00:00:09.440And one of the things is I said, imagine all of the words in your head were erased,
00:00:15.060every single one, and you could only get back 50 words for the rest of your life.
00:00:20.680And then I said, what are the 50 words that actually do work in your life that actually
00:00:25.900designate real relationships. Like my guess is it's not justice. It's not like activism. It's
00:00:32.180not like environmentalism. It's not like health. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson
00:00:39.600Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology.
00:00:45.340Her first book of essays, The Flowering Wand, Rewilding the Sacred Masculine,
00:00:49.660will be published by Inner Traditions on November 22nd, 2022 and is available for pre-order.
00:00:55.900Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the Gospels, The Madonna Secret, will also be published by Inner Traditions in spring 2023.
00:01:06.000Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com and follow her work on Instagram at cosmogony and at sophiestrand.com.
00:01:15.000i am so excited and maybe even a bit nervous because the topics you cover are so fascinating
00:01:26.720to me and i've been trying for days to wrap my head around how to even ask you them so welcome
00:01:34.660to my excited jumbling mind and space today well thank you the nervousness is mutual and i think
00:01:43.300it'll probably create fertile movement. I feel it. I feel it. Okay. Well, I'm going to start off
00:01:51.160with a quote from your book, The Flowering Wand, Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. And this one
00:01:58.460really pulled on me this morning. Quote, who is the monster of today's legends? Today, we see a
00:02:08.220surfeit of media coverage devoted to weather and climate events? Has the biosphere become the
00:02:13.800monster? Every attempt to create weather or climate-regulating technology, rather than
00:02:19.820adjusting and halting our own abysmal behaviors, pose its Earth as a monster, and humankind as
00:02:26.960the heroes who must control her and tame her and save her. Techno-narcissists are the new Marduk,
00:02:34.320the new theseus they want the myth of progress to subsume the older although newly investigated in
00:02:42.060the realms of quantum physics and glacial ice coring chaos of emergent systems and biospheric
00:02:48.440intelligence earth doesn't know best our cultures insist we know best and we must progress ever
00:02:56.520onward towards greater control end quote well that is pretty dramatic of me you would think
00:03:07.280oh just the right uh just the right drama i love it it really sums up so much of
00:03:15.340my questioning around saviorism, human supremacy, and our lack of
00:03:27.040ability or desire to stand in our own, what am I trying to say? Something about
00:03:36.360when you're saying halting our own abysmal behaviors. It's like anything but that.
00:03:41.460anything but looking at our lifestyles and bringing up the technology part I mean again
00:03:49.940I'm just this quote really harnesses so much of what I'm questioning so I could ask you
00:03:57.160probably 10 different questions and race through them all in a desire to have you answer them all
00:04:03.640but what does this quote bring up for you in this moment well it's interesting for me because you
00:04:11.200know i think the thing about writing is and i study writing and the history of writing and how
00:04:16.060it kind of calcifies thought that should be adaptive and oral and relational and always
00:04:22.040shifting to um be tailored to a specific political sociological situation when you write something
00:04:29.580down it becomes brittle it stops changing it stops adapting so it's interesting to hear this
00:04:34.440quote read back to me and think of how it has already ossified for me having written it three
00:04:39.200years ago um it's interesting to to hear yourself enshrined in in writing um I think for me I
00:04:49.780the new monster I've been actually thinking that the new monster is the person who refuses to get
00:04:56.800well and that the new if I was actually looking at that quote again I've been thinking about the
00:05:02.800new monster as being the person who rejects the technology, who rejects the fix, who refuses to
00:05:09.180come back into a normative nervous system or a normative body, and that the unwell are the
00:05:17.340monstrous and also perhaps the most capable of giving us information on how to salvage more
00:05:24.940interspecies feral um futures that's interesting to consider committing to unwellness or um refusing
00:05:38.580a type of wellness that's being sold to us by the same systems that have poisoned us
00:05:45.960and what could that look like like if we were just um to imagine a day-to-day of somebody
00:05:55.160or maybe even yourself refusing that i would say false wellness yeah so to answer your question i
00:06:04.000would say this is high stakes which is i feel that people who do not have illnesses that can
00:06:09.780be effectively cured and managed are exiled from narratives of completeness and wholeness and yet
00:06:17.460are supposed to constantly be financially and practically investing in trying to better
00:06:24.060themselves and trying to come back into more of a normative body and more of a normative nervous
00:06:29.100system and it's an extra burden on top of the very material reality of being sick and you know
00:06:36.460having a condition that doesn't have a cure and having to actually deal with that and take care
00:06:40.440of yourself in an already extraordinarily complex time. And so I've been thinking that
00:06:49.620what would it mean to claim fertility inside of decay instead of always feeling like you're
00:06:57.680a failure every day when a treatment doesn't work, when you haven't come back into a window
00:07:04.200of tolerance, when your nervous system is still glitchy, when you still have triggers, how can
00:07:09.080you stop problematizing that and overburdening your already burdened system and begin to think
00:07:15.940of yourself as soil? You know, I think we problematize death, we problematize waste and
00:07:21.380excrement and breaking down, but rot is actually the womb of life, that decay makes the room for
00:07:28.740the next phase. And so we can begin to look at things in our body that the culture problematizes
00:07:33.720as actually making good soil for other stories and other possibilities.
00:07:39.620That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes and notes I was making for this interview
00:07:46.420from the Inner Lives of Fungi Expeditions Advocacy and Poetics from the Life Worlds podcast.
00:07:56.660I think you were saying, quote, we live in a culture that's very inside of chronological
00:08:02.980time and a very simplistic idea of Darwinism, that everything is moving towards some end,
00:08:09.000that everything is progressing towards betterment. And as someone who lives in a body that is only
00:08:14.440going to decay and is in the process of decay at a much more accelerated rate than most people,
00:08:20.560I have to begin to think about myself as a compost heap, which is very noticeably decaying
00:08:26.220and falling apart, but that that actually might be a very fertile generative place to be,
00:08:32.040That I might not be sprouting stories that I get to live, but I might make myself into good soil, good compost for other people to grow something. And I think that's how many indigenous cultures think, how am I making myself a good ancestor? How are my decisions opening up the way for other people and beings to live?
00:08:52.160end quote and I felt so relieved by hearing you speak to this because I think that there is such
00:09:04.220a push to get well to fix the earth to fix ourselves to save save save and it doesn't
00:09:13.200allow us to be present with where we're at and I think that it's an added pressure that
00:09:20.240can even make ourselves sicker, really. And to imagine living in a culture that looks at
00:09:30.280death as the cycle of life and something that creates more fecundity is a completely different
00:09:36.940worldview. And if we were to live inside that worldview for just a short period of time,
00:09:44.060How would that shift the way that we did look at climate change or the Anthropocene extinction?
00:09:51.020And I'm not saying that because I want to not feel grief over the changes.
00:09:57.500I think that's beautiful and healthy and acknowledging what we're losing is so important.
00:10:03.040but I also wonder where does that become disempowering or when does that become more
00:10:14.760problematic? I oftentimes like to use deep timeframes because I think we're stuck in such
00:10:20.640a narrow slice of anthropocentric narrative. You know, humans have not been around for that long.
00:10:26.380the earth has been doing life for a very very long time and there have been four five major
00:10:33.700extinction events whereby 90 of all of the beings were extinguished and it's actually i think the
00:10:41.820thing that i find so compelling about those moments is they're in they're an apocalypse
00:10:45.760they're an absolute end of the world almost all of the beings die and yet from the space opened
00:10:52.580up by these extinction events there are all these ecological niches that are opened up and suddenly
00:10:57.760you know the three species that come through that bottleneck event diversify and create a whole new
00:11:02.980world and that human beings are actually the product of the space opened up by an extinction
00:11:08.780event that our very morphology our very body is in a certain way a flesh owed to that extinction
00:11:16.480event and so that we our very bodies depend on absence depend on the deaths of other beings
00:11:23.420and practically every time we eat we are rebuilding ourselves metabolically with death
00:11:28.940um and that can be a more interesting place to begin to inhabit um that you know to enter life
00:11:35.960be food to enter you know death is actually the moment when solitary aliveness overflows its cup
00:11:43.560I'll never forget sitting next to this dead deer that had been hit by a car and I watched it die
00:11:50.540and sat with it and I was very very upset but I went to it day after day and watched as its
00:11:55.880you know atomized self began to melt and relax and become maggots and beetles and fungi and flies
00:12:02.940and as someone who during that time period was navigating extraordinary illness that I was
00:12:08.640beginning to grapple with what's going to be incurable it suddenly it softened my own
00:12:15.080understanding of a self that you have to learn how to feed the self to others
00:12:19.700I guess what I'm sitting with is how do we know when to let go and how do we know when to fight
00:12:31.300or stand for what we love? That's a beautiful question. That's something that I'm really
00:12:38.600thinking about. I think we fight for what we love and we follow our love. And I think that
00:12:46.280fighting for what you love is instinctual. It's a mother who lifts up a car to protect her child
00:12:52.140without thinking. I think a great example for me is when you really need to save something,
00:12:57.580you hardly think about it you just do it your whole body knows that it loves something so much
00:13:02.580it will sacrifice itself for it and I you know for months at the beginning of quarantine I was
00:13:10.320visited by woodchucks wherever I went woodchucks would charge me they would come up to me they
00:13:16.400would you know make themselves known and I kind of wanted a sexier animal companion than woodchucks
00:13:21.840I was not super, I was, I was really like this, this is like my teacher right now, woodchucks.
00:13:28.760I think I wanted a coyote or a heron or something, but it was woodchucks.
00:13:33.000I call them land seals because of the way they dive in and out of the earth and their tunnels.
00:19:41.780As on heaven, as on heaven, as on heaven, as on heaven, as on heaven.
00:19:57.560It's my strength, you know, a trip I come in, it's my strength, you know.
00:20:11.780I sense that we have a strong desire to be in that type of altered state, you know, and love is altering and purpose is altering and a calling I think is also altering us.
00:20:37.060And I'm thinking about how that has taken really unhealthy forms for many of us through addictions to substances or even social media, in a sense, or things that are outside of us that are brought to us by colonial capitalism that maybe fill the void of these alterations that bring us in closer connection.
00:21:07.060because when we're not thinking and we're allowing ourselves to be lived through or you know I don't
00:21:13.700remember all of the words that you just used but I felt it in my body as you were saying it
00:21:18.720and I think about how so many of us even myself have tried to get there but even in getting there
00:21:26.140it's almost a surrender like to even get to the place of being altered by love isn't about control
00:21:32.620And we can't even necessarily choose it, right? Like, I'm trying to slow down my thoughts enough
00:21:38.560to even understand how we even get to a place where we are living in a purposeful way, altered
00:21:47.000by love, altered by commitment to the earth. And I think, at least in my experience, for me to have
00:21:53.620gotten there is a slowing down and a surrender to not being the savior, to not having control,
00:21:59.760to not knowing how the story ends to maybe not even knowing the story how the story begins
00:22:05.260so yeah i'm wondering in your experience if folks are listening to this and they're thinking gosh
00:22:12.940i i want to get there too i i think that i always want to kind of interrupt an eco-preciousness
00:22:21.000that has infused a lot of popular conversation about deep ecology and ecological embodiment
00:22:26.100And I think, you know, I'm a person who has been in hospital rooms and has been in, you know, complicated relationships with people who are helping to support my body with medicines that are created from extractive processes that, you know, there's no purity, there's no exclusion zone, and there's also no perfect way to do this.
