If you just want the ideas; the poem that carries the title of this post, skip down to (or past) the video.

If you want it’s history, well

Ten, eleven years ago when I lived in West Philly
before Scientific Animism
before The Overstory
before Braiding Sweetgrass
before Substack
I thought about space 
all the time—
interplanetary humanity was just
around the corner,
I was sure of it
and thinking about it
makes one a better person!
I was sure of that too.

A friend organized Ignite Philly.
(In an evening of Ignite talks,
each speaker has a strict five minutes,
and an auto-progressing slide deck
where each slide has a strict 15 seconds.)
I said to friend, "hey friend, 
I want to give an Ignite talk."
Friend agreed.

This was my TED-inspired title & description:

Title

Earth Clouds are the Best Clouds: How Cosmic Daydreams Increase Empathy

Description

Seriously, other planets don’t have it so good.

As we anticipate a near future in which human civilization is dispersed among multiple planets, let’s reflect on how great we on Team Earth have it. The biggest thing those suckers on other worlds are missing out on? The mthrfckn WATER CYCLE, yo! We have, like, PUDDLES! And RAIN! And holy crap, OCEANS.

When the settlers of other worlds look up from their new surfaces, there’s one thing they definitely won’t be seeing: CLOUDS. Or, they’ll ALWAYS see clouds, and never the stars! Let’s celebrate our home planet and learn how dreaming about The Great Big Out There makes us better citizens of The Teeny Tiny Right Here.

Friend accepted.
Said that my title & description were,
and I quote,
"Trippy. As. Hell."
It was 2015. 

I took my laptop to Clark Park.
Early evening, early November.
Sat on a park bench,
orange-tipped branches
dazzling sodium lamp street lights
gently fascinating my gaze
while my fingers fiddled
stream of consciousness
in verse.

(Somehow lots of line breaks just
felt easier.
Still does.)

I liked my little verses—
the granddaughter on Mars
grandson on Venus,
the trip to Titan
and the stellar dance of our nearest neighbors—
but there was no moral;
no Aesop's wisdom drop,
no tidy TED ending.
I never really circled 'round
to that "how [blah blah] increase empathy" thing.
"Should I?" I asked friend.
Nah, he said. 
You already kind of do.

And I think then my style was born?
Discovered.
Solidified.
This whole "write it in verse" thing.
This whole "scientifically rigorous,
but make it transcendent" thing.
This whole "transcend, 
but keep it grounded" thing.

But apart from being
Unimportant Me's backstory:
Is it Scientific Animism, this piece?
To which I say:
Maybe?
A little?
The considering-the-place-based-spiritual-longings-of-humans-on-other-worlds thing.
The imaging-new-and-evolving-religions thing.
The gobsmacked-awe-of-Earth thing.

I want it to be a children's book.
A children's book author gave me an edit;
gave me feedback.
And though I make time
for so many other things,
I never quite make make it back to those notes;
never quite go the last bit of the way to
a finished draft,
a query letter,
an agent search.

The version below is a half-edit.
Fourth stanza swapped
from the stellar dance of Centauri A & B
to the stationary sun of Proxima.
The video's the original.
(Which also has a curse word.)
I hope you enjoy both.

I'd love to give you a finished version,
but that doesn't exist yet
and between my last full-moon post
and this here new moon
some humans flew around the moon.
Space is happening;
space is in the air.
So here's some space for you,
but grounded.
I hope you enjoy.

Earth Clouds are the Best Clouds

Someday, sooner than you think,

your granddaughter will immigrate to Mars.
She will pack her bags and leave
the only home any earth-creature has ever known,
and take up residence on a new sphere.

And like so many immigrants,
she will learn to find beauty in her new environment.
She will learn to find beauty in the indoor gardens;
the red cave walls;
the timing of Phobos and Deimos, her small new moons;
in tawny noon
and blue sunset.

With her people, she will create culture of the desert,
she will brew red ale
and sing hymns rife with metaphors
of dust.

She will celebrate stars,
shining clear through thin atmosphere,
just outside the habitat,
with no clouds to ever obstruct.

She will find the parts of herself that resonate
with her new surroundings.
She will mold, from a strange and alien landscape,

a home.


Someday, sooner than you think,

her grandson will immigrate to Venus.
To the thick clouds above Venus,
and live in floating cities.

He will forget life on the surface,
because his is a surface that will

crush like an ocean;
char like a furnace;
melt with unending
sulfuric acid rain.

His people tell stories of falling
and dream nightmares of flame.

He praises High Wind;
delights in No Landmark;
spots swirling sentries soaring
through The Yellow,
those clouds far below.


Someday, sooner than you think,

his granddaughter will immigrate to Titan,
that dazzling satellite of Saturn.

She will sail on cryogenic lakes
and surf the towering, slow-motion waves.

Flight
will be a popular pastime on Titan,
because air is thick,
and gravity thin,
and humans can learn to fly by our own arm strength,
like a bug, or a bat,
or a bird, or a stunt plane.

Her white will be orange;
her rainbow, redder than red.
The darkness, her temple.
The twilight, her friend.

From above, Titan looks featureless,
a glowing orb of unending cloud cover.
She will learn to find home in that
dim orange haze;
in that absence of stars.


Someday, sooner than you think,

her grandchild will immigrate
to a whole new star.

To Proxima Centauri,
the star nearest ours,
with its planet, like our moon,
locked in synchronous rotation.

They will live in perpetual dawn;
the pink light eternal;
long shadows unmoving;
their sun always watching
from low on horizon;
their temperate zone draped
near the boundary with Night.

For vacations they’ll journey
out to dark; out to cold
to watch lights in the sky
(including our sun) –
and these little lights move!
How disorienting.
How unsettling that heavens
are not fixed
like the ground.

They’ll find Earth so bizarre,
with our wandering guardian
rolling round in the sky
and disappearing at night.


Wherever they go—
your adaptive descendants—
they’ll find the beauty;
they’ll make a home.

But they’ll always tell stories
of the planet that spawned them—
the cool summer starlight,
the warm winter snow.

Waterfalls, puddles, and rain you can drink!
Oceans that stretch out beyond the horizon!

From out there we’ll all seem
so similar and small,
all our difference rendered same
by the distance of the vantage.

And how vulnerable; how precious
our whole majestic planet!
Just a dot among the stars!
Or less, depending on the season!

They’ll get videos,
after great time-delay,
from loved ones back on Earth,

and those clouds,
Earth’s shocking clouds,
will always startle them.

Let me back up. (Let me recede.)

This project; this newsletter; this me-talking-at-you—

I never meant this to be about me.

I don’t think I have good ideas so much as I:

Noticed that a thing is happening.

And that thing should maybe be called Scientific Animism.

And I also noticed that:

Given this name; this label:

I started noticing it

all . over . the . place

The Overstory; Braiding Sweetgrass:

These might be the most essential reading;

the core texts of the emerging canon;

the truest expression of these ideals

( this marrying of, on the one hand:

1. “Rigorous, reproducible science, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish, ego, and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.”1

and on the other hand

2. “a common thread of species humility; an understanding that we’re not the only beings that are alive. Not the only beings that have feelings and stories. And that we live in a world, a kaleidoscope, of voices and perspectives.”2

)

but surely there are others.

Surely these texts did not spring, whole-cloth, from nothing.

Nothing comes from nothing!
(ain’t no creatio ex nihilo)

For all their intellectual preeminence,

surely even Richard Powers and Robin Wall Kimmerer took inspiration from somewhere.

So help me trace it back further

And help me trace it wider

There’s an explosion of people exploring these ideas now.

Certainly, like this newsletter, there are many people inspired by the same source texts.

But there’s also all the stuff that was concurrent-with

and all the stuff that came before.

Since starting this newsletter,

I’ve learned of Joanna Macy and
The Work That Reconnects,
work stretching back to the 1970s

I’ve learned of The Emerald podcast and
The Mythic Body course,
exploring global animist traditions and history.

There is so much happening.

And there is so much I miss.

Let’s help each other find this stuff

I wrote a post with this title before:

and I asked you to share your reading list with me in the comments.

Comments are cool i guess

But you know what’s cooler?

A shared board.

A pinboard.

Like a Pinterest board, say, but not destroyed by venture capital and AI.

Introducing Are.na

Pronounced “arena” but the URL is literally are.na

The site Internet hipsters use to find the parts of the web that are still

• living that 90’s dream

• esoteric / whimsical / unexpected / DIY

• worth visiting

A site where you are the customer and not the product,

where you can use it for free and pay them when you’re able,

where you can pin more than just images,

and you can have boards (aka Channels) that are

totally . open

anyone can post!

Let chaos reign 🤘🏼

This is perfect for us

a tiny group of internet people,

converging on a shared interest,

documenting and exploring together.

No need to lock things down prematurely.

No need to have a platform that celebrates the cult of the individual creator.

Let’s see what happens if we all add things together.

All add our picks.

If trolls wreck us later,

we can lock things down then

But for now:

DEFAULT TO OPENNESS.

Let’s build a reference library together.

In a venue where you are

not a second-class citizen

not locked in the comment section of some Almighty Content Creator’s blog

but an equal

as i have always viewed you

→ check it out ←
↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓
are.na/scientific-animism
↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑

It looks like this!

There are many categories / channels!

1. books

2. courses

3. art

4. podcast

5. music

6. film

We can make more categories / channels!

If you have things in mind now, please add them!

If you think of things later, please add them!

This is a living resource that we can all create together,

to document the large and growing

mycelium network

growing between all these things that seem

maybe separate

but once you have the label you see

they’re all one organism,

we’re all growing together

we’re growing it together

Let’s trace the contours together

of this emerging philosophy

this spiritual pathway

this hopeful lifeway

this inchoate superstructure

Let’s play.

Let’s have fun.

ok first of all it’s pronounced ZEEN, like a mag-a-zine. it’s a thing cool kids did in the 80s and that cool kids are still doing

(my hip little town has a Zine Fest! does yours??)

it’s deliciously analog; deliciously ai-resistent; deliciously connection-forming. a folded piece of paper! the mass-broadcast mechanism of yester-century! so cute, so retro!

i wanted one specifically of Animist Gratitude Prayers, so that i could hold my zine in my folded thumbs like a prayer book while i sit cross legged in some cemetery, watching the sunrise, recounting my blessings. do you want to hold a PHONE while you root into your source? of course not! don’t bring the torment nexus to the spiritual practice!

bring a zine!

go forth and print!

→ github.com/scientificanimism/animist-gratitude-prayers ←

instructions & printable webpage link at the GitHub link above!

yes, a printable webpage! a GitHub!

my sickday-birthday DIY cut-paper-pasted-on-paper-bag zine…

…made me want to DIY some HTML+CSS for, first of all, a mass-printable version of the zine because ~fUcK cAnVa~ (omg can we just tell things where to go with WORDS please instead of POINTING and CLICKING and DRAGGING a fussy CURSOR around a STUPID AI-RIDDEN WEB APP) amirite?

…but then also i wanted to keep on DIYing some HTML+CSS and finally make a cute lil webpage for Scientific Animism! because also that QR code that i put in there—when you point your iPhone camera at it your iPhone will tell you simply that the QR code is going to take you to “Substack” and 😖

that won’t do.

That won’t do!

I want it to say “scientificanimism.org”

So now scientificanimism.org is a place you can go!

It’s hilariously useless for now, but you can follow my progress on GitHub or, tbh, i’ll probably tell you right here, on—that’s right, NOT scientificanimism.substack.com, but on newsletter.scientificanimism.org!!!

I like that this also nods to a post-Substack future. We’re all getting tired of it here, aren’t we? (For now, I have no plans to abandon this platform; newsletter.scientificanimism.org will continue to be powered by Substack.)

things i wish

• i wish the background image of my zine wasn’t slop

it’s the ai slop from the (re)introducing post.

i threw it in there because

1. texture

2. sorta matches the white-paper-on-brown-paper-bag energy of my prototype

3. i had already spent the energetic resources to create that image; it already existed; no new trees were burned or ecosystems desolated for the creation of this artifact

4. honestly i DO find this image super interesting

5. purity is a vice

and it did match the content better than i could have come up with quickly on my own. the written content on many of the pages sorta slant-rhymes with the visual content—spirals for galaxies; slugbird for creatures.

but i HAVE started to feel much more annoyed by ai since i used it to make the image for that post. getting quite fed up with all this bullshit.

if you have a better image or images to offer, i’d happily take suggestions! feel free to reply to this email, to comment on this post, or send me a pull request!

• i wish you would get one of these zines!

print one at the link above, or!

pay me and i’ll send you one! all paid tiers on this here newsletter now come with ZINES!!!

Get 20% off forever

• i wish you would tell me what other posts to turn into zines!

Gratitude Prayers was my first choice because it doesn’t even feel like a zine, it feels like a devotional. and i love it.

Reverse Ecclesiastes might have a similar feel.

A lot of my other poetry is more self-narrative, which doesn’t feel like quite the same devotional category, but maybe that’s ok? Some of my favorites:

(👆🏼 the one that started it all!)

