For The Wild - SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT on The Motherline ⧸363

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with Sylvia Linstead.

00:00:14.980 If you take a point in history and retell the story of it, time is not linear, time is circular.

00:00:21.380 And so suddenly in retelling that story or re-examining or re-weaving a wholly other non-patriarchal possibility, suddenly that story becomes alive now, too.

00:00:33.680 And the history itself can shift and affect us now.

00:00:37.100 When the Earth is actually speaking through a story, then justice and Earth's laws are also speaking through that story.

00:00:45.120 sylvia linsted is a writer and certified wildlife tracker from northern california

00:00:53.740 ancestral coast miwok territory she currently lives in devon england her work both fiction

00:01:00.240 and non-fiction is rooted in myth ecology ancient history feminism and bioregionalism

00:01:06.060 and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land

00:01:10.920 She is the author of the collections The Venus Year and Our Lady of the Dark Country, two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising, and the post-apocalyptic folktale cycle Tattermelian, with painter Rema Staines.

00:01:27.480 Her nonfiction books include The Wonderments of the East Bay, The Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area, which won the 2018 Northern California Book Award for Best General Nonfiction.

00:01:38.000 She is currently finishing a novel set in the Bronze Age, Crete, where she has lived and researched extensively.

00:01:46.080 Sylvia also teaches occasional myth-oriented creative writing workshops and shares her work out loud on her podcast, Calliope's Sanctum.

00:01:59.100 Sylvia, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:02:02.240 it just feels like a long time in the making, I guess. So I'm really glad that we get to sit down

00:02:08.760 and chat. Yeah. Thank you so much, Ayana, for having me on the podcast. I've been a fan and

00:02:13.940 a listener for many years, so it's a pleasure and an honor. Oh, I'm so happy that we're here.

00:02:22.300 Great. Well, there's so many places we could start with, but I guess as we begin, I want to

00:02:30.600 make some space to recognize the time of intense war and violence and existential threat that the

00:02:37.580 world is in right now. This is something you've written a lot about recently. And I think it's so

00:02:43.340 crucial to recognize these realities and the ways that they affect us, affect every level of our

00:02:50.220 lives. So I'm wondering if you could speak to us a bit about how you're holding grief right now

00:02:56.680 and incorporating it into your work.

00:03:00.840 That's a big, big place to begin.

00:03:03.680 And also the only place to begin really, I think right now in so many ways, I would say,

00:03:11.260 I think this moment that we're in of what it feels to me, like a great veil has dropped

00:03:21.200 in the last two months since, you know, since October 7th.

00:03:25.280 And this great kind of colonial ugliness and violence has revealed itself more fully, revealed its face more fully, but it's been present.

00:03:38.400 And it's been present to me in my work and in how I write, why I write, what I write about in terms of how I approach mythic retellings, how I approach land connection in California as a descendant of white European settlers.

00:03:54.220 These are themes and griefs that have been so present to me and important to me and how I work for a long time.

00:04:02.780 But to actually suddenly see the kind of genocidal forces that I've grieved so much in the historical record of California in terms of the indigenous past in California suddenly like enacted so fully and so presently upon the people of Palestine by the Israeli military in the last two months.

00:04:28.220 The shock of seeing that, this thing that I sort of naively thought we couldn't see again in that way, has kicked up so, so much in me and so many people, obviously.

00:04:41.720 I mean, I don't even really know how to speak about it right now, but I think one of the main ways that I've been holding it is by leaning into...

00:04:58.220 like the deepest stories that I've been circling for so long already I think and seeing how

00:05:05.140 there's been a great cry kind of across time for so many thousands of years in that part

00:05:14.840 of the world and also carried in the bodies of like all beings that have known this kind

00:05:21.360 of grief and I think when I when I lean into the deep stratum of history and of and of time and of

00:05:31.060 myth it helps create context and I think that leaning into earth also I don't know is the only

00:05:38.640 thing to do right now but I'm I'm I I kind of don't know what to say actually because

00:05:43.380 a lot of the time I've just felt incredibly sick and full of grief and haven't been able to stop

00:05:50.460 crying. I think praying to the most pure form of love in the center of all beings, in the center

00:06:04.040 of all of us that I know, that has been the other great pillar for me right now.

