The five practices in the last edition of Field Notes I described as somatic first aid: they are useful in-the-moment resources for when a feeling arrives or starts to settle in and you’re looking for a way to recentre. This companion piece is about the more enduring practice of ecosomatics. More than simply taking our practice into the landscape, it asks us to cultivate an embodiment that no longer positions the living world as a backdrop for living life but rather as an integral part of that very same life, yours and mine.
BEGINNINGS, ENDINGS & MEETING PLACES
Most of us were taught, perhaps without ever being told directly, that we end at the boundary of our skin and the world begins just beyond it. Nature is out there, while we are in here, looking at it, painting it, writing poems about it and, yes, worrying about it. Ecosomatics starts from a different premise, one that says that the body was never separate from its surroundings, there never has been a me in here and a not-me out there. Our skin is more a meeting place with the world, where we touch and are touched, not a place of separation. The same is true of the breath.
Your lungs share a branching architecture with the trees and a reciprocal gas-for-gas relationship with them; their exhale is your inhale, and yours is theirs. Invisible as this entanglement is, trees are your life-giving kin - I expand on this in one of the chapters in Bodyscapes. So, where does anything begin or end? The rain that falls on your roof passed through a river, an ocean, a cloud, perhaps even another person’s tears.1 It’s the kind of claim that nature writer Robert Macfarlane takes seriously in his recent book Is a River Alive?, which asks what changes both legally and imaginatively once we treat a river as a living entity rather than a resource.
And this conversation isn’t limited to rivers. On 9 June 2026, the municipality of Terrasse-Vaudreuil in Quebec officially recognised trees as living beings, granting them “the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration”.2 As we follow the thoughts of thinkers from various backgrounds and modalities, it may become clearer in our own practices that any boundary between self and forest was never real to begin with. anyway.
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