Transcript: SOPHIE STRAND on Myths as Maps /312
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Sophie Strand.
Sophie Strand One of the things I said is imagine all of the words in your head were erased, every single one, and you could only get back 50 words for the rest of your life. And then I said, what are the 50 words that actually do work in your life? That actually designate real relationships? Like my guess is it's not justice. It's not like activism. It's not environmentalism. It's not like health.
Ayana Young Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions on November 22, 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com
I am so excited and maybe even a bit nervous because the topics you cover are so fascinating to me and I've been trying for days to wrap my head around how to even ask you about them. So welcome to my excited jumbling mind and space today.
Sophie Strand Well, thank you. The nervousness is mutual, and I think it'll probably create fertile movement.
Ayana Young I feel it, I feel it. Okay, well, I'm gonna start off with a quote from your book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, and this one really pulled on me this morning.“Who is the monster of today’s legends? Today, we see a surfeit of media coverage devoted to weather and climate events. Has the biosphere become the monster? Every attempt to create weather- or climate-regulating technology, rather than adjusting and halting our own abysmal behaviors, posits Earth as a monster and humankind as the “heroes” who must control her and tame her and save her. Technonarcissists are the new Marduk. The new Theseus. They want the myth of progress to subsume the older (although newly investigated in the realms of quantum physics and glacial ice coring) chaos of emergent systems and biospheric intelligence. Earth doesn’t know best, our cultures insist. We know best. And we must progress ever onward toward greater control.”
Sophie Strand That is pretty dramatic of me you would think–
Ayana Young Oh, just the right drama. I love it. It really sums up so much of my questioning around saviorism, human supremacy, and our lack of ability or desire to stand in our own – what am I trying to say? Something about when you’re saying halting our own abysmal behaviors, it's like anything but that. Anything but looking at our lifestyles, and bringing up the technology part. I mean, again, this quote really harnesses so much of what I'm questioning so I could ask you probably 10 different questions and race through them all in a desire to have you answer them all. But what does this quote bring up for you at this moment?
Sophie Strand Well, it's interesting for me, because, you know, I think the thing about writing is, and I study writing and the history of writing and how it kind of calcifies thought that should be adaptive and oral and relational, and always shifting to be tailored to a specific political, sociological situation. When you write something down, it becomes brittle, it stops changing and stops adopting. So it's interesting to hear this quote, read back to me and think of how it has already ossified for me having written it three years ago. It's interesting to hear yourself enshrined in writing.
I think for me, I, the new monster, I've been actually thinking that the new monster is the person who refuses to get well and that if I was actually looking at that quote again, I've been thinking about the new monsters being the person who rejects the technology, who rejects the fix, who refuses to come back into a normative nervous system or a normative body, and that the unwell are the monstrous and also perhaps the most capable of giving us information on how to salvage more interspecies feral futures.
Ayana Young That's interesting to consider committing to unwellness or refusing a type of wellness that's being sold to us by the same systems that have poisoned us. And what could that look like? Like if we were just to imagine a day to day of somebody? Or maybe even yourself refusing that I would say false wellness?
Sophie Strand Yeah, so to answer your question, I would say this is high stakes, which is I feel that people who do not have illnesses that can be effectively cured or managed, are exiled from narratives of completeness, and wholeness, and yet are supposed to constantly be financially and practically investing in trying to better themselves and trying to come back into more of a normative body, and more of a normative nervous system. And it's an extra burden on top of the very material reality of being sick, you know, having a condition that doesn't have a cure and having to actually deal with that and take care of yourself in an already extraordinarily complex time. And so, I've been thinking, what would it mean to claim fertility inside of decay, instead of always feeling like you're a failure every day, when a treatment doesn't work? When you haven't, you know, come back and to a window of tolerance when your nervous system is still glitchy, when you still have triggers, how can you stop problematizing that and overburdening your already burdened system, and begin to think of yourself as soil? You know, I think we problematize death, we problematize waste and excrement and breaking down, but rot is actually the womb of life, that decay makes the room for the next phase. And so we can begin to look at things in our body that the culture problematizes as actually making good soil for other stories and other possibilities.
Ayana Young That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes and notes I was making for this interview from The Inner Lives of Fungi - Expeditions, Advocacy and Poetics, from the Lifeworlds podcast, and I want to pull this up. So I think you’re saying, “We live in a culture that's very inside of chronological time, and a very simplistic idea of Darwinism, that everything is moving towards some end, that everything is progressing towards betterment. And as someone who lives in a body that is only going to decay, and is in the process of decay at a much more accelerated rate than most people, I have to begin to think about myself as a compost heap, which is very noticeably decaying and falling apart. But that actually might be a very fertile generative place to be, that I might not be sprouting stories that I get to live, but I might make myself into good soil, good compost for other people to grow something. And I think that's how many Indigenous cultures think, how am I making myself a good ancestor? How are my decisions, opening up the way for other people and beings to live?”
