What do philosopher Timothy Morton, a Lewis Carroll poem, Indigenous worldviews, Buddhist meditation, the climate crisis, and oysters have in common?

This may sound like the setup to an offensive joke; I am, in fact, entirely serious. Yet, I am also considering the question as a conceptually playful (or playfully conceptual) inquiry that has the potential to evolve into a playful (but also serious) praxis. To be precise: a guided meditation on oysters. If you’d be willing to spend 20 minutes contemplating a raisin as part of mindfulness-based stress reduction, then why not an oyster?

The phrase “Don’t just do something, sit there!” resonates as a kind of ironic joke amongst some meditation practitioners, whether dedicated Shambhala Buddhists or those adopting aspects of the mindfulness movement. In meditating, we are not doing anything, exactly; we are sitting, becoming aware of the breath, the sounds in our environments, the escalating discomfort in our bodies. We are meant to become aware of our thoughts, toward not reacting impulsively to upsets but responding with equanimity.

But could the flipside also work: could just sitting there also be doing something?

Photo by Jane Affleck 2019.

In the context of the global climate crisis (and immanent ecological destruction, not to mention unfathomable decisions made by world leaders that seem intended not to halt but to hasten extinction), we may feel helpless and overwhelmed, unable to take meaningful or effective action to address this “hyperobject,” as Morton categorizes the climate crisis in his 2017 Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (105). If meditation is simultaneously doing something and nothing, then it might exemplify Morton’s conclusion that, through a process founded in object-oriented ontology (OOO) that enables Western humans to re-examine existence as being-in-relation, we will develop awareness of and solidarity with nonhuman beings; OOO, as Morton describes it, establishes that “the whole is always less than the sum of its parts,” a concept applicable to such things as the human body and ecosystems (101). This process comprises both action and non-action; Morton broadly describes it as “rocking,” a word meant to account for movement that can’t be pinpointed, much like that of a photon; it refers to “an inner dynamic of action” (179). I suggest, in consideration of themes linking the items listed in the opening query, that meditation understood as “rocking” or “an inner dynamic of action” can encourage in the practitioner an effective—and affective—awareness of other beings.

Meditation, then, becomes a means not just of “centering” the self (that “new-agey” language signifying a process of calming your mind and “connect[ing] with your spirit”), but also of de-centering—as in, shifting your focus outward, away from the self. Meditation then comprises part of the process of turning from anthropocentrism toward Morton-inspired solidarity.

But what does all this have to do with the worldviews of certain Indigenous peoples, Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and oysters?

Carroll’s devious Walrus invites some naïve young oysters to take “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk / Along the briny beach” (stanza 6, lines 3 & 4). Toward the end of the poem, the Walrus’s ulterior motive is revealed (spoiler alert): he and the Carpenter consume “every one” of the oysters, along with a considerable quantity of bread and butter (stanza 18, line 6). Anyone experiencing ecological grief, also known as solastalgia, philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s neologism for emotional attunement to “negative environmental change,” might challenge this heedless consumption and deem the Walrus’s subsequent tears and “deep” sympathy disingenuous.

Living a Better “Good Life”

Tacit critiques of heedless consumption may also be found in the worldviews and practices of Indigenous peoples living in Turtle Island, a.k.a. North America. The Indigenous Mi’kmaq concept of netukulimk, first introduced to me by artist Ursula Johnson (a member of Eskasoni First Nation in what is now Nova Scotia), can be understood as a more fundamental variety of sustainability, premised on “taking only what you need” and recognizing the interconnectedness of all beings.

More recently, seeking to contextualize my analysis of contemporary Indigenous art in my doctoral thesis, I began learning about other Indigenous worldviews, philosophies, and research methodologies. Anishinaabemowin—a word that inheres the languages and worldviews of Ojibwe peoples living at the heart of Turtle Island—teaches that “living the good life,” as mino bimaadiziwin is often translated, is premised on respect for all lifeforms; one of seven core principles, inaadiziwin, or “being,” affirms that in striving for the “highest-quality Anishinaabeg personhood,” individuals are “connected to the earth and in relation to all creation.” Margaret Kovach (Plains Cree and Salteaux), quoting Fyre Jean Graveline (Métis, Cree), states in Indigenous Methodologies (2009) that “knowing is a process of ‘self-in-relation’” (14).

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (a member of Alderville First Nation in what is now Ontario) writes in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) of the importance in Anishinaabeg tradition of an “embodied respect for” the land and other lifeforms (20). Linguist and educator James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, in an “Ojibwe Word of the Day” video, explains that mino means “in balance,” so mino bimaadiziwin means to “live a balanced life . . . in harmony with all your relatives,” human and nonhuman.