Or maybe something else? You tell me!

one last thing

while we’re on the topic of “the web presence is growing up 🥹”, you can also now LISTEN to Scientific Animism in your favorite podcast/listening app! For example, here it is on PocketCasts, on Spotify, on Apple. If you notice problems, or if you can’t find it on your preferred platform, let me know!

ok that’s all for this time!

thanks for being here. hope you enjoy the zine. catch you next time.

Maybe the new gets layered over the old by degrees and half-measures and one beautiful, laborious story at a time.

Share the vision widely enough, get enough others to buy into the new fiction, so that you can cover over the old, cover over part of the old, fill in gaps in the old, create new edges of possibility in the old.

Make the revolution irresistible.

I sing my kids a Bright Eyes song as a lullaby. The Bottom of Everything. An excerpt:

We must take all of the medicines
too expensive now to sell;
set fire to the preacher
who is promising us hell.

Doesn’t it feel so-very-Gen-X?

Very this-or-that, us-vs-them, out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new?

Enough with that dualistic angst. I don’t want my kids repeating lines about setting anyone on fire. For any reason.

Instead we can release the rancid reservoir.

That wisdom tradition got a bit polluted, didn’t it? Lots of people getting poisoned by that body of water now. Time to release it. Time to destroy the dam; drain the reservoir. Release those old attachments. Let the stream run wild again; let the delicate displaced ecosystems and populations regrow. It gave more life, fostered more entangled interbeing, when it was small and free. Before it got captured; redirected; dammed and swollen and stagnated to serve the needs of empire.

Time to dig a brand new well.

The future appears by degrees.

We discover it, invent it, story-tell and consensus-build and conjure it into existence, one possibility at a time. We layer it onto what already exists; a new city over the ruins of the old; saplings over McMansions over old-growth.

Christianity, religion—these are for sure the master’s tools. Tools of empire. Tools used largely to oppress, to control, to justify all manner of genocidal violence.

But as Alnoor Ladha says in the video linked at the top, in our current context, we’re not going to be able to amputate Christianity (he said this of capital). The master’s tools may be the only ones that people understand. “So instead of trying to amputate it, how do you work with it?” How do we “co-opt, Jiu-Jitsu, hack, dismantle existing structures, and use that system—including capital, including rationality, including…” Christianity & religion?

For Christianity, this makes me think of smaller, more humble manifestations of the belief system.

It makes me think of Nathan Evan Fox’s Hillbilly Hymn:

Or Jordan Smart’s Who Would Jesus Bomb?

It makes me think of ’s book, The Madonna Secret (about which admittedly I’ve only regrettably listened to interviews so far) and her thoughts about the illiterate Aramaic storyteller:

And the “decolonize for Jesus” work of .

Release the rancid reservoir. Don’t try to amputate the whole belief system. Work with it; transform it; use its own logic to denounce its violent impulses. Don’t leave all biblical interpretation to the wolves.

This is not work for everyone. I’m not sure it’s for me. But I’m grateful to everyone out there doing it.

And religion as a whole? Can we co-opt that tool of empire more broadly, beyond Christianity? Can we dig a brand new well?

I think that’s what we’re doing here. I think that’s the stream I’m trying to tap into. The work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, of Richard Powers, of The Emerald and and The Great Simplification. Of Joanna Macy. That’s the political-spiritual practice—praxis—that Alnoor Ladha speaks of.

We’re digging a brand new well. The spiritual complement to our political work.1

Let’s co-imagine it. Let’s co-enact it.

Thanks for being here with me, friend. Can’t wait to see where you take this.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.

The process is simple enough—I post a little prompt in a shared digital space inviting anyone who wants to participate; I collect responses either through direct message or a quick Google form and then weave them all together into one poem.

This year’s prompt came from the necessity of hope, and it was:

What is one wish you have for our new year? It can be for yourself, for others, for your loved ones, for the earth, for the animals we love, for the *gestures at everything*

You could also respond with a particular beautiful moment you experienced this last year.

Be as creative as you’d like in one to three sentences. <3

I got eight loving responses this year, and I’m so grateful to my community and contributors for daring to wish. Here is the poem we came up with together. I hope it feels as grounding for you as it did for me in putting it together.

Thank you to Lisa Yoder, Meghan Phillips, Mary West, Shawna Stoltzfoos, Katie Joy Nellis, Ashley Novalis, Coral Rites, and Pam McMillin for their beautiful words and hearts.

2026 Communal New Year’s Poem

May we continue to curl into ourselves,
and through, like spiraling bramble and
ancient branches that forge
their path amidst the misty thicket.
We can only hope for bluebird
sightings and beads of rain
to let all the parts that broke find a way
to mend together
like neighbors, living in peace and leaning
on one another, holding each other.
May we behold each other.
May we find a healing
of our individual and collective attention;
a restoration of our ability to notice
beyond engineered algorithms.
May we refuse all manufactured
panic, and only act
in the urgency of love and
embrace ourselves like we would
a new lover or an old friend -
with curiosity, gentleness, humor,
and grace.
May we all allow ourselves to be moved
by the wind of inspiration,

forged by the fire of collective
responsibility, held by the
depth of the ocean, and grounded
by the oneness of the earth.
May we find peace and let this
slowing, this moontide current of awe
be the hymn whisper-sung
throughout the year.

Push me to boil down the movement to one ethos, one raison d’être, one catchphrase, and it’s this:

More life.

More abundant life.

More kinds of life.

More diversity of life.

More ways to understand life.

More perspectives, more minds, more kinds of minds, more sensory apparata, more sense-making paradigms.

More lenses.

More beauty, more kinds of beauty, more intelligences.

More exuberant experiment, beyond my and my culture’s comprehension or comfort.

Life unbeholden to utility.

Life beyond human instrumentability.

Our human systems, human structures (both infra- and super-) should be built to nurture, to nest within, to engender, foster, cultivate, to rejoice with

More.

Out of well-founded humility/fear—“Who am I to request an interview from her? Why on earth would she bother responding, let alone honoring, that request?”—I waited until the day before leaving for the conference/retreat where she was scheduled to speak. And she got back to me! Quickly! We sat beside each other at the welcome dinner; she recognized my name when we were introduced. And to be honest, after she was put in the uncomfortable position of interviewing a couple business bros the next morning, I think she was relieved to have a reason to leave.

“Are you finding this interesting?” I leaned over and asked. We were listening to a panel discussion about how to improve the world by (checks notes) being a good boss.

“No,” she said, sounding impossibly bored.

“Do you want to go talk about animism now?”

“Yes.”

For those who don’t know: read Sophie Strand! She will cut you open. She will myceliate your wounds. She will weave your tattered edges back into the exuberant earth. Read her!

My massive delay in publishing had a few causes. A baby born in June, a move across town in July. But also, if I’m being honest: I’ve been scared! This format—interview—is brand new for me. There’s the technical ignorance—how to transcribe? Manually, all myself? With an AI-assist? Hire someone? (that one, in the end)—but also: listening to it made me want to hide. I didn’t prepare or speak as well as I’d like; I thought maybe the whole thing needed to be chopped into bits, the just-Sophie bits, and reconstituted.

Thanks to the friend who listened and assured me that it works. That it is good, and worth sharing, as-is (though I did edit some).

I’m sorry I kept Sophie’s wisdom from you for so long. Here it is, in all it’s recorded-on-a-phone-in-a-dining-hall glory. (Another attendee stopped, listened, then, at Sophie’s invitation, sat at our table. You’ll hear her introduce herself.) I highly encourage listening to this one! Though I did clean the transcript and add thematic headings for easy reference/quoting, and for those who prefer to read.

And an update on her health! She mentions in this interview that she got a terminal diagnosis just weeks before. She got a second opinion, and that diagnosis evaporated. (Though she’s still not better.)

Without further ado, the (transcript of) the interview:

On a scale of 1-10, how much joy do you feel in your body right now?

Chad: Let’s start, Sophie. I’ve got interview questions for you. On a scale of one to ten, how much joy do you feel in your body right now?

Sophie: Pass.

Chad: Fair.

So, you wrote a book about bodies and health, and I also get the sense that you would rather not talk about bodies and health!

Sophie: Yeah, it’s interesting. You write a book about illness, and then you’re asked to talk about illness. Our culture wants us to cannibalize our worst experiences and make them our identity.

Simone Weil says that what we pay attention to we pray towards. And I worry that if all I do is talk about illness, I’m praying towards illness. I’m a little superstitious about that at this point.

Chad: And not just superstitious! That question, “on a scale of one to 10, how much joy do you feel in your body?” — that was the title of one of your posts. And you talked powerfully about the nocebo effect.

When you’re told that this sugar pill will benefit you: placebo effect. It benefits a bunch of people, even though it’s a sugar pill! Same thing, if you’re told that it has all these side effects, then you end up getting those side effects, even though it’s a sugar pill. And our entire medical system—

Sophie: It’s bad theater.

Chad: It’s bad theater, exactly.

Sophie: It reinforces our mistrust in experiences that could be amelioratory.

Chad: Yeah, but yeah, I also understand. I listened to another interview you did about this book, The Body is the Doorway, and you talked about sort of not wanting to become your illness.

I’ve heard this from other people too. Like you’re supposed to become whatever that thing is, but you are like that thing personified. For some people, it’s like, “I’m a canceled person on the internet,” right? “Now all I get invited to talk about is being a canceled person on the internet,” where you’re, you’re whatever condition personified or reified and you’re supposed to monetize it.

Sophie: Yeah, we live in a very, very scared culture. In a traumatized nervous system, you need to make sense of your environment so you can find safety. So you wanna be able to label people and things.

I think that our over-identification with certain identity markers and our ways of simplifying other people into how they classify themselves is… I think it’s almost symptomatic of how traumatized our culture is. We wanna be able to simplify our environment so we understand who’s safe and who’s not safe, but that’s not how anyone works.

Chad: A traumatized environment, but also the like the simplifying feels like part of the sort of reductionist, scientific, …

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. And also, we’re evolving all the time. We should have different identities every day. To only have one identity is to have only one way of traveling and that doesn’t feel very evolutionarily viable.

Chad: I like that.

So my first questions here were about body stuff. We can skip right past them.

Sophie: We can totally talk about them.

How has your (individual or extended) body been delighting you lately?

Chad: Yeah, sure.

How has your body been delighting you lately? Your individual body, but also as you talk about beautifully in the book, your extended body. Like the ecosystem of which you are a part. I’ll let you answer for both or either.

Sophie: Yeah, it’s hard. I received almost like a very serious, perhaps terminal diagnosis in the past two weeks. So, it’s a very difficult…

Like, that’s like a fun question.

And I think there are ways in which this book represents a fossil of who I was. I think I’m in a place in my life where…

How does my body delight me?

• I’m glad I’ve been here for as long as I’ve been here.

• I’m glad that I have so many connections.

• That I’m able to drink coffee.

• That I can go on a run still.

I also know that could be obsolete really soon.

I don’t know. I mean, I’m happy to be materially present. Today.

Chad: I’m glad you’re materially present.

Sophie: Yeah, but longer than that, I have no idea.

Chad: Like you don’t know how long you will continue to be materially present.

Sophie: Yeah, or like, or what will continue to be possible. I’m super, super glad that I’ve been able to live independently and live on my own for a while and to really be self-sufficient. I don’t know how much longer that will last, either.

Sophie: I’d ask that you not put the diagnostic information in, maybe edit that out, just because I’m not sharing that super widely until I have more information.

Chad: That’s fine.

Sophie: Thank you.

Chad: Yeah, totally.

No normative bodies (Chad’s weird body shit)

Chad: I don’t know if there’s space for this, but I also think it’s, I don’t know. You’re always supposed to talk about what’s going on with you. But the able-bodied interviewer…

There’s a way that I tell myself the story, or I am told the story, of being able-bodied. And that we sort of downplay the way that everyone’s body has glitches.

The frontlines of evolution

Sophie: Yeah, there’s no such thing as a normative body. We’re all different. And in fact, that’s how evolution works. Every hand began as a glitch that was perfectly adapted to a shifting ecosystem.

I always say that people who are really sick are on the bleeding edge, the front line of evolution. Like, something’s gonna work at some point! You’re an experiment.

But everyone’s body is, you know—there’s no climactic organism. If evolution is working, it means that each person is a little bit different. And that can be a match or a mismatch with the environment.

Chad: Yeah. The biggest weird body shit for me over the past two years has been: I tore my cornea like two years ago. I woke up in incredible pain. And then it just… Never. Heals? My eyelid fuses to my cornea while I sleep. And then when I open my eyes in the morning, it re-tears.

Sophie: That’s really intense.

Chad: I mean, it’s nowhere near as intense as what you’re going through.

Sophie: There’s no trauma Olympics. Everyone is dealing with lots of stuff.

Spiralic time

Chad: It’s certainly not as all-consuming. But there are weeks of time where I can’t see clearly out of one eye.

Sophie: It sounds like it’s also a spiral. It’s not linear, “sick—fix—better.”

Chad: For sure.

Sophie: It’s more like: “sometimes okay—maybe not,” you know? And it’s that spiralic time that I think is really important to remember with illness. Like, it’s not a straight trajectory up.

Chad: Yeah. I went to a doctor about it initially, and it was like, “try these eye drops.” And I tried the eye drop for like, a year. Thinking “maybe I’ll make it long enough that the cornea will heal enough that my eyelid stops fusing to it. And then I won’t have to think about this anymore.” But after a year of that, and it just kept happening every few weeks, I was like—Okay. We’ll go back and see more doctors.

It’s a very small version of what you’ve gone through.

Sophie: Yeah, it’s the wound that refuses to close or fully heal.

Chad: Right. So anyway, I just—

Sophie: Well, I am sorry you’re dealing with that.

Chad: I’m not saying it to like—

Sophie: No, I’m glad, no.

Chad: I thought it would be fun to try to invert the like—

Dignity in the details

Sophie: I always appreciate it.

People are so uncomfortable hearing about what’s really happening. And I’m always like, give me the particularities. For me the dignity is in the details. Especially when people are sick. Like, tell me the nasty stuff. Tell me what’s really happening.

Chad: I like that.

Sophie: So, thank you.

Chad: But I also want, like I said, I want to give you a chance to not be the sick person in the interview.

Sophie: I appreciate it. Thank you.

Unintentional wellness grifters

Chad: To wrap up the health stuff conversation: there is so much in The Body is a Doorway that I just love. I love your insight into our wellness-obsessed culture right now. There’s so many wellness grifters and wellness coaches and maybe even unintentional grifters, where they really believe their own bullshit…

Sophie: Oh, I think a lot of them are unintentional.

Chad: …and the way we recreate the harms of dogmatic Christianity or dogmatic religion via new age “manifesting” kind of language. You address all of that so beautifully.

Sophie: I’m glad that it connected.

Chad: So there’s lots there that we could dig into, but…

You’re a troubadour?

…you are a troubadour animist.

Sophie: I guess I am.

Chad: That’s been your bio for a long time. Where did it come from? Tell me especially about the troubadour piece.

Sophie: Troubadour comes from the romance tradition of the Middle Ages, especially in France, kind of the Arthurian cycles of romance.

I have always been obsessed with romance culture. And when I say that, I don’t just mean romance books. I mean these storytelling cycles with fantastical elements—with dragons, with quests, with love, with relationship, with mystery. Kind of like the magical realism of the Middle Ages.

Those are the kinds of stories that I wanna tell. Fantasy stories, love stories.

Don’t pigeon-hole me

I think I put “troubadour” in my bio when I was becoming more well-known for nonfiction. It was a way of saying, “Actually, I like to write fiction, and love stories, and fantastical stories.”

Troubadours were also a last holdout of the Bardic oral tradition, which is people who would travel, collect stories, recycle certain elements. You would travel by way of storytelling. And so, it’s also kind of a way of saying I’m a traveling storyteller.

I’m collecting stories. I’m putting them together.

And the animist part, of course, is my orientation towards the prickly, weird aliveness of the world and an acknowledgement that the aliveness of a stone or a tree or a mountain is inherently different than my version of it.

A common root system in lyricism

Chad: On the troubadour piece, I had thought that troubadours were specifically musicians, but it sounds like it was a much broader category.

Sophie: Storytelling and music didn’t used to be separate. They were part of the same tradition. I mean, lyric poetry is the origin of the epic. The original storytellers had a lyre; they would always accompany themselves with some kind of music. Oral storytelling traveled by way of mnemonic devices, melodic devices. You remembered long stories by coupling with them with certain body movements, with musical motifs. There was a greater emphasis on the musicality of your speech because you were speaking it to an audience.

Chad: And that was how you made your voice carry farther, right? Before microphones?

Sophie: Exactly, and you had to, of course, also delight your audience. So, you wanted it to be entertaining. I always say that music and writing have a common root system in lyricism.

So, the troubadours were songmakers, but the songs were stories. All of the original Arthurian legends were originally like Arthurian songs.

Chad: Have you tried to resuscitate or reinvent that style of oration at all as you’ve traveled?

Who taught you story

Sophie: I come from Southern storytellers. My dad’s family are deep Arkansas, Alabaman storytellers who sit around a table at a holiday and exchange their wildest stories of their life. So, I come from a storytelling tradition. On the other side of my family are deeply boisterous Irish storytellers. And I have Middle Eastern relatives too who also have a big storytelling culture. So as part of my family, there’s this idea that you have to keep the stories of your ancestors alive, you have to make your audience laugh, what are the stories that are memorable, which stories do you pass down.

I think in my own work, it’s important for me to understand that there is a musicality to words, that they are essentially breath. They are embodied when they work well. I have been the audiobook reader for my books. This was not by choice, but I have taken it up. And I think that it means that I have to be careful about vocalization and about the melodic line of a piece of writing. It has to be speakable.

Orate your work! (to the place/being that inspired it)

Chad: I’ve heard a lot of authors recommend reading your work out loud as part of the writing process.

Sophie: I think it’s great. In classes I’ve taught, when I have people create some kind of ecological parable or story, I say: read it to the place or being that it was inspired by. See how it responds. Be open to a no. Be open to a bad reaction.

Chad: I love that. I’m curious if there have been any times when, I don’t know, the birds didn’t like it.

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe you go to a place, and you’re reading aloud a piece, and a giant storm kicks up. I’ve had that happen. And I take that as a sign. Like, “Oh, there’s something here.”

Some things aren’t for sharing

Sophie: I also think that we live in a culture where we’re encouraged to eat up other beings and turn them into profit, turn them into product, but that there are stories that we’re not supposed to tell. That we’re supposed to experience, have inside of us, and then maybe not share. And so sometimes when people are talking about animal stories or encounters they’ve had, I say: do you have permission to tell this story?

Chad: From the animal that they interacted with.

Sophie: Or like, is this an okay story to share? It opens up the relationship.

Chad: It reminds me of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Sophie: Ah, yes. Holy Robin.

Define (your) animism

Chad: I kind of want you to define animism again as we start talking about it.

An oversimplification; species humility; a compost heap

Sophie: I mean, I think “animism” is an oversimplification of a biodiversity of different belief systems the world over. And that to create a homogenizing universalism is always a problem—to say that there is an indigenous animism or there is an animism.

I think it refers to a common thread of species humility; an understanding that we’re not the only beings that are alive. Not the only beings that have feelings and stories. And that we live in a world, a kaleidoscope, of voices and perspectives. And that belief looks different as it’s rooted in different environments and cultures.

My animism is not indigenous. It is a weird compost heap of my upbringing. I was raised on the Chautauqua Tales and a kind of Japanese Zen Buddhist animism—my dad had traveled to Japan and worked inside Zen Buddhism for many years, an ex-Buddhist monk. My mom was part of a kind of environmental, pagan goddess orientation. They were both really involved with environmentalists and ecologists. So my animism was of a strange variety growing up.

Since a child

Chad: But you’ve had it since you were growing up.

Sophie: Oh yeah. I think I learned the name for it post-college. I was like, oh, I guess people call my belief system “animism.” But that’s always what I’ve believed.

I mean, I grew up with animals being people to me. And not in any kind of superficial way. It was very real. We had lots of animals growing up, and my parents were very careful that I knew that they were just as alive, and they had tons of opinions.

Chad: It’s remarkable, in our culture, to have been so steeped in animism.

Chad’s entrypoint into animism

Sophie: I was lucky in lots of different ways. What was your entry point into animism?

Chad: For me, this is much more recent; seeing this and being like, “oh, that really resonates.” I grew up a zealous young earth Creationist; very in the Christian fold.

It took seven years from the time when someone really threw a wrench into my Creationism to get to a point where I had fully deconstructed it and could talk about it as something that happened, where it didn’t still feel like an open wound. A seven-year journey to close the chapter on Creationism.

And then in early 2022 or 2023, I listened to Richard Powers on the Ezra Klein show. Ezra Klein says to him, “You’ve described yourself as becoming something of an animist, but to me you don’t seem like an animist in the traditional sense. You seem like a bit of a scientific animist. I wonder if you could reflect on that.” And Powers had this very beautiful reflection. And then I went and listened to Power’s book, The Overstory, and it was incredible.

No supernatural truth claims needed?

And then: this longing I had heard about from people—from Ezra Klein himself, but also people that I follow online and people I know—this longing for a religion-like force in their lives, but not being able to convince themselves to believe supernatural truth claims.

Sitting with Richard Powers, I was like: I don’t know that we need the supernatural truth claim! There’s enough going on. Just with everything happening in the natural world and our place in it—we’re already part of this larger narrative. There’s already this grand mystery to be swept up in. Just look around and notice! You are already swept up in this grand narrative.

Cult-leader vibes

So, it was sort of that. And then I had friends joking that I had cult leader vibes.

Sophie: Always a good sign.

Chad: And I was like, if I want to use this power for good, what would be the thing, what would be the name for the movement? This, like, scientific animism that Richard Powers exemplified—that was it. I was like, that’s what I want to talk about and think about. That’s interesting to me.

I went to a conference, DWeb Camp, in 2023. Decentralized Web Camp, but I didn’t want to talk about the web. I wanted to talk about animism. I led a discussion called Scientific Animism: Let’s Invent a Religion. A bunch of people showed up. Someone else had read Braiding Sweetgrass; became the co-host; was like, you gotta read Braiding Sweetgrass.

So, this is within the past two or three years for me.

Sophie: It’s a huge paradigm shift, wow.

One does not digest the other

Chad: Something else I want to talk about: you talk about syncretism in The Body is a Doorway. This idea of: the new paradigm does not digest the old paradigm. They sit in uneasy conversation, or uneasy—

Occupying the same body

Sophie: Endosymbiotic Theory, yeah. They’re occupying the same body, but they’re not digesting each other.

Chad: Endos—?

Sophie: Endosymbiotic Theory. It’s how plants have chloroplasts and how we have mitochondria. Lynn Margolis came up with it, and she was mocked until it was found to be absolutely true. Multicellular life is because of this merger between two simple cells.

Chad: Gotcha, and neither-

Sophie: Fully digested the other.

Chad: Exactly. And that’s sort of the posture that I take toward Christianity at this point. I still go to a Mennonite church—there are many versions of Christianity that would be totally disgusting to me. You don’t have to look hard to find them. It’s most of it out there. But there’s also a version of it that I can still sit with and allow to be in that syncretic relationship with animism.

Sometimes people will be like, “my Christianity has a little like witchcraft mixed into it” or whatever, and I’m like: One doesn’t have to digest the other. It doesn’t have to be that your Christianity has digested your witchy impulses or your animism, and the animism doesn’t have to fully digest the Christianity. They can just be; they can both continue to exist.

To hold paradox

Sophie: F. Scott Fitzgerald says the mark of true intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your head at once without going insane. Paradox is always part of every wisdom tradition. Can you hold paradox? Can you hold two things at once that sometimes oppose? It must be good for us ideologically, spiritually, to hold paradox.

Chad: I like that. I think of it as almost two lenses or two sets of glasses through which to look at the world. You can move back and forth between them, but you don’t have to like—

Sophie: Fuse them into one, one eyeglass. Yeah, I think it’s really good to oscillate through different perspectives. You miss something in one and then you see it in another.

Imagining the rituals of scientific animists

Chad: Alright, more animism. Let’s go to a more imaginal, fantastical space. This is where you like to hang out.

When I first started thinking about scientific animism, I was like: if I were an author, I would write a novel where people are doing scientific animism. I was curious what it would look like if it had the society-organizing power or force or presence as something like Christianity in the United States. Like, what do scientific animists do? What are their rituals?

Do they get together every week? What do they do when they get together? Does it look sort of like Christianity, where you sit and you listen to someone talk? Or does it look like the Sangha of Buddhism, where you all sit in a circle? Or is it something totally unconsidered by me so far?

I wanna put to you that thought experiment. You are a novelist. Imagine that world for me.

Queer sci-fi re-imagining of Tristan & Isolde

Sophie: I think I have. I think it’s a book I just wrote actually.

Chad: Perfect, haha.

Sophie: I just wrote the first book in a series which I call my queer sci-fi re-imagining of Tristan & Isolde, which is an old Arthurian lay, a romance, of the Troubadour tradition. It’s based on a colonized planet that has been abandoned some 30,000 years before, because it is a place where horizontal gene transfer happens at an increased rate, where humans merge with the world very, very quickly. And not through reproductive selection, but through accidental gene transfer.

Chad: This is delightful.

Sophie: And there’s a theocratic eugenicist state that believes in genetic purity, and a much older—you could label it pagan—civilization that is more of a scientific animism, which believes in the inherent erotic life force of this world that eats everything and changes everything. I based a lot of the religious structure of the competing animist religion on Shintoism in Japan.

Shintoism

Chad: Do you wanna say more about Shintoism?

