Crack Flowers #7 🌼
Stories to Rewild our Worldviews, Minds, Hearts & Cultures
'You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you. - Isadora Duncan'
Have you ever fallen in love with a crack flower? A courageous little being that flips the finger to our concrete world, breaks a crack in the concrete wall and against all mechanistic odds flourishes. She refuses to be sentenced to death by a species obsessed with creating hostile environments hell-bent on disconnecting life. Crack flowers are stubborn, strong and courageous, no concrete strong enough to shut them down.
With Crack Flowers I am seeking, gathering and sharing perspectives and stories holding the potential to shift horizons. These stories invite you to question your lens, methodology, language, knowledge, myths, facts and beliefs.
Crack Flowers sprout at the edges, unapologetically burst into our lives and are nurtured by unexpected love. Did you spot a colourful flower cracking through a vast sea of grey concrete? Drop me a message and share her with the Shifting Horizons Community in the next Crack Flowers edition.
Sometimes I wonder how quickly I will run out of things to write about when cooped up in an office. Travelling introduces me constantly to the unknown, unexpected and surprising. Even if I wrote an essay per day for the rest of my life I would have just begun to make a dent. I accepted that I am not writing for dent-making. I write to you because I hope to nurture a shared dreaming willingness, questioning capacity, language, playfulness and surprisability, where we can relate, break down, (un)learn, heal, dismantle, imagine and hold space.
In the last couple weeks, most of my writing happened in a half-fallen-apart red journal full of cute and slightly odd stickers. The poor notebook is constantly either covered in sand, slightly wet from my commute through the river or both. The abundance of Crack Flowers in Rio De Janeiro guided me back to my laptop and this newsletter series.
#1 ➡️ How do you say “Go”?
The ways we communicate, give directions, sense-make and navigate are shaped by our language, worldviews and what we consider vital capacities to develop. We are descendants of a species with excellent navigation skills, deep knowledge of the environment, and a multigenerational understanding of the way of the rivers, the clouds and the seasons.
Now… For the time we check our digital watches. For directions, there is Google Maps. Even with Google Maps until a year ago we had to, at least place ourselves in our surroundings, and figure out where to go. Not anymore. Now you just point your camera and follow the arrow. Handy for sure, in the short term, when you are rushing to the train station in an unfamiliar city. In the long term? Not so much. With every tool, the wall between us and our innate nature-centric capacities is built up higher. Without intentionally grounding in and connecting to the land we live in we are not just losing our ability to navigate without artificial support but our capacity to care with intuition and understanding.
”For example, the preferred way to say “go” in Tuvan refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current. They keep track of that information as they’re moving around the landscape. When I once hosted a Tuvan friend in Manhattan, he asked me, “Where’s the river?” So I took him to the west side of Manhattan and showed him one of the rivers. And he took note of it, so he could use the Tuvan topographic verbs properly in New York City.
If the majority of conversations happening around you are about the environment, you start caring about that. For example, Tuvans have a word, ий, pronounced “ee,” which means the short side of a hill. This is a very important concept, because you want to avoid the steep side of the hill if you’re walking, riding a horse, or herding your flock of goats. Once I learned the name for it, I began to look for it. But until the language provides you with this concept, you’re just oblivious to it. Learning these nature-centric concepts in the language makes you see the environment differently.”
Q/A with Environmental Linguist David Harrison - Interview by Katarina Zimmer
#2 BodyMindfulness 🧘🏾♂️
When you reflect on meditation and mindfulness what are you drawn towards? Upwards towards the brain, or inwards to the wholeness of your body? For a long time, I have understood mindfulness as the practice of ‘training’ a calm, focused state of mind. In these approaches, we were invited to always keep bringing our minds back to counting the breath. They never asked, where the breath goes, or where it comes from. Who does it connect you with, inwards and outwards? What's your body doing, feeling, knowing whilst we are focussing on mindfulness up in our brains?
