Belonging, Resistance, the Ascetic, & What Identity has to do with the Soul

I don't believe that our souls are waiting to be 'found' per se, as if they are a lost wallet, nor discovered as if they were lands unknown to us. This view gives too much agency, of a passé heroic type, to one person, really, it is a form of blaming the victim for their own spiritual dispossession, or even, in the case of many First Nations people, displacement. I would never be so arrogant as to attempt to define the soul, but as apocalyptic/critical naturalists who utilize tracking as a way of knowing, we do make field notes. And I have noticed (at certain times and with varying styles of occupancy) that the soul dwells within us ("us" as individual organisms having fuzzy borders), like a hologram rooted in our nervous systems, like a dove that comes now and then back to the dovecote.

I've also noticed, per the hologram metaphor, that something that seems awfully Soul-Like is reflected back to us through encounter and relation with our multi-species Kin. Does that mean that this Soul thing is also located outside ourselves too? Likely. But I think that many of us, Euro-Settler descendants, are unable to see this because we have not honored and tended to the reservoirs for Soul in the more-than-human world--perhaps with the one exception of our obsession with domestic dogs, which I think has basically become a politically neutered, commodified, hobby-ified version of animism (though count me among the dog people, and this isn't' supposed to dismiss people's individual experiences, I'm critiquing the systematics of the culture as a whole). My experiences as a queer shepherd, fugitive from what the theology of the Mediterranean has become, lead me to wonder if some of our most accessible reservoirs for Soul are confined to factory farms and thought of as "meat" before they are regarded as persons. In Orthodox Christianity, or more precisely according to the official party line (the Church), they are not considered to have souls.

If the soul waits for anything, it's not necessarily to be found, but to be tended, grown, even, backing up a few steps, believed in. But for tending to even work, there need to be conditions that allow growth. These conditions do not lie within the sole agency of an individual organism—they are distributed throughout the environment that the organism lives. We are kind of just complicated, ambulatory plants, so why is this concept so hard for so many spiritual & transformational leaders to understand? So many of them just espouse a candy-coated version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," just applied to the numinous.

Sometimes I would rather Speak of Soul Growth than Soul Encounter. Soul Growth is a more accessible concept for those of us who have been very aware of how dominant culture has often suppressed or (literally) arrested the natural tendency of the soul to grow, to expand, to come home to roost, den, or burrow...

For the soul to have space to grow, especially the souls in marginalized bodies living a during a time of ecocide within a hubristic society, we need both a sense of belonging to the earth and the wider ecologies beyond the human, and also fugitivity from the human status quo—which some might vaguely call 'dominant culture,' but let's also call it white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy. (Fugitivity is a concept that my friend brontë introduced me to, and as I've recently discovered, scholar Bayo Akomolafe writes about at beautiful length.) If we have one without the other (Belonging Without Resistance/Fugitivity or the latter without Belonging), we can become lost in these times, where there is already so much fracture. We seek an alchemical ratio of safety and risk, especially as we train, and prepare for the unknowns, the next-worlds. These needs, ratios, and word-definitions are different for different people according to their ability levels and their experiences of oppression, which many of the elite New Age practitioners of various sorts seem to fail to understand, chalking this up to a shortcoming that demonstrates a subject's "need to heal first." Colonial spiritualities like to separate the business of healing from the business of spiritual self actualization. In a decolonial lens, they aren't separate. This is also why so-called "safe spaces" (brave spaces) can be Holy spaces.

When we wrote @queernature's motto, "Belonging as Resistance" we did not intend to suggest that belonging is automatically radical & 'good.' Belonging to what? Belonging to a system of extractivism, burn-out, and white supremacy is not what we had in mind at all. That is not Belonging as Resistance, that is Belonging as Complicity. However, neither do we mean to suggest that "resistance" is automatically good, radical, or co-liberatory.

Even people who appear to hold all the power in a society at a given time seem to be capable of creating stories of "resistance" with which to inform how, and what, or to whom, they belong. It is quite incredible how nearly anyone is able to weave a story in which they are the rogue, the outsider looking in, the one who got away, the persecuted. White supremacists do it all the time. I've certainly utilized it inappropriately before, ignoring how my privileges interact with the parts of me that feel exiled, or even allow me to dwell on that exile (that's identity philosophy gone toxic, for me). Think of what the word "Protestant" means, though now it accounts for the majority of Christians in this country. Therefore I am also highly wary of these words we play with, "Belonging" and "Resistance," especially as a coupled pair. Their togetherness is combustible, potent. They are words that take a stand, that require accountability or bust. They are, to use an expression, fighting words.

Geoffrey Harpham, in his 1987 book "The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism" argued that at the heart of much of Western culture is the impulse to resist certain things—in essence, to build lifeways and identities by what one rejects. His analysis is not to either condemn nor vindicate Western culture, but merely to observe that over and over, from religion to politics, this culture is built on kinds of "resistance"—kinds of asceticism. The root of "asceticism," a rather obscure word mostly associated with extreme spiritual practices, actually just means 'discipline' or 'training' even though a lot of people associate it more overtly with deprivation, picturing images of skinny monks in desert caves or forest-dwelling yogis. It refers to a committed, sustained practice of discipline, of spiritual training really, that encompasses (and actually, centers) the body and governs bodily practices and rituals.

Unfortunately, this ascetic impulse is part of the so-called “resistance” to or rejection of those who are deemed “uncivilized” or sub-human, and on this act of rejection and curation is colonial & white supremacist culture built. The point here is that "asceticism" is not some exotic thing that ancient people did or that mystics from foreign cultures do. It is extremely ubiquitous and widespread and it has found a twisted, subtle form in the pillars of societies built on extractivism and excess.

Since we live in such a culture where we are told what comfort is and that its something we’re supposed to want, this allows us to idolize and valorize the weaponized "ascetics" that hold up the cornerstone of the State: the military, even the police, who "Keep us Safe," who essentially, do the "extreme rituals" So "we don't have to." We talk so much about how these folks "embrace the suck," "show restraint," "sacrifice their lives" etc. These values, these selective histories, can and do become weaponized, as they also become mundane. Just think about the twisted way that Spartan culture (where my own maternal ancestors are from) has become adopted by alt right militia types. Therefore, the concept of "resistance," like belonging, is not innocent, nor pure. Nor is the concept of the ascetic and its militarized, valorized modern analogs.

Yet it is actually because these concepts of belonging, resistance, and asceticism (training) are not neutral, because they contain within them possibilities and multitudes, that we are also able to utilize them for co-liberatory struggles. The ascetic, in an aesthetic sense and also in a moral sense, is no doubt a core part of Queer Nature. The monastic, which is a delivery mechanism for ascetic lifestyle, is certainly core to our futurisms, though too often whispered and kept to ourselves for fear of being misunderstood. During my time living at a Greek Orthodox Monastery as a work volunteer, I was struck by the autonomy and fugitive practices enabled in that space. I was struck by the notion of each nun married to something larger than herself, which included her community. I was struck by how anti-civ they were, how bound to the land, how they spoke of GMOs as "against God." I was struck by how the sisters would be buried—on that land, in a cemetery they built themselves—in their habits, the robes which they wore every day. Yet, my romanticism aside, I do long for some strange monastic futurism, made of post-apocalyptic climate monks, that is not socially conservative nor made of white liberal back to the land dreams—but is something else entirely—a Multispecies Monasticism. We don't fully know what it is. We're tired of waiting to fully know and be able to articulate it to talk about it. The future will not just be birthed from such essays, but from, too, the disjointed thoughts that long to queerly haunt other brains, that beckon you to think through them with us. Trying to figure it all out right now and lay it out for a reader, especially for me as a white person with a penchant for wordsmithing, is not wise.

To speak to another ascetic ideal, yes, we are about "preparing," we are about the somatic ritual of training-with-the-more-than-human, but it's not for the catastrophe envisioned by Western culture's imagination, replete with the bogeymen of communists and anarchists, rioting and looting. We are adjacent to the culture of "prepping" and "survivalism," but what we are prepping for and surviving is most often dominant culture's reactions to their own fears. Their itchy trigger finger. Their penchant for shooting first, which disproportionately harms our BIPOC trans and queer kin.

Dominant culture—in particular, Amerika, loves to shame and belittle those who resist key parts of itself. It wants to have a monopoly on resistance. And what is that, if not the definition of Statehood? Religion and spirituality, too, especially those that are trendy or practiced by majorities, love to dictate what is and is not sacred, what is an is not Spirit, what is and is not soul. Even though church and state are ostensibly separate, so often what is seen as spiritually honorable, admirable, or pure, are things that conform and comply with colonial and Protestant values. This is true too for new age spiritualities, eco and post-jungian psychologies, too. For example, take the notion that anger is not enlightened, or take the notion (when held by white folks) that we must go into the "wilderness," "alone" to self-actualize, purify ourselves, find God, or any number of things. The more days we hold out for, the better! That may be a powerful experience, and this is not to trash that archetype as it is present and embedded, with varying wording, in the contexts of many religions and cultures. But those who can access such an experience on these lands are precious few, and their ranks are monochrome. What does this ideal even mean when we unpack colonial meanings of "wilderness," of solitude, of saviorism informed by salvation-based religions? What happens to the heroic solitude of the transcendendalists when the wilderness is a place tended by Indigenous people, non-humans are people, (therefore 'solitude' is actually an abundance of connection and a balm to species isolation), and saviorism is a human-centric misinformed estimation of our importance and entitlement?

 Just as tone-policing dictates what emotions are okay or not okay for marginalized people to feel publicly, there is a sort of soul policing that happens, too, in this culture. That policing happens when a psychiatrist diagnoses someone as schizophrenic for feeling grief at species loss. It happens when entheogenic and visionary plant allies are called "Drugs." It happens when someone is told that their identity does not matter to God, because God "looks past that" (sorry but tolerance is just another form of control). It happens when wolves are poached, coyotes mass-murdered in derbies. It happens when white "liberal" kids are brought up to look on Pentecostal religion or Voudun with mockery (spiritual soul-policing as classist and racist), It happens when New Age leaders say that our souls have no gender. I and my friends are done with these veiled attacks. It is not for anyone to say how people who carry experiences of systemic oppression practice their spirituality, their soul-work, their healing... One has to keep in mind that the spirituality of marginalized peoples has often been mocked, dismissed, or suppressed. It's one of those histories that repeats itself. So we should not repeat it again now.

There are those out there, the white spiritual leaders, the yogis and the bestselling authors, often men, but definitely women too, who would say that being trans, or being queer, is not part of the shape of the soul -- it is part of something like "ego" or the like. I've heard it and it's been said point blank to my spouse. For one thing, this view is anti-Indigenous, because Two-Spirit people don't necessarily view themselves in the context of dominant discourses about identity. Would those same people dare to say that Indigeneity or Blackness does not touch or proceed from Soul? I cannot speak for Black and Indigenous kin, nor for those among them that have devoted years and lifetimes to studies of the numinous, but it's certainly not our place as white people to dismiss those possibilities. Just because white people might try to claim that their ancestors' identities and actions are unrelated to their soul's purpose (a shitty move), we can't impose something similar on others. These views are Spiritual Racism disguised as Wisdom.

We know that affinity spaces can create potent opportunities for one to engage with Soul, even if we can't fully explain why. We absolutely can have a discussion about the toxic forms "identity politics" or identity philosophy can take. But we will only do that if we are trusted to know what the fuck our own souls look like.

~ Faun (@cyberpunkecology) with input from Pinar

The Anathema of Adoration: Tracking and the Possibility of Romantic Science

(Previously published on our Patreon several months ago)

Naturalist interpretation & wildlife tracking is for me so much about witnessing & generating local stories and local science. It’s also about stubbornly maintaining that even though electron microscopes and genetics are amazing (and can contribute greatly to an enchanted science), we can also “still” (always? At least as long as we have bodies?) do a kind of science with our senses and with what is perceivable to our senses. This sensory science is the essence of what being a ‘naturalist’ is. We can certainly mix our sensory science (still technologically mediated with our rulers, our loupes, our tracking sticks, now our cellphone apps & cameras) with what we’ve learned from other sciences that measure with more than just a single human body—but the point is we shouldn’t ditch this embodied & local version. The ability to pay attention is an incredible gift that animals (including humans) have, and it also has been largely dispossessed from us and manipulated in contemporary industrial & post-industrial societies. Paying studious attention to the wind, the water, the birds and the animal trails, has no economic value, unless we’re funded scientists, or hunters (and subsistence hunters, foreign OR domestic, still largely get treated like trash by many people, so…).

The loss of many Indigenous peoples’ abilities to hunt on their territories (through either the legislation by settler states or of destruction of habitats and animal ranges) has been incurred by colonial processes, and the mindset that goes along with those processes often does not see oral-history based cultures as being able to do or produce science. This is very tied in with why the body, and specifically the emotional and spiritual body, is often dismissed as an interface for creating scientific knowledge.

Tracking is now an endangered skill. Settler and colonial cultures almost wholly ditched it, along with community-based natural history, & a spiritual ecology of attention that seems to be what allowed humans to survive dire evolutionary straits in the first place. Settler scientists have just started to realize in the last 20 years (thanks to the work of some very talented and visionary people including the San people of the Kalahari), that tracking is oftentimes a better ”tool for the job” of interpreting story/history than numerous recent technologies. One example is the Pech Merle cave in Southern France, the site of a fossilized series of trackways made by humans 15,000 years ago. European archaeologists invited several Indigenous Namibian trackers to interpret the trackways, and within three minutes of examining the tracks, the trackers discerned information that the archaeologists had not been able to deduce in a couple of decades of studying the prints. Previous methods had included utilizing various computer-based imaging methods to scan & analyze the substrate. However, these machines, at least at this nexus, could not produce the desired meaning. Only relationships accumulated over many hours and many generations could do that.

The Pech Merle researchers, after experiencing this incredible science firsthand, were quoted as saying in a BBC article that "Integrating indigenous knowledge of tracking into the research procedure is not a matter of romanticism.” Fair enough, but I must roll my eyes a little at how much us settler and ‘Western’ scientists are still getting triggered by the human imagination—not to mention that talking about “integrating” Indigenous people is harmful, & cringey in its exposure of deep settler biases and its inability to see that the path to genocide is and has been paved with intentions of 'integration.' It is Indigenous trackers who should be honored (in measurable ways no less) as long-time generators and stewards of science as well as the most biodiverse lands left on earth.

Cybertracker has made some steps toward this by helping create a system that gives legitimacy to the expertise of Indigenous San trackers, giving these trackers an ability to make a living off of their skills working for conservation, biodiversity, anti-poaching projects, etc. Data created by trackers through the Cybertracker system is owned by those trackers, and if it is used for scientific papers, the trackers must be named as co-authors in the paper. However, as I'm sure many readers will be able to see, questions still come up with this model because it is difficult for it to escape positioning Western/Settler technology and science as a gatekeeper on many levels—however in its defense the strategy there is to work with the forces of a powerful system to basically erode aspects of that very system, just as our bodies can release chemicals that erode our own bones when change is necessary. I wanted to mention this because people often ask about the issue of decolonising tracking, and this is a complex and rich story that we are still learning to carry, and the pressure to oversimplify and summarize such stories is great in some leftist praxis. In short, tracking is such an endangered lifeway, that it is not widely understood or known about by many people, Indigenous and Settler alike. Right now, it seems we as a human species are in triage mode with carrying forward this skill/lifeway.

‘Romantic’ when used in a negative way denotes someone who has an idealized (and ostensibly false) view of reality. However, romantic also means something conducive to or characteristic of love, of interpersonal enchantment. If there was such a thing as 21st century Romanticism—we’d rush to admit we’re firmly located within it. This is a romanticism, perhaps, of the strange & monstrous, the science-fictional, the animist, the unknown and unknowable. Indigenous, Black, Queer, Trans, Neurodivergent, or even just Deeply Sensitive naturalists, scientists, and environmentalists shouldn’t have to pass as E.O. Wilson or Carl Sagan to have their eco-mystical motivations and feelings regarded as appropriate. At Queer Nature we are a type of ‘romantic’ who know that love is anything but ideal, it’s simply the trail that glows the longest, after all the others have winked out. Unfortunately, there’s a reason that a tracker or field biologist might get scoffed at if they squeal with adoration at animals and their tracks, as Pinar, an excellent and practiced tracker & Indigenous animist, often does experience. It’s because adoring something is seen as clouding the empirical acuity of science’s steely gaze. It’s “cringey” according to the patriarchal frame of Western science. Good science has long been seen as cold and unfeeling, detached—as if that’s not an emotional response too. It’s a mindset deeply wrapped up in misogyny and the infantilizing of anything perceived as feminine or childlike. It’s also revelatory of the fear many hold of being awed themselves, because awe and wonder naturally disarm us and erode the walls we’ve naturally (and understandably) built in our psyches in the course of living in a world that often tells us that to succeed we have to be calm, serious, or cynical at all times. Many people have had their hearts opened up by awe or wonder, often a lifetime ago in their youth or young adulthood, only to conclude, after the inevitable grief, pain, or rejection came crashing down, that awe and wonder are never worth it. It’s a quandary for the ages, whether we can choose to live, as poet David Whyte writes, “with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.” And there’s no denying it’s fucking hard… no less for the queer psyche.

As science writer Carol Yoon points out in her book “Naming Nature,” European science, despite what it thought of itself a couple hundred years ago, didn’t invent taxonomy—differentiating and relating to living forms is a pan-human instinct that is expressed in every culture. The end result of taxonomy might have been the “naming” of the living world, which brings with a religiously-rooted entitlement. But really, any cultural system of ‘ordering’ or ‘naming’ actually begins in ‘relating,’ and some systems are much MUCH better at honoring that than others. These days, the business of classification can be enigmatic to most non-scientists, especially with the unseen realms of DNA feeding in to the endeavor. This makes good sense, and we love that people look at DNA (please carry on), but what we lose in the notion that “experts somewhere” are the only valid knowledge keepers about the gophers in our backyard, is we lose something rather simple but important, which is just the permission to get to know those particular beings intimately, the permission to “behold” (as Martin Shaw says,) which is different than just “looking,” it’s paying attention to something as a love language. “Well, I won’t ever publish a paper on it so it doesn’t matter” we may grumble to ourselves. We counter, yes, it does matter a lot, even if we can’t quantify it now, or ever. Paying attention to our multi-species habitats should be a source of science, but it should also be a source of stories, because stories are memetic and outlive us. Ideally, the two endeavors would be more entangled.

And if we do find space to behold, our observations seem to get funneled into poetry. Which they should be, but the problem that creates is somehow people think then that the attention of the poet lacks rigor, credibility even. It bothers me that we don’t think of Mary Oliver as a scientist. Though, if she was a scientist, I’d probably be bothered that she wasn’t called a poet. Yes, I get that we like our systems of doing science to be certain ways, with funding, peer review. It makes some sense. But for crying out loud, the lady literally spent her whole life paying attention to ecology and to her place within it. “When it’s over” she wrote, “I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” I have very little doubt that many scientists do feel this way about the world, but it's just become culturally taboo to talk about, due to an idealization of rationality and the pervasive anti-myth that science is disenchanting the world.

Naturalist studies occurring outside recognized scientific institutions are not just about our own human spiritual development either. No denying that spirituality and deep emotional need is involved—we try to overcorrect for the fact that the legacy of European/settler science often was in the closet about its own relationship with ghosts and enchantment… so we DO talk about spirit, soul, emotion, a lot. But purpose doesn’t end there either, it trails into the horizon of Mystery.

Witnessing matters, as the Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar regions have tried to tell us as they are able to track sensitive ecosystems shifting dramatically over generations of time. This society has not been good at valuing the stories about the land that people gather inside themselves just through the course of living. Conservationists call what they do “Ecological monitoring,” with its echoes of surveillance—and maybe there’s an honesty to that. But what, too, of witnessing, of paying attention—that cognitive act that poet Mary Oliver identified with the very nature of the Soul.

The ‘natural history’ of an area is only limited by what we choose to pay attention to. The bear that turned over hundred-pound chunks of granite a few years ago to forage for insects is but one example of an intimate and mundane event that still is ‘transcribed’ into (from?) the landscape, in the traces of the aged sockets of soil from which the heavy rocks were displaced. However, crucially, what we pay attention to shifts when our cosmologies, world-views, and habits shift. If we consider animals to have personhood, consciousness, even sentience, how do we look at their tracks and trails (and ours) on the landscape differently? What if we consider them to even have something like spirituality—to be animists themselves? If we have realized that 'wilderness' is a human social construct, and these lands have been tended for tens of thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, how differently might we look at forest ecology? Or, for that matter, Indigenous lifeways & those who tend them?

In an age of post-truth, what perhaps 'pathological skepticism' has revealed is the core tenet that is at the center of the little-known field of historiography: the writing of history is never neutral. The writing of history is an art, a craft, a science, a vocation. And also what it perhaps reveals is that many humans are traumatized by the disembedding of stories from place. This leads us to mistrust any stories, and even story as a technology itself. However, the deconstruction of stories is not the endgame. It is a stepping stone to reclaiming our ability to bear witness and orient to events in our literal physical environment. As is evident in the basic workings of EMDR therapy (creator: Dr. Francine Shapiro), locating and orienting to stimuli that occur unpredictably all around our bodies (in this case, relatively neutral stimuli like vibrations or beeps) is a method of healing the nervous system as we realize that these stimuli are not threats. However, we would also say that during EMDR therapy, a patient is 'tracking' and storying signals that they perceive.

There are a lot of threads here, but one that is sticking with me is around returning stories to place, and seeing stories that occur on very small scales as important. So, let us not be neutral. Let us imagine what would be possible if more of us considered the possibility that we could be natural historians—which is really another word for 'tracker'. Natural historians who don't see culture as separate from nature. Natural historians who track trauma in the body and trauma on the land too. Natural historians who know that multi-species and transbiological relationships are a normative part of human social and emotional worlds. Natural historians who learn from living beings and our adoration of them as much as, or even more than from books, and who know that without variation and diversity, life would not go on.

A photo of a young orphaned pine squirrel that we helped rescue, in the process of being rehabilitated for release. Pinar who used to volunteer in wildlife rehab, reported that it was an “open secret” that the volunteers would often “kiss the baby squirrels” when other staff weren’t looking. Wildlife rehabilitation is underfunded all over the country and is powered by love.

Cybernetics is a Type of Ecology

“Ecologies should be seen as the original cybernetic systems.” That was more or less the motto of my dorky (and somewhat cringeworthy at times) cyberpunk environmentalist themed blog started back in 2008. But these echo views that have been around since at least the 70s. Ecology and cybernetics are really quite similar, I think more than they are different, because cybernetics is a type of ecology.

Cybernetics refers to how information flows through systems (though it does connote governance and control to a certain extent), and was originally applied more toward artificial systems such as computers. Though, in the view of #biosemiotics, information, even data, is not just a thing humans create and store. Human generated information is merely one type of information that exists in the universe. Natural ecologies are also #biosemiotic systems, but they were not created by someONE in the strict sense (though many of them the world over have been stewarded and tended by Indigenous peoples… that’s really important to remember). They are rather, self-governing, if we want to use a word more comfortable in cybernetic theory. Moreover, they are “governed” through distributed agencies that blurs the boundaries between our notions of self and not self.

Information can exist as molecules on a surface, as some fur on a scratching post or as an anal gland secretion on an otter’s scent mound. Biologists first thought that canines scratching the ground—depositing scent from their interdigital glands—was just an olfactory signal, but now an emerging view is that it also could be a visual signal. From witnessing dozens of coyote scrapes and mountain lion scratches in the field, it is obvious to me that they can “track” in ways more similar to humans than we’re ready to admit, even if we admit that they may track through different dominant sense modalities than us. Visual tracking scares us sometimes when non-humans do it. Sometimes we act like we’re the only species with eyes, or at least with forward facing ones. When the coyote is watching you and not running away, some people would assume there must be a sinister intention behind it, they must be plotting to eat your dog. The more likely reality is that coyotes can be extremely curious and actually enjoy watching things without a particular agenda!

I digress. However, we must take care to not over simplify ecologies by just superimposing what we know about how computers work onto them. More on that later. But, drawing from the work of Barbara King, an animal studies scholar who has also made some much needed contributions to religious studies, we must resist the temptation to see organic relations as computational in nature. Meaning is created inside encounters rather than transported as ‘packet’ from Being A to Being B. We know this to be true in our emotional bodies! We thus move more into the realm of dynamical systems theory and connectionism, from the older more linear views of agency, communication, and meaning granted to us by computation. In a dynamical view, it’s relations/relationships all the way down, and ‘coupled’ phenomena (at least two things interacting) is how life, thought, and information get generated. The explosion of research into holobionts (plant and animal biomes) and the revelations of how really, we are more like multi-species events rather than individual entities, is also a thread we could weave in here.

Tracking, enchanted science, & place-based witnessing through multi-species/transbiology/animist lenses especially is a way to consider how meaning & signification can actually be a more-than-human category, unlike what we often hear from human exceptionalists or cynics who are like “LOL look at humans pointlessly trying to find the meaning of life.” Curiosity is not worth shaming, rather, what is worth reconsidering is that we’re the only species that are curious in that way or that engage in, as Teya Pribac writes, a “dancing with animacy,” and also a mapping of subjective worlds. Perhaps if we felt some sort of spiritual solidarity with other animals we’d be less resentful about our own lot. Many land-based cosmologies, too, as well as the crypto-animism of Ancient Greece that has been mostly (but not totally) eclipsed by later worldviews, acknowledge things like voices, stories, songs, personhood, etc. that are located or have their origin in non-human subjects, topoi (places), or Things. (All of us who work at these intersections are deeply indebted to Indigenous scientists, naturalists, & ecophilosophers who have been weaving in these ways all along! E.g. Enrique Salmon, Dennis Martinez, Robin W. Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and many others)

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Perhaps it is repetitive to say this at this point, but this aforementioned motto is not the same as saying “biological systems are computers.” No no. Those classic cyberpunk tropes have been done and played out—we are interested in a post-cyberpunk view grounded in ecology. It’s more like computers are simplified echoes of biological systems, similarly to how a garden is a simplified ecosystem. However, these “simplified” systems outsource a lot of complexity onto their tenders and stewards. And once you put them in networks, they can be very, very complicated! I do not want to downplay that at all. One reason why we all get so exhausted on social media if we aren’t careful. So in some ways their simplicity conceals a wider complexity. One of the shortcomings of the cyberpunk genre was the comparison of brains to computers as if computers were the parent metaphor. Really it should be the other way around. The parent metaphor is ecology, and ecology simply means “the logic of the home.” There’s nothing specifically deliberating *what* has the be the subject of relations in that word. In a similar way, technologies don’t just refer to human created devices or machines, they refer to any fabricated, improvised, or ritual way of achieving a task.

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When some people think about practitioners of place/earth-based skills they often assume these folks hold very dualistic views of the world. Like oh yeah, those people who want us to “go back to this or that state of human history” or get rid of computers, etc. Not all of us! Place-based technologies and practices are not “primitive,” nor do they have to uphold culture/nature, artificial/natural binaries. They can also be futuristic! That’s also why we like to say forward to the land instead of back to the land, because our politics are different from the latter movement, and we recognize the present and future as technologically hybrid or monstrous. Monstrous not connoting “scary /bad” but rather connoting unexpected assemblages that challenge dominant views of personhood, agency, life, and yep, identity. As one of our artist friends printed on an anarchist patch, “no system but the ecosystem,” but if you think that means we’re just talking about green things you’re mistaken.

When Cyberpunks Became Ecologists

The current effects of people, particularly life scientists/naturalists/environmentalists reaching adulthood who grew up during the dawn of the world wide web (a more specific thing than 'the internet' in general), and furthermore, 90's hacker culture, is really interesting. I haven't seen it talked about much, at least in popular culture, as it seems so many of us are still working through the problems bestowed upon us by the splitting of nature/culture, artificial/natural, etc. As someone who currently works in the nature-based education realm, I often have felt hesitant to bring up how much I (and my fellow Queer Nature co-founder) both, in different ways, grew up immersed in technology and don't have a strictly negative critique of it. To bring some of this aesthetic, somatic, and intellectual lineage into the light, I wanted to share a poem I wrote about "Coming of Age in Cyberspace" a few years ago.

"Coming of Age in Cyberspace

I grew up in an unfurling wilderness

of interconnected machines

—the 90’s.

No one taught me to hunt deer

so I hunted for modems,

memorized the tones of

analog phones

instead of bird song.

Carrier signals

were like the calls of rare

and elusive

creatures

obscured by a vegetation of wire.

IP addresses

glowed on screens

like footprints

winding through terminals of text,

laying trails

that could be followed.

.

No one taught me to dream with the earth

or be possessed by the spirits

of the animals,

so I was haunted

by the strange wildness

of networks.

A virtual ecology

with its own terrain

yet animated by that original pump,

the heart.

