Intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) is an ancient and reemergent way of knowing with promising implications for ameliorating environmental destruction and healing troubled humans. Yet IIC processes are poorly understood and inherently extend beyond the purview of Western education's rational ways of knowing. The author practiced intuitive interspecies communication with Trees and other nonhumans to examine how love might enable transrational knowledges through IIC collaborations.
This research orients from a deeply relational worldview and a subjectivist epistemology, modified to account for multispecies subjectivity. The project involved 20 outdoor IIC encounters, framed here as an intimate ethnography of multispecies encounters.
This project reports on the key themes: (1) IIC processes conflicted with the process of transcribing fieldnotes, (2) IIC supported relational, settler, physical and epistemological healing; (3) IIC generated ever-expanding learning processes and (4) IIC appeared to be facilitated by a particular form of luminous love, which enables a shared space that is not dependent upon the material realities.
This research offers a relational, multispecies approach to comprehending love and the possible role of love in facilitating IIC. It identifies the core conflict between Western-style educational institutions and transrational epistemologies.
