Welcome to Entangled Worlds

I have been craving something for as long as I can remember. I used to say that I was hungry for “story.” Then I thought, mourning my dreams, perhaps it’s called “wonder.” Maybe, “play”? A heartbeat past despair, I called out “hope.” Now, I name it something near “connection.” The wonder of our connection to all other living and non-living beings in the universe. The whimsy of imagining what strange ecological relationships exist beyond our understanding. The curiosity to dismantle the facade of individualism that entraps us in banal materialist systems and to engage our sensuous ecological imagination. What I was looking for was “entanglement.”

"Entanglement describes the ongoing interweaving, of different kinds of things acting at different scales (e.g. mushrooms, pine trees, soils, Hmong-Americans, Japanese buyers, cell phones, property rights, gift-giving customs, markets, etc.), into complex relationships...In order to rearrange our mental landscapes, we must learn not to pull on one end of the thread, but to engage with the knot as a whole."
-From the Anthropocene Curriculum, referring to Mushroom at the End of the World by Dr. Anna L. Tsing

Dr. Anna L. Tsing describes entanglement from an environmental anthropological point-of-view, as a way to integrate our understanding of extractive human systems into the ecological systems they claim to be separated from. For me, entanglement is all the things I foraged along my way to the word: wonder and whimsy, curiosity and play, story especially. As a storyteller, I am making entanglement my practice. I write with nature, from nature, and to nature, so my stories become like birdsong.

Most of all, entanglement, for me, is hope. Living in a Sacrifice Zone, I can either give in to the relentless despair of endless extraction or I can choose to see the entangled mychorrizhal roots of the strange more-than-human communities growing in the ruins of extractive industries. I choose entanglement, every single time. Not as a naive luxury, but as stubborn survival. Nature only knows how to grow. And grow. And grow. I want to learn how to dream with it again.

Do you want to come along?

Let's go. ⬇️

Forage hope from nature.

A frog calls in your cul-de-sac. A stubborn bloom peers from the cracks of the pavement. The flash of a butterfly snaps in the summer heat. Start to notice the aliveness all around you. Pluck it (metaphorically) from the ruins of capitalism. Forage it from rust and decay. Notice. Pay attention. Radically pay attention, in fact, for capitalism will always try to steal this from you. Then begin to ask questions. Where does this frog live? Why does it call? Why do I only hear it for a few months? Is the bloom a weed? Why does it want to grow here? Where is that butterfly going and why is it here? Following your questions is pulling on the thread that leads to the knot of entanglement.

Root in community.

Once you begin a practice or radical attention to the nature around you, your eyes begin to open to the connections in the more-than-human community around you, that IS you. The frog calls from the pond near the stream. It only calls in the early spring after the first warm days. Your elderly neighbor said the frog’s call was two weeks later when they were growing up here. Wait, on the neighborhood's social media group page, people are saying a developer is going to take down a forest near the pond and put in a new neighborhood. How will that affect the frog? How will that affect the residents of the new homes if the forest and pond aren’t there? Aren’t we having trouble with flooding in town?

Your eyes are opening to the ecological connections around you - and to what happens when they are broken. This is the beginning of rooting radically in place and in community. Overtime, your eyes begin to open to the ways that humans and the more-than-human are partaking in creative ecological community-making around you. Humans planting pollinator gardens in the middle of six lane highways. The river painting bluebells upon the crumbling brownfield site. Ants planting gardens of ten million trilliums on formerly-cleared hills made of ancient reefs. See how nature grows when humans and the more-than-human garden? You’ve followed the thread and you’re finally seeing the knot of entanglement.

Bloom with imagination.

You’re learning to explore the knots and weaves of the more-than-human entanglement around you. But you’ve also noticed the frayed and torn edges. Have you wondered how to mend them? Let’s learn to dream with nature again. Learn how other beings form strange relationships and symbiotic connections. Forests think through the branching roots of mushrooms. Oceans breathe through the symbiosis of cyanobacteria. Squid light up the depths in a language made of bacterial light. All around us nature entangles itself through radical collectivism in order to survive. Can we imagine futures where these entanglements thrive? Can we dream of a world where humans celebrate the sacred entanglements around them? Practice your imagination regularly and radically. Spin each entanglement you notice into wild and feral possibilities.

Spore through stories.

Stories stitch our society together. They can mend relationships and weave new ones, expanding our personal sense of community in our neurobiology. Stories make us want to reach out to others. They fuel prosocial behavior. Can that include the more-than-human too? And yet, we are living with the legacy of a colonialist monoculture of stories and materialist story structures that is limiting our ability to imagine new more-than-human communities. How do we break through?

Wild clocks. Insect symphonies. River weavers. The more-than-human world is filled with wonder and whimsy, so shouldn’t our stories be too? Break through cynicism with hopepunk. Collapse realist expectations with speculative escapism. Write nature with animacy. Make everything a poem (like, seriously, everything). Tell stories together. Tell them at a campfire, beneath the flaps of owl wings. Make them immersive. Make them interactive. Make them mythic and fantastical and wondrous. And no matter the form or function, focus on making relationships through story, whether that’s between the reader and the entanglement you write about or you and the river you read your poem to. Story is community. Community is story. Spore your stories and see what blooms.

Plant through action.

Stories can help folks expand their sense of community and want to take actions to help that community. If your story is rooted in your community, what can you do this month to get the entanglement in that story a little closer to reality? Did you write about a frog chorus birthing a new world? So, is there something you can do to protect this frog? Is there something you can ask your audience to do to protect the pond or wetland the frog lives in? Can you check to see if the wetland is in a local conservancy? If it’s not, is there a local watershed group that can help you monitor it? Can you volunteer with them to do communications work or help fundraise through an open mic? Can you get FrogWatch involved and give scientists data about the species that live there? Maybe it’s as simple as planting certain plants in your yard to prevent runoff into the pond? You’re part of a more-than-human entanglement. You always were, but you’re realizing it now. So what will you do to protect this community? What will you do to protect yourself? You must find ways to plant your stories back into the world around you and begin mending the entanglement that you are a part of.