The body is a mind, the mind is a body. 

To imagine that the basis of all relationships is anything but your embodiment is to profoundly miss the fact that your body is your mind. Even if you only listen to scientific “facts”, which, by the way, are merely singular and highly simplistic Western constructions of the body (more on this later), you must agree that the neuronal network we call the brain includes the gut, the heart, the stomach, and more. And, this model is still a very limited understanding of the “thinking” body. We so easily miss the “thinking” that is the detailed communication that passes through the fascial system, the soma, and so much more. Even our cellular lives are brilliant. Although to say “It’s turtles all the way down” is to invoke mythology, the myth points to the mark.

It’s lively down there on those other scales of being!

“Meaning and matter are more like interacting excitations of non-linear fields – a dynamic, shifting dance we call science.” Karen Barad



The emphasis on identification of individuated bits of things both within our bodies and within our worlds is a fascination that scientists began in ancient Greece with Aristotle, among others. Scientific categorization got a big boost with the enlightenment (1715-1815) and a desire to bring the unreasonable world into graspable material - though systems of naming that included everything possible -the human body, all life, and all the non-living.

This took reasoning, and with this reasoning came distance, “objectivity,” and individuation. It removed what my buddies, science theorists Joe Dumit and Natasha Myers recall into current usage “the middle voice” – verb usage that is neither passive nor active but understands the space of being recomposed by the engagement of things with one another - entanglement - the recognition that the scientist is embodied in part by the very thing he is studying.

When science gets this position, it enters a new, far muddier world… but it becomes a dance. Systems of classification killed an understanding of entanglement, intra and inter action and the middle ground of being. Recovering our senses, we feel beyond the name of things and return to the unreasoned world of being. And, not surprisingly, the world, experience and relations look, feel, and are different!!! 

Dance is the answer… it is almost always the answer.