Dr. Laura McCullough

Compassionate Curiosity, Apophatic Storytelling, & the Healing Imagination: The Coordinates of Being

This lyric essay enacts a compassionate curiosity, an apophatic, relational, and imaginative mode of engaging knowledge shaped by a metamodern condition marked by trauma, ecological urgency, and the paradoxical entanglements of science and the arts. Rather than moving toward argument or resolution, and courting uncertainty, it models storification as a way of thinking-feeling into what exceeds the limits of language, an epistemological and ontological praxis in which writing becomes a process and space of discovery, where one comes to know what one did not know one knew until it is written, and in being written, it alters the writer and makes space for change in the world.

Drawing on apophatic storytelling, relational ethics, and what I describe as constellative thinking, the essay proceeds by indirection, circling grief, silence, contradiction, paradox, and the unknowable not as absence but as generative soil, engaging a process in which the writer moves toward and around what resists direct articulation, allowing ambiguity and felt experience to shape meaning, and in doing so relinquishes mastery in favor of participation in mystery; attention and attunement become co-occurring skilled practice and a vulnerable openness to change and “becoming-ness”.