Tracing a Path Through Planetary Initiation
My new course now starts September 5th. All live sessions are recorded.
Dear readers,
There’s a few brief updates I’d like to share. First, my new course, “Fragments of an Integral Future,” now starts one week later on September 5th.
There’s still plenty of time to sign up, and all sessions will be recorded, so you can participate asynchronously at your own pace, or circle back to previous lessons.
Of course, there is a certain dramaturgic quality to attending the live sessions. My co-host, astrid and I designed this class to be myth-laden and narrative focused.
Fragments builds a bridge to the future—and past—with story.
With seven lessons and three modules, Fragments is a triptych laid upon the altar of climate crisis, tracing a path through planetary initiation:
I. Collaborations (Lessons 1-2)
II. Wayfinding (Lessons 3-5)
III. Crystallizations (Lessons 6-7)
Module I: Collaborations plots the path we are about undertake, a metamorphic journey that comes equipped with theory-craft and somatic practices, narrative tools designed to help us engage with a time between worlds, with civilization in the midst of worldview transition. Here we are invited to think with the rhizome, the lichen and other planetary kin. We are encouraged to think with time and place and embrace a mode of “temporal wanderlust” across deep time and evolutionary history. Intimations of new-and-ancient worldviews, relational models of self and becoming are offered here before we embark.
Module II: Wayfinding sets us on the path of descent, a passage through deconstruction, and towards the first glimmerings in the dark, regeneration. The cocoon is woven. The container is set. We are invited to leap into the exquisite beauty and grief of metamorphosis. Old myths and worldviews are composted as we lean into becoming-humus. What was a mere intimation of a different self and world now comes to focus, takes to seed and root in the darkened and humbling earth. We feel like we have lost ourselves, but it is only here that we have gained the world: a manifold of tentacular beings come rushing forward, lending paw, appendage and vine. Our more-than-human kin offer guidance as we learn to weave myth and science alike into planetary stories of niche construction and homecoming.
Module III: Crystallizations sets us on our course: we are Earthbound.1 We have gathered ideas that are wild enough to take root and practices that extend our “senseful”2 relations towards the whole Earth imaginary. Novalis wrote that “the ideas of the future drive us toward enlivenment,” but also that this future, indeed, all of time and eternity, “is in us or it is nowhere.”3 This concluding module leaves us with the varieties of a planetary culture, crystallizations of a new worldview that have distinct flavors of embodiment and cognition. Here, we are joyously emboldened to lean into the diaphanous “thick present4,” and from here and only here—and where else?—live the future, dispersing invitations to collaborate like fungi and photosynthesizers, carrier bags and medicine bundles under our arms (or flagella) as we move towards partnership with planetary kin, towards habitable futures. The cocoon has opened, yes, but we know that life itself is a cocoon in the process of unending metamorphosis.5
This is, at least, the story that I will be weaving for the duration of this course (and the book writing that is slowly but assuredly happening in the background). Every participant will be braiding the elements of their own medicine bundle, their own myths of planetary homecoming, into the story.
My co-host and I will be providing course materials, a syllabus, weekly recommended media viewing and reading, and office hour sessions (hosted on Wednesdays) as we move along through the lessons.
I hope to see you in class on September 5th.
Register here, and reach out if you need a student discount. No one will be turned away.
In gratitude,
Jeremy
Postscript:
After a long break this summer, Patreon calls return with the new course! Patrons and paid Substack subscribers receive access to overlapping “office hours” sessions, which have tended to function like intimate philosophical-poetic salons. Please consider this an invitation. We’ll also be hosting monthly Mutations Zoom calls with fellow mutant authors and scholars in our network. Some will be free to the public, others will be for subscribers. Stay tuned here for a schedule announcement.
Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth.
Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. “Senseful” is a neologism which Gebser uses often and which I am more than happy to help circulate.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. See her concept of the “thick present.”
Coccia, Emanuelle. Metamorphosis.