The Slow Movement offers feminist scholars permission to inhabit multiple identities and recognizes the inherent value of care work as work. Against an intimate living backdrop of pancreatic cancer, COVID-19, and overwork, I practice Slow scholarship by embodied caring for three elders while experiencing powerful anxiety. Identifying as a daughter, mother, carer, student, friend, leader, and scholar, I look to a variety of wisdom sources outside universal concepts of value and time to ground myself in the present. Zen, Taoism, and existentialism suggest staying with anxiety as a viable means to live in an uncomfortable present.
The practice of oil painting landforms, rocks and sea water in Jervis Inlet, British Columbia (BC) puts me in dialogue with land’s resistant alterity. By closely attuning to landforms, and by stepping back and blurring my focus at regular intervals while practicing oil painting of landforms, I experience phusis of land and of my painting. Through self-concealment and emergence, land alternates between revealing and enfolding its character, resisting my human comprehension but speaking to more-than-human elements in myself. The slow accretive process of oil painting lends itself to phenomenological research, taking days and weeks for paint to dry before new layers can be applied. This slowness produces phusis within me as an artist, as I am forced to withdraw from the painting while its layers dry and we reassume an unfamiliarity with one another as dual subjects. Through oil painting, landforms’ alterity shifts towards familiarity. Earth’s elements originate in deep time, pre-dating human experience. Cycling within me is a repository of minerals, water, and salinity originating in deep time. This draws attention to alterity within my own body. By practicing phenomenological research through painting landforms, I encounter the phenomenological paradox of deep time and come face-to-face with the originary elemental origin I share with landforms.
This paper curates four experiential narratives and poetry by the five co-authors that illustrate epistemic and ontic shift from the Modern Western (ModWest) mindset to a holistic, embodied and animistic mindset. Coming from different cultural backgrounds, yet having been systemically influenced by the dominant ModWest views and values, each author has initiated an ongoing shift in consciousness, demonstrating how such transformations are possible. Affirming that a shift in consciousness is not simply a matter of cognitive change but is a thoroughly holistic process, the authors write in autobiographical narratives and poetry to capture and convey embodied and emplaced, experiential understanding and feelings, or ‘felt sense.’ Deep changes in the consciousness, such as these epistemic shifts, take the whole ensemble of “body + mind + heart + soul + spirit + the world” as the unit of change for learning. Through these writings, they sensuously and feelingly, existentially-and-spiritually and discursively explore possibilities of becoming one-bodied with the animate Earth. They call this the re-bonding project through which they address humanity’s first-order bonding rupture between Humans and the Earth community.
Through direct encounters with the more-than-human world (MTHW) I encounter otherness. Practices of oil painting, slowing down, shapeless listening, and gazing afford distinct ways of seeing that resist comprehension, naming, or control. This research affirms that much of the planet remains mysterious and likely indifferent to me. Respecting enduring mystery runs counter to empirical research doctrine, which through seeking to understand, quantify, and name, often entails destroying the source of wonder. Eschewing enclosure and control, I accept unknowability. Themes of coherence, complexity, mattering, and indifference emerge. This inquiry offers loose prescriptions for encountering otherness and invites researchers to practice humility.
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