Transcript of Queer Nature Interview

Podcast date: April 10, 2020 (Edited for written clarity)


Transcript:

Jacks McNamara

Welcome to So Many Wings, a flock of misfits and change makers, So Many Wings is a podcast that draws on our backgrounds in transformative mental health and social justice organizing to gather our people and share stories and visions as we struggle for collective liberation.

Sascha Altman DuBrul

This project is a node in the growing network of creatively maladjusted folks who are rising up and capturing the imaginations of people who are ready for change. We chose the name So Many Wings because there are so many ways to get free and because we can only get free together. We're glad you're here.

Jacks McNamara 

I'm your host Jacks McNamara and I'm a queer writer, artist, parent, healer and troublemaker living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'm the cofounder of The Icarus Project and the author of In Between Land. I have a somatic coaching practice working with amazing folks all over the world. I'm passionate about social justice, magic, plants and parenting one wondrous little human.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

And I'm Sascha Altman DuBrul, a writer and developer of transformative mutual aid practices, living in Oakland, California. I'm also the cofounder of The Icarus Project, author of Maps to the Other Side, and currently the training director at the Institute for the Development of Human Arts. My interests lie at the intersection of the public mental health system and the mad underground. I also derive great pleasure from growing food for my friends. And now for today's episode.

Jacks McNamara 

Welcome to So Many Wings. Today we are welcoming Pınar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd from Queer Nature.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Queer Nature is an education and social sculpture project that actively dreams into decolonially-informed queer ‘ancestral futurism’ through mentorship in place-based skills with awareness of post-industrial/globalized/ecocidal contexts. Place-based skills include naturalist studies, handcrafts, “survival skills,” and recognition of colonial and indigenous histories of land, and are framed in a container that emphasizes deep listening and relationship building with living and non-living earth systems. Queer Nature designs and facilitates nature-based workshops and multi-day immersions intended to be financially, emotionally, and physically accessible to LGBTQ2+ people and QTBIPOCs. We carry the story and hope that these spaces create resilient narratives of belonging for folks who have often been made to feel by systems of oppression that they biologically, socially, or culturally don’t belong.

Jacks  & Sascha 

That is an amazing mission statement (laughter), yeh for real. That's an amazing mission statement. I just felt that as I was reading it. Yeah. Welcome to the show.

Jacks McNamara 

So first we want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, your ancestors, and your connection to place in any way that feels relevant for you all.

Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

My name is Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd. I use they/them pronouns and it feels important to introduce my ancestors. My matrilineage is Quechua which is native to the Andes, near Izcuchaca, as well as Chinese, from Spanish enslavement in the 1700's, and so-called Peru. And on my father's side my patrilineage is Turkish, which is where I grew up. My family is from the Southeastern parts of Turkey, or what is now called Turkey. And let's see, what else would I like to introduce myself as, or by? I would say one thing that's also really core to who I am -- I identify also as a psychiatric survivor and also to specify that it's a psychiatric survivor of the colonial psychopharmaceutical system and really name that the psychopharmaceutical system is very much a tool of colonialism. And we could talk more about that at some point. Also naming a really big part of why I'm still here and who I am is the more-than-human beings who raised me. And one of them is an incredible creek in so-called central Arizona and Yavapai and Apache territories and just wanting to honor the more-than-human beings and our ecological relatives who make it possible for us to be here. Yeah, just honoring the beings that have helped us survive and thrive.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

Thanks Pinar. I'll go ahead and introduce myself as well. My name is So Sinopoulos-Lloyd. And, I'm a white, gender queer person of settler descent. I grew up in the Northern hardwood forests of Abenaki or Alnobak territory and that's also called Vermont. I also feel very raised by the landscape of the Northern hardwoods. And when I introduce myself, I often think about introducing, in addition to my human ancestors, [those] who I consider also my other-than-human ancestors. And for me what really comes up with that is sheep and specifically the domestic sheep or, Ovis aries, their Latin name. My mom's side of the family comes from Greece. So I'm a first generation immigrant on my mom's side. And my dad's side of the family is of settler descent, for many generations. They go back to Northern European heritage. And yeah, I love to introduce sheep as part of my answer to ancestry and who I am because also as a queer person and as a trans person who's in a “same sex marriage.” And I don't know if we're going to have kids, adopted or biological, human kids that is, but I've often thought a lot about the ways in which we can be ancestors, sort of indirect ancestors, to creatures that are a different species, through conservation work and advocacy work, and other sorts of environmental and climate activism. And then alternatively, how we all carry these interspecies indirect ancestors in the form of these literally keystone species, that were cultural keystones in our different ancestral lineages and lifeways. I often think that sheep get pretty overlooked in mainstream Western culture. They are literally used by people as a symbol or metaphor for stupidity or complacency but if you work closely with them like I have as a shepherd throughout my college years and throughout my twenties, you really begin to see how much deep intelligence is in the flock or hive mind and how resilient these creatures really are. And so I often use that as a starting point since these creatures are also what really introduced me to earth based skills in general, actually.

