Transcript: MOLLY YOUNG BROWN on The Great Turning /360
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Molly Brown.
Molly Young Brown When we allow ourselves to share our grief, our rage, our fear, or just our numbness with other people and have them listen to it and accept that and not tell us we shouldn't feel that way. It's like, everything else gets released too. It's all in the same container and we open the container and let the pain out, we also let out the joy and the love. And then we start to see ourselves in the world with new eyes. We start to see how interconnected we are.
Ayana Young Oh, Molly, this is such a sweet moment to be here with you. I'm so grateful for this moment, we get to share in this context. All the years that we've spent together have really changed my life. And so I honestly feel kind of teary... Already feel emotional, just introducing you, so thanks so much for being here with us.
Molly Young Brown I am feeling the sweetness of the moment too. It's very special because I've known about your podcast and listened to it for a long time and to actually be with you here is a real special privilege.
Ayana Young Well, yeah, I just want to, yeah, just take this moment of gratitude and know that we have had so many conversations before this and woven through so many topics and discussions about where we are in the world and the Great Turning and how to be alive at this time in a good way. And it is challenging and it's you know, it is the beauty and the terror every day all at once. And I think it might be good for the listeners if we start to ground the conversation in a bit of your work and an explanation of the Work That Reconnects that you've been engaged in for so many years now. So maybe you could start off by explaining how you got involved in this work and how its meaning in your life has evolved over time?
Molly Young Brown Oh, golly. Well, for one thing, my background prior to getting involved in The Work That Reconnects was psychosynthesis. And I want to mention that because it's already a sort of alternative, non-mainstream approach. And I studied it for many years, including with the founder of Roberto Assagioli. So I was looking for a way to bring psychosynthesis into the kind-of larger world and I thought, well, peace psychology... I... maybe I'll look into peace psychology. And then in 1987, I went to a gathering of people involved in something called despair and empowerment work. And I went, "What's this? What's this?" And then what that was, was the early version of what is now called the Work That Reconnects.
So in 1990, I had an opportunity to go to a workshop with Joanna Macy who is... we consider her the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects. At that time, she was offering a workshop and something called Nuclear Guardianship. And because I came from Los Alamos, I felt a karmic connection to dealing with all the nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and the whole nuclear issue. So I went to the workshop and fell in love with Joanna and said, I've, I've got to do this. I've got to be with her. So I was involved in the Nuclear Guardianship Project for two or three years. And then let's see, I guess it was somewhere in the mid 1990s, I had started doing workshops with Joanna. So that's how I got involved. In 1995 more or less, Joanna asked me to do a new version of a book she'd published in the 70s, which was called Despair and Personal Power and the Nuclear Age. And the publisher, New Society Publishers, wanted an update on it.
So that was what we started out to do is just update that book, but it came clear very soon that we needed a new book, a whole new book, and the title came, Coming Back to Life and Reconnecting Our Lives in Our World was the subtitle. While we were working on that book, we were trying to find a new name for it because at that time, it was called Deep Ecology Work, which was, you know, not terribly descriptive. And there was this wonderful moment when Fred Macy joined, Joanna’s husband was talking with us. And we were saying, Well, we were trying to think of a new name, and he said, Well, what is the work do? And Joanna said, It reconnects. So there was the Work That Reconnects. That's how that that name came about and that's what has been called ever since.
Ayana Young It's just incredible how far reaching the Work That Reconnects has reached and, you know, internationally, definitely, in the framework that I was brought up in as a young activist, I met so many of my dearest friends through the Work That Reconnects, and it's still transforming and growing, and maybe you could speak a little bit to where you are now with the work and how you're shepherding it.
Molly Young Brown Certainly, certainly. It's very exciting. We just had the the Work That Reconnects network, just had a couple of weeks ago, something called A Gaian Gathering, which was a five-day online gathering with all kinds of little mini workshops and keynote speakers and what was exciting about it was how international it was. Because there was a time when the Work That Reconnects was mostly in the United States and Canada and some European countries. But it now has spread to… We have people in China. We have people in Hong Kong. We have people in Malaysia. We have people in South Africa, Egypt, several people from India that are now facilitators and adapting the work to their own cultures, which is part of the importance of it is that it's highly-adaptable. There's sort of a central framework, which I can describe, but then it's... it can be adapted to many different situations and cultures. It was very, very inspiring.
