#Sophie Strand

[astranemus]

Let us give masculinity back its flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Let us call Dionysus to the gates of our cities and homes. A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. A secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. A throng of singing women. A magician.

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

[gatheringbones]

[“I want to suggest that patriarchal masculinity has acted like an overprescription of antibiotics, effectively killing off healthier, more magical modes of the masculine so regularly that it has become difficult for them to grow back. What has been left behind culturally is similar to my scorched gut. Too much empty real estate. No wonder problematic figures bloom like candida. They don’t have any competition. They are harmful only in that they have too much free space to grow.

So I am not surprised that so many intelligent, curious men find themselves listening to and reading the work of these fungal overgrowths. They aren’t presented with enough compelling alternatives. Confronted by the toxicity of the patriarchal masculinity, they search for something else. Anything else. I am sympathetic with their heartache and their questing. Where are the healthy stories? Where are the compassionate, fertile masculinities?

I am changing my tune. I don’t think it’s helpful to try to erase or “kill off” these problematic figures. They only come back stronger, sapping us of our strength as we try again and again to disprove their faulty logic. Instead, I want to overwhelm them. I want to crowd them into a very small corner of the cultural gut.”]

Sophie Strand, from The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

[lowcountry-gothic]

Masculinity is lunar. Gender is lunar. Sexuality is lunar. Landscape is lunar. Bodies, liquid in a flesh silhouette, are tides of lunacy, constantly shifting their internal shorelines. To be lunar means to change—to be full and ripe one night, and tired and reclusive another.

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, p. 30

[coldalbion]

"The Hanged Man, for me, is the Rooted One. He represents more than a physical inversion. The Rooted One initiates a perspectival shift. We blink, and suddenly the ground becomes the sky. The brain is not abstracted in the head. It lives in and is constituted by the roots. The wisdom of the Rooted One is to relax our ideas about dominant epistemological paradigms, to relax our ideas about how knowledge arrives. First, the Rooted One shows us how to let personal, somatic understanding sink down into the soil of ourselves. Our bodies are deeply intelligent. They hold emotions. They register and respond to danger. They regulate and stimulate our breath, our appetites, our desires. They dance and flow and merge and create. How can we honor body’s wisdom? In a culture that encourages us to ignore our personal sleep schedules, our aches and pains, our true hungers, our bodies’ rhythms, it is important to reconnect to this type of knowledge. Our bodies, when we get to know them intimately, have a lot to tell us about what kind of medicine and movement might really benefit us. But the Rooted One’s wisdom is deeper than just the somatic. As we sink down deeper into the actual roots of plants and trees and mycelium, below our feet, the Rooted One says that there is no need to travel or seek other cultures’ spiritual practices. Everything we need is right here." — Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

[kitchen-light]

In the wonderful book The Once and Future King by T. H. White, the wizard Merlin instructs the young king Arthur: “The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

Sophie Strand, from “The Birth of The Flowering Wand | A Year of Otherness”

[becoming-with]

“Inspired by paradigms of wholeness and purity, our conception of psychological healing often comes to us heavy with metaphors of cleanliness and subtraction. Remove the trauma. Make a boundary. Identify the inciting incident. Disentangle it from your other parts. Separate, analyze, quantify, medicate. A patient is a fiction created by a conceptual framework with its foundation in capitalism and colonialism. A patient is a single self that can untie itself from the world and then granulate into a distinct pointillism of traumatic events, parental missteps, and pathologies. Analysis and diagnosis themselves are terms that, when we break them down to their roots, –imply just that - “breaking down”. Analysis comes from “analyein” meaning to “unfasten” “unmoor a ship”. A patient is isolated, unmoored, in a fictional idea of selfhood that is hardly seaworthy. Diagnosis, similarly, comes from the Greek roots “dia” and “gignoskein” meaning to obtain knowledge by separating it off from the rest of the world. Knowledge through separation, through rupture, through atomization. There is no better diagnosis for our culture’s ecocidal madness than the root of the word diagnosis itself. How do we possibly think we can understand any thing, being, ecosystem, pathology, uprooted, unmoored from its web of relationality? How do we treat a psychological breakdown with another break down? We are atomized out of community, out of our distributed bodies and intelligences that might have an easier time holding grief and pain too big for single selves. If we are always playing mental forensics with ourselves, increasingly stuck in a solipsistic feedback loop of self investigation, we often loose touch with the real knowledge.”

Sophie Strand, Texere-Diagnosis

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

If a cursory study of somatics shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think, if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my cells. Let my river run both ways. Sophie Strand, Supracellular (via astranemus)

[altrbody]

I WILL NOT BE PURIFIED

Sophie Strand, Amanda Palmer, and Gracie and Rachel. 2022.