"Somatic mindfulness is informed by one very simple observation: the mind is distracted but the body is not. The body is not thinking or ruminating. It is just feeling and being present, aware, and vibrant. In other words: the body is already mindful."
Willa Blythe Baker, The Wakeful Body
"The embodiment journey is lifelong, as Dr. McBride will tell you. Many of us will be forever learning to ask our bodies questions in order to listen better."
Kaitlin B. Curtice, Living Resistance
The Wakeful Body - Willa Blythe Baker
Living Resistance, Kaitlin B. Curtice
#3 The Lone Wolf Myth 🐺
“In the West, many of us have been raised to be lone wolves. We have been fed the lie of alpha dominance, the notion that we must vie for our place in the pack. It’s ingrained in us that we are each here to make our individual marks and achieve our individual dreams. Even those of us with shared goals—such as ecological conservation—have been led to believe that individual action is the only way to get there. This is largely thanks to inventions like the conscious consumer (the idea that we can shop our way out of this mess) and the personal carbon footprint (popularized by an insidious and effective PR campaign by BP in the early aughts), which have kept us distracted from focusing on the real culprits and the systematic change required.” Willow Defebauch - Part of the pack: debunking the lone wolf myth
European and American cultures have many folkloric myths and campfire stories villainizing animals. Lone wolves, roaring lions and vicious sharks are likely to call vivid images of dangerous predators to mind. This myth was debunked by scientists decades ago after recognizing the previous research was grounded in observations of wolves in captivity. Who understandably behaved very differently than when they were in their natural environment.
“Wolf families are well-disciplined and are generally headed by a female and her mate in a supportive leadership role (frequently referred to by biologists as an “alpha” pair). Finding food is a priority, but at its heart, the task is driven by the imperative to maintain protection and care for the group and their young. Raising children is Wolf social glue.” The Evolved Nest, Darcia Narvaez, PhD
“A group of wolves is not a snarling aggregation of fighting beasts, each bent on fending only for itself, but a highly organized group of related individuals or family units, all working together in a remarkably amiable, efficient manner.” - 'Haber and Holleman, Among Wolves'
“We are never alone. We are wolves howling to the same moon.”
- Atticus
Sweden’s Big Five Website is a beautiful collection of stories and statistics that make you reconsider your view of wildly misunderstood and villainized wild predator animals like the grey wolf. They shared a fact by the Forensic Science International/Eurostat that I never considered and made me rearrange my understanding of wolves and dogs.
“Domestic dogs tend to in reality be far more dangerous to humans than wolves are. The number of EU citizens killed by dogs from 1995 to 2016 was estimated at 827, according to Forensic Science International/Eurostat.”
Whilst the number of documented lethal wolf attacks are extremely low and only seem to occur in extreme and unnatural circumstances .
Willow Defebauch ends his article with a beautiful reflection.
“Much like wolves, we are social creatures. As the trials of the last decade have made all too clear, we need each other—now more than ever before. And our strength is in numbers; as activism has proven time and time again, together we can accomplish what would be impossible alone. So, instead of tearing each other apart, what would it look like for us to protect and care for one another as a community? To raise, rather than raze, each other at every turn? Maybe our fascination with wolves is a yearning for that feeling of family, a longing for a remembrance lost: that we are all part of the same pack.” Willow Defebauch
Why is the lone wolf myth so strong? Who is it benefiting? What if, we are truly more like wolves? How will this change the ways we show up to each other and our environment?
Let’s amplify stories that rewild our minds and hearts together.
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🖋️ Articles holding the potential to
Shift Horizons
Listening and the Crisis of Inattention - An Interview with David G. Haskell
Indigenous languages are founts of environmental knowledge - Katarina Zimmer
📚 Books I am (re)reading
The Artist’s Way Workbook - Julia Cameron
Small Arcs of Larger Circles - Nora Bateson
Bitch - Lucy Cooke
The Continuum Concept - Jean Liedloff
The Wakeful Body - Willa Blythe Baker
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery