Listening With Darkness Outside the Academy: Darkness as Partner in Ecosomatic Practice.
A talk presented at the Symposium on Darkness at the Doctoral School, Nottingham Trent University, on 10th July 2025
On the day of Autumn Equinox, as we begin the turn towards the darkness of Winter here in the Northern hemisphere, I am sharing with you the text and some of the images from a talk I gave back in July, as part of a one-day Symposium on Darkness at the Doctoral School, Nottingham Trent University. The Symposium, organised by the wonderful Rupal Bansal, shared perspectives on darkness from a number of very different creative practitioners. Here is the text in full.
I have travelled here today from the part of the country I grew up in - close to the edge of the Lincolnshire fens near Bourne, where the A15 hugs the north-south contour as the land begins to rise from flat fields of monoculture in the east. This is landscape as artefact. I live sandwiched between the old route of the Roman road, and Car Dyke, a waterway built by the Romans to link Peterborough with Lincoln, linear artefacts that influence and reinforce linear patterns of movement and being. And quite honestly, it’s a challenge. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I am here today. Because I find in darkness a refuge and sanctuary from linearity, and as someone who suffered severe migraines for 40 years, as a refuge from the ocular.
The primacy of vision - the tendency in western thought to place sight at the top of the hierarchy of senses, has strongly influenced knowledge production, erasing and marginalising other ways of knowing. The colonial gaze is one of objectification, leading to hierarchies of dominance and control. I would argue that embodied practice with darkness offers a potent way of disrupting these hierarchies.
I have structured this presentation around relationships - introducing some of the rhizomatic connections with multi-species kin that are the well-spring of my work. I see it as my responsibility to make those relationships explicit, as part of an ethics of care and reciprocity, and a reflection of the reality that my work can never truly be considered mine alone.
Simultaneously it is a way of sharing an overview of my different practices with darkness, in an approach which is influenced both by indigenous learning and autoethnography.
So I do not stand here alone, as it may seem from the outside. Darkness teaches me that the gross material body - as you see it with daylight eyes, seemingly quite clearly bounded by my skin - is not the same as the soma - the felt sense of the body from within, where each breath, word and gesture is in relationship with a complexity of beings and places, with past, present and future, with the intricate web of experience.
This brings us to the nature of Embodied Inquiry, which according to Leigh and Brown “evades clear categorisations and classifications” but always includes “the three principles of reflexivity, conscious awareness and the interconnection of body and mind”. Likewise ecosomatics is proving to be a shape-shifting creature with multiple definitions. Nonetheless most seem to agree that ecosomatics places conscious awareness at the interface between material body and environment. Permaculturist, therapist and writer, Nala Walla, describes it as
“a gateway to the greater ‘Earth-body’ via our individual bodies. It expresses the fluid nature of the Self, and a world of boundaries which are at once distinct, and permeable”.
Ecosomatics is often described as an emerging field, yet this is somewhat misleading. Our ancestors relied for their survival on these forms of sensing and feedback between the permeable animal body and their surroundings.
As Silvia Federici says in her book “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin”,
“There was a time when we could read the winds, the clouds, and the changes in currents of rivers and seas. We know, for instance, that Polynesian populations used to travel the high seas at night with only their bodies as their compass, as they could tell from the vibrations of the waves the different ways by which they could direct their boats to the shore”.
This prompts me to speak of my two dear colleagues in Aotearoa New Zealand - artist and teacher Wairere Pene, and Dr Mahutoa Pasha Clothier, whose practice-led PhD centred around the precedence of diffraction in indigenous awareness - diffraction being the phenomenon of waves bending or spreading out as they move around obstacles or through narrow openings. After I left Aotearoa to come back to England in 2022, I met with them every full moon for 18 months via zoom. In refusing to conform to the anglo calendar for our meetings, being led instead by the moon cycles, and in being in opposite hemispheres so that day and night were always both present, the way was opened for a very different kind of learning together.
I have spent many a night in the companionship and catalytic presence of land, both in Aotearoa and England, walking ancient paths and sleeping outside, often in dark sky areas, a practice which for me strengthens embodied listening.
I have a kinship with limestone places, and Maungarongapou cave showed me the intense stillness of absolute darkness deep beneath the surface. I also owe immense gratitude to Ruakuri cave, with whom I had the privilege of co-creating a water ritual at night outside of the public opening times.
And speaking of limestone places I would also like to mention Helen Poynor, movement teacher and mentor on the Jurassic coast of Devon, with whom I learned for a year, and her firm resistance to extractive practice with land and body, which is often surprisingly absent within movement workshops.
