My Philosophy

My Philosophy 

I am a young woman currently on a global pilgrimage; a philosophical, cultural, and spiritual inquiry that is deeply intertwined with the engagements of everyday life.

I’m a critical thinker, a poet, and a passionate activist who is committed to creating a future of global sustainability for all. My areas of interest are many, which you will see reflected in the different topics, writing and forms of artistic inquiry on this site.

I am currently in the process of deconstructing much of my own identity as a North American woman, along with the unconscious filters and biases that have been intimately woven into that identity, so as to consciously re-construct/re-birth my “self” as a Global Nomad, as a daughter born of the liminal, and as a grandmother of the entire cosmic process.

In The Global Nomadic Experience: Living in Liminality, authors Barbara F. Schaetti and Sheila J. Ramsey describe a Global Nomad as someone who is “marked by frequent geographic transitions and multiple cultural influences.” At the heart of Global Nomadic existence is the social-psychological experience known as “liminality.” From the Greek word limnos, meaning “threshold,” liminality describes an “in-between time when what was, is no longer, and what will be, is not yet. It is a time rich with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the possibility of creative fermentation."

There are no false comforts here

only the echo of emptiness

hanging with anticipation

on a moment that has displaced itself from time

I find a new love

for the cold sharp edges of truth

they cut through all the markers of my seeming youth

and reveal in my heart an ancient burning

that has traveled to this moment

from the distant past of a bursting star…[1]

Living in the liminal is about leaving the comforts of home and stepping out of the certainty of any one fixed identity in order to discover and give birth to oneself in the “margins” and at the mysterious intersection between multiple identities and relationships with others.

Critical postmodern feminist theorist, Rosi Braidotti, describes nomadism as a constant state of “in-process” or “becoming,” a “technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we need of the past so as to trace paths of transformation for our lives here, now and for the future.” For Braidotti, the nomad does not stand for homelessness or compulsive displacement (i.e. complete detachment from all roots), but rather a subjectivity that has “relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity.”

Nomadic is a verb, an experience of fluid boundaries, a process by which we map out multiple transformations and multiple ways of being and belonging. Braidotti argues that, “We have to map out the alternative cartographies of the non-unitary subjects that we are, so that we can get rid of any idea that there are subjects that are completely unitary, belonging entirely to one location.”

Braidotti points to the essential need for a postmodern deconstruction of the unitary modernist self, as well as a breaking down of national boundaries and linear notions of time, history and progress. Braidotti, like myself, is also a re-constructionist. She wishes to deconstruct fixed identities in order to reconstruct new forms of expanded self, ethics and relationships that can serve the changes and needs of a globalizing world.

Choosing to become a Global Nomad, for me, has meant continually stepping out of the familiar and comfortable in order to stretch my own limits. It has become a soul commitment to expand, embrace and embody more and more of the world so as to become a better vehicle of service to the whole. This is not about colonialization or appropriation of other cultures, nor is it an attempt to collect more and more exotic experiences from other cultures in order to hang them on the trophy of me and all the exciting things I’ve done and experienced. Both of these are the potential pitfalls and dangers that we face as “tourists” of other cultures and lands.

It is so easy to travel to other countries, see all the famous historical sites, take a thousand pictures of our experiences there, and yet never really enter into the energy of the land or engage the native inhabitants with any level of depth. We can easily travel through another culture without ever having to challenge or expand our own sense of self, or what we view as “other.” As Braidotti states, “I don’t call that nomadism, I call that the perverted fragmentation of advanced capitalism. Nomadism is marked by a qualitative shift in our own consciousness, not by a consumption of the other into ourselves."

It is this call to creating and expressing a qualitative shift in consciousness that I aim for in traveling the world and re-constructing/re-birthing myself a Global Nomad.

So while my desire is to start connecting dialogue, values and worldviews across cultures, genders and generations, it is certain that I must engage a continual stripping down and re-building of myself in the process. I feel this stripping down to be necessary for making my own worldviews and filters increasingly transparent, and for supporting the emergence of a fluid and flexible sense of self that can tap into and express a more subtle global intelligence.

I have dedicated myself to the path of a peregrinatio. Karla Kincannon defines the journey of  a peregrinatio in her book Creativity and Divine Surprise, when she writes, "In the early Christian era, many Celtic Christians embarked on a kind of pilgrimage called a peregrinatio. Unlike the pilgrimages to the Holy Land undertaken by Christians in the Middle Ages, a peregrinatio proposes no specific relic to see, shrine to visit, or icon to venerate. Nothing allows the pilgrim to return home with a sense of ‘I’ve been there and done that.‘ Instead, a peregrinatio is a wandering into the unknown, inaugurated by the pilgrim’s inner conviction of fate and fortune. Essentially a peregrinatio represents travel for the sake of Love, initiated and sustained by the love of God. It calls the traveler to leave all that is familiar, to let go of security and any goals or desires for life except one; to find the place of one’s own resurrection."
 

I draw from a mixture of theoretical and disciplinary frameworks for my writing and inquiry, including psychology, theology, postmodern theory, feminist theory, art theory and integral theory, among others. My own writing and work is in a continual process of deconstruction and reconstruction, ascending and descending, in-breath and out-breath... just as I am.