Symptom and Oracle
Through reverent listening and mythical imagery
There is a living intertwining, a vibrant web that fertilizes the ecological emotions of the Global North, those who feel the collapse in eco-anxiety or ecological mourning, like echoes of an older dialogue exiled by modernity. These are not individual pathologies, but resonances of conversations silenced by modernity, which can be reopened through reverent listening and mythical imagery.
Ecological emotions are symptom and oracle. They are meanders, mycelium, and rhizomes. They are manifestations of the pernicious disease of separation and vestiges of the capacity, however buried, to feel planetary metabolism. Instead of treating eco-anxiety as an emotional “excess” to be flattened again in the name of dissociated normality, let us venture to listen to it as a remnant of an interrupted listening that can be reactivated.
Through Eco-Mythical Activism and Research-Prayer, we can open ourselves to reverent listening, which senses beyond content. This raw presence is a living testimony of reconnection. The mythical imagination, in this context, is not an escape, but a language of reconnection, fertilizing the ecological body, ancestors, and pluricosmos, today reduced to a psychological symptom.
Modernity fragments the body, silences emotions, and guts the planet, making feeling something to be corrected or controlled. For its part, Eco-Mythical Activism recalls myth as the guardian of knowledge and practices that kept listening alive before being pushed into eco-symbolic exile. Weaving a shared space of fermentation where one can sing, narrate, dance, and pray the collapse, not to ward it off, but to be in it with dignity. The praxis of Research-Prayer intertwines attention and devotion, fertilizing listening beyond instrumental logic. Not to “solve” the malaise, but to transform it into living matter of connection.
Validating these emotions as legitimate, even if they arise late and with privilege, is to invite them out of the individual register of the modern corset. They become fertile when welcomed into a broader relational web, where grief and myth dance together, opening space for new forms of belonging and commitment to the planetary metabolism. Validating what one feels is opening up to a movement of overflowing beyond the individual self.
Because just feeling is not enough, but it is a starting point for a deeper commitment to planetary metabolism. We accept the invitation to continuous practices of reverent listening and mythical imagination as ways of living and dying within the transformations underway. May we let mourning speak to the Earth, and may the Earth speak to us, in a language we have forgotten, but which lives in our bones.
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Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.
Love this post Sofia. Actually all human communes and communities everywhere have developed significant resources and approaches to grieving, so it is not actually such a remote or implausible idea. The modern West with an infantile obsession with yourhful sexuality - a promise usually not delivered or else delivered in dark ways - chooses to deny the existence or role of real connections to other beings - human and more-than-human, and of grief.....connections to places, landscapes are replaced by the utterly predictable look of the MacDonald, Starbucks or Citibank - wherever you travel.