Con-Spiration: The Joyous Imperative of Community Action
Collective Atmospheres: Air, Intimacy, and Inequality, The Association of the Study for Literature and the Environment, 2025 Biennial Conference
Con-Spiration: The Joyous Imperative of Community Action ASLE, 2025
Join us this Thursday, July 17, 3:30-5:00pm EST
If you are interested in joining our virtual conference portion, please contact me (photo@carajudea.com) and I will send you the Zoom link.
Exploring infrastructures of etheric storytelling, etheric being the nothing that connects everything, my presentation will hopefully instigate counterhegemonic improvisational con-spiratorial dialogues, referring to breathing together, that potentially generate decolonizing, collaborative ecoliteracies. If you feel in-spired by any of the following, please contact me.
Three scenes: please place one hand on your belly, one on your heart/head—notice your inhalations and exhalations as I recall these breathscapes…
Everything moves and breathes together. The pointing of a finger originates in the opposite foot. —Frederick Leboyer, Obstetrician Birth Activist
Scene 1. 2011. In the atmosphere of giving birth, although I find her work tremendously potent, I had a very different experience from Jamieson Webster, author of On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, who writes about an infant’s first breath as a symbol of separation from her mother’s body, “our first independent act.” My birthing experience was also radically different from Anne Dufourmantelle who, in her discussion of Spinoza in Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy, claims: “we were separated in the violence of birth, but apart from that act nothing is separated” (98). I concern myself with these assumptions of separation-at-birth not only as an eco-social activist, writer, analog (and now digital) color photographer, but as a mother who rejected all medical interventions during my pregnancy, labor, and birth of my baby boy, Zazu—an unassisted homebirth on my 40th birthday, April 8, 2011—a few months prior to Occupy Oakland.
(This excerpt from Darian Stansbury’s film, “The History of Women” is of Zazu’s and my glorious two-in-one placenta—a Succenturiate lobe and our umbilical connection).
Zazu’s birth, his body leaving mine, was not a separation—our shared breath amplified our interconnectedness, our discrete borders actually (re)connected us. Reminiscent of Jacques Rancière’s “together apart,” David Suzuki writes: “you and I don’t end at our fingertips or skin—we are connected through air, water, and soil…we are quite literally, air, water, soil, energy, and other living creatures.” Through breath, Zazu and I became our becoming—echoing embryologist Jaap van der Wal: “We are not built from cells; rather we are individual beings using cells to become. …[We] are not the product of cell division; [we] are an organism” (Liz Koch, Stalking Wild Psoas 11, 14). In a Heraclitean sense (Heraclitus was known as the Greek Taoist), birth is an integrated process of transformation, not a definitive severing. Birth embodies con-spiration, a remarkable contraction of union and separation—not of splitting away or a sectioning, but a lived Derridean différance. Our collective becoming-animal embodies the interpenetrations of irreducible difference.
Scene 2. 2005. Running through the Gwangmyeong Seoul train station—my knees buckle, collapse beneath me. In Chinese Traditional Medicine, knees are directly connected with our emotions. Collapsing betrays my grief-response to my 8-year relationship unexpectedly ending. Synergistically, my fellow yoga teachers have invited me to visit the Buddha Mountains: Gyeongju.
The sign reads: “Gyeongju is Breathing.” The Silla people from the first Korean dynasty since the 6th century, say the breath of Buddha dances through these mountains.
I hang onto the banister and pull myself back onto my feet.
The key to me pulling myself together—an Apocalyptic (apocalypse meaning “to reveal”) phrase indicating the vitality of embodied coherence—was a recognition of connection to those beyond myself—an awareness of our collective spiritual intelligence. The bottom line, wave, particle is that we need one another.
Scene 3. 1997. It is my first and only year teaching Restorative Iyengar Yoga at the Stonestown YMCA in San Francisco. In between the neighboring high-impact aerobics-class teacher demanding “KILL THOSE ABS!” through a scratchy microphone and one of my students who every class asks, “What do you mean by ‘breathe?’” I attempt to offer a place of solace, care, and community.
