Welcome to Entangled Worlds
Let me tell you about a book.
It sits in an odd little library, nothing more than an alcove brimming with tomes in tall piles and arcs to the ceiling. Oh, and it is carved in the corner of a living world. Every part of this world is wriggling with aliveness. It exists at all times. And yet it is frozen, existing at no time.
This book contains the field notes of an ecologist who wandered into this fantastical world and recorded her observations of its strange happenings. In the book, a psychedelic garden unfurls. Here a woman who is waterfall thunders with a storm raging inside her. A carnival-colored stag gallops by with legs so tall you can walk under it. Grown memories sit ensconced in living crystals along breathing walls. Papery mushrooms spawn, and jellyfish chime in an unseen wind. Here the seeds of new worlds drip down from the ceiling, frozen in time yet glowing and growing, shooting off into the universe and yet always connected to where they were born.
As you flip further through the ecologist’s experiences in this world, her linear descriptions become increasingly strange and poetic, disconnected but ethereal, increasingly written in some strange, unreadable script that winds and bends along the page. She describes feeling like she is disappearing into this world, or, because of the strange flow of time here, she was always a part of it and only now is she remembering. In the end, the field journal fades off, and the ecologist disappears, fate unknown.
This fictional world is called Numina. Except this world actually exists. It is shaped by hundreds of hands as part of the immersive and interactive sci-fi art exhibit called Meow Wolf Convergence Station in Denver, Colorado. I have actually flipped through this book with a woman-who-is-a-waterfall thundering behind me and jellyfish chimes waving above me. You can only access the book in the exhibit. They do not sell a facsimile. There is no digital copy.
The world of Numina at Convergence Station. | Photos by N.A. Chapman
I tell you about this book because it’s what I dream storytelling can be. This is what I want my storytelling to one day become. Because the best stories help us escape from our accepted reality, if only for a moment. For when we return, we see our world anew. And we begin to understand that just worlds worlds are not only possible, they are already here climbing through the crumbling pavement, reaching for the light. The best stories radically root us in place, over and over again awakening us to the wonder that was always here if only we knew how to see.
"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison. If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Our world is wondrous (so are you). Our world is strange (us too). Our world - or the many smaller ones that make up the whole - is entangled. And to tell stories of this world, we must be the same. We must become feral and cosmic and speak in frogsong and remember our time as stars and learn to read the library the river is always becoming. By escaping into the fantastical in a world obsessed with materialism, we return to our world emblazoned with possibility. By escaping into the wondrous in a world that tries desperately to stamp it out, we return to our world ready to fight for every bloom.
That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, tell stories where I disappear into the strange, wondrous narrative our entangled world weaves. And I want to bring you along too, all of us learning together to bask in wonder and to resist the forces that would separate us forever from the world’s embrace. From here on out, I'll be posting weekly field notes on this wondrous but unraveling world.
So let’s escape into a hawk song and help mountains rise and bloom. Let’s board a train made of night and marvel awhile at the bees drinking snakeroot blooms in a rippling sea of autumn light.
Come along, fellow waylarks.
Allons-y.
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