In a brilliant dystopian mythos

the disembodied soul

was the animal I hunted,

the one whose movements

I longed to understand.

.

Eventually, after years

of tracing circuits

with my finger

like braille

—the promise of meaning

looming in the dark—

I found a path

leading back

(or maybe forward?)

into the eco-system

a green world

of soft borders

and furry logic.

.

Trailing a deer

in desert twilight

we became spirits

chasing the horizon

like a dream.

Cloven tracks glow darkly

on the sand,

their magnetism

like the static fuzz

of those glass screens

that flooded the bedroom

of my youth

with foreign light.

The medium

has changed

but the potent dazzle

of mystery

is the same,

and the green-tinged window

to the Other-world

remains.

.

it was a network

of machines

that taught me

relationship is the

magical substance

of our world."

The Vindication of Despair

Grief rituals and ecological grief are justifiably trending now, but despair still gets a bad rap. It’s still the emotion that we want to shame and avoid. It’s the emotion that, along with Anger, we often use to patronize and “pity” marginalized people. I even cracked open a beloved Rebecca Solnit book lately and got told to, whatever I do, not go there. In some ways, this is a literary and linguistic problem, not a sign of bad faith: "despair" has come to be a stand in for some sort of existential defeat, instead of for what it is: a complex emotion and somatic experience.

—

Being a social and ecological emotion, despair often means something is happening outside ourselves. I worry that too often it gets swept aside as a personal failing. People are actually asking us, over and over, to listen to their despair. Why in Godx's name should our response be that despair is useless?

—

I’m not telling you to seek it out as if it’s the latest New Age therapy. But it has a massive purpose. Every emotion we are capable of feeling does. With despair, what I’ve learned is that purpose is on one hand, to decompose old systems of value and meaning that we used to navigate the world (especially ones that we used to try to control said world). It totally, and often mercilessly, abolishes (our sense) of meaning & justice from our lives. Maybe you’ve already been through it and you know what I’m talking about. If you have, thanks for still being here. Thanks for even trusting my intention enough to read a paragraph of my words—that’s a lot in these times.

—

Despair is truly, barely survivable for many people and I don’t mean at all to trivialize it—yet I would argue more people would survive it if those of us holding more power and privilege actually acknowledged when we feel it too, in socially responsible ways.

—

But what is possible after (or during?) despair is something that our world, especially the so-called Western world, is in dire need of: reenchantment. Reenchantment does not mean a new overlay of Meaning(TM) that’s just different words than the old Meaning system. It means that the new meaning we see in the world is written in an entirely new language—or maybe it’s not written at all, maybe it’s sung or danced. Maybe it’s seen in the eyes of another human or non-human, or felt in the presence of a smog-less day. Maybe there are blank pages—maybe it’s supposed to be in incomplete. To be enchanted is to be able to be courted by Mystery again—to not simply recoil In fear *especially* if we wield power and influence in our communities. Because there is so, so much Mystery out there, and within each of us, still. It’s not so much waiting to be discovered as it is waiting to be celebrated, revered, from wherever we are. Don’t forget that awe and wonder are still accessible to you, and don’t forget that there are still things out there that can sway your heart and take your breathe away.

—

And so much of this re-learning depends on our capacity to survive total breakdown. To live and walk this world with a broken heart, but to know we are not defeated. A capacity which I fear, many of us (possibly me included) have lost, now and again. I believe we can find it again. The Earth and her many cycles make sure of that.

—

There are people in this world building new worlds out of fires of despair. A lot of those people are Black and brown people, transgender people, disabled people, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, and just plain sensitive and highly empathic people (and I think there are a lot more of you out there in this last category than you let on ) folks who have been forced to carry the despairs of societies and cultures, many not even their own. Some people would look down on this despair with fear and loathing, say put it back in this box (that some of my ancestors made), but I know its holy. It is holy in you, whether you fall into a category I named or not. And that doesn’t dismiss the pain of it, nor is it supposed to pedestalize it.

—

Justice is evidence of our capacity to acknowledge both divinity and despair in the world.

—

One person who really helped me feel & think through this is the ecofeminist psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan. Her work on Despair is a masterpiece.

—

From an historical perspective, us European-derived people, we have been in a period of barely acknowledged despair (grief too yes) since at least we started telling stories about how God is Dead, ( like Pan was before him), oh yeah Matter is Dead too, Animals Don’t have Souls, and Everything Eventually can Be Explained (apparently with gothic, buzzkill statements formulated as [Noun] is DEAD! )

—

I’m not even saying the opposite of those things are true. It’s just that when you act like you know, or can know that much, it drives all around you, and if you’re a famous philosopher or thinker-man, all those under your influence, into a state of learned hopelessness and at worst, self abandonment.

—

The other big thing is that power and privilege can, to an extent, insulate us from despair. Especially wealth & influence. They can muzzle despair, as it were—keep it simmering in the form of anxiety, insecurity, suspicion, and fear of others. It doesn’t mean we don’t feel it, in some form. What it means is that, as people with class privilege, wealth, influence, whiteness, we can arrange reality so that it doesn’t bring us down. And that’s dishonest and actually, quietly violent because the cocoons we weave are often made of threads of anti-blackness, anti-immigrant, anti-Unknown, anti-Anyone stirring the pot, anti-riot, anti-feeling, anti-mystery, anti-life—we might not even be conscious of that. It’s the ultimate abandoning of the self that in spite of all the shiny things, wants to transform through relationship with Others & the Unknown. Everyone has the right to retreat, to cocoon themselves, to heal, even to escape disaster or a zombie apocalypse. But if my retreat is built on hate, resentment, envy, it’s *not actually retreat*—it’s some intense involvement, cause hate is one of the strongest attachments there is.

—

I hesitate to join in the chorus that pits despair and hope as opposites, even moreso a binary. I think they are twins of a sort. I feel like engaging with despair in a curious way (at least as much as I can manage it), has helped me with hope. Since Despair works on such a deep, fundamental, indeed animal/somatic level, it's like it can reconfigure what I’ve used as a basis for hope in the first place. In my humble opinion, my despair (and many other emotional states) are inextricable from the political because it/they acts on my relationship with my values and worldviews. Similarly, my hope is not apolitical either. What have I been conditioned to hope for by society, as a white person—what about as a trans person? (And importantly, what have I been conditioned to not hope for?) I want to look and ask the question through every social prism that I occupy, not because I want these identities or statuses to define me, but because this is what it will take to heal my (and our) imagination. And what could a decolonial hope look like, for me? For you? What my hope might look or feel like—especially after despair, the social and ecological emotion that it is—may change, but it will still exist out there, like a stealthy creature, who’s feet fall lightly on the ground. My task now, is to to track hope, to become current with them, to recognize what they, now, are.

—

So I’m done with the plea to “not despair.” What I think those kind people really mean is don’t give up. Despair doesn’t have to mean we are giving up or resorting to harming ourself or others. *thats not what despair is.* Your Despair is ancient somatic wisdom that is radically dislodging whatever you were focusing or centering with your attention/life/hopes and saying “Hey, this isn’t the Center anymore. Figure out how to live now.” Let yourself go there, with the support of loved ones, creaturely Kin, and the Land, if it’s safe to. I’ll be here when you get back, and I’m sure you’ll have something huge to teach me, and all of us, if you so choose.

Words & Photo by So @borealfaun

Ecomystics & Dreampunks: (Re)Enchantment at the Confluence of Ecocide & Mytho-Memetic Warfare (Pt 1)

(this post is a bit of a living work in progress, so you might recognize several sections which were published on instagram or Facebook over the past several months. It’s a bit long so if you are interested in reading just the section about #dreampunk, scroll about halfway down :) )

Part I: The Necessary Seed-Bombing of the Future

“There are some people who are so magical that we break reality… [We] are alien in a world that won’t believe in us. We are mythic.” 

— Seb Barnett, genderqueer artist & mystic (Rest In Power)

The late anti-capitalist cultural theorist Mark Fisher felt that Western civilization was experiencing a crisis of the imagination. Fisher located one generator of this crisis in the processes of late capitalism—with the hyper-interconnectedness of the digital as its handmaid—which he feared had colonized and constrained creativity, time itself, and the stories we tell about the future. From pop music to blockbuster science fiction, Fisher saw old versions of the future simply being remade or ‘upgraded,’ but not, in his estimation, fundamentally changing or producing subversive and diverse narratives. Throughout much of his writing, Fisher warned that Western culture had fallen under a spell wherein “our capacity to even conceive of alternatives to capitalism has atrophied.” Imagination was a skill that “we” were losing, fast. In Capitalist Realism—published in 2009—he remarked darkly that it had become "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." Sadly, we lost Mark to suicide in 2017.

Discovering Fisher’s work was a revelation because “the future” has always been a deeply troubling topic for us and Fisher helped us see that there is a lot of power in this ‘trouble.’ Our childhood and teenage years coincided with the rise of the internet, and as computing and the digital remade the economy, certainty and precision were the name of the game. For me though, as a queer and gender non-conforming kid in a rural New England town, I couldn’t envision myself as an adult. This was probably in part due to the fact that I didn’t know any real (and hardly any fictional) queer or trans adults. Throughout my teen years I was staunchly convinced that I was going to die before reaching adulthood. I had no idea what the future was supposed to look like for me, and it was literally easier for me to imagine my death than my emergence. We hear echoes of this when we re-read Fisher’s words printed a decade ago, that it was "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." A lot of people, it turns out, experience a sort of oppression (and literally, depression) from dominant culture’s versions of ‘the future,’ either feeling shut out of it (like I did then), or locked into it, as in the vision of the indebted worker enslaved to a monotonous “future” under capitalism.

As a young teen growing up in the strange techno-utopianism of the Silicon Valley, Pinar became progressively horrified by the wastefulness and ecological destruction caused by human civilization and disillusioned with the visions of ‘the future’ that Silicon Valley was in the business of manufacturing. Though now the phrase ‘ecological grief’ has finally entered popular consciousness, when they shared with a therapist in the early 2000’s about their intense feelings of kinship with the more-than-human world and grief at its destruction, they were diagnosed as schizophrenic and bipolar. This dismissal of their reality and the pathologizing of their altered states created a violent sense of exile that was difficult to survive. One of the ways they survived their teenage years, other than through their connection with animals and water, was through art. They had to create worlds in order to survive, and art was a way for them to create worlds in which they belonged. It was not a pastime, but was very much a ceremony of survival. Art was also a form of mysticism for them because it was a way of metabolizing despair into an act of creation. Like me, they also eventually were drawn to both ancient and contemporary human mystical traditions because these ways of knowing de-centered human supremacy and centered mystery as something sacred, vital, and necessary.

Experiencing mystery is central to understanding oneself and one’s role—it is an engine of joy, resilience, awe, faith, and imagination. Mystery can remind us that reconfigured  meaning and new relationships are possible, and that meaning-making is an active, living, ongoing process, not something that was pre-given or fixed before our births. Mystery is necessary for healthy culturing of futures (yet we are constantly told that the market hates uncertainty). For us mystery has been a critical concept in the formation of healthy relationships to our queerness and identities, because our spiritual wholeness and earthly belonging has not always been reflected by society, and we cannot afford to wait for a time when it will be. As young people, we both desperately needed to engage with ways of knowing that centered the unknown and uncertainty, and that allowed us to see the unknown and the little-understood in a positive light. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, these sorts of things were cryptic and hard to come by—we were brought up steeped in what Jason A Josephson-Storm calls the “anti-myths” of disenchantment—which told us that we lived in a mechanistic universe, where God had died like Pan long before him, and the rational and sane philosophical and emotional positions were atheistic ones. We both found affirmations of the priceless value of mystery via labyrinthine paths—though the common denominator was in relationship with the world beyond the human and through human mystical or mythical traditions that contemporary Western society has often been quick to judge as superstitious, delusional, or relegate to the past. 

Although the computer seemed to be the crown-jewel of supposedly rational, disenchanted science, it is ironic that I first found mystery (and therefore mysticism) among machines. In my pre-teen and early teen years I became fascinated with the workings of the internet and the computer networks that made it up. The internet was like a mysterious landscape to me—I wasn’t brought up knowing that it was even possible to follow the trails of animals, so I followed trails made of wires. Connections with remote machines seemed like magic, and the blinking cursor and command line was a strange mix of absence and presence characteristic of the mystical—a reminder that this world was deeply interactive, and also unknown to me. This was a place in which I could wander, and it happened to be a virtual space. We often realize that mystery is most alive when we have ‘space’ (which could also be time) to wander through some sort of terrain that is rich with connections—whether it’s a landscape, a dreamscape, cyberspace, or even the micro-terrain of something we are making with our hands. 

A similar experience of mystery was what attracted me to games, from text-based adventures to isometric RPGs. Because of the central role of the human user in these artificial systems, one naturally feels drawn into them, beckoned, in a way that to them felt spiritual (though it was of course, manufactured). Ironically, this use of machines formed part of my ability to see the world as animate, deeply interactive, and full of information. Looking back, it was not surprising that I soon fell in love with the more-than-human world and the mysteries of ecology and started spending more time outside and less time behind the screen. Here, the unknown went beyond the human in a way it couldn’t in human-made cyberspace. Here, no human was in control. The future was made everyday with paws, wings, teeth, leaves. You learned ‘who you were’ by your relation to others, to the land. You unfolded. Mystery was welcome here. This personal history is partially why we never shame gaming culture in our work as nature-connection mentors. The desire to inhabit and ‘belong’ in worlds that is characteristic of modern gaming is a deeply intelligent ‘hack’ for engaging with mystery within a mystery-deprived culture that is obsessed with what is already known and created. 

When Mystery is marginalized in culture and society—or monopolized and only allowed to come from one source, like Western science or Protestant religion—as we believe it has been (at least publicly) for much of the last century, the future also becomes more monolithic and constrained. This has social and political effects, because then it is only certain people—often white, wealthy, and cisgender—who are able to imagine themselves in these futures. The mythos of the future is closely tied to how we come to define ourselves. Especially in adolescence, whether we are queer or not, we are unknown to ourselves, and in a healthy culture, this would be a source of mystical power, a ‘necessary crisis,’ and the object of rite-of-passage through which we would come to embody a local future by growing in to our unique role in community. Mystery is, as we say at Queer Nature, a primary need, along with shelter, food, clean water, and community. We both grew up in a society where we were told we could ‘be whatever we wanted,’ yet what if what we wanted to be was something society was not ready for—or even saw as antithetical to itself? This is not just any society, mind you, but one driven by immense capital created from slavery and stolen land. When this society becomes invested in certain futures, there is very little social and mythic space for roles that would question or undo those systems of investment. This is partially why mystics are medicated and institutionalized, hackers thrown in jail or their innovations appropriated by the state, Indigenous land protectors are imprisoned or assassinated, and transgender people are dehumanized and murdered. They represent futures that are not economically viable for the state and global capitalism.

Lately, the future has been a topic on many people’s minds, conjuring the post-apocalyptic for some, the post-human for others, and the enigma of uncertainty for many of us. The English word ultimately comes from the Latin futurus, which is the future participle of the verb ‘to be.’ In English we don’t really have this verb form, and something has been lost in our use of this potent word. In reading the etymology, the future is literally ‘what is about to become’ or what is ‘going to become.’ It denotes a process of becoming, not a fixed destination. Seeing the future as a fixed destination (as fate or destiny) can, at worst, create merely another terrain available for colonization and commodification. To be trans, for us both as non-binary or genderqueer trans people, is to be a futurist. However, to be a non-binary futurist is also to reject the dichotomy of utopia and dystopia (which Donna Haraway powerfully writes about in Staying with the Trouble), and to trust that we contain futures in our bodily becomings. We are imagination becoming flesh. Truly, all organisms are. We live in an era where entire ecosystems and species are transitioning from one state to another within our lifetimes—we are not utilizing the full potential of imagination if we are not paying attention to them and seeing them (as well as the various Indigenous peoples who have stewarded them for thousands of years) as “thought leaders” for these times.

“We have to invent the future,” Fisher concluded, arguing that we had forgotten how to create it. However, what if this has been a necessary forgetting for dominant Western culture? In some ways, Fisher and many other sensitive Gen Xers like him probably felt the future splintering—by the late 0s it was clear that the project of neoliberalism, with its dreams of economic growth and prosperity through globalization, was not sustainable, financially or ecologically. At this point, the ‘future’ as envisioned by those in power is a story of protecting and shoring up their property and resources, closing their borders, and mythologizing the zombie apocalypse, or lately, Hollywood’s popular climate catastrophe scenarios that only deviate slightly from the former by picturing the Earth as a  ‘zombie mother’ who threatens to destroy her children and must also be controlled and subdued. The future needs to be splintered because it is plural. It is the natural state of futures to be legion, to be local, to be as numerous as are bioregions on earth, however inconvenient that might be to those fixated on prediction and control. The futures of the 20th century seemed more monolithic because they relied upon unsustainable systems of production, power, and imagination. That era is over, or at least it should be. 

What if the future is something that can only be dreamt, grown, embodied? We don’t believe we have all forgotten how to be with the future. Only the most privileged of us ever had a chance to ‘invest’ in the future in the first place. For those oppressed and subjugated by the future-making machine of empire, envisioning alternative futures has always been a natural and necessary part of resistance, not a past time, but an emotional and spiritual and mythological necessity. Trans and queer folks live with uncertainty every day. We grew up seeing our community members kicked out of their homes, institutionalized, suicidal—or experiencing these things ourselves. It’s no wonder that many of us have cultivated methods of creating relationships with the unknown that are pleasurable or grounding for us—like through recovered ancestral traditions, through fantasy or sci-fi literature, or through ‘occult’ practices like astrology and tarot. One of our main eco-mystical practices that forms an important practical and theoretical core for Queer Nature is wildlife and ecological tracking—which is a practice of listening to the land so that we can better understand our place with it. These practices, and others, literally heal the trauma that we have around uncertainty and unknowing, they build our capacity to live without a Future™—they build resilience in the face of apocalypse and existential crisis.

Futures, mystery/mysticism, imagination, and creativity are all bound up together. Imagination is an ecological force. It requires space, mystery, and Otherness. It is a distributed phenomenon, among the neurons in our nervous systems yes, but also among singing songbirds, twinkling stars, and subterranean mycelium. It isn’t something our brains do in isolation. It is something that is done in community that extends beyond the human. So what happens then to our ability to imagine when there is less biodiversity, less other-than-human beings, less old growth forests? Less space and time to rest? Ecocide is not just something that is happening “out there.” It’s also happening to our minds, and to our dreamscapes. However, this is not a message of doom. It is also a way through. We can expand the scope of our dreams by engaging more with worlds beyond the human.

Dreampunks: Punching Phantasms in the Face and Distributing/Democratizing Dream-space since the Future

Enter the archetype of the #dreampunk, about which we’ve mused on a little, mostly through poetry. Dreampunk is a speculative aesthetic and subgenre of fantasy & sci-fi literature that, as some of its cultural stewards describe, engages with the questions “is this real?” and furthermore “what does ‘real'‘ mean?” Dreampunk questions the binary of real/false, fiction and nonfiction, and therefore, is also a way of being that questions ableist grand narratives about sanity and consensus reality.

Dreampunk, I think, is an aesthetic in need of attention now precisely because we live in an era where, because of a cocktail of social media, toxic skepticism, and fake news, it is easier than ever for many people to be deceived, their views of the world changed or shifted with a single click. Many many people already ARE asking “Is this real?” about our reality, I would wager more than they were 30 years ago. But this state of affairs doesn’t really have a name that feels true yet. It still feels like a bad dream. It’s a sub-reality of the Anthropocene that I struggle to name, but one name could be the Oneirocene—the age of dreams. Yet, this society seems undeserving of such a lyrical name—I fear too many of us are not dreaming well, but hypnotized, entrapped. So perhaps what we are in the thick of now is the Phantasmacene—the era of illusion, where sorcery has gotten out of control because of our overconfidence in magic’s insignificance (some day, we’ll reach the Oneirocene…).

So far the subterranean zeitgeist of surreality, skepticism, absurdity, and apathy bubbling up from our shadows and subconscious is being taken advantage of by malicious actors whose apathy and nihilism make them dangerous—apathy and nihilism turned against one’s kin make a dream terrorist, not a dreampunk. Dreampunk is not in favor of deception that will lead to hate, rather dreampunk is interested in enchantment, and in forms of “healthy deception” like those used by magicians for healing. (The trolls on 4Chan who made up #Pizzagate weren’t dreampunks...they missed the mark.)

When I started using this word last year, I wasn’t aware of its existence as a genre at all. I’ve now become aware of a more widespread notion of this term as a niche genre and vaporwave variant, and the ways in which others are also leaning into the philosophical potential of the word, such as my gifted contemporaries at the Dreaming Kinarchy page. I am excited about these connections and synchronicities, because they point to the widespread desire for a punk culture of dreams and myths. A subculture that doesn’t reject mythology and lore, but sees the subversive value in it, a culture that sees the dreams of oppressed and minoritized people as sources of the mythic—moreover, dreampunk is about resisting the co-opting of such liberatory mythos by “empire.”

Below I’ll continue to engage with my ‘own’ interpretation of dreampunk, through it in no way is meant to invalidate or erase any other work done on the term. For me dreampunk is a sort of spiritual descendant of cyberpunk—a dystopian hero archetype developed through science fiction and hacker culture in the 80’s and 90’s. The cyberpunk is one who utilizes computerized systems that are often designed for control in unpredictable ways. As discussed extensively in McKenzie Wark’s “Hacker Manifesto,” this figure is often an unrecognized innovator, because they naturally test the limits and weaknesses of systems in ways that the creators of those systems never could, and often bring about those systems’ unrealized capacities. However, the cyberpunk is often (unfortunately) a martyr, too, and somewhat of a tragic figure because her endeavors, her resourcefulness and creativity, often end up absorbed into the apparatus of the state or pirated by corporations that don’t always have the best interests of the majority in mind. 

Instead of operating primarily in the realm of cyberspace, the dreampunk’s domain is then imaginative space, mythic space, what Jungians might call the collective unconscious. She is the hacker of the dreamworld. As a hacker thinks outside the box from an engineering perspective, dreampunks use mystical, altered, or outlawed states of consciousness as a way of breaking through the limits of ambient ways of seeing, knowing, and imagining, within a context of anti-capitalist/anti-authoritarian & de-colonial critique. Therefore there are similarities with the figure of the ‘psychonaut,’ but the latter is not devoid of problems, because it carries with it very little analysis of power, privilege, or the cultural appropriation endemic to psychedelic culture. Dreampunk has more decolonial potential than ‘psychonaut.’

I think as trans and queer folks, we had some unintentional training in mythic remediation and dreampunk-craft before we knew how to name it. Because we had to stretch the limits of cultural stories, narratives, folktales, fables, and myths that were passed down to us, from which we had been erased. We had to find ourselves in them. I have done a lot of excavating and reading between the lines… that’s one of the reasons I wanted to be a cultural historian… because the worst threat, the biggest enemy, was No Story. Like the Nothing from The Neverending Story. Actually, exactly like that. The Nothing is a dark storm of destruction, a wave of anti-matter that sweeps across the land of Fantasia—a living world generated by the dreams of humanity. When humans lose hope and forget their dreams, the Nothing grows stronger and destroys more of Fantasia. The Nothing is a metaphor for what happens when we cannot regenerate imagination. However, I don’t interpret the Nothing as strictly despair. It is also a form of psychological subjugation that occurs when others actually don’t want us to dream or are dismissive of our dreams because they see them as having no ‘real’ value (like when Bastian’s rather emotionless Dad scolds him for having his ‘head in the clouds’). A more sinister form of this would be the scenario where those in power are actually invested in reducing your ability to dream, because, as the anti-hero Gmork says in the Neverending Story, people who have given up their dreams are easier to control.

Going through despair is normal, losing the story is normal. Throwing out a toxic story may be necessary. But we have to be able to build story again. Especially those of us who are left out of dominant culture’s stories… Needless to say, The Neverending Story is a classic dreampunk/mythpunk text.

Queer Nature could be described as a dreampunk project because in addition to teaching place based skills we hope to steward futuristic (and ancient) narratives of belonging and resilience for QTBIPOC & LGBTQIA people. It is a restorying of relations and a reminder of the Land as Reality past all the bullshit and noise.

Dreampunks are necessary because cosmology, world views, grand narratives, whatever you want to call them (especially in globalized age of mass media or in authoritarian societies) are one of the most basic systems of control, encompassing all other systems. Paradoxically, worldviews can be roadmaps for connection with life and deep relationship with the other-than-human, so when they are utilized for alienation and division, or have that outcome, we are in an imaginative crisis, a war on dreams. The jaded may say that if the stories are what wound us, then we should take away the stories—a great example of that type of (toxic) cynicism is Landmark Education. But we don’t believe that tactic will work in the long run because even though some stories need to die, humans are story seers and storymakers and we cannot live without stories, without meaning, in a resilient way. Rigidity and dogmatism are actually the enemy of story and myth, especially in their living forms—this is something that you can learn by following stories on landscapes, like through wildlife tracking and other forms of pattern recognition. 

The problem is that if we do not have healthy, resilient stories, (as well as their expression in funny memes and things that make us laugh—the rise of funny memes about wildlife beyond cats is a good sign in our view) and the means for creating them through access to deep rest and the more-than-human world, toxic stories will take hold. Healthy and liberatory story-systems are like a cultural immune system. When we lack them, we are vulnerable to manipulation. (Some people have talked about Zen being a tradition that is hugely resilient and immune to would-be 'mythic/memetic viruses’ because koans and parables act can function to essentially root out toxic views—I see this as similar to the action of a white blood cell on a pathogen). This vulnerability has been well demonstrated through the effective psychological operations against the American public conducted by psychographics company Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign, as well as the torrents of memes unleashed by trolls and alt-right keyboard warriors during the so-called Great Meme Wars. These phenomena, and more, helped “win” the election. Propaganda especially targets and takes advantage of those who are ambivalent, apathetic, or bored. (And those states, like all emotions, are not inherently bad… they actually beg to be understood. Read this article by Karla McLaren about how apathy is an emotional strategy to mask anger).

Memetic warfare—a digital form of psychological warfare—has been studied by DARPA since almost the beginning of the millennium. Memetic warfare is a thing folks—it’s a real, legitimate tool—memes are not something anybody should make fun of. Instead, we should take them seriously. For too long, leftists, and many who identify as progressive, have been wary of the big M’s (myth, magic, and mysticism… should we add memes to that?) to a fault—even when they have been embraced, in the case of memes, their underlying potential and power has not been widely acknowledged, and the M’s are basically seen as sources of entertainment. While some of the folks behind the “Great Meme Wars” actually outright refer to memes as magic.  I’ve been studying and thinking about memes, mythology, mysticism, and the art of persuasion for 15 years. I couldn’t get through two degrees in religious studies without studying persuasion and so-called “charisma.” The book Poker Without Cards convinced me of the importance of the former back in 2008 when a lot of the “Great Meme Warriors” were probably babies. It’s a shame that so many have ignored the power of the mind as both a force multiplier and also as a contested site of weaponization and conquest—this has been true long before the internet existed. The consequences of liberal, progressive, and leftist skepticism about ‘magic’ suck a lot.

The Gradual Ambush of Rest

Before I go on to talk about sleep and rest more specifically, I want to mention the work of Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry and the one who coined the phrase Rest as Resistance. I hope you have heard of her—if not, look her up! The Nap Ministry is a project that creates spaces for collective rest as an act of ceremony. It actively imagines what it would be like for us to attend a communal space like church and rest, even literally, sleep together. Her work, which is rooted in her theological studies as an M.Div as well as in her prior experience in the performing arts, is a critical interruption of the business-as-usual of grind culture, where everything is seen as an opportunity for profit and burnout is inevitable. Her work brings attention to the racism and white supremacy inherent in grind culture, where the false myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps acts as a way of gaslighting people who are actually dealing with layers and layers of systemic oppression. This makes rest, especially ritualized rest, a crucial act of resistance for black folks (especially women), and other oppressed and targeted groups. Queer Nature is %110 on board with Hersey’s message, and we are huge fans!

 In the book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, author Jonathan Crary weaves a veritable manifesto against all the ways industrial and post-industrial society wages war against our ability to sleep and rest. He points out all the ways that sleep is one of the biggest barriers to extractive economic growth under capitalism. The average nightly sleep cycle is down several hours from where it was 100 years ago. Corporate and state-sanctioned efforts to marginalize sleep, rest, and the natural cover provided by night are widespread, from the pervasiveness of light in commercial spaces, the legal and architectural designs preventing sleep in public places, to the ongoing quest for the sleepless soldier in military medicine. Crary also discusses how class inequity creates a grotesque situation where only the sleep of the rich is protected.  

A big takeaway for us from Hersey’s and Crary’s work is that incipient in the war against sleep and against our circadian rhythms, is a war against our dreams.* This systemic erosion of dreamspace, while not a ‘conspiracy’ per se, unfortunately seems to be an emergent quality of the complex system of society as it currently is. Which is to say, it carries a different, more deeply rooted danger than if it were a conspiracy plotted and executed by a discrete group of “bad guys.” Emergence is not all sunshine and rainbows, it’s just a word to describe phenomena in complex adaptive systems. If the systems are fucked up to begin with, emergent properties of that system do have the potential to be toxic. So, dream deprivation, as an emergent property of extractive capitalism is backed by very powerful forces who truly do benefit from the dispossession of creativity from oppressed and minoritized people, including the average worker. Creativity is fueled by many things, but some of the big ones are deep sleep, and relatedly, “boredom” and the ability to daydream while awake (Fisher also discussed how foolish it was for American culture to position boredom as an enemy when it often is the beginning of creativity and other emotional breakthrough processes). These are things that our society seems to now consider optional or annoyingly in the way of productivity. 

Crary talks alot about state torture and psychological control practices like those used by military and law enforcement, and quite a bit of it involves not just sleep deprivation, but also sensory abuse during times of wakefulness, such as bright lights, loud noises, etc. Constant stimulation erases the ability of our minds to think and plan, thus create, because all of those cognitive processes require space. It is well known to neuroscientists who study dreams that the brain is able to create more new neural connections, solve problems and see new solutions, when in relaxed states. Crary is suggesting that the sensory environment of late capitalist society is effectively a low level, chronic form of psychological control, resulting in a more complicit and suggestible state. At the same time, the people who are able to isolate themselves and control their environments more (i.e. the wealthy) are those who are more likely to be able to reap the neurological benefits from rest states, create startups, become CEOs… you get the picture. 

In my estimation, one of the reasons dreamspace marginalization is tolerated at all is because systems of empire have come to mimic dreams. There is an aesthetic about some contemporary societies that is dreamlike, hypnagogic, almost dreampunk. Think of the screens, filters, and feeds that inhabit our environments and beckon our attention. The neon lights in the darkness. Some scholars and writers have referred to commodities that are designed to sensuously allure us—digitized and synced, glowing, blinking, or vibrating softly with haptic feedback—as ‘enchanted’ objects. One would have to hope this nomenclature is tongue in cheek. Because truly, this is hypnosis, not enchantment. When we are hypnotized by something, it is not fully consensual. Hypnosis has a purpose—to control, to identify or isolate a problem, a secret. Hypnosis is a controlled state where consent can not be withdrawn. It is also literally sleep without dreams, by the way. Hypnos means sleep in ancient Greek, and “osis” denotes a state of disease, as in “psychosis” being a state of the breakdown of the psyche. The dreamlike state I often find myself in while trying to navigate the world I live in is not dreampunk, it is a trauma response akin to depersonalization, the bell jar effect. However, within this hypnotized state, I believe it is possible to break in to a liberatory dreamspace, as if through a backdoor…

Dreampunk as a word is itself a site for mythic remediation—which is bioremediation at the level of meaning (in this view meaning is part of ecology, which is the view taken by the field of biosemiotics). The word is an example of the aesthetic at large—because there is no easy answer to “what does (a) dreampunk look like?” Similar to the word “queer,” the word for me creates space rather than describes or prescribes space. Language play has always been a way to track magic and move it around, make way for it like a gardener prepares a bed for planting, to cast spells, to create space with the paradox of circumscription.

I’m not just talking about dreampunk as an identity. The point of this isn’t strictly identity, much less mine. No, dreampunk is an archetype through which dreams and relations are made.

(Some) Hackers addressed and still do address questions of freedom and privacy in an age increasingly governed and influenced by cyberspace and the data industrial complex. Some of my most nagging questions these days are not that different from theirs. How can we democratize (in the true sense of the word meaning rule by the people), re(distribute), decentralize, the means to dream and heal our stories. We live in conditions in which these means have been taken away — through ecocide and environmental racism, through war and conquest, through obsession with profit and property, through xenophobia and fear of the Other, through intrusions into our privacy and dismissals of our dreams as dangerous. Yes, dreampunks still do share a lot with their cyberpunk cousins. If, as we’ve written about in the past, part of mysticism is longing for a transformed world, than count both the cyberpunk and the dreampunk under such a banner. I hope, in the future, we can join in solidarity. Ecosystems, after all, are the original cybernetic systems.

(To be continued…)

*There has been some interesting work by cultural historians and others on the history and cultural context of sleep and circadian rhythms. For example, in medieval Europe some have argued it was normal for people to sleep in two phases and wake up at least once in the night to engage in certain activities like prayer, reflection, dream interpretation, sexual activity, or socializing. See the book At Day’s Close, by A. Roger Ekirch.

Toward a Multispecies Apocalyptic Shepherdcraft

Hi! 👋🏼 I’m So, one of the Queer Nature co-creators. I was initiated into earth-based skills by sheep. 🐑 I worked as a shepherd seasonally throughout college as a way to connect with my Balkan ancestral life ways.
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In particular I worked with small dairy flocks who were part of projects that were building soil (& carbon) through “mob stocking” or rotational grazing, which is more similar to how wild ungulates graze. To me that relationship allowed me to see the toxic madness of Western culture’s war against animism and ecology, and one of the ways that manifests is the way we treat animals, and sheep in particular (even though the main religions of Western civ are full of sheep and lamb imagery). It’s really sad how we project so much of our shadow onto sheep, especially with regard to our fears about our own complicity and conformity. But sheep actually take care of us, and particularly for me they took care of my ancestors and I consider them my indirect ancestors. There are a lot of stories of human societies being soulmates with a hooved species, and ours in Southeastern Europe was distorted by the processes of empire, but it’s still there, if you choose to look for it.
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Sheep also help provide a model of how I, as a queer person who probably won’t biologically reproduce, can be an ‘indirect’ ancestor to others, human and non. Sheep teach about the intelligence of the collective, they teach how ecological knowledge can be stored in the body, they teach about trust, accountability, and interspecies community. They also really teach about the gifts of fear and vigilance. Sheep have mad survival skills. There is a reason Cretan shepherds during WW2 were a key part of one of the most remarkable guerrilla operations in European history. Because they saw and experienced the land, the terrain through the eyes of the sheep. In being a shepherd, they also were shepherded *by* these animals that have become a metaphor for stupidity in this society. 
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Exploring mysticism as an ecological role is a big part of my and our work. My work with sheep was really about me realizing that I would do anything for them, which is along the lines of the old, esoteric understanding of shepherding. We have dozens of portals to mysticism but one of them is surrendering your life to an Other who is beyond human, whom you love very much and whom reminds you, in a way, how to be human, who keeps you accountable to life.
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That is why I have the words “Shepherd” engraved inside my wedding ring. No, being a shepherd is not necessarily about control, power, and dominance. It’s not just about “Jesus” or Kings (what if you considered that the kings and church heirarchs that interpreted millennial/apocalyptic spiritual movements for their own gain *used* an *already very powerful and potent symbol* to *consolidate power.?*) Yeah, the Big Stories would have you believe a lot of bullshit about sheep and our relationship to them and what it means. (But the Big Stories didn’t uplift queer or non-binary shepherds either.) In the end, if that had me reject the whole topic out of hand, that would have been a “win” for the dominators of “nature” who don’t want anyone in an oppressed or minoritized position to be #dreampunks and interpret ecology and mythology for themselves and their own liberation.
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It would be convenient if it was all that simple as Shepherd = Overlord, but it’s not. It’s an open secret among the old guard of “European” shepherds that we serve the cloven-Hooved ones. And of course there is an aspect of trauma bonding in domestication, and in our relationship with sheep. Let’s also talk about that rigid, shame-rooted tendency to just label things as trauma-derived and walk away, as if that’s supposed to be a moral judgement and set all the healing in motion. Try to tell any group of folks that have escaped disaster together and become interdependent that their relationship is co-dependent. Yeah, no it doesn’t work like that. Us and sheep? What if we’re escaping the disaster of civilization’s biggest toxicities together. Slowly, because it won’t happen overnight like in the movies. And I think it’s possible , but it’s a science fictional future, where we graze our micro-flocks in abandoned cities. Shepherding is a problematic paradigm when the shepherds are always white, male, heterosexual, or abusive. But we can at least try to imagine alternatives.
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We also must pause for a moment to note that many Americans have never experienced flocks mostly used for milk or wool, much less carbon (grass) farming. And with carbon farming, some of that is known now through the work of some cattle ranchers but small ungulates like sheep provide many benefits to the land like small hooves and small high nitrogen, harder poop that disturb the soil less. Many ancestral shepherds also used mixed sheep & goat flocks which is also better ecologically because they eat different things. Some people think ranching and herding is about growing meat. Animals with short lives, not given a chance at deep multi species relationship with us. Well, in ancient times my ancestors would rarely keep a flock only for meat. When you are around a dairy flock you have constant contact with them, with these many gentle mothers, and you see a whole different side of them than if you were just looking at them as future meat. And you form attachments you never would otherwise. Attachments that will surprise you with their depth.
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I don’t see shepherding as humans necessarily using another species for their survival. Of course most animal farming is extractive and massive and terrible—but saying that is the easy part! I see that there is *also* the possibility of co-survival, when there is respect, reverence, and love. The kind of multi species kinship that Donna Haraway talks about. It’s a pretty funny paradox from an anti-civ perspective that both Pinar and I became enamored of this work through our (separate!) relationships with sheep. We are still trailing these mythic story lines, still figuring it out, and we don’t have all the answers. But we do know that our time as shepherds is borrowed time from the Mother of Life and Death. For a short time (our lifetimes) her rocks become bones and hooves, her soil becomes wool and flesh, and her water becomes blood. And for a time we protect her. She allows us to. She gives us the gift of imitating a fraction, *a fraction* of what she does on a daily basis. And one day we will return to her, and our flesh will become grass. And the herbivores will do what they do, converting cellulose to a more bioavailable form, without which many predators and omnivores would not be able to access much of the biomass on earth. No big deal...
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When Pınar worked as a shepherd for a Diné elder and master weaver at Black Mesa, they saw a different side of shepherding too. The less told side. The side where people marginalized by the US government already ARE living with sheep post-apocalyptically. Sheep and goats being among the only creatures that can convert the desert plant life to forms more bioavailable for human and other then human use. And as Pınar often tells, looking at all those imprints of hooves in the sandy soil day after day was what calibrated their mind for tracking. The elder they lived with would say that looking at the ground is them reading the newspaper every morning. When you are a shepherd you have to pay attention to where the sheep go, to their tracks. The critics are just going to say that this is because we are protecting our property. But have they ever considered that we see the sheep as our siblings, our aunties and mothers? What about how the sheep teach us to identify plants, to navigate, to find our way home? When we forget those things they’ll teach us again. Yes, there is a story there beyond trauma, beyond control. The ironic part is that at this point in the project of late capitalist civilization hardly anyone around us is experiencing this relationship anymore, much less folks with some sort of access to media platforms, so the ones in power and the ones making stories, the loud voices, will define for us something we never even experienced.
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Needless to say our r/ship with agriculture... it’s complicated!

On Interspecies Humility

by Faun – April 2019

“In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nature Needs a New Pronoun

Seeing sound, smelling the past/ differentiating between hundreds of types of plants/ practicing herbal medicine/ weaving/ creating detailed mental maps of landscapes to recall where food is cached/ participating in interspecies language systems to transmit information at the speed of sound... these are just some of the things other-than-humans can do and that are part of extrahuman (“non-human”) cultures. Other species undoubtedly also have abilities that we (speaking as subjects of colonial “Western culture,”) don’t know about or might not have names for.

             Human knowledge can often be traced back to wild knowledge and culture (I often wish that instead of the tired old nature/culture dichotomy, we’d say human culture & extrahuman culture—at least if we still want to do dichotomies). We at Queer Nature love studying evasion and stealth skills in the context of survival and connection to place—especially as folks of targeted statuses and ‘apocalyptic naturalists’ in an era of climate chaos. One mentor of ours, a former special operations forces instructor, shared with us that evasion experts often travel along what they call the “military crest,” a path along contour line about 3/4 of the way up a hillside, just below the ridge. This is of course, a very common place to find animal trails and is also a popular location for deer and elk to bed during the day. Professional evaders avoid being sky-lit on ridgelines, they travel only at dawn, dusk, and in inclement weather. They move slowly and deliberately. They might even climb a tree because people rarely look up in a dense forest. They step in each others’ tracks to hide their group numbers, like wolves do. As wildlife trackers we realized that all these things are things that our extrahuman kin, the deer and the wolves and the bears, already do, all the time. These vivid moments reminded us of the expertise of other-than-human beings, and humbled us in the recognition of all that we continue to owe to them in these times in which we live.  (* Often we are reminded in our studies that so many of these skills that were learned from extrahuman cultures were beautifully adapted to human cultures by land-based peoples, and then copied or appropriated from indigenous peoples by imperial and colonial forces.)

            The word ‘humility,’ meaning a “modest or low view of one’s own importance,” has a striking etymology. It comes from the Latin humus, which means soil. To be humble is to ‘lower’ oneself toward the soil—toward the earth themselves—not out of self-loathing, but out of a desire to be in respectful relationship with another being. There seems, then, to be a paradox in humility—because what is more powerful, more full of potential and multiplicity, than the soil? What better model for so(i)lidarity than the ground that supports us all, and also decomposes our bodies after we die in order to share and redistribute our metabolic capital as nutrition for other beings? Learning skills of survival, evasion, and stealth has taught us humility and inter (and intra)-species empathy in very literal ways, because we’ve been pressed up against the soil, digging in it, covered in it, warmed by it and chilled by it. We’ve learned that the soil is way more powerful than us, and also that we’re spiritually stronger when we spend more time with them.

             In 1998, Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia proposed that healthcare professionals ditch the term ‘cultural competence,’ and instead practice something they called ‘cultural humility’ in order to better provide care in a multicultural world.  In cultural competence, minority cultures are treated as monolithic entities about which one can gain totalizing knowledge in order to facilitate successful transactions (deemed successful, of course, by the ones in power). However, with cultural humility, knowledge of the other gained through an extractive context in order to meet presumptuous goals of ‘care’ is called out as harmful. Cultural humility is instead a stance that centers lifelong learning without the transactional and patronizing expectation of competency, and also centers learning-with as opposed to learning-about. Approaches to this must involve acknowledgement of one’s own positions of power and privilege in relation to another as well as a commitment to continuous self-reflection throughout these relationships. Fundamentally, cultural humility is an orientation that embraces not-knowing in service of respecting another person’s sovereignty and expertise in their own culture and self.

            If cultural humility challenges the notion that we can ever be “competent” in another person’s culture, interspecies humility challenges the notion that we can possess totalizing knowledge about another species—and, for example, that we could ever gain enough knowledge about other species to fully quantify their roles in ecosystems, as is hoped for in traditional modes of conservation. Furthermore, interspecies humility acknowledges that other species can know “more” than we know about what we might call botany, zoology, chemistry, tracking, meteorology, and other fields. They also may know things about “us,” about human psychology, sociology, or biology that we would have no way of apprehending other than (maybe) through a practice of deep listening and trust building with the more-than-human world. With that said, to speak of disparities in knowledge among species reveals a problem inherent in our epistemology, for each organism has their own knowledge systems, ways of knowing and perceiving the world that allow them to gain strategic knowledge about their environment. Many people would say so-called modern humans are really good at this‚ at data gathering. But what if we’re actually very bad at it, from an ecological perspective? What happens when we use techno-science to gain and amass “strategic knowledge” about our environment at a very fast pace, in service of profit and control way beyond what we need to survive, in species isolation where we are separated from accountability with the rest of the living world? What if knowledge evolved to be used in service of living and surviving in a multi-species world made up of multi-species cultures? What if it did not evolve to be used for profit? Capital in its current forms may be a sort of cybernetic metastasis of knowledge.

            Interspecies humility is not just a scientific concept either; it is an ecological and interpersonal set of practices. It involves listening at a depth that most of us were never taught, in a way that de-centers ourselves and centers the one speaking (or tweeting, or howling), because listening without expectation of ‘getting answers’ or ‘fixing it’ is the first step toward healing trauma. We live under the spell of an imperial science, where to be a biologist, and therefore to be the creator and purveyor of knowledge about the biotic world, one must have certain degrees and do certain things like conduct experiments and publish articles. This creates a heuristic that can be dangerous for the earth and contrary to ecological resilience—it dispossesses us of our ability to listen intently because we think that we aren’t authorized to.  With that said, to think we are anti-science would be a brazen misinterpretation of our work. We are “anti” the ways that the practice of science and the philosophies behind these practices can perpetuate attitudes that harm beings, life, and the earth. We are also “anti” the ways that the institutionalization of science can erase the presence of indigenous knowledge, or lead people to devalue their own experience. We are “anti” the ways in which the practice of science can be disproportionately connected to the economy (especially in ways that uphold inequity). However, none of this means that we don’t appreciate the institutionalized practice of science. Often, we do, and the scientists whose work we follow often do interdisciplinary, intersectional, culturally humble work or work that questions humancentrism. The critical ecologists, the queer biologists, the prophets of climate chaos, and the muckrakers of monocultures—they are definitely out there.

             In this same breath, we aren’t entitled to knowledge about non-humans either, especially if we keep thinking that listening leads to knowledge which leads to producing something in order to gain capital. Especially if we keep thinking that knowledge can be gained honorably without relationship. If we aren’t entitled to knowledge, but still want to build relationship with other-than-human beings, we must expand the concept of consent beyond the human, too. Surely this will lead to an existential moment, because how does the land and their other-than-human denizens say yes or no? (How has rape culture been projected onto the land, in our sentimental odes to their “fertility” and “receptivity?”) With interspecies humility, I see each individual as an expert in their own species-ology, and my role is at best a witness of this expertise. I realize that species-level generalizations, such as those advertised in “field guides” might only be of provisional use when I really get to know the individual denizens of those “species” living in my backyard—this is something trackers have known for thousands of years. This is because these individuals possess personhood, personality, and you don’t have to sentimentalize it, you can tell from the tracks they leave behind. This personality is partially the ongoing result of a lifelong conversation with their environment, definitely the equivalent of several PhDs, if we’re going to go there. Who cares if they philosophize about their own existence—most humans don’t even have time for that. (The benchmark of sentience as a signifier of personhood is elitist and useless when harbored by a species that exists in toxic systems of human supremacy and species isolation.)

My initiation into interspecies humility—though I wouldn’t find the words for it until years later—came the summer I turned twenty-one, spent working on a sheep dairy farm in mid-coast Maine. Having grown up in a Greek-American family, sheep had always triggered a dreamy nostalgia in me. Their meat, milk, wool, and presence on the landscape were things I had come to associate with my time spent in Greece as a kid. My great-grandfather had been a shepherd in Arcadia, the traditional home of the god Pan—himself the ancient patron of shepherds—and my mom had grown up in a pastoral village thick with the smells and sounds of the cloven-hoofed. On a spiritual level, I felt somehow descended from these creatures. Although they didn’t give birth to me, they unequivocally made that birth possible because they and my ancestors took care of each other in order for each to survive. To me, sheep are one of the proverbial uncles or aunts to the human species—not our direct ancestors, but our auxiliary ones, no less important. (As a queer creature who may not have children of my own, I often wonder with my spouse Pinar—to whom will we one day be—if not the much-romanticized direct ancestors—ecological ancestors?)

  As a student of religious studies as well as animal sciences, I also sensed a holy paradox in sheep and the relationship between our two species. “Sheep” are synonymous with conformity, complacency, and stupidity in popular culture while also simultaneously being a symbol for the Christian god. Something seems pretty off there, to say the least. Ovis aries, the domestic sheep, is thought to have been domesticated 8,000 years ago in the Near East, and without them sharing with us their ability to turn cellulose into protein, my ancestors and I certainly would not have existed. A split or double consciousness haunts our relationship with these tender yet resilient creatures. I often wonder if we in Western culture, through our shifting stories and collective memories of these beings have come to resent them and view them with ridicule partially because of our obvious ancestral dependence on them—a dynamic that echoes with mother-wounds that become all the more inflamed in a misogynistic society. Is it possible that we could be in some sort of avoidant or abusive relationship with an entire species? Unfortunately, it’s probably not just one species—but many.

When I started becoming interested in agrarianism and place-based skills in college I found myself drawn to be near these gentle beings, to enter into my own relationship with them. I sought out sheep farms that centered sustainable grazing—which appeared to be a strange revival of ancient relationships between ungulates and grasses within the constraints of late-capitalist rural landscapes. I also was drawn to dairy sheep because of how much I loved the many cheeses derived from their milk, especially feta and kasseri, both staples of rustic Greek cuisine. Dairy sheep, I came to find, have special temperaments because unlike animals raised solely for meat, they often live much longer and also have lots of contact with humans over their lifetimes. This type of contact—which includes milking—is intimate, filled with an unavoidable interspecies sensuality, and therefore requires trust to be built. Through this the dairy shepherd becomes all the more part of the ovine family—she is stitched into their social web and therefore is given more opportunities to see them as individuals (which they already are). To be trusted by a sheep—or by any herd or flock ungulate whose nervous systems have been shaped over thousands of years by their wariness of predators—is a huge honor. It’s what helped me understand what humility felt like. Horse people understand this, too.

In several years of working with sheep every summer, I watched their incredible mix of gentleness and resilience shine through in a hundred ways. I saw their unabated glee when they were led to a fresh pasture full of clover. I saw how discerning they were with what they ate—how they could differentiate between plants like trained botanists. I saw their vigilance when, in response to a threat, they attuned to each other’s body language with the speed of electricity. I noticed how they seemed to know when a storm was coming. I marveled at how their wool both kept them cool in the heat and warm in the cold, and helped them belong wherever they stood on the earth. I admired them. I fell in love with them.

It seemed like most humans—especially in a culture of hyper-individualism—wanted to be less like sheep, but after getting to know them, I wanted to be more like them. They seemed to belong so well to the land. They were so emotionally in tune with each other because their survival had always been a collective endeavor. When you fall in love with a being, you see their soul—and this applies across species, too. The ovine soul is hard for many of us socialized in ecocidal cultures to see, mostly because we don’t expect it to be there—the system of human supremacy benefits from the alleged soullessness of these beings. But I found their souls to be like a camouflaged bird’s nest—difficult to notice from afar, but up close, a marvel. Subtlety can be brilliant—and it’s often a successful survival strategy. As I started to talk to other shepherds, and read shepherding literature like the French Serpent of Stars that bordered on the mystical, I realized that this experience of deep, heartbreaking kinship with sheep was an open secret within this rustic vocation. Shepherding was like an ancient mystery cult that enshrined the paradox that sheep were the ones that took care of us, not the other way around.

Scholars in the critical field of animal studies are now starting to reframe domestication, too (even though people who work the land and who are living in the thick of multi-species family [eco]systems already knew this). What they are affirming is that “domestication” (which is such a varied and diverse phenomenon to begin with) is not just about power-over—it’s not the history of human dominion or “independence.” That’s a narrative that colonial cultures (and certain religions like later forms of Christianity) imposed on it. The story of domestication(s) could also be the opposite—the history of human dependence, interspecies relating, and therefore, vulnerability, accountability, responsibility…  the old dichotomies of domesticated versus wild, agrarian versus hunter, don’t help anymore, because it’s all a fucking spectrum.

Another dairy farm I worked at several years later was home to a sheep I’ll never forget. Sydney was a small black Icelandic ewe, and she was by far the most gregarious sheep I’d ever met, remarkably fond of humans. Any time a person, (familiar or new) approached the flock, she would rush ahead to meet them. Many shepherds will tell you, especially of the more hardy and ancient breeds, that there is often an “alpha sheep” who act as the recon scout for the rest of the flock, sniffing out new aspects of their environment in order to detect danger. However, there was another sheep in this flock that better fit the description of that stoic but wary guardian—Sydney on the other hand had a charming silliness about her and seemed simply obsessed with making new human friends at any opportunity. The other sheep seemed to regard her inter-species sociality with apathy, as if they were used to it. When I would go sit with the flock in the pasture, Sydney would always come over, ears flopping in sync with her urgent stride, to greet me. I’ll never forget one morning when I was sitting in the pasture and she came up to me, circled in front of me several times like a dog, and then sat right in my lap! We sat cuddling for a while, and I couldn’t quite believe what was happening, given all of the conditioning I’d had around who and what “sheep” were supposed to be. Recalling memories of sweet Sydney now, I am humbled once again as I realize that in her immense curiosity and love for those beyond her own species, Sydney was practicing interspecies humility long before I ever put words to it for myself.

Dreampunk Part 2: Liberatory Cybernetics and Mythic Remediation

(A sequel-ish thing to the poem “Trans(Eco)Futurism and Dreampunk”)

Dreampunks became necessary when the future became colonized.

When we started to sleep less...

When sleep became inimical to capitalist progress...

Our anachronistic ancestor is the cyberpunk—she saw the subversive power in a type of interconnection that was developed for control. 

Her domain was cyberspace, ours the dreamworld, which you could also call the underworld.

Because that realm of bit and baud that sprouted its wires around us while we dreamt in our cribs 

has fused all the more with our senses, our memories, our imagination, with the earth’s flesh—global capitalism makes Gaia into an unwitting cyborg.

Systems of empire have come to mimic dreams.(1) Screens, filters, and feeds create a hypnotic hypnagogia. But hypnosis is not enchantment. Hypnosis is sleep without dreams. Hypnosis is a controlled state where consent can not be withdrawn.

So we must then be the hackers of the mythic. (And hackers have always been dreampunks, too.) And we must be then bards of mythcore, singing outlawed songs through a cybernetic synthesis of the virtual and the chthonic.

Which is to say we want myth and magic to be available to all, we want freedom of revelation. We want to disrupt projects of dream warfare, and dream piracy. We want to restore information and currency to the ecosystems from which they have been extracted.

We became necessary when our society told us to reject myths but secretly kept one for them$elve$.

When we were told church and state were separate while politics became a priesthood, while consumerism became a covenant.

We become necessary when creativity becomes merely another metric for production.

When dominant culture is stuck in the reoccurring nightmare of their eventual loss of control.

We became necessary when you institutionalized us for creating and inhabiting other worlds before you could think to make them.

When your hate put us in your shadow. We’re going to turn that cover of darkness into fuel for our practices of divination, for our oneiromancy. We’re going to dream the most liberatory dreams in that shadow of yours.

We became necessary when you legislated against our Eros.

When you said we weren’t real. When you said we weren’t human. 

That’s when we became // Fucking Necessary //

A dreampunk is not just someone who sleeps or who can rest. Because who has the ability to rest “peacefully” is also a problem of power (& often a parody of peace).

Dreampunks are ones who know that sleep, rest, and dreams—whatever the quantity or mode—are mystical practices, practices to invite the earth to dream with us and through us. Sometimes we even forego sleep in order to take back time from empire, under a digital glow we write our dreams, like the scribes who wrote by green foxfire. We have no monastery. But we’re finding it, that dark tower crouching in the future, its bells tolling for us backwards through time. We can already see its shadow.

We long for the earth to enter us with her roots and hyphae—that other Holy Spirit, ((the Holy Soul)), the one who comes from below. We long For possession of another kind, an old kind, the kind that grasps you to free you. So it is also an erotic practice(2) (and a beyond human erotic, as mysticism has often been). We want to donate these delta waves to the divine like blood, to all the beings who can’t rest because they’re surviving ecocide. 

So I say to you, before you wake up.

Dream.

~ So/@borealfaun

1. see the poem by @borealfaun “images used to be gods”

2. The notion of the erotic as a force for remediating white supremacy and conjuring eco justice are teachings we are seeing in the work of fellow dreampunk brontë velez 

The Case for Mysticism (Dreampunk Journal Notes)

One of our many (living) definitions for “Mysticism” @QueerNature is surrendering your life to what you love. What does this look like in times of eco-social fracture?

((Pictured in the photo is a Starburst Anemone—An intertidal being who is helping us apprentice to the mysteries of moving between worlds))

“Mysticism” has come to mean certain things in its European / (originating from Greek) context of use, which is all useful stuff, but we’re also curious about expanding these historical definitions, at least for ourselves. We don’t necessarily want to prescribe what it means for others, merely we want to riff on possibilities. 

Many dictionaries would define it as the practice of seeking encounter or union with a divine or sacred reality, often in a way that is very direct and apparent to the senses, or experiential. It has often been used in the context of organized religion to identify devotees who expressed their religiosity in unorthodox ways. Many mystics who gained public attention were/are variously seen as heretics — I.e. they are “doing it wrong” — or alternatively, they can come to be seen as saints or prophets — affirming aspects of said religion in new ways. How mystics are interpreted by their societies, and by the people in offices of power within those religions, depended on many factors mostly having to to with power, politics, and who was friends with who. 

