We are a world of many worlds.

There are many ways of knowing our world and being in our world. Our cultures are as diverse as our places – as diverse as the unique ecologies, geologies and geographies from which they emerge.

And we hold many worlds within us. Many of us are the carriers of diverse lineages and intersecting and sometimes conflicting identities. We are of multiples.

I am the child of lines that include peasant folk, refugees of revolution, migrants and the middle class. Eastern European music stirs me, the Southern European sun soothes me, and the English treescape cradles me. When I listen, these stories run through me. There are, of course, parts of me that I do not know and do not understand. Those stories are whispered under the breath, heard but unheard, known but unknown, there but also not.

In many ways, I feel that some of my stories were not forgotten but stolen. The perpetrator is cloaked, their identity shrouded in shadow. They have devoured a wealth of stories over past millennia, getting hungrier in recent centuries, feeding on the loss and capitalising on the ruins. Though fat from feasting, the spectre still lurks, ever greedy for more, thieving further, cultivating a monoculture that makes us easier to farm until we are depleted of who we are and homogenised into one. Who is this spectre? Perhaps it goes by many names: modernity, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, industrialisation, globalisation? 

Stories are invisible bonds that hold us in communion with all else. They are our compasses as we navigate the weird, wonderful and wicked. These compasses are passed down through the generations, scuffed up in the pockets of our ancestors, carrying marks that memorialise their journeys through time. Without our compasses, are we lost? Bereft of our stories, are many of us wandering souls?

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Shared stories create cultures and emerge from the kinship between people and place. I will define “place" as the land, the water, the air and all who live within these ecosystems. Therefore, humans cannot be thought of as separate from place. We are of place(s). 

However, for most of the history of the human species, we’ve been on the move… slowly. There were bursts of migration, but mostly, it's been a slow crawl, first out of Africa and onto the Eurasian continent, and then beyond. Or so the theory goes. 

As our ancestors moved, they carried with them their cultures, which evolved in response to new places in the continuous creation of biocultural diversity. Many ways of being, knowing and seeing emerged, converged and diverged into a great multiplicity.

I wonder, is a part of who we are as humans defined by movement and migration and the divergences this creates? What motivates these movements? Anthropologists point to the need for “resources” and us following the migration of prey. Is this the evolutionary reason why many of us are curious about the unknown, excited by newness, and intrigued by the unfamiliar? Is this what creates the urge in the human psyche to push into terra incognita, be it figuratively or literally? Do we possess an innate restlessness? 

History reads that twelve thousand years ago, peoples started settling, swapping their nomadic existence for pastoral lives. Bands of once hunter-gatherers swelled in size, and villages, towns and cities (in their then-iterations) were born. Wildlands gave way to tended lands. Wild flora were cultivated. Wild beasts were tamed. A great domestication got underway.

Civilisations rose up. New lifeways emerged. Humans’ inherent creativity and imagination flourished in architecture, pottery, metallurgy and more. Food cultures erupted. Trade became embedded, both locally and further afield. Those still wrestling with a nomadic spirit from yesteryear became traders journeying lands and waters with the “goods” of one place to exchange for those of another, threading communities together.

We humans are social beings wired to need community. Our brains respond chemically to one another, creating bonds between us. We are attuned to group dynamics and social cues and behaviours. We have evolved to rely on others. We seek and need belonging.

Belonging is an elusive feeling that each of us experiences differently. Broadly, when we feel that we belong, we feel seen, heard, valued and accepted; we feel in communion with others. In many cultures, this communion transcends the human species, and all species are considered kin. These kin share our places with us. Moreover, they are our place. Place is not inert. It is alive. This is to say that the land, the water, the air and all who live within these ecosystems are place, and we continue to create places together in a dynamic dance through time. All are woven into the great fabric of life; all have emerged in relationship with one another, our coexistence hinged on complex reciprocal arrangements. 

Many place-based cultures know this reciprocity; it underpins many knowledge systems and cosmologies. Many diverse Indigenous and traditional peoples around the world find commonality in this understanding of interbeing and unify in the global movement for Indigenous rights and the pushback of the worldview of empire and its continued onslaught. The worldview of empire is predicated on the extraction, exhaustion and expiration of place; worldviews of interbeing cannot comprehend this.   