Jacks McNamara 

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that and I love the idea of thinking about them having hive mind. I've never thought that way about sheep before. It's really beautiful. Something we're going to come up against on this podcast is the inadequacy of language. So when we talk about this podcast, one of the ways we talk about it is being centered around transformative mental health and social justice. And both Sasha and I have a lot of discomfort with the term mental health, but we find it useful as a phrase to pull people in as a cultural reference point so they know what we're talking about. And we would love to hear about your relationships, either personally, or Queer Nature as a project, to the ideas of emotional distress, mental health and what it means to heal or to find wholeness and connection in a decolonial sense.

Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

Thank you for that question. There are so many threads to that question and it's such a huge foundational part of who I am and who we are as individuals, as well as an ecology and an organism of Queer Nature. And yeah, I feel like I want to follow this thread that's popping up in my mind incessantly for some reason. And just share this story. It's not necessarily the beginning of my journey, but it's a part of it, in the more recent-ish part of my life. I think it was a little over 10 years ago, I was living in Turkey. I moved back to Turkey where my father is from and all of my father's side of the family is still there. And, I'm also trans. So, growing up with that complexity in terms of being of Turkish and growing up in Turkey, in a mostly conservative family, that's its own story for sure. But one of the reasons I moved back to Turkey was that when I was living in Arizona right before then, I essentially started having these experiences. 

 

I think I was about 20 at the time and actually even before that, it really just started happening, even gaining more momentum around this time where I started having experiences of really intense feelings of grief that I knew weren't just mine. And if you've ever been to so-called Phoenix, Arizona you may have experienced that as well, or someone who's listening now might feel like that. And you know, this is not the balance of Phoenix, Arizona. It's bound. There's ecological and ancestral grief in a lot of places. And especially on Turtle Island. 

 

So I started feeling this big grief and a lot of what some people might call parallel realities, experiences of parallel realities, which I've had for as long as I can remember. But they were  happening more frequently. Being surrounded by the saguaro cactuses and all these incredible, resilient desert beings who are such mentors of resilience for me, and still continue to be. And I just had this huge, intense experience of debilitating grief. Like I just couldn't function. And, you know, question mark of what does functioning mean in a really colonial, capitalist system that's built on ecocide and the genocide of indigenous peoples. 

 

So, I don't think the word dysfunctional - actually - we can expand on that. It is actually very healthy to have that experience in my opinion and in many other people's opinions as well. But I had this experience where I just couldn't do much. I couldn't get out of bed and I was just unclear of what was happening in my body. All I knew was, I needed to go back to my ancestral lands. Which prompted me, as a young trans person, to move back to Turkey, which doesn't seem like a very safe place, [laughter] but I felt like I just needed to be on the land and so I returned there. 

 

And essentially what happened at that point was, just fast forward a little bit, only when I returned to my ancestral lands was I able to start integrating what was happening. And with the support of the lands that helped raise me, like being by the Aegean Sea, which was another place that really raised me, another entity. 

 

So what I wanted to get to was I had this experience where as a teenager I was medicated not by choice, was forcibly medicated and forcibly institutionalized. And I had a very big traumatic experience with that. So I decided to not be on medication as an adult. But I had this experience in Turkey when I was 21, where I was like, I am going to go on medication. I am choosing to willingly and I need some support. 

 

So I went to a psychiatrist in Turkey and I essentially started telling them my experiences of having so much grief come up and I don't know how to function because we're killing the planet. And I love the earth so much and I don't like it whenever I turn on the faucet, I just can't function. I just keep thinking about all the impacts that we're making with every little day to day thing that I do that might seem normal to others. I just can't close my eyes to the pain. And the psychiatrist didn't really understand. And essentially she ended up diagnosing me with psychosis and other different kinds of [things] you know, like schizophrenia and - I can't remember what else right now, but just these things and putting me on anti-psychotics and I was like okay, I'm just going to try this right now and I still have my sovereignty because I'm choosing to take this. And I attempted to. 

