Steal This Event! — PLANTS / ART / ATTENTION

rituals for composting modernity?

When I started this Substack I also had the goal of

sort of

LARPing, with friends,

what we thought Scientific Animism might look like

if it were some sort of

organized / organizing

religion / movement / whatever.

We started in the summer and did a Quaker Meeting-inspired

Sunset Watch thing.

I loved it; tried

half-assedly

to keep it going for a few months,

but then October came and dang!

sitting on the ground for an hour!

in that cold!

---

It’s also been hard,

keeping a writing

schedule AND scheduling

regular (monthly?) events.

---

This past January I got together with “the cabal”

(aka “small group of friends who seem to actually enjoy humoring me on this stuff”);

bought them lunch and

brainstormed.

What rituals

have we liked?

would we like?

What would work in the cold?

---

We made a Google Doc.

You can steal it.

We made a Google Calendar.

You can subscribe.

(It mostly just has a year

of full & new moons.

We are attempting one event per month,

without particular care for moon cadence,

for now.)

I changed the tagline here.

A couple weeks back.

“A spiritually humble meeting place to foster thought, practice, and community ritual that will summon a better world.”

This is aspirational.

Ritual to summon a better world.

I’m still mostly at

“LARPing with friends.”

---

Can LARPing summon a better world?

Can it bring comfort

while the current world crashes

roars

breaks

upon our exhausted ears?

---

I want you to listen to this interview

between Dougald Hine and Nate Hagens.

I want community practice

to help us embody; enact; summon

a world worth living for.

The damage that can be done by 
    good people! 
    with good intentions! 
when we cannot make the distinction
between the end of the world
    as we know it
and the end of the world 
    full stop.

When we find ourselves doubling down 
on attempts
    to somehow 
        make sustainable
things that are fundamentally 
    unsustainable;
when “sustainability” ends up meaning, 
    as it did end up meaning,
        “sustaining the ways of life of 
            the Western middle classes 
                at all costs,”
as if that's
possible 
or even frankly 
desirable.

There is a space of possibility between 
the end of the world 
    as some of us have known it 
        around here 
            lately, 
and the end of a world 
    worth living for.

That zone is where the work is. 

– Dougald Hine

I want community practice

that helps us bear witness.

...attention is a thing that
that moves and that
changes shape and that
by drawing attention 
into different shapes
we become aware
it's like 
you can draw more than one map 
of the same
landscape 
and so bearing witness 
is partly just
offering maps 
that bring things
into view things 
that were hidden 
    from the maps 
        we were told 
            we should 
be steering by.

– Dougald Hine

---

I don’t know if we’re hitting the mark of

all that

with the silly event

whose description I share below.

---

We wanted to copy

borrow

steal

adapt a practice we learned about

in a New Yorker article

about The Battle for Attention

a practice / protocol / exercise done

by a group called

The Order of the Third Bird.

---

They attend art;

we’ll attend nature.

We’ll attend a plant.

(This is indoor ritual.)

---

Here’s our event invite page.

Feel free to come out,

if you’re in the area.

Feel free to steal it,

if you’re not.

Feel free to LARP with your own friends,

to call yourselves

“the Scientific Animists of [wherever you are].”

---

PLANTS / ART / ATTENTION

ℹ️ The Battle for Attention, in which we learn of the Order of the Third Bird

🎵 Your Mind Is Being Fracked, in which Ezra Klein interviews the Third Bird guy

ARRIVE/ATTEND/NEGATE/REALIZE • REFLECT • DISCUSS

Come one, come all! This is attention practice.

We're gonna give a PLANT the ATTENTION it is DUE. Have you ever really LOOKED at a plant? WOW. That's the only appropriate response. The ONLY appropriate response! To a plant. But also to literally ANYTHING! Anything at all! in this GOB-SMACKED • LIVING • WORLD we've got. WOW.

So fuck the noise! There's a lot of awful shit going on right now. For one evening, let's show up and be quiet together.

• Jo Davis, noted artist, is going to lead us

• 7:00-7:30, ARRIVE/ATTEND/NEGATE/REALIZE: the protocol itself; the main event; we will bless a plant with four distinct ways of giving it attention

• it will bless us in return

• 7:30-8: REFLECT: we all disperse and reflect on the experience individually

• 8pm: reconvene and DISCUSS our experiences at a restaurant/bar

This roughly follows a practice done by the Order of the Third Bird, explained in the article linked above.

It's gonna be weird and fun and you are going to be there and I can't wait to see you.

xxoo

💛 💛🌱 🌱

These times got us tweakin, 
these times got us twitchin; 
ain't we all straight-up 
bankrupt on attention? 
None left to give; 
none left to pay. 
Let's learn to grow some; 
let's learn to play. 

💛 💛🌱 🌱