Playing coyote: a ceremony of relationship,distance,and subjectivity

Setting the scene, a coyote discourse

Coyote and I have an odd relationship. Occasionally, he visits me in my dreams. More often, I see him dashing across a highway, trotting through a field, or I spy tracks and know that our paths have crossed. Many people know coyote as the trickster, the embodiment of paradox. Native American stories credit him (coyote usually appears in such stories as a ‘he’) with stealing fire and besting giants, ¹ while scholars playfully name the pursuit of shifting truths a ‘coyote discourse’. ² Coyote isn’t malicious, but if he steps into your life, take a deep breath. Things may not proceed as planned.

While an individual coyote occasionally tosses my world into tumult, the population of North American coyotes has been busy flaunting fantasies of domination and control for over a century. Under the guise of making the West safe for cows and sheep, nearly 100,000 coyotes are killed in the United States every year, but coyote populations have exploded under the stress. ³ When threatened, coyotes change their breeding patterns. More females go into estrus more frequently and they give birth to larger litters. Essayist Craig Childs wrote, ‘if three-quarters of the world’s coyote population were destroyed at once, within a year or two their numbers would return unfazed’. ⁴ As both symbol and species, coyote embodies the trickster.

This is an essay about playing coyote along the borderlands of ontology and subjectivity. It is not an essay about the subjectivity of coyotes as such. Instead, what I will offer is a narrative interpretation of human subjectivity – mine in this case – as an intersubjective experience, a sense of self that emerges from relationship with a coyote and the land that we shared for a brief time.

Geographers have largely moved beyond dualist ontologies that insist on strict divisions between nature and culture, human and animal, or mind and materiality, and nondual descriptions of life and experience, relational ontologies, have swept through geography and adjacent disciplines. ⁵ Critiques of the humanist tradition complement this work by dismantling the idea of the human self as preexisting either embodiment or experience, ⁶ and the literature on the subjectivity of nonhumans ⁷ and of the land itself expands the social world beyond humans. ⁸ Some of the best work in this vein is directed toward establishing a more-than-human ethics of care. ⁹

And yet, the felt experience of relationality remains frustratingly elusive. For many of us, everyday understandings of life too often remain rooted in dualisms. It can even be a struggle to effectively write the world in a relational way because of the subject and predicate structure of the English language. ¹⁰ Felt experiences of relationality are important both to help further our conceptual understanding of subjectivity and because effective motivation and commitment to address socio-ecological crisis comes from affective attachment much more so than from cognitive awareness or ‘negative’ emotions like fear and shame that so often dominate environmental politics. ¹¹

I am not alone in finding the felt experience of relationality elusive. Jane Bennett, for example, writes that even if she is right about her vital materialism, it remains ‘hard to discern it, and, once discerned, hard to keep focused on. It is too close and too fugitive, as much wind as thing, impetus as entity, a movement always on the way to becoming otherwise’. ¹² Put another way, perception of our world as relational hides from itself. While many say with confidence that a subject is contingent and ephemeral, a ‘hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade’, declaring this enigmatic truth is not the same as living it. ¹³

This challenge calls for experimentation. In this essay, I narrate one attempt to look beyond the academy in order to engage ‘practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers’. ¹⁴ Through the experience of a vision fast ceremony, a 10-day ceremony centered on 4 days of fasting alone in a wild landscape, I ask, how can practices like this help to connect the necessarily dense language and neologisms of the study of subjectivity and relational ontologies to the rich tapestry of lived experience? Through story and theory, I offer a conversation that explores the vision fast ceremony as a more-than-human therapy, an experiment in cultivating not just knowledge, but experience of the world as enchanted, animate, and relational to its core. To do so, I write from the dual perspectives of a geographer and a psychotherapist. ¹⁵

I hope to accomplish the following two goals. My immersion in the experience of the vision fast ceremony and the essay itself are presented as border crossings, movements between story and theory that are presented more as productive experiments with subjectivity than as critical deconstructions of the practice or of the human subject. I do so in order to consider how dialogs between academic theorizing and experiential practices can nudge us toward experiencing the world and ourselves as always emerging from within relationships that cross species boundaries. It is an attempt to narrate how a practice like this fast offers the potential to experience a relational ontology that may be present in everyday life but remains difficult to perceive or otherwise feel. Second, I argue that there is a therapeutic element to this experimentation with subjectivity. My argument is in affinity with post or more-than-human scholarship that critiques the autonomous human subject and theorizes it in increasingly diffuse terms. However, in describing this ceremony as a more-than-human therapy, I argue that scholarship on human subjectivity should also emphasize its felt experience as well as its conceptual deconstruction. The felt experience of the human self as a more-than-human production can help to strengthen ethical bonds with the nonhuman others with whom we share the social world and who help to produce our sense of self.

The essay proceeds as follows. I begin by introducing two key concepts that enliven the narrative: Merleau-Ponty’s writing on subjectivity and new animism. Next, I narrate my experience with the vision fast ceremony. I then offer an interpretation of the experience as a more-than-human therapy. I situate this argument in relation to other studies of subjectivity in cultural geography and argue for the importance of paying attention to the experiential constitution of subjectivity as well as its conceptual diffusion. I conclude with some thoughts on the world-building potential of intertwining theoretical inquiry and experimental practice.

Merleau-Ponty and the ephemeral subject

For the 20th-century French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the borders between self and other are shifting and ambiguous, they emerge out of one’s experience of living in the world only to fade again as experience proceeds. Neither subject nor object – self nor other – have a definitive outside and each are forever on the verge of coming into being. He writes, ‘We have the experience of an I, not in the sense of absolute subjectivity, but rather one that is indivisibly unmade and remade by the course of time’. To perceive an object in the world, ‘I abandon myself to it, I plunge into this mystery, and it “thinks itself in me”’. ¹⁶ The ‘me’, in this case, is pre-personal, one who ‘perceives in me, and not that I perceive’. ¹⁷ His point is that this work of perception is not that of an autonomous subject who preexists perception, but that the always shifting experience of being a subject arises from this presubjective, embodied, ongoing experience of being in the world. Ambiguous, enigmatic, and immanent to the ‘continuous birth of the world’, ¹⁸ this self in whom others think is nevertheless a meaningful center of our experience and a place to return to as we critically reflect on our experience in the world.

Animism

The addition of an animist perspective to Merleau-Ponty’s ephemeral subjectivity widens his perspective beyond the human and helps to redirect the human exceptionalism that is still present in some contemporary phenomenological scholarship. ¹⁹ Animism offers an ontology that recognizes nonhuman others as intentional subjects with whom we humans share a common social world. It is a ‘condition of being alive to the world’ in which many kinds of beings ‘continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’. ²⁰ Animism suggests ‘that humans are but one extension of Earth’s ability to know’ and that it is our responsibility ‘to learn to take our place in a community of knowers, only some of whom are human’. ²¹ It is not just a focus on the relational construction of subjects but also on their potential for ongoing interaction and communication. For me, animism emphasizes cultivating the willingness and ability to listen and attend to others as soulful creatures who might have something to say.

The term animism has traditionally been associated with indigenous knowledges, but it is increasingly being applied under the monikers ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ animism as a conceptual frame or guide for people like me who are working their way through the prejudices of Western philosophy. There is a danger here of imposing a fictional unity on the diverse philosophical worlds upon which animist scholarship draws, ²² but it is useful as an aspirational concept in the sense that it points toward the goal of understanding and experiencing the social world as a lively, more-than-human, place full of soulful beings. This is a far cry from scholars’ initial use of the term animism as a ‘colonial slur’, as code for primitive. ²³ Perhaps this is one reason why few indigenous scholars apply the label to themselves. ‘We just call it tradition’, says Linda Hogan. ²⁴

Animism assumes a dialogical world so that knowing ‘always implies [the] possibility of being known as well’. ²⁵ That other knower may be a birch tree, a raven, or a landscape, among others. ²⁶ If arguments concerning the social construction of nature pointed out the extent to which humans produce natures, animism emphasizes attunement to how others produce us and the relationships that can form across the borders of significant otherness. ²⁷ My use of animist philosophy in this essay is not an attempt to get inside the lifeworlds of others, like coyote. ²⁸ It is an effort to lay a conceptual foundation whereby the subjectivity of more-than-human others can be assumed and I can explore the constitution of my own subjectivity as arising from dialog with those others.

The Vision fast narrated

My story starts in Death Valley. I arrived shortly after the winter solstice, coming from my home on the Southern edge of the Colorado Plateau in Utah, a land of piñon pine, juniper trees, sage brush, and a sea of red and white sandstone cliffs, mesas, and hoodoos. A desert, but not a desert like Death Valley where a scrubby bush with waxy green leaves called creosote covers the valley floors. There’s not much else. In spring, the creosote bushes improbably explode with little yellow flowers, but at this time of year, they simply hang on, their roots keeping the whole place from blowing away.

Ten of us came together to participate in the vision fast ceremony. The others came from as near as Los Angeles and as far away as Germany. It is a rite of passage, a ritual used to mark one’s transition from one phase of life to another. Contemporary practitioners of the ceremony draw on both Native American and Western traditions in order to create a unique ceremony tuned for the contemporary task of suturing the experiential gap between human selves and ‘nature’. ²⁹ The heart of the experience is a 4-day solo. Four days and nights camped alone, without food. It is a journey out of everyday physical and psychic worlds into a liminal space where the commonsense boundaries between the two tend to dissolve. Not eating tends to nudge you into an altered state. A deep meditation sneaks up, arriving slowly enough that it is difficult to mark its entrance until the altered state has made itself at home, shifting your experience of the world in subtle but powerful ways.

We began with several days of preparation. We adjusted to our temporary home, sheltering ourselves from the infamous Mojave winds by tucking into small coves made by finger-like gypsum ridges that rose out of the campground. Our guides were two women from strikingly different backgrounds. Betsy is a PhD psychologist trained in the Jungian tradition. Emerald found her education way off the grid, living and learning with Cheyenne, Lakota, and Navajo practitioners for years. The contrast between them is typical of this rites of passage community. Since the late 1960s, university professors, mental health professionals, back to the landers, and wilderness guides have been busy working with each other to remodel the ancient practice for a contemporary audience. They taught us the Four Shields, a model of human development interpreted through the passing of the seasons. ³⁰ It is an attempt to relocate psyche from the confines of the human mind out into the world. It shifts psyche from a deeply personal possession to something more akin to a participatory field.

I use the term psyche in the Jungian sense and embrace its enigma. Jung resists a full and clear definition, writing, ‘Our psyche is part of nature and its enigma is as limitless. Thus we cannot define either the psyche or nature’. ³¹ It is a way to imagine psyche as a collective production. ³² Hillman extended Jung’s work with his concept of the ‘anima mundi’ or soul of the world, suggesting that the distinction between interior psychological experience and material reality was false. Instead, he argued that ‘psyche includes the world – all things offer soul’. ³³ Psyche then becomes a connective tissue, ‘the forgotten third between matter and spirit, man and world, inner and outer’. ³⁴

Coyote made his entrance while I was sharing my ‘intentions’ with the group. Each faster has the opportunity to talk through the upcoming fast with the guides and other participants. What question will guide the experience? What do you hope to find or to leave in the desert? I hadn’t thought through these questions well. Curiosity had drawn me to the ceremony. I had been hearing about it in personal and academic circles, and a mentor encouraged me to participate. But I needed a better reason to sit in this circle than to be a tourist. So I spoke about reconnecting with my emotions. I was working as a psychotherapist and my days were filled with the pain, conflicts, and turmoil of others. I had become detached. As a therapist, it is a great skill to be able to work with emotion without actually feeling it oneself. As a human being, it is called being cold, intellectual, out of touch. It is lonely. So I asked to uncover that part of me I had packed away to get my feelings moving again.

As I spoke about this with the group, a coyote walked up the gypsum finger to my right. He paused on the ridge, perhaps 100 feet away, and we stared at one another. He was big. Desert coyotes tend to be small and scrappy, weighing maybe 20 pounds. This one appeared nearly twice that size, perhaps because the dumpsters in the campground provided more protein than the scrawny field mice and jackrabbits that ran through the creosote. My anxiety ticked up at the entrance of this trickster. Certainly, I had felt trepidation about not eating for 4 days, but I was confident in my ability to handle the rigors of the fast. As a wilderness guide, I had weathered all sorts of adventures. I was mistaken and coyote said as much.