 

The point in the story that I'm sharing here is, I was considered "crazy," which I know is a word that's being used now and has been reclaimed. So I use that really mindfully, right? Attempt to, by just feeling ecological grief and grief that's bigger than our bodies and actually are a part of our bodies when we come down to it. And I just feel that was such a point of, "Oh my gosh.” Over 10 years ago when I shared this with someone they considered my feelings of intense ecological loss and grief as somehow crazy. Like, what does that mean when we're considered unwell or like something's wrong with us for feeling for our ecological kin. 

 

And this realization helped spur so many of the foundations of the work that we do now, of how do we create the conditions -- and co-create, because it's not just us alone -- to really help support people, connecting to the more-than-human world and give place for ecological resilience to emerge, which includes ecological grief. But it's not just limited to that. It's also how do we create conditions for awe to emerge and the connection of kinship. Because honestly, co-regulation with the more-than-human world and place-based attachment is such a huge part of resilience within our own systems, like our own nervous system, as individuals, but also as a collective.

Jacks McNamara 

I just want to say that for me, it's so resonant. It's just so deeply, deeply resonant. Like when I remember back to what the psychiatrist would consider my first psychotic break, a bunch of it centered around what Walmart was doing to the planet. For some reason Walmart was like this central figure in capitalist and ecological devastation in my mind. Which it is, but, I just relate so much to that idea that when we feel the grief of the world, does that mean we're crazy and then we can't turn off our awareness of ecocide? It seems to me that that's actually a pretty healthy adaptation.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Pinar, I just want to say that your story feels deeply, deeply powerful. I can only imagine that we're transmitting the story out and that there are going to be people that are going to hear what you're saying for the first time and it's going to be very resonant. And you know, when we started the Icarus project, like back in 2002, part of the foundation of it was this question of “what does it mean if the society that we live in is clearly sick? How do we decide for ourselves what it means to be healthy?” And I think a lot of the social movements, the ecological, the radical ecoactivists movements that I was part of when I was a young man, were filled with people like us who were just super sensitive and just could see and feel the pain of the world. So just that. I'm just grateful. Grateful you're on the show.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd  

Thanks. Yeah. And thanks for the question. And, what comes to mind for me when I think about my journey with so-called mental health is, well I definitely don't have the same history of experience with the psychiatric industry and complex, as Pinar and as some people do. Though for me one thing that comes up when I think about how it began or where I can locate it is struggling with a so-called eating disorder. In my case, that was anorexia, like really, really hard when I was a teenager, a young to middle teenager. To me it felt really connected to being queer and particularly being trans or just gender variant. And it felt in a big way really connected to this desire to transform. And, and then also at the same time I was really struggling a lot with what is often called depression. 

 

But when I actually think about what it really felt like and what it was, I feel like it was really a deep grief and a longing. I see that as really kind of interpersonally and emotionally and ecologically intelligent looking back on it. And these two orientations that I had, that were pathologized as anorexia and depression respectively, ended up drawing me to and providing a lot of healing and guidance throughout my life and also throughout the work of Queer Nature. And that basically is like human mystical traditions. In particular, some of the traditions around devotional poetry, both in the Christian tradition, in medieval times and also in Southwest Asia. And I can get more into that in a little while, but basically, I don't know what I encountered first, but I think I might've encountered some Rumi poetry or Hafiz which are very much gateway mystics, I think, to a lot of people in the Western world. And I encountered some of their poetry and basically I was completely stunned because I was reading this very emotional and devotional poetry about longing for a beloved, a sort of transcendental unattainable beloved that was both absent and present. I was a young person living in a pretty rural part of part of the country, I was like, “Whoa, this is what it feels like to be queer, you know?” I didn't have many queer role models. I was coming of age in the nineties, early two thousands. And so there weren’t really many queer and trans role models on TV. There definitely wasn’t anyone who was out in my community who was an adult, that I knew of. So when I encountered these mystics I basically had sort of a touchstone for what it felt like to be queer, and in particular to also be gender variant or to not identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. I'll just pause there cause I want to sort of gather my thoughts.   

