Naturalizing Our Severance

I'm having that thing where a theme comes into my life and then I see it everywhere. Specifically with:

📺 Severance the TV series
📖 Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
🎙 Crrow777 radio podcast

Overall the question they all seem to be asking is what happens when we are cut off from nature and history? The answer I've gotten: we become dependent on corporations and we have to speak their language.

🔪 In the pathologically sterile work environment in Severance, there's an isolated green in the cubicle partitions, an isolated blue in the mid-century furniture. It's as though someone took an eyedropper tool and selected one of each color from a photo of planet Earth to allow into this artificially lit underworld where people are medically disconnected from their true selves. The workers know that there's so much more to their story but they can't access it. Who doesn't have this longing, living in this world abstracted from the ground we stand on? An allegory, for now.

🌾 I couldn't help but see the similarities to an essay from Braiding Sweetgrass: Kimmerer is trying to learn her native language. She meets an elderly man who is one of the few remaining few speakers of it, the knowledge saved because he was successfully hidden from the Indian agents who kidnapped Native children into boarding school to disconnect them from their history, language and culture. Who benefits when we lose ancient ways of seeing the world, the ability to "address all of the living world as we would family"?

🗣 I'm still wrapping my head around a lot of the content at crrow777radio.com, but across many of the show's occult conspiracy explorations is a warning about tricks of language we are indoctrinated to use to against ourselves to divide us from nature and history.

I've been obsessed with this competition between nature and artificiality in our human consciousness for decades. I've taken photos for a long time of industrially-produced representations of animals or artificial light on plants. When I was completing my masters thesis in industrial design, a phrase from someone I interviewed completely changed everything for me. They described traffic as "a force of nature".

In that moment I recognized the rhetorical effort to replace nature's role in our lives, to naturalize brutality and compliance and conformity. I guess that's what rhetoric is, the naturalizing of stories, which is easier to do when we've lost a connection to what's true.

When I look for ways to stay grounded and well-rounded, I'm trying to overcome this severance in myself. To connect with the cycles of the seasons, the motion of the planets, the timing of the sun and the moon. Looking up and out from the trance of this moment to feel a larger cycle of time.

I'll share more on how I work with astrology and Feng Shui to do just that very soon in a video workshop intro - would that interest you? It will be free for newsletter subscribers, so sign up here if you'd like to receive it.