Transcript: JAROD K. ANDERSON on Reclaiming Limits /319
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Jarod K. Anderson.
Jarod K. Anderson I just kind of feel like those insidious fingers of our cultural narratives sneak into even our well meaning narratives of progress, because the destroyer is romanticized, and the healer, and the grower, and the caregiver are not in so many of the dominant narratives.
Ayana Young Writer, Poet, and podcaster Jarod K. Anderson (creator of The CryptoNaturalist Podcast) has built a large audience of readers and listeners with his strange, vibrant appreciations of nature. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of single-celled organisms, Jarod is forever writing love letters to the natural world.
Well, welcome Jarod, it's so lovely to be having this conversation with you on these winter days, although slightly different temperatures where we're at, feels good to have some deep conversations during this time of year.
Jarod K. Anderson Thank you, it's really lovely to be here, I feel the same. It feels like a meditative time of year.
Ayana Young Absolutely, very inward. It’s a good time for readings poems and books, and I actually wanted to start off by reading a poem from your book of poetry the Field Guide to the Haunted Forest called “Woodland You” where you write:
“It's easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel
a bone deep love for nature.
It's less easy to remember that the contours of your own body
represent the exact same nature.
The pathways of your mind.
Your dreams,
dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock.
Your regret,
bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass.
It's the same as the nature you make time to love.
That you practice loving.
The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy.
You are as natural as any postcard landscape
and deserve the same love.”
Yeah, this really seems to capture so much of what your work details and as we begin, I want to specifically think through what the practice of loving may mean for us when it can be difficult to muster the strength to love, and and be that when it feels like the Earth is slipping away through climate change or when we ourselves are not deserving, or feel not deserving.
Jarod K. Anderson Yeah, that's one of those poems that sometimes I think of as a bit of a thesis statement or a mission statement from my work, and in general, because I'm somebody who suffers from lifelong chronic major depression and anxiety and a bundle of other mental challenges. So I very much empathize with the idea of having trouble mustering up love for oneself. But in that sense, I find nature instructive, because I have found that many of us who struggle with mental illness, can summon a sort of a generosity of spirit and love for the natural world. Even if it's difficult to see my own worth, from time to time, depending on where I am in my mental health journey, I can always walk in the woods, and feel sort of a broad sense of gratitude and wonder. In that sense, in many senses, I feel like that nature is medicinal when we come to it with intention, intention to notice, intention to listen and intention to learn. And so I know what it feels like to love nature in a generous and unconditional, natural, effortless sort of way. So I don't think it takes too many steps to then realize my own connection to the natural world. I'm a messy, organic thing, that is also part of cycles and change and a constant ebb and flow, give and take. And so, in so much as I know what it is to apply love and generosity and admiration to nature, with a little effort of will I find that I can take that lesson and use it, to find new ways to love myself.
Ayana Young Yeah, sometimes I think it's so cliche when we're like, “Oh, to love the Earth is to love ourselves, the Earth body is our body.” And maybe that's just my own resistance to feeling deserving of the same love that I have for the Earth, and that sometimes I want to be misanthropic towards myself and think, you know, the Earth is so pure, and I'm tainted, or, you know, these stories that I think a lot of us tell ourselves right now, especially right now, because we're not in intact cultures where we have the type of social support that we may have once had, or like the anxiety that you brought up. I know so many of us feel lost and confused and not connected to a purpose or to a type of even like an inner knowing of spirit, and so I know this is resonating with me, I can imagine resonating with a lot of folks and I'm trying to imagine you as you're working through your mind and heart and what practices you have. And maybe if you want to share with us, what you do for yourself when the anxiety comes up, or when you find it hard to love yourself, or even find it hard to love the Earth or maybe what we've done to the earth as humans in this time, like, I think I'll just give a quick example, when I was really falling in love with the forest, specifically of the Pacific Northwest, I would go into old growth forest. And I think that concept of purity, and maybe that comes from like a white supremacist reductionist background, I was like, “You're pure, and you're old growth, and you're this virgin forest, and I'm so in love with you, and you're just incredibly wise and beautiful.” And then I'd go into a plantation forest or a third growth forest or clear cut. And I'd feel like, “Wait, like, no, not you or, you know, the drought is here and your leaves are crunchy, and this isn't it.” And maybe it's almost a reflection of like, those landscapes that are harder to love is a connection to the harder to love parts of myself. So I don't know, just kind of, I'll pause myself there and see where that sparks in you.
Jarod K. Anderson You're just touching on a lot of things that I think about a lot and I think there is overlap behind that sort of purity culture that has touched a lot of us, at least I can speak for myself growing up here and in the US and in the Midwest specifically and I think that connects to what you said earlier about the difficulty of feeling that we are tainted, that we are too tainted in a variety of ways to think of the Earth as family as anything but sort of a toxic positivity, you know, poster on a wall at an office. But I think these things are tied to the same thing, which is this insidious kind of cultural baggage that we all internalize, I think, and we do it unconsciously at first, but that defines for us how we achieve worth or merit within our own identities. And that's the purity thing, but it's also, you know, the artifacts of that in my own life are sort of this work ethic and this sort of capitalist productivity model. You know, am I successful? How much money do I make? What's my job title? These are the sorts of ways in which the story we learn to tell about our identity starts to erode the sense that you know, that you can go into an old growth forest and somehow that feels pure and correct. But it's difficult to apply that to yourself. Well, why? It comes down to the sense of worth, right. We are often taught what worth is when we are young through our cultural stories.
You know, a lot of us seem to understand that a two year old child has intrinsic worth that has nothing to do with merit or achievement or success, and yet then struggle to apply that same concept to ourselves. Or that, you know, new growth forest is somehow less than old growth forest. Why? Well, because we're focusing on a narrative that new growth forest is an aftermath. And our mind settles on the disasters, not the growth. You know, I wrote a poem, if you don't mind, I'll read here quickly from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest called “Unscripted.” Okay, this sort of touches on what we're talking about, “Unscripted”:
We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories, that it's easy to forget life doesn't follow conventional narrative structure.
We can't wait for our climax, we don't have character arcs
we live in then we don't,
There is no culmination and success or failure.
We're not curated collections of achievements or mishaps
don't fear you won't be good enough.
Just be here, present in this dance between joy and sorrow.
The plot is happening now,
today is the story of you and me.
And, you know, I love stories. Of course, I love language, I'm a writer. But stories aren't real life, it's sort of the old saying that the map is not the territory. You know, the stories, we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, essentially, that's what I think identity is–contextualizing ourselves by telling a story of ourselves. I mean, stories are how we understand the world, sharing narratives with one another. And that's wonderful, but the downside of it is that if you grow up hearing a certain kind of story that the good guys are the ones who are successful and productive and rich and own things. Well, that becomes our default of how we model worth and success in ourselves. Which is a construct, it's a culturally created construct, and we forget that. So we begin to feel worthless, if we don't match the construct, if we can't fit ourselves into the template of an identity story that we're told over and over again. And going back to that “Woodland You” poem, I think that's why the nature metaphor is, you know, not just a cliche, it's we have different narrative expectations, or sometimes no narrative expectations for seeing a sunset, or seeing, you know, a particularly gorgeous oak tree growing in a field. So we know how to love, sort of a natural occurrence. And then, you know, it's just literally true that we are also a natural occurrence in every real way that matters. And, yes, climate change is disastrous, and will present so many terrible challenges and losses and tragedy. But that's nature too.
You know, I always am careful when I say this, because I am definitely not advocating sort of a passive looking on approach to such things. But I am saying that endings, in tragedy and messiness are not a reason to abandon the love, or the hope, or that instinctual feeling of worthiness that we get when we come to a lake shore or look at a starry sky, or, you know, glimpse a deer, those things are not diminished by the fact that there are man made catastrophes here and on the horizon. Those catastrophes do not need to be catastrophes of love, or worth, or meaning or hope. There is, of course work to do, but we get into that sort of scary purity artifact of so many of our cultures, when we think, “Well, maybe the works not worth it now because mistakes have been made, tragedies have happened, losses have happened. Maybe this version of nature isn't worth my love or respect or attention, because now it's sullied and will be sullied forever. That's falling into that dichotomous thinking narrative that is poisonous to so many of us in so many ways, both in terms of our identities and our worldviews.
Ayana Young That was beautiful. And I’m wondering, if you're open to it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how masculinity weaves into some of the threads we've been pulling on. And I'll just leave that totally open, because I feel like there's so many things to say about that.
Jarod K. Anderson I think it's huge and it's one of the subjects that I'm very preoccupied with, especially as somebody who grew up in, you know, sort of a traditional American Midwest, Rust Belt, small rural town, kind of environment. You know, it's a tragedy that I have had so many male friends in my life that not only do not seem to have the tools to enjoy the connections that come through vulnerability, and the emotional work, that sometimes it takes to build deeper relationships with others and ourselves. And, you know, it's not just that a lot of these, these folks were denied the tools through the cultural expectations, but, you know, the project of acquiring those tools was seen as, you know, somehow taboo or a way to become weak or less than, or something other than masculine. And it's something that I've dealt with my entire life, the tension between those expectations, and, I mean, what I am, I remember, I won a statewide poetry contest, when I was in the fifth grade, and I had to miss a football practice to go to the banquet. And, you know, explaining why I had to miss to coaches, you know, with teammates around. You know, it was like I was telling them that I had to miss because I was being abducted by aliens that day. I mean, there was just no cultural script to even navigate that, except that anything that is other, and sort of traditional American masculinity is often sidelined, or met with, you know, at best, playful teasing, and at worst, hate and derision and being ostracized. So I've always felt like I have operated in sort of a strange liminal space where I love weightlifting, I was a boxer. But I have written nature poetry for 30 years.
It's another one of these times when I feel like narrative becomes a trap, if you don't constantly interrogate it, if you don't have a conversation with it. Because there will always be a ready made prepackaged store bought narrative for anything you want, identity or morality, you know, you can always just grab the first one off the shelf. And people don't seem to understand what they give up by taking that convenience. You know, I know that my life is richer, for being able to speak openly about, you know, my mental health struggles, about my vulnerability and uncertainty about my own sense of worth, about, you know, being vulnerable in love, in the human yearning for connection, and self expression, and creation. Do I also like to talk about the benchpress? Sure. And it's just, it sometimes always feels so tragic to see peers and friends and loved ones, bullied by a cold dead narrative, into shrinking themselves into only certain little corners of human experience.
And so I do all this writing on social media, and every once in a while, I like to post a picture of myself. And partly, I'm doing it to say like, “Hey, here's a man doing these things.” And inevitably, I always get comments. “Oh, I thought you were a woman.” That's like, oh, yeah, that's because I'm being thoughtful and empathetic in a, you know, open public context. So it's a conversation that is important to me, and that I want to have and it's another one of those big, sort of like the purity narrative thing, conversations that I feel like, the only way we fix it is through intentionally rejecting it. And then in my case, you know, I think the thing I can do is be a visible example of another way to interact with the world and myself. I just sincerely and earnestly hope it helps someone, because yeah, growing up, there were so many ways in which I kind of had a general sense that I didn't fit narratives. And I know, this is true of so many, so many folks, but I think it would have been helpful to me to have other examples of sort of whole and functional lives that had the same sorts of interests and loves and struggles that I had. So you know, I feel like at the least I have an obligation to try to, with the visibility that has come from my writing and social media following, I feel an obligation to at least be a visible example of somebody who rejects traditional narrative expectations of what masculinity is and how it should be performed.
Ayana Young Yeah, I think it really shows how multi-dimensional we all are and even those of us who outwardly seem like we do fit those molds, there's so much more to us than either what meets the eye, or even what we think we are. And we're also always changing. I think that's part of the molds to me that's an issue, is that the molds are really stagnant. It's like, okay, this is what you are, and this is your role, and this will be you forever. But I've found even for myself, of course, and in a lot of ways I've kept the same values and I think there are core elements that have stayed steady. But I hope that as we start to shift the dominant culture, we give each other and ourselves more space to shift and grow and be multi-dimensional creatures. And give ourselves a space of that creativity too.
It's kind of like, and we've seen this time and time again, when we repress ourselves with these hard rules, we end up doing really weird things, you know, it's not good for us. We do all sorts of strange things, when repression and purity culture come into play. But I just thought of this, and maybe we can play with this thought for a minute, because I think there's a real difference between repression and limits. Where it's almost like, something about the dominant culture is like, “Don't repress” even though it's saying repress yourself, it's also saying, like, “Don't repress yourself, be whoever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, buy whatever you want to buy,” where I'm like, “Well, hold on, hold on, let's, let's clarify for a minute,” because the Earth has limits. And that's a beautiful thing, you know, to have limits to have boundaries. It's true. And I think respecting the Earth's limits has been something we haven't done in this dominant culture, and therefore we're dealing with so much extinction and climate chaos and so on and so forth. But I almost wonder if capitalism has kind of bamboozled us, where I feel like repression is more of a maybe an issue around repressing our spirit, or some type of inner expression. Do you see where I'm going with this? I don't want to keep going if it's getting too out there.
Jarod K. Anderson Yeah, and I think this ties in to the other things we've been talking about. So I was sort of a non-traditional first generation student who studied literature, I did a bachelor's, and then went and did a master's, and taught college English. And right around the time I had been teaching for a few years, I had been accepted to a couple of PhD programs and decided I didn't want to do this anymore, that I loved writing and words, but I didn't actually like grading 300 essays a day as my day job. So you know, armed with degrees and writing, I switched to marketing. And so a lot of the study of marketing is the discussion of, you know, brands. And to the point you were making a brand, often folks think of it as a logo, et cetera, you know, a font. But the core of a brand, what people selling things want to do, is define what you think about yourself when you use the product. So like Apple, for example, what Apple wants from the Apple brand is for you to feel sophisticated or fancy. When you are engaged with somebody, somebody who's sort of like plugged in and, you know, maybe tech, maybe tech savvy, what they're trying to do is sort of engender the sense of pride, this identity connection, that part of my identity is to be an Apple user. And so it attaches to everything else we've said of like, these sophisticated firms with billions of dollars to put behind this research, what they want is to have an attractive, ready made piece of identity for you to consume, for you to spend money on. And they're good at it. And nobody really teaches anybody how to defend against it.
So it's like, in the struggle between consumer and product, all of the deck is stacked before the products in terms of you know, their facility and knowledge and sophistication with crafting narratives. And the fact that, you know, we don't educate the consumer, because the consumer's job is to buy things and, you know, so much of our civilization is set up on everyone kind of nodding and smiling and accepting that belief that yes, buying things is part of my identity. In so I see this reflected sometimes in messages I get. I get lots of messages every day, and a genre of them that I get is, “Hey, I'd really like to write poetry, like you do. How do I do that?” And there's a lot of different flavors of that message, but that message is asking for permission to, what do I need to have this identity? And I think the question reveals so much because the question is like the purity culture thing, how do I do this legitimately? Because come on, you know how, enjoy poetry and then play with language and write poetry. Like that's essentially the core advice I send back. But the question is, how do I do it legitimately in a way that–what is the Apple product I can buy of becoming someone who writes poetry. And people get confused, and even a little uncomfortable when there isn't a thing, when it's something that you give yourself permission to do. And then of course, you will always see people trying to sell the legitimacy, you know, and people spend so much money on degrees and workshops and books. And I'm not saying there's no value to that, but at the end of the day, how you become a poet is you write poetry a lot, you read a lot, and you write a lot. But there's this baked in preoccupation with, “Okay, but how do I really do it? How do I do it in the context, I understand, which is the context of buying approval, of buying legitimacy for my identity.”
It's funny, poetry itself teaches us that limits are often nourishing, you know, there's a reason poets through the centuries have loved strict forms like sonnets and you know, Shakespeare with iambic pentameter and trying to take an idea, and find a way to express it well, within limitations, even sort of the free verse sort of poetry I write. Well, there's a reason it is small on a page, it's because the challenge is to express a big idea in a small space, thinking about kind of economy of language and which words really matter. The limitations themselves are what kind of prompt growth and satisfaction and that feeling of meaning. But limits, as a virtue, are definitely not part of the kind of prevailing cultural narrative that many of us were raised in. Both, and as you said, you can do anything, you know, express yourself way, but the subtext of that, that we all I think, understand is like you can do anything, express yourself through buying, through being productive, through ways that we all kind of know are the correct ways to be successful. And it eats at people.
I mean, it's another reason why a lot of folks have trouble with self worth. And that misanthropy toward the self that you mentioned earlier, I actually have a poem called “Limits” in Field Guide to the Haunted Forests, maybe I could read that real quick. Okay, “Limits”:
You won't see most of this planet,
under each rock,
beneath the water,
secrets of air and soil.
Can you feel the joy behind this limitation,
that there is always a new thing to discover?
A new way to grow,
is one of the sweetest parts of living,
and it's free and inexhaustible.
It's odd how much anxiety I think so many of us have of sort of fear of missing out, applied so broadly to so many things, but understanding that so much of the world and the universe and ourselves will remain a mystery, is something that I think is humbling in a way that is fulfilling and nourishing, because the other side of that is certainty, as as opposed to mystery, you know, certainty and spirituality are our identity, etc. And so many people are afraid of the mystery, but I really feel like certainty is what is claustrophobic, is what shuts down possibility and growth. Yeah, I rambled for a minute there. Did I leave the subject completely?
Ayana Young I really love where we're going with this, because even when I think about what you talked about with freedom earlier, I forgot the line you spoke but I almost feel like we need to reclaim limits or reclaim freedom, where, of course, these huge themes have been co-opted by a dominant culture to be like, “Okay, well, freedom is, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want.” It's like no, no, no, that's not, that's not freedom, that's called selfish. That's not the same thing. So what is freedom? What is self liberation, what is self expression, when it's coming from a place of depth, and spirit, and empathy, and not from selfishness?
I don't think we're intrinsically selfish, because also, you know, if you're too selfish, you die in the natural world. So that's not even a good survival strategy and I think it's really bamboozling, when, from such a young age, we're taught that what freedom is, is to be able to do whatever we want, buy whatever we want, whenever we want it. You know, Uber Eats at any time, doesn’t matter when you can get on a flight, you can buy what you want, you can have delivered Amazon Prime 24 hours, no, two hours, you know, it's just like, that's what we're sold as freedom, when not only is that devastating the planet, I think it's devastating us. And I think it's leaving us so empty, because we're wrapping our identities around this intense work culture, productivity culture, to get this “freedom.”
And on the flip side, you know, I'm just thinking about when Trump was running, and not that this was ever said, but it was kind of this idea of like, if anybody is putting limits on you, like, that's unAmerican, or something, or like, that's kind of the devil, that's evil, like if somebody's trying to put a limit on you, rather than like us, seeing limitations as like, respectful. So I just think of no wonder we're confused, no wonder we're anxious. What we've been conditioned to believe is so confusing and it’s ecocidal, and it’s like well if we’re raised to be ecocidal, well yeah, we're going to be depressed, like, that feels pretty, like par for the course here.
So I wanted to read something from one of your essay kind of under this theme of how we resist, while we continue to build and it's from one of your essays “Seeking Peace While the Work is Unfinished” you write, “It's no secret that we need our destructive mindsets to oppose injustice, fight those who do harm, and speak out against abusers, bigots, fascists, etc. We also know that social media uses our innate prioritization of threats to hold our attention and keep us scrolling. And yet... I think it's clear that what makes the world (and the inside of our skulls) a joyful, livable, sustainable place to dwell requires constructive mindsets. Building shelter. Building communities. Food. Art. Education. Childcare. Science. Medicine. Fun and leisure.” I'd love it if you could speak on that for a minute.
