I got my spot under the willow again. It is becoming something like a “home base” for me. A spot to sit. A spot to observe. To watch. To learn again how to listen. A mallard honks and wiggles her tail. She grooms herself and looks at me. A cuckoo announces himself in the swaying boughs of the willow above. I have tightness in my lower stomach. I think this is excitement. It still feels a lot like anxiety, but I am starting to be able to distinguish the two a bit better. I’ve been working on it for a while now—feeling back into my body again. I hear some crows discussing things in the trees beyond. Their voices pull me back into the world and my bodily awareness of it all.
I sit here to calm down and re-energize a bit too. I have been working over the past year to return to my body, to return to what Nietzsche meant I believe by “the nearest things.” I thought I knew what Nietzsche meant here when I was writing my dissertation and I liked it. However, it was not until I began exploring Earthbound communities and participating in some of their practices like meditation, breathwork, group circles, and embodiment exercises that I realized just how much I fear my body, how disconnected from it I am, how little I trust it, how I am always trying to control it, how I am always afraid it will betray me, expose me. This has led me to take more conscious stock of just how damn jittery I am all the time. How I feel like I’m always on the edge, always off-center, always living a bit outside my body, ahead of my body. It’s taken sinking into some Earthbound practices to name it like this, but I have felt it for years.
For as long as I remember I have been “driven.” The cardiologist wrote this off as the reason for my chronic high blood pressure as a young teen and prescribed pills. I didn’t take them for long. Alcohol worked better, even in high school I found (although it’s been more of pickle to stop taking than the pills). In high school and university I wore the label “driven” like some badge of honor, my cross to carry nobly. I never then considered or even questioned what it was that drove me.
It has only been in the past half year that I have begun to consciously realize how much I mistrust my body, how much I fear my body. It seems dark inside, a bit wily, a lot rogue. How I feel like I’m always trying to control my body and then escape it once the will to control, silence, and micromanage becomes unbearable. This realization disturbed me. What was I so afraid of?
I have never been able to dance. I would always go to dances, but only to do the slow dances when I could hide behind a girl and the motives of physical intimacy. Dancing froze me still. To dance meant to feel the body. To let the body express itself in response to its environment. But this meant trusting the body. I have a similar feeling around singing, but here the tightness is more in the throat, like something got stuck there. The fact that I struggle with these basic human activities—no not just human, other hominids danced and sang once under prehistoric skies too—has been bothering me more. The fact that others do too is more alarming. Should this bother me? Is this part of becoming Earthbound? Or have I just fallen prey to the self-help industry? But what if we do need help? These are the questions I wrestle with in the field.
I started stretching when my grandma died. Slowing down and just touching my toes. I increased my meditation and mindfulness practices. I started trying to feel into my body, to note emotions and bodily sensations and their differences. I spent a weekend alone in silence. I talked to people I had met during my fieldwork who had walked similar paths. I listened to podcasts. I began doing some breathwork exercises. I spent some intense weeks in community. I’ve done a lot of inner work too. I’ve started to work through some trauma around growing up with queer desires in an Evangelical home. I’ve had to begin to repattern my relationship to work too. I’ve also started to work through some ancestral trauma around anxiety and depression. All of this has been necessary to start to feel into my body again.
Two coots just swam into the middle of the pond. A third appeared, joining the second to chase the first away. They quack or chirp loudly, aggressively. In the tumult—or was it just before—a strong shudder went up my spine. The first coot continues to evade the chasers, running across the surface of the water with wings beating. I get the image of a prophet being chased out of town. The shudder congeals in my chest and I try to release it back into the ground. Let it compost.
I took a break. I’ve realized I need to take frequent breaks when I am writing to remember I have a body. I increasingly dislike not feeling my body now. I watched a murder of crows weave themselves together through the air above the cattails on the far side of the pond. I got lost in my head. No, I got lost in the world! In the crows and cattails and my bodily awareness of it all. Learning to feel again my body has gone hand-in-hand with learning to feel the world (especially the more-than-human world) around me again. I don’t think I realized just how much I had shut down when I stopped trusting my body.
For most of my life I have avoided strong feelings. This seemed like the only viable strategy in a world coursing with such intense and disruptive feelings. Better to push them down, control them, lest they wash our fragile egos away. I have begun to doubt this strategy. I have begun to want to feel again.
