Roots and Reflections with Elder Tree
Consider ancestral intelligence, as we consider the bridge between artificial intelligence and colonialism.
Taurus new moon is upon us, a time to connect with the abundance of the Earth, our lives, and the wild places within us that might support what is shedding and dissolving.
Before writing this, I was intentional about going for a wander in the woods to connect with her abundance, pleasure, and to return home to presence after some full weeks. I wanted to write to you all with an open heart and presence.
What emerged was unexpected.
I was found by an elder of a tree - one of those tall, wide, and deep ones that elegantly stand on the edge of a rise overlooking a valley. I took time to lay beneath their shelter as the spring snowfall cascaded through the forest.
I lay there a long time…listening.
I felt my tissues and bones find gravity and settle as I began to feel more human, wild, and embodied.
I felt the blessing in these eerie times of rapid change - the blessing of solitude with the forest, listening to snow fall amongst fresh green leaf blooms.
Beauty and eros can be so simple, and such medicine. As I lay on the mycorrhizal soils and roots of this elder tree, my imagination opened.
I thought of AI - the ancestral intelligence I was resting with - my skin being kissed by snowflakes from the sky as I lay watching them swirl and dance toward their love, gravity.
I wondered about the acronym AI, known today as artificial intelligence, and what the root of the word artificial might be.
Researching further: it means a skill or craft produced by humans, not naturally made - a bridge between the lineages ofart, artisan, artifact and fact, factory, manufacture.
As I lay looking at the patch of soil fading into white snow, I wondered about colonialism - an extractive, violent, and dominating form of human imposition on land, places, and people who were viewed as inert: passive, lifeless, lacking agency. The objectification of peoples, land, and cultures.
As I wondered about objectification, I felt the land holding and receiving me, gravity a way the earth might love me into the weight of the world.
Perhaps another bridge worth noting - one between artificial, something produced by skill rather than by or of the wild world, and colonialism operating under the premise that lands and peoples were uncultivated and inert, waiting to be shaped by an external “civilizing” hand.
Could the act of colonization be a project of artificial-ization - one that views cultures, ways of knowing, and traditions as undeveloped, replacing them with imported structures disconnected from the earth?
Could artificial intelligence be a form of colonization?
I wonder about the times we are in - the tension and eeriness I feel - about the interplay between earth wisdom that brings snow to blanket the land, supporting slow saturation for summer’s becoming, the role of ancestors in sustaining life, and the artificial intelligence we access that pulls from human history and knowledge, infiltrating our psyches as we interface with a form of intelligence we have never before encountered
One whose reach extends into the wellbeing of water and earth.
Where might the choice points reside to remain in connection and relationship with the earth?
In what different ways might artificial intelligence and ancestral intelligence shape people and culture - cultivating minds, thoughts, bodies?
It is remarkable to witness the simplicity of listening to snowfall stirring such complex questions - questions with no answers, only inquiries and choices, beneath the branches of this elder tree.