 

So the more I explored mystical traditions, first it began with those poets who I mentioned, and then I began to discover that in my own ancestral traditions, [in] Abrahamic and specifically Christian traditions. There were a lot of amazing mystics, and people who wrote similar devotional poetry that was very sensual and erotic and really beyond what I think most people think of when they think of the Christian tradition. And a lot of it was actually modeled after the tradition of courtly love in medieval times or a social tradition of courtship. And what was interesting about that was a lot of these mystics were taking the tradition that is associated with an elite social class. And they were basically queering it because they were using it to talk about their relationship with God or with the divine. And this could sometimes even be in ways that were sort of queer, or basically gender bending. So that was just really exciting for me. I think I kind of realized that I was a mystic and that that was part of my role and also something that even went beyond social identity actually. 

 

Let's see if there's anything else I want to say about that. It was interesting to also discover that a lot of mystical traditions and devotional traditions were in my own lineage, particularly in the Greek, Greco Roman world. And in that part of the world there were a lot of traditions of people fasting and people curating what they ate and what they put in their body. And also being out in nature, in the desert, and having practices of lamentation and prayer and ways of expressing grief. So to me, that was a really big way that I actually came to understand and accept this concept of madness, [it] was actually through mysticism and through the notion of being madly in love with something that can never quite be consummated. 

 

I think that it's interesting to talk about this as a queer person because some people might hear that and they might be like, “Oh well that sounds really sort of puritan or something.” But it's really not, it's so much deeper than that. Because there's just something so mystical about being queer and about being trans and I'm so grateful for that sort of intersection, that kind of allowed me to not feel alone in those ways of being. And actually what ended up being a point of healing for this so-called eating disorder, was actually working with sheep and doing some shepherding during the summers when I was younger. And, this was also a way for me to connect with this ancestral animal that has been so important to people in the Eastern Mediterranean for thousands of years. It was also a way for me to begin to see my body as part of this ecology with the grass and the sheep and the dogs and the milk that was procured from these sheep. And the cheese that we made from the milk. And I think that first summer I spent shepherding in Maine was the actual beginning of my healing journey, which won't ever be over [because] I'm still on it now.

Jacks McNamara 

Well, thank you so much. There's so much I relate to there.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

This is really beautiful. I have a lot of thoughts. I don't know if you know this, but Jacks and I both, when we first became friends, one of the things that bonded us is that we had both spent time working on farms and we ended up starting a farm together with our friends where we raised goats and chickens. And for me, for sure, being close to the land and growing food and being around animals has been super important. Anyway, thank you so much for sharing. I just think your stories are super beautiful.

Jacks McNamara 

I want to say 40 million more things, but I also want to keep us moving. So I'm wondering if we could segue from your personal stories into what led you to start Queer Nature?

Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

When I started having these parallel reality experiences and experiences of grief that were far beyond just my own grief, I started to realize that through nature connection and co-regulating, (as in regulating my nervous system by regulating with the more-than-human world), was one of the only ways that I could actually regulate my nervous system at this time. Like humans, and we're far more challenging (laughter) to be or to be around, I started to realize that nature connection -- that the more-than-human, relative to really supporting me to have a connection to a kind of a portal to my ancestors and also to my gender expansiveness, which is very much tied into my ancestors. As well as being like a hybrid, like a person of mixed lineages, as a mixed indigenous person. I'm bringing that up because that has been such a [big] part of why I went toward nature connection skills -- it wasn't only ecological co-regulation, it was also an ancestral co-regulation, with the ancestors and my body.   

 

