A Daughter's Return to the Motherland

A Live Call: Photo & Video Storytelling from Spring Cheng's Journey in China

Dear Substack Friends,

I’ve been quiet here for quite a while. Over the past six months, I was completely absorbed in what has been the most important journey of my life.

From October 2025 to January 2026, I spent 75 days in China, traveling across five cities. I taught workshops, visited family, and formed meaningful connections with people and land in two ecovillages. It was a trip of reunion, laughter, tears, songs and play, carried by the unfolding waves of emergence when an ancient culture births herself anew.

After I shared some of these experiences with a friend, she said to me:
“You were finally able to experience your true self, in your place of birth, where that self was once not allowed.”

I hugged my friends in tears. Her words rang profoundly true.

I have long known that part of my life’s purpose is to re-enliven the archetype of the Chinese priestess—a role that has slipped into the abyss of time, buried in the dark chambers under the weight of patriarchy. On this journey, I was able to reclaim that role for myself, alongside many Chinese women who are also reclaiming their own inner priestesshood.

This experience is deeply visceral and personal. The best way I know to share it with you is in real time and in my own voice. I’d love to invite you to a Zoom gathering, where I will tell more of the story and share photos and videos from the journey.

Some of the background of the journey

When China’s industrialization accelerated some forty years ago, much of its indigenous wisdom and traditional cultural heritage was pushed underground. Practices such as Chinese medicine were labeled “unscientific,” and ancestral ways of knowing—especially those carried through embodied, oral, and feminine lineages—were largely erased from public life.

In the past five years, however, a quiet resurgence has been taking place. Across China, people have begun reclaiming cultural roots and re-engaging ancient wisdom through contemporary forms.

For the past two decades, my own work has been devoted to reimagining the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle, through an integration of Taoist teachings and modern Western philosophy, infused with embodied play and artistic sensibility. In 2019, I published The Resonance Code. In 2020, during the pandemic, I was invited to teach this work in China via Zoom.

This journey marked the first time I met, in person, the Chinese community that has grown around The Resonance Code since then. After five years of being woven into one another’s lives through screens, we finally stood together on the same land.

Reunion at Qixi Village in Guangdong Province (广东中山旗溪村）

I also returned to the village where my father was born and met many relatives on his side of the family for the first time. Many of them live near the bottom of the social hierarchy, having built the infrastructure of modern development with their own hands. I visited our ancestral graves and offered the laminated cover of my book to my grandparents. My grandmother belonged to one of the last generations of women with bound feet. She never learned to read or write.

Standing there, I am embracing the full arc of inheritance—what was silenced, what endured, and what is now asking to be carried forward in new form.

Spring Cheng Standing In Front of the Ancestral House in Western Sichuan