Making-room

The crows are watching again!

I thought I would put on here some of the thoughts I have been having recently about my practice of 'becoming-with' the animals and plants around me.

One aspect is somthing I call "making-room".

By making-room, I mean both physical space and psychological space. The latter is as important as the former, yet far less frequently examined. While the allocation of land, habitat, and freedom from human incursion is rightly acknowledged as central to conservation, preservation, and ecological restoration, the provision of psychological space is typically treated as a secondary or derivative concern. Where it is addressed at all, it often appears in the form of a corrective project: theorists emphasise that terms such as vermin or pest distort our perception of certain non-humans, and argue that removing these pejorative framings would allow us to see animals more clearly, more accurately, or more justly.

What I am proposing here goes further. It is not only that non-humans are mis-seen through human veils of prejudice, utility, or fear, but that the ethical problem lies in the assumption that justice requires clearer sight at all. The provision of psychological space does not aim at replacing distorted representations with truer ones, as though ethical relation culminated in correct understanding. Rather, it is a deliberate refusal to convert encounter into possession. That involves suspending the demand for full perceptual, interpretive, or conceptual access. Making room, in this sense, is not a matter of seeing non-humans as they really are, but of allowing their ways of being to remain partially unavailable, unassimilated, and resistant to human frames of meaning. And this opacity is not because, or just because, their ways are inherently mysterious, but because enforced availability is itself a mode of domination.

This position differs equally from scientific extraction, empathetic fusion, and phenomenological completion, each of which, in different ways, seeks to stabilise the other through understanding. In contrast, making-room, by offering psychological space, names the practice of refraining from filling that space with explanation, interpretation, or narrative closure, and instead tolerating the discomfort of coexistence without comprehension. Or, more accurately, this practice celebrates the friction supplied by alterity. Making-room is not the precondition for later understanding; it is the practice that replaces that demand.

Making-room is specifically concerned with space and availability.

And the birds make use of that space and availability!