The Body is an Ecotone

Outtake from my upcoming book The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human

(Illustration by George Underwood for Dawn by Octavia Butler)

As the The Body is a Doorway nears its final line edits, I’m looking through all the essays and pieces I didn’t end up including in the narrative. I originally only shared this piece with my paid subscribers but wanted to share it with everyone who supports my work on Substack. Thank you all so much for all the spores, seeds, sparks you add to my creative fire and conceptual compost heap. This outtake is from a talk I originally gave to the Feel Better Feldenkrais Summit in 2022.

We live in a culture that prizes the atomized self, inappropriately foisting healing onto individuals when disease and discomfort are the multi-causal snares of systems of oppression within which we are stuck like flies in a spider’s web. We think we must heal individually and succeed individually. We are taught, also, that we feel and sense individually, keyed only to direct contact with our skin-delineated corporality. This phenomenon is known as “healthism” and is defined as the preoccupation with personal health and personal responsibility for health as primary often at the detriment of understanding that the health of one person is intimately tied to and representative of a whole population. Illness, trauma, and pain do not belong to an individual. They are a web that includes someone.

Likewise, healing is not an object or achievement that belongs to one person. Research into embodied cognition and ecology, microbiology and somatics offers a glimmer of something leakier than the modern idea of a self.

How does a body understand itself in environments that leak and twitch and spasm in reaction to extractive capitalism and pollution? How does our body stay siloed from the pain of the places it calls its home? We must remember that ecology comes from the word Greek word oikos, for household. We are always “inside” of a web of relationships. A household of beings. We live in an age of atrazine and microplastics, blood pressure stabilizer in tap water and ancient Mesozoic ferns churned into smog imprinted in the vasculature of our lungs. We live in an age when environmentalism rests on the bedrock of eugenics and ableism and homophobia, positing queers and crips as genetic glitches, evolutionary maladapted, reproductively defunct. Our environments and our environmentalism is polluted. And our ideas of healing are often tailored to much smaller selves than the ecologically entangled webs we drag into a practitioner’s office. On a grand scale, all of us have ingested molecules rearticulated by the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima decades ago. Although our culture is remarkably good at pretending you can disappear waste, waste has a way of making its way back into our every pore. Comfortingly, waste also underpins all healthy food webs, stitching together multi-species ecosystems. One being’s waste is another’s food. Food webs are created by the transmutation of waste into nourishment. But we both create more complicated waste than ever before and then refuse to understand how to weave it back into a food web. We pretend waste and nature are separate. Humans and nature are separate.

Nature as articulated by Christian theology and then Cartesian dualism is seen as isolated from our activities. This can make it wild and other. But it also runs the risk of making it sacred and pure and opposed to the messy culpability of our actual embodied experience. This problem is also a portal into wilder kinship: we are more patterns than we are static matter. Our cells reshuffle every seven years. The food we eat, the microbiome we inhale, the waves of gut biosis and dysbiosis we experience due to both medicine and environmental pollution, rearticulate the chemical choreography of our bodies such that we think differently, behave and believe differently. We are porous beings, doorways open to a constant flow of carbon. More verb than noun. Streaming gerunds of transformed sunlight, tracing back the unlocked energy we receive from the plants we eat, the animals we eat that were built by the sun-eating plants they consume. Our carbon-bound, cellular being has a root system that stretches all the way to the sun. This porousness avails of us pollution, trauma, nonconsensual incursions, but it also opens us up to healing beyond our expectations. It refreshes us cellularly and it also reminds us that our bodies are not islands. Our shores are molded and remolded everyday by an ocean of shifting relationships.

Where then does our pain occur? Where then does our joy and our pleasure reside? Is it in my body, my mind, or does it leak past my fictional limits?

Let me ask you a different question. How much does a horizon weigh? What is its texture? Can you hold and manipulate it in your hands? Have you ever sliced a shoreline free of forest and river?

The shore is the interaction of land and water. The horizon the line that occurs between sky and mountain’s spine. Much of life occurs not on the inside of a self or the externality of the world. It occurs and comes into being through the interface – the interaction – of bodies and beings. The dynamic overlap.

(Art: Nils Udo)

This idea of the place that comes into being only when two other places meet, in ecology, is called the ecotone, referring to biological convergence zones that occur when one distinct ecosystem abruptly transitions into another, creating briefly an intermediate and novel ecology. Think of a river rapidly shifting into woodland, forest into meadow. Ecotone comes from the Greek word mentioned before oikos for household and tonos for tension. It refers to the tension of a boundary that is not just a line. It is an animate thickness. A living skin that belongs, not to one body’s boundary, but to two different bodily ecosystems, acting semi-porously to translate species, water, seeds, and spores, between the two disparate zones.

