So I guess the question I'm trying to ask you is, when did this first start to, when did you first tune yourself to understanding that you could work with weather, the elements specifically here?

It's always, there's a lot of things in our life that we really don't have a lot of control over.

And the weather is just kind of one of those things where you are faced with circumstances and forces much larger than yourself that you generally just have to Get used to.

And I honestly started working with weather to help my anxiety, to be honest with you, because when, for instance, we just had a really good rain the other day.

We hadn't had rain for almost we had had some rain, but not very much for almost a month.

And all my crops were at a. critical point where they needed rain and we're very worried so I went down to my oak tree and sat down there Thursday night and just poured my heart out in prayer and chanting to the gods asking for that they help me out and bring some rain now I also ask that it not be too much and not be not be dangerous we did have some very serious storms and flooding in my state on Friday night luckily that did not hit our place we've been having Storms go through in June.

As you say, we live in a place where it's prone to tornadoes and severe storms.

yeah yeah so what is what is of your book what do you what would be your key like top takeaways from this book that uh you want to share with listeners

How did you end up getting into, I think you also do Reiki, correct?

I did.

Well, I got into Reiki because it's an initiatory system that is open you know you just you take the class and and they'll they'll they'll give you the initiation it's an energy healing system that that was that was open to me i found i found a teacher and i found a class and um they introduced you to the to the symbols which i actually think are spirits that work through you when you um when you do the healing and i also i also want to take some of the um power over healing back into my own hands.

You know what I mean? I tried using angelic entities, working with angelic entities for healing.

And I would actually, I explained in the book, I would actually visualize myself as the angel doing the healing.

The next day I would feel wiped out.

Like so tired.

Can you just give maybe people a little bit of an idea about like how you look at that? I guess maybe like psychologically, metaphorically, ecologically, if you do.

Todd, what gave you sort of the inspiration to put this book together?

Well, I think the genesis of the book was in my early 20s.

I sort of really wanted to write a book about some of the themes that are still present in The Cunning Farmer.

I actually discuss it in one of the chapters about how we sort of have fallen away from nature and many of the things that we're Traditionally grounding practices for our ancestors, many of the ancestral practices that our ancient people grew up and ancient people cultivated and that we needed to get back to some of those practices.

I mean, not in a sense of returning to the past, but more bringing back some of the things that had been lost when people became more civilized and more urbanized and more removed from the land and from nature.

I started thinking about that in my early twenties, and then as I got older, and as I started studying esotericism again, I studied this in my early twenties.

And like I said, I got really busy with farming and really down to earth and was sort of an armchair magician and a researcher, but not a practitioner.

So what is an eighth lunar mansion talisman?

So lay out operationally who we're actually trying to be in right relationship with as a farmer in your model.

So my, my sort of meta paradigm is her- as you said, hermetic philosophy, Neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy.

I feel like that is, that's the thing that holds it together for me, um, the idea that there is a create- a, a creator, the one, some sort of intelligence, some sort of source, um, outside or, or within space and time that emanates the world into existence.

Um, I think that to get at what is actually going on in the philosophical realm or the, the, um, higher realms is really ...

It, it's almost impossible to put it into words.

So we just kinda need to find a system that, that helps us visualize and understand that so we can believe in it.

I mean, um, I don't ...

Why tobacco? Tell me why tobacco.

What's be- what's behi- what's behind the magical moments that it works?

Well, I think, like I said, I think we all, uh, w- everything is within one, one mental network.

I, I feel like we're all living, we're all living within the mind of the creator, and, um, everything is connected from abo- as above, so below, right? So you have the, you have the movements of the heavens showing in a visible way what's happening on Earth.

You know, Carl Jung came up with a syn- with a, with a theory of synchronicity, which i- it's not really a theory.

It's, it's more of a, it's more of just a, a, a, a label or...

But it's, it's...

If we believe that everything, everything moves together, everything breathes together, like the, the hands of a clock don't make time happen, but they, but they point out time.

Tell us, what is the most fascinating aspect of what you've done magically, that just wowed you?

Now, what about invasive species? Do you have any particular perspective on them?

So I was thinking about this recently.

Our land here is pretty damaged from agriculture.

And from sheep, I think sheep grazing, cattle grazing, arable farming, the people that the European settlers that moved here farmed in a completely different way than the native people who lived here before them.

who the native people i believe practice sweden agriculture on the river bottoms and maybe somewhat on the uplands but mostly on the river bottoms which are a lot more level soil and the sweden you know the shifting cultivation or the sweden cultivation doesn't lend itself to erosion because you you will crop a place a few years and then you'll abandon it for 15 to 20 years and then come back.

But when the European settlers moved here in the late 18th century, they started clearing large tracts of farmland first on the riverbanks, but now we also have very fertile soils on the uplands around here, but they're also highly erodible.

As the farming economy kind of tanked in the mid-20th century, a lot of farmland came to be abandoned, and a lot of our woods here actually used to be pastures and even cropland.

He does like BBC documentaries.

This chapter is quite expansive.

Well, I think that one of the most important things things in farming, aspects of farming, one of the most difficult aspects of farming is the weather, as we've been discussing.

And I think societies that have made their living through farming, which is practically every human society, or even hunter gatherers were concerned with the weather as well.

So the office of the rainmaker was a very important office in practically every human society and every society has come up with some form of weather magic.

And I think there's a psychological, almost a psychological need to feel like you can influence something which seems to be so far out of your control.

And it is my conceit to think that one probably can influence the weather.

I think a lot of my take on this is that if nature...

I mean, even the Roman Romulus and Remus sucking on the tit of the great she-wolf, like even that is an aspect of the creation story that is the migration or really the... mediation the middle ground between like the terrestrial realm and then like the storms above like the storm gods and things so much of that and it seems to write well into our language the kept linguistics of the created and that that that's interesting to me it's interesting to me especially from a magic perspective in the sense that so much of what we talked about is the language of magic here like you know The words, the chants, the being of that, the actual vocalization of this inner intent that walks in words into the outer space that then interacts with the outer things, the animate, the living, the being, and the breathing.

You know, it's an interesting concept.

Well, let's see.

Encounter the sprawl.

The sprawl is something, to me, it's something like you, you sort of feel it.

And yes, I have, I've had like visionary experiences where I could, I could see it flowing through the, through the landscape and being pulled up into trees by their roots.

And, and, uh, that was a really powerful and meaningful experience.

Um, But one of those times when I was out at night in the moonlight, just doing my wandering to try to gather some of that energy, I felt like I could actually see it and sense it with my eyes.

What do you say to those that like covet your life and wish they could have, you know, all these opportunities to do this stuff, but like they live in an apartment in Brooklyn, what have you, like what's the

What are your feelings about the book in terms of passing on knowledge? Did you write the book because it's important for us to remember and continue to utilize these techniques?

I wrote the book because I know that what we're doing to the earth and the way we're living on the earth is not okay.

And to say the least, we're in a very bad—we're in a crossroads right now.

We're in a time in history when it seems like a lot of older— Systems are falling apart and newer systems have not necessarily emerged to take their place.

And I was hoping to contribute to that conversation of in my own way, based on my own experience of working the land for, you know, my whole career, um, and my particular point of view that I have of studying esotericism, mythology, and religious traditions, and trying to just contribute the conversation to bring agriculture and our relationship with land back to a more sacred and reciprocal relationship.

And I think that's so critical.

I mean, it seems like the petroleum is running out, that technology is... seems like it's taking over the artificial intelligence and the data center.

It's creating and maintaining some form of living or life that I'm curious to hear about your interpretation on.

Mm-hmm

...

in y- in the old country would've definitely said that my, the fairies took my cow.

I had a beautiful Jersey cow, very, like, lovely.

She was a show animal.

She'd been in the, she'd been in a, like, somebody's 4-H show calf, and we bought her to, as a milk cow, and I don't know.

I, I kinda have a soft spot for Jersey cows.

[laughs]

And then

you mentioned the sun and its undeniable beauty.

uh, astral influence.

The sun is a star that is our, is the closest star to us and is the source of all, all energy in life.

And it's, it's motions and it's declinations and it's, well, I mean, we now know that the earth is wobbling on its axis, you know, and we, we now know it's a variations in the axial tilt or, or in the position of the, uh, earth relative to the sun and the angle of the sun relative to the earth that makes the seasons but that is the foundation of tropical astrology of the so when the um when claudius ptolemy who we quote in this chapter talks about the moon in the tetrabiblos he also talks about how the seasons The variations in solar energy and intensity in the seasons are the foundation for the symbolism of the tropical zodiac.

So, for instance, the sun has its domicile, the sun where he's the most powerful in Leo.

And it just so happens that the sun is the most powerful from June...

And so it's interesting that empathy and feeling is so akin to practical magic that without it, it's almost impossible to accept it.

How, how, how long have you been planning to make all this into the book?

Why so eclectic? Oh, God.

Well, I mean, I had the genesis of the idea when I was in my early 20s, and I'm 53 now, so it's been 30 years kind of in the making.

You know, I, I started writing notes on a book that I might wanna write one day when I was, like I said, 30 years ago in my early 20s.

Um, so you know, just kinda write, keeping ideas in the back of my head about what I wanted to write about.

I knew it was gonna be about agriculture and the sacred somehow, and, you know, agricultural magic, things like that.

But, uh, I really started writing it three years ago, a little over three years ago, started working on the manuscript, and, uh, just it all came together.

... does one sort of come first? Like, did you, did you get into the magic side of things first, or did you get into the farmer thing, or how did that sort of, how did those two come t- come together? Because it's, I mean, I guess the ancients probably took that sort of stuff for granted that, that we don't even really think about anymore.