30
Migration
Stimpunks × More Realms · Guest Zine · No. 30

Always Migrating

migration, monotropism, and the galaxy you're already made of

Helen Edgar · Autistic Realms · never fixed, never finished

L★S
Love You Down
To Your Star Stuff
· open edition ·
Inner compass

Reading the world as
felt knowledge

Every migrating body is made of matter that has already migrated once — forged inside a star, scattered across unthinkable distance, and gathered again by gravity into a bird, a whale, a galaxy, you. Migration was never a metaphor borrowed from animals. It's the oldest fact about star stuff.

Birds cross oceans using a compass sense we still don't fully understand — something in their eyes that responds to the Earth's magnetic field, tied to quantum effects still being worked out (Mouritsen, 2018). No map. Just the world, read directly, as something felt.

Salmon return to their birth river through magnetic imprinting and the memory of water. Humpback whales cross hemispheres between calving and feeding grounds. Elephants walk the routes their grandparents walked. Even a seed migrates, carried on wind or fur, landing on new ground — every one of these bodies built, ultimately, from the same stellar matter, just arranged into a different way of moving through the world.

It's easy to think of migration as a straight line — departure, journey, arrival. The workshop pushed against that. Migration is transformation across time as much as displacement across distance. Gilles Deleuze (1994) circled something close to this in his work on difference and repetition: no repeated pattern is ever a true copy — each turn carries its own small variation. Migration, read this way, is a spiral. With every movement, everything changes.

the tug begins here not arrival — transformation

a spiral, not a loop
every turn carries its own variation

Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 2
inside a bird's eye earth's faint field light cryptochrome two spins, still linked separated — not separate

a compass made of relation
warm, alive, and airborne

A quantum compass

Linked, even
at a distance

Here's the strange part of the bird's compass that's worth slowing down on. Inside a bird's eye, light striking a protein called cryptochrome creates a pair of electrons whose spins become linked in a way physicists call entanglement. Once two particles are entangled, what happens to one is tied to the other — even after they've separated. That linked pair turns out to be sensitive to the Earth's very faint magnetic field, and that sensitivity is thought to be part of how a bird reads direction (Hore & Mouritsen, 2016; Mouritsen, 2018).

This is one of the only places we know of where this kind of quantum behaviour seems to do real, working, felt-in-the-body science — not sealed in a lab near absolute zero, but warm, alive, and airborne. A bird's felt sense of direction may be, quite literally, a small piece of quantum physics happening inside a living eye.

Entanglement means: once two things have been in relation, they stay in relation. Distance doesn't undo it. Separateness was always the less accurate story.
Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 3
Relationship first

Not fixed-thing-first,
relationship-second

There's a related idea in physics called relational quantum mechanics (Rovelli, 1996). In this view, a tiny particle doesn't quietly hold fixed properties of its own, waiting to be measured. What it is only becomes definite in relation to whatever it's interacting with — another particle, an instrument, an observer.

Writing on Rovelli's work, philosopher George Webster (2026) draws out the wider stakes: objects don't come first and then differ from each other — they emerge out of something more fundamental, a process of difference and relation that was already under way. Not fixed-thing-first, relationship-second. Relationship first, all the way down.

I'm not a physicist, and this is one interpretation among several that physicists still argue about. But as a multiply neurodivergent person, it's closer to how I actually experience being myself — not a fixed, separate thing moving through the world on its own, but something that shows up through relationship and encounter (Edgar, 2026a).

A bird doesn't carry its compass in isolation from the field around it. Maybe none of us carry ourselves in isolation from the fields around us either.
the tidy story a thing, then its relations the closer story definite only in relation difference and relation come first; the standalone object is what got built

relation, then thing
one reading — physicists still argue

Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 4
in motion · not yet decided Milky Way Andromeda ~50/50, not fated Sagittarius dwarf — still arriving trajectories, revised as the data arrives

a tug, not a destination
an itinerary that keeps being rewritten

The same tug, at galactic scale

Galaxies
migrate too

Zoom out far enough and the same pattern is still running. The stars in the Milky Way's halo aren't all original residents — many arrived. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has been streaming its stars into our halo for billions of years, a slow-motion migration first identified by Ibata, Gilmore, and Irwin (1994) that is, in a very real sense, still arriving.

