Transforming epistemological disconnection from the more-than-human world: (inter)nodes of ecologically attuned ways of knowing

Abstract

Drawing out resonances across art-based practice and critical imaginations in the discipline, this paper maps out conceptual, creative and experiential resources for re-rooting International Relations for the climate and the needs of the more-than-human world. I trace what I describe as ecologically attuned ways of knowing along two main inspirations: L. H. M. Ling’s Imagining World Politics and the 7000 HUMANS participatory initiative designed by Shelley Sacks. Writing with a rhizomatic sensibility and foregrounding ways of knowing that may emerge in and through encounters with trees, I explore imaginative possibilities for transforming epistemological disconnection from vegetal life into embodied, integrative, life-enhancing modes of relating to both ourselves and the more-than-human world.

Pathways to knowing otherwise

Pamela Rosenkranz’s bright pink and red sculpture Old Tree, commissioned for the High Line in New York City, is a striking sight. The synthetic figure of the tree, created by digitally merging scans of actual trees, human circulatory systems and muscles seeks to provoke a visceral response: ‘something that also awakes or repulses’. ¹ Rosenkranz notes that it ‘might remind us of an organ’, inviting contemplation of our complex relationships with nature and our bodies, and how we attribute meaning to human and vegetal life. The image of a tree invokes associations with mythical trees of life that bridge planes otherwise seen as separate in the human-made world. The Yggdrasil of Norse mythology or Jianmu from ancient Chinese cosmology mediate between Heaven and Earth, the visible and the invisible, past and future, representing a harmonious order of earthly and cosmic spheres in dynamic, self-renewing cycles. Metaphorically and physically, trees’ connective capacity extends into their unique sociality of hosting other species and forming delicate communication networks within forests. Stephanie R. Fishel observes that ‘the tree is a rhizomatic, symbiotic community living in relation to its forest and that forest is a rhizomatic, symbiotic community living in relation to other forests and the biosphere. A singular tree is also a global tree’. ²

Depending on perspective, the singular tree can be stripped of its rich relations and symbolic meaning. Reduced to mere objects of use and consumption, trees become part of what Michael Marder calls the ‘inconspicuous backdrops’ of human life, especially in urban settings. ³ Joana Castro Pereira and Maria Fernanda Gebara argue that the crises and aporias of the Anthropocene are linked to this epistemological disconnection: ‘our actions towards other-than-human-beings are mainly informed by a utilitarian ontology’ and, as such, ‘the human relationship to the other-than-human part of the world has predominantly been one of exploitation, not co-creation’. ⁴ This objectification of vegetal life deprives humans of the ability to move and translate across worlds and acknowledge both the singular relations of more-than-human life forms and our interdependence with them. The agricultural estrangement that perpetuates colonial destruction, white racist domination and other forms of hierarchical disposition stems from the legacy of Western metaphysical dualism and its categorical separations. ⁵ Given the deeply ingrained distinctions of physical and non-physical, mind and body, man and nature that permeate everyday practice, how can the Master who once chose to sever themselves and others from the land as a living organism find a new way forward? How can these deep-seated cultural imprints be rewritten, and our senses reconfigured to see, embrace and nurture plurality in an ecologically attuned, integrative, non-anthropocentric manner? What pathways may lead us from exploitation to co-creation?

Marder notes that the instrumental familiarity of vegetal life coincides with ‘the incapacity of humans to recognise elements of ourselves in the form of vegetal being, and, hence, the uncanny—strangely familiar—nature of our relation to them’. ⁶ Old Tree stages an encounter where we might see ourselves in the tree and the tree in ourselves. It prompts viewers to ponder such questions of (co-)existence through the gut reactions of the body, especially as synthetic materials impact the organic composition of all life forms. The visual proximity of the systems that sustain life within and without – such as the superimposition of blood vessels carrying oxygen and tree branches purifying the air that we breathe – invites a response and to make connections not only at the register of thinking but also as embodied, felt experience. The scale of separation and alienation from plants calls for interventions that can break through the threshold of numbness arising from the normalised sensibility of disconnection and enable connection with our shared aliveness. Echoing the artist’s intention, there is a need for ‘somatic knowing’ ⁷ beyond intellectual probing: a mode of knowing otherwise that emerges from the mind/body as an integrated state of sensing, feeling and cognitive processing. Somatic knowing, writes Matthews, ‘is the concrete, non-dualistic experience of existence’. ⁸ It has the potential to throw light also on the imbrications of the social and the personal, ⁹ uncovering the geographies of socially conditioned perception as well as openings to more life-enhancing possibilities for individual and communal being.

Re-rooting International Relations for the climate and the needs of the more-than-human world necessitates new sociological imaginations and experiences of ‘knowledge’ embedded in multispecies relations and a critically sensitive, self-reflexive understanding of our participation in them. The following sections offer conceptual, creative and experiential resources for what such embodied sense-making practices might be like and how they may transform our relationships to both ourselves and the more-than-human world. Branching out of the provocations of Old Tree, I set out to trace what I describe as ecologically attuned ways of knowing within and beyond the discipline inspired by L. H. M. Ling’s Imagining World Politics: Sihar & Shenya, A Fable for Our Times and the 7000 HUMANS global participatory initiative designed by Shelley Sacks. As a spectator of Old Tree, a reader of Imagining World Politics and a participant and co-facilitator of 7000 HUMANS I listen for resonances across experiential sites and imaginative possibilities, foregrounding integrative modes of relating and ways of knowing that emerge from encounters with trees. For Russell J. Duvernoy ecological attunement calls for rethinking ‘the ontological role of attention and feeling’ as one that comes before ‘the abstract general category of self’, re-embedding selfhood within relational processes that constitute ‘the ontological ground of all existence’. ¹⁰ Attuning to our ability to attend and make connections at the register of not-yet intellectualised sensing ‘encourages modes of attention to qualitative micro-perceptions operative within ongoing events of experience’ that also have the potential to transgress conceptual boundaries separating life-forms. ¹¹

Thinking with the bodily sensations prompted by Old Tree, the multiple emotional worlds made accessible by Imagining World Politics, and the cultivation of self-aware, imaginal thinking in 7000 HUMANS, I explore three modalities of somatic knowing that arise through ecological attunement. I trace how these creative epistemological openings encourage the realisation of our already existing interconnectedness with the more-than-human world, offering gateways towards respectful, nourishing, co-creative ways of thinking, feeling, knowing, relating and being-together. Rendering experientially the political and ethical possibilities that arise from this investment in relational being and thinking necessitates a mode of telling that aligns with this endeavour. Subverting the encoded ‘fictive distancing’ of social science prose that perpetuates disconnection and hierarchical ordering, ¹² in an ethos where (academic) knowing and writing seeks to learn from and together with vegetal life, this text evolves in a rhizomatic sensibility, unfolding from multiple entry points. Claire Colebrook observes that ‘rhizomes are ways of creating new relations that would enable the world to be perceived anew’, ¹³ rather than through already familiar concepts or modes of (linear) narration. I observe Old Tree, read Imagining World Politics and narrate key features of 7000 HUMANS through formations of nodes and internodes – junctures and connective tissues – that grow upwards, downwards, sideways. These are locations from where new roots and shoots – questions, ideas, realisations – might spring forth. The ensuing vignettes embody a practice of slow, contemplative exploration within and in between imaginative terrains that articulate alternatives to disconnected, disembodied thought. I ponder ‘imagining world politics’ through the fluid, porous properties of yin-like energy and the ‘imaginal ways of knowing’ of 7000 HUMANS that unfold in a practice of ‘living inquiry’, gesturing towards actual experiences of ‘ecological citizenship’ and the plurality of international relations. Through different efforts of ecological attunement I repeatedly ask: how do we shift from knowledge to knowing otherwise, as a mode of being otherwise? What may knowing as a state of becoming be like and feel like as an ongoing praxis of inquiry, (re)connection and collective (un)making?

Interspecies knowing

I walked around Old Tree in circles, taking pictures from different angles and distances. Its overpowering visual appearance attracts attention from afar. Yet, the closer I moved and the deeper I looked, the more the vein-branches and their smooth surface revealed their plastic composition. As I lost sight of the artwork as a whole and the complex system of signification it mobilises, I started to feel the tree, the human anatomy and their mutual imbrication with synthetic molecules in my own body. The recognition of the human-imposed damage collectively suffered registered as tension in my stomach. I felt powerlessness first, then anger. However, the bursting vitality of the pink-red colour kept pulling the energy upwards and outwards. I didn’t quite know how and in what orientation exactly, but a parallel plane of imaginative and experiential possibility opened. Around the gut’s instinctive knowing there was room to explore what it might mean to think, feel, relate and act from this place, shaped by the power of embodied realisations.

I kept returning to Old Tree, both on site and in my mind, to re-enter this relational space and observe the thoughts, feelings, questions, images and associations it provoked in me. In this process, I remembered another ‘old tree’. In L. H. M. Ling’s Imagining World Politics the sovereign finds unexpected counsel in the wisdom of a high priestess who studies trees. Shenya, belonging to The Temple of Knowledge, makes observations about plant life and translates them into practical solutions for resolving conflict and managing social governance. She connects with the Ancient One in a prayer, described as an awe-inspiring, twisted black tree with a brook running beside it. The tree hosts various species, including birds, insects, worms and orchids in a complex system of interdependence, inspiring insights for harmonious individual conduct and communal being. ‘Trees have much to teach us’, Shenya tells Sihar, the king, ‘they live many lives and store much wisdom within’. ¹⁴

Shenya’s recommendations based on her understanding of the ecosystem of the tree help avoid war, install a model of economic growth without sanction or exploitation and orient young people towards cultivating a meaningful life grounded in introspection and self-love. She emphasises the importance of nurturing ‘roots’ and turning ‘lacks’ into ‘talents’ by finding mutually beneficial ways of living together, respecting all parties’ unique characteristics. Just as the orchid flourishes in a symbiotic relationship with its host, differences in needs and viewpoints can also be harmonised without subordination or suppression. Her knowledge of herbs and their medicinal properties heals a sick tyrant and makes his army ‘less warlike’ through meals cooked according to her instruction, which ‘take effect’ and restore bodies to proper functioning. ¹⁵ Those who are not open to hearing the transformational wisdom of Shenya’s ‘tree talk’ dismiss it as nonsensical. Yet when embraced by those in power, it facilitates well-being and growth in a non-violent, gentle and caring manner, offering a holistic perspective that connects rather than divides. During her brief stint at the sovereign’s court, Sihar notices that

Shenya often gives the best, most comprehensive, and workable proposals. She does not so by competing against the Ministers, nor by pitting one against the other, but by drawing them together, composing a whole from the various parts. ¹⁶

Sihar describes Shenya’s ‘method’ as ‘subtle’. Her practice of observation departs from a question coming from dysfunctional human relationships, and in seeking an answer she attends to what are already present in the more-than-human world as living, life-enhancing processes.

As events unfold, more of the mechanisms of Shenya’s method of attaining ecologically attuned knowledge come to light. Communication, collaboration and an attitude of humbleness are key aspects of her sense-making. Visiting the tree, she asks that knowledge that already exists in the more-than-human world be revealed to her: ‘O Ancient One, please guide us with your wisdom’. ¹⁷ In a non-extractive, non-instrumental, open relationship she patiently awaits the realisation. What is received first emerges as a tree-metaphor, which is then converted into practical action as the king and the priestess unpack its meaning in a conversation. Ultimately, a new government policy that benefits the community on all occasions, even those who position themselves in a relation of enmity, is the result of collaboration between the tree, Shenya and Sihar.

Shenya brings knowledge practices to the king’s court that work across species in a relational and co-creative manner. However, there are times when Shenya responds to life-threatening danger or questions regarding the ultimate meaning of human life ‘from the heart’, drawing on her own wisdom gained through studying arboreal life. Translating her observations from the more-than-human world into an understanding of the human condition, she speaks about love that connects ‘the Visible’ and ‘the Invisible’, which is also what ‘people, like trees, need more than basic elements to fully flower’. ¹⁸ Love and being true to oneself – to one’s own nature – inform the call to take responsibility for one’s feelings and actions, such as the tyrant’s rage that only he can control. ¹⁹

Individual practice and social theory weave together in Shenya’s approach to life and the body politic. Living well with others is only possible with self-realisation and the realisation of abilities: when a seed has turned into a flower ‘under the right conditions and the right friendship’. ²⁰ Personal awareness of the value and abundance of one’s own life grows in a supportive environment: it is only through appreciation that we may be able to go beyond the ‘self’ as lacking. Modes of knowing drawn from vegetal being ²¹ and developed further as socio-personal understanding both reveal and engender connection. They bring to light an already existing possibility from plant sociality which, when rearticulated into principles to guide human interactions, lead to higher levels of integration and wellbeing in oneself and in relation to others. How can we open our senses to the wisdom of what is already present in the more-than-human world, to begin with?

Embracing emotional multiplicities

L. H. M Ling writes that ‘to decolonize IR, we must not only recognise the role of emotions but also treat them as repositories of multiplicity’. ²² ‘Multiple emotional worlds’, encompassing the emotional complexity of lived experience and how we render our experiences meaningful ‘need to be recognized and appreciated as such’. ²³ Transforming the epistemological disconnection from the more-than-human sphere in our knowledge practices and ways of living may unfold from the recognition that ‘knowledge arises from time, place, and – significantly – feeling’. ²⁴

Embedded in Daoist dialectics, Ling’s worldism theorises ‘hybridities’ as Multiple Worlds, comprised of ‘modes of thinking, doing, being and relating’, intersect and communicate with each other, bridging and sometimes transforming the gaps between them. ²⁵ Balancing the relationship between Westphalia World and Multiple Worlds unfolds through a view from within emotional multiplicities. The fable brings the yin of a fairy tale to the yang of realist power politics, exploring ‘emancipation through porous, water-like transformations’. ²⁶ While yang thinks in binary categories and their antagonisms, the yin brings to the fore their ‘complicities’ and interconnections: ‘inside and out, top and bottom, center and periphery’. ²⁷ As Ling notes, Sihar & Shenya offers a ‘postcolonial bridge’ that enables ‘knowing about the Other on its own terms’ and with that, the possibility of justice that ‘sustains over time’, brought about by ‘compassion and care motivated by respect’. ²⁸

Knowing differently as an opening to other political and ethical possibilities requires balance and the recognition of the fundamental interconnectedness of all principles, beings and life forms. One pathway to achieve this realisation lies in uncovering the life-enhancing intimacies and conjunctions of knowledge and feeling. The ‘remarkably unremarkable’ ²⁹ story of Sihar and Shenya surprises with a twist: it turns out to be one iteration of how the Mythic Ones of Power, Wealth, Security, Knowledge and Love, incarnated in actual lives, play out their singular desires and differences. Embodied human relations are unveiled as the learning space of otherwise invisible forces, depicted as curious and open to change. Negotiations and events in earthly life unfold parallel to the dynamics of the immaterial world while connections between the two realms are made explicit in the transition between the ‘books’ of the book, marked by different font types and aesthetics.

In the exchanges of multiple emotional worlds, knowing differently is revealed as a non-linear, embodied learning process that promises a more holistic perspective for both the Mythic Ones and the reader. The Mythic Ones’ journey traces how they realise their inherent interconnectedness by overcoming atomised, separated lines of thinking and being. In Sihar and Shenya’s interactions and relationship to each other and the world, Love is revealed as a ‘kind of Knowledge’ itself. In the book’s symbolism, Knowledge associated with water and Love with the burst of vegetation always appear together: the brook and the tree are described by Sihar as the ‘eternal pair’. The signs of co-implication are everywhere in the play of forces; it takes Knowledge, however, to understand this:

A second insight suddenly ripples through the Watery One: they are all related! Power, Wealth, Love, Security, Knowledge. Each one needs the others not just to make sense of the Universe but, also, simply to be. ³⁰

Once ‘interbeing’ ³¹ is exposed as a pre-existing ontological condition, it is then embraced and reflected in the actions taken. Instead of jumping into a new iteration of their game, the Mythic ones make the compassionate decision to sustain Sihar and Shenya’s final union for the time being: that of water and plant life, fluidity and growth, knowledge and love.

Amaya Querejazu reads Sihar & Shenya as an example of cosmopraxis that ‘shows another “how” to IR’, making accessible a pluriversal mode of worlding. ³² She notes that ‘if the reader can imagine it, what normally would be considered irrelevant to IR, becomes possible and can eventually be practiced as IR’. ³³ Following the adventures of the mythic forces, readers of the book are invited to embark on a resonant process of discovering how they inhabit the ‘games’ of the discipline and world politics, and where more accommodating horizons may lie. Multiple emotional worlds offer multiple openings. We can decide from which plane to enter the story, which also includes the postgraduate IR classroom, where Wanda, an African American woman from the Midwest searches for an anchor point after having been shut down by a white male professor introducing IR through the realist reading of Hobbes’ ‘State of Nature’. Wanda recalls an image of her ancestral heritage where the ‘State of Nature’ appears as Mother Earth’s generosity unreciprocated by humans: ‘powerful yet loving, challenging but nurturing’, prefiguring a different kind of IR. ³⁴

Yet it is not only about what may be known and recognised as international relations but how we may come to know what we know and how our ‘knowledge’ as intrinsically relational practice may feed back into what we study, as part of the same intellectual, affective, energetic ecosystem. ³⁵ After having been offered tea, biscuits and care for her emotional state, Wanda is guided to Ling’s book by an old librarian ‘with a laughing face’. On another plane, the fable’s narrator emerges as the figure of the laughing monk who playfully provokes the Mythic Ones with a pedagogical intention. The monk’s questions evoke reflection, nudging the personified forces out of their habitually enacted roles in competition with each other, transforming a mindset of loss into the appreciation of hybrid, plural existences. Once connection and interdependence are realised, a different story becomes possible: one of harmonious balance across all properties.

Relating to self and knowledge is rendered actual as the lived, living experience of ‘relations relating’. ³⁶ The laughing monk speaks directly to us, readers as well, positioning us as inhabitants of a related world. We are not only invited to imagine world politics beyond logistical necessity but to do so from a place of fundamental interconnectedness. The fable’s mode of address – ‘Gentle Friend’ – marks out a subject position for the self as constituted through the other’s friendly and caring gaze, based on intimacy rather than separation. Inhabiting emotional complexity as complicity in what there is, as the human condition of many, continuous becomings as ‘life unfolds through processes’, ³⁷ encourages a ‘yin’-like attitude in receiving, processing, taking forward the provocations, wisdom and sentiment of the story. The laughing monk’s disposition towards both humans and the non-human-world invokes what Maria Lugones describes as the playfulness of ‘loving perception’ juxtaposed with the violence of ‘arrogant perception’ associated with the Western ‘agonistic traveller’. ³⁸ While the latter plays only to win and conquer, ‘loving perception’ is the modality for ‘world-traveling’, that is, being in any particular and often multiple worlds ‘creatively’, with ease. ³⁹ Instead of focusing on winning or observing the rules of the game the emphasis shifts to a state of being playful. Lugones describes this attitude as ‘an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight’. ⁴⁰ Just like Sihar and Shenya’s co-creative translation of plant wisdom into new policy and principles for individual and communal well-being what are the ways in which we may nourish a yin-like imagination of world politics as actual, embodied, affective practice? What stories, intrinsically nested within multiple emotional worlds, do we choose to weave, tell or provoke, and how? How can we work towards a mindset of ease, rather than competition?

Inner work through ‘instruments of consciousness’ ⁴¹

Questions like these emerged in longer and shorter stretches of silence in my encounters with a living tree. I regularly visit a silver birch that lives by the lake in Türkenschanzpark in Vienna and, in good weather, I sit beside it for a few minutes. A small ritual has grown out of what initially started as brief pauses on my walk. I take a moment to look at the tree with my full attention. My body moves as I look up and down, pace back and forth, stretching my neck to observe it in its wholeness. I only ever get a partial view: some include the sky. I note that. Through these improvised movements I gradually slow down and keep on noticing details that would otherwise pass by me. The ruffled edges of the bark. The drying tips of leaves. The grains of soil. The supple movements of tiny insects. From this place I often talk to the tree, silently, in my mind, or aloud. I also write down what comes to me, either in a notebook or by recording voice notes. When it is time for me to go, I thank the tree and wish it well. May we both have the light and nourishment we need to live a full life. As I walk away, I note the warmth of gratitude and the subtle shift in my nervous system. I have become calmer, lighter, more rooted in my own being.

I developed this practice as a participant and co-facilitator of the evolving social sculpture experiment 7000 HUMANS, which foregrounds such inconspicuous yet generative moments as it draws insights from encounters with trees. Shelley Sacks, a social sculpture practitioner, cultural activist and transdisciplinary thinker, designed the initiative, and together with Ulrike Oemish, a permaculture designer, launched it in 2021. Joseph Beuys’ artwork 7000 Oaks, which inspired 7000 HUMANS, planted 7000 oak trees in Kassel, Germany as a participatory process, contributing to the city’s post-war urban renewal and as a catalyst to changing attitudes globally. Fabio Maria Montagnino notes that the motto, ‘Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung’ pictured ‘a forest-like city instead of an administrated city’. ⁴² Completed between 1982 and 1987, the project embodied key aspects of Beuys’s philosophy, such as individual creativity, ‘beehive’-like collaboration and the regeneration of the ‘man-nature equilibrium’. ⁴³ The trees were planted alongside basalt stones as timekeepers: as they gradually outgrew the steles, which were dominant at the beginning, a lasting global mark was made of a ‘collective will to save ourselves and the planet’, which then inspired resonant actions and adaptations around the world. ⁴⁴

7000 HUMANS takes these intentions forward while it refocuses on human agency, exploring how to take responsibility for planetary damage, outgrow limiting mind frames and conceive of new social imaginations and pathways of action to enable a viable eco-social future. 7000 HUMANS emerges from Sacks’ commitment to cultivating ‘ecological citizenship’: a relational practice of communal being grounded in unlocking individual capacities to listen, perceive, imagine, speak, and act in an ongoing dialogue with others. ⁴⁵ It offers both a critique and potential remedy to a fragmented conception of society populated by atomised individuals, yet how to think otherwise so that new modes of acting may become available is what must be reached experientially, in the process.