I felt so relieved by hearing you speak to this. Because I think that there is such a push, to get well, to fix the earth, to fix ourselves to save, save, save. And it doesn't allow us to be present with where we're at. And I think that it's an added pressure that can even make us sicker really, and to imagine living in a culture that looks at death as the cycle of life and something that creates more fecundity is a completely different worldview. And if we were to live inside that worldview for just a short period of time, how would that shift the way that we did look at climate change or the Anthropocene extinction? And I'm not saying that because I want to not feel grief over the changes. I think that's beautiful and healthy and acknowledging what we're losing is so important. But I also wonder, where does that become disempowering? Or when does that become more problematic?
Sophie Strand I oftentimes like to use deep timeframes because I think we're stuck in such a narrow slice of anthropocentric narratives. You know, humans have not been around for that long, the Earth has been doing life for a very, very long time and there have been four or five major extinction events whereby 90% of all of the beings were extinguished. And it's actually I think the thing that I find so compelling about those moments is they're in Apocalypse, they're an absolute end of the world, almost all of the beings die. And yet, from the space opened up by these extinction events, they're all these ecological niches that are opened up, and suddenly, you know, the three species that come through that bottleneck event, diversify and create a whole new world, and that human beings are actually the product of the space opened up by an extinction event, that our very morphology, our very body is in a certain way of flesh-owed to that extinction event, so that our very bodies depend on the deaths of other beings and practically every time we eat, we're rebuilding ourselves metabolically with death. And that can be a more interesting place to begin to inhabit, to enter life via food. You know, death is actually the moment when solitary aliveness overflows its cup.
I will never forget sitting next to this dead deer that had been hit by a car and I watched it die and sat with it. And I was very, very upset, but I went to it day after day and watched as its, you know, atomized self began to melt and relax and become maggots and beetles and fungi and flies. And as someone who during that time period was navigating an extraordinary illness that I was beginning to grapple with, was going to be incurable, it suddenly softened my own understanding of a self, that you have to learn how to feed the self to others.
Ayana Young I guess what I'm sitting with is how do we know when to let go? And how do we know when to fight? Or stand for what we love?
Sophie Strand That's a beautiful question and something that I'm really thinking about. I think we fight for what we love, and we follow our love. And I think that fighting for what you love is instinctual. It's you know, a mother who lifts up a car to protect your child without thinking. You know, I think a great example for me is when you really need to save something, you hardly think about it, you just do it, your whole body knows that it loves something so much it will sacrifice itself for it. And I know, for months at the beginning of quarantine, I was visited by woodchucks wherever I went. Woodchuck's would charge me, they would come up to me, they would, you know, make themselves known and I kind of wanted a sexier animal companion than woodchucks. I was not super–I was really like, “This? This is like my teacher right now, Woodchucks?” I think I wanted a coyote or a heron or something, but it was woodchucks. I call them land seals because of the way they dive in and out of the earth and their tunnels. But I've been seeing them for months, and then I was driving on the highway and there was a huge storm and against the dividing line. There was just a shivering woodchuck that was trapped. And I didn't think, I put my car into park, I ran out through, you know, 70 miles per hour cars speeding by screaming at me and put out my hands and the Woodchuck jumped into my hands. And I ran out across the road, and put it in the forest. And I did it without thinking. And the minute I got back in my car, I thought to myself, I thought, “Oh, that was the purpose of my entire life.” Like my grand act of heroism has nothing to do with big gestures that show up within, you know, human culture. It was that I'm not the main character. I was like the sidekick and that was what I was supposed to do.
Ayana Young I really have been sitting with the potential problematic nature of overthinking, over intellectualizing. Well, maybe I don't even want to say over but just something I have seen myself do and potentially many humans of today's world. So much value has been placed on our rational mind, and thinking things through, and coming up with solutions. And I wonder how much that in and of itself has disconnected us from the doing out of love or the intuition or allowing our erotic nature to guide us towards being in better relation or right relationship with the earth and with the cycles?
So I've really been practicing by myself just trying to not think so much or trying to not care about being “smart.” I'm like, is smartness even helping us right now? And I know, of course, we can think to ourselves like no, but we need to be educated and education leads to us caring more or doing better. And maybe, and I'm not, I don't want to argue that that is true or not true, because I think that it's a complex line of thinking and questions and not that it can be answered in a simplistic response, but only when should we or when do we get back to not trying to be smart or thinking so much? When do we value the simplicity of being and loving? And yeah, I don't know if I want to ask that in relationship to fungi because I think maybe they haven't–
Sophia Strand I was thinking about fungi as you were speaking and I was actually thinking about, it’s kind of horrifying, but my favorite metaphor, which is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which takes over these carpenter ants, infects them, and coordinates their behavior such that they climb up these stalks of plants and bite into a leaf, and effectively become the fungus in an ants costume. I think Merlin Sheldrake says that in his book Entangled like they become a vehicle for the fungus. So by the end of the experience, you don't know if it's an ant or a fungus, but there's a mushroom coming out of the ant’s head. And I think for me, I'm interested in those moments when it's not about me thinking, it's what is thinking me? What if I can let myself be thought of by something much wilder and stranger than me? What if I can let myself be borrowed as an instrument, as a mouthpiece, that you know–
I often have a prayer I do every morning. I go outside, you know, sometimes because I'm disabled, sometimes I can't make it outside. But you know, I try to be in my location, and I summon by name every being, be it fungal, insect, geological formation, Indigenous being, Indigenous population, or folkloric being that I know in a 20 mile radius by name. So that as I enter into my day, I know that every decision I make isn't happening inside of this idea of the brain or the mind, that I am part of a mind that extends outward like a spider in its web, that I'm part of a greater mind that's thinking me. And that, you know, when I turn on my car and let out exhaust into the environment, I'm not just harming my environment, I'm harming myself that you know, I'm connected with every inhalation of pheromone and funk and microbiome, I am building my body from otherness and from these beings that we are interconnected.