For decades it was treated as settled science that the Milky Way and Andromeda are on a fixed collision course, due to merge in roughly four to five billion years. The most recent modelling, using the latest Hubble and Gaia data, found something more honest: closer to a fifty-fifty chance of that merger happening at all within the next ten billion years, once the pull of smaller nearby galaxies is properly accounted for (Sawala et al., 2025). What looked like an inevitable itinerary turns out to be trajectories, still being revised as better data arrives. In the meantime, the Milky Way is far more likely to slowly absorb one of its own smaller satellites, the Large Magellanic Cloud, over roughly the next two billion years.

Nothing here is a fixed itinerary. It's motion under gravity — a tug, not a destination — the same shape as a bird's restlessness before flight, revised at every scale as new pulls make themselves felt.
Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 5
The tug

The restlessness that
arrives before thought

Brigit Anna McNeill writes of the tug of migration — a bodily restlessness that builds before anything is consciously decided. The pull comes from within, shaped by season and sea, and the sense of direction follows from inside it.

I recognise that tug. Monotropism (Murray, Lesser, & Lawson, 2005) describes the way Autistic and ADHD attention gathers intensely around a small number of interests rather than spreading evenly across many. I've written elsewhere about picturing my own attention as a galaxy rather than a chart — energy gathered gravitationally into a few bright points, rather than spread out in an even, undifferentiated glow (Edgar, 2026b). The tug is that gravity. It pulls the same way a star's gravity gathers the matter that will become its next generation of planets: not evenly, not by choice exactly, but by an attraction real enough to bend everything nearby around it.

Many of us are taught early to override this. Autistic masking research describes suppressing natural responses in favour of alternatives judged safer in non-Autistic spaces (Pearson & Rose, 2021). The tug gets read as too much, too narrow — and over the years we learn to quieten it, moving further from our own inner compass, until we may not recognise our true self at all.

Csikszentmihalyi (1990) described flow as the state where attention and challenge align closely enough that the sense of separate effort disappears. Monotropic hyperfocus may be one of that state's clearest expressions — often carrying an undercurrent of wonder, where the world briefly widens around whatever has caught you, the way a night sky widens once your eyes adjust to it.
the even glow spread evenly, nothing gathered the galaxy a few bright points, gathered by gravity the tug is that gravity

attention as a galaxy
not evenly — not by choice exactly

Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 6
the needle was never broken N your own north the "correct" default pulled off, not demagnetised trust returns unevenly

deflection, not defect
the pull was outside you

Letting go of neuronormativity

Learning to trust
the pull again

Trusting our inner compass again isn't easy, and there's real privilege in being able to unmask and be your Autistic self among others. Neuronormativity — the assumption that evenly distributed, easily legible attention is the "correct" default — doesn't just ask us to behave differently. It makes us distrust ourselves.

Neuroqueering (Walker, 2021) is an ongoing practice of subverting and resisting that assumption. Not a destination to arrive at — no more than a galaxy's merger is a fixed destination — but an ongoing refusal to be ashamed of who you are.

Pernille Fraser's poem "Can We Trust?" names this same rupture from the other direction — not what we lose faith in within ourselves, but what has to be earned from everyone around us before that trust can return. Shared through Stimpunks Foundation, it repeats its question across sensory load, pacing, correction, and whether we'll be believed: "Can we trust the space you offer?" (Fraser, 2019/2024). It never resolves into an answer. It stays in the asking — the way migration stays in the tug, before any destination has been decided.

Nota flaw to be corrected, or a phase to be outgrown.
Notsomething owed only once you've proven yourself safe to include.
Nota straight line, or a fixed orbit — trust returns unevenly, and it can be withdrawn.
Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 7
Many ways of moving through

No single frame
is the fixed one

Migration is only one expression of the many ways living things exist in and move through the world. Tarragnat (2025) names this range ethodiversity — the variability of behavioural and existential styles within and across species, opening neurodiversity out beyond a purely human-centred neurological framing.

A bird's compass, a salmon's imprinting, a whale's crossing, a galaxy's slow absorption of its neighbour, a human's monotropic pull — not the same mechanism in different costumes. Genuinely different ways of being, each valid on its own terms rather than measured against one baseline. That sits alongside Milton's (2012) double empathy problem, which cautions against treating any one frame of reference as the fixed one against which others are read as deviant.

Difference here is already a form of connection. A migrating salmon doesn't just pass through a river — its body becomes part of it. When Pacific salmon return to their home streams to spawn and die, they carry marine-derived nutrients into freshwater and the ecosystems around it: something taken from one world into another. Whales do something similar at ocean scale, helping move nutrients such as nitrogen and iron back into sunlit waters and redistributing them across great distances. Neither salmon nor whale sets out to feed a forest or an ocean. But each unique way of moving through the world is, at the same time, an act of shaping it — and of being reshaped by it in turn.

Barad's (2007) intra-action: a self, a species, a migrating body, a galaxy doesn't exist as a separate thing that then relates to its surroundings — it comes into being through the relating itself. The liminal space a migrating creature passes through isn't empty transit between two solid states. It's where the shaping actually happens, at every scale there is.
the crossing is not empty self field shaped in the relating not before it — intra-action no frame is the fixed one

intra-action
the self forms in relation, not before it

Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 8
a profile still measures axes · edges · a baseline a constellation moves no baseline · no rank always connecting, always becoming

from chart to constellation
never fixed, never finished

Nothing stands still

A migrating galaxy
of intensities

The workshop's real gift was permission: to stop treating change as the exception that needs explaining, and start treating it as the base condition everything else moves through.

I used to picture the shape of my own bodymind as a spiky profile — real peaks, real troughs, instead of one flat line of neuronormativity running across the whole of who I am. It's a truer picture than the flat line. But a profile still measures. It still needs axes, still has edges. What I actually recognise, when I try to map myself, isn't a chart at all — it's a constellation of intensities, an ever-shifting arrangement of sensory, cognitive, and relational ways of being, always connecting, always becoming, never fixed, never finished (Edgar, 2026c).

This zine is what happens when you let that constellation move. We are made of matter that has already migrated across unthinkable distances — forged in stars that lived and died before Earth existed, scattered by their deaths, gathered by gravity into a solar system, a planet, a body, an interest, a self. Not a chart with a fixed baseline, and not even a fixed arrangement of points — a galaxy, always in relationship with itself, always in motion.

Migration isn't a metaphor borrowed from birds, whales, and galaxies. It's one of the oldest facts about life on Earth. Every one of us is a small, temporary constellation inside a much larger migration that hasn't finished, and is always moving.

Life doesn't hold still and occasionally migrate. It migrates, and it moves, it transforms everything and everyone around it, living and non-living.
We were never a line. We are not a chart. We are migrating stardust — never fixed, never finished.
Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 9
This thread isn't new here

Threads already running

None of this arrives from nowhere. Star Stuff has been pulling the same threads from other directions — this zine ties several of them into one flight path:

Only in Relation No. 29 — relational quantum mechanics and Barad's intra-action, developed after Helen's own essay. Spreads 3, 4 and 8 here share its spine: relationship first, all the way down.
Not a Line No. 21 — the escalation this zine's closing spread completes: severity line → spiky profile → a constellation of intensities, with no baseline left to measure from.
No Universal Now No. 19 — carries Helen's coda on monotropic spiral time. The spiral in Spread 2 is that same figure, drawn in distance instead of hours.
Every Nervous System No. 27 — ethodiversity after Ombre Tarragnat, read all the way out past the human. Spread 8's many ways of moving through is its migration chapter.
Why Difference Comes First No. 11 — Helen's first guest zine here, ending on a self that is "dynamic, relational, and never finished." This one puts that self in motion.
Wyrd & Weird No. 28 — weorþan, "to become": nobody is finished. Migration is what becoming looks like when it takes up distance as well as time.

Always Migrating isn't a departure from that collection. It's the collection, in flight.

Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 10
L★S We were never a line. We are migrating stardust — never fixed, never finished.
No. 25 Shared Signal — signal, distance & no channel at the top
No. 26 A Mycelium and a Rhizome — decentralised knowledge & the Autistic Rhizome
No. 27 Every Nervous System — more-than-human neurodiversity & reclaiming animality
No. 28 Wyrd & Weird — fate, worth & becoming; the etymology of a reclaimed word
No. 29 Only in Relation — relational quantum physics, intra-action & intradependence
No. 30 Always Migrating — migration, monotropism & the galaxy you're already made of ← you are here
A thread to follow

Where do you feel the tug — and what have you been taught to call it instead?

What have you already crossed that nobody recorded as a journey?

If you drew your attention as a galaxy rather than a chart, what would be bright?

Always Migrating is a guest zine in the Stimpunks Star Stuff series, written by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms · More Realms) — neuro-affirming, identity-first, written from inside the community. It was inspired by Brigit Anna McNeill's The Living Page migration writing workshop, Into the Woods Writing Group, 6 August 2026, and rehoused here in the Star Stuff style with Helen's own text kept intact.

The essay version. Helen published Migration & Trusting Our Inner Monotropic Compass at More Realms on 9 August 2026, and links back to this zine and to A Field Guide to the Ways of Migrating from it. The two are siblings, not copies. The essay carries the passage on salmon and whales moving nutrients between worlds (Spread 8 here), the Neuroqueer Learning Spaces context for Pernille Fraser's poem, and a closing that turns from finding the compass to building spaces safe enough to trust it in. The zine carries strands the essay leaves out — entanglement inside the bird's eye, relational quantum mechanics, migration at galactic scale, and the closing constellation of intensities. Read the essay for the argument at its own length; read this for the long way round.

Read more. Migration & Trusting Our Inner Monotropic Compass (More Realms) · The Constellation of Intensities: Neuroqueering the Spiky Profile (Autistic Realms) · We Are Made of Relations: Quantum Physics and What It Means to Be Autistic (More Realms) · My Monotropic Galaxy: A Constellation of My Autistic Self (More Realms) · Love You Down to Your Star Stuff.

Held honestly. The bird's compass is the least settled science here: the radical-pair mechanism is the leading hypothesis for magnetoreception, not a closed case, which is why Spread 3 says "thought to be" and means it. Relational quantum mechanics is likewise one interpretation among several that physicists still argue about, and the zine says so in Helen's own words. The Milky Way–Andromeda figure is deliberately the revised one — a coin-flip, not a fate — because the point of the spread is that itineraries get rewritten. A rhyme across scales, not a proof.

References. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow. Harper & Row.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)
Edgar, H. (2026a, June 7). We are made of relations: Quantum physics and what it means to be Autistic. More Realms. morerealms.com
Edgar, H. (2026b, June 16). My monotropic galaxy: A constellation of my Autistic self. More Realms. morerealms.com
Edgar, H. (2026c, July 18). The constellation of intensities: Neuroqueering the spiky profile. Autistic Realms. autisticrealms.com
Edgar, H. (2026d, August 9). Migration & trusting our inner monotropic compass. More Realms. morerealms.com
Fraser, P. (2019). Can we trust? [Poem]. Republished in Stimpunks Foundation (2024, April 27). stimpunks.org
Hore, P. J., & Mouritsen, H. (2016). The radical-pair mechanism of magnetoreception. Annual Review of Biophysics, 45, 299–344.
Ibata, R., Gilmore, G., & Irwin, M. (1994). A dwarf satellite galaxy in Sagittarius. Nature, 370, 194–196.
McNeill, B. (2026, August 2). Links to lovely things [The Living Page: Migration]. Into the Woods with Brigit Anna McNeill (Substack). brigitannamcneill.substack.com
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The "double empathy problem." Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
Mouritsen, H. (2018). Long-distance navigation and magnetoreception in migratory animals. Nature, 558(7708), 50–59.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60.
Roman, J., & McCarthy, J. J. (2010). The whale pump: Marine mammals enhance primary productivity in a coastal basin. PLoS ONE, 5(10), e13255.
Rovelli, C. (1996). Relational quantum mechanics. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 35, 1637–1678.
Sawala, T., Delhomelle, J., Deason, A. J., Frenk, C. S., Häkkinen, J., Johansson, P. H., Keitaanranta, A., Rawlings, A., & Wright, R. (2025). No certainty of a Milky Way–Andromeda collision. Nature Astronomy, 9(8), 1206–1217.
Tarragnat, O. (2025, February 25). What is ethodiversity? ombretarragnat.com. ombretarragnat.com
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Webster, G. (2026, February 19). The quantum world reveals reality is made of relations, not objects. IAI TV. iai.tv

Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms · Guest Zine No. 30 · © Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms)
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Always Migrating · Helen Edgar 11