Spring 2026
Vol. 35 No. 2

Bridging Worlds cover

Cover art by Gary Newman and Karen Jaenke

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Bridging Worlds

Karen Jaenke and Jürgen Werner Kremer, Editors

The contributors to the issue “Bridging Worlds” find their socio-cultural location within the Western world, yet they seek to bridge to sustainable Indigenous paradigms. Indigenous cosmologies are relational ethico-onto-epistemologies, which matter ever so urgently as the Western reductionist and materialist metaphysics acts out a repetition compulsion of failure to care for all beings on this Earth. Westerners who make forays into Indigenous ways of knowing and being obviously cannot claim Indigeneity in the sense of living or having grown up in a world dedicated to radical reciprocity and implicit or explicit values of sustainability. Yet folks of Western mind can intentionally adopt certain transformative practices (personal, communal, and activist) that potentially shift the well-boundaried masterful individualistic self, enshrined in the West and centrally implicated in its poly-crisis, towards more a porous way of being in intimate and deep relationality and conversation with Life. Reversing the conquering, masterful attitude to a receptive listening one offers an initial step towards remembrance of relationality and interdependence in the profound Indigenous sense, as it is lived to this day by aboriginal peoples all over this world. It asserts the continued presence as well as the remembrance of a decolonial imaginary that manifests in various acts of resistance to the dominant modern narrative and its practices.

The authors of this issue adopt different touchpoints, or “preferences,” that serve as bridges into more permeable or relational ways of perceiving and being. Cultivating a relationship to one’s preference is a way to acknowledge our ethical socio-ecological responsibilities in the co-creation of the realities we live in. According to some traditional teachings, we each are naturally drawn to certain “preferences”—something in this world that calls to us, activating our interest and even fascination. Within physics, preferences are like the “strange attractor” of chaos theory, or within the language of analytical psychology, “the call of the soul’s desire”. The preference is something that gives one a sense of purpose; it acts as a motivating force, naturally bringing pleasure or fulfillment. By attending to our intrinsic preferences within the socio-cultural world we live in, and by developing consistent attentional practices within relationality to tend to that aspect of the world that calls out to us, we can begin to find our way in a traditional manner, that is, in the way of reciprocity and balancing ourselves in the web of life.

So our authors followed a trail of breadcrumbs, leading through the forest into an ancient way of knowing that is embodied by Indigenous peoples the world over to this day. Ultimately, the trail leads us to revise the story of modernity and its twin colonialism (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) and address the imbalances and calamities we presently are confronted with. The underlying principle is: by attending in a disciplined manner to the specificity and depth of one’s preference, a complex world of interconnections may be revealed. A single thread in the web of life can become a sacred calling that leads into the intricacies of the entire network! In other words, the underlying patterns of relationships central to the workings of the universe reveal themselves through a single thread when followed with consistency and relational reverence. Thus, through the specificity of a single deeply-held preference, the circuitry of the whole can be known.

When a deeply respectful stance is adopted towards one’s preference, living presences in nature become communicative partners. When adopting profound respect for the intelligence dwelling within nature—whether the elements of earth or water; or the minds of plants and animals; or the archetypal spirit world of dreams, visions, and ritual—then this respect becomes a bridge into ecological intimacy and entanglement with the web of life. Following one’s preference, then, becomes an initial foray into the relational and interdependent world of Indigenous peoples, bringing shifts in attentional awareness and consciousness processes, while restoring our human calling to be critical caretakers of biodiversity. This is a remembrance of our interrelational capacities, as it were, the remembrance of indigenous roots.

The authors represented here embody different preferences—dreams, plant medicine, the element of water, ritual practices, and the dreaming body—as pathways of personal wisdom. One’s preference can also manifest as all-encompassing passion to understand some facet of the universe, including the psychological universe—such as the difference between the way the Western self is constructed and inhabited, and the formation of self in native contexts.

The practice of attending to one’s preference, in all its consequence, offers a methodology for people of Western mind for returning to and remembering indigenous ways of knowing and being. The consequence of attending deeply to one’s preference includes reaching for a rational-emotive receptivity that opens into processes of relationality. But to offer a wider framework for why this approach and its fruits are significant, we broadly consider three distinct processes, or configurations of human consciousness throughout our human presence on the planet. While these processes are commonly placed into linear evolutionary schemata in Western thinking (implying the exceptionality and superiority of modernity), the emphasis and assertion here is on structures or processes of consciousness that may be either active or hidden as potential.

Editors’ Introduction

Karen Jaenke and Jürgen Werner Kremer

Dreaming of a Plant Spirit

Mary Gomes and Victoria Brekelmans

Healing From Natural Disasters With Ritual

Sandra Alstrand

Reflections on Violence: Dreaming into the Collective

Karen Jaenke

Holy Water: An Autoethnography of Learning From Water on a Transformative Path

Michelle Boyle

The Dreambody as a Path out of Western Dissociation

Karen Jaenke