With the specter of coyote ever present, my fast unfolded as an arduous journey full of sickness and doubt. Once Emerald and Betsy offered me their blessings with sage smoke and hugs, I walked to my camp, which I had picked out the previous day. It sat at the foot of a nob of chunky basalt rising up out of a sea of creosote in an infrequently traveled part of the park. After laying out my sleeping bag and pad, I sat down to wait – for 4 days. I quickly started to wonder what could have driven me to a choice as foolish as 4 days and nights alone and without food. The questions and struggles I had been so eager to face came rushing at me with an overwhelming intensity. My anxiety overtook me. My thoughts raced and my stomach turned as waves of undifferentiated emotion poured over me. I began to restlessly wander the stark desert, trying to displace my agitation and anxiety onto the land itself.

Each day, I climbed a ridge above my camp and stared across the expanse of Death Valley, watched the circling hawks, and longed for vision. An insight, a feeling of calm, a flash of understanding. I received none. Instead, I watched the sun slowly make its way across the achingly blue sky while hawks rode the thermals, keeping an eye out for scurrying mice or perhaps simply enjoying the ride. I had long identified with hawks, admiring their vision and independence. They appeared in my life at timely moments, offering guidance, but now it was as if they were studiously ignoring me. The desert had slowly ceased to be simply the desert, and I began to feel as if I were wandering through seldom explored recesses of psyche. Toward the end of each day, I retreated back to the valley, still feeling agitated and out of place. I lay through the nights, sleeping fitfully and never feeling rested.

Gradually, my attention shifted to the sparse creosote bushes that surrounded my camp. Sparrows flitted through them each morning and afternoon, and, as I sat and listened, their chatter drew my attention down from the ridge tops and solitary hawks to the sparrows and their community here in the valley. My agitation gradually subsided. I felt calmer in their presence and was struck by the contrast between the vocal community of sparrows that moved together through the brush and the silent, solitary hawks floating on the distant winds. Coyote, ever the shapeshifter, morphed from canid to raptor, from raptor to passerine.

The paradox and enigma of the ceremony began to unfold. My sense of self had long been caught up in the image of the independent hawk, but the sparrows brought me back to earth, drew my attention to how my own community produced me. Emerald, one of the guides, would later say, ‘Hawk landed, looked in the mirror, and saw a sparrow staring back’.

The fast temporarily separated me from others, but that distance amplified our connections. It helped me better appreciate how Emerald and Betsy held the space for my experience and how coyote’s cautionary jaunt through our circle pricked my awareness so that I could listen to the sparrows with whom I shared the valley for a few days. I rode unpredictable swells of emotion. I felt joy and gratitude for the communities that nurtured me here in Death Valley and in my life at home. Yet, I also plunged into grief as I faced the many ways that I distance myself from others. At times, I’ve needed the vision and distance of hawks, but in that moment, when my own intentions were upset, a space opened up for me to listen to others whom I would normally overlook. Radically different creatures in our own right – Sparrow, Hawk, Gypsum, Sky, Creosote, Coyote, and Human – nevertheless participate in and bear witness to the ‘continuous birth of the world’. ³⁵

More-than-human therapy

I want to begin an interpretation of this experience by suggesting that the contemporary vision fast ceremony be thought of as a more-than-human therapy, a way to open a gap in the metaphysical border fence separating human subjectivity from the material and psychic more-than-human world. More-than-human scholarship clearly articulates that as humans, we have never achieved an empirical or categorical separation from the rest of life no matter how far down the humanist rabbit hole certain knowledge traditions may have fallen. ³⁶ We do, however, continue to wrestle with how to set aside the anxious bordering processes that have long defined both what it is to be human and attempted to define women and people of color as less human than others. ³⁷ Therefore, healing from the loss of relationship brought about by these anxious bordering practices is needed in addition to the critical deconstruction of ‘the human’. By healing, I do not mean to reconstitute an autonomous human self – far from it. Instead, I mean that a therapeutic experience of the self as emergent from within the more-than-human world helps to weave the critical work of diffusing the human subject with the experiential task of learning to listen and attend to the ‘others’ who constitute ‘me’.

