In Part 2 of this mini-series on Ecological Attachment Theory, we have the inevitable but necessary conversation about how colonialism impacts our land-based relationships.
Loved this 💚 The banishment from Eden as loss of connection to the land and the “original sin” of extracting forbidden fruit from that land really opens up a whole new (pretty profound) interpretation when looked at from this lens
The Old Gods illustration is from Sineater! This one is of the green man, so definitely celtic influenced. You can find his work on IG under sineateruk and at www.sineater.bigcartel.com
Thank you so much re: image source! I will update it right now :)
And I am so glad this perspective has sparked some curiosity. I am certainly no religious scholar but the topic of Adam & Eve does intrigue me deeply, especially Christianity’s contrast of Paganism - which of course is a conversation as old as time, but adding the ecological & attachment elements provides us with a new shard of perspective as you have mentioned. :)
Wonderful topic and exploration, Marika - thank you - the connections/conversations between our bodies/world, our ideas/souls, and our stories/histories has been calling me too. There's some magic behind it all, I must insist. It calls me into practice more than into thinking.
For those of us in the way of Yeshua, I can recommend as companions to your work: Victoria Loors 'Church of the Wild' Ch 6 (logos as sermo as conversation), Brian McLaren 'Life After Doom' Ch 9 (Hebrew and Christ stories as indigenous wisdom), and Cyprian Smith 'The Way of Paradox' Ch 2 (Eckhart's communitive eye of the heart )
Hi BJ! Thank you so much for letting me know how my words have inspired connection of ideas and personal reflection for you. I also appreciate you sharing resources from your own cultural practices & worldviews. I look forward to exploring <3
Another animist hustle-theory-concept to get people to sign up for a course. Another teacher-facilitator articulating important topics very well but topics which are evident and do not require a central thinker but a group dynamic using all their different gifts to work on a topic. The intersection of attachment theory and land is a "duh," very interesting but a dug that doesn't require a prolonged course. Land relationality won't be solved in a course with a teacher-student top-down dynamic and a transactional nature,. It will be solved when people exit their comfort zones in to horizontal human-to-human communities, making commitments to one another and the place they live to rely more on one another and the land than on the system as they go through all the discomforts that the loss of convenience and individualism involves.
If you don’t like my work, or how I choose to share it, feel free to dismiss it and instead focus on your own life, your own work, your own contributions to this space or your community - instead of tearing down others on the black void of your phone screen who are just trying to make a difference in all of the small and big ways they can 🫶🏼 Have a great 2025! 🌞
I love your work. I am just disappointed because whenever I meet someone working on similar topics to myself, it seems they are just about building an audience for their courses. And it makes me sad because i want to do this work non-transactionally with a group of people who want to build relationships over long-term. I'm personally frustrated because whenever I meet people with similar interests to me, like yourself, theyre not interested in building friendship, community and building something together, they are focused on their individual careers and non to much relationship/reciprocity building.
If you are talking about decoloniality, then this is something you might want to consider how whiteness and the needs of career building alter our approaches to animism, indigenous worldviews, trauma healing.
I am personally tired of land practice being made conceptual and commodified. It just doesn't work in a student-teacher or client-service provider relationship. Can we come together, therapists, land practitioners, activists, artists, activists, animists, etc and build something together horizontally? Can we engage with the land without it having to be a course that someeone organized. Can we share the responsbility of facilitating and leading and see what comes up emergently? Can we put coming together as a group and building relationships over our individual career aspirations?
So, if you want to make a difference, maybe making a difference does not have you as a centered figure with your own audience. People like yourself, maybe should do an examination of conscience and analyze what privileges have allowed oyu to do this work and have an audience? And then I would be thinking in terms of how can I bring my work in to a collective, one where my ability to build an audience serves a group and not just myself, where other people’s talents and gifts can be given a voice and a platform.
There are people, like myself, who have deep experience and practice with the land, trauma healing, attachment theory, decolonization, but our traumas and neurodiversities prevent us from turning our skills and abilities and knowledge in to a platform online. But we have gifts to offer as well, we would like to be included, participate and help. Why not use your platform to work as a group.
Besides it is only a village, a group of people that can truly see and relate to the land, it is not an individual pursuit. So my question, are you interested in connecting and collaborating with marginalized and underprivileged people like me, or pursue and individual career where you have an advantage over us? Or would you like to use you platform to also center other voices?
Tayshaun, I appreciate you bringing in the career-building aspect of colonialism, and the one-directional nature of much of Westernized teaching and courses. We do need to consider how our work really impacts the dynamic of the people involved, and if it might in fact perpetuate systems we are fighting against. And I personally find that courses often are places of building networks of collaboration. Even when the course is not intentionally built to do so, but center the instructor as the 'authority', I have made crucial connections in those contexts. And from what I have read about this course, it looks like it's actually intended to be a community conversation, led by the person who has organized these thoughts and it's direction. Do you think there's a place for courses (ideally structured to encourage participants to team up and collaborate), as well as more decentralized efforts to organize collaborative action (which is what I understood to be your expression of a better alternative to a course)?
This makes me think of the permaculture concept of 'appropriate technology'. In which, although we might think of an ideal regenerative future where we don't use fossil fuel vehicles to do our regenerative work - for the current time being, we do need to do so to get the work done.
I deeply appreciate your contribution to the dialogue happening here, and I couldn't agree more. These types of containers - and the impact they have on an individual & communal level - require rigorous self-reflection on behalf of the facilitators. Facilitators themselves can perpetuate hierarchies of power that reinforce a lack of agency among participants (as is reinforced in western/traditional teaching structures). It is important that we interrogate our own personal relationships to power, and envisioning communal spaces of co-creative learning experiences. I have been so fortunate to have loosely defined the edges of these types of containers, informed by my own experiences of witnessing authoritarian dynamics even within activist spaces, and have used this as motivation to help set intentions for different types of engagement, which have been fulfilled through the participation and collaboration of the student communities. The relationships and cross-pollination of experience and knowledge is so important to creating more revolutionary spaces for learning. Thank you so much for sharing your insight and perspective, it is beautiful. xoxo
Don't get me wrong I have made a friend or two in courses but I feel like the courses themselves almost weren't necessary. I would find myself looking in the chat of a zoom session to connect with peers while ignoring speakers who were giving basic summaries of easy to find information for hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour. Having the speaker/teacher just felt redundant, especially since the most compelling and fascinating discussion were coming from attendees rather than the speakers. These people were were so well-informed, incisive and had had such profound experiences in unlearning whiteness, developing relationships with nature, decolonizing and more that I felt like we just don’t need leaders/teachers. The only difference I saw between the people offering and the people attending was that the former were able to to do the work of building an audience and scheduling an event, sometimes for reasons of popularity and celebrity culture more than from merit. I also noticed these people offering were usually happy to stay in intellectual comfort zones and centering interaction on conceptual or academic discussions and then go one about their way, maybe doing some exercises but not really interested in using their outreach in bringing people together.
I don’t have 300 dollars to participate and hopefully meet people, I’d like to cut out the middle man and just meet people directly without having to attend a course or conference that is largely made up of content that I am already familiar with or that I could easily find on my own. I also think providing it for ourselves helps us work on community and relationships more, which is the most important thing I think we need to do. I get the using fossil fuels to someday hopefully see a world without them argument, and I agree with it to a great extent. I’m just thinking we’re ready for a new phase. I appreciate someone providing a space for this, we’ve definitely needed it up until now, but I think we’re ready to provide this for one another horizontally and share the responsibility of creating a container while drawing on the gifts of the whole group rather than just one person.
I think were ready for spaces that don’t rely on a singular organizer, thinker, speaker, teacher, etc where building community is in and of itself the primary reason for coming together rather any individual’s modality or pedagogy or curriculum. I think we can come together as an organism, do things in a way that fits our schedule and rhythm as a group and then emergently do this work together, figuring out our own programs. We can come up with our own exercises and do them in ways or in flows that serve where we’re at, rather than follow a program of only one person who is not in a personal context with us on a regular basis for the long-term. I just believe in the intelligence of the collective to create their own container much more than a professional specialist providing one.
I’ve written a lot more on this subject just below in direct responses to Marika. Ultimately if people want to do these spaces and find value in them I respect that, I just desperately need more horizontal spaces because courses, conferences offered by one person marginalize me and don’t provide what I’m looking for. Meeting people in a course is nice, but I’m ready for a group that wants to be a collective organism and commit to a long-term and consistent group-project or community together. I am not sure how the nature of courses and conferences foment the values of collective responsibility, trust relationality and reciprocity that I am looking for.
I am working with someone on creating a space that is more about bringing people together around trauma-healing, land-practice, animism, decoloniality-modernity and other parallel topics. It should hopefully help people facilitate group spaces, organize events created together and deepen relationships, almost like a non-toxic social network. I would be happy to share this with you If you are interested in having a chat, I’d be delighted to get together because, like I said, i’m primarily interested in building community and relationship right now.
I appreciate the intentions behind your comment here, and the opening of dialogue. I totally understand any judgments you have towards folks who create these types of offerings and sell them, and perhaps if you knew more about me you would understand why I provide this type of workshop, my first in over a year.
Community building: I was a farmer for 7 years, and have participated in and helped support a vibrant community of folks invested in sustainable agriculture here in the WA state. My involvement with sustainable agriculture, herbalism, and healing, has always been community oriented, and 90% of these relationships (in exception to my direct employers) have been built through presence, showing up consistently, contributing my labor, voice, and soul - and not through monetary transactions of any kind. As far as the online spaces through which I share my work and articulate my experiences, I am so lucky to be apart of an immensely beautiful corner of the internet with people who have now known me for 4+ years since I started sharing online about my healing work. The only reason I transitioned out of farming (besides the financial insecurity of being a farm laborer and single mother + sole income provider for my family) was because of chronic health issues caused by farming, more specifically becoming immune compromised and having a damaged respiratory system due to mushroom cultivation. My health is *still* impacted by these conditions, and I am not able to return to the types of work that I did previously. During this 4+ years of transitioning into being fully supported by my healing & soul-led work (which, I still have a number of side-gigs, and am still working part-time for one of the farms I used to work for as one of their farmer's market leads), I have contributed an innumerable number of hours to sharing my work freely on various platforms. The reason I have such a beautiful online community of folks that support my work (non-monetarily) is because I've chosen to contribute my voice to these spaces, and have built many relationships because of that - I hope you consider that as a reason to begin sharing your voice, too. Sharing our voice helps create relationships.
Can community be built through these types of online course/workshop spaces? And what about the hierarchy of power within a student-teacher or client dynamic? The answer is absolutely yes, but it depends on who is leading the container and, more importantly, who chooses to show up to them consistently. From 2021-2022, I facilitated a cohort of about 20 students through a year-long program focused on my frameworks of energetic ecology. Nearly every single week, for the entire year, we all showed up to that space for practice, discussion, etc. I can't overstate when I say - I still talk to these folks on a regular basis, and they have all maintained relationships with each other beyond the closure of the space. I wish I could depict to you how awe-inspiring it has been to witness a community grow like that, but I can't show you the thousands of interactions I've had with these folks, and the cross-pollinating network of relationships that have been built - and tended to with care - since 2021. The number of pictures I get of students within this cohort who are meeting (in real life) with other students, tending friendships, and I myself having had the opportunity to meet some of them in person as well. In my opinion, the success of community building in these types of cohorts/courses/workshops is dependent upon the participation of everyone involved, not just the facilitator. The facilitator is simply whom creates the container, opens the space, and creates invitations for exploration. In regards to hierarchy and roles of authority within these types of spaces, I have put great effort into establishing spaces that are as anti-authoritarian as possible. There were a number of reasons for this, but a few were: 1) Seeing an inherent flaw in a hierarchy of power within teacher-student relationships/spaces, not just in traditional education but how spiritual/woo-woo spaces have adopted these same structures of power within containers for learning and 2) having participated in activist spaces during 2020, I witnessed how people entered positions of power within activist groups and, without having any other model for how to be in a position of power, defaulted to authoritarianism. The amount of abuse that I witnessed within those communities here in Seattle disturbed me, and when creating the container in 2021, I was determined not to recreate what I saw. If we're going to be revolutionaries and create a more equitable world, we can't simply adopt the same structures of oppression of which we are trying to deconstruct - nor recreate them in the new worlds we want to cultivate. The many nuances of how I did this is much too long of a conversation, and the process I'm sure was far from perfect, as I didn't really have a model for it myself. I've had students specifically tell me that the spaces I hold have deconstructed their perspective on what it means to be a "student", because how I facilitated the space was so outside of a traditional education model. But again, I simply set my intentions, invited people to the space, and we actually all collaboratively contributed to the learning process, and co-creating the overall container. The first few meetings for this cohort were spent collaboratively creating a document with our intentions, desires for safety, boundaries, etc.
In regards to the commodification of land-based perspectives, I completely agree, and I see it in the most hyperbolic ways. An example is a woman who I saw on various platforms pushing a book called "Regenerative Business" (or something like that), co-opting the language of regenerative agriculture, along with the nature aesthetic. When I looked into her various accounts more deeply, I found that she was previously a yoga instructor, then made a very quick pivot into regenerative business guru. You are welcome to think that is what I am doing, but I'm not going to allow that judgment to impact me. I was raised in a household of immigrants, my mother grew up in a folk-animist culture and passed down those beliefs to me. I spent my entire childhood hunting and fishing with my dad. I started farming in 2013, and have since worked on and for probably over a dozen farms at this point, not to mention having started one of my own. I started foraging for plants in 2014, and started crafting herbal medicines shortly thereafter. I completed a degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on restoration ecology in 2018. I've been doing healing work since 2013 as well. While there are aspects of my business that yes, from a practical standpoint do need to be monetized (you can see my response on capitalism below), I would say that I am far from someone simply chasing the animism, nature, yada yada trend. And, at the very least, if I am creating these types of spaces that you take issue with, such as a communal workshop series, I do my absolute best to root them in REAL practice, not just online romanticization, philosophizing, and talking about nature through a screen. People that are in my cohorts - we do the real work.
I think the ideas you discuss regarding platform, horizontal development of online presence, etc. are beautiful, and I invite you to begin working on that within your own community. Again, I don't think you're familiar with me, my story, or my work in other spaces, but I have done a lot of collaboration with many other folks from many different communities. I've co-facilitated containers/workshops, I've brought in a number of different practitioners on various projects, had people guest-teach within my cohorts, and much more. There has been an immense effort to cross-pollinate and work with various communities. I don't need to throw in all of the identity buzzwords to describe the types of people I have been in collaboration with. And yes, I have historically always made ways to ensure that folks of varying income levels are able to participate. I've offered innumerable scholarships, sliding scale, and donation-based events. My colleague and I facilitated communal nature walks here in Seattle every month last year, all donation-based. My colleague deals with chronic health issues that can sporadically limit her mobility (and at times she has to use a cane to get around), so we also take great care to provide a variety of different types of accessibility for our walks, rotating between routes that are wheel-chair accessible, varied terrain, or routes that require more mobility. Her & I, from the beginning, have been making plans to film all of the walks so that we can upload them to youtube and make them accessible to the disabled community. For most of the gatherings, we didn't even make enough money to pay for printing the flyers. You have seen my work on Substack (I'm assuming), and Substack is just one, very small facet, of my work overall - and really, this is simply a space where I get to share long-form content, something I really enjoy. It has been my desire to divest from Instagram and other types of short-form media, explore my own personal delight and joy in writing. That's pretty much it.
On capitalism and marketing on platforms, I don't have much to say other than I do believe that if people value something, reciprocity, in whatever way that can happen, is deeply necessary. As I have mentioned in my substack pieces, or have put in the "subscribe" button comment - folks engagement and desire to connect gives me motivation to share my work, but small donations or monetary support in any way supports my ability to do this work. I was not able to have an online presence and share my work when I was working for 2-3 different farms with only 2 days off a month - again, as a single mother. If what I contribute to this space, or any space that folks have access to, is meaningful to them, reciprocity can happen and it doesn't have to just be financial. And in fact, reciprocity (imo) deeply operates in opposition to capitalism. Instead of people just mindlessly extracting content from the internet, they can be in relationship with me. And I will be very honest when I say that I have felt very extracted from, on many different platforms, as people do seem to value my contributions to various spaces, but not enough to support my ability to show up to them. Realistically, I live in a capitalist economic system in one of the most expensive places in the country. I am a single mother and sole income provider for my family. I am very legitimately diagnosed with schizo-effective disorder (i am not just "neurospicy", but actually live with a life-threatening psychological disorder) which demands constant vigilance and deep levels of care every single day to ensure I stay stable. I have other chronic health conditions... I can't just *not* make money, and in fact, I don't make enough to even be supported by my business and practice full-time, as I have stated. I do 2-3 other things to support my livelihood.
I'll be honest when I say, I did not love the energy you brought in your initial comment regarding my work, and I don't resonate with all of the assumptions you are operating on in your follow up - that I'm just filled with power and privilege, that all I do is charge people for my work, and that I don't work collaboratively with marginalized people (of which, according to the "requirements of marginalization as determined by the marginalized community", i might qualify for in some but not all respects). All of those judgments are purely assumptions based off of the fact that you have no idea who I am, you don't know my story, you are not familiar with my work, etc - and it doesn't seem like you really wanted to try from the beginning. I would gently encourage you to interrogate your own relationship to these types of online spaces, why you have immediately positioned me as someone who has supposed power over you, am witholding some type of resource from you, have not done my due justice of lifting you up (which, we aren't in relationship and this whole interaction does not compel nor motivate me to tend relationship with you whatsoever).
I am not your oppressor.
Thanks for the chat. I wish you well in all of your endeavors, and hope that you not only find the community you desire, but that your future is full of an abundance of resources, connection, and joy - truly.
My country’s healthcare system does not provide the kinds of treatments that I need, so for now I am just living very slowly and carefully and dealing with my chronic conditions as best as I can. I am taking this risk, and somehow I am getting by and almost no money but lots of free time. Not saying you have to, I obviously don’t know your life, just sharing my own.
I will be working on creating a space that is not centered around me or my work, but about getting people interested in trauma-healing, land-practice, hospicing modernity, animism etc together. I fortunately have met someone who is taking care of the online-tech part. This space will be built on a play-oriented and relational approach to trying to help people reparent one another and build long-term relationships, also while hospicing modernity and recognizing issues of white-modernity (following the work of Vanessa De Oliveira). This will happen in the hopes of weaving greater relationality, reciprocity, trust and respectful land-practice, one that doesn’t force spiritual connection with nature without consent.
I want to support groups where there is no central-facilitator, the facilitation is shared. There are so many of us who have knowledge, experience and skills to offer who don’t want to have to hustle to be a full-time facilitator and would rather share the burden non-transactionally. Unfortunately platforms still exist within modernity and competition, so some get more popular and others don’t but this market is not “rational”, so we would like to create a space that level the playing field and allows people to connect as equals rather than as well-known “experts” and lesser known “nobodies”.
Question About Community
I am very curious about the people you have brought together in your courses. What do you mean by saying that your courses have built community among them? For me there is a big difference between being friends and chatting about intellectual concepts and hanging out once in a while and really building a community around collective responsibility, trust, reciprocity and really living together on a common landscape (while acknowledging the realities of ecovillage gentrification and other privileges).
What I have found is that because I am low-functioning, have high needs, am very emotional, do not wish to hide my grief or wear a mask that building relationships is very hard for me. At the same time I am very good at group setting and bringing people together. Unfortunately, I live in a part of the world where the zeitgeist is still very much like what you described in Seattle. I am surrounded by spiritual narcissists and career seekers and manifesters and people concerned only with their own position/value/comfort while masquerading as activists and community leaders. I have also witnessed a lot of abuses in alternative/activist/spiritual/permaculture spaces and also I just know a lot of perfectly fine people who just don’t want to make any moves out of modernity or try to work on care ecologies. I also know a lot of cool people in the organic and regenrative movements but are just building an audience for their consultancies or treating the land as a just a means to an end (“make healthy food for me so I can be healthy and show it off on social media while ignoring your needs and feelings”). They do not recognize the land’s right to consent.
Anyway, can you put me in touch with these people who have connected in your events, I would love to hear their experiences and connect with them. Maybe they have similar needs and goals to my own.
Can You Help me Connect with New friends?
The idea of building this project I mentioned (its like a non-toxic social media for people to come together around these topics) from the ground-up is exhausting and also redundant because there are already communities and platforms established who have gathered people together around these topics. I have the fear that the people with the platforms (like yours) are reluctant to use their audience in ways that may bring people together in ways that do not center their presence/work. So my question would be if I build up this kind of social media space, would you actively share it in your community? What I’m wondering, for those of you that have built an audience, its nice that you show up and provide a service, but are you willing to help us connect with one another in a way that may not benefit you (directly) or center your work? Can you use your platform(s) to just help us meet one another. Can I meet the people who attend your events without having to spend money, are they are channels for me to do that?
I cannot afford to pay 300 or even 30 dollars to meet people. I also don’t want to have to attend a conference of information I already know to meet those people or have the events structured around a single person holding the space. I am not interested in attending the events of any singular facilitator just to meet people while engaging in activities I am already familiar with. I have clicked “adventures and community” on your website hoping it would connect me to a forum or discord or something, but its just for your newsletter to hear updates about your events. I have deep, deep experience with ecological attachment, and I would love to share that with a groups of friends and give them what I have learned. Can you give the people who attend your events my contact so I can do this with them in relationship and community?
Could You Help me find a Team to work with?
Can you help me find people to work with? In spite of the health issues and brokeness I’ve mentioned, my number one priority right now is relationship, because the absence of relationship is doing a lot of damage to my nervous system and consequentially exacerbating those health conditions. Also I don’t think I can make a living on my own, I think I need to work within a team of people do share my work. Are you interested in collaborations with people like me who have a similar background, do you know people who are more interested in doing this work as a team?
Can You Help me With My Individual project?
Can you help me find a place for my work? While I would preferably do something as a member of a team, I also have issues that at some point will ask me to have money in order to live, which may force me to go it alone. So I’m gonna be a little more honest/provocative here with my questions. I’ve noticed that you charge 9 people 300 dollars each for a 2 month session. Could you help me do something similar? I have a pedagogy I’ve been working on (its probably no that different from energetic ecology to be honest but I guess everyone’s gotta put their own label on things) that brings together attachment theory, land practice, animism, trauma healing and community building. Its my own invention!!!!!!! An extra 3000 bucks every year or so would help me pay for some needed health care or maybe even rent a place so that I don’t have to live with my abusers (the worst part of my life situation is having to live with parents). They want to kick me out anyway so they can have their ideal consumerist-boomer comfort zone and I can learn what its like in the real world (which I cant survive in, so I guess I’ll have to hustle some courses to survive also).
If I offer something similar to what you do, would you share it with your audience? Or do I have to “earn” my own audience? This is the kind of stuff I wonder about when thinking about how the hell to live on this planet. Maybe I should just give up and build a platform like everyone else with my qualifications. Would you or someone else with a similar platform be willing to spend time with me and help me with my work? We can review each other’s work like they do in academia. I feel we’re too isolated from on aother.
I have all the work done for a land-relationship offering, I just can’t do the part of putting it online and having an audience to attend. You say you’re not my oppressor but people in your position seem to be quite happy having a competitive advantage over me and seem to have no interest in working on my ideas and helping my project or seeing how my work might be meant to be in collaboration with theirs. Sometimes I feel like what I’m doing is a maturation and evolution of what others are doing and that they feel intimidated by me and refusing to share my work in fear of losing their gig/niche/position while I just want to be their friend, cooperate and be in mutual aid.
The whole having your own animist patented system thing is weird to me. Seeing that you and many others have one makes me feel pressure to patent my own project and build a platform around my own work so so that I can have a community centered on me that will pay for my events and help me survive the apocalypse so that I don’t have to die alone, afraid and in pain, so that I don’t have to suffer anymore. But I would much rather connect and collaborate.
Also thank you because I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation because I’ve found what I have been feeling and wanted to say to people with platforms like your own, I hope you can see this is directed to the zeitgeist and landscape and the general community of practitioners rather than directly to yourself. Your substack just happened to light the fire of communication in me. if you feel like there are other platforms I should be focusing on, please feel free to share them with me and I will reach out to them.
I am curious, was your long answer was in a genuine interest to communicate with me? If that is the case I would like to talk further, I am probably the only person in my country with the kind of land practice experiences that I lived. Or maybe you wrote a lot just because you felt the need to explain yourself and maintain a good reputation for this platform?
Anyway, I’m very grateful because loneliness has been killing me lately and now I am going to be more forward with people whose work I enjoy in letting them know what my needs are and directly asking them if they’d like to get to know one another. Hopefully they are like you and want to actually engage with their audience and not just build one.
First of all, thanks for the detailed response, very informative.
Yes You Gotta Make a Living, but What if?
I get your life situation completely, it actually is very similar to my own. Land practiioner for 15 years now, focused on my relationship with the land over comm0difiying my space in to some sort of workaway/permaculture/spiritual event hub like most people do. Just hopsiving modernity yeat after year, dealing with my crazy CPTSD, schizo-symptoms, chronic health issues and constant/chronic pain (both emotional and physical).
But this also still brings me to what I have been thinking about for a long time. I see very talented people with backgrounds and interest similar to my own who have found a niche in creating a platform and use that platform to support themselves. I get it. But there are many people in life situations like your own, including myself who do not have the personality-type skills to build a platform but do have a lot to offer, share, teach. The general public ends up finding platforms like your own offered by an individual, but do not find the people who are not able to actively build a well-known space. So then what may happen is what if there are missing pieces to these conferences and courses in these platforms that become well-known that might be in the hands of these people who have different backgrounds to your own, unable to afford your spaces, unable to create their own? I think there are issues with one person being responsible for holding a space. I think their biases and personality end up having too much of an influence on the culture of the space. I read your work and I really like it but I also see a lot of gaps and absences that I think I could fill for you. For example I think I see some issues with what you are offering on ecological attachment and could help you with that, its one of my specialities, but I cant (and don’t want) to pay 300 dollars just to see how you offer your work and how it matches with my expertise and experience. (I live on less than 300 a month, which is 20% of the average salary where I live). And I’m sure I have some blind spots in my own work that you could fill.
So that is where I see a lack of responsbility from people like you to people like me, you are not using your platform to look for and include peers-soulkin, like me, who may enhance and enrich your work, I assume that is because relationships are hard and if you have you’re own thing going that pays the bills, why risk including another person and getting things messy right? This is where you see my anger and frustration come from, people who have built a platform focusing on relating to their audience and not seeking to include peers-kin who do similar work but are not able to build a platform or help us connect with one another with that platform.
It sounds like, like you say, you need to make a living, so you have to turn you work and knowledge in to your “patented” framework of energetic ecology. This is an issue I see where everyone has to have their own modality, so that they can have an exclusive educational product to offer. I just don’t think modalities, especially land practice modalities can come from individuals, it takes lots of eyes to truly see the landscape and I think this work needs to come from a group of people. Also I feel like a lot of people are sharing more or less the same thing but giving it their own personal trademark so that they can build a career on it based on exclusivity. Then when someone like me with no audience comes along we are either “stealing someone’s patented work” because what we do is similar to what someone else already trademarked, or we are not taken seriously because we aren’t the one that invented the “official modality.” What if my work is meant to be with your work? But your work is the only one seeing the light of day? I don’t think you can be the founder or owner of practices that are common to all human ancestry, but calling yourself one seems to be in the interest of a career or competitive advantage.
Also, using the word hustle may sound like an attack, but it seems to me like you are in hustle culture, doing a lot of jobs to survive. What sucks is that doing things to pay the bills inherently alters the content. Maybe someone commodifies something that could be easily delivered in a non transactional way. Maybe what someone is offering is something that could be easily shared horizontally but they center it through their own faucet or space in order to maintain a platform that brings in income. Commofidication affects how work is presented, it alters it, that is the nature of modernity, like Vanessa de Oliveira talks about, No educational space is free from it. Sometimes the content is better learned/incorporated in a non-transactional non-academic way. Groups could do things in their own time in their own way while building relationships with on another and learning how they can do this for themselves and seeing that they don’t need experts, but they sign up for something because modernity has them convinced that that is how you learn something.
So for larger spaces, where someone with greater experience is offering to a wider audience that may still be starting out their journeys, I think the person who has the abilities to create a well-known platform should look for peers who maybe are not good at building a platform but have a lot to offer that audience (thus also helping others in situations like you and me of being fucked phsycally/psychologically). Then, I think these platforms should support and encourage bringing people together in to horizontal groups that don’t need them as teachers anymore.
So just because you need to do this work transactionally to get by, doesn’t mean its the ideal way, it doesn’t mean that commodifying the work doesn’t bring in problems and issues to how you present your offering. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be exploring how to decenter central thinkers and facilitators and make things diffuse. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be seeking out an ecology of projects, and where our work can be weaved together in to new cultures, economies, and villages. Are you interested in an ecology of projects of weaving your work with that of others with similar, but symbiotic backgrounds? What if your work is incomplete, what if it is meant to be merged and myceliated and share genes with other peoples work?
Maybe We Need to Risk It
If money wasn’t an issue, would you do as much, or would you pull back on hosting events? And so while I feel for you, I see my own life situation in yours, we are still perpetuating competition, where a bunch of us are in this weird situation of having serious issues but also a lot of skills and wisdom to share, some of us rise to the top some don’t. Who rises to the top I think is a topic that needs exploring. For example I have been in spaces where charismatic figures are centered because they appeal to audience’s frustrations and biases with unnecessarily ornate conceptual verbal-toys and terms that create the illusion of having some sort of answers or deeper wisdom which they do not actually have that keep the audience captivated and staying within the comfort zone of intellectual discussion (cough, Bayo, cough) but that’s the subject of another discussion.
Doing things collectively, where others also contribute to the curriculum, planning, content, decision making may lead to more emergent and organic community events. The system is fucked, I get you’re forced to hustle, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way, one that may involve financial risks but ultimately lead to greater horizontality and inclusion of the gifts of more people, rather than focus on one person to bear the weight of opening a space.
Maybe if people who have successfully built platforms, use those platforms to collectivize their own work in to collaborations with others who have similar skills and then used those platforms to connect the audience with one another regardless of whether or not it led to greater attendance in their events, it would lead to greater collective responsibility, gift snd support networks and reciprocity so that then those who hustled to build platforms would have more free time and support to attend to their needs or have their needs met?
I love these explorations of yours as they reflect some of mine. Of course, I also learn from them and the connections I didn't make on my own. I wanted to also share a resource, a bridge, on the topic of Christianity's inherent departure from nature. I must say, I don't have an easy relationship with Christianity and I am certainly not a believer, so if I'm biased, I'm biased in the other way and possibly, had I read your piece a few months ago, I would have agreed with your view. However, I do love possibilities, the 'what if...?'. After all, Eve's banishment is mournful in the Bible, so what if it is actually a cautionary tale?
There's this storyteller and mythologist I really love, Martin Shaw. In his work he dives deep into our relationship with nature, especially through myth. Recently, he's converted to Christianity, something he never talked about before. Honestly, I was taken aback by this given my feelings towards Christianity, but then, as I love Shaw so much and he's got this poetic way of talking about things (he never calls something by its name :))), I kept listening, trying to cultivate an open mind. I am now curious to see where he takes his work next, as it seems to be like he's trying to give Jesus a mossy makeover so to speak, and uncover aspects of Christianity that have been rooted out by subsequent practices, interpretations and dogma revisions, aspects that place Christianity and Christ deep in our natural realm, instead of sterile cathedrals. Here's an interview where he talks about this, if you fancy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPQdfx5a-R4
Really loved this, been so interested in this original wounds idea but this is the first I've properly read about it. Learned recently that the first wars/human-human violence that archaeologists have evidence of (Jebel Sahaba) is probably due to resource scarcity after environmental catastrophes - flooding etc. Which brings up so many questions about how do we (/can we even? hold the force of nature without turning on one another and nature itself?
