Our ethos that regeneration is the everyday way of life led to the idea of deconstructing the typical ‘Context, framings and behaviours’ chapter and transforming it into a place-based narrative that looked at seemingly mundane routines centred around care, stewardship and wellbeing.
The vision was to illustrate regeneration rooted in community, along with the daily, seasonal and annual practices that interlink life and livelihood. The interconnectedness of relationships between various entities (individual, community, more-than-human beings, ecology, seasonality, habitat, etc.) that co-exist in a place is key to recognising worldviews and behaviours. Regeneration is a living and evolving way of life, and it manifests as a community that coevolves with the ecosystem it inhabits.
Informed by this intention, we formulated the research direction to encapsulate key questions, such as how this anthology can reflect the living system it seeks to encapsulate. How can we find room for the infinite possibilities and variations of what makes something regenerative? Thus, this chapter serves as a glimpse into the Pluriverse.
Regeneration is not a one-size-fits-all framework or a series of linear steps one must take to attain a goal. It is an enmeshment of lives and processes, vastly intergenerational and deeply contextual. To capture the complexity, the infinite diversity and the continued evolution of ‘Regeneration’ and all it stands for, we envisioned a chapter that steps away from the typical layout and format of a ‘chapter’ in a ‘report’.
Acknowledgement: Nisha Mary Poulose and Lua Couto contributed as early project co-leads during the initial phases of the Anthology's journey. We honour their foundational involvement and vision in shaping its beginnings.
My participation in this research has been both an intellectual inquiry and an inner journey of regeneration. I come from a background of relative privilege in terms of access to education and economic security.
My perspectives and stories in this chapter were inspired by The Ants and the Pen by Idries Shah, a children’s book that illustrates how focusing solely on the mechanics of a phenomenon can prevent us from understanding its true meaning or purpose.
I come to this work as an American from a settler background and as a professional linguist with over a decade of collaborative research on language diversity, ethnobiology and conservation within an academic context.
I write this as a Dutch social sector expat living and working in India, in a culture that is infinitely more diverse than the one in which I grew up in the Netherlands, with layers of meaning that I will never understand.
My participation in this research has been both an intellectual inquiry and an inner journey of regeneration. I come from a background of relative privilege in terms of access to education and economic security. While I have not personally experienced the injustices of dispossession, marginalisation, or exile that many of the communities in this report endure, immersing myself in their worlds has stirred in me a deep mix of pain and hope. Pain, in witnessing how colonial modernity and neoliberal systems perpetuate persistent harmful actions that strip people and ecosystems of dignity; hope, in witnessing gestures of resilience, care, and regeneration that persist despite such suppression.
I write not as a neutral observer but as someone consciously learning to unlearn colonial framings and to attune to regenerative worldviews. I recognise that my interpretations are filtered through my own positionality: one of privilege, but also of responsibility. With humility, I hope this work invites readers to reflect deeply, embody regenerative values in their own contexts, and ensure that regeneration serves communities rather than reproducing colonial patterns.
My perspectives and stories in this chapter were inspired by The Ants and the Pen by Idries Shah, a children’s book that illustrates how focusing solely on the mechanics of a phenomenon can prevent us from understanding its true meaning or purpose. The story follows a group of ants who, after discovering a pen writing on paper, meticulously study its parts and find it's connected to a hand, arm and body. But despite their extensive ‘scientific’ research, they fail to grasp the overarching concept of reading or the meaning of the writing itself, highlighting that information is not the same as knowledge.
How to position my uniquely storied body in a way that tells you where this work comes from and why? I am a queer East Afrikan woman of three lineages who has most recently also been in East Afrika. In each of my lineages, my people have experienced violent (is there any other?) colonial dispossession and displacement from land. In one of my lines, I am of pastoral heritage. These ancestral wounds and ancestral healing inform my Being – my own explorations and intentions towards reweaving relationship with land and Life. My commitments are to Earth, Afrika and ancestrality. I am a process in reindigenisation, exploring and experimenting in alternatives to coloniality, mostly in how we un/learn, as learning shapes the picture of the world we hold and delimits our possibilities. I do not speak from outside, I speak from a movement towards inside, a movement intending to recover, reclaim, re-member the violently dismembered. My writing is witness work, is grief work (and we have such grief debt in the world today), and is Beauty work, where Beauty is a guiding cosmological principle. I storyweave for land, for Life, for my people. I invite you to listen and be moved.
I write this as a Dutch social sector expat living and working in India, in a culture that is infinitely more diverse than the one in which I grew up in the Netherlands, with layers of meaning that I will never understand. I am aware of my privileges and try to be aware of my biases. Any misinterpretation is my own, as are omissions of important aspects that I am not seeing.
In the following section, I will introduce three cases: one deeply Indigenous, rooted in a way of living and growing for 10,000 years, the second on the edge of modernity and tradition, and the third, a futuristic, playful story that could easily take place in the year 2035.