On Liberatory Love & Wild Relations
What would it mean to practice human love with the same reverence, attentiveness, non-possession, and commitment to mutual flourishing that we can experience through close observation and relationship with the beyond-human world?
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In the early days of the first cohorts of Somatics for Polyam-Queers, I invited twenty different non-monogamous queers to describe their deepest longing.
I anticipated responses about love, collectivism, freedom, intimacy, and desire. I could already hear them saying: ‘more authentic self-expression,’ ‘truly reciprocal care,’ ‘a village,’ ‘love without possession,’ and ‘skills to navigate conflict and repair.’
It isn’t what came.
Curiously, every single person described a scene in which they were out in nature—not alone, but without other humans.
I didn’t expect this from a group of people brought together by a common interest in exploring abundant love and intimacy. I was some combination of confused and awestruck at what was unfolding.
As I listened, something profoundly telling surfaced.
They described visions of being in the intertidal zones of the ocean’s shore, in the company of salted mist, rocky earth, seastars and anemones. Others were amidst wildflowers and drifting clouds, a gently warming sun and the calls of spring peepers from ephemeral ponds. Still others were rooted among the trees in the mountains, breathing the pungent smell of acidic soils and following the caws of young ravens to blueberry patches. And then there were the desert dwellers, layering up for the night and breathing in sagebrush and juniper beneath a vast, starlit sky.
I had asked them what they longed for as polyamorous queers devoted to liberatory love.
They responded in landscapes and wild relations.
The answers surprised me—and, at the same time, affirmed the belief at the crux of my work: people want to belong deeply while remaining free, complex, present, wild, and fully dignified. We long for relationships expansive enough to honor our fullness, to grow inside of, to hold us, to inspire our imaginations, and to empower us.
Landscapes and wild relations offer that.
Here’s the thing, y’all: we want it from each other, too.
That’s why we show up to a group about liberatory love and, when invited to name what we most deeply long for, visions of oceans and mountains and ephemeral ponds arise.
Their longing was not for isolation, nor an escape from relationship. They were longing foracertainquality of relating. One made palpable by the beyond-human world. One we aspire to feel in our human relationships, too.
This longing to belong deeply while remaining free, complex, wild, and fully dignified reveals a fundamental contradiction between the relationships we desire and the relational culture we have inherited. Generations of insidious Christian and white supremacy, patriarchy and racial capitalism have taught us to organize belonging - and love - through possession and exclusion. We are taught to ask: who belongs to whom, who has access to whom, whose body is legitimate, who holds power and control, whose desire is safe and whose is dangerous, and what family counts. This relational culture conflates devotion with ownership, commitment with access, intimacy with entitlement, and security with control.
Liberatory love asks us to unlearn the premises we’ve been taught. To course-correct after all this time.
It’s no wonder so many of us go elsewhere in our dreams. No wonder that we return to Land – where there are actual wild relatives ready and able to unsettle what we have internalized, help us learn what true satisfaction feels like, and share a web of liberatory love with us – complete with conflict, loss, experiments, contradictions & unruliness.
This is why the ecological and the intimate are intertwined in my work. Both wild and human relations ask us to reconsider our working definitions of relationship, love and belonging. Both offer practice grounds for building the skills required to embody the exquisite care of our dreams. Both demand the end of systems of suffering. Both ask us who we would be if a bit more wild, weird and feral, and what it would take to co-create a more fierce, reliable and networked love for this world.
To dip your toes in intertidal waters, is to enter the currents of negotiation, exposure, emergence, and adaptation. To worship a watery mood that will cycle with the moon. To watch a world respond to your presence. To sit with your own uncertainty, agency and choice in an emergent reality.
To sit beside a pond full of spring peepers long enough to appreciate how many tadpoles have matured into vocalists is to practice attention without extraction. To be awestruck and charmed by another’s evolution. To celebrate all the iterations of self that led to the frogs singing here now.
To follow a raven's call toward a blueberry patch is to allow your life trajectory to be changed by the curiosity and hunger of another. To taste what they love, delight in Earth’s sensuality, and then go separate ways as you’re ready – everyone’s dignity still intact.
To drift to sleep blanketed by desert stars is to surrender to a vast and boundless possibility. To feel held without being held down. To reimagine abundant - even endless - love.
That has everything to do with the lover I aspire to be, and the love I want to receive.
In relationship with beyond-human kin, we transform what we believe intimacy can be. We seed these beliefs with our lovers and friends, in our homes and communities. We water them with practice.
We get to be the same kind of lover to partners, friends and family as rocky earth is to seastars, as trees are to birds, and flowers to pollinators. Lovers who show up in their full truth, with a hell of a lot of care for life, a strong integrity, a willingness to be changed by love and a firm belief that all flourishing is mutual. We get to make relationships where we can be weird, wild, feral and dignified–because our bodyspirits know: I am safely held in a landscape of love, here we cherish change, and there is the freedom to be.
