Ferociously Present: A Conversation About Caressing the Fractures for New Knowings [Episode 14]
It was with utter delight that I recently shared a conversation with fellow intranaut and Ayurvedic medicine practitioner, Alana Layne Greenberg. I knew she would be game for turning off the lights so to speak, fumbling around with heightened senses, palpating the fissures, pressing up against some initiatory questions like: What does it mean to re-embody indigeneity? What’s up with our obsession about the end of the world? How does our human body reflect the land body and vice versa (and are there any ways that we might take this sense of “mirroring” too far?)
And more, so much more! Here are some highlights:
- Alana describes how she connects to Gaia, using wonderment as a vibration, “receiving a frequency medicine” that runs through all of her senses, ultimately creating a loop of reciprocity.
- Feeling into the personal nature and potential stickiness of the term “re-embodying indigeneity,” Alana explores it as “a more natural way of knowing… a way of being reverent.”
- It is speculated that every aspect of our bodies has olfactory receptors, including our heart, liver, lungs, sperm, and ova. What if our origin story is entirely based on smell? What if we have been entraining and detoxifying when we are in less-humanly impacted spaces with receptors we didn’t even know that we have?
- Learning to work with Void medicine - the dark, inherently feminine energy from which all life springs- makes space for a radical not-knowingness and the embracing of uncertainty.
- Alana wonders how we might “untame presence in a way that fosters a revolution of love?”
- How is our obsession with extinction becoming like a trendy “sexy, burning man event?” How might we be careful about seeding our own prophecy?
- Using the Ayurvedic principle of agni, let us transmute our grief for the world, laying it down in digestive fires, metabolizing it in a way that stops centering humans and reveres Gaia instead.
- Alana recently watched a lily opening in real time, the inside of the lily's petals so very white, and she felt acutely aware of all that our senses can’t perceive and how we struggle to see the more-than-humans in their full wholeness.
More Resources:
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Young
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia by Stephan Harding
Becoming Gaia by Sean Kelly
Restoring the Kinship Worldview by Wahinkpe Topa
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Gaston Bachelard: An Elemental Reverie on the World's Stuff by Joanne Stroud
Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber
