But what if they could bring an erotic aliveness through story?

Yeah, I mean, also you think about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is coming off of the Inquisition, the plague, social collapse, the Protestant Reformation.

He was a secret Catholic living in terror prob- His family was probably like very worried about that.

And what did he do? He didn't write a nonfiction tract.

He wrote wild gender-bending love stories that would give people...

I mean, his own son died of the plague.

Ooh

And so, yeah, how do you think... we can move through with a little bit of like negative capability, a little bit of, you know, mystery into an unknown space, into a kind of underworld culturally where things are just getting way messier and accrued senses of how things ought to be are dissolving without holding tight to these symbols of order that can like these ideas of structure, whether it's conspiracy, whether it's like hyper rationalism,

I mean, Henry, isn't that the question? I feel like that's what me and you were talking about all the time.

If I had a if I had a quippy answer, I'd give you one.

I have some some feelings about it.

I how do we how do we stay with this negative negative capability or to summon, you know, the F. Scott Fitzgerald? Can we hold two opposing ideas in our head at the same time? without letting them drive us insane.

And the issue right now is it's not two opposing ideas.

It is 4 million on your phone, scrolling every day, you know? So it's kind of impossible.

Sure.

We can move through with a little bit of like negative capability, a little bit of, you know, mystery into an unknown space, into a kind of underworld culturally where things are just getting way messier and a crude senses of how things ought to be are dissolving without holding tight to these symbols of order that can like these ideas of structure, whether it's conspiracy, whether it's like hyper rationalism.

I mean, Henry, isn't that the question? I feel like that's what me and you were talking about all the time.

If I had a quippy answer, I'd give you one.

I have some feelings about it.

How do we stay with this negative capability? Or to summon the F.

Scott Fitzgerald, can we hold two opposing ideas in our head at the same time? without letting them drive us insane.

And the issue right now is it's not two opposing ideas.

Yeah.

So what does stagnation or movement feel like to you? And how do you discern between them?

So interesting.

Lately, I've been thinking about how we live in a culture of the mind and we think that we can fix everything when we meet mind to mind.

But oftentimes we fix things by moving together, gardening together, making food together, going on a hike together, moving through a landscape together, noticing things outside of ourselves.

And I oftentimes think when friends are having fights, when family members are having fights, We're so stuck within this very atomized, very cerebral model of psychotherapy and analysis.

And the truth is that so little is solved by talk.

So much can be solved by moving together, moving emotional lymph, physical lymph together.

sick, in the way that you're conceiving of it right now, does it feel like you can give a texture or a set of parameters to what it is about your encounter with that environment that brought your system to transition into the state?

next to them it's like having shamans at home when you live with horses they're just extraordinarily powerful but this problem about um the the guruism and your work being influential to people sometimes without you realizing that it was influential and then you get put on a pedestal and the discomfort you feel around people self-abandoning and using, quote unquote, your work as a vehicle for self abandonment, how can we compost that to use your own beautiful metaphors? How can we compost that into something that looks a little bit more like devotion and a little bit less like deflection?

I mean, I think for me, I studied very intensely in college hagiography, so how we beatify certain individuals.

So hagiography is a saint's life.

And it was one of the most popular genres of writing.

In fact, the romantic tradition and the hagiographic tradition are kind of sides of the same coin.

the way we write love stories and fantastical stories have a lot in common with how we tell stories of miraculous individuals.

And the wild thing is that there actually reached a point in the Middle Ages where people were living their lives with an innate understanding of what happens in a hagiography, trying to become a saint.

But I've come to see that event with my health as a gift and an opportunity.

So that's kind of like the first thing that I really wanted to explore with you is what exactly is animism and how is it that you found it in your life? And, you know, what has it done for you?

So my first caveat is that animism is an umbrella term for a biodiversity of practices spanning many different geographies, many different cultures.

But it is a simplistic way of explaining how, for most of human history, across many different cultures, people seem to believe that other beings are alive and conscious and agential.

And they behave with the humility and a respect that they are woven into ecologies of relationship whereby they have to honor the agency and the aliveness of stones, mountains, rivers, birds, plants, such that the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere can continue evolving.

And that has different flavors in different places.

There are some people who really, some cultures that really believe stones and mountains are alive, that there are these tutelary land deities and that you have to feed them and appreciate them, that they are the elders.

Then of course there are other flavors whereby it's more that the plants and the animals have agency.

So when did you kind of first get turned on to this, this track? And I guess what is the experience of that, you know, we have kind of this conceptual overlay that we're kind of exploring here, but, you know, in a moment to moment kind of awareness of this intelligence of the other aspects of life, you know, for you, I guess, how is that kind of permeated in your awareness?

When interviewing author Sophie Strand for research for this episode, she unexpectedly told us a story of when she was visited by Nettle in a Dream to help with her own chronic kidney

disease.

I went into pretty severe kidney failure.

I've had experiences on and off for many years.

My doctors believe it's autoimmune.

They've never been able to figure out what triggers it, why it happens.

And there was a flurry, like, was I going to need dialysis? What kind of intervention was I going to need? And I asked my doctors, I said, give me four days.

This show does not give medical advice and cannot replace care from a qualified physician.

[laughs]

Um, yeah, I mean, it does feel a little on the nose these days, especially in the ways in which they have also become explicitly invested in Christological paradigms, [laughs] um, and are all kind of covert Christians or Gnostics, um, to some extent, like neo-Gnostics.

Um, yeah, I mean, hmm.

I will say that I, I think it is f- a fun game, an interesting game to go back and try and pinpoint the place where we stepped off course, where we stopped living in sustainable, resilient, um, communities, um, within the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere, when we stopped being participants, uh, in that ongoing dance.

And I definitely have a theory, but it's a theory.

Um, and my theory definitely lives somewhere around the collapse of the Bronze Age and the shift from oral culture to s- um, oral, like, i- itinerant culture, where agriculture is just one tool in a tool, tool belt of many different ways of surviving, to sessile communities, sta- s- cities that stay in place, and to written culture, to pinning down knowledge on a page such that it is no longer responsive, kept alive in community, constantly adapting with each retelling.

So the shift from oral culture to textual culture, and this shift from more dynamic, improvisational ways of survi- of surviving to, um, agriculture and civilization.

It, it was a really different, for me, a way of understanding, uh, you know, disease and impediment.

And I'm curious, how did you receive those kinds of messages as someone with illness in terms of that sort of viewing it as something to overcome? And how did that relate to your relationship to nature?

I do think When we get sick, we're looking for an explanation and a reason.

Why did we get sick? But the truth is, it's not why did we get sick? It's how can I have a wider framework whereby me being sick or getting better isn't the end all be all.

That there's no story that is moving along some linear continuum whereby eventually I get better and then eventually I die.

We need much bigger, more ambiguous paradigms than simple human value dualisms of good and bad.

Because things happen on scales that dwarf the meteor streak of the human lifetime.

That we are born into stories that with our limited sensory apparatus and short lives we will never understand.

And I'm curious, yeah, what your views on death are at this point and how you look at it.

When interviewing author Sophie Strand for research for this episode, she unexpectedly told us a story of when she was visited by nettle in a dream to help with her own chronic kidney disease.

I went into pretty severe kidney failure.

I've had experiences on and off for many years.

My doctors believe it's autoimmune.

They've never been able to figure out what triggers it, why it happens.

And there was a flurry, like was I gonna need dialysis? What kind of intervention was I gonna need? And I asked my doctors, I said, "Give me four days.

Like, please, just give me four days." I'm not saying that anyone else should do this, but I was at this time in my life where I was like intuitively like, "I need four days to just think about this." And I asked for a dream, and I dreamed of nettle, and I drank so much nettle infusion.

This show does not give medical advice and cannot replace care from a qualified physician.