Feelings cross the body. To have feelings, you must be able to feel the body, you must return to your body. To its diverse intelligences, its emergent desires, its movements, smells, sounds, tastes. I remember as a child how the oak forest would thrill and balm my stomach: the somber majesty of the oaks alongside the squirrel’s playful gambol. The wave too, white-crested, wind-swept could make my heart still. I remember too what it was like to have the earth breath me, to rise in me with the smell of fallen leaves and fill my chest. At some point though I forgot what it was like to feel the flow of life in me. Or did I turn away from it? Did I judge it too much of a liability? Too weak? Too unpredictable? Too connected to the organic flow of life and death?
The three coots continue their dance. There is aggression in it, but something else too. The two who seem to believe this is their pond could easily force the other out. For a while now they have been advancing and retreating. Coming to within beak’s reach of the third, but then backing off. Why? Are they playing? I wonder what they are teaching me? Am I just reading the aggression into the scene? A certain tenseness gathers between my upper stomach and heart with each harsh honk or romping splash along the water. Crows gathers in the trees opposite and re-ignite their discussion. One takes the lead. I try to release the tension into the ground.
My thinking has never been linear. Maybe it’s my left-handedness, my sinister streak, but I have always balked at the straight line. A cold cut, unnatural, from without. It stunk of a terrible and rapacious musk, the urge to rule, to master, to dominate: the canalization of thought.
A friend of mine—someone I met a few years ago as I began to explore Earthbound social movements—once described her thinking to me like a flood. It comes and goes. It ravages and drowns, but then resides. It does not follow a course but rises. This feels more right. Feel the thought rise in the chest with the breath, feel it crest and then ebb. Take another breath.
So, who are the Earthbound? Do they really exist as something collective or am I exaggerating, hoping, aspiring? As a theoretical concept they definitely exist. I recently discovered there has been an Institute for Earthbound Studies since 2015! I first encountered the concept a year later when I was finishing my dissertation. Bruno Latour uses it in his 2013 Gifford Lectures to describe the new political community he sees emerging as a response to the social and environmental dynamics brought on by the Anthropocene and climate collapse. Other thinkers have different terms and arguments for why their term is preferable. I particularly like Donna Haraway’s argument for “terrans” and like her I worry that Latour’s reliance on Carl Schmitt leads to a friend/enemy distinction that may not be sustainable. But Earthbound has stuck in my imagination.
This leads me to my final point. I think the answer to question of whether the Earthbound actually exist, that is, not just as a theoretical concept, is also a yes. When I began my search several years ago, I thought I would just go and hangout in some remote eco-communes and see how I liked them. I wanted something else, but I was particular. I’ve had to give up some of that particularity, that desire to control, to know in advance what I will find. I’ve had to cast wider nets. I’ve had to open and trust. Not easy things for a critical social scientist by training.
What I have been discovering, though, is a lot more than a few eco-villages. It is an emergent and mottled patchwork of communities, foundations, cooperatives, activists, alliances, online education, campaigns, rallies, social movements, spiritual movements, and mutual aid networks that not only share similar aims in researching, practicing, and working toward postcapitalist, ecological futures now, but also see themselves as part of a bigger movement with concrete alliances and an emerging politics and culture. I tell some of their stories here. I also hope that Stories for the Earthbound can become a place for others to tell their stories too.
——
P.S. Where to begin? How to begin? Questions best left until the end. I’ve always faltered at the start. I hated the tense minutes before a cross country race in high school. The energy scared me. It felt isolating. It still does. The absolute aloneness made me want to retreat. Beginnings have always made my skin crawl a little bit. There is just something unnatural about them, something forced or cookie-cutter like. The gunshot starts the race. A forceful cutting, clearing-space energy. A beginning wrought not in the flow of things, but out of it, a break from it, a decision, a cut, a cult of the hunter and warrior.
Deleuze and Guattari thought the trick was to start in the middle. Le Guin suggested gathering and collecting rather than tracing the hero arcs of hunters and warriors. I’m also trying to learn a new way to begin. One less dominated by the image of homo faber, the sovereign creator. One more content with dipping in and out, with starting where we are at, always in the middle, where I am at. One more intent on gathering and collecting and spreading and connecting.