These teachings bolstered my conviction that dominant Western worldviews, particularly the notion of “the good life” as an individualistic quest for self-fulfillment through attaining material wealth, have contributed to the climate crisis. These teachings also inspired me to return to one of the places where I have felt most connected to the land, with the aim of engaging in an embodied practice that would help me rebalance. So I returned to Epekwitk, as the Indigenous Mi’kmaq people of Lennox Island and Abegweit First Nations continue to call Prince Edward Island (PEI), the smallest of the provinces and territories in the nation-state that is Canada. Here, as a free-range seven-year-old spending hours along the shores, I first became attuned to a kind of meditation practice (beachcombing) and to other lifeforms, watching pugilistic hermit crabs duke it out in tidal pools, meandering moonsnails wave their eyestalks in lazy circles, and skittish sandpipers race at the water’s edge.

Another reason I wanted to re-engage with the land was because I was worried parts of it were disappearing. Summertime visits in recent years have involved squinting with concern at the littoral zone: How many more trees are toppling off the sandstone cliffs? What happened to the dune along this stretch of beach? The fear that rising seas were altering these beloved coastlines was substantiated in August 2018 when I spoke with researchers at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Climate Lab, who affirmed that sea-level rise associated with climate change was accelerating the natural erosion process—between “20 to 40 centimeters on average . . . per year” (9–18 inches); in some areas, as much as 1.46 meters (about 4.5 feet) was falling into the sea. Per year.

Photo by Jane Affleck 2019.

Anyway. I still had a thesis to finish. After daily editing sessions, I went walking on the beach, sometimes at Hurds Point, which happens to be alongside one of the largest beds of the Atlantic oyster (Crassostrea virginica) on Epekwitk/PEI. The cycle of life being what it is, oyster shells are everywhere; picking them up, I began to see them as more than the hindrance to barefoot walking they’d been to child-me. Fascinated by their individuality, I gathered them, and other shells. (And that fall, I began drawing them, producing a series of “portraits.”) Learning about Indigenous worldviews had inspired me to re-examine the nonhuman world and my part in it; oysters became one focal point.

At about the same time, I cracked open Timothy Morton’s Humankind. Parsing his ideas, I saw parallels with what I had learned about Indigenous worldviews, my sense that Western culture needed a reboot, and my feelings of solastalgia. I don’t agree with everything Morton says; for one thing, he doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the similarities between his philosophies and Indigenous ways of conceptualizing and being in/with the nonhuman world; and his claim to the universality of human and nonhuman beings does nothing to solve the very real problems of various peoples marginalized by a society that foregrounds whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. But his essential point offers some analgesic for the dolor of solastalgia, if not a solution to the climate crisis per se.

Humankind in the Symbiotic Real

For Morton, the climate crisis is a given and is causally linked to the perpetuation of Neolithic/Mesopotamian “agrilogistics” in present-day neoliberal capitalism; the onset of agriculture prompted “The Severing,” when (some) humans began to view themselves as separate from and dominant over all other beings, or what has come to be called “Nature.” Morton proposes a paradigm shift, aimed at healing the traumas of The Severing, toward becoming “ecological” and in solidarity with other lifeforms. This means abandoning our capitalist anthropocentrism, even as we can’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) shed our tendency to anthropomorphism. Yet, classic Marxism isn’t the solution, Morton suggests, because, like capitalism, it doesn’t account for the nonhuman and that Earth is finite: communist politics is “not simply . . . international in scope but planetary. . . . Communism only works when its economic models are thought as an attunement to the fact of living in a biosphere, a fact that I call ‘the symbiotic real’” (1).

The symbiotic real is the fundamental situation of relationship amongst all lifeforms often obscured by Western ideologies such as capitalism. In the symbiotic real, humanity too becomes a “hyperobject,” an entity well beyond immediate perception: “some things . . . are thinkable and computable, yet we find it impossible to see them: the hyperobjects. Many are ecological phenomena such as global warming, evolution, and extinction, not to mention the human species and the biosphere” (105). That these things are larger or more complex than we can experience empirically also relates to “subscendence,” the idea, rooted in object-oriented ontology (OOO), that “the whole is always less than the sum of its parts” (101). All lifeforms “subscend”; humans, for example, are comprised of other, smaller beings, including our intestinal microflorae, on which we depend for health and even life. This reconceptualization of human-nonhuman relationships is non-hierarchical; in the symbiotic real, “entities are related in a non-total, ragged way. . . . In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont . . . Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?” (1).