Practice: Jin Shin Jyutsu = thumb press on ring fingernail mudra—an invitation to expand our breath through supporting our lungs
Again, referring to Jamieson Webster’s On Breathing: she offers, “Breath intertwines self, body, the world” and warns against “treating breath as a self-care commodity—‘a means of curing 21st-century alienation.” I have written extensively about the commodification of self-care in the context of our international well-being-industrial complex that includes yoga and relies on “slow-washing.” Frequently expressing a spiritual-bypassing undertone while emphasizing self-reliance, freedom, and solipsism; isolated, hermetically sealed individuals are at the core of this multi-million-dollar industry. Again, thriving in contradiction: congruent with breath that joins the individual and the social/ the private with the public/ the micro with the macro, the word yoga means to yoke, to join. Through individual breath as collective air, the both/and supersedes hierarchical erasure of difference.
2025, yet again, is the time to reclaim our civil rights to the collective act of breathing; breathing uncontaminated air. Playing with collective-creative risk taking, my pedagogical-personal presentation explores our epigenetic potential to conspire counternormativity. Conspire means to breathe together. Our body is made up of 100 trillion cells that are continually dying and being reborn—and a billion chemical changes occurring among these cells every second. Given our stupefyingly phenomenal inherent communal nature, how can we possibly consider breath outside of a collective act, a shared vulnerability, a shared atmosphere? “The air we breathe one moment will be breathed by someone else the next and has been breathed by someone else before. We exist as respiring, pulsating organisms within a sea of life-serving beings” (M. C. Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989: 39).
As Radical Symbiosis, breathing together manifests in myriad field of possibilities. Cultivating our collective atmosphere of kindness, Dobrosphera with Alena Maslova is one way. This atmosphere pulsates with bearing witness. In his Hope on a Tightrope, Cornel West declares: “To be human you must bear witness to justice. Justice is what love looks like in public…” (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2008, 181, cf. 210). Similarly, in his interview in Ann Daly’s Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture, Bill T. Jones shares his choreographic process, he says: “I never had a clean slate where I could feel that I owned anything, so everything has to be fought for. Therefore, everything [I] made somehow had to bear witness to the struggle” (Daly interview Jones 73).
In Non-Violent Communication (NVC) Marshall Rosenberg’s community-based practice that focuses on empathy and promoting cooperative processes that meet peoples’ needs, being seen is considered a basic need, like water, shelter, air to breathe. For those who have been emotionally, physically, sexually abused, having those experiences be recognized is essential in the healing process—healing as transformation, composting, in the vein of my friend and colleague, Bayo Akomolafe. See my “Healing From Healing: There is no recovery…” The subject’s (I am explicitly choosing the term subject over victim) abusive experience being denied, ignored, dismissed, belittled by others (family, friends, etc.) often has more long-lasting debilitating implications than the abuse itself. We are relational beings.
Elaine Scarry (ASLE’s 2020 Keynote) writes of our desire to share beauty: the fluff of a baby animal, a streak of red, an ancient memory of texture (my versions of beauty). It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people (3). See my series based on Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just.
The Tantricas believe that everything exists in pulsations—what they call spandas— infinitely conspiring (breathing together) through expansion and contraction. Inhalation and exhalation are embedded within one another; the other is contained within each. Milan Kundera writes: “People like to say: Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 234). Every day we navigate through concealment and revelation. Apocalypse (meaning to reveal) exposes horror in relation to beauty.
Collective witnessing of these intimacies is an act of con-spiration. Collective witnessing requires the Apocalyse. The Apocalypse unveils the Ob-scene, the off-stage, the hidden systems that splinter and suffocate the possibility of coherent communities. See my Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
We seem to be collectively holding our breath as warnings abound.
See “Confusion as a State of Grace: Climate and Kinship in 2021- The Shame Sham ~’Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires,’” my article that distinguishes between submitting to fraudulent, corporate guilt tactics that blame the individual and acknowledging the power in collective-creative risk taking.
As we veer away from blaming and shaming the individual, we must simultaneously embolden the individual. Ancient Greeks wielded the term parrhesia—free, fearless speech. Speech requires breath. The cost of speaking out alone compared to creative coalitional risk-taking through a collective voice is monumental—especially for parents. The cost of the individual speaking out without a community too often leads to officially-sanctioned suffocation—i.e., censorship and self-censorship. Being a parent in the 21st century offers a searing example of our asthmatic culture. In the face of what I call petroleum parenting, the torturous irony of Zazu’s name refers to movement—for example, social movements as a collective practice (in contrast to isolated futile efforts to shift our societal norms).
Marcus Rediker’s enchanting The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist describes Lay as a prophet who practiced parrhesia: “As a man ahead of his time, without a social movement to support his radical views, he exercised the power of the dissident individual who challenged a regime of power” (92). See my Lilith Refuses the Anthropocene: What My Mother Taught Me. However, Lay’s community mocked and exiled him as he spent his life trying to dismantle the institution of slavery sustained within his hypocritical Quaker communities. The Apocalypse-as-Revelation was central to Lay’s imperative.
