---
title: "Metaphoray"
url: "https://queering.earth/metaphoray"
updated: "2026-09-23"
description: "Helen Edgar on foraging between ways of knowing: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s word for the writer’s walk, Etuaptmumk and the four aspects a discipline had no room for, and the gap between the label and the plant."
licence: "CC-BY-SA-4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
attribution_ledger: "https://github.com/Stimpunks/Queering-Earth/blob/main/ATTRIBUTIONS.md"
generated_by: "tools/make-markdown.mjs from the page's own <main> landmark"
---

1. [Queering Earth](https://queering.earth/)
2. [The plate](https://queering.earth/the-plate)

Sheet No. 15 · an essay

# Metaphoray

Foraging between ways of knowing. A botanist’s word for the walk, a writer’s word for the same walk, and the gap between what a label can hold and what the plant actually was.

## The gap between the label and the plant

Every specimen on this site begins the same way: a plant lifted from the ground it grew in, pressed flat between blotting paper, dated, and labelled with more care than most living things ever receive. The label exists to hold the specimen still long enough to be studied. It was never built to hold the whole plant, only the parts a particular kind of looking knows how to ask for. This sheet is about the gap between the label and the plant, and about a way of moving through that gap that this site borrows Robin Wall Kimmerer’s own word for: a metaphoray.

## A word for the walk

Botanists have a name for the expedition itself, separate from anything it turns up: a foray, the walk into the forest with a hand lens and a collecting bag, gathering by noticing rather than by conquering. Metaphor, from the Greek *metapherein*, means to carry across. Kimmerer puts the two together herself in *Braiding Sweetgrass*, coining the word a few paragraphs after asking, on the same page, whether science and traditional knowledge might be purple and yellow to one another, goldenrod and asters — complementary colours rather than rivals (Kimmerer, 2013).

Specimen — the coinage, in her own words

> When botanists go walking the forests and fields looking for plants, we say we are going on a foray. When writers do the same, we should call it a metaphoray, and the land is rich in both.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, *Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants* (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 46, in the chapter “Asters and Goldenrod”.

**Her own sense of the word is narrower than the use this sheet makes of it, and the difference is worth marking rather than blurring.** A metaphoray, as she defines it, is the writer’s walk, and what it gathers is metaphors. The extension — a journey taken not to extract a fact but to carry meaning from one register of knowing into another and back again — is this sheet’s reading of what the word could hold. It sits one sentence away from what she actually wrote, which is directly above, so that a reader can see exactly where she stops and we start.

## Two-Eyed Seeing

Two-Eyed Seeing is Elder Albert Marshall’s, and his co-authors set it down in his terms: it refers to “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing, and to using both these eyes together, for the benefit of all” (Bartlett et al., 2012). **The Mi’kmaw word for it is Etuaptmumk, and that word does not appear in the paper.** It is Marshall’s and it travels with him, but a reader following the citation to find it there will not, so it is named here without being sourced to a place it is not. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist long before she became one of the most widely read writers on plant kinship, has described what it cost her to keep that second eye open while training inside a discipline that mostly did not believe it existed. She draws on Greg Cajete’s account of Indigenous science, where understanding something means knowing it “with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit” (Cajete, as cited in Kimmerer, 2013). Her scientific training, she found, had room for the first two only. Emotion and spirit were treated as noise to be filtered out before the knowledge counted as real.

## What this is not

I want to be careful with what comes next, because the easy move here is to lay that framework straight over Autistic or neurodivergent experience, as though the second explains the first. I do not think it does, and I am not writing this sheet as though it does. Indigenous knowledge systems carry their own histories, their own sovereignty, and a specific record of having been actively and violently suppressed, from residential schools to the outlawing of ceremony and language. None of that is raw material for another group’s story, and Two-Eyed Seeing was never offered as a metaphor for someone else’s marginalisation. What I am noticing instead is a shared shape rather than a shared source: the instrument that decided emotion and spirit were not legitimate knowledge is recognisably the same instrument that has decided, elsewhere and for different reasons, that other ways of attending to the world were not legitimate either.