In recognizing this, we experience “spectrality,” which “is the flavor of the symbiotic real, where everything is what it is, yet nothing coincides exactly with itself. . . . Spectrality is nonhumans, including the nonhuman aspects of ourselves” (54–55). Awareness of spectrality, posits Morton, “will aid us in imagining something like an ecocommunism, a communism of humans and nonhumans alike” (ibid.). But with this awareness comes ambiguity; because we can no longer draw boundaries between ourselves and other beings, we are deeply discomfited—even paranoid, a feeling Morton sums up as one “of being haunted and watched” by other beings and that amplifies our awareness of them (161). The word paranoia has deeper connotations: the prefix “para,” from the Greek preposition, means “beside” but also “counter to,” while “noia,” from noos, means “mind” or “intellect”—in other words, a mind that is beside itself and/or against itself; the discipline of psychology thus understands paranoia as an imbalance in perception and thought that may lead to a dissolution of the self.

In the context of the symbiotic real, the contradictory facets of paranoia suggest we may conceptualize ourselves as together with and apart from ourselves but also other beings; humans are whole entities that are also less than the sum of their parts. Yet, as Morton says, “paranoia is a possibility condition for solidarity. Because I don’t know whether or not you are or I am a person, I am paranoid, and as this ambiguity becomes ever more intense, I relate to you ever more intimately” (161). He concludes: “Per-ver-sion. En-vir-ronment. These terms come from the verb ‘to veer.’ To veer, to swerve toward: am I choosing to do so or am I being pulled?” (189). In effect, solidarity is not a choice but a recognition of a prior condition, that of being both together with and apart from nonhuman beings. And in the context of The Severing, a sense that one is not completely separate but an interconnected, ecological being is a perversion, a veering away from capitalism’s mandate that we can consume ad infinitum without repercussion.

Photo by Jane Affleck 2019.

For Morton, paranoia encourages us to be and/or act with “humankind-ness”: appreciation and compassion. Humankind-ness is about “appreciation for no reason, based on an emotional economy of desire. This entails the possibility not of refraining from pleasure . . . but of allowing other beings to have pleasure. For some reason, this part of your house is where sparrows, not you, get to have fun. But you get to have fun by appreciating the sparrow fun. You become fascinated by enhancing and expanding nonhuman pleasure modes” (144).

This is, as Morton phrases it, “humankinding”; while a noun, the gerund form also alludes to process, to action that “is unfolding, manifesting” (157–58). Describing how we may come to find solidarity, Morton underscores how awareness can be both state of being and process: awareness “oscillates or undulates . . . neither doing or feeling exclusively, neither active nor passive” (186). “Awareness,” he continues, “is still and moving at the same time, a ground state of feeling or doing or mentating or being embodied. Awareness rocks” (188). This oscillation between action and non-action is perhaps only one step, or breath, away from meditation.

Morton’s notion of humankindness echoes the Buddhist concept of loving-kindness (metta). Loving-kindness meditations are meant to help the practitioner feel compassion for other beings, recognizing that, in samsara’s cycle of rebirth, they could be you or you them. Humankindness might be viewed as a paranoid (in Morton’s sense) version of sympathy or empathy, both of which are mired in the inequities of Western capitalist society. Sympathy is akin to pity, which Morton deems “condescending in precisely the way William Blake outlined: ‘Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor.’ Sympathy is always a power relationship. . . . But so [is] empathy, which has to do with identification” (31–32). This suggests we feel empathy only for those we recognize as being like us. In contrast, “Solidarity is always in the structural position of wishing it could encompass more, encompass everything. . . . This wish is just exactly the feeling of compassion, in its most default, least hyped-up state, a passion-to-coexist, a striving-to-be-with” (179). Similarly, in metta meditation, one is meant to resist “othering”; the challenge is to feel compassion for those we have conceptualized as detestable, offensive, or just not like us.

The feeling Morton names as “passion-to-coexist” also recalls Indigenous worldviews premised on living in balance with other lifeforms. He raises this point himself, attempting to dispel potential resistance to adopting such ways of being, whether because doing so might be dismissed as “hippie” or appropriative (11). One might ask why, if traditions promoting awareness and compassion already exist, should we consider Morton’s ostensible alternative? Perhaps because he’s advocating for experiences of/with other lifeforms that transcend, or stand at a distance from, language and thought—experiences that encourage us to “[drop] the idea that (human) thought is the top access mode and [hold] that brushing against, licking, or irradiating are . . . as valid (or as invalid) as thinking” (Ibid.). A guided meditation may yet be too close to those human access modes, with words evoking thoughts and images. Morton himself is ambivalent about the mindfulness movement, which “is not definitely good. In fact, mindfulness can be quite bad” (186); other writers, including Sahanika Ratnayake, offer cogent arguments to that end. But might meditation, when using words to re-embody the practitioner in relation to an/Other being (an oyster) begin the process of effecting fascination and solidarity? We won’t know until we try.