And realizing that nature connection was one of the core ways in which I could actually help heal intergenerational trauma of my lineage, and also the lineage of the land I was on. I felt like that kind of launched me into my studies of what's called eco-psychology, or place-based or nature based psychology, which is a field that's a very white field. And a lot of indigenous peoples have been saying what the foundations of eco psychology [have been saying] for way longer than the field has ever been around for, so also wanting to name that. But I went in to study ecopsychology and started to realize that it was a bunch of writing by a lot of white folks and white men in particular, where I didn't feel very understood and reflected, especially coming from a de-colonial perspective. So I went toward focusing on ecological co-regulation and ancestral co-regulation and tend to place base skills and tend to kinship, land and, the more-than-human, which kind of led me to “survival skills.” And you know, as someone who's a psychiatric survivor and also a survivor of colonization, it's something that, at the time, I don't know if I had the language for it, but I was definitely like, wow, I do have survival skills to be living on this planet at this time. And my body is a reflection of the survival skills of my ancestors and that we're still here and we're still alive. So I think survival skills became a really important part of my journey. And I had no care if it was me who was going to survive necessarily. Like if you want to consider what survival skills are for, it was like, wow, these skills helped me regulate my nervous system and also helped me really connect to my more-than-human kin and my ancestors. And, this is why I do this work. And if I can gather these skills the best as I can and  help create a learning environment where it doesn't retraumatize people, because a lot of the learning spaces for these skills are unfortunately really rooted in white supremacy, whether it's super overtly or not. And I think that it just took a lot of energy for me to be there as an indigenous person, as a trans person, as many of the identities that I hold. So I felt it was a way to decentralize the skills. That was definitely an inspiration of mine, to help co-create learning spaces where we can learn without worrying about our safety as much at least.  

 

And after meeting So there was definitely a huge click where we were just like, “Oh, okay, this is who I'm going to do this with.” And we often say that Queer Nature is a love story, and it is also a love story, not only between us as trans folks, but also, so much around our ancestors too, our intergenerational healing that we're doing across the tension that our ancestors have with each other. And also a love story with the land and with mystery and with the beloved. And I just feel  that's been a really big part of the journey of what started Queer Nature and there's so much more to share about that. But I feel that one of the deep prayers is for Queer Nature to essentially co-create the conditions for resilience to emerge in our communities, which includes how do we learn how to co regulate our nervous systems with the more-than-human world. There's so much we can do between each other as people, but we can't hold this alone. We need to expand it beyond just the human-centric ways of community. There's so much more available to us if we connect with our more-than-human kin and tend to kinship beyond the human, which includes other dimensions as well. So I feel like I'll just pause there because I feel like there's more I could share, but I'm sure we'll tend to those threads too.

Jacks McNamara 

So much there. So much there. Yeah, that's a beautiful love story.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Full, full body chills, over here in Oakland, California. Ecological co-regulation, ancestral co-regulation... I'm deeply resonant as someone who also grew up in the middle of a city. I think Jacks and I probably both have a million things we could say, but Jacks, where are we? Where are we taking this interview?

Jacks McNamara 

Well, okay, on a personal level, I'm just going to say that I really appreciate that you're trying to create learning spaces that are accessible on multiple levels. I spent some time in outdoor education and working for outward bound and misguidedly had hoped that that was going to help me find community around a different set of place-based skills and also found that it was very white, very colonialist, very macho, very ableist --  a lot of the things that you named. And I actually learned about Queer Nature pretty shortly after I left that world. And I was so excited to hear what you all were up to coming out of that environment and being like, “Oh my God, here are some people who have a decolonial lens on ancestral and place based skills and they're doing this in a really different way that is so needed.” Because I know something I've heard you all talk about is just how a lot of queer people, like we end up gravitating towards urban spaces because it's where we feel the safest culturally, not necessarily because it's where we really want to be. And having nature-based space that is particularly welcoming and attuned to queer and gender variant folks is so important and so rare. And I wonder if you could talk about that aspect of your work a little bit.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd

It's interesting because sometimes I have said and sometimes I'll hear other people say “well I don't feel judged by the more-than-human world, by animals when I'm out there.” And, and for me, that doesn't quite hit the mark because I actually do feel judged, in a way, by the birds and the wild creatures and the mycelium under the ground. It's not really judgment, it's more like discernment. They definitely react to us, it's just that they don't react according to human social conventions and therefore they don't react according to bigotry and that is what's really powerful for me. So when I'm in these spaces, and also what I've experienced or heard from others in these spaces, there's a way in which we can experience feedback, and even resistance from other beings in the more-than-human world or from materials like wood, like stone, like fire. And this resistance is actually resilience building and nervous system strengthening because it's not coming from a place of hate, you know? There's just something really, really powerful about that, that I think goes beyond what can even be articulated in words. But another aspect I would share is what I like to call a re-mythologizing or a mythic remediation that happens in these spaces for me. And I use that term as sort of a spinoff of the term bio-remediation, which is the act of using plants and fungi and cultivating ecosystems in order to heal them. There's something that happens when we work with these elements. We're talking about these really basic elements of earth and life that are so present in every mythology, like fire, like water, like shelter. And there's a way in which, when we engage in learning and apprenticing to these things in a trans and queer space, we are actually kind of automatically restorying these things without always having to talk about it on an intellectual level. And because any number of these things carries with it so many meanings that have been so wounding to queer people and people of color, like even if you think about fire, that's something that's so up right now in our society, is like us awakening to the misuses of fire in colonial culture and remembering and being reminded of the ways in which fire can be used and is used by indigenous people to be regenerative and restorative. And so that's just one example, but there's something I keep coming back to -- this image I have of a bunch of us working on fire together and learning how to tend fire and how to make fire through friction and learning about different woods. And there's a way in which that is an act of myth hacking or something. That is a big part of and a huge heart of what Queer Nature does. I think on the surface of it, we are seen as people who teach skills, technical skills, hands on skills. But the heart of Queer Nature is, on one hand, definitely about mysticism, about the dream world and the mythic world and the future and engaging in subterranean sorts of acts of co-dreaming and co-imagining in these new ways. Kind of what Pinar was speaking to.

