Pandemonious Revelations:

The Terra-fying Mystery of Belonging

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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We are currently publishing on Substack some companion pieces to the two Unpsychology Imaginings editions of the magazine, published in 2023.

This essay by

Tempist Jade

appears in two parts in Unpsychology Magazine’s Imagining editions, 9.1 and 9.2. The full essay is posted here so you can read Tempist’s whole immersive piece. You can also listen below to recorded extracts from the essay, read by Tempist and with sound by Patrick Carpenter.

You can find more about the new Imaginings issue HERE or download both magazines as PDFs on the button below.

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Extract 1 with Flute accompaniment

Extract 2 with percussion accompaniment

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“You will be torn apart on the wheel, I am a stag with seven tines, I am a flood on a

plain, I am a wind over the deep water, I am a hawk on a cliff, I am a tear in the eye of

the sun, the transformation is inevitable, reincarnation, release.”

– The Song of Amergin, Author unknown

“You are conditioned to be in desperate need of a future.” – Alan Watts

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, lan-

guage, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.” – Rumi

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IS DEATH AN EXPLOSION of creative potential? Feeling my way along the edges of my embodied imagination, I wonder what it must be like to be a dying star. To reach a point in one’s life where all your living collapses in and your outer layers super-nova, everything surrounding you incinerated. Spewing your body across galactic space, paving the way for the next generation while violently planting stellar seeds of dust and gas. How do stars experience their celestial impact? Far eclipsing humanity’s existence, do their long lives offer them a more expansive understanding of and trust in the cycles of creation and destruction? While humanity’s relationship with the more-than-human world is historically and presently diverse, it is undeniable that our species, like all life-forms, is impactful. Our behavioral range, informed by narratives of belonging, remains a consequential evolutionary note, the effects of which play a significant role in the Earth’s current sixth mass extinction.

Taking a cue from our stellar kin and the moral spaciousness we afford them alongside other life-forms with immense destructive capability, I wonder how we might reorient the perception of humanity’s destruction, and its relationship withcreation. And doing so long enough to make ourselves available to other possibilities that might otherwise be veiled by the virtues of fixity and preservation. To be sure, this is not a journey into saviorism, nor is it an attempt at imagining a future guaranteeing a place for humanity. It begs the question, if we are not here to save the world and indeterminately perpetuate our species, what other purposes await our trembling hearts and radicalized souls? Wondering in this way requires a great stretching of our understanding of time, and we must be willing to speak with vibrant ghosts lighting up the night. By comparison to the lifespan of a star, we humans are but a distant dream living inside the entangling bodies of ancestors who have long since slipped across the veil. Stargazing then is a mystical practice of speaking with the dead, and our ancestors are proof of such astronomic lingualism. Not all light that reaches us across our cosmic sea is reflective of a current life, and the night sky is a haunting presence.

Stars are proof that death is faster than the speed of light. By the time some stars stretch their electromagnetically radiated souls through the womb of space, our eyes are imbibing luminous phantoms. Remnants of their previous forms sparkle with themagik of an ancient wisdom felt in the most tender regions of our hearts. They glisten with a truth that burns; a truth that seems to eat up all the air in our lungs, making space for grief to deliver us home; a truth that burdens us with the agony and, just as often, enchantment of dreaming with a universe bustling with uncertainty, and the promise of our inescapable demise. Our stellar kin remind us that destruction is inevitable, and death crucial for transformation and the ongoingness of life.

For nearly three years, stargazing became a regular, middle-of-the-night ritual inspired by a relentless dance with the disorienting magnitude of these times. Already struggling through the shifty territory of personal transformation and the countless psycho-spiritual deaths and births inherent to such a mystical journey, that ritualized restlessness overwhelmed the remaining vestiges of my resistance. As an eco-mystical guide, my own journey was, and continues to be, heavily informed by the intersection of ancestral hybridity and motherhood. Cellular memories, imbued with the trauma of displacement and genocide, amplified the already profound vulnerability of a piece of my heart walking around outside of me, falling in love with the world. This crucible left me further exposed to the unbearable losses of a world undergoing riotous, breathtaking, and gut wrenching change. The abounding destruction not only brought into question the survival of my multi-specied kin, but also the survival of my own child. Breaking down the well-worn narratives that guided my way of belonging to the world, this tension further rubbed the already nervy landscape of my lament. I responded with desperate attempts to save the world so my child would have a future. This also led to unsuccessful finger-pointing, my own heroic efforting to stave off the growing feeling of inevitability. Eventually the activisms I relied upon as response to the endless ecological and paradigmatic collapse began to waver.

Over time, my beloved answers and solutions also collapsed, as I grappled with the realization that I could not protect my child from such grave uncertainty — a truth my own ancestors were no strangers to. Spiritually exhausted and stumbling to the edges of certitude, when sleep called out to me the dreamtime offered no relief. Meticulously delivering me to disturbing and initiatory terrain, I would jolt awake next to my two-year-old creature, breathing heavily from fear’s permeation. Panic would slip its sharp fingers through the space between my ribs, massaging stellar truths deep into my heart. Terrorizing verities prophesying unpredictable futures that shook me like a rattle, summoning images of a world without whalesong, ravens, flowing rivers, chickadees, summer rainfall, humming pollinators, fecund soil, and blooming yarrow. All the while, my ancestrally inherited eyes would reach out through the west window, traversing vertebral mountains enveloped by the night to convene with the stars. The moon of course made inconsistent appearances over these lands that were once an interior seaway. Where the elk and deer now roam, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs once swam. Collaborating across the webbing of time, those luminous orbs and extinct giants spun unruly shadows of possibility from the sinew of my confusion.

Night after night, I would surrender my bewildered body to the dexterity of a power so ancient it took me several years to fully grok what or, rather, whom I was offering my tender attention. Given many appellations, each holy iteration belongs to a greater pancultural tradition of worship honoring. an irrefutable cosmic principle: khaos. Known by my Egyptian ancestors as Set, they “represent the good and bad, fear and reverence, as one and the same thing” which is “the life of the world”¹ For my Greek ancestors, this pluralizing entity is imaged as a horned hybrid whose name begins like a kiss on my lips and curves upward leaving my tongue to rest at the roof of my mouth: Pan. So linguistically related are Set and Pan, one might say “they are the same thing.”² Both are deified representatives of a multiplicitous “all” that articulates through endless assemblages of relationship ebbing and flowing through the tides of death and destruction.

These ancestral and linguistic kin delighted in taking all manner of bi- and quadri-pedal forms while stalking me through dreams. Beseeched by the musk of my existential anguish, they gnawed at the umbilicus of my certainty. Set loose, I drifted far past the regions of the known with pandemonious exhales filling the sails of my soul. Directionless, I had to surrender myself to the ever-shifting currents of Pan-ic towing me through the ocean of Khaos. This meant sacrificing nearly all reliable stories tethering me to a familiar shore, and though I forget from time to time, surrender is a spiritual muscle essential to mysticism; a practice of remaining present with the fertile ground of what-is-so, so as to cultivate receptivity toward the inevitability of change.

Minimized as it has been in our more modern times to superstition or magical woo woo, mysticism is a relational pathway to connect with divine realities weaving and unweaving our enigmatic existence. From the Midewiwin (Abenaki) and the Gnostics to the Taosists and the Eleusynian Mysteries of the Greeks, all peoples of the world have spiritual roots within mysticism, though the word itself owes its etymological origins to the Greeks. Derived from the word “mystery” which comes from theGreek mū́ ō (μῡ́ ω), this word literally means “to shut one’s eyes.” As an invitation to “see” with other faculties, mysticism invites us to listen attentively to the ineffable. Embodied and receptive, this quality of listening renders us accessible to transformation and reinforces the significance of what we are listening to and for.

While often associated with the metaphysical, mysticism maintains an older, and often forgotten, relationship with materiality commonly referred to as “eco-mysticism.” Entwined with animism, this mystic channel of enquiry is guided by the wisdoms and intelligences of an enlivened matter, engaging our embodied imaginations in a conversation with the more-than-human, past and present. Mycelium, rocks, volcanoes, dinosaurs, stars, trees, grasshoppers, viruses, whales, bacteria, and rivers become holy places of absorption, out of which our reconfigured consciousnesses emerge with stunning revelations; new possibilities of understanding that shift the shape of our belonging, inviting untold stories to proliferate through re-purposed participation.

Over the last several hundred years, mysticism has endured the criticisms of the scientific revolution, with Cartesian and Newtonian philosophies circumscribing phenomena and reducing complex and dynamic relationships. Denounced as an unviable and unreliable pathway of knowing, it has been overshadowed by reductive certitudes that have become a pseudo-remedy for the malaise experienced by many who have forgotten how to engage the endless territory of the unknown. I suspect one reason for this is that the larger mystery of existence overwhelms the senses, leaving many stranded and groping in the dark. And yet, a vibrant love affair with Mystery dwells deep in our ancestral cells: a living memory whose resiliency articulates itself through our dreams and imaginations. Perhaps it’s because, deep down, we know of its great necessity in navigating an ever-changing universe of which we belong and comprise.

Arguably, these times are a clarion call, imploring Mysticism’s cyclic return. Though we have numerous well-worn narratives guiding our actions, it is clear that many are crying out for alternative ways of understanding what lies before, around, beneath above, behind, and ahead of us. While many of our world’s activisms make honorable attempts to address the growing complexity and increased needs of all species, efforts remain bogged down by the weight of ineffectual reason and stubborn fixity. Cerebral strategies become inadequate, here, as more gestalt approaches are needed in order to dance with the enfolding and unfolding mystery.

Where analytical thinking falls short, mysticism picks up the slack, welcoming us home to the somatic wisdoms ready to spring like the green shoot germinating in the darkness of our experiences. As a practice that facilitates spiritual apprehension believed otherwise inaccessible to the more regulated intellect, mysticism invites us to submit our small narratives of belonging and conceptions of individualism to the ground of multiplicity and paradox. And what better a paradox to do so than the one brought alive by the dance between destruction (Khaos) and creation (Kosmos), and its current extinctive amplifications.

My own relationship with these two cosmic principles stretched during pregnancy and birth. Becoming a mother connected me more intimately with creation, and bound me to a kind of loss whose looming possibility still occasions a ferocious fragility invoked through destruction and death. Having split open my hips as well as my heart, I was left forever exposed to more virulent strains of belonging. Strains that had been laying dormant within my soul, making regular visitations at night within the dreamtime.

Dinosaurs, lipoterns (hoofed mammals), eurhinodelphids (long-snouted dolphins), and otodontidae (sharks — past as well as present), to name a few, seduced and stalked me with gentle eyes and fearsome intelligence, for years, within the dreamtime. These ancestral apparitions transmitted inaudible wisdoms not subject to linear conceptions of time. Their very presence laid claim to my existence, and folded me back into a more ancient family of everything. Eventually, their visitations stretched beyond the realm of my sleep, seizing my attention with unexpected visions bearing messages belted from the mouth/s of a “multiply unified, multiply divided,constantly evolving multiplicity.”³ Destruction’s incantations rumbled across their tongues, casting spells that trans-mutated my understanding of thenEarth’s current circumstances, and, as a result, the nature of my belonging.

My fervent attempts at trying to preserve and ultimately control the direction of the Earth’s unfolding met their final blow while driving one day down a tree-lined road with my young one. Peering out the window, my eyes settled upon a raven whose guttural cries tore open the fabric of time, landing me in the visionary presence of Jurassic ancestors. The potency of their appearance, translated through absence, pierced my body with the knee-dropping love of an “un-totalizable and shapeshifting”⁴ world — a world whose previous iterations made mine and my child’s existence possible. Bewildered by the profundity that had slipped through the seemingly mundane routine of my day, my whole body surrendered in wonderment of who would get to exist because I no longer did?

