Eco-Mysticism for Apocalyptic Times

By So Sinopoulos-Lloyd with Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Originally published in Loam Magazine (July 2020).

We created Queer Nature after we fell in love and decided to weave our lives together. It is a hybrid organism—part nature school, part performance art, and part philosophical project. In a practical sense, we are apprenticing to the re-imagination of “survival skills” and naturalist studies in an era of eco-social fracture and climate chaos. On the ground, this looks like creating affinity spaces where fellow trans, lgbtqiap+, and queer people can teach and learn various outdoor and place-based skills in community. 

In a mythic or ritual dimension, our skill-share gatherings are very much about creating transformation and liberation at the level of affect. Affect refers to the feeling, emotion, or mood that something instills—it encapsulates how we are touched, emotionally and physically, by our surroundings. The experiences of our skill-shares are about feeling what it is like to be together in a space, sensing natural materials and other-than-human nature, making things, and exploring the capacities (and limits) of our awareness. Ultimately, this can give us the space and narrative sovereignty to begin to re-story our relationship to “nature” and naturalness that has been damaged by dominant cultural narratives.

On a spiritual level, we want to create conditions for people (including ourselves) to experience enchantment—moments of spellbinding awe—with the more-than-human world. Enchantment is a pathway not only to resistance of extractive and oppressive social and economic systems, but also to reimagining our identities, agencies, and futures. 

Queer Nature is at its core a project of public mysticism. We share this in an effort to dispel the persistent binaries that separate ‘technical skills’ from intellectual work, vocational from artistic, and mind from body.  The work that we do is often seen in relation to teaching hands-on skills, such as friction fire-making or wildlife tracking. However, our commitment to sharing these skills is rooted to and in service of our experiences of belonging and kinship with the more-than-human world that have been deeply healing to us as trans and queer people.

“Public Mysticism” is inspired by Krista Tippet’s notion of reimagining public theology, which she describes as “connecting grand religious ideas with messy human reality.”[1] Through the educational and philosophical work of Queer Nature, we seek to be more public about the ways in which we are enchanted, entranced, and spellbound by the more-than-human world. We believe there is a hidden world of mysticism and magic at the heart of the inner lives of naturalists, scientists, and craftspeople that has been long kept under wraps because of a multitude of social pressures—including needing to appear “rational” rather than “superstitious,” or “detached” as opposed to “sentimental.”[2] There is political power to this de-privatization of mystical spirituality, especially when it is connected to place, earth, and natural materials.

For us, mysticism is—among many other things—an age-old psycho-spiritual process that can transform despair into creativity and hope. Despair is a place where worldviews crumble and justice can feel impossible. However, in our cultural and historical readings of mysticisms, despair can be a vital part of envisioning paradigm shifts and dreaming the future. 

Mysticisms are also characterized by transpersonal or interspecies love, longing, and devotion. This deeply charged emotional stance has the power to bridge our experiences of ecological grief and despair with our experiences of awe, love, and enchantment with the beyond human world. Enchantment and awe can be entry points into reconfigured relationships with kin in a post-apocalyptic ‘life after despair.’ Because mysticism makes mystery a space where the sacred can emerge, we believe that a reimagining of mysticism can help us live into the unknown in an era of ecocide. 

Mystery and mysticism feel central to the work of environmental and nature-based education, especially for folks of marginalized and emergent identities. ‘Nature’ is a place where the unknown and unfamiliar is able to exist and take up space. The more-than-human world has acted as a guide, parent, sibling, peer, and Beloved to both of us in our coming of age as queer, and for Pinar as a queer Indigenous person of color. Being dehumanized naturally pushed us to identify with the realms of existence that Western culture (especially according to Christianity) has mythologized as subordinate to humans—or even as monstrous. When we hear the old hegemonic stories that our bodies or desires are ‘unnatural,’ we look to the myriad ways that queerness is reflected in the extra-human world. We see does growing antlers and lionesses growing manes, songbirds who are half male and half female, fungi with tens of thousands of sexes, other species who choose members of the ‘same sex’ as mates, and much, much more. When we are called insurgent, we look to the species able to thrive in damaged ecosystems who are called ‘invasive.’ When we are called excessive, we look to the tropical birds that dazzle for a living, for whom beauty and aesthetics are a coded language that is an incantation for kinship and survival.

