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Inherited Wounds: Tend the Land, Heal Men (with Roy Arthur Blodgett) · Evolutionary Men

• 0:00
  All right, and welcome back, everybody.
• 0:02
  I am super pumped today to be joined by Roy Arthur Blodgett, who is a naturalist and poet and a
• 0:09
  Fucking cool guy I've been getting to know over the last couple of years as he's been an integral part in the Labor Day retreat I've been leading out in Northern California, which we'll kind of be talking about exactly
• 0:24
  How he's involved in that, and what an education it's been for me, and the way I've seen it really impact the men that we've been bringing out there.
• 0:35
  And in general, I just want to kind of get to know him.
• 0:38
  And he's been involved in men's work and has a really unique, I would say, in my experience, take on the world.
• 0:44
  And so I'm just really excited to be here with you today, brother.
• 0:48
  Yeah, likewise.
• 0:49
  I really appreciate you inviting me on here.
• 0:51
  It's an honor.
• 0:52
  And thanks for being time for it.
• 0:54
  Totally, totally stoked.
• 0:56
  So I'd love, you know, we were just talking before the call of, you know, many hats you wear and whatnot.
• 1:01
  But to give guys kind of a take on your experience of men's work and kind of what you find your attention moving to these days in your life in terms of what you really care about.
• 1:14
  Yeah, thanks for that.
• 1:17
  You know, my relationship to men's work, it's interesting.
• 1:23
  It wasn't something I thought about a lot until I was in my kind of early to mid twenties.
• 1:28
  My relationship to masculinity, all of that stuff started to become more salient.
• 1:34
  I realized that there was some kind of incongruence between the kind of man I wanted to be and how I was
• 1:43
  Performing that in the world, I guess.
• 1:46
  And I simultaneously wanted to be the toughest motherfucker in the room and the softest.
• 1:54
  You know what I mean?
• 1:54
  I wanted to have the full breadth of
• 1:57
  of expression.
• 1:59
  And I realized that sometimes those things were diametrically opposed and difficult to manage at once.
• 2:09
  And so that was kind of the beginning of an inquiry into masculinity and my relationship to it.
• 2:14
  And I thought about the kind of men that in my life that I liked, and often there were the kind of
• 2:20
  Softer spoken, um, confident but not um arrogant men in my life.
• 2:26
  And um
• 2:29
  And often there were also people that spent a lot of time outside, I realized.
• 2:33
  And that was always kind of a place where I found solace.
• 2:40
  like where I just felt the most myself was like in places, like wild places, you know, deep wilderness settings.
• 2:49
  And
• 2:50
  And so, yeah, that's kind of been the intersection, I would say, there is like this relationship between our relation, you know, as humans, our relationship to the natural world
• 3:02
  And then how that then ties in with masculinity.
• 3:06
  Those are things I've been exploring for a really long time at this point.
• 3:09
  You know, the last
• 3:11
  10, 15 years to varying degrees of awareness about it.
• 3:17
  I think the inquiry started before I was like cognitively analyzing the experience, right?
• 3:23
  Yeah.
• 3:25
  But definitely, at least for the last 10 years, it's been a pretty strong inquiry in my life.
• 3:32
  These days, it's interesting because I think we were just speaking about this a little bit before we started recording.
• 3:39
  this last like really since the the pandemic, the beginning of COVID in twenty twenty or so, and then really particularly since twenty twenty two
• 3:50
  It's probably the period of time in my life where I've spent the least time around men, which has really has been interesting because it's just in many ways it's just circumstantial.
• 4:01
  It's just the people I live with are not men.
• 4:05
  And I don't I don't the the kind of work I do is so all over the place, and it's often solo, it's often as an individual.
• 4:14
  And so I'm not like
• 4:15
  Around other men in the workplace very often, that kind of thing.
• 4:21
  But it's interesting to
• 4:25
  In some ways, I feel like I have almost like this outsider perspective.
• 4:30
  I'm like observing masculinity in this moment, in this nation.
• 4:37
  which is a pretty grim thing to observe.
• 4:39
  I think you could probably agree with me about that, at least in the overculture.
• 4:45
  And so yeah, that's a bit of a tangled mess in response, but but it
• 4:50
  That's just to say that like the kind of salient experiences I'm having right now around masculinity are like feeling a little bit more settled in my own masculinity, a little bit more confident in that.
• 5:04
  In my own expression of it, and really observing the world around me and asking a lot of questions about what do we need to do right now to respond to this moment?
• 5:15
  Because something is.
• 5:17
  Clearly needed for those of us who have a more embodied, like soulful expression of masculinity to step into this moment.
• 5:27
  So
• 5:28
  Yeah, and I feel like this is a great gateway.