Sophie: Shintoism is really an, it’s an idea that there are like tutelary deities of every piece of land, of stones, but also of technology.

Chad: Tutelary?

Sophie: Yeah, it means they are like place-specific. That every place you go, everything you touch has a different totemic identity, a spirit.

There were also tutelary land deities in England. When Christianity came in, they syncretically merged with Christian figures and became saints. But they’re really land deities of certain places: The goddess figure who embodies a spring becomes a Saint Bridget; you know? There’s this evolution. I often call them stowaways—it’s a way of continuing their existence through oppressive regimes. They kind of like, put on a disguise.

There are the kami in Japanese Shintoism: spirits of the forest, of certain places, of shrines. There are also technology kami; there’s no purity there. I think about that a lot.

So I definitely was playing with these ideas in this book.

Too queer to sell; life-force from writing

I hope it— it’s way too queer to sell right now. It’s almost been bought a couple of times and then people are like: ooooh.

Chad: I feel like too-queer-to-sell shouldn’t be a thing.

Sophie: It’s a real thing. It’s a real thing right now.

Chad: I guess right now. Would it have sold five years ago?

Sophie: Yeah, probably. In fact, there was a publisher about to buy it, and then Trump published that list of words. And every word described my book. And they were like: actually, no! But they had been drawing up the contract.

Chad: Are you gonna try to modify the book to sell in the current market? Or just move on, sell a different book for now?

Sophie: You know: I’m a writer. Not a writer of one book. The joy I get is from creation.

So, I wrote that book. I have to trust the timing for it will be correct at some point. (And then I’ll write the second two, because it’s a series.)

But right now, what I need is life-force. Which means I need a new project. So I’m doing something else.

Chad: Yeah, no, selling a book gives no one life force.

Sophie: Yeah, and it might sell eventually. My agent has it; it’s out there. And I’ll just trust—

Chad: It sounds fantastic.

Sophie: Thank you. I do think it’s for the scientific animist. It’s not for a mass audience. And I think that is a little bit of the issue.

Chad: I think that’s sort of my—

Grow the movement with smut

Chad: How do you make the scientific animists the mass audience? How do we grow this?

Sophie: I think with smut! With dragons, and smut, and fairy sex. What are people reading? The top-selling books are romantacy. You want the dog to eat the pill? Put it in cheese. You want people to have a more expanded, animistic worldview? Put it in cheese. Put it in smutty dragon stories. What I’m writing right now is very much a dog-and-cheese kind of vehicle. I’m writing a book that is very much like: maybe you should consider _______. You know?

Would it fix anything, though?

Chad: My background deconstructing Christianity brought me to this place of feeling, like, epistemological nihilism about the effects of any religious system.

If you look at the history of the reductionary scientific approach; empiricism—

You can’t be epistemologically nihilistic about

Chad: (Tons of faults of empiricism and reductionist science! Actually, whenever I ask people if they’re a scientific animist and I sort of, “do you believe in science?” All the people I’ve asked have had way more of a problem with science than with animism. Animism? They’re like: sure. Science? They’re like: let’s put in some caveats.

So, go ahead and put in all those caveats, but also—)

Phones would not be possible without empirical science. We have these physical objects in our lives; we have medical interventions that did not exist before; I wouldn’t have children without modern science. They are science babies.

Sophie: I love that. I love that qualification.

Chad: So, like, science and this version of empiricism have given us tangible things. We can see the march of it within our own lifespans. The cameras now are way better than they were 10 years ago. There’s a way that you can’t be epistemologically nihilistic about science and empiricism.

But religion feels like much more of a mixed bag.

Buddhism & empire

Chad: In the West, we sort of fetishize Buddhism, like it seems so wise, and if we were all Buddhists, if we were a Buddhist society, surely we’d all be better. But then you look at Buddhist societies, like—where are they genociding the Rohingya right now? I forgot what country that is, but they’re a Buddhist-majority country!

It feels like any religious orientation has a way of being metabolized by the larger society and being used to whatever destructive ends the powerful people wanted in the first place. Christianity has certainly been used in that way; it’s been a tool of empire. But Buddhism gets co-opted by empire and by the powerful in the same way.

To me, animism seems obvious, in a way. It just feels like seeing the world for what it is. But if it grows as a movement, as something with a religion-like force or as a societal organizing paradigm, I’m curious if you think there’s a straight line to a better world there.

Sophie: I am always suspicious of ideas of progress and evolution and betterment, especially because I’m in a process of decay and degeneration and we all die and every species goes extinct or becomes something else.

“Religion” vs “Spirituality” is a matter of class

Sophie: In the anthropological paradigm, the difference between spirituality and religion is one of class. Religion is always: you have the luxury to create scholastic culture, liturgy, ritual. Because you have enough time and money.

Magic, or spirituality, is called the little tradition. Which is: it’s the stuff that works.

You’re sick, you’re trying to feed your family, and so you oftentimes are more interested in spells or things like miracle healing. Things that work. Less ritual, less performativity, less scholasticism and hierarchy, and more folk tradition.

And so, to the extent that there’s any difference between spirituality and religion, it’s one of class. It’s a class distinction.

I need what works

Sophie: So I’m always suspicious of religion because it’s how class ingests spirituality. For me, especially as someone who’s really sick and poor, I’m interested in magic, not creating systems or rituals, because I don’t have time for that. I need what works.

Give me the magic beans. Spit my eyes. Lay hands on me.

Those are the traditions, the anarchic traditions of the peasant class, who are trying to make meaning on a day-to-day survival basis. That’s what I’m interested in.

You really only have super hierarchical religious institutions when you have accumulation of goods and some kind of stable grain. A stable grain is one where— Potatoes aren’t, because you don’t know where potatoes are. Tax collectors can’t come and dig up your potatoes because they don’t know where they’re hidden. Grain they can see so they can tax it.

No religions without taxable surplus

And when you have taxable grain and accumulation of goods, and you can begin to use a person to produce that for you, and then take the things they grow away from them, you have, what is it called? A landed gentry. And when you have a landed gentry, they have enough time to create religious texts, to write down the folk traditions. And then you have the illiterate peasant class who are actually producing that grain and that accumulation without actually partaking of it. And they’re doing what is oftentimes considered the incorrect version of religion.

So, for me, I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be a religious person. I’m always gonna be a spiritual person. Like, I don’t know, I want what works. And yeah, in dark nights of the soul, I have tons of rituals and prayers, but usually what comes with me is just kind of a raw howl. It’s the basest stuff.

The animism I’m interested in is one that isn’t rule-based, that doesn’t become systematized, that’s patchy and heterogeneous, that shifts according to needs. One that wouldn’t have ritual, that wouldn’t be attached to class, would be always feral, anarchic, and ever-changing.

Let’s talk about rituals, vis-à-vis the little tradition

Chad: I think that there is meaning that people get from those sorts of rituals. I’ve been curious if a scientific animism that emerges from our current society, if it did have—

I feel like people want ritual. People want ceremony. People want that sort of organizing process. And also a way to embody knowledge. Like, if we believe that other beings have a consciousness that is not inferior to our own, but is just a different way to sing the song, how do we remind ourselves of that in an embodied, group/community way? I think that there’s power in those kinds of things.

Sophie: If you look at the most radical spiritual leaders, who lead underground movements—

The Aramaic illiterate storyteller

Sophie: Like, let’s go to Yeshua, the Aramaic illiterate storyteller who becomes co-opted by empire. Becomes Jesus. His only two rituals, if you actually look at the earliest versions, are:

1. Share food. Communally share food. And:

2. Heal everybody you meet. Without charging them money for it.

That’s it. Those are your rituals.

No actual liturgy. That all comes way after he dies. That’s his followers being like, “Actually we’re special and you’re not, because we know this stuff.” But he just said:

• Don’t do it in my name.

• Don’t pretend like I’m the leader.

• Share food.

And it’s obviously a response to the Roman empire, which had created bad loans in city centers and taken away people’s lands. People couldn’t support their families. And so he was saying, “Okay, empire’s controlling food? Share food. Empire is making you sick? Heal each other.” That’s it.

I mean, I think that the most radical thing you can do is

• share food

• grown locally

• with people

• and try to offer a little ease in people’s lives, because we’re all hurting in lots of different ways right now.

Ritual machines

Sophie: I’ve been invited to so many different ritual containers, people trying to create ritual. And it feels very artificial to me.

We’re given a lot of rituals!

• We are born and die. Those are rituals. They’re the most sacred thresholds that people pass over. There are tons of people dying right now. We could do dying better. We could do dying and illness better.

• We could do menstruation better.

Our bodies are ritual machines! We don’t have to create fake ritual. We’re given it.

We could honor that. And work with it more.

So for me, I wanna die better. I wanna be involved in babies being born. Be they animal babies, human babies.

But I’m not super interested in getting a bunch of white ladies together wearing feathers to do a moon ceremony. Nah.

Baked into our larger body

Chad: That’s exactly who—

So I’ve been organizing locally in my area. I’ve got the scientific animism Substack, but I’ve also been curious to sort of LARP scientific animism as a community thing.

The thought experiment was: what would scientific animism look like if it were something approaching more formality? What trappings would it have? What sorts of things would people do? And rather than write it into a story, I was like, what if I invite friends, or the people near me, to sort of co-imagine and LARP scientific animism with me? Let’s do some Live Action Role-Playing of what we think this thing could look like.

Sophie: I mean, neo-paganism is very much like that. And we’ve lost track of the seasons. Just like there are rituals baked into our body, there are rituals baked into our larger body. There are seasonal shifts, there are astronomical shifts. For me personally, eclipses are really big deals. When eclipses happen, I’m like, this is a thing. This feels big to me. I’ve decided this is a big deal.

What does an eclipse mean?

Chad: What does the eclipse symbolize? If it’s a metaphor for something, what is it for?

Sophie: Well, either the sun is covering the moon or the moon is covering the sun. So for me, it’s a revealing or it’s a conscious obfuscation. And they’re also cyclical, which I like. They’re a way of punctuating time. Like tying a stitch. It stitches you into another time period. It stitches two times together. And you’re like, how does— what did this pocket of time contain? What were its themes? It’s a meaning-making device.

My favorite is comets. Because comets oftentimes will take, like, 10 million years to return to earth. And I’m like, what did they see? Last time they passed earth? Did they see mammoths? Were we even here? I think of them as cosmic sewing needles, stitching us together.

But of course, all of this, for me, is a very personal way of storytelling and doesn’t necessarily translate to someone else.

Morphic Resonance (the hundred monkeys theory)

Chad: I guess to go back, there’s part of me that wants to evangelize this worldview, animism, because it feels like how the world actually is. And it feels like it will be helpful in some way to the other creatures that we are currently in the process of murdering. And to go back, do ideas work in that sort of linear way? Where you convince more people—

Sophie: Morphic resonance, right? Where the hundred monkeys on the island learn how to break the coconut. Do you know about this idea? There’s this idea, many times shown to be true, they show these monkeys how to use a stone tool to open up a coconut. And once they reached a critical mass on one island, even though there was no communication with the monkeys on the other island, they all learned it.

Chad: Wait, say this again.

Sophie: It’s called the hundred monkeys theory.

Chad: You teach the monkeys on one island how to do the thing—

Sophie: And when they reach a critical mass, suddenly all the monkeys know. It’s also how viruses work.

Chad: On an island far away, the other monkeys figure it out?

Sophie: There are tons of theories for how this happens. It kind of complicates our idea of selfhood, consciousness. You know Rupert Sheldrake?

Chad: No.

Sophie: My homie, I love Rupert. Rupert Sheldrake is this great scientist who posits this idea of Morphic Resonance, which is like: there are these patterns and fields of behavior that are bigger than individuals, and if a field changes, all the individuals within it will change. And it’s not so much like—

My favorite is, I think in Toronto, they made these garbage cans that were supposed to be completely immune to being taken apart by raccoons. And raccoons are not social learners. They don’t learn something and teach another raccoon how to do it. They’re greedy, apparently. I love raccoons. But one raccoon learned, and then they all knew. And they all knew how to break into the trash cans.

Chad: And it’s not from watching that one raccoon. It spread too fast and too far.

Sophie: Too fast. It’s also how viruses work. And I’m not saying like this is a true theory, but it does complicate our idea of how things happen, which is like one virus mutates, learns how to disable a cell, and then all over the world, the viruses all know. It’s a quorum-sensing almost. Which is like when bacteria produce chemicals and all kind of coordinate their behavior.

But will growing the movement fix anything?

Chad: This is making me think of a couple of things, but I wanna go back to the question I posited. Does convincing more people, or getting more people on board with animism, change society’s relationship—

Sophie: Maybe! If you teach a hundred monkeys how to open up the coconut and suddenly a hundred million monkeys know how to open the coconut… I don’t know!

I have to believe that things are catching. Things are viral. They shift, they move.

And I also care— I want people to love what I love. So that they don’t hurt it.

I orient towards life not as an expert but as a lover. Like, I don’t really know. I’m not sure how to answer your question.

Chad: That’s fair. That’s fair.

How to hold (uncomfortable) difference

Chad: So, the other question that I had written down, that the morphic resonance and whatnot was making me think of is: there’s a humility to your writing and to your orientation that I really appreciate. To engage something like morphic resonance, or in your book, you tell the story of the golden rose and the nondescript, totally-not-an-elf who handed it to you in the bar. It’s a really good story!

But there’s a way of sitting with uncertainty that attracts conspiratorial types.

I’ve also noticed as I write about scientific animism online and talk about it at parties, it brings out the kooks. There’ll be people who show up in the comments who have real out-there ideas they’re excited to talk about.

Have you found that your holding of mystery, holding of uncertainty, invites these same kinds of conversations? How do you engage when people— ?

Need for certainty feeds conspiracy

Sophie: I think that the impulse for conspiracy is the impulse for certainty.

I would say I was up there on stage [earlier today] with two conspiracists. I mean, I’d say the economy, money, is a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy is saying there is some grand unifying theory of something that explains everything. It’s a desire for a comprehensive worldview.

The difference between a politician and the conspiracist is just, like, capital and cultural legitimacy.

So, I would consider someone who comes and tells me that like the earth isn’t alive, that it’s just brute materials, as much a conspiracy theorist as someone who’s like, “Ancient archeology! The master race created everything!”

Which to shut down

I think anybody who’s talking about ideas comes up against some that feel really wacky. The ones I don’t like are ones that are eugenicist and racist and human-supremacist. And those ones I try and shut down pretty immediately.

And, you know, eco-fascism is super real. And it’s a growing force.

And there are people, an accelerationist movement in environmentalism, which is like, “break it all down so that we can rebuild everything.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m a disabled person and if we break it all down, I’m gonna die.”

So I think that I’m always trying to think about, when people come to me with their crazy ideas, that I have my own crazy ideas. But I try to make sure they’re not harmful. And if they are, I try to make sure to be clear that we’re not aligned, that I’m not part of that crew, that camp.

Epistimelogical humility

Sophie: But also, I’ve been wrong about so much in my life. Repeatedly. I’ve had the balloon punctured on a belief system, or a way of traveling, so many times that I can’t pretend like I could not have that happen again. I have to let myself be wrong repeatedly and have my mind changed. I would like to be open. If something happened tomorrow that totally ruptured my belief sphere, I wanna be open to it. Like if a reptile came to earth and it turned out all the Reptilians were right a,nd it was super obvious, I would want to not be so blinkered by the pride in my belief system that I wouldn’t be able like to change and pivot.

For me, it’s also: we’re told that bad things happen to bad people, or if you get sick it’s because you didn’t do the right thing. Or if something bad happens to you, it’s because you’re out of spiritual alignment or something. And I think that I’ve seen so many things happen in my life that feel so random and weird, to me and to other people, that I’m like: I don’t know anything.

The eternal return of the “sickness as moral failing” mind-virus

Chad: Yeah, I feel that one. The persistence of the “if you are sick, you did something bad” thinking across religious persuasions. This is going back to your book, The Body is a Doorway.

To me that’s one of the most harmful things that I saw in Christianity, the “if you’re still sick, you didn’t pray hard enough” kind of thing. It’s so harmful to people, so upsetting. And then people slough off their Christianity, and they pick up some New Age sorta things, and replace the word “God” with the word “universe”—

Scientism is the new Christianity

Sophie: Or they replace it with “science.” I mean, science is the new Christianity.

Not real science. Science is like not a monolith, it’s a way of asking questions, it’s a verb. But Scientism, as a collection of dogmas that are taken to be true without evolving and constant updating, is a kind of new Christianity.

And within it is the idea of Healthism, which is that if you’re sick, it’s because you haven’t optimized your body, or done enough. And if you drink more celery juice and pay money to the right boutique doctors and change your life, you’ll get better. And that wellness is an individual possession you have to defend and pay for, rather than, like, an entangled network of sedimented oppression.

I don’t think it’s just religion. I think that this paradigm has infected everything.

Because we’re scared. When something bad happens to someone, we wanna be able to explain it so it doesn’t happen to us. It’s so much easier to say, like, “They’re a bad person. I’m a good person; it won’t happen to me.”

Then it does.

Chad: Yeah, I mean, I feel like maybe humans have always had a bad relationship with this idea, “why do bad things happen to good people?”

Like the book of Job, the oldest book of the Bible and it’s the same conversation. Bad stuff happens to Job and his friends are like, “You obviously did something to deserve this. What did you do?” And he’s like, “I didn’t do anything.” It’s an ancient conversation.

Update the harmful, not superficial, parts

Chad: Where I was going with it before was: I feel like when people slough off their Christianity and pick up some new worldview, part of the goal should be to get rid of the most harmful pieces. But there’s a way that they just replace superficial pieces of it. And keep the harmful parts! And I’m like, why?? Why did you do that??

Sophie: Hannah Arendt says something really interesting in her book, Responsibility and Judgment, about Nazism. She says that a culture that has dominant mores, or set of beliefs—be they religious or cultural—is perfectly ripe for fascism. Because you just pick up one and exchange it with the other overnight, and everybody’s just ready. And you have to have a personal, bespoke imperative; you have to figure out what you personally believe, totally apart from any religious or spiritual— What will you not abide by?

She says the only defense against fascism, against being overtaken by these cultural, religious violences, is to not outsource your belief to a dominant structure. You can, but you also have to compare it against a subjective personal compass. What do you really believe, totally apart from any type of religious structure, any paradigm, any big unifying myth?

And it doesn’t have to be something that someone else believes. It’s not something you give to someone else. It’s what you personally cannot abide by. There are certain things in my life where I wouldn’t ask anyone else to live in that way, but I certainly believe them and they orient me. I will not exchange them out for something else that someone else gives me.

It feels ecologically contextual too, because it has to do with where you are, how you were raised, what plants you saw, what animals you ate or tended to. Highly specific.

Instagram tho, smdh

Chad: We’ll end with your relationship with technology. You make a good bit of your living on a platform that is owned by some startup, Substack. You’re also active on Instagram. And Facebook? All the things. You’re on all the places.

I’ve been mostly off of Instagram for years. I love not needing to be on Instagram. I am really privileged that I don’t need to be for the most part.

If I want to grow my audience on Substack, the fastest way to do it is to also be on the other platforms, but then: I don’t want to be consumed by it. Feeling the pull of the app. (I actually deleted the Instagram app when I realized that my main emotional trigger to open Instagram was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with my life. Like, “Oh, that’s what makes me want to reach for Instagram? Dissatisfaction?” And it only amplifies it.)

So, what is your relationship with all of these things? You’re sort of dependent on them.

Sophie: Impure. Fraught. Impure and fraught.

You know, I do think some of these social media platforms originally worked to kind of undermine dominant gatekeeping. I was not breaking into publishing as a young queer woman writing radical shit. Not getting published or making any money off of it. And I posted it for free online. Gave it away for free. And then it went viral (because I didn’t try to make it viral).

How to make viral internet content

People are always like “how do you make something go viral?” And I’m like, “By not trying.” Like, if you try it will not work.

Chad: “Make good shit that people enjoy.”

Sophie: No, like, “Write about what you care about, give it away for free. Don’t think about it too much. You can’t game this shit.”

Old internet nostalgia

Sophie: And then I got a book deal retroactively. Like, I had the audience first and then the book deal came. (And then I was able to pay for my medical bills.)

One of those things where the gatekeepers of the academy did not want to let me in. They had to, when they saw that I had an audience.

So it’s: when it works well (which is very rarely these days—)

I did come of age at a time when—

How old are you?

Chad: 38.

Sophie: So, similar. I came of age in, like, early internet. Fan fiction boards. Early, weird, feral internet. Where it was still like you could meet really weird people and make incredible connections. I think the algorithms and simplification and aggregation of different sites is making that less and less possible these days.

But that I did really like. I met some of my closest, weirdest friends and collaborators that way. And because I shared my writing imperfectly online, people changed my mind too. People sent me references, they critiqued me. I was forced to defend my positions, change my positions. There was a way in which being online on these platforms initially kept me really spry, thinking on my feet, changing. And I just don’t think they’re operating like that anymore.

Does your online time pay you for your offline time?

My friend—who is also an amazing animist educator—David Abram was watching me do all these talks and stuff online and he was like, “You should only be spending time online if it’s feeding your real days. If it’s literally paying for you to spend most of your life outside, doing the things you love. But if you are taking that precious caloric energy/time and spending it online, the equation is off.”

And that was a really big deal for me. I was like, “I have to shift the equation.” My goal is to be—and it’s a position of privilege, and I’m not in it yet—my desire is to have the type of career where I am not dependent on being an avatar, or a brand, or online. And I hope every day I can move more towards that. But it’s really hard to make money and pay bills.

Chad: Yeah, to get to a point where you can just, like, write books and publish books and make your money off—

Sophie: Yeah, the publishing industry has completely collapsed. There are no publicists anymore. You don’t make any money off of book deals. You really have to be scrappy. I’ve been really scrappy! But it requires a lot more public-facing self-monetization than I am comfortable with.

Turning trauma into videos

But yeah, if you want to grow your Substack, Instagram’s the way. Like, I’m not gonna be purist about it. Absolutely.

I mean, I watched in realtime as some video reel I did went viral. And it sold books; it made me money. And I watched it, and I was like: I don’t like how this is rewiring my dopamine. I don’t like how I’m now like, “Well, if I make another video of me talking about a shitty part of my life, if I just keep turning my trauma into videos—”

Chad: “I’ll sell more books.”

Sophie: “I’ll sell more books,” yeah.

Be satisfiable

Sophie: But the big thing I’m also asking myself is: what is enough? I want to be satisfiable. People are always like, “You should have a team. You should hire an assistant because you obviously can’t answer all your emails.” And I’m like, No, I don’t want to make this more complicated and bigger. I want to make it as glitchy and homegrown as possible. I don’t want it to grow bigger. I want it to be just fine where it is.

Chad: Find balance with it in smallness.

Sophie: If I have enough money to pay my medical bills and my rent, I’m happy.

Chad: Yeah. Good word.

Books & authors

Chad: All right, you recommended some books to me yesterday. Can you give book recommendations, or author recommendations?

Sophie: I loved Right Story Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. He’s great. His first book, Sand Talk, is amazing. His second book, Right Story Wrong Story, is even better.

If you want the pill in cheese—if you want big questions about humanity and about evolution and our ability to relate to each other with any kind of kindness—I love the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. It’s sci-fi. It’s fantastic.

What else? I love the work of Andreas Weber. Scientist, philosopher. He wrote Matter & Desire. He’s a good friend. He’s amazing.

There’s so much. Lynn Margolis’s writing about endosymbiotic theory. She wrote a book called Symbiotic Planet. It’s one of my favorite books.

Thomas Halliday’s book, Otherlands, is a story backwards through deep time.

Those are some favorites.

Death is a bad smell

as I cross the parking lot

A life I do not interrogate
A being I do not consider

Death is a minor annoyance
on my walk
    from the transportation device 
        that likely squashed it
    to the department store
        that destroyed its habitat

Death surrounds me
it’s ugly but it's all I can see
An ocean of impermeable concrete
An economy of extraction
(holy lands ground down for parts
vast fields of ancient stumps)
all so normalized
and I so inculcated
that I can’t imagine any other way

Death fills the air
fills my lungs
wildfires in the spring
in the humid northeast
A whole new season every year

Death is carefully applied
by men in backpacks with wands
to any life insolencing through cracks
any green despoiling grey
Death sentenced too
to humans struggling through cracks
seeking refuge, sanctuary
in a world with no home

Death is hurled over fences
neighbor to neighbor
Death unleashed in symbolic barrage
"we can Death as hard as you"
Death is stockpiled
(combatants in a vat of gasoline
crowing about match collections)
Death distilled into single devices
so diabolic they require no launch
(detonate anywhere
destroy life everywhere)

Death receives sanctuary
in a dome over our planet
long arms battering energy webs
as we seek refuge in
the fossil-swathed interiors
where Death nurses
where Death weans

and yes
Death clears way
for new life

but not ours

When my four-year-old says it slow,
you can hear the misplaced consonant,
the "K" at the beginning of the second word:
Majih-Kwand.

These kids have been captured by the idea. "I wish I had a magic wand that gave me all the powers in the whole world," says my six-year-old.

    Wow, I say,
                         me too.
    What would you do first?

She thinks. 
"I would become a unicorn."

    Sounds fun, I say. 

She never asks 

    What would you do with yours?

(I really want you to pause here,
answer the question for yourself,
draft a comment with that answer,
come back, read mine,
then edit and post yours.)

Leave a comment

Tree Power.
I've had this vision,
this longing
for a World Tree,
a single tree so vast
it rights the seasons,
protects us,
keeps us safe.

I'd make a billion of them.

