Working in the Margins of our Movements

Turning Towards Subversive Spiritualities During the Decolonial Turn

We are in a collective moment here in the States where we can feel ourselves in history. We don’t know what the shape of things will look like yet. There’s a lot we can predict and there’s a lot we have no ability to prepare for. We are angry, grieving, blaming, scared, avoiding feeling, minimizing, catastrophizing, organizing, and waiting to see what happens. We are all trying to figure out next steps in whatever way we best know how to figure out next steps. And this is a current that’s been flowing. There is a current of change happening that predates the second Trump election and will continue flowing as power transfers over and over again within the imperial core until it crumbles.

As we figure out how to orient ourselves in this time, I find myself looking at a 500-year-old struggle -colonialism and the perpetuation of coloniality- and noticing some positions we might take that some of us in the West haven’t taken before. Alternative vantage points can potentially help us to create something new. This is emergent. This requires deep listening and shape-shifting and a commitment to standing in our integrity as our responsibilities shift and evolve. If we can step back and take in a whole picture of the Capitalist Hydra -to borrow language from the Zapatismo movement- the Hydra having many heads including imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, racism, etc. which regenerate if cut off- we can see the centuries old battle between the Hydra and those on the ground with swords (Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016). What if we used a different instrument? What if we approached in a different way? What if instead of running straight towards, we worked in the margins?

In this paper I will illustrate the rhythm of the struggle, invite us to live into other ways of being through more animistic lifeways, explore how a widened sense of perception and connection can deepen our communication with the unseen world, and show us some existing pathways we can align ourselves with.

Circumnavigating Centripetal Force

There is a rhythm to the way we respond to crises within our change movements. It’s something we can track. A flashpoint, a groundswell, some truly incredible organizing and changework, a settling, and then another flashpoint and there we are again having to respond to crisis (James, 2024). It’s a centripetal force that continues to pull us in towards an entanglement at the center, even as we’re fighting our way to move forward. From within this vortex, we can’t see that we are being manipulated into particular movements, it feels natural. But from the outside, we can see how the movement of the vortex -the Hydra- is influencing the movements of those within it. In other words, from within the struggle, we may not clearly see how we are being pushed, pulled, or moved into specific actions. From outside of it, perhaps we can break the spell and find our footing.

While we are in a political flashpoint, we are also in a wider moment of what decolonial scholars call the decolonial turn; a position that encompasses many areas of study all in agreement that ongoing coloniality is a fundamental issue in our age, and that decolonization or decolonial work needs to be our focus in this time (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). This is a time that is not only ripe for the dismantling of the systems of oppression we live under, but also a window where our ability to create new worlds and align ourselves with other ways of being is incredibly potent.

The system expects and encourages dissent and pushback and has mechanisms in place to deal with it (James, 2024). This isn’t to say we should abandon all activism and organizing, which are different, but is an invitation to widen our aperture. What happens if we get curious about our strategies? What do we see if we look at the history of movement work and its outcomes? What if how we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?

Finding the Fluidity

As we look at the rhythms of the natural world, including the rhythms of the body, we see that pushing up against resistance often creates more bracing and more resistance. Something we see in bodywork, as well as in somatic therapy, is that if a practitioner dives right into the center of a resistant knot and challenges it, or puts pressure on it, the resistance doubles down on itself and becomes even more constricted, even more of a pain point, and even less accessible. The constriction protects itself from dissolution in this way. Instead, practitioners can work around the point of constriction. We can work in the surrounding area, connecting with soft tissue and any availability fluidity in the body and encourage it to move towards the point of constriction. Gradually, with enough time and enough trust, this fluidity -or aliveness- begins to reach the pain point and a sense of movement and buoyancy returns.

Assemblage theory teaches us that an assemblage is a complex system composed of different elements that come together to function as a whole (James, 2024). The key here is that the parts are independent from each other and maintain their own distinguishing features, but when they come together, they form something synergistic, dynamic, and new. The co-created new thing happens because of the coming together, not because of any individual contribution. An assemblage is ongoing and always changing rather than a static intervention. The body is an assemblage. A forest is an assemblage. Perhaps humans too can learn to behave as an assemblage.