00:22:46.520I mean, an interesting way to kind of turn this idea of being fought by another being or being in service for another being is to think about fermentation itself and think about civilization and think, well, is civilization a human story?
00:23:02.020You know, we always think we own everything, including our culture, but we can see that, you know, sessile communities and civilizations where hierarchy begins to really formalize are always occur concurrently with mass breweries and fermentation and grain.
00:23:22.520and so sometimes I think of you know single-celled yeast and I think you guys are writing the story
00:23:27.620of civilization this is this is you know it you know it's interactive we're participants but like
00:23:33.500it is civilization even a human story I'm in no way saying that's true but I'm saying it's a way
00:23:38.780of flipping our the power dynamic and also interrupting the idea that relationality is
00:23:44.360always intimate and sensual eros because eros is also can be you know I think symbiosis is a good
00:23:52.260example which is we have a very narrow idea of symbiosis as always being mutually beneficial
00:23:57.680it's lichen you know lichen which are a composite of algae and fungi and and yeasts and bacteria
00:24:05.020but you know symbiosis actually in science represents a continuum from anything from
00:24:12.260parasitism to mutualism or commensalism and actually most beings will ride along that
00:24:18.860continuum their whole life. And sometimes they'll be antagonizing each other. Sometimes they'll be
00:24:23.800helping each other. And it just depends on when you take a snapshot on that continuum, what it
00:24:28.500looks like. And I think that that's why I like the example of the, you know, the ant being taken over
00:24:36.300by the fungus, which is, you know, to tell the right stories right now might be agonizing. I
00:24:41.760sometimes think about how many people are having gastrointestinal issues and where their gut biomes
00:24:46.120are so disturbed that they've become somehow the mouthpiece for these disturbed microbial
00:24:51.280communities. I mean, that's personal for me. I think about how, you know, my gastrointestinal
00:24:57.420tract has been incredibly destroyed by experimental medications, by my connective tissue
00:25:03.520disease, and by a host of other issues. And so it's made me in a certain way, if we think about
00:25:08.920the gut brain access the mouthpiece for a very unhappy group of microbes I'm really it's a pretty
00:25:17.720wild place to have gone with that no I'm but I'm seeing it I'm I'm feeling it and I am grateful for
00:25:25.600your challenge of the eco-preciousness I think as you called it because I think that feeds back
00:25:32.840into the saviorism or the purity culture or the perfectionist white supremacist culture where
00:25:42.960everything has to fit into this other mythology of how we must connect or when it's right
00:25:51.740or how it should feel and I love that you're challenging that because I think there's more
00:26:01.180truth to it when our ways of connection aren't so confined to what somebody else says it should be
00:26:07.600or or what we think it should be based off cultural stories I love how you speak about
00:26:12.480civilization since I was a child I think I was always questioning it being like why am I
00:26:20.280consenting to this culture or the civilization that I don't like that I don't believe in that
00:26:26.820I don't even trust the leaders who built it in the first place. And I started studying theology
00:26:32.800in undergrad and really diving into these questions of consent and why are we believing
00:26:40.680this set of stories that were given to us by people we don't trust or people who have really
00:26:50.320harmed um so many folks and creatures you know human and are more than human kin and and so
00:26:59.200maybe we could explore a bit about what it looks like to consent to these mythologies of our
00:27:07.600dominant culture and how we rise up and i don't want to even say against them because in a sense
00:27:14.360that's giving them more power even though of course they have had a ton of power and we can
00:27:19.980see that everywhere we look, but maybe I'll pause there. I always look to my fungal and invasive
00:27:28.780species allies, which is I want to digest the house from the outside. I want to compost it. I
00:27:33.960want to rot the root system. I think that we have to look to tools that the dominant paradigm is
00:27:41.220allergic to. And those tools are often invasive species or parasites or viruses or things that
00:27:48.300are considered harmful or outside of normalcy. Yeah, so I often look to things that are disgusting
00:27:56.960for advice on how to digest the master's house from the outside. I do think that we live in an
00:28:04.620age of deracinated mythologies, that myth used to be a context-sensitive relational experience,
00:28:10.800a dialogue with a specific place, and that it was, you know, it lived in breath, it lived in
00:28:17.160community you had to resurrect it each time you told it and adapt it and it came from the specific
00:28:23.180you know myth was created to be a vessel for ecological wisdom that you know narratives
00:28:28.200travel and are more easily remembered in oral cultures than lists lists actually don't exist
00:28:32.860until well after well after writing is is created and the first lists are of course lists of
00:28:39.140agricultural surplus so it's not until we start staying still and we start textually staying still
00:28:45.580that we get lists. And before that, the best way to transmit really practical information about
00:28:51.420ecological survival, about when to gather things, how to make medicine, how to create community,
00:28:58.340the best way to help that travel was by putting it in a myth that had fruited up like a mushroom
00:29:04.480from the mycelial system of a specific place. A mycelial system below ground, my corrisal system
00:29:10.600is a map of relationships and so a myth can also be a map of relationships in a place that you see
00:29:16.640of course deities or figures but they're really anthropomorphized elementals who are telling you
00:29:21.960how to you know correctly inhabit a specific ecology um but we live in a moment where the
00:29:28.400there's this idea that a myth can be uprooted deracinated from its location from its time
00:29:34.180period and then extrapolated to many different cultures and many different climates and ecosystems
00:29:38.820and still make sense um i mean my favorite example is christianity which is you know an incredibly
00:29:45.040context sensitive um story you know the teachings of jesus are specific to second temple period
00:29:51.340palestine under roman imperial rule in galilee spoken in aramaic in an oral culture and you know
00:29:58.820the romans come in and uproot that and then turn it into their tool for militaristic um colonialism
00:30:06.540I want to take a moment on Christianity and Jesus. I have really felt fascinated by your writings and thought processes around this.
00:30:21.160a lot about how you speak of comparing the ground people worshiping sky stories and how
00:30:32.180Jesus was a god of of the maybe it's not underworld but and I'm probably mixing up some of your
00:30:40.260thoughts but I was so fascinated with the the differentiation between the sky gods and the
00:30:47.320ground gods and how when we set our belief systems based not on the earth and not underground how
00:31:00.060much disconnection comes from that so I'm going to pause because I know that I'm kind of bumbling
00:31:05.480through this one but if you could take it away and whatever that just inspired in you I would
00:31:10.380love to hear about this well this is my favorite topic which is you know I think it's interesting
00:31:16.100to think of jesus as the end of a long rhizomatic continuity of vegetal gods associated with
00:31:22.160fermentation death and rebirth um you know vines ivy ecstatic experiences in nature open air dance
00:31:31.860jesus is the interruption of that cycle but it had been it had been extant as a mythic mycelium
00:31:38.200below ground for a long time so i think of myth mythic systems in certain places as being like
00:31:43.640mycorrhizal mycelial fungal systems below ground there are these branching filamentous cells
00:31:50.280that work their way through the soil connecting trees providing a highway for bacteria and you
00:31:57.000know behaving like like like messengers ferrying information between different beings and
00:32:02.820constituting the very connective tissue of the soil and so there's this kind of mythic system
00:32:07.580below ground that then will fruit up as a mushroom superficially looks like an individual
00:32:12.080but it's really just connected to this much older system below ground and so I've been thinking of
00:32:18.200you know Osiris, Addis, Adonis, Dumuzi and all of these figures in the Mediterranean basin as being
00:32:26.140these above ground mushrooms of a much older mythic mycelium and Jesus is associated with
00:32:32.480the very same things death and rebirth you know radical all of these beings are all are also
00:32:38.440associated with a threat to the dominant system with coming in and making people act crazy act
00:32:45.400like animals create festivity drama um entertainment and jesus definitely is aligned with
00:32:53.420dionysus is of course the best example but yeah so i was thinking about these what these original
00:32:59.940vegetal gods of the mediterranean do well is they don't get stuck at one point in the cycle
00:33:04.920so i'm not demonizing sky gods the problem is sky gods that don't also return to the earth
00:33:10.560which is why i love the metaphor of spores i'm like i'm not interested in sky gods or earth gods
00:33:16.160i'm interested in spore gods so for me spore gods are you have this fungal system below ground
00:33:22.760that creates a mushroom that then sporulates out spores and now we know that spores actually
00:33:29.340many of them are carried up into the wind where they nucleate water molecules and actually
00:33:34.680facilitate cloud formation. In rainforests, it's actually below ground fungal systems that are
00:33:41.260coordinating rain production. It intimately stitches the sky into the ground. Spore gods
00:33:48.200say that you can't prize descent over ascent or ascent over descent. You have to tie them into
00:33:53.880a virtuous cycle where sometimes things are growing, they're mushrooming up, and sometimes
00:33:58.460that are decaying back to nourish the soil and to provide the matrix for something else to grow
00:34:04.220and so of course someone like Dionysus someone like Orpheus they they come into being they make
00:34:10.480beautiful music they create interspecies collaboration and then usually they die and
00:34:15.740they're mulched back into the ground the problem with Jesus is that he's an interruption in that
00:34:21.460cycle he does not his body literally disappears he does not go back to nourish the earth from which
00:34:27.720he drew his ecological parables and his teachings and so if we look in deep time of course we can
00:34:34.260see what happens when the process of decay is interrupted and we can go all the way back to
00:34:40.620the carboniferous period where their lignin was first produced which creates woody plants like
00:34:46.680trees and so there was an explosion in the growth of growth of woody plants but white rot which is
00:34:53.520the only the fungi that's best at breaking down lignin had not yet evolved and so when all of
00:35:00.680these trees and these woody plants died they didn't decay and so they actually swapped huge
00:35:07.640areas of land and created they brought down the temperature and caused an actual climatological
00:35:14.300crisis so it was they didn't decay and actually one of the things that seems most interesting to
00:35:22.080me is it's that compacted undigested matter. It's that fungal absence, that interruption in the
00:35:28.400cycle of decay and refruit that is fueling our fossil fuel dependent culture today. So it's that
00:35:36.680interruption that is informing our extractive capitalistic culture. I want you to go on with
00:35:44.240this and i am thinking about how so many of our bodies are never allowed to go back to the earth
00:35:55.560to feed the soil from whence we came whether it's because we're filled with formaldehyde
00:36:03.120put in uh varnished caskets in concrete in the earth we are kept from the earth or so many of
00:36:13.100our buildings, pressure treated wood, houses wrapped in plastic. So much of our culture
00:36:19.700is fighting decay, even human lifespan. I mean, it's like we, we, our mythologies, our cultures
00:36:31.000are, are, I'm my, I wish you could see my hands right now, but it's like they're making a clawing
00:36:36.940motion because I feel like this culture is clawing and desperate to keep us from composting
00:36:44.840back into fertility yeah I mean and I of course one of the worst things is you know I oftentimes
00:36:52.400think about it it's very closely aligned to our fear of waste and the truth is there's no way to
00:36:59.140throw anything to you know when when you abstract yourself from waste what you're really saying is
00:37:03.760I want someone else to digest this poison.
