Within modernity, we are conditioned to want to cover everything with a heavy blanket of fixed meanings, to index reality in language, to “word the world.” Carl Mika, a Māori philosopher suggests that instead of “wording the world”, when language manifests as an entity, it “worlds the world” and this opens other possibilities for experiencing existence within the world[i].

There are significant implications of working with language to world the world, especially in relation to our relationship with stories and ideas. In wording the world, we are socialized to treat ideas as tools of communication that enable us to describe reality, prescribe the future and accumulate knowledge. In worlding the world, ideas are living entities that emerge from and move things in the world. Some of these ideas are meant to exist for a long time; others expire sooner. Some ideas are meant to remain as and where they are, and to work only with a very select group of people; other ideas are meant to travel the world, and to trans-form and to be trans-formed by other world-entities, including story-tellers and those who receive the ideas.

Sometimes worlding ideas can create micro or macro movements, in all directions, as soon as they arrive. Sometimes they will hide somewhere in your body, perhaps close to a song that already lives there, and wait for the right time to dance with you. Sometimes, they will do their work undercover, in alliance with other resident ideas. Other times they will be rejected, ignored, hated, or attacked by other ideas that live within you. When mobilized in this way, it feels like ideas interact with your body in a physical/material way – and they actually do.

This walk invites you to make space for a political practice of healing and wellbeing beyond desperate hope and desolate hopelessness to encounter you through your engagement with entity-ideas who want to dance with you.

This walk requires some preparation. Start with exercise invitation A – become intimate with the text “co-sensing with radical tenderness” . Exercise invitation B encourages you to check what entity-ideas want to hang out and go for a walk with you.  Exercise invitation C invites you to create a routine where healthy entity-ideas can dance with you every day.

Exercise invitation A: shower of entity-ideas

Play the recording 4 times. 1. The first time, just hear the song in the background, without paying attention to meaning; 2. The second time, let the sentences and words (entity-ideas) that want to touch you reach your body; 3. The third time, just move with the music and the words, as your body responds to them; 4. The fourth time, read along with the written version of the poem.

Exercise invitation B: hanging out with entity-ideas

Register in writing or doodling what you remember from exercise A, what stayed with you, or what entity-ideas want to “hang out”, both intellectually and sensually. Take these ideas for a walk with you. Have a conversation with them: Why do they want to hang out now? Where do they come from? Where have you seen them before? In what other circumstances (if any) have they tried to contact you?  What are they showing you in your walk that you would not have noticed before? How long do they plan to stay? What do they need you to do? How can your relationship be nurtured?

Exercise invitation C: creating a routine for healthy entity-ideas to dance with you

Create a routine that can help you walk the tightrope between desperate hope and desolate hopelessness with the SMDR compass, with honesty, humility, humour and hyper-self-reflexivity. This needs to be something small that you do every single day. Start with creating a routine for the entity-ideas that have stuck with you. Try to create a routine that deepens intimacies – between you and your own body-metabolism, between you and the body-metabolism of the earth, between you and those in the social-body-metabolism who are calibrated towards deep healing and wellbeing (SMDR compass!). Look for practices that turn us towards rather than away from each other, without projections, transactions, idealizations or expectations. From time to time, you can have another shower of entity-ideas by reading the “co-sensing with radical tenderness” text (or using the cards) or listening to the audio.