Resonant Ways of Being

In the hushed echoes of an ancient forest, where mycelial threads weave stories through the soil, a resonance vibrates. It is not a sound in the conventional sense - no hum or rhythm discernible to the human ear - but a somatic presence, a harmony that underpins the pulse of life. This resonance is a bridge, a living connection, between all beings. Yet, in our modern world, this bridge has frayed, leaving us stranded on islands of abstraction and reason.

For centuries, stories were the sinew binding us to the generative tissues of existence. Myths, those archetypal technologies, were less about gods and heroes and more about ways of being, invitations to resonate with the living cosmos. Pan, the wild god of resonance, once wandered these mythic landscapes, his presence felt in the haunting calls of the forest and the echoing laughter of streams. But as the modern world emerged, Pan faded, and resonance was drowned out by the mechanistic hum of industry and the binary logic of progress.

The death of the old gods signalled not just the end of their worship but the silencing of the intermediary links they embodied - those vibratory forces connecting human consciousness to the more-than-human world. Where Pan’s echo once invited us to listen, modernity demands we look, catalog, and control. In this shift, the universe became mute, a cold machine responding only to human commands, leaving us estranged from the song of creation.

What is Resonance?

To resonate is to align, to sync, to co-vibrate. It is the language of ecosystems, the rhythmic pulse of heartbeats, the harmonic frequencies that tether life to life. Resonance is more than metaphor; it is the fundamental nature of existence. All living beings are oscillators, vibrating in response to their surroundings, drawn to harmonise like musicians in a grand symphony.

In resonance, there is mutual phase-locking - a phenomenon of entrainment where disparate rhythms converge. This is not an abstraction but a deeply embodied experience: the way a forest hums with life as trees, fungi, and microbes synchronise their processes; the way a spoken story breathes life into its listeners, aligning their imaginations with its unfolding. Resonance is what allows stories to move through us, transforming and being transformed, creating a twofold exchange of energy and meaning.

Yet, in a world dominated by extractive narratives - stories that fracture and commodify - the power of resonance is diminished. Words have become hollow, their reverberations lost in the long corridors of supply chains and the endless scroll of digital feeds. We are surrounded by noise, but little that truly resonates.

Stories as Resonant Fields

In oral traditions, stories were alive - breathing, evolving, deeply rooted in the land and its rhythms. They were vessels of resonance, inseparable from the breath that carried them, the bodies that performed them, and the places that shaped them. Aboriginal knowledge systems, for instance, speak of a ‘kinship-mind’, where nothing exists in isolation but emerges from the relationships between things. Here, stories are not static texts but dynamic networks, sustained by the forces of connection that hold creation together.

Writing, with its ossified permanence, introduced a layer of abstraction, separating stories from their living contexts. Over time, this separation deepened, shrinking the parameters of reality to what could be measured, reasoned, and controlled. The resonance of oral storytelling - the vibratory exchange that animates and empowers - was replaced by the linearity of written narratives, which often strip away complexity in favour of coherence.

Yet, resonance persists. It lingers in the soil, where mycelial networks communicate through vibratory signals, connecting vast ecosystems in symphonic harmony. It lives in the chthonic dimensions of our subconscious, where archetypal stories continue to stir, unsettling our fixed realities and opening portals to new ways of seeing.

Pan and the Return of Resonance

Pan, the god of natural sounds and echoes, is a deity of resonance par excellence. His presence is felt through vibration rather than vision - a rustling in the underbrush, a haunting note that reverberates in the soul. To encounter Pan is to be reminded of the invisible forces that connect us to the larger cosmos.

In many ways, Pan’s death at the dawn of the first millennium symbolises the loss of resonance in the modern world. The noises of progress - industrial machinery, digital alerts - have drowned out the subtler frequencies of the natural world. Yet Pan is not gone; he has merely gone quiet, waiting for us to remember how to listen.

Listening is an act of attunement, a re-entrainment with the wild. Walking through a forest, one can feel the resonance of life - a mandala of oscillating fields syncing with each other. Plants, for example, use vibratory communication to harmonise with their environment, creating a collective song that sustains the ecosystem. This is resonance in action: a co-creative process that we, too, can participate in if we let go of the need to dominate and instead learn to dwell.

Toward Resonant Ways of Being

Resonance is not just a phenomenon; it is a way of being. It requires us to move beyond the dialectical traps of modernity - the binary logic of either/or - and embrace the with/within of sensuous knowledge. Resonant stories do not merely describe reality; they unsettle it, inviting us to inhabit its liminal spaces, to breathe with it, and to return transformed.

This is the opposite of what artificial intelligence or colonial narratives offer. These systems of knowledge, disembodied and abstract, enforce a trance-like state that narrows our agency and imagination. By contrast, resonant stories - like fungal spores - travel, adapt, and grow, forming networks of connection that nourish and sustain.

To reclaim resonance is to widen our understanding of what stories are and who can participate in them. It is to honour the voices of the more-than-human world, the deep-time wisdom embedded in soil, water, and air. It is to recognise that we are not separate from the web of life but vibratory threads within it, co-composing the song of existence.

Perhaps the first step is simply to listen: to the whispers of the forest, the hum of mycelium, the echoes of Pan. To attune ourselves to these resonant frequencies is to remember that we, too, are oscillators, pulsing with the rhythm of the cosmos. And in this remembering, we might find our way back to the generative tissue of life, where new stories, alchemical and alive, await their telling.