An Invitation to join our Spring 2025 "Re-Seeding Imaginations" Book Club

Announcing our Spring Book Club Selection!

Our Spring 2025 “Re-Seeding Imaginations” Book Club starts in April as an interactive offering for paid subscribers. Read more details in the post below.

We need a new ancient lexicon to seed the new world.

We also need a way to language the multi-layered griefs we grapple with in these transformative times. Often, we don’t have the words to name the complexity of grief we feel, watching human-driven ecological catastrophes or social inequities on an exponential level.

We are not made to hold all of this alone.

In my fascination with language, I have always gravitated towards those who stretch the English language to try to carry more complexity and relationality. I also love neologisms, which are new words, usages, or expressions.

In my work in Indigenous land and lifeways reclamation, I find myself challenging buzz words and colonial pressures in our work towards the dignified resurgence of our traditional Indigenous cultures in modern times.

We must pay attention to how English and the Western mindset always want us to squeeze into their boxes and sit at their tables; our frontline work as creatives, artists, and community members is to continue to resist that on all levels.

In the area of my life’s work, "Regenerative ag," " food systems,” or “food sovereignty," etc., are all English words that don't even approximate or in any way get at the heart of describing what our deeply kin-centric cultural foodways encompass. Language serves as a powerful lens through which we understand culture and worldview, reflecting shared values, beliefs, and experiences within a community while also shaping how we perceive and interact with the world.

We need a new lexicon ( perhaps one that isn't in English) that adequately tells the story of this work. We need to sprout something new from the rich soil of ancestral brilliance to seed the nourishing and irresistible future we are borrowing from our descendants.

We have so much work to do to dismantle the barbed wire of capitalism and imperialism, the enclosures not only across the commons but inside our minds as well.

As someone born into speaking the tongue of my ancestral oppressors, I'm always stretching the English language to express what I want to say so that it has the essence of a much deeper holistic, cyclical thought pattern, moving against the linear grain of the English syntax.

I come from a long line of people who spoke with words that recognize animacy in everything and acknowledge the mycelial web of countless interdependent relationships; a whole, beautiful, and complete thought or idea can be expressed in one word. My grandparents were the last in my lineage to speak Mohawk as a first language.

If we are bound by the constraints of a language and lexicon, how will modern culture shift in the powerful and positive ways it needs to to restore our collective spiritual power?

Last year, when grappling with multiple overlapping ecological and social griefs, I wrote an essay about Solastalgia, which is “the mental distress specifically caused by environmental change, where one’s home environment and sense of place is being violated”

Ecopsychologist Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia in 2005, based on the emotional impacts of large-scale coal mining on Aboriginal individuals’ wellbeing in New South Wales, Australia.

In Albrecht's critical book "Earth Emotions", solastalgia is identified as one of six conditions he defines as land-based sicknesses, or psychoterratic diseases, emerging from our what I see as the imperialist/ capitalist worldview which has impacted everyone's relationship to our natural world. "Solastalgia" describes the loss that land-dependent communities feel when their place is violated.

Right now, we are witnessing solastalgic loss at magnitudes never felt or seen on our Earth. In addition to the significant loss of life from wars and climate catastrophes, both natural and human-cultivated landscapes are irrevocably harmed, which delivers a reverberating blow to people's sense of place and identity and leads to severe mental and emotional health issues that are rarely linked to these systemic issues.

People with depression and addiction are often told to go to therapy and engage in individual healing for what are collective and systemic problems,. Their embodied despair is seen as some isolated instance instead of overlapping phenomena with the destruction of the Earth that we are seeing at the hands of an economy of extraction and warfare capitalism.

Our well-being is inextricably intertwined with the well-being of our Earth and the intact tapestry of memory held in our natural and built landscapes.

To embody cultures of transition, we must understand the role of historical and contemporary violences faced by communities worldwide in our lived experience of Solastalgia and other Earth emotions in the face of unprecedented ecological shifts.

Glenn Albrecht states:

“We can read history to see how this has happened to humans before, as indigenous people were put on this path by colonial powers in places all over the globe. Their experience of emotional loss, then extinction (in some cases), presents a glimpse of our own future. Indigenous literature now contains dystopian plots that tell of solastalgia and other powerful negative displacement emotions for land and places. In Australia, Indigenous writers, such as Alexis Wright in her terraphthoric novel, The Swan Book, transmit the very idea of solastalgic loss to the reader.

