More Realms

Back to Autistic Realms…

Tag: ethodivergence

  • Ethodivergent Hearth Building: A Relational Neuroqueering Community Practice

    Ethodivergent Hearth Building: A Relational Neuroqueering Community Practice

    What would it mean to build a hearth that welcomes not only diverse minds, but diverse ways of sensing, relating, and becoming across human and more-than-human lives?


    This blog emerged from a conversation with Stimpunks during our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project planning, where we explored what it truly means to create spaces that sustain neurodivergent people, rather than simply include. We found ourselves returning to the image of the hearth, the Cavendish Campfire, a warm, relational centre where ethodivergence is held, honoured, and co-regulated. This piece reflects on ethodivergent hearth building as a neuroqueer practice of community care and more-than-human kinship.

    Ethodivergence speaks to the richness of relational, sensory, and affective difference. It’s about how we move, connect, feel, and attend, how our rhythms and responses don’t always align with dominant norms. Drawing from Ombre Tarragnat’s (2025) concept of ethodiversity, this expands neurodiversity beyond the human brain into relational ecology, honouring the full range of our inter-being ways with the world across all species of living and non-living things.

    More-than-human refers to the interconnected ecology of life that includes not just humans but also animals, plants, weather systems, seasons, fungi, rivers, stones, moon cycles, and sensory environments. It’s a way of recognising that our ways of being, knowing, and healing are shaped by more than just other humans and that these entanglements are vital, not peripheral.

    The hearth is a warm centre, a gathering space, a site of return and regeneration. It holds history, presence, and possibility, it’s where people tend the fire together, share stories, and learn from one another, a rhythm of shared becoming. To build ethodivergent hearths is to make room for new forms of kinship, ones that honour slow attunement, deep presence, and non-normative ways of sensing, being, and knowing. It’s an invitation to live otherwise, interdependently, in communities shaped not by conformity but by relational integrity and care.

    Beyond its physical form, the hearth also holds sensory and emotional resonance, it is a centre, part of the basecamp, that may not be an actual campfire fire or a room, but a feeling. Sometimes it lives in the softness of our favourite weighted blanket, the texture of moss under our fingertips, the familiar paths we may return to in the woods or our local park, the stillness shared with our chosen family and pets. In ethodivergent hearth building, these sensory and relational centres become vital anchors, places to return to without performance, where our difference is held with warmth rather than shame or stigma.

    Cavendish Spaces and ethodivergent hearths are built slowly, relationally, through co-regulation, sensory consideration, and access intimacy. There is room for fallow rest time, stim time, quiet time, time that bends to our bodyminds rather than our bodyminds being twisted into neuronormative time constraints that lead us into burnout and mental ill health. These are spaces that reject extraction and standardisation and instead, they welcome divergence and difference through shared rhythms, bodily autonomy, and relational consent, psychological and sensory safety. Cavendish spaces are like ethodivergent hearths for the soul where people gather not to fix or scrutinise, but to sit alongside, validate, and co-exist.

    To think about and create ethodivergent hearths is to imagine what it means to design for difference, to centre care and safety for those of us often left out in the cold, on the edges and in the liminal spaces. It’s about making space for monotropic attention, sensory flow, and nonlinear emotional rhythms. It’s about pacing together through co-regulation, glimmers, multi-modal ways of communicating and attuned silence. It’s about giving permission for slow grief, spiralling joy, or messy recovery.

    Ethodivergent hearth building means:

    • Not centring only human and normative ways of relating and knowing.
    • Honouring sensory, affective, and relational exchanges between people and natural or material environments.
    • Acknowledging that Autistic, disabled, and neurodivergent people often form deep attunements with non-human kin, sometimes more sustaining than traditional social models.

    It might look like mutual aid networks, or shared rest practices, it might mean building more flexible time-structures that go beyond our clocks. This kind of hearth holds our queertime, our difference, our interdependence, without trying to fix, mask, explain, or justify. It’s a way of living gently with difference, and tending the fire that can help sustain us.

    Ethodivergent hearth building invites a shift from thinking of community as exclusively human, towards something more ecological, embodied, and expansive, a shared hearth where difference is relational, and care ripples outward beyond species boundaries. Ethodivergent hearth building is a neuroqueer practice of relational community rooted in presence, divergence, and shared becoming where everyone can thrive.

  • Mingling with the universe: Autistic Perception

    Mingling with the universe: Autistic Perception

    This section of the poem from Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, speaks to me deeply and resonates with my Autistic experience of meaning as something felt, sensed, and lived through, especially in solitude, sensory immersion, and more-than-human connection.



    There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
    There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
    There is society where none intrudes,
    By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
    I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
    From these our interviews, in which I steal
    From all I may be, or have been before,
    To mingle with the Universe, and feel
    What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

    Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto iv



    Autistic meaning-making is not abstract, but an embodied attunement, a “mingling with the Universe” that resists neuronormative expression yet pulses with emotional and sensory intensity.

    As Erin Manning wrote, “Autistics…are hypersensorial, alive not only to the presence of the other, but more importantly, to the absence of category. They live the differential, feeling into the world’s quality of emergence. Bodying, for them, is worlding.”

    Autistic experience often resists the default social scripts and expected ways of making sense of things, our thoughts are less linear, more constellation-y and rhizomatic. They may appear chaotic and not always make sense to others as the connections are happening deep inside us.

    Meaning for me, often arises between things, in the liminal spaces, in the felt sensory and emotional moments, a subtle change of a sound, the shifting pattern of sunlight on leaves and my relationship with living things that don’t speak in human words, and also a more natural attunement to people who also can’t or prefer not to speak verbally.

    Like Lord Byron’s “rapture on the lonely shore,” the Autistic sense of meaning-making may emerge most powerfully in the absence of human intrusion, words and voices, not from isolation, but from a deep, open presence with what is. It is why we may crave time alone, in our dens, out in nature, fully immersed in stimming activities and other forms of communication and connecting online. Alone time is so often stigmatised as being antisocial, but it is a different kind of sociality, and may be more meaningful for many Autistic people and is something to value and allow ourselves the time to lean into in what ever way we want and helps us feel good. It may be less about escaping and more about finding belonging in other ways and belonging otherwise.

    Autistic people often experience a heightened resonance and connection with our environment, this may not always be with people, but with animals, objects, places, atmospheres and sensory experiences. This is not a deficit of sociality, but perhaps a re-routing of relational (monotropic) attention toward the more-than-human, an ethodivergent way of being. (Ombre Tarragnat, 2025)

    I have written extensively about liminality, the in-between spaces where many Autistic people feel they may be stuck, but I think it is in these liminal spaces and states, where our bodyminds “mingles with the Universe,” that we can find a quiet calm that helps regulate, bring comfort and a meaning that allows us to emerge from the liminal or delight in the dwelling moments of the unspoken between realms. It is in liminality that Autistic perception becomes a kind of aesthetic felt knowing. It may not be easily verbalised or put into human words, “what I can ne’er express” but it is real, it emerges and can be captured in art, poetry and nature, in our online community spaces and is valid.

    “There is society where none intrudes”.

    “There is pleasure in the pathless woods” when we diverge from neuronormative expectations and follow our inner compasses.

    Allowing ourselves to feel, wholly and completely and merge with our environment is a way of creating our own language, a bodymind way of being that doesn’t rely on human words and can be felt and understood in other ways………we need to create our own worlds, reworld, neuroqueer – so we can survive together in a world dominated by neuronormativity and find our own place of belonging.

    Image of frozen droplet of water in snow Text: "HAD I NOT CREATED MY WHOLE WORLD. I WOULD CERTAINLY HAVE DIED IN OTHER PEOPLE'S" ANAIS NIN

    Sharing early morning thoughts after having read more of Erin Manning‘s beautiful work last night ‘A Feel for Others Feeling You‘ (2025), about challenging normative orientations around the concept of mirror-touch synaesthesia and touch (inspired by the DeafBlind Protactile community and work of John Lee Clark).

    “To feel the touch of the world is to feel the difference the world brings to all it comes into contact with, and this contact cannot be separated from all that worlds. To be a body is to be in contact. To touch is to feel the differential.”
    (Erin Manning, 2025)

    Thoughts welcome – I am hoping to set up an alternative space to explore through Autistic Realms into More Realms to share, discuss and collaborate on things like this with anyone who is interested alongside CASY Cultural Autism Studies at Yale and Stimpunks communities.

    Ocean Waves



    Listen to Ocean Waves by Adriel Jeremiah Wool:

    “Ocean Waves by Adriel J Wool” is a meditation in ambient flow states. Introduced with a special tuning that allows the brain to touch and feel more true pythagorean intervals of musicality.

    The flows and textures of nature follow patterns that resonate with the human body through its ability to hear sound.

    The nervous system is a microcosm, however it relates in scale to the power of nature, and is comforted within her crests.

    To breathe more slowly and more deeply. The sound spectrum is given in the powerful release of deep sound energy, very much like the Earth’s beautiful shores.”

    “Ocean Waves by Adriel J. Wool isn’t a recording of the ocean, it’s a fractal composition of the nature of the ocean. Modulated into swells, the rhythm evokes the massive release of great ocean waves and the more humble release of the human breath“.
    Ryan Boren (Stimpunks)