00:00:38.020and the healer and the grower and the caregiver
00:00:45.600is not in so many of the dominant narratives.
00:00:50.100writer poet and podcaster jared k anderson creator of the crypto naturalist podcast
00:00:58.200has built a large audience of readers and listeners with his strange vibrant appreciations
00:01:04.340of nature ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of single-celled
00:01:12.600organisms jared is forever writing love letters to the natural world
00:01:20.100Well, welcome, Jared. It's so lovely to be having this conversation with you on these winter days, although slightly different temperatures where we're at. Feels good to have some deep conversations during this time of year.
00:01:34.360Thank you. It's really lovely to be here. I feel the same. It feels like a meditative time of year.
00:01:39.720Absolutely. Very inward. It's a good time for reading poems and books. And I actually wanted to start off by reading a poem from your book of poetry, The Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, called Woodland You, where you write, quote,
00:01:58.120it's easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone-deep love for nature it's less
00:02:05.500easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature the pathways
00:02:12.320of your mind your dreams dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock your regret
00:02:19.480bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass it's the same as the nature you make time to love
00:02:26.260that you practice loving the forest the meadow the sweeping arm of a galaxy you are as natural
00:02:34.320as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love end quote oh yeah this poem it really seems
00:02:43.600to capture so much of what your work details and as we begin I want to specifically think through
00:02:52.420what the practice of loving may mean for us when it can be difficult to muster the strength to love
00:02:59.700and be that when it feels like the earth is slipping away through climate change or
00:03:06.500when we ourselves are not deserving or feel not deserving.
00:03:10.940Yeah, that's one of those poems that sometimes I think of as a bit of a thesis statement or
00:03:18.620a mission statement for my work in general, because I'm somebody who suffers from lifelong
00:03:26.100chronic major depression and anxiety and a bundle of other mental challenges. So I very much
00:03:33.680empathize with the idea of having trouble mustering up love for oneself.
00:03:39.980um but in that sense i find nature instructive because i have found that many of us who
00:03:48.860struggle with mental illness can summon sort of a generosity of spirit and love for the natural world
00:03:57.660even if it's difficult to see my own worth from time to time depending on where i am in my
00:04:07.480mental health journey, I can always walk in the woods and feel sort of a broad sense of gratitude
00:04:13.500and wonder. And in that sense, and in many senses, I feel like the nature is medicinal when we come
00:04:22.600to it with intention, intention to notice, intention to listen, intention to learn. And so
00:04:30.760I know what it feels like to love nature in a generous and unconditional, natural,
00:04:38.540effortless sort of way. So I don't think it takes too many steps to then realize my own connection
00:04:49.100to the natural world. I'm a messy, organic thing that is also part of cycles and change and
00:04:57.480um, a constant ebb and flow and give and take. Um, and so in so much as I know what it is
00:05:07.380to apply love and generosity and admiration to nature, uh, with a little effort of will,
00:05:15.200I find that I can take that lesson and use it to find new ways to love myself.
00:05:22.420mm-hmm yeah sometimes I think it's so cliche when we're like oh to love the earth is to love
00:05:32.220ourselves the earth body is our body and maybe that's just my own resistance to feeling deserving
00:05:38.260of the same love that I have for the earth and that sometimes I want to be misanthropic towards
00:05:45.700myself and think, you know, the earth is so pure, and I'm tainted, or, you know, these stories that
00:05:54.360I think a lot of us tell ourselves right now, especially right now, because we're not in intact
00:06:00.080cultures, where we have the type of social support that we may have once had, or like the anxiety
00:06:08.300that you brought up. I know so many of us feel lost and confused and not connected to a purpose
00:06:15.440or to a type of even like an inner knowing of spirit and so I know this is resonating with me
00:06:28.960I could imagine resonating with a lot of folks and I'm trying to imagine you as you're working
00:06:34.440through your your mind and heart and what practices you have and maybe if you want to share with us
00:06:42.720what you do for yourself when the anxiety comes up or when you find it hard to love yourself or
00:06:49.940even find it hard to love the earth or maybe what we've done to the earth as humans in this time
00:06:56.960like I think I'll just give a quick example when I was really falling in love with the forest
00:07:03.120specifically of the Pacific Northwest I would go into old growth forest and I think that
00:07:10.200concept of purity and maybe that comes from like a white supremacist reductionist background I was
00:07:15.940like oh like you're pure and you're old growth and you're this virgin forest and I'm so in love
00:07:20.700with you and you're just incredibly wise and beautiful and then I'd go into a plantation
00:07:27.740forest or a third growth forest or a clear cut and I'd feel like wait like no not you or you know
00:07:35.780the drought is here and your leaves are crunchy and this isn't and maybe it's almost a reflection
00:07:41.100of like those landscapes that are harder to love is is a connection to the harder to love parts of
00:07:47.620myself um so i don't know just to kind of i'll pause myself there and see where that what that
00:07:53.920sparks in you oh you're just touching on a lot of things that i think about a lot um and i think
00:08:00.700there is overlap behind that sort of purity culture that has touched a lot of us, at least
00:08:08.660I can speak for myself growing up here in the US and in the Midwest specifically. And I think that
00:08:14.780connects to what you said earlier about the difficulty of feeling that we are tainted,
00:08:21.240that we are too tainted in a variety of ways to think of the earth as family as anything but
00:08:29.480sort of a toxic positivity, you know, poster on a wall at an office. But I think these things are
00:08:36.140tied to the same thing, which is this insidious kind of cultural baggage that we all internalize,
00:08:47.340I think, and we do it unconsciously at first, but that defines for us how we achieve worth or merit
00:08:56.100within our own identities. And that's the purity thing. But it's also, the artifacts of that in my
00:09:03.860own life are sort of this work ethic and this sort of capitalist productivity model. Am I successful?
00:09:12.420How much money do I make? What's my job title? These are the sorts of ways in which the story
00:09:19.940we learn to tell about our identity starts to erode the sense that, you know, that you can go
00:09:31.760into an old growth forest and somehow that feels pure and correct, but it's difficult to apply
00:09:38.960that to yourself. Well, why? It comes down to the sense of worth, right? We are often taught what
00:09:47.520worth is when we are young through our cultural stories. You know, a lot of us seem to understand
00:09:52.460that a two-year-old child has intrinsic worth that has nothing to do with merit or achievement
00:09:59.200or success, and yet then struggle to apply that same concept to ourselves. Or that, you know,
00:10:06.540new growth forest is somehow less than old growth. Why? Well, because we're focusing on a narrative
00:10:13.800that the, that new growth forest is an aftermath and our mind settles on the disasters, not the
00:10:22.420growth. You know, I wrote a poem, if you don't mind, I'll read here quickly from field guide to
00:10:29.800the haunted forest called unscripted. And it, okay, this sort of touches on what we're talking
00:10:34.980about. Unscripted. We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories that it's easy
00:10:41.860to forget life doesn't follow conventional narrative structure. We can't wait for our
00:10:46.900climax. We don't have character arcs. We live and then we don't. There is no culmination in success
00:10:54.260or failure. We're not curated collections of achievements or mishaps. Don't fear you won't
00:11:00.720be good enough. Just be here, present in this dance between joy and sorrow. The plot is happening now.
00:11:08.120today is the story of you and me and you know i love stories of course i love language i'm a writer
00:11:17.720but stories aren't real life it's sort of the old saying that the map is not the territory
00:11:23.300you know the stories we tell ourselves stories about ourselves essentially that's what i think
00:11:30.940identity is contextualizing ourselves by telling a story of ourselves i mean stories are how we
00:11:37.260understand the world, sharing narratives with one another. And that's wonderful. But the downside of
00:11:46.160it is that if you grow up hearing a certain kind of story that the good guys are, you know, the
00:11:51.320ones who are successful and productive and rich and own things. Well, that becomes our default of
00:12:00.080of how we model worth and success in ourselves, which is a construct. It's, you know, a culturally
00:12:11.980created construct. And we forget that. So we begin to feel worthless if we don't match the
00:12:22.840construct, if we can't fit ourselves into the template of an identity story that we're told
00:12:29.100over and over again. And going back to that Woodland U poem, I think that's why the nature
00:12:35.460metaphor is not just a cliche. It's we have different narrative expectations or sometimes
00:12:46.060no narrative expectations for seeing a sunset or seeing a particularly gorgeous oak tree growing
00:12:55.100in a field. So we know how to love sort of a natural occurrence. And then it's just literally
00:13:03.300true that we are also a natural occurrence in every real way that matters. And yes, climate
00:13:12.380change is disastrous and will present so many terrible challenges and losses and tragedy,
00:13:21.220But that's nature too. I always am careful when I say this because I am definitely not advocating sort of a passive looking on approach to such things.
00:13:34.960But I am saying that endings and tragedy and messiness are not a reason to abandon the love or the hope or that instinctual feeling of worthiness that we get when we come to a lakeshore or look at a starry sky or glimpse a deer.
00:14:02.440those things are not diminished by the fact that there are man-made catastrophes here and on the
00:14:10.820horizon. Those catastrophes do not need to be catastrophes of love or worth or meaning or hope.
00:14:19.980There is, of course, work to do. But we get into that sort of scary purity artifact of so many of
00:14:29.440our cultures when we think, well, maybe the work's not worth it now because mistakes have been made,
00:14:37.180tragedies have happened, losses have happened. Maybe this version of nature isn't worth my love
00:14:43.580or respect or attention because now it's sullied and will be sullied forever. That's falling into
00:14:52.140that dichotomous thinking narrative that is poisonous to so many of us in so many ways
00:14:59.520both in terms of our identities and our worldviews that was beautiful and I am wondering
00:15:07.660if you're open to it I'd love to hear your thoughts on how masculinity weaves into some
00:15:16.380of the threads we've been pulling on and I'll just leave that totally open because I feel like
00:15:21.420there's so many things to say about that. I think it's huge. And it's one of the subjects
00:15:28.440that I'm very preoccupied with, especially as somebody who grew up in, you know, sort of a
00:15:35.040traditional American Midwest rust belt, small rural town kind of environment. You know, it's
00:15:42.780a tragedy that I have had so many male friends in my life that not only do not seem to have the
00:15:54.100tools to enjoy the connections that come through vulnerability and the emotional work that
00:16:05.840sometimes it takes to build deeper relationships with others and ourselves. And, you know, it's
00:16:12.220not just that a lot of these these folks were denied the tools through the cultural expectations
00:16:20.420but you know the the project of acquiring those tools was seen as you know somehow taboo or
00:16:33.880a way to become you know weak or less than or something other than masculine and it's something
00:16:40.960that I've dealt with my entire life, the tension between those expectations and, I mean, what
00:16:48.500I am, I remember I won a statewide poetry contest when I was in the fifth grade, and
00:16:57.240I had to miss a football practice to go to the banquet, and, you know, explaining why
00:17:04.920i had to miss to coaches you know with teammates around um you know it was like i was telling them
00:17:13.940that i had to miss because i was being abducted by aliens that day i mean there was just no
00:17:20.200cultural script to even navigate that except that anything that is other and sort of traditional
00:17:29.980American masculinity is often sidelined or met with, you know, at best playful teasing and at
00:17:38.820worst hate and derision and being ostracized. So I've always felt like I have operated in sort
00:17:47.320of a strange liminal space where I love weightlifting. I was a boxer, but I have written
00:17:54.920nature poetry for 30 years. And it's another one of these times when I feel like narrative
00:18:05.720becomes a trap if you don't constantly interrogate it, if you don't have a conversation with it.
00:18:14.840Because there will always be a ready-made, pre-packaged, store-bought narrative
00:18:21.000for anything you want, identity or morality, you know, you can always just grab the first one off
00:18:27.520the shelf. And people don't seem to understand what they give up by taking that convenience.
00:18:38.860You know, I know that my life is richer for being able to speak openly about,
00:18:44.040you know, my mental health struggles, about my vulnerability and uncertainty,
00:18:49.600about my own sense of worth, about being vulnerable in love, in the human yearning
00:19:02.260for connection and self-expression and creation. Do I also like to talk about the bench press?
00:19:09.840Sure. And it's just, it sometimes, you know, always feel so tragic to see peers and friends and loved ones bullied by a cold dead narrative into shrinking themselves into only certain little corners of human experience.
00:19:32.100and so i do all this writing and social media and every once in a while i like to post a picture of
00:19:38.960myself um and partly i'm doing it to say like hey here's here's a here's a man doing these things
00:19:47.780and inevitably i always get comments oh i thought you were a woman it's like oh yeah that's because
00:19:51.980I'm being thoughtful and empathetic in an open public context. So it's a conversation that is
00:20:03.460important to me and that I want to have. And it's another one of those big sort of like the purity
00:20:11.760narrative thing conversations that I feel like the only way we fix it is through intentionally
00:20:20.200rejecting it. And then in my case, I think the thing I can do is be a visible example of another
00:20:28.280way to interact with the world and myself. Yeah. And I just sincerely and earnestly hope it helps
00:20:38.900someone. Because yeah, growing up, there were so many ways in which I kind of had a general sense
00:20:44.920that I didn't fit narratives. And I know this is true of so many, so many folks, but I think it
00:20:54.100would have been helpful to me to have other examples of sort of whole and functional lives
00:21:00.040that had the same sorts of interests and loves and struggles that I had. So, you know, I feel
00:21:08.800like at the least I have an obligation to try to, with the visibility that has come from my writing
00:21:14.860and social media following, I feel an obligation to at least be a visible example of somebody
00:21:22.380who rejects traditional narrative expectations of what masculinity is and how it should be performed.
00:26:39.220And nobody really teaches anybody how to defend against it.
00:26:43.020So, it's like in the struggle between consumer and product, all of the deck is stacked for the products in terms of their facility and knowledge and sophistication with crafting narratives.
00:27:01.720and the fact that, you know, we don't educate the consumer because the consumer's job is to buy
00:27:07.860things. And, you know, so much of our civilization is set up on everyone kind of nodding and smiling
00:27:16.040and accepting that belief that, yes, buying things is part of my identity. And so I see this reflected
00:27:23.600sometimes in messages I get. I get lots of messages every day. And a genre of them that I get is,
00:27:30.640hey, I'd really like to write poetry like you do. How do I do that? And there's a lot of different
00:27:37.200flavor of that message. But that message is asking for permission to, like, what do I need
00:27:44.880to have this identity? And I think the question reveals so much, because the question is like
00:27:51.500the purity culture thing. How do I do this legitimately? Because come on, you know how.
00:27:57.300enjoy poetry and then play with language and write poetry like that's essentially the core
00:28:03.260advice i send back but the question is how do i do it legitimately in a way that what is the apple
00:28:10.820product i can buy of of becoming someone who writes poetry and people get confused and even
00:28:19.460a little uncomfortable when there isn't a thing when it's something that you give yourself
00:28:24.000permission to do and then of course you will always see people trying to sell the legitimacy
00:28:30.200you know um and people spend so much money on degrees and workshops and books and i'm not
00:28:40.420saying there's no value to that but at the end of the day how you become a poet is you write poetry
00:28:45.660a lot um you read a lot and you write a lot but there is this baked in preoccupation with
00:28:53.860okay, but how do I really do it? How do I do it in the context I understand, which is the context
00:28:59.800of buying approval, of buying legitimacy for my identity? And it's funny, poetry itself teaches us
00:29:08.780that limits are often nourishing. There's a reason poets through the centuries have loved
00:29:17.680strict forms like sonnets and Shakespeare with iambic pentameter and trying to take an idea
00:29:25.860and find a way to express it well within limitations. Even sort of the free verse
00:29:33.700sort of poetry I write, well, there's a reason it is small on a page. It's because the challenge is
00:29:39.780to express a big idea in a small space, thinking about kind of economy of language and which words
00:29:46.740really matter. And the limitations themselves are what kind of prompt growth and satisfaction
00:29:56.560and that feeling of meaning. But limits as a virtue is definitely not part of the kind of
00:30:06.720prevailing cultural narrative that many of us were raised in. Both in, as you said,
00:30:13.540you can do anything, express yourself way. But the subtext of that, that we all, I think,
00:30:19.820understand is like, you can do anything, express yourself through buying, through being productive,
00:30:27.620through ways that we all kind of know are the correct ways to be successful. And it eats at
00:30:35.200people. I mean, it's another reason why a lot of folks have trouble with self-worth and that
00:30:41.380misanthropy toward the self that you mentioned earlier. I actually have a poem called Limits
00:30:47.740in Field Guide to the Haunted Forest. Maybe I could read that real quick.
00:30:52.480Okay. Limits. You won't see most of this planet under each rock beneath the water secrets of air
00:31:00.580and soil. Can you feel the joy behind this limitation? That there is always a new thing
00:31:07.140to discover, a new way to grow, is one of the sweetest parts of living, and it's free and
00:31:13.820inexhaustible. It's odd how much anxiety I think so many of us have of sort of fear of missing out
00:31:21.840applied so broadly to so many things, but understanding that so much of the world and
00:31:29.020the universe and ourselves will remain a mystery is something that I think is humbling in a way
00:31:39.380that is fulfilling and nourishing. Because the other side of that is certainty as opposed to
00:31:49.160mystery, you know, certainty in spirituality or our identity, et cetera. And so many people are
00:31:57.660afraid of the mystery but I really feel like certainty is is what is claustrophobic is what
00:32:04.620shuts down possibility and growth yeah I rambled for a minute there did I leave the subject
00:32:12.080completely I really love where we're going with this because even when I think about
00:32:17.500what you talked about with freedom earlier I forgot the line you spoke but I almost feel
00:32:25.420like we need to reclaim limits or reclaim freedom where of course these huge themes have been
00:32:36.380co-opted by dominant culture to be like okay well freedom is you can do whatever you want
00:32:41.980whenever you want it's like no no no that's not that's not freedom that's called selfish
00:32:49.940That's not the same thing. So what is freedom? What is self liberation? What is self expression? When it's coming from a place of depth and spirit and empathy and not from selfishness. I don't think we're intrinsically selfish. Because also, you know, if you're too selfish, you die in the natural world.
00:33:13.340So it's not like that's not even a good survival strategy. And I think it's really bamboozling when from such a young age, we're taught that what freedom is, is to be able to do whatever we want, buy whatever we want, whenever we want it.
00:33:30.020you know uber eats at any time it doesn't matter when you can get on a flight you can buy what you
00:33:35.520want you can have it delivered amazon prime 24 hours no two hours you know it's just like
00:33:40.020that's what we're sold as freedom when not only is that devastating the planet i think it's
00:33:46.960devastating us and i i think it's leaving us so empty because we're wrapping our identities around
00:33:54.600this intense work culture productivity culture to get this quote freedom and on the flip side
00:34:01.240you know i'm just thinking about when trump was running and not that this was ever said but it
00:34:05.980was kind of this idea of like um if anybody's putting limits on you like that's un-american
00:34:11.680or something or like that's kind of the devil that's evil like if somebody's trying to put a
00:34:15.660limit on you rather than like us seeing limitations and a type is as like respectful so i just think
00:34:25.300no wonder we're confused like no wonder we're anxious we're what we've been conditioned to
00:34:31.420believe is so confused is so confusing and it's ecocidal and it's like well if we're raised to
00:34:36.760be ecocidal well like yeah we're gonna be depressed like that feels pretty um like par for the course
00:34:44.300here. So I wanted to read something from one of your essays, kind of under this theme of how we
00:34:50.420resist while we continue to build. And it's from one of your essays, Seeking Peace While the Work
00:34:55.920is Unfinished. And you write, quote, it's no secret that we need our destructive mindsets to
00:35:01.940oppose injustice, fight those who do harm and speak out against ad busters, bigots, fascists,
00:35:08.480etc. We also know that social media uses our innate prioritization of threats to hold our
00:35:14.700attention and keep us scrolling. And yet, I think it's clear that what makes the world and the
00:35:21.280inside of our skulls a joyful, livable, sustainable place to dwell requires constructive mindsets,
00:35:28.520building shelter, building community, food, art, education, child care, science, medicine,
00:35:35.980fun and leisure end quote yeah yes i'd love if you could speak on that for a minute
00:35:43.140a lot of it has to do with a lot of people who i feel like are not wrong calling for various kinds
00:35:51.220of revolution and deconstruction and i don't think that's wrong but i also think that
00:35:58.900if your thing is say industrialization of farming and food production and all of the consequences
00:36:09.800of it i want to know more about how you feed everyone than how you destroy the industrialized
00:36:18.860farms i just kind of feel like those insidious fingers of our cultural narratives sneak in to
00:36:26.920even our well-meaning narratives of progress because the destroyer is romanticized and
00:36:40.280the healer and the grower and the caregiver is not in so many of the dominant narratives.
