We Must Risk New Shapes
A Community Gathering With Sophie Strand
Advances in evolutionary science have revealed that biological novelty is created by horizontal fusions between species and between bodies. One being’s lack is not so much a disability as it is an invitation to corporally collaborate with another species. Resilient ecosystems and species emerge from places of physical overlap. In a culture that prizes the individual, what health and resilience have we denied ourselves? Is it possible that there are better futures visible only from the vantage point of symbiotic collaboration? Symbiosis is always fraught. You leave behind a recognizable shape. But, in a moment of extinction and climate collapse, we need to escape the shipwreck of the singular. I want to offer that becoming new is never safe. Survival is never safe. It is always a breach. A break in the skin. It is a leap across the abyss. It is the moment you leap into another body.
Presenter
Sophie Strand
is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Yet it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.
She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and The Madonna Secret. She is also finishing a collection of essays about navigating an incurable genetic disease and early trauma through ecological storytelling.
You can subscribe to her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com, and follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.