Interbeing

We are woven into reciprocal relations as a fundamental reality of life. We are part of a participatory web. Ancient wisdom traditions and modern science both affirm this truth of Life as interbeing.

Trees release exactly the substance that we need to breath in order to survive. We exhale exactly the nourishment trees need in return. The very first thing we do when we are born is drink in this life giving substance from plants, and the last thing we do as we die is exhale our breath which plants drink in. We are woven together in kinship with trees and all plant life of Earth. Plants and animals need one another to survive. Our ecology is based in recipriocal relations.

We resonate with one another, ripple and catch fire together. Suffering and joy are not solitary; through our mirror neurons, our sensitive nervous systems, what is happening for one part of the whole ripples through all other aspects. When folks gather together, if one person holds their breath the others will also start to hold their breath. When one of us relaxes and lengthens the exhalation, others also start to relax. Our nervous systems are social nervous systems. This is kin to mycorrhizal networks in Earth’s humus rippling with intelligent communication traveling among trees.

Cree Elders speak of 'Wâhkôhtowin,' we are all related, kin, part of a collective family of Earth, mutually influencing one another, Ancestors, contemporaries, and decendants of all species. This is a source for comfort and courage, as well as responsibility. What and how we do influences the whole.

We can tend our collective through the ways that we live our own lives. What and how we do ripples through relations with everyone around us. We can care for the whole through the movements we create in our own sphere of relatedness.

Collective Disconnection from Earth is collective trauma and causing deep injury

Many humans around the world have been impacted by colonial cultures’ embedded practices of domination - hierarchies of belonging and exclusion, among people, between people and other animals, between people and Land. This culture of domination centers mind as separate from body, positioning body and Earth as places to be controlled, managed, regulated. This culture of domination is insidious and has caused harm through time and around the world.

The resulting separation in our relations with one another and with Earth as a living being is collective trauma. We carry this collective trauma of separation and domination in our bodies, in our embodied relations with one another, in our nervous system responses, in our tight and tense muscles, in our held breath, our bracing against gravity, our aggressions and judgements, our anxiety and depression.

We are taught to use language that perpetuates this separation - such as naming Earth as It rather than being, referencing Earth as the environment as if it were possible to be separate from the web of life.

This disconnection is an injury to consciousness and harms our collective web. We are in the midst of the 6th Mass Extinction. Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research recently shared a red alert, stating: “vital organs of the Earth system are weakening, leading to a loss of resilience and rising risks of crossing tipping points….Planet Earth is in critical condition”

Colonial separation positions humans as outside Nature and superior to Nature; this paradigm supports capitalist extractivism, destroying ecology for money. The paradigm of separation and domination is painful and numbs our capacity for response to the serious dangers we face as Earth’s living systems are injured and collapsing through human greed and indifference.

Movement Play in the Collective, with Earth and Sky is a pathway for health

Yet, we can actively change culture. We are not simply consumers of culture, supporting the status quo, we are active participants in how culture moves and shifts and changes. We embody culture and we craft it in each moment - through creative, innovative responses to life. What patterns do we need to alter and can choose to shapeshift?

Improvisation helps us grow our capacity to be in the unknown, the unpredictable, the uncertain. Improvisation helps us find novel ways of being, relating, and collaborating. Collective improvisation also makes space for ancestral wisdom to surface through our bodies, through movement, gesture, associations, images. This listening for wise and innovative instincts is part of our embodied intelligence that rise when we play and improvise together through movement and embodied arts.

Play liberates, makes our nervous system responses more flexible, uncoils us where we are bound and braced, where we are contracted and fearful, or tense with aggression. Improvisational play brings freedom from constriction, wakes up life force, opens paths of liberation.

Movement is life. Movement is sustenance. Movement brings us out of freeze, out of paralysis, out of immobilization, out of perseveration. Improvisational movement play helps us develop supple responses to life.

Movement is shapeshifting: breath moving through us, us moving out into the open spaces, rippling with light, shadow, sound, the touch of Sky, wind, Earth under feet, flow of water through us and through the world, becoming animal, bones and heart beat. Unforgetting our belonging in Life. Unforgetting reciprocity. Movement weaves us back into kin relations with Earth and Sky. Body As Earth Song. Relational Ecology. Wâhkôhtowin.

We care for who and what we love. Body Songs, Body As Earth Song, Relational Ecology is an invitation to fall in love again with Life, with Eairth, with body, with kinship.