Place-based cultures may be considered as those whose lifeways, knowledge systems, cultural practices, spiritual beliefs and social structures are deeply rooted in their place – in their kinships with all whom they share time and space. It is through these kinships that the human imagination folded into the magic of the world. Our crafts arose from the gifts place offers – of the earth, which is sculpted and put in fires to create pots; of the reeds, which are woven to create baskets; of the plants, which are blended into culinary delights; of the animals, whose skins have been used to make clothing, bedding and the tensioned skins of beating drums. Our imaginations, inspired by our kin all around us, have brought entire worlds into being: tantalised, we moved abstractions from our minds and made them our realities. In communion with the world, our creativity is unbounded.

The continent from which all my known ancestors derive, Europe, was once a sweep of tribal lands comprising many groups with distinct place-based cultures. They experienced the magic of their places and knew the aliveness of all who surrounded them, from the rushing rivers to the mighty mountains to solitary small stones. That was until they were systematically assimilated into now-dominant ways of knowing with the rise of empires, medieval kingdoms, feudal states and modern nations. 

The spectre had begun its feeding frenzy, permeating minds and indoctrinating communities. It moves like a virus, colonising and rendering some people hosts to infect others while killing off the rest. In a stupor, infected individuals surrender traditional knowledge to “reason”, forsake being of place for “progress”, and sacrifice kinship for individualism. Further, they justify the “salvation from savagery”, for both humans and more-than-humans, in an extermination, enslavement and exploitation that has brought the world to its knees.   

This is a process in motion: the great homogenisation is still underway; colonisation is actively happening in almost all places. Around the world, place-based cultures and remnants of them continue to be devoured along with their unique and diverse places. Sometimes, the spectre creeps slowly and insidiously, and other times, it moves swiftly and aggressively. Both are to the same end: to claw all into the wasteland of monoculture. Many have succumbed, many still fight for their existence, and many are trying to find their way home. 

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In his book Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta welcomes us to consider the “global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land, but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation with it”. The central question of his book asks, “what happens if we bring an Indigenous perspective to the big picture?” For the purposes of his book, he defines “an Indigenous person [as] a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land-base. Indigenous Knowledge is any application of those memories as living knowledge to improve present and future circumstances.” 

The “memories” that Yunkaporta refers to are the stories to which the spectre licks its lips. Perhaps the stories of my “community’s life lived” in place are gone forever. Or perhaps this is what the spectre wants me to believe as it tries to drown out the stories that channel through me from times before the spectre’s reign, sung out by my ancestors and kin from before the peoples of Europe became so possessed and infected.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I host the spectre. It lives within me and controls me like a puppet. Even in my attempts to resist it, I surely embody its ambitions. I question, are my stories too faded from memory to find my way home? Is the chasm of time between now and Indigenous Europe* too great? Are the waters of history too choppy to navigate? Where even is home? Is it within the leafy folds of ancient trees of England? Or the storied lands of dragons and Celtic tongues of Wales? Or the golden coastlines that melt into shimmering mirages on the Mediterranean Sea of Sicily? Or the swaying grasslands and plains that cradle the meandering blue arteries of Hungary? Or where the ocean rages against the wind-beaten coastlines of Portugal? If I journeyed only a few centuries back, would I learn that my Hungarian lines extend onto the Asian continent into the Ural mountains or that my Sicilian lines weave with those of the Moors of North Africa? (*It’s extremely important that we don’t relegate Indigenous peoples to the past; there are Indigenous peoples as well as traditional place-based cultures on the lands considered politically and/or geographically in Europe.)  

I am, by some measures, of all these places. I suggest that we are each of all our places, the children of many lines, including those we find comfortable and familiar and those we don’t, and those we know and those condemned to the past, from which we may have been aggressively wrenched. If we could trace back our lines, it’s likely we’d find ancestors who “lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land-base” in many and diverse places. I propose that we are each a weaving of all of these peoples and cultures, of all the creativity, beauty, imagination and love that existed in and between them. We may visibly see this in ourselves, in the colour of our eyes, hair and skin; we may feel it in how we physically respond to place, to climate, to environment, to diet. Our bodies carry wisdoms, and if we pause to listen, if we are patient, we may hear them. Our stories may be alive within us and in our ways of being, instinctually, ancestrally, knowingly and unknowingly.  

Our being of many places does not dilute us into hegemony. That is the work of systematic homogenisation, of the spectre, who rips us from our stories and felt sense of place, strips us of who we are, and then deepens its inroads by deviously whispering in our ears that we are of no place; that we are lost. With a menacing grin, it toys with us in our searching and yearning, promising to fill the hollows that it’s created, distracting us with mirages of belonging and stuff and things and busy schedules and perpetuated ideas of success and prosperity, which linger like a carrot on a stick. The effect is that people feel more lost, more lonely, and more bereft of who they are.