00:37:06.320And you're also saying, I don't want to be part of a food web.
00:37:08.980I think that we've forgotten how to weave our shit into food webs.
00:37:12.700But food webs are actually created by a healthy matrix of shit that's being alchemically transformed by another being's appetite.
00:37:19.860We have forgot how to turn our bodies into food.
00:37:23.760We've forgot how to turn our shit into food, our pollution into food.
00:37:27.260And so I oftentimes ask, you know, oyster mushrooms are incredibly good at tailoring their appetites to, you know, poisons and toxins that nothing else will digest.
00:37:37.480You know, there are mushrooms at Chernobyl that grow towards the radiation and eat it.
00:37:41.920And of course, I have a very bad feeling about training fungi to eat our pollution and forcing them to do that.
00:37:50.040But I think metaphorically, we can begin to think about what does it mean to eat our own poison?
00:37:55.600what does it mean to eat our own our own pollution what would it mean to act like the oyster mushroom
00:38:01.520and begin to tailor our appetites towards those things that we have offloaded onto communities
00:38:06.820who did not participate in their creation well i think there's something about eating our own
00:38:12.940self-hatred that is in a sense the poison beautiful yeah yeah i'm just thinking about
00:38:20.760how we our shit is disgusting uh dead bodies are gross the the self-hatred is so deep within our
00:38:31.440conditioning that how do we eat that and metabolize it into something that looks more like love or
00:38:39.420and maybe it's not love maybe it's something else i mean i think we can all deal with this
00:38:46.740practically in our own lives which is I sometimes think about feeding the demons so I have I have
00:38:52.400some demons in my life and when I tried to get rid of them they just did you know my friend um
00:38:57.800oftentimes says that you know when you try and shove your demons away they do um push-ups in the
00:39:02.200dark and they just get stronger um and I realized that instead I had to selectively feed them and
00:39:10.360invite them to the table and to realize that they were boisterous and they were you know difficult
00:39:15.300company and they made a mess. But when I didn't invite them to the table, they did much, much
00:39:19.560worse damage. And so inviting that self-shame, that self-policing, those faults in us that we
00:39:27.660can't get rid of, but we have to learn how to collaborate with. You know, this is also part of
00:39:32.860our community building. You know, there's such an idea of purity that keeps us from actually
00:39:37.840creating, you know, mutual aid systems where we live. Like I live around a lot of people
00:39:42.740who have practically kept me alive when i've had physical crises out on you know a walk when i fell
00:39:48.740three years ago and my top of my kneecap came off you know it was not my liberal you know activist
00:39:55.300friends that came to help me it was you know the republican neighbors who i know their names i know
00:40:01.700their dogs names and we actually live close to each other it's a really interesting
00:40:08.640yeah i'm kind of storm the mind storm that we're getting into around
00:40:15.240the eating the self-hatred and inviting the demons and even inviting the enemies and it's
00:40:23.160reminding me of bio komalafe who i know we're both really familiar with and there was well
00:40:31.560there's a few things one i remember when i first moved to cougar mountain and i think at that time
00:40:37.560I had interviewed Stephen Herod Buhner or close to and I was inspired by him and I said demons
00:40:43.180welcome here and what I meant was like in me demons welcome like I don't want them to hide
00:40:49.980I want them to come out I want I want to look at them and for years I thought why did I do that
00:40:56.600I've been like living with these demons it's been so challenging and they just stripped me and it
00:41:02.220was so hard to work with them and be with the land and and now that I'm you know years into
00:41:10.080that process I am grateful for aspects of it but I think that um you know sometimes I think about
00:41:17.960how we or how how do I say this um how our culture and especially liberalism I believe
00:41:28.060has separated us more from each other in the sense of demonizing, otherizing, better, you know,
00:41:36.180we are better than them. They don't, they're doing this, we're doing that. You know, all this we them
00:41:40.900type of mentality. And I think, well, is shame really the way to change people's psychology?
00:41:49.600Is shame or hatred the way to shift people that we want to change or see what we see?
00:41:55.580I'm like this isn't even an effective strategy at this point like I'm like what are we doing this
00:42:01.100doesn't make sense to keep hating ourselves and hating others when we're really just trying to
00:42:06.840get back to reconnection and I know I'm saying a lot of we right now it's like well who who are
00:42:11.420the we's that want to get back to reconnection but I doubt that maybe there's a small population
00:42:16.780of people. But I don't see many people wanting to choose disconnection from themselves or from
00:42:25.860the earth. Maybe they don't have the language from it. And I think we're all stuck in a lot
00:42:29.740of trauma that comes from many different places. But yeah, I'm just, I'm still in this place of
00:42:37.940of considering how ineffective our strategies are that either halt the compost the rot
00:42:50.200hate our own shit hate other people's shit hate ourselves hate each other but yet are still
00:42:56.620self-righteous I'm like where is this all coming from and how do we look at it yeah I mean as
00:43:04.320someone who's been through violent trauma i have a lot of sympathy for the need for it to create
00:43:09.880stable value systems to say there's an inside in the outside i'm safe when i'm on the inside
00:43:15.580i'm unsafe when the outside comes in and i understand the need for the survival mechanism
00:43:21.740but that doesn't mean that it's the right technique to to implement right now um i mean i i i love
00:43:29.840working by probiotic by addition which is it's not about changing these people in some kind of
00:43:36.800tailored specific way or like changing their mind it's about adding so much stuff onto the
00:43:42.640compost pile so that you know belief systems and ideas and paradigms that we're never supposed to
00:43:48.740touch touch and you know spark off some kind of growth that we could have never planned or authored
00:43:56.040you know i think when we sit down and try and author a plan it's oftentimes not as fertile as
00:44:03.400the spontaneous generative experience of the ecotone you know an ecotone is when one ecosystem
00:44:09.200dramatically shifts into another and it's often a place where we see the highest biodiversity of
00:44:14.360species like fish and birds it's this you know it comes from oikos for home household and tonos for
00:44:21.220tension. It's the places, the place where tensions are held in a household. And I think that when we
00:44:27.240try and create these stable value systems of inside and outside, we preclude the ecotone
00:44:32.740where more species can diversify, where more stories can sprout.
