Also catalogued elsewhere

An invitation to widen our horizons and engage in a politics that holds multiple truths, acknowledges our shared dis-ease, and works toward collective healing and wellbeing as a legible political practice.

Summary

Thesis

An invitation to widen our horizons and engage in a politics that holds multiple truths, acknowledges our shared dis-ease, and works toward collective healing and wellbeing as a legible political practice.

“To truly hold the light, we must also know how to hold the darkness—because when we focus only on the light, our shadows grow larger.” (Location 2033)

“When it comes to genuine change: no shit, no starter.” (Location 2111)

As the cracks become impossible to ignore, we are faced with a stark choice: to react with fear—doubling down on control and polarization, or to engage with relational wisdom—cultivating the relational stamina and strategic insight necessary to stay grounded amidst the chaos, resisting reactionary impulses while leaning into the generative possibilities of seeing turbulence not just as breakdown but as an opportunity to reimagine how we move, respond, and repair. (Location 2142)

What alternative narrative could invite connection, curiosity, and systemic insight rather than fear or division? (Location 3162)

Definitions

Depth enquiry

Depth inquiry is a process that prioritizes cognitive, affective, and relational experimentation to confront modernity’s denials, disinvest in harmful patterns, and reactivate capacities it has exiled.

Hospicing

The work of hospicing systems in decline requires us to disinvest in their futurity and continuity and compost their failures while offering prenatal care to what is emerging without idealizing or smothering these nascent possibilities. It is a precarious, rhythmic dance that requires us to find balance in movement (as in capoeira) with self-reflexivity, humor, and a willingness to embrace the complexity of the whole.

Separability

If we define separability as the root cause of colonialism and occupation and subjugation as symptoms of colonialism, then the core of the problem can be found in a series of illusions grounded in the socially sanctioned and rewarded denial of our metabolic entanglement with (and responsibility to) everything: human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, egocentrism, allochronism (the belief that your skin color determines your place in the advancement of progress in linear time), land as property, and cultural supremacy.

Animating questions

1. What if you knew—in your bones, not just in your mind—that major social and ecological collapse is on the horizon? That sooner or later much of what we take for granted will no longer be viable, primarily because we have crossed at least six of the nine planetary boundaries currently identified? How would you respond if you could stay with this knowledge? (Location 511)
2. What if we could act today from a collective cultural space grounded in emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational and interspecies responsibility (SMDR)? What would we do differently now, and what actions would our children born today look back on in thirty years and be grateful for? (Location 514)
3. How do we face the legacies of harm embedded in the systems we inhabit? How do we unlearn patterns of separability and reorient ourselves toward relational repair?

Acronyms

WEIRD

“Westernized Entitled Investments in Reductionism and Delusions of Superiority,” (Location 1510)

TRRACCK

Build relations rooted in Trust, Respect, Reciprocity, Accountability, Consent, Compassion, and Kindness. (Location 3538)

SMDR

• Emotional sobriety encourages us to approach ethical challenges with clarity and steadiness, resisting reactive or self-serving emotional impulses. (Location 3896)
• Relational maturity calls us to hold complexity with grace, fostering relationships that honor dignity, reciprocity, and accountability without falling into entitlement or coddling. (Location 3898)
• Intellectual discernment sharpens our ability to sense when knowledge is being wielded to dominate rather than to illuminate, guiding us to engage with humility and precision. (Location 3899)
• Intergenerational and interspecies responsibility reminds us to consider how our actions ripple through time and across species, calling for attuned care that is expansive, patient, and attuned to the unseen. (Location 3901)

Frameworks

Seven Foundational Responsibilities

For intellectual, effective and relational labour

1. Relational responsibility: Recognizing systemic separations and inequalities while working toward healing and regenerating relationships that honor both entanglement and accountable autonomy.
2. Trans-local responsibility: Grounding our work in community-centered struggles while recognizing the interconnectedness of global and local contexts and the power imbalances between and complexities within the global north and south (including recognizing the dynamics between the north of the north, the north of the south, the south of the north, and the south of the south).
3. Pluri-vocal responsibility: Engaging with different ways of knowing and being, ethically navigating the tensions and gifts between them, and challenging dominant ways of communicating, relating, and imagining.
4. Intergenerational responsibility: Addressing both literal and figurative toxicity to regenerate social-ecological relationships that can uphold the wellbeing of all beings—human and nonhuman—past, present, and future, since time is not linear.
5. Experimental responsibility: Recognizing that inquiry and adaptive change require ongoing experimentation, curiosity, and reflexivity, as well as accepting uncertainty and the importance of learning from failure.
6. Self-reflexive responsibility: Naming and denaturalizing harmful power dynamics, tracing shared problems, interrupting circular patterns of critique, and mobilizing the recognition of complicity in systemic harm as leverage for accountability.
7. Improvisational responsibility: Remaining open to rethinking our responsibilities in response to changing contexts, mobilizing interruptions, and embracing deep listening and un/learning.

Ten Hallucinations of Modernity

1. Separation Is Real
2. Progress Is Linear
3. Nature Is a Resource
4. Growth Can Be Infinite
5. Consumption Equals Happiness
6. Individual Success Is the Measure of Worth
7. Social Mobility Is the Purpose of Life
8. Science and Technology Will Save Us
9. Certainty and Mastery Are Attainable
10. Reality Is Objective

COMPOST

Commit to developing capacity for holding space for painful and difficult things that are irritating and overwhelming, but without being immobilized or wanting to be coddled or rescued;

Own up to one’s complicity and implication in harm: the harms of violence and unsustainability required to create and maintain “the world as we know it” with the pleasures, certainties, entitlements, and securities that we enjoy at others’ expense;

Manifest maturity, interrupting self-infantilizations in order to face and work on individual and collective “shit,” rather than denying or dumping it onto others or spreading it around;

Pause self-serving and “fixing” compulsions in… (Location 1972)

Observe your patterns of indulgence (that also manifest in refusals, rejections, and resistances) and build stamina and sobriety to show up differently to do what is needed rather than what is pleasurable, preferable, easier, more comfortable, consumable, and/or convenient;

Step back from self-images and self-narratives in order to encounter the “self beyond the self,” including the beautiful, the ugly, the broken, and the messed-up in everything/everyone—within and around;

Turn toward unlimited visceral responsibility… (Location 1979)

Subject-Object // Subject-Subject

• Subject-object orientation (transactional, conditional, hierarchical) (Location 3993)
• Subject-subject perspective (relational, mutual, emergent) (Location 3994)

Images

Weight of Layers

We will need to learn to face the weight of complexity, complicity, and collapse head-on; lift it from our backs and bring it into view; and learn how to place it down on the Land so we can collectively witness and process it. (Location 664)

Expanding Dimensions of Relational Intelligence