Eco-Mythic Praxis

On dewdrop shimmers on my way to the supermarket.

{Beware, lengthy essay ahead, researched and written from November 2025 to March 2026}

Here, on the bend facing the Atlantic to the west, I walk down the hill along the narrow dirt path to go to the supermarket. In the darkening evening, the dewdrops on the wild clovers by the dirt road attract me. While my knee hurts, I awkwardly bend to look at the tiny and delicate water worlds, ready to drip or evaporate. The glow of their minute watery bodies reminds me of ancient tales of ephemeral sparkles that appear in feral places, enchanting and capturing those who pass by. You could be doomed or turned prosperous, but all riches would be extinguished instantly, leaving you with a damp coal in your hand. I also remember local solstice rituals, where plants are consecrated by every dewdrop on their green leaves, and villagers roll or jump over lush herbs in a fertile, symbiotic intimacy with the land.

The glow refuses to be archived, despite something in me wanting to pocket it. I can just stay with a knee on the ground, witnessing this fragile worlding. Glimpses of mythic organic glows will accompany us through the living meanders of Eco-Mythic Praxis^[1], just before we arrive at the blinding artificial lights of the supermarket. Folktales of enchanted brightness still carry the paradox of the empire that seeks to fixate and accumulate all things shiny, capturing and domesticating sparkle into power. I’m complicit in the shimmer-harvesting, still trying to fully fixate it to understand; the dew glow incriminates me. But we also sense the contrasting wisdom of ephemeral withdrawal, returning brilliance to place, time, and uncertainty. To reclaim the possibilities of the animated vibrancy of one’s Eco-Mythic Praxis, we will wander through the paved roads of the hegemonic grammar of empire, witnessing the cracks widening through paraontological portals. These are more murky cracks than portals, for they rupture perception, inducing the vertigo of uncertainty, like the rotten smells that fill my senses when I kneel.

The craft of this essay follows the ethics of research-prayer,^[2] along with the narrator’s responsibility. As a white person and beneficiary of a colonial legacy, my body is not neutral, carrying stories that have domesticated worlds, erased presences, and universalized a way of storytelling that separates and moralizes. Eco-Mythic Praxis, especially in contexts that continuously reproduce oppression, dispossession, and silencing of indigenous practices and ancestral knowledge, requires accountability. It requires acknowledging and confessing failure, when I don’t fully listen, when I won’t kneel but still romanticize idyllic relationality.

The narrow dirt trail to the supermarket is an interval calling for a bearing that unravels and dissolves, an inquiry that does not collect data but restores dignity. A prayer that does not seek revelation but digests inherited wounds. Here, on this narrow slope, to fabulate and narrate is not a performance but to sit on the edge of difference without colonizing it. This is a lonely and unintelligible place to be, for it risks credibility and threatens social participation. Breaking down the legacy of colonial European tales, listening to the symptoms of a modernity still demanding to be universal^[3]. My own complicity trembles, and the slope feels steeper, for I’m still seduced by the illusion of stability of the supermarket lights.

Allowing one to fabulate and retell only what, in the humus of this decomposing pile, still hums as ritual and relationship. Like the glow of evening dew on the winding path to the supermarket. A shimmer that also blinds, lures, and exposes modern bias—it is not safe, we will tumble many times.

We walk with and try to listen to myth, symbol, and archetype as vibrant ecological verbs, under the constraints of colonial modernity. Not as universal abstractions, modern “tools,” or private psychological trophies, but as a rupture in this darkening, shimmering slope. Reclaiming, from modernity’s glare, the fierce yet gentle, organic glistening as living, body-place-bound yarns of relational intelligence.

Empire Grammar and the Eco-Mythic

We continue along this steep dirt path with a simple but destabilizing recognition: the crisis we inhabit is not only ecological but also narrative and ontological, a collapse of what can be sensed, said, imagined, and therefore lived. The blinding imperial grammar does not merely colonize territories; it colonizes story ecologies, producing tales without ground, linear time as fate, the isolated hero as the sole unit of agency, land reduced to scenery, and symbolic language captured into racial structures, dogma, innocence, or universalism. My knee in the dirt reminds me that, even as I resist linear time, I feel its syntax shaping my own sentences.