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah. It is inspiring how much it's grown and how it touches people in really different ways in different cultures and it still has a through line. And I think, to me, part of that... the connection I felt was on mentorship and guidance, and it seems like the value behind rooted generational wisdom is really ignored in this overculture. And I'm wondering, how can we not just continue but almost revitalize mentorship in our knowledge seeking practices?
Molly Young Brown Mm hmm. Hmm. Well, I think of the aspect of the work called Deep Time, which is the idea that not only are we interconnected to all living beings that are alive with us right now, but we are also connected to ancestors, human ancestors, and more than human ancestors, as well as future beings. Because everything we do today, it will affect what happens tomorrow. And again, not just humans, certainly humans, but also other species and ecosystems and rivers and mountains and everything. So we're connected through deep time and somehow that reflects on the relationship of young people and elders in the present time. Because if I'm about to become an ancestor, I might have something I want to share before... Before I do that, so mentorship. Actually, that's a term that I found myself using it for my own work. Being a mentor means coaxing out of the person you're working with, what needs to be coaxed out... their wisdom that they don't even know they have. Their perspectives on the world and their callings. What is it that they are really called to do? Not what they think they should do, but what are they really called to do on behalf of life? So it's a coaxing and listening as much as it is pronouncing. And I think elders are particularly good at that or can be because of life experience.
Ayana Young Yeah, I've really trusted the mentorship and specifically, your guidance, because the… what you bring to the table is like a type of realism. Like everything, of course, has so much meaning, but also there's a lightness to it because life is ephemeral. And it's hard to find the words of that combination of taking things seriously, but also letting things go because ultimately, everything's all going. And so how do we get into that rhythm where we honor and value, but we also realize that time is short, and we can't hold on? Yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear you riff on that and maybe even tie in the psychosynthesis practice into that way of thinking,
Molly Young Brown One of the main things that I learned in psychosynthesis is called dis-identification, which is a great big mouthful, but it means being able to say, Okay, I'm feeling this feeling and it's not to deny the feeling. It's not to repress it or make it go away, but just recognize, Okay, I have this feeling and I'm more than this feeling, there's more to me than this feeling, so I'm not lost in it. And in the process, I can actually look at it and examine it and experience it and see what it's here to teach me, but it's not my whole reality. So it's really interesting, because it's kind of almost paradoxical that the more you... I can dis-identify from a feeling the more I can experience it, because I'm not so afraid of it, especially if it's an unpleasant feeling. It's not just disidentifying from feelings, but also from perspectives, thoughts, worldviews. So I have very strong worldviews and I treasure them, I feel like they're very useful, but I know that they're not complete. Nothing that I think can be the whole story. Never. So I can dis-identify from my thoughts as well and say, Yeah, oh, that's a great insight. That's really a cool way of looking at it, but knowing that it's not the whole story, it's not the whole reality, you can never know the whole reality. No way. There's a kind of humility involved in that as well.
Ayana Young Yeah, humility and relief that we don't know. We'll never know. And then what kind of life can we live from that place where we're not in control and we're not dominant and the all-knowing human that can figure it out and if we can figure it out, therefore, we can save it. And if we can save it, then we can control it. And, you know, so on and so forth. It's like this self-fulfilling loop that keeps us in, I think, kind of a hell, at least for me. It's been torturous. And so to learn how to release, but not release out of apathy, almost release out of reverence. Yeah, I just continue to try to practice that.
But going back to the psychosynthesis for a minute, on the What Matters Conversations podcast, you discuss your interest in understanding the psychology of peace. And so often, we turn to psychology to explain what's wrong with the world or to make sense of the troubling aspects of the human condition. But there seems to be a flip side to this in the psychology of the good. So I'm wondering how might psychosynthesis might also point to our powers for peace and justice?
Molly Young Brown Hmm, thank you. I like that question. Well, in psychosynthesis, there is a notion of something we call the superconscious—that the unconscious has kind of three fields that, of course, it's all just one. There's no such thing as separation here, but just for purposes of thinking about it, we talk about the lower unconscious, the middle unconscious, and the higher unconscious. And the lower unconscious is like our basic biological functioning. We don't have to be conscious of every breath we take, or every heartbeat, thank goodness. And it's also things we've forgotten, or things that have even become repressed. So the middle unconscious is just like what I had for breakfast this morning, and I'm not thinking about it right now so it's not in my conscious mind, but I can easily retrieve it. Then the higher unconscious is what you're talking about: our capacities for love and beauty and compassion and service and creativity—all the really most beautiful aspects of human beings are kind of there in the higher unconscious for us to tap into when we need to. And, in fact, in this conversation, I feel like there's a little bit of that happening, because I don't know what you're going to ask me. And when you asked me a question, I have to kind of go, Hmmm, what about that? and it feels like part of what I do is tap into the higher unconscious in that time. So that's a psychosynthesis concept I have found very useful, is like, you know, people say, Well, it's human nature to be competitive, or whatever, and, well, it's also human nature to be loving. So it's all available to us. And we do have the power of choice to some extent, as to what we bring forth in our lives.
Ayana Young Yeah, that's such a good reminder. It can get really messy out there and in our heads, and sometimes it's hard to remember that we have agency over the way we react or behave towards others or the Earth. And I'm wondering if we can also connect this to ecological rootedness and ecopsychology? On your website, you describe ecopsychology as, quote, "a developing field of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and our natural environment from two perspectives. 1) how the natural world shapes and sustains us on all levels physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, and 2) how we can heal the industrial growth societies in a strange relationship to the natural world, restoring a deep knowing of our interconnectedness with all life," end quote. So yeah, if you could riff on ecopsychology, and maybe how that weaves into psychosynthesis, or the Work That Reconnects or just your, your ideology in general?
Molly Young Brown Sure. I thought I made the term eco-psychology up. Oh, we ought to have an ecopsychology, but apparently, it was one of those ideas or words that kind of occurs to a whole lot of people at the same time because Theodore Roszak, he came up with that term when he wrote that book, and the whole idea of ecopsychology came into being, and then it was... for a while it was there were conferences being held of some of which I attended and was, uh, a very exciting field. It was... The quotation you read from my website, I was like, Oh, that's really good. Did I say that? I'd forgotten it. So it's also ecopsychologists. How come we do it all? And I say 'we' I'm talking about members of our human species, you know, do such destructive things—tar sands extraction, mountaintop removal. I mean, we, you and I could spend the whole morning naming all the horrible things that are going on in the world ecologically speaking. How can we do that? What is it about our estranged relationship that has allowed that to happen and to take place?
Ayana Young I want to also explore psychosynthesis just a bit more because I think it's really fascinating and you also write on your website, quote, "Psychosynthesis models are oriented toward health and potential rather than pathology. They point to the nature of I or personal self, the will, the multi-dimensional unconscious, the personality structure, and our spiritual source self. They explicate the relationship of the various personality functions to one another and to I and the relationship of I to self, of individual to universal," end quote. Yeah, so I'd love if you could dissect this a bit and maybe even share about your personal intellectual journey with ecopsychology and understanding the role of the self within the world more broadly.
Molly Young Brown So my sense of, quote, capital 'S' self has really changed in is partly through the Work That Reconnects because initially it was... everyone has.. it was called higher self, actually. And the idea was, this was your kind of spiritual self, your soul. And then the I, the personal I, is more of a psychological thing of: I'm happy, or I'm sad, or I'm going to the store being... what's that I, you know, that sense of entity, that's it, it's a little different than ego, but it's kind of connected or related to ego. So self is this more expansive spiritual field, if you will, in which we all live. And one of the ideas about self is that it's universal—it's both individual and universal. So yourself, and myself, maybe are they the same self? Or are they just, like, in close communication with each other? I'm not sure. But in the Work That Reconnects, I've become accustomed to this idea of the ecological-self. And that is that as a self, I'm way, way more than just this body and this personality and this set of life experiences. Because every breath I take, brings in oxygen from the trees around me. And every breath I lead out, sends carbon dioxide to the trees nearby. So I'm constantly exchanging life with life around me, always, every moment, every microsecond. So how can I say I'm separate? I'm a separate self. And that's the idea of the ecological-self is that we're all part of this larger whole of life and constantly exchanging with that larger life.
