On the Cusp

We are on the cusp of the Solstice, the deepest dark and rise of light. I wish all of us some time to sink into the juicy dark and nourish seeds we can grow in some near or far future and also to find those sources of flickering light, the nearby and daily joys and also your maybe far away feeling and yet emerging dreams. All of it.

Thank you for being here. I and the team that supports me in this Moving Mountain Institute effort, exist to support you in your work in the world. We all appreciate any interest you have shown in our work and hope that you have found value here over the past year. And will continue to do so as we move towards 2023. 

Most people I talk with have faced some significant challenges over the past year, including me. I know you have gotten through in part because of the people around you. I have been thinking about porosity lately. How we are porous to and with our many environments, human and non human, built and natural. It’s another way of saying interdependent but maybe more direct. I came across the concept from the work of the immunologist and philosopher,  Thomas Pradeu. He is advocating an approach to immunity emphasizing the porosity we experience with our environments, offering some different ways of thinking about immunity that highlight our fundamental interrelationships with each other and our surroundings. 

I like it because it’s an immunological perspective totally coherent with a premise from Interpersonal Neurobiology that I also love; our brains are en-skulled, embodied and embedded. It’s the embeddedness that’s the rub. We aren’t who we are without those whom we are around. It’s true for our nervous systems and our immune systems and our social systems. We need each other. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love solitude, maybe more than most but it is with each other that we thrive and in solitude that we might further our capacities for that mutual thriving. The dark and the light. 

Or, as Andreas Weber writes (as quoted by Maggie Nelson in her brilliant book, On Freedom):

No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This make each life form less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life like the fireflies orbiting one in the night (check out this video on fireflies for some flickering light in the dark, start at 1:50). Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.” (Matter and Desire, p. 36)

I know existing in this “immeasurable network of relationships” is, these days, often fraught for both us and the folks we go to work to help. And yet we do and to do so we need to keep on finding our own inner bubbling springs. It doesn’t have to be joy or toxic positivity that we find, maybe it’s often best to just be willing to connect… 

In appreciation for you and your work in this dewdrop world…

Michael