Let’s interrupt this glare with eco-mythic persistence, a practice of storytelling as relational ecology, where myth is metabolic infrastructure, symbol is kin encounter, and archetype is situated pattern-in-motion. All wounded by history but always animated by place^[4]. Taken together, these threads argue that eco-mythic storytelling is not an aesthetic to escape but an eco-political repair of imagination, in a slow, situated, non-dogmatic praxis that composts imperial inheritance and reopens the possibility of cohabitation in a living Earth.

We should also note how modernity’s hunger for light engulfed and silenced the ancient mythic glimmers. The grammar of empire is indeed a luminous extraction machine. Not only does it capture all sparkles, but it also transforms their brilliance into a civilizational obsession; these lights cease to illuminate, becoming a sign of hierarchies and conquests, trying to outshine all that is different. This type of language, linear, cumulative, and deterritorialized, while narrating the hero’s rise, also manufactures desire for fixating binaries. The problem is not luminosity per se but fixation and ownership. The enchanted glimmer ceases to be an invitation to mystic relationality and becomes a trophy of the self. Even the tales whispered among the roots can be bent by this decontextualized glare, in which light is distilled into value, and the symbolic is appropriated as a universal asset. The empire not only steals but also reconfigures the signs of the sacred as evidence of its right to possess.

To relate to this Praxis, we will sit with friction and discomfort together, within the closed imperial grammar and the eco-mythic. Let’s walk the winding, narrow trail to the supermarket, tending to the shimmers, glows, and mythical lights. I can foresee the mythic shimmer colliding with the barcode glow under fluorescent lights hum.

The first Wandering Lights to cross our path are illuminated by contemporary neuroscience. Tales of wandering lights often appear associated with moments of danger, omens of death, or magical devices. Ecological brain models dismantle the empire’s favorite fiction: the modular, isolated self that thinks “in a vacuum,” separate from body, environment, and relations^[5], instead describing the brain as entangled and dynamically assembled. These mythic Wandering Lights mark the threshold between worlds, warning us that the empire’s closed grammar^[6] depends on a false ontology of separateness, the severed lone rational subject, the world as an inert object, and control as intelligence^[7]. The brain is ecological, not modular, but imperial grammar urges us to be hypervigilant and in control.

On special hours and days, we also encounter Shining Beings^[8], guardians of the earth and stewards of ancient cycles^[9], not as essence, but as peoples forced into defense by invasion. In local folktales, there are the golden serpents and snakes with gleaming scales that guard springs or rocks. These glowing bodies point us towards intergenerational legacies of rigorous and brilliant Indigenous Storytelling^{[10] [11]}. This situated yarning reveals the imperial grammar’s deepest violence: the production of disconnection^[12]. Severing knowledge from bodies and place, identity from ecology, and story from governance^[13]. Indigenous narratives operate as relational methods and lived land-law^[14]. Stories are not “representations” but bodies-in-practice that sustain kinship, accountability, and collective regeneration^[15]. These Shining Beings know that land is not a neutral setting but another character, imprinted with events, holding memory, and offering instruction^[16]. The storyteller is not a solo author but a node in a wider ecology of ancestors, spirits, animals, and weather^[17]. These are storytelling legacies that still fight to survive extractive dispossession, imperial oppression, and hostile bigotry every day. Eco-mythic listening is indebted to these non-colonial ways of narrating with and through the land.^[18] At the core of Eco-Mythic Praxis is the refusal of appropriation, for it remains derivative, indebted, accountable, and incomplete without these living traditions.