Back home in Lincolnshire there is a stretch of road that I used to cycle regularly at night as a teenager - my bike being my only means of transport (and my parents not inclined to be a taxi service!). I would round a particular bend and cross an invisible line where the texture of darkness changed - where a sense of vastness would overtake me. I was afraid, awed, and consoled all at once by this feeling, and often pedalled faster in response. It was a difficult feeling, at that age, to be with. On reflection, it corresponds with my subsequent experiences of thin places, and opened a sense of darkness as paradox, holding something in excess of what my day-time mind knew and feared.
In her book The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning, speaks of
“the more-than that lies outside daily actualisations of existence”.
Still close to home, the experience of sitting with my dying father for seven nights, taking turns with my mother and sister, also exposed me to experiences which, in Erin Manning’s words again, “troubled the notion of a self-enclosed subject”: the experiences he related as they were happening to him, and the subtle things I observed in the dark and silence with a different kind of sensing, as his body slowly closed down.
Night-time visits from palliative care nurses further extended my experience of a night-time world of (mostly) womens care and the intimacy of darkness when attending to the physicality of both birthing and dying. It put me in mind of the legend of the black shuck, a large ghostly black dog, usually portrayed as fearsome and demonic, yet if you search in the shadows there are different stories to be found, mostly told by women, of a benevolent and protective being who accompanies them when travelling at night, perhaps especially those who work with thresholds.
Thresholds are a fundamental component of Māori experiential learning and teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand. A Noho Marae is an immersive learning experience that involves staying overnight at traditional meeting grounds - everyone sleeping on mattresses in one big room, and participating in traditional practices. Crossing the physical threshold onto the marae is done in ceremony and carries symbolic and spiritual weight.
I found these experiences both excruciatingly difficult, and profoundly formative - a thoroughly embodied process of collective eating, dreaming, learning, drifting in and out of light sleep while others spoke and sang through the night. It was here that I first learned of the profound Māori relationship with Te Po and Te Kore, which loosely translate as the Darkness and the Nothing, the void. Te Po, the darkness, is considered to be multi-faceted and has at least 12 different names. These are not my stories to tell, but as traditional Māori plant medicine teacher Donna Kerridge generously says, “sometimes we need to learn through the lens of others in order to understand our own indigeneity”.
So it was these experiences that activated an intense longing to find and reconnect with my own indigenous heritage. It is not uncommon for non-native New Zealanders to be encouraged by Māori to return home for a while (quite literally if possible), in order to ground themselves in the stories of their own ancestors rather than appropriating Māori traditions.
There is a particular area in North Lincolnshire that has supported my learning in this respect, and to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude. For sixteen months, until recently, I lived in a small rented cottage in Redbourne in the Ancholme valley. I spent many hours walking the land in darkness, and stumbled across a number of folktales recorded in that very village from oral tradition by Marie Balfour, which spoke extensively of the dark… tales such as The Dead Moon and Tiddy Mun. I worked with the land and these stories for over a year, culminating in a 30-day ritual work called Libations.
Here’s an excerpt from my journal, from December 2023 near the beginning of that work:
Reaching the river I removed my boots and socks. A brown-tinged purple descended across the landscape, infusing the river, which then darkened into blackness. My cold feet squelched in the waterlogged sodden ground, mud oozing up between my toes. Small invisible winter nettles stung my soles - a pleasurable sting, creating radiating points of aliveness. My footprints merged with those of roe deer.
The purple twilight deepened. Emptiness. Little to smell except the mud, little to hear except corn leaves whispering. Energy of air, sky and space.
Tawny owl called as I passed the Ash tree, looked me straight in the eye. Past the orchard. It’s really dark now. Shifted my gait to navigate the uneven path. Seeing now with my feet, lowering my centre of gravity, engaging thighs and allowing pelvic girdle to roll, absorbing the varying height of my footfall. Felt creaturely, at home. Movement became effortless, trusting my body. My pace quickened with this new-found energised state, as if I could travel like this for miles through unknowable darkness.
I conclude with an invocation, written in collaboration with darkness:
May we diffract our ways of knowing
May we let ourselves be led by moon cycles
May we embrace the void, the gaps, the unknown
May we become lost in the dark - the lostness of a seed buried in the ground
May we foster conditions for emergence
May we recognise when to practice silence
May we shed the primacy of the ocular
May we refrain from the compulsion to document, capture, name
May we resist the exoticisation of darkness
May we foster multi-layered perception and deep time awareness
May we refrain from shining too bright a light on experience
May we recognise darkness and that which we have avoided as sacred
May we give primacy to relationship, reciprocity, and the body
May we value stories that hide in the shadows
May we listen deeply with darkness
