Artist Statement
All my life, I have known a kind of loneliness that dissolves in moments of deep attention—when sensory experience brings forth a curiosity that feels like stillness. I create from this place. These interludes take shape through my work—not to connect myself with others, but to connect others with themselves, with each other, with what we collectively forget until we pause.
I work in the space between study and sensation. Here, I transform research into experience, dissolving the boundary between knowing and feeling. Wonder lives not in spectacle but in quiet revelation. I craft each piece as an act of forgetting through looking, through listening—and in that forgetting, remember what was always there.
This practice of attention reveals intelligence not as individual processing but as participation in larger systems of relationship. Through forest sounds, butterfly wings, or architectural spaces, I explore how understanding emerges through integration rather than separation—how we come to know the world by discovering our place within it.
My compositions, films, and collaborations stand as invitations to attunement. They are documents of attention paid to a world that speaks in many voices—through ice formations, butterfly wings, architectural spaces, forest sounds. I offer these translations not as explanations but as experiences, moments when the barrier between self and world might briefly, beautifully thin.
On Intelligence: Three Essays
Part One
On Intelligence and Integration
I often think about intelligence, and the use of the word itself. The way we commonly speak of intelligence—as cognitive horsepower, as processing speed, as the ability to manipulate symbols—feels hollow to me. We parse intelligence into categories: intellectual, emotional, physical. But at the end of the day, what difference does it really make if someone is an athlete or a professor? Both are important in their own right. Both contribute to the whole.
I've been reading psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor's "On Kindness," and I now realize that this is closer to the way I would define intelligence. The capacity for care. The absence of harm to others and to oneself. Kindness.
But perhaps even this is too narrow. Perhaps intelligence must have something to do with connection to the whole—not just to other human beings, but to the larger system, the cosmos we are embedded within. Integration within oneself, yes, but also an orientation that allows one to integrate with what we call the universe.
Children often possess this quality naturally, which makes me hesitate to call it wisdom. A three-year-old shows profound kindness without accumulated knowledge or life experience. There's something immediate about it, something that exists before we layer on complexity. Children see someone hurt and want to help, without calculation.
The Samburu Way
I learned about a different kind of intelligence while staying in Samburu, in northern Kenya. The Samburu demonstrate what I'm trying to describe through their entire way of life. Their young men, the *moran*, spend months on cattle herding journeys, learning the landscape through direct participation. They gain knowledge of vegetation, topography, wildlife, and "the ecological effects of their interaction with it," as researchers put it. But this isn't data collection—it's integration with a living system.
Daily, they make deliberate choices about accessing water and pastures based on available resources and knowledge of the area. They read the whole ecosystem constantly, understanding their role within it rather than standing apart from it. Their grazing practices prevent overuse of any single area, allowing grasslands to regenerate. Their spiritual beliefs forbid polluting water holes that wild animals share.
What struck me most was their care economy. When someone's in need, that need is met—not through transaction or obligation, but through recognition that individual and community wellbeing are inseparable. The person receiving feels no shame, but carries forward the responsibility to extend care when others are in need. The system flows like water, maintaining balance through attention to the whole. This is intelligence expressed as integration rather than separation.
Intelligence as System
What if intelligence isn't something we possess but something we participate in? What if it's less about what we can process and more about how we relate?
The Samburu show intelligence emerging from deep attunement to systems—ecological, social, cosmic. It requires the capacity to see beyond immediate individual needs to larger patterns and relationships. We're not isolated processors but participants in ongoing world-creation.
We see this kind of systemic awareness in other indigenous knowledge systems. Aboriginal fire management in Australia involves reading weather patterns, fire behavior, and ecological responses to conduct controlled burns that reduce wildfire risk and promote biodiversity. Inuit communities in the Arctic identify ocean patterns and seasonal changes with such precision they can locate marine life invisible to outsiders. The Maya milpa farming system works with natural cycles to maintain soil health across generations.
These examples share something essential: intelligence as partnership with larger systems rather than domination of them.
Beyond the Individual
AI is function—how well a system performs tasks. But real intelligence isn't mechanical. It's relational. It's about orientation, about how we position ourselves within the web of relationships that sustain life.
