This deeply resonates, especially the distinction between “absolute politics” and “flow politics.”

Something that occurred to me yesterday while explaining honeybee democracy to my husband, sitting in front of our hive, watching the bees dance, was the question of the somatic dimension of democracy, something that feels almost entirely missing from modern political culture.

The hive reaches coherence through embodied signaling, attunement, responsiveness, and relational sensing in real time. There are many dances, communicating many options, and over time, they begin dancing together, reaching accord based on the information and experience each is operating from. Their intelligence emerges through resonance.

Reading this, I’m thinking about how much democratic capacity may depend on our ability to stay embodied enough to receive real-time feedback from both the world around us and our own nervous systems. Sometimes those responses are attunement to reality, sometimes they are habituated trauma responses, but both contain information about the larger system at hand. Without that embodied awareness, the living relationship, with the public, and with reality, is not possible.