We may not “retain” all the “memories” of the multiple lineages of our ancestors, but culture is emergent and memories are forever in the making. So I wonder, can we weave the many parts of ourselves into new stories that are in relation to place? Can we exist in communion with place even without our old stories, memories and compasses? Can a compass from one place be useful in another? I suspect there are no hard answers to these questions; it’s all a matter of opinion, perspective and context. 

Though, in times of converging crises, what many can likely agree on is that we must escape the clutches of the spectre. But how? Scholar and Native American writer Lyla June suggests that “Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves. Our task is to remember that we are those beautiful Earth People … When we remember this, we will remember that the fates of all beings are intertwined with our own.” Her essay “Reclaiming Our Indigenous European Roots” reminds us that in our complex world, in the context of deep time, people cannot be so neatly divided into the two boxes of “colonised” and “coloniser”, and we must acknowledge the many parts of ourselves and the many ancient peoples from whom we descend. 

The remembering that June describes asks us to embody our kinship with our place(s) and feel into worldviews of interbeing. At complete odds with the worldview of empire, we are asked to trust that through communion with place, we will find home. 

And our world is pleading with us to come home to ourselves and our places, as the seas boil and turn to acid, the forests burn, the poles melt, the rivers run dry, the lands flood and also turn to desert, and so many of our kin perish. But our homecoming shouldn’t be defined by grief and loss but by celebration, joy, creativity, imagination and inquiry. As ecologist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer explains in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” This gifting is an act of reciprocity.  

Our inquiries should be soft, kind, humble and slow; as writer and philosopher Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “The times are urgent: let us slow down”. In them, we should listen out for the stories we hold: to hear the gentle utterances of wisdoms we thought we’d lost that are nested in our languages, cultural practices and ways of engaging with the world; to hear the stories our places are singing out, for us to dance and play together with all our kin; to hear guidance from others, from the people with knowledge of our places as well as the people of place-based cultures with deep understandings of how to be of place. These people and cultures should not be co-opted, extracted from or subjugated; their practices and wisdoms should not be commodified, deconstructed from their cultures or looked upon with a superior eye.

We should not expect to understand our world of many worlds as others do; everyone everywhere will always be blinkered by their own ways of knowing and seeing. This too should be approached with softness and kindness and be celebrated. This diversity is evidence of our gains against the spectre. And as we make gains, more and more diversity will flourish. Cultures can coalesce rather than be dominated and consolidated. This coalescence enables us to learn from one another and share in diverse ways of knowing and being, enabling the continual emergence and divergence of cultures.   

Cultural diversity and biodiversity are entwined. Knowledge of how to be of place is rooted in place. Knowledge itself is alive; it evolves as it holds people and place together, living through language, song, practice, through how people exist on the land. (Re)kindling this knowledge requires us to be on the land and be enlivened by place(s). It asks for us to awaken to the many stories interwoven into our beings: of place and peoples and the kinship between them, of migration and movement, of settlement and unsettlement, of the atrocities and traumas of the past. 

As we enter a new chapter for the Earth, I trust that we may step out of the fog of the spectre’s spell and escape its snarl to find contentment beyond the trappings of empire. May we resist collapsing into hegemony and instead find ourselves here, now, among the weaving of colourful threads that spin our world in its continuous creation. May we recognise our innate restlessness as a driver of continued divergence but surrender to a slower pace that allows us intimate and personal relations with place and community and the time to listen to their wisdoms. Time is, of course, not equitably distributed under the spectre’s reign, so we will need to work collectively to find our way home. 

May we carry living culture with us, from the past into the future, as our compasses. In feeling into this multiplicity and continual emergence, may we embody our role as participants of place(s) to co-create a diverse and thriving world, allowing space for many ways of knowing to coexist, coalesce and coevolve continuously in a dance that welcomes us all home.

Dearest reader, as a parting exercise, I invite you to consider how you relate to place – to the land, the water, the air and all the communities, both human and more-than-human, who live within these ecosystems. Do you sense the inherent aliveness of place? Is there magic in the trees, in the ancient stone, in the sand used to construct our buildings? What are the stories you hear? Allow your imagination and creativity to involve kin of all kinds. Surrender to the weirdness, softly and playfully. I suggest that the innate ways of knowing the world that we felt as children, that saw aliveness in all around us, that pivoted around the playful and wondrous, are some of the wisdoms that channel through us ancestrally but are systematically stamped out. See what happens when you welcome them back in; how will this translate into how you engage with the world; what doors in your mind will open; what richness will you be gifted?