Therapy can mean many things. Here, I use the word therapy in the tradition of existential psychotherapy where the therapist and client cultivate an intentional relationship whose dynamics they persistently investigate. More than the use of any particular therapeutic technique or specific insights gained in the process, the experience of relationship, vulnerability, conflict, and empathy works to facilitate healing. ³⁸ Having walked similar paths with others, an effective therapist in this sense acts as a ‘fellow traveler’, facilitating consistent reflection on the experience of relationship so that vague feelings, twisted thoughts, and dysfunctional dynamics percolate to the surface. ³⁹ It is this reflexive conversation – the ongoing investigation of the relationship itself – that differentiates the therapeutic dyad from everyday relationships. While difficult and often fraught with conflict, successful therapeutic encounters exaggerate and draw attention to the dynamics driving the therapist–client relationship. This ongoing reflection allows the client to more consciously attend to the relationship, creating both the space and the capacity to try different, perhaps more effective, approaches to intra- and interpersonal relationships. The contemporary vision fast ceremony becomes a more-than-human therapy by shifting how the boundaries between the material, psychic, and symbolic worlds are enacted. ⁴⁰

Consider coyote. Coyote’s reputation as a trickster has a deep social history. The stories of coyote stealing fire and besting giants referenced in the introduction stretch back for centuries. More recently, the proliferation of coyotes across the continent in the face of intense predation by humans is the embodiment of the trickster story across an entire population. When coyote made his appearance in our circle while I prepared for my fast, my understanding of the significance of its presence was clearly influenced by coyote’s reputation. So were my guides who registered its entrance as a reason to take pause. They understood coyote as saying something akin to, ‘Set your intentions, but don’t hold them too close’. One could understand this as a chance encounter upon which meaning was projected, which would reinforce the boundary between human meaning making and the more-than-human world. In a more-than-human therapeutic space, however, my guides actively encouraged me not to worry too much about discerning between projection and communication. Instead of questioning whether others such as the coyote could ‘speak’ or otherwise participate in meaning making, I was invited to see what arises when that participation is assumed. The ceremonial space was offered as a space of experimentation. By assuming the potential symbolic value of each encounter, I became free to set aside questions such as discerning between projection and communication in order to be present to the experiment.

More subtle than coyote’s dramatic entrance, my sense of self shifted in intersubjective encounters with the hawks, sparrows, and the creosote bush landscape. With animism providing a foundational posture of receptivity to consider these others as subjects who participate in the same common psychic field as people, I will now delve a bit further into Merleau-Ponty’s work to think through encountering self and meaning in the world. Asserting that one can be in this sort of relationship with the more-than-human world should in no way diminish the alterity of others. Rather, it embraces Haraway’s paradox of always holding relationship and otherness together. The capacity for relationship makes the tangle possible. Significant otherness keeps it interesting.

Merleau-Ponty wrote the well-known phrase, the world is the ‘homeland of our thoughts’, in the context of a critique against empiricism as a way of seeing the world that strictly divided materiality and meaning. ⁴¹ He argued that meaning and understanding exist in the world, they are not projected upon it or layered on top of it. We find that meaning in relationship with others and with their milieu, what some now call an interworld. ⁴² Merleau-Ponty was suggesting that knowledge and feeling are encountered and constituted beyond the physical body or mind. One encounters something’s sense ‘not behind appearances’, but as ‘a signification that descends into the world and begins to exist there and that can only be fully understood by attempting to see it there, in its place’. ⁴³ As a ‘knot of living significations’, the self arises, dissipates, and is renewed through these encounters in the world. ⁴⁴

Throughout my fast, I wandered the ridge tops feeling lonely, anxious, unsettled, and out of place. I looked to the solitary hawks, but felt as if they had consciously retreated from me. I found no sense of relationship in their distant flight. However, during the many hours that I spent at my camp sitting among the creosote bushes, watching and listening to the sparrows, my world shifted. I found a feeling of community and an awareness of the importance of my community in the world that the creosote bushes, sparrows, and I produced and shared. Self arose out of a communion. As Merleau-Ponty would say, ‘I deliver over my body . . . to this manner of vibrating and of filling space’ named creosote or sparrow. ⁴⁵ Through Merleau-Ponty and the posture of animism, I can begin to appreciate how I encounter meaning in my experience of the world and to think of the creosote and sparrows as other ephemeral subjects also engaged in this meaningful encounter. Intrasubjective understanding flourished through attention to more-than-human intersubjectivity.

