Well, I’m on a community resilience roll (rant) this week, so let’s keep exploring what it means to think beyond the Me Me Me.
Sophie Strand is a writer who explores the intersections of ecology, healing and mythology. In a recent post, she talked about how our consciousness is collective… our ideas of separation and individuality are not really accurate, and they’re prisons, in a way, that keep us trapped in a sense of deep isolation.
It’s a wild provocation to try and stretch your brain in this direction. Try it on. I’m curious how it lands for you.
“My favourite metaphor of the spider and the spider web. Extended cognition researchers at MIT have been showing (there’s new research every day, pretty much) that spiders’ cognition is not in its brain or its body. It extends into its web. And if you damage part of the web, it acts as if it has had a stroke. And so human beings are like this. Most animals have some amount of extended cognition. And what I like to think is that, because we are only self through other, through a constant intaking of otherness, to very materially metabolically build our bodies, our minds are not in our head. Minds are territories we inhabit. That multiple beings inhabit. (That’s why the therapeutic model sometimes feels too small for me. If a mind is a territory that many beings are inside of, how can two human beings in a sterile room solve the problem that is constituted by a whole web of wild kin?”
Sophie Strand
Photo by George Rosema on Unsplash
The Wellness Almanac 