The phenomenology of Cronedom

I'm writing this before the Croning Ritual, though that will have happened by the time you read it.

I've had a day in which I felt happy at one point - I walked through a park I didn't know well and saw a lot of crows - and then felt anger, frustration, and shame. This came about as I was in a zoom meeting and I spoke too much and too forcefully and too stupidly. I hadn't listened well enough and I wasn't tactful enough. I didn't privilege the others in the conversation as I should have.

At the same time, there were things being said that I thought had such an implicit athropocentricity about them that I was riled. The thing is, one is not allowed to question anthropocentricity because it can seem to suggest a further deprivileging of people and communities who have long been oppressed. My view is that many humans - in the Global South, from indigenous communities, people of colour, people facing gender-based or sexuality-based injustice, or indeed people oppressed by ablism and neuro-normalism - are due reparation and support. However, I further feel that the more-than-human others are due like reparation and support. What's more,the more-than-human is likely to require protection from all human communities, given our population and the different reasons for harms to the more-than-human, which may involve poverty, exile from certain places, lack of education in certain communities, and so on in addition to ever great land-demands for humans. To assert this for the more-than-human does require limitations on the actions of all humans, in other words. And it also demands that we acknowledge the harms done not just by the Global North but by all of us.

I sound like an eco-fascist. At least, that is the term used by those who think that dispossessed human communities are more important than the more-than-human - while I would say they have the same importance, while also bearing some responsibility. Even if considerably less.

You feel discomfort reading this? I would suggest that it's because ultimately it's really really hard to believe that an animal or a woodland or whatever non-human entity could ever be anywhere near as deserving as a human, especially a human suffering from prejudice or colonialism. And that to suggest as much, especially from my position as a privileged person in the Global North, is to double-down on the prejudice already suffered by such a person.

But I say it is not to double-down. It is to valorise the more-than-human appropriately. More than one thing can matter. It does not have to be either/or. And, remember, right now the either/or inevitably chooses the human.

Still, I mind appearing callous. I mind appearing prejudiced. And I mind feeling that I am always an outsider.

One of the things I wanted to give up was all this minding. One of the things I wanted to celebrate was that my upbringing led to me always being an outsider, so I should be used to it. This has reinforced those desires.

On a different note, this quote seemed to express what I have been hearing from the trees - about seeking truth not out there and not "in my gut" but in relationship with the world.

In other words, the intelligibility is neither “within us’ nor “out there.” Rather, it is in the dynamics of the “inter world”—of being-with, not a determinate order of being—because we, as interrogating, speaking beings, express the world and endlessly discover the world expressed through us. - Carleton Dallery

And I remember writing this some months back::

By refusing to pay attention to the world, we refuse to be shaped by it and then, presumably, become misfits, anomalies. Academic Harry Wels stresses the need for noticing: "Radical empathy through the art of noticing is based on a wise and kind curiosity and constant alertness on what might be overlooked to the detriment of striving for a radical empathy." Earlier in the same text, he writes:

The essentialist mind-body binary, as well as the culture-nature divide which is in sync with, and paralleling the mind-body binary, were both discarded [in most southern African ontologies] for embracing inclusivity as enchanted webs of significance, inspired by San cosmologies and tracking practices. Empathy is no longer restricted to humans, but stretches as far as the senses and the mind can carry it, into enchanted and spirited landscapes full of shared sentience, sensuality and multiple meanings and ambiguities (cf. Myburgh, 2013; Latour, 2017).

Maybe I'm not the misfit.