Sylvia V. Linsteadt  If you take a point in history and retell the story of it, time is not linear, time is circular. And so, suddenly, in retelling that story or re-examining or re-weaving a wholly other non patriarchal possibility, suddenly that story becomes alive now too. And the history itself can shift and affect us now. And I think when the Earth is actually speaking through a story then justice and Earth laws are also speaking through that story.

Ayana Young  Sylvia Linsteadt is a writer and certified wildlife tracker from northern California, ancestral Coast Miwok territory. She currently lives in Devon, England. Her work—both fiction and non-fiction—is rooted in myth, ecology, ancient history, feminism & bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land. She is the author of the collections The Venus Year and Our Lady of the Dark Country, two novels for young readers, The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising, and the post-apocalyptic folktale cycle Tatterdemalion with painter Rima Staines. Her nonfiction books include The Wonderments of the East Bay, and Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area, which won the 2018 Northern California Book Award for best general nonfiction. She is currently finishing a novel set in Bronze Age Crete, where she has lived and researched extensively. Sylvia also teaches occasional myth-oriented creative writing workshops, and shares her work out loud on her podcast Kalliope's Sanctum.

Hello and welcome to For The wild. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Sylvia Linsteadt. Sylvia, thank you so much for joining us today. It just feels like a long time in the making, I guess. So I'm really glad that we get to sit down and chat. 

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  Yeah, thank you so much Ayana, for having me on the podcast. I've been a fan and a listener for many years. So it's a pleasure and an honor.

Ayana Young  I'm so happy that we're here. Great. Well, there's so many places we could start with. But I guess as we begin, I want to make some space to recognize the time of intense war and violence and existential threat that the world is in right now. This is something you've written a lot about recently, and I think it's so crucial to recognize these realities, and the ways that they affect us, you know, affect every level of our lives. So I'm wondering if you could speak to us a bit about how you're holding grief right now and incorporating it into your work.

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  That's a big, big place to begin and, also, the only place to begin really, I think right now in so many ways. I would say, hmm, I think this moment that we're in... It feels to me like a great veil has dropped in the last two months since, you know, since October 7. And this great kind of colonial ugliness and violence has revealed itself more fully, revealed its face more fully. But it's been present and it's been present to me like in my work and in how I write, why I write, what I write about in terms of how I approach mythic retellings, how I approach land connection in California as a descendant of White European settlers like it... These are themes and griefs that have been so present to me and important to me and how I work for a long time. But to actually suddenly see the kind of genocidal forces that I've grieved so much in the historical record of California, in terms of the Indigenous past and California suddenly, like, enacted so fully and so presently, you know, upon the people of Palestine by the Israeli military in the last two months. The shock of seeing this thing that I sort of naively thought we couldn't see again in that way, has kicked up so, so much in me and so many people obviously. Like, I mean, I don't even really know how to speak about it right now. But I think one of the main ways that I've been holding it is by leaning into the deepest stories that I've been circling for so long already, I think. And seeing how there's been a great cry across time for so many 1000s of years in that part of the world and also carried in the bodies of all beings that have known this kind of grief. And I think that when I lean into the deep stratum of history and of time and a myth, it helps create context. And I think that leaning into Earth also, I don't know, is the only thing to do right now. But I kind of don't know what to say actually, because a lot of the time, I've just felt incredibly sick and full of grief and haven't been able to stop crying, you know. I think praying, praying to the most pure form of love in the center of all beings, in the center of all of us that I know, that has been the other, like, great pillar for me right now. 

