Begin Here
An orientation to A Tender Revolt
Welcome.
I’ve come to notice that our most rooted social, political, ecological, and interpersonal crises are also crises of unexamined perception.
Perception that is no longer capable of being rearranged through genuine encounter.
This isn’t necessarily because we failed to see. It’s moreso because we often mistake inherited ways of seeing for reality itself.
A Tender Revolt is an unfolding inquiry into the interpersonal patterns of perception that shape the webs of interdependent connection we become capable of building together.
This work is not intended to persuade people into certainty or to offer conclusions.
Reality is a river. In its unfolding it continually exceeds the forms of meaning through which we attempt to make sense of it.
I am writing to contribute perceptual distinctions to an ongoing collective inquiry.
I am writing because distinctions reorganize perception.
Distinctions change what we notice amongst layers of abstraction. What we notice and offer our attention to shapes what becomes meaningful, and meaning shapes how we respond to uncertainty, conflict, and change.
The provisional constellation of questions organizing this publication includes:
How does the way we have learned to perceive ourselves, one another, and the more-than-human world shape our capacity to participate in interpersonal relationships?
What allows perception to remain rearrangeable under conditions of uncertainty, conflict, and perceived relational threat.?
My work explores what I call “relational literacy”: the capacities that help us perceive and listen with greater fidelity, connect more sustainably, and more wholly regard one another while remaining open to the ways life continually exceeds our present understandings.
The philosophies I explore are experiments in cultivating the socioemotional capacities that sustain repair and continued relationship. They are invitations to remain in relationship through difference and discomfort.
I’m interested in the possibility that life continually exceeds the fixed categories through which we attempt to understand a dynamically stable world—and in what becomes possible when the conversations inside our interpersonal relationships begin to reflect that recognition.
I’m interested in how the capacities we cultivate—and what we repeatedly, and perhaps unquestioningly, offer our attention to—shape our range of available responses and how we orient toward the crises or our time.
I’m also interested in the possibility that the development of these literacies may make manipulation, domination, and disconnection less likely at an interpersonal, institutional and global scale.
My deeper timescale inquiry asks: Can increasing our socioemotional and relational literacies reverberate outward—shaping families, communities, institutions, and the worlds we build together?
The categories we perceive are not the full fabric of life.
They are just an assortment of maps.
Belonging begins to emerge when we live into the recognition that life continually exceeeds the categories by which we are attempting to understand it.
In order to rearrange and inhabit new ways of belonging, we need to be in conversation with one another as life unfolds.
To remain in these conversations at the depth they require, we need to be cultivating our relational literacies.
𓃗𓃗𓃗𓃗𓃗
If something in this sparks your curiosity, here are a few places to begin:
Identity-Protection Circuits
start with these three essays introducing the Identity-Protection Circuits model—a conceptual framework that I refer to throughout this publication as I am exploring how people might orient toward protecting belonging, identity, and coherence under conditions of perceived relational threat.
Part 1: When those in proximity to structural power conflate comfort with safety
Part 2: The colonial fracture in the psyche: when we learned to override the body
Part 3: The over-defended psychosomatic wound; and the alchemy of rupture and repair
Living Glossary
The Living Glossary is an evolution of orienting language i use for noticing, relating, and repairing
Living Reverence
The Living Reverence page (link coming soon) is a growing collection of the people, traditions, and ideas that have shaped my ontoepistemology
Dear Beloved
Dear Beloved (link coming soon) is a collection of real letters of repair, accountability, gratitude, grief, meaning-making and becoming written from inside the interpersonal relationships that continue to shape me. They are offered as artifacts of relational practice.
Poems and Short Stories
Poems and Short stories are my modalities for exploring inchoate curiosities for which I don’t yet know the question being asked.
Becoming happens around tables—in conversation, through shared practices of repair, inquiry, and attention. Photo from a 한정식 (hanjeongsik) with my aunties at 옻골마을 한정식 (Otgol village) outside Daegu (2017).