Sacks describes 7000 HUMANS as an ‘instrument of consciousness’ that enables imaginal work with individuals and in groups. ⁴⁶ As an ‘instrument’ it provides a framework and a multi-sited process to work consciously with what Beuys described as ‘invisible materials’ – speech, discussion and thought – also including attitudes, values, questions and habits of thinking. ⁴⁷ Facilitated by a team of guides and co-creators, encounters with the more-than-human sphere and how new insights, images and questions that might arise in this way take centre stage. Participants are invited to imagine, inhabit and cultivate a state of connectedness with the tree and themselves. Initially, 7000 HUMANS was designed to move through four phases, planned for one annual sun-cycle to honour the universal power-source, extending between two winter solstices. It envisioned synchronous personal and co-creative work on the online plane, in local group meetings, and in one’s ‘connective-reflective dialogue with oneself’. ⁴⁸ These simultaneous lines of inquiry were designed to initiate a ‘global warmth-work process that connects thought, heart and will’ and serves as an antidote to the kind of calculative, ‘cold thought that has led to climate crisis, war, racism, colonisation, and an increasingly disconnected technosphere’. ⁴⁹

Participants primarily joined through personal referrals and word of mouth. Hundreds of invitations circulated through various channels facilitated friendly exchanges between acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours, community members, even strangers. While not all conversations resulted in formal participation, they fed into the ‘global’ aspiration of the initiative expanding spherically from local experiential centres, transforming abstract, detached reconstructions of the ‘globe’. ⁵⁰

Upon registering, we placed a sun on a borderless map that alludes to reframing citizenship as ‘ecological citizenship’ beyond state borders, through co-creating ‘another territory:’ a ‘poetic domain of exchange and listening, of empathy, of thinking together and living together, in which the social imagination lives and moves’. ⁵¹ We marked our locations and motivation. Then we created an ‘anchor point’ with a ‘tree partner’, ⁵² and shared questions and commitments arising from this relationship on the initiative’s website. Learning communities formed around individual contemplations most prominently in Japan, India, Germany, China, France, Spain, Iran, Brazil, Austria, the UK and the USA. Fourteen questions were democratically selected from over seventy submissions for weekly online global assemblies and local hubs on the ground, guided by methods of imaginal work and attentive listening from Sacks’ Connective Practice Approach. The final phase consisted of three sessions to enhance connective capacities and strengthen emerging initiatives. In a resonant gesture to translating Shenya’s observations about vegetal life into policy, we carried the energy of our experiences and realisations back into our human-made surroundings, exploring: what may be possible to think and do from these reflexively shaped inner locations?

Enlivening imagination

I wonder at the ease of Shenya’s method of studying trees and translating insights into guiding principles for ecologically attuned action. Imagining World Politics shares little about her learning journey, if there had been one: how did she develop and hone her skills to co-create knowledge with the more-than-human world? Even though the ‘how’ – my own method – is yet to be worked out and articulated, as I feel my way through the book, the imaginative possibility of such ways of knowing becomes real.

Both Rosenkranz’s Old Tree and 7000 HUMANS draw on the generative potential of imagination as an embodied, actual process of inhabiting our lives and surroundings, offering distinctive points of entry into transforming lived experience so that a different relationship to self, other and multiple worlds may emerge. Old Tree provokes reflection through intense sensory stimuli, while 7000 HUMANS, informed by the Connective Practice Approach, engages our ability to attend to inner phenomena. It offers processes and methods to link individual and collective agency and think with the relationship between ‘inner work’ and ‘outer action’ by foregrounding ‘the inner dimension of external transformation’. ⁵³ Practicing continuous reflexivity, cultivating awareness of our sense-making processes and developing capacities for ‘imaginal ways of knowing’ are key experiential mechanisms for exploring and nurturing connections across life worlds and compartmentalised planes of social existence, transforming disembodied, ‘calculative thinking’. ⁵⁴ Sacks writes that ‘a tree knows how to be a tree’, ⁵⁵ while the human being

is a being different to all the other beings – a creator, whose inventions both illuminate and disconnect. This is the only being that seems to get ontologically lost. All other beings unfold according to an inner plan and purpose. Beech trees, roses, blackbirds. They do not have to make a conscious effort to develop their qualities and capacities. And they do not invent things that destroy the world. This is the only being responsible for such destruction, for an era like no other, now described as the ‘anthropocene’. ⁵⁶

Transforming our epistemological disconnection from the more-than-human world starts with acknowledging both the dysfunctional tendencies of the ‘human being’ and the creative possibilities that may lie with it, as ‘a being in a state of becoming’. ⁵⁷ From this place, the aim is to ‘develop capacities of connective imagining, rooted in compassion and care beyond self’ ⁵⁸ that may give rise to more sustainable presents and futures. However, the sense of relatedness which is the precondition to be able to ‘care at a distance’ ⁵⁹ – for lives and life-worlds that have been rendered remote or mute within the sensory regimes of our everyday worlding – is not a given, it must be cultivated.

One way to ‘develop’ the human being – that is, ourselves – towards ‘a more connective mind-set’ ⁶⁰ is to learn to use imagination as an integrative process. Sacks notes that ‘one of our key interfaces with the world is imagination: the imagination that encounters, the imagination that enables us to re-enter sensuous experience and information to “make sense”’. ⁶¹ Sacks and Zumdick describe the space of imagination as a ‘workspace’: a ‘permanent rent-free space available to all’. ⁶² We all use this capacity daily, but the question is, how and with what implications? Imagination’s creative force can shape reality in multiple ways: ‘we can enter the real world with imagination, or create an unreal world. Both depend on our ability to create inner images’. ⁶³ The work of imagination may contribute to deepening lines of separation, while it can also serve as a resource in transforming them. It can both give rise to disconnected fantasies and conjure up new horizons of more connected, less estranged modes of being, both within ourselves and with others. ⁶⁴ What images we create and are created in us in any given moment shapes the horizons of what we may deem to be possible.