00:06:09.820 Yeah, I really hear the awe in a sense in your voice and in your response. And I think

00:06:16.600 to me, colonial violence and the intensity of what the earth and their people, humans and

00:06:28.000 otherwise are going through. It's kind of like when you see something that's beautiful at

00:06:31.880 Awestruck's. It's like the same with the grief and the terror. It's shocking, although it's not

00:06:38.980 new. It's shocking, although it's not something a lot of us don't know of, of course. So much of

00:06:46.460 this colonial violence never ended. And so, yeah, it's interesting to get used to that cycle of

00:06:54.440 being awestruck by the grief and the terror and the beauty of life and going in the cycles

00:07:00.540 of tragedy and relief and back and forth. I mean, I think it's something really interesting that us

00:07:08.260 humans do. I think sometimes we can do it in healthy ways going through the cycle. Sometimes

00:07:12.420 we get desensitized, which I think is part of the problem too. But I think it's just hard to take in

00:07:18.940 the grief and the terror 24-7. But right now, yeah, what's happening in the Middle East is

00:07:25.980 not new, but is still horrifying and shocking to the system. And so I appreciate you just kind of

00:07:33.800 bringing that felt awareness to the conversation. And in Holy Trees of Life, you write, quote,

00:07:41.340 Mother of God, why didn't you tell me this could still happen in 2023? Mother of God,

00:07:46.980 why didn't I ask you? Why wasn't I looking? Did you tell me and I wasn't listening? Have you

00:07:53.280 shown us again and again what we are capable of? But surely it couldn't happen again,

00:07:59.300 and it was too awful to turn and see, end quote. So many of the questions that times like these

00:08:07.240 bring up are so devastating. How have we gotten to this point? Where has our moral compass gone?

00:08:15.440 And so on and so forth. And I'm wondering where you're finding the space to ask these questions

00:08:20.580 and to keep pushing forward in the knowledge that things don't have to be like this.

00:08:27.200 Yeah. Thank you for all of that and reminding me of that quote too. I think in that vein or in that

00:08:35.800 way, I think this is probably true for me actually my whole life, but especially in

00:08:41.040 the last seven or so years, my focus in my research and in my creative life has really

00:08:48.780 been the deep Bronze Age and Neolithic past in Europe and kind of trying to excavate a

00:08:59.180 pre-patriarchal root system indigenous to Europe that helps me kind of hold hope to see these other

00:09:09.460 patterns of being that reside in you know my own bloodline somewhere right because like as a person

00:09:16.180 of British Scandinavian German as well as Jewish descent but you know the majority of my ancestry

00:09:25.380 is like very northern European it can just be so challenging to to try to navigate like the

00:09:33.120 the layers of of trauma both enacted and carried you know in that ancestry and so I've been digging

00:09:41.360 and digging and digging and and um kind of through the work of a somewhat controversial

00:09:47.440 archaeologist named Regan Butas who really found this ground of incredible nourishment

00:09:54.440 and inspiration. And her work kind of exposing in the 60s and 70s, this stratum of culture

00:10:03.600 beneath the Bronze Age, beneath the kind of typically patriarchal European culture that

00:10:09.720 we might recognize what we see, for example, in the Iliad or the Odyssey, the classic Mycenaean

00:10:15.240 Greek warrior celebrating kinds of cultures. Beneath that, she found enormous amounts of

00:10:24.300 evidence for a really different kind of set of cultures, particularly in Eastern Europe from,

00:10:31.120 you know, the early Neolithic through to kind of the beginning of the Bronze Age, I would say.

00:10:37.320 And this culture was not hierarchical in the way that we see in the later Bronze Age across Europe.

00:10:46.540 It seems to have been matrilineal, meaning descent kind of was recognized as passing through

00:10:51.360 mother lines maybe made for local meaning that people kind of stayed near maternal lineages as

00:10:57.840 well there doesn't seem to be a celebration of or a glorification of violence or of war not to say

00:11:06.560 that violence didn't happen but it wasn't glorified in the way that we see later and a clear reverence

00:11:13.060 for female-bodied ancestors, goddesses, deities, spirits of place.

00:11:20.580 You know, it's hard to know what all these figurines represented exactly.

00:11:24.520 And, you know, these cultures also arose in Europe around the time of the agricultural

00:11:31.360 revolution and the rise of agriculture in the Neolithic.

00:11:34.700 And yet what I loved about kind of this, what I've loved about this research as well is

00:11:39.260 that there isn't that kind of classic link that we can sometimes see where agriculture equals like

00:11:44.580 the end of the kind of balanced Paleolithic that I know is often a kind of line that is drawn by

00:11:53.160 scholars that agriculture as a way of connecting to earth was the moment when we started to kind

00:11:59.880 of exploit and dominate rather than coexist and, you know, live in this state of interdependence

00:12:07.900 and honor of that interdependence, but actually this archaeologist's work really demonstrated

00:12:14.840 that it's just more complicated than that and that there's this incredible weave of

00:12:22.180 deeply, how would I say it, like egalitarian, life-affirming, life-loving,

00:12:33.360 flourishing cultures that flourished for thousands of years across Europe

00:12:39.740 without resource diminishment to a great degree until

00:12:45.260 you know another kind of culture pattern and political pattern arose which could very likely

00:12:52.940 have come from droughts or famines like resource wars so I think yeah so I think what ultimately

00:12:59.520 I mean, there's a lot of like theories about this, but probably one of the things that ultimately led to waves of invasions of different Indo-European speaking peoples from the East into Europe probably had to do with resource depletion in the kind of steppe lands of the Caucasus area.

00:13:23.220 And these waves of Indo-European Bronze Age, like warrior cultures, as they're classically seen, came into Europe. And so there were probably resource conflicts that meant that the populations of Europe, especially the male populations, were largely replaced by Indo-European speaking, much more patriarchally oriented peoples from those areas.

00:13:46.180 And, you know, I think certain things about Maria Gambutas' argument are kind of overly simplistic, you know, and I've sat with this question a lot, like, why patriarchy? What was the moment? Was there a moment? Are there different moments in different parts of the world when a patriarchal system takes over one that's more matrilineally oriented or more, you know, egalitarian? Does it have to do with resource conflicts and depletions?

00:14:13.860 it probably does and i like i think when stress enters kind of human culture suddenly a violent

00:14:20.200 tendency is the one that can kind of overcome um the more complicated patterns that are needed to

00:14:25.880 hold peace because i think keeping peace is not easy necessarily um but all of that

00:14:34.280 kind of leaning into these this research um and then the store the traces of stories you know

00:14:43.560 the traces in the mythic record that to me feel like they carry memories, particularly down through

00:14:51.080 lines of, you know, female crafts, weaving and ceramics and embroidery and song, you know,

00:15:02.180 which, for example, on the island of Crete, where I've spent quite a bit of time living and

00:15:06.620 researching and loving and learning to sing and play music, I can still feel some of those threads

00:15:13.340 of that long, long ago, pre-patriarchal time. And that gives me hope that carried within all of us

00:15:23.420 is another possibility. It's been lived once, it's being lived still, you know, in so many

00:15:30.180 different ways all around us. And that the more we kind of excavate those stories, those histories,

00:15:36.580 these other versions of history, these other voices from history, I think once those stories

00:15:41.780 are spoken they become possible and alive again and once we kind of re-imagine the past that past

00:15:47.460 then joins us in the present like I remember just to finish this thought I remember hearing

00:15:52.600 the wonderful Pat McCabe say something in an interview many years ago and I think I listened

00:16:00.820 to it when I first got to Crete maybe in 2018 and she said something about how she had been told

00:16:07.740 kind of by her spiritual guides if you take a point in history and retell the story of it like

00:16:15.460 time is not linear time is circular and so suddenly in retelling that that story or re-examining or

00:16:22.860 re-weaving our sense of a very deep European past for example seeing it through the lens of

00:16:30.320 a wholly other non-patriarchal possibility suddenly that story becomes alive now too

00:16:37.600 and the history itself can shift and affect us now. And I think that's kind of where I sit

00:16:44.120 in my work every day and how I kind of hold hope.

00:16:51.640 The question of when did it start, you know, the separation from nature, colonization, patriarchy,

00:16:59.300 what was the moment? I think about that so much. Was it farming? Was it carrying capacity overload?

00:17:06.380 You know, when was it? How did it happen? Who did it start with? And it was really nice to hear your exploration with those questions.

00:17:17.780 And just hearing that there are places you've experienced that practice and have essence of a time before this kind of poisoned ecocidal culture took over is really hopeful, I guess.

00:17:39.200 And it kind of brings me to your new book, The Venus Year.

00:17:44.840 And in your poem, Lyra, from The Venus Year, you write, quote,

00:17:50.240 They say a female monk lived alone here long ago.

00:17:54.480 I imagined she was very peaceful and strong as a goat.

00:17:58.560 I imagined she knew every star and bathed in the sea.

00:18:03.080 Chase Sperry still blooms purple near the caves, end quote.

00:18:07.380 So, yeah, I guess I'm wondering how can imagining and calling forth the women who came before us bring comfort and knowledge, especially when for so long stories of women particularly have been devalued and even erased from history?

00:18:26.480 I love that female monk. Thank you for reading her. And I did just want to say, and actually, I think it kind of connects to the monk, in a sense, I just wanted to say, what this moment, actually, this very present moment in terms of this, what's happening in Gaza, and the capacity for genocidal, like, psychotic behavior.

00:18:53.120 there's a kind of harrowing reminder that I feel like I'm holding right now that the potential

00:18:59.360 for destruction or life is kind of inherent in each of us in every moment like each of us

00:19:07.260 is kind of in our own inner walk with what it means to be kind of complicit in these systems

00:19:15.260 or liberate parts of ourselves and then people around us to another possibility

00:19:21.080 and then regarding the the women well i would say actually that i think a certain kind of anger

00:19:30.620 is the place that i started from in terms of really trying to retell and reimagine the stories

00:19:35.920 of ancient women particularly from generally european and then particularly mediterranean

00:19:41.540 context because you know in the mythic record in the historical record and so many of the things

00:19:47.660 that I've read and we've all read, that sense of women constantly not being given voice,

00:19:58.420 their voices being diminished or ridiculed or reviled or kind of demonized, especially in

00:20:06.740 Greek myths, I would say, which is kind of what was one of my entry points in terms of this work

00:20:11.600 and this research. I think that kind of outrage, the sudden outrage that rose up in me at a certain

