The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled. ✨
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Welcome to my Substack.
I’ve been (over)thinking about starting this for a while, pondering what value I can offer. I’ve landed on this being somewhere to share inquiries and explore ideas that have the potential for co-learning and co-adventuring.
Moreover, it will be a space to celebrate being in communion with the world and to feel into our interbeing. It will be about re-patterning into life as everything continuously co-evolves. It hopes to thread into a paradigm shift of how we think, feel, know and live on this planet. It will be an exploration, an experiment, a place to ponder, wonder, wander, dream, imagine, play and, importantly, feel.
Undoubtedly, I will straddle the poetic, the scientific, the philosophical and, gently, carefully, the spiritual, tending toward the animistic, which arises through personal experience and felt connection. I’ll likely play with imagining into the future while holding a sense of deep time.
What I write will never be absolute. Because the more I learn, the more wondrous the world becomes and the more uncertain I am of anything (I’m currently reading a book about quantum gravity, and my mind is being blown). I note the paradoxes that I stumble into daily, all the changing theories, all the exceptions to the rule, all the humanness brought to the world in our effort to understand it. I wonder whether trying to understand it is a fool’s errand and instead mystified awe with a generous serving of curiosity is our natural state of being (maybe, even, the two are one and the same).
I chose to include “art” in the title because I think art, in all its vast forms, is the human expression of our souls meeting the world – meeting everything tangible and intangible, explainable and not, all framed through the stories we hold. Art absolves us of knowing and wholly permits us to be expressive, intuitive, curious, in awe, in wonder, in all our humanness, feeling into our aliveness, into the depths of who we are, as painful as that may be, in ways that tickle something yawning inside of us.
What to expect
I will remain fluid in how this newsletter unfolds, leaning into what it wants to be. My work is a “practice” – something never fixed but always emerging that asks me to move with it. That said, I have a format that I intend to follow, which will become clear as I get mailing out. This will include observations from my own perspective, which, I note, is uniquely my own; these will arise from, among other things, the bioregions I am intimately familiar with, mostly the Atlantic Coast of Portugal and rural Wales. It is also framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside.
Mostly, I will write in a style that I’ve taken to calling thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquires arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world and sources of inspiration). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. But I think being open and vulnerable is more important than ever in these times.
Note that I have my own philosophy of life and theory of change. These are also ever-evolving, and I won’t anchor my identity to them – though some philosophies have been with me for a good while now. I won’t attempt to sell you on these; you’ll find no doctrine here. Instead, I invite you to cherry-pick what resonates. If that’s nothing, don’t hesitate to unsubscribe, or better yet, create a dialogue, a third space, in which we can learn from each other.
Philosophy of Life & Theory of Change
The simplified version: Be among the living world > fold into the magic and stories that are gifted > foster a personal and intimate connection > decentre the human experience > know yourself as a living being among complexes of life > allow this to guide you in all that you do > live into stories of change > disrupt story ecologies that undermine life and are deeply unjust > foster emerging regenerative cultures > rinse and repeat.
The longer version: I believe we are entangled in all ways in our planetary interbeing. Historically, our diverse cultures emerged through our communion with the cosmos, with the world around us, and with our places. Insidious stories led many into degenerative modes of being, which have propelled, promoted and perpetuated cultures predicated on the exploitation, exhaustion and expiration of humans and more than humans. This has collapsed widely diverse biocultures through hegemony and brought the world to her knees.
I believe that the deep change that is needed will arise through weaving ourselves (back) into the spirit of the world and knowing ourselves and our multi-species histories as wholly interconnected1. I believe this should be rooted in aliveness and ignited, stoked and fanned through the felt experience of story. Because story is affecting. It is experiential, felt, imaginative and creative. It is human. We humans have evolved with story minds.
I think of stories as ecologies. They exist in dynamic constellations. We are not originators of stories. They are given to us by the world. They ripple through us, involve us and evolve with us. They weave together to frame all we know, sense and feel, shaping how we understand the world, interact with others, and our behaviours, beliefs and worldviews. When we create shared story-ecologies, cultures are formed. The aliveness of stories means that culture is emergent, and we can influence cultures in their evolution.
Stories can uphold injustice and inequity and be the scaffolds for structures that undermine communities, societies and planetary systems. Often, these stories live within us. Often, they hide and try to conceal themselves. Through weeding them out and nurturing others, I believe we can be co-creators in the emergence2 of diverse regenerative cultures3. We can re-pattern into life. I don’t say this metaphorically. Modernity mostly fails to reflect the ways of nature; the modern dominant human systems aren’t modelled on the patterns of the living world.
How do we re-pattern into life4? There are many answers, and likely, it will be a journey that is as painful and confronting as nourishing. It will require collective composting of stories that are degenerative. It will ask us to put ourselves in the way of nature’s wonder and allow ourselves to be spirited away, over and over. It will happen through kinship and felt connection. Though meeting the animate. Through inhabiting the entanglement. Through engaging with the material realm in intimate ways that respect our interbeing. Through art. Art that welcomes a felt sense of communion with the world. Art that holds space for collective imagination, where we can play at the boundaries of reality and dream into being a flourishing future.
Art is diverse in its expressions. These manifestations of engaging with life reflect the breadth of who we are as individuals, collectives and cultures. In seeking a thriving world, there should be no attempts to manufacture monoculture in any domain. There are many story-ecologies, cosmologies, and ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and being, which should be celebrated. Often, these stem from the co-evolution of people and place and the kinship between them, from migration and movement, from settlement and unsettlement, and from the atrocities and traumas of the past. We now also occupy digital spaces and trans-local communities and cultures.
In a bid for regenerative cultures, there must be ground for diverse art and imaginings to emerge, intersect, coalesce, converge and diverge, to disrupt patterns and lead to transformative shifts. Research shows that cultural diversity and biodiversity are entwined. Cultures should be rooted in our living places. Because we all live in places. And in that, we can nourish them and allow ourselves to be nourished by them. By being in touch physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, in all ways, with the world around us.
My Practice
My practice orbits around creating story worlds to seed regeneration and disrupt structures that uphold degeneration so we may support into being a thriving world. I work with organisations on their brand stories, core messaging and communications, and heading up story projects, including books, magazines, events, and short films. I also write for media outlets, covering diverse topics, from food and farming to art and culture, outdoor recreation, environmental stewardship, and more.
I want to affirm that all that I’ve written above is also a practice for me: figuring out how to re-pattern, be expressive, and be in communion with my place and the world. Writing these mail-outs will deepen this practice and change me in the process.
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Here, I take the position that coloniality is founded on anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Decoloniality is a distinct part of what’s proposed in this statement. To know our interconnection and to dispel the myth of separation between humans and the rest of the world requires a dissolution of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism.
I chose the word “emergence” not as a tool of erasure of the diverse cultures already in existence, but to reflect that culture is relational, dynamic and always evolving.
I note that stories hold a lot of power, but for systems evolution, the underlying structures must change, including policies, laws, governance structures, customs, etc. I believe that stories can be so potent that it drives the want and will for such structural changes.
By “re-patterning”, I mean intuitively integrating patterns of the living world and detangling ourselves from patterns – of feeling, thinking, doing, acting, being – that are rooted in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism and superiority of any kind.
"mystified awe with a generous serving of curiosity" - that's my favorite way of being in the world. Thanks for sharing your art <3