Jacks McNamara 

Wow. That was super powerful. I really hope one day that you do some writing about mythic remediation if you haven't already, because that concept is so beautiful and so important and I've never heard that language before.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Yeah. Once again, I'm sitting here thinking about mythic remediation and myth hacking and the work that we do on the surface and what's happening underneath and what happens when you gather groups of people together. It's kind of that language that we've been using for years of prefigurative. You know, we could plan the future, we could talk about the future, but then we just get together and start acting the way we want to be living and seeing how it works.

Jacks McNamara 

So I kind of want to take a little bit of a detour just to make sure we hit on a couple of things we wanted to talk about. I was wondering if you could talk about the idea of Pachacuti. Sascha and I both listened to your interview on For The Wild, which is an excellent podcast, for anyone listening - check out For The Wild. And the interview you all did was really inspiring to me. And I was particularly interested in the ways you talked about Pachacuti. Would you be willing to talk about that?

Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

So it's a concept or it's actually a word, like an event that is from Quechua and Andean tradition   and essentially what that means… I'll rewind a little bit back because the way that I came about this term was actually reading about the gender variant peoples and the roles that the Quariwarmi people had and how they emerged. Like the origin story, like the cultural mythic origin story of the third gender folks -- Quariwarmi. It was astounding when I read this origin story, for personal reasons, because of my own gender expansive lineage, and ancestral connections and ancestral work that I've been doing. So the story that goes with how the Quariwarmi people emerged, was that, at least in the Inca empire, when there were the first pachacuti, which essentially means like a cataclysmic change that was happening to their peoples, that they didn't know how to move through. They were just terrified, they needed help. And a huge part of the orientation within our peoples is the Apus, which are our mountain deities. Each mountain has their own spirit. It just very much revolved around many deities. But Apus are definitely one of the big ones. So they went to one of the Apus and essentially asked for support. And this was when the Quariwarmi people emerged eventually, from this mountain, from their own deity of sorts that protected them, which is a mountain Jaguar deity, Chuqui chinchay. Their name is the deity's name. And essentially the Quariwarmi emerge to help support people and the culture, through the Pachacuti because Quariwarmi, or the third people, essentially knew how to move through liminal spaces. They were in between genders, in between the masculine, the feminine, and also death and rebirth. And they were seen as the midwives and the people who were the hospice caregivers or caretakers. So they were people, ceremonialists, who held a lot. One of their roles was to carry the cultural stories of our people through ceremony because we weren't a written language then. And so the Quariwarmi emerged to help support people, our peoples, through the first Pachacuti, as people who knew how to navigate the liminal. So that's a little bit about the Pachacuti. To give a little more context that might be more relatable is -- when the colonizers came, the settlers came, the Spaniards, conquistadors came, that was definitely a Pachacuti and it's still an ongoing one that we're moving through. And, no surprise, the Quariwarmi were one of the first people to be targeted by the Spaniards. So we went underground and we hid. Hid our ceremonialists and our peoples because what better way to destroy a culture than to destroy not only the liminal walkers, but also the people who were the ceremonialists who held the cultural story and the storyline. This is so important because it's clear to me that many of our communities, the dominant culture, other cultures, all over the world right now, are going through a kind of initiation or rite of passage - that we're in it as a species.