You know, I feel we're interconnected spiritually, but we're probably also connected very materially. And so when I do that, at the end, I always say, show me who needs to use me as a mouthpiece. You know, how can I be an instrument just like that carpenter ant becomes, you know, the instrument for the fungus? Can I become an instrument for the mycorrhizal fungi? You know, or for the lake that's getting “managed by the Conservancy” and destroyed, can I become a mouthpiece for the beavers, knowing that they're part of my extended web of kinship and cognition?
Ayana Young I sense that we have a strong desire to be in that type of altered state that you know, and love is altering and, and purpose is altering. And a calling, I think is also altering us. And I'm thinking about how that has taken really unhealthy forms, for many of us through addictions to substances, or even social media, in a sense are things that are outside of us that are brought to us by colonial capitalism, that maybe fill the void of these alterations that bring us in closer connection. Because when we're not thinking, and we're allowing ourselves to be lived through or, you know, I don't remember all of the words that you just use, but I felt it in my body as you were saying it. And I think about how so many of us, even myself, have tried to get there. But even in getting there, it's almost a surrender. Like to even get to the place of being altered by love isn't about control, and we can't even necessarily choose it, right? Like, I'm trying to slow down my thoughts enough to even understand how we even get to a place where we are living in a purposeful way—altered by love, altered by commitment to the earth. And I think, at least in my experience, for me to have gotten there is a slowing down and a surrender, to not being the savior, to not having control, to not knowing how the story ends, to maybe not even knowing the story, how the story begins. So yeah, I'm wondering, in your experience, if folks are listening to this, and they're thinking, Gosh, I want to get there too.
Sophia Strand I think that I always want to kind of interrupt eco preciousness that has infused a lot of popular conversation about deep ecology and ecological embodiment. And I think, you know, I'm a person who has been in hospital rooms and has been in, you know, complicated relationships with people who are helping to support my body with medicines that are created from extractive processes that you know, there's no purity, there's no exclusion zone. And there's also no perfect way to do this. I mean, an interesting way to kind of turn this idea of being fought for by another being, or being in service for another being is to think about fermentation itself and think about civilization and think, well, a civilization, a human story, you know, we always think we own everything, including our culture, but we can see that you know, sessile communities and civilizations where hierarchy begins to really formalize or almost always occur concurrently, with mass breweries and, and fermentation and grain. And so sometimes I think of, you know, single celled yeasts, and I think you guys are writing the story of civilization. This is, it's interactive, we're participants, but like is civilization even a human story? I’m in no way saying that's true, but I'm saying it's a way of flipping the power dynamic, and also interrupting the idea that relationality is always intimate and sensual eros, because eros can be, you know, I think symbiosis is a good example, which is, we have a very narrow idea of symbiosis as always being mutually beneficial. It's like it, you know, like in which are composite algae, fungi, yeasts, and bacteria. But, you know, symbiosis actually in science represents a continuum, from anything, from parasitism to mutualism, or commensalism. And actually, most beings will ride along that continuum their whole life. And sometimes they'll be antagonizing each other, sometimes they'll be helping each other. And it just depends on when you take a snapshot on that continuum, what it looks like.
I think that that's why I like the example of the you know, the ant being taken over by the fungus, which is, you know, to tell the right stories right now might be agonizing. I sometimes think about how many people are having gastrointestinal issues and where their gut biomes are so disturbed, that they've become somehow the mouthpiece for these disturbed microbial communities. I mean, that's personal for me. I think about how, you know, my gastrointestinal tract has been incredibly destroyed by experimental medications, by my connective tissue disease and by a host of other issues. And so it's made me a certain way if we think about the gut brain as the mouthpiece for a very unhappy group of microbes. It's a pretty wild place to have gone with that.
