## Metadata - Author: [[Sophie Strand]] - Full Title: The Body Is a Doorway - Category: #books ## Highlights - To stop eating is to stop participating in the world. To demonize appetite is to demonize the metabolic alchemy of our very cells. If we are rivers of carbon and matter, breathing in microbiome, drinking in pollen and sugar, releasing heat and carbon dioxide, and created by movement, then the suppression of appetite is like a dam. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=632)) - While a hummingbird’s copulation lasts only four seconds, the hummingbird will spend her life guided by another, interspecies penetration—a stronger, weirder intimacy. Beak into blossom. Her relationship to flowers is an ancient orchestration of appetite, vision, metabolism, and form. ([Location 658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=658)) - The hummingbird shows me that matter tends to flow rather than stay still in a single person, in a body of water, or even in a cell. How well-tricked we have been into ideas of solidity by the skin silhouettes that we call a human self. But what powers our bodies, our speech, our very brains, is the metabolic process of energy conversion. Food is converted to energy and waste is excreted, only to become something else’s food. When we remove ourselves from the metabolic exchanges that weave the world together, we are trying to protect ourselves from changing. But within the deep time of evolution, refusing to adapt is a surefire way to go extinct. ([Location 674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=674)) - Hummingbirds almost seem to squander embodiment. They flap their wings more than fifty times a second, requiring an enormous amount of food to continue their movement. And yet the movement itself is choreographed toward and for the food. Metabolism loops. It stitches us into intimacies. The hummingbird draws this into exquisite, vibratory focus. No sooner is a desire met than it explodes into dissipated heat. The wings churn the air, the beak seeks a flower, and the hummingbird is almost a porthole into how quickly matter moves through us, alchemically transformed into the glitter of feathers, the purr and hum of wings, the match-strike of flight upward and beyond, southward, always drawn by every yearning, metabolic cell toward summer. ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=683)) - Life does not have a savings account. It has an appetite. An appetite for dancing and for sweetness and for interpenetration. Life does not stay still. Every cell is a constant influx and outflow of matter. ([Location 688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=688)) - “To enter life, be food,” writes poet Linda Hogan. But I also believe, “To enter life, want food, seek food, become food.” One day we, too, will be eaten. But until then, let us pollinate flowers, spread spores, open up fields, graze grass, and create meadows with our seeking tongues, our heat-generating desires, our wild, life-giving appetites. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=693)) - Fan fiction has traditionally been a landscape populated by those who don’t get included in the stories. The marginalized—the queer, the disabled, the nonwhite, the nonmales—cast themselves in their beloved literature by literally writing in the margins—making books wider, fleshier, and weirder by writing over and into the original text. We must not forget that Shakespeare, the son of an impoverished glover, wrote himself into the court of England and literary acclaim not by imagining original stories, but by retelling popular contemporary plots. Romeo and Juliet, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It are all essentially fan fiction of earlier authors. ([Location 1141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1141)) - I was coming to believe that stories preceded our arrival. Mineral stories. Deep-time stories. We were authored by geological stories with scales too vast for us to ever grasp. We were infected with fungal stories that altered our consciousness, with civilization-changing consequences. What if civilization itself was a nonhuman narrative, authored by fermentation yeasts using humans as mere characters? ([Location 1218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1218)) - I’d been fascinated with the story of Jesus since childhood, much to the confusion and amusement of my animistic parents. I’d drawn pictures of a crying Mary at the foot of the cross as a child, wondering how this tragedy was turned into a miracle. How did a Galilean healer with a penchant for nature-based storytelling get mistranslated by empire and co-opted by patriarchy? How did a healer get used to create so many wounds? I thought of my feet tracing the path of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem as I grew sicker with each step. Why did we worship his untimely death rather than grieving the unfulfilled promise of his wild storytelling? ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1252)) - Every story, like every human body, is an ecosystem of other stories: the virus author that “taught” us mammals how to develop wombs, the ancient ecological pressures that molded us into multicellularity, our pulsing microbiome, our fungi-dusted skin, our metabolic reciprocity with every substance we breathe and drink and eat. Every recombinatory miracle of genetics gave birth not to an individual on a hero’s journey, but to a biodiversity of competing and converging aliveness. If I was beginning to understand that my body was an ecology, I realized that so should my stories represent textured, relational, sometimes ruptured ecosystems. We are not kept alive by single species or single stories. We are authored and breathed into being by polyphonic, multivoiced, interspecies epics. ([Location 1564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1564)) - When I was asked by my old high school to mentor a group of teen female writers, I knew that I had to be straight with them. I had to show them that writing was a high-stakes activity that didn’t just live on the page. Stories were atmospheric and encompassing. There were stories that infused our life like air: invisible until we realized we lived inside of them and thrived or died according to their limitations. ([Location 1578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1578)) - When we relax our hold on the hero’s journey of an individual life, we can see again that we are all the soil bed for something else to grow. ([Location 2006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2006)) - I believe that we must complicate arbitrary cuts between clean and unclean, wasteful and useful. Excrement is less ontologically stable than we might believe. There is a reason the phrase “shit happens” is so ubiquitous. Shit isn’t still. It isn’t an object. Shit is a relationally constituted “event.” To the dung beetle, the dung is life-giving sustenance. The pitcher plant survives on the excrement of the inquiline bacteria and insects that dwell within its curled leaves. ([Location 2150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2150)) - The collective deaths of many extinction events have been brief bottlenecks that “clear” ecological niches. After the dust and ash settle, there is usually an explosion of new species and new life. It was only after the asteroid impact that caused the Earth’s fifth major extinction that the first mammals diversified, providing the evolutionary ground for humanity’s eventual emergence. An asteroid crater becomes a vibrant forest. A grave becomes a womb. The Earth continues experimenting with embodiment. Our meteor-streak lives are too short and small to comprehend the long story of evolution. ([Location 2160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2160)) - Many years before I became ill, a deer, hit by a car, managed to struggle into the woods at the periphery of my parents’ property, where it died. It was high summer, frying pan hot, the peeling birch bark almost crisping into cinders under unrelenting sunshine. Day after day, I would visit the carcass and watch as one life melted into a riot of lives. Worms. Ants. Maggots. Beetles. Mushrooms. Death was the moment when life overflowed its cup. Death wasn’t an end of life. It was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive, generative plurality. One narrative diverged into four hundred narratives. ([Location 2165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2165)) - We are just a doorway through which matter is flowing on its way to becoming something else. A brief shape that atoms and electrons and recycled minerals take on their way to becoming hummingbirds and tomatoes and dragonflies and mountains. ([Location 2174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2174)) - Decay is always a day, a microbe, a rootlet away from sprouting. ([Location 2185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2185)) - In fact, we can think of the traveling bard as being a traveling compost heap: able to alchemize and rot down popular themes and characters so that a new story could sprout for a new audience. ([Location 2306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2306)) - Like rhapsodes, fungi and bacteria compose and decompose material in order to generate the soil foundation of entire ecosystems. The decomposition process—the unweaving of minerals from stone, nutrients from dead wood—is just as important as the eventual regrowth of new vegetation. The unweaving of the web allows for an ecosystem instead of a shroud. A fresh narrative instead of a dead-end dogma. ([Location 2309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2309)) - The last of a species is called an endling. Our world is filled with endlings. ([Location 2542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2542)) - Whether tomb or womb, the cocoon is a vessel. An autopoietic boat through the meltwater of your own transformation. It both creates and shapes disorder. An interesting fact is that the caterpillar and the butterfly both “fit” inside of the cocoon. When we digest ourselves, we create ourselves. Not a single cell is expendable. Nothing is discarded. The butterfly, then, is a remarkable act of inclusion. No part of the caterpillar will be exiled from the ecstasy of flight. Yet no part of the caterpillar will remain unchanged. ([Location 2616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2616)) - Every story, like every human body, is an ecosystem of other stories: the virus author that “taught” us mammals how to develop wombs, the ancient ecological pressures that molded us into multicellularity, our pulsing microbiome, our fungi-dusted skin, our metabolic reciprocity with every substance we breathe and drink and eat. Every recombinatory miracle of genetics gave birth not to an individual on a hero’s journey, but to a biodiversity of competing and converging aliveness. If I was beginning to understand that my body was an ecology, I realized that so should my stories represent textured, relational, sometimes ruptured ecosystems. We are not kept alive by single species or single stories. We are authored and breathed into being by polyphonic, multivoiced, interspecies epics. ([Location 1564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1564)) - When I was asked by my old high school to mentor a group of teen female writers, I knew that I had to be straight with them. I had to show them that writing was a high-stakes activity that didn’t just live on the page. Stories were atmospheric and encompassing. There were stories that infused our life like air: invisible until we realized we lived inside of them and thrived or died according to their limitations. ([Location 1578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=1578)) - When we relax our hold on the hero’s journey of an individual life, we can see again that we are all the soil bed for something else to grow. ([Location 2006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2006)) - I believe that we must complicate arbitrary cuts between clean and unclean, wasteful and useful. Excrement is less ontologically stable than we might believe. There is a reason the phrase “shit happens” is so ubiquitous. Shit isn’t still. It isn’t an object. Shit is a relationally constituted “event.” To the dung beetle, the dung is life-giving sustenance. The pitcher plant survives on the excrement of the inquiline