00:44:51.220To the little place you would tell me about
00:44:57.240When you'd sense that I'd want to escape
00:45:18.700in the city. You make it there and you make it anywhere. Anywhere. But I've been anywhere
00:45:34.600and it's not what I want. I want to be still with you.
00:45:41.340i think you make a really good point in speaking to how we have needed to create safety
00:45:52.520and sometimes that has looked like othering or differentiating and i wonder
00:46:02.260is that serving us now or what parts of that is or could serve us because we are in such dire
00:46:14.660times and maybe we've always been in such dire times and I know we spoke about this before the
00:46:19.140interview you know there's probably always been elements of apocalypse in our human story but I
00:46:27.180really am trying to challenge what I thought I knew. I'm trying to challenge my own self-righteousness
00:46:35.280of environmentalism or liberalism or intelligence or intellectualism. I'm just like,
00:46:46.120is this helping me or helping the earth come to a steady state and I am yearning for simpler ways
00:46:57.840of knowing of understanding of being of relating like going back to the basics of like what is it
00:47:04.820to be human at our most basic level and can we reconnect on that and can we find safety there
00:47:11.660And can we find solace with each other there? Because I just cannot live in a self-righteous
00:47:20.440state in myself or even around others anymore on whatever side of the aisle anybody stands on,
00:47:26.160because I see it as actually being part of the death trap or the ecocidal, feeding the ecocidal
00:47:32.920culture, even if we think that it's something that's saving us from it. I was just thinking,
00:47:38.080I just watched Ken Burns documentary on U.S. and the Holocaust. And I knew a lot of the stuff
00:47:42.400about eugenics, especially as someone who is, you know, I've been in and outside of the medical
00:47:46.320industrial complex for better or for worse for a long time. And just realizing that we're all
00:47:51.140culpable, you know, our whole country was culpable in not letting in refugees, not letting in people
00:47:58.180who have been displaced, that, you know, passivity is a kind of culpability that we're all, you know,
00:48:04.500we're all entangled with with networks of violence and that there's no tapping into that
00:48:12.740experience can be paralyzing and can be really painful but then suddenly you you can shirk the
00:48:19.640the paralyzing effect of always having to be correct i sometimes say that to be correct is
00:48:25.100to be isolated i've been thinking about disability actually as being a profound invitation to
00:48:30.700relationality that, you know, you can look at the ghost pipe, the monotropa uniflora, which is a
00:48:36.500mycoheterotrophic plant. It's white because it doesn't need to photosynthesize. It doesn't
00:48:41.660actually make its own food. It receives it all from a symbiotic mycorrhizal fungal system
00:48:46.540blood ground, Russell or Lacterius. And it's often characterized as parasitic
00:48:51.620by you know very reductionist simple analyses by science but the truth is it's it's queering our
00:49:01.940idea of what relationality is you know what does it mean to invite in otherness to invite to to
00:49:08.540know that you depend on other beings to be a body and that disability in itself is a kind of
00:49:15.860invitation to collaborate that you would never risk if you didn't have that lack in the first
00:49:21.080place you know when plants first made it onto dry land around 450 million years ago they didn't have
00:49:27.980roots you know fungi reached up from the soil and acted as surrogate root systems for millions of
00:49:33.360years they still still 90 percent of plants depend on symbiotic mycorrhizal systems to extend the
00:49:40.380radius of their root systems and you know that that was a kind of lovemaking that was permanent
00:49:46.160but it was also risky so i oftentimes say that you know becoming new is never safe i don't know
00:49:52.540if safety should be our working goal you know in order to withstand what's to come we're going to
00:49:59.120need to have we're going to have to adapt quickly we're going to have to develop improvisational
00:50:05.600agility and you know you you can't when the climatological and social changes to come are
00:50:12.260going to be increasingly unpredictable planning your response does not actually give you the
00:50:17.440widest ability to respond correctly rather you should begin to collaborate with kin and with
00:50:24.360beings who might not seem totally friendly you know and and so i i think it's those those anarchic
00:50:31.560problematic but sometimes interesting moments where we're forced to create a relationship
00:50:37.160that may hold the potential for new worlds that's really beautiful and energizing and
00:50:47.500nerve-wracking and it feels like it's at the edge which i think is where we grow like what
00:50:56.140you were saying about the ecotones it's it's very abundant in those spaces where we don't
00:51:01.780have plans and it hasn't been all thought out and gosh yeah thinking about planning I'm like
00:51:08.260you know there I think there are certain things we can do to plan for an uncertain future and again
00:51:16.320to me that's a lot about preparing our mental state how do we come back to a steady state
00:51:26.200in the midst of chaos or how can we be those people in the community that are warm and tender
00:51:33.140in the face of so much hatred and fear like that's to me what I'm trying to plan for now of course
00:51:40.020like I think there's a lot to say about skill hard skills and food growing and harvesting and
00:51:46.240and learning different methods of preservation for food not relying on electricity and refrigeration
00:51:52.800And like, you know, I think there is planning in the ways that we can educate ourselves and become wise, not in the ways that our culture values so much, but in these, I think, basic, but that word even has a connotation of kind of dull.
00:52:13.920And I mean, mean, basic and like such a revered way. And it may be that's also what I'm trying to get to in my own life is how do I have reverence for the ways of knowing that have been tossed out as base or uninteresting by the dominant culture that I definitely grew up under.
00:52:39.140So yeah, there's like the sense of if we were to plan or if we were to prepare, what are the ways in which we can do that that aren't about strict playbook guidelines that we know aren't going to really serve us when so much is shifting so quickly that we can't actually know.
00:53:05.040Like when we were talking about climate change and you were expressing the weather shifts in upstate New York where you are, we can't predict all of this stuff that's coming for us. And that also means that we can't predict unlikely allies. And we can't predict who's going to come to the table with support.
00:53:27.660you know i i i write a lot about myth and folks and i oftentimes think that in fairy tales
00:53:34.540you know the smallest creatures offer the greatest boon you know you know it's always to your
00:53:40.180downfall when you don't give the crumb to the mouse or when you don't help the old woman because
00:53:45.700at the end of the day it turns out that was the fairy king or the angel or you know the most
00:53:50.600powerful being and i think that right now as we prepare for you know not prepare for but as we
00:53:57.080anticipate, as we feel in our bodily instrument oncoming chaos, we can begin to look at the
00:54:03.900smalls, you know, the insignificant beings, you know, the viruses, the bacteria, you know, the
00:54:10.360neighbors, you know, the places that don't seem to hold that much importance as perhaps being the
00:54:17.300most important allies in the days to come. You know, the smallest beings, the least flashy
00:54:23.420beings will offer the greatest boon eventually and that it's important to you know fungi are
00:54:30.380teach me to get involved and to get involved with everybody you know not to like try and plan who i
00:54:37.660get involved with but to put out my hyphal cells through the soil and connect with every single
00:54:43.300being i can get my hands on and connect with them so intensely that i'm actually inside of their
00:54:49.520root system so that you know when an incredibly intense you know hurricane comes through I know
00:54:57.260everybody in my neighborhood I also know where plants grow where mushrooms grow where certain
00:55:02.300things happen um yeah I think getting to know where you live in a 10 mile radius and a five
00:55:09.200mile radius is actually dancing where you know where you live and I also mean that physically
00:55:15.720Like, I think I just read an incredible book. Have you read Dancing in the Streets by Barbara
00:55:21.480Ehrenreich? I haven't, but I'm making a note. It's an incredible book about how ecstatic
00:55:28.300dancing experiences have been incredibly cohesive to cultures for a long time. And when they start
00:55:34.580to become demonized by Eurocentric colonialism, you see the rise in depression and certain types
00:55:40.740of extractive violent behavior and that they they create a kind of social um intelligence a kind of
00:55:48.060extended mind of certain communities that it might be important to foster again so like learn I
00:55:54.060sometimes think about like on a very practical level the best way you can prepare is to learn
00:56:00.940how to grow food where you live or support the people who grow it then eat it with the people
00:56:05.540where you live and then dance with the people where you live. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot
00:56:11.420about the power of being local. And I know that in a sense, probably for so many folks listening,
00:56:18.480that's like, yeah, yeah, we've heard it before, local, local. But I actually think it's subversive
00:56:24.460to be local because so much of media, social media, dominant conditioning is once us anything
00:56:34.760but that it's like you know look over here it's interesting it's fascinating your own backyard
00:56:40.780boring you know it's like we don't it's it's taking us away from where we actually have power
00:56:47.100and that's why I think it's even by design to put the plant the seeds in our head that we need to
00:56:54.640keep going out and going further because we don't we are not invested in those places and we don't
00:57:02.520have a way to really yeah have power like where we have power is where we're quote stakeholders
00:57:10.120in you know to use corporate languaging and I've seen that so much in movements against resource
00:57:19.540extraction when you live somewhere and you begin to know it in a way that is intimate and you see
00:57:28.180the changes and you can become a watchdog. I think about if we're not actually paying attention
00:57:37.300to what's around us within five miles or 10 miles, we miss out on so much. How do I say this?
00:57:47.120I'm kind of getting jumbled, but I think about how much we miss when we don't get involved in
00:57:53.960a very close radius. Like, you know, some folks who are listening might be involved in their local
00:57:58.960city governments. I just started to do that. And it's amazing how much happens just in this little
00:58:06.700tiny town that if I wasn't actually going to the meetings every couple weeks, I wouldn't know what
00:58:12.680people were voting on. I wouldn't know what poison they're spraying on the river for erosion control,
00:58:18.140and i wouldn't have a say and so i i think being involved and in the local scene is powerful but
00:58:27.960it's also what we actually can offer in terms of we can't hold on to that much like i i i've
00:58:37.080talked about this a lot but i'm so frustrated with having to learn through whatever media
00:58:43.020sources we're listening to all of the guilt shame fear were fed on what's happening all over the
00:58:49.260world it's not to say that we shouldn't have some sense of it or have compassion or care but we only
00:58:56.800have so much energy to give anything so if our energy is so dispersed all over the world that
00:59:02.760we can't then even focus on fighting the glyphosates at the local playground like there's a problem
00:59:09.500there and we're really losing power and momentum to heal the places we can you know it's so
00:59:15.420interesting so i'm one of the areas i really study closely is the movement from oral culture
00:59:20.720to alphabetic chirographic culture so from you know all of your knowledge being sustained in
00:59:27.500breath sustained in oral storytelling to it getting written down and the idea of the atomized author
00:59:32.700you know becoming a phenomenon and something that was very interesting to me is in oral cultures
00:59:38.360that still exist today and those that we can look back on, they have much smaller vocabularies,
00:59:43.860but that is because each word has backing behind it. It's like, you know, when you have money with
00:59:48.800no backing behind it, each word stands for a real relationship, like a real experience. And I think
00:59:55.160about how many words that, you know, the English language is a colonial language. It's gone into
01:00:00.380other cultures and taken their words that have no backing, no root system. They don't actually
01:00:05.640designate a relationship or some being that you're responsible to that you're accountable to the
01:00:10.860part of witnessing you and you're making decisions and implicated in those decisions and so in a
01:00:16.400certain way smaller vocabularies are vocabularies with root systems and I've been thinking I did
01:00:22.240this class that was really focused on this this summer and one of the things as I said imagine
01:00:28.140all of the words in your head were erased every single one and you could only get back 50 words
01:00:35.260for the rest of your life. And then I said, what are the 50 words that actually do work in your
01:00:41.460life that actually designate real relationships? Like my guess is it's not justice. It's not like
01:00:47.400activism. It's not like environmentalism. It's not like health, you know, it will probably
01:00:55.180designate like real relationships you have with plants, with other people, um, with places. Um,
01:01:01.720So like, what are your 50 most necessary words?
