Hi y’all. Today’s post is a meditation on the theme that’s been threading through many of my pieces lately, turning the prism around to let every facet find its moment in the sunlight. To be honest, I struggled with massive writer’s block this week. And after a lot of angsty attempts, this is what flowed through. Sometimes I have an agenda, sometimes the agenda has me. This is the latter.
Please don’t hesitate to share if this moves anything in you, in the comments.
With big love,
Rachel
Much of life is living a distinctly nonhuman story. As I stand here typing, a swirl of gnats, so tiny they are nearly imperceptible, are spiraling and dodging and circling around one another. In fact, I can only see them because the sun has dropped to a particular angle, painting them alive in the fading light. When they wander into the shadows, they are lost to me.
Quite possibly, they are engaged in their own form of tantric ensemble, whirling dervishes enraptured by the climate so conducive for their thrival. Quite possibly, they are enamored in mating swarms. Quite possibly, they are a manifestation of love itself. They a world unto themselves. I am careful not to observe them in a performative gaze, but to honor their companionship as neighbors. We are all swimming in shared airspace. I am sure quite a few of them have now swum through my digestive tract, maybe spinning themselves into my tea, maybe whirling into the pool of my mouth on an inhale. They are *so* tiny, I wouldn't be surprised. Just a few moments ago, I watched as a hummingbird ate one of their kin who had become a hovering morsel dangling from a spider's thread at the tip of a tree branch. The non-humanness of my own life grows and grows as I re-enter the chorus of life being lived all around me, a composite of everythingness that I am also held within.
In these pandemic months and years of staying close-in, it seems as though my eyes themselves are readjusting to a kind of nearness of living. In fact, my eyesight has literally improved by 50% per my last optometry appointment. I am no longer straining to be a 100 miles ahead of myself at all times. I am not peering into insatiably gluttonous progress narratives disassociated from *real* life, the life of gnats and hummingbirds. I have dropped into a kind of presence in my being that I never knew before.
There is something about the way my very movements and gestures have reconfigured themselves in these times... from breadth, from bigness, from endless exertion, to depth, to intricacy, to infinite intimacy. Day by day, I circumnavigate repeated routes through my neighborhood. I traverse the same trail network nestled between the ridge lines of the rolling hills behind my cottage, and though I am mobile on my two legs, I feel more and more like my footprints embed themselves into the root structures and mycelial webs beneath my feet as I step. Like sand displaces itself to embrace the pressure of your weight, in a much more subtle way, I think that is true on any and every surface. We are imprinting, we are impacting.
This way of living could be considered relational. Instead of the conditioning to be either detached and observational or invasively domineering, I am shaking off these shackles in the very ways I go about my life, by considering myself in constant exchange. My question is increasingly becoming: "how can my sovereignty meet your sovereignty and thrive together in solidarity?", and this question is not reserved for humans, and it is not only offered, it is actually just more deeply recognized in me. As in, "oh, this is how it has been all along, I just wasn't holding up my end of the deal."
The farm is one of my greatest teachers in this regard, precisely because it is a place where co-creating sanctuary with our more than human kin is the aim, is the goal, is the highest intention. So anything that contradicts this stands out with the harshness of contrast. For example, when I first started working at the farm, it was effectively encased in a layer of plastic netting, draped across 10 foot high posts in the ground, covering the entire surface area, hovering above our heads. Though it was fairly high, it was claustrophobic. It was also dangerous. Birds and butterflies occasionally got tangled and trapped, their carcasses an insufferable haunting. I could barely stand it.
Within days of working there, I began what became a many-month devotion to systematically removing every square inch of that netting - a surprisingly tedious and labor-intensive project. My body ached and strained, but my body also became a force of liberation, an instrument of reparation, a being living in responsible relation with the more-than-human world, who are living distinctly nonhuman stories. This horizontal fencing dis-abled their bodies, their wings, their right to life - whether to nourish themselves from the land that is also theirs, whether to fly through the skies that are also theirs. I made it my job to un-do, to un-restrain, to un-collapse the multidimensional field of life that us two-leggeds contort to serve our own needs first.
Living in this way has been, in some senses, a surrendering of whatever I thought a "human" was. "Human" has been long-trained to be user, consumer, performer, achiever, monetizer, manager... I am making it my job to un-do all of this training and become steward, caregiver, conduit, co-creator, community, ecology, cosmology.
I'm looking at my notes from Tiokasin Ghosthorse. He told us that in Lakota language, the word for water is "mnii" which is nearly impossible to translate to the rigidly possessive qualities of English, but his closest offering is: "voicing the living relationship between you and I and all things." Isn't that remarkable? Water. Sacred water. Word is prayer. Water, revered in its bigness. Water, living a distinctly nonhuman story. Speaking its own sovereignty, and acknowledging mine and yours and everything's, thriving together in multibeing solidarity. (lol @ the audio recording: my dog neighbor wants their story heard, too!)
To close, I want to lift up a movement that that has my heart: recognizing the rights to thrival for our more-than-human kin, such as The Nonhuman Rights Project, Rights of Rivers, and Earth Law Center, amongst many blooming organizations.
I believe storytelling is one of the most potent forms of weaving work to find our way together through our sovereignty to speak and be heard and co-create the narratives that shape the way we live. I am listening to the distinctly nonhuman stories in the ecosystems within and around me, wondering about a wider and wilder mythology yearning to be heard. What are the nonhuman stories in your world that are calling for your attention, your presence, your interbeingness?
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Re-imagining "human", listening deep