Villager Inspiration – Jose “Bosque” Reimondez
@Foresnauts (Youtube, Insta, Substack)
and Liveo Games
Click Here For direct Access to my Youtube Channel
Hello all. My name is Bosque and I’ve been a part of Rooted for almost a year now and I’m very, very happy I signed up.
It’s been, like: “somatic movement; yes, grief; oh yes, singing and dancing; oh hell yes!’’
So I have been grateful to have this space, especially during a semi-hermetic lifestyle. Rooted has kept me near the group experience of cultural experimentation and collective healing.
I’m here to share my own project related to cultural experimentation and collective healing.
It’s called Foresnauts.
Where groups of people can both experience and create what I call liveo games :
Theatrical role-playing experiences usually held outdoors, myths that are experienced rather than heard, that emerge from the landscape. To better explain the terms, Foresnauts are to liveo games what Pixar or Studio Ghibli are to movies :)
They are a throwback to ritual play, when cultures would use theater and pretend to experiment with cultural novelty and adjustments in their societies. I’m hoping to co-discover and develop this practice with others.
I signed up for Rooted after hearing Karine’s introductory talk to this space and it stuck with me, not just hearing “tickling the roots” and “staying with the trouble,” articulated concepts that were also underlying the liveo game scripts I was writing. I felt a strong resonance between our projects and applied the next day. For example, during that talk, the values of air, vigor, play and expression were mentioned, traits which liveo games create dimensions for and cultivate; and since I heard that talk, I’ve wanted to share liveo games with this community.
So, what are liveo games?
Liveo games invite the archetypes, plants, fungi, land-beings and animals and all kin to play with us and through us; they are eco-theatres where one can be a grumpy badger, as glamorous as a flower, rise like a termite mound, flow like a sacred waterfall or be mysterious like a nymph disappearing into the fog.
One may tumble like an otter, myceliate among rotting matters, or be still and magnificent like a tree!
The scripts invite us into the realms of the psyche that tend to be rusty and little-used in our day-to-day lives. For example, making it easier to shine bright and be outrageous, or drop into grief and be with the hurt.
Stories where a frog may come in and say “I’m going to teach you to sing,” or a place may call out for help, “I am in need of help and I need those parts of you that coloniality extinguished in you to wake up and aid me!”
If I had to describe their purpose, I would put them into two broad categories.
First, Healing the old:
Addressing our upbringings of trauma, coloniality, domestication, schooling, lack of healthy attachments (to caregivers/place/community), emotional harm and psychological neglect, childhoods severed from village and the outdoors with a deficit of development and maturation that perpetuate modernity’s culture of separation and superiority.
Second, Birthing the new:
Cultural experimentation, ritual play, soulwork, speculative world building, indigenousness and rewilding, kinship making, community building.
1. Healing and Hospicing the Old
We all know the various traumas, both lived through and inherited, of being brought up in modernity-coloniality. The domestication, schooling and other woundings inflicted bring about ruptures and fissures in our psyches that create subpersonalities/false selves/wounded egos/defense mechanisms/comfort zones/survival strategies/parts that helps us survive childhood yet result in pain, chronic fear, disconnection and dissociation. Vanessa Andreotti De Oliveira talks about them as the riders on our bus.
We end up repressing, indulging or managing these parts (*my preferred term as its the shortest lol*) to fit into society, living in a sort of arrested development, severed from our wilder selves, one another and the natural world, perpetuating a world of white supremacy, coloniality, etc.
As talked about in many places that study childhood trauma and development, these parts of us stay in safe roles: they project, addict, judge, distract, seek out or maintain entitlement, etc. at the same time, they are also archetypes holding gifts and liberatory qualities such as big feelings, grandiosity, empathy, grief, praise, belonging and wildnesses such as creativity, spontaneity, connection, resilience. But these parts were kept immature, undeveloped, running on stress and fear, working to keep us in separation, out of our bodies, disconnected from the landscape; but they could be worked with, inspired and cared for in order to…
‘‘..reawaken our inherent capacities to experience in our bodies, hearts and minds within the present moment and company of nature in our present space.’’
– Jeanine M. Canty, Returning the Self to Nature
Liveo games create interactive environments, usually outdoors, that want to restore embodied experience and connection through role-playing eco-narratives for both healing and wholing these parts, seeking to address both what we didn’t get but should have and what we did get and messed us up. They are immersive stories, recreating situations of healthy development in nature and village that most of us didn’t quite get.
(I find it important to note here that liveo games don’t have to be always focused on ourselves and our psyches as individuals. They can take on a more top-down focus using allegorical stories to understand and process historical trauma, pick apart the patterns of coloniality-modernity and offer spaces that may lower the water line enough to explore and dismantle violent, unjust systems and how they manifest in our relationships and group environments.)
Some stories may focus on reawakening a childlike-animism, in sensory delights, a sense of innocence, awe and wonder, of belonging to the world without shame.
Other games may be social in nature, restoring confidence in our own voices and learning to navigate relationships from authenticity and mutual entanglement.
Other adventures might stimulate connection to the body and land and the feelings and sensations that that entails. Others may be related to relationships, expression and being witnessed and finding authentic roles in a community.
Of course, even something like playing can awaken the resistances, awkwardness, discomforts, avoidance and downright panics of our parts, and in the day-to-day institutions and places of modernity it might not feel safe to work through these feelings.
Even in the mental health industry, Jennifer Mullan in Decolonizing Therapy describes how people are “afraid of big feelings and losing their minds if they let go and let out” and how its standards of conduct keep people from believing they can “connect, trust one another and liberate themselves.”
Liveo games try to assuage the overwhelm through the one-two-three combo of being outdoors, theater and collective relationality. Outside, the unconscious cues of modernity are dumbed down, the alerts that say “not supposed to do that!” or “don’t go there, it's dangerous!” aren’t as loud.
There is just something about the gleam of green leaves that helps us forget civilization’s strictures. On the flip side, the outdoors can encourage, offering cues that say, “yes this is alright here” or “why don’t you try that?” The open air can help things feel safer, easier to address, confront, feel through, process, and help welcome profound feelings and where there are no neighbors to worry about when it’s time for screaming and crying.
Secondly, theater, being in character, reduces shame, “it’s not me, it’s just this crazy being I’m playing!” Acting can help bypass the trauma-protections, schooling and domestication of our parts, giving their forgotten aspects a space to emerge and stretch their legs. The domesticated/colonized parts of our psyches get an experimental space that requires no acting skills, they just offer chances to lean in to play and see what happens.
Lastly, liveo games address the difficulties of relational trauma inherent in modernity by putting us in worlds and characters for whom connecting is more normalized. Something I have both experienced and researched is how our ability to connect to ourselves and to the more-than-human is shaped by how we were socialized, the quality of our attachments and relationships growing up.
‘‘Just as with developing our healthy egos as well as our ecological selves, building our compassion toward other people requires restoring our trust in the world and one another, which requires working on our skills to connect and relate. When we close down our worldviews to protect ourselves, we often shut down our emotions, senses, and forms of expression, thus diminishing our capacity to attend to our own needs and those of others. We miss the social cues of looking into someone’s eyes, smiling at one another, sensing someone’s mood, asking about someone’s story and needs, and responding.’’
- Jeanine M. Canty, Returning the Self to Nature
Now, it is one thing to try and simply tell our parts, habituated to disconnection, that things are different, that it is now safe to connect, and another is actually showing, creating situations of trust, care and pleasurable exchange. Theatre is one of the most effective tools for doing this, where we can support one another in letting go of the “every man for himself” colonial habits with humor, grief, awareness, kindness, craziness, whatever we want. Of course, being in community is not always our comfort zone. Games are written where we can ease into being witnessed, sensing one another, expressing ourselves, relying on others, coming into agreements. Liveo games write worlds that activate our relational self where inclusion, connection, belonging, collective responsibility, mutual support and listening are the norms of the worlds we inhabit, rather than shame and marginalization.
2) Birthing the New
So, if these eco-ludic spaces to help us compost all the historical trauma within us, the second intention is growing from that compost, as Vanessa De Oliveira Andreotti writes about, hospicing modernity goes hand in hand with birthing whatever new ways of being emerge from this era.
What is it like to be in connection, reciprocity and collective responsibility with landscape, to others, to oneself, to experience new kin-making cultures that may lead to relational and place-based ways of living?
Something I have learned the hard way, is that most of our nervous systems can’t yet handle or understand something like group ceremony or the level of intimacy or place-awareness land-based peoples tend to be in. We have all been doing a lot of work on ourselves, but being in this space as a community is another story.
So, like kids learning life through play, we need play in order to relearn this! For most of us, this means a gradual return to ancestral ways and opening up space for the eco-centered societies that I imagine will emerge in our descendants.
This return to indigeneity, so-to-speak, to ways of being that many of our brothers and sisters all over the world still preserve and maintain is described in a book on decolonization and unlearning whiteness called Ethnoautobiography. They state that the indigenous way of being is…
‘‘..consciously based on locally, ecologically, and seasonally contextualized truths that are narratively anchored – their stories are embedded – in natural community where an interdependent view of the Self embedded in place, myth, ritual, ancestors and spirits.’’
- River Jackson-Paton and Jurgen Kremer, Ethnoautobiography
After beginning this project, I found out about a tradition of cultural experimentation where peoples throughout history have engaged in ritual play, spaces where people could actually test out changes and new iterations in their culture, whether it was to adapt to a changing climate, prepare for political upheavals, weave new technological conditions in to their life-ways or simply to try something new.
This was a space for testing new values, gestures, customs, agreements, etc. and it was usually done via playing out mythological-type stories. I believe that liveo games follow this tradition, as a vessel for imagining many decolonial futures, I call them new planets right here on Mother Earth, where we can pretend the worlds we would like to see, using these fictional spaces as prototypes for new cultures, serving as wombs for new foundational stories that will guide us.
Like Karine’s metaphor on the Intro page to Rooted, liveo games are a space of tickling the roots as we plant ourselves into temporary garden beds of possibly future forest realities.
They are acclimation spaces for gradually learning and processing everything that comes with living in kinship, with being in the indigenous psyche, with healing domesticity and returning to wildness. With all of the nervous system rewirings, skill-learnings, slowing into natural cycles, with the sensitivity required to attune into our landscapes and communities, I think we need a practice space to adjust and learn this world that many of us haven’t experienced for generations.
So rather than trying to engage in a practice beyond where we’re realistically at, it’s just “hello Sun, you look beautiful and bright today, hello grass, can I pet you? Hello stone can I tell you about my day, how was yours? Hello, tree how are you doing today, is there anything I can do for you?” Remembering belonging in the simple, down-to-earth ways of childhood.
The Liveo Games I tend to offer: What they Look Like
The liveo games I tend to work on usually follow the format of myths and fables resembling the kinds you might have heard from Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, Alixa Garcia, Martin Shaw, Jan Blake or Sofia Batalha; usually adventures through magical places filled with transformative, ancient objects or special songs, movements, dances while meeting curious creatures of the land who require help: maybe they have tasks for us or want to be heard and felt, often involving creative land-art.
These adventures can involve anything from land-art-bushcraft-puzzles to environmentally-tuned-in movement and dance, from eco-aware exploration and treasure-hunting to group scenes of celebration, radical acceptance and expression.
I use natural settings and landart to immerse people in fantasy-animist realities meant to gradually awaken and relearn sacred land practices and place-relatedness, help reawaken somatic sensation and feeling-toned awareness, and interpersonal subjectivity and interstitial relating.
I particularly love coming up with scenarios where people are being appreciated, seen, cheered on, supported, embraced by loving elders or by the beings of the land or giving someone the chance to be the hero of the day or star of the show. I also like giving people situations where they stand up for themselves when silenced, or get to ask for help vulnerably when pushed away. I love using liveo games as spaces for the parts of us that usually aren’t activated outside of closed doors, stoking the flames of whatever our hearts have had at a slow burn or even left unlit.
On the land we inhabit here, we’ve planted a forest garden for these ludic purposes. We highlight the different biomes with decorations that use atmospheric storytelling to reveal the emotional cartography inviting people to experience the mythoterritoriality of the space as well as ecological dimension. Bamboo slips become tags to write runes on, morning glory vines become puppet strings for leaf and flower people, stacked stones become temples, flowers become encoded message to interpret and trees can represent particular dance-move-emoticon poses. A bird sighting can mean a shift in the narrative o a message to the players. Hazel-rods are woven in to backdrops whose patterns indicate the type of stage people are on. A bramble labyrinth teaches people to play close attention to the paths they choose. Plants, animals and the elements are teachers, welcomed and invited to be a part of the experience, hopefully with wisdom or insights in to the future that we are missing when we write the narratives on our own.
These experiences may be facilitated by actors, or players may take on various roles themselves or cards, notes, pictures, art, setting may facilitate the story for the players. While preferably held outdoors, I am of course aware of inequalities in access to natural spaces, and even just having access to the sky offers a sense of place and relatedness to the Earth. Or indoor spaces can use imagination and found-objects to bring the vibe and culture of the outdoors into the indoor spaces that may be easier for us to access.
Additional Questions:
You Can Make Liveo Games Too!
I don’t own the term liveo games, it's just a term for a medium of storytelling: like movie, novel, graphic novel, video game. It’s just something that I’ve been feeling in the zeitgeist, that rather than vicariously watching actors or playing avatars on the screen, we’re going to start wanting to live out the stories ourselves. I hope there will be many genres beyond how I envision them.
Compatible with modalities like the gesturing towards decolonial futures, the work that reconnects, decolonizing therapy, biodanza, sharing nature with children, psychodrama, parts work, nature awareness, soulwork, body and movement practices, somatic abolitionism, teatro del opreso, improv, deschooling, direct democracy, whatever you’re using, whatever your modality, whatever sets of practices and values you are working with, any of these can be woven in to a narrative and set in a mythology where we get to play it out in character, where we can feel what it's like to live in a story of which this modality is a fundamental part and where the more-than-human can participate and have a voice.
Anyone can make liveo games, they are simply a manifestation of our innate human ability to try on and move between different stories as we adjust from phase to phase, group to group and place to place in life.
So feel free to employ liveo games as a concept in nature education, in wild retreats, for community meetings, activist work, in group therapy, in family get-togethers, wherever you might imagine them!
Delivery Methods
So what are the logistics? Well, whatever works for you! Take this and run with it! This could be something you do on a monthly or weekly basis rotating across people’s backyards, homesteads, parks, halls, community centers, whatever is available! Maybe, like those DnD games that last forever, you continue the same game each time you get together, picking up each time where you left off. Or maybe you try lots of different mini games and shorter stories. They could start out as one or two hour experiences and gradually evolve in to longer and longer encounters.
Liveo games could be melded in to a retreat experience, an artist’s residency, a summer camp, a festival, a sports league or presented through cruise ship entertainment, a theme park, street theatre. They could be used in alternative spaces, further from the system or directly within already existing institutions. I’m looking forward to seeing the places these games are slipped in to.
Ok, I Think I Get Liveo Games, but Who Are Foresnauts?
Foresnauts discover new planets right here on mother Earth. Rather than riding into the cowboy west in search of new lands, they nurture place back into being, they discover in time rather than in space, through the natural pacing of succession and birth-life-death-birth rather than the forced pace of progress.
They are caregivers of what has already been conquered.
These planets may be long-term physical communities and collectives or shorter-term tents like a session on Rooted Global Village. They attune to the interaction of communities and land, both with each other and among themselves, hoping to help cultural experimentation and maturation in to eco-centered cultures that hopefully arise from the compost heap of modernity.
Foresnauts are storytellers and game masters of liveo games who are particularly focused on the realm of matchmaking the right land and the right people.
Specializing in sacred land practice and communication with the more-than-human they open up the line of communication with places with the possibility of determining, through the land’s consent, which places might match groups of people and stories that are compatible with them during the shifting times of climate change.
Foresnauts then try to help the getting-to-know you process among people and land with liveo games that help them find the stories that match the group growing-pains, cultural discovery and community arrangements that go with the initial stages of new collectives.
All of this is just speculative, these are hunches I’ve been having. The only way to find out whether liveo games can serve as tools of cultural shifts as modernity enters its twilight years is through testing them out, is through play and experimentation! I don’t have all the answers, I’m not sure if what I’ve written is the right “model” but I’m interested in testing it out!
If anyone has anymore questions feel free to reach out to @foresnauts on insta, substack or youtube.
Thanks for Reading!
About the author(s):
Jose "Bosque" Reimondez he/him
Born and raised in Yonkers, NY, Jose grew up with a love of animals, video games, rap music, legos and fantasy, anything that got him out of the real world. As an Adult, years of depression and trying to "make it there" led to burnout, an abyss of financial debt and personal collapse. Enamored with the art of forest gardening, he remembered an abandoned smallholding that belonged to his grandparents in Galicia, Spain and decided to move across the Atlantic and start over. Slowed down by CPTSD from family trauma, Jose could not take the race to the finish line to self-sufficiency approach to homesteading and instead was blessed with a gradual discovery of slow, consent-based land relations through an approach of childlike-animism and was blessed with participating in a co-creative and co-nurturing succession of a new ecosystem. During this time, he also took part in many different alternative practices and community spaces hosted on regenerative sites and noticed how we often recreate modernity while trying rebel against it and avoid the difficult work of reciprocity, relationship and accountability. This began an interest in using games and theater as a way of seeing our blind spots while bringing the more-than-human-kin in to the games in ways that avoid the using of nature as nothing but a means to self-improvement or performative spiritual practices. So Jose began taking his background in forest gardening and regenerative practices and his hobbies in myth, video games, theater, dance, land art and storytelling and began melding them in to experiences that have been dubbed liveo games. Hopefully, they can help us look at our own patterns with a sense of humor and grief while softly opening up spaces that might nourish and inform decolonial, land-based ways of being in community.