 

I definitely see that and I feel like there's been so little support…. you know, we talk about queerness as an identity, but for two spirit people, which I don't call myself two spirit, but for people who are indigenous, forms of gender expansiveness were actually linked to roles and  responsibilities for our people. I feel there is a distinction from queerness that's important to just share. But I will say this: we are forgetting our roles. And I'm really curious about the roles that the liminal walkers have in this time. Whether it's  culturally rooted or if it emerges from the land, the land where you're at now, or where one is at now. Like, what is our role beyond identity? What is our responsibility at this time and how can we support the liminal times that we're in? That's just so urgent. And what can we say yes to and step into, or move towards? That's something that we really sit with at Queer Nature: Yes identity is so important, but what are our ecological roles at this time? And that's one of the reasons we spend so much time with nature connection skills, because the only way to answer that is by listening to the more-than-human.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

Yeah. I'm really glad we're getting into this discussion of identity -- maybe versus role or identity and role. Because I think it's something we hold pretty close in our hearts and souls. I do think it can be a potentially controversial and triggering topic, especially because in these times where so many of us, and those who came before us, have fought so hard for our social identities. And so, not to dismiss that at all, but to just be curious about these ways that Pinar was mentioning. It makes me think of something that was written by the Zapatistas (EZLN). In one of their manifestos is the suggestion that true identity can really only be found through the collective. And this really does point to role at points, but not role as in oppression. 

 

Because when people think about roles, well, we just spent like a couple of generations deconstructing our roles, so what do you mean?  What are you talking about wanting to center roles and it feels like a circumscription or a boxing in. And we could experience that as harmful, but it's not about role in an oppressive sense. This gets at one of your other questions, which we might end up circling back to, the idea that we can't really be truly free without structure and without boundaries in a way. But I'm not talking about structure and boundaries in an authoritarian, human and fascist sense -- quite the opposite in fact. I think that there are systems of structure and there are systems of boundaries that are ecological, that are actually antifascist and anticapitalist and anti-authoritarian and can actually be leveraged to crumble and disintegrate those systems. I mean, mycelium is a structure that has rules and operates in a certain way and can serve to break down hydrocarbons. And so yeah, this notion of identity versus role is really interesting to me and to us. And it's something we definitely want to think more about.

Jacks McNamara 

Super powerful. And I really love the idea of thinking about role as it relates to ecological roles rather than constructed social roles. I really hear you, it makes me think about that old essay, the Tyranny of Structurelessness, and just, what does it look like to organize for liberation and to also have boundaries and have roles and to think about who we need to be in this historical moment because it's a pretty urgent historical moment that we're in. Do you have any thoughts?

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Yeah, I'm so glad that you invoked the Zapatistas and the sense that the true identity can only be found in the collective. I feel like when Jacks I decided to do this podcast, it was really coming from this place of, “how can we be most helpful?” And part of that is being this connector point between a whole bunch of different people who might not necessarily know each other. So it makes me really happy to be listening to you two talk about your work and think about the ways that it might connect to a whole bunch of other people who might not have heard of the work that you're doing. 

Jacks McNamara 

I'm wondering as we're getting near to the end of this interview, which has been so excellent,  thank you all so much -- I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit about the idea of what it means to you to get free because that's one of the things we really want to explore in this podcast --  the different ways people get free and what that means. And I feel like our conversation about role in some way starts to speak to that. The idea that, I don't know, when I was a teenager I thought freedom was having no responsibilities, no obligations and doing whatever I wanted, whenever I could, that sort of rugged individualism idea. And as I've gotten older, I've realized that actually responsibility can be freedom. I'm glad I'm responsible to my daughter. I'm glad I'm responsible to the planet and how do I move within that? So anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what it means to get free.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd

So some of the trails that have helped me really embody what we might be calling co-liberation, or freedom, or sovereignty, are continuing practices of relationship. To me that often looks like going outside and going on a wander that doesn't have a goal, which is hard. (laughter) It's hard not to have a goal sometimes. Or it's watching  the salmonberry blossoms right now and getting really excited about “Oh my gosh, the salmon berries are coming.” Or “when are the so-called Swainson's thrushes returning because they're one of the birds who I adore so much.” Yeah, I feel those are things that point me towards freedom. It's when I feel awe and connection and kinship. And yeah, it's an ongoing process and it's an ongoing relationship. It's all about a network of relationships for me.   