Eurocentric modern bodies quiver to unfurl a restorying in imperial lands, nurturing spaces where the imposed “single story” loses its monopoly, and wisdom is not handed down as dogma but sought through silence, opacity, and direct participation.^[19] Shining Land Bodies. Here, time bends helicoidally, making the past an active force in the present, for Indigenous protocols do not simply critique the imperial grammar; they oppose it with paraontological practices of belonging, reciprocity, and mythic sovereign relationality.^[20]

We also find the Glows that obey the time of the earth, never that of humans, shining only at certain times in the mythical calendar, resonating with Transcorporeality^[21] and Immanence^[22]. But empire is not a philosophical error but rather a structure we inhabit; after all my knee is in soil that may contain pesticides and plastic particles from the supermarket. Transcorporeality and Immanent philosophies expose the empire’s grammar as an ontological, gruesome crime scene. With disappeared rivers, bodies in migration routes, and collapsed mountains. A system that invented “Nature” as an external category, dispossessing and discarding, making territory and bodies into extractable materials. Transcorporeality insists that bodies are porous environments, sites where toxins, histories, climates, and economies circulate, shattering the fantasy of a clean, uncontaminated, independent self. Bodies absorbing toxins in sacrifice zones that cannot afford the fantasy of purity. Immanence reorients the sacred away from sky-abstraction and back into soil, decomposition, fertility, and the pulsing continuity that empire calls “chaos” only because it cannot dominate it. But the soil is also poisoned, and decomposition smells of rot and methane. Here, Eco-Mythic Praxis becomes foraging and ecological rooting, treating the world as “who,” as a metabolic practice of cohabitation^[23]. This demands consequential change of posture, asking for consent, refusing extraction, and interrupting idealized convenience.

Finally, we find a half-buried bright Golden Comb, a broken pact that Folklore Philosophy exposes, pulling the scalp of certainty. How imperial grammar not only colonizes land but also occupies what counts as “thought.” The Golden Comb brings intimacy, for it untangles close to the skin, pulling and snagging, and it may hurt.

When academic philosophy polices legitimacy through exclusivity, genius myths, and Eurocentric canons, folktales become dismissed as ornament, childishness^[24], or mere entertainment; yet this dismissal is itself a political technology of enclosure, narrowing imagination to what the empire can validate. Seen differently, folktales are a communal living archive of philosophical work conducted across generations: a collaborative investigation in which “no one owns the stories,”^[25] and meaning remains nomadic, seasonal, contingent, and collectively metabolized. While some folktales carry empire in their braids, Eco-myths are not a return to tradition but a continuous confrontation of epistemic hegemony. A tentative recovery of the folktale as “dangerous knowledge,”^[26] capable of startling us out of inherited norms. Modernity dismissed storytelling as unserious, so this is an invitation to submit with ecological accountability, refusal of appropriation, and political solidarity.

{art by me}

Eco-Mythic Praxis as Paraontological

Unglared by modernity and rooted in mythical watery shimmers, Eco-Mythic Praxis moves as something like paraontology because it rejects the closed ontology of colonial modernity, its fantasy of separation, progress, the severed individual, and the “world” as an available stage. This unstable and wandering practice chooses to inhabit the cracks where life persists without asking permission from the dominant categories of being. This praxis does not seek to “include” what has been expelled in an already constructed ontological home^[27]. The intention is to descend into the humus, where existence organizes itself, in the in-between, in that which cannot be captured by neoliberal metrics of achievement, productivity, or redemption. After all, these enchanted waters glimmer on the surface but are also deep, dark, and opaque. Sometimes refusing to shine at all.

The mythical glow of tales that guided us along this path does not belong to the grammar of empire either, dismantling it from within. Unlike imperial light, which becomes fixed and hoarded, the luminance in tales is also impossible to possess, unsuitable for transport, and contrary to human sovereignty. It shines and then fades, appearing in a specific place at a split moment. This glow does not promise progress but reveals a relationship with time, territory, and the non-human. When tempted outside this mythic ecology, it disappears, retaliates, and disintegrates. Here, light is not a metaphor for clarity, morality, or enlightenment, but a journey of listening, presence, and belonging. It is a tangled process in which enchantment pulses in cyclical ecological rhythms rather than in linear achievements. The shimmering in tales does not confirm the empire, despite power demands to conquer it. Instead, mythical lights sabotage modernity with an ancestral embrace of shapeshifting place.

Eco-mythical re-fabulation is a tentative gesture of fugitivity, not to escape the real, but to free our constrained participation from the imperial grammar that impoverishes it. Allowing myth, symbol, archetype, and territory to act once again as inherently territorial and relational intelligences, weaving a collective agency where the “I” decenters, remaining accountable, and the question becomes “How do I care, sing, and risk kinship in damaged conditions?”

