Lullabies for Anthropocene

Connect with the land

Find a piece of ground around you. Feel it. Touch it, sit there and listen. Ask for permission to be there. Can you sense a response? Are you allowed to stay? Connect with this piece of ground—as it will become your grieving and dreaming nest. Take your time to relate to it and let it relate to you, dig a hole for your body, make a space… Look around you: who can help you create your nest? Again, check in with the life around you, ask for permission to bring and arrange the leaves, the sticks, the grass, the moss, and any other beings that can help offer you rest. Again, check with the life around you, ask for permission: who can help you create your nest? Once you are ready, step into it with the whole of your body, drop into it and lie comfortably in your nest. Sense the earth and soil under your fingers. Feel the heaviness of your body. Feel the wind on your skin. You’re made of earth. You are Earth. Feel all the surfaces where you’re touching the ground, feel the smell of the soil. And now listen. Can you hear your breath? Listen to the sound of your heart, the sound of your body. Listen to the sound of the wind, the song of the leaves. As you feel the support of the ground underneath you, sense the weight of your body on its surface. Feel into the vibrations you can notice, into the power of gravity. Can you imagine your body merging with the ground? Can you sense this happening?

Awareness of violence(s)

While you are lying here feeling held by the beings of this forest, around the world there are people cutting down trees, and entire forests elsewhere. We have been witnessing the destruction of the Amazon forest, the Białowieża forest, the Hambach forest, and so many others… Humans are digging in the earth to get cobalt, coal, and other minerals. They are drilling through all the layers of the earth and soil to get oil and petrol, poisoning the water and air and all the beings, animals and plants, who need clean water and air to survive. You included. You live in a world marked by systemic violences, in a system which cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides. At the edge of social and ecological collapse, we are witnessing the extinction of species: nearly 500 species have gone extinct in the past decade alone and there are many on the verge of extinction, such as black rhinos, red wolves, bornean orangutan, right whales, red pandas, sea turtles, and tigers among many others. We are witnessing the expulsion and annihilation of communities across the world: Yanomami people in Amazon forests, Palestinian, Lebanese, Congolese people. All this is marked by underlying illusions that colonial modernity is built on: that humans are separated from the rest of the living world, and that the world is made for and belongs to them, to humans, but not all humans—the whiter, the better.

Feel into the life inside of you and listen

But listen to the life in you, inside of you. Begin to shift your attention to all that is living in you. Feel the surface of your skin, the vibration of your muscles. Hear the sounds in your stomach, feel the movement of your cells. As you were born, you became connected with the rich world outside the uterus you grew in. You connected with various microbiota from the vaginal flora of your mother (if you went through the vaginal tunnel), or directly from the outside world if you were born by Caesarean section. Micro-organisms became present on and in your body, where they adapted to specific features of each niche. You were born with many, and soon started to form an even larger community of symbiotic and pathogenic microbes, which currently inhabit your gut, skin, and mucosal passages, and form a stable community that is resistant to external pathogens. You are constantly in a process of becoming with all this life.

A group of people sit or lie on the ground, most of them with eyes closed.

Your immune system has evolved as a result of the co-evolution of vertebrates and the microbiota. Through this coevolution of indigenous microbiota and the immune system, immune responses were developed and enhanced—they protect you from harm. When you were three years old your microbiota stabilised and resembled the one you live with now. The microbiota lives in your gut, in your mouth, in your respiratory system, and on your skin. There are approximately 50 species and 1000 sub-species that exist just in your mouth. On your skin lives a dense community of microbiomes composed of highly diverse communities. In your gut there are 100 trillion microbes representing as many as 5,000 different species. They weigh approximately 2 kilograms. The quality of your life, your digestive system, your mental wellbeing, the quality of your relationships depend on the relationship with these microbeings. They affect your wound healing processes, and impact cognition and moods, including anxiety levels. They help you digest your food. Even now as you lie down here, breathing and smelling the earth and soil and wind, they are actively interbeing with your cells. “Life is, at nearly every level, a collective concern, a shared journey undertaken by a wide variety of beings that arrive at a stable, functional, and thereby beautiful ecosystem by somehow putting up with one another and reaching agreements.”¹ And this is in a constant dance. You are part of this.

Broaden your entanglement with life
beyond the limits of your skin

You do not exist independently of the ecosystems you live in. Your body does not end at your skin. Remember. You are nature. You are earth. And you can open up to the broader, wider and deeper presence and coevolution with other beings on the planet Earth. Let the idea that humans are the centre of the world die, move from exploitative to nourishing relationships with other beings. Let the seeds of solidarity with the more than human world grow in you to guide you beyond extractivism. Let yourself be entangled with life, let yourself be part of symbiotic relationships with trees, grasses, animals, insects, to let the non-anthropocentric solidarity flourish. Don’t forget that without the generosity of the Earth, the plants, the water, you would not be here. You would not be.

You can let human exceptionalism in you go.

You can let it die.

Get into connection with the soil and let the human exceptionalism in you sink into the Earth.

Feel little roots start to grow from the bottom of your body. First one root and then the second. Feel them moving through the layers of the soil. Sense how from the top of the roots they multiply and become many, sense into it. You live on this planet in a human body. Your body has been made to live in a system that is inherently violent, and you’re part of it. How are you still supporting this system?

In which ways are you complicit with it?

How have you been centring human life and needs as priorities for the future?

Which addictions inhabit your body and spirit?

Which desires and entitlements inhabit you?

Where in yourself can you find them?

Sense into your body and spirit.

How do you feel their presence manifests here and now?

Where are they present?

With the safety of the earth holding you and being able to hold complex emotions, check how your body is feeling. Feel into the roots giving you stability. Remember the support of the earth under your skin. Everything that can rest in peace can rest in the ground below you, in the earth. Let it go down through the roots to the earth, to the soil. Let the entitlements, arrogances, and exceptionalisms go. See yourself saying goodbye. With gratitude to their teachings, to all the gifts you received and shared, now allow yourself to release them. Let them go down through your roots. Let them dissolve into the Earth. Sense into this dissolution. Ask the Earth to help you overcome your fear.

Invitation to the dreamworld

Feel how this release helps you feel into your inter-being, the collaborations between your microbiota, the air in your lungs, the soil under your skin, the waters moving in your body and through your cells.

Feel how this release helps you sense into your inter-being, your collaboration with the microbiota, with the elements of air in your lungs, with the soil under your skin, with the waters moving in your body and through your cells. Surrender to their wisdom and guidance; how your spirit interacts with them, and how they can guide you. Let the dreams come and be dreamed by you. Let the land dream through you. Be open for visions, messages, dreams. Your mind, spirit and soul are free to wander and explore. Let the collective of beings in symbiotic relation with your cells and energies take you to places, places you do not know yet. Let the collective experience of this shared journey offer you im-possible futures.

How does it feel to surrender?

How does it feel to be taken away?

How does it feel to trust?

How does it feel to melt and dissolve into life?

How does it feel to be part of a wider metabolism?

What are the unimaginable possibilities of coexistence which show up in your dreams?

ArtsEverywhere · Agnieszka Bułacik – Lullabies For Anthropocene

You can slowly come back to our world, and start waking up, savouring your dreams and visions. what dreams do you want to sow? What intentions came through? What has changed?