I didn't know that psyche was a synonym for butterfly.

Yeah, the Greek word psyche can either mean butterflied or human soul.

That's so rich.

That's so rich.

Human nature is connected to nature.

Even though in the Western world we've been told we're separate subject, object, and all that stuff.

But essentially, human nature is connected to the heart of great nature.

Okay.

Can you tell us a little bit about the book and as this, you know, this progression that we all go through from youth to hopefully eventually eldership, why did you pick the metaphor of a butterfly to, to tell the story?

So the first idea is from a mythological point of view.

We're in a transformational time on Earth, and the Earth has gone through major transformations before.

I think this is unique because we have nature unraveling while culture is falling apart or falling into polarization, inability to change.

And so it involved both nature and culture, what's going on now.

It's a really big deal.

But the nature of the cosmos, the Earth, and the human soul is transformation.

Yeah

Do you mind recounting? I mean, it really speaks to everything that came after.

So the book is laid out in three sections, or I call it three books.

And the first book is... are using nature as a text, seeing transformation through the lens of nature.

And the second one is seeing changes in human nature through the lens of initiation or rites of passage.

And then the third one is seeing transformation on a cultural collective level.

And so I'm starting, you know, trying to write my way into why something like rites of passage or the parallel thing of initiation is so important.

And I realized that maybe people, why would I even have the authority to write about it or, you know, why? And so I got drafted to go to Vietnam when I was 20 or just before I was 20.

them?

oh.

And then I remembered that day.

And I realized I told the story.

I saved my life by telling the story.

Because they weren't going to beat me up.

They had knives.

And they were known to do real damage to people.

So what is it in the digital world that makes such a convincing substitute? And why is it this dangerous kind of proxy for a way to avoid human connection, true, genuine human connection?

Whatever comes up when I ask you this.

Well, it's a good question, and of course, courage comes from lacura, the heart.

So it's really about paths of the heart, and can we find the path our heart would have us taken away? And part of what happens to me every time war occurs on a big scale is I have my own PTSD, because when I was young, 19, I got drafted to go to the Vietnam War, and, um, and I didn't believe in that war.

And, um, but I was 19 and I wasn't sure, and my family expected me to go.

Everyone in my neighborhood thought I should go.

But I didn't feel that I could, so I sent a letter back to the draft board saying, you know, "This is not a declared war, it's not a wise war.

It's, it's a, a damaging war.

So if myth was so, um, like so much connect- or is so much connected to your soul as it, as your life turns out anyway later also, but, like, how, how did that help you or support you in this situation when you were so deep in, in your prison cell and also in the fasting? When you had that, like, can you share a little bit how that helped you in this moment? Like, how did that show up in you and help you?

Okay.

All of those things.

And so then you had mentioned initiation, and initiation was the culturally created descent that took the young man or, you know, teenager, as we would say now, out of the gang, otherwise known as the political party or the police or whatever, the men form gangs all the time, and take them out of that into an individual descent for two reasons near as I could figure out.

One is to find their own natural gifts, the gifts that they are ensouled with, and the other being to begin the healing of the wound that everyone has.

And so whereas with women it's a little different because of the menses, that a girl becomes a woman, in a sense, on the day she begins having the menses, and it's a physical, extroverted demonstration of bleeding, which suggests the moon.

I said a womb, a wound, but it also su- suggests the moon, and there's a whole thing that goes with that.

And if men have the menses, it's internal and can go unnoticed.

Yeah.