A Relational Sympoietic Wonder
Dear Friends and Family,
I thought to break from the riddled and apophatic (knowing through negation) language of the past few weeks and share a story today. I hope you’ll see the interplay between wonder and the wondrous, as we turn from an emphasis on unknowing to revealing and an announcement. For you who have been waiting on a next batch of CURAlive, you’ll discover: It’s here!
To each of you, thank you for being here.
With love,
Renée
In the beginning is relation.1
What began as a question in response to a skin cancer lesion on my left shoulder has become (w)holy inquiry. This is not because the skin cancer is no longer there—I am no doubt grateful it is gone. It is because, for the past handful of years, I have been privy to a relational sympoietic wonder.
I have been strangely hushed about this. There are unexpected parallels that call up memories of the ‘chemistry lab’ my father set up at my pleading as a young girl. I would close the door to the world and pretend to make mad science in beakers and test tubes, dreaming all the while that some magic would come about to alchemize liquids into life. I would be swept into a spark of awe, leaping back, mouth wide open, as terrified as I was thrilled, then hiding the whole favor behind a loincloth of silence like Adam, like Eve who ate from the Tree—as if I would come upon something I should not. But I was young and impatient, and still carrying enough of the innocence we come into the world with to have my hopes dashed every Saturday in the winter of my eleventh year when no such alchemy came about.
I soon gave up in favor of a ‘geology lab’ and outdoor jaunts come spring to do ‘fieldwork’. I would burrow like a mole into ravines on the forest floor nearby where it seemed the Earth had broken, then hollowed into itself. I would pull fool’s gold from the walls of the bare-naked brokenness. And I would follow the water’s edge of a dam-fluctuating lake to peer into deep crevices of cracked red clay visible only when the dam was in full flow, emptying a lake that once was not there. Twenty-six Mile Creek, they called it. I would swear—but not really because it was forbidden—that I could see the ink-dark beginning in those Earth-bear cleavages.
Little has changed in the mind of me, as you no doubt surmise if you’ve been reading these letters long enough. I still long to peer into the beginning and wonder more than I can say about the first whispers of life. Only now, I wonder, too, about endings. But about five years ago, I happened onto something.
I happened onto something about which I can no doubt take no credit. It was there already, or there in wait, and I was an accidental bystander sending off for a fortnight a mélange of botanicals brewing in water and a taste of local honey, not unlike humans have been doing for eons. Only, I came to see it in a whole new light.
Everything bears out the belief that the [vegetal] and animal are descended from a common ancestor which united the tendencies of both in a rudimentary state.
. . .
They say you can’t ferment tea with honey. They say the natural antibiotics in the bees’ brew will kill the microbes inclined to make a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), more commonly called ‘the mother’, the hallmark of a healthy tea ferment. But I had a hunch the raw honey carried a living memory the microbes would recall, a memory lost to the heating and drying and purifying and refining of cane, and so, I did not heed what they say.
They say you should not mess with a long tradition of fermenting black tea. But I was as disinclined to tradition as I was inclined to it when I started brewing other dried leaves with roots and shoots in the old way. And so, I plied at the folds of the way things like to be with the way things could be to effect a new kind of fermented tea.
They say once heat hits green tea you should drink it within a day or two because all the reasons you drink green tea besides the flavor are sensitive to heat. Volatile compounds dissipate. This made sense, and so I took heed. I would have to come at this another way.
I hoped to preserve those volatile nutrients because I was homing in on a serum to apply to skin. I had been researching ingredients and method for a handful of years. The idea was to ward off the combined oxidative and inflammatory effects of the sun and nurture the skin’s less-than-robust immune system that comes with age, now more inclined toward oxidative stress and low-grade inflammation, now losing some of the plenitude of the skin’s microbiome.
I brewed some tea—basic black tea sweetened with a touch of honey. After letting it cool, I poured the tea over a mother that had formed from an opened bottle of kombucha I had let sit for weeks. After two weeks in the dark, the tea birthed a new mother. I poured some off, added more honey and a combination of dry leaves and this time, dried flowers, then sent this jar off with a prayer. I was breaking with tradition now. Yet, two more weeks in the dark birthed another mother. I did this a few more times, adding different botanicals each time. There were some ‘failures’. With each, the whole process would begin anew. But something was taking place, and I became more a witness than an endeavoring alchemist.
It seems to us most probable that the animal cell and the [vegetal] cell derived from a common stock, and that the first living organisms oscillated between the [vegetal] and animal form, participating in both at once.2
. . .
I came to understand what happened in the dark by what grew or didn’t grow on top of the tea. What would commonly be called dead leaves and roots and shoots would, by some favor, come to life when mixed with honey and time. Liquid would craft something akin to skin.
Countless airborne (friendly) bacteria and yeasts who happened to be passing by would settle and sip on the ink-dark water and in turn, by some magic, make the stuff of plant-cell walls. Cellulose as thick as an orange peel, sometimes thicker, would float on top of the tea. Cellulose (C6H10O5)n is what structures the entire domain of plants.
Do you see? The (good) germs3 from two domains of the tree of life—microbes and yeast together sipping on honey and plant-infused water—were making the stuff of the plant domain. It dawned on me with a rush of wow! the germinality of what we call germs. I was bearing witness to the making of the rudiments of one life form by the conversation between two others. What’s more, the mother had a look and feel of human skin. This got me thinking.
. . .
There is no real manifestation of life . . . that does not show us, in a rudimentary or latent state, the characters of the other manifestations.4
. . .
To deliver nutrients into skin, the serum would need to be more like the cell membrane of human skin. It would need a base of liquid fat but with a low enough pH to match that of the skin. What would happen if I added plant oils to the tea ferment? Would the kombucha mother die?
I decided to give it a try. I poured off some of the botanical brew, ‘harvested’ one of the mothers, added the oil extractions, and sent this jar off with a prayer—every time with a prayer, recognizing that life was giving birth to itself in these jars. Two weeks in the dark, and this brew fell apart, separating and coddling into layers and tiny globules of fat. In hindsight, I mistook what I saw. Even so, the mother survived and not only that, looked robust. This told me the conversation was hearty in the glass jar. It was a promise and the beginning of what, in time and many tries, would become CURAlive re-generative serum.
In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.5
. . .
When I was a young woman, I was given the task of drawing pointillistic sketches of cellular membranes in a comparative biology class. I failed miserably. Sitting at my desk for hours, I grew weary of the task, which I began to see as pointless, and so, I took some shortcuts, neglecting to pointillate enough.
A few tiny lines here and there would be ok, I thought. But this would not do. She wanted dots. Nothing more. That fat red f on the page—and + mark for exclamatory measure or to keep me a breath shy of despair; who can say?—was the beginning of something.
Suddenly, I could see. Those figurative lines, however small, suffocated the give and take of life. The cell ‘wall’ is no wall at all. It is a living breathing membranous ‘skin’; it is ceaseless self fabric/ation; it is tireless conversation; it is the en/unfolding of sympoietic possibility.
A cell membrane is the beginning of matter’s becoming. The very first cell to appear would become the common ancestor we all share. As life became more and more complex, cells gave way to tissues and ever more complex bodies. Still, at the outer reach of each form—cell, tissue, body—there is a living, breathing membranous inter-change, and on both sides, the force of life.
. . .
Over these years, I have come to see skin not so much as an outer shell prone to bumps and blemishes, rashes and lesions, but as a conversation between self and world, world and self. And I have come to understand that those uncomely expressions are a hunger for nourishing relation more so than an assault by the elements and that the more we carry within us the message of assault, the more the body will express this message.
I have come to understand, not as an idea but as a living lab, that plants and friendly microbes speak a language the human body understands . . . and requires. It has become evident in the activities of a glass jar that we all come from one common impulse of self fabric/ating cellular life. That life is what we disaffectionately call germ, the common ancestor to every living expression. That ancestor, still today, nourishes, educates, and regulates the activities of us all—from plant to pterodactyl to sturgeon to human. Even the clouds in the sky are enlivened to release rain by the suddenly synchronous cues from a fount of single-celled bacterial flora.
In the beginning is relation.
It is through sympoietic relation amongst life forms that CURAlive serum came to be and lives on in each bottle. And it is through relation that it finds its way to skin of every age and color and gender. By keeping CURAlive relational, we keep it living and intimate, bottling limited numbers each batch.
Batch #6 went into bottles last week.
I am especially excited about this new batch because it widens the horizons of relation. CURAlive would not be possible without Kerri. It would not have made it past Batch #1 without Traci. And it is now reformulated with a potent extract of wild-harvested calendula oil, which comes by way of
, whom many of us on Substack know and love.(I’m early outing [with her permission] Kimberly’s forthcoming Face Fluf with hopes that Kimberly will share a bit more in comments).
New CURAlive labels go to print next week. While we wait . . .
I am taking pre-orders until March 15.
To you whose Batch #5 bottles have run dry, you can now replenish.
To you who’ve asked to try and I said, Wait, something new is coming! something new is here! and you can now order.
To you who are curious and have questions, please ask in comments, and I will gladly respond.
Pre-orders receive free shipping in the US and a ‘something new’ discount of 15%.
Annual Paid Subscribers to Beyond the Comfort Zone receive an additional
20% off.
Pre-orders are by email only. reneeeliphd@gmail.com
(I’m not savvy enough to do multiple discounts & free shipping on Etsy! After March 15, I’ll provide the Etsy link.)
Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. (New York: NY, Scribner Classics, 1958), p. 31.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), p. 125.
Germs are taken here to mean earliest forms of life: microorganisms. In the same way, germinality refers to the tendency of life to generate more life.
Bergson, p. 131.
Ibid., p. 31.
Wild experimentation!!! It's provocative to say the least - in terms of how I can relate to my own 'motives' of food!
(In healing chronic illness - my in-gestion has been limited)
I've lately been able to include homemade Sourdough in my diet - and this relation with my starter has developed a deeper intimacy to food.
Yet, this here - from you - takes that inner/outer co-operation with my 'Vasilisa' (starters name) to another layer of intimacy.
Bless you
Renée I loved this ! I love your deep relationship with the very base lines of nature, the fact that you look deeper into the traditions of beliefs and question them wholly.
Indeed, I am envious (kindly so because we each have our different strengths and understandings) of your knowledge. I have played - with my lack of knowledge it can be cooled nothing else - with SCOBY fabrication for years. As a child I made ‘potions’ with petals and plants, roots and leaves, stealing from the my mothers always well stocked pantry any number of liquids to add to help preserve my always failing experiments. Mostly these sprouted mould and would be discarded, but some developed, a SCOBY. I had no idea what this was at such a tender age and considered it a failure also… years passed and I grew.
In my late twenties I was given a SCOBY for making my own kombucha and it wasn’t until I saw this soft living creature that I realised what I had created as a child. My experiments were revisited once again. With much success, Now I have several, one is many years old, I call her grandma - for surely it must be feminine to create so many babies? She was made from apple cider vinegar, it took many years for the vinegary taste to dissipate but she is now, in my humble and unlearned opinion acceptable in flavour.
I am intrigued by your use of honey, for it is true to say I have had no reasonable successes myself here and yet I am still convinced that this shouldn’t be so. I must and will begin my playful experiments again! You say you believe honey has a living memory that could be recalled… this, quite apart from everything, excites me immensely.
And, here, after reading almost all I find a name I know, not just a name but a truly admirable name, why am I not surprised that you have worked with Kimberly! Of course two brilliant ladies would find each other - my delight is doubled!
With love Renée- thank you xx