Gladstone, Pam Richter, Tom Heitcamp
Album: The Past Is Still Alive by Hurray for the Riff Raff
Singer/Songwriter: Alynda Segarra
Dear Alynda,
I have been listening to your album The Past Is Still Alive for a week now and I can’t stop listening.
I have been wondering about a movie script, what story or landscape could hold your voice and the whispers in all the dimensions of American earth and soil that move through your sound.
And as I danced this morning, it came to me. The movie that works to pair with your album. A voyage. A journey. It is the film, The Unknown Country.
**
One cannot capture the feeling and vibe of music accurately in words, but I occasionally try.
A song has the power to visit a person at various stages of life, and hold a space nothing else holds regarding a memory and an experience. A song brings us into the present and the past and the future, and we see our souls, if our souls have been taking a long voyage and we need to come back to them.
At least that is what good music always did for me, and does for me now. It brings me back to my soul, and I remember. These days I listen all the time, with my soul intact, alongside me rather than missing. I sit in the driver’s seat of my life, and my soul is my passenger. We gaze, we listen, we breathe, we dance. We feel the hum.
I have my soul with me all the time now, because I took the long voyage to reclaim her, by myself. No shaman from Peru did it for me, you know. I didn’t take any drug like ayahuasca. (I am not a fan of drugs.) Soul retrieval is a real thing, but it is best to do it with your own inner guidance, and with love as the North Star. I did it with Jesus and Mary and their holy spirit hugging me all the way. My soul and I became one again, and that feels better than anything ever did before. This is why I like your album so much, Alynda, and this movie, An Unknown Country. It is the soul that speaks in both of them. Especially the soul of women.
**
What is a woman?
She has something different about her, right? She’s not a man.
And what is a human being?
**
Beautiful Alynda, I want to hold you in my arms the way a mother holds a child. In spaces of silence and no singing. So that you feel loved even in moments when the guitar is not playing. So you know me, and we. And feel the hope that lives all around us, in the women who are putting together the world again and making it new. Spider Woman, some call her. She is scary, but she works, you know. And all the indigenous women who passed away, and whose stories have not been told, live inside us and speak through our words and voices, and the spaces between our speaking. They never left. We are all still vibrating with the potency of who they were and who we still are. So let’s ensure we have the best frequency and potency, and show others the spark.
Teaching is in our being.
You know this. We.
**
In The Unknown Country, a woman journeys alone on country roads through America’s heartland. It is a non-political voyage.
The shaman teaches us about the inner journeys, the dimensions, the multiple worlds we can go to and inhabit. It is a saving grace, to have spaces in one’s soul that give calm, that provide joy and respite and peace. What an amazing thing is this vast mind of consciousness we all share.
And on this cinematic journey through America, the everywoman (played by Lily Gladstone) meets people. They are kind, and quirky, and she attracts that kind of light and presence because of who she is. She is accepting, curious. Non-harming. Non-volatile. There are quiet moments she shares with family members and friends, too—people who take comfort in the regularity of blue-collar jobs. There are bars and smiles and revisiting old connections in a new time and place. Yet she keeps a space inside her so pure—this space of knowing. Her own soul is a bulb of glowing light that no one can touch. It is hers. We all must find this, and maintain it.
**
In the spaces I searched inside for many years—the religious buildings—I looked for the mothers. I asked God—whatever God is—where are the mothers? Where are the women’s faces, their names? Why are women spiritual leaders so absent, everywhere?
I found it strange. I am curious. I pay attention to what is not said, not seen. The dark places.
I heard a voice inside me say, “That mother is inside you.”
And I realized that the hero was never going to come from someone else. The hero had to rise up from within. I had to save my own soul, and create my own story.
We all do.
And when we don’t, we’ll have another life to give it a try. None of us ends until the darkness and dust dissipates, and the spark of light grows brighter and fiercer everywhere. We all return to light eventually. And in some measure of space and time, oneness. Wisdom.
**
What would the rocks say, if rocks could talk? What feet have passed on them, relied on them to get somewhere? What would the trees whisper about passersby, and the night sky, and the changes in the earth, over generations?
The only way to know is to be with nature—to put our hands on the earth and breathe. I see you. I love you. I am here. I am known.
We must believe.
**
The first step for us all, don’t you think, is to uncover what we are made of.
Who am I? we ask. And keep digging, beyond labels.
Then we dance and breathe. We dance on beaches, and in valleys. We dance on mountaintops, and on screens. We dance in public places, and in forests. That spark of lightning in our hips—well, one cannot underestimate the power of that.
And no matter what, we keep dancing. We face the monsters. We know what they’re up to. We know their desire is to steal.
We dance anyway. We stare them down. We embody our own grace and wisdom, and we keep doing it. We lift others up in their pain and need, and we concentrate on all the women and men doing things well. We inspire.
Nothing can stop us now.
Yours truly,
Ms. Wonderful