That very question plucked a string in the webbing of time, sending out a chord whose notes reverberated through the bodies of unknown future ones gestating like a dream in my life, as well as my child’s. An emergent dream that will one day be made manifest because of our hallowed absence. No longer allured by saviorism’s propaganda, I had stepped beyond the ideological walls of right-doing and wrong-doing, and joined Rumi in a field of possibility where saviorism could not take root. It was here that I began to look upon humanity’s destructive behavior with fresh eyes and renegade questions.

Though destruction and death are essential to life, saviorism exhaustively vilifies both, birthing easy evils and valiant heroes from the womb of institutionalized moralisms. And while saviorism efforts to transcend impermanence, mysticism embarks upon a very different venture, one that asks our imaginations to abandon the safe and stuffy confines of lawful prescriptions. With space to breathe and stretch, our curiosity is given the opportunity to engage the complexity of circumstance from other undervalued senses, conjuring forth a more feral body of knowing whose organismic intelligence enables discernment and relational depth. Experience sheds its garments of inherency as the reductions of “good” and “bad” unravel, exposing our tender and attentive bodies to the primordial love-making of Khaos and Kosmos.

Reintroducing these cosmic principles as erotic counterparts, rather than forces imbued with negation, enables a conscious setting down of current narratives — not as a means of escape from discomfort and pain, but rather as a means for developing greater intimacy with ourselves and the world. Often interchangeable with birth and death, creation and destruction are neither inherently good or bad. And yet, modern times are saturated with the fear of death, and the persecution of destruction. That might seem an incongruent statement given how much death and destruction is being wrought as we witness and feel the implications of ecologies collapsing, genocide perpetuating, war mushrooming, poverty gripping, sickness proliferating, refugees asylum seeking, and economies extracting. Bear with me, and dare to look again, and again, taking your time as needed when facing what is gruesome and terrifying, perhaps even unimaginable at first. Let your looking become a listening inspired by the darkness that, as Rilke once wrote, “holds it all: the shape and the flame, the animal and myself, how it holds them, all powers, all sight.”⁵

Destruction is a universal force, enacted through endless bodies of power. Varying in size and scale, destruction has a range. Whether it be stars dying, mycelium breaking down rock, volcanoes erupting, photosynthetic bacteria producing oxygen, tsunamis engulfing, galactic centers exploding, or storms raking the land, destruction is unavoidable. More specifically, and perhaps more difficult to embrace, it is necessary for life’s continued evolution. Particularly when it comes to the destruction generated by human hands, which many within environmental movements unquestionably deem 'unnatural.' When other life-forms destroy, they are often assumed to be within their natural rights. Perhaps this is an unexamined byproduct of mechanistic paradigms that position the Earth and Universe as inanimate, and therefore unintelligent and lacking agency. I suspect our mystic ancestors would balk at such a belief.

Human-centric and -exceptionalistic narratives abound, with character development ranging from the only self-aware and imaginative intelligence in the Universe to poor excuses of earthly form with plague-like affects. This is further compounded by the compulsion to anthropomorphize, resulting in an underestimation of the diverse intelligences that make up the Earth, and articulate through endless sets of creative and destructive relationships. Even evolutionary theories, still rife with anthropocentrism, reinforce hierarchical biases that present biological development as one-directional; simplicity as always moving toward complexity. What’s more, complexity has become synonymous with intelligence, resulting in the undervaluing of other lifeforms that disrupt this very narrative. Thank goodness for anarchists like tunicates and comb jellyfish who “demonstrate that nature does not have an apical structure,”⁶ leaving people, like Andreas Hejnol, to propose that “humans have to find new ways of representing their place in nature.”⁷

This brings me to my own proposition with regard to humanity’s purpose as a species whose genealogy reaches back to the origins of the Universe. If we engage these times with the understanding that humans are Gaian, and therefore everything we do is natural, how might we come to understand the nature of our destruction from renewed places? What might open up within and around us, when we set down the rejection of destruction brought about through our bodies? What else might be possible when we consider that we are not doing it alone? Asked another way: as members of a Gaian assemblage, what is the Earth really up to?

Contrary to what the ongoing script tells us, that the Earth is a mute victim in need of saving, our  world is teeming with multi-specied, agentic bodies participating in the emergent story of the world.  Not to mention the galactic, ancestral, and unseen bodies collaboratively at play. As  neuromicrobiology reminds us, we humans are anything but singular. Our gut biomes, alone,  contain trillions of bacteria and fungi that produce chemicals with the capacity to influence our  nervous systems. Pair that with the research being done by organizations such as the HeartMath  Institute studying the effects of solar activity upon human behavior, and we end up with a spiraling  body of trans-specied and -stellar proportion. 

Upending reductive approaches applied as solutions to our increasingly complex times, our minds  bend as we must reconsider who is weaving the web or steering the ship. Pick your metaphor. To  be sure, this is not an attempt to outsource responsibility, rather an inquiry about what informs and  drives human behavior, and the nature of our participation, as “what is or isn’t an “individual” is not clear and distinct matter.”⁸ While accountability is a reflective skill that equips us with space to  change, our porosity makes us available to the influence of other forces. The idea of individualism  waivers here, as we fold in towards our own navels, remembering our plural beginnings in the  womb. 

Indeed, humans have proven to be an impactful presence, the resulting consequences of which  vary in diversity as much as humansthemselves do. This is a reflection of our Gaian heritage, and  a testament to the relational patternings that ceaselessly propel us across the thresholds of  evolution. Just as much as our actions can be terrifying, they are also terra-fying. Shaping and  reshaping ecologies, for “better” or “worse,” is innate to all life-forms. And though there are eco philosophical camps of thought proclaiming that much of humanity has forgotten their intra connection with the rest of life, resulting in self-imposed ostracisation and “unnatural” destruction, I’ve found myself wondering what other possibilities have been overlooked. 

For example, is it possible that it isn’t so much that we’ve forgotten we are Earth, rather that we are an earthen force capable of terra-fying acts? Acts with further reaching implications than any single one of us could ever imagine or lay claim to knowing? Actions that are the manifestation of an  intra- and trans-specied assemblage? And if our actions are the result of a more distributed Gaian  intelligence, what does such forgetting facilitate in the larger storying of the world? Try as some  might with triumphant perpetualism and savioristic voyages into a villainous unknown, we cannot  stop the wheel from turning. 

Even in modern day humanity’s attempts at preventing large-scale change, the Earth remains a steadfast shapeshifter, relentlessly reincarnating. And while it remains true that our species is  undeniably participatory, savioristic narratives present humanity as the sole cause of these  ecological crises. This fosters a denial of other agentic bodies, and binds us to the belief that we  can fix and control our circumstances. Extinction, for all of the appropriately felt grief, rage, despair  and terror it evokes, remains a Gaian process, and humans are but one of an endless many,  comprising and re-comprising the Earth’s shape and form. 

Human beings are no accident, nor are we a mistake to be fixed or a problem to be solved.  Dynamic and unruly, our existence tells a story of belonging more vast than most present-day  scriptures convey. We lived as a dream inside the bodies of those who have come before, present  in our absence. And just as presence lives within absence, absence makes way for presence. The  absence of our Jurassic ancestors made way for the presence of our current world, just as the  absence of other bacteria, killed off by our photosynthetic kin, made way for our floral kin. Absence becomes a gesture of space-making, and space-making is a gestational act of love. 