Meditative Awareness and Solidarity

Choose one of the photos included in this essay. Look at it for a few moments, noting details such as contours, colors, and textures. Or, you might wish to open the photo in another tab to consider as you do the meditation. (Or both.)

When you are ready, find a comfortable place to sit—cross-legged on the floor or in a chair—but not so comfortable that you fall asleep. Now, recall the photo of the oyster shell (or look at it again). Do you recall (or see) anything unusual about it? Try not to think of it in terms of beauty or ugliness; try simply to describe it.

Imagine holding this shell in your hand, running a finger around its edge, across its concave interior. Where might it feel rough, smooth, or sharp? Imagine the shell’s thickness, its weight. Think about its material: calcium carbonate—a strong, durable substance that can, in optimal conditions, last for millennia. Remember that your bones, your teeth, are made of similar material. Though oysters are invertebrate—they have no skeleton—this material is something you and oysters have in common; the word oyster comes from the Greek ostreon, which is rooted in Proto-Indo-European ost, meaning bone.

Photo by Jane Affleck 2019.

Imagine being a being with bones outside of your body. Imagine being safely tucked inside these two bone-like bits of yourself. Imagine them as a cup with a lid, containing your softness. Imagine that though you are soft, you are also powerful enough to hinge your shells open. You feel a fresh sluice of saltwater, as though your entire body were a tongue ready to taste. You snap your shells shut again, a trapdoor, bicep-strong, that is your arm.

Now imagine yourself as a tiny larva, swimming in a current. You stop when you find a suitable surface and anchor yourself. There, as a tiny spat, you begin building your shells, layer by layer, like a splayed toenail curving outward. And there you remain, with thousands of other oysters, feeding by filtering, cleaning the water you share. You are also a surface onto which other beings attach, like oyster spat, barnacles, and seaweeds.

Imagine now that you’ve grown enough to reproduce. Along with most your kind, you started life as male. But now, you may become female, depending on the season or water temperature. If you stay male during midlife, toward the end of your life you will likely become female.

Imagine your saltwater home becoming less saline, as rain runoff dilutes it. The wind stirs the water, lifts sediments, turning the water milky-red. You pull shut your trapdoor. You can’t feed, and you weaken. Imagine the water forcing open your shell, breaking you away from the bed. Your soft insides begin to decay, and you become food for others. Your shells wash onto a beach, pummeled by waves, splitting apart. Eventually you become tiny, glittering flakes amongst the grains of sand. You are sand; sand is you.

Think now about having human feet and walking on the sand. Silky soft, malleable, neither solid nor liquid, the sand moves and is still at the same time; its parts, including particles of oyster shell, are greater than the whole.

Ecological Beings/Being Ecological

If you don’t yet feel solidarity with oysters, would it help to know that nearshore oyster reefs help reduce the impact of storm surges? And that restoring oyster beds may be a means of mitigating coastal erosion caused by sea-level rise? Oysters’ water-filtering capability also promotes the growth of underwater grasses that provide habitat for other intertidal species, and that help keep shorelines intact.

Morton’s philosophy alone won’t sequester gigatons of carbon, or prevent more from being released. But finding solidarity with nonhumans might be a step toward curtailing exponential biodiversity loss. Compassionate fascination for other beings might also help end wildlife tourism and activities such as swimming with dolphins, which has nothing to do with dolphin fun and everything to do with tourist entertainment (and tour operator profit), typifying an anthropocentric view of biodiversity.

Perhaps at best, a meditation on oysters should inspire you to go and find some actual oysters, to experience sensual, embodied engagement in the symbiotic real, rather than in your mind. (I highly recommend this; the desire for experiences unmediated by thought was one impetus for my drawing mollusk shells.) If our awareness of oysters expands to recognizing its essential role in stabilizing coastlines, we might work harder to prevent their populations from declining further (an estimated 85% over the last century, largely due to overfishing). Then we might avoid the variety of “kindness” the oysters in Carroll’s poem finally (but too late) recognized in the Walrus, who “deeply sympathized” with them only after consuming them.

And though I’ll never eat an oyster, I’m not suggesting a complete moratorium on enjoying them that way. Just don’t be the Walrus and eat every one; instead, be compassionate humankind.