Sympoiesis workshops provide an immersive learning experience that combines theory, imagination, storytelling, and conversation. Let go of your human identity and assume a new form: transforming from human, into another species.

Sympoiesis worked with Steffi on creating the website that houses the book. In this conversation, we explore her transformational journey to compiling this radical anthology, described by Satish Kumar as "a book of wisdom”; a journey that began more than thirty years ago and proved to be a profound reckoning with reality at the “gates of grief”.

We are bringing to life a new paradigm in marketing and communications. One that has co-creation, ethics, and enlivenment at its heart. We call it regenerative communications.

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day! In the coming week, we’ll be showcasing women who have inspired and deeply influenced our worldview. Each of them is an edge-walker and pioneer in their field, who deeply challenged the status quo and entrenched gender norms. 

Sympoiesis poses the questions: Which structures are refusing to fall? What aspect of decay are we — as individuals, as groups, as a society — resisting against? From the ashes of the old, what are the new stories and structures that will stand the test of time? How do we co-inhabit this planet harmoniously with our more-than-human companions? How do we stay awake and attuned to other life forms and learn from them? What stories want to be told?

Sympoiesis is this process of recognizing that *I am because you are*. And you, whoever you are: a mushroom, a bacteria, a pine tree, a river stream, a centipede, a human, or a crow—I cannot exist without your existence. My mind tells me that I *could* survive without you, but it fails to see you and me embedded in this interdependent ecosystem of life.

Estuaries are sympoetic spaces —strands of co-becoming and co-evolving. In estuaries, the river imagines what it’s like to dance with the moon as she surrenders to tidal forces. The ocean comes to know itself as the river, fluid and in flux, purifying and life-sustaining. In the estuary, the ocean receives life’s flow and does not resist it.

Untended grief, compounded on a collective level, degenerates living systems. Yet grief, when processed, opens us up to life; takes us outward and into closer relationships with those we love and the wider community of species. It infuses our lives with new meaning.

How can we, descendants of modernity — with its fixation on progress and urgency, culturally stuck within the archetype of the anthropocentric hero— once again unite as beings of place(s), participating in the grand unfolding of this multiplicity of beingness we call life?

We need multi-species perspectives. Freedom and justice cannot exist for us humans until we grant it to all species.

Imagination is the first act of mending the rift in the membrane that brings us into a full, embodied relationship with the earth — the first step in the process of undoing the story of separation that permitted us to morally justify centuries of capture and extraction.