Ayana Young No, I'm but I'm seeing it. I'm feeling it and I am grateful for your challenge of the ego preciousness, I think as you called it, because I think that feeds back into the saviorism, or the purity culture, or the perfectionist, white supremacist culture where everything has to fit into this other mythology of how we must connect or when it's right, or how it should feel. And I, I love that you're challenging that because I think there's more truth to it, when our ways of connection aren't so confined to what somebody else says it should be or, or what we think it should be based on cultural stories. I love how you speak about civilization. Since I was a child, I think I was always questioning it being like, why am I consenting to this culture or the civilization that I don't like, that I don't believe in, that I don't even trust the leaders who built it in the first place. And I started studying theology and undergrad and really diving into these questions of consent. And why are we believing this set of stories that were given to us by people we don't trust or people who have really harmed? So many folks and creatures, you know, human, are more than human can. And, and so maybe we could explore a bit about what it looks like to consent to these mythologies of our dominant culture, and how we rise up, and I don't want to even say against them, because in a sense, that's giving them more power, even though of course, they have had a ton of power. And we can see that everywhere we look. But maybe I'll pause there.
Sophie Strand I always look to my fungal and invasive species allies, which is “I want to digest the house from the outside. I want to compost it. I want to rot the root system.” I think that we have to look to tools that the dominant paradigm is allergic to. And those tools are often invasive species or parasites or viruses or things that are considered harmful or outside of normalcy. Yeah, so I often look to things that are disgusting for advice on how to digest the master's house from the outside.
Myth used to be a context sensitive relational experience, a dialogue with a specific place and that it was, you know, it lived in breath, it lived in community, you had to resurrect it each time you told it and adapt it. And it came from the specific, you know, myth was created to be a vessel for ecological wisdom, that, you know, narratives travel and are more easily remembered in oral cultures. And so a myth can also be a map of relationships in a place that you see of course, deities or figures, but they're really anthropomorphized elementals, who are telling you how to, you know, correctly inhabit a specific ecology. But we live in a moment where there's this idea that a myth can be uprooted, deracinated from its location, from its time period, and then extrapolate it to many different cultures and many different climates and ecosystems and still make sense. I mean, my favorite example is Christianity, which is, you know, an incredibly context sensitive story. You know, the teachings of Jesus are specific to Second Temple period Palestine under Roman imperial rule in Galilee spoken in Aramaic in an oral culture. And you know, the Romans come and then uproot that and then turn it into their tool for militaristic colonialism.
Ayana Young I want to take a moment on Christianity and Jesus. I have really felt fascinated by your writings and thought processes around this. A lot about how you speak of comparing the ground people worshipping sky stories, and how Jesus was a god of, maybe it's not underworld and I'm probably mixing up some of your thoughts, but I was so fascinated with the differentiation between the sky gods and the ground gods and how when we set our belief systems based not on the earth and not underground, how much disconnection comes from that. So I'm gonna pause because I know that I'm kind of bumbling through this one, but if you could take it away and whatever that just inspired in you, I would love to hear about this.
Sophie Strand Well, this is my favorite topic, which is, you know, I think it's interesting to think of Jesus as the end of a long rhizomatic continuity of vegetal gods associated with fermentation, death and rebirth. You know, vines, ivy, ecstatic experiences in nature, open air dance, Jesus is the interruption of that cycle. But it had been existant as a mythic mycelium below ground for a long time. So I think of myth, mythic systems in certain places as being like mycelial fungal systems below ground, there are these branching filamentous cells that work their way through the soil, connecting trees, providing a highway for bacteria, and you know, behaving like messengers, ferrying information between different beings and constituting the very connective tissue of the soil. And so there's this kind of mythic system below ground, but then we'll fruit up as a mushroom superficially looks like an individual, but it's really just connected to this much older system below ground. And so I've been thinking of, you know, Osiris, Adonis, all of these figures in the Mediterranean basin as being these above ground mushrooms of a much older mythic mycelium and Jesus is associated with the very same things: death and rebirth, you know, radical, all of these beings are also associated with a threat to the dominant system with coming in and making people act crazy. Act like animals, create festivity, drama, entertainment, and Jesus definitely is aligned with, Dionysus is of course the best example.
But yeah, so I was thinking about how these original vegetal gods of the Mediterranean do well if they don't get stuck at one point in the cycle. So I'm not demonizing sky gods. The problem is sky gods that don't also return to the earth, which is why I love the metaphor of spores. I'm like, I'm not interested in sky gods or earth gods. I'm interested in spore gods. So for me spore gods have this fungal system below ground that creates a mushroom that then spore out spores. And now we know that spores, actually, many of them are carried up into the wind, where they nucleate water molecules and actually facilitate cloud formation. You know, in rainforests, it's actually below ground fungal systems that are coordinating rain production. So it intimately stitches the sky into the ground. So spore gods say that you can't prize descent over assent or assent over descent, you have to tie them into a virtuous cycle, where sometimes things are growing, they're mushrooming up, and sometimes they're decaying back to nourish the soil, and to provide the matrix for something else to grow.
