To get things out of the way, I would like to begin my first blog with death. As integral part of, not in opposition to, life. Sweet foreshadowing of coming home, full circle.
The western mindset has been diagnosed as death-phobic (Stephen Jenkinson1), banishing thoughts of death and decay, or otherwise graceful endings. Instead, we engage in dysfunctional market economies that require perpetual growth as a justification for existence. Rushing to stay in control over life at all cost precludes an openness to much needed restructurings & reconfigurations of the vital relationships Earth’s circular economy depends upon. Gregory Bateson2 noted in an interview (1972) that the most one could do for the world was “scientific work” that may “reconcile occidentals to death”. With my dissertation on mortality in the plant kingdom in my pocket, I feel the green beings have given me insight into the limitations of growing up in a cosmology of individualism, imperialism and material capitalist accumulation, and how death – in the grand scheme of things – doesn’t really spell disaster per se. It’s about flow.
Flowing with, courting the otherwise
Years after my graduation, I ascribe it to the grace of having sat in the presence of intelligence sourced from the phytosphere – in a Council of all Beings session, a communal practice from the Work that Reconnects3 – that I have the following experience to tell. One afternoon, in an act of deliberate openness and vulnerability, I laid my body into the zone where terrestrial and aquatic meet, onto the ocean sand of my home island Fyn in southern Denmark, known as the Baltic, with a mix of North Sea water, in northern Europe at the foot of Scandinavia. The practice that took me to lay myself consciously aware of creating a space for a new perception was part of a homework that Bayo Akomolafe4 had bestowed upon his students to “court the otherwise”. And as I lay in the shallow sand, held by gravity, rocked by calm undulations of water and swaying eelgrass caressing my submerged skin, a knowing exuded into and over me.
home is becoming compost for life
The so called legacy, such as the achievement of a doctorate degree, writing a book, building a school, all the accolades which to attain I had worked myself into the ground did not matter. In the moment of submergence and being taken in the watery arms of mother ocean, all I felt was love and home and becoming precious compost for life. I felt entirely one with the Earth system and with the one-ness the promise that she would take me back any time and fully, no questions asked. What followed was the awareness of my being alive here now was a chance of making something that would otherwise not see the light of day.
A crystal clear fact etched itself in this moment into a secret space under my bones, that simply inhabiting this Earth at this moment being held by gravity in the sand moving below the waves is bliss.
flowing into fULL CIRCLE
As mainstream business as usual continues to gloss over the realities of natural endings, our desperate running away from death has finally (hint: in nature there are no straight lines) brought us full circle as we are staring our very society’s death in the face.
My personal befriending with “Mr.5” death came within a time of lots of “eco-” grief, acceptance of the collapse of a system ruled by patriarchy that I had attempted to appease and serve all my life, and a concurrent connecting with real and honest humans that allowed me to reconnect to my “own” nature I had had to lay on ice from an early age.
It has been a process of finding myself again in the whole Earth community from Eelgrass to Oak nation, of noticing being noticed by the birds, being visited upon by bats, of paying attention to life and beauty, with open eyes. It has been a process of growing daily gratitude for the regrowth of connection sensing and touching kinship tissue, shoulder to shoulder, looking into a never-again-separable communal inter-generational, inter-species, and inter-cultural path of embodied belonging. Now more often than not, my life is celebration of this incredible chance of being alive for a short time.
Concurrent with these realisations, I became aware of a growing wish to support the younger generations in their ability to navigate incredibly uncertain times, and in the general absence of elders’ integral presence in western society, equipping them with tools that resource their innate confidence in already being born knowledge-able. My story thus has it that through transatlantic connections made during online storytelling practice with the Media and Storytelling Hub, life brought me to a small village in the Algarve west of Lagos in Portugal, where I am now part of designing a cross-generational, cross-cultural, cross-species village “un-school”. What we do in detail will require another blog post, but basically we find ways to lead by getting out of youth’s way, making spaces where we can learn to learn together. Smack within an incredible community of humans, I landed on the village beach in December last year and have since felt forever grounded. I now call this place home.
By-The-Wind-Sailor
The other day down on that beach, I found these wondrous communal organisms of the Atlantic Blue Fleet, washed ashore. Their name is By-The-Wind-Sailor. This became my April totem animal. Its actually a colony of many individual polyps6 and -to top this off- they have a sail for transport. Diagon-ally across. Isn’t this incredible?
Being in the knowing of not knowing where we are going, except that we are going, until we strand somewhere, community beings can simply go and let go together. A version of live and let live, live and let die.
This Cnidarian stranded collectively during their continuous arrival home. As I, too, have little influence on where I am going to end up (aware any “I” being already a construct), somehow this ancient ocean-faring happenstance collective floating on the surface of the sea gives me permission. Permission to bask in my integrity with life as inseparably interconnected and vindicated as to my deepest commitment to laying down my life for the collective celebration of life to continue. And it is not a trivial thing to be exchanging breath with my surrounding trees like we are buddies on a planetary dive.
My blood is part of the ocean
Just the moment I draft this story from my home back in Denmark, our resident philosopher scholar calls me from Portugal, and during our call asks me to read aloud to us the below excerpt by D.H.Lawrence 7, crafted as he lay dying young of tuberculosis in 1930. So as this serendipitously on-topic prose time-washed over me, I decided to add it to the deep Atlantic’s ebb and flow spirit present to me in these images. Perhaps, as I gaze at the moon tonight, this whole thing with aliveness in the face of no end to endings will make even more sense.
“The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.”
D. H. Lawrence, 1930
- / “The Wise Ones” – Stephen Jenkinson interviewed by my storytelling teacher in Denmark, Carina Lyall, in her “Becoming Nature Podcast”. https://www.carinalyall.com/en/blog/the-wise-ones-episode-4-with-stephen-jenkinson-d82ey ↩︎
- / I have heard this statement by Gregory Bateson speaking to his biographer Lipset in 1972 cited often. Find it near the very end of this article in aeon; “The most one could do for the world ‘was scientific work which might reconcile Occidentals to death’.” https://aeon.co/essays/gregory-bateson-changed-the-way-we-think-about-changing-ourselves. ↩︎
- / Incidentally, in the session I had been called by eelgrass (Zostera marina) to represent the species. The Work that Reconnects is based on the teachings of Joanna Macy and reawakens the “ecological self.” https://workthatreconnects.org/resources/council-of-all-beings/ ↩︎
- / This exercise was part of the course “We Will Dance With Mountains” https://www.dancingwithmountains.com/, and online gathering under the auspices of The Emergence Network https://www.emergencenetwork.org/tens-organism/ ↩︎
- / The salmon mousse scence from Monty Python simply inserts itself in my mind when I speak of “death” as an “entity” – British humour, please forgive, I mean not to be irreverent referring to “Mr. Death”. https://youtu.be/obioF4_c6RM?si=NcqtkP1zXgdNJtfD ↩︎
- / Velella velella is a cool Cnidarian. I had never seen one in my life! Check out some facts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJGO_bSsR3w ↩︎
- / More context to go with this D. H. Lawrence excerpt https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/10/parts/ ↩︎
Stories from the Wood Wide Web 