The Mutual Maturation Between Humans and Their Creative Projects
Raw draft of a new PhD Statement of Purpose
I'm working on a Statement of Purpose for a new PhD program—sharing the raw gathering of words here with some polishing still left to do... I am really excited about this one!!!
My research tends the mutual maturation between human beings and their and visionary creative projects, piercing through dominant reality fields to potentiate primordial, ancestral dreamings.
Visionary Embodiment is a transgenerational maturational process that is mediated through the nested fractals of Relational Fields that each person is embedded inside of, which shape the aperture of their perception and their ability to access the creative sourcing through which alchemy and evolution can be born.
My exploration as a scholar-practitioner is in the development of a modality called Relational Field Consulting, the emergent application of eight years of graduate research into practices of systemic liberation, collective maturation, and embodied ritual, influenced by core frameworks from Bree Greenberg of the Movement of Existence and Larissa Kaul of Animist Arts. The foundation of this approach grew out of sixteen years of co-creating imaginal architectures within theatre, poetics, and other interdisciplinary arts spaces. This work also draws on ecological, somatic, and decolonial approaches to collective emergent process, especially rooted in my training as a facilitator in Systemic Constellations with Katherine Curran and Warm Data Labs with Nora Bateson.
Throughout my masters studies at Goddard College, I explored topics around somatics, systemic perception, and indigenous ways of knowing to bring presence to the relational rupturing that lives at the root of colonial realities. I have been fascinated by the way that colonial cosmologies are compressed within a limited aperture of social perception which leaves out most of the supportive fields of existence: such as relationship to sensory embodiment, radiant ancestors, nature beings, and the primordial. It is the loss of the cultural rituals and daily life intimacies that sustain our contact with this web of animate consciousness that was the baseline for most of our ancestors throughout time, which leaves us so existentially lost and unable to metabolize the calcified ancestral trauma fields that are holding in place oppressive systems of domination.
My Masters thesis Long Body Prayers invites colonially-shaped humans to deepen into a sense of embodied relationality through shifting the epistemology of self to include ecological and ancestral sources of support. Linking nervous system approaches in interpersonal neurobiology and polyvagal theory with practices around systems intelligence and creative expression, my research, essays, and poetic channellings are an embodiment of the potentialities through which the “human” bends and shimmers into other shapes of ecological perception, allowing inheritances of ancestral trauma to dissolve into a vital interplay of relational process on behalf of the wider field of life.
My current practice explores the questions: What does an ecosystem of support look like for visionary dreamings where the resources circulate to all the places they are needed? Where is the support for those of us who are healing generations of dissociated ancestors within the crucible of our own bodies? And how do we nourish the emergence of all who are incubating reality-changing visions on behalf of the collective?
There are particular creations coming through right now—stories, maps, and structures that carry an ancient resonance and that are tuned to this specific moment of evolution. These projects have their own intelligence and agency. They carry an energy of potentiation and disruption, the ability to destroy and renew, to pierce through distortions of domination and potentiate new process of collective maturation. They are seeding a lived aesthetic that can become a culture, setting the template for possible realities, making transformation tangible, allowing people to feel what might become.
Creativity is fractal. It does not just take place in the silo of one relational context, it ripples outwards, circulating, touching all the places with its invitation into aliveness. What I am doing in my work now, across all of my offerings from supporting energetic sensitivity to consulting for visionary creative projects, is restoring access to a wider circulatory system of relational resonance that includes the ordinariness of daily life intimacies while sourcing from the power of the primordial. One of the questions I am tending is: how does our own maturation and nourishment within these human-shaped bodies not become a sacrifice when we are acting as mediators for these wider forces?
I have an encompassing creative vision for a Wyrd economic structure across my body of work that will function like the microclimate of a forest, connecting and circulating the nutrients from my Relational Field Consulting work with resourced creatives into funding for my incubatory collaborative Alembic Artists to nourish visionary collective projects that are difficult to bring into tangibility within structures of capitalism and colonization, and nourishing my facilitation practice in The Mundane Mycelium supporting energetically sensitive people in attuning to practices of perception that are the building blocks of ritual and culture, reweaving the relational feedback loops that have been severed by systems of domination.
In this PhD program, I intend to engage in a research and development process around Relational Field Consulting that is rooted in somatic, phenomenological, and action-based inquiry. I would like to spread this work to places where it is visible in mass popular culture, especially fantasy and sci-fi media, as well as support its rooting down into intimacy with sustainable communities practicing mutual aid and the creation of local infrastructure for decolonization and divestment from capitalist over-structures.
I also intend to develop a body of research and writing that articulates the way that Relational Field Consciousness is mediated through embodied resonance and animist attunement to ritual, and how the remembering of these perceptual processes can support collective maturation through remediating distorted inheritances of colonization and potentiating the right-sized relational feedback loops that support the emergence of “microclimates” of culture as expressions of beauty for the nourishment of life.
If you feel called to support my work and my writing as I am going through the portal moment of these next few months with my own healing process from mold exposure, you can make a donation here.