[quotecollector14]

Right now, uncertainty would probably be the healthiest place to be. I think a lot about how when you don't know what crisis is coming, it's better to be agile and able to dance than to try and predict exactly what's going to happen.

--Sophie Strand

[third-nature]

[x]

[astranemus]

The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.

Sophie Strand, The Birth of The Flowering Wand

[gatheringbones]

[“The reason I have begun to shy away from the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine is their unfortunate identification with gender and, more importantly, their overidentification with humans and their myopic classifications generally.

Animacy is plushier. Springier. More mosslike. It seems a soft spot to rest on while I try to understand and explain how very sentient the world is to me these days. I am attracted to the constellations of meaning that sparkle like distant stars inside the word anima: breath, spirit, soul. And animate: to give vigor or life, to ensoul. I enjoy the animal itself, furred, horned, hoofed, clawed, scaled, and indeterminate, that bucks and bays and howls inside the word. I enjoy how philosophers try to clip it grammatically, like a twitchy nerve, and it keeps flinching away. It is a term I think most closely related to the original meaning of the word spell: the performative utterance. To summon magic. To myth. To story. To make happen.

Animacy is the degree to which the referent of a noun is sentient. It is the “soul” that invigorates syntax with something very much beyond language. Ultimately, I am a poet, and my choices often originate from a darker soil than common sense. Animacy, to my poet self, seems the “everything” of my actual lived ecosystem. The bright-blue darning needles weaving through thimbleweed and clover. The vultures wheeling through a hazy sky. The microbes in my gut, keeping me alive and nourished. The mycelium below my feet, holding the soil together.

The opposite of anthropocentrism is not any Divine Gender. The opposite of anthropocentrism is Everything. And what a tender beautiful thing it is to walk outside on a bright spring morning. Swathes of clementine light wash the pollen from the bricks of a nearby building. The robin’s song is like the key turning in a lock. A handful of doves float down from the red-green cloud of a newly foliated maple tree. What a relief to realize that, unlike Adam and Eve, we haven’t been severed from the Garden. The Everything still includes us. The Everything is us, but it needs something in return. It needs us to melt our ideas of sentience as a purely human property. Or as a purely animal property. Or as a purely individual property. Relationships are sentient. Anima is the inhalation, carrying molecules and spores and pheromones into our bodies from the landscape. And then we exhale, sharing cells that have clung to our deepest cells, slept inside the pith of our blood. With every exhalation we decant ourselves back into the world.

How could we be one, or two, or three? We are more gerund than cold, hard noun. More animacy than strictly animal. We ensoul the world and are ensouled in return. Our myths about individuation and linearity no longer hold all the trouble. And all the love. We need to stop sticking out our two hands like it proves everything comes in oppositional dualisms. How many hands does the tree have? The peony? The pileated woodpecker? How many hands is the mycelium using to crochet intimacy from plant to tree to plant through the soil?

Divine Feminine just isn’t big enough for all the relationships holding and constituting me these days. She thins my language into a one-toone relationship. Even if she includes saints and “mother earth” and all women, it’s easy to slip into the language of the singular. One mother. One relationship. One sacred gender expression. One temporality. One thinking animal. One species. I’m not throwing her out, the Divine Feminine. I’m throwing her in. Melting her down. Mixing her into the messier, polytemporal animacy of everything I touch, change, and become.

The animate earth is a verb. An assemblage of verbs. A mycorrhizal system sewing together a whole forest. A shared breath. A midsummer celebration where everyone is invited.”]

Sophie Strand, from The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

[lowcountry-gothic]

Just as fungi originally taught plants how to root into the soil, so myths teach us how to root into relation with our ecological and social ecosystems. They narrativize a deep understanding of our connection to more-than-human time scales.

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, p. 4

[deunmundoraro-blog]

Enough already

'What I want to say, loudly, forcefully, is this: It is only initiation if you survive. And many do not survive. The way we live produces suffering, both our own and the suffering of others. It is only natural that our myths have sought to justify this suffering as sacred initiation or the only grounds for rebirth and transformation. On a personal scale we defend our addictions with stories. On a larger scale we defend our addiction to violence with violent mythologies'.

Sophie Strand - 'Lunar kings, trans-species magicians and rhizomatic harpists'.

[theeditorandnarratorcollaborate]

BookTuber Tuesday - Mythweaving today with Sophie Strand

[insufficient-earth-skills]

About to read Sophie Strand's The Flowering Wand and I'm looking forward to these two chapters: