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  • We Are Star Stuff: Being Autistic, Ethodiversity and Cosmic Connection

    We Are Star Stuff: Being Autistic, Ethodiversity and Cosmic Connection



    My physical body is your physical body, and just as the sun and stars are present in you, they are also present in me. […] we are all made of stars.

    Vietnamese Buddhist monk: Thich Nhat Hanh

    I find it genuinely awe-inspiring to know that the atoms that make up your body, the oxygen in your lungs, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood were forged inside stars that died before our planet even existed. Not metaphorically, we are actually, literally, made of stars!

    A 2017 survey of 150,000 stars confirmed that humans and our galaxy share around 97% of the same kinds of atoms, and that the six elements essential to life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur — are woven right through the Milky Way (Howell, 2017). We are a living part of the cosmos.

    I have been thinking about this a lot, and what it may mean to us as Autistic people, and it is something that is evolving in conversations within the CASY Autistic Physics group and my recent collaborative work with Stimpunks. There is something about being made of stardust that resonates far deeper than a scientific fact for me.

    As an Autistic person, I have always felt that the boundaries between myself and the world are more porous than I was told they should be. Everything feels entangled, I am deeply influenced by my environment in ways that go beyond what neuronormative frameworks tend to account for. Time, my past and present merge and move together; my pull towards moss and mushrooms, and my interest in water, are more than a ‘like’ or form of regulation or sensory relief, they feel like I am becoming more attuned to something deeper and more essential, something I can only describe as parts of my soul recognising what they actually belong to.

    The elements in your body right now came into being through some of the most violent events in the universe. The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen in every breath, were forged in the cores of massive stars and released in supernovae: entire stars compressing their whole lives into a single catastrophic release. In that rupture, what had been locked inside was scattered outward, making things possible that could never have existed before.

    Animated square graphic with a glowing purple, pink, and teal orb slowly morphing and rotating against a star-filled galaxy background. White text reads: “The Star Stuff Of Being Autistic.” Below: “The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself — in every color, key, and frequency of neurodiversity.” Stimpunks and Autistic Realms Logos appear in the lower corners.

    Many of us, as neurodivergent people and from marginalised communities, may know something about transformation through rupture, about how the most difficult passages of burnout and exclusion can forge something that simply could not have existed any other way. As I have written, these periods of burnout seem to change me at my core. I never fully recover; the deepest burnouts feel like a seismic shift has taken place. My whole sensory system and way of relating to the world transforms.

    For Autistic people, the idea of a fixed, bounded, separate self may sit uneasily, we are always in flow, always fluid and always responsive to everything around us. The theory of Monotropism developed by Murray, Lesser, and Lawson (2005) may help explain this. It describes the way Autistic (and may be ADHD/ AuDHD) attention tends to move in deep, singular currents rather than spreading across many channels at once. It is a different way of connecting: like matter drawn into a stellar core, our attention concentrates and transforms, and, like the star, what forms in that depth eventually moves outward and can expand, making new connections and new ways of being.

    Ethodiversity is a concept that feels important here. Originally coined by Cordero-Rivera (2017) in ecology and evolutionary science, and developed by Tarragnat (2025) into a framework for thinking about human and nonhuman life together, it refers to the full range of behavioural and existential ways of being across species, not just neurological difference, but the diversity of how living beings sense, connect, relate, move through, and respond to the world. As Autistic people, our particular way of being is shaped by, and in turn shapes, everything around us, perhaps more intensely for some than others. We are not separate from the wider pattern of the cosmos; we are very much a part of how the pattern moves, interdependent on each other and everything around us.

    For many Autistic people, this deep attunement to the world, to its textures, its moods, its patterns may be felt intensely. However, it is so often misread, pathologised, or masked out of our existence simply to fit into spaces that were not built for us. When we are in environments where we feel genuinely safe, something can shift. We are able to be our full selves, more open, more present to what the world is actually offering us —the things that bring us comfort, joy, and we can meet them on our own terms. That is what a real connection actually feels like, and we deserve spaces where it’s possible.

    That sense of belonging and connection can ripple outwards. adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy (2017) that small patterns replicate into large ones, that the local and the cosmic are always doing the same thing at different scales. She centres the people that dominant systems have tried to cast as anomalies, Black, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, poor and names what many of us may already sense: that what looks like deviation is often a more honest expression of how complex living systems actually work. Emergence doesn’t need conformity; it needs difference. A universe that could only produce one kind of star would not have produced us or our world as we know it.

    We are all made of stardust, and our entanglement, our porousness, our deep attunement to the world and cosmos around us are things we should all embrace, regardless of any labels or diagnoses we may or may not have.

    Stimpunks, whose work on star stuff has been part of the thinking woven through this piece and through our collaborative work sums it up nicely:



    The cosmos is within us, and we are a way for the universe to know itself — in every colour, key, and frequency of neurodiversity

    LYSS: https://stimpunks.org/star-stuff/



    “What more do you want?
    The ingredients in our bodies have been assembled in the hearts of long-dead stars over billions of years and have assembled themselves into temporary structures that can think and explore…”
    Brian Cox



    Love You Down To Your Star Stuff



    References



    American Museum of Natural History. (n.d.). We are stardust. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/the-universe/stars/a-spectacular-stellar-finale/we-are-stardust

    Boren, R. Stimpunks Foundation. (2026). Love you down to your star stuff. https://stimpunks.org/star-stuff/

    brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.

    Cordero-Rivera, A. (2017). Behavioral diversity (ethodiversity): A neglected level in the study of biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 5, Article 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2017.00007

    Howell, E. (2017, January 10). Humans really are made of stardust, and a new study proves it. Space.com. https://www.space.com/35276-humans-made-of-stardust-galaxy-life-elements.html

    Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398

    Tarragnat, O. (2025, February 25). What is ethodiversity? https://ombretarragnat.com/2025/02/25/what-is-ethodiversity/

  • 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)


  • Mossy Minds & Monotropism

    Mossy Minds & Monotropism

    “Attention without feeling,
    is only a report.”

    Mary Oliver — Upstream: Selected Essays (2016)

    The quote, “Attention without feeling, is only a report.” from Mary Oliver — Upstream: Selected Essays (2016) resonates with me as a deeply monotropic person. It summarises what happens whenever I find myself pulled into a moment so fully and immersively that the boundary between noticing and becoming begins to dissolve, and time melts away. These moments will be different for everyone, they happen when our monotropic bodyminds are pulled towards something, it returns when I am in woodlands and when I see moss, fungi, flowing water.

    There’s something about moss, it’s soft resilience, its quiet deep greenness of a million shades, the way it persists and thrives on forgotten land and inbetween stones, on forest floors and brings old things back to a new life. Moss doesn’t demand to be seen, but when we do look, really look, really feel, and really give ourselves time to sense and be with moss, it offers a different kind of presence and an almost different kind of knowing and connecting and Autistic Joy.

    I am exploring the idea of moss as an invitation to consider monotropism, ethodiversity, and neuroqueering our spaces as a way of creating belonging. Drawing from the work of Popova, M. (2023). The Magic of Moss and what it teaches us about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales , Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others, alongside my emerging neuroqueer and holographic ideas, I am considering if moss (like mushrooms and water which I have written about before!), could offer not only a symbol and metaphor for neurodivergent thriving but a methodology to reclaim creative practice and ways of being that resists the fast, extractive modes of dominant neuronormative culture.

    Note: These thoughts are evolving through discussions in the community spaces I am engaging with such as; Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice by KR Moorhead, Marta Rose and Meg Max, Barbara Melville’s Writing the Dawn nature writing workshop and my engagement with Stimpunks, CASY and Monotropism discord community, amongst others………

    So………….

    More monotropic musings…….

    Monotropism: Deep Attention, Embodied Feelings

    Monotropism (Murray et al, 2005) is a neuro-affirming theory of Autistic experiences. It describes a tendency to enter flow states of deeply focused attention, to move inward towards just one or a few connected interests, sensations, or patterns at anyone time and to dwell there. This is not just a cognitive style; for myself being monotropic it is a whole-bodymind sensory way of being. For many Autistic/ADHD people, monotropism underpins and helps to make sense of our sensory experiences, ways of learning, communication styles, and creativity. If you are Autistic / ADHD the theory of monotropism may resonate and help explain how you process and relate to the world.

    Find out more about monotropism

    In environments dominated by neuronormativity ,which are structured around multitasking, high demands, quick-switching of attention tunnels, and surface level engagement, monotropic people can be often misread as being obsessive, inflexible, or disengaged. If we reframe this deep-focus not as deficit, but as capacity and energy, it offers a more affirming lens of Autistic experiences as being a form of attunement with attentional resources, a way of giving attention feelingly and holistically.

    For me, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss (2003) exemplifies monotropic attentional ecology. Her writing spirals and notices what others may overlook such as the micro-patterns of bryophytes (group name for any non vascular, rootless plants like moss) , the webs that cover forest floors and emerge through cracks and over sleeping objects. Kimmerer just doesn’t describe moss she enters into relationship with nature, her science and writing is guided by care, her noticing is lived, it feels very monotropic much like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2023).

    To attend like this, monotropically, with feeling and deep attention is not just to extract facts, but to stay present with complexity, multiplicity and connect with nature and our environment rhizomatically, completely and become deeply absorbed in greenness and texture. As Mary Oliver reminds us, “without feeling, attention becomes mere reporting“. For some monotropic people their perception may offer a different kind of report / blog writing/ creative experience, one filled with sensory details and emotional resonance, there are no barriers between the body and the environment, the moss, nature.

    Nature Positivity: We Are Not Outside the Ecosystem

    Nature positivity was a term only recently introduced to me on Barbara Melville’s writing course. It made me think about how as a neurodivergent person I am not disconnected from nature but often deeply and almost painfully attuned to it, inseparable, we are a part of nature. We do not need to be brought back into the natural world; we need to be recognised as already being part of it. Our sensory experiences, our flows of attention, our non-normative experience of time, memories and rhythms, aren’t deviations from a natural or ‘normative’ baseline, they can be seen to be part of biodiversity and our wider ethodivergent ways of being (Tarragnat, 2025).

    Ethodiversity is a term developed by Ombre Tarragnat (2025) to describe the variability of behavioural and existential styles within and across species. Ethodiversity invites us to move beyond a purely neurological model of divergence and into a more-than-human framework of difference. It reminds us that there are many ways to live, relate, and thrive not only for humans, but for all living things.

    Moss embodies ethodiverse wisdom. It rejects hierarchy and human time, it forms webs, it’s value is in its interconnectedness and the spaces inbetween. We can learn from all non-human beings and living things, we are all interconnected and if we give our selves more time to tune in to the natural world we could perhaps can expand our ways of thinking, not just as humans for humans, but as part of nature. We can help to recreate a world where every living thing can thrive (non-human and human). It creates a space to think about our relationship with the wider planet we are in, the importance of environmental sustainability, not just focusing on our human-centric needs (Solarpunk ideas).

    Find out about ethodiversity

    In this sense, moss, like many other aspects of nature, becomes a kind of kin, we are interdependent. I think lots of us are trying to survive from the edges, in the liminal spaces, trying to grow in shade and darkness through cycles of burnout. I live in the dark-mode, underground settings of Discord servers, it is where I feel at home, inbetween the reality of life outside my front door and where I really feel safe and a sense of belonging. Moss grows across ruins, rooftops, gravestones and inbetween the places and objects people normally tread over or overlook. It softens hard spaces and it survives and thrives on it’s own terms, in it’s own way much like our online community spaces.

    Mushrooms and fungi, like moss, offer a metaphor of hope and an opportunity to think about how we can create a life from capitalist ruins which invalidates and overlooks neurodivergent needs and potential. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World reminds us that life persists in the ruins of Capitalism, not in spite of disruption, but through it and can flourish through adversity. Like matsutake mushrooms thriving in disturbed forests, neurodivergent people often live in the edges of systems, through adversity, in fractured spiral time, outside of centralised blueprints and neuronormativity, however hard these systems try to contain us and pressure us to mask. This resonates deeply with monotropic ways of being, our ability to create our own Autistic rhizomes and communities, how our senses sometimes form unlikely but radically resilient connections in overlooked spaces.

    Tsing’s emphasis on precarity, interdependence, and multi-species assemblages mirrors the sintered ways neurodivergent communities form: not through uniformity, but through shared friction and feeling. Our creative practices become more than self-expression, they are part of what Tsing calls the “arts of noticing,” where we document life not for control or mastery, but as a way of staying with complexity and multiplicity and to create shared meaning. It is a way to honour our entangled, emergent, sensory ways of being as ecologically vital. It reminds us that even in fragmented systems and broken ground, we can reclaim ourselves, find connection, and grow into something whole, be together and create something new.

    Sintering

    In Sintering: Neurodivergent Community Building (2025), I explored the metaphor of sintering. Sintering is the process through which individual snow grains gradually begin to bond. Tiny necks form between them, bridging the gaps, making the snowpack stronger, more resilient, and more resistant to collapse.

    In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers this as a metaphor for collective becoming. “Sintering is a joining,” she writes, “It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other… Sintering is bonding, it’s building coalitions with your neighbours” (p. 18).

    This analogy resonates deeply with my own experiences of the neurodivergent community and the Autistic rhizome. Many of us begin our journeys alone trying to discover our real identity under the layers of masking and internalised ableism, realising we are caught in systems not made for us and that is why life has felt SO hard! Discovering I was Autistic was life changing for me. In my 40’s I suddenly had access to a whole world of new vocabulary to describe my experiences. It has been through connecting with other neurodivergent people through various online communities and sharing stories that my life has begun to make more sense. When we find each other across difference, across shared experiences, we can start to build bridges, rhizomes. Through conversation, care, and solidarity, we can begin to sinter.

    Neuroqueering from the Liminal

    In Neuroqueering Liminal Spaces (2024), I wrote about the spaces where categorisation breaks down between identities, between disciplines, between states of being. Neurodivergent people often find ourselves in these thresholds, not quite fitting in, living in the margins, I am suggesting that liminality can be a fertile and exciting place to neuroqueer and evolve from.

    Find out about neuroqueer theory

    Moss is liminal, it exists between. It mediates, connects and holds and brings things together. In many ways it could be seen to reflect what neuroqueer creative practice can be, something that isn’t fixed, something that moves away from dominant frameworks, it is textured and radically relational and multidimensional.

    To write from moss is to write from the in-between spaces, attune to our environment, to feel safe and at home. It is to resist linearity, binary ways, hierarchy and to embrace multiplicity, to value the process of becoming and connecting.

    Moss offers a model for neurodivergent thriving, one that honours attention with feeling, presence without performance and growth without urgency. It teaches us to notice differently, to value slowness, to dwell in the cracks and embrace neuroqueering, monotropic felt time.

    Our creative practice can be moss-like, it can be sintered through our shared stories and experiences. To attend with feeling and lean into monotropic time can be a lifeline for many people who are experiencing burnout. It is a way of reclaiming our authentic ways of resting and being.


    Monotropic attention, a different ecology


    In the Writing the Dawn workshop I took part in this week, Barb Melville encouraged us to begin our writing with a nature-positive message. She asked us, not just what we notice, but why it matters. For me, moss represents a kind of quiet kinship, it is soft, slow and often overlooked and fills me with sensory joy. As a neurodivergent person, I see myself reflected in its persistence, its texture, its need for quiet, shaded places to thrive. In protecting nature and moss we are also protecting our sensory environments, the liminal spaces, and the overlooked ecologies that support neurodivergent ways of being and feeling safe.

    This reflection can become call to action which Barbara invited us to think about. It enables us to think about reimagining ways of connecting, not just with nature but in the way we create our communities, educational spaces and care settings. We need to design practices that honour differences, not pathologise. Like moss, neurodivergent people thrive with more time and space, gentleness and connection in spaces like our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.

    My home is in the mossy, liminal spaces that we create together, in our reaching toward one another. Our strength is in radical resilience and sintering, our refusal to face the world alone, valuing interdependence and not conforming to harmful systems based only on neuronormative values. 

    Radical resilience does not come from hardness or conformity, but from mossy softness, it comes from flow and fungi like rhizomatic community networks and the cumulative strength of many unique connections forming bonds to offer support to each other. As Bruno Lataur summarised, “Learning to live in the ruins of capitalism means learning to do without the notion of projects and, finally, moving on to an attentive description of situations that cannot easily change scale…..With her dog Cayenne, Donna Haraway had proved how far one could take analysis of relations between species. With her matsutake (mushroom), Anna Tsing proves that we can go still further, modifying not only the landscape to be described but what we should expect of meticulous description.”

    Mossy, messy, monotropic ways


    Nature-positive writing what ever the focus – mushrooms, moss, trees, water can be a radical act of reclamation, helping us grow cultures and communities that are ecologically aware. Neurodivergent spaces are rhizomatic, soft, mossy, fluid, flowy, webby and spirally and entangled. They allow space for dwelling, noticing, interdependence and omnidirectional growth.

    ‘To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into light.’
    pg 155 (Tsing)

    Let’s keep growing spaces that honour slowness, texture, and sensory ways of knowing and feeling, where monotropic ways of being are not just accepted, but celebrated. Spaces where infodumping, deep focus, stimming, and sensory richness are recognised as meaningful ways of connecting and building interdependence between humans, non-human beings and our wider environments.

    Monotropism lets us sink into and experience the world with our full-bodymind presence, not just noticing, but flowing and feeling with the world in ways that bring resonance, validation, and a sense of belonging. Mary Oliver wrote “Attention without feeling, is only a report.”, for monotropic people how we use our attentional resources helps to explain everything, it is how we experience life in all it’s joyful mossy, messy ways.



    “Next time the bus is late,
    take those waiting minutes to
    look around for signs of life…..
    amidst the noise and fumes
    and elbowing crowds,
    there is some small reasurance in the
    moss between the cracks.”
    (Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, pg 105)

    References & Further Reading