Similarly, in my West African Backfire! The Art of Apocalyptic Parenting, con-spiration is my imperative.
The story is terribly raw because it demonstrates the precarity of a mother without a collective (me, not just in W. Africa, but submerged in modernity and Western civilization). Given the intersection between commodity fetishism, Western imperialism, and cultural anthropology, I see this piece as an anarchist theater of the absurd (my personal challenges with my son in a “foreign” situation in the context of the political—virulent coercive normalcies). …I hope I can position my vulnerability as a kind of manifesto—a call to action for parents to collectively break through interlocking hegemonies (ranging from petroleum parenting, compulsory education, consumer capitalism, land ownership, habituated obedience/ complicity-disguised-as- entrepreneurship). My story is not about “me,” but the quantum entanglement of “we.”
In 1981, Toni Morrison declared: “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers’ movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.” My dear friend and colleague, biologist Scott Gilbert asserts the criticality of teamwork, the radical impact of symbiotic relationships. Tibetan Shambhala Buddhism asserts that in order to experience the depths of one’s spiritual potentials, one cannot go on a journey alone; one must practice within a community (even if that community consists of simply one other person—reminiscent of Chavruta meaning “fellowship” in Hebrew). Vanessa Andreotti beautifully describes how an individual heart cannot bear the overwhelm of social injustices on its own. Andreotti illustrates the exquisite power of ancestral teachings of collectivizing the heart in which a communal pain is somaticized through ritual and ceremony—spiritual technologies echoing conspiration.
My individual body reflects multiple social bodies with which I daily come in contact (directly/locally and indirectly/globally). Amid these aching ethical struggles, I have had to face the fact that none of these commitments will have any lasting validity unless other parents and community members practice an embodiment of their ecological ethics. The strain on parent-child relationships that results from not having supportive peers who are raising their children with similar values can be devastating. Teaching and learning alone not only potentially debilitates nonconformist families but contributes to the destruction of our planet earth.
Infrastructures that appear inevitable in modernity, Western Civilization, industrial-waste consumer culture are not. I repeat with as much grace as I can muster—infrastructures that we take for granted as much as we take for granted each breath we breathe—are not inevitable. Reminiscent of Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, in which she writes: “You're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic” (88), I practice and parent alternatives to the reality that consumers are capitalism. My life-passion commitment is central to con-spiring divergent realities. Rather than being real with our radical self-accountability-as-collective action, the solipsistic obsession embedded in our car culture (one of tsunami-converging hegemonies) is rooted in the illusion of individual choice—as if the breath of the individual is self-contained.
Car-culture mentality parallels the medical-industrial complex. One example of the devastating impacts of confining breath to an individual body was the global response to COVID. Pulmonary deaths were exponentially acerbated by intubating patients. Hooking them onto invasive hospital ventilators was presumed to be life-saving treatment. However, doctors later realized that intubation led to prolonged ventilator dependence and could reduce a patient’s chance of survival. The misdirected and misinformed preoccupation with acquiring ventilators funneled our hopes into industrial technology. Instead of recognizing the “necessity of mutual care” (Webster, On Breathing), focusing on our interdependency, we fixated on machines to fix us.
These questions offer very different meanings when we frame them within a sensibility of “we” rather than “I.” Several years ago during one of Bayo’s teachings, a student/participant who proudly identified as defiantly autistic announced their (our) pronouns as we/us. Since then, as a practice of embodying hospitality, welcoming the stranger within—I, too identify as we/us.
Similarly, in her delightfully provocative Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances, my colleague Catherine Keller writes about the vitality of “apocalyptic mindfulness.” She incites us with histories of the Diggers, Levelers, Seekers, Quakers, Ranters, and Shakers such as Ann Lee, the feminist Shaker who used Friend as a Pronoun. Sharon Betcher states: “In the refraction of one moment, the Friend apocalyptically unveils the bindings of gender binaries.” See my discussion of friendship as collaboration that overcomes the private/public divide in the context of Nietzsche, Derrida, Georges Bataille, Avital Ronell, and Kathy Acker.
