«The body is a landscape, a geography to be explored»
– Andrea Olsen
Whether we as humans are aware of it or not, there’s an old rhytm that hums beneath the noise of the world. This rhytm is older than progress, older than politics – and older than pain. It beats in the soil and bone alike; whispering gently; you are of the earth. You were never seperated from it.
The Ecology of being disabled
To live in a disabled body is to live as the land does – with seasons, boundaries and unexpected weather. There are droughts of energy, floods of emotion, and soft mossy recoveries after storms. There are parts of us that bloom – while other parts ache, but all parts belong to the same ecosystem.
Because, whether we are willing to accept it or not, the body that cannot be «fixed» to be like ‘everyone else’ is not broken – it’s just remnants of ancient beings.
Go back just a hundred years from now, and see how today’s standardized body of ‘everyone else’ was just a lucky exeption to the rest of society.
For most of human history, some form of disability was the norm. These bodies knew how to adapt, how and when to rest, how to grow sideways instead of upwards when in need; like roots twisting around a stone, one way or another finding its way to the light.
And with this, nature does not rush itself into repair. It integrates the wound. A fallen tree becomes the home of moss and fungus; scar tissue becomes a garden of wild-flowers.
Within this point of view, disability is not a detour from ‘natural’ humanity, – it is humanity, unmasked to its core. It’s the reminder that the sacred feminine – the energy of nurture, renewal and indurance itself – has always existed. Not through her perfection, but through her persistence.
As such, the disabled body, in all its forms, holds the same slow wisdom that ancient landscapes do: in knowing when to conserve energy, when to open – and when to fall into darkness in preperation for the next sunrise.
Many disabled and chronically-ill people learn to read the world in ways others have forgotten. In a way, our bodies become barometers, calendars, like quiet prophets of the natural world.
To use myself as an example; I can smell snow and ‘winter’, rain and ‘fall’, several weeks before it arrives, through the specific smell of soil in the wind. Others can sense storms in their bones, or even feel the shift of seasons in their blood, long before the trees changes colour.
And none of it is a coincidence. Because, to live with limitations, is to live attuned. Most of us don’t even know we’re doing it!
The Witch’s Body
«The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male workers».
– Silvia Federici
Yet, there is also resistance in the body itself. Disabled people have always lived on the edges – where survival itself becomes an act of creation. This is because disability forces an intimacy with nature that modernity often forgets.
Like I mentioned, my body tells me when the seasons shift. This is important as different seasons lead to different challenges, and the more time I have to preopare for said challenges, the smaller they become in my everyday life.
Historically, many of those highly disabled, obviously ill, queer, undead, wise and old women (and certain men) – were labelled as dangerous.
They were believed to have energy, wisdom and a general kind of knowledge that could not be measured, which in turn was highly feared by the social systems built around having control.
Across medieval and early modern Europe – particularly in the North, women who could heal through herbs or intuition were labeled as witches, Midwives, wise-women and those born with epilepsy like me became living metaphors of coming chaos. Or, as the church claimed; evidence of the devil’s touch.
In fact, epilepsy was once called «the sacred disease» – not for its holiness (or lack thereof), but because no one could explain it: People fell to the ground, shook, saw visions, and woke transformed. And it completely frightened the rational world.
In some Nordic communities, the afflicted were also believed to walk between worlds – to glimpse the unseen, and speak with ancestors.
The same applied to those with mental or physical anomalities.
As an example, In some Sámi traditions, noaidi (shamans) often carried disabilities, and their altered bodies were seen as vessels for spiritual travel.
During the witch-trials in the North, set forth by the church, these people (men and women) were arrested and burned out of fear – though earlier cultures honoured it as sacred differences.
And in the end, the line between «witch» and «disabled» was often only drawn by who were allowed to survive.
And, to be frank – in some ways, this is still the case today…
As historian Liv Helene Willumsen notes in her studies of the Vardø witch trials, many of those executed in Northern Norway were women who lived alone, had poor health, or were socially marginal; outsiders made to be monstrous by circumstances. And the body that could not be controlled became the body that had to be punished.
The Return of the Sacred
And yet, despite all these efforts, the witch never vanished.
She returned in art, in feminism, in disability pride, and in every person who refuses to apologize for existing outside of the norm. To reclaim the witch is to reclaim the disabled, the aging, the strange, and the knowing. It is to insist that our intuition and our embodied knowledge are not deviations from nature – but rather it’s voice speaking through us.
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote:
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.»
– Ursula K. Le Guin
For those of us whose lives are defined by unpredictability, that uncertainty is our craft.
A Reflection
Ask yourself:
- What season is my body in right now?
- What is the soil of my life asking me to nourish, and what must I let decay?
- How can I honor the sacred feminine within myself — not as softness alone, but as the fierce, regenerative power of the earth?
“The earth does not rush; she evolves. So too does the body.”
– Silje Elsrud Yttervik
In the end, to live in a disabled body is to remember what the world keeps forgetting: that strength is not speed, and healing is not the same as erasure. Our bodies are not obstacles to overcome — they are altars to the sacred feminine, grounded in earth and time, whispering to us in the language of wind, scent, and bone.
And if you listen closely — before the snow, before the storm — you might hear it too.
– Silje