“Mystic” comes from the Greek word for initiate, which in the social context of mystery cults in the ancient Greco-Roman world, was one who kept their experience of cult rites secret. Nowadays “mystic” still carries some connotations of privacy (as in, one who has private mystical experiences), despite the fact that in late antique and medieval forms of Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism, mystics often became sources of public interest, spectacle, and legend, and their “private” experiences ended up having a significant impact on culture. This is part of our inspiration behind envisioning possibilities of a “Public Mysticism,” (a phrase we came up with that is inspired by Krista Tippet’s @onbeing notion of reimagining public theology), particularly in a time of anthropogenic climate chaos and ecological fracture?

What are portals to mysticism for us? We experience it as a politics beyond the human / A more than human romance with the unknown / A psycho-spiritual method for engaging with uncertainty / A way toward a “secure”/creative relationship with Mystery / Faith in the insurrectionary power of things that have yet to emergence, or that are emerging // Belief in the soul’s natural capacity for insurgence // A space of so-called ‘madness,’ un-sanity & imagination carved out by Love // An ecological Eros… 

It is trust in the feeling of sacredness in spite of what the dominant culture tells us sacredness is. It is respect for chaos. It is spiritual or soul-shaking wonder at the notion that not everything is, or even can be, known. It is the experience that the world is enchanted and alive despite being told otherwise by people (therefore it feels very related to the suppression / dismissal of animisms by processes of colonization both internal and external). Mysticism is surrendering your life to what you love.

This ties in to more of its historical & religious meaning (and political too), which we find useful: it is also longing for a transformed or Other world, often expressed through a deeply intimate (possibly life-long) relationship with an other-than-human entity. Traditionally in its use, this could be a god, but it could also be a forest, a river, a landscape, an ancestor, an entire species. 

In this relationship of having a “soulmate” (or several) who are other than human, there is a strong identification with that entity (across species or category of being), a devotion to them, even a surrender to them, that is performed. Which gets at another layer of meaning for us. Mysticism is not just the contemporary /“modern” notion of spirituality, which especially in an “American” context tends to denote what we believe. 

Mysticism is something we can do with our spirituality. One might do this through poetry, through practices of trance, through altered & neurodivergent/emergent states, through art, through activism, through meditation, body modification, walking the land, through fasting or other rituals. These rituals are, among whatever other functions they have, a way or keeping a “hole” in our ways of seeing the world so that the unanticipated can come through and not be deemed heretical, & even can be deemed holy. (& Hole-y)

Mysticism gets at the need for a productive rupture in our cosmologies. This is to also say, mysticism is dangerous especially to status quos of “empires.” It is an overflow of myth, creativity, life force, despair, joy, that can emerge as a reaction to stagnancy in systems. It is particularly important now to cultivate an anti-capitalist (and anti-fascist!) mysticism because one of the strange illusions of late capitalism in a digitized world is that things can appear to not decay. The aesthetic of “newness” abounds. But it is shallow. 

Historically we see mysticisms emerge (though not exclusively) in times that are felt as apocalyptic or catastrophic, in the wake of massive disasters or in the shadow of anticipated ones (the r/ship between the plague and medieval mysticism is but one example). This is because these things destabilize our senses of purpose, meaning, and justice. They make “strange” / or alienate/ some human systems of meaning, in ways that can contribute to new imaginaries. 

This gets us to the topic of despair. Mysticism is a way of not just metabolizing (which means processing, digesting) despair, but also alchemizing (transforming) it. It is an elusive, shimmering spiritual circuit connecting despair and joy. We believe it is a concept in need of more common notions and conversation at this time partially because despair is growing and also is still mostly seen as taboo, useless, a sign something is wrong with you, selfish, a detraction or detailing of activism, a reason for medicating someone, etc., which is all absolutely untrue. 

In fact, (as the eco-feminist psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan points out), despair is a normal reaction to colossal destabilizations of meaning and justice, is a correct complex emotion to be experiencing at this geological time, and calls for nothing less than radical transformation of how we see the world. For us this means a process of re-enchantment (this is a whole topic of its own).

It is also really worth noting right now that mysticism, as transpersonal spiritual longing, can manifest in terrible, harmful forms. Because spiritual surrender, devoting one’s soul to a god, to a concept, to something beyond the self, to ancestors, does have the potential to justify incredible violence, *especially when it is strategically used by powerful public figures as a tool to psychologically control a populist base*. 

In some ways, this goes beyond even “Psy Ops” to what one might call a “Spirit” or “Soul Ops.” Check out the brilliant article, “The Magical Thinking of the Far Right,” by Brian Phillips, on how deeply the occult influenced Nazism as well as the current alt-right movement.

Yep, Mysticism can be militant. We can’t take that part out of it. But we can work to become more aware of how esoteric & mystical ways of thinking can serve to use “smoke and mirrors” to consolidate power and justify what is actually just pure hate and resentment toward other beings. As the author of the above essay perfectly puts it:

“The unknown is the largest need of the intellect,” Emily Dickinson wrote. I happen to believe that this is true; but the kind of esotericism that thrives on the far right has never had the slightest interest in the unknown. It wants to be told the news it wants to hear, and the atmosphere of mystery it cultivates—like the pseudo-science to which it often gives rise—only exists to provide obvious lies with a vague cover of authority, a comfortably blurred prestige.” — Brian Phillips, author 

We believe that we can’t turn away from the mystical in this cultural and geological moment, even if, like Phillips points out, neopaganism is taking off in the alt right. What if this means that we should in fact, not dismiss so-called “magical thinking,” but actually realize that we have the power and right to stand for our notion of an enchanted world (and uplift the notions of marginalized peoples who are literally being killed for their stances)—one  where enchantment is a pathway to anti-fascist and anti-capitalist ways of living on the earth. We fiercely reject the practice of using mysticism to control people. (In some ways, we could argue [and certainly some have] that commodity fetishism in capitalism is a twisted form of mysticism, a zombie animism that locates power in objects manufactured through extraction of vitality from the earth). 

Being dismissive of “magical thinking” is the same logic that was and is used to justify indigenous subjugation and genocide, as well as chattel slavery. If we took the militance out of mysticism we would also risk denying that mysticism is dangerous to extractive capitalism. Systems of toxic power that rely on resource extraction “hate” when activist, protectors, guardians, surrender themselves NOT to those systems of power but to the Land. In doing so they reveal that Devotion to a system *other* than extractive capitalism and neoliberal notions of “progress” is powerful and valid. Indigenous protectors are killed for doing this. 

We are in a process of articulating these eco-mysticisms as part of what we see as a widespread effort at “mythic remediation,” being undertaken by indigenous activists and land protectors, queer brujxs, psychics, healers, mystics, astrologers, witches.... y’all know who you are!!!

We do this as an act of support and in an effort to help other queer mystics feel less alone, not in an effort to brand or coopt any movement. Since we have spent what feels like a lot of cumulative years of our lives studying and engaging with questions of human spirituality, and also feeling that experience filter through our experiences in the world as trans & queer, & also neurodivergent (or neuroemergent, a word IG follower @neuroemergent_insurgent introduced us to) would feel strange to not share what is coming up for us in these times. If this feel/thought work is useful and empowering to you, we’re honored, and it not, that’s ok too! 

It is also worth mentioning, especially because the word “mystic” has European origins, that our working definitions of this eco-mysticism also is related to the healing work going on in our relationship ecology between our ancestries from Europe and Abya Yala (South America), and our choice to use it for ourselves is deeply personal, not an ideology we want to impose on anyone.

To be continued…

Mysticism is a Survival Skill

This poem by So Sinopoulos-Lloyd @borealfaun was originally shared on Instagram several months ago.

Mysticism is a Survival Skill

Mysticism is a vital practice during times of collapse.

The mystics have always been so good at embracing unknowing, longing, and paradox. 

They’ve been good at being curious about death, and rebirth.

They’ve been good at balancing perseverance with surrender.

So why does (mysticism) feel so out of style now?

It’s delusion. It’s escape. We activists say, as we fear yielding any ground in this war of dreams.

What about the mystics who didn’t try to transcend suffering, but gave themselves fully to it? Let it shape their life, their purpose? For whom grief was prayer?

They lived during times when the world was changing. 

And their hearts were like the lichens.

Their souls were like the coral reefs.

Howling with pain at a world out of touch with mystery

and the howls alchemized into strange bewitching music that no one had heard before. Dirges. Laments.

These melodies contain every emotion. Joy, love, grief, terror, anger, reverence.

Anger is necessary but it’s not the only emotion related to the desire for justice. 

What about also sharing our despair?

:: Mysticism is the only type of ancient thought I know of that makes despair holy ::

Without despair’s re/enchantment, anger is like fire without water.

Oh yes, Mysticism is related to justice. 

Because in courtship of mystery, in longing for a different world,

Justice is dreamt that can also reach beyond the human.

That’s Pretty Fucking Big.

Queer Survival as Ceremony

“[B]ut what if belonging isn’t a place at all, but a skill; a set of competencies that

we in modern life have lost or forgotten.” — Toko-pa Turner

In the fall of 1998, Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, the

same year I fell in love with a girl for the first time and realized I was queer. I was

in 8 th grade. A year later, the film Boys Don’t Cry came out, which was based on

the life and murder of Brandon Teena, a transman who lived in rural Nebraska.

It’s only years later that I can appreciate the psycho-spiritual effect these high-

profile events had on me and an entire generation of LGBTQ2+ millennials

(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer or Questioning, and Two-Spirit). It

reinforced the narrative that queer and trans people weren’t safe in rural areas,

participating in rural life-ways. Everyone knew that to find acceptance and

community, you eventually migrated to the cities, you found your way to the gay

bars and clubs with their promise of connection. Although it’s changing now, rural

queer culture has historically been hard to identify.

When I decided to through-hike Vermont’s Long Trail with my girlfriend

when we graduated high school, I was privately haunted by the story of Rebecca

Wight and Claudia Brenner, Appalachian Trail hikers who were stalked and shot

at their campsite…while making love. Wight—who died—was also a biracial

woman of color. In all these cases—of Shepard, Teena, and Wight—their killers

had seemed to have a few things in common—they were white men enraged at

the revelation that their victims were queer or trans and they felt at liberty to

fatally harm them. I honor the gravity of inviting the stories of these young queer

ancestors into my reflection. It is worth emphasizing that these were some of the

first queer stories I ever heard—and certainly the first queer nature stories.

Stories like this impact us in ways that aren’t just psychic—they are mythic. The

moral of the stories appeared to be that being way out in the woods is dangerous

if you’re queer. I eventually realized that bad things that happened to queer

people in remote places are connected to an enduring toxic pioneer mentality

that saw anything and everything it encountered in the “wilderness” or on the

frontier as its own for the taking. When you encounter hate in the backcountry,

not just as a queer person but also as a black and/or indigenous person, for a

moment the frontier materializes, right between your body and the person who

sees you as ‘other.’

We live in a society where trans identity has recently been a matter of

public debate—in the form of whether trans people should be allowed to use the

bathroom of their choice. Patronizing attitudes toward gender-neutral pronouns

are common. We then also live in a society that has never been in greater need

of ways to affirm trans and queer identity in the very arena in which they have

been historically denied—in nature. This is part of what is behind the mission of

Queer Nature—the ‘organism’ that I have been co-visioning with my spouse

Pinar for over three years. Through Queer Nature, we create spaces for

QTBIPOC (queer or trans black and indigenous people of color) and white

queers to learn various place-based skills and survival skills—which range from

things like basket-weaving and spoon carving to wildlife tracking and first aid.

Even though it appears to be didactic, we interpret and enact this work as

transformational and ceremonial—potent emotions and acknowledgement of

spirit and soul are welcome and are part of the framing of the spaces.

When possible, we offer courses where the tuition is sliding scale or

subsidized with grants. This is because emotional, social, and financial barriers

prevent queer folks, QTBIPOC, and women from accessing spaces to learn land-

based skills. Historically learning these skills has been the provenance of

communities that aren’t welcoming to these populations or actively erase their

existence—e.g. rural hunting communities, the Scouting movement, or the

military. Though the latter two are changing, progress has been glacier-slow.

Furthermore, these communities are founded upon the piracy of knowledge from

First Nations people, a process we seek to interrupt. One of our most important

ongoing questions is how to teach ancestral skills in culturally humble ways while

on stolen land. Some of our de-colonial practices are naming whose land we are

on, and researching first names of rivers and mountains, or the first names of

keystone animal or plant species that show up in our curriculums. When teaching

a certain craft, we give examples of analogous technologies that derive from

European cultures, to disrupt the selective pedestalizing of First Nations cultures.

***

As dusk started to fall on our fire-making workshop, the air around the fire

pit began to fill with the spicy aroma of smoldering cedar wood. Various folks,

many of them pierced and tattooed twenty and thirty-somethings, huddled in the

proximity carving or practicing operating wooden bow-drill kits that my spouse

and I had been coaching them on how to build throughout the day. One of the

participants, a queer graphic designer who lived in Denver, was on the verge of

making a coal—that magical moment where the wood dust created by friction

heats up to the point of ignition. They stopped to catch their breath and we all

were transfixed by the chaotic tendrils of milky smoke drifting from a small pile of

dark dust next to their fireboard. The smoking heap of dust soon glimmered with

orange—proof that it was forming into a coal, and the tension in the air was

palpable. The student gingerly poured the coal into a nest of papery cottonwood

bark and began blowing on it to conjure the next step in the pyrotechnic

algorithm: flame. When the flame finally sprouted from the bundle of tinder, the

student grinned widely. No one could have told them how satisfying that

experience would be!

The mythos of making fire is so rich and self-evident that it’s hard to put

into words. Fire’s symbolism is complex—associated in its domesticated guises

with hearth and community, creation and birth, but also with control and

civilization. As an LGBTQ2+ community, we carry wounds associated with every

one of these facets. One way we have been disempowered is through the deep-

seated narratives, perpetuated by religions, nations, and medical theories, that

our ways of being—whether erotic or somatic—are unnatural or at best aberrant.

Learning how to make fire as queer folks is not just about learning a vital survival

skill, but about incarnating these symbols of home, creation, and control in queer

space, which naturally re-stories them and invests them with new meaning and

subversive power.