Ann Lee whose “proto-rock ritual of intense, rhythmic, unpartnered dance” (Keller 78) was intended to invoke egalitarianism within both gender and economics). Her collective spirituality represented an anti-authoritarian Heretical Imperative (Peter L. Berger). Heretic comes from Latin, “to choose,” or “one who holds a doctrine at variance with established or dominant standards”) who must be eliminated by the state. I discuss this in detail in my essay, Lilith Refuses the Anthropocene: What My Mother Taught Me, (Two Jews-one Biblical, one Sephardic, a Buddhist Monk, a New York Shaman, and a Quaker Abolitionist Hunchback “Little Person” walk into a bar…).
In our post-human cyber-era, like Heraclitus, we urge the courage to celebrate the infinite potential of autonomous and contingent modes of relation. To decolonize our cells and psyches, “we must each, on our own, come into relation with the divine. Air and breath allow us to relate and, at the same time, individuate ourselves” (Irigaray 2002:56). Luce Irigaray explores how breath opens oneself and requires us to return our original ‘home’ to a natural human identity (Irigaray 2004: 89). Let us continue to play with con-spiring through home or “eco” from Oikos, the Greek for home or whole house—the root of eco-logy and eco-nomics. The resilience of home conspires the potential to remap our symbiotic interconnectedness.
During the driest year in recorded Colorado history, citing from The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s 1939 story about The Dust Bowl during The Great Depression, takes my breath away. However, we can share a glorious exhalation when we remember there are so many of us who are committed to developing and sustaining solidarity with the “other” as we shift from “I” to “We.” Keller cites Steinbeck’s “revelation of interrelation, the emphatic ‘we’ [that] moves from solitary grief into the work of shared mourning and collective transformation…the urgent assemblage of ‘we’” (104).
Steinbeck writes:
This is the beginning—from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ If you who own things that people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’ (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 2006; orig., 1939), 152.
However, I insist that when we breathe together, we thaw the frozen quality of “I.” We con-spire the joyous imperative of community action. As an attempt to plant such a seed in this fertile territory, I wrote and continue to perform Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate-justice book with a Foreword by the phenomenal eco-feminist seed activist Vandana Shiva. Endorsements below...
If we are to breathe in relation to one another, we must ask: What happens when socialized norms are so deeply ingrained in us that our imaginations contort perceptions of “reality;” when our imaginations become more threatening than “reality”? I investigate how, through the manufactured construction of desire, our imaginations are rendered impotent, our capacity to breathe, dream, and think is so profoundly distorted by normative hierarchies in which we are complicit; and, how to theoretically and practically engage passion politics as a strategy to conspire our collective emancipation. How can we conspire the in-between—the mutable space between “reality”/ the supposed inevitability of modernity (industrial-waste, convenience culture) and our moral imagination?
One seed we can collectively plant is to seek the possibility of breathing together, conspiring, as a form of conviviality (See Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality). Convivencia refers to the Golden Age in Spain before the Inquisition during which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities symbiotically thrived. Convivencia represents a socio-spiritual conspiration: a cultural collaboration of diverse religions and ethnicities. Adrienne Rich reminds us: “The breath is…Ruach, the spirit, the human connection to the universe” (Rich, cited in Alhadeff 2017:109, 82).
Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura echoes both dobrashphera (an atmosphere of kindness) and Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic field resonance in which we are tuned to the same frequency—a coherence woven into the fabric of our reality that we need one another. The uncanny con-spires (breathing with) in a differential movement—a breathing together which animates convivencia-conviviality: “Aura is a medium that envelops and physically connects—and thus blurs the boundaries between—subject and object, suggesting a sensorial, embodied mode of perception. One need only cursorily recall the biblical and mystical connotations of breath and breathing to understand that this mode of perception involves surrender to the object as other” (Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, 114).
Our collective sensorium of relationality demonstrates a sense of individual and collective empowerment. To conjure this kind of fluid agency, we can learn from polymorphic bodies engaged in ambiguous ceremonies. I explore this web as a process of multi-layered storytelling in which ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but a multiplicity of clarities. Biomimicry (lessons from nature) offers us such a pluriverse of possibility embedded in wildlife relationality. Animal relationality reflects how “everything in the universe is interconnected through quantum non-locality...an indivisible system. ...These [morphic] fields are the basis of interconnections not only in space, but also in time” (Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. New York: Random House, 1999 280). These psychokinetic, morphic fields of relationality offer us the opportunity to practice biomimicry.
Learning from non-human ecosystems through breathing together can be a tool for interspecies communication. In Zazu Dreams, con-spiring with Zazu and supporting one another’s biointelligence, is his travel companion, a humpback whale. Together with their Alaskan malamute sidekick, they explore an atmospheric reciprocity— an intuitive, biophilic technology (techne from the Latin, meaning to weave), an ancient earth-based technology. Simultaneously, in 2025, new scientific research is finding humpback whale behavior that is “both cooperative and seemingly calculated, using air as a tool,” blowing underwater bubble rings near humans, apparently expressing playful nonverbal intelligence through a form of call & response.
I must add a note about the repulsive irony that the same Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) team studying interspecies communication through breath also studied the Antarctica and the Atacama Desert as a proxy for Mars and the Moon. The Whale SETI team is “studying intelligent, aquatic, non-human communication systems to develop filters that aid in parsing cosmic signals for signs of extraterrestrial life.” Chile’s Atacama Desert is a site of collective suffocation: a fast-fashion disaster zone.
Countering industrial-waste normalcy and its epidemic of individualism, I suggest investigating how blowing/ exhaling in the context of religious symbols can converge with biomimicry—lessons from our natural world. Science, religion, spirituality, and ecology breathe together throughout Zazu Dreams. For example, the voice of the shofar converges with whale song. Blowing the shofar becomes a kind of umbilical cord of breath, of shared atmosphere, a collective song (reminiscent of the cicada Ommmm…) that invites us to reconsider what we as a dominant culture think we know. See my Almost Home: The 17-Year Swarm Cycle’s Orgiastic Frequencies.
Zazu gleans from his mother lessons about cosmological interventions into normalcy. As a mystic who according to Whitney Bauman “challenges the dominant received narratives and a certain ordering of reality, and…asks people to cross borders, blur boundaries, and turn assumptions on their heads” (2021:97), Zazu utilizes his breath to embody nonlinear time—learning how to activate quantum entanglements, the yogic art of deep noticing: “Mommia had taught me that if I breathe slowly and pay deep attention, unexpected magical things can happen; time and space—distance and scale can transform in unexplainable ways” (Alhadeff 2017:47).
And later, “Ari, when we finally arrived in Esfahan, we could still see the gazelles! I asked ibn Sina how this was happening—another moment where the strangeness of scale and magic conspired to help us see the world around us—alert and amplified!” (42). Magic is prohibited in institutional Jewish liturgy, yet magic proliferates through so many cross-cultural Jewish histories, philosophies, and daily practices—such as transferring energy through laying our hands above our children's heads during Shabbat or our prayers based on our individual and collective breath. The Kabbalistic Zohar endlessly illuminates our world’s beauty and challenges—offering an Apocalypse as it provokes the uncomfortable questions and fundamental assumptions about what we think we know. In her sublime Stalking Wild Psoas, Liz Koch dreamwrites: “My being is no longer local, and I am no longer breathing; instead, I am being breathed by a larger breath of life” (30). Congruently, the Zohar conspires with Quantum Mechanics.
The Zazu Dreams characters develop a collective sense of somatic cognition as they experience the interreligious history that merges spirit with nature to create humans: “In Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions God blew breath/ruach or ruh into dirt to create humans. In Hebrew, Adam means dirt or clay” (Alhadeff 2017:136). They learn how interfaith concepts of breath can become “model[s] for a reconceived subjectivity and intersubjectivity with new possibilities for understanding individual autonomy” (Irigaray 2005:87); how “breath within the individual [can] achieve unity and reciprocity Irigaray imparts: “We, as humans, were made alive through the breath of the divine.
The divine, through air and breath, is within us. Within our bodies, we incarnate the living breath of the divine” (Irigaray 2002:7). In “The Age of Breath” Irigaray reminds women that “the breath of God is within each of us. According to Genesis story, God created humanity by sending his breath into matter, into earth” (1999:168). For Irigaray, ‘god’ has no independent reality outside of the human psyche. Embodied divinity becomes a path for collective ecojustice. Her body represents the body-politic. From Luce Irigaray: “In yogic tradition, breath is neither personal nor a property of someone else; rather it represents the priority of intersubjective dialogic relationships over the individuality of subjects.”
In “Embodied Encounters: Exploring Irigaray’s Philosophy in Art and Activism,” (seen here with Elizabeth Grosz projected in my self-portrait head) my recent essay for the Body and Religion Interdisciplinary Journal, I write extensively about Luce Irigaray and breath as collective resistance. In conjunction with “spiritual becoming” (Irigaray 2002:74) that dematerializes industrial fossil-fuel addicted economies, breath makes manifest the “human relation.” (Irigaray 2008:98). A counterhegemonic strategy, breath invites body-mind simultaneity.