00:20:17.140 point. And I'm not really sure exactly when it really reached its like peak of like, okay,

00:20:21.680 I need to do something about this. I need to creatively address this because I can't deal

00:20:25.900 with this. I think it probably came at a moment in my life when I too needed to liberate parts

00:20:31.620 of my own voice and my own body and my own creativity, which did happen around the time

00:20:37.700 that I went to Crete. But I think a part of me just suddenly decided like, I refuse to keep

00:20:43.820 believing this or buying into these kinds of, uh, representations that I'm reading. I mean,

00:20:49.860 as far, you know, as far back as Eve and much further, actually, you know, that, um, 0.53

00:20:57.100 the Judeo-Christian tradition of deep female silencing, um, comes after an even deeper

00:21:07.180 tradition of, you know, classical Greek and, um, iron age and, you know, Homeric stereotypes and

00:21:16.880 misogyny. Um, but I think when I finally turned to writing about the feminine in this way,

00:21:26.540 I just kind of let these women who were the characters in my writing speak through my pen.

00:21:35.040 And interestingly, one of the things that I feel like has been very grounding for me is leaning into the roles or the crafts or the kind of positions that have been typically seen as feminine in, let's say, the classical Greek and before that context and tried to re-empower them.

00:21:59.000 So instead of pushing away from things like women as weavers, women as potters, women as the ones by the hearth, women as mothers and tenders of babies and children, I tried to kind of lean into what it would mean to imagine a culture where none of those things were seen as less than.

00:22:24.440 What does it mean when typically domestic, so-called domestic, crafts and activities and stories are actually seen as the center point of a culture?

00:22:40.120 Because, my God, like, they actually are.

00:22:43.260 And I think that this is something, again, that Maria Gambutos was really pointing to in her research, her archaeological, her excavations, her assessments of what she found.

00:22:58.600 She was seeing that the temples in these cultures, particularly along the Danube in Eastern and Central Europe, their temples were simply the places where the biggest hearths and looms were for baking bread, for weaving, and also kilns for firing ceramics.

00:23:21.100 And so this domestic creativity was actually central to the religious and sacred life of these ancient people. And moving from that place has just been incredibly nourishing for me personally and nourishing as a lineage.

00:23:39.540 Like I see it like these women, I almost see them like I touch back and back and back along these threads in my imagination, along these like warp threads in a loom.

00:23:52.240 And, you know, in the patterns in the weaving, like I was saying, in the embroidery, we can see even to this day, for example, in Cretan embroidery patterns that you can also see 3,000 years ago in pottery.

00:24:06.040 meaning that there are certain memories that were never lost you know as all the men for example in

00:24:13.160 the minoan times in crete which is the bronze age of crete were most of them their genetics like

00:24:19.720 were wiped out by waves of invasion the women actually remain and carry these threads and

00:24:27.560 i know that there's obviously a conversation to be had of course and like complicating around 1.00

00:24:34.360 gender roles and that binary for sure. But also I think it's important to just like re-remember

00:24:42.200 and re-center and celebrate again the power of these arts and traditions and these potent

00:24:53.240 life-affirming ways that for so long have been sidelined as stuff that women do.

00:25:04.360 Thank you.

00:25:34.360 I love hearing you speak because I'm transported to another time, to another, not just physical

00:25:56.980 time out there, but time inside myself, it's almost like I remember what I once was a part

00:26:06.260 of through, I don't know. I don't know if it's like blood memory or muscle memory. I don't know

00:26:13.820 where that, but it feels like a kind of excitement and calmness and knowing that still exists in me.

00:26:21.300 And I think in probably all of us on different levels. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for the

00:26:29.420 trip, the mind trip. It's really fun, actually, and deep. And another thing that I've noticed

00:26:37.980 across your writing is you focus a lot on Mother Mary. And I would love if you could describe your

00:26:43.060 relationship to her and motherhood in general in the context of myth.

00:26:46.940 Yes, Mary. So my relationship with Mother Mary actively started six or seven years ago. And it's, it really took me by surprise because, you know, from a really young age, like I grew up reading, I grew up really obsessed with ancient history, which is probably coming through, like this has been a lifelong passion.

00:27:11.620 And I grew up reading, you know, novels that were set in ancient times, you know, or medieval times, and they tended to be very, like, quote, pagan, and really, in an important way, taught me early on about kind of the horrors that have been enacted in the name of the Christian faith on animistic peoples. 0.54

00:27:41.620 world over. And so I was extremely not into it for most of my adult life. And Mary seemed to me

00:27:53.040 this figure kind of stripped of most of the power and potency that I saw in, for example,

00:28:02.500 earlier goddesses from the same regions, such as Inanna or Astarte or Isis or the different great

00:28:11.100 goddesses of Crete. And then something changed. And I think it happened for a couple reasons.

