Becoming as Praxis
Bee and flower illustration, Morimoto Toko.
Happy final day of Gregory’s calendar!
If you are the kind of person that likes to reflect at specific times of the year, At the End of a Cycle might be right up your ally. It’s my personal method of taking stock, though these days I often skip the first two sections and go straight to the letter writing. I love letter writing! Which you could do as well—the guide isn’t meant to be prescriptive but supportive, suggestive, and most importantly fun.
Here in San Francisco the last few weeks have been unexpectedly fruitful. Not through any volition on my end, the days just seem to have agendas of their own. The day god and the place god, doing their thing.
It's nice when things finally come together. When long pockets of confusion clear and you realize the path was there all along. I especially like it because it takes me a rather long time to get my mind around something, let alone express it. During which there is a lot of self-doubt, grimacing, floundering, and shrugging of shoulders. And jokes, lots of jokes.
Confusion for me feels like a tumble of sensations, thoughts, and images that feel individually resonant but simultaneously isolated, like the lone house at the end of a cul-de-sac. And these isolated things have to jumble around and knock into each other a billion times before, click! The knowing happens.
Some what's been jumbling around: consciousness, emergence, somatics, time, ecology, poetry, divinity, language, mysticism, dreams, non-dual stuff, imaginal practices, and relationality.
At the turn of the century I lived in New Orleans for a spell, an old fancy house in the Garden District. In the wee hours of Mardi Gras morning I woke to an otherwordly tune, ostensibly coming from one of the early krewes making their way to the French Quarter. But when I looked out my window there was nothing. No bands, no floats, just empty streets. Nothing that might reveal the identity of these mysterious musicians. I think that was the first time I really listened. Not with my ears, but my entire being. Present, open, and luminous. Woven directly into the fabric of reality, dense and transparent, receiving and participating.
These things that are jumbling around, each comes to me like my mystery Mardi Gras song. A quick catch of the breath, a punctuated moment of focus, just enough to say hey, pay extra attention here. And I do, for as long as I can, until everything goes back to jumbling around. This happens with books, teachers, music, images, offerings, recipes, poems, and dreams (to name a few). Each appearing at just the right time with a whisper of affirmation, enough to push things a little farther, and then back to the jumble.
When I was home visiting my folks for Thanksgiving in November, I told Papa Mignolo that I wanted to work on a dissertation, but without enrolling in a PhD program. I want to do deep work, but from what I can tell I am not cut out for academic writing, my research interests are heavy on praxis, and I don’t want to become a professor. So why not craft a research practice outside the hallowed halls of institutional life?
Ever the professor, he asked me for my research statement. 🙃
A few days ago I spent an entire morning organizing a giant folder (four years worth) of PDFs. Which, until recently, had been living in my downloads folder in reverse-chronological order. I knew the work would be mindless, but it also felt important, so I made a cup of coffee and surrendered to the task. About halfway through, everything started coming together. All those things jumbling around came together like Voltron. By the end of the day, I sent my dad a research statement:
“My research explores listening as an embodied practice of attunement through which humans might rediscover our place within the living world. Following Gebser’s analysis of perspectival consciousness as a force of “deworlding,” I investigate how deep listening practices—supported through somatic awareness, dialogue, and careful work with psychedelics—might contribute to the emergence of aperspectival consciousness. This work examines how humans, through sustained attention to local ecologies, dreamworlds, relationality, and fundamental consciousness, can become transversal intensifiers of sympoietic arrangements. The aim is not simply to engage with the more-than-human world, but to participate in a fundamental reworlding that transforms human consciousness and our mode of belonging within Earth's living systems.”
It’s not perfect, but it captures the light in my heart and gets me excited to do the work I do each day. And I’m sharing this here because this is the becoming. Which I had been gesturing towards all along but hadn’t quite figured out. Until now. I'm still crafting what this non-institutional dissertation-ish thing looks like, which I'll share when I have more clarity.
If this resonates with you, please stick around! And if it totally isn’t your jam, that’s cool too. The unsubscribe link is right below (and I rarely check subscriber numbers so I won’t know if you do!).
See you in 2025,
Andi