The Erotics of Encounter is an emerging body of practices that collaborates with chance and entanglement to enliven the imaginal ground of relationality — cultivating the capacity to meet rupture and the intensities moving there.

Last year, we entered 'bewilderness' — those erotic zones where identity unravels and certainty dissolves. We listened for patterns, pressures, hidden tensions, and emergent dynamics shaping involvement. Working with voice, singing, movement, and improvisation, we cultivated body as a resonant relational field.

My mood revealed itself as far more than only my mood.

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This year, Resonance Circles continue the exploration of the ethics and erotics of encounter.

They are an invitation to gather together in nature to tend the cracks of the current crisis together. A call to encounter wild gods and practice world-making as decoloniality.

The colonial is what is possible, legible. Untethering from its political programme of sovereign self-regulation that captures imagination, we stay with the impossible. Every itch, stammer, ache, yearning, or unusual smell draws us into encounter with the many intelligences with which we share an ecology.

Originally, encounter meant a meeting of adversaries — from Old French encontrer, based on Latin in (“in”) + contra (“against”). An unexpected clash. A confrontation.

Today, the word is softened to mean meeting difficulties or contending with problems. Yet something wilder persists in it.

To encounter a god is to catch fire. Bodies shake, fall, run, laugh, cry. Desire explodes. Identity loosens. In these moments attraction, beauty, and rupture intersect, and transformation becomes possible, if we can ride the intensity without being shattered by it.

Emotion is the seismic activity of soul moving through us to provoke response — an immediate engagement with the truth of things. James Hillman reminds us that emotion is not disorder but heightened intelligence: disgust turns us from decay, fear alerts danger, desire recognises beauty, pity responds to need. Emotion involves us with the prickly aliveness that emerges through cracks.

And cracks, Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé suggests, are where what we owe returns to interrogate the form we’ve assembled. What had to be repressed, excluded, or abandoned in order to perform coherence and moral legibility leaks back as the wound that will not heal, the grief that won’t resolve, the exhaustion of compulsory growth. These excesses remind us that bodies are never fully available to the colonial project of optimisation.

Avgi Saketopoulou names this excess ‘thorns under the skin’ — irreducible irritants that cannot be removed, only retranslated. These enigmas disorganise identity toward mobility. Restless, haunting, libidinal (not genital), they persist as fantasy and desire threaded through with the trespass of the other. They return through compulsions, obsessions, and repetitions, fracturing the subject under meanings it cannot contain.

This erotic pressure does not follow a teleological arc. It is not about climax, completion, resolution, or cure. It persists as intensity — a non-soothing pleasure Saketopoulou calls an exigent force. Its appetite for more and more stimulation overrides homeostatic control. Its wasteful, unproductive expenditure of energy furnishes psyche with its queer, anarchic potential.

Tracing intensity and fault lines with breath, body, and sound, we learn to discern vibration as world-making. With patience, joy, and imagination, eros thickens. Desire ceases to be consumptive or driven by lack. It becomes a force that moves between — a lifeway into reciprocity. Love becomes a political act.

Resonance holds this fertile edge. Attuning to unforeseen energies at play, we follow imp-pulses—a duende, daimon, a caprice at work— into rhythmic cracks, tremors, slippages, and leakages. As both act-or and act-ed upon, initiator and receiver, we lean into the generosity of uncertainty to find rhythm together.

Giving voice, movement, gesture to the shape-shifting imagination of psyche moving between, patterns of relations emerge. Like a schooling of fish, a convergence occurs where synchronicity, reciprocity, and complexity coalesce, without erasing difference. Each perceives differently. Each carries blind spots. Each holds fragments the others cannot. When one breaks forward with some new echo, others hold resonance, sustaining relation. Resonance thus emerges slowly, incompletely, always fugitive, non-linear, non-verbal, polysexual — like psyche itself.

World becomes abundant again, under a moving feast of stars.

We gather on Sundays closest to the First Quarter Moon, from 8-10am. Our first meeting is 25 January for the Dassie Moon. 

First-quarter moons are when we feel weird fidelity with the not fully formed. The moon is mostly both, always trans: waxing and waning, flirting with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change.

Email me to join us this Sunday 8-10am, and receive the full details of place, and the mythic and astronomical resonances for the growing Dassie moon. nan@imaginalbody.com

The events are free.

The Year’s Dates to Diarise

Moving through the year, our ritual practices will reflect each lunation as a threshold for shared and collective sensing of what is emerging between light and dark, new and full.

25 January — Dassie Moon / Feb 1 / Aquarius Sun

22 Feb — Harvest Moon / March 3 / Pisces Sun

22 March — Diamond Moon /April 2 / Aries Sun

26 April — Frost Moon / May 1 / Taurus Sun

24 May — Fire Moon / May 31 / Gemini Sun

21 June — Sisters Moon / Jun 29 / Cancer Sun

19 July — Meerkat Moon / July 29 / Leo Sun

16 Aug — Peace Moon / Aug 28 / Virgo Sun

20 Sept — Spring Moon / Sept 26 / Libra Sun

18 Oct — Whale Moon / Oct 26 / Scorpio Sun

22 Nov — Milk Moon / Nov 24 / Sagittarius Sun

20 Dec — Springbok Moon / Dec 24 / Capricorn Sun

[South African moons as given by the Centre for Astronomical Heritage]

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