My name is Kel and I’m a non-binary 40-something parent, partner, and community organizer. I’ve worked with a number of community organizations over the years focused on everything from local food to mental health. I have spent the last 6 years unschooling my kids, which has been a huge catalyst into exploring non-oppressive ways of living in community with human and non-human co-tenants on this planet. A while back I wrote about my experience in a long form essay, which also became a zine.
I think every day (probably too much) about how to solve some of the big problems of our time and writing helps me organize those thoughts.
I love making functional and accessible art and craft.
I believe in building and supporting alternative economic systems outside the capitalism paradigm.
I align politically with green anarchism: the belief that top down hierarchical systems do not serve the betterment of all.
I believe that there’s a careful balance between action and theory; the balance is important both extrinsically and intrinsically.
I try really hard to decenter myself in the motivation to do good work. It’s actually quite hard.
When I was in my early twenties, I don’t remember when exactly, I created the online handle subsomatic. At the time, I was in the early days of my career as a web designer and I wanted to have a space online to be creative. I had been blogging for a few years under different names so I shifted the blog to a new domain name and created new layouts every few months. The creative expression of web design is something that I’ve lost through corporatization and web standards – I remember many nights staying up too late (too early?) after having been struck with a new layout idea to create. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. (If you’re so inclined, the wayback machine has a partial catalog of designs and posts from subsomatic.com dating back to 2002).
Of course, all this was long before “somatic” was a common term. I had pulled the word from a Prodigy song and just wondered what the word meant:
somatic
sō-măt′ĭk
adjective
- Of, relating to, or affecting the body, especially as distinguished from a body part, the mind, or the environment; corporeal or physical.
- Of or relating to the wall of the body cavity, especially as distinguished from the head, limbs, or viscera.
- Of or relating to the portion of the vertebrate nervous system that regulates voluntary movement.
Based off this definition then, I believed subsomatic to be something that was beneath or below the idea of the somatic self. It was the invisible pieces that affected the body in a less corporeal but nonetheless distinguishable and noticeable way. The term felt spiritual, not in a religious sense but more in a spooky, philosophical sense; or that might just have been the way that I felt when I adopted the handle.
After a hiatus when blogging became not cool anymore and professional web design took over my creative passion, subsomatic is back as a creative outlet.