Praxis Rhythm for Eco-Mythical Fabulation

Refusal as the Door, Noticing the Shimmer of What Insists.

Remembering that research-prayer does not amass linear facts, the journey is to keep the territory vibrant in gestures of consented attention.

Eco-Mythic Praxis is not a redemption arc but a sensory rooting into the visible and invisible weaves of a living Earth, walking along the fracture the way one walks with fire, mud, and endings. Slowly, and with humility, undoing modern imagination traps: the world as inert scenery and the self as hero-manager of meaning. These “modern structures” also include human superiority/control, racialized coloniality, patriarchy that degrades feminine dignity, loss of seasonal/ecological literacy, and an abstract God in the sky/desecration of place. This is soil-work, turning what decays into nutrients for different worlds.

Crossing the threshold, we also gently notice what keeps insisting, even after it was denied legitimacy. The dimming and half-buried mythical shimmers. Silenced stories, unacknowledged grief, a place that captured you, living images recoiling like the wind, a river that summons you in dreams. Sparkles of relational re-membrance. Crossing the resistance door, you refuse to reproduce colonial, patriarchal, anthropocentric defaults as if they were “just tradition.” Instead of solving, ask:

• Who is allowed to move? Who is caged?

• Where does agency tremble instead of triumph?

• Whose longing has been pathologized into sin, silence, or stereotype?

• What bodies have become metaphors before they could be kin?

• What part of the land is only touched to be taken?

• Who has paid the price for the myth I love most?

• Where in my own body have I become empire’s echo?

Refabulating Story as Critter

After shedding parts of modern skins, a new-ancient beast arises. It molts and bites. Refabulation is not “a creative writing exercise” but a political refusal of narrative domestication by capitalist/colonial sense-making. A shapeshifting of perception, posture, and relational capacity. The story becomes a dangerous sanctuary for other ways of being. Implicated and not heroic.

Instead of triumphant achievements, the story becomes a container of relations, not a weapon of conquest. For that to happen, we need to disable the colonial single meaning and “I” as the compulsory center of reality. The protagonist becomes plural, while identity dissolves into landscape and humus. Transformation is collective, and the tale carries luminous seeds, shiny residues, bright kinship, and not glaring final trophies.

Like all critters, stories unfold over time. If colonial time is a straight road called progress, eco-mythic time is tidal, past and future squeezing into the present as living, flowing forces. Molting. This matters politically because linear time produces amnesia, inevitability, and obedience. Spiral time returns alternatives as ancestral memory, territorial pedagogies, unfinished grief, and still-possible futures. It slows down publication, rejects the urgency culture, allows unfinished work, and returns to a place seasonally.

{art by me}

Close without Closure

Eco-mythic praxis refuses the “takeaway culture.” Although in practice, takeaway culture has been institutionalized. So this praxis includes navigating the consequences of the assumed and demanded clarity of students, editors, and audiences. This brings social and professional risks, as you have to relinquish the idealized intelligibility or linearity of the process, such as the interruption of convenience, the disturbance of reputation, and the complications of publication. Eco-mythic praxis is not symbolic, for it requires material shifts: redistributing resources when invoking Indigenous knowledge; refusing productivity timelines that erase ecological time; returning to the same place until it begins to speak back; declining platforms that demand simplification; and composting beloved narratives that reproduce harm.

Refrain from summarizing, but ask:

• Did it cultivate humility rather than mastery?

• Did it mend relational attention to place?

The goal is not “knowledge gained” but imagination regenerated.

Why this Practice is Politically Crucial

Because colonialism is not only the occupation of land, it is the occupation of the possible. It narrows imagination to property and extraction logic, human centrality, purity regimes, linear progress, and a single authorized reality. If colonialism occupies the possible, then this essay itself is written within an occupied imagination. Eco-mythic fabulation^[28] interrupts, unsettles, and contests this occupation by learning to respond to agencies that exceed us in land, animal, ancestor, cycles, and weather; refusing the modern seizure of everything as a personal symbol, like in commodified spirituality; unraveling imperial story-architecture into story-ecology; practicing collective, situated, living ways of knowing-with-and-through, like the shimmer of dewdrops on the way to the supermarket. It is an activism of perception, affect, and myth that perforates denial through humble care, reopening the imagination that modernity made brittle. For perception might alter participation. But this reimagining has consequences; it stains hands, rearranges relations, exposes your complicity publicly, and refuses to let you exit unchanged.