Reorienting our relationship with belonging from this place of immeasurable kinship reminds us of  the world’s irreducibility; that existence depends upon the magic of tentacular becomings  conceived by death through adaptations, mutations, and hybridizations. We are pluralized,  proverbial cells within a larger pluralizing body, within which our living becomes a relationally, self exceeded queer koan. Left to consider the endless entanglements that drive emergence, that  mystic skill of full-bodied listening becomes a synesthetic prayer: sacred speech that re-intimates  us with wonder, and the mystery within the sonorous shape of our be-longing. 

Prayer arises out of our deepest longings, perpetually consummating our relationship with Mystery. As a result, our bodies become a solemn vow to listen for all the ways we long to dream with the  world. Consequently, we are reciprocally met by all the ways the world longs to dream with and  through us. In this way, futurism becomes an intra-imaginative act of devotion that channels our  prayerful attention: a present-moment conjugation by all of the dreaming bodies of the world  inspired by the rhythms of creation and destruction. As a result, we are led not toward destination  points, but rather toward each other, perpetually renewed by the seasons of belonging that are  marked by presence and absence. 

With regard to my own life, understanding the world from this place meant relinquishing my solutional pursuits; the small and righteous stories of how I thought the world should be, opening  me up to all the ways the world longs to be. And though I was not without resistance, the  accumulated force of my dreams and visions, as well as the nights of ritualized restlessness,  painstakingly renewed my faith in creation and its inseparability from destruction. I began to feel the blurred edges of love-making where the erotic play between Khaos and Kosmos arouses orgiastic intelligences; moaning polyphonies that continue to tempt my listening toward heretical  futures gyrating to the music of life hungering for life. 

Not only had my understanding of death’s necessity for life’s continuation been expanded, I had  begun to remember death as an aspect of existence replete with pleasure. This truth, though  disturbing, liberates eroticism from the confinements of a sanitized generativity. Indeed, attempts to sterilize Eros remain futile as death’s ravenous desire carries on impregnating the world with  rebellious catenations: turbulent harmonies erupting from the consum-mating bodies of Khaos and Kosmos. Even survival is not exempt, as the desperate cravings to continue living carry the seeds of death’s erotic pulse. No life-form is absolved from this cycle. This is a mattering wisdom adorned by the temporary dapplings of satiety. 

The industrial appetite of many humans is often characterized as greedy and excessive, charging  pockets of humanity with the responsibility for our current, ecological circumstances. Yet this is not an isolated phenomenon only to be seen in humans. Ticks, as their populations swell, are  consuming moose blood at a rate now so severe they are draining calves to death with the  anticipated effect of moose populations declining. Or consider pine beetles who pine for pine trees. They are blanketing forests with their hunger, and, with the aid of a fungus, leaving tree graveyards in their wake. Similar to large swaths of humanity, neither ticks nor pine beetles appear to be  considering “resource” dependent longevity. Allopathic explanations attempt to frame such  behavior as symptomatic of an industrial disease, conveniently dismissing the complexity of our  world’s current emergency. Though we are in the midst of devastating ecological losses, it is also  true that many species are benefiting and adapting, reminding us that “the rules of togetherness  are constantly being renegotiated.”⁹ 

Such striking behavioral similarities kink the linear narratives that present these times as a  singularly human-driven apocalypse from which we are the only species capable of saving the Earth. Urgency’s cries are irresistible to the heroic compulsions of saviorism, whose pursuit is a  future holding the promise of our existence. When we are driven by forward-thinking activisms, we  estrange ourselves from an awareness of the fuzzy and peripheral collaborations of our multi specied world. 

Slowing down becomes a prerequisite to reconnecting our attention with the mystery of our  entangled existence. To be sure, this is no small feat, especially at a time when so much we hold  dear and love is at stake. Stilling the frantic firings of our overwhelmed nervous systems is a  privilege that feels inaccessible for more and more people. Acknowledging this very real animal bodied response to stress and threat, I would like to invite youto pause before continuing on. For  what lays ahead are more renegade questions that hold no promise of simple answers, hoped-for  solutions, or universal directives. Rather, these forthcoming questions are meant to invite the cyclic renewal of multi-directional possibilities expressed through our participation, and to wonder how  such questions change the way we are in relationship with the world. 

