In celebration of Valentine’s, this blog explores the intersections of Alain de Botton’s theory of love, Scott Thurston’s Kinepoetics, and ethics of care to unfurl how attentiveness, movement and care shape our relational ways of knowing and being in the world. This text holds that knowledge emerges through lived experience, bodily perception, and interaction with the world. Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology reminds us that knowing is always entangled with being. Our experience of love, language, movement, and creativity does not happen in isolation from the world but within and through it. Enactivism, drawing from Varela et al. (1991) and Thompson (2007), suggests that cognition itself is relational, arising through reciprocity between self and environment. This lens further supports the notion that love and creative ecological practices are not merely expressions but modes of knowing - ways of being in the world that enact meaning through presence, attention, and response.
At the heart of this inquiry is the concept of Suchness, drawn from both Mahayana Buddhism and dance scholarship. Beatrice Lane Suzuki (1959) defines Suchness (tathata) as the ability to perceive things as they are, beyond our subjective interpretations, accepting them in their essence. Within dance and ecological arts, Suchness manifests as an attunement to the full presence of an experience - the sum of its qualities rather than its representation. It is not merely about movement or inscription but about allowing creative processes to unfold in their most unfiltered, elemental state.
To speak of love and to speak of creative ecological practice is to engage in parallel conversations - each concerned with the nature of relation, attentiveness, with how we come to know and be known through acts of perception and response. Love, as Alain de Botton suggests, is not a stable condition but an ongoing negotiation of self and other - so too is creative ecological practice. It grows into a continual engagement with and between site, body, material, time and imagination, in which the boundaries between human and nonhuman, observer and observed, are rendered porous.
Camilla Nelson’s Human Language-Making as Environmental Praxis (2016) provides further grounding for this relational epistemology, arguing that language, like love and creative practice, is not merely a representational tool but an environmental act, a process by which we shape and are shaped by the world. She critiques the tendency to separate writing as cognitive process from writing as cultural practice, emphasizing instead that language emerges through mutual influence, entanglement, and material interaction with the environment. This resonates with Thurston’s Kinepoetics (2020), which positions movement and writing as inseparable, each shaping the other through embodied exchange.
For Thurston, the inseparability of movement and language means each carries the trace of the other. Kinepoetics describes a relational practice that moves through and with the body, recognising that meaning is never singular but always gestural, shaped by rhythm, energy, and reciprocity. If love, as de Botton suggests, is the art of sustained seeing, then Kinepoetics asks how we move in relation to what we see, feel, and invite in - how our writing, our movements, and our creative acts are bound within the oscillations of presence and perception.
From an ethics of care perspective, this relationality is central. Love, whether for a person, a landscape, or an artistic practice, is not simply about recognition, but responsibility. Care theorists such as Joan Tronto and Nel Noddings argue that care is not just an emotion but a practice, requiring attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness. That is to say, to care, is to acknowledge the vulnerability and interdependence of all things. Creative ecological practice demands such an ethic. It is a way of moving through the world that does not impose or extract but listens and gives back.
Within the transitional space of movement and stillness, word and land, presence and trace, both love and creativity become intelligible as ways of being in the world, modes of encounter that shape and reshape the contours of experience. To engage in creative ecological practice through art, movement, sound, and performance, is to attend to the world with the same carefulness that love demands. It is to be drawn into a dialogue with place, to listen deeply, to allow oneself to be altered by the encounter.
Attentiveness and the Poetics of Place
For de Botton, love is a practice of seeing - of looking, again and again, at the beloved with fresh eyes, resisting the impulse to fix them in time and space. In this, love is an act of curiosity, of sustained attention, of recognising that the other is always more than the sum of our assumptions. Creative ecological practice demands something similar - a refusal to impose form, an openness to the unfolding of process, and a sensitivity to the fluctuations of land, weather, and presence.
My collaborative work at Bakestonedale Moor alongside artist Sabine Kussmaul, and poet, mover Scott Thurston, is marked by the ethic of attentiveness. Here, movement, writing, and mark-making emerge as acts of deep mapping, practices of slow looking and deep listening that allow the land to speak in its own rhythms. The creative gesture is not an imposition but a response, an engagement with the textures and temporalities of place. To walk, to dance, to trace a line upon the space of a page - each of these a process of witnessing, a method of inscription that acknowledges the agency of the world beyond the human.
Thurston’s Kinepoetics echoes this, proposing that writing and movement when combined, enact an aesthetic effect of pairing the similar with the not exactly the same. This echoes the poetic nature of love - a space in which two bodies, two minds, two worlds meet but do not collapse into each other. There is always a gap, a breath, a necessary incompleteness that allows relation to remain dynamic.
Care, in this context, is about allowing this difference - tending to the complexities of the other without reducing them to something fully knowable. As María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) suggests, care is not always comfortable. It involves difficulty, uncertainty, and the willingness to be unsettled. In this way, care aligns with creative ecological practice. Both insist upon an ethic of deep attention, of staying with complexity rather than resolving it.
Mutual Transformation: The Ecology of Encounter
Love, de Botton suggests, is not simply an experience but an education (2019). To love is to be transformed, to allow the presence of the other to shift the parameters of one’s being. Bernard Andrieu’s Body Ecology (2018) articulates a similar principle within the context of creative ecological practice, describing how sustained immersion in place alters the sensorium, attuning the body to new forms of perception and relation.