Ayana Young Hearing you say that it sounds so rational and simple. And like, we should just know that and live by that knowledge. And yet, we've been so bamboozled by the overculture and so many of us can't see that or feel that or practice that knowledge, that awareness. Just even thinking about how some of us choose to poison the water we drink. It doesn't make sense. Why would we do that? We know that we are connected to the Earth body. They are one of the same and what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. Maybe it goes back to that idea that we can dominate, we can control, we can somehow escape the body and get into the mind. And maybe that's even where science and data allows us to feel that much more powerful over the body that we can kind of outrun it in some way. And yeah—it's really strange, and we can't. And that cycle of thinking that I'm in right now reminds me of a word that you mentioned in preparing for this interview, and the word is polycrisis. And I would love if you could give us a bit of perspective on what it is to experience polycrisis and to be aware of what's happening in the world in such a way.
Molly Young Brown The idea is that all these crises that we know about, and some we don't know about, are all interconnected and all affecting one another. Some of the worst cases of that—one of them is in Alberta, where the tar sands extraction is totally destroying this amazing, beautiful, rich boreal forest and the native lands and waters of the Native people living there. Now, that crisis is totally about racism and about a belief that certain groups of people are somehow not as important or not... what happens to them doesn't matter. Because "we" need this oil to make the profits for the people that really do matter, which are the rich capitalists or whoever they are. So that's what we mean by polycrisis. They're all interconnected. Racism and oppression and income inequality and all those things are totally connected to what is happening to the earth, the rape of the Earth. And it all stems, I think, from a belief that we're separate—that my well-being is completely independent of yours or only slightly influenced, perhaps. And that I could look out from my old number one without worrying about what happens to anyone else. So the polycrises are, I think, based in one origin, which is the sense of separation. And where that came from in history, there's a lot of theories about that. Lyla June Johnson talks about that from some of the traumas that happened in Europe because it does seem to be a European phenomenon—that sense of separation, which is, of course, now spread all over the world.
Ayana Young Yeah, the origin of separation—I feel like we can question that our entire lives. And, you know, part of me, when I first started the podcast, I was so obsessed with that question. And I researched the advent of farming, I thought, Okay, that's where it started, when people started to farm and the carrying capacity and the cedars of Lebanon and the Fertile Crescent and how, you know, time and time again, our separation from our relationship to the Earth led to farming which led to slavery which led to…….. But I've become almost less interested in trying to understand where it came from, because I feel like I keep getting debunked in some way. Like, I'll really believe it's one story, but then there'll be this outlier story somewhere else on an island far away. And I think, Oh, okay, interesting. So it was happening there, too, at some other time. Okay. And then, and I think what it does is it just continues to remind me that I don't know and I'm not going to know. And I'm probably not going to figure it out by reading books or by listening to theories. And can I be okay with that? Can I be okay, not knowing where our separation came from? And I think why I was searching so madly for that is because maybe I thought, if I could figure out where it came from, I could solve it. I could understand Well, it came from here, and this is what happened. And we grew and grew and grew in this separation story, And now we're here and we can use all that knowledge so we don't do it again, or we can heal from that place. But then I think, Well, how can we heal without that historical knowing? Is that possible? Is it possible to move through it without having… Yeah, without having all this baseline data?
And this kind of also makes me think about these two theories that I hear a lot in the Work That Reconnects, which is business as usual and The Great Unraveling. And there's something that the Work That Reconnects explains the three stories of our time, including The Great Unraveling, saying, quote, "The living systems of Earth have been unraveling regionally for centuries. Under colonial expansion and rule, the extraction of resources from the land has always gone hand in hand with exploitation of people and their labor. Refineries, mines, and toxic waste disposal are cited in the near up in and near their communities," end quote.
And then there's another thing I want to read from The Five Questions for Humanity in The Great Unraveling, you and Richard Lamb write quote, "One of the three poisons in our collective sensemaking bloodstream is delusion, spawned from greed and aversion disconnecting humanity from true perception. The true value of ourselves within our shared environment becomes distorted," end quote. I just deeply appreciate how your work recognizes just how crazy making it can feel to live in a world that seemingly insists on business as usual when all it takes is a critical look to see how quickly we are unraveling. Maybe a question is, how can we build a culture that steers clear of this impulse towards delusion? And if we were to do that, how do we build a culture that steers clear of the impulse towards delusion?
Molly Young Brown So obviously, there's no formula. There's no quick answer to that, but I do think there's some ingredients. And one is, in the one hand, to believe it's possible. And it's almost a choose to believe as possible—to have a world that isn't based on the insanity that our current economic system is based on, which is profit. I think for starters, we have to get away from profit as a central motivation in what we do. And that doesn't mean not being paid for your labor, but profit is something in addition to that, that's being paid for having money. You get paid because you have money and you invested in something and then there's a profit comes back. So you haven't done anything, you haven't labored. You've simply happened to have the good fortune of having some money that you can then make more money on. So the question is, how do we move beyond the delusion?
Love? Love. That's what I get for an answer. Feeling love, experiencing love, and loving life and loving trees and loving people and loving, just loving. That's a place to start. That's one of the ingredients.
Ayana Young To me, that seems like the place to start and to maybe not end but to continue on is love because I think good, we are truly loving, it is all encompassing. It is fulfilling to such an extent that we don't care about acquiring more and more and more because we are... like all of us is being cared for in that love. It's funny, it's so clear, and yet it's so challenging. Because so many of us, I think, are so far from being able to experience liberated love or love that feels free of strings or attachments or troubles. And so, you know, there's part of me that just wants to be like, yes, love. And then I go, Oh, gosh, like that's gonna be a tough one for a lot of us, which I think is again, why we do continue to find ourselves in the great unraveling because love and connection, although I think are such a natural part of us, it's almost like we have forgotten how to receive and give love and connection and belonging.
Molly Young Brown I think humans are very, very malleable. So there isn't any such thing as, quote, "human nature." We are so affected by how the experiences we have as infants and even in utero and as infants and children and, and as adults. So it's a vicious circle, or it could be a benevolent circle. We have to have been loved, I think. I don't know if we can love without having been loved—having experienced it, having had that life experience. So it's not like we forget, we just kind of like Oh, well I forgot, if we've been traumatized. And then there's patterns of trauma that are passed from generation to generation. And there's a lot being done in that field. There's a lot being done about how to heal from trauma. So there is hope in that respect. So we are becoming collectively more aware of these things.
Ayana Young That's really good to be reminded that it's not just like oh, you know, I'll just forget about love or, or like somehow we're laissez faire about it. Like, it's important to remember Yeah, we've been traumatized out of our sense of belonging, our connection to each other, to the Earth, and along with trauma, and I'm sure this is connected to it, but there's so much hate that is being fed in the world right now. And maybe it has for a really long time and it just feels bigger because there's more of us. And there's more media and there's more ways to hate each other in person, behind the screen. People are becoming more frightened of each other. But maybe not more. I mean, that's another thing that I used to think, Oh, this time is so much more intense and so much more apocalyptic than it used to be. But maybe that's not true. Maybe we are just as humans in these cycles of love and apocalypse and hatred and reconnection and, is it the spiral journey? I don't know how to put it in the Reconnect Framework. Maybe the question is, how does the spiral journey honor how vulnerable and scary it can be to be open with our hearts and our eyes to the world as it truly is?
Molly Young Brown Yeah, you talked about cycles of love in apocalypse and I'm thinking, Yeah, there's big cycles, and there's little cycles. Like, we might have a cycle in a day. And we can have a cycle in a generation, and I've lived 81 years and God, I have seen so many horrible, horrible things. And it is so much more visible now. My hope, and maybe this is my faith almost more than my hope, is that we are reaching a crescendo and the media is part of it because we are knowing about these things right when they're taking place, and not days later, or weeks later, or months later.
And consequently, it could be reaching a point of bifurcation when there will be a… some kind of a great awakening, The Great Turning—we talk about it in the Work That Reconnects. And it's happened in the past where things have gotten so bad, that they just can't continue. And something happens to change the direction. People's hearts change people's say, Oh, we can't we can't do this anymore. So that's my hope.
I don't know that it's a belief. It's more of a hypothesis that says what could be happening right now is that we're reaching a crisis point when there will be a dramatic shift. And we've seen it happen. Marriage equality has come about. Marijuana is being legalized. I mean, there have been dramatic changes and I just hope that we might be on the verge of another one. It's not fast enough for my comfort, though.
Ayana Young Mmmmhmmm. We'll make maybe in that there's a question about honoring the pain because with media and seeing things in real time and really being bombarded with the news cycle. The grief can get so big and the pain can get so overwhelming that I think it can of course be debilitating. It can be desensitizing. And, yeah, it seems that even when we are encouraged to look pain in the eye, we are then encouraged to move right on to the next thing, to continue with business as usual. And the social media algorithms especially encourage this. So I guess maybe to counter the push to just move on or accept these realities. How can honoring pain make space for grief and pain that's not legible within capitalist systems of productivity?
Molly Young Brown Hmm, thank you for that last phrase especially. Well, in the Work That Reconnects as you know, you'd spoken of the spiral before. And actually, when we first wrote the first edition of Coming Back to Life, we didn't include the spiral. That's something that kind of evolved later. So the spiral is the idea that there's this movement in the work, and that you open and start most of the time there are exceptions, but most of the time you start with gratitude. And the reason for starting with gratitude is that it opens your heart. And, of course, this is done like in workshops, either online or in person. So there's practices for coming from gratitude. You might have people introduce themselves and say one thing they love about life, for example. Or you might have people talk about someone who lifted them up and gave them courage and especially as a child or possibly as an adult. So you have people talk about things that they have been grateful for. We tend not to use the word grateful because of the thing that many of us may have experienced as children, who with an adult saying to us, a mother or father or teacher, You should be grateful! So we don't want to make it as ‘should.’ But gratitude is there and every person and it's just a matter of evoking it and inviting it into expression.
So then we're more able to move in honestly, often happens automatically, because what we love, we also grieve. And so we move into honoring our pain. And this is probably the kind of one of the things that has defined The Work That Reconnects is the expression "honoring our pain for the world." And it could be personal pain, but it's often like the pain we feel when we read about what's happening in Gaza. We're not there. Our kids aren't being killed, why do we feel anything? But we do, and to honor that and to recognize it as legitimate and real and important because it arises out of our interconnectedness. We care because we are connected. And we know that what happens halfway around the world is going to affect us directly or indirectly. But it's not just a concept, it's also a felt sense. So when we allow ourselves to share our grief, our rage, our fear, or just our numbness with other people and have them listen to it and accept that and not tell us we shouldn't feel that way. It's huge. It's huge. It's like, everything else gets released to our compassion, our passion for justice, our courage, our determination to serve, our goodwill. You know, it gets released too. It's like it's all in the same container. And we open the container and let the pain out, we also let out the joy and the love.
So it's this a really, really important part of the Work That Reconnects. And then what happens is, we start to see ourselves in the world with new eyes. We start to see how interconnected we are. We start to look at the trees or the flowers or the plants or the snow or though rain or whatever, all as so beautiful, and it's so present with us, that it changes the way we think. And oh, we start seeing ourselves getting it on a really deep level how interconnected we are.
So we started using the term "seek with new eyes" was what we used to call it, but now we call it "seeing with ancient eyes" because our Indigenous ancestors—all of us have Indigenous ancestors if we go far enough back—did see the world this way. It's new to us, but it's not new to humanity to see the world in this way. And then, when we do that, and that also includes that idea of deep time that I mentioned earlier, we go forth, we find out, Oh, I really feel called to do this for what we call The Great Turning—the great turning to a humane, sustainable, equitable culture. And it would take many forms. It wouldn't just be one cookie cutter way of doing things. There's lots of different ways you can be loving and humane and sustainable and that's where our creativity comes in. and we get to figure that out. And each person finds their own path. We don't have a prescription. People discover that from within themselves—what it is they want to do, how they want to serve life in creative and joyful ways.
Ayana Young Yeah, and when we can do that together, it's that much more joyful. And when I think about, your speaking to doing this work in groups, like doing the grief work in groups, and doing the creative work in groups. Not to say it always has to be like that, you know, I think each of us individually has our own creative ingredients to add in. But I can see that when we can come together in our pain and our love so much can happen. And if we can continue to replicate that all over the world, yeah, we can make changes like you'd sais a few responses ago, we have to believe it's possible. I mean, that's the number one probably first step is believing we can change, the world can change, that colonial capitalism can be released. We can let it go. We can let go of our need to acquire and consume. And we can let go of a hatred even. And I think even though it can feel so big and we can feel so small and inconsequential, to this huge machine that's killing us all, we, too, make-up that machine. And we can find ways of removing ourselves and the machine will get weaker and weaker and weaker. And sometimes it's hard to have that act of hope, or, you know, believe that faith, that it can change. But, you know, sometimes I think about these extraction projects, especially of this time where it's getting so much more intensive, because the easy resources have already been gotten. And so now it's deep sea drilling in the Arctic and it's drilling under glaciers, and it's just so insane what industry is doing to get the last resources, minerals, fossil fuels, etc. So it's like if somebody can dream up building machines to mine the deep sea, why can't other people have dreams of a world without it? You know, I think we've just been so trained that the dream has to be a dream of extraction. There's so much that has been drummed up in technology as well, that have seemed completely impossible. But it has been made possible by ingenuity, and, of course, a lot of money. But what is money anyways? And so I like to play that devil's advocate, and imagine dreaming that other dream and why couldn't we do it?
Molly Young Brown And we don't have to know how. I mean, I think that's one aspect of... I don't know whether it's to fight supremacy or capitalism, or what, but that a large number of us think we have to know how before we can start on something. And almost any achievement that has been made, they didn't know how they just worked away at it until they figured it out or until things fell into place, or whatever. Does a tree know how to grow? No, it doesn't have a master plan. It just grows. You know, we need to trust our intuition, our imagination a whole lot more than we do—that if we set out to move in a certain direction, and we may change direction, after we start moving in that direction, but it's like a constant dialogue within and what's happening in the environment without a need to know the whole roadmap before we start out. Because we can't, because it hasn't been made yet. It's like going into the wilderness and saying, where's the roadmap for this wilderness? Well, if it's wilderness, there is no road map. So we just have to find our way.
And there was something you said that I wanted to respond to a moment ago about, What can I do? The truth is, if you think you're the only one, it is a lost cause. But if we think of okay, I'm one of jillions of people who are working for a better world. And my little assignment is this. That's all I have to do. Just my little assignment. I have to show up today and talk to Ayana Young on her podcast. That's my assignment for today. I don't know what benefit it's going to have. I don't know if someone's going to be so inspired by this webcast that they go out and do something. I don't know that, but that's my assignment right now. So that's what I'm doing. And I just have to have faith that it betters, in that it will make a difference, a tiny little difference, maybe, but it will make a difference. And that's all we can do. Each of us as an individual do what we're called to do, from within and from without.
Ayana Young That feels like a big exhale on my heart. Yeah.
Well Molly, this has been so wonderful and I don't want it to end, but as we wrap up, I would love if you could share, where people can find Deep Times, a journal of the Work That Reconnects, and maybe to learn more about The Spiral Journey Facilitator Development Program, or anything else you can share with us of how people can engage with the work you've been stewarding?
Molly Young Brown Well, there is now the Work That Reconnects Network, which has formed over the last, well, about seven years. It's this wonderful organization. So they have a website, theworkthatreconnects.org. And you can go there, and you can find workshops there that people are putting on all over the world, online and in person. And really, really encourage everyone to experience the work because it's such a blessing and such a relief to find yourself in a company of other really caring, concerned people. So that's the first thing.
The Deep Times Journal is a publication of the network and if you go to the network's website, you'll see the journal. And I've been editing The Deep Times Journal since 2016—comes out twice a year—and honestly, it's just an amazing publication. And I say that without too much undue modesty because, it happens. People send them these wonderful poems and essays and art and video. And it's all online, and it's free. So that's just a really wonderful resource for everyone. We'll be putting out a new issue in March.
And then the third thing is, for the last six or seven years with Tima, Imani, Constance, Washburn, and myself had been offering a Facilitator Development program in the work that reconnects, we call it Spiral Journey. It is a six month program. We just started one in September, and it probably won't have another one until next September. But you can go to our website, which is spiraljourneyworkthatreconnects.org and find out about it, and there's some prerequisites for taking the course so if you're interested, go check out their prerequisites and get them done before next September. It's just been such an exciting program and it's a learning community. People learn as much from each other as they learn from the directors, and they get a lot of support from one another as well. So it's a really, very, very rewarding program for all concerned. And I have a website. It's really, really old. It's really old and old fashioned, but it's mollyyoungbrown.com.
Ayana Young That's where I found you, so still works. Oh Molly, I'm just so happy we got this time. I could keep going. But maybe we'll have to have a part two.
Molly Young Brown I'd love that. I'd love that.
Evan Tenenbaum Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Celia Hollander provided courtesy of the artist and Patience Records. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Bailey Bigger, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.