So of course, someone like Dionysus, someone like Orpheus, they come into being, they make beautiful music, they create interspecies collaboration, and then usually they die and they mulch back into the ground. The problem with Jesus is that he's an interruption in that cycle, his body literally disappears, he does not go back to nourish the earth from which he drew his ecological parables and his teachings. And so if we look in deep time, of course, we can see what happens when the process of decay is interrupted. And we can go all the way back to the Carboniferous period, where lignin was first produced, which creates woody plants like trees. And so there was an explosion in the growth of woody plants. But white rot, which is the only fungi that's best at breaking down lignin, had not yet evolved and so when all of these trees and these woody plants died, they didn't decay. And so they actually swapped huge areas of land and created, they brought down the temperature and caused an actual climatological crisis. So they didn't decay. And actually, one of the things that seems most interesting to me is that it's compacted undigested matter. It's that fungal absence, that interruption in the cycle of decay and re fruit that is fueling our fossil fuel dependent culture today. So it's that interruption that is informing our extractive capitalistic culture.
Ayana Young I want you to go on with this and I am thinking about how so many of our bodies are never allowed to go back to the earth, to feed the soil from whence we came. Whether it's because we're filled with formaldehyde, put in varnished caskets in concrete in the earth, we are kept from the earth, or so many of our buildings, pressure treated wood houses wrapped in plastic, so much of our culture is fighting decay, even human lifespan. I mean, it's like we are mythologies, our cultures are, I wish you could see my hands right now, but it's like they're making a climbing motion, because I feel like this culture is climbing and desperate to keep us from composting back into fertility.
Sophie Strand Yeah, I mean, and I, of course, one of the worst things is, you know, I often think about it, it's very closely aligned to our fear of waste. And the truth is, there's no way to throw anything away, when you abstract yourself from waste, what you're really saying is, “I want someone else to digest this poison.” And you're also saying, “I don't want to be part of a food web.” I think that we've forgotten how to weave our shit into food webs, that food webs are actually created by a healthy matrix of shit that's been chemically transformed by another being's appetite, we have forgotten how to turn our bodies into food. You know, we've forgotten how to turn our shit into food, or pollution into food. And so I often ask, you know, oyster mushrooms are incredibly good at tailoring their appetites, to you know, poisons and toxins that nothing else will digest. You know, there are mushrooms at Chernobyl that grow towards radiation and eat it. And of course, I have a very bad feeling about training fungi to eat our pollution and forcing them to do that. But I think metaphorically, we can begin to think about what it means to eat our own poison. What does it mean to eat our own pollution? What would it mean to act like the oyster mushroom and begin to tailor our appetites towards those things that we have offloaded onto communities who did not participate in their creation?
Ayana Young Well, I think there's something about eating our own self hatred. That is, in a sense, the poison.
Sophie Strand Beautiful, yeah–
Ayana Young I’m just thinking about how we–our shit is disgusting. Dead bodies are gross, the self hatred is so deep within our conditioning, that how do we eat that and metabolize it into something that looks more like love, or, and maybe it's not love, maybe it's something else.
Sophie Strand I mean, I think we can all deal with this practically in our own lives, which is, I sometimes think about feeding the demons. So I have some demons in my life. And when I tried to get rid of them, they just did. You know, my friend often says that, you know, when you try and shove your demons away, they do push ups in the dark. And they just get stronger. And I realized that instead, I had to selectively feed them and invite them to the table, and to realize that they were boisterous, and they were, you know, difficult company, and they made a mess. But when I didn't invite them to the table, they did much, much worse damage. And so inviting that self shame, that shame that that self policing, those, those faults in us that we can't get rid of, but we have to learn how to collaborate with, you know, this is also part of our community building.
You know, there's such an idea of purity that keeps us from actually creating mutual aid systems where we live. Like I live around a lot of people who have practically kept me alive. When I've had physical crises out on a walk when I fell three years ago and my top of my kneecap came off, it was not my liberal, activist friends that came to help me it was the Republican neighbors. So I know their names, I know their dog's names, and we actually live close to each other.
Ayana Young It's a really interesting kind of storm, the mindstorm that we're getting into around eating the self hatred and inviting the demons and even inviting the enemies in, it's reminding me of Bayo Akomolafe who I know we're both really familiar with. And there was, well, there's a few things. One, I remember when I first moved to Cougar Mountain and I think at that time I had interviewed Stephen Harrod Buhner and I was inspired by him, and I said, “Demons welcome here.” And what I meant was like, in me, demons welcome. Like, I don't want them to hide. I want them to come out. I want to look at them. And for years, I thought, “Why did I do that?!?” I've been like, living with these demons. It's been so challenging, and they just stripped me and it was so hard to work with them and be with the land. And now that I'm, you know, years into that process, I am grateful for aspects of it. But I think that, you know, sometimes I think about how we, or how do I say this, how our culture and especially liberalism, I believe has separated us more from each other in the sense of demonizing others, you know, “We are better than them. They're doing this, we're doing that,” you know, all this we/them type of mentality. And I think, well, it is a shame. Really, the way to change people's psychology is shame or hatred, the way to shift people that we want to change or see what we see. I'm like, this isn't even an effective strategy at this point. Like what are we doing? This doesn't make sense to keep hating ourselves and hating others, when we're really trying to get back to a reconnection.
