Animistic Entanglement

“What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn’t you dance it? Wouldn’t you act it out? Wouldn’t your every movement tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives... plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food.” Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Potawatomi Nation

Been deep in fields of green and pulsing imaginal, dreamtime states that speak in green. Amidst all the endless frameworks, models, and methods (which make “sense” to me and have a kind of “intelligence”, but are less and less foundational for me these days), there’s an undulating flow of life and conversation that (for me) feels confined by frameworks, models, and methods.

I think such attempts at understanding and relating with the world inevitably become fixed, and are slow to evolve (if ever, at times).

Rather, I find comfort, resonance, and somatic sense in Kimmerer’s words where she points at the lived transmissions of nourishment that enable both cyclic passages of life, as well as ongoing processes of change that diversify the articulations of existence. A diversity that invites reciprocity and organic possibility.

Listening from the body for the ways life chooses to move, and what it longs to communicate as a form of connection, and what becomes possible because of our relating with one another is what inspires and informs me the most these days. Some might understand this as an animistic intelligence, or indigenous intelligence, or earth-rooted intelligence. Whichever word or combination of words we call upon, they’re pointing at something innate to being a creature of this world.

Knowing is a mark of our permeability and entanglement, and is never static. Rather it expands and twists through evolutionary states of becoming.