Echolocation as a practice of collective care, ft. Alexis Pauline Gumbs

How do we deepen our mindfulness?

Gentle greetings ~

I feel like I say this every December, but I can’t believe we are already entering the last month of the year! If you are reading this from parts of the Earth that are easing towards the winter solstice, I hope you are able to rest into your personal spaces of warmth… perhaps by a cozy campfire or fireplace, perhaps in the presence of loved ones, accompanied by a hot beverage or other metaphorical flames that bring you a bit more comfort this season.

The colder climate certainly reminds me of my dream to one day have a wood-burning cook stove that I can simultaneously warm the cabin with while I cook breakfast and heat water for a nice morning cup of tea ~ That also reminds me of a general need to bring greater nuance to discourses on energy — what it might mean to create place-based energy systems, and the difference between small-scale, decentralized production versus industrial-scale operations. More on that another time.

For this week, I invite you to tune into my latest interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist, an aspirational cousin to all life, and the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Her most recent book is Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Enjoy!

with light, green dreamer kaméa

Episode artwork by Stacie Balkaran; Song feature Blue Lake by Forest Veil

“There’s a delusion that’s possible when we don’t echolocate, when we don’t practice mindfulness for where we are and what our impact is.” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I’m not quite sure why, but I always feel drawn to thinking with the more-than-human world — exploring what we can learn from other beings in how they show up for and relate to their communities. This intrigue was my inspiration to create the “Otherness” theme in ~alchemize~, Green Dreamer’s 12-week imagination program — through which participants are invited via audio-guided practices to speculatively imagine ourselves as an other. These engagements include “You are honeybee-ing,” “You are water-ing,” “You are lichen-ing,” and more.

So I particularly resonate with Alexis’ call for us to learn from the vibrational technology of echolocation as practiced by marine mammals (and bats).

As Alexis shares with me in Green Dreamer EP439:

“It’s a way of understanding space through echo — the ways that the sounds we make bounce back to us. Then we have a sense of the shape, of how far it is to the nearest stone formation, of how deep a certain area in the water might be.

It helps marine mammals, most of whom at some point have a reason to find each other and create a shared map of space.

If I could be more mindful of the space I'm in, physically, but also in every other way, the very sound I make could help teach me in the way it comes back to me: How quickly to move, whether I should slow down, who else is here.

That's a very different way of relating to life than what I've been socialized into in my colonial education, which is to say, ‘Just go forward. If there's something in your way, you're going to just have to knock it out of the way.’ It's not about mindfulness of space. It's not about listening to our impact. It's just this kind of linear drive towards… what?

So, I do think that there's a lot of listening that we need to do.”

The dominant way of understanding mindfulness seems to center on the individual — referring to a heightened sense of awareness of someone being and moving in/as their body. So I love how Alexis speaks of echolocation as a more expansive mindfulness — becoming more tuned in to how the sounds we put out, and the actions we take, then “bounce” and ripple back to us.

This seems to be at the heart of our varied crises today — for a variety of reasons, many people are becoming more and more disconnected from and de-sensitized to the impacts that we create.

Join me and Alexis in this heartwarming discussion as we talk through lessons from marine mammals, teachings from the artful life of Audre Lorde, the significance of what it means to survive, and more ~

(You can listen to this conversation here or via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any podcast app, and view our transcript and episode resources here.)

P.S., If the topic of deep/multi-sensory listening resonates, I also welcome you to check out my past interviews with Red River Métis artist-researcher Zoe Todd on embodied listening with freshwater fish, and with sound artist A.M. Kanngieser on becoming more responsive to the world.

Invitations into reflection:

1. What are some ways that you practice echolocation as expanded mindfulness in your life? And how would you like to deepen this practice further?

2. What is asking for more of your attention and attunement within your community and more-than-human environment this season? What does it mean for you to become more responsive to their language and ways of being?

It is Giving Tuesday!

As 2024 comes towards a close, I want to extend my most heartfelt appreciation to the supporting subscribers of UPROOTED & Green Dreamer who have helped to sustain our alternative media work for the last years! We would not still be here without you.

If you haven’t yet, for this Giving Tuesday, I invite you to 1) make a one-time year-end donation here, or 2) join as a paid Substack subscriber to receive more of my personal reflection pieces, submit comments, and support my independent writing and podcast interviews.

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With my sincerest gratitudes ~