And I know I'm saying a lot of “we” right now. It's like, well, who are the ones that want to get back to reconnection? But I doubt that, maybe there's a small population of people, but I don't see many people wanting to choose disconnection from themselves or from the earth, maybe they don't have the language for it. And I think we're all stuck in a lot of trauma that comes from many different places. But yeah, I'm just, I'm still in this place of, of considering how effective our strategies are, that either halt the compost to the rot, hate our own shit, hate other people should hate ourselves hate each other, but yet are still self righteous. I'm like, where is this coming from? And how do we look at it?
Sophie Strand Yeah, I mean, as someone who's been through violent trauma, I have a lot of sympathy for the need to create stable value systems, to say there's an inside on the outside, I'm safe, when I'm on the inside, I'm unsafe when the outside comes in. And I understand the need for the survival mechanism. But that doesn't mean that it's the right technique to implement right now. I mean, I, I love working my probiotic by addition, which is, it's not about changing these people in some kind of tailored specific way, or like changing their mind, it's about adding so much stuff onto the compost pile, so that, you know, belief systems and ideas and paradigms that were never supposed to touch, touch, and, you know, spark off some kind of growth that we could have never planned or authored. You know, I think when we sit down and try and author a plan, it's oftentimes not as fertile as the spontaneous generative experience of the ecotone. You know, an ecotone is when one ecosystem dramatically shifts into another. And it's often a place where we see the highest biodiversity of species like fish and birds. It's this, you know, it comes from home, household. It's the place where tensions are held in a household. And I think that when we try and create these stable value systems inside and outside, we preclude the ecotone, where more species can diversify, where more stories can sprout.
Ayana Young I think you make a really good point in speaking to how we have needed to create safety. And sometimes that has looked like othering or differentiating. And I wonder, Is that serving us now? Or what parts of that are? Or could it serve us? Because we are in such dire times, and maybe we've always been in such dire times. And I know, we spoke about this before the interview, you know, there's probably always been elements of the apocalypse in our human story. But I really am trying to challenge what I thought I knew. I'm trying to challenge my own self righteousness of environmentalism or liberalism, or intelligence or intellectualism. I'm just like, Is this helping me or helping the earth come to a steady state? And I am yearning for simpler ways of knowing, understanding of being, of relating, going back to the basics of life, what is it to be human at our most basic level? And can we reconnect on that? And can we find safety there? And can we find solace with each other there? Because I, I just cannot live in a self righteous state with myself or even around others anymore on whatever side of the aisle anybody stands on, because I see it as actually being part of the death trap or the ecocidal feeding, the ecocidal culture, even if we think that it's something that saving us from it.
Sophie Strand I was just thinking, I just watched Ken Burns documentary on the holocaust and I knew a lot of the stuff about eugenics especially as someone who is you know, I've been in and outside of the medical industrial complex for better for worse for a long time and just realizing that we're all culpable you know, our whole country is was culpable and not letting in refugees not letting in people who had been displaced. That, you know, passivity, is a kind of culpability that we're all you know, we're all entangled with, with networks of violence and that tapping into that experience can be paralyzing. It can be really painful. But then suddenly, you can shirk the paralyzing effect of always having to be correct. I sometimes say that to be correct is to be isolated.
I've been thinking about disability as being a profound invitation to relationality that you can look at the ghost pipe, Monotropa uniflora, which is a micro heterotrophic plant. It's white because it doesn't need to photosynthesize. It doesn't actually make its own food, it receives it all from a symbiotic mycorrhizal fungal system below ground. And it's often characterized as parasitic by very reductionist, simple analysis by science. But the truth is, it's queering our idea of what relationality is. What does it mean to invite in otherness, to know that you depend on other beings to be a body? Disability in itself is a kind of invitation to collaborate that you would never risk if you didn't have that lack in the first place.
You know, when plants first made it onto dry land around 450 million years ago, they didn't have roots. You know, fungi reached up from the soil and acted as surrogate root systems for millions of years. 90% of plants depend on symbiotic mycorrhizal systems to extend the radius of their root systems. And you know, that kind of lovemaking, that was permanent, but it was also risky. So I often say that, you know, becoming new is never safe. I don't know if safety should be our working goal. You know, in order to withstand what's to come, we're going to have to adapt quickly, we're going to have to develop improvisational agility.
When the climatological and social changes to come are going to be increasingly unpredictable, planning your response does not actually give you the widest ability to respond correctly. Rather, you should begin to collaborate with kin and with beings who might not seem totally friendly, you know. And so I think it's those anarchic, problematic, but sometimes interesting moments where we're forced to create a relationship that may hold the potential for new worlds.
