There’s no such thing as a beginning

The benefit of spending large volumes of time learning about ecology is that you are constantly reminded your way of doing anything is only on one approach amongst many. Apart from being one human amongst many others, you are more importantly one small version of one species living life alongside the efforts of 8.7 million other species, who are as certain of their ways of being in the world as you are yours. Inheriting a world so ruptured by anthropocentric efforts of select cultures, it is a relief to remember this is not the only way to live on earth. It’s not even the most popular. It just happens to be the most familiar. Everywhere you look, other lifeways, from the bacterial and fungal to the vegetal and animal carry on across generations demonstrating all sorts of ways of relating to each other and to the planet we all share.

If you are here you might already know that I am passionate about what worlds beyond the human have to teach us. The stories, lessons, futures and practices that are swarmed, scrawled, spawned, flocked and seeded in every minute of this riotous earth bare infinite instruction for the attentive human.

In the last twelve years or so I have had vast privilege of spending large volumes of time doing the things that I find most interesting. Slipping into fresh bodies of water, floating in salt water shallows, wandering through grasslands, peering through swamps, crawling through red walled canyons, watching kingfishers and giant moths, following slugs and cuttlefish, tracing the wing tips of eagles as they rise with the sun over stretching estuaries.

Some of this is the ability to be in the right place at the right time, and a knack for getting invited into interesting places. Some of it is the inability to stay very long inside the confines of the city, and penchant for wandering off when a turtle or lyrebird crosses my path. Some of it is the result of an insatiable curiosity and a taste for chasing wonder. Some is a skill in cultivating very convincing reasons to be snorkelling, hiking or canoeing at anyone time. It doesn’t hurt to have cultivated a large cohort of infinitely curious teachers, mentors, friends, companions and collaborators who are equally interested in learning about the world by meditating in quarries, singing with frogs or dragging hydrophones through rockpools. But mostly, this all happens because I have the privilege of time and space to to pursue these interests. This is something I am both immensely grateful for and that makes me keenly aware of a responsibility to share the things I have the benefit of learning.

When I am not off wandering the field, my ecologic interests are fuelled by the benefit of artistic, academic and conservation communities filled with enthusiastic and exceptional folks who have cultivated expertise through countless ways of learning, from empirical research to experimental practice. And this all mingles in me, augmenting and mutating the lessons I learn from teachers beyond the human, from termites and echidnas, millipedes and cockatoos. This inquiry of mine is seeded in a desire to learn and practice being good kin, (re)learning how to show up as a companion and collaborator for interspecies worlds, when I have been raised without a cultural practice of my own. An effort to reintegrate my body, practice and imaginary with the living worldn as a white, settler artist on the stolen, unceded land of the Eastern Kulin Nations in so-called Australia.

I did not inherit a culture of care, of collaboration, or creation. I did not learn how to pray so I’ve learned to listen—to sit in the company of moss, to kneel at the mouths of rivers, to follow the hymnal scrawls of snails and the tidal choirs of shorelines. My teachers have been the liturgies of salt on pink lakes, the syntax of sandstone shaped by wind, the entanglements of mangrove roots, the soft percussion of fields of paper daisies. From them, I’ve learned what it means to pay attention. To be humbled. To begin again. The work that has emerged between these more-than-human peoples is a practice of reorientation, an attempt to cultivate cultural forms that redirect the self toward planetary participation. Its seeded in a longing to belong differently, to cultivate personal and collective ways of being that resist the ecologic estrangement wrought by Cartesian, colonial, and capitalist violence. And when I share these practices, it is not as answers, but as offerings for others who, like me, are searching for ways to listen, to respond, to reenter a dialogue with a world still speaking.

There’s no such thing as a beginning on Earth, only continuance. This is a place of cycles and spillages, decomposition and reformation. Iron forged in the bellies of collapsing stars runs in your your blood; mountains move towards the sea, shift into the soft sediment of sea floors; a fallen twig becomes banquet and bed for life regenerating. The same materials recycled perpetually across vast scales, from coral to millipedes, the same matter reconstituted over and over again. And so, this first post isn’t a beginning either. Just a glimpse of something already in motion—small signals surfacing through the soil, like fungi fruiting from unseen threads.

As we go along here you’ll find fragments and field notes: methods, reflections, practices, rituals, rites. Interspecies relations, unworlding, reworlding, trans futures, queer ecologies and probably slugs.

It won’t be tidy, or without blunder. It will bloom and break and bloom again. If you feel like following along, there may be fruit. Or mulch. Or maybe even something that quietly germinates in the dark and makes its way toward the light in your own forest floor. I’m glad to share it with you, whatever it looks like.

My studio door from where I write.