Working within our inner workspaces we can become aware of how we sense and make sense by learning to ‘allow images about inner and outer situations to arise, without censoring, pre-empting, our judging’. ⁶⁵ For Sacks and Zumdick the ‘art of imagination’ – when imagination is not an act of escape or closure – opens a space of encounter and ways of knowing that embrace the unknown without foreclosing. ⁶⁶ It is a way of remaining close to the complexity of life worlds and lived experience without trying to change or manipulate them. Rather than naming or analysing, through ‘allowing whatever we encounter to disclose itself in us’ we enter ‘the artistic mode’ of relating, ⁶⁷ which transforms the socially conditioned disjunctures between feeling and thinking, emotions and the intellect. What is thought is also felt. Imagination that emanates from this ‘poetic’ or ‘aesthetic’ mind-state also enlivens, in contrast to the ‘anaesthetic’ or numbness, that of the ‘cold thought’ of objectifying analysis, linear reasoning and instrumental problem-solving. ⁶⁸ ‘Connective imagination’ ⁶⁹ makes us feel more alive, and vice versa: whatever we feel and experience as life-enhancing, also connects. The pathway from disconnection to connection, from ignorance to care, towards ecologically attuned ways of knowing and action leads through unlocking more of our capacity to feel. In the imaginative space that opens around words that may sound unfamiliar at first, we may be pondering: What responses are evoked, provoked in me as I think, feel, imagine the ‘global warmth-work process’ of 7000 HUMANS and my place in it?

Poetic modes of travel

Sitting with the silver birch revealed the complexities of allowing as a mode of perceiving and being-with another being. Rather than turning to the tree for guidance on a human-made matter, awaiting questions and insights proved challenging at times. Impatience and looping thoughts kept probing into how this practice might make any sense at all. It took multiple visits to ease into it. I remembered a quote that Sacks often cites from Goethean science: ‘every object truly seen opens up in us a new organ of perception’. ⁷⁰ By showing up without expectation, I noticed the gradual development of a sensory interface for ecological attunement. Between the tree and me, a channel of some kind was opening.

Practicing ‘imaginal thinking’ as an actual, embodied experience of how we sense and make sense unfolds through continuous movements ‘in’ and ‘out’, symbolised by the lemniscate. ⁷¹ Following the folds of the infinity symbol, our attention moves outwards to gather new experience and insight, and returns inwards, expanding awareness, ad infinitum. We tune within, look at our surroundings from a connected place, with fresh eyes, then ponder internally what we see and think. Sacks describes the five stages of coming to individual insights as ‘(1) Seeing or observation; (2) Seeing what I see; (3) Seeing what I think; (4) Thinking about what I think; and (5) Having the opportunity to choose and change what I think’. ⁷² In each moment there is observation and distillation. Akin to what Arturo Escobar discusses as sentipensar (feel-think) – a mode of entering ‘new notions about what is real and thus what is possible’ ⁷³ – the non-linear, exploratory movements of attention, feeling and thinking as ‘inner sculpting’ traverse thresholds between the known and the unknown, what has visual or linguistic form and formless potential. ⁷⁴

Working with eco-phenomenological insights that arise from cultivating a partnership with a tree is a slow, granular, open-ended process. This journey began well before writing this paper and will continue beyond it, with the acts of writing and thinking through writing contributing to the expansion of what Sacks describes as the ‘social mycelium above the ground, in the human sphere’, echoing ‘the natural mycelium which creates an underground network for communication and nourishment’. ⁷⁵ Thinking with and through vegetal consciousness heightens our awareness of our connective capacity, grounding us within a way of living that is already relational and communal: forest-like. The micro-movements of thoughts, feelings and attention – both in individual practice and collective work – accumulate as a ‘field of transformation’ and a ‘warmth body’, aligning with other transformative activities worldwide. How do the inner events of spending time with the silver birch, looking at Old Tree, reading Imagining World Politics, and thinking with and through them as I write – the sentiments, energies, textures of emotions, images and thought orientations – make an impact, however small? How do these acts communicate with other invisible, hybrid efforts elsewhere, within and beyond the discipline? What ‘new organs of perception’ are developing in our attempts to see and hear them?

Collective imaginative spaces

At one point I told the tree about this project. I wanted to explore what feels relevant when I imagine that the tree is listening, or at least it is part of my ecosystem of sense-making. Even if I focus on what appears as a single tree though, there is also the sky, other plants and animals. The sensibility of what Fishel describes as a ‘global tree’ and its fundamental interconnectedness with other beings becomes palpable. From this space I notice that the texture of my thoughts and the rhythm of sentences change. It is not so much about getting to the point anymore. Unlike knowledge born from stress, pressure or insecurity, a slower, more careful, more tentative mode of narrating experience emerges. Instead of merely including the tree in my thinking, I am connecting with the ecosystem that has always embraced me.

Ailton Krenak writes that ‘when people speak of imagining a new possible world, it’s in a sense of rearranging relations and spaces, introducing new understandings of what we recognize as nature, as if we were not nature ourselves’. ⁷⁶ I have written different versions of this paper to make space for these contemplations inspired by plant life. Following Marder, these improvised chronicles of developing ‘new eyes’ to recognise shared life aspects in vegetal being would otherwise have remained hidden in presenting knowledge in familiar academic terms and genres. I am learning through experience how ecologically attuned ways of knowing unfold as uneven, contingent and hesitant processes. I am also learning how making them visible and rendering them experientially – as living, embodied, open-ended practices of inquiry – requires care and creativity to preserve their processual nature.

Making sensible and sharable such efforts that contribute to the ‘inner sculpting’ of ‘invisible materials’ is part of the ongoing ‘warmth-work’ of 7000 HUMANS. The website expands as a repository of traces and fragments of ephemeral sense-making from multiple locations. As accounts of finding tree partners, making commitments and formulating questions multiply, the suns on the map grow brighter. The ‘anchor point’ can be a living tree or a place in the ‘mind’s eye’, especially for those lacking physical stability or connection to a ‘bio-regional place’. We are encouraged to work with an image that

feels meaningful to you in some way. And if it also includes a tree, then partner with this tree that you carry with you, perhaps from your childhood. Places are not only physically present. They live in our soul. ⁷⁷

Iterated visits to a real, remembered or imagined being in a fixed location serve as acts of grounding that reconnect abstract thinking with living realities. The tree partner helps with ‘rooting one’s contemplations’. Dwelling places vary: cities, countries, transit points or gardens ‘where the plants are always in flux and I am in constant relationship with the soil, life and air’. Some are real, some imagined and some held in memory. Trees as anchor points are identified by genus or rich descriptions of the location and relationship cultivated: ‘the oldest living trees and forests’, ‘redwoods nearby’, ‘a co-dominant ash tree’, ‘a pecan tree in my yard’ or ‘the big cherry tree in the large garden nearby’. It may be the image and place of a tree that no longer exists, or one in decay. Various accounts narrate the path of finding a tree partner as a process of observation and negotiation:

there is a row of large candlenut trees that sit in Kowloon Park and create a canopy over the very busy sidewalk. They house a flock of green parakeets as well as uncountable other creatures, plants, fungi etc. I asked each of them if they would partner with me on this project and one of them agreed. It is the one nearest to Canton Road. It has a unique shape and is a little more sheltered than the others, being beside a tall building. ⁷⁸

Trees are often rendered as female presences:

She is the most majestic tree in an area steeped in prehistory where I regularly walk my dogs. I am so happy each time I see her and feel anchored to the Earth and connected to the past. I converse with her as I pass, addressing her reverentially as ‘Your Majesty’. ⁷⁹

Echoing the invitation of Rosenkranz’s Old Tree to contemplate vegetal life through the body, bodies may come together in a co-creative relationship:

Xiloxochitl better known as Coquito is an antique tree from south Mexico. There is a Coquito growing in my yard. For many years it did not flower. Every month during the last year I had my menstruation I offered the tree my blood. When it flowered for the firsts time I entered menopause. We do have a connection. My blood blossoms with the tree. ⁸⁰

Learning unfolds from the poetic mode of allowing and being-with. Appreciation, and the efforts to engage the intricate expressions of plant life and the resonances created in one’s ‘inner workspace’ – without reducing or collapsing either ‘human’ or ‘vegetal’ – prompt questions and the formulation of intentions. Someone notes: ‘I want to learn to be sensitive about what she needs’, pondering that ‘don’t we all flourish through admiration?’ Sharing locations and moments of lived experiences in these partnerships creates a collective imaginative space with portraits of more-than-human relations unfolding across the globe. The collective display of diverse modes of moving between inside and outside, human perception and plant consciousness, give rise to a co-created archive, a ‘herbarium’ that exposes ‘family resemblances’ ⁸¹ not through visual appearance but the inner experiences of connection with oneself and the more-than-human world, beyond what can be seen with physical eyes.

Working at the thresholds

Enabling an experience of already existing and emerging more-than-human relations and the fundamental condition of interconnectedness that permeates them is a mechanism central to Old Tree, Imagining World Politics and 7000 HUMANS. This is one pathway towards recovering our ability to move and translate across worlds, restoring the symbolic richness to all life forms, ‘human’ included. Ways of seeing and knowing that recognise abundance in the other – both in living realities and imaginative possibility – also enriches the self. When ‘the inner field is activated’ through such aesthetic experiences, writes Sacks,

we are mobilized internally and begin to encounter the world in us and the world we are within as an interdependent living being. But this aesthetic mode has a further significance. Being mobilized internally is what enables us to respond. Instead of responsibility as a moral imperative or duty, responsibility can be understood as the ability-to-respond. ⁸²

Responding as an outward-moving trajectory evoked by an awareness of our irreducible complicity and participation in multiple worlds proceeds along two main lines in 7000 HUMANS: making commitments and formulating questions. Working at the thresholds of the (un)known, inner and outer commitments initiate the making of new form by channelling the energy of insights consciously, towards aims with personal significance. It is described as

an opportunity to look with new eyes at something you are already doing or feel needs to be done – something personal, social, spiritual, political, ecological or all of these. It is a chance to look at how you have chosen to act in your life and the world, or might choose to act, and uncover this ‘commitment’ that drives and motivates this. ⁸³

Some mention physical activities related to vegetal life in their website entries, such as planting, saving, healing trees and other plants, collecting seeds, reforesting, rewilding, preserving and caring for land, soil, and natural habitats. Others commit themselves to activism, community engagement, storytelling, connecting different scientific fields and knowledge practices, art-based education or initiating new creative projects. Using fewer plastic bags or repurposing human-created substances as art objects. Commitments can also involve performing everyday acts with greater awareness: walking, breathing, keeping mind and heart open, responding to other beings with kindness, working towards ‘small positive changes’. Someone notes that

my commitment is to connect multiple times every day to the living presence that animates my body and all bodies of all beings. By sensing this presence I intend to remind myself that all is well and that I am not separate from all other living things. In addition, I will continue to provide listening spaces where others can connect deeply to their own embodied wisdom. ⁸⁴

Questions mould the ‘social mycelium’ and the poetic domain of ecological citizenship without a specific outcome, revealing the generative possibilities of the field. Sacks and Zumdick see questions as a force that breaks through ‘all the information and ways of seeing we are socialised into’, ⁸⁵ and working with them is like ‘shining light into unknown terrain’. ⁸⁶ The improvisational practice of ‘finding and following questions’ transforms the linear approach of seeking solutions to problems. It keeps both the questions and potential answers adaptable, flexible and alive.

From the fourteen questions selected for global assemblies, ⁸⁷ two feel particularly prominent for the intentions of this project. ‘How do we move from doing to being?’ directs my attention to exploring moments of silence – comfortable and uncomfortable ones – in breaking through the numb surfaces of academic habit. Every time I visit my tree partner I ponder ‘What does it mean to listen to non-human worlds, and how can we be sure that we hear them?’ As I listen more deeply, I note that I still do not know, and I keep on listening.

Thinking alongside these questions and thinking with and through the experiential sites of this paper, prompted multiple others. The questions scattered throughout this text, weaving into a rhizome-like structure, embody a continuous effort to translate between worlds. Working at the thresholds, rhizomatic writing unfolds as a modality of ecologically attuned ways of knowing, inspired by encounters with tree-figures and my initial inquiry of ‘How do we move from knowledge to knowing otherwise, as a mode of being otherwise?’ as an effort to transform epistemic disconnection from the more-than-human world. Finding a creative form that embraces and enhances rather than reduces emotional multiplicities revealed in the mycelium-like ecologies of thinking, feeling and relating has been another driving force. It took multiple attempts of going ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the inner workspace to make the work with the ‘invisible materials’ visible and accessible as actual, living processes of sensing and sense-making. Not only in how to write and narrate inner phenomena without trying to capture them, but also in drawing out their ethical and political potential in shaping multiple worlds, at however small a scale. This required a closer, deeper practice of noticing, through which I came to see more of both the silver birch and my own feeling-thinking processes.

There is no end or conclusion to rhizomatic writing and thinking. I offer the potent energy of these micro-perceptions and eco-phenomenological stories to be taken further onto new planes of knowing, being, relating and acting. The tree-figures encourage us to explore ways of integrative, somatic knowing through connecting with the body, embracing multiple emotional worlds and becoming aware of our own sense-making processes. Reflexivity through sensory stimulation, world politics imagined through a yin-sensibility, enlivening imaginations of selfhood and society, the poetic modes of allowing and working with questions serve as experiential, experimental methods and creative resources to ‘recraft’ the discipline ⁸⁸ through hybrid, sometimes hesitant sensibilities unfolding from more-than-human relations. Perceiving and inhabiting International Relations through the plurality of everyday international relations, also as inner relations, promises new epistemologies and imaginative horizons of not only what could be done, but also who we might become in and through our relations, relating. New concepts and imaginations informed by vegetal consciousness; experiential processes and research methods that emerge from and feed back into more-than-human relations; self-reflexive ways of knowing that expose and account for their own contingent, fragmented, non-linear nature; pedagogies for developing ‘new organs of perception’ and working with attention; creative forms of expression and language for making sensible what is emergent are but a few sites and possibilities where we may continue to dwell, seek balance and allow ourselves to be moved, finding and following questions.

Holding attention on the ‘personal’ and committing to ‘inner work’, however, remain crucial ethical and political aspects of transformational labour and cultivating ecologically attuned ways of knowing. For Sacks, social sustainability hinges on understanding and practicing ‘personal sustainability’. ⁸⁹ Beyond disconnection and identification, when we can see from a ‘connective distance’, a non-anthropocentric, non-hierarchical ‘I-sense’ may arise through which ‘we are able to recognise the being and integrity of all life forms’, and craft respectful, caring and appreciative relationships to ourselves, each other and the planet. ⁹⁰ A differentiated yet interdependent social ‘we’ emerges when self-aware individuals come together to think and imagine collectively. ⁹¹ Shenya’s social theory envisions community well-being through individual self-realisation, enhancing human abilities and transcending the ‘self’ as lacking. Attuning to vegetal consciousness, for both Shenya and 7000 HUMANS, begins with and returns to our capacity to feel. Expanding our sensitivity becomes a pathway to transgress inner and outer boundaries, including solidified, limiting forms of thinking and human-made borders. Rosenkranz’s Old Tree, Ling’s Imagining World Politics and the connective practices of 7000 HUMANS gesture towards integrative ways of knowing where experiencing more connection within – across our sense making faculties and atomised senses of self – gives rise to more interconnected experiences and imaginations outside, across multiple, hybrid worlds, in which we, too, are implicated. Connecting with a tree can be a catalyst in sensing and making sense differently. Yet – as the lemniscate folds back onto itself and the laughing monk provokes all species face-to-face – embracing the fundamental relationality of our (inter)being as many, simultaneous becomings can only stem from individual awareness, reconfiguring the I-sense as inherently plural. It takes the mythic force of Knowledge to first realise its interbeing with Love and all other forces.

As spectators of Old Tree, readers of Imagining World Politics, old and new participants of 7000 HUMANS carry the energy of encounters with plant life to other social realms, I continue to visit the silver birch, and I invite you, the reader, to keep on formulating your questions and exploring the many connective modalities – already available and yet to be co-created – that expand the ‘warmth body’ through these and other transformational efforts.