We live in an age of loss and pain: personal and ecological, human and more than human. But our wounds don’t just show up in our bodies. They show up in our ecosystems. When we feel pain, we can ask ourselves where that pain is pointing us. What plant, landscape, ocean, mountain, or fungus resonates with our particular plight? How can we let chornic illness, disability, and grief galvanize us into greater connection with our more than human kin? What if the bodies of the disabled, survivors of violence and abuse, the neurodivergent, and the chronically ill were not broken and in need of constant fixing and problematization? What if, alienated from normalcy, they were able to glimpse adjacent possibles? Alternative ways of living and becoming together. What if our pain was a compass that directed us out of anthropocentric narratives? In an age of mass extinction and ecological crisis, coming back to our bodies will not necessarily be pleasurable. We need to normalize and alchemize our discomfort. But those people that live with conditions that give them non-normative physical experiences may have much to teach us about how our pain is a portal into greater participation with the “flesh of the world”. Let us help each other become differently, become together, and salvage something from our uncomfortable entanglements.
Sophie Strand walks us through personal practices, stories, and somatic meditations that help us understand our what we think are our greatest pains, may be portals into greater kinship with a wild, generous world.
About Sophie:
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.