The thing about “ruling” is that in origin, a “ruler” is a stick to measure things by, not a person … so being under someone elses rule implies having to deal with how that person measures importance, value, emotion, … & how that may differ from yr own, thus setting da scene … So inda midst of lovemaking, she reaches overhead for a juicy apple to quench her thirst, only to find by experience that her lover is allergic to apples, causing a retract of da trousersnake and da shock of diffrence in experience, no longer the assumed identical, while to her it becomes clear that to achieve orgastic bliss, it kinda depends on how fickle & unreliable da penis … henceforth quickly substituted by carved effigees, .. . On a group walk, da distance covered over time is ruled by da slowest while da fun over time is ruled by how well da fastest can deal with that, … such is social evolution in a nutshell …
Loved this 💚 The banishment from Eden as loss of connection to the land and the “original sin” of extracting forbidden fruit from that land really opens up a whole new (pretty profound) interpretation when looked at from this lens
The Old Gods illustration is from Sineater! This one is of the green man, so definitely celtic influenced. You can find his work on IG under sineateruk and at www.sineater.bigcartel.com
Thank you so much re: image source! I will update it right now :)
And I am so glad this perspective has sparked some curiosity. I am certainly no religious scholar but the topic of Adam & Eve does intrigue me deeply, especially Christianity’s contrast of Paganism - which of course is a conversation as old as time, but adding the ecological & attachment elements provides us with a new shard of perspective as you have mentioned. :)
Wonderful topic and exploration, Marika - thank you - the connections/conversations between our bodies/world, our ideas/souls, and our stories/histories has been calling me too. There's some magic behind it all, I must insist. It calls me into practice more than into thinking.
For those of us in the way of Yeshua, I can recommend as companions to your work: Victoria Loors 'Church of the Wild' Ch 6 (logos as sermo as conversation), Brian McLaren 'Life After Doom' Ch 9 (Hebrew and Christ stories as indigenous wisdom), and Cyprian Smith 'The Way of Paradox' Ch 2 (Eckhart's communitive eye of the heart )
Hi BJ! Thank you so much for letting me know how my words have inspired connection of ideas and personal reflection for you. I also appreciate you sharing resources from your own cultural practices & worldviews. I look forward to exploring <3
Another animist hustle-theory-concept to get people to sign up for a course. Another teacher-facilitator articulating important topics very well but topics which are evident and do not require a central thinker but a group dynamic using all their different gifts to work on a topic. The intersection of attachment theory and land is a "duh," very interesting but a dug that doesn't require a prolonged course. Land relationality won't be solved in a course with a teacher-student top-down dynamic and a transactional nature,. It will be solved when people exit their comfort zones in to horizontal human-to-human communities, making commitments to one another and the place they live to rely more on one another and the land than on the system as they go through all the discomforts that the loss of convenience and individualism involves.
If you don’t like my work, or how I choose to share it, feel free to dismiss it and instead focus on your own life, your own work, your own contributions to this space or your community - instead of tearing down others on the black void of your phone screen who are just trying to make a difference in all of the small and big ways they can 🫶🏼 Have a great 2025! 🌞
I love your work. I am just disappointed because whenever I meet someone working on similar topics to myself, it seems they are just about building an audience for their courses. And it makes me sad because i want to do this work non-transactionally with a group of people who want to build relationships over long-term. I'm personally frustrated because whenever I meet people with similar interests to me, like yourself, theyre not interested in building friendship, community and building something together, they are focused on their individual careers and non to much relationship/reciprocity building.
If you are talking about decoloniality, then this is something you might want to consider how whiteness and the needs of career building alter our approaches to animism, indigenous worldviews, trauma healing.
I am personally tired of land practice being made conceptual and commodified. It just doesn't work in a student-teacher or client-service provider relationship. Can we come together, therapists, land practitioners, activists, artists, activists, animists, etc and build something together horizontally? Can we engage with the land without it having to be a course that someeone organized. Can we share the responsbility of facilitating and leading and see what comes up emergently? Can we put coming together as a group and building relationships over our individual career aspirations?
So, if you want to make a difference, maybe making a difference does not have you as a centered figure with your own audience. People like yourself, maybe should do an examination of conscience and analyze what privileges have allowed oyu to do this work and have an audience? And then I would be thinking in terms of how can I bring my work in to a collective, one where my ability to build an audience serves a group and not just myself, where other people’s talents and gifts can be given a voice and a platform.
There are people, like myself, who have deep experience and practice with the land, trauma healing, attachment theory, decolonization, but our traumas and neurodiversities prevent us from turning our skills and abilities and knowledge in to a platform online. But we have gifts to offer as well, we would like to be included, participate and help. Why not use your platform to work as a group.
Besides it is only a village, a group of people that can truly see and relate to the land, it is not an individual pursuit. So my question, are you interested in connecting and collaborating with marginalized and underprivileged people like me, or pursue and individual career where you have an advantage over us? Or would you like to use you platform to also center other voices?
Tayshaun, I appreciate you bringing in the career-building aspect of colonialism, and the one-directional nature of much of Westernized teaching and courses. We do need to consider how our work really impacts the dynamic of the people involved, and if it might in fact perpetuate systems we are fighting against. And I personally find that courses often are places of building networks of collaboration. Even when the course is not intentionally built to do so, but center the instructor as the 'authority', I have made crucial connections in those contexts. And from what I have read about this course, it looks like it's actually intended to be a community conversation, led by the person who has organized these thoughts and it's direction. Do you think there's a place for courses (ideally structured to encourage participants to team up and collaborate), as well as more decentralized efforts to organize collaborative action (which is what I understood to be your expression of a better alternative to a course)?
This makes me think of the permaculture concept of 'appropriate technology'. In which, although we might think of an ideal regenerative future where we don't use fossil fuel vehicles to do our regenerative work - for the current time being, we do need to do so to get the work done.
Hello Forever in Gratitude,
I deeply appreciate your contribution to the dialogue happening here, and I couldn't agree more. These types of containers - and the impact they have on an individual & communal level - require rigorous self-reflection on behalf of the facilitators. Facilitators themselves can perpetuate hierarchies of power that reinforce a lack of agency among participants (as is reinforced in western/traditional teaching structures). It is important that we interrogate our own personal relationships to power, and envisioning communal spaces of co-creative learning experiences. I have been so fortunate to have loosely defined the edges of these types of containers, informed by my own experiences of witnessing authoritarian dynamics even within activist spaces, and have used this as motivation to help set intentions for different types of engagement, which have been fulfilled through the participation and collaboration of the student communities. The relationships and cross-pollination of experience and knowledge is so important to creating more revolutionary spaces for learning. Thank you so much for sharing your insight and perspective, it is beautiful. xoxo
Don't get me wrong I have made a friend or two in courses but I feel like the courses themselves almost weren't necessary. I would find myself looking in the chat of a zoom session to connect with peers while ignoring speakers who were giving basic summaries of easy to find information for hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour. Having the speaker/teacher just felt redundant, especially since the most compelling and fascinating discussion were coming from attendees rather than the speakers. These people were were so well-informed, incisive and had had such profound experiences in unlearning whiteness, developing relationships with nature, decolonizing and more that I felt like we just don’t need leaders/teachers. The only difference I saw between the people offering and the people attending was that the former were able to to do the work of building an audience and scheduling an event, sometimes for reasons of popularity and celebrity culture more than from merit. I also noticed these people offering were usually happy to stay in intellectual comfort zones and centering interaction on conceptual or academic discussions and then go one about their way, maybe doing some exercises but not really interested in using their outreach in bringing people together.
I don’t have 300 dollars to participate and hopefully meet people, I’d like to cut out the middle man and just meet people directly without having to attend a course or conference that is largely made up of content that I am already familiar with or that I could easily find on my own. I also think providing it for ourselves helps us work on community and relationships more, which is the most important thing I think we need to do. I get the using fossil fuels to someday hopefully see a world without them argument, and I agree with it to a great extent. I’m just thinking we’re ready for a new phase. I appreciate someone providing a space for this, we’ve definitely needed it up until now, but I think we’re ready to provide this for one another horizontally and share the responsibility of creating a container while drawing on the gifts of the whole group rather than just one person.
I think were ready for spaces that don’t rely on a singular organizer, thinker, speaker, teacher, etc where building community is in and of itself the primary reason for coming together rather any individual’s modality or pedagogy or curriculum. I think we can come together as an organism, do things in a way that fits our schedule and rhythm as a group and then emergently do this work together, figuring out our own programs. We can come up with our own exercises and do them in ways or in flows that serve where we’re at, rather than follow a program of only one person who is not in a personal context with us on a regular basis for the long-term. I just believe in the intelligence of the collective to create their own container much more than a professional specialist providing one.
I’ve written a lot more on this subject just below in direct responses to Marika. Ultimately if people want to do these spaces and find value in them I respect that, I just desperately need more horizontal spaces because courses, conferences offered by one person marginalize me and don’t provide what I’m looking for. Meeting people in a course is nice, but I’m ready for a group that wants to be a collective organism and commit to a long-term and consistent group-project or community together. I am not sure how the nature of courses and conferences foment the values of collective responsibility, trust relationality and reciprocity that I am looking for.
I am working with someone on creating a space that is more about bringing people together around trauma-healing, land-practice, animism, decoloniality-modernity and other parallel topics. It should hopefully help people facilitate group spaces, organize events created together and deepen relationships, almost like a non-toxic social network. I would be happy to share this with you If you are interested in having a chat, I’d be delighted to get together because, like I said, i’m primarily interested in building community and relationship right now.
Hi Tayshaun!
I appreciate the intentions behind your comment here, and the opening of dialogue. I totally understand any judgments you have towards folks who create these types of offerings and sell them, and perhaps if you knew more about me you would understand why I provide this type of workshop, my first in over a year.
Community building: I was a farmer for 7 years, and have participated in and helped support a vibrant community of folks invested in sustainable agriculture here in the WA state. My involvement with sustainable agriculture, herbalism, and healing, has always been community oriented, and 90% of these relationships (in exception to my direct employers) have been built through presence, showing up consistently, contributing my labor, voice, and soul - and not through monetary transactions of any kind. As far as the online spaces through which I share my work and articulate my experiences, I am so lucky to be apart of an immensely beautiful corner of the internet with people who have now known me for 4+ years since I started sharing online about my healing work. The only reason I transitioned out of farming (besides the financial insecurity of being a farm laborer and single mother + sole income provider for my family) was because of chronic health issues caused by farming, more specifically becoming immune compromised and having a damaged respiratory system due to mushroom cultivation. My health is *still* impacted by these conditions, and I am not able to return to the types of work that I did previously. During this 4+ years of transitioning into being fully supported by my healing & soul-led work (which, I still have a number of side-gigs, and am still working part-time for one of the farms I used to work for as one of their farmer's market leads), I have contributed an innumerable number of hours to sharing my work freely on various platforms. The reason I have such a beautiful online community of folks that support my work (non-monetarily) is because I've chosen to contribute my voice to these spaces, and have built many relationships because of that - I hope you consider that as a reason to begin sharing your voice, too. Sharing our voice helps create relationships.
Can community be built through these types of online course/workshop spaces? And what about the hierarchy of power within a student-teacher or client dynamic? The answer is absolutely yes, but it depends on who is leading the container and, more importantly, who chooses to show up to them consistently. From 2021-2022, I facilitated a cohort of about 20 students through a year-long program focused on my frameworks of energetic ecology. Nearly every single week, for the entire year, we all showed up to that space for practice, discussion, etc. I can't overstate when I say - I still talk to these folks on a regular basis, and they have all maintained relationships with each other beyond the closure of the space. I wish I could depict to you how awe-inspiring it has been to witness a community grow like that, but I can't show you the thousands of interactions I've had with these folks, and the cross-pollinating network of relationships that have been built - and tended to with care - since 2021. The number of pictures I get of students within this cohort who are meeting (in real life) with other students, tending friendships, and I myself having had the opportunity to meet some of them in person as well. In my opinion, the success of community building in these types of cohorts/courses/workshops is dependent upon the participation of everyone involved, not just the facilitator. The facilitator is simply whom creates the container, opens the space, and creates invitations for exploration. In regards to hierarchy and roles of authority within these types of spaces, I have put great effort into establishing spaces that are as anti-authoritarian as possible. There were a number of reasons for this, but a few were: 1) Seeing an inherent flaw in a hierarchy of power within teacher-student relationships/spaces, not just in traditional education but how spiritual/woo-woo spaces have adopted these same structures of power within containers for learning and 2) having participated in activist spaces during 2020, I witnessed how people entered positions of power within activist groups and, without having any other model for how to be in a position of power, defaulted to authoritarianism. The amount of abuse that I witnessed within those communities here in Seattle disturbed me, and when creating the container in 2021, I was determined not to recreate what I saw. If we're going to be revolutionaries and create a more equitable world, we can't simply adopt the same structures of oppression of which we are trying to deconstruct - nor recreate them in the new worlds we want to cultivate. The many nuances of how I did this is much too long of a conversation, and the process I'm sure was far from perfect, as I didn't really have a model for it myself. I've had students specifically tell me that the spaces I hold have deconstructed their perspective on what it means to be a "student", because how I facilitated the space was so outside of a traditional education model. But again, I simply set my intentions, invited people to the space, and we actually all collaboratively contributed to the learning process, and co-creating the overall container. The first few meetings for this cohort were spent collaboratively creating a document with our intentions, desires for safety, boundaries, etc.
In regards to the commodification of land-based perspectives, I completely agree, and I see it in the most hyperbolic ways. An example is a woman who I saw on various platforms pushing a book called "Regenerative Business" (or something like that), co-opting the language of regenerative agriculture, along with the nature aesthetic. When I looked into her various accounts more deeply, I found that she was previously a yoga instructor, then made a very quick pivot into regenerative business guru. You are welcome to think that is what I am doing, but I'm not going to allow that judgment to impact me. I was raised in a household of immigrants, my mother grew up in a folk-animist culture and passed down those beliefs to me. I spent my entire childhood hunting and fishing with my dad. I started farming in 2013, and have since worked on and for probably over a dozen farms at this point, not to mention having started one of my own. I started foraging for plants in 2014, and started crafting herbal medicines shortly thereafter. I completed a degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on restoration ecology in 2018. I've been doing healing work since 2013 as well. While there are aspects of my business that yes, from a practical standpoint do need to be monetized (you can see my response on capitalism below), I would say that I am far from someone simply chasing the animism, nature, yada yada trend. And, at the very least, if I am creating these types of spaces that you take issue with, such as a communal workshop series, I do my absolute best to root them in REAL practice, not just online romanticization, philosophizing, and talking about nature through a screen. People that are in my cohorts - we do the real work.
I think the ideas you discuss regarding platform, horizontal development of online presence, etc. are beautiful, and I invite you to begin working on that within your own community. Again, I don't think you're familiar with me, my story, or my work in other spaces, but I have done a lot of collaboration with many other folks from many different communities. I've co-facilitated containers/workshops, I've brought in a number of different practitioners on various projects, had people guest-teach within my cohorts, and much more. There has been an immense effort to cross-pollinate and work with various communities. I don't need to throw in all of the identity buzzwords to describe the types of people I have been in collaboration with. And yes, I have historically always made ways to ensure that folks of varying income levels are able to participate. I've offered innumerable scholarships, sliding scale, and donation-based events. My colleague and I facilitated communal nature walks here in Seattle every month last year, all donation-based. My colleague deals with chronic health issues that can sporadically limit her mobility (and at times she has to use a cane to get around), so we also take great care to provide a variety of different types of accessibility for our walks, rotating between routes that are wheel-chair accessible, varied terrain, or routes that require more mobility. Her & I, from the beginning, have been making plans to film all of the walks so that we can upload them to youtube and make them accessible to the disabled community. For most of the gatherings, we didn't even make enough money to pay for printing the flyers. You have seen my work on Substack (I'm assuming), and Substack is just one, very small facet, of my work overall - and really, this is simply a space where I get to share long-form content, something I really enjoy. It has been my desire to divest from Instagram and other types of short-form media, explore my own personal delight and joy in writing. That's pretty much it.
(continued in reply to this comment)
On capitalism and marketing on platforms, I don't have much to say other than I do believe that if people value something, reciprocity, in whatever way that can happen, is deeply necessary. As I have mentioned in my substack pieces, or have put in the "subscribe" button comment - folks engagement and desire to connect gives me motivation to share my work, but small donations or monetary support in any way supports my ability to do this work. I was not able to have an online presence and share my work when I was working for 2-3 different farms with only 2 days off a month - again, as a single mother. If what I contribute to this space, or any space that folks have access to, is meaningful to them, reciprocity can happen and it doesn't have to just be financial. And in fact, reciprocity (imo) deeply operates in opposition to capitalism. Instead of people just mindlessly extracting content from the internet, they can be in relationship with me. And I will be very honest when I say that I have felt very extracted from, on many different platforms, as people do seem to value my contributions to various spaces, but not enough to support my ability to show up to them. Realistically, I live in a capitalist economic system in one of the most expensive places in the country. I am a single mother and sole income provider for my family. I am very legitimately diagnosed with schizo-effective disorder (i am not just "neurospicy", but actually live with a life-threatening psychological disorder) which demands constant vigilance and deep levels of care every single day to ensure I stay stable. I have other chronic health conditions... I can't just *not* make money, and in fact, I don't make enough to even be supported by my business and practice full-time, as I have stated. I do 2-3 other things to support my livelihood.
I'll be honest when I say, I did not love the energy you brought in your initial comment regarding my work, and I don't resonate with all of the assumptions you are operating on in your follow up - that I'm just filled with power and privilege, that all I do is charge people for my work, and that I don't work collaboratively with marginalized people (of which, according to the "requirements of marginalization as determined by the marginalized community", i might qualify for in some but not all respects). All of those judgments are purely assumptions based off of the fact that you have no idea who I am, you don't know my story, you are not familiar with my work, etc - and it doesn't seem like you really wanted to try from the beginning. I would gently encourage you to interrogate your own relationship to these types of online spaces, why you have immediately positioned me as someone who has supposed power over you, am witholding some type of resource from you, have not done my due justice of lifting you up (which, we aren't in relationship and this whole interaction does not compel nor motivate me to tend relationship with you whatsoever).
I am not your oppressor.
Thanks for the chat. I wish you well in all of your endeavors, and hope that you not only find the community you desire, but that your future is full of an abundance of resources, connection, and joy - truly.
Building a Horizontal Space
My country’s healthcare system does not provide the kinds of treatments that I need, so for now I am just living very slowly and carefully and dealing with my chronic conditions as best as I can. I am taking this risk, and somehow I am getting by and almost no money but lots of free time. Not saying you have to, I obviously don’t know your life, just sharing my own.
I will be working on creating a space that is not centered around me or my work, but about getting people interested in trauma-healing, land-practice, hospicing modernity, animism etc together. I fortunately have met someone who is taking care of the online-tech part. This space will be built on a play-oriented and relational approach to trying to help people reparent one another and build long-term relationships, also while hospicing modernity and recognizing issues of white-modernity (following the work of Vanessa De Oliveira). This will happen in the hopes of weaving greater relationality, reciprocity, trust and respectful land-practice, one that doesn’t force spiritual connection with nature without consent.
I want to support groups where there is no central-facilitator, the facilitation is shared. There are so many of us who have knowledge, experience and skills to offer who don’t want to have to hustle to be a full-time facilitator and would rather share the burden non-transactionally. Unfortunately platforms still exist within modernity and competition, so some get more popular and others don’t but this market is not “rational”, so we would like to create a space that level the playing field and allows people to connect as equals rather than as well-known “experts” and lesser known “nobodies”.
Question About Community
I am very curious about the people you have brought together in your courses. What do you mean by saying that your courses have built community among them? For me there is a big difference between being friends and chatting about intellectual concepts and hanging out once in a while and really building a community around collective responsibility, trust, reciprocity and really living together on a common landscape (while acknowledging the realities of ecovillage gentrification and other privileges).
What I have found is that because I am low-functioning, have high needs, am very emotional, do not wish to hide my grief or wear a mask that building relationships is very hard for me. At the same time I am very good at group setting and bringing people together. Unfortunately, I live in a part of the world where the zeitgeist is still very much like what you described in Seattle. I am surrounded by spiritual narcissists and career seekers and manifesters and people concerned only with their own position/value/comfort while masquerading as activists and community leaders. I have also witnessed a lot of abuses in alternative/activist/spiritual/permaculture spaces and also I just know a lot of perfectly fine people who just don’t want to make any moves out of modernity or try to work on care ecologies. I also know a lot of cool people in the organic and regenrative movements but are just building an audience for their consultancies or treating the land as a just a means to an end (“make healthy food for me so I can be healthy and show it off on social media while ignoring your needs and feelings”). They do not recognize the land’s right to consent.
Anyway, can you put me in touch with these people who have connected in your events, I would love to hear their experiences and connect with them. Maybe they have similar needs and goals to my own.
Can You Help me Connect with New friends?
The idea of building this project I mentioned (its like a non-toxic social media for people to come together around these topics) from the ground-up is exhausting and also redundant because there are already communities and platforms established who have gathered people together around these topics. I have the fear that the people with the platforms (like yours) are reluctant to use their audience in ways that may bring people together in ways that do not center their presence/work. So my question would be if I build up this kind of social media space, would you actively share it in your community? What I’m wondering, for those of you that have built an audience, its nice that you show up and provide a service, but are you willing to help us connect with one another in a way that may not benefit you (directly) or center your work? Can you use your platform(s) to just help us meet one another. Can I meet the people who attend your events without having to spend money, are they are channels for me to do that?
I cannot afford to pay 300 or even 30 dollars to meet people. I also don’t want to have to attend a conference of information I already know to meet those people or have the events structured around a single person holding the space. I am not interested in attending the events of any singular facilitator just to meet people while engaging in activities I am already familiar with. I have clicked “adventures and community” on your website hoping it would connect me to a forum or discord or something, but its just for your newsletter to hear updates about your events. I have deep, deep experience with ecological attachment, and I would love to share that with a groups of friends and give them what I have learned. Can you give the people who attend your events my contact so I can do this with them in relationship and community?
Could You Help me find a Team to work with?
Can you help me find people to work with? In spite of the health issues and brokeness I’ve mentioned, my number one priority right now is relationship, because the absence of relationship is doing a lot of damage to my nervous system and consequentially exacerbating those health conditions. Also I don’t think I can make a living on my own, I think I need to work within a team of people do share my work. Are you interested in collaborations with people like me who have a similar background, do you know people who are more interested in doing this work as a team?
Can You Help me With My Individual project?
Can you help me find a place for my work? While I would preferably do something as a member of a team, I also have issues that at some point will ask me to have money in order to live, which may force me to go it alone. So I’m gonna be a little more honest/provocative here with my questions. I’ve noticed that you charge 9 people 300 dollars each for a 2 month session. Could you help me do something similar? I have a pedagogy I’ve been working on (its probably no that different from energetic ecology to be honest but I guess everyone’s gotta put their own label on things) that brings together attachment theory, land practice, animism, trauma healing and community building. Its my own invention!!!!!!! An extra 3000 bucks every year or so would help me pay for some needed health care or maybe even rent a place so that I don’t have to live with my abusers (the worst part of my life situation is having to live with parents). They want to kick me out anyway so they can have their ideal consumerist-boomer comfort zone and I can learn what its like in the real world (which I cant survive in, so I guess I’ll have to hustle some courses to survive also).
If I offer something similar to what you do, would you share it with your audience? Or do I have to “earn” my own audience? This is the kind of stuff I wonder about when thinking about how the hell to live on this planet. Maybe I should just give up and build a platform like everyone else with my qualifications. Would you or someone else with a similar platform be willing to spend time with me and help me with my work? We can review each other’s work like they do in academia. I feel we’re too isolated from on aother.
I have all the work done for a land-relationship offering, I just can’t do the part of putting it online and having an audience to attend. You say you’re not my oppressor but people in your position seem to be quite happy having a competitive advantage over me and seem to have no interest in working on my ideas and helping my project or seeing how my work might be meant to be in collaboration with theirs. Sometimes I feel like what I’m doing is a maturation and evolution of what others are doing and that they feel intimidated by me and refusing to share my work in fear of losing their gig/niche/position while I just want to be their friend, cooperate and be in mutual aid.
The whole having your own animist patented system thing is weird to me. Seeing that you and many others have one makes me feel pressure to patent my own project and build a platform around my own work so so that I can have a community centered on me that will pay for my events and help me survive the apocalypse so that I don’t have to die alone, afraid and in pain, so that I don’t have to suffer anymore. But I would much rather connect and collaborate.
Thanks So Much
Also thank you because I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation because I’ve found what I have been feeling and wanted to say to people with platforms like your own, I hope you can see this is directed to the zeitgeist and landscape and the general community of practitioners rather than directly to yourself. Your substack just happened to light the fire of communication in me. if you feel like there are other platforms I should be focusing on, please feel free to share them with me and I will reach out to them.
I am curious, was your long answer was in a genuine interest to communicate with me? If that is the case I would like to talk further, I am probably the only person in my country with the kind of land practice experiences that I lived. Or maybe you wrote a lot just because you felt the need to explain yourself and maintain a good reputation for this platform?
Anyway, I’m very grateful because loneliness has been killing me lately and now I am going to be more forward with people whose work I enjoy in letting them know what my needs are and directly asking them if they’d like to get to know one another. Hopefully they are like you and want to actually engage with their audience and not just build one.
First of all, thanks for the detailed response, very informative.
Yes You Gotta Make a Living, but What if?
I get your life situation completely, it actually is very similar to my own. Land practiioner for 15 years now, focused on my relationship with the land over comm0difiying my space in to some sort of workaway/permaculture/spiritual event hub like most people do. Just hopsiving modernity yeat after year, dealing with my crazy CPTSD, schizo-symptoms, chronic health issues and constant/chronic pain (both emotional and physical).
But this also still brings me to what I have been thinking about for a long time. I see very talented people with backgrounds and interest similar to my own who have found a niche in creating a platform and use that platform to support themselves. I get it. But there are many people in life situations like your own, including myself who do not have the personality-type skills to build a platform but do have a lot to offer, share, teach. The general public ends up finding platforms like your own offered by an individual, but do not find the people who are not able to actively build a well-known space. So then what may happen is what if there are missing pieces to these conferences and courses in these platforms that become well-known that might be in the hands of these people who have different backgrounds to your own, unable to afford your spaces, unable to create their own? I think there are issues with one person being responsible for holding a space. I think their biases and personality end up having too much of an influence on the culture of the space. I read your work and I really like it but I also see a lot of gaps and absences that I think I could fill for you. For example I think I see some issues with what you are offering on ecological attachment and could help you with that, its one of my specialities, but I cant (and don’t want) to pay 300 dollars just to see how you offer your work and how it matches with my expertise and experience. (I live on less than 300 a month, which is 20% of the average salary where I live). And I’m sure I have some blind spots in my own work that you could fill.
So that is where I see a lack of responsbility from people like you to people like me, you are not using your platform to look for and include peers-soulkin, like me, who may enhance and enrich your work, I assume that is because relationships are hard and if you have you’re own thing going that pays the bills, why risk including another person and getting things messy right? This is where you see my anger and frustration come from, people who have built a platform focusing on relating to their audience and not seeking to include peers-kin who do similar work but are not able to build a platform or help us connect with one another with that platform.
It sounds like, like you say, you need to make a living, so you have to turn you work and knowledge in to your “patented” framework of energetic ecology. This is an issue I see where everyone has to have their own modality, so that they can have an exclusive educational product to offer. I just don’t think modalities, especially land practice modalities can come from individuals, it takes lots of eyes to truly see the landscape and I think this work needs to come from a group of people. Also I feel like a lot of people are sharing more or less the same thing but giving it their own personal trademark so that they can build a career on it based on exclusivity. Then when someone like me with no audience comes along we are either “stealing someone’s patented work” because what we do is similar to what someone else already trademarked, or we are not taken seriously because we aren’t the one that invented the “official modality.” What if my work is meant to be with your work? But your work is the only one seeing the light of day? I don’t think you can be the founder or owner of practices that are common to all human ancestry, but calling yourself one seems to be in the interest of a career or competitive advantage.
Also, using the word hustle may sound like an attack, but it seems to me like you are in hustle culture, doing a lot of jobs to survive. What sucks is that doing things to pay the bills inherently alters the content. Maybe someone commodifies something that could be easily delivered in a non transactional way. Maybe what someone is offering is something that could be easily shared horizontally but they center it through their own faucet or space in order to maintain a platform that brings in income. Commofidication affects how work is presented, it alters it, that is the nature of modernity, like Vanessa de Oliveira talks about, No educational space is free from it. Sometimes the content is better learned/incorporated in a non-transactional non-academic way. Groups could do things in their own time in their own way while building relationships with on another and learning how they can do this for themselves and seeing that they don’t need experts, but they sign up for something because modernity has them convinced that that is how you learn something.
So for larger spaces, where someone with greater experience is offering to a wider audience that may still be starting out their journeys, I think the person who has the abilities to create a well-known platform should look for peers who maybe are not good at building a platform but have a lot to offer that audience (thus also helping others in situations like you and me of being fucked phsycally/psychologically). Then, I think these platforms should support and encourage bringing people together in to horizontal groups that don’t need them as teachers anymore.
So just because you need to do this work transactionally to get by, doesn’t mean its the ideal way, it doesn’t mean that commodifying the work doesn’t bring in problems and issues to how you present your offering. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be exploring how to decenter central thinkers and facilitators and make things diffuse. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be seeking out an ecology of projects, and where our work can be weaved together in to new cultures, economies, and villages. Are you interested in an ecology of projects of weaving your work with that of others with similar, but symbiotic backgrounds? What if your work is incomplete, what if it is meant to be merged and myceliated and share genes with other peoples work?
Maybe We Need to Risk It
If money wasn’t an issue, would you do as much, or would you pull back on hosting events? And so while I feel for you, I see my own life situation in yours, we are still perpetuating competition, where a bunch of us are in this weird situation of having serious issues but also a lot of skills and wisdom to share, some of us rise to the top some don’t. Who rises to the top I think is a topic that needs exploring. For example I have been in spaces where charismatic figures are centered because they appeal to audience’s frustrations and biases with unnecessarily ornate conceptual verbal-toys and terms that create the illusion of having some sort of answers or deeper wisdom which they do not actually have that keep the audience captivated and staying within the comfort zone of intellectual discussion (cough, Bayo, cough) but that’s the subject of another discussion.
Doing things collectively, where others also contribute to the curriculum, planning, content, decision making may lead to more emergent and organic community events. The system is fucked, I get you’re forced to hustle, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way, one that may involve financial risks but ultimately lead to greater horizontality and inclusion of the gifts of more people, rather than focus on one person to bear the weight of opening a space.
Maybe if people who have successfully built platforms, use those platforms to collectivize their own work in to collaborations with others who have similar skills and then used those platforms to connect the audience with one another regardless of whether or not it led to greater attendance in their events, it would lead to greater collective responsibility, gift snd support networks and reciprocity so that then those who hustled to build platforms would have more free time and support to attend to their needs or have their needs met?
I love these explorations of yours as they reflect some of mine. Of course, I also learn from them and the connections I didn't make on my own. I wanted to also share a resource, a bridge, on the topic of Christianity's inherent departure from nature. I must say, I don't have an easy relationship with Christianity and I am certainly not a believer, so if I'm biased, I'm biased in the other way and possibly, had I read your piece a few months ago, I would have agreed with your view. However, I do love possibilities, the 'what if...?'. After all, Eve's banishment is mournful in the Bible, so what if it is actually a cautionary tale?
There's this storyteller and mythologist I really love, Martin Shaw. In his work he dives deep into our relationship with nature, especially through myth. Recently, he's converted to Christianity, something he never talked about before. Honestly, I was taken aback by this given my feelings towards Christianity, but then, as I love Shaw so much and he's got this poetic way of talking about things (he never calls something by its name :))), I kept listening, trying to cultivate an open mind. I am now curious to see where he takes his work next, as it seems to be like he's trying to give Jesus a mossy makeover so to speak, and uncover aspects of Christianity that have been rooted out by subsequent practices, interpretations and dogma revisions, aspects that place Christianity and Christ deep in our natural realm, instead of sterile cathedrals. Here's an interview where he talks about this, if you fancy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPQdfx5a-R4
Really loved this, been so interested in this original wounds idea but this is the first I've properly read about it. Learned recently that the first wars/human-human violence that archaeologists have evidence of (Jebel Sahaba) is probably due to resource scarcity after environmental catastrophes - flooding etc. Which brings up so many questions about how do we (/can we even? hold the force of nature without turning on one another and nature itself?
The thing about “ruling” is that in origin, a “ruler” is a stick to measure things by, not a person … so being under someone elses rule implies having to deal with how that person measures importance, value, emotion, … & how that may differ from yr own, thus setting da scene … So inda midst of lovemaking, she reaches overhead for a juicy apple to quench her thirst, only to find by experience that her lover is allergic to apples, causing a retract of da trousersnake and da shock of diffrence in experience, no longer the assumed identical, while to her it becomes clear that to achieve orgastic bliss, it kinda depends on how fickle & unreliable da penis … henceforth quickly substituted by carved effigees, .. . On a group walk, da distance covered over time is ruled by da slowest while da fun over time is ruled by how well da fastest can deal with that, … such is social evolution in a nutshell …