Set in the wild landscape of Death Valley and framed as a therapeutic space, the fast allowed me to render the paradoxical movement between self and other strange enough to pay attention to it. Eugen Fink, who worked with Husserl, described the practice of phenomenology as having a ‘“wonder” before the world’. ⁴⁶ For Husserl, the idea was to loosen ‘the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear’. ⁴⁷ To stand in wonder before the world, however, suggests that one can somehow adopt the perspective of an outsider looking in on the world. One of Merleau-Ponty’s great contributions was to see that wonderment was not the adoption of an outsider’s perspective but a painstaking act of immanent attention. Rather than interrupting one’s connection to the world, he sought to delve into the ‘thickness of being’ to understand the constitution of subjects.

Over and over again, writers have described the capacity of wild places to spark a sense of wonderment not by standing back, but by walking into landscapes that are almost magical in their ability to produce awe. In the famous, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, William Cronon writes, ‘the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires not an act of will, but forces itself upon us’. ⁴⁸ Rachel Carson, a guiding light of the American environmental movement, found in wild places the potential to cultivate ‘a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years’. ⁴⁹ This sense of wonder in the face of the wild, the alterity that it presents, and the way that it challenges one’s everyday sense of the world lies at the heart of writings on the ‘wilderness effect’ and the ‘ecological self’. ⁵⁰ Together with the crafting of a ceremonial space, vision fast participants’ immersion in a wild space away from human community creates an opportunity to render perceptible the ongoing production of an ephemeral self that is easy to overlook in daily life.

Geographers trained to be skeptical of natures and their essentialist cargo may feel worried at this point. Am I suggesting a return to a romantic imagination of nature through adventure in a constructed wilderness? Important critiques have been made along these lines. Some argue that mourning for an imagined nature is a defining psychic quality of (post)modernity, an era diagnosed as manic-depressive, swinging between feeling nostalgic for a lost idyll or lapsing into technological euphoria. ⁵¹ These are important critiques of colonial constructions of nature, and I am sympathetic to the claim that no pristine nature exists and that significant violence has been done in its name. ⁵² We must be cautious in our evaluation of what has been lost. However, I interpret these feelings of loss less as a desire for an imagined pure nature than as a longing for relationship and connection. What I am describing as a more-than-human therapy is working through alienation toward relationship rather than a retreat to an imagined nature.

A reflection for geography

What I hope this essay offers to cultural geography is both a sense of why we should reflect on the experience of subjectivity even as our conceptual understanding of the human self becomes increasingly diffuse and one way that we can go about doing that. Mine is by no means the first attempt by geographers to explore subjectivity through embodied practices. John Wylie’s meditations on vision and walking, for example, blend creative writing styles, embodied practice, and critical reflection on phenomenology to consider the relationship between self and landscape. ⁵³ Scholarship in the nonrepresentational vein considers dance, interactions with animals, affects, and more. ⁵⁴ Looking further back in the discipline’s history, 40 years ago, Buttimer’s work articulated a geography of lived experience and called for giving attention to practices like yoga to understand the self as an embodied self, something much richer than the purely rational subject employed by quantitative approaches at the time. ⁵⁵ However, sharp critiques were leveled against Buttimer and other humanist geographers for too often assuming a more-or-less intact subject that did not account for difference, ⁵⁶ and contemporary geographies of subjectivity tend toward the diffusion or outright deconstruction of the human subject. Rose’s ‘Pilgrims: an ethnography of sacredness’ is an eloquent example. He argues for a conception of identity where ‘there is no abiding interiority, where identity is wholly and primordially called’. ⁵⁷ In this sense, subjectivity is not something ‘we have’ but that arrives wholly from the outside as a gift, an argument inspired by Levinas.