Realms beyond the human have provided a ‘safer’ space for us, not because they lack danger, but because their dangers aren’t rooted in human attitudes. In our work, ‘safe space’ is the space where we can take the risks necessary to learn those vital place-based skills that have often felt inaccessible because of the machismo and individualism that surrounds ‘outdoors culture.’ The ‘dangers’ of the more-than-human often lie in its powers to undermine or circumvent human plans and ideologies—think of the power of a flash flood, the roots that break concrete, the species such as the Eastern Coyote that hybridize when they are persecuted. Because these subversive strategies within the more-than-human world are relatable, we find solidarity in this space. In this era that many call the Anthropocene, more-than-human ecologies seem fundamentally ‘punk’ because they are able to resist human authority in unanticipated ways.

At their root, naturalist studies and earth-based skills are mystical because they encapsulate a ‘body of knowledge’ that is always changing and never fully known given that the earth is a living text constantly rewriting itself. Wildlife tracking has taught us the most about the mystical nature of ecological inquiry. Deciphering animal tracks and following their trails reframes many of the cultural assumptions that we have developed about knowledge. It teaches us that knowledge is not possible without imagination. Since tracking and trailing often are done in the absence of the creature being tracked, we must call on our storytelling abilities in order to engage. In many ways, tracking teaches us how to truly be co-creative with the land, instead of immediately imposing our ideas onto it. 

We dream of an ecological mysticism as a politics beyond the human; a more than human romance with the unknown; a way toward a “secure” relationship with Mystery. Mysticism is trust in the feeling of sacredness in spite of what the dominant culture tells us sacredness is. It is spiritual or soul-shaking wonder at the notion that not everything is, or ever will be, known. It is the experience that the world is enchanted and alive. Mysticism is surrendering your life to what you love. 

 Mysticism exists on the fringes of culture. Many dictionaries define mysticism as the practice of seeking encounter or union with a divine or sacred reality. Mystical experiences are often spoken of as altered states of consciousness reached spontaneously, through contemplation or prayer, or through ritual acts of surrender. Many historians have used “mystic” to describe notorious individuals who expressed their religiosity in unorthodox ways. Mystics who gained public attention were variously seen as either heretics and outlaws or saints and prophets. Whether mystics are uplifted as heroes and harbingers of the future, or demonized and persecuted by their societies depends on many factors mostly having to do with power, politics, and popularity.

There is a voyeuristic, sideshow-like quality to contemporary conceptions of mysticism. Mystics, we are made to believe, are mostly those who populate the past or non-Western cultures. We hear of mystics as people who performed strange behaviors and cultivated incredible lifestyles due to their devotion to the divine or more-than-human. They lived in a cave and ate only a slice of bread per day, they sat with one arm raised for ten years, they lived on top of a 30 foot column, they were chronically ill and had visions, they dreamt of becoming animals—all in the name of devotion to something that Western science cannot measure. When we reduce mysticism to pure spectacle we create a false divide between ourselves and these historical or cultural others. This upholds problematic notions of Western modernity by continuing the depressing story that we live in a disenchanted world. 

An attitude of dismissive amusement to mysticism is also part of the heritage of misogyny and racism. Indigenous people and womxn are often seen as impressionable to various ‘forces,’ such as emotions or spirits. Some of these negative views toward mysticism reveal racism and classism expressed through prejudice toward traditions that actually embrace ‘public mysticism’ through altered states.

Yet people also cannot help but be fascinated with mystics precisely because of how they use their bodies. Many revered mystics—whether long dead saints or living activists—treat their bodies and lives as contested sites of struggle, as places where activism emerges, as imagination written in flesh. The ‘creative danger’ in mysticism lies in the potent mix of devotion and performance. Mysticism has the potential of being dangerous, because action, ritual, and performance infused with devotion stirs the social, political, and spiritual imagination. This is why we do not want just an ecological spirituality, but an ecological mysticism. We need mysticism so that it can be normal for our consciousness to feel radically altered or transformed when we hear that an Indigenous leader was murdered by a mining company, that another coral reef died, or another whale was found dead with a stomach full of trash. To the mystic, a soul shaken is a soul mobilized.