A floodplain around a river is a wonderful example of an ecotone: with rich, thick soil, and preponderance of wild grasses, grains, beetles, butterflies, birds, and beings. The ecotone also acts as a bridge between water and land. Species can thrive in the floodplain or use it as the connective tissue that guides them into a new world. This type of biodiversity is typical of these thick, living boundaries where ecosystems overlap, reflux in and out of each other – effectively “dialogue” intimately using animals and insect and plants instead of spoken words. It is in these transitional spaces of material exchange that we find a richness of plant and bird and fish life proliferating and diversifying like nowhere else. This is called the edge effect. Edge species include deer, quail, rabbits, the Eastern spadefoot, the gray bat, catnip, black locust trees.

Edge species may also include us – or more specifically – three of the first human civilizations that sprouted up in the rich soil and grain-threaded floodplains of the Tigris, Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus River. It is in these porous “zones of ecological dialogue” that we see the birth of agriculture, the domestication of cereal grains, the development of fermented beverages and foods. Many of the types of consciousness we take for granted today including inebriation are states that do not exist on their own. They require the mixture of substance and body to produce their effervescent effect. And the fermented substances that catalyze these altered states of consciousness were themselves, brough into being by the interface between human beings and the ancient transitional zone between river and grassland.

I often like to say that I believe the best thinking happens interstitially – in the friction and gradient produced between different species and beings, between belief systems and epistemologies and healing paradigms. I opine that the gradient between the summit of the mountain and the valley is what draw the river into movement and shape, the potential energy of the summit unlocked as it carves its path down through the bluestone musculature of the mountainside. Creating a vein of communication between the chill thin air of the alpine heights with the moist loam of the moss-furred valley. But as we can see, this statement is also a biological phenomenon. Although best thinking might be better translated to the highest biodiversity, the occurrence of species diversification, the sheer volume of different beings, rubbing up against each other, mutually transforming each other, happens not in the ocean or the forest, but the shared skin between the two. The tidal pool. The estuary zone. The vibrant tension between two opposing zones, the ecotone.

While this metaphor is helpful in understanding how healing, feeling, and thinking doesn’t happen inside us – but between us – in the ecotone created when two bodies touch, two hands converge– it is also interesting to think of our bodies themselves as being ecotones, evolved and molded into being by the tension between the landscapes of the past and the environmental conditions of the future.

We are the flickering bodily shoreline between grassland savannas and boreal forests. Between the forgotten and the yet to come. Evolution moves at so slow a pace that it is hard to comprehend. Genetic traits are selected for not in one generation, but over the course of hundreds of generations. The morphology – the shape and function of our features – are not a bounded subjects. Our physical shape is a verb in a long ecological dialogue, a response to a particular environmental embeddedness. If you can find a niche, a shape that helps you survive and reproduce yourself in a relational context, you pass along your traits to the next generation. Thus, the bodies that emerge, over millions of years, out of this embeddedness are flesh odes to past ecosystems. Your body is a love song to a lost landscape. Your eyes were first developed in the penumbra of the Cambrian explosion, fitting into a seawater niche that they no longer blink through. Your eyes were crafted to see beings that no longer exist. Is the inky iris at the center of your sight an ode to those extinct witnesses? Does your sight, like the spokes and hubs around a wheel, depend on absence? Does it remember that it was developed to see corals? Arthropods? Trilobites? Viridian cyanobacteria growing like dragon skin across the oceans? Further on, our long arms and curved fingers were made for tree climbing, for manipulating vines and branches. Our bodies are the photo-negative of these lost forests. 

There was no first human and last monkey-becoming-a-human. There is only one pulsing river of bodily becoming. The body you have today is not the product of a quick, tidy experiment in upright, large-brained hominids. It is the ecotone where the weather of the future and the geographic conditions of the past converged to mold you into your unique form. So slow, so gradual is this process, that the landscape our bodies are fit to fill no longer even exist. We are not even adapted to our present environments. Today our genetic glitches and remixes will perhaps land on new modes of survival, slowly selected for future worlds we will never live to see. The wheel of evolution spins, whether forwards or backwards it does not matter. What matters is that we are neither complete nor are we just born. We are the haunted matter of prehistoric grasslands. We are ancient absences that open up the gestational space for unexpected emergence. We are all the love songs of past relationships, weathered down to minerals and sparkling dust. We are all the ecotones where vegetal translations of sunlight, minerals, pollen, and pollution converge to briefly, coalesce into the constellation of a human self.

We are a landscape where microbial and subatomic reunions happen that we will never be able to witness. We are the liminal realm where edge species can experiment with new forms of communal living just like our ancestors experimented with civilization and agriculture in the ecotonal floodplains of the Euphrates.

Life occurs in the overlap. In the floodplains. In the connective tissue that in a human body connects different organs and in a living earth connects different bioregions to weave together the dynamic homeostasis of the greater biosphere. Life experiments and changes and flourishes in the places where bodies meet and dialogue with each other, asking questions, and mutually changing each other.

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