00:36:50.860and i think sort of to tie in with social media the big destructive impulses
00:37:00.940trigger that kind of cortisol threat thing in us that also captures our attention and then if we
00:37:09.220doom scroll for long enough we start to feel this soul threatening numbness and malaise
00:37:16.860and you know folks often talk about the placelessness of social media that we're
00:37:23.740bombarded with all of these sort of global sized narratives and it starts to feel like we are
00:37:30.120residents of the internet of social media and then of course it's not a place and it doesn't
00:37:39.080have an environment. And we can find community through it. But it isn't where we live. And
00:37:47.840we're pulled away from our physical contexts and limitations. I think this might tie into
00:37:55.560what you were saying. We are creatures of a place and time. And between the pandemic and
00:38:05.020the rise of social media. And a lot of us are isolated while feeling like we are more connected
00:38:15.160than ever. But the connection of social media sometimes feels like empty calories, like we're
00:38:23.440eating sugar cubes constantly, and then thinking like, well, I feel full. Why am I sick all the
00:38:30.460time. And it's because we are not being present in our place and moment and doing the work that
00:38:42.140is not threat assessment or destructive mindset, doing the work of local engagement and feeling
00:38:50.080like we are needed and useful and engaged in our place and time, and not that we are somehow pulled
00:39:00.020out into a huge abstract unknowable kind of collection of a billion minds um then it's like
00:39:10.420we never know our neighborhood and i mean that in kind of a broad metaphorical way like the
00:39:16.360neighborhood of ourselves the neighborhood of where we live the nature around us the people
00:39:20.820around us. We are limited, finite, small things and creatures. And a lot of narratives and sometimes
00:39:31.460narratives that are selling us something desperately want us all to feel like we are
00:39:39.160creatures of global outcomes. This isn't me saying let's be passive, but this is me saying
00:39:45.320let's be awake to what we can and can't control, you know, and let's sort of engage in a little
00:39:53.420bit of radical acceptance about what we have the energy and capacity to do. You know, we can say
00:40:02.760to ourselves, and I think we should, that I want to be involved in the project of moving us toward
00:40:09.100toward justice and sustainability. I think it is also fair to say that I do have the same
00:40:18.020intrinsic worth as an old growth forest and deserve a bit of compassion, that I deserve
00:40:24.680to meet myself where I am, that I do, in fact, not have my two small hands on the levers of
00:40:31.840global outcomes. You know, I like the metaphor sometimes of global outcomes, social justice,
00:40:40.580climate justice, as being this monolithic boulder, right? And any one person could dash themselves
00:40:49.760to death against the boulder, not recognizing their own limitations. But that doesn't move
00:40:56.040the boulder. What moves the boulder is all of us pressing gently in the direction of our values
00:41:02.840within the bounds of our own sort of capacities and self-love. And, you know, that pressing,
00:41:11.880that pressing in the direction of our values is, I think, our obligation.
00:41:18.540I think the dashing ourselves against the boulder is another way to fall prey to these purity narratives that aren't good for human minds and don't mirror the natural world.
00:42:18.540yeah there's so much there it's a it's a subtle subject though right because i feel like someone
00:42:31.860could hear that and be like well we can't do nothing and it's like well that's certainly
00:42:35.080not what i'm saying um but it is acceptance of limitations but i think those limitations
00:42:42.540make us stronger i like i think that's another i don't know why the bamboozle word is in my head
00:42:50.740but like this i think it's another bamboozlement to make us less effective because when we're so
00:42:57.380spun out whether we're looking on social media or the news or we're feeling this external pressure
00:43:04.100to care about everything across the globe to do something about what's happening here what's
00:43:10.240happening there places we've never been places will never go cultures will never understand and
00:43:15.760we have all this pressure to somehow show up and support these issues global issues it's like
00:43:23.640we we actually can't yeah like we truly can't and where we do have the most effective power
00:43:32.020is where we're actual stakeholders which to me means where you live and and that doesn't mean
00:43:39.160and I agree like this doesn't it's nuanced because it's not saying oh well if you live
00:43:44.540in California you can't care what's happening in New York or something or you know it's not
00:43:51.660that that that to me kind of simplifies it in a way that makes it it puts it in a binary that's
00:43:58.920not helpful but when we can understand that no we do have limits like we only have a certain
00:44:07.220amount of energy every day. We only have a certain amount of time. We only have a certain amount of
00:44:12.540resource to give, whether that's like time, money, love, dot, dot, dot. So where are we going to put
00:44:18.840that? And there's literally so much going on just outside our window, whether they're spraying
00:44:25.160glyphosate or poison on the kids' park down the road, or whether they're dealing with sewage in
00:44:30.760a weird way or whether they're subdividing the last remaining wetland in your area I mean literally
00:44:38.020it's like everywhere you look around you there are decisions being made that you have no clue
00:44:43.960about usually so it's just not effective to spread ourselves so thin and honestly I'm like if if all
00:44:52.020of us really focused a lot more we'd probably feel better because we'd be building community
00:44:57.180around that focus we'd probably be more effective and then us as these smaller hamlets could come
00:45:04.280together in these bigger groups like you know local coming together regionally regionally coming
00:45:09.700together state national i don't know these are like i guess we're really getting into this
00:45:14.800theme of theory of change or of how we organize for a better future and i think i think one of
00:45:23.580the enemies to what you're saying. And I fully agree with you that I think that is the model
00:45:28.300that works and not only works, but leaves people feeling fulfilled. But one of the things that the
00:45:35.040dominant culture sells us is grandiosity. And perhaps we don't feel that serotonin hit of
00:45:45.080grandiosity if we write a letter to the editor in our local town or post on a Facebook or try to
00:45:52.600organize um against the spraying of chemicals on the park like i think people sometimes get
00:46:01.920wrapped up in wanting to feel that they are part of no not the local issue but the big issue
00:46:06.880the grandiosity and sometimes even the performative aspect of it in terms of social media
00:46:12.860and then everybody feels ill in an identity sort of way and again it's this destructive
00:46:21.580versus constructive mindset like you're not going to get a thousand likes for the quiet work
00:46:28.100you know for the for the planting a tree work and yet i'm somebody who let's say in my creative life
00:46:40.180has to really work at not doing this purity mindset this perfectionism mindset where i'll
00:46:46.880get so wrapped up in like a section of a book that I'm working on, that if I can't envision it
00:46:53.860perfectly, I will put it off and not do it at all. And it's this all or nothing kind of thinking,
00:47:00.340this grandiosity or nothing kind of thinking, that small things are imperfect things are not
00:47:07.120worth my time. And then that leads to, you know, nothing at all happening in a lot of times.
00:47:12.820Because sometimes I find this sort of metaphor too, in terms of writing, you might not be surprised to see that I look at a lot of things through the lens of writing. But if I really don't want to write, and there's something I'm working on, I'll often find myself reading about writing, as if that's the same thing.
00:47:31.300and it's not you know if I write a paragraph that gets me closer to my goal than if I spent
00:47:40.580four hours reading articles about character development online but that paragraph might
00:47:48.840be really hard and those articles might go down really easily yeah I just think that
00:47:55.820these purity narratives and the way marketing works and the way branding works and the way
00:48:01.920we are sold constant grand images of ourselves and this sort of toxic self-deceiving freedom
00:48:08.680that you were mentioning. I think a lot of these things conspire to push us toward these all or
00:48:15.300nothing mindsets that leave a lot of folks feeling numb and paralyzed. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:48:24.780everything you think it's you're on to something with the grandiose so or grandiose like this yeah
00:48:30.020it kind of taps into like the hero the savior the big and the humble isn't desirable and personally
00:48:41.580i think the humble quiet service oriented person is so beautiful i mean the older i get like that's
00:48:50.620what I strive for I don't want to be the grandiose person out front like that's like first of all
00:48:57.020like that's stressful and it doesn't really get you love it doesn't get you real connection it
00:49:04.560gets you projections and pedestalization and it just keeps feeding an emptiness
00:49:10.500at least from my experience or I've seen in you know my little life so yeah I think that's a
00:49:19.540really important thread into all of this and there's something that I feel like might be an
00:49:27.280antidote to a lot of this what we've been talking about that you bring up in your work which is like
00:49:32.320the value of the mystical the the magical nature there's magic in this world the beauty of science
00:49:41.280fiction, and your podcast, The Crypto Naturalist, it just has such a distinct feeling of adventure
00:49:50.720and curiosity. And I think there's so much we can gain from this sense of transportation.