## The same instrument

Monotropism, the tendency to fall completely into a small number of interests or sensations at a time rather than spreading attention thinly across many, has spent decades read through that instrument as a deficit in flexibility rather than a coherent way of knowing in its own right (Murray et al., 2005). The double empathy problem names a related move: communication does not fail because Autistic people lack a theory of mind, it falters between two different processing styles meeting each other, neither one the default the other has strayed from (Milton, 2012). Stimming, still described in clinical literature mostly as a symptom to extinguish, functions for many Autistic people as embodied regulation and sometimes communication, information carried in the body rather than in speech, closer to Cajete’s body and emotion than to anything a purely verbal model of cognition was ever built to register. None of this is spiritual in the sense Cajete means. But it shares the shape of his complaint. A way of knowing built to recognise only certain kinds of evidence will keep mistaking difference for error, whoever’s difference it happens to be looking at.

## The crossing Star Stuff holds open

[Star Stuff](https://starstuff.earth/), this site’s sibling project, holds open a different crossing. Every element heavier than hydrogen and helium in a human body, the calcium in bone, the iron carried in blood, was forged inside a star before that star collapsed and scattered its contents across the galaxy that eventually became this one. Filed as pure mind, that is a tidy piece of nucleosynthesis and nothing more. Sit with it longer than it takes to read the sentence and it starts doing something closer to what Cajete describes, reorganising a felt sense of scale rather than only an intellectual one. Posthumanist theory has a name for the shift underneath that feeling: the human was never a separate, bounded observer standing safely outside the systems it studies, only ever one more participant caught up inside them, made of the same collapsing and recombining matter as everything else it examines.

## What this plate has been doing

This site has been practising a version of that crossing since Sheet No. 1. Each sheet borrows the classifying discipline of a herbarium specimen, a number, a label, a date, and then fills that label with poetry, painting, political argument, and grief rather than the dried plant the format expects: [Virginia Woolf on illness](https://queering.earth/on-being-ill), [Ryan Boren on coming to terms](https://queering.earth/coming-to-terms), [Christina Rossetti on the promises pie-crust makes and breaks](https://queering.earth/promises-like-pie-crust), [a reading of my own on the invention of normal](https://queering.earth/invention-of-normal), and [Miranda, shipwrecked and painted and read against the grain](https://queering.earth/the-tempest). Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory names what happens when a form like this refuses to let one way of seeing do all the work alone, unsettling neuronormativity and heteronormativity in the same movement rather than treating them as separate projects (Walker, 2021). Two-Eyed Seeing was never only a metaphor for the crossing between Indigenous and Western knowledge, though that is its origin and its ongoing responsibility, held by the people who named it. It is also, more modestly, a discipline any project can borrow the shape of when it refuses to let the label do more work than the plant can bear.

## Goldenrod and asters

Kimmerer’s chapter on goldenrod and asters asks whether science and traditional knowledge might stand toward each other the way those two flowers do in a September field, each colour made more visible by the other rather than diminished by any contest between them (Kimmerer, 2013). A monotropic attention already knows something about that kind of reciprocity, the way falling completely into one interest can make a person more rather than less able to notice what is growing right beside it, once the fall is allowed to happen on its own terms instead of being interrupted for looking wrong from the outside. Reciprocity, read that way, is not a compromise struck between two things asked to meet in the middle. It is closer to what happens when neither one is required to shrink first.

## The next foray

A foray does not end with the forest fully catalogued. You go out, you notice what is growing where it grows, you carry a little of it home without pretending you have collected the whole territory, and you go back out again next season to see what else has come up in the meantime. A metaphoray works the same way, gathered here as one more sheet in a collection that was never meant to be finished, mind and body and emotion and whatever spirit turns out to mean for the person doing the looking, kept distinct and uncollapsed, ready for the next foray out.

## What this sheet does not settle

**The posthumanism sentence has no source and needs one.** The claim that the human was never a bounded observer outside the systems it studies is real posthumanist argument — Barad and Haraway are the obvious places it lives — but the draft carried it attached to *Braiding Sweetgrass*, which is not where it comes from. The citation has been removed rather than corrected to a book nobody here has checked. It wants a real one before this is accessioned, or it wants rewriting as this sheet’s own sentence.

**The stimming claim is not verified against Walker.** The draft cited *Neuroqueer Heresies* for stimming as embodied regulation; that citation has been lifted for now because it has not been checked against the book, and the surrounding paragraph reads without it. Walker is still cited where the neuroqueer argument is actually his. Kapp and colleagues on stimming is the literature this probably wants.

**Etuaptmumk needs a source of its own.** The paper was read at the primary on 22 September 2026 and the word is not in it, so the sheet now names the term without a citation. It is Elder Albert Marshall’s and is used across the Institute for Integrative Science & Health’s own materials and in later work; one of those wants reading and citing, and until it is the word stands here uncited. **His definition is still at one remove even so**, because the paper reports what he explains rather than printing him in the first person — which matters on a sheet whose own argument is that other people’s knowledge is not raw material.

**The citation style is the original draft’s own** — parenthetical (Author, Year) in the running prose, full references below — rather than naming each source in a sentence the way [The Five Unmistakable Marks](https://queering.earth/five-unmistakable-marks) and [Held, Not Fixed](https://queering.earth/held-not-fixed) do. The same question is open on *Time Present, Time Past* and the two should be answered together rather than one at a time.

**No social card, no number, no stamp.** Those are accession and they happen at publication, not here.

## Sources

Robin Wall Kimmerer, *Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants* (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013). The coinage is on page 46 and the Cajete sentence on page 47, in the chapter “Asters and Goldenrod”; the page break falls inside the Jeffrey Burton Russell quotation that sits between them. Read from the book itself rather than from a secondary account of it.

Cheryl Bartlett, Murdena Marshall and Albert Marshall, *Two-Eyed Seeing and other lessons learned within a co-learning journey of bringing together indigenous and mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing*, *Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences* 2:4 (2012), 331–340, [doi:10.1007/s13412-012-0086-8](https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-012-0086-8). **The journal prints *indigenous* lower case in its own title and this sheet has not tidied it**, because a title is a quotation. Read at the primary, from the authors’ e-offprint; its abstract is identical to the published first page.

Gregory Cajete, *Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence* (Santa Fe: Clear Light, 2000), is the account of Indigenous science behind the four aspects. **It is quoted here at one remove**, as Kimmerer reports it, and the quotation above is her sentence rather than his.

Monotropism is Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wenn Lawson, *Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism*, *Autism* 9:2 (2005), 139–156, [doi:10.1177/1362361305051398](https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398). **Its third author is Wenn Lawson, and the journal’s byline is not the name he uses** — the DOI is what makes the paper findable, so nothing here reproduces the old one. Helen keeps a resource page at [Autistic Realms](https://autisticrealms.com/monotropism/); Fergus Murray keeps [monotropism.org](https://monotropism.org/).

The double empathy problem is Damian E. M. Milton, *On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’*, *Disability & Society* 27:6 (2012), 883–887, [doi:10.1080/09687599.2012.710008](https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008).

Nick Walker, *Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities* (Fort Worth: Autonomous Press, 2021), for neuroqueer theory. **That subtitle and this site’s masthead phrase are one hyphen apart**, which is a collision the cabinet found and said out loud rather than a borrowing anybody has established: Walker published it first, Helen wrote the phrase in the founding brainstorm, and [the ledger](https://queering.earth/ledger) declines to claim how it reached us because nobody honestly can.

The stellar nucleosynthesis is [Star Stuff](https://starstuff.earth/)’s subject rather than this sheet’s, and it is fact-checked to the primary over there.

Queering Earth Sheet No. 15 Accessioned 23 Sep 2026

Provenance Mounted [23 September 2026](https://queering.earth/changelog#a-2026-09-23-metaphoray). Not yet corrected.