Participatory Mode of Perception—The Art of Mirroring

Just one week ago, we—a group of humyns—were sitting together with Juniper, Pinon Jay, Black-throated Gray Warbler, Mule Deer, dry and flowing beds of water, Cryptobiotic soil, Humyn, Sandstone, Puma, Owl, and Coyote, encircled by the Colorado Plateau—an exquisite landscape of color and texture shaped by forces of erosion and emergence. We gathered with the community of the life-world to be immersed in the Art of Mirroring with diverse modes of intelligence. There we were, exposed to a relatedness with elemental forces within and beyond our seen-peripheries, and the stories of the ancestors—both humyn and more-than-humyn—weaving our narratives into a tapestry of participatory animism. We wandered through expansive buttes and deep valleys of erosion and sand. Each morning we sat together with the sand, Juniper, and the winged ones, and we were steeped in the infused medicine of silence and song. Like water in a parched desert, the animistic songs and silence seeped into the ancient and new soil of place and soul, while Raven soared the unknown vistas of spring's emergence and Coyote howled into the depths of intersubjectivity.

author, colleen, wandering through sandstone slot canyons carved overtime by elemental forces

Her verdant pulse called me and asked me to step beyond my own self-imposed barriers. I am so grateful to have answered her call, for she nudged me to feel the long-awaited pull of muscle and sinew to hear the stories lying beneath the threshold of consciousness. Saying yes to her awakened my embodied sensorial perception, met my reach with curiosity, vitality, and wonder, and supported me in attuning with a wordless language of inter-species communion that knows the way of sandstone and water in their bones. I feel immense gratitude to have been welcomed by the life-world of this bioregion, for the opportunity to listen with life and be shaped by it, be awakened to love, to attune with rhythms shimmering with aliveness, and be mentored by the seen and unseen stories of deep time relationships with Earth. And I offer sincere gratitude to the fellow humyns who said yes to this experience and opened to the raw beauty of clear seeing—thank you ❤️ 

a perceptual vista into spring in Southern Utah