Hello!
Hey so you have gotten my invite. Welcome! This following essay is some background on my thought process on eco-cultural experimentation and hopefully transitioning away from 3CPM (capitalism colonialism civilization patriarchy property plantation-mind and modernity lol. I think its easier to use an acronym for all of the terms we use to describe how messed up our society has gotten).
To be clear on the invite, this is an informal happening, some mushroom spores being thrown out in the wind to see where they might find some nice wood to decompose. Basically, I’m going to see who responds with interest to trying out liveo games (I have more stuff I can share explaining them but really its about experiencing them). So, feel free to inquire and if you’re interested in visiting or meeting from the 27th of October until the end of November, let me know and I’ll try to organize people on to the same days! I am @foresnauts on instagram if you don’t have my number. And if you’re not free during this dates but you’re interested in an encounter, feel free to get in touch anyway, for future games :)
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This essay should help you all understand the underlying motivations behind liveo games and giving you a peek in to my thought-process behind using these games for rediscovering animist cultures in today’s context. The essay certainly isn’t about telling you that my way is right; with play, there is no right or wrong, its about discovering together, you may come with another outlook, with other priorities and values, with different modalities and that’s great! None of us has all the answers, if there even are answers. I think it would help to get out of our intellectual bubbles; beyond courses, lectures, books, academic discussions and see and feel one another and try things out! So my thinking with liveo games is why not get together as animists, artists, activist, therapists, facilitators, land-regenerators and all the other job descriptions we give ourselves and use the great tool of play to engage in imaginary spaces, including the other-than-human, and from figure out what eco-centered cultures might look like, allowing our bodies, feelings, hearts and senses to lead the way?
Me, The Land and Halloween
Halloween is my favorite holiday. I was raised in the States so that’s what I’ve always called what is traditionally known as Samhain. I grew up with Halloween as a playful, mischievous night, where you could cruise around your neighbourhood knocking on the doors of people you never even spoke to during the rest of the year, usually dressed up as beings that were considered to be creatures of fantasy and ignored for the rest of the year.
Since leaving the States, I have repeatedly heard that Samhain is a time where the veil is at its thinnest, the most pagan night of the year, where communication with the spirits is enhanced. As a forest gardener who never lost his childlike love of fantasy, I developed an empathy and affection for the souls and spirits that I surmised might surround me. I remember sometimes walking among the trees and hearing choruses of “thank you, thank you” (I think for planting them) and crying as I heard their voices because no one had ever showered with me gratitude like that before in my life.
So, over the years, as the forest garden has matured and taken on more personality, I have wondered if mouras and fairies have taken up residence, or have they always been there and are now reawakening? And are they the beings from the local folklore or perhaps from other sources that I love? Are there koroks (Zelda) and kodamas (Princess Mononoke) hiding and disappearing around me as I walk? Is Deer Woman (a Mayan deity I read about and fell in love with in Martin Prechtel’s Toe Bone and the Tooth) creating all this life that surrounds me? Is Totoro playing the flute in the wind while standing on the tips of the tallest trees?
On a wider level, beyond the boundaries of our project, I live in a land forgotten, yet pilgrimaged to, over-inhabited yet ignored, abandoned but occupied. I wonder how have the deep presences, the other-than-human beings, reacted? Where does the rich consciousness go when the ecosystems have been destabilized, eliminated and marauded? How do we honor, feed, thank, and recognize what most of us have hardly ever perceived? Do they even want us to, are they even still there? Where have the genius loci, the spirits of these places that our forebears spoke of and related to, gone? What does it mean to be in relationship with among multiple generations of people (including those dead and yet-to-be-born) in custodial relation to a sentient landscape?
Guilt and the Land
Many of us long to reopen the conversation, to open the lines of communication. Yet this isn’t a straightforward exercise, it asks us to engage in some self-awareness and recognize how trauma and civilization have warped our understanding of relationship. Some of you may be aware of codependence, attachment theory and development psychology and these all apply to how we relate to the land.