00:49:55.540And though what you discussed may be fictional, I think it inspires real awe and relationship
00:50:02.040with the world. So I'd love to hear more about what draws you to the mystical and imaginal realms.
00:50:08.720And we're stretching our minds to encompass such journeys might lead us out of these kind
00:50:13.700of dark spiraling holes we've been talking about.
00:51:23.860I will get more to the question specifically,
00:51:27.200but this is from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest. Technically speaking, you can look at
00:51:33.500any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions in much the same way as you
00:51:40.860can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say you can
00:51:46.960miss the point of anything. And that's a distinction I like to talk about a lot, where
00:51:52.940for me, so much of science is the what and sometimes the how, but it leaves this huge
00:52:00.400span of human endeavor that is the why. And then I think folks get uncomfortable with the idea that
00:52:09.220whatever the why is for you will be correct. And there is a burden to that when, like the people
00:52:18.780asking me how you get permission to call yourself a poet there is a burden to that when you think
00:52:25.020wait so i can make meaning and take it seriously um i've been taught that my meaning should be
00:52:33.320store-bought or that my meaning originates in consensus and that leads to the grandiosity
00:52:41.000thing and it leads to people sort of apologizing for you know having a humble life or small
00:52:48.020interests or non-dramatic passions, you know, for whatever the value of that is in terms
00:52:54.300of the dominant culture at the moment.
00:52:59.040And part of it comes down to kind of the self-love of that original Woodland You, that poem that
00:53:04.380you read of, you have to love yourself a little bit to take yourself seriously and think that
00:53:11.900The meaning you make from acts big or small, you know, from humble interests, curiosity, you know, a pretty rock can make your month and that's okay if you let it be okay.
00:53:27.960and part of you know my love of fantasy is the idea of world creation you know crypto naturalist
00:53:37.480the podcast is is sometimes sort of um really intentionally silly and i've described that show
00:53:45.400as real love for fake nature before and i'm trying to do two things with that i'm trying to
00:53:54.400I mean, first of all, it's just fun and I love fantasy and science fiction, but also I think it demonstrates something that, you know, we can create our own love and enthusiasm and passion and that, you know, we can make worlds.
00:54:11.080and what does that mean and in terms of it being a metaphor i bet anybody listening to this could
00:54:19.220walk 10 feet and find it's not even that where they're sitting could find some aspect of nature
00:54:26.760that is unfathomably complex and wonderful and that they really haven't thought about
00:54:34.560i mean you know take take the word air what is air how many things compose it where is it from
00:54:42.500why why does our atmosphere have oxygen what's the history of that how has that changed life on earth
00:54:48.800on and on and on and then you know we we stick a one syllable word on it and
00:54:53.440pretend that like oh we're done with it we got that one um so sometimes you know if i if i talk
00:55:01.080about a unreal bird that lives in low orbit, you know, and dives into mountain lakes to eat
00:55:08.840inscrutable creatures. Somebody can sometimes summon up wonder for that. But I think what
00:55:16.180we're almost doing is practicing the act of wonder, of awe, and revisiting sort of the childhood
00:55:23.780wonder of being, you know, a little kid and you learn about electric eels, and you're young and
00:55:29.580everything is new and wonderful so you're just like oh cool and now you've just internalized
00:55:34.360that electric yields exist well it's bonkers that electric yields exist um and yet familiarity
00:55:42.840sometimes robs us of of that wonder and so for me it's like well sometimes the practice
00:55:50.920can involve fiction to get back to an essential truth you know the essential truth of
00:55:57.400being alive and awake in such an awe-inspiring universe in such a singular and rare world
00:56:05.520if i may share one more poem on that subject here and this is bringing it home to sort of
00:56:12.760real things but with the same concept and this is um from love notes from the hollow tree
00:56:19.320it's a poem called look there look there beyond the parking lot past the broken pallets and sun
00:56:26.560bleached Coors cans, down where the march of saplings meets the ditch lilies, a deer. You
00:56:33.760know this won't last. You know the site wasn't arranged just for you, that it isn't nature's
00:56:40.160message of quiet wholeness, that the deer didn't arrive because you needed it to. And yet, and yet,
00:56:47.360and yet, you suspect it will. It was, it is, it did. And with just a little effort,