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