Our Emotional Ecology

Learning to listen in water

✒️ Today’s newsletter features an essay by a member of The Grove. The Grove is a small writing collective I created to work with Anya, Rishab and Jess, three extremely intelligent, thoughtful and learned people in their mid-twenties. These pieces are the result of our reading and writing together over four months.

Human language is powerful, complex, and offers us many avenues for creative communication. It is therefore natural for us to look for solutions to our ecological crisis through this knowledge system. But in this world, so wary of violence and consumed by distrust, is it enough? It would be worth more, I reckon, to offer you a logically-sound argument, if it could carry through some of the deeper emotional information my body is absorbing, and you could receive a more truthful telling of my reality and get a sense of where I am coming from. Then you could understand me as well as my environment better. Feeling deeply is surely an evolutionary asset, through which we can listen and learn from each other and understand our social environments better. In a world where we need each other to survive, where our existence is relationally constructed, understanding how we exist reveals to us where we exist.

For an organism to survive and grow, especially in an ecological crisis, it is imperative to understand its environment as well as it can. Our social environment is one such physical place. In its deeper parts, we communicate through something fluid, where our sophisticated intellectual apparatus turns to the superiority of the physical, embodied, and emotional senses. Here we find an emotional ecology, a natural ecosystem, which facilitates social life. Navigating this ecology requires a more sophisticated and sensitive system than the one easily described in words. It is easy to miss, because it resists being experienced in words.

I grew up in an incredibly patriarchal social environment whose abrasion and violence did not allow for my girlhood to exist and grow safely. I could not say how I felt. Society relegated me to make myself alone, in the quietness of my mind, unknowingly subjecting my growing body, my growing senses, to social erasure. Emotionally, I stayed awake and alert as my body navigated its fluid depths and taught itself its intricacies through evolutionary attunement, need, and curiosity. Socially, I grew mute. The part of my body that needed to integrate my emotional learnings into my rational mind became inactive because I did not exercise it. I did not use my voice. I hardly even knew it.