Eco-Myth widens animacy not by declaring everything alive but by changing how we speak, from ownership to relation, object to encounter, “it” to “who.” To widen animacy is not to romanticize vitality, but to accept consequence. If land is a “who,” extraction becomes violation, if story is alive, citation becomes relationship. We do not tell eco-mythical tales to escape reality; we fabulate them so reality can return, feral, through us—refusing to be orchestrated. With dew on my feet, I can see the supermarket lights flicker. Nothing is solved.

References

• Braga, Teófilo. Contos Tradicionais do Povo Português. 3.ª ed. 2 vols. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1987.

• Cardigos, Isabel. Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2006.

• Pedroso, Consiglieri. Portuguese Folk-Tales. Translated by Henriqueta Monteiro. London: Elliot Stock, 1882.

• Vaz da Silva, Francisco. Archeology of Intangible Heritage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

• Vaz da Silva, Francisco. “Extraordinary Children, Werewolves, and Witches in Portuguese Folk Tradition.” Em Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, editado por Gábor Klaniczay e Éva Pócs, 262–264. Budapest: CEU Press, 2008.

• Vaz da Silva, Francisco. Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales. International Folkloristics 1. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

• Favela, Luis H. The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment. Nova Iorque: Routledge, 2024.

• Pessoa, Luiz. The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022.

• Žukauskaitė, Audronė. Organism-Oriented Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

• Dahal, Hikmat, e Balaram Bhatta. “Folktales: A Moral Message from the Past to the Future Generation.” Nepal Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (NJMR) 4, n.º 1 (março de 2021): 31–43. https://doi.org/10.3126/njmr.v4i1.36618.

• Magini, Riccardo. “Folk and Fairy Tales as Philosophy through Fantasy: an interpretation of memory, imagination, and culture.” Sofia Philosophical Review XVI, n.º 2 (2022): 92–114.

• Meimaridi, Maggie. “Come Seek Us Where Our Voices Sound: Encountering the Mermaid in Harry Potter.” Em The Philosophical Power of Fairy Tales from Around the World: An Ocean of Stories, editado por Wendy C. Turgeon, 55–70. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2024.

• Tulenko, Abigail. “Folklore is philosophy: Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world.” Aeon, 26 de fevereiro de 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/folktales-like-philosophy-startle-us-into-rethinking-our-values.

• Turgeon, Wendy C., ed. The Philosophical Power of Fairy Tales from Around the World: An Ocean of Stories. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60373-0.

• Archibald, Jo-ann. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008.

• Cajete, Gregory A. “Children, Myth and Storytelling: An Indigenous Perspective.” Global Studies of Childhood 7, no. 2 (2017): 113–30.

• Chan, Adrienne S. “Storytelling, Culture, and Indigenous Methodology.” In Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research: An Ecology of Life and Learning, edited by Alan Bainbridge, Laura Formenti e Linden West, 170–85. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

• Corntassel, Jeff, Chaw-win-is e T’lakwadzi. “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, no. 1 (2009): 137–59.

• Cragoe, Nicholas G. “Narrating Indigenous Boundaries: Postcolonial and Decolonial Storytelling in Northern Minnesota.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23, no. 2 (2017): 182–202.

• Datta, Ranjan. “Traditional Storytelling: An Effective Indigenous Research Methodology and Its Implications for Environmental Research.” AlterNative 14, no. 1 (2017): 1–10.

• Emberley, Julia V. The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014.

• Fincham, Gail. “Towards a New Environmentalism: Indigeneity, Ethics and Ecology in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Two Recent Ecocritical Studies.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 32, no. 1 (2020): 63–73.

• Geia, Lynore K., Barbara Hayes e Kim Usher. “Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice.” Contemporary Nurse 46, no. 1 (2013): 13–17.

• Riascos, Jaime. “Ancient and Indigenous Stories: Their Ethics and Power Reflected in Latin American Storytelling Movements.” Marvels & Tales 21, no. 2 (2007): 253–67.

• Rosile, Grace Ann. “So, What Does it Mean? Mysterious Practices of Indigenous Storytellers.” Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2016.

• Maynard, Robyn, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.

• Manning, Erin. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020;

• Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

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I thank fabrice dubosc and Daniela Kato for engaging, reviewing, and asking me the right questions for this essay.

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[1] Eco-Myth is a slow and unraveling storytelling pedagogy, anchored in refusal and an ethics of relation, unsettling ​​the desire to adopt or control.

[2] Sofia Batalha, “Research Prayer,” Substack, Oct 19, 2023, https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/p/research-prayer

[3] Eco-myth is not an attempt to summarize myth but to diffract and shatter the Eurocentric idealism and demand of the universal by situating it in various tongues of biological bodies and ecological niches. I usually tell students that words and concepts are vast living territories. So, while the term acknowledges its lineage in Greek and Western thought, where mythos denotes spoken symbolic narrative, we refuse the colonial impulse to make such narratives global defaults. We are meandering on a steep dirt path after all. In a personal communication, Fabrice Dubosc reminded me that many relational ontologies, such as Aboriginal Australian songlines, Yanomami xapiri cosmopolitics, Taoist cosmology, and the apophatic mysticism found across traditions, enact Earth-rooted meaning-making that cannot be reduced to the metaphorical, symbolic, or representational logic embedded in the Western idea of “myth.” In this sense, eco-myth is not a continuation of the universal definition of myth under a colonial Eurocentric lens, but a metabolic rupture. It is a fugitive concept that gestures toward Earth-attuned storytelling practices, inaccessible from fixed archetypes and always exceeding modern translation.

[4] “Do not ask how to survive the collapse. There is not one, but many, layered like old bones in the soil, each breaking on a different rhythm. Live cyclically, not because the world is whole, but because it is fractured.” To engage eco-mythically is to stand amid ruins and still return to wounded places, and fragmented narratives. It is to make meaning with the broken, not despite it. Return here is not nostalgia nor repair. It is a vow to re-enter the living field of grief and growth, again and again, as a practice of kinship in the face of collapse’s plurality. The myth, in this frame, is not an escape from disaster but a rhythm for breathing through it. Sofia Batalha, “Oracle for Living Cyclically in a Collapsing World,” Substack, January 23, 2026, https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/p/oracle-for-living-cyclically-in-a.

[5] Luis H. Favela, in his book The Ecological Brain, quotes György Buzsáki to emphasize that “the brain is just a brain. It has no function without the body and the environmental niche it occupies.” This perspective refutes the idea of a modular self that thinks “in a vacuum.” Luiz Pessoa, in The Entangled Brain, reinforces that the brain is not a modular system, challenging the “divide and conquer“ strategy that attempted to isolate functions into separate parts. Luis H. Favela, The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2024).

[6] Empire’s closed grammar does not mean that nothing relational grows within it. Contemporary neuroscience, for instance, increasingly demonstrates the brain’s distributed, relational, and plastic character; yet much of this research is funded, institutionalized, and operationalized within imperial infrastructures. The paradox is that empire can reveal interdependence while still upholding separateness as its foundational myth. The issue, then, is not truth versus falsehood, but which story becomes central.

[7] Audronė Žukauskaitė, in Organism-Oriented Ontology, criticizes ontologies based on identity and substance (the isolated self), proposing instead an ontology based on processuality, multiplicity, and potentiality. She suggests that the organic being is a “folded multiplicity composed of heterogeneous parts,” which resists the fixity of a single, sovereign identity. Audronė Žukauskaitė, Organism-Oriented Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

[8] “Shining Beings” intends to move toward respect, while it risks reproducing a classic distortion. Indigenous peoples have long been mythologized as ecological guardians, spiritual archetypes, or vessels of ancestral purity. Such imagery, even when admiring, tends to flatten complexity. Indigenous communities are not symbols of planetary innocence. They are internally diverse, politically entangled, urban and rural, embedded within modern infrastructures, negotiating survival amid disintegration and continuity. To cast these communities as luminous stewards without naming this symbolic exile may exalt them while denying and erasing their ordinary, contested, and practical humanity. The danger is reduction, for metaphor must not overshadow material reality.

