Un-clogging the Pores of Perception: Membrane Permeability, Hygiene and Knowing When to Stop

I was asked to write on ecothanatos, an emerging theme in my study group where we engage in practicing other ways of learning with the more-than-human world. The word teases me.

What can I learn about endings from other beings who have so many millions of years more experience in being a good ancestor, in pulling their weight inside a lineage, as a social creature, me, a being that has spent a life believing others at her own expense, not to take up any space or cause discomfort of any kind.

Letting go of stuff seems easy on the outside. There’s a bin. Uncared-for receptacles. But on the inside? Like in an unfamiliar toilet, I am looking for the flush.

In the course of my transitioning from a western-trained, disembodied Earth scientist to a somatic practitioner studying the western delusion of separation between “man” and “nature”, I am retracing the wounds I had torn into my own connective tissue while striving to appease the patriarchal demands of becoming in service of mechanized death.

As a living example myself of the enslavement of life, I begin to notice – a lot of stuff. Learned old things. Odd new things: True living growth means constantly shedding something. ​Something that serves thriving. Materials must be let go of not to get clogged up with forever detritus.

There is literal shedding. We celebrate it. Grooming for beauty. Hair, dead skin, nails. Easy, like falling leaves. Feels good, cleaning up to remain unclogged. To be free-moving, fresh. Of course, shedding is not the same as dumping, because there’s consciousness. For a beautiful work on the dump I recommend following the work of our dear colleague Michael Marder.

Figuratively, also, we must shed beliefs. For example, our ​colonial capitalist economy’s misguided growth paradigm doesn’t acknowledge the biophysical consequences tied to engaging in anything but growth and maximized​ yield – consequences which are actually predominantly causing death for “others” – “externalities” piling up “elsewhere” as “waste.”

Where inside of us do the consequences go when sense no longer rings true and knowing is toppled by lies? Do we carry shards? 

Recently I cut my toenails under the olive trees and a moment later I see an ant making off with one of my clippings, proudly carrying it high like a samurai sword. 

I project she is perhaps feeling lucky since there aren’t so many mammal nail clippings to be found on this old farm abandoned for several decades.

I wonder if she feels she has something valuable like I felt when I had defended my PhD thesis which became a quick meal for a few academics and is serving as partially decomposed compost for my current musings. 

Being a scholar-observer of the plant king/queendom, professionally listening into the cycles of life, it is clear that growth as a continuous demographic living process has as both consequence and prerequisite a need for closure of cycles, for pauses that favor decay, rest, or reproduction. To be Moving On. ​Transcorporeal and literal migration through spacetime.

Insane in the membrane?

During my own migration from the natural sciences towards this unknown space of practice, un-learning linear thought, I attended a phenomenal lecture entitled “it’s absurd!: A (radicalized) psychoanalytical gaze at consumer culture”, offered by Sofia Ulver¹ from Lund University.

The penny dropped, leaving behind a loud pop-sound in my (mem-)brain.

We as capitalist consumers are stuck in a loop, an intricately crafted bio-psycho-neuro-social hamster wheel, believing that with the next shopping, our life will be better.

I am not a consumer culture theorist but I like to postulate nonetheless. Whatever the basis of the abuse the European psyche has suffered for ending up in this loop of perpetrating war, lies and deceit in a total numbness on a global scale, there simply must be an accumulation of clogged-up “non-sequiturs” – some kind of anti-integrity aftermath, since we Europeans stopped feeling our connectedness and abandoned common sense logic altogether.

Perhaps centuries of forced unlearning of our true needs as social beings now has us mistaking sugary substances for necessary nourishment?

Over generations, mixed with all the lies, a self-fulfilling glue keeps obstructing sanity to percolate preventing recalibration of an adequate flow within our societal arteries of life. Can we starve the monster? 

Learning with Tachigali tree

My favourite tree species modeling purposeful death is Tachigali vasquezii. I cite its wisdom already seven years ago, in page nine of my PhD Thesis on plant mortality². In some circles it is known as the suicide tree. I met this impressive neotropical rain forest giant in person in the Peruvian Amazon twenty years ago, and I remember vividly that I had to tilt my nose ninety degrees upwards to see into its enormous canopy, straining to understand what I was looking at. Were these leaves? Fruits? We were studying the trees in the nine-hectare permanent forest plot in Jenaro Herrera, a village on the Ucayali river near Iquitos, as part of a training course in plant biodiversity. 

