It is presumed that the ego, the actant, is bottled up – immured on an island of its own making – and that the thing to do here is to bring it out, to realign it with a mycelial festival of sorts, to reach out and touch the betrothed other, the land, across a gaping chasm of word and ritual.
But perhaps the ego is the land, the serenading regress of moon, the conniving whispers of breeze, the politics of succeeding ripples branching out in widening circles, the memories brooding in clouds that occasionally pour out as raindrops of remembering. Perhaps the ego is an eco-onto-epistemic unfurling – how the entangled whole astonishes itself when it touches itself. In this sense, there are no ‘actors’, no contained egos to defeat. Ego is a quilt of a thousand rivers – the knot on the string that thinks itself separate from it. Maybe by noticing this, we can be more accountable, more alive to the world around us. Maybe we can dance to tunes only birds know.
