On Happiness: Becoming Ecologically Embedded with Sophie Strand

Sophie Strand speaks as if she is weaving, bringing disparate technicolor ideas together into a single beautiful, taut tapestry. “I work by addition, not negation,” she explains. As a prolific writer and educator, Sophie is “interested in the idea of a compost heap where you throw your refuse, your actual shit, your pollution, everything. It can inappropriately meld, things that are not supposed to touch can touch, and then something new can sprout.” Over the course of our conversation, the Hudson Valley-based eco-feminist draws upon the burgundies of scientific research, the deep blues of process philosophy, the verdant greens of eco-poetics, and the shimmering silvers of ancient religious scholarship. That she tenderly grips them all—that she affords them equal weight and intellectual favor—speaks to her maximalist designs. She takes everything in. For Sophie Strand, there is no waste, only colors and textures that can render a richer pattern.

While she could absolutely crystallize her knowledge into sharp edges and blunt certainty, I’m struck by the way her attitude remains so open, supple, and fluid. She feels her way into statements with a certain grace and shares them humbly as offerings informed by her own experience. Devoid of pretention, Sophie speaks both merely and powerfully as a “skin silhouette through which matter flows.” On the subject of happiness (so often rare, so often fleeting), she locates its fountainhead in precisely this recognition: our seemingly static and individuated selves are actually both transient and permeable. We belong to and are co-constituted by our shared and infinitely-layered universe.

There’s a certain existential humility that attends Sophie’s view of happiness, which departs from the achingly modern school of Don Draper that classifies it as “the smell of a new car” and surpasses more utilitarian perspectives that simply strive to maximize endorphin release. “I shy away from the anthropocentric abstraction of happiness as a kind of colonial term that creates meaning through human culture,” she explains. “It reinforces this euro-patriarchal idea of the atomized self as somehow maintaining its boundaries.” Looking beyond the confines of human culture (which is all too often taken as the sole landscape in which happiness can flourish): rather, “it’s rooted, it’s relational, it’s interspecies. It’s a dialogue. Happiness is, for me, an almost unconscious organismic experience of becoming ecologically embedded.” Happiness happens in the body. It happens when our bodies relate to the world. It happens when we help build and feel that we are being built by the world in turn.

The thing is, tragically, it’s much easier to buy a new car or snort endorphins than it is to embed ourselves ecologically. Unlearning the sensory gating so rigorously imposed under late-stage capitalism and re-attuning ourselves (as our bodies) to our local environments is not only a long-term practice, it is also one that is not necessarily enjoyable. “There’s a very eco-fascist idea that coming back into ecological awareness is pleasurable,” Sophie remarks, “that it’s all tree bathing, enjoying beauty, the pristine, Teddy Roosevelt, nature preserves… but really, it’s an incredibly uncomfortable experience.” The Romantic notion of the sublime comes into play here: tapping back into our human ecological niche is both transcendently awe-inspiring and fundamentally terrifying. “When your foot has been asleep and it comes back awake, when the blood pulses back into your flesh, the first experience is not pleasure,” Sophie continues. “At first, the experience is of pins and needles and discomfort.” But, ultimately, such discomfort is productive (as my therapist tends to remind me). Only through the thrall of fire can the crucible refine its ore. Only through existential pins and needles can we forge greater connections to our bodies, deeper engagement with our earth, more profound recognition of our ecological embeddedness.

While healing our disembodiment absolutely requires re-inhabiting our own immediate mortal coils, it is also about circling back to the cosmic current that flows through us. It means “coming into a body that is bigger than our body.” With reference to the work of biologist-philosopher Andreas Weber, Sophie elaborates: “self is only self through others. That’s not just philosophical, that’s practical: with every breath we take in, we are built by the microbiome, the pheromones, the dust, the pollen, the spores in our environment.” Only by reconfiguring our senses of self to encompass this wider set of inter-species relations can we begin to reinvigorate our lived experience with the kind of embedded ecological happiness Sophie describes. “We’ve conflated our selves with bodies that look like selves—like individuals,” she explains. “When we are really these extended bodies, extended networks.”

Drawing upon studies in extended cognition and her lived experience as a disabled person, Sophie reiterates that physical borders and boundaries are superficial: nothing is ever contained in isolation; everything is always overflowing itself. With characteristic reference to an organic example, Sophie explains that “mind and brain are not the same thing. If you harm part of a spider’s web, it acts as if it’s had brain damage or a stroke, such that we begin to ask, ‘Where is the spiders mind?’” It follows that thinking, even being, is a relational process—it occurs in the roiling and nebulous in-between. “As a disabled person,” she continues, “I always want to complicate this idea of embodiment as something that ever happens alone. I’m a ‘body plus’: a body plus trauma, plus caretakers, plus medicine, plus constant help. I think ‘body plus’ is the calculus by which the world continues.”

Recognizing this kind of radical and fundamentally life-affirming codependency opens up new possibilities for happiness. In this constellation, there is room for charming instances of enmeshment, mysteriously virtuous feedback loops, and even a smattering of magic. We are also urged to step down from our pedestal as the arbiters of biological justice and attune ourselves to the myriad mystical expressions of live that exist beyond ourselves. To relinquish our stranglehold on agency is both uncomfortable and immediately rewarding: for Sophie, “the best place we can situate ourselves is not in a desire to control outcome, but in improvisational fluidity and musculature.” All at once, her predisposition towards jazz-like rhetorical riffs and lyrical infusion/interpolation is clarified. Even and perhaps especially in conversation, Sophie situates herself openly and generously, participating in what she refers to as a “festival of aliveness.”

And yet, there is another layer of cosmic and ethical responsibility that attends this festival, this process of re-embedding ourselves in our ecological landscapes. While we may not wield unilateral power in this fleshed-out matrix of vitality, the delicate and diffuse ways in which we inhabit the world take on new gravity: “When we come back into awareness that our bodies extend past our skin perimeters and into our ecosystems,” she explains, “we realize that by polluting rivers, by harming the soil, we have been implicated in harming our own bodies.” Becoming better attuned to ongoing environmental harms and recognizing their direct impact on the trembling web of lived experience is far more challenging and frankly far more frightening than other prescriptions for happiness. When we lean into our embeddedness and expand our notion of self accordingly, our sense of happiness begins to transcend its contemporary socio-cultural construct. Our understandings of pleasure and pain radically transform: liberated from the illusion of an indifferent universe inhabited by individual, atomized selves, we can begin to tenderly steward a rapturous and communal fertility. Like Sophie Strand, we can begin to weave richer patterns.

Sophie Strand’s two recently published books, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and The Madonna Secret, are now available for purchase.