I am tempted to begin this story by telling you who The Being of Becoming is, but a better question to start with is, who are you? As in, who am I? Who are we? That is where I started. 

I had a recurring dream once for years. In it, I was running again and again down a hill. There was something close behind me - a chill, an ache, a vacuum. Somehow, I knew if I just jumped high and let myself fall that the wind would catch me and I would soar high above the fear. I just had to trust that the wind would catch me before I hit pavement. In the dream, I would try, and try to fall, until it was nearly too late, then - just before my face smashed the ground - up, up, and up I’d soar, caught and lifted by the wind. 

That’s how The Being of Becoming started. Well, actually, it started before that. It started in the vacuum. In unsteadiness and an unsettling, quivering question that felt like falling - who am I? Becoming, the wind said. You are becoming. 

How do I become? I asked the wind, but I received no reply. So, I simply kept falling. 

And I fell right into my skin.

My cold, wet skin, and wet cold feet, and shoulders, and hands in a funny looking costume in the middle of the forest. 

Throughout the making of The Being of Becoming I was reading a book, The Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey. In it, I was introduced to Karen Barad and Donna Haraway’s theories about non-human embodied knowledges, diffraction theory, and most influentially, Barads term ‘intra-action’ and Haraways theories of ‘becoming-with’. This quote from Barad was particularly inspiring: “The importance of the body as a performance, rather than a thing, can hardly be overemphasized. Bodies are among the differential performances of the worlds dynamic reconfiguring” (228, 229). Regarding the theory of becoming-with, there is this quote from Katherine Wright, which I pulled from The Multispecies Salons website: “... we become with lives, not bodies, and lives are always connected to worlds”. 

The Being of Becoming is not the pictures of me in the costume at Nahmint Lake, nor is it the costume itself. The Being of Becoming is the gasp I took coming out of that freezing water, it is my numb feet, and the butterflies I feel in my stomach writing this down. The Being of Becoming will evolve as you look at it and as you touch it, and imagine it, feeling it. It will become with and through your lives just as it has with mine.

That said, the costume,  sightings, and video might all be considered catalysts for our collective becoming. 

So once again I am wondering… Who are you? Who am I? Who are we, together, going to become?