For example, in my case it has been difficult to relate to the land beyond my own forest garden, going from caring deeply about a place I was in control of to places that were out of my hands, that belonged to neighbours and the wider society has felt very disempowering. I have recognized the personhood in the land and bonded with my bioregion but when I see the them hurt or toxified, I feel like an angry child. I still attach like a scared child as I am still healing relational trauma and so those parts of me that are still emotionally immature identify with the land so that it feels like what is done to the land is done to me.
So when those landscapes are harmed, it feels like a personal attack and then I get frustrated because my protector parts want to protect me from feeling attacked. Or it feels like I was supposed to be there for the land and it feels like it is my fault, like I was responsible for protecting the land. The way my mom would guilt me for not “being there for her, which is, of course unfair because children are not meant to take care of adults. One common response to this is to develop a saviour complex in environmentalism, to try and “save the land” in order to feel in control or give the land the protection we did not receive as children.
And so, I feel deeply sensitive to the situations of environmental abuse and ecocide; but this is all mixed up with projection and transference. For example it drives me crazy that people can do whatever they want with “their property,” it reminds me of my parents power over me. I am still processing this rage and so I project my feelings of being dominated on to the land. I also experience transference, where the guilt about not doing or helping enough that my parents inflicted on me is reflected in me not feeling like I’ve done enough for the land. On top of this all, I come from a family that was an extreme case of suppressing emotions and this results in a great difficulty with feeling my authentic love, sadness and grief related to the land.
And so I am interested in working with this, in acknowledging that, yes, the perspectives from wounds and our feelings around nature get all mixed up. I think that the personalities of nature can help us as theatrical aides in helping us explore those wounds, a bit like when you see psychologists use a puppet or a doll to help children express their feelings or process difficult memories. But I am also interested in getting past that and understanding the land from a place where we do not project our issues on to them. I am interested in perceiving the land from the perspective of a secure, whole adult and listening to how they feel without our trauma-biases and learn to be with them in compassion or support and to know if that’s even what they want.
So, I think that as we begin our journeys in animism, we should notice how our old habits, our wounded inner children can hijack the process. Taking up new beliefs intellectually does not mean that old habits and blocked emotions will step aside. We can very easily enter this panpsychic cosmology and engage in it from our immature subpersonalities and it important that we catch ourselves as it happens. With me, one part wanted to forcefully engage in ritual in order to be “finally be who I really am!” and avoid low self-esteem, while another felt embarrassment and reluctance to engage in something vulnerable and weird, while underneath all that there was a part that felt obligation and like I wasn’t good enough if I didn’t do something for the land. And if I didn’t do some ritual on Halloween, the solstices or the equinoxes, it felt like back when if I didn’t go to mass as a kid or do my homework or finish all my chores. I could hear the introject voice of my mother saying “you are a bad boy! You aren’t helping the land and you haven’t completed your duties for Samhain properly!”
Becoming an animist doesn’t automatically wipe away the guilt and shame parts of the psyche and it is these guilt and shame that keeps us from feeling and coexisting with the non-human realms consciously. Yet I still want to do something for the land, honor them, thank them, nourish them. I just don’t want to do it from the shame, obligation, fear of punishment, self-criticism, I don’t want to be in the operating systems inculcated in to me by my family and civilization when I approach the other than human.
Village
So, like I just talked about, I like to be aware of how my wounds affect my relationship with the other-than-human. Another thing I am aware of, along with the presence of my wounds, is the absence of community. What does it mean to come together in relation to the other-than-human, to the land without being a village, without really being a cohesive group? Do the spirits notice, can they tell? I can imagine that to the land or to a god, an isolated individual or a group made up of people who just met or rarely get together feels different than a group that has coalesced, that collaborate in the creation and maintaining of life.
Having read Martin Prechtel over and over again and studied or experienced other indigenous and traditional cultures, I wonder if animism is a team sport? How far can one really get on their own?
Does it take a village to hold and carry the mythology of the land and maintain relationships with the beings present out on the mythocartography? It feels like it takes a village to feed and nourish all the many spirits that our out there on the landbase we have taken up.
Of course, we are about as far from the village as we can get. We no longer live and work and create together in direct relation to our land base. Everything we do is beamed in to the global marketplace, whether we intend it to or not. And many of us not only live far away from where our ancestors did but live in many different places throughout our lives. We seem to be in a great period of remixing and migration.
Even if we do live where our ancestors did, the landscapes they related to and received their mythologies from were in a totally different state than they are now. Is the old story of the mountain god the same now that that this god is covered in mines and roads and communication towers, now that hundreds of different toxins run through the aquifers in their slopes?
So, the land is not who they used to be, we don’t relate to each other as village anymore and we don’t stay in one place anymore either. Perhaps we need new kinds of villages and new mythologies? Perhaps we can figure out out more malleable villages, ways of coming together that are flexible since our souls’ may call us to different places on Earth at different times. Maybe pursuing our personal journeys means being in more than one village at a time or during a lifetime?
Yet I feel this doesn’t happen overnight, it took villages generations to relate to their land. I imagine it will take us some time to relearn relationality, bonding and trust in ways that also grant us migratory flexibility among different communities and land-bases in a globalized context where we are not necessarily meant to stick to a single ethno-national landbase or identity yet still evolve place-centered kinship networks.
What does it mean to be in relationship?
Thins brings me ton being in relationship, with our selves, with each other. We spend so much time relating from trauma, politeness, subpersonality and immaturity and rarely longer notice how separate we are. Even in my group experiences with long-term projects or community experiments, where people would talk about being family or tribe, I would notice how much spiritual dogma was used to keep us from really relying on one another or sharing in grief or accepting one another’s shadows. These spaces still felt impersonal, where non-attachment and being unaffected by one anothers’ “egos” was worn as a badge of honor.
Often upper-world spiritual practices would mix with nature-reverence out of naivete. It always felt strange to me to set up some serious ceremony with a land we have not established kinship with nor having established kinship with one another or at least knowing where we are emotionally and personally. I e always felt strange when I tried upper-world focused spiritual gatherings, (trance exercises, guided meditations, cacaoe ceremonies + sweat lodges, sound baths, etc) yet not knowing what is going on inside the person next to me. It didn’t make sense to me to gather with people without establishing trust and intimacy first.
I have learned that this point of view is shared by many traditional and indigenous peoples. For example, in Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, he talks about kinship-mind. He writes that for the Aboriginals of Australia “there can be no exchange or dialogue until the protocols of establishing relationships have taken place. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going? What is your true purpose here? Where does the knowledge you carry come from and who shared it with you? What are the applications and potential impacts of this knowledge on this place? What impacts has it had on other places? What other knowledges is it related to? Who are you to be saying these things?” The anonymous interactions and impersonal relationships we are all so used to just feel so strange to me.
For many of us, the ability to be in relationship has been hampered or even completely severed. Modern society would simply not run without the level of dissociation we are at today. I have experienced a lot of relational trauma myself, I was surrounded by family constantly in fear and anxiety and as I grew up and began moving and talking, it was also shame, anger and threats that were directed at me and led me to a state of disconnection in order to make life tolerable.
This led me to an interest in attachment theory, developmental psychology and childhood upbringing. In Bill Plotkin’s Nature and the Human Soul, a book about the mythopeotic rewilding and the maturation process of becoming human he talks about the importance of developing innocence, wonder and the ability to feel relatedness as little ones and how, if we didn’t receive these developments as children, it is important to do so as adults.
And so I am interested in how relating to one another influences how we relate to nature and vice versa. For some of us, our attachment was sufficiently healthy in our early years that we developed some innocence, wonder and relationality to experience some connection to the more-than-human. For others, our difficult childhoods made it almost impossible to connect and be present. Still, going back to Prechtel’s writing and the study of other indigenous and traditional peoples, it seems to me that even with the best childhood, the nature of being in civilization and the demands of modernity make it difficult to be in a fully immersed eco-centric nature-related way of life.
It seems to me, we can all go deeper and further in to connection and immersion in to the natural world. The spiritual and energetic back and forth that I have read about with nature in cultures who have not been sucked in to 3CPM. I think is something that no one can achieve on their own. Experiencing a feeling-toned, body-present, part-of-the-land life on a day-to-day basis seems to be like it would go better as a team effort.
Just Play, No Expectations, Simply Willing to be with the Unpredictable and Uncontrollable
To sum it all up, I think our egos/subpersonalities/wounds complicate our relating to nature from Self but that we should still do so in a playful manner, together, helping one another (land-people, everyone) heal our wounds while trying to get to greater authenticity and inter-relatedness through play.
For me, play is the key vehicle for the interrelated issues of healing our ability to be in embodied present relationship, developing a connection with the spirits of the land and relearning village. Think of a child who runs around complimenting rocks and greeting the grass, their animist behaviour is playful. Or think about a kid running around a village imitating what others do, asking questions, and walking in to any place they want to.
Animism is rooted in the innocence of infancy the wonder and joy of a child. When a child finds a stone, they may see a building block or a fascinating form that evokes a personality, when they find an owl feather, they may put it in their hair and run around pretending they are flying. But they aren’t thinking whether these are power objects for their altars or if these things will increase their access to spirit guides. Animism isn’t about jumping in to shamanic or druidic practices. First we have to assess what we didn’t get in our development as young people that has maybe prevented us from fully being adults.
People in earth-centered cultures raise their children in villages connected to landscapes through a matrix of cultural, manual, ecological experiences.. We haven’t received this, we’ve been schooled, we’ve numbed and severed much of ourselves. It is possible to go back and recover what we didn’t receive in our growth and I think play is the portal to rewiring what was wired through domestication.
Play makes it easier to interact with one another in the forgotten spaces (panpsychic/emotional/visceral/socio-cultural). The magic circle of theatre allows us to bypass the feeling of right or wrong (domesticity’s operating system), helping us to be with one another in greater honesty. Playing helps us through with the discomfort of feeling silly in spaces we were taught were either wrong or not real. Play is the salve for the wounds that shame have inflicted.
Halloween helps with the honesty, it is a lower-world focused holiday, a mischeivous celebration of the trickster, and embrace of shadow, permissive of “bad, unenlightened behaviour.” Plus being dressed up and in a forest garden that seems so much different than what we are used to, perhaps we will feel tricked in to another time and place.
This is a mischievous invitation to nothing in particular, to come and play, to not be so serious and maybe hang out with the discomfort of not really having a plan, it is the unpredictable that fuels play and it is in informality that we become friends with unpredictable. There are no expectations, no goals beyond saying “Hello! we’re hear and we’re fooling around!” I am not even aiming for any great encounters with the spirits or the other-than-human. The land may share their stories with us, they may not. The point is to be informal, to not take working with the “spirits” too seriously, to just be kids and dialogue with the surrounding lifeforms.
Thank You
This essay is a rough draft that reflects my thought process on restoring animist communal ways, working on embodied cognition, being vibrantly connected to the world and each other at the same time. Your though process may be different and that’t okay, not just okay that’s truly wonderful.
When it comes to societal change I’m influenced by Martin Prechtel’s seed cultures, Joanna Macy’s Great Turning, Bill Plotkin’s maturing through soulcraft in to an eco-centered society, Adrienne Maree Brown’s emergent strategy, among others. Modalities and concepts incorporate somatic therapies, parts work, music and dance, nature awareness games, liberatory theatre practices, unschooling, rewilding, staying with the trouble, decolonization, somatic abolitionism and many more. Nothing is off-limits for liveo games, I am trying to give these ideas a forum where they can be played with, woven together, and sown in to our new cultures and I am happy to work with whatever you are all working with and influenced by as well.
I am simply using Halloween as an excuse for getting us together, those of us wishing to unschool the mind, decolonize the heart, and undomesticate the body so that we can figure it out together. No one has all the answers, all that matters is a willingness to play through the uncertainty and unknown in the cracks we are given.
I would like for this to be a tradition, for playful holidays like halloween or carnaval to be gathering of wildness and cultural experimentation that hopefully lead to long-lasting relationships and seeds of village.
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