“Remember that we all come from somewhere...

...and that those places, and the place called Earth, need us to fight for them.” How to Survive Apocalypse Part 3

Quick Note: We are now opening the interest list for the second iteration of Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice¹, co-taught by me, KR Moorhead, and Meg Max. Signing up for the interest list gives you first notice of early bird discounted tickets. More information coming soon! Tickets sold out in two weeks for the fall course, so definitely get on the list if you are at all interested!

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This is the third section of a longer essay called How to Survive Apocalypse: Practicing Public Mysticism in the Face of Despair and Catastrophe, which I wrote when I was pursuing a (now abandoned) masters degree program in religious history. This is the third section of the essay, which follows the admonition of Julian Brave Noisecat:

So my message to you is simple: Remember who you are. [section 1] Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman. [section 2] And remember that we all come from somewhere, and that those places, and the place called Earth, need us to fight for them.² [section 3, below].

I have long struggled with this question of where I come from. I suppose I could say that my “hometowns” include Lafayette and Delphi Indiana, where I respectively spent my childhood and adolescence, and I do certainly still long for those landscapes, for tiger lilies in ditches, and big wild skies and horizons all around, for the smell of corn and the sight of little yellow butterflies flitting on the sides of gravel roads. But since my father left Indiana, that era of my life has felt over, like a dream I once had or a movie I once saw—until, that is, my DDS friend Lizzie began sharing slideshows of photographs from her nature walk in and around Muncie, Indiana. Every time, it feels like a homecoming.

I also sometimes wonder if it’s possible to have landscapes in one’s DNA, as I feel certain landscapes—the Scottish highlands, the islands of the North Sea, the forests of Scandinavia—are more my ancestors and my kin than the people from those places I may be “related” to. I long for those landscapes: for wide-open spaces, for water, for woods. I feel very much that those are the “somewheres” that I “come from”—and I do very much feel, on some mystical level, that I “remember” them, even though many of them I have never, and may never, actually visit.

Think about the difference between being from a place and being of a place…. However, [for] many of the people that I meet who have been [in one place] for a long time, that is not a passport necessarily to deep spiritual literacy of that area. They can be utterly oblivious to it. That’s being from a place….To be of a place is something a little bit more subtle, and it involves you being alive to your own sensibilities…. Keep open to the fact that whatever your age is, there could be a place that wants to reach out and say, “Hey, stop. I’ve got something I want to say to you.” And you cannot hear it until you slow down, till you stop multitasking, till you stop looking only at what is a foot and a half in front of you, and pay attention to all those trembling mysteries of that place that we just spoke of.

~ Martin Shaw

Instead, I find myself on a small patch of gritty Southwest Germantown, in Philadelphia, on the stolen land of the Lenni Lenape people, trying to feel planted but often feeling stuck. The pull to other landscapes is strong, but more and more I feel myself rooted here through a small but deep community which I will not call “in real life”—because my online friendships are every bit as much “in real life”—but maybe “brick and mortar” since this community gathers primarily in the built spaces of homes and bars and coffee shops. Like my online community, this group of kin is young and old, trans and queer, mad and disabled, and my place in it is precious to me: mother, lover, queer elder, hearth witch. To leave in search of other landscapes would be to leave them behind, and that is unthinkable.

But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It’s all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.

~ Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Which leaves me with, in the words of Andrea Nightingale in her essay Broken Knowledge, “the problem of being ‘at-home’ and, at the same time ‘homeless’ in the natural world. I conceive of ‘ecology’,” says Nightingale, “in the original sense of the Greek words, that is, a discipline that offers an ‘account’ (logos) of the ‘household (oikos) where we dwell.”³ Nightingale examines contrasting “economies of attention” as they relate to nature, knowledge, and wonder, including a scientific one, rooted in certainty, and an ecological one, rooted in wonder and enchantment. She notes that “the rise of modern science was rooted in a particular epistemology: the valorization of ‘certainty’ and the demotion of wonder. Francis Bacon … eloquently articulates this point: denigrating wonder as ‘broken knowledge’ (‘contemplation broken off, or losing itself’), he claimed that scientists must repair this by the achievement of scientific knowledge.” Thus, she argues, “Modern science developed a specific ‘economy of attention’—attention to nature—that aimed toward “certain” knowledge and technological control [and that] treated the natural world as a complex machine that could be studied, known, and ‘mastered’ by humans.”⁴ She goes on to offer an alternative “economy of attention” to nature that “will always be partial, broken off” and that is “bodily and experiential … ‘situated’ knowledge…. [that] attempts to understand kinship between humans and nonhumans through bodily forms of engagement” (16).

A chariot of fire parted ever either, and Elijah ascended by a whirlwind into heaven. (13th and Ogden). Photo by John Tiedemann

Nightingale offers Thoreau’s experiment on Walden Pond as an example of this sort of situated, bodily economy of attention to the more-than-human world. This experiment in “wilderness living” might seem far from anything I could recreate in my little corner of Philadelphia, until we remember that actually, Thoreau was a mere few miles from “civilization”—and not only that, his mother still did his laundry! I think the bigger point of Thoreau’s insights from his experiment in living in and with the natural world can lead us to wonder and enchantment with the more-than-human world, wherever we find it—even in tiny urban gardens where we can, like Thoreau, “set out to ‘know’ nature…. Thoreau had a lifelong love affair with the earthly world. His curiosity and his investigations of nature, however, do not aim at scientific certainty,” but rather in “a mode of understanding rooted in wonder.”⁵

I will admit that I have struggled to make my own garden such a place of wonder—perhaps because I remember too well the extravagant cornucopia of my father’s gardens growing up—gardens he still tends at age 87. He was a pioneer of the sustainable agriculture movement, and of community supported agriculture projects. I inherited much from him, but alas, not his green thumb. Year after year I have tried to shape my own tiny garden in the image of his, with little success. This past summer, in fact, in the same period of time that I was writing this paper, I also was planting seedlings I had started, and some my father sent home with me from a recent visit—it felt like kismet, an almost mystical convergence of my hands cultivating plants in the dirt and my mind cultivating words on the page, in the same way that Thoreau “creates a physical house to dwell in, and labors in the fields and forests of Concord” at the same time that “he creates a house in words, not only in his descriptive account of his house and housekeeping at Walden Pond, but in his wide-ranging poetic and philosophic discourse”⁶

How do we engage in these more-than-human eco-mysticisms without acting appropriative or entitled? We believe that it starts with creating relationships with the land where we live—relationships built on humility and listening. It starts with the possibility of falling in love and sustaining love as joyful (and sorrowful) labor. What might happen if we fall in love with the local river, with the songbirds in the bushes outside our window? What grief might we feel when we begin to see that these beings whom we love may not be fully free? What devotion might we feel when we realize how these beings infiltrate and expand our dreams, when we realize that our precious creativity is not possible without them?

~ So and Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd

But then some creature ate all of my tender seedlings, which threw me out of my sense of wonder (and out of my flow with this paper) for an anxious and fretful day, until I came to my senses: I can draw inspiration from Thoreau, and from my father, but my garden is situated differently, as am I, and I will need to make my own wonder. In doing this, I take inspiration from an essay entitled “Homeless Gardens,” about the phenomenon of makeshift, transitory “gardens” created by homeless people in even far grittier urban environments than my neighborhood. Many of these “gardens” do not even include living plants, but rather of “diverse, largely random materials: toys, stuffed animals, flags, found objects, milk cartons, recycled trash, piles of leaves, at times a simple row of flowers” and which attest to “an irreducible will to creative expressions in their makers… The gardens of the homeless, which are in effect homeless gardens, introduce form where it was not discernible, and in so doing, they give composure to a segment of the inarticulate milieus in which they take their stand (almost defiantly).”⁷ Our beloved DDS friend John Tiedemann, who ran writing workshops with homeless people in Denver until his recent untimely death, called this sort of homeless aesthetic an “aesthetic of defiance,” which calls to mind So and Pinar’s insight that “Enchantment is a pathway not only to resistance of extractive and oppressive social and economic systems, but also to reimagining our identities, agencies, and futures.”⁸

“Remember[ing] that we all come from somewhere,”⁹ can include—must include—that some of us are “from” places where it requires a very special economy of attention to find enchantment in and with the more-than-human world. Thoreau knew that “human and nonhuman beings [are] members of a single, living world”¹⁰; so did the Native American prophet Smohalla, who urged an “acceptance of the earth as a conscious partner in the covenant of life.”¹¹ In offering Smohalla’s vision as wisdom for surviving environmental apocalypse, Steven Charleston argues—in keeping with the public mystics (including Thoreau)—that “[t]he key to stopping the environmental apocalypse is not science but love.”¹²

I am still not sure what exactly it will look like to transform my little patch of gritty Germantown—my home and my garden—into the “somewhere” that I can be content to be “from” and will want to “remember” and “fight for.” But I do know it will require wonder at the more-than-human world —even (maybe especially) the wild urban critters that eat my seedlings!—and enchantment with the “irreducible will to creative expression”—even (maybe especially) art made of trash—and that eventually it will become a place of repose for “myth-making and ritual” for and with my Self and my community that “can give us the space and narrative sovereignty to begin to re-story our relationship to ‘nature’ and naturalness that has been damaged by dominant cultural narratives.”¹³

And in so doing, perhaps we can find a way together, in love and wonder, to survive apocalypse.

1. This course is a deep dive into a variety of ‘neuroqueering’ practices, geared towards artists and creatives. As a community, we will deconstruct capitalist/colonialist concepts of time, work, productivity, shame, ‘executive function’, giving and receiving feedback, and more, while simultaneously constructing new systems, languages, narratives, and ways of being/creating that subvert, defy, disrupt, and liberate us from neuronormativity and heteronormativity. This course is for anyone who writes or makes art (or would like to). No previous knowledge or experience required. As Nick Walker says:

“One can neuroqueer, and one can be neuroqueer. A neuroqueer individual is any individual whose identity, selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering, regardless of what gender, sexual orientation, or style of neurocognitive functioning they may have been born with.”

2. Noisecat, Julian Brave. How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse. Emergence Magazine, November 23, 2021. https://emergencemagazine.org/op_ed/how-indigenous-peoples-are-fighting-the-apocalypse

3. Nightingale, Andrea. “Broken Knowledge.” In The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Stanford University Press, 2021, p. 16.

4. Nightingale, p. 15

5. Nightingale, p. 17

6. Nightingale, p. 26

7. Harrison, Robert. “Homeless Gardens.” In The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Stanford University Press, 2021, p. 74.

8. Sinopoulos-Lloyd, So and Pinar. Eco-Mysticism for Apocalyptic Times, Apocalyptic Ecology. https://www.apocalypticecology.com/essays/project-five-y7ebz

9. Noisecat, Julian Brave. How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse. Emergence Magazine, November 23, 2021. https://emergencemagazine.org/op_ed/how-indigenous-peoples-are-fighting-the-apocalypse/

10. Nightingale, p. 36

11. Charleston, Steven. We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Broadleaf Books, 2023, p. 102.

12. Charleston, p. 109.

13. Sinopoulos-Lloyd, So and Pinar. Eco-Mysticism for Apocalyptic Times, Apocalyptic Ecology. https://www.apocalypticecology.com/essays/project-five-y7ebz