• 5:34
  I'd love for you to share a little bit about your kind of journey in terms of connecting to land
• 5:41
  in nature in what it brought, right?
• 5:44
  What it brought to you as you developed and grew from a boy into a man, because I think there's going to be some strong
• 5:52
  things we can point to and that you talk about in your teachings with our men as well around disconnection from the land and the very real impact that's that's been having.
• 6:01
  But yeah, what kind of, you know, what was your experience growing up of the land, and how did you interface with it, and what's it brought to you?
• 6:11
  Yeah, you know, it's interesting because growing up, I grew up in an inner city environment.
• 6:15
  I grew up in Santa Rosa, California, you know, right in the middle of the city.
• 6:21
  But I was always obsessed with the natural world for as long as I can remember, particularly reptiles and amphibians.
• 6:31
  I wanted to get out and find snakes.
• 6:34
  And I still do.
• 6:36
  I still love that.
• 6:37
  And it's still a big part of my life.
• 6:39
  But that was the kind of original thing that brought me outside
• 6:44
  Was the desire to go out and find critters.
• 6:47
  And, you know, I had a pretty, a pretty difficult upbringing.
• 6:53
  And, you know, especially through kind of my like
• 6:57
  adolescence my young adult years, or really approaching adulthood, was in a pretty abusive home environment and was recovering from a lot of
• 7:11
  Significant trauma as a child that occurred to me as a child.
• 7:15
  And the place where I just felt the most well was just outside.
• 7:21
  And so
• 7:22
  A lot of times I would ride my bike out to the parks, you know, and on the edge of the city, or I would take the bus out
• 7:31
  To parks and walk out to these parks on the edge of the city.
• 7:35
  And I just spend a lot of time outside alone.
• 7:40
  At a certain point in that, again, originally the pursuit being to go find critters, I realized as a byproduct of that, like, oh, I feel different out here.
• 7:54
  Like, my nervous system is really different out here.
• 7:59
  I feel much more alive.
• 8:02
  Much more switched on.
• 8:04
  And it was really this experience and this realization of, you know, my because I wasn't in a very safe home environment.
• 8:13
  I was kind of walking around guarded all the time, right?
• 8:15
  You know, like my defenses were always up.
• 8:18
  And when I would get out into these spaces, after a couple of hours, that would start to fall away, and I would.
• 8:24
  I would open, you know, and my vision would go from this to that.
• 8:34
  And I could my senses were more fully alive.
• 8:37
  Like food tasted different out on the trail than it did in the kitchen.
• 8:44
  And I mean that literally.
• 8:46
  Like it was a pretty profound experience.
• 8:50
  And so
• 8:53
  You know, that kind of I also had a lot of really profound experiences with like wild animals in the wild in these places and seeing critters, like creatures.
• 9:05
  And observing them and having them approach me, even.
• 9:08
  And I was confronted with this feeling of all my life, I had kind of received this message from osmosis, just from the culture, that.
• 9:18
  Humans are a scourge on the earth.
• 9:21
  You know, that we're just destroying our environment, and we can only cause harm.
• 9:30
  And my experiences around wild creatures was that there was a lot of grace and a lot of curiosity, and that felt incongruent.
• 9:39
  And so I started asking questions about
• 9:42
  Well, what is the role of a human being?
• 9:45
  Like, we're animals.
• 9:47
  How do we fit into all this?
• 9:49
  And how do we have a healthy relationship with land and with ecosystems and with wildlife?
• 9:55
  And
• 9:58
  That brought me to a lot of questions around like indigeneity and relationship to culture.
• 10:07
  I realize that so much of modern society is built around
• 10:16
  consumerism, of course.
• 10:20
  And so much of that is driven by this profound longing that I believe all of us in a kind of modern civilization, so to speak,
• 10:30
  possess for relationship and not just relationship with other people, of course, but relationship with
• 10:41
  our environments with other species, with our food.
• 10:49
  And in every one of these
• 10:54
  Extensions of relationship in modern society, there's a disconnect that really
• 11:03
  Creates this positive feedback loop, right?
• 11:06
  Of dissatisfaction.
• 11:10
  And again, this deep longing.
• 11:15
  And so
• 11:17
  A lot of the work that I try to do now with people and getting people outside and into wild places is helping them to first helping them to see
• 11:30
  the land and um and and see see patterns in the land and see um see the ways in which um our
• 11:43
  Management or lack thereof impacts land and ecosystems, and seeking to empower them to enter the conversation on their own in an empowered way.
• 11:57
  Because one of the major responses that people have when they start to become aware of this like disconnect and they start to feel this longing to reconnect
• 12:08
  Is there's a lot of hesitation.
• 12:10
  There's like a fear.
• 12:11
  There's that fear of causing harm.
• