processual beings
The person you were before wasn't less real. They were responding to different circumstances with different information. You didn't "find yourself"—you changed, you adapted, you became someone new, and you'll probably change again.
Feifei • The Tyranny of "Finding Yourself.”
Watching changes in form, thought, and sensation underscores the liberating insight that, although in a very real sense we are embodied beings, we are not this body. Or rather that this body is not a solid and permanent phenomenon.
Mary Taylor • The Art of Vinyasa: Awakening Body and Mind through the Practice of Ashtanga Yoga
I find something comfortingly anti-essentialist in the way ecology works. As someone who is both Asian and white, I am an anomaly or a nonentity from an essentialist point of view. It’s not possible for me to be “native” to anywhere in any obvious sense. But things like the atmospheric river, or even the sight of Western tanagers (a favorite bird)
... See moreJenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
A dragonfly molting a final time as it breaches the pondwater portal between nymph and adult so that its iridescent wings can at last unfurl. A hatchling pipping inside an egg, using its beak to fracture the only world it has ever known. A snake growing a new skin under the translucent specter of the old, scraping against stone to create a tear so... See more
Processual Biology: You Aren’t a Being, You’re a Process | Atmos
The fact that all “beings” have lifecycles complicates the nature of “being.” Is the true essence of a butterfly its winged form, or is it the caterpillar? If nearly all of it dissolves in the messy stew of metamorphosis, is what emerges entirely new? What of fungi that exist as microscopic yeast in one stage, only to emerge as a fruiting mushroom... See more
Processual Biology: You Aren’t a Being, You’re a Process | Atmos
We are—our world is—transformation given shape. What we call the Earth is a stabilized field of fluctuating patterns, where organisms hatch and molt, die and are born across scales of time. Processual biology reveals life not as a collection of beings experiencing change, but change itself. When we resist change, we resist life. Such is the paradox... See more