In non-indigenous literature, the resonance of the eco-apocalyptic in The Road by Cormac McCarthy conveys a similar experience for those already thinking about the emotions of displacement and separation due to anthropogenic climate change. What is this period of human history doing to our mental landscapes as it obliterates and blights biophysical ones? In addition to the concepts of nostalgia and solastalgia, negative psychoterratic states in the existing literature, such as biophobia, ecoparalysis, ecoanxiety, ecocide, and ecophobia will be introduced, as will the emergent role of my new terms such as terrafurie, tierracide, tierratrauma, and meteoranxiety."

I keep thinking about the numbing influence of the type of traumatizing dominant culture we live under. And we are seeing it on our feeds in real time with landscapes being obliterated by war. We are seeing people in shock and enduring significant traumatic injuries, both physical and mental/emotional, and we are in shock and trauma just bearing witness. This can lead us to feelings of despair, which in turn leads us to dissociation because that is a protective mechanism of the response of our nervous system to trauma. Freeze. Shut down.

Emotional death is a type of dissassociation that breeds a lack of empathy because if we were feeling the emotions of the grief of the earth's pain, we would be immobile. Glenn Albrecht speaks of this biophilic emotional death here: "The emotional death.. occurs when some humans no longer even have a reaction to the end, death, or loss of nature. There is no emotional presence to bear witness, as all remaining biota are ignored as irrelevant to the life projects of individual humans."

In these times, we cannot be frozen in our grief. Sometimes we need a safe space, and some words that can hold the complexity of what we are all collectively carrying. That is why I wanted this to be our first “Re-Seeding Imaginations” Book club selection.

Our Spring 2025 Book Club Selection: Earth Emotions; New Words for New Worlds

I would love to introduce you to a book that truly shifted something in me. It gave me a whole portal of words that described both the negative eco-grief that I was carrying and also gave name to the new life-affirming relational culture many of us are nourishing and leading towards—a vernacular for our radical imagination.

Earth Emotions is our Spring 2025 Book Club Selection;

It is more important than ever that we continue to lean in and feel the full spectrum of emotions in this current moment, however uncomfortable they may be. That's why it's also helpful to have new vocabulary to speak to these very specific emotions felt in the shadow of empire. Otherwise, we risk apathy that leads to moral injury.

Albrecht's book Earth Emotions opens a doorway to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the world's emergent state.

We need this creation of a lexicon of positive and negative emotions to extract ourselves from environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia love of life for our home planet. He proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually, on the revolution in thinking that is delivered by contemporary symbiotic science and Indigenous wisdom. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene.

"The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory. In order to get out of the Anthropocene, humans will need generational change. I will make the case that Generation Symbiocene (Gen S) will arise from within the ranks of all of the post-boomer generations (Gens) as the need for a new human identity, built on common Symbiocene principles, politics, and ethics, becomes clear."

Here is how our Book Club will work:

Our Interactive Book Club is for paid subscribers of Re-Seeding Imaginations.

April:

• We will gather our books and begin to read.

• Rowen will start a message thread so that we can begin to gather questions, curiosities, and talking points for our live book club discussion.

May:

• We will host one live 90-minute Book Club discussion circle virtually via Zoom, which will be recorded for replay. I facilitate using an interactive virtual approach that works for introverts, extroverts, and anyone in between. This will be a safe and brave space for all who want to join us.

• We will create a voting poll for the live session so we can get as many as can make it to the live discussion circle.

June:

• We will host a second live 90-minute Book Club discussion circle, virtually via Zoom. This will be recorded for replay.

• We will vote on the following selection for our Summer 2025 Book Club selection.

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I’ve been dreaming of hosting a book club around this book for the last year, and now we get to circle up together. Thank you all for your generous support of “Re-Seeding Imagination” so that we could catalyze these gatherings.

I genuinely look forward to exploring the realms of these new words, seeding new worlds, and using them to hold and name our collective grief so that we can continue to metabolize and compost it into renewed life. What inspirations or curiosities do you have about this book? Feel free to name them in the comments below.