In queer space, learning ancestral survival skills—like how to make fire

without matches or how to blend into the forest and evade detection—are

initiatory ceremonies in and of themselves because when we engage in them, we

enact both communally and individually the axiom that we can survive. Unlike

how these skills have been framed in Western popular culture, we don’t learn

them because we are afraid of the so-called wilderness and need to conquer and

control it, but because we don’t want to rely on the human world for our sense of

sovereignty. We want to build relationship with our other-than-human kin, with

wood grain, with stone and rivers, with songbirds and herbs. We want to bind up

our own liberation with that of theirs. We want to have nature’s back, and we

have the sense they’ll have our back in return. That’s always how we’ve

survived—by finding each other in community, and standing together—like

antelope or prairie dogs, we get the power of the herd. In the various contexts

I’ve been a part of where survival skills are taught, I’ve rarely seen more

teamwork than in the groups that bless Queer Nature classes with their

presence. People who come to our workshops often aren’t interested in doing it

all themselves. We’ve all gotten plenty of practice with ‘going it alone.’ We know

better than to romanticize the lone cowboy or commando.

The bedrock of our pedagogy is the skill of awareness. Based on our

experiences of living in our bodies and studying the arts of survival as well as the

arts of council, we have learned that the most important survival skill is what we

do with our attention—which often looks like listening with multiple senses.

Listening is also a medicine for trauma—so what magic might happen when we,

with our various layered identities, engage in a practice of listening and being-

listened-to by the more-than-human world? We hope it will lead to belonging—a

dynamic state of being embedded in webs of accountability and intimacy with

other species and the earth. For many of us, belonging is an act of resistance.

Note: Originally published in Circles on the Mountain Issue #24 (2019)

Incorporation within White Supremacy & Settler Colonialism

As rites of passage guides, we know that the hardest challenge of the ceremony is not the severance, threshold or liminal space, but rather what comes after: incorporation. Incorporation means to bring into the body or to embody what one learned for their people during their initiatory fast on the land. What does incorporation mean living within a system that chooses which bodies get to thrive and targets others? What does incorporation mean with the history of a nation built of chattel slavery of black bodies and the genocide of First Nation peoples? How does one embody their vision with the implications that their skin color, ability and gender has? 

Last August of 2018, we ran our inaugural Queer Mountain Quest (QMQ) through Rite of Passage Journeys with an incredible team dreaming into its creation for over two years. The co-guide team was Roz Katonah (they/them), Anna Schulman (she/her) and me (they/them). So Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them) was the QMQ fundraising director as well as the basecamp ceremonialist. This was a two-week backpacking trip on Snohomish, Klallam and Quileute territories for 13-18 year old two-spirit, nonbinary, trans and queer youth. 

The majority of the youth found the QMQ through Queer Nature’s social media accounts where we bring in decolonial and anti-racist discourse in the fields of nature-connection, place-based skills, and rites of passage. The youth who came were white or white-passing teens from all over Turtle Island including so-called Canada. They chose to come due to feeling seen and represented by the guide team as well as by a desire to walk in right relationship with the history of colonial violence on the wild and urban landscapes. 

To the guides’ surprise, several youth were the ones to initiate inquiring to know more about the First Nations of the place after our land acknowledgments. What I have come to know working with trans and queer youth—including at the School of Lost Borders’ inaugural Queer Youth Quest in 2017—is that the younger generation will always be a delightful and edgy surprise initiating intergenerational co-learning containers. These inquiries lit our fire as we realized that what we were preparing for as a guide team was being co-created before our eyes. 

We delved deep into being in right relationship to ourselves, each other, our more-than-human kin as well as whose land we were on. There is so much depth of possibility for the land to hold these inquiries. If our conversations around diversity, equity, inclusion as well as decolonization remain intraspecies (humancentric), I frankly am concerned. Only in collaboration with the land will we be able to fully explore the depth of trauma and wounding we must go into to truly explore power, privilege and oppression. This is something that we continue to flesh out in the Ecology of Power & Privilege curriculum in collaboration with Youth Passageways. Kruti Parekh (she/her), Darcy Ottey (she/her) and I are deeply exploring decentering humancentric spaces and bringing our more-than-human kin as potential allies and accomplices in our anti-oppression journey towards co-liberation. Of course, we must also be confronted with the discomfort of our own areas of privilege with interspecies reflection by our BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) community members especially within the rite of passage communities. There is a balance between intraspecies and interspecies conversations that has the potential of remediating the impact of colonial and ecocidal violence. 

Photo from the Queer Mountain Quest

This is why the QMQ guide team decided to discuss white supremacy during our incorporation. It is necessary to do so for our youth in the current political climate we are in. By the epic coastline, we lit candles and made an altar where we read co-liberatory poems by Audre Lorde, a black lesbian abolitionist. As we sat to have our discussion on incorporation, we began by reading “A Letter to White Queers, A Letter to Myself”, a poem by a nonbinary white poet, Andrea Gibson (they/them). The poem was a reminder that the queer community needs to be intersectional and remember to actively fight anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity as white or white-passing folks in the LGBTQ2IA+ community. We opened a council to integrate the gravity of the longest part of the ceremony: incorporation. This dialogue shook the youth as a reminder of what world they are walking back into with their necessary gifts that are a healing balm and regenerative disruptive force to the dominant ecocidal culture. 

In forming the QMQ guide team, we decided to center and co-empower guides who hold intersectional identities within our queer community. When one holds multiple locations of oppression (class, ability, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), they are more impacted members within our communities. An example is our trans black community members have a disproportionately higher likelihood of transphobic murder compared to those being trans and white. Or being a darker-skinned and indigenous-featured Latinx person with citizenship gets profiled significantly more than a lighter-skinned Latinx mestizo without citizenship. Who in our communities are being impacted by oppression on an institutional level? In order for co-liberation to be actualized, we need to center the most impacted in our communities. We need to find ways to move aside and be behind someone as a gesture of support with their consent. 

As the darkest member of the Wilderness Guides Council, I hardly ever see black and/or indigenous guides of color without white-passing privilege. It is an isolating experience as an indigenous guide, especially with the word “wilderness” reverberating genocide and the invisibilization of our existences. The concept of wilderness is a foundational concept that perpetuates racism. John Muir, the father of National Parks, was explicitly racist against First Nation folks as well as black communities and promoted the eradication of Ahwahnechee tribal members to preserve the “pristine wilderness” of Yosemite. Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, was avidly disturbed by indigenous-migrants and was an early advocate for a militarized border on the lands he loved. 

I wonder as “wilderness” guides, how can we each walk in right relationship while engaging in the complexities of white supremacy within the lands we guide on? For First Nations, land and people are the same. Therefore, land can never be an apolitical place. Leadership is a reproduction of culture. If that is the case, I wonder what culture are we reproducing as guides? Who will you make sure takes your guide seat? How can we all create opportunities for those who do not look like us and are systematically targeted to take the guide seat? How do we make sure that there are more black and brown faces in our wilderness guides networks without tokenizing? 

Right now in the Sonoran desert, there are children, adults and elders nonconsensually fasting in the desert praying that they will make it through the ordeal of crossing the border. There are black bodies being shot at in public by law enforcement without any justice. Native communities have the highest rates of suicide in this country. There are young generations of white youth who are being initiated into white supremacy. If we are bringing our gifts back for our people, we must include all bodies and center those systematically targeted. Incorporation in this fragmented world must include looking at our power, privilege and oppression and how it informs our roles as we live into the initiation our species is moving through.

Note: Originally published in Circles on the Mountain Issue #24 (2019)

Trans(Eco)Futurism and Dreampunk

Photo by Pınar

Foreword: Some may say it’s unwise to say anything definitive about nature (or queerness, for that matter). here is the thing about that: Not to bite the hand that fed us…not to condone essentializing (especially by those who control the majority of the narratives)…but f*ck the part of postmodern thought that makes us afraid to take a stand… that makes us complacent. Truth is relative, but so are we, we *relate.* So we float, down this stream, alongside our truth. that’s how relativity and truth can exist at once. Truth exists within time and space. Here’s ours, now.

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If warfare is also psychological & informational

and if it’s the new means by which we will be fucked with/

we will resist invasions and ambushes in the form of stories, spells, dreams that re-frame, re-inscribe, re-late (the root of the word relate means to bring or carry something back).

we will wage mythopoetic guerrilla warfare in reaction to widespread political terror and disenchantment.

we will tell our stories to dis-arm & seed-bomb with the green tendrils of our humanity 

we will imagine a future when dominant culture can no longer imagine one.

we will be #dreampunks.

supreme authority can not imagine its own de-centering or demise, except in the form of un-analyzed hatred and otherization of people. that is what passes for its “imagination.”

we, as trans and non-binary folx (& all marginalized folx) are used to living forward into the unknown.

we are used to maybe expecting our own untimely demise.

we have been there and done that. 

we have reimagined our bodies, we have experienced our desire or our joy as something sacred, to be transmitted not always through biological reproduction, but through other means.

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apocalyptic times require movement between worlds. between institutions, cultures, genders. 

the wild ones know it — they (like the “eastern coyote”) hybridize when their habitats break down. they walk between species. (hybridization is distinct from assimilation)

apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψις) actually means an uncovering, a revealing, not an ultimate end.

the center was always fed by the edges, that’s the secret they don’t want us to know. 

people argue about gender and bathrooms, and turn us into a tool for their own transformation. 

we become tools for them to think with [to paraphrase Peter Brown’s “men use women to think with”]

in the meantime, what do we think with? dream about? 

finding the space to dream is a radical act right now. 

and dreaming with the land (and informed by more-than-human relationships) is an endangered ancestral skill.

(just like grieving—the two are coupled)

too often now we forget our dreams because the images in mainstream media are stronger than our dreams.

that is not just psychological warfare, it is war against the soul.

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You who walk on the edges—know that you are well equipped to be with mystery.

We tend mystery when dominant culture sees it as inconvenient. (They would build a wall to keep it out.)

Now, they would be healed by apprenticing to it—to the unknown, to fear of death, to fear of identity loss. Like the white supremacists who are grasping for identity™ while sneering at ours.

some say Western society is experiencing a failure of imagination. an inability to dream new futures.

funny because I don’t feel a loss of imagination at all. I feel an excess of it. Maybe that’s what happens though. Maybe when the cultures of control lose their future, pretty much everyone else disempowered by that system gains a future.

and anyways, the in-between ones and the Others and other-than-humans among us know how to live without a future. 

we have been through despair while they are digging their heels on the way into her inevitable vortex.

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when we lost the thread of our futures, we wander with the more-than-human world, with the land. 

Then we remember that there are billions of futures in this world.

And only a tiny sliver of them are human.

Maybe that’s what they are scared of.

Photo by So

:: On Why Nature-Connection Work Needs to Be Anti-Racist, Epistemological Piracy, and Eco-Fascism ::

Link to Related Article: Eco-fascism: The ideology marrying environmentalism and white supremacy thriving online

Nature-based education, forest schools, the rewilding movement (especially those that are white dominated, which is most), we want to call you and ourselves in! This work needs to be explicitly anti-racist and also aware of its cultural-historical context. We don’t hold all the answers as to how to do this, and this is something many folx have talked about before, but are committed to doing it together as a community. Thank you @joewhittlephotography for recently tagging us on a post by @wilderness_awaremess to engage about the vital importance of acknowledgment of indigenous lifeways & philosophies in the nature-connection / 8 shields / rewilding communities. There is currently a surge of interest in nature-based education and place-based skills in “the West” particularly among white middle+ class people and I’m seeing and hearing how harmful it is when we as mentors in this field frame our pedagogies and curriculums as “new.” They are often based in kincentric (relation-based) philosophies that are influenced by First Nations cosmologies and other indigenous cosmologies. This is true for “Western” society at large too—ecology, the study of the relationships between beings and elements of the natural world, is considered a “newer” field of science while indigenous peoples have been ecologists for thousands of years. Because of the juxtaposition of ongoing colonial processes that impact First Nations folx on this land, it is so important to continue to acknowledge that these ways of thinking that center relationship and reciprocity are in fact ancient, still living, and a great deal of energy goes into protecting and stewarding them in the face of a colonizing force that has tried to erase them. Too much harm has already been done by the coopting and repackaging of traditional ecological knowledge through processes of biopiracy (a great term to google), so we must strive for awareness in how we frame our work.

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At Queer Nature we talk about dismantling anthropocentrism (human-centrism) and it’s associated supremacies through fostering interspecies relationship. Though, we aren’t strictly biocentric (centering the other-than-human) either in the sense of being anti-human and/or anti-civ* Rather, we are interested in questioning the dichotomy between these two—the dichotomy that separates “nature” and “culture” and therefore the same dichotomy that exists when white outdoorists ask “what does race have to do with my work?” Dennis Martinez, an ecologist indigenous to so-called Mexico, describes a “kincentric” model of environmental thought as a middle path between the extremes of biocentrism and anthropocentrism. Instead of choosing to either put humans above everything else or below everything else, Martinez describes a worldview held by his relatives and other First Nations people that centers relationship. It is clear that kin-centric or eco-centric views are catching on among folks who were not raised to think this way—but if we are utilizing these worldviews for our own transformation without engaging in accountability to our First Nations neighbors, we are not truly being kin-centric, but only selectively kin-centric. 

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At QN, we also do align with so-called ‘biocentric’ ideologies on some levels because of how much impact human supremacy has had on non-humans. “A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that if you look at the world’s mammals by weight, 96% of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.” (From the New York Times Magazine article “The Insect Apocalypse is here.”) Therefore we recognize that now there is a need to listen to non-humans (as well as humans) and uplift them, because they have been ecologically marginalized. The notion of ‘the earth’s’ desires, wishes, and concerns taking precedence over human ones is certainly alluring at times.

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Because of these various places we sit, is long past due that we also acknowledge that biocentric ideologies considered by some as “radical” forms of environmentalism have been used and are being used to justify indigenous genocide and forms of “deep ecology” that are white supremacist, racist, classist, and ableist in nature. Recently (but also traceable back to Nazi ideology) biocentric ideologies have been shared in a growing vein of “eco-fascism” that takes many ideological points from some strands of deep ecology, such as the notion that humans are a cancer of the planet and the notion that population needs to be controlled. Not to mention strands of thinking in rewilding and “radical” conservation that blame indigenous peoples for species loss as a tactic for justifying oppression. Unfortunately it is all too easy to commandeer these views for use as excuses for racism and classism in very overt ways, which the current generation of social-media savvy eco-fascists are doing.  One of their claims is that non-white people are destroying the environment, and related, that there needs to be a white ethnostate that is centered around “conservation.” And that’s just scratching the surface.

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So again, encouraging white/settler-identified nature-based educators and place-based skills instructors... to consider that this work should be anti-racist in mission and orientation and aware of our place in the family of things—not just ecologically, but ideologically as well. Cosmology IS ecology!

*expansion on anti-civ: though we have been influenced by some so-called “anti-civ” literature we are skeptical of anti-civ thought without a power/privilege/racial analysis