Jarod K. Anderson A lot of it has to do with a lot of people who I feel like are not wrong, calling for various kinds of revolution and deconstruction. And I don't think that's wrong. But I also think that if your thing is, say, industrialization of farming, and food production, and all of the consequences of it, I want to know more about how you feed everyone then how you destroy the industrialized farms. I just kind of feel like those insidious fingers of our cultural narratives, sneak in to even our well-meaning narratives of progress, because the destroyer is romanticized and the healer, and the grower, and the caregiver is not in so many of the dominant narratives. And I think, sort of, to tie in with social media, the big destructive impulses trigger that kind of cortisol threat thing in us, that also captures our attention. And then if we doom scroll for long enough, we start to feel this soul-threatening numbness and malaise. And, you know folks often talk about the placelessness of social media, that we're bombarded with all of these sorts of global-size narratives and it starts to feel like we are residents of the internet, of social media. And then of course, it's not a place, and it doesn't have an environment, and we can find community through it, but it isn't where we live. And you know, we're pulled away from our physical contexts and limitations, I think this might tie into what you were saying. We are creatures of a place in time. And you know, between the pandemic and the rise of social media, a lot of us are isolated, while feeling like we are more connected than ever. But the connection of social media sometimes feels like empty calories. Like we're eating sugar cubes constantly and then thinking like, “Well, I feel full, why am I sick all the time?” And it's because, you know, we are not being present in our place and moment. And doing the work that is not threat assessment or destructive mindset, doing the work of local engagement and feeling like we are needed and useful and engaged in our place and time. And not that we are somehow pulled out into a huge, abstract, unknowable kind of collection of a billion minds. Then it's like we never know our neighborhood. I mean, in kind of a broad, metaphorical way, like the neighborhood of ourselves, the neighborhood of where we live, the nature around us, the people around us. We are limited finite, small things and creatures.
A lot of narratives, and sometimes narratives that are selling us something, desperately want us all to feel like we are creatures of global outcomes. This isn't me saying let's be passive. But this is me saying, let's be awake to what we can and can't control. You know, and let's sort of engage in a little bit of radical acceptance, about what we have the energy and capacity to do. You know, we can say to ourselves, and I think we should, that I want to be involved in the project of moving us toward justice and sustainability. I think it is also fair to say that I do have the same intrinsic worth as an old growth forest and deserve a bit of compassion, that I deserve to meet myself where I am, that I do, in fact, not have my two small hands on the levers of global outcomes. I like the metaphor sometimes of global outcomes, social justice, climate justice, as being this monolithic boulder, right? And any one person could dash themselves to death against the boulder, not recognizing their own limitations, but that doesn't move the boulder. What moves the boulder is all of us pressing gently in the direction of our values, within the bounds of our own sort of capacities and self-love, and you know, that pressing in the direction of our values, is I think our obligation. I think that dashing ourselves against the Boulder is another way to fall prey to these purity narratives that aren't good for human minds and don't mirror the natural world.
Ayana Young Yeah, there's so much there.
Jarod K. Anderson It's a subtle subject, though, right? Because I feel like someone could hear that and be like, “Well, we can't do nothing.” And it's like, “Well, that's certainly not what I'm saying.” But it is acceptance of limitations.
Ayana Young But I think those limitations make us stronger. I think that's another, I don't know why the bamboozle word is in my head, but like this, I think it's another bamboozlement to make us less effective, because when we're so spun out, whether we're looking on social media or the news, or we're feeling this external pressure, to care about everything across the globe, to do something about what's happening here, what's happening there, places we've never been, places we'll never go, cultures will never understand, and we have all this pressure to somehow show up and support these issues, global issues, it's like, we actually can't, like we truly can't, and where we do have the most effective power is where we're actual stakeholders. Which to me means where you live, and that doesn't mean, I agree like this doesn't, it's nuanced, because it's not saying, “Oh, well, if you live in California, you can't care what's happening in New York” or something or, you know, it's not that. That to me kind of simplifies it in a way that makes it, it puts it in a binary, that's not helpful. But when we can understand that, no, we do have limits, like we only have a certain amount of energy every day, we only have a certain amount of time, we only have a certain amount of resource to give, whether that's like time, money, love, etc. so where are we going to put that? And there's literally so much going on just outside our window, whether they're spraying glyphosate or poison on the kid's park down the road, or whether they're dealing with sewage in a weird way, or whether they're subdividing the last remaining wetland in your area. I mean, literally, it's like, everywhere you look around you, there are decisions being made that you have no clue about, usually.
So it's just not effective to spread ourselves so thin and honestly, I'm like, if all of us really focused a lot more, we'd probably feel better, because we'd be building community around that focus, we'd probably be more effective, and then us as these smaller hamlet's could come together in these bigger groups, like, you know, local coming together, regionally, regionally coming together state, national, I don't know, these are like, I guess we're really getting into this theme of theory of change, or of how we organize for a better future.
Jarod K. Anderson I think one of the enemies to what you're saying, and I fully agree with you that I think that is the model that works and not only works but leaves people feeling fulfilled, but one of the things that the dominant culture sells us is grandiosity. And perhaps we don't feel that, you know, serotonin hit of grandiosity, if we write a letter to the, you know, editor in our local town or, you know, post on Facebook or try to organize against the spraying of chemicals on the park like I think people sometimes get wrapped up in wanting to feel that they are part of “No, not the local issue. But the big issue,” the grandiosity and sometimes even the performative aspect of it in terms of social media, and then everybody feels ill in an identity sort of way. Again it's this destructive versus constructive mindset, like, you're not gonna get 1000 likes for the quiet work, you know, for the planting a tree work. And yet, I'm somebody who, let's say in my creative life, has to really work at not doing this purity mindset, this perfectionism mindset, where I'll get so wrapped up in like, a section of a book that I'm working on that if I can't envision it perfectly, I will put it off and not do it at all and it's this all or nothing kind of thinking, this grandiosity or nothing kind of thinking. That small things or imperfect things are not worth my time, and then that leads to you know, nothing at all happening in a lot of times.
Sometimes I find this sort of metaphor too, in terms of writing, you might not be surprised to see that I look at a lot of things through the lens of writing. But if I really don't want to write, and there's something I'm working on, I'll often find myself reading about writing. As if that's the same thing. And it's not, you know, if I write a paragraph that gets me closer to my goal than if I spent four hours reading articles about character development online, but that paragraph might be really hard and those articles might go down really easily. Yeah. I just think that these purity narratives and the way marketing works and the way branding works and the way we are sold constant brand images of ourselves and this sort of toxic self deceiving freedom that you were mentioning, I think a lot of these things conspire to push us toward these all or nothing mindsets that leave a lot of folks feeling numb and paralyzed.
Ayana Young Absolutely, yeah, I really think it's, you're onto something with the grandioso or grandiose, like this, yeah, it kind of taps into like the hero, the savior, the big, and the humble isn't desirable. And personally, I think the humble, quiet, service oriented person is so beautiful. I mean, the older I get, like, that's what I strive for. I don't want to be the grandiose person out front, like, first of all, like, that's stressful, and it doesn't really get you love. It doesn't get you real connection, it gets you projections and pedestalization, and it just keeps feeding an emptiness. At least from my experience, or I've seen in, you know, my little life. So yeah, I think that's a really important thread into all of this and there's something that I feel like might be an antidote to a lot of this, what we've been talking about that you bring up in your work, which is like the value of the mystical, the magical nature, that is the magic in this world, the beauty of science fiction, and your podcast, the Cryptonaturalist, it just has such a distinct feeling of adventure and curiosity, and I think there's so much we can gain from this sense of transportation and and though what you discuss may be fictional I think it inspires real awe and relationship with the world. So I'd love to hear more about what draws you to the mystical and imaginal realms, and stretching our minds to encompass such journeys might lead us out of these kinds of dark spiraling holes we've been talking about.
Jarod K. Anderson Yeah, I think a lot of what we're saying can for me be put under the umbrella of making meaning. Like I think one reason people are drawn to grandiosity is, I mean, what is grandiosity in the context of social media, it's external validation from other people that you are worthy, or you know, worth paying attention to. And I think that dovetails with the marketing thing we were talking about earlier about, like, okay, buying this product is a shortcut to identity for me. So I think the trouble a lot of people have, and teaching and embracing this skill, I think would solve a lot, is the sense that we can make our own meaning and that we are then allowed to take it seriously. And yeah, there's an element of mysticism or magic to that, which, you know, I'm fine with, like, I think some people have complicated relationships with the idea of magic, but I keep thinking of poems that are related to this. Let me grab one real quick I, I will get more to the question specifically, but this is from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest:
Technically speaking,
you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection
of chemical reactions,
in much the same way
as you can look at any beautiful painting
as a simple collection of pigments,
which is to say,
you can miss the point of anything.