Tachigali vasquezii exhibits so-called monocarpy, a life history strategy rare in long-lived species³, where in its first decades the tree focuses solely on (fast) growth without creating any fruits at all.

Then, one day, when it has reached the size it deems good enough for the time being, in other words, when it has come into its time given the conditions in the now, it goes into full flower and at the end of its “individual” life cycle stands a tree with only fruits, zero leaves, giving anything left to give into its next generation and then dies. Or, begins to let go of its body. 

I wonder where is the cue that the tree knows when to stop growing? Is the agency in the vascular cambium to put a stop to the proliferation of xylem and phloem? Is someone studying Tachigali’s last years’ pores laid down, crafted into the wood? Who pays attention to its intelligent decision to die just in time? It reminds me of the economic, life history approach of an octopus, who gives its own dying body as food for its young.

Could befriending death allow us to live better lives?

“Hoka hey, today is a good day to die!” This affirmative battle cry was related to me by a person of culture during a gathering on the Mall in Washington DC, where I studied at the turn of the millenium.

When I was adolescent, I had marvelled at stories conveyed to me in Europe as coming from indigenous elders somewhere on Turtle Island, where when their time came, the old people would leave the village, sit under a tree and die. I felt if ever I could do this, that would be my biggest achievement in life.

Come to think of it, I still feel that way. That is because, in this hyperindividualistic, death phobic society, such ‘suicide tree’ behavior is already a walk at the edge of the bearably imaginable. The insatiable part of me who wants to live forever shudders. 

Yet, it is this kind of behavior that I believe is now asked of mwe⁴, in the western capitalist, delusion-dependent, soul- and source-separated society, to give all my no-longer-needed possessions, my “holdings on”, onwards for life that is now here to flourish after me. 

​Can I hear the ecological cues of life history meeting collapse in service of life? Can mwe stand being with Tachigali?

Deep inside, mwe know that it means mwe have to embrace our “own”, “individual” endings.

It means to understand that we are part of a bigger ecology.

However, some things block this knowledge from arriving in our brain informing us when it is time for old beliefs to give way to new experiences. Even unfamiliar ones. 

White privilege and the illusion of human exceptionalism are deeply engrained. If I were Tachigali, would I rather die by the chainsaw than give up my so-called “individual” wealth?

Would it be so tough to grieve over how long it took to come back to a sharing, feel-real economy, and begin living in simple abundance partnering again with life? Well, it seems we are running ourselves off a cliff of greed.

“In essence, the lifetime reproductive schedule is constrained through natural selection by the probability of success and the probability of living to try again” Willson⁵

If we continue in the colonial capitalist paradigm for few more years without also funding the regenerative spaces that need our finances now to regrow a basic vegetative infrastructure, perhaps starting with rekindling our relationships inside the plant king/queendom, our odds of living to try again are close to nil.

So if we want humanity to keep a place in this galactic lineage …. let nature select for plant intelligence so we may receive instructions, now, for how to flow on, as plants and their allies. 

Do humans have a cambium? Re-juvenating refusal in the Algarve

Working with an African-led NGO in southern Europe for two years, I am beginning to understand this blindness to sense clogged pores in our membrane designed for exchange, for learning, acts of remembrance about which matters even matter.

For me this membrane image and the notion of clogged-up channels where flow is nature’s intention is really helpful. It allows me a space for beginning to feel into a (wishful, I know) slumbering capacity for change, to believe that we in the west are not just zombies, but that we are humans who have lost our ability to sense ourselves as participants in the greater whole, with, and perhaps due to the consequences of our actions. And that the memory of being human again can be re-attained. Re-trained.  

This is mandatory because working from the premise of sourcing knowledge through relying on the seepage of information through clogged, western-trained pores, stuffed with white “do good” reasoning is out right dangerous, because the era of disinformation didn’t start with Zuckerberg. 

Witnessing deaths of humans, more-than humans and ways of knowing

It is indeed unfathomable. Imagine your home gets raided, your more-than-human kin desecrated, your meaning-making gaslit. All your family and friends killed or evicted at gunpoint. Ways of knowing how to live in congruence with the land, the rains, the forest beings, sentenced to death. Death is celebrated everywhere. Creative life force denigrated. The colonized soul is perhaps tiring from thousands of years of oppression. Here in Algarve, I notice dying waterways, where belonging has become an unaffordable sentiment for various reasons. Tourists call the shots. 

We drink sugarwater, we eat sugarbodies – and remain blind to all the deaths and suffering. How can we on the one hand seem so inquisitive about life (science and all) but adamant to stay incarcerated in our western-capitalist economic criminal conduct of genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide, both abroad and on our doorstep? 

Can we as the western mindset-embedded and perpetuating societies of Europe and North America, Machado”s north of the north⁶, aptly self-referencing as First World, seek what is beneath our addiction for sugarwater-sucking when flowers with real nectar abound left and right waiting for us to break through the thin veil separating us in our addiction to illusion? Can we smell our ancestral roses? Can we recognize our brain’s need to chew home-grown nuts?

The decision to embark on this process of facing what horrors lie within continuing to feed the inner machine of denial has to be held as a most courageous act of reverence to the gift of living on this beautifully intelligent Earth planet.  

Learning from and with the ant-cestors

I had Latin in school. Ante: before; cestors: passers, but also the ones giving up control – the word combination pointing to the fluid arc our lifespans take, dipping in and out of the big river, Earth time.

My playmates in Circle Five recently suggested the word ‘ant-cestors’ – 150 million years that ants came before us, ever ready to face their maker. To honour our antecessors, then, am I ready to face my demons, when they come in my dreams, and I slaughter them with knives or secateurs?

Now it is about listening to the space between the lives of other kin. Ants carry knowledge or rather, ants embody knowing the consequences of 150 million years of becoming social beings. Watching them, now, under the olive trees who came to be a hundred million years later – I wonder what we can learn together with life about what is continuing, and tend with care that what wants to die. 

Can we learn with the ants ways of tending to the conditions for plants and humans to live another thousand years? What action campaigns would they lead? I try to imagine what it would take to farm macrophages that eat away our clogged-up goo of patriarchy in our once-intelligent membranes. Can we hear the waters gurgling beneath the facade of our false realities?

What if in my dream the monsters still move towards me, am I failing to see the trap door into the new world? Or must I walk towards them? Tachigali talks of letting go. Ants sort things out. Just how in our universe nothing gets created nor destroyed, when the fear of moving on meets the fear of failing to do so in time –  we rather transform than further erode our real economy, our soil! What needs ending? What needs tending?

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Do you want to explore these questions?

On the weekend of 12-13 December 2026, we will explore the idea of eco+thanatology in an online (late)autumn symposium. Currently, there is a call for prayers, papers, practices and poetry (until September 15th). To learn more, visit: https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-5-ecology-of-transformative-learning-practices-with-in-a-more-than-human-world/

1. Sofia Ulver is senior lecturer in marketing at Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM). The lecture entitled it’s absurd! was held during the Consumer Culture Theory Seminar at the University of Southern Denmark in the summer of 2025. Here a link to a description, https://www.cctweb.org/post/university-of-southern-denmark-odense-organizes-consumption-theory-canon-of-classics and following is one of her famous papers: Ulver, Sofia. (2021). The conflict market: Polarizing consumer culture(s) in counter-democracy. Journal of Consumer Culture. 22. 908-928. 10.1177/14695405211026040. ↩︎
2.  I also mention Tachigali in my PhD Thesis introduction elaborating on mortality patterns in plants, already on page nine, https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/klk71oo3amos0jsnq5hb7/tHESISfLIPPEDiCONS.pdf?rlkey=sbmhngycp70hb8ix11zom2xoq&st=7e34aoq3&e=1&dl=0 ↩︎
3. an article on Tachigali in the British Ecological Society Journal
   https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2005.00958.x
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4. Daniel Siegel and colleagues coined the term mwe as a pronoun in connection with the publication of his book entitled Intraconnected. He speaks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrgjF9xLaGg I use it because the confusion I cause myself and my playmates switching between I and we has also a fallacy of language at the base – and most of the time my either-or switching reveals some kind of othering pattern in me. Daniel Siegel together with his (student-) colleagues is bringing an extremely important message from within the ranks of western science (finally), that we were wrong in assuming this separation to be true. ↩︎
5. Willson, M. F. (1983). Plant Reproductive Ecology (A. W. I. Publication, Ed.). JohnWiley; Sons. 
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6. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Hospicing Modernity – in the book, nuance is offerered that differentiates not only between global north and global south, but the north of the north the south of the north, the north of the south and the south of the south. ↩︎