By Dr Emily Samuels Ballantyne (Dr Demeter)
“Don’t get lost in your pain, know that one day your pain will become your cure.” - Rumi
This piece is part of The Fault Line series and will appear in my upcoming book, Compost to Creation. I publish it here at Magical Farm as a signal fire, for those who’ve been cast out, and for those still inside, watching.
Before the Fire
They thought a lie would end me,
but lies are dry kindling.
I was already flame.
They made noise to erase me,
but silence still fed the roots.
And the roots remembered.
Now I rise, not to rage,
but to plant
a lantern in the dark.
____
In 2011, something was taken from me that no one had the right to take.
My name.
My dignity.
My voice.
A fabricated article appeared online,
one that would follow me like a shadow for more than a decade.
People Googled.
They judged.
They assumed.
Some used it to discredit me.
Some, I suspect, used it to justify the violence of institutions, already uneasy with my presence.
But this is not a story about what was written.
It’s a story about what it tried to erase.
Because I wasn’t the only one marked.
That article was a weapon in a broader political takedown.
I became collateral damage in a war I didn’t declare.
My gutsy boyfriend, himself a political figure, was taken down too.
The kind who stood beside me when others stayed silent,
while I planted the garden and did my best to make life happen in a concrete jungle, while people kept writing documents about ‘life’.
His loyalty mattered,
because the paper-shufflers and policy groupies,
did not show up.
They never do.
The Garden I grew
on a concrete slab in the Docklands,
threatened the tidy plans of men in suits.
The head of planning policy once told me:
A multi-million-dollar apartment is going there.
I was 26.
Navigating leases, developers, bureaucracy.
Learning that silence was the system’s default setting.
They’re still silent.
Institutionalised.
Box-ticking.
Performing progress, while perpetuating harm.
And yet, he, that boyfriend
had integrity.
Old-school values.
And guts.
There is something hollow and devastating
about a world where search engine results matter more than soul.
Where a woman’s body, or voice, or presence
becomes too much for the very systems she once tried to serve.
Where the echo of a lie outlives the truth of a life.
And yet,
I would not take it back.
Because what broke me open
also broke me free.
That rupture, humiliating, unjust, and violent,
was the beginning of a deeper becoming.
It cast me out of the career I thought I needed
and into the arms of the Earth.
It dismantled my sense of worth so thoroughly
that I had no choice but to grow a new one,
from compost, from poetry, from my own hands in the soil.
I did not get justice.
I did not get a retraction.
But I got voice and my body & soul was liberated from a violent system.
I became a regenerative farmer and herbalist.
An eco-philosopher.
A weaver of new myths.
This moment was a rite of passage.
I ended up on Country, learning about ancient culture,
and was broken open to life systems which I completed a PhD in.
I too had been institutionalised,
brought up in a colonised education system.
My soul needed to see more.
And this slap in the face,
was the initiation I needed
to open to a much wider world.
I am now critiquing the institutions and political systems
so damaging to life systems.
I am here to offer a mirror,
to the very system that exiled me. Maybe it needs to connect to Country too?
Maybe its time for it to have a slap in the face of its own?
I am a woman who no longer asks for permission.
Today, I run Magical Farm Tasmania and write as Dr Demeter.
I teach others how to reclaim what was taken,
land, truth, agency, soul.
I no longer seek a “career.”
I am building a commons.
And I write this as a lantern,
To support Wayfinding from the mess we are in, which is perpetuated by lack of Care Culture.
For anyone who has been shamed.
Who has been made into a scapegoat
for someone else’s agenda.
Who has been cast out,
only to discover their path began at the gates.
Let them talk.
Let them Google.
Let the article stay online, if it must.
Because my truth now lives elsewhere:
in seeds,
in stories,
in sovereignty.
A lie tried to define me.
But I turned it into light.
Musing:
I wrote this with shaking hands.
because telling it feels like reclaiming my name from the fire.
May this piece be a signal fire for others who have been burned.
Dr Emily Samuels Ballantyne (Dr Demeter) is a regenerative farmer, writer, and eco-philosopher based at Magical Farm Tasmania. She is the founder of Regenera Commons and author of The Spiral Shelves: A Living Library for Regenerative Culture. This piece is part of The Fault Line series.