If we can resist the temptation or instinct to fight systems directly, to dive right into the center of it, we can become aware of alternative energies -land spirits, elemental beings, ancestors, descendants, primordial emergences- waiting to be listened to and brought into the co-creation of something new. This “something new” is informed by indigenous technologies of deep listening, respect for the autonomy of earth beings, reciprocity and right relationship, and recognition of interconnectivity. These are lifeways inherent to intact cultures and all beings if we can learn to listen. Whatever it is that we co-create gets to be both informed by the old and inherent as it meets the specific shape of the present.

Subversive Spirituality

Subversive spirituality speaks to connecting with temporarily forgotten or buried knowledges, including cultural and ritual practices, and relational ontologies with what Frederique Apffel-Marglin calls “earth others” (Apffel-Marglin, 2020). Earth others are the beings that are other-than-human. The beings we ignore in the West in favor of human exceptionalism. Earth others include plants, animals, elements, elemental spirits, ancestors, deities, and spirits of land and place.

These are ideas and lifeways that have been historically cast aside by Western modernity and deemed superstitious or overly-mystical, a projection of spirit or consciousness onto dead matter; only recently have these ideas come into more validity in certain academic disciplines (James & Lorenz, 2021). To me, this is evidence of a shifting tide. The beginning of a shift in consciousness that is allowing us to remember some of our ancestral and intrinsic ways of being. If we can continue to widen our sensory and perceptive skills, we can tap back into a sense of our communal unconscious which includes beings both human and nonhuman, both living and dead, and in material, spirit, or energetic form (Bynum, 1999).

As our consciousness shifts and widens to re-include communication with the Earth, elemental beings, and ancestral spirits we are invited into the co-creation of a new way of being. One that exists outside the confines of modernity and where we can be in collaborative weaving alongside the beings we walk with. This reweaving can only happen if there is active participation between the human and nonhuman through ritual acts (James & Lorenz, 2021). If we can be in a practice of sentipensando con la tierra, or thinking/feeling with the earth, we re-engage with the rhythm of life and can learn, and take direction from, forms of knowledge held by beings the West has deemed no longer relevant; those whose experiences are no longer legible (Escobar, 2016). The subversive aspect of this is that this transition into a more pluriversal and relational way of being is so outside of the narrow scope of what’s considered to be possible within Western ontological frameworks that it’s unthinkable and unimaginable from the perspective of Eurocentric/Western thought and theory (Escobar, 2016). This can happen, and is happening, right under their noses. Those locked into the dying paradigm don’t have the sensory or perceptive skills to comprehend this kind of world-building.

Relational Reciprocality

Frederique Apffel-Marglin writes about this kind of world-building as a “carefully orchestrated communication and co-creation or co-making not only between humans but between humans and earth others” (2020). We can understand this kind of relational world-building as our responsibility. It gifts us a kind of intentional way of moving that offers intrinsic agency and respect to all beings in the co-collaborative effort towards this kind of ritual enactment of new worlds. Apffel-Marglin shares an example of this kind of co-creation with Amazonian Dark Earth. Amazonian Dark Earth is an anthropogenic soil, co-created between Amerindian people and earth others, containing bits of broken ceramics and biochar, or kind of charcoal with reduced oxygen levels, discovered in the whole of the Amazon basin by archeologists- the oldest strata of it dating back to 8500 years ago. The incredible thing about this soil is that it is still fertile, despite the fact that the civilization that created this soil –or the civilization created by this soil- died out about 500 years ago after Spanish invasion in the early 16^th century.

Apffel- Marglin speaks about how “earth others reciprocally affect each other” in an act of co-animation (2020). With an understanding that Amerindian people didn’t share the view we have in the West of human-exceptionalism, we can see this kind of co-animation in action through a process of offering bits of pottery to the spirit of the soil. This relational and reciprocal act is a show of respect for earth beings; and as the earth eats or drinks, so do the humans (Apffel-Marglin, 2020). While many of the publications about Amazonian Dark Earth don’t consider this act of reciprocal offering as a reason for the broken pottery that makes up so much of this rich soil, we can clearly see that this soil was made from kinship, a call and response, and a co-creation between Amerindian humans and earth others.

I share this example because it takes these concepts out of the realm of theory, for Westerners just beginning to be curious about other ways of being, and into the realm of ritual, enaction, and ensoilment. An important takeaway from this relationship between the Amerindians and the soil is that the humans didn’t have a top-down expectation that they were going to create soil so fertile it was still thriving even after 500 years of non-use. The deep listening and respect for the agency of the soil engenders a practice of offering, in this case pottery, which over time created something rich, specific, and life-giving for the entire ecosystem. This isn’t a ritual act that can simply be replicated, because it stems from an ability to deeply sentipensar. The cultivation of this skill and way of being in relationship with the world is, in large part, what is going to help us co-create new worlds.

The Body as a Site of Remembrance

As we begin to shift our consciousness and widen our perception to include the more-than-human, it’s crucial to know who we walk with or which beings we are in relationship with (Alexander, 2005). Which spirits? Which elemental beings? Which ancestors? If we don’t know who we walk with, we can’t properly listen. If I enacted the ritual of giving pottery to the soil of the mountain I live on, like the Amerindians, I would be performing a gesture without being in conversation with the spirits of this particular place –a place which just so happens to want wood ash and seashells- it wouldn’t be reciprocal. This isn’t to say we have to name or know everything in the Western way of siloed categories, we lose possibility and interconnectivity when we do that, but it is to say that to build relationship we must recognize the agency and intentionality of the beings we walk with.

To do this, we may first have to admit to ourselves that we don’t yet know how to do it; we must inhabit a space of not-knowing and allow information or communication to bubble up. From here, we can begin to understand the body as a site of communication; we can begin to know it as a medium for spirit (Alexander, 2005). By deeply inhabiting the body, we can receive impressions of communication such as imagery, symbol, sensation, emotion, gesture, impulse, memory, and the presence of non-human beings both alive and in spirit form. We can reject the notion of the mind-body split and feel ourselves as a thread in a vast, earthy, intertemporal tapestry constantly being affected by the elements around us and affecting them in turn. Our bodies are constantly communicating with each other through intercorporeal pathways, just as plants and trees communicate and send resources through underground mycelial networks (James & Lorenz, 2021).

From this understanding, we can honor the body as a site of ancestral remembrance, collective consciousness, elemental and spiritual communication, and a vessel that both affects and is affected by the ecosystems we are embedded in. Here, the body is no longer a commodity, but an entanglement, a site for memory, a becoming. Embodiment, when practiced within this context, becomes a pathway to spiritual, ecological, and ancestral knowledge.

Suzzane Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest speaks about how mother trees, or highly connected hub trees, pass on carbon and nitrogen to their seedlings which act as a form of protection and assurance of their survival (Simard, 2021). They do this when threat is imminent, if another tree is struggling, and upon their own deaths through the mycelial network under the ground. This is an unseen act. These mother trees understand that they are repositories of knowledge, of genealogical information, and pass that knowledge on to their kin as they die. Not only is this a call to protect our old growth forests and their knowledge transmissions, but it is also an insight into a previously unknowable-to-the-Western-eye network of care. One we can learn from as humans and replicate through acts of, say, mutual aid- but more interestingly, we can see that there is an ancestral or intergenerational technology of knowledge sharing between the bodies of trees; who is to say we do not also have this technology?

I believe this is part of the work of remembering. Honoring the body as a site of praxis and a repository of knowledge. It is here that sacred knowledge is accessed. It is here that we affect and are affected. It is through the body that this kind of non-verbal communication is received and reciprocated, and where we might find the unspoken knowledge passed down to us through our ancestors upon their deaths.

