A Soft Invocation
(Un)Learning Eco-Mythic Trails
To say “the human being is like this” is not a neutral claim—it is a colonial incantation, a spell of domestication and dispossession. Behind the soft absolute universality of its syntax lies a deep violence: the rendering of one culturally specific, historically situated, often colonial template of humanness as ubiquitous. This spell flattens. Silences. It erases the layered ecologies of being that defy containment: grief rituals whispered by rivers, kinship with fungi, memory stored in scars and seeds. It turns dense, entangled inheritances into legible silhouettes fit for management and measurement.
The danger is not just what it says—but what it ghosts: all the “otherwises” of being human. All the knowledge that was metabolized through body, land, myth, and non-human kin, all deemed illegible, unscientific, or inconvenient to serve modernity’s appetite for control.
It is here that the work of (Un)Learning Eco-Mythic Trails meets the fracture, not as repair by returning to purities, but as trails into the decomposition. I invite you to “walk” with me, not in a curricular form, but in a rewilded space of attunement, a refusal to walk by maps forged in the cartography of extraction. To shift from the demand for universality to the practice of situatedness is not to dissolve coherence, but to compost normopathy, honoring the opaque truth that coherence grows differently in different soils.
In this view, “the human” is not a fixed category, but an ongoing ceremony, shaped by myth, rhythm, grief, and the touch of other beings. (Un)learning becomes a practice of listening to what modernity silenced, of allowing myths to breathe again, not as fictions but as relational critters. This shapeshift is not merely epistemological, but ontological. Turning knowledge from extractive certainty into a practice of ecological bodies of ancestral presence.
This is not a search for one truth, but a willingness to be shaped by many.
Not mastery or resolution, but reverence and rhythm.
If you find yourself weary of certainty, of clever answers that forgot the songs your bones still carry, come. Not to agree or improve, but to arrive. Just here. Un)Learning Eco-Mythic Trails is not a solution, but a generous rupture in the wall. A place where your questions do not need to be refined before being offered. Where paradox is not a flaw in the system, but a language the Earth still speaks. You do not have to be ready. You do not have to know. You can come entangled, fragmented, unsure.
Bring your discontinuities. Bring your longing. Bring the question that has no sentence yet. There is space here to not know together. To let story and silence do what strategies and aseptic methods cannot.
No need to escape the world, just let it show itself again through the root systems we forgot to feel.