Bruno’s Reflection
I remember the scene more vaguely than I expected. I can picture me, and Gio outside the house, waiting for Ma to return from Hawaii. I can remember the tension in the air, though not my exact thoughts. Those have been blurred by what came after: a long stretch of reactionary atheism.
At eleven, I had an awareness of plurality—I knew there were many ways of seeing—but I was already searching for the “right” one. In that moment, I thought the way to find it was to map every perspective and then pick the correct one. So I took the tools I had—Bible verses from Veronica, the poststructuralist questions I’d learned from Ma’s work—and I went looking for coherence. I wanted logic, consistency, a defensible position.
In hindsight, my thinking back then stayed mostly in the cognitive lane. I could deconstruct, trace the genealogy of ideas, point out contradictions. But I didn’t yet have the language—or maybe the permission—to connect that with affective and relational awareness. I didn’t see how my desire for a unifying framework was itself shaped by modernity’s imprints: the pull toward mastery, legitimacy, and control over uncertainty.
Not long after, my thinking hardened into militant atheism. I blamed Christianity for the unnecessary conflict Veronica had brought into our home, and I reacted by rejecting anything that looked like religion. In practice, that atheism mirrored what it opposed—it became its own kind of fundamentalism. I kept those “atheist passengers” on my bus for years. I still do, in fact. They’re useful; they help me anticipate how certain parts of modernity will react. But they no longer drive.
The turning point wasn’t a neat epiphany—it was messy. Psychedelic work in Finland helped loosen the grip of that binary. I saw, viscerally, that my atheism rested on the same hidden assumptions as religion: the demand for a singular truth. That recognition cracked something open. It allowed other passengers—other ways of knowing—to speak again.
Over the years, moving through New Zealand, Finland, Canada, Peru, and Brazil, I began to see how much of my life had been shaped by navigating between worlds. Part of that came from being a third-culture kid; part from being neurodivergent. What I once thought of as code-switching I now think of as “consciousness switching”—not just changing vocabulary or tone, but shifting the frame of reality I was inhabiting.
That shift eventually led me to linguistics and mathematics. My work now looks at layers of linguistic variation we don’t usually recognise as linguistic at all. I’m interested in how languages—and the conceptual systems they carry—interact, intertwine, and sometimes talk past each other. And I’m using formal systems, including category theory and model theory, to create tools for navigating those translations without collapsing them into a single “right” form.
Looking back, the “rocks” conversation makes more sense to me now. At the time, I was looking for the one perspective that would survive scrutiny. Gio, in contrast, was attending to the relationships themselves—between people, between worldviews, and even with the rocks. She wasn’t trying to resolve the paradox; she was willing to live with it.
I still don’t talk to rocks in the way Gio meant then, but I sense something adjacent when I play music. I understand that “talking to rocks” can name a stance: a readiness to treat what’s outside our conceptual frame as a participant in the conversation. In that sense, I’ve learned to listen to the rocks, even if the listening happens through mathematics, logic, song, and the study of computation and language.
If I could tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: the tools of modernity are not always on modernity’s side. Sometimes the very methods and instruments built to control and contain reality (like AI) end up deconstructing themselves and working against what they were meant to do. The question is whether we can notice when that’s happening, and whether we can use that opening to create something more accountable, more relational, and less afraid of the unknown.
Gio’s Reflection
I don’t remember the whole conversation that day, I was four, but I do remember going to ask the rocks. Part of me genuinely wondered if they might answer in human language, and part of me just wanted to see what would happen if I tried. Standing there, I realized that if they were speaking, I might not understand. It wasn’t because they couldn’t communicate, but because I didn’t yet know how to fully listen in their language. I figured that was my problem, not theirs, and it didn’t make me want to stop asking. It wasn’t about getting a definitive answer anyway. It was about giving it space to be what it was, without forcing it into another form.
As a kid, those kinds of connections felt natural. People, animals, trees, stones — everything was part of the same web, always in conversation, always in relation. My mom likes to tell the story of how, one autumn, I saw a tree losing its leaves and reached up to touch my hair, worried I might start “going bald” for the winter too. It wasn’t magical or strange to think like that. It just seemed like how the world worked.
As I got older, that way of sensing the world started to feel heavier. The signals I picked up on became sharper, more constant, and harder to tune out. It was exhausting and overwhelming and I didn’t want to be here for it at all. It felt like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and knowing I couldn’t look away. Around then, my mom’s work and collective felt like too much on every level. I called it “the diffi-cult,” partly as a joke, but also because of the difficult conversations about violence, collapse, and complicity, and because I had never seen a collective or community of people work and be together like that before. I didn’t know how to place myself in it, and I didn’t want to. I tried to close the door on it all. But you can’t really turn that kind of sensing off. At best, you can muffle it, and even then, it still hums in the background.
A few years ago, I surprised everyone and stopped trying to muffle it and stepped into the work. Now, one of my main responsibilities is helping hold space in Facing Human Wrongs, where people meet parts of themselves they would rather not see. It’s tricky, finding ways to help people face complexity and complicity without pushing them into guilt or shame, and holding tenderness without letting them off the hook. Watching my mom, I have seen how much heart and dedication this work demands, and also how much it can stretch a person’s capacity. I am finding my own way of holding it, one that lets me contribute fully while also tending to my energy so I can keep showing up for the long haul.
Looking back, that moment with the rocks still makes sense to me. I wasn’t doing nothing. I was practicing something I still believe in: being with what’s alive, without forcing it to fit into one frame. It wasn’t about getting a final answer or resolution. Some things aren’t meant to be closed. That’s the thread I am still choosing to follow now, through all the beauty, the grief, and the ongoing work of keeping the conversation alive.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 