Ayana Young That's really beautiful, and energizing and nerve wracking and it feels like it's at the edge, which I think is where we grow. Like what you were saying about the ecotones, it’s very abundant in those spaces where we don't have plans and it hasn't been all thought out. And, gosh, yeah, thinking about planning on like, you know, there, I think there are certain things we can do to plan for an uncertain future, and again, to me, that's a lot about preparing our mental state. How do we come back to a steady state in the midst of chaos? Or how can we be those people in the community that are warm and tender in the face of so much hatred and fear? Like, that's, to me what I'm trying to plan for now, of course, like, I think there's a lot to say about skills, hard skills, and food growing and harvesting, and, and learning different methods of preservation for food, not relying on electricity and refrigeration, and like, you know, I think there's planning in the ways that we can educate ourselves and become wise not in the ways that our culture values so much, but in these I think, basic, but that word even has a connotation of kind of dull and I mean, mean basic and like such a revered way. And it may be that's also what I'm trying to get to in my own life is how do I have reverence for the ways of knowing that have been tossed out as base or uninteresting by the dominant culture that I definitely grew up under?
So yeah, there's like the sense of, if we were to plan or if we were to prepare, what are the what are the ways in which we can do that that aren't about a strict playbook guidelines that we know are aren't going to really serve us when so much as shifting so quickly, that we can't actually know. When we are talking about climate change, and you were expressing the weather shifts in upstate New York where you are, we can't predict all of this stuff that's coming for us. And that also means that we can't predict unlikely allies, and we can't predict who's going to come to the table with support.
Sophie Strand You know, I write a lot about myth and folklore, and I often think that in fairy tales, the smallest creatures offer the greatest boon, you know, you know, it's always to your downfall when you don't give the crumb to the mouse or when you don't help the old woman. Because at the end of the day, it turns out that was the fairy king, or the angel or, you know, the most powerful being. And I think that right now, as we anticipate, as we feel in our bodily instrument, oncoming chaos, we can begin to look at the smalls, you know, the insignificant beings, you know, the viruses, the bacteria, you know, the neighbors, you know, the places that don't seem to hold that much importance as perhaps being the most important allies in the days to come. You know, the smallest beings, the least flashy beings will offer the greatest boon eventually, and that it's important to–fungi teach me to get involved and to get involved with everybody. No, not to like to try and plan who I get involved with, but to put out my hyphal cells through the soil and connect with every single being I can get my hands on and connect with them so intensely that I'm actually inside of their root system. So that you know, when an incredibly intense, you know, hurricane comes through, I know everybody in my neighborhood.
I also know where plants grow, where mushrooms grow, where certain things happen. I think getting to know where you live in a 10 mile radius and a five mile radius, actually dancing where you know where you live. And I also mean that physically, like, I think I just read an incredible book, have you read Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich?
Ayana Young I haven't. But I'm making a note.
Sophie Strand It's an incredible book about how ecstatic dancing experiences have been incredibly cohesive to cultures for a long time and when they start to become demonized by Eurocentric colonialism, you see the rise of depression and certain types of extractive violent behavior. And that they create a kind of social intelligence, a kind of extended mind of certain communities, that it might be important to foster again. So sometimes I think about, like, on a very practical level, the best way you can prepare is to learn how to grow food, where you live, or support the people who grow it, then eat it with the people where you live, and then dance with the people where you live.
Ayana Young Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the power of being local. And I know that, in a sense, probably for so many folks listening, that's like, yeah, yeah, we've heard it before local, local, but I actually think it's subversive to be local, because so much of media, social media, dominant conditioning wants us anything but that. It’s like look over here, it's interesting, it's fascinating, your own backyard is boring, you know, it's taking us away from where we actually have power. And that's why I think it's even by design to plant the seeds in our head that we need to keep going out and going further, because we're not invested in those places. And we don't have a way to really, yeah, have power like, where we have power is where we're, quote, stakeholders, to use corporate language. And I've seen that so much in movements against resource extraction, when you live somewhere, and you begin to know it in a way that is intimate, and you see the changes, and you can become a watchdog, like I think about if we're not actually paying attention to what's around us within five miles, or 10 miles we miss out on so much. I think about how much we miss when we don't get involved in a very close radius. Like, you know, some folks who are listening might be involved in their local city governments. I just started to do that. And it's amazing how much happens, just in this little tiny town, that if I wasn't actually going to the meetings every couple of weeks, I wouldn't know what people were voting on, I wouldn't know what poison they're spraying on the river for erosion control. And I wouldn't have a say.
So I think being involved in the local scene is powerful. But it's also what we actually can offer in terms of, we can't hold on to that much. Like I talk about this a lot, but I'm so frustrated with having to learn through whatever media sources we're listening to, all of the guilt, shame, fear, we're fed on what's happening all over the world. It's not to say that we shouldn't have some sense of it, or have compassion or care. But we only have so much energy to give anything. So if our energy is so dispersed all over the world that we can't then even focus on fighting the glyphosate at the local playground. Like there's a problem there. And we're really losing power and momentum to heal the places we can.
Sophie Strand One of the areas that I really studied closely is the movement from oral culture to alphabetic hieroglyphic culture. So from, you know, all of your knowledge being sustained and breath sustained in oral storytelling to it getting written down, and the idea of the atomized author, you know, becoming a phenomenon. And something that was very interesting to me is the oral cultures that still exist today and those that we can look back on, they have much smaller vocabularies, but that is because each word has backing behind it. It's like you know, when you have money with no backing behind it, each word stands for a real relationship, like a real experience. And I think about how many words that you know, the English language is a colonial language. It's going into other cultures and taking their words that have no backing, no root system, they don't actually designate a relationship or some being that you're responsible to, that you're accountable to, that witness you, and you're making decisions and implicated in those decisions. And so in a certain way, smaller vocabularies or vocabularies with root systems, and I've been thinking, I did this class that was really focused on this this summer. And one of the things I said is, “Imagine, all of the words in your head were erased, every single one, and you could only get back 50 words for the rest of your life. What are the 50 words that actually do work in your life? That actually designates real relationships?” Like my guess is, it's not justice. It's not like activism. It's not like environmentalism, it's not like health, you know, they will probably designate like real relationships you have with plants, with other people, with places. So like, what are your 50 most necessary words?
And so that's also become a way of thinking about community for me, which is, you know, actually, the smaller I make my life, the more of a root system, it has more backing there behind every decision I make, that it's very easy to kind of participate in a charismatic overculture where you're doing symbolic action all the time, for what really matters is like going up to the mowers who are about to mow the field with the milkweed, where the monarchs are, and saying like, “Do you really think this is a good idea? Who can I talk to you? How can I stop this?”
Ayana Young The charismatic overculture? My goodness, it's true. I’ve had to steal my glance away many times because it’s sparkly and really knows how to grab attention. And, yeah, yeah, so much of that is really hitting me. And, gosh, there's so much more to speak to Sophie and I feel like we're gonna need a part two. It's almost like I have such a buffet of what I want to ask you that I don't know which thing to scoop on my plate, or ask you right now, metaphorically speaking. But I've really appreciated your study of mythologies and stories and gods and goddesses and I wonder if there's a story that you could leave us with right now that has been touching you recently.
Sophie Strand I think I'll go to my favorite and it's very simple and it's not even really a myth, but I was very interested that when you actually go back, so a lot of what we take to be Christianity are Romanized rewrites of the rewrites of the rewrites of you know, it's a game of telephone, through many different generations and languages and cultures. But if we actually go back to the Aramaic, to the ecology of Galilee, to the time period, the socio-political pressures, we can realize that Jesus's parables are actually really anti-imperial and ecologically radical. And that they're much more interesting than when they're deracinated in this translation. And so one of my favorites is, you know, he says, “The kingdom is like a mustard seed.” And you know, when it grows, all the birds roost in its trees, it starts out as a little seed. And of course, having been mistranslated and uprooted from its time period and its location. It has lost all of its radical, wild meaning, its scintillating meaning, but the truth is that at that time period Jesus would have been talking to farmers who were losing their land and needed to be able to produce effective crops to pay the taxes to the Romans so they wouldn't die. And in fact, the Romans were moving. The Roman operation was a commercialized agricultural state. So what it did is it would force people off of their lands and seize their land, so that it could turn the land into profit making monoculture actually, so that, you know, your complicated kitchen gardens would suddenly just become a green crop to feed the Romans. And so mustard greens at that time period, were actually an incredibly pernicious invasive weed that would destroy crops. So to say that to a group of farmers was a terrifying thing to say, that the most important thing, the Kingdom of God, it's not to come. It's not something that's abstracted from the earth. It's not in the future. It's right here right now. And it's the weed that you hate the most, that interrupts your ability to participate in the empire, in the commercialization process, and to feed your own family. And that has seemed to me to be like an absolutely radical koan, you know a japanese riddle that you sit with and try to understand because it's very tricky to unravel what it actually means. And so for me, I've been looking at the parables that we have that come to us from Jesus and saying, like, how do they teach me to look at my own environment and look to the beings who I'm afraid of for information on how to actually digest the empire?
Ayana Young Sophie, I've thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this conversation. And I'm definitely saying goodbye hoping that we get to talk again, and keep exploring together. I really deeply appreciate how much you weave together like I don't even I'm a little left a little speechless on like, I could say a bunch of words right now. But honestly, I think just sitting back in awe and letting it all compost in my head is beautiful. Thank you so much for your work and the time and intention you've spent in how you see the world.
Sophie Strand Thank you so much Ayana and for giving me the space to be absolutely insane. I do want to honor that I am a compost heap that includes your wisdom and your skill, your interactive skill, your ability to ask really interesting questions that open up more questions rather than shutting them down with predetermined answers. So that's something I've really admired in the work you do.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Tan Cologne and Mitski. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.
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Cover artwork by Alexandra Levasseur (Biophilia, 2022). Used with permission