Pull a Totoro,
incanting, dancing
big, rowdy trees from the earth
anyplace that needs shade and food.

tree by tree
I'd regrow the ancient forests
asphalt, concrete, endless
monocrop grass corn soy
all rototilled back to topsoil 
    by new churning roots
thrilled back to polyphony
    by new branching mycelia.

Superconductor Power.
A wave, a tap,
and we'd know the secret,
the material
for not just room-temp
but jungle-temp superconductors.
More waves
more taps
and new zero-loss electrical webs
intercontinental maglev rail
branch like hyphae
across half the earth.

Tokamak Power.
Like dial-up to gigabit,
new fusion power plants
would flood this web
with so much energy
we wouldn't know what to do with it.
    Desalination.
    Hydrogen fuel cells.
    Just to start.
And no need to constrain
to current-but-scaled-up tech;
no need to top-out at
boring-ass heavy hydrogen.
We're making helium
    (sky cities; dirigibles)
we're making lithium
    (from raw, abundant hydrogen)
And heck, why stop there.
You can set these tokamaks
to conjure any element
forged in the heart of the largest stars,
the whole periodic table
up to iron.

Leaf Power.
This world of
ceramic and metal
superconductor and tokamak
high-modern cIviLiZaTi0ɴ
is fine and all
but lets go back to the trees.
For all the countries
with contracting populations,
for all the rural areas
returning to nature,
let's give a cozy opt-out
from capitalist high-tech metropolis.
We'll learn old and new ways
to live among forest,
carve round dwellings
in living trunks.
This is fully-provisioned
luxury subsistence,
you can plug your
    phone
    minifridge
    induction hot-plate
    heat pump
    medical device
right into the wall:
phloem to electron conversion,
the leaves make more than enough to share.

Heartbreak Power.
Over black ICE vans
and homesick soldiers 
following orders
genociding neighbors
I wave my wand
and hearts rip apart
horrified at the work of their hands
unable any longer
to muster obedience
to the order
of death
or let their own brokenness
compel them to anything but grief.

Fences, walls, borders collapse
great wailing mass of humanity
safe from each other at last
by this mutually-observed
devestation,

dismantling warheads
    (works of pRøGrⅇsS
    to end all progress
    10,000 times anew),
hammering tanks to plowshares—
why did our ancestors
stockpile horrors?

Neighbor weeps with neighbor,
and all share fruit and shade.

After reading Pleasure Activism, while visiting pandemic-ravaged San Francisco, while feeling a particular sliding-into-middle-aged sense of out-of-touchness, of the-kids-are-not-alright-ness, of defamiliarization with the world and a sense that things are becoming quite deranged aren’t they, I wondered if pleasure is what civilizations shrug into when all grander central projects have been lost. “Not sure what else to do; we might as well feel good?”

Intro #2: not overwhelm, but fascination (child-likeness)

There’s that Bible verse: wanna be the greatest in the kingdom? Become like a child. Then people talk about how humble kids are. And like, maybe? But I also love kids for their fearlessness. For their lack of overwhelm.

When my now-6-year-old was first starting to speak English, I started "learning" Chinese. I put "learning" in quotes because I was more accurately just "playing the Chinese game" on Duolingo. (Their recent replacing-humans-with-AI announcement aside, I mean no shade on Duolingo! I have loved it! I think it's probably most effective when used as one part of a complete language-learning program, but I didn't need my Chinese exploration to to be most effective, I just wanted to have fun. Anyhow.)

At the beginning, I was picking up words in my new language faster than she was in hers, but I knew she'd surpass me at some point (it didn't take long!). I remember scrolling through the still-greyed-out part of the Duolingo course, seeing how far I had to go, and feeling sort of overwhelmed by it. Defeated.

But then I'd look at her. She never felt that way. Call it humility, call it ignorance, but kids have so much to learn! And they never feel overwhelmed, at least when they're very young, by the frankly-quite-overwhelming journey before them. They just throw themselves into the next thing with delight; with fascination. "What will the next lesson hold??"

Intro #3: hard focus vs soft vigilance (returning to breath)

Buddhist meditation says: don’t use the vice-grip of your willpower to clamp your attention to your breath, yelling at yourself, “focus! concentrate!” until your jaw is sore. That’s “challenging and boring at the same time.”

Instead, experience the world through your breath; with your breath. Find something interesting about your breath. Let it draw you gently into yet something else interesting about it. Let there be a cascade, a momentum of attention, of interest, of vigilance.

This is what’s meant by the “right concentration” aspect of the Eightfold Path. Not “hard focus”, but “soft vigilance.”

down with the pleasure hierarchy! ain’t we all hedonists?

Back to my Pleasure Curmudgeon moment in SF—what a celebrated cultural impulse! I’ve stumbled across this perspective all over the place. Recently I came across it in some conservative blog post. “Trans people are bad,” said the regrettable post, “because their highest ideal is mere desire fulfillment.”

As if the writer’s isn’t!

Their issue isn’t with desire and its fulfillment, it’s the kind of desire. It’s the social class or people group doing the desiring. It’s that certain groups’ pleasure challenges the dominant power structure.

One is only supposed to desire the things the author desires. Like, I don’t know, going to church, or a fundraiser auction, or, you know, a friggin’ amusement park.

We build entire multi-million dollar industries around entertainment, amusement, fun, and pleasure, but you’re going to say that “just” trying to get desires fulfilled is a base impulse? That we should all pursue some higher purpose? What is this “higher purpose” of which you speak? Is it something that you just happen to find… desirable?

fuck yeah, slow hedonism

Am I saying that all pleasure is equal? That there’s no objective way to measure one pleasure against another? That one person’s genuine enjoyment of church-going is as morally pure, or morally bankrupt, as someone else’s genuine enjoyment of a drugged-out rave?

Maybe! Applying morality to these sorts of things feels fraught, to me.

What’s helpful, to each person? And whose job is it to determine that?

I know church-enjoyers who aren’t hateful; who don’t get off on self-righteous indignation and dominance hierarchies. And I know ravers who use their drugs conscientiously, who are stable and skilled at their work, who aren’t falling into self-destruction.

For me, right now, at my life stage, I want to embrace slow hedonism. Do things for pleasure! Pleasure is good! But I don’t need the easiest, fastest return on investment. Some of life’s most rewarding experiences require time; commitment; persistent exploration. Like a small child, follow fascination. Like the Buddha, practice soft vigilance.

A Slow Hedonism lens on:

• Church

If you’re going to church out of obligation or fear, maybe stop! Go again when/if you can find the joy in it.

To be swept up in some holy cause; to feel a part of a collective; to lift glad voices together; to care and be cared for in a web of reciprocity—of course this feels good.

The Happy Show, a traveling museum exhibition that changed my worldview in 2013, had a graph I’ll never forget. How happy did people report being, when engaged in various activities?

In case you can’t see it, the happiest activity is “going to a religious service.” Rated much higher than “having sex” (3rd place) or even—2nd place—“working”!

And of COURSE there’s also a bunch of trauma that happens in religious spaces and of COURSE lots of people participate out of a sense of obligation and fear. But for every one of those, I wonder if there’s an equal or greater number of people who participate in organized religion because they genuinely enjoy it. They’re not allowed SAYING that’s why they do it. They’re not ADMITTING even to themselves that that’s why they’re there. But is that the actual truth? The actual draw?

They’re feeling good. Pleasure-seeking. A deep sort of pleasure that we call “meaning.” A slow sort of pleasure that drips out over time, heightening life’s highs and softening its lows. A high-effort, high-reward sort of pleasure.

• Spiritual practice

I had a consistent meditation practice for a couple years, ended by a video game (Breath of the Wild, for all those who partake).

And the video game is fun too! I have no guilt about it.

In fact, for a very little while, the two overlapped. The meditating and the gaming. And I actually really liked the way the game shaped my subconscious! I would close my eyes to meditate, and I would still see swirling phantasmagoric colors. The whole world felt more vivid, more saturated.

Meditation also promises interesting brain states, but it takes many years of discipline to achieve those. Video games deliver instantly! And the “practice,” insofar as we can call it that, offers much more immediate dopamine.

But still, the video game brain state is a pretty low high. Easy to get to the peak, nowhere to go from there.

By contrast, I’ve heard the mental states you can achieve through meditation have a much higher high. Might be more like exploring a range of mountain peaks than climbing one summit. Sounds fun! Rewarding; pleasurable. Worth investing some effort to achieve.

It’s not that I compel myself out of guilt, or shame. I just get curious about what those higher highs would feel like; what sort of insight and meaning and pleasure await if I spend more time with the harder thing.

• Sobriety

This one’s obvious, right?

Drinking makes you feel like shit.

Ok, I’ll personalize it.

Drinking makes me feel like shit.

And ok, that’s not strictly true. And I’m not full-sober!

But I love this trend of being sober-curious, of watching how much we drink, of actually thinking about whether this evening’s slightly-enhanced pleasure is worth tomorrow’s headache, sluggishness, bloat.

If I abstain for the goal of increasing tomorrow’s pleasure, isn’t that still hedonism? It’s just slower hedonism. Hedonism with a different time horizon.

You can extend this to all sorts of healthful activities. Sleeping enough (aka “not staying out late, at least not often”). Eating foods that sustain. Not eating too much. Moving your body. (I often don’t feel like going for my run, and I’m annoyed at how fucking good it makes me feel. I wish there were an easier way to get that high.)

• World improvement

One reason to resettle refugees in your city is to raise the bar on your city’s food culture. Get new kinds of restaurants; new fusions between unexpected flavors.

Is this the best reason? Probably not. But even at the level of pleasure, of the aesthetic, it makes sense to work for a better, more just world.

This extends to other kinds of world improvement, too. At some point, improving only your own and your family’s well-being while allowing broad immiseration to deepen will eventually worsen your own experience in the world. No matter how rich you are, you cannot control the security detail at your bunker after the collapse.

I think about this when I think about how my (literal and cultural) ancestors deforested a hemisphere, destroyed its cultures, erased its languages, murdered its peoples: in the name of abundance, these fuckers truncated a bunch of my options in the world. There is cuisine I will never taste. There are languages I cannot learn. There are towering sacred forests I can never wander.

A world of empowered women who enjoy sex is a world where men have to worry less and have better sex.

A world where diverse people groups can thrive and create in safety is a world of better art; more interesting stories.

All flourishing is mutual. Our liberation is all bound up together. I want to summon a better world out of a sense of justice and rightness, sure, but also because it directly benefits me.

I suspect this lens can make the work of liberation more broadly appealing. It’s not some namby-pamby self-flagellation, it’s about our own experiences of pleasure and joy and thriving.

Pleasure Activism starts at this premise—working toward a world that will bring more abundant joy—and further asks how we can make the work itself the most pleasurable activity.

• Grand central projects

Do you think the illiterate workers who built the cathedrals felt awful the whole time?

Of course not!

They were thrilled to spend a lifetime carving one massive stone for one wall in one building. They were delighted to play a role in gifting a grand inheritance to future generations.

Curse my Pleasure Curmudgeon confusion. Pleasure and work—even or especially grand, courageous, generational work—are not at odds. Pleasure can lead us toward the grand project. If the grand project does not bring pleasure, it is not worth doing.

Will you be a hedonist with me?

Next time you spot a pleasure curmudgeon out in the wild—or feel the one inside you rising—look closer. Is the curmudgeon also pleasure-motivated? Is it just that their preferred pleasures are normalized, even sanctified, by the dominant culture?

I want to invite you to be a hedonist with me, but I think the truth is that you already are one. I think we’re all hedonists. We just disagree on time-scale.

We can still have a grand central project

Hedonism and pleasure have a reputation for ablating the future; for having the shortest-possible time-horizon; for seeking the quickest return on investment.

Quick pleasure can be fun. Quick pleasure can be a life-saving step on the path.

Quick pleasure can also be a blindfold. An endless procession of quarterly earnings statements can destroy a biosphere.

Give me a hedonism slow enough to consider the 50-year plan; the 100-year vision; the seventh generation. Give me hedonism slow enough to regrow the forests. Give me the meaning and pleasure of a future worth yearning toward.

Share

This Jan or Feb, I started going out into my tiny city backyard, listening to the birds, watching the brightening sky over the fence. No need to be strict, right? No need to go out right at sunrise? I could keep this going! This whole “go out first thing upon waking, whenever waking may occur” thing. Easy!

I thought of ’s words in So We And Our Children May Live:

I am amazed, on the mornings I can give thanks, to stand and witness that every morning is singular, unique. At dawn, creation is rediscovered, renegotiated. The early morning light reveals the robust and fragile world around me with a new lens—today’s lens.

Ok, so Sarah Augustine goes out and gives thanks in the morning? I can do that! She didn’t say right at sunrise.

Then I listened to one of her podcast episodes, and a guest talked about going out at sunrise. Every day. For almost 20 years!

One of the most important, life-changing spiritual disciplines that I’ve incorporated into my life: to do what my people have done for hundreds, thousands of years: to get up every morning and greet the morning sunrise with my prayers. I’ve been watching the sunrise on a regular basis for the past 20 years of my life, and it has been a life-changing experience for me.