Irigaray declares: “The West is stifled by its inability to breathe” (Irigaray 2002:6). Breath offers pause, selah in Hebrew. Breath challenges the relentless pace of Progress; it transforms culturally idolized mind-body dichotomies. Breath, like the ancient Hebraic philosophy of gilgulim, to reanimate, reincarnate, continual renewal, echoes the First Law of Thermodynamics: the total amount of heat energy can never be altered; energy can never be created nor destroyed, instead it is transformed. We practice breath as a counterhegemony when we choose to embody this Law. In je, tu, nous Irigaray offers refracted light, a breath a through one another’s bodies. Instead of moral judgments that dissipate the potential for change, we could speak of solidarity economies that deploy a relation of ethics. Religion and Science converge within our ether of flux.
Breath is nonhierarchical and reciprocal. Rather than adopting a reversal of power, the characters learn how to embody a coexistence of perspectives, a Convivencia of subjectivities, of worlds, and of cultures. In my discussion of the emancipatory potential of Spinoza’s conatus (strive, tendency), the characters revisit the possibility to con-spire, to breathe together as a Convivencia. “Breath is the opposite of substances that remain contained and immobile, fixed in one place; breath is constitutively that which crosses boundaries between inside and outside, between multiple spaces and subjects” (Rama 1976:14).
Irigaray explores how “Breath…generates the space in-between the subjects” (Irigaray 2002:10). Breath, like energy, prana, qi is indiscriminate: “Qi entails a universal sense of care. The same qi that empowers humans lies in mountains, rivers, landfills, and even parking lots. The notion of qi establishes a complex web of relationships that traverse boundaries, scales, and species” (Li The Ecotopian Lexicon 2019:223). What emerges then, is a recognition of our species’ de-centrality—deterritorialization establishes this new community—an ever-unfolding statelessness of becoming. Once we embody Irigaray’s breath incarnate, we no longer see ourselves as the static center, we release our imposed values that “privilege our image on our vision of the universe” (Fred Ulfers, European Graduate School 2007:19); we generate a Irigarayan potential for community. Within this field of collective becoming, we are embedded in an interdependent rhizomatic dialogue.
This is a call for radical citizenship—a demand that we inhabit our etheric potential. Echoing the Sephardic Spinoza’s quest for “what a body can do,” Rosi Braidotti calls out: “To become means fulfilling the wholeness of what we are capable of being” (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994: 111).
I dedicate this presentation to my friend and mentor, Joanna Macy whose life-passions focused on fulfilling the wholeness of what we are capable of being.
“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe — to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it — is a wonder beyond words.” — Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self
An excerpt from the Aspen Times:
Joanna: a leading environmental activist, a prolific Buddhist scholar on deep ecology and systems theory, and a seminal translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry. She has been a catalytic international spokesperson for anti-nuclear causes and a tireless advocate for peace, justice, and nature. She is a legend, and her legacy of loving communion with the Earth, the courage to feel grief and despair over the world’s suffering, the alchemy of that material into compassion and gratitude, is an offering of limitless measure to us now.
And from our dear friend, Shams Kairys:
My heart is stirred as a deepening pool of sorrow and benevolence draws me closer to her, and I rejoice at the marvel of how we have interwoven so tellingly that I know ours will be a parting without separation.
We revisit Rancière’s “together apart.”
Joanna is as “still as she could get (while still breathing) but then she gets stiller yet.” She is currently still connected to us through the “sighs of the oxygen concentrator…” (from her daughter, Peggy, this morning).
Exactly one year ago, Zazu and I visited Joanna Macy in her kitchen. I felt immediately at home—her muted orange and pink flower napkins reminded me of growing up in Boulder, Colorado in the 1970s. We shared how daunting, yet beautiful, the task to which we are called—disentangling ourselves from over five centuries of hyperindividualism—the tyranny of Western Civilization. In reference to Zazu Dreams, Joanna reminded me of the Buddhist practice of Bodhichitta: a commitment to the beautiful whole of which we are apart, the tide of deep time in which we stop measuring ourselves and begin to embody our mutual belonging. Resonating with Joanna's sentiment, in her No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Greta Thunberg beautifully proclaims: “You can help turn individuals into movements.”
With profound care, let us breathe together.