So what do you do?
The classic question inevitably arises: So what do you do?
The classic question inevitably arises: So what do you do? A question that is easily confused with “who you are”.
There's always a silence... I never know what to answer. What do I do?
I do so many things in different dimensions of life. I've already done so much... in the various and ambiguous phases, cycles, and life contexts. I'll do so many more that I can't imagine. Just like the rest of us.
Why does what I do professionally have to define me? By fixing, limiting, and demarcating who I supposedly am. Keeping me in a box with the “correct” label, CV and diplomas, in a presentable and supposedly intelligible way. In a paradox of both attribution to a professional group and individual prominence. I don't know what “professionally” means because 98.9% of my research and creative work isn't paid for.
I never know what to answer...
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But I do know that curiosity is my guide and companion.
I don't know so much that I can't imagine what I don't know.
I move through complexity and the tension between mourning, enchantment, and exhaustion. I invite the wisdom of grief and wonder as tools of deep ecological wisdom.
I know that conversations anchored in kindness, collectivity, responsibility, and kinship are belonging.
I know that the world burns because of comfortable laziness, bordering on privilege, and the illusion of immunity for some, as well as the willful ignorance of so many.
I admit the legacy of the violent separation and domination of modernity that lives in our metabolisms. Still, I remember, maturely and responsibly, the deepest mammalian-mythical legacy: interbeing, entanglement, hybridization, symbiosis, belonging, sovereignty, collectivity, dignity, and respect.
I follow trans- and interdisciplinary paths, porously mixing what emerges from the interstices in the imaginal, mythical, cosmological, ecological, and scientific layers.
I know that Research-Prayer is a living ceremony that brings us closer to the nourishing mystery, not through the narrowing of categories but through the fractal opening of vast and wide symbiotic encounters. At the same time, I engage in active research.
I reflexively dance to the various chimerical melodies of fantasy, poetry, dreams and fiction, speculation, fabulation, imagination, folk tales, and everything else.
I know that I am the human form of the territory, so I intentionally cultivate intimacy, nurturing a visceral kinship of closeness, gestated by time, attention, humility, commitment, patience, and slowness, despite all my limitations and blind spots.
My multiple selves forge and mend words, cries, and hybrid beings, which I express in books and collective spaces.
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Perhaps I don't know how to define myself because I'm reluctant to separate life's various layers and kaleidoscopic areas into watertight shelves with defined borders. Maybe it's because I'm just another mammal, as valid as all the others.
In various native and contextual traditions, the answer to what we do or who we are is a web of relationships that are human and a living lineage of kinship. These relationships are anchored in the territory and its guardians, ancestors, and relatives.
I miss belonging and being found, known and received, felt and witnessed.
So that's all I am. Alive, for now.
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