Disability, otherheartedness, environmentalism, and movement.
I don’t feel a need to do quads to connect with my kithtype, as martens can shift between plantigrade and digitigrade stances with ease. But it’s easier to reassure myself that other alterhumans can relate to the ache of not being able to do quads (my solidarity with all of them) than it is to think about how much disability limits the way I express the other aspects of my otherheartedness. Sure, it affects my everything, but this isn’t meant to be a vent of disability in my life, more so an exploration of how it specifically mixes with being alterhuman.
I crave movement. Running, climbing, swimming, ducking & weaving, digging & burrowing. I want to connect with the world around me in deeper & more tangible ways than imagination can bring me. I want to help my environment grow, be an active participant in the preservation and documentation of life itself. I want my hands to touch the earth as human claws and marten hands, and help close wounds. I think of myself as intrinsically human, even as I am marten, because I love being a species that can love so much, and take that love and care for the world around me. Not as a “Shepard”, a wiser man above it all, like some religions have perpetuated into Western culture, but instead as an equal part in it all, a community member, doing my part in maintaining the land we all live on. And humans can take on so many positive roles, just as we can take on so many negative ones. We just have to choose to do so. I want to choose to do so.
As a human, part of my mind is inclined to be marten, or mustelid, or animal. Being human made me alterhuman. That’s not true for all (or even most) alterhumans, but a joy for me of being human is to have a mind capable of such complex connections and understanding. I am otherhearted because humans have such range.
I’ve said before “if I was truly a Pine Marten, I’d wish to be human so I could make art.” But the fact is, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t know art. I wouldn’t miss it. I wouldn’t miss having human hands to create and gesture and help others. I’d only know what I know, and what I’d know would be animal. It’s a good world. I wish every one who wishes for it can reach it. But being otherhearted, so deeply tied to humanity, I don’t want to choose blissful oblivion, even if the reward is bliss in existing as the animal part of myself. The difference between my experience and others is just that one difference; “part of myself” where for others it is the “whole of themselves”. I could never judge someone for it. I intrinsically understand why the complete lack of connection to humanity is appealing, because other people aren’t human. They’re animals. An animal doesn’t want to be human. But I am human, and I am shot through with marten, and some marten is peeking out the sides, and sometimes the face that’s mine to wear is marten too. But the way I love flows through a human mind and a human body and surrounds humanity so tightly. I wouldn’t want to untangle it all, to have one part human and one part “other”. To throw away one piece would be to abandon the whole.
I can’t do the work I love right now. The work of service to the world around me, the conservation, the labor. The work that makes me feel marten, that makes me feel human, that makes me feel earthen and content and fulfilled, but I can build my strength every day with that love as the goal. Rebuilding the human vessel that is so sick and that I so joyfully live in, with hopes one day its catastrophic damage can become as insignificant as a sore limb; still limping, still compensating with other means, but upright & capable. Able to limp my way to the things I miss. Able to climb, even if badly, able to swim, even if shortly, able to run, even if slowly. Let me rebuild myself until I can touch the earth again with less consequences. Let me grow strong enough and healthy enough to mirror the love that the earth & nature & humanity have shown me so I can echo it back into all of it. Let me exist in the joyful fluidity, the in-betweens of human and animal and advocate and participant and benefactor and beneficiary.
Let me become a worker on the branch of the natural systems that tie us together. Let me make it better for you, and for me, and for futures we prepare for. Let me rest, repair, and then embody. Let me aspire to the unremarkable aspects of growth and change. I want to be a part of it. I will try. And then I will try again.