00:28:17.920 One of them was that I took this trip to Southern Italy with this wonderful herbalist named

00:28:23.620 Gail Faith Edwards. It's kind of through this experience with her that I saw how in these

00:28:29.080 mountain villages in Southern Italy, this beautiful syncretism had happened between

00:28:34.140 this earth-based faith clearly that had always been there in those mountains belief in you know

00:28:42.380 the living potency of of rocks and trees and streams and you know the spirits that inhabited

00:28:48.880 them and great feminine divine figures whether and ancestors or you know manifestations of

00:28:58.000 the mountain or the moon or whatever it might be. But I saw on that journey, how Mary was kind of

00:29:07.240 holding like all of these older female mysteries in her skirts, like almost like under her skirts,

00:29:16.840 like wherever she was, she took on these different names and these different faces that kind of

00:29:22.420 integrated earlier sacred beings in a really beautiful way, not in a colonial way at all,

00:29:30.800 but in a really kind of beautiful braiding. And so that kind of opened something in me to her,

00:29:36.820 because I think what I noticed shortly thereafter when I was living in Crete was that, you know,

00:29:43.560 I was visiting and doing research and all these different Minoan sites, so Bronze Age ruins. And

00:29:50.560 And I always felt I could kind of feel and imagine a lot in those places. And I would imagine, you know, the kind of spiritual practices that people might have been doing in them. And I was doing a lot of research about who some of these female divinities might have been for Cretan people.

00:30:09.280 But what I noticed when I was living there was that the place where the female divine was still alive was no longer in those ruins, but in the little chapels to the Panagia, to the Virgin Mary, you know, the Greek Orthodox Christian Mary.

00:30:27.500 And there are certain places, especially like cave chapels, where you know that she's been worshipped in one form or another forever in that cave.

00:30:38.340 and now Mary is holding that energy and I remember you know one cave shrine that I went to where the

00:30:48.100 icon of Mary was so heavy with these um call them tamata the little silver offerings that you bring

00:30:56.520 and tie to these icons of Mary asking for healing and she was just absolutely covered with them and

00:31:01.920 it just made my hair stand up. And I could feel this aliveness still of this presence and this

00:31:09.160 kind of sacred power in her. And then at the same time, I had just gone through a really

00:31:17.640 heartbreaking and really challenging divorce. And then the pandemic happened like not that long

00:31:23.900 after. And I was so shattered emotionally, psychologically, that I needed a deeper faith

00:31:37.520 and support. I needed her. Really, in the end, I needed her. And it was like these experiences

00:31:46.760 were kind of leading up to me almost calling out for her. Um, and early on in the pandemic,

00:31:56.740 I actually made myself a rosary. Um, and it was one of those really mysterious experiences where,

00:32:03.280 you know, I'd bought this rosary when I was in Southern Italy a few years before,

00:32:08.160 slightly embarrassed. Like I can't believe I'm buying a rosary, but I'm buying a rosary.

00:32:12.140 I need it. And it was made with these wooden beads that were scented with rose oil,

00:32:17.180 which was lovely. And I carried it with me. It's still actually hangs in my car right now

00:32:21.660 here in England. I've carried it everywhere. But a few years later, I decided I wanted to make my

00:32:28.100 own. And I had sort of vaguely encountered somebody rolling like beads from rose petals.

00:32:36.740 And I was like, I'll give that a try. And it was like my hands and my body knew how to do this

00:32:42.440 thing that I'd never tried in my life. I gathered all these rose petals from my garden and my

00:32:49.120 mother's garden. And I had this old ceramic pot, um, from Hungary that I'd found at a flea market.

00:32:55.720 And I just like put all the rose petals in it and kept mashing them in my hands. Kind of,

00:33:00.080 I felt like a little kid again, like every day I'd go squeeze them and mash them until they were in

00:33:04.340 this like big juicy ball. And then I let it ferment because that just felt like that would

00:33:09.100 probably be useful. And the more it fermented, the more it became like clay. And then it became

00:33:14.040 kind of blackened from oxidizing. And I could roll the roses into these beads that then dried

00:33:23.660 and became the most incredible rosary beads. And it was like through that process, this like

00:33:31.660 alchemy of the rose petals I was making some kind of commitment to Mary that I don't think

00:33:40.960 I could have made intellectually but I made it kind of with my heart and with my body and with

00:33:45.540 my soul because I needed to feel like I was held by a much greater being of profound love

00:33:54.580 than I'd ever known before. And she really got me through. And she still does.

00:34:02.960 It's a mysterious thing, really. But I just started to talk to her after that and ask for

00:34:09.700 her help. And she is always there. And I can't really explain even what that means.

00:34:18.620 but she she she has been um yeah and the relationship continues to deepen and deepen

00:34:30.020 and i'm just remembering the other thing you asked me was about motherhood

00:34:33.980 i don't know that i've written a whole lot about

00:34:37.700 motherhood directly in myths because well partly i mean i have never been a mother

00:34:46.220 So it's an experience that I haven't yet had in my body.

00:34:48.760 I hope to for so many reasons.

00:34:53.940 But so on the one hand, I would say, I think that the place that I have focused up to this

00:34:58.520 point in my work is on the mother line is like kind of looking back, tracing from me

00:35:04.600 to my mother, to her mother and back and back and back, kind of trying to orient to a relationship

00:35:11.160 to all of this kind of wombic line back through time. And that is actually also one of the reasons

00:35:16.980 that I'm living in England right now, because my mother line is English. And so part of my time

00:35:22.620 here and my research here is around that kind of like blood and bones line in me. And yeah,

00:35:30.300 sinking into learning the place of my mother line, ecologically and also historically and

00:35:36.460 mythically I think in orientation number one I think I'm interested in orienting to the mother

00:35:42.380 line as a woman and as a creative and a writer because there's a potency in that story you know

00:35:53.200 of this line of women that that has so long for so long not been spoken because we're used to

00:35:59.480 descent going through a father line, you know, um, as I'm just kind of fascinated by

00:36:04.780 what it means as a woman to explore that. Um, and

00:36:10.120 it struck me recently that, you know, kind of the archetype of the maiden, the mother

00:36:17.840 and the crone that we kind of see in so many different, um, mythic contexts,

00:36:24.780 really the world over but especially in Europe um you know if you think about how

00:36:31.320 that concept that we existed within our grandmother's bodies as the little egg in our

00:36:38.920 mother's ovaries when she was an embryo in her mother right there you have the maiden the mother

00:36:46.760 and the crone like all held in one moment in grandmother's womb and so somehow the mother

00:36:54.240 line is actually like this embodiment of this powerful feminine kind of goddess that is so

00:37:00.600 is so prominent across you know the regions of my ancestry so that certainly creatively feels

00:37:09.100 really important to me and it's something that i'm kind of actively exploring and writing through

00:37:14.440 and i a future project that i'm circling and part of my phd research here has been connected to this

00:37:21.700 is exploring like actually myths that feature birth pregnancy and childbirth because i've

00:37:29.700 noticed that it's like not that present mythically anywhere like there's really brief like you know

00:37:38.460 a woman couldn't conceive and then she was granted a magical favor and suddenly conceived by a flower

00:37:47.400 or a wind or you know something and then a strange child was born and then that's it you

00:37:50.900 know, and we don't really hear a lot more about the actual embodied experience of pregnancy and

00:37:54.960 childbirth from a folkloric or a mythic perspective. But I'm interested in why that's

00:38:02.540 the case, because, you know, as a lot of my friends around me become mothers, and I hear

00:38:08.980 their stories firsthand, it's one of the most profoundly powerful, fundamental, psychedelic,

00:38:22.160 incredible experiences that there is as a human being to have. And we all got here that way,

00:38:27.580 right? And so why do we have so many epic stories about really long battles and not epic stories

00:38:37.700 about women in childbirth and the places that maybe the visions that they have, the places

00:38:42.960 that they go in order to bring that soul down, in order to like open their body and let life

00:38:48.380 out.

00:38:48.840 I mean, I just, I feel like these are stories that, you know, these women that I was talking

00:38:53.960 about and we were kind of conjuring in this space, these women in their hearth, loom,

00:38:59.540 temple spaces would have been telling each other, but they weren't stories that kind

00:39:03.700 of made it into the dominant, big, important quote, story record. But I'm really interested

00:39:11.940 in finding those threads, seeing where I can find bits and pieces and just maybe even putting

00:39:18.540 together a collection so that for myself and anyone else who is interested in this kind of

00:39:26.700 thing, who also wants to become a mother might have like a folktale collection or a myth

00:39:32.320 collection of myths that actually speak directly to that experience. I would like to have that.

00:39:38.740 I would like to be able to lean on powerful stories like that, that are ancient. And yeah,

00:39:45.720 so far, I just haven't seen anything like that. Please go there. Please. Not just for you,

00:39:52.800 but for me and I'm sure many of our listeners. I was thinking through if I could conjure up any

00:39:59.440 stories that I had heard or known that were more specifically about pregnancy and motherhood,

00:40:05.860 and I couldn't come up with any. Why wouldn't there be these stories? What is the purpose of

00:40:12.660 leaving that part of the human experience out of the narrative?

00:40:18.460 I mean, just even speaking, for example, to the literary record, in terms of novels or

00:40:26.280 kind of the, yeah, the literary tradition, the Western literary tradition. First of all,

00:40:32.740 you know, women haven't really even been allowed to like write or publish until fairly recently

00:40:37.800 haven't been taken seriously. I mean, and that tradition goes back to like classical Greece,

00:40:42.600 where women kind of had to write under a kind of a masculine guise in a way in order to be

00:40:48.960 taken seriously. And the experience of childbirth, I think was kind of seen as one of the least

00:40:54.740 intellectual things that somebody could talk about you know it's like really not that's women's

00:41:01.040 business and it's like it became more recently like indecent to talk about you know in the

00:41:07.620 victorian era for example like do not talk about that so i think it's been really silenced and

00:41:13.160 even yeah even up to this to this day in certain ways i think we're coming to a moment where

00:41:18.720 it's more and more celebrated and acceptable to really center birth stories and women's stories

00:41:27.020 of pregnancy. But it's, yeah, I wonder if it's not so much a intentional silencing of female

00:41:35.000 power, although it might be for sure, especially further back, but like a kind of ingrained

00:41:42.120 misogyny that this is just not a subject matter worthy of intellectual or artistic investigation

00:41:50.440 that's kind of how it's felt from the research that I've done in kind of the canon so to speak

00:41:56.180 I'm sure there's something but I think it needs to be brought forward more

00:42:12.120 Thank you.

00:42:42.120 maybe we could explore myth and religion and the christian bible in the bells of good friday you

00:42:56.320 write quote i have a whole lot of thoughts about the institution of christianity which i'm sure

00:43:01.480 those of you familiar with my work can guess at but there is something outside the confines of

00:43:06.520 the institution at the heart of the mystery that i have found myself circling ever since my first

00:43:11.660 months in Crete. I share all of this simply from my experience, from my feelings, and from my

00:43:17.060 instincts, because all of these I do know and can speak from, end quote. And I can relate to

00:43:25.980 some of the words in this quote, and I'm wondering, how do you hold the tension of the beauty and the

00:43:32.120 heart of mystery and story within Christianity, and of course the simultaneous confines of the

00:43:39.260 institution itself. Yeah, certainly an ongoing inner struggle for me. So I don't have a

00:43:48.360 definitive answer. Maybe what I'll say is, in that essay, I was describing this moment that I had

00:43:56.580 when I was living in Crete. And it was Easter, which is the most important holy day, you know,

00:44:06.080 in the Orthodox liturgical cycle, and certainly like in Greece, it's absolutely enormous. And

00:44:12.680 I'd never experienced anything like it before. And it wasn't, it was only, so this was only about

00:44:18.440 a year after the divorce that I, you know, in the end of this relationship. And I remember

00:44:25.940 Jesus had died, you know, in the festive cycle. And I was like sitting, I was sitting in my studio,

00:44:32.840 this little studio in the dark working. And suddenly these bells started ringing across

00:44:38.840 the island and they were the death bells of Jesus. And I had never heard death bells before.

00:44:44.280 And I didn't, nobody told me they were the death bells. It's just like the minute I heard them

00:44:48.580 start ringing, I knew those are the death bells. It was the most haunting, shattering sound that I

00:44:57.900 have ever heard. I can still hear them if I think about it. And I just, you know, it was warm and

00:45:05.260 dark and I was up in the mountains and these bells were ringing in the village, this like two tone

00:45:11.060 and then this pause and like three tones, I think, and then a pause. And I could also hear them kind

00:45:18.740 of in other villages ringing like further and further across Crete. And I had this sense that

00:45:23.700 the whole island was ringing with these death bells. And they were ringing down into the

00:45:29.700 valleys and up the mountains. And the grief was so profound that I just went out on the porch

00:45:37.840 and sank to my knees and just started crying. And I stayed there until they were done. And it was

00:45:42.960 this feeling of mixed, almost torture of how much grief I felt. And yet I couldn't move. I couldn't

00:45:50.100 stop listening. And I couldn't move. And what I felt was that the grief, the personal grief and

00:45:55.200 loss that I felt that I had experienced and was continuing to experience as I process the loss of

00:46:02.720 this person in my life, I felt it to be those bells were ringing for that death for me. And

00:46:11.640 they were ringing for the death of Jesus of this man who was also the son of God who you know just

00:46:21.000 this like profound being whose death allowed everybody to grieve in that moment that's how

00:46:32.380 it felt to me I don't know who else was like actually out on their porch crying but I know

00:46:37.360 that it's a very emotional time for people there you know the the especially the more like actually

00:46:43.300 religious practicing religious orthodox christians in crete and there's a lot of them and you know

00:46:49.500 it just it just completely took me out and it brought me closer to this mystery that is still

00:46:57.140 a profound mystery to me that i really like don't even know how to speak to that this man who was

00:47:03.120 this beacon of shattering love that we still can't really handle died on that day. You know,

00:47:13.220 and I was just sitting there like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I'm feeling

00:47:17.240 this way, but I'm feeling a lot right now about this. And it feels really precious to my heart

00:47:23.700 and to my being. And there's some like organizing, overpowering force of love that is emanating from

00:47:31.620 this story that does something to me that's just incredibly precious and surrendering.

