Dr. Tami Spry is an author, speaker, and communication specialist in developing our relationship with nature through nature/culture writing, speaking and advocacy. She has offered performances and workshops on writing, performative writing, autoethnography and more at multiple venues in England, Scotland, New Zealand, Chile, and the USA. As the author of two award winning books (Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography and Autoethnography and the Other: Unsettling Power Through Utopian Performatives) and over 50 essays, her work in the last ten years focuses on developing one's relationship to the natural world. Her latest book written with Travis Brisini and Jake Simmons, Posthumanist Collaborations in Performance: A Praxis-based Approach to Qualitative Inquiry offers the naturecuture body as a method for writing our way into eco-kinship with nature.
Our relationship with nature and the natural world is one of the most important in our lives. Walking in the woods, sitting by a pond or just feeling the breeze on your face enhances physical and emotional well being. The more we reflect upon this relationship, the more advantageous nature's benefits become, the more committed we are to policies that enhance the health of the natural world. But what does it mean to develop a relationship with the natural world and how do we do it? This is the focus of the natureculture body methodology.
An example of what we might do in our CANI-net session:
There are times when I lose my cellular structure in the space of my garden, or among the Joshua trees. We become bodies with no beginning or end, no borders or boundaries. Just there. A differently merged consciousness. A radically botanical flow of being. Time slows. The natureculture body takes over. Breath/bark/being.
What does it mean to "lose yourself" in nature or the natural world? Are we really losing ourselves or are we, through natureculture body practice, becoming merged with nonhuman entities like plants, trees, soil, sun? Are we, through a sympoietic praxis, being made into something new? How might we "become kin" with these other-than-human beings through natureculture body practice?
Writing Prompt:
· Sit somewhere with/in nature (the woods, a garden, a park, by your house plants). Focus on a particular nature-being, perhaps a plant, a rock, a tree, pine cone, etc.
· Take three deep slow breaths with this nature-being. With each breath let your consciousness embody a being-with this other-than-human being. With each breath think of what you are "with" this being.
· Describe this "being with" feeling: