Hi! Welcome to May’s email, a winding-ish newsletter on things I’ve learned about nonbinary approaches from nature and some brilliant humans. I was telling my friend as we walked together in the woods yesterday that I’m noticing the binary pressure to have each month’s email be the exact same format, and trying to practice the wisdom of letting each be exactly what it is asking to be.
As always, thanks for being here - I’d love to hear how this month’s lands for you.
A couple of years ago I lived in a little house near the Susquehanna river. The house sat on the side of a hill, and was shaded all the time by a little forest of trees. My partner and I spent hours outside, sitting and walking along the river, and to the creek who lived down the road and back in the woods.
I always really felt the impacts of settler colonialism in this place. There were layers and layers of history of indigenous people and colonizers, and we lived (as most everyone does) among the ever-present consequences of settler colonialism — air pollution, a river so full of chemicals and runoff that our neighbors advised us not to swim, the dam that about 100 years earlier turned the wetland river into a vast lake filled with many loud boats and jet skis.
It was also a place that continued to be wild despite all attempts at control — the river, during the time we lived there, slowly and swiftly ate away the concrete sidewalks that formed the artificial banks of the area around the boat launch, and the dam, like most dams on the Susquehanna, was about 10 years away from being washed downriver. There were two or three unmappable islands in the lake whose shorelines changed daily with the height of the river, and there were, as there are everywhere, all of the beings who lived in that place — thousands of insects, animals, trees, fungi, and plants of all kinds.
no way to be alone
The more time I spent outside in this place, the more I learned that I was surrounded by other beings — surprised by the spiderwebs I face planted through, the geese I walked respectfully around, the unexpected garter snakes in the lawn, the millions of mayflies who lived and died in a few short days in June.
There was factually no way to be alone in that place by the river. I was reminded — constantly — that I was part of a whole web of relationship that had opened and adjusted around me without me really noticing. I did not get to choose whether I was in relationship or not, only the ways I might relate with everyone around me.
The more I noticed, the more I realized that it wasn’t that there was a binary of alone/together with nature landing on the together side, or that I had somehow moved to a special kind of place where these relationships existed, but something deeper, outside of that alone/together construction. Living there showed me, daily, that the idea of contrasting alone and together didn’t even really make sense. Alone is a construct that depends on the binary humans/everyone else — and as I learned in that place, that binary doesn’t exist in the world as it is.
The longer I lived by the river, the more I learned in a really deep way that I had lived my whole life sustained by this web of relationship that I had not been taught to notice, or had only been taught to relate to in specific, dominating and extractive ways.
As a descendant of settlers, settler colonialism seeps into almost everything, and one of the ways it can show up around sharing something we’ve learned is by acting like we discovered it, or that we extracted it out of the earth ourselves. But this learning I’m describing is more like being part of a watershed — knowledge comes to us from many sources, and we always only have our own part of the story to share, woven in with everyone else’s part. We are always already in relationship, and this network of relationship is not centered on us, but like any relationship, is a place of change, adaptation, learning, vulnerability, and so much more.
In addition to this place that shared so generously with me, here are some of the people who have shared wisdom and teachings that underpin much of this learning: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rowen White, Jen Lemen, Susan Raffo, James-Olivia Chu-Hillman, Carolyn Collado, Tiffany Curtis, yasmin marrero.
noticing our way into knowing
These are the nonbinary approaches I’m interested in - the kind that emerge from relationship, from new experiences so subtle we don’t even realize we’re having them until we’re well into something that changes everything. A felt sense, a learning that begins in our bodies rather our minds. Something we sense our way towards language for, turning our heads and looking at the ground and up to the sky like birds, our hands in the earth, a spiderweb catching our face, weaving us in to what is already here, all around us.
This kind of learning takes time, both a lot and a little. I think my previous experience of undoing binaries around my gender and sexuality gave me some practice in noticing what exists outside of binaries. Even so, I’m convinced that there isn’t one path into this kind of embodied learning — that all of us, no matter our gender or sexuality, have nonbinary experiences of this kind woven through us, and that if we can make a little space, learn to notice what is already here, we can also learn to practice and appreciate the nonbinary approaches and skills we (and everyone around us) always already have. This kind of learning is available to us our whole lives.
space beyond binaries
Binary thinking is so deep in us that it can be easy to make a new binary: nature good, everything else bad. But the question I find myself asking is, where does the everything else begin, if nature is a network of relationship that includes all humans, the places we live, the air we breathe, the microbes in our guts, the fungi on and in us?
This kind of nonbinary approach is less trying to debunk binaries using binary thinking and more about saying, okay, if this is one way we can look at this thing, what are the others? What happens if we zoom in, or out, or sideways? What happens if we find the most confusing possibility? One goal, for me at least, is finding as many ways of approaching something without making nonbinary approaches the new good to the bad of binary.
My experiences of remembering that there is no way to be alone on this planet remind me that trying to fit myself and everyone around me on the good/bad sorting scale is a kind of futile endeavor. Good and bad tell us such limited information — it’s not that the construction good/bad is wrong, it’s just a really small lens to use to view a vast and ever-changing world. For me, spending time a little more consciously in relationship — both human and more than human — dissolves these potential good/bad binaries, reveals how much is happening between and under and around them.
I am grateful, in the now almost two years since we left that place, to know that this learning was not specific to this particular river, a place that like all relationships came with all kinds of quirks and frustrations and confusion and wonder and delight. I have loved a lot of places since then, too, and continue to learn what it means to be in relationship that isn’t based on settler ideas of control and domination in the name of survival. I think it is a lifetime’s work, and perhaps many lifetimes.
sending you much nonbinary and queer love,
Kali
PS - I don’t have a list of questions or activities this month, but I do have a wondering: I wonder how many beings you might notice that you are in relationship with, or are relating to, over the next month. <3
places you can go a little deeper with me this month:
If you want to do a deep dive into the binary underpinnings of whiteness, settler colonialism, and substances, I’ll be supporting a six-month container for white folks with lived experiences with substances hosted by Carolyn Collado of Recovery for the Revolution. This container begins the week of June 12, and you can learn more here.
If you want to dive into nature as nonbinary teacher a little bit more with me, on June 3rd at 12pm EST I’m chatting nonbinary approaches with Jane Charlesworth, who writes and coaches brilliantly about anticapitalism. Learn more here about Queering Success: what mycelium, compost heaps, and rivers have to teach us about the many ways we can find and define a meaningful life. I think it’s going to be a fun, juicy time.
And if you have a binary conundrum, I do 1:1 sessions and monthly coaching on nonbinary approaches — I’ve currently got 2 spots available for new folks. You can learn more about that here.