What could this look like in times of eco-social fracture and anthropogenic climate chaos?  Ecological or ‘climate’ mysticism is already alive in the creative practices and resistance movements led by Indigenous activists and other environmental protectors. Diné musician, poet, and water protector Lyla June fasted on the steps of the Capitol Building in Santa Fe in January as a spiritual, political, and ecological act of public ceremony. During her “Fast 4 the Future,” which was part of her campaign for the New Mexico House of Representatives, she spent seven days in “contemplative prayer for life on earth in the face of the climate crisis.”[3]  Ecological mysticism was alive in Lenca activist Berta Caceres’ campaign to stop development of the Gualcarque River, or the devotion of Mexican eco-activist Homero Gomez to the monarch butterfly in the face of massive deforestation. The work of the latter two—and their devotion to beloved kin—was so threatening to corrupt mining and logging interests that it cost them their lives.  Ecological mysticism is alive too in the work of the underfunded and rogue conservationists who see their subjects as people (in spite of Western philosophy’s penchant for seeing animals as soulless beings), and who bring new public understanding of non-humans through their work.

An important political dynamic of mysticism for us is that it is about longing for a transformed world through a deeply intimate and sometimes life-long relationship with a more-than-human entity. This could be a god, a forest, a river, a landscape, an ancestor, an entire species. In this relationship lives the possibility of surrender through poetry, practices of trance, art, activism, meditation, body modification, or fasting. Mysticism gets at the need for a productive rupture in our cosmologies—a site where the unanticipated can enter our view of the world. This is to also say, mysticism is dangerous especially to status quos of “empires.” It is an overflow of myth, creativity, life force, despair, or joy that can emerge as a reaction to stagnancy in systems. Mysticism is brought out too in times that are felt as apocalyptic or catastrophic, in the wake of massive disasters or in the shadow of anticipated ones.

In this way, mysticism is not only a tool for metabolizing despair, but also for transforming it. Despair is often seen as useless, as a sign something is wrong with you, as selfish, as a detraction from activism, as reason for administering medication. The feminist psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan has powerfully argued that despair is a social and moral emotion, which also makes it an ecological emotion—coupling our emotional bodies with the bodily state(s) of the planet and our multi-species kin.[4] 

Despair is a normal reaction to colossal destabilizations of meaning and justice and is actually a ‘correct’ emotion to be experiencing at this geological time. As Greenspan emphasizes, what despair asks of us is no less than a complete overhaul of our worldview, a reimagining of cosmology and our place in it that represents a becoming-current with the world-as-it-is now.  Despair carves out a space for us to be re-enchanted with the world, not as a form of escapism but as an affirmation of radically reformed values.

We cannot turn away from the mystical in this cultural and geological moment. What if instead of dismissing so-called “magical thinking,” we realized our own power and right to stand for our notion of an enchanted world—one where enchantment is a pathway to anti-fascist and anti-capitalist ways of living on the earth? This includes respecting and uplifting the values of the marginalized peoples who are being killed for their loyalty to the more-than-human world. Systems of toxic power that rely on resource extraction hate when activists, protectors, and guardians surrender themselves not to those systems of power but to the Land. In doing so they reveal that devotion to a system other than extractive capitalism and neoliberal notions of “progress” is powerful and valid. 

Just as despair allows us to become current with what is, awe enables us to become current to what is possible. UC researcher Dacher Keltner describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”[5] So the experience of awe is very much related to—and dependent on—the existence of mystery. Awe is a non-binary emotion that can be felt when we are ecstatic or when we are terrified. In Keltner’s research, he found that after experiences of awe, people were motivated to act in more collectivistic and altruistic ways. He writes, “[b]rief experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective and orient our actions toward the interests of others.” Awe is more than just being dazzled. It’s actually transformative.

Awe is an emotion very dear to the mystic. Mystics use awe to track the movements of the sacred, their own souls, and the sensuous relations between the two. We live for the moments where we are consensually captivated by the more-than-human world, by a fresh lion track pressed into mud or a hermit thrush’s song, by the moonlight in the desert or the micro-ecosystem of an animal carcass. Awe humbles us and makes us feel small but at the same time fills us with the very ‘big’ emotions of wonder and amazement. Awe is a direct encounter with Mystery—it is the place where the unknown and the known bleed together like watercolor pigments on paper. When we become aware of this seam between worlds, we feel deep respect and curiosity for our other-than-human kin. They have given us the gift of perspective and so we are eager to give back the gift of our protection and commitment. Transformed and strengthened bonds with others beyond the human are an important basis for hope for the future. 

When we both were still pretty new to tracking, we went on a trip to Algonquin Provincial Park to track Eastern Wolves with a wild canid biologist whom we knew. It was February and the place was blanketed in several feet of snow, with temperatures dropping to 30° below at night. A few days into the trip, one of our colleagues found what appeared to be signs of double-marking on one of the snowshoe trails near our cabins. Double-marking is when a mated pair of canines urinate on the same spot in order to advertise their presence to others. When the female is approaching peak fertility, she has blood in her pee, which is extremely noticeable on snow. We were ecstatic at the prospect of finding a wolf couple’s fresh trail. As we followed the tracks, they veered off the snowshoe trail and broke out across a frozen lake. The snow was so fresh that the two track lines were the only disturbance we could see across the flat boreal expanse. Soon though, the trails began to skitter around seemingly randomly, zigzagging and weaving as they traced across the lake. One of the more seasoned trackers on our trip threw up his hands in frustration. He was now convinced that these trails were made by Cedar, the large breed dog owned by the groundskeeper at the wildlife research station where we were staying. It is rare for trails made by adult wild canines—especially in deep winter when every calorie counts—to go ‘all over the place’ like these seemed to be, without any obvious reason.

The elder tracker was so upset by the prospect of a domestic dog roaming free that he was ready to turn around and call it a day. However, some of us newbies were curious to keep following the trails. As we trudged across the frozen lake, our trip leader, a tender-hearted scientist and certain mystic named Chris Schadler, began to get emotional. As her eyes moved across the trails, they welled up with tears. As she analyzed the playful, loping gaits, she confirmed what was indeed the truth. These were a mated pair, and they were in the thick of their courtship—playing like puppies. This period would only last about one week out of the whole year, and in over a decade of leading this trip annually, she had never seen such fresh evidence of this magical time. These were the tracks and trails of mutual enchantment. We all stood now in the center of the lake, in bundled-up awe. Suddenly we were careful not to step on the tracks. Even though the activity had likely occurred much earlier than morning, we turned around to head back to the research station. We didn’t want to disturb them.

Being in awe of wolves in the wild is a special experience in these times. Wolves are among the most persecuted and hated large predator on earth, along with their cousins the coyotes and jackals, and the story of their extirpation on Turtle Island follows lockstep with the story of colonization and Indigenous genocide. Yet, they survive, and they even have time for enchantment. In fact, maybe their future depends on it. For trans and queer folks, there is a strange and easy solidarity to be found with wolves, as we have all, at one time or another, been called monstrous, or been seen as a moral or physical threat to society. Whenever we have come across wolf sign—whether a footprint or a kill-site—our awe was not relaxed, nor was it a form of entertainment. We were alert, and humbled, and forever changed, forever oriented towards the enigmatic and misunderstood soul of the wolf. If no field guide had fully prepared us for what we would encounter out there, what other mysteries lay in the glyphs and glens of the other-than-human?  Working with Chris, who is one of the most ardent defenders of coyotes and wolves we’ve ever met, taught us that if science isn’t mystical, it’s dead in the water. That is the power of awe.

We see enchantment as a branch of awe. It’s the experience of mystery as pleasurable. It’s the guerrilla takeover of our attention by the radically Other. It’s the spirit of beckoning that brings us closer to something or someone. And in an era when the future of life on earth is uncertain, these experiences are integral to nourishing our nervous systems. In studies of the mindset of people who had self-rescued or survived extreme situations (such as remote plane crashes or mountaineering accidents), the survivors often reported experiences of awe & wonder at the beauty and fierceness of the landscapes in which they found themselves.[6] When we are ‘stopped in our tracks’ in wonderment, our panicked or anxious minds have a chance to pause, and this pause could be critical to our survival. Pinar refers to the practice of letting oneself be enchanted by the more-than-human in these times ‘guerrilla mysticism.’ This phrase encapsulates the notion that we have a duty and a responsibility to slow down and be allured by the world as part of our response to eco-social crisis.

Apprenticing to enchantment is particularly potent at this time because it can help us puzzle together a roadmap for rebuilding our world after despair has torn it apart. Enchantment can be the beginning of interest, affection, and love—those experiences that encourage paying attention to Others, listening to them, and learning from them. These are vital practices of responsibility in a time of species isolation and species loss. Enchantment as possession by an ‘other’ is also a means to flip the colonial & capitalist story that measures our lives by what we are able to possess. 