Rejection and Re-Membering

What I’m introducing here may not be easily accessible. Especially for those of us who may benefit in some ways under the systems we’re under. Especially when we’ve been conditioned to believe that much of what I’m speaking to in the above sections aren’t “real” and that it’s “primitive” to think so. That language is on purpose, these ways have been othered and outlawed and words like this demean the power of these ways of being. What’s needed is an abject rejection of the Capitalist Hydra, which includes fundamentally getting to understand it, and a shifting of consciousness away from modernism and human exceptionalism into relationship with land, our bodies, the animate spirit in all beings, and truly understanding interconnectedness; in this lifetime but also ancestrally and through into our future generations. This is a tall order. This isn’t as simple as going out to the woods to connect with a tree- although I certainly advise doing that as a starting point. This is learning to cultivate perceptive skills we’ve been taught to ignore. This is trusting what we sense in a world that tells us not to be too sensitive. Here, we get to lean into hapticality, connected with kin and land- a position that’s inherently disruptive, emergent, and revolutionary (James & Lorenz, 2021). For many of us, this goes against everything we’ve been taught about how to stay safe and within the good graces of perceived authority figures who will grant us access, success, or safety if we stay in line. This work is necessarily confronting without the satisfying charge of running into battle or the sweet anesthetic of hoping someone comes to save us.

Conclusion

If we can step outside of the vortex and find ways to connect and strategize in a different and deeper way, perhaps through subversive spiritualities, suddenly the rhythm shifts. Now the motion, rather than encircling and moving in and being expelled out, gets to be a going under, going below, co-creating relationship and following new tributaries shown to us from el rio abajo del rio, the river under the river, the ever-present spark of life and collective unconscious. Perhaps from this vantage point, we can rise together with the more-than-human in an emergent assemblage of something we haven’t seen before. Perhaps it bears resemblance to something our ancestors have known. Perhaps it’s something they and the earth others dream of. We get to be in the incubation of the unknown here, with the support of beings not previously recognized as having agency here in the West.

I’ll leave you briefly with a concept that’s been bringing me a sense of direction lately. In Celtic Cosmology, there are “thin places” on Earth that act as a sort of portal into the Otherworld. Here, the Otherworld is easily accessed, and information is exchanged fluidly. Places can be thin, but time can be thin too. We see this at certain times in the year, but also in particular epochs where rapid change is happening. I believe this is a thin time. A time for moving slowly, belly to the ground, listening and sensing for next steps rather than rushing to what is already known.

May we build networks of support between ourselves, our kin, the places our feet are planted, and the more-than-human beings waiting for us to turn towards them. May we learn to work in the margins of our movements as we build towards something new.

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References

Alexander, J. (2005). Pedagogies of the sacred: making the invisible tangible. Pedagogies of Crossing. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386988-011

Apffel-Marglin, F. (2020). Co-creating commons with earth others: Decolonizing the mastery of nature. Mester, 49(1). https://doi.org/10.5070/m3491046314

Bynum, E. B. (1999). The African unconscious: Roots of ancient mysticism and modern psychology. Cosimo Books.

Escobar, A. (2016). Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South. AIBR, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 11(1), 11–32. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.110102e

James, S. (2024). Transitions: what could we do differently? [In class lecture]. Pacifica Graduate Institute, DPC 730.

James, S., & Lorenz, H. (2021). Do your first works over. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 57(4), 319–335. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22118

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016). Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality. Frantz Fanon Fondation. https://www.fondation-frantzfanon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/maldonado-torres_outline_of_ten_theses-10.23.16.pdf

Simard, S. (2022). Finding the mother tree: Discovering the wisdom of the Forest. Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Sixth Commission of the EZLN. (2016). Critical thought in the face of the capitalist hydra: I: contributions by the sixth commission of the EZLN. Sixth Commission of the EZLN.