When you rise up every morning—day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, eventually decade after decade—it does something deep in your spirituality that I was not expecting.

I got to understand and know Creator. Through much the same process as my people have been knowing Creator for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

And in that process, one of the things I learned, was how to feel comfortable being out of control. When you watch the sunrise, when you watch the birds migrate, when you see the flowers bloom and die, when you see the seasons change, the rains the winds everything happening all around, what you recognize as you do it day after day, week after week, year after year, you’re like…

The sunrise happens. You can’t control it. You can’t make it come quicker or make it come later, you can’t speed it up or slow it down. It happens.

The question is: are you gonna be there to be a part of it?

Oof, dang, that’s almost convincing! Maybe I did wanna be a part of it!

But I still kind of wanted an out. When Sarah Augustine visited, I asked her if she goes out at sunrise. Every day? Like, all year?

Yes, she said. Maybe someday I won’t, she said, as my Multiple Sclerosis progresses. Maybe someday I’ll just go out after I happen to wake up.

Well shit. That’s a good excuse. It’s gonna take a chronic degenerative disease to stop her from getting out? And I’m here whining about what exactly?

Earth, my body

At her Saturday morning talk, Sarah talked about her morning practice. Sitting on the earth. Touching it. Speaking these words.

Earth, my body.

In her land acknowledgement, she made it clear not just that we were on land that belongs to a displaced people, but is made of those people. In a literal way. The soil itself, in part: made of ancestors’ decomposed bodies.

Our bodies feed the soil and the soil feeds our bodies. The earth is our extended body. says this well in The Body Is A Doorway:

We pretend that the Earth we burn for fuel, gash for minerals, and mutilate for capital gain is not connected to us. We live above it. We pretend this Earth is not our own body, extended.

We are not floating above this Earth. We are intimately, materially, metabolically linked with every plant, animal, and ecology that is grappling with unimaginable pain and disruption. We have been numb for so long we no longer understand that the body we are harming is an extension of our own. When we clear-cut a forest or drive another population of birds to extinction, we do not somatically register that we are twisting a knife in our own side.

“Take. Eat. This is my body.” Jesus instructs in the Gospel of John, offering the disciples bread. There is a deep biological mysticism in that offering. What we hunger for, we become. By eating bread, we transform ourselves not into sons and daughters of God, but into looped, interpenetrative companions of barley and yeast and salt and sunshine.

“Interpenetrative.” The barley and yeast and salt penetrate our shells; become part of us. We penetrate the soil, till it, plant it, and eventually, become part of it again.

I had learned the rest of the “Earth, my body” refrain from Kanyon CoyoteWoman at a camp last summer:

I decided to show up for the sunrise. It was still midwinter; it was still easy. I would follow the sun as it journeyed earlier. It would make the beginning of Daylight Savings Time feel like nothing! I would see how it worked on me; how it felt if I stayed strict about it for long enough to have an effect.

I stopped my attempts at learning vipassana meditation (who has time for more than one daily spiritual practice 😂) and found a sitting spot half a block from my house in the cemetery/arboretum.

Minute-for-minute, I have found sunrise-watching to be a much more potent discipline than meditation. Given the same amount of time “invested”, watching the sunrise yields greater inner peace and calm-within-the-day’s-chaos than meditation. For me. (If that’s not a sales pitch tailored to our fucked up, workaholic, productivity-obsessed culture, I don’t know what is! “Sunrise watching: the most efficient spiritual discipline.” Don’t you want your spiritual practice to be… efficient?? Surely there’s no better way to measure spirituality! 😂)

I started this mid-Feb. In early March, I decided to start writing down a sentence or two of gratitude or just observation every day. These ended up reminding me of ’s one-sentence journals, and I thought they might be fun for you to read here. (My sunrise watching continues, but I’ve already stopped the journaling practice, so don’t expect another one of these posts with my April reflections! But if one or two of you comment that you really want more such, maybe I’ll start again.)

Without further ado,

my daily-ish sunrise journals

3 March: Thank you long arms of sun; long mountains of cloud; for wrapping us, for keeping us warm in your luminous embrace; for dazzling our eyes skyward toward the glittering crown you place on our unworthy heads.

4 March: arrived after devices told me sun had already risen, bleary eyes cast unseeing toward sky, until sky looks back at me, eyeball sun peering through cloud’s own squinting eyelid. I missed nothing. Thank you for seeing me.

5 March: a friend’s hospitality and a slowly brightening gray reflected in East River ripples and tower glass, punctuated by pops of pigeons flapping furiously above buildings, startled from perches by runners below.

6 March: a smell of wet earth that used to signal spring and a seat-finding meander to peep horizon’s thin orange worm. With the sun so far above, why are the clouds still gray? Surely it hits these clouds, too? They don’t look THAT thick. Maybe their tops are brilliant. But keep your eye to the textured sky—geese, 17 in a line, flying north.

7 March: new sitting spot, under old Sycamore—or is it a London Plane Tree?—almost too perfectly positioned, tumbling hemisphere careening into daylight, sun blasting over rooftops into cloudless sky, stabbing deep into pupils. Glory.

8 March: crocuses burst into purple.

9 March: a rise in volume from trees above as peeking rays work their way down the branches. When that good sun hits you, you can’t help but sing. Probably you sing a familiar song of praise—a chanted “om,” “Amazing Grace”—or maybe the new day draws out a new song.

And now begin the long months when sun rises too far north to shine low and orange through kitchen window.

10 March: squirrel tip-tiptoed around a tombstone, waffled erratic nose at me, body seizing with nervousness, then scampered off. How long before I am Ace Ventura?

11 March: the birds liked this sycamore, before I started sitting under it. Today they cautiously returned. Carolina chickadee sang their sweet song, two branches above. A playful robin couple hopped from behind tombstones, cast me side eye, chattered.

12 March: the sky a perfect patchwork of blue and pink cotton candy, sun’s orange gradient draped with thin veil of cloud, atmospheric conditions just right for every passing jet to leave an everlasting contrail, until the sky is crisscrossed with brilliant worms. What did the sky look like on these mornings before engine particulates seeded condensation? What will it look like once they no longer do?

13 March: thank you patient birds for teaching me your songs. Thank you robin who came to have a conversation with me. On a morning when the sky barely shifted from gray.

14 March: dark gray to light gray. Hip cramp on run prevented timely return to sitting spot. Same clouds here, though. Brightening everywhere.

15 March: dark gray to light gray. Enthusiastic children accompanied; wanted to know where the sun was. “So far above the clouds.”

16 March: dark gray to light gray. Nine geese burst over rooftop behind me, flying east, flying low.

17 March: dark gray to light gray. Wet earth, dry sky. Smell of verdant mud. Bird chorus. Robin friends have not yet come back to visit. I hear them before I see them. I see them dare each other to the top of the ginkgo tree.

18 March: pale grass, color returning, below brightening pink and blue, and it finally dawns on my chuckling mouth: this is why we celebrate this season with pastels.

19 March: a ladder of contrails heading straight west in southern sky is the first to fade from pink to white. Moon watches over right shoulder. Robin couple seems annoyed. Am I in their spot? Good to see you, friends!

20 March: blazing sun through airplane windows. Too soon.

21 March: beautiful canals, beautiful canyons of brick. Sun fades up; landscape too flat to watch it rise. I install the European expansion pack and shazam a new bird: the great tit.

22 March - 28 March: unobserved / unobservant

29 March: orange fireball over New York from airport hotel window. Jet-lagged children rejoice.

30 March: orange pink sun blob peeks out cloud eyelet; come look! I tell playing children. The sun! shouts six year old. It's rising! Here, we need to rise too, she says. She guides us to lay in the grass, rise to a squat, hold flat hands near shoulders, slowly rise. Maybe 30 seconds later, the ritual concludes; play continues.

31 March: grass yoga, twenty minutes. Inverted faces of elated children, running to tell me of their games. After yoga, I order breakfast at their patisserie.

Being in a fairly soft, in-between place myself at the time, I loved it. If I recall correctly, the reporters weren’t sure how to tell the story. Like, sure, they gave statistics: Japan had an even larger number of these people than the US. But what exactly was the viewpoint here? Is being both even internally consistent?

I felt like maybe I knew, and wrote this poem.

I wouldn’t write it the same way today. Like I said, I was in a softer, more in-between place on the issue. Mid-migration. But that's the point! This is for people on that border. And to people like me now, or me several years before that moment, it is an invitation: soften. Find common ground.

That probably sounds ridiculous. Especially in our current political moment. Isn’t this life or death? Don’t compromise with evil!

(The “evil” language will resonate more with strident pro-lifers (aka “me a few years before I wrote this”). For the strident pro-choice reader like me today, try swapping out “evil” for “those assholes” and see how it lands.)

I never published this back then. I could have posted it to my Medium, but I wanted it to be something more than just a blog post. I still feel like maybe it could be something more. So here’s another invitation: everything I write is published under a BY-NC-SA license. If you want to remix this—to make an animated YouTube with this as the text, or use it in a song, or reblog it (as-is or with modifications)—feel free! Just link back to this one, and use the same license. And don’t put ads on that YouTube video without asking me about it first.

The Pro-Both Manifesto

I am PRO. LIFE.

LIFE! I am for it!

The whole heaving biosphere of life,
in all its messy complexity:
I am for it!

Every mushroom, every
mole, every
mouse and mussel and mollusc,
every creeping vine,
every mossy stump,
every dancing leaf:
I am for them!

What a joy to share the same substance!
My molecules, cut from the same fabric!
With all I share this great commonality:
WE, THE LIVING!
We are here now, and not decomposed.
We are here now, reused parts from life expired!

And I confess that living is difficult.
I confess I don’t always know how to champion

both parasite and host
both predator and prey
both officer and protester
both impoverished and endangered
both the flailing survivor
and the potential in her womb

I confess that life has strange edges,
and I do not fully know all who
make up this great family.
(Oh virus, my comrade,
oh genetically anomalous blastocyst,
oh countless chemical pregnancies,
are you living, too?)

I am not smart enough
to know such with much precision.

But I thrum and thrive with all of it,
and live right into the ambiguity.

I am PRO. CHOICE.

CHOICE! I am for it!

I affirm the freedom
of every fellow creature.

I affirm no human has the freedom
to limit the freedom of another.

Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
At least. At least at my nose!

But as for what concerns only you,
do as you wish.
Even if I find it repulsive.

And even for decisions you must make
on behalf of other beings,
I find it hard to be prescriptive.
(You, doctor,
in that flooded hospital,
power out, life-support batteries dwindling—
Who should you carry to safety?
Who gets left to die?)

There are some choices no one should have to make.

There are some choices where every answer is wrong.

I won’t make those decisions for you.
To be honest, I’m relieved
that I don’t have to make them.

My heart breaks for yours
breaking under the weight
of monstrous decision.

I will trust you with your freedom.
Will you trust me with mine?

sort of

LARPing, with friends,

what we thought Scientific Animism might look like

if it were some sort of

organized / organizing

religion / movement / whatever.

We started in the summer and did a Quaker Meeting-inspired

Sunset Watch thing.

I loved it; tried

half-assedly

to keep it going for a few months,

but then October came and dang!

sitting on the ground for an hour!

in that cold!

It’s also been hard,

keeping a writing

schedule AND scheduling

regular (monthly?) events.

This past January I got together with “the cabal”

(aka “small group of friends who seem to actually enjoy humoring me on this stuff”);

bought them lunch and

brainstormed.

What rituals

have we liked?

would we like?

What would work in the cold?

We made a Google Doc.

You can steal it.

We made a Google Calendar.

You can subscribe.

(It mostly just has a year

of full & new moons.

We are attempting one event per month,

without particular care for moon cadence,

for now.)

I changed the tagline here.

A couple weeks back.

“A spiritually humble meeting place to foster thought, practice, and community ritual that will summon a better world.”

This is aspirational.

Ritual to summon a better world.

I’m still mostly at

“LARPing with friends.”

Can LARPing summon a better world?

Can it bring comfort

while the current world crashes

roars

breaks

upon our exhausted ears?

I want you to listen to this interview

between Dougald Hine and Nate Hagens.

I want community practice

to help us embody; enact; summon

a world worth living for.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The damage that can be done by 
    good people! 
    with good intentions! 
when we cannot make the distinction
between the end of the world
    as we know it
and the end of the world 
    full stop.

When we find ourselves doubling down 
on attempts
    to somehow 
        make sustainable
things that are fundamentally 
    unsustainable;
when “sustainability” ends up meaning, 
    as it did end up meaning,
        “sustaining the ways of life of 
            the Western middle classes 
                at all costs,”
as if that's
possible 
or even frankly 
desirable.

There is a space of possibility between 
the end of the world 
    as some of us have known it 
        around here 
            lately, 
and the end of a world 
    worth living for.

That zone is where the work is. 

– Dougald Hine

I want community practice

that helps us bear witness.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

...attention is a thing that
that moves and that
changes shape and that
by drawing attention 
into different shapes
we become aware
it's like 
you can draw more than one map 
of the same
landscape 
and so bearing witness 
is partly just
offering maps 
that bring things
into view things 
that were hidden 
    from the maps 
        we were told 
            we should 
be steering by.

– Dougald Hine

I don’t know if we’re hitting the mark of

all that

with the silly event

whose description I share below.

We wanted to copy

borrow

steal

adapt a practice we learned about

in a New Yorker article

about The Battle for Attention

a practice / protocol / exercise done

by a group called

The Order of the Third Bird.

They attend art;

we’ll attend nature.

We’ll attend a plant.

(This is indoor ritual.)

Here’s our event invite page.

Feel free to come out,

if you’re in the area.

Feel free to steal it,

if you’re not.

Feel free to LARP with your own friends,

to call yourselves

“the Scientific Animists of [wherever you are].”

PLANTS / ART / ATTENTION

ℹ️ The Battle for Attention, in which we learn of the Order of the Third Bird

🎵 Your Mind Is Being Fracked, in which Ezra Klein interviews the Third Bird guy

ARRIVE/ATTEND/NEGATE/REALIZE • REFLECT • DISCUSS

Come one, come all! This is attention practice.

We're gonna give a PLANT the ATTENTION it is DUE. Have you ever really LOOKED at a plant? WOW. That's the only appropriate response. The ONLY appropriate response! To a plant. But also to literally ANYTHING! Anything at all! in this GOB-SMACKED • LIVING • WORLD we've got. WOW.

So fuck the noise! There's a lot of awful shit going on right now. For one evening, let's show up and be quiet together.

• Jo Davis, noted artist, is going to lead us

• 7:00-7:30, ARRIVE/ATTEND/NEGATE/REALIZE: the protocol itself; the main event; we will bless a plant with four distinct ways of giving it attention

• it will bless us in return

• 7:30-8: REFLECT: we all disperse and reflect on the experience individually

• 8pm: reconvene and DISCUSS our experiences at a restaurant/bar

This roughly follows a practice done by the Order of the Third Bird, explained in the article linked above.

It's gonna be weird and fun and you are going to be there and I can't wait to see you.

xxoo

💛 💛🌱 🌱

These times got us tweakin, 
these times got us twitchin; 
ain't we all straight-up 
bankrupt on attention? 
None left to give; 
none left to pay. 
Let's learn to grow some; 
let's learn to play. 

💛 💛🌱 🌱

I have been practicing a Daoist meditation called the Microcosmic Orbit. As part of this practice, I visualize a pearl forming and growing in my sacrum—the Pearl of Consciousness.

“Do you feel the pearl?” my meditation teacher once asked.

“I think so… yes, yes, I do.”

As I continued the practice, I noticed a shift. Standing before a mirror, my body appeared more solid, more grounded. This non-local, non-material “pearl” visibly affected how I perceived myself.

Yet, I don’t imagine an actual pearl growing inside my body. Instead, I see this as a metaphor: refined consciousness condensing out of the raw material of experience—an alchemical process, a mystery of transfiguration.

Transfiguration

When I searched for the definition of transfiguration, the Transfiguration of Jesus dominated the results. This biblical moment, where Jesus, praying on a mountaintop, emanates rays of light and is declared the “Son of God,” is one form of transfiguration. But the dictionary definition is broader:

a) change in form or appearance: metamorphosis

b) an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change

Merriam Webster

Metamorphosis brings to mind Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tales of humans transforming into plants and animals. Spiritual metamorphosis also calls to mind the Jungian concept of individuation, the process often unfolding in midlife in which a person sheds the conditioned beliefs of society, family, and religion—consensus reality itself—and becomes a distinct individual with their own consciousness. Individuation is a mysterious unfolding, much like the Daoist cultivation of the pearl.

This process of individuation is also often likened to a flower blooming. Just as a human individuates, a flower blossoms into its fullest expression.

This flower stalk is the plant mullein. Mullein is a plant that soothes the lungs as a tea and ear aches as an oil. Last summer, while visiting Rheims, I saw a mullein stalk growing on the site of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom, an Ovidian transfiguration.

There are many phytochemical reasons for Mullein’s demulcent qualities. However, Dr. Edward Bach pioneered the creation of the Mullein flower essence (and flower essences in general). A flower essence captures the consciousness or vibration of a plant in water. When we take a flower essence, the medicine works on our emotional and spiritual bodies rather than our physical bodies—a scientific animist practice perhaps.

Spiritual and Material Techniques

In Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, he distinguishes material and spiritual (or magical) techniques:

When a civilization dies, it transmits to its heirs its material but not its spiritual apparatus. Tools, houses, and methods of manufacture live on and, more or less reincarnated, are to be met with again… But magical techniques, rites, formulas, and sacrificial practices disappear irremediably…Since every technique is subordinate to its immediate result, it is only a question of choosing the one that produces the most satisfactory result; and, in the material domain, that result can readily be seen… But with magical techniques, the same certainty or force of evidence does not exist. Who can judge their relative efficiency? Magical efficiency is not always to be measured by a clear material result such as making rain fall, but may have to do with some purely spiritual phenomena or even with material phenomena over a long period of time.

This is at the core of the tension between material and spiritual practices: Spiritual experience is subjective and often unquantifiable, making it more difficult to measure, yet this does not make it less accurate. As scientific animism progresses, I imagine we will see a proliferation of technologies designed for consciousness cultivation—tools that blur the lines between material and spiritual techniques.

I consider Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, a stroboscopic device designed to induce altered states of consciousness through flickering light.

I think of John Vervaeke’s concept of psychotechnologies, tools that expand human consciousness like writing, the computer or meditation, and practices for making meaning of our experiences; what he calls an ecology of practices.

Full Moon Fever

This essay is going out on the full moon. The full moon is like a pearl—luminous, round, reflective. Across cultures, the moon is tied to numerous technologies and practices. It governs the lunar calendar, an apparatus of social organization. It regulates the tides and aligns with the ovulation cycles of many women. Poet and activist Judy Grahn theorizes that the association between menstruation and the moon was the foundation for early human culture—sparking the creation of tools, rituals, and abstract reasoning.

A prompt: What techniques and practices support a scientific animist orientation?

A meditation: Imagine the pearl growing. Imagine the moon shining. A mystery unfolds, within and without.

Subscribe now

a whole winter,
this constant companion—
every morning out delivering papers,
every exit from school—
breath made visible,
maybe a little,
maybe a lot,
but almost always there,
still warm but cooling,
bits of was-just-me
dispersing.

i didn't leave the cold,
the cold left me.
i'm still here in pennsylvania,
always known for its freeze-thaw, sure,
always been on that border,
but now it's more thaw
and less freeze,
less breath-made-visible,
less chance to commune with
those spent bits of myself
joining the brownian motion,
the chaos of currents,
particles jostling.

i used to try to direct them.
used to try to blow rings.
it works with smoke,
why not with breath?
but it doesn't work with breath.
breath won't cohere.
you don't get to control
where these bits of was-just-you
becoming atmosphere
land. where they journey.
who uses them next,
and how. 

zoom out enough and we're one big
organism, aren't we?
zoom out enough and it’s one big
nutrient flow; one body.
air, the lymph or blood or cytosol,
cohering us,
cycling one organ's waste products
to another's inputs,
then back again,
"round and round it goes,
ever singing on its course" —
what was the air,
before this comingling?
before oxygen exhalers
called forth oxygen breathers;
before the macro-organism was born?

the hookah lounge in college taught me
it wasn't my technique.
breath really can’t cohere.
smoke can.
i never mastered the skill,
never bothered spending the time
to blow perfect rings,
but now i knew.

the task, friends, is to straddle the border
between chaos and order.
but tell me: which is which?
which chaos is destruction,
to be avoided,
and which is mere uncertainty?
the original oxygen exhalers
poisoned all other life forms on the planet,
and yet:
from our vantage,
beneficiaries as we are,
was not even this
an act of creation?

i always missed my breath come spring.
i'd almost forgotten
here twice a life beyond 
those paper-route mornings
those hookah lounge half-rings
most waking hours in between spent
making internet,
or at least a few pieces of it.
i used to believe in this project,
in the world-improving inevitability
of Connection™.
i used to love the shapes i made
as they drifted out away from me.
but as everything i do
decoheres
joins the ambiguated commons
of our collective exhale
i can't tell—
will anything i do
do any good?
will it call forth a better world?
will it poison all current life forms?

i'm here still sending warm
bits of just-was-me—
words, work, art,
noble intentions
and half-hearted efforts—
hurtling into the jostling particles
of a world gone incoherent.
if my breath won't hold together long,
let me breathe for the joy of it.
if i keep my focus short
i can see where it lands,
who gets nourished,
how i still might do some good.

Share

Now onto the post ↓

The tree makes 10,000 seeds. Sometimes, the yard is filled with seedlings. Sometimes none take.

It’s not that God / The Universe wanted you to have this one new opportunity, and you just needed to trust and step out; give up the old thing.

It’s not that you and that one old friend happened to be in the same city at the same time, and God / The Universe brought you together.

What an impoverished view!

There were ten old friends in that city. You missed nine.

This buzzing world is throbbing with possibility. So much that we could never realize it all.

God/the Universe/the living, Chaotic Earth had 10,000 possibilities on offer, all cycling in and out of ripeness, and when you started looking, you found one. You became the good soil, and a seed grew.

And it was beautiful! It was the right possibility for you!

Just like any of the others would have been.

And yes, sometimes no seeds grow. Sometimes the baby will not come no matter how many seeds you scatter, no matter how positive your thoughts, no matter how fervent your wishes, your petitions, your manifestations.

[wait, are we the soil in which the seeds grow, or the ones doing the scattering?

yes we are]

Other possibilities, shaped like presence or like lack, would have taken you elsewhere. Other paths would have unfolded differently; taken different shapes. In the dense, brambly branches of the multiverse tree, maybe the prism-split-you did take every path. None right, none wrong, none destined, none intended or unintended. All on offer; all possible; all worthwhile.

Someone once asked me what the “source” is in Scientific Animism. I didn’t really understand the question.

But I think now I might say “chaos,” or “darkness.” Uncertainty. Mystery. The Unknown.

Not “chaos” in the destructive sense, but in the “patterns not yet perceived” sense; the “too complex to model” sense; the Chaos Theory sense. Chaos like the maybe-unmeasurable systems of cloud movements, water currents, or the interplay of multi-motivated actors in complex ecosystems.

The Art of Hosting people invented a new term for “destructive chaos” to keep it separate from this “patterns not yet perceived” kind. They call the destructive sort “chamos.” On the continuum between destructive chaos and stifling control, they suggest staying just within order, while skirting chaos:

It is also this sense of the unknown that Rebecca Solnit encourages us to embrace:

…the present and past are daylight, and the future is night. But in that darkness is a kind of mysterious, erotic, enveloping sense of possibility and communion. Love is made in the dark as often as not. And then to recognize that unknowability as fertile, as rich as the womb rather than the tomb in some sense. And so much for me of hope is, as I was saying, not optimism that everything will be fine, but that we don’t know what will happen.

My favorite quote about this comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s invented religion in The Left Hand of Darkness, which she admits is largely borrowed from Taoism:

Nature maximizes time spent on this Chaordic Path all over the place. Nested, overlapping webs of orderly reciprocal relationship at all zoom levels, but also: The random splitting and recombination of genes in sexual reproduction. The 10,000 seeds. The dizzying shapes of proteins. The dazzling configurations of planets around stars. The jumble of species in the rainforest, in the soil, in the abyss.

Maybe we should, too.

This can be scary. If chamos, destructive chaos, was part of your family as a child—or an unwanted recurring guest in your household—then anything left of the “Control” circle might feel like destruction’s doorstep. Or when the world feels out of control, then we might skew toward the right side of this spectrum. (Maybe this is why we pray or “manifest” in the first place, at least when it comes to petition-style prayer—the world feels too chaotic, and we want to believe that some Supreme Agent has it all, you know, under control.)

Or maybe you hang out at the other end of the spectrum. Maybe you grew up in an environment of stifling control (with religious authoritarian parents, say). Maybe you had—or are having!—a period of destructive chaos, and now even the “order” circle feels stifling.

Where do our human systems already walk the line between order and chaos?

Cities are one. Part of the joy of a city is the constant surprise of it; not knowing what will happen on any given walk down the street.

Libraries and coworking spaces, with their jumbles of disparate perspectives, are a smaller version.

And what about the Internet? I suppose it’s many things, all at once. Much of it feels like chamos to me anymore. Destructive chaos; fundamental breakdown. Maybe that’s partly because some people made destruction their explicit jobs. And yet there’s also joy, community, play, silliness, loads of generative disorder. Despite our devices’ attempts to make us our worst selves, maybe one can still walk The Chaordic Path through the Internet.

(And also, I remind myself: even destruction can be part of a cycle, clearing way for creative emergence.)

What sorts of chaos do you purposely seek out, or find enjoyable? What sorts do you avoid?