We are Nature

31 May We are Nature

By Elizabeth Janowski

What first grabbed me was a sense that we caught the wrong end of tiger’s tail. We were chasing at phantoms in an attempt to save our souls and this was why we just kept shadow boxing, never quite able to make an impact on what really mattered.

As a mother, a thinker, and a feeling person, sitting at the edge of climate catastrophe and the decline of the American empire, you must feel it too … the shaky, neurotic sense that all is not well, and no one really knows what to do about it.

How does one lead others through the such an uncertain time without glomming onto promises that cannot be fulfilled? I spent 2023 in a relationship with ancient stories and an obsession with first tales. I spent the prior five years looking for entry points to myths and archetypes, always with an emphasis on sovereignty. “You are the Shaman you seek”, I would tell my students again and again. However, once I felt the stories we needed had been told, and we went back so far, I could not find written words any older, I found a road map so extraordinary, I began to see everything else we had done had simply been in preparation.

We’ve spent the late winter and spring of 2024 in reverence for lifeforms and knowledge that has existed on this planet much longer than we have. I keep asking my students what if instead of seeing humanity as the apex of evolution, we are simply the babies of this planet?

Why not look to trees or bees or whales…things that have been here much longer than us for ways of being, relating and existing?

This method of knowledge gathering has changed everything for me, and evoked a sustained sense of awe in my work and my teaching.

We have explored the relational brilliance of mushrooms, the survival mechanics of the first cell LUCA, the mutli-generational care and communication of trees, the density of stars, and the receptivity bodies of sea sponges. However, what is most important to me is that we remember that we humans are not above nature, not masters of nature, not users of nature, and not being used or cast upon by a nature here to destroy us (climate change), but that we too are nature.

There is so much here, and I am just hinting at tiny threads of our work.

We exist as Nature. My work has been most deeply affected by the work of Donna Haraway and her definition of Sympoesis – or making with.

It is our huge human flaw to believe that we are ever created with out other, because we are always in relationship with other(s).

I was also changed by the BRILLIANT book We are Animal by Jennifer Case, which profoundly impacted my worldview.