In this sense, creative ecological practice is not a solitary act but a relational process, one in which the artist’s body is shaped by the land just as the artist’s presence marks the land. The movement of a dancer across rock, the pressure of charcoal against paper, the imprint of a body upon grass - each of these gestures testifies to a reciprocity, a mutual becoming. To make is to be made, to inscribe is to be inscribed.
Nelson echoes this with her claim that language itself is an ecological process, emerging through interaction rather than pre-existing as a stable form. She critiques the idea that language merely describes the world, instead positioning it as something that actively reconfigures relationships between self and environment.
In our collaborative enquiry on Bakestonedale Moor, this process of forming and informing was described as intermodal transfer, where one form of creative expression moves through another, altering both. This movement between modalities, dance becoming text, text becoming gesture, becoming mark, is akin to the way love shifts between language and touch, between silence and articulation. Love, like art, requires a willingness to be carried by forces beyond the self.
From an epistemological standpoint, this transformation is phenomenological. It is knowledge that does not precede experience but arises through it. Love and creative ecological practice are ways of knowing that emerge through relational movement, through acts of care and response.
Love as Ecological Practice
To love is to be in relation. To create, within an ecological framework, is also to be in relation. In both cases, there is an acknowledgement of interdependence, an understanding that self and world are co-constitutive, that meaning emerges not in isolation but through encounter.
Suchness invites us to engage with love and creativity without resistance - without attempting to extract, define, or contain. It is a state of openness, where both movement and language unfold as they are, rather than being forced into pre-existing frameworks of meaning. In writing, this might mean abandoning formal academic structures in favour of embodied expression, in dance, it might mean relinquishing choreographic control in favour of improvisation, in love, it might mean surrendering the need for certainty and embracing the shifting nature of connection.
Nelson’s work supports this by dissolving the boundary between human, language, and environment, arguing that these are not separate entities but interwoven processes. Just as love does not exist in a vacuum but is practiced through relational engagement, language does not exist apart from the world but is performed through the embodied act of writing. Thurston’s Kinepoetics captures this movement, describing the way meaning cycles through activation, translation, structure, and integration, constantly in flux.
From an ethics of care and phenomenological perspective, this process is one of responsibility and embodied knowledge. To love a person, a landscape, or an artistic process, is not just to feel but to act, to respond, to sustain. Care theorists remind us that care is always situated, always specific - it does not seek universal truths but attends to the textures of the moment, to the needs of the present. Creative ecological practice also operates within this frame. It is a practice of tending, of adapting, and of moving with rather than against.
But more than this, love, creative ecological practice, and language-making are enactive processes - they bring forth worlds through interaction, attention, and embodied engagement. The enactive approach suggests that cognition is not a process of representing a pre-existing world but of actively participating in its emergence. Meaning does not pre-exist. It is not waiting to be discovered. Rather, it arises through our embodied encounters with other(s).
In this view, love is not something that exists independently - it is co-created through action, attention, and care. Similarly, creative ecological practice is not merely documenting nature, remaining at distance, but it encourages engagement - immersion - moving through and with it, allowing it to shape the artefact in return.
Thus, to love - is to inhabit the world enactively, to acknowledge that knowing is always participatory, that we are shaped by what we attend to. Love and creative ecological practice do not map a pre-existing reality but create new ways of being within it, new ways of moving through it, new ways of writing and responding. They resist fixity, demanding patience, openness, and a willingness to be undone and remade. They ask us to listen, to attend, to let go of mastery and step into the flux of relation.
And in doing so, they remind us that love, language, and ecological art are not simply about making sense of the world, but about bringing the world into being anew, through gesture, word, and movement - through an enactive practice of Suchness and care.
The Thread Between Us (For RS)
You linger, not in thought,
but in the marrow of my movement…
a quiet hum beneath skin stretched by years,
a rhythm I cannot unlearn.
We are something older than words,
a connection that breathes beyond time.
The thread between us does not fray;
it stretches, it holds,
softly steady in the stillness and the storm.
Your presence is a gentle language,
spoken through the weight of shared moments.
Each step forward is carved
from the quiet courage of being…
of rising to meet what comes,
of finding strength in what remains.
What is love, if not this?
A quiet persistence,
a beauty found in the unfolding,
in the way our edges meet and hold,
in the space between hope and knowing.
We are earth and flame,
water tracing pathways unseen,
a horizon that whispers possibility.
Our bond is not still;
it moves, trembles,
settles like roots, like sky.
In the tender bending of all we’ve carried,
we find a luminous grace…
the strength to continue,
the courage to embrace what’s next,
the quiet joy
of knowing this connection endures.
References
Andrieu, B., Parry, J., Porrovecchio, A., & Sirost, O. (Eds.). (2018). Body Ecology and Emersive Leisure (1st ed.). Routledge.
de Botton, A. (2006). Essays in Love. United Kingdom: Picador.
de Botton, A. (2019). The School of Life: An Emotional Education. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (1974). London: New York: Routledge & K. Paul; Humanities Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
Suzuki, B., L. (1959) Mahayana Buddhism. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thurston, S. (2020) Phrases Towards a Kinepoetics. Contraband.
Varela, F., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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