Interbeing

We are woven into relationships as a fundamental reality of life. The trees release exactly the substance that we need to breath in order to survive. We exhale exactly the nourishment the trees need in return. The first thing we do when we are born is drink in this life giving substance from the plants, and the last thing we do upon dying is exhale our breath that the plants drink in. We are woven together in kinship with trees and all plant life of Earth.

We are part of a participatory web of relationships. We resonate with one another, we ripple and catch fire together. Suffering and joy is not solitary; through our mirror neurons, through our sensitive nervous systems, what is happening for one part of the whole ripples through all other aspects - much like the wind rippling through the leaves of a tree, much like the mycorrhizal networks in the humus of Earth rippling with intelligence traveling between the trees. All the trees in a forest belong to one another. All beings of Earth belong to one another. As the Cree Elders teach us all, 'Wâhkôhtowin,' we are all related, we are all relatives woven together, all elements of Earth are kin and we are part of that collective family.

We can tend our collective through the ways that we live our own lives, rippling through relations with everyone around us. We can care for the whole through the movements we create in our own sphere of relatedness.

Collective Disconnection from Earth as collective trauma

Many humans around the world have been impacted by colonial culture that has taught embedded practices of domination, domination of Land by humans, domination of white Western Europeans over Indigenous communities, Black folk, and people of colour around the world - extracting wealth from the Land and from communities and countries of colour through exploitation and enslavement. Domination of women, nonbinary, and Trans folks by men and cis folks. Domination of disabled folks, elders, children, neurodivergent folks, by those who hold the power over capacity.

Colonial culture has created hierarchies of belonging and exclusion, among people, between people and other animals, between people and Land. This culture of domination centers mind as separate from body, positioning body and Earth as places to be controlled by humans, especially male, white, wealthy, cis, folk. This culture of domination is insidious and has caused harm through time and around the world.

The resulting separation in our relations with one another and with Earth as a living being who we are part of: this is collective trauma. We carry this collective trauma in our bodies, in our embodied relations with one another, in our nervous system responses, in our tight and tense muscles, in our held breath, our bracing against gravity, our belief that nature is out there and we are not part of that whole. We carry language that perpetuates this separation naming Earth as It rather than being, referencing Earth as the environment as if it were possible to be separate from the web of life.

This is an injury in our consciousness that supports extractivism and numbs our response to the dangers we face as the Earth life systems are destroyed by human greed and indifference.

Movement Play in the Collective, with Earth and Sky is a pathway for health

Yet, we can actually change culture. We are not simply consumers of culture, we are active participants in how culture moves and shifts and changes. We embody culture and we craft it in each moment of our creative, innovative, and patterned responses to life.

Improvisation helps us find novel ways of relating and conjuring. Collective improvisation allows ancestral wisdom to surface through our bodies that remember, through our embodied intelligence. Play releases our nervous system responses, uncoils where we are bound and braced, where we are contracted and fearful. Improvisational play is freedom, life force, liberation. Movement is life. Movement is sustenance. Movement brings us out of freeze, out of paralysis, out of immobilization, out of perseveration. Improvisational movement play helps us find pathways of collective and personal supple response to life, brings breath moving through us, brings us out into the open spaces to ripple with light, shadow, sound, the touch of the Sky, wind, Earth under feet, the flow of water through us and through the world. We belong as Earth together. Kin. Movement weaves us back into relationship with Earth and Sky.