 

Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd

This is such a great question and I feel like I spoke to it a little bit earlier, but just to add a few thoughts to that -- I recently was recommended a book by our friend Denali, called Joyful Militancy. I haven't read the whole thing, but there are some really awesome chapters and essays. One of the concepts I've been really inspired by is the notion of defining freedom in terms of accountability to others rather than total autonomy. Which kind of implies disconnection from others, and they cite other people's work who have also talked about disconnection -- that freedom and friend have the same Indo-European root word, which is the word for love actually. And that basically friendship is kind of the root of freedom and the root of resistance. And freedom is also the state of basically being bound to love. I'm paraphrasing here but it's about having a responsibility to love. And when I think about when I feel the most free, and about this more decolonial way that we're talking about, I think about times where I feel most inspired to act out of love in these times that we live in and in this body that I live in, that struggles a lot with anxiety and nervous system regulation and the various states that my brain can go into, it's hard to always act in ways that are deeply inspired by love. 

 

So, yeah, that's something that came up for me. And I also feel like it's connected for me when I feel the most curious about mystery. And this ties into a big core of philosophy of Queer Nature that we're working on a lot right now, which is this idea of mystery being a primary need along with food, shelter, water, fire, community and things like that. The notion of creating a secure attachment to mystery in these times we live in is especially challenging to those with the most power. And of course that shows up even in myself and the ways I myself hold power — where we become afraid of mystery. Mystery can become a monstrous other and can feel like a threat to what we have. So when I think about freedom and how to get free, I also think about how are we really creating courtship and relationship and a kind of flirtation with mystery that is inherent to mysticisms the world over and is also actually very ancient. It is such a deep part of being human, especially if you're interacting and engaging with the-more-than-human world on a regular basis. It's unavoidable. Mystery is everywhere and it's not on the periphery, it's actually at the center. And so for me, when I think about getting free, I think about my need to constantly work on that.

Jacks McNamara 

That's so beautiful. I love the idea of mystery as a core human need.

 

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

Thank you. We actually are having a piece come out in one of our colleague's magazines, which is called Loam Magazine and I believe it's the spring or summer issue. We've got an essay coming out that's just basically about mystery and Queer Nature as a project of public mysticism. So if you feel enticed by that idea, that will definitely be a way to further dive in for folks who are interested.

Jacks McNamara 

Awesome. Yeah, I'll definitely check that out. So we need to wrap up in a minute. 

 

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

This is a good segue for you to talk about how people can find you.

 

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd

We use Instagram as kind of a primary mode where we write mini essays and also showcase our photography. We see our Instagram account, which is just QueerNature, one word, as a venue for engaging in the side of Queer Nature that is performative and engaged in a really artistic practice, as well as an eco philosophical practice. So it is definitely a venue for that side of us. We also have a website, queernature.org and that has a lot of information about what we do and links to different media resources and other interviews. Then we also have a Facebook page where we often advertise  workshops that we're co-hosting or collaborating on. So those are the main ways that people can find us. We also recently relocated to so-called Whidbey Island in the Puget sound after a long, almost a year, of being in transition from our previous home base. We're about to start launching some workshops this spring in this area. So if people are in the Pacific Northwest, look out for that. 

Jacks McNamara 

Well, is there anything else that you all want to make sure you touch on before we go today?

 

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd

I think we feel complete. We feel super grateful and very nourished by this conversation. Thank you for having us.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Yeah. Such an honor to get a chance to talk to you both. Thank you so much.

Jacks McNamara 

Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm going to be reflecting on this and listening to it again. So much beautiful stuff in there.

So Sinopoulos-Lloyd & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd 

Thank you too. And best of luck with this, this podcast series, it seems really, really, amazing and creative. So thank you for including us.

Jacks McNamara 

Yeah, totally. We're so glad you're here. All right. Goodbye everyone.

Sascha Altman DuBrul 

Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of So Many Wings. We hope you learned a lot and found some inspiration here. This episode was a labor of love created by Jack McNamara and Sascha Altman DuBrul during the chaotic times of global transformation of 2020. We're coming to you from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Oakland, California on Turtle Island in the United States. Much thanks to our editor, Erica Fletcher in Los Angeles and our much beloved founding supporter Anita Altman in New York city. You can find us on the web at somanywings.org and on Facebook and Instagram at So Many Wings podcast. To contribute financially to the sustainability of this podcast you can become a member for as little as $3 a month at patrion.com/SoManyWingspodcast. There's so many of us out here and we want you to join us.