Enchantment can be political, too. This is because it is a form of joy that can disrupt dynamics of control that work to erode our dignity, power, and agency as people, communities, and ecosystems. Even one small disruption to the hypnotized state of our nervous systems under late capitalism can become a site of insurgence that can guide us to resist the ‘false enchantment’ that capitalism profits from.

When we think of enchantment, we may think of desire, and along with that the ways that desire can promote harmful behaviors in a culture of extractivism and white supremacy. But what if our reaction to enchantment was to move back and give space instead of moving immediately toward something? 

Our thought partners for this question are beings by whom we have been recently enchanted; particularly by Awlon, the Rumsen Ohlone word for abalone. They are a sea snail inhabiting the tidal zones of the Pacific coast. Abalones are a sacred person and very important food for many coastal native people. Their iridescent shell—the origin of ‘mother-of-pearl’— is also used for many things including beads, fishhooks, and as ceremonial vessels. They were found throughout the central coast of what is now called California for thousands of years until settlers and tourists’ taste for the meat of these gentle, slow moving sea snails triggered a global frenzy, and they were massively overharvested by commercial fishers and recreational divers. 

Consumers driving the demand for the snails had no idea how long it took these magical creatures to grow, or that they exist in a delicate balance with kelp ecosystems forged out of deep time. In 2017, the last abalone fishery in California was closed and harvesting laws have been severely reduced—in 2018 the fishing season for them was cancelled entirely. Throughout it all, the state of California has not granted Indigenous people their sovereign hunting and fishing rights, and their late recognition of the ecological crisis has only made them double down on enforcing colonial laws. Abalone have been so reduced in numbers that many coastal native folks can not consistently source even the shells to create their traditional regalia. We are in an emergency with our sea snail kin, and the over harvesting of them has been part of cultural genocide against Indigenous people.

We now know too well the results of acting too quickly when we are enchanted by something. We want it to be “ours.” We want to immediately pick up that antler, that feather, that bone. But we must be wary of the fuzzy line between enchantment and infatuation for the sake of cultivating an ecological ethic that can help us navigate these times with less harm toward, and more support of, life. 

We have a prayer that enchantment be an invitation to relationship, and by that we mean first listening. Martin Shaw wrote that when you love something, you pay attention to it; you don’t immediately try to categorize it (either with your thought or with your behavior).[7] When we are enchanted, we are actually in a space of mystery where we can’t fully know what something means, much less what our relationship to it should look like. Enchantment is a mystical space. 

How do we engage in these more-than-human eco-mysticisms without acting appropriative or entitled? We believe it starts with creating relationships with the land where we live —relationships built on humility and listening. It starts with the possibility of falling in love and sustaining love as joyful (and sorrowful) labor. What might happen if we fall in love with the local river, with the songbirds in the bushes outside our window? What grief might we feel when we begin to see that these beings whom we love may not be fully free? What devotion might we feel when we realize how these beings infiltrate and expand our dreams, when we realize that our precious creativity is not possible without them? 

Mystical spiritualities teach us that love begins and ends beyond the human. The growing ecological awareness in our world is an opportunity to consider that mystical love is part of interpersonal relationship with other-than-human beings. Mystical love is the opposite of infatuation—it orients us, mercilessly, toward common liberation. The songbirds outside our window are the ones who hold us accountable with their presence—or their absence. Only when we start here can we be trusted to love and commit to beings who are located further away from us, physically, culturally, and across worlds.

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[1] Krista Tippett, Public Theology Reimagined,” On Being, <onbeing.org/libraries/public-theology-reimagined>.

[2] For a mind-blowing discussion of the hidden life of magic and the occult within the “Western” sciences, see Jason A. Josephson Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences,” The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

[3]  Lyla June, “Fast 4 The Future,” 2020, < https://electlylajune.com/fast-for-the-future/>.

[4] Miriam Greenspan, “Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair,” Shambhala Publications, 2004.

[5] Dacher Keltner, “Why Do We Feel Awe? The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, 10 May 2016, <greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_do_we_feel_awe>.

[6] Laurence Gonzales, “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.” W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

[7] Martin Shaw, “Mud and Antler Bone: An Interview with Martin Shaw,” Emergence Magazine, 2019, <emergencemagazine.org/story/mud-and-antler-bone/>.