00:47:42.860 And I think that whoever exactly he was and whatever exactly happened, the kind of emanation

00:47:51.580 and almost tone or resonance of love that he was trying to bring here, we're just beginning

00:48:00.580 to like work out what that meant I think and I think one of the ways that I kind of have

00:48:05.460 conceptualized or felt into or thought about the absolute hell that's also been enacted in the name

00:48:11.380 so-called supposed name of Christ it's almost like this man being came here

00:48:18.300 kind of shining forth such overpowering equalizing humbling divine love in each of us

00:48:27.040 that it almost conjured the equal and opposite darkness, if that makes sense. Because I kind of

00:48:35.040 am overwhelmed by the level of ugliness that's been done in the name of somebody who came here

00:48:42.900 bringing a kind of love unlike anything, almost anything that's ever arrived. And so I think

00:48:51.420 We've hardly even begun being able to integrate it. And I don't really know how personally to process so much of the institution of Christianity because it has been a force of such colonial, misogynistic hell. And I think that that has literally nothing to do with the man who those bells were ringing for that night in Crete. 0.62

00:49:14.520 I love your responses. I feel like I'm in a story and I'm with you every moment, every breath. And I think that's a really beautiful response to a question that impacts us all. Yeah, we're all impacted by Christianity.

00:49:33.160 It's really interesting how much power the institution has and the intentions versus the

00:49:40.700 impact. And, oh, it is just, yeah, it's a lot. There's so many more questions to ask. I was

00:49:47.620 thinking about the trouble with enshrining myth into doctrine and how we can keep our stories

00:49:55.620 from becoming oppressive. I feel like so much in the Christian tradition feels like

00:50:03.160 myth gone wrong, you know, the Venus year in certain ways kind of is a, like a map of the

00:50:12.940 different layers of my creative process. And so it includes, you know, each chapter includes

00:50:19.040 seasonal notes specific to the land where I was, um, which was mostly Crete, but it's also at home

00:50:26.320 in California. So there's seasonal notes and then there's, um, seasonal and like personal life notes

00:50:33.000 And then there's a poem or a short story or both that are threading myths from the places where I am, reworking them, kind of connected to the ecology of the place. And this is something that I've centered in my work, you know, for at least a decade, this kind of way of layering ecological specificity and rootedness in with my storytelling.

00:51:03.000 And I think that that connects into the question about how does, how do we keep myth from becoming oppressive doctrine? I think it has to remain alive to, to the wholeness of place. And I know that feels like a really big, slightly vague answer.

00:51:20.580 But as an example, about 10 years ago, one of the first projects I did as like a working adult writer was this project called the Gray Fox Epistles, where I sent out what I called rewilded fairy tales in the post to subscribers that I kind of slowly gathered around the world.

00:51:43.220 so it was like these little wax sealed envelopes with these stories in them and my idea was that

00:51:50.100 I was trying to reroute fairy tales and myths from my ancestry in the ecologies of California

00:51:56.820 where I'm from and where I grew up because I was really wanting to feel kind of like a storied 0.58

00:52:03.800 rooting in place but I recognized that me as a like white girl retelling

00:52:10.920 indigenous coast me walker pomo myths was like not appropriate not okay appropriative and just

00:52:19.820 was like stealing somebody else's thousands of years of relationship to place um encoded in a

00:52:27.000 story and there's so many reasons why that isn't okay come you know being who i am so i was like

00:52:33.080 okay, what if I gather different fairy tales from my different ancestries, and then see what

00:52:41.860 happens when I kind of rewrite them rooted in the ecologies of this place. And at the same time,

00:52:48.340 I was studying animal tracking really deeply. And so was really allowing these living languages of

00:52:54.900 the land to be the tellers, be the voices of these fairy tales and show me what would happen

00:53:04.340 to them if they were set loose, respectfully set loose, you know, in this place that I was born.

00:53:11.640 And doing that brought these stories alive and made them kind of fluid and transformative

00:53:21.860 in a way that felt really important and continues to feel really important to me in terms of how I

00:53:28.780 approach any story. So it feels like wherever we can let the living earth back in to the mythic,

00:53:40.800 when it is allowed back in, I don't think it can become oppressive because when the earth is

00:53:47.700 actually speaking through a story, then justice and earth's laws are also speaking through that

00:53:55.840 story. Sylvia, this has been such a enjoyable and deep and yeah, I've been transported in this

00:54:06.100 conversation. I feel the myths live in you. You are a magical creature. I don't know. I just

00:54:15.360 continued to feel you as a portal to these other times. And I feel really grateful that I

00:54:24.340 personally just got to sit with you for this time and kind of, I feel like gotten a time machine

00:54:32.400 together. Yeah. Spiritual time machine of sorts, a remembrance, a re-enlivement, a re-enchantment

00:54:41.480 really, of what it is to be human. And so thanks again so much.

00:54:47.580 Oh, thank you. Thank you.

00:55:05.940 Thanks for listening to For the Wild. The music in today's episode was by The New Ruins.

00:55:11.480 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young,

00:55:14.740 Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson,

00:55:17.460 Jackson Krupp, Jose Alejandro Rivera,

00:55:20.760 and Evan Tenenbaum.

00:55:41.480 Thank you.

00:56:11.480 Thank you.

For The Wild - January 24, 2024

SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT on The Motherline ⧸363

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