[9] Gregory A. Cajete describes how children in Indigenous communities are seen as having a “direct connection to special spirits in nature” and are considered “bearers of light.” Gregory A. Cajete, “Children, Myth and Storytelling: An Indigenous Perspective,” Global Studies of Childhood 7, no. 2 (2017): 114. See also the role of spirits as witnesses in Julia V. Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 28.

[10] In this mythical brilliance, genealogies of resistance of blackness are included, which Maynard and Simpson describe as a “life-affirming crescendo,” rooted in generations of intellectual and political labor. In Part 3 of the book Rehearsals for Living, Maynard characterizes uprisings as moments when “collective light is blown into a new world” through a “radical Black tradition” that prioritizes mutual care and liberation. This luminosity of blackness is not an abstraction but an energy that resides in bodies, kept alive by ancestors to challenge the “cult of death” of white supremacy and the “monumentalizations of violence.” Thus, stories of struggle and cultures of Black resistance and legacy function as portals to “alternative futures,” where the act of storytelling becomes, like the encounter with the Shining Ones, a practice of “continuous rebirth” and healing from colonial dispossession. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), Part 3.

[11] The act of storytelling is defined as the “first foundation of indigenous education.” Cajete, “Children, Myth and Storytelling,” 114. Jaime Riascos corroborates that these movements transmit “ethical values from different cultures through the power of language.” Jaime Riascos, “Ancient and Indigenous Stories: Their Ethics and Power Reflected in Latin American Storytelling Movements,” Marvels & Tales 21, no. 2 (2007): 253.

[12] The “imperial grammar” and its violence of disconnection are discussed in terms of “representational violence” that separates human relations from the land. Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny, 8. Jeff Corntassel et al. explain how colonial policies removed people from their “homelands and families” to force assimilation. Jeff Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, no. 1 (2009): 138.

[13] On the separation between knowledge, body, and place, see Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny, 3–4. Adrienne S. Chan discusses how colonialism stripped Indigenous peoples of their culture and disconnected them from their ecologies. Adrienne S. Chan, “Storytelling, Culture, and Indigenous Methodology,” in Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research, ed. Alan Bainbridge, Laura Formenti, and Linden West (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 172.

[14] Indigenous narratives as “lived land laws” are exemplified by the haa-huu-pah, which are “lived values that form the basis for Indigenous governance and regeneration.” Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling,” 138.

[15] On the role of stories in sustaining kinship and collective regeneration, see Ranjan Datta, “Traditional Storytelling: An Effective Indigenous Research Methodology and Its Implications for Environmental Research,” AlterNative 14, no. 1 (2017): 3. See also Chan, “Storytelling, Culture, and Indigenous Methodology,” 174.

[16] Grace Ann Rosile states that, in indigenous ontology, “the place becomes almost another character in the stories” and is “imbued with the spirit of the events that occurred there.” Grace Ann Rosile, “So, What Does it Mean? Mysterious Practices of Indigenous Storytellers,” in Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2016), 90-91.

[17] The idea of the storyteller as a “node” in an ecology of sacred energies is explored in Gail Fincham, “Towards a New Environmentalism: Indigeneity, Ethics and Ecology in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Two Recent Ecocritical Studies,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 32, no. 1 (2020): 70.

[18] Lynore K. Geia et al. discuss the struggle to validate these voices in academia and respect for non-colonial forms of storytelling. Lynore K. Geia, Barbara Hayes, and Kim Usher, “Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice,” Contemporary Nurse 46, no. 1 (2013): 14.

[19] The term “restorying” to create spaces where the colonizer’s “single story” loses its monopoly is fundamental in Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling,” 138-139.

[20] “Helicoidal” time and practices of reciprocity and sovereignty that oppose imperial grammar are described in Fincham, “Towards a New Environmentalism,” 71, and in Nicholas G. Cragoe, “Narrating Indigenous Boundaries: Postcolonial and Decolonial Storytelling in Northern Minnesota,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23, no. 2 (2017): 191, 194.