This intelligence can't be taught through information transfer. It emerges through participation, through what the Samburu young men experience on their long journeys: learning the land by moving with it, understanding animals by caring for them, knowing weather by living exposed to it.
It's the intelligence of the sea star I wrote about in a short piece of prose, whose "radial truth" means holding wound and healing without choosing between them, whose "strange math of division" teaches that separation can become wholeness. Integration from the center, expanding outward through relationship.
The Only Intelligence That Truly Matters
This is the only intelligence that matters for functioning well in the world: the capacity to perceive our embeddedness in larger systems and to act from that understanding with care. Not the cleverness that sets us apart, but the attunement that draws us deeper into connection.
It's the intelligence that emerges when we stop asking "How smart am I?" and start asking "How am I participating? How am I relating? Where's my attention?"
Maybe what we call wisdom in some older people isn't accumulated knowledge but a return to this more integrated way of being. Releasing the need to separate thinking from feeling, self from world, human from nature.
This intelligence can't be measured or ranked. It's not competitive. It simply is—available in any moment we choose to participate fully in the larger systems that hold us. Available when we remember that we aren't separate from the world we seek to understand, but expressions of it, learning to know itself through countless forms of attention and care.
Intelligence, IMHO, is less about being smart and more about being whole.
Part Two
On Intelligence and Psychology
If intelligence is integration with the whole rather than isolated processing, then our psychological life—our moods, responses, capacity for relationship—might also be less individual than we assume. We divide our psychological processes into familiar categories: the cultural, the familial, the personal. Yet these frameworks often reduce our inner life to a series of cause-and-effect relationships. *This happened, therefore I respond this way. My family was like this, so I relate like that.*
But what if our psychology is more fundamentally environmental? What if the quality of our attention, our capacity for encounter, emerges not just from personal history but from our ongoing attunement to whatever environment holds us?
Beyond Green and Soothing
We're often told that to feel better, we should go for a walk in nature. The prescription treats nature as a place that's green and soothing, full of birdsong and something biologically resonant—a kind of therapeutic backdrop. But this reduces both nature and psychology to their most superficial elements.
The deeper question isn't about nature as medicine but about attunement itself. In a forest, a library, a crowded concert, a museum in a foreign country—each environment creates different possibilities for encounter, different qualities of attention, different capacities for relationship. The forest doesn't soothe us because it's green; it offers a particular kind of attunement that allows certain aspects of ourselves to emerge.
This reflects what Heidegger called *Stimmung*—fundamental attunements or moods that aren't just internal feelings but ways of being tuned into the world itself. Standing among Douglas firs, I might access a quality of listening unavailable in my kitchen. In a cathedral, different possibilities for reverence arise than those available in a coffee shop. At a loud concert, the dissolution of individual boundaries creates openings that solitude cannot. Each environment doesn't just influence mood—it shapes the very ground from which mood arises.
The Limits of Causation
Much of psychology builds on causative frameworks: early experiences create patterns that guide future responses, conscious or unconscious, reflexive or deliberate. But this emphasis on individual history, while important, might be only one aspect of our psychological reality.
From a phenomenological perspective—drawing on thinkers like Heidegger who understood our existence as fundamentally relational rather than isolated—we're less interested in *why* we respond a certain way than in *what types of attunement* are possible in this moment, in this environment, with these others. Our fundamental being-toward-death, our openness to relationship, our capacity for concealment or revelation—these shift depending on where and how we find ourselves.
A conversation by a river unfolds differently than the same conversation in a sterile office. Not because the river is pretty, but because the quality of attention, the possibilities for encounter, the very ground of relationship changes. The sound of water, the movement of light, the presence of other-than-human life—these create different openings, different ways of being present to each other and ourselves.
Familial Attunement
What we call family dynamics might be as much about environmental attunement as about psychological patterns. The quality of attention available in a family home, the way space is held or constricted, the presence or absence of ritual, beauty, quietude—these shape not just behavior but the very possibilities for relationship.
This doesn't dismiss the reality of family patterns or the importance of individual healing. But it suggests that psychological work happens not just through understanding our personal history, but through expanding our capacity for different kinds of attunement. Sometimes the most profound healing comes not from analyzing the past but from experiencing entirely new qualities of presence, new environments for encounter.
Radial Psychology
In my piece about sea stars, I wrote about "radial truth"—the capacity to hold wound and healing without choosing between them, the "strange math of division" where separation becomes wholeness. I wrote this before encountering Jung's *Red Book*, but later recognized something similar in his explorations of individuation.
Jung understood that psychological integration isn't linear but radial—expanding outward from a center while maintaining connection to the whole. Like the sea star, we might need to experience separation, even disintegration, to discover new possibilities for wholeness. The process isn't about fixing or returning to a previous state, but about allowing transformation through encounter with what we don't yet know.
This kind of psychological intelligence emerges through participation rather than analysis. It requires the same quality of attention I witnessed in Samburu—the capacity to read whole systems, to understand ourselves as participants in larger patterns rather than isolated subjects working through individual issues.
Environmental Psychology
If intelligence is participatory, then psychological health might be less about achieving individual balance and more about developing our capacity for varied forms of attunement. Different environments call forth different aspects of psyche. Rather than seeking consistency, we might cultivate responsiveness—the ability to be present to whatever quality of encounter each moment offers.
This resonates with Heidegger's understanding of human existence as *Dasein*—literally "being-there"—always already embedded in world rather than existing as isolated subjects. We are our relationships, our environmental encounters, our ongoing participation in the unfolding of being itself.
This doesn't mean abandoning the work of understanding personal patterns or healing family wounds. But it places this work within a larger context of environmental intelligence—our ongoing capacity to read and respond to the fields of relationship that hold us.
The question shifts from "How do I fix myself?" to "How do I participate more fully in the larger systems that shape possibility?" From "What's wrong with my psychology?" to "What kinds of attunement are available here, now, with these others?"
Integration, Not Resolution
Like the sea star whose "wholeness isn't an absence of division," psychological health might not be about resolving all conflicts or understanding all patterns. It might be about developing what Jung called the transcendent function—the capacity to hold opposites, to find the third way that emerges when we stop trying to choose between wound and healing, individual and collective, personal and environmental.
This is psychological intelligence as integration with the whole. Not the isolated self working through its issues, but the self discovering its larger participation in the ongoing creation of reality. Less about being psychologically smart and more about being psychologically whole.
Part Three
On Intelligence and Acknowledgment
If intelligence is integration with the whole, and psychology is environmental attunement, then what becomes possible when we acknowledge other forms of consciousness rather than trying to prove them? When we respond to animal consciousness as something we participate in rather than observe from outside?
In Kenya's northern landscapes, elephants communicate through infrasonic frequencies below human hearing. Their conversations flow beneath the soundscape of evening calls—frogs, birds, baboons from distant hills. We can detect these frequencies with equipment, but the deeper question isn't whether we can measure elephant communication, but how we respond to the consciousness behind it.
What changes when we approach animal awareness not as a puzzle to solve but as a presence to acknowledge?
Beyond Proof and Explanation
The Cambridge and New York University Declarations on Consciousness acknowledged what indigenous peoples have long known—yet our ways of relating to animals haven't fundamentally changed. We still approach animal consciousness as something to be proven rather than honored, explained rather than responded to.
Traditional nature documentaries reduce animals to behaviors or spectacular moments. They ask us to marvel at animal intelligence while maintaining our position as outside observers. But what if the question isn't whether animals are conscious, but how we can respond to the consciousness that's already there?
When a cheetah's breathing slows toward sleep, when zebras coordinate movement through subtle body language, when reticulated giraffes navigate perfectly through complete darkness—these moments call for acknowledgment rather than analysis. They require a quality of presence that honors consciousness as relational rather than individual.
Samburu Acknowledgment
For the Samburu, animal consciousness isn't theoretical—it's woven into daily life through relationships built on generations of acknowledgment and mutual respect. Those elephants drinking in the evening light? In Samburu tradition, they're ancient relatives whose lives and deaths are honored as family.
This isn't anthropomorphism or romantic projection. It's a sophisticated understanding that consciousness exists in relationship, that intelligence emerges through participation in larger systems. The Samburu don't ask whether elephants think—they respond to elephant awareness as something deserving of respect, something that shapes their own decisions and movements across the landscape.
Their environmental intelligence, discussed in Part 1, includes acknowledgment of the consciousness of other beings. They read not just the ecosystem but the community of minds within it. When they move their cattle to avoid overgrazing, they're honoring not just grass and water but the needs and patterns of wild animals whose intelligence shapes the landscape.
Interspecies Umwelt
Each species inhabits its own perceptual world—its umwelt—shaped by unique sensory capabilities. Elephants communicate through infrasound we can't hear, navigating emotional and social landscapes through frequencies below human perception. Giraffes move through darkness using senses we can barely imagine. Zebras coordinate through body language so subtle it appears telepathic.
A bat's umwelt is relatively fixed by its evolutionary biology—echolocation creates a rich auditory world utterly unlike our own. But what might be distinctive about human umwelt is our capacity for attentional flexibility within our sensory range. We can't echolocate like bats or see UV patterns like butterflies, but we can cultivate radically different qualities of listening, seeing, presence depending on our environmental attunement.
Rather than seeing these perceptual worlds as isolated bubbles of experience, what if we understood them as overlapping fields of awareness? What if consciousness, like intelligence, is participatory—something that emerges between beings rather than belonging to individual minds?
Through careful attention to soundscape, we might become aware of conversations happening in frequencies we can't access directly. Through slowing our temporal experience, we might perceive subtle communications usually invisible to human time scales. Our human umwelt can expand not by gaining new senses, but by developing new qualities of attention within the senses we have.
The Art of Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment requires a different stance than analysis. When we encounter animals in their environments, we face a choice: document their behavior or create space for response. Slowing down our own rhythms allows us to honor subtleties usually hidden from our temporal umwelt.
Working alongside people who've spent generations in relationship with wild animals—like the Samburu guides I've learned from—reveals how much we miss when we approach animals as objects of study rather than subjects deserving of respect. They point to communications invisible to untrained eyes, relationships that demand acknowledgment rather than explanation, social complexities that call for reverence rather than analysis.
This kind of acknowledgment can't be taught through information transfer. Like the intelligence described in Parts 1 and 2, it emerges through participation, through allowing our own perceptual boundaries to become more responsive.
Consciousness as Field
Perhaps consciousness isn't something individual animals "have" but something they participate in—a field of awareness that includes and connects all sensing beings. When we acknowledge animals through this understanding, the question shifts from "Are they conscious?" to "How can we participate more fully in the larger consciousness we share?"
This changes everything about how we relate to animals. Instead of seeking proof of mind in familiar behaviors, we become curious about forms of awareness utterly unlike our own. Instead of measuring animal intelligence against human standards, we acknowledge intelligence as something larger than any individual species.
John Berger wrote about the "look between animal and man," mourning its disappearance in modern life. But perhaps what we need isn't to recover that look but to develop new forms of encounter—moments where acknowledgment becomes mutual, where the boundary between observer and observed dissolves into shared presence.
A New Framework
This approach offers a framework for conversations about animal consciousness that moves beyond the tired debates about whether animals think or feel. Of course they do. The more important question is how we respond to their thinking and feeling as valid forms of intelligence deserving of respect.
When giraffes navigate darkness, they're not just using superior night vision—they're participating in a form of environmental intelligence that includes spatial awareness, social coordination, and temporal prediction. When elephants coordinate through infrasound, they're not just communicating—they're participating in a collective consciousness that spans vast distances and multiple generations.
Acknowledgment of this kind of intelligence transforms our relationship with the natural world. We stop seeing ourselves as the only conscious beings on a planet of objects and start responding to ourselves as participants in a community of minds, each contributing their unique form of awareness to the larger intelligence of the whole.
But this framework extends beyond interspecies relationships. When we understand intelligence as participatory rather than individual, as integration rather than isolation, the hierarchical structures that separate humans from each other begin to dissolve as well. The model that ranks intelligence—whether between species or between people—becomes not just challenged but nullified.
If consciousness emerges through relationship and environmental attunement, then there can be no hierarchy of minds, only different forms of participation in the larger field of awareness. The professor and the athlete, the Western scientist and the Samburu guide, the human and the elephant—all become collaborators in the ongoing intelligence of the world.
This is what becomes possible when we acknowledge consciousness through the lens of intelligence as integration: not proof or explanation, but response and participation. Not studying consciousness from the outside, but discovering our place within the larger field of awareness that includes us
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*Originally published in Musings, 2025*