In response to Stefan Bengtsson's search for alternatives to Education for Sustainable Development practices outside the mainstream of the state and its policy formulations, this response outlines how our journey, experiences, and approaches reflect a de-professionalizing encounter with autonomous places of learning emerging from indigenous knowledge, social, and ecological movements in different parts of the world. The article proposes an enlivened form of inquiry-in-solidarity as an ethical and intellectual framework for such encounters. Such an alternative approach to research opens up for official policy makers in ESD and academically institutionalized researchers contributing to the "politics of policy" the possibility of an ongoing ecological conversation between different knowledge traditions and practices and ways that they may engage, critique, celebrate, and deepen the questions we each ask in times that increasingly require innovative, hopeful, and urgent answers.