The care commons that Mariame Kaba is building — the one Selma James spent her life making visible, that Federici traced back through the witch trials — is not only economic. It is epistemic. People who care for each other learn to read each other. They develop a shared vocabulary, a way of knowing that cannot be transferred to someone who wasn't there. The knowledge lives in the relationship. No individual holds it.
This is what the enclosure destroyed when it enclosed care. Not only the labor. The knowing.
Silvia Federici calls it re-enchanting the world. The disenchantment was not a natural process. It was a political project. The witch was not burned because medieval people were superstitious and Renaissance people were not. The witch was burned because she maintained a relationship to the land, to the body, to the cycles of birth and death and season, that made her community less dependent on the emerging market. She knew things — about plants, illness, birth, grief — the market could not sell. Given freely. Embedded in relationship rather than procedure. You could not extract the knowledge from her and sell it as a service. You could only destroy it or absorb it.
The disenchantment of the world is the enclosure of that knowing.
The re-enchantment of the world is its recovery.
We thought we were making up silly little voices for the birds.
We had always loved them. Watching was easy to drop into — an endless puzzle of cute little fluffs, never work, always a game. So when Jon Young suggested, on a CD, that we listen as if they were actually talking, we did. We filled the gaps in our knowledge with hypotheses — little phrases that crystallized our guesses about what was going on. Narrative weaves the thread of awareness; the silly voices held the practice open.
The silliness was the protection. Take it too seriously and you go heavy. If you're heavy, you cannot keep up with the birds.
Then the guesses began to fit.
You do this when you're learning to birdwatch. You hear a sound you can't identify, and you reach for language, and what comes out is faintly ridiculous — the Carolina wren sounds like it's saying teakettle teakettle teakettle, or the Eastern towhee is calling drink your teaaaa. You feel slightly embarrassed about this. Mnemonics for children. Training wheels.
But something else was happening.
We were learning to attend. Attention, given consistently and with genuine curiosity, opens a channel. Not metaphorically. The channel is real. Behavioral on both ends. Reciprocal. The birds get as close to you as they feel comfortable. And we began to notice, over months of practice, that when we addressed them — kindly, directly, as one might address a neighbor — they became more comfortable. More present. The distance closed.
As we tried to understand them, they understood us.
We were in Ravenna Park in Seattle — an Olmsted design, a park built so the city could hold a forest — where we had been going to practice. We do most of our birding by ear.
The crows. We heard them as we always did. But the quality had changed — something excited, agitated, upset in a way I hadn't recognized before. We had been learning to feel what they were feeling, not just to listen and analyze. And what we were feeling was: something is here.
We decided to look.
There was a cloud of them — many crows, hanging in trees, swooping and diving and calling, making a sustained ruckus. And at the center of it was an owl. A barred owl. The first owl we had ever seen in daylight.
I do not know exactly when the shift happened from hearing and analyzing to reading the feeling. The crow cloud over the barred owl was one moment — the discovery that a feeling could be transmitted across species, amplified and broadcast, as legible across the gap as a shout. The robin a few months later was the confirmation: nothing like a crow acoustically, but the same quality of excitement and agitation and upset. The feeling was the same. The channel was the same. The owl was in the same direction the robin was looking.
Reading the birds was never only about the calls. Their patterns — even their presence, even their absence — tell you what a place is. What unsettles me in the suburbs is the silence where the woodpeckers should be. Absence reads. No woodpeckers means the residents cut their trees the moment they begin to die — and a dying tree is where the life is, the insects, the soft wood. No snags, no woodpeckers. No old woodpecker holes, no owls to nest in them. No rotting wood, no chickadees working it. Lawn where the shrubs should be, no sparrows. The whole web reads from a single absence. So the suburbs feel eerie to me — like talking to someone who can only say the same few phrases, worn down to a loop. Step back into the forest and it is like coming home: every absence turned back into a presence.
We had not been taught this. We had practiced our way into it.
Once you are in, you cannot fully leave. The world does not go back to being a backdrop. The crow is not decoration. The robin is not a pleasant accompaniment to your walk. They are telling you something, specifically, about what is happening in a place you cannot see. This is information. You begin to use it. You begin to depend on it. You discover you are part of a network of attention that was always there, operating at frequencies you had not been tuned to receive.
Erin notices space. I notice systems.
She reads the substrate, the ground everything is shaped by, and shapes. The particular quality of light in a hedgerow at dusk. The way a pond edge holds silence differently than open water. The feeling of a habitat before you can name what's in it. Through her attention to space I have access to the social field — the habitus, the shared body-knowledge of a place — that my system-thinking moves too fast to feel. She slows me down into the actual ground.
I see the processes: the relationship between the drought upstream and the water level of the creek, the reason the hawk circles this field rather than that one, the shape of the territory a pair of great horned owls have established and how I can infer the nest location from the pattern of their calls. Through my attention to systems she has access to spaces she couldn't find on the surface — spaces hidden inside processes, or too large to see without the conceptual frame.
What we see together is not the sum of what we see separately. It is a different kind of seeing. We inhabit a commons of perception. Neither of us built it alone. Neither of us owns it. It requires the difference between us to function. Our singularities are the condition of the shared thing, not obstacles to it.
This is also what Simondon means by the pre-individual field. Shared knowing that emerges from genuine encounter between different perceivers, each bringing what the other cannot access. The commons of perception is as real as the commons of land. It can be built. It can be cultivated. It can be enclosed.
It is enclosed every time the curriculum decides there is only one correct answer. Every time the performance review substitutes measurable output for genuine contact. Every time the meeting runs a script that produces consensus rather than encounter. The enclosure of perception is the impoverishment of the collective mind. We live inside it so thoroughly we have forgotten what unenclosed feels like.
The birds remember.
Not metaphorically. The doves in our yard greet us differently than they greet the neighbors. The finches, wrens, and house sparrows do not flush at our approach the way they flush at strangers. The bluejays announce us. The squirrels watch us with a different posture. The grackles, when they come through in season, treat us as known terrain. The animals around the house recognize us — individually — and respond to us individually, because we have addressed them, individually, for years. We talk to them. They notice.
Corvids, famously, hold human faces for years and pass the information to their young. Other beings remember in shorter arcs. And some forms of memory exceed any single body — the recognition passes between organisms, between generations, between species. Memory here goes transorganic. The living world keeps track of who has paid attention, who has spoken kindly, who has thrown the rock, who has walked past five hundred times without looking up.
You are already in that ledger. The only question is what you will write next to your name.
Eldritch originally meant: of the supernatural, the strange, the unearthly. But in Old English the root is elf-kingdom — not horror but the other country, the one adjacent to this one, accessed through the wrong door or the lucky stumble. Not the absence of nature but a different nature. Hybrid. Otherworldly in the sense that it belongs to a world continuous with this one but not reducible to it.
The things we have done with the mind through information technology and through psychedelics are eldritch in this older sense. Not unnatural — a new nature. We have extended perception into frequencies no organism has ever had access to: the electromagnetic spectrum visualized, the microbiome characterized, the neural correlates of experience mapped. We have also discovered that consciousness, given certain compounds, opens onto something that reads as larger than itself — not a fantasy but a contact, an encounter with a field that the ordinary mind is too busy managing its own coherence to notice.
This is not the mysticism of the credulous. This is the report of every tradition that ever developed a systematic practice of sustained attention — meditation, tracking, ceremony, psychedelics, grief-work, deep nature immersion. They describe the same encounter in different vocabularies: the field is alive, it is attentive, it reads you while you are reading it. The reciprocity that Erin and I discovered in the hedgerow at dusk is the same reciprocity the San hunter knows in the Kalahari, the same that Abram learned from the Nepali shaman in Kathmandu, the same that every intact sense culture has preserved and that the disenchantment project has systematically destroyed.
We need the wisdom of the ancient shamans — and anyone else who can stand the Far Outside — because they maintained the practice through the burning. They are the living continuity of the knowing the enclosure tried to destroy.
This is also why we need each other. The Far Outside requires a companion. Not because you can't go alone — you can, and sometimes must — but because what you find there needs to be received by someone who is not you, or it cannot be fully real. Prechtel says it directly: the soul's gift is not for the soul that carries it. It is for the community that receives it. The shaman returns from the underground not to keep what they found, but because there are people on the surface who need it. The direction of travel is always: back.
Here is what re-enchantment is not.
It is not the belief that everything is nice. The animated world contains predation, parasitism, disease, and death. The crow broadcasting the owl's location is alarmed. The alarm is real. The owl is dangerous to the robin's eggs. The re-enchanted world is not a world without violence or loss or the specific cruelty of things eating each other. It is a world in which those things are legible. The crow's alarm is information. The owl's presence is a signal. The pattern of who is alarmed and who is hunting and who is hidden tells you something true about the specific place you are standing.
The disenchanted world is not a world without violence. It is a world in which violence has been removed from legibility — in which the violence of the enclosure is called progress, the violence of the market is called efficiency, the violence of the extracted outside is called development. The enchantment that was destroyed was not an illusion of harmony. It was a form of knowing that made the actual conditions of life legible to the people living in them. That is what made response possible.
Re-enchantment is the recovery of that legibility.
You cannot protect what you cannot imagine losing. You cannot imagine losing what you have never met. The environmental movement's crisis is partly this: not that people don't care, but that the thing they care about is increasingly abstract. A statistic. A projection. A graph. You cannot grieve a graph. You can grieve a meadow you have walked through every morning, whose specific birds you know, whose specific smell you carry in your body. The relationship makes the loss real. The loss being real makes action possible.
This is not sentimentality. This is the epistemology of care.
A practice, offered in the spirit of the grimoire rather than the curriculum. What follows is not a set of techniques. It is ceremony — the ancient form of paying attention.
Find something alive that is not you — a bird, a tree, a creek, a crow, a worm turning in the soil after rain. Give it your undivided attention for longer than feels comfortable. Do not reach for your phone, your field guide, your identification app. Sit with not-knowing, and keep looking.
The baseline is simpler than you think. You are entering someone else's space. They were here before you. Your role is guest, not director — and as a guest, your first obligation is to do no harm. Move slowly. Make no sudden movements. Speak quietly if at all. Don't reach.
This is their territory. They are your hosts.
Address it, if you can do so without feeling entirely ridiculous. Not performatively — you don't need to make a speech. As you might acknowledge a neighbor you are passing on the sidewalk. A nod. A word. Something that communicates: I see that you are here.
Notice what happens next.
This is not a guarantee. The bird may leave. The tree will not respond in any way you can immediately measure. The creek doesn't care whether you've acknowledged it. You are not trying to produce a result. You are restoring a channel that has been closed by the habit of treating the living world as backdrop.
The practice continues in their response. Watch what happens after you've acknowledged them — whether you spoke, nodded, or simply stopped and let your attention rest on them.
The bird may ignore you. That's information. The bird may look at you directly. That's different information. If they're tense, don't assume you've disturbed them: they're probably picking up on your tension. Relax first. Watch what follows.
This is how the channel opens — not by announcing yourself, but by reading what comes back and responding to it. Reading and responding. Over time you learn to tell alarm from curiosity, discomfort from ease. You stop being something that happens to them and become something they can navigate. Shared space, attended to mutually, across the species line.
The channel, once opened, stays open. Not through effort — through practice, which is a different thing. Effort pushes. Practice builds. What you are building is the perceptual commons: the capacity to attend to a world that is attending to you, and to find, in that reciprocity, a form of knowing that no individual alone can produce.
This is what it may look like when the channel opens.
We had known they were there — trackers know — but we had not laid eyes on them. Then one afternoon, when the water was low, something in the corner of my eye: a sheen. I turned instinctively. A chunky body, shuffling and snuffling among old oyster shells. The coat said otter, but the shape was wrong — too small, too round, too waddly. A muskrat. Frankly adorable. We stopped — walk, conversation, everything — and stood there for fifteen or twenty minutes while it went about its business. Time flows differently in the wild, and the wild is often not very far from you at all.
After that, we knew where to look. There are at least two of them now. A small constructed wetland nearby — a triumph in its own right. We check it periodically. We hope they have a burrow, a good winter, babies.
They were always there. Something changed when they showed themselves. Something in the texture of happenstance.
The witch knew the plant's name — not the Latin, the plant's own name, the one it answered to. She knew which root cooled fever and which would stop a heart, and she knew it the way you know a neighbor's temperament: by years of showing up. The enclosure project tried her for that knowledge. What it could not tolerate was not what she knew. It was who she had learned it from.
The zanjero walked the acequia before anyone else was awake. He knew every foot of the ditch by sound — where the water quickened meant a blockage upstream; where it went quiet, someone had opened their gate early. He was not managing infrastructure. He was maintaining a conversation between that water and that land, a conversation four hundred years old, and his job was to keep it going.
Typson Yunkaporta, in Sand Talk, puts it directly: "The crocodile is not an abstract factor in an algorithm, but a sentient being who observed you the first time and will be waiting for you the second time." That is the shift — from the living world as backdrop, passive and processable, to the living world as a party to a relationship. It already has a read on you. The only question is what you know about it.
You knew this once too, before the disenchantment project convinced you it was silly. The silliness was the armor. The armor was the wisdom. Play is the name real wisdom hides behind. The knowing is still there, waiting to be addressed kindly and directly, as you would address a neighbor.
Start there. The rest of the grammar arrives on its own.