bacteria and insects that dwell within its curled leaves. ([Location 2150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2150)) - The collective deaths of many extinction events have been brief bottlenecks that “clear” ecological niches. After the dust and ash settle, there is usually an explosion of new species and new life. It was only after the asteroid impact that caused the Earth’s fifth major extinction that the first mammals diversified, providing the evolutionary ground for humanity’s eventual emergence. An asteroid crater becomes a vibrant forest. A grave becomes a womb. The Earth continues experimenting with embodiment. Our meteor-streak lives are too short and small to comprehend the long story of evolution. ([Location 2160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2160)) - Many years before I became ill, a deer, hit by a car, managed to struggle into the woods at the periphery of my parents’ property, where it died. It was high summer, frying pan hot, the peeling birch bark almost crisping into cinders under unrelenting sunshine. Day after day, I would visit the carcass and watch as one life melted into a riot of lives. Worms. Ants. Maggots. Beetles. Mushrooms. Death was the moment when life overflowed its cup. Death wasn’t an end of life. It was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive, generative plurality. One narrative diverged into four hundred narratives. ([Location 2165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2165)) - We are just a doorway through which matter is flowing on its way to becoming something else. A brief shape that atoms and electrons and recycled minerals take on their way to becoming hummingbirds and tomatoes and dragonflies and mountains. ([Location 2174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2174)) - Decay is always a day, a microbe, a rootlet away from sprouting. ([Location 2185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2185)) - In fact, we can think of the traveling bard as being a traveling compost heap: able to alchemize and rot down popular themes and characters so that a new story could sprout for a new audience. ([Location 2306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2306)) - Like rhapsodes, fungi and bacteria compose and decompose material in order to generate the soil foundation of entire ecosystems. The decomposition process—the unweaving of minerals from stone, nutrients from dead wood—is just as important as the eventual regrowth of new vegetation. The unweaving of the web allows for an ecosystem instead of a shroud. A fresh narrative instead of a dead-end dogma. ([Location 2309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2309)) - The last of a species is called an endling. Our world is filled with endlings. ([Location 2542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2542)) - Whether tomb or womb, the cocoon is a vessel. An autopoietic boat through the meltwater of your own transformation. It both creates and shapes disorder. An interesting fact is that the caterpillar and the butterfly both “fit” inside of the cocoon. When we digest ourselves, we create ourselves. Not a single cell is expendable. Nothing is discarded. The butterfly, then, is a remarkable act of inclusion. No part of the caterpillar will be exiled from the ecstasy of flight. Yet no part of the caterpillar will remain unchanged. ([Location 2616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2616)) - Coincidences flood my life, flowing to the lowest valleys, the moments of desperation and need. ([Location 2779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2779)) - encounters. What shape does your life take on when it is no longer articulated by the grammar of human progress? I am not built by birthdays or promotions. I am made by moments of interspecies impact. ([Location 2845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2845)) - As much as I am an advocate of tapping into our own intuitions, I think the need for external guidance and mentorship is real. I just think we’ve been looking for it in the wrong places. We don’t need any more human teachers. We need to engage in an active, humble mentorship with the more-than-human world. We need more woodchucks and mountain lions. More mustard greens and microbes. We need other species to teach us how to enter into an ecosystem of knowledge, rather than a single species soliloquy. ([Location 2931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2931)) - Linda Hogan. “To enter life, be food.” ([Location 2940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2940)) - When a being that is constituted by a mutualism mates with another being constituted by a mutualism, it is difficult to quantify how many beings are involved. How many species create a reproductive event? How many “I”s does it take to have an erotic experience? The feminist in me wants to say one. But the erotic, dumbfounded animist in me knows it takes almost one hundred trillion bacterial cells. It takes the anarchic fusion that generated my very cells: the endosymbiotic theory demonstrates that originally separate prokaryotic organelles fused to create our building-block eukaryotic cells. And if my lust, my corporeal compulsion to touch and fuse and kiss, is, in part, catalyzed by a hormonal impulse to reproduce, then I must also include the virus that taught my body how to reproduce with a placenta. Over two hundred million years ago, an ancient retrovirus taught us how to create the proteins that develop wombs. Wombs may be human. But they are also plural. They are also viral. ([Location 2960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2960)) - Queer ecology as an interpretive framework seeks to disrupt how heteronormative projections onto nature produce bad science. Queerness, it turns out, isn’t a rarity inside ecosystems. It is ubiquitous, from flowers to insects to fungi. Queer ecology seeks to trouble how cultural dualisms get grafted onto entangled, complex ecosystems. It “interrupts” the tired monologue of hegemonic heterosexuality and the sterile fiction that we as humans are, in fact, differentiated from the natural world. It encourages thinking erotically outside of extractive eroticisms. It melts power dynamics and pulls the rug of linearity out from underneath the “narrative” of sex. What does nature have to teach us about queerness? If we are fruiting bodies of our larger ecosystems, densities of mushroom and mineral and meaning erupting from the forest floor, how is our individual queerness an echo of larger tentacular sexualities? ([Location 2986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2986)) - What is queer ecology, I ask again? You should get a different answer from anyone you ask. Heteronormativity, as wedded to patriarchal capitalism, wants singular answers. Or binary couples that can produce nuclear families and nuclear ideologies. It wants to locate and commodify disciplines, to banish radical paradigms to academia where they wither inside tautological arguments between like-minded, similarly privileged people. ([Location 2994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=2994)) - Philosopher Andreas Weber asserts, “Life has a tendency to transform all available resources into a meshwork of bodies.” This meshwork of bodies’ goal is aliveness of the whole, and not aliveness of the individual. An aliveness that “in its innermost core carries the plea that there be more life, not that I am fine. Putting the desire that there be life first might even provoke my own destruction.” ([Location 3237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3237)) - What does it mean to be an artist in an age of extinction and ecological collapse? What does it mean to be a storyteller when you have come to the end of all your personal stories? I think it means inviting the duende to dance at the edge of the wound. I think it means opening the door to another species. Yes, I wanted to tell stories, but they no longer needed to be my stories. They didn’t even have to protect my body and promote my own aliveness. ([Location 3273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3273)) - How could I become the vehicle of another species’ narrative urgency? How could I creatively and dynamically contribute to the vitality of the whole world, perhaps even at the cost of my own personal narrative? ([Location 3284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3284)) - Every day when I woke, I could taste the anguish, the inability to imagine a future. I could feel the tremble of absolute physical and practical uncertainty. And then, every day, I would try to offer some medicine to the world. For so long I’d sought medicine for my ailing body and my glitchy nervous system. What would it look like to offer medicine in return? ([Location 3298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3298)) - How can I make my body, my life, my work into a home for other beings, good soil for other thinkers to come and plant their seeds inside? Each day, I would try to offer some tiny kernel of magic. And people would reach back, openhearted and openhanded, weaving me into their ecosystems. Telling me I wasn’t alone. ([Location 3304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3304)) - Everything I do is ecological. When I use the word ecological, I root back to the original etymology: Greek oikos for household. I am not a noun on an empty page. I do nothing alone. I am a syntactical being, strung together by my metabolism and needs and desires to thousands of other beings. Together we are all a household, and every choice we make, whether mundane or explosive, takes place within the networked household of relationships. ([Location 3424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3424)) - Anyone who has been seriously ill, or has had a near-death experience, will know that it cuts the metaphysical chaff. Illness and injury and mental anguish act like a bottleneck. You are squeezed through, pressurized, and simplified. Only the most intrinsic beliefs, prayers, and ideas travel with you to the other side. ([Location 3428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3428)) - Trauma does not belong to an individual. It is a web that includes someone. It is not an object that can be removed. Your body’s innate ability to dance with harm and with discomfort is not always a problem. It is a relational tactic. A nonconsensual opening to both the good and the bad, the human and the nonhuman. ([Location 3708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3708)) - What if the shape of our wounds, the exact flickering silhouette of our hypersensitivity, was the shape of the doorway into another being’s pain and experience? ([Location 3716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3716)) - I stopped worshipping at the altar of penitential healing that day. I vowed to be incorrect. I would let my joints dislocate, cracking open space for fungal incursions. I would choose to take the wrong path. I would hobble myself into holiness. Stumble my way to the sacred. I would finally honor my body as a material refusal to participate in this ecocidal culture. I would tie my roots to other roots permanently. Let us join hands and then let our hands melt together, permanently, terrifyingly fused. Let us honor our wounds as invitations to risky collaborations we might otherwise not attempt. Let us acknowledge that to be correct is to be isolated. To be incorrect is to be relational. Survival is never safe. It is always a breach. A break in the skin. I did not want to heal; I wanted to survive. I want us all—the entire biosphere—to survive. ([Location 3731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3731)) - light is a cosmos-weary traveler, photons flung from a combusting muscle of matter at the center of our star system. ([Location 3869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3869)) - Let me walk past the end of this sentence, this page, this typed word, into worlds wilder, less human, more generous than I can individually author. And if I die, let it not be seen as a failure. And if I live, let it not be mistaken for success. Let me stumble and love and howl and dance and fail and dream and eat. Let me keep changing shape. Here, world. Let me be wrong. Let me live long enough to write this story again someday differently. ([Location 3888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D8HNRBZW&location=3888))