[21] Stacy Alaimo defines transcorporeality as the “space-time where human corporeality, in all its material carnality, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” conceiving bodies as porous sites and places of transit where substances, toxins, histories, and climates circulate, collapsing the fantasy of an autonomous and isolated “self.” Stacy Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 238; Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

[22] Radical immanence, grounded in Spinoza’s monism and Whitehead’s process philosophy, proposes a single “plane of existence” where reality is constituted by “intra-active becomings” and internal relations, rejecting vertical transcendence to affirm that matter is intrinsically vibrant, agential, and inseparable from spirit or idea. Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman, eds., Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023), 5, 144; Catherine Keller, “Amorous Entanglements: The Matter of Christian Panentheism,” in Earthly Things, 104; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.

[23] Expanding on this practice of cohabitation, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson discusses, in Part 3 of Rehearsals for Living, based on Fred Moten’s concept of “homelessness.” Paraphrasing Moten, Simpson argues that the home should not be considered an enclosure or guarded private property but rather as a space of radical hospitality, constantly “offered“ and shared. From this perspective, home is a network of relationality where squirrels, insects, bears, spirits, plants, and meteorological phenomena are not invaders but constituent members of the household. For the author, paraphrasing Moten, being homeless means rejecting the logic of colonial possession in order to inhabit a territory of profound sharing and reciprocity with all beings. Maynard and Simpson, Rehearsals for Living, Part 3.

[24] Tulenko, “Folklore is philosophy”; Hikmat Dahal and Balaram Bhatta, “Folktales: A Moral Message from the Past to the Future Generation,” Nepal Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 4, no. 1 (2021): 42. The sources note that short stories are often relegated to the children’s sphere or seen merely as “cute,” but not as ‘art’ or rigorous “philosophy.”

[25] The premise that “no one owns these stories” (attributed to folklorist Steve Sanfield) highlights the inherently communal and collaborative nature of folklore, opposing the “myth of individual genius” and “atomistic ownership” of traditional academic philosophy. As a living archive, the tale functions as a collective investigation that persists through the centuries, where the narrative remains fluid and “green,” adapting to each new telling without hardening into abstract dogmas. See Abigail Tulenko, “Folklore is philosophy: Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world,” Aeon, February 26, 2024. Although I would like to add that today corporations copyright myths, nation-states nationalize folklore, tourism industries commodify tradition, and settlers appropriate Indigenous stories. So ownership is contested, although the deeper logic of folktales resists this enclosure.

[26] I borrow this term “dangerous knowledge” to refer to the subversive potential of eco-mythical storytelling to act as an ‘exorcism’ of epistemic hegemonies, challenging the exclusivity of academic philosophy and the “grammar of empire” by using startle to destabilize inherited norms and validate marginalized knowledge. See Tulenko, “Folklore is philosophy.” But it also carries personal risk, such as loss of institutional credibility, being called unserious, or epistemic isolation.

[27] Eco-mythic praxis cannot claim the genealogy of Black paraontology, only learn from its refusal. Even calling this paraontological risks solidifying what should remain fugitive. The paraontology formulated by Fred Moten, based on his reading of Nahum Chandler, is a processual “anoriginal displacement of ontology.” In which blackness (or being that escapes the norm) is not an absence of being, but a way of life that is organized before and beyond the ontological categories imposed by colonial modernity. This concept describes a “paraontological distinction“ between categorized people and the fugitive force of their being, which refuses to be reduced to a property or an object of exchange. Erin Manning expands this view by characterizing the paraontological mode of existence as “minor,” a practice that neither registers nor submits to the ‘neurotypical’ or “white” normopathic hegemonic subjectivity. Thus, paraontological praxis inhabits the “lesser sociality” and “humus” of the incalculable, moving through a “fugitivity” that transforms deprivation into relational abundance and insurgent fabulation. Manning, Erin. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020; Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

[28] Sofia Batalha, “Eco-Mythic Tales,” Substack, accessed February 8, 2026, https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/t/eco-mythic-tales.