On Becoming a Lakeside Alien
Learning to Unself
Notes from the Inflection Point explores ways to process and express climate-related emotions like love and fear together. With a voice dedicated to seeing things afresh, again, and with agency, we offer readers reflections most Thursdays.
Arne Næss called it our “ecological self.”
Iris Murdoch called it “learning to unself, to become.”
Bayard Rustin didn’t have a term, but a belief: “We are all one—and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.”
What would it feel like for everything to be bound together, as one breathing system?
I invite you to imagine your body as the space around you, the land around you, the bugs, the rats, your neighbors, the trees. This thought experiment moves us from one life to unified living, woven together by random acts of madness, of creativity, and changing weather conditions.
I invite you to imagine we aren’t just connected by proximity, but that our fates are interdependent. We rise and fall together.
I invite you to imagine what it might mean for us to move toward what Dr. Lou Cozolino calls “survival of the nurtured.” Some of the smallest, most vulnerable creatures are still alive today because they operated as a collective.
In times of crisis, our imagination suffers. It’s natural: we are trying to survive.
When facing an active shooter, first explicit instruction is to run. Implicitly, the instruction is to look toward all possible exits. The common default is to exit the way we came in—through the front where, most likely, the shooter is standing. Rarely do people think to break windows for escape or distraction.
Pope Francis said business as usual is “no longer the ethical option,” but there is no glass to break in case of emergency on the planet.
There is no single Answer. We need to practice visions for functioning, compatible with our own local environments, resources, capacities. How you imagine doesn’t matter as much as the attempt to implement and iterate right now, where you are, with what you have. Wellness folks will call this “starting where you are.”
Start where you are, because we need your imagination.
Cultivating critical creativity intersects with other frameworks of justice and belonging: anti-racist, feminist, queer, decolonization, disability, antiwar, decarceration, anti-corporate, public education, and other grassroots community movements. It all belongs. Change creates ripples.
Let’s return to us as part of a wider environment. Let’s imagine, as Erik Olin Wright invites us in How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, a lake.
When you read “lake,” what do you imagine? Do you imagine water temperature? Humidity? Shorelines? Muddy soil? Is there algae? Ice?
Do you imagine the fish? What kind of fish? Are there birds there that feast on the fish? How many different birdsongs can you hear?
Trees with roots stretching into the water? What kind of trees? Is there wind that is blowing through them? Can you hear the sounds of single leaves falling?
What’s the local landscape? Is it mountainous? Could a bear move from one lake to another in a single day, looking for lunch?
Is it raining? Snowing? How does weather change which animals come out or hide out? Where would animals live?
Where are you in this scene?
Wright writes of introducing an “alien species” into the picture. Some would get eaten immediately. Some might adapt to this new participatory ecosystem.
Some might disrupt it.
The strategic vision of eroding capitalism imagines introducing the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches and figuring out ways of expanding their habitats. The ultimate hope is that eventually these alien species can spill out of their narrow niches and transform the character of the ecosystem as a whole.
Mr. Rogers’ translation: Nurture the helper aliens. Transform together.
This same process happens in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and social groups. Each act of balancing self and/as wider systems, each offering in a shared economy, each time we choose cooperation over competition—we're introducing emancipatory alien vigor into the environment. Our ecological self becomes.
I know. I hear myself, too. It’s a nice dream, but our current nightmare is too real.
A response: we already live in a world filled with farce. That business as usual is fine. That if we ignore the news, it won’t come knocking on the front door. That we are alone and no one else can know our personal suffering. That “self” can be “sufficient.”
Why not double-down on fantastical thinking to imagine new ways of being? If we are the lake, the observer, we can also be the transformative alien species. Duration matters less than that we are here, now, together, becoming.
Dismantling the dream of separation can be a joyful world-building.
Some options and visions:
Anya Kamentz,
Ari Mostov,
Gregory Pettys,
Justin McAffee,
Margaret Killjoy,
Margi Prideaux, PhD,
Please share else who you think belongs on this list!
Speaking of practicing imagining together...
🧬 Creative Coalition: Exquisite Biome — August 24
A critical creativity workshop for folks seeking ways to reconnect with internal wonder for external benefit.
So much of our education and work systems depend on binaries: right/wrong, good/bad, 0/1. The Creative Coalition is for folks who want to explore the intersections, the gaps, and help each other adapt to changing variables in a supportive container. As a participatory coalition, our goal is to give each other permission to try and to intentionally cultivate our ability to respond.
Award-winning designer Caro Asercion's Exquisite Biome will guide us through imagining wholly new creatures and building scenes of them in their habitats, their kinship systems, how they occupy land. We'll build empathy and narratives around non-human creatures through collaborative storytelling.
In 2.5 hours, you'll practice:
Imagining life cycles of your own, randomly generated creature
Articulating their needs, relational systems, habitats, threats
Designing scenes of interaction
Building your own sense of wonder
Fostering shared curiosity about each other and our natural world
You do not need to buy the game to play, but it's always nice to support creators.
August 24, 3-5:30 PM PT
Limit 10
Base price: $150
There are three full scholarship spots. Email/DM for more info.
🧬 Sign up here! And bring a standard deck of playing cards if you can!
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) writes Light Hive and designs workshops that blend socially engaged Buddhism with collective curiosity-building. Their prior creative work has been staged in New York, London, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seoul, and Melbourne, with coverage in Time Out, The Evening Standard, and Los Angeles Times. Today, they are grateful for generous friends.