I hope this essay occupies an ambivalent space, one that is indebted to these poststructural deconstructions of subjectivity but that maintains one’s ‘individual’ sense of self as an ambiguous center of our experience. The critical fracturing of concepts like subjectivity and the human have furthered our understanding of both, but their continued diffusion should not be an end in itself. I want to affirm inquiry into the experience of subjectivity as a way of being. Levinas’ phrase, ‘the subject is more than itself’, is an invitation to inquire into its constitution. ⁵⁸ Through the inquiry, we establish bonds with the others who help to constitute who ‘we’ are. My sense of myself as produced in community was a gift both from the hawks that seemed to ignore me and from the sparrows who visited my camp and to whom I listened. Recovering a sense of the human psyche as existing within a fabric constituted by all of life is both an enchantment of the world and a way to hold closer to ourselves the fleeting felt experience of an animate, relational world.

Doubt remains, of course. One of my guides writes, ‘I too have doubts about the intersubjectivity of the outer world. I wonder if I’m just projecting my thoughts onto things, anthropomorphizing, or if I’m just making it all up’. However, she also says, ‘My goal as an instructor is to help students (and myself) suspend, if only for a moment, the culturally bred skepticism that the material world is lifeless, unfeeling, and unresponsive’. ⁵⁹ Practices like the vision fast do not prove that nonhuman others are animate nor do they discern between imagination and communication, projection and co-constitution. That isn’t the point. Rather, as an experiment in ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ animism, they provide an opportunity to experience a world beyond the rigid enactment of boundaries between so-called natural and social, material, and psychic worlds. ⁶⁰

Where to from here?

My interpretations are provisional and speculative. I don’t know with any familiar kind of verifiable certainty what the coyote’s intention was in visiting our circle, nor do I know whether the hawks ignored me or what sense the sparrows had of our interactions on the valley floor. That isn’t the point. The ambiguity of the experience is essential to its richness. As an experiment beyond the bounds of traditional academic inquiry, I can say that the vision fast affords me a different way to dance with the production of self, other, and world in a deeply felt and experiential sense. Similar to the way a good therapist exaggerates interpersonal dynamics in order to facilitate reflection, the experience offered me an exaggerated glimpse of the self in the world, produced in relationship with strange but accessible others. In this sense, the contemporary vision fast ceremony offers a way to materialize a relational ontology that can otherwise feel more like a thought experiment than a lived reality. While I am not suggesting that everyone who reads this essay needs to complete their own fast, I do ask that as academics we thoughtfully consider the practice as one way to look beyond the academy in order to imagine and experience our world as an animate place.

Furthermore, scholarly descriptions of experimental practices can be thought as ‘performative ontological projects’, ⁶¹ engagements with practices beyond the academy that can do much more than critique. Against a sort of ‘doomed to fail’ thinking that begins from a position of strong critique, academics can instead cultivate the ‘space and freedom’ for experiments like this one to flourish. ⁶² By working to connect practices with academic discourses, we can build the paths that allow knowledge to flow more smoothly between sites. Ultimately, ontology can become ‘the effect instead of the ground of knowledge’. ⁶³ Our analytic work can participate in the creation of the worlds that we inhabit and write about.

In this essay, I sought to weave together Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and animism to offer an interpretive description of the contemporary vision fast ceremony. In doing so, I demonstrated how engagement with experimental practices can enrich efforts to bring relational worlds to life. I worked to effect a border crossing between animist and phenomenological traditions, demonstrating that an animist posture helps to cultivate a receptivity to nonhuman others participating in human social worlds. As a more-than-human therapy, I argued that reflection on the constitution of subjectivity in relationship with an animate world can shift one’s sense of self and form bonds with the others through whom one is produced. The essay offers one model for weaving together scholarly work with practices beyond the academy.

I envision a dialog that travels from sites of experimental practice to academia and back again. While critique has an essential place in geographic scholarship, we ought to also seek to identify opportunities to productively nurture experiments geared toward producing the sorts of worlds we want to inhabit. As scholars describe and interpret practices that intersect – albeit in messy and incomplete ways – with our theoretical goals, we begin to produce a knowledge that itself crosses borders, enacting the boundaries of the academy in more fluid ways so that those of us who are committed to ‘the more-than-human project’ can take seriously the disciplines, practices, and others who speak different languages. Some of our work is translation, which I’ve attempted to do here, but much of it is simply cultivating the willingness to actively listen and allowing ourselves to be transformed by what we hear.