And that's a distinction I like to talk about a lot. Where, for me, so much of science is the what, and sometimes the how, but it leaves this huge span of human endeavor that is the why. And then I think folks get uncomfortable with the idea that whatever the Y is for you will be correct. And there is a burden to that when, like the people asking me how you get permission to call yourself a poet, there is a burden to that when you think “Wait, so I can make meaning and take it seriously. I've been taught that my meaning should be store bought or that my meaning originates in consensus.” And that leads to the grandiosity thing and it leads to People sort of apologizing for, you know, having a humble life, or small interests or nondramatic passions, you know, for whatever the value of that is, in terms of the dominant culture at the moment. And part of it comes down to kind of the self-love of that original “Woodland You”, that poem that you read of, you have to love yourself a little bit to take yourself seriously and think that the meaning you make from x, big or small, you know, from humble interests, curiosity, you know, a pretty rock can make your month and that's okay, if you let it be okay.
Part of you know, my love of fantasy is the idea of world creation. You know, Cryptonaturalist, the podcast, is sometimes sort of really, intentionally silly and I've described that show as real love for fake nature before. And I'm trying to do two things with that, I'm trying to, I mean, first of all, it's just fun, and I love fantasy and science fiction. But also, I think it demonstrates something that, you know, we can create our own love, enthusiasm, and passion. And that, you know, we can make worlds. And what does that mean? And in terms of it being a metaphor, I bet anybody listening to this could walk 10 feet and find, not even that, where they're sitting could find some aspect of nature that is unfathomably complex and wonderful and that they really haven't thought about.
I mean, you know, take the word air. What is air? How many things compose it? Where's it from? Why, why does our atmosphere have oxygen? What's the history of that? How has that changed life on Earth? On and on and on, and then you know, we stick a one syllable word on it, and pretend that like, Oh, we're done with it, we got that one. So sometimes, you know, if I talk about a unreal bird that lives in low orbit, dives into mountain lakes to eat inscrutable creatures, somebody can sometimes summon up wonder for that, but I think what we're almost doing is practicing the act of wonder, of awe, and revisiting sort of the childhood wonder of being, you know, a little kid and you learn about electric eels, and you're young, and everything is new and wonderful. So you're just like, “Oh, cool.” And now you've just internalized that electric eels exist, well, It's bonkers that electric eels exist. And yet, familiarity sometimes robs us of that wonder, and so for me, it's like, well, sometimes the practice can involve fiction, to get back to an essential truth, you know, the essential truth of being alive and awake in such an awe-inspiring universe, in such a singular and rare world. If I may share one more poem on that subject here, and this is bringing it home to sort of real things, but with the same concept, and this is from Love Notes From The Hollow Tree, it's a poem called “Look There” :
Look there,
beyond the parking lot
past the broken pallets and sunbleached Coors cans,
down where the march of saplings meets the ditch lilies,
a deer.
You know this won't last,
you know the site wasn't arranged just for you,
that it isn't nature's message of quiet wholeness,
that the deer didn't arrive because you needed it to.
And yet,
and yet,
and yet, you suspect it will,
It was, it is, it did.
And with just a little effort,
you'll be right.
Ayana Young Jarod that was just such a beautiful response and I have thoroughly enjoyed pinging this ball back and forth with you. It's been really fun like this mental heart ping pong. I've just, yeah, it's been such an enjoyable way to spend some time and yeah, thank you so much for sharing with us and journeying together.
Jarod K. Anderson Sincerely my pleasure. I just looked down the clock and did a double take, time flies talking about things like this.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The musical accompaniment you heard on today's episode is called Pine Chant, a composition inspired by tree ring growth data and climate crisis by Sara Fraker and Lachlan Skipworth. To learn more about Pine Chant and their work with the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring research, visit our website. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.