I haven’t had much to write about recently, partly because I wanted to focus on other projects and partly because of health issues. So I thought, why not write about the projects? Maybe others are interested in collaborating?
My philosophy is that we all have a lot to learn from each other and we need more spaces that are co-created, that focus less on centering on a single person's thinking or work and create room for an emergence. So when I make something, I think of my work as only a part of the ecosystem, perhaps my work is soil for others to grow in or light for others’ work to grow or perhaps our work are species who share a microclimate and cycle resources among one another to form a macro-organism like a lichen or a very tightly-knit and specialized ecosystem found in a microclimate.
The Projects
1) I’ve been offering a forest gardening workshop here for years now. Early on I realized that the way it was usually taught, was too technical, too solutionist and was often a Step 1-2-3 follow-this-recipe that carried some of the underlying colonial assumptions and attitudes that have shaped monocultural. So when I began to see that the standard way of teaching did not align with how placed-based people build kinship with their horticultural systems in ways that reciprocal relational kinship. Even though everything was organic, it still felt more like extraction more than interbeing.
I noticed how much people, both students and other teachers gravitated to a get-to-the-thing-I-want in a straight-line approach, where the education seems to be “tell me the right answers, the right way or what’s wrong, tell me what’s good what’s bad.”
And people have been selling and buying the myth that forest gardening is an easy self-sustaining system that offers you a bunch of food and resources without any effort and that you can race to that goal and thus feel safer and more in control. For some reason this narrative has taken hold of forest gardening, especially when they are called food forests, with a culture of “show me how to get to the thing that I want” in an addictive or possessive way.
So I began refusing to give people the answers or “the way,” while they expected a course that says “this is a formula you can follow to superimpose a forest garden on your land” I began showing process of overlapping cycles that are continually happening, with no end point. These land-practice cycles help people understand the different aspects of weaving an ecosystem whereby they can try and figure out a system for themselves that fits in to their circumstances and their own pace while respecting the land as a sentient, autonomous being whose transformation one is aiding and working with. I try to teach a process by which a person can enter a slower rhythm, gradually making changes while trying to gain a sense of relationship and reciprocity with the places they were regenerating or gardening in a consent-based process.
So now rather than me talking about or telling people about these cycles and processes, I’ve decided to turn them in to an experience, I am gamifying the workshop, implanting a narrative with myth imbued in to the forest garden through environmental storytelling, games, exercises, characters and little tales.
And its been fun seeing how a workshop could become a story, turning lessons in to lore, asking people to be players and adventurers rather than students. My brother and I have been investigating the history of monoculture and colonial attitude towards nature spread by 19th century “naturalists” and creating NPCs one can interact with based on these old ways, as well as more kinship-oriented indigenous-thinking characters they can ally themselves with and learn from. Its a bit scary because people are used to learning ecology through spaces that feel educational, but I’m not sure how they will react to learning through artistic, expressive or theatric means, we’ll see what happens.
2) Another thing I have worked on that I am proud is helping a friend who is putting together a sort of alternative nature-focused social media space, where they can discuss wildness within and without, come together and build community, share practices and support one another while carrying underlying values of being modernity-informed, collectively-oriented and non-extractive/non-anthropocentric.
So his project got me thinking what a place-based social media space would be like if it were more like an natural landscape that a digital one. What if different forums or accounts were laid out on a topography, a social cartography or interpersonal landscape, if you will?
Rather than focused on individual accounts where you go to someone’s page, people could take an avatar, which contains who they are and what they create with them to places on the map, shared platforms around a theme or topic represented by a geographic feature on the map? What if posts were actual tree posts? I have no idea if this is going to come to be but if you like this idea, please don’t take it as your own, get in touch with me/us and we can collab!!!!
3) Then, I’ve been working on some liveo games. On one side I’m just writing whatever comes to me, without thinking about the audience and on the other side I’m preparing some that I’m going to be offering some liveo games at a festival this summer at the end of June in Central Portugal during the Daterra festival near Coimbra!!!!
Mostly I’ve been developing the craft, because these aren’t quite scripts or screen plays, they’re not quite workshops, and they’re not quite therapy either, so I’m coming up with a creative process as I go that fits this new practice. And when it comes to the themes and plots, I’ve been just letting myself go, writing whatever scenarios and characters come up without judging myself.
And what keeps coming up is transmutative parodies. Parodies of the spirituality, wellness, permaculture worlds that I used to be involved with years ago, where the words love, family and tribe were often spouted but not really honored (and more recently even adopting the term decoloniality). Like many alternative spaces, we often fall in to the habit of focusing on our own lives as individuales, our own circumstances and perpetuating white-modernity unconsciously beneath the surface. And these spaces left me with a lot of hurt and feelings of betrayal that I am still processing.
So the stories that come to me begin with some vengeful satire, pointing out how these spaces claim values of solidarity on the outside but are not willing to give up the freedom and comfort of the individual pleasure/alignment seeker for relational accountability or collective responsibility. They then take the player out in to rugged or wilder landscapes, where non-human kin help us recognize and address how our attempts at change still carry with them the DNA of modernity.
And then with this festival, knowing that people that I don’t know will be experiencing it, is a very different process. The festival is themed on agroecology and community-building and I’m currently figuring out which liveo game template would best fit these themes, their land and their internal social context as an organization. I’m going to meeting up with one of the organizers to get a better idea of the space, its features, what they feel like, its shape, tone and texture while also listening to how people are working with place there, both the techniques they apply to the land and the organizational tools they use to coordinate and collaborate amongst themselves.
I’m going to offer a liveo game where a play space can create room for practicing some relationship skills in situations that tend to come up in regenerative spaces while the land themself is brought in as a character who has their own opinions on the matter of regeneration and on how a group of people can come together and organize around regeneration.
Is anyone here in Iberia that might attend? Would you want to be a character in the game?!?!
4) Then finally, I just started this discord, which I have shared with some people who seem to fit a similar vibe. The discord is about a playful, sensorial land practice that is non-extractive and I’ve been sharing it with people who I have felt a resonance with, who seem to have similar thinking around kinship making in a context of building community and addressing trauma. Here is in the intro message from the channel.
Hello everyone! Welcome! This a brand new space that I want to be shared and built together. I've named it foresnauts because that's what I name everything I do but I am very open to coming up with a name together. Foresnauts refers to a new class of people who are at an intersection between land practice and community building, who want to use creativity, play and trauma work to bring people in closer relationship with their landscapes. I would love for this to be a space that is collectively created. If there are channels that could have better names or descriptions, please feel free to express that! If you'd like a new channel or space, please feel free to make it, I'll put you on as a mod!
It’s funny as I have been dealing with some health issues lately (SIBO and knee issues) I seem to be connecting with people who have also experienced marginalization in one way or another, whether they have chronic health issues, CPTSD, neurodivergence, live in an isolated situation or just don’t have the kind of support they need. So some of these wonderful folks have joined and I’m looking forward to getting to know them better as they all seems to have developed special bonds to place and sensorial listening skills.
I have really been coming to appreciate when people have gone through an ordeal, they seem to have really important life experiences that we could all learn from. They really deserve more attention and support.
https://discord.gg/yzhbrYz3
The Health Issues
It’s funny having health issues, during my years of CPTSD I have always relatively healthy and strong, so like If I had a bad panic attack or just more anxiety than I could handle at the moment. I could always rely on food and walking to take the edge off. My stomach could handle just about anything and my legs could carry me for miles when I needed a coping mechanism. I’m talking 12-hour walks so that I could actually get calm enough to sleep or always relying on comfort foods around to blunt the pain.
I remember walks where I would focus on the ground, my head bent forward, looking over the ground cover species like a helicopter hovering over the jungle and just look at dead nettle, stinging nettle, cleavers, dock, hemlock, hogweed, musk storks-bill, plantain, campion, clover, evergreen bugloss… I would focus on the the structures they would build, how they fit in to one another, the up and down landscape-on-landscapes that they would form, rippled patterns up and down. Looking at them as if they were an overhead panning shot was something that locked me in to the Earth rather than the alarm bells sounding within myself.
But now, with these two issues, I can’t rely on food or long walks, I have to just kind of sit with it. When its nice out, I’ll hobble over to a sit spot, like next to the bladdernut in full bloom where I might pull up some rascally spiderwort that I missed. The what-is-going-to-happen-to-me anxiey coming and going. I don’t really have a support network so being chronically sick is scary. Plus all four of my grandparents had extended stays in hospitals during Franco Spain at a time where missing work meant not eating because they were all peasant farmers, so I know I’m processing some ancestral traumas there.
You may have heard people talk about leaning in to the discomfort or staying with the trouble. As in spending some time outside of our comfort zones and feelings of security; wading offshore and spending some time in some rougher waters. In my life, I tend not to need to engage in this habit because the discomfort tends to lean in to me, the trouble tends to enjoy sticking around in my life. The times in which I feel safe and secure are so rare that I just enjoy them and try to get some ideas done until the next tidal wave comes crashing around me, unsettling any stability I though I had.
Its weird because its hard to avoid like other triggers. How do you avoid a trigger that’s inside of you? How do you set boundaries with your own body? The health anxiety activates with the gut pain, the knee aching, constant reminders that you are in danger, that you’re in trouble, that you’re stuck on your own with this. And you feel the realization that there’s no one around who could care for you full-time, nor are used to to burdening others with your needs.
I think sickness is such a huge doorway to relationship, to facing our absence of it. It brings up so many of the blindspots of our society, especially when the industrial health care system or modern medicine can’t quite deal with your problems. It also asks you to lean in to your own body, to follow along with it, to care for it, to listen to it, to sit with it even when the sensations its its providing is one you’d rather not feel, because you need that info, that feedback to know how to step in the next day. It also really, really, asks you to stop and get used to not being productive, not accomplishing, falling behind, facing fears of being forgotten or irrelevant while everyone pursues cool projects and careers. So I’m learning from this teacher as best as I can, as frustrating and sometimes horrifying and nerve-wracking as it can be.
I could say a lot more but there are people who have far more experience with being chronically ill than I do. I just wanted to share a bit of this experience, rather than posting right now about play-based strategies for kinships making, I wanted to just share that I am struggling a bit now and that not much is getting done, or least not very quickly. And I really wanted recognize that people who have been through this deserve a lot more attention. They have maybe been too busy just trying to get well to maintain or build some sort of project but they have so much to offer and I think have really important voices. I think that they are vital pieces to groups and create a more fleshed out and biodiverse emergence in those spaces. I feel like for groups to have a more sincere and complete emergence, they really need to have all the kinds of marginalized voices, and seek them out because these voices are often muffled and muted and forgotten.
The love and care that people who have lived with chronic illness or other debilitating situations deserve.
The idea of a social cartography for digital space is really good. It feels like a return to how communities naturally interact.
And I also have a personal question about this topic that I left in your inbox, when you have some time, please check it out