So, I invite you to notice your body, and its current orientation. Let your senses grow wide, feeling  yourself as a part of your greater surroundings. Notice your breath, its rhythm, texture and pace;  whether it is smooth or choppy, short or long. If you can, let yourself feel you, as you are in this  moment, right now. Are you ready? Here we go. 

Is it possible that we humans, the trans-specied animals that we are, whether conscious of it or  not, are being wielded by a more distributed Gaian consciousness that has set course for a large scale biotic transformation commonly referred to as mass extinction? Pause here, and maybe read that question again, for it disrupts anthropocentric, human exceptionalistic, and savioristic  understandings of purpose and belonging. Such a question leaves us to consider other  pandemonious possibilities expressed through our participation, opening our awareness back to  the thrumming web of intra-specied and -ancestral collaborations. Possibilities that spring from the terra-fying mystery of our webworks of belonging. 

For some, this might be incredibly difficult and heartbreaking to imagine, or even entertain. And yet  imagination, in its heart of hearts, is transgressive, challenging the boundaries of convention;  drawing us out beyond the edges of the known toward that vast realm of the unknown, where our  convictions falter and succumb to the currents of possibility. In this place we must surrender  narratives we hold tightly, lest we are drowned. Though narratives of certitude offer the illusion of  safety, none of us are exempt from the primeval dance of Khaos and Kosmos. Their love affair births emergent and unpredictable futures whose mutating bodies stretch across the webbing of  time and space, offering panoramic views of the past, present, and future’s perennial intra sections. 

When I look up at the night sky, I see some of the same constellations my ancestors did. Indeed,  stars have been looked to for guidance by all manner of creatures for millions, if not, billions of  years. From migration and finding food to planting crops and searching for mates, steering by  starlight is an ancestral skill, and these denizens of the sky have yet more to impart. As atomized  ancients, they are constantly unleashing energetic wisdoms that glisten in the darkness,  reconnecting us to our awe-some origins. I believe that’s why so many of our ancestors devoted  their attention to these holy luminaries. They remind us of our unequivocal belonging, and that our  genealogy extends to the origins of the Universe. And these times, for all their precious precarity,  are an invitation to reconvene with the mystery of our entangling lives. 

As members of a larger Gaian and cosmic family shrouded in mystery, I believe there are other  yet-to-be-known possibilities that lay in wait for us. Terra-fying prospects whose emergent  becomings grow their way out of a perpetually rearranging ground of absence and presence.  Through the aid of mysticism and imagination, we can learn to navigate this ever-shifting territory,  fitting ourselves with big questions that become a musical contribution within the euphonic  cacophony of everything.

Which brings me to three questions I shall leave you with: 

What is your current governing narrative of belonging? 

How can the quality of your listening radically alter your sense of belonging?

How does the nature of your participation change when your belonging is reconfigured? 

These are the kinds of questions I find best explored with/in the regions of the world we are each in relationship with, at this time. My hope is that they will encourage a richer sense of place-based kinship, a widened consideration of 'self,' and a more personalized understanding of purpose as expressing our participatory aliveness. Each moment is an opportunity to dream with the world, and to wonder what other assemblages of  life are waiting in the mystical territory of our chthonic and cosmic transformations.

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Notes

1. Morrow, Susan Brind. The Dawning Moon of the Mind. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015. p. 76

2. Ibid

3. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters. Columbia University Press, 2018. p. 25

4. Ibid

5. Rainer Maria Rilke, You Darkness, translated by David Whyte

6. Hejnol, Andreas. Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317400047_Ladders_Trees_Complexity_and_Other_Metaphors_in_Evolutionary_Thinking

7. Ibid

8. Barad, Karen. “Intra-actions.” Adam Kleinman. mousse 34. http://johannesk.com/posthumanist/readings/barad-mousse.pdf

9. Weber, Andreas. Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology. Translated by Rory Bradley. 2014.  Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017. p 40

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