Welcome
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
There is a field
I’ll meet you there
There are no new ideas
Only new ways of making them felt
Kaleidoscope:
Derived from Ancient Greek:
skopeō (to look at, Observe, consider)
kalos (beautiful)
eidos (forms or shapes)
In my childhood, I had a kaleidoscope.
It crackled with unpredictable arrangements on each twist and turn of my hand. The flimsy tube slipped my attention from the chaotic, hurtling world around and within me, into a quiet portal of complexity.
The kaleidoscope gave me opportunities to enjoy and participate in relationships between light, movement and matter. I witnessed how with a twitch in my finger new tessellations emerged. Yet, if you tried to control the arrangement, you would find time and time again that you are no match for reflecting, refracting and diffracting light. While you could separate the kaleidoscope, arrange the parts to your own order and observe a frozen image, you would no longer be enjoying a kaleidoscope.
While much of my childhood didn’t solidify into coherent autobiographical accounts, momentary time-slips like these have stayed with me. I give much credit to these kinds of experiences for compelling me towards questions, people and places that offer ways to attend to the dynamic emergence of our lives. Experiences which continue to inform my beliefs, perspective, and approach to working with far more complex systems, including people, families, and communities.
That even tiny changes can rearrange everything.
That we cannot separate ourselves from the complex systems we are interwoven within.
That control is a short-lived fantasy.
The title for this blog, Entangled Field/s Notes speaks from and to this momentum. It explores perspectives from the meld of my work and life experiences and hopes to offer you moments to wonder about complexity, relationships, and the possible responses we might experiment with as we navigate the troubling times we are in.
Images ByMalens (Pexels)
on Language & Meaning
The word entangled follows Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Nora Bateson and others, in appreciating the ways that beings, bodies, ideas, and environments are shaping, influencing, combining and co-constituting one another.
Here, entangled is not a synonym for connection. It is a word that articulates how who we are, and what can be, emerges in relation. For example, your emotions, immune responses, cravings, and cognitive patterns are all influenced by microbial communities in your digestive system. The foods microbial flora metabolize are influenced by cultures, families, finances, soil health and geographies. All of this is influenced by ancestral experiences, migrations, recent and ancient histories.
The word entangled gestures towards webs of relations that generate fields. Embodied, ecological, relational, historical, political, imaginal, ancestral, cultural, linguistic, and professional fields are influencing, interacting and intra-acting with each other in powerful ways. We are entangled with/in these entangledfields.
How we sense, understand, relate to and respond within these fields matters.
It matters to our species, to other species, to the past and future and present. It matters to how we will come to navigate the significant changes we will experience throughout what has been named the polycrisis and metacrisis.
While polycrisis and metacrisis are newer terms in our lexicon, they themselves are not new. Multiple, intersecting, combining, and existential challenges are, and have been, the norm for a great many people.
Hope
I hope that as we deepen our appreciation for how entangled we really are, we might begin to relinquish our fantasies of control. Which is not to say we ought to give up on agency, contribution or care. Rather, letting go of attempts to control can make more space available to increase the quality of attention we pay to who we are, where we are and the responses which are possible for us within our webs and fields of relation.
My notes here at this blog explore questions and reflections that emerge from this approach to thinking, relating and practising as a therapist in South East Queensland, Australia. Thank you for joining me as I learn out loud and grapple with what it can mean to be human in the here and now.