Ayana Young  Yeah, really hear the awe, in a sense, in your voice and in your response. And I think, to me, colonial violence and the intensity of what the Earth and their people, humans and otherwise, are going through. It's kind of like when you see something that's beautiful and awestruck. It's like the same with the grief and the terror. It's shocking, although it's not new. It's shocking, although it's not something we… a lot of us don't know, of course, like it... So much of this, colonial violence never ended. And so yeah, it's interesting to get used to that cycle of being awestruck by the grief and the terror and the beauty of life and going in the cycles of tragedy and relief, and back and forth. I mean, I think it's something really interesting that us humans do. I think sometimes we can do it in healthy ways going through the cycle. Sometimes we get desensitized, which I think is part of the problem, too. But I think it's just hard to take in the grief and the terror 24/7. But right now, yeah, what's happening in the Middle East is not new, but is still horrifying and shocking to the system. And so I appreciate you just kind of bringing that felt awareness to the conversation and... 

In  Holy Trees of Life, you write, quote, "Mother of God, why didn't you tell me this could still happen in 2023? Mother of God, why didn't I ask you? Why wasn't I looking? Did you tell me and I wasn't listening? Have you shown us again and again, what we are capable of? But surely it couldn't happen again and it was too awful to turn and see," end quote. So many of the questions that times like these bring up are so devastating, you know... How have we gotten to this point? Where has our moral compass gone? And, you know, so on and so forth. And I'm wondering where you're finding the space to ask these questions and to keep pushing forward in the knowledge that things don't have to be like this. 

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  Yeah, thank you for all of that and reminding me of that quote, too. I think in that vein or in that way, I think this is probably true for me actually my whole life, but especially in the last seven or so years. My focus in my research and in my creative life has really been the deep Bronze Age and Neolithic past in Europe and trying to excavate a pre-patriarchal root system indigenous to Europe. That helps me kind of hold hope to see these other patterns of being that reside in, you know, my own bloodline somewhere, right, because like, as a person of British, Scandinavian, German, as well as Jewish descent—but, you know, the majority of my ancestry is like very northern European—it can just be so challenging  to try to navigate the the layers of trauma, both enacted and carried in that ancestry. 

And so, I've been digging and digging and digging and through the work of a somewhat controversial archaeologist namedMarija Gimbutas really found this ground of incredible nourishment and inspiration in her work and of exposing in the ‘60s and ‘70s this stratum of culture beneath the Bronze Age, beneath a kind of typically patriarchal European culture that we might recognize what we see; for example, in the Iliad, or the Odyssey, the classic Mycenaean Greek warrior-celebrating kinds of cultures. Beneath that she found enormous amounts of evidence for a really different kind of set of cultures, particularly in Eastern Europe from the early Neolithic through to the beginning of the Bronze Age, I would say. And this culture was not hierarchical in the way that we see in the later Bronze Age across Europe. It seems to have been matrilineal, meaning descent was recognized as passing through motherlines. Maybe matrilocal, meaning that people stayed near maternal lineages as well. There doesn't seem to be a celebration of or a glorification of violence or of war—not to say that violence didn't happen—but it wasn't glorified in the way that we see later. And a clear reverence for female-bodied ancestors, goddesses, deities, spirits of place. It's hard to know what all these figurines represented exactly. And these cultures also arose in Europe around the time of the agricultural revolution and the rise of agriculture in the Neolithic. And yet, what I've loved about this research, as well as that there isn't that kind of classic link that we can sometimes see where agriculture equals, like, the end of the balanced Paleolithic that I know is often a kind of line that is drawn by scholars that agriculture as a way of connecting to Earth was the moment when we started to exploit and dominate rather than coexist and, you know, live in the state of interdependence and honor of that interdependence. 

And, you know, I think certain things about Marija Gimbutas's argument are kind of overly simplistic. You know, and I've sat with this question a lot like, Why patriarchy? What was the moment? Was there a moment? Are there different moments in different parts of the world when a patriarchal system takes over? One that's more matrilineally-oriented or more, you know, egalitarian? Does it have to do with resource conflicts and depletions? It probably does. And I like… I think, when stress enters a kind of human culture, suddenly a violent tendency is the one that can kind of overcome the more complicated patterns that are needed to hold peace because I think keeping peace is not easy, necessarily. 

But actually, this archeologist's work really demonstrated that it is more complicated than that and that there's this incredible weave of deeply—what I say like—egalitarian, life-affirming, life-loving, flourishing cultures that flourished for 1000s of years across Europe without resource diminishment to a great degree until, you know, another kind of culture pattern and political pattern arose. Which could very likely have come from droughts or famines, like resource wars.

So I think, yeah… So I think what ultimately, I mean, there's a lot of like theories about this, but probably one of the things that ultimately led to waves of invasions of different Indo-European speaking peoples from the East into Europe probably had to do with resource depletion in the kind of steppe lands of the Caucasus area and these waves of indo European Bronze Age, like warrior cultures, as they're classically seen, came into Europe. And so there were probably resource conflicts that meant that the populations of Europe, especially the male populations, were largely replaced by Indo-European speaking, much more patriarchal-oriented peoples from those areas. 

But, all of that, kind of leaning into this research and then the story of the traces of stories, you know. The traces in the mythic record that to me feel like they carry memories, particularly down through lines of female crafts, weaving and ceramics and embroidery and song. 

I remember—just to finish this thought—I remember hearing the wonderful Pat McCabe say something in an interview many years ago, and I think I listened to it when I first got to Crete, maybe in 2018. And she said something about how she had been told by her spiritual guides: If you take a point in history and retell the story of it, time is not linear time is circular and so suddenly, in retelling that story or re-examining or re-weaving our sense of a very deep European past, for example, seeing it through the lens of a holy other non patriarchal possibility, suddenly, that story becomes alive now, too, and the history itself can shift and affect us now. And I think that's kind of where I sit in my work every day, and how I kind of hold hope.

Which, for example, on the island of Crete where I've spent quite a bit of time living and researching and loving and learning to sing and play music and... I can still feel some of those threads of that long, long ago pre-patriarchal time. And that gives me hope that carried within all of us is another possibility. It's been lived once. It's being lived still, you know, in so many different ways all around us and that the more we kind of excavate those stories, those histories, these other versions of history, these other voices from history... I think once those stories are spoken, they become possible and alive again. And once we kind of reimagine the past that past then joins us in the present. 

Ayana Young  The question of when did it start? You know, the separation from nature... colonization, patriarchy? What was the moment? I think about that so much. Was it farming? Was it carrying capacity overload? You know, what, when was it? How did it happen? Who did it? Who did it start with? And it was really nice to hear your exploration with those questions and just hearing that there are places you've experienced that practice and have the essence of a time before this kind of poison and ecocidal culture took over is really hopeful, I guess. 

And it kind of brings me to your new book, The Venus Year and in your poem, Lyra, from The Venus Year you write, quote, "They say a female monk lived alone here long ago, I imagined she was very peaceful and strong as a goat. I imagined she knew every star and bathed in the sea. Chasteberry still blooms purple near the caves," end quote. So yeah, I guess I'm wondering, how can imagining and calling for the women who came before us bring comfort and knowledge, especially when for so long, the stories of women particularly had been devalued and even erased from history?

Sylvia V. Linsteadt   I love that female monk. Thank you for reading her. And I did just want to say and actually I think it kind of connects to the monk. In a sense, I just wanted to say, what this moment, actually this very present moment in terms of this, what's happening in Gaza, and the capacity for genocidal, like psychotic behavior, there's a kind of harrowing reminder that I feel like I'm holding right now. That the potential for destruction or life, is it kind of inherent in each of us in every moment? Like, each of us is kind of in our own inner walk with what it means to be kind of complicit in these systems or liberate parts of ourselves and then people around us to another possibility. 

And then regarding the women... Well, I would say actually, that I think a certain kind of anger is the place that I started from in terms of really trying to retell and reimagine the stories of ancient women, particularly from generally European and then particularly Mediterranean context. Because, you know, in the mythic record, in the historical record and so many of the things that I've read, and we've all read.... that sense of women constantly not being given voice. Their voice is being diminished or ridiculed or reviled or kind of demonized, especially in Greek myths, I would say, which is kind of what was one of my entry points in terms of this work in this research. I think that kind of outrage, the sudden outrage that rose up in me at a certain point and I'm not really sure exactly when it really reached its peak of like, Okay, I need to do something about this I need to creatively address. Like, because I can't deal with this. I think it probably came at a moment in my life when I too needed to liberate parts of my own voice and my own body and my own creativity, which did happen around the time that I went to Crete. But I think a part of me just suddenly decided, like, I refuse to keep believing this or buying into these kinds of representations that I'm reading. I mean, as far back as Eve and much further actually, you know that, um... the Judeo Christian tradition of deep female silencing comes after an even deeper tradition of classical Greek and Iron Age and, you know, Homeric stereotypes and misogyny. 

But I think, when I finally turned to writing about the feminine in this way, I just kind of let these women who are the characters in my writing speak through my pen. And interestingly, one of the things that I feel like, has been very grounding for me is leaning into the roles or the crafts or the kind of positions that have been typically seen as feminine in, let's say, the classical Greek and before that context, and tried to re empower them. So instead of pushing away from things like women as weavers, women as potters, women as the ones by the hearth, women as mothers and tenders of babies and children, I tried to kind of lean into what it would mean, to imagine a culture where none of those things were seen as "less than." What does it mean when typically domestic, so-called domestic, crafts and activities and stories are actually seen as the center point of a culture? Because, my god, they actually are. 

And I think that this is something again that Marija Gimbutas's is really pointing to in her research, her archaeological, like her excavations, her assessments of what she found. She was seeing that the temples, you know, in these cultures—particularly along the Danube in eastern and central Europe—their temples were simply the places where the biggest hearths and looms were for baking bread, for weaving, and also kilns for firing ceramics. And so this domestic creativity was actually central to the religious and sacred life of these ancient people. And moving from that place has just been incredibly nourishing for me personally, and nourishing as a lineage. Like I see it like these, these, these women, I almost see them like, I touch back and back and back along these threads in my imagination, along these like warp threads in a loom and, you know, in the patterns in the weaving. Like I was saying in the embroidery, we can see, even to this day, for example, in creating embroidery patterns that you can also see 3000 years ago and pottery meaning that there are certain memories that were never lost. 

You know, as all the men for example, in the Minoan times and Crete, which is the Bronze Age of Crete, were, most of them, their genetics, like, were wiped out by waves of invasion. The women actually remain and carry these threads. And I know that there's obviously a conversation to be had, of course, and like complicating around gender roles and that binary, for sure. But also, I think it's important to just like, re-remember and recenter and celebrate again, the power of these arts and traditions and these potent, life-affirming ways that for so long have been sidelined as stuff that women do.

Ayana Young  I love hearing you speak because I'm transported to another time. To another, not just physical time out there but time inside myself. It's almost like I remember what I once was a part of through, I don't know, I don't know if it's like blood memory or muscle memory... I don't know where, but it feels like a kind of excitement and calmness and knowing that still exists in me and I think, in probably all of us, on different levels. And yeah, thank you for thank you for the like the trip, the mind trip, it's really fun, actually and deep. And another thing that I've noticed across your writing, as you focus a lot on Mother Mary, and I would love if you could describe your relationship to her and motherhood in general in the context of myth.

