Here’s some cozy emergent morning tea. Whenever I’m navigating mythic plurality while speaking of wholeness, someone typically asks… “oh! but how can lineage not be linear?” I mean, it’s a fair question if we’re standing inside the monomyth, Aristotle’s ladders, and the Socratic fixation on clear beginnings and tidy endings. But I’m trying really hard to swim against (and with) these strong currents while working with an ontology that is relational and fractal. So lineage, in this frame, isn’t a line at all. It’s a field of resonances.

Look at the mycelial networks under a forest, or the root systems of ancient trees. In these places, life doesn’t move in straight lines. Life moves through webs and through what I call multidimensional nodes:

• roots touching roots

• signals traveling through soil

• nutrients shared across species

• invisible threads shaping visible worlds

Linear genealogy gives us chronology, and it totally missed the mark when it ignored relationality. It also gives us descent yet crickets when it comes to resonance. Sequence… consequentality… “this then that” thinking has been taken to the moon and back! But where is emergence? When we shift to “rhizomatic” genealogy, lineage stops behaving like a ladder and starts behaving like a web which is very much in the ethos of sonar communication, sacred exchange, and improvisation. Kind of like a wound dressing; it knows how to bind, hold, breathe, and repair beautifully (which spider webs have been literally used as wound dressing). And because linear lineage is a timeline and certainly useful for history (especially those holding the pen) and leaves out so many dimensions… is precisely why this ontology needs to be in relationship with something deeper. Rhizomatic lineage or some would call interconnected lineage.

Rhizomatic lineage is a constellation which can be defined as a cluster of nodal relationships that illuminate one another through proximity, resonance, and pattern. In my studious work, lineage doesn’t ask “who came first,”. It will ask who it’s in relation with…why it’s a relationship…how it’s in relationship with others… where this relationship goes (and come from). Its stops asking the chicken why it crossed the road…completely. It’s not “what did I inherit,” but what am I entangled with? So I’m over hear sitting with my cup of tea… with lineage as a forest of worlds, continuously sensing, speaking, and remaking one another; tending to rupture and growing new meaning across the sondages and excavations we find ourselves in.

Provecho!