01:01:05.000And so that's also become a way of thinking about community for me, which is, you know,
01:01:09.520actually the smaller I make my life, the more of a root system it has, the more real it
01:01:15.900is, the more backing there is behind every decision I make.
01:01:18.860But it's very easy to kind of participate in a charismatic overculture where you're
01:01:27.180But what really matters is like going up to the mowers who are about to mow the field
01:01:31.560with, you know, with milkweed where the monarchs are and saying like, do you really think this is
01:01:35.360a good idea? Who can I talk to? How can I stop this? The charismatic overculture, my goodness.
01:01:43.580It's true. I, I, I've had to, um, steal my glance away many times because it's sparkly and really
01:01:54.480knows how to grab and keep attention and um yeah I yeah so much of that is really
01:02:02.960it's hitting me and gosh there's so much more to speak to Sophie and I feel like we're gonna
01:02:11.200need a part two and as we're those are coming to the hour I it's almost like I have such a buffet
01:02:21.500of what I want to ask you that I don't know which thing to scoop on my plate or ask you right now
01:02:29.640metaphorically speaking but I've really appreciated your study of mythologies and
01:02:38.660stories and gods and goddesses and I wonder if there's a story that you could leave us with
01:02:46.640right now that has been touching you recently? I think I'll go to my favorite and it's very simple
01:02:53.220and it's not even really a myth but I was very interested that when you actually go back
01:03:00.520so a lot of what we take to be Christianity are Romanized rewrites of the rewrites of the
01:03:06.760rewrites of you know it's a game of telephone through many different generations and languages
01:03:12.480and cultures but if we actually go back to the aramaic to the ecology of galilee to the time
01:03:18.080period the socio-political pressures we can realize that jesus's parables are actually really
01:03:23.600anti-imperial and ecologically radical and that they're much more interesting than they are when
01:03:30.440they're deracinated and mistranslated and so one of my favorites is you know he says the kingdom
01:03:37.280is like a mustard seed and you know when it grows all the birds roost in its trees it starts out as
01:03:43.900a little seed and of course having been mistranslated and uprooted from its time period
01:03:49.760and its location it has lost all of its radical wild um meaning its scintillating meaning but the
01:03:58.840truth is that the time period jesus would have been talking to farmers who were losing their
01:04:03.960land and needed to be able to produce effective crops to pay the taxes to the romans they wouldn't
01:04:09.240die and in fact the romans were moving the roman operation was a commercialized agricultural state
01:04:16.140so what it did is it would it would force people off of their lands and seize their land
01:04:21.100so that it could it could turn the land into profit-making monoculture actually um so that
01:04:28.700you know your complicated kitchen gardens would suddenly just become a grain crop to feed the
01:04:34.920Romans and so which and so mustard greens at that time period were actually an incredibly pernicious
01:04:41.020invasive weed that would destroy crops so they to say that to a group of farmers wasn't a terrifying
01:04:47.820thing to say say that the most important thing the kingdom of God it's not to come it's not
01:04:54.180something that's abstracted from the earth it's not in the future it's right here right now and
01:04:58.820it's the weed that you hate the most that interrupts your ability to participate in the empire
01:05:04.240in in the commercialization process and to feed your own family and that has seemed to me to be
01:05:10.600like an absolutely radical koan you know in zen a koan is this kind of riddle that you sit with
01:05:17.240and try to understand because it's very tricky to tricky to unravel what it actually means
01:05:23.180And so for me, I've been looking at the parables that we have that come to us from Jesus and saying, like, how do they teach me to look at my own environment and look to the beings who I'm afraid of for information on how to actually digest empire?
01:05:38.660well sophie i have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this conversation and i'm definitely
01:05:47.700saying goodbye hoping that we get to talk again and keep exploring together i really
01:05:55.660deeply appreciate how much you weave together like i i don't even i'm a little i'm left a
01:06:04.220little speech I'm like I could say a bunch of words right now but honestly I think just sitting
01:06:09.960back in awe and letting it all compost in my head and yeah it's beautiful thank you so much for
01:06:19.800your work and the time and intention you have spent in how you see the world
01:06:28.180Thank you so much, Ayanna, and for giving me the space to be absolutely insane.
01:06:34.840I do want to honor that I am a compost heap that includes your wisdom and your skill,
01:06:40.820your interrogative skill, your ability to ask really interesting questions that open
01:06:46.600up more questions rather than shutting them down with predetermined answers.
01:06:50.320So that's something I've really admired in the work you do.