Sitting-with

This is the second of three meditations on my practice. And you will see even more overtly in this one the impact that reading Édouard Glissant has had upon me!

Sitting-with concerns time, presence, and duration.

All life is inescapably located and related: sitting-with is the temporal, embodied, embedded aspect of the practice. The sitter is not a neutral observer: their presence will change the non-human community in terms of who remains present and in terms of what those present do and do not do. Nor is the sitter an indistinguishable, unbounded presence that merges into a fluid state with other indistinguishable, unbounded presences. The sitter is a body in a place. The longer and more regularly the sitter remains, still, silent, in that place, the less disturbance they will cause, although their presence will always change the mood and dynamics of the emplaced community.

Many people engaged in close attention to the more-than-human world already advocate practices that resemble what I am calling sitting-with. Naturalists, ecologists, trackers, environmental educators, and practitioners of what is sometimes called nature connection or animal communication often recommend sustained stillness in a particular place—Jon Young’s well-known sit spot practice is one example—as a way of attuning to the rhythms and presences of other beings. Such practices are frequently described as cultivating awareness, perception, or relationship through repeated, embodied presence. I do not claim to be reinventing these practices, nor to offer a novel technique. My interest lies instead in how such forms of stillness can be re-read ethically and ontologically: not as methods for gaining access, insight, or communion, but as disciplines of restraint. Read through Glissant’s notion of opacity, sitting-with becomes less a way of learning more about others and more a way of learning how not to convert presence into capture—how to remain nearby without demanding disclosure, response, or intelligibility.

To clarify, in my terms, sitting-with is not observation aimed at explanation. It involves staying present, alert to the ‘response-ability’ of the non-human community and open to, as Despret put it above, ‘the possibility [of inscribing] oneself in a relation of exchange and proximity that has nothing to do with identification’. Open, yes, but without demanding, seeking, or even expecting confirmation or reciprocity.

Sitting-with does not presume that relation improves through understanding; however, through sustained non-resolution, allowing space for the potential of mutual transformation, relation may deepen. Critically, however, sitting-with resists capture, entitlement, and mastery.

In the garden, I stood-with Garden Robin (AKA Falco or Falca) who was whisper-singing.