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  Yes, Mary. So, my relationship with Mother Mary actively started six or seven years ago and it really took me by surprise, because, you know, from a really young age, like I grew up reading, I grew up really obsessed with ancient history, which is probably coming through like this has been a lifelong passion. And I grew up reading novels that were set in ancient times or medieval times, and they tended to be very like, quote, pagan. And really, in an important way, taught me early on about the horrors that have been enacted in the name of the Christian faith on animistic peoples the world over. And so I was like, extremely not into it. For most of my adult life, like, and Mary seemed to me, this figure kind of stripped of most of the power and potency that I saw in, for example, earlier Goddesses from the same region, such as, you know, Innana or Astarte or Isis, or the different great goddesses of Crete. And then something changed, and I think it happened for a couple of reasons. One of them was that I took this trip to Southern Italy with this wonderful Herbalist named Gail Faith Edwards. It's kind of through this experience with her that I saw how in these mountain villages in southern Italy, this beautiful syncretism had happened between this Earth-based faith clearly that had always been there in those mountains—belief in, you know, the living potency of rocks and trees and streams and, you know, the spirits that inhabited them and great feminine divine figures and ancestors or, you know, manifestations of the mountain or the moon or whatever it might be. But I saw on that journey, how Mary was kind of holding all of these older female mysteries in her skirts, like almost like under her skirts. Like, wherever she was, she took on these different names and these different faces that kind of integrated earlier, sacred beings in a really beautiful way, not in a colonial way at all, but in a really kind of beautiful braiding. 

And so that kind of opened something in me to her because I think what I noticed, shortly thereafter, when I was living in Crete was that, you know, I was visiting, and doing research and all these different Minoan sites of Bronze Age ruins. And I always felt I could kind of feel and imagine a lot in those places. And I would imagine, you know, the kind of spiritual practices that people might have been doing in them. And I was doing a lot of research about who some of these female divinities might have been for Cretan people. But what I noticed when I was living there was that the place where the female divine was still alive was no longer in those ruins, but in the little chapels—to the Panagia to the Virgin Mary, you know, the Greek Orthodox Christian Mary. And there are certain places especially like cave chapels, where you know that she's been worshiped in one form or another forever in that cave and now Mary is holding that energy. And, I remember, one cave shrine that I went to where the icon of Mary was so heavy with these tamata, the little silver offerings that you bring and tie to these icons of Mary asking for healing. And she was just absolutely covered with them and it just made my hair stand up and I could feel this aliveness, she still had this presence and this kind of sacred power in her. 

And then at the same time, I had just gone through a really heartbreaking and really challenging divorce and then the pandemic happened not that long after. And I was so shattered, emotionally, psychologically, that I needed a deeper faith and support. I needed her. Really, in the end, I needed her. And it was like these experiences were kind of leading up to me almost calling out for her. And early on in the pandemic, I actually made myself a rosary. And it was one of those really mysterious experiences where, you know, I bought this rosary when I was in southern Italy a few years before, slightly embarrassed, like, I can't believe I'm buying a rosary, but I'm buying a rosary, I need it. And it was made with these wooden beads that were scented with rose oil, which was lovely, and I carried it with me. It still actually hangs in my car right now, here in England. I've carried it everywhere. 

But a few years later, I decided I wanted to make my own and I had sort of vaguely encountered somebody rolling like beads from rose petals. And I was like, I'll give that a try. And it was like my hands and my body knew how to do this thing that I'd never tried in my life. I gathered all these rose petals from my garden and my mother's garden. And I had this old ceramic pot from Hungary that I found at a flea market. And I just like put all the rose petals in it and kept mashing them in my hands, kind of I… felt like a little kid again. Like everyday, I'd go squeeze them and mash them until they were in this big juicy ball and then I let it ferment because that just felt like that would probably be useful. And the more it fermented, the more it became like clay. And then it became kind of blackened from oxidizing. And I could roll the roses into these beads that then dried and became the most incredible rosary beads. And it was like through that process this like alchemy of the rose petals, I was making some kind of commitment to Mary that I don't think I could have made intellectually but I made it kind of with my heart and with my body and with my soul because I needed to feel like I was held by a much greater being of profound love than I've ever known before. And she really got me through, and she still does. It's a mysterious thing, really. But I just started to talk to her after that, and ask for her help. And, she is always there. And I can't really explain even what that means. But she has been. Yeah, and the relationship continues to deepen and deepen. 

And I'm just remembering the other thing you asked me was about motherhood. I don't know that I've written a whole lot about motherhood directly in myths because, well partly I mean, I have never been a mother. So it's an experience that I haven't yet had in my body, I hope to for so many reasons. But so on the one hand, I would say I think that the place that I have focused up to this point in my work is on the mother line is like kind of looking back, tracing from me to my mother to her mother and back and back and back kind of trying to orient to a relationship to all of this kind of wombic-line back through time. And that is actually also one of the reasons that I'm living in England right now because my motherline is English. And so part of my time here and my research here is around that kind of like blood and bones line in me., and yeah sinking into learning the place of my mother line, ecologically and also historically and mythically. 

I think in orientation number one, I think I'm interested in orienting to the motherline as a woman and as a creative and a writer because there's a potency in that story. You know of this line of women that has for so long not been spoken because we're used to dissent going through a fatherline, you know. And I'm just kind of fascinated by what it means as a woman to explore that and it struck me recently that, you know, kind of the archetype of the maiden, the mother, and the crone that we kind of see in so many different mythic contexts, really the world over, but especially in Europe. If you think about how that concept—that we existed within our grandmother's bodies as the little egg in our mother's ovaries when she was an embryo in her mother—right there you have the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, like all held in one moment in grandmother's womb. And so somehow the motherline is actually like this embodiment of this powerful, feminine kind of goddess that is so prominent across, you know, the regions of my ancestry. So that certainly creatively feels really important to me and it's something that I'm kind of actively exploring and writing through and I... 

A future project that I'm circling on, part of my PhD research here has been connected to this: is exploring, like, actually myths that feature birth, pregnancy, and childbirth because I've noticed that it's like not that present. mythically anywhere. Like there's really brief, like, you know, A woman couldn't conceive and then she was granted a magical favor and suddenly conceived by a flower or a wind or you know, something, and then a strange child was born and then that's it. You know, and we don't really hear a lot more about the actual embodied experience of pregnancy and childbirth from a folkloric or mythic perspective. 

But I'm interested in why that's the case because as a lot of my friends around me, become mothers and I hear their stories firsthand, it's one of the most profoundly powerful, fundamental, psychedelic, incredible experiences that there is as a human being to have. And we all got here that way, right? And so why do we have so many epic stories about really long battles, and not epic stories about women in childbirth and the places that maybe the visions that they have the places that they go in order to bring that soul down, in order to like, open their body and let life out? I mean, I just, I feel like these are stories that, you know, these these women that I was talking about, and we were kind of conjuring in this space, these women in their hearth-loom-temple spaces would have been telling each other, but they weren't stories that kind of made it into the dominant, big important, quote, "story record." 

But I'm really interested in finding those threads, seeing where I can find bits and pieces, and just maybe even putting together a collection. So that for myself, and anyone else, who is interested in this kind of thing—who also wants to become a mother—might have a folktale collection or a myth, a collection of myths, that actually speak directly to that experience. I would like to have that. I would like to be able to lean on powerful stories like that, that are ancient. And yeah, so far, I just haven't seen anything like that. 

Ayana Young  Please go there, please. Not just for you. But for me, and I'm sure many of our listeners. I was thinking through if I could conjure up any stories that I had heard or known that were more specifically about pregnancy and motherhood, and I couldn't come up with any. Why wouldn't there be these stories? What is the purpose of leaving that part of the human experience out of the narrative? 

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  I mean, just even speaking, for example, to the literary record, you know, in terms of like, novels, or kind of the yeah, the literary tradition, the Western literary tradition—First of all, you know, women haven't really even been allowed to, like write or publish until fairly recently, haven't been taken seriously. I mean and that tradition goes back to classical Greece where women kind of had to write under a kind of a masculine guise in a way in order to be taken seriously. And the experience of childbirth I think, was kind of seen as one of the least intellectual things that somebody could talk about. That was like really not... that's women's business and it's like it became more recently, like indecent to talk about, you know, in the Victorian era, for example, like, Do not talk about that. So I think it's been really silenced. And even, yeah, even up to this day in certain ways, I think we're coming to a moment where it's more and more celebrated and acceptable to really center birth stories and women's stories of pregnancy. Yeah, I wonder if it's not so much an intentional silencing of female power, although it might be for sure, especially further back, but like a kind of ingrained misogyny, that this is just not a subject matter worthy of intellectual or artistic investigation. That's kind of how it's felt from the research that I've done in kind of the canon, so to speak. I'm sure I'm missing something...like obviously, I'm sure there's something, but I think it needs to be brought forward more.

Ayana Young  Yeah, absolutely. And maybe we could explore myth and religion and the Christian Bible. In The Bells of Good Friday, you  quote, "I have a whole lot of thoughts about the institution of Christianity, which I'm sure those of you familiar with my work can guess that. But there is something outside the confines of the institution, at the heart of the mystery that I have found myself circling ever since my first month in Crete. I share all of this simply from my experience, from my feelings, and from my instincts  because all of these I do know and can speak from," end quote. And I can relate to some of the words in this quote, and I'm wondering, how do you hold the tension of the beauty and the heart of mystery and story within Christianity? And of course, the simultaneous confines of the institution itself?

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  Yeah, it's definitely an ongoing inner struggle for me so I don't have a definitive answer. Maybe what I'll say is, in that essay, I was describing this moment that I had when I was living in Crete. And it was Easter, which is the most important, holy day, you know, in the Orthodox, liturgical cycle, and certainly, like in Greece,. It's absolutely enormous. And I never experienced anything like it before. And it wasn't, it was only so this was only about a year after the divorce that I, you know, in the end of this relationship, and I remember... Jesus had died, you know, in the festive cycle. And I was sitting in my studio, this little studio in the dark, working. And suddenly, these bells started ringing across the island, and they were the death bells of Jesus and I had never heard death bells before. And I didn't... nobody told me they were the death bells. It was just like the minute I heard them start ringing, I knew, Those are the death bells. It was the most haunting, shattering sound that I have ever heard, I can still hear them, if I think about it. And I just, you know, it was warm, and dark and I was up in the mountains and these bells were ringing in the village, this like two-tone, and then this pause. And like three tones, I think, and then a pause. And I can also hear them kind of in other villages, ringing like further and further across Crete and I had this sense that the whole island was ringing with these death bells. And they were ringing down into the valleys and up the mountains and the grief was so profound, that I just went out on the porch and sank to my knees and just started crying, and I stayed there until they were done. And it was this feeling of like, mixed, almost torture of how much grief I felt, and yet I couldn't move. I couldn't stop listening. And I couldn't move. And what I felt was that the grief the personal grief and loss that I felt that I had experienced and was continuing to experience as I process that you know, the loss of this person in my life. I felt it to be... those bells were ringing for that death for me, and they were ringing for the death of Jesus, of this man who was also the Son of God, who, you know, just this like profound being whose death allowed everybody to grieve in that moment. That's how it felt to me. I don't know who else was like actually out on their porch crying. But I know that it's a very emotional time for people there. You know, the the especially the more like, actually religion, practicing religious, Orthodox Christians in Crete, and there's a lot of them. 

And you know, it just, it just completely took me out. And it brought me closer to this mystery that is still a profound mystery to me that I really like don't even know how to speak to that. This man who was this beacon of shattering love, that we still can't really handle, died on that day. You know, and I was just sitting there, like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I'm feeling this way. But I'm feeling a lot right now about this. And it feels really precious to my heart and to my being, and there's some, like organizing, overpowering force of love that is emanating from this story that does something to me, that's just incredibly precious, and surrendering. And I think that whoever exactly he was, and whatever exactly happened, the kind of emanation and almost tone or resonance of love that he was trying to bring here, we're just beginning to like, work out what that meant, I think. And I think one of the ways that I kind of have conceptualized or felt into or thought about the absolute hell that's also been enacted in the name, so-called, supposed name of Christ. It's almost like this man-being came here kind of shining forth such overpowering, equalizing, humbling, divine love in each of us that it almost conjured the equal and opposite darkness, if that makes sense. Because I kind of am overwhelmed by the level of ugliness that's been done in the name of somebody who came here bringing a kind of love unlike anything, almost anything that's ever arrived. And so I think we're like, we've hardly even begun being able to integrate it. And I don't know, I don't really know how personally to process so much of the institution of Christianity because it's a force of... it has been a force of such colonial misogynistic hell. And I think that that has literally nothing to do with the man who those bells were ringing for that night in Crete.

Ayana Young  I love your responses. I feel like I'm in a story. And I'm with you, every moment, every breath and and I think that's a really beautiful response to a question that impacts us all. Yeah, we're all impacted by Christianity. It's really interesting how much power the institution has and the intentions versus the impact and oh, it is just yeah, it's a lot. There are so many more questions to ask, I was thinking about the trouble with enshrining myth into doctrine, and how we can keep our stories from becoming oppressive. 

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  I feel like so much in the Christian tradition feels like myth gone wrong. You know, The Venus Year in certain ways, kind of, is like a map of the different layers of my creative process. And so it includes, you know, each chapter includes seasonal notes specific to the land where I was, which was mostly Crete, but it's also at home in California. So there's seasonal notes and then there's seasonal and like personal life notes. And then there's a poem or a short story, or both that are threading myths from the places where I am, reworking them kind of connected to the ecology of the place. And this is something that I've centered in my work, you know, for at least a decade, this kind of way of layering, ecological specificity and rootedness in with my storytelling. 

And I think that that connects into the question about how does... how do we keep myth from becoming oppressive doctrine? I think it has to remain alive to the wholeness of place and I know that feels like a really big, slightly vague answer. But as an example, about 10 years ago, one of the first projects I did as a working adult writer was this project called The Gray Fox Epistles where I sent out what I called rewilded fairy tales in the post to subscribers that I kind of slowly gathered around the world. So it was like these little wax sealed envelopes with these stories in them. And my idea was that I was trying to reroute fairy tales and myths from my ancestry in the ecologies of California where I'm from, and where I grew up. Because I was really wanting to feel kind of like a storied, rooting in place, but I recognized that me as a like white girl retelling Indigenous Coast, Miwok, Pomo myths was like not appropriate, not okay, appropriative, and just was like stealing somebody else's 1000s of years of relationship to place encoded in a story. And there's so many reasons why that isn't okay, cuz, you know, being who I am. 

So I was like, Okay, what if I gather different fairy tales from my different ancestries, and then see what happens when I kind of rewrite them rooted in the ecologies of this place? And at the same time, I was studying animal tracking really deeply. And so was really allowing these living languages of the land to be the tellers, be the voices of these fairy tales and show me what would happen to them if they were set loose, respectfully set loose, you know, in this place that I was born. And doing that brought these stories alive and made them kind of fluid and transformative in a way that felt really important and continues to feel really important to me in terms of how I approach any story. So it feels like wherever we can let the living Earth back into the mythic, when it is allowed back in I don't think it can become oppressive. Because when the Earth is actually speaking through a story, then justice and Earth's laws are also speaking through that story.

Ayana Young  Sylvia, this has been such an enjoyable and deep, and yeah… I've been transported in this conversation. I feel the myths live in you. Like you, you are a magical creature. I don't know, I just continue to feel you as a portal to these other times and I feel really grateful that I personally just got to sit with you for this time. And kind of I feel like we’ve gotten in a time machine together… Yes, spiritual time machine of sorts, a remembrance, a re-enlivenment, a re-enchantment, really, of what it is to be human. And so thanks, again, so much.

Sylvia V. Linsteadt  Thank you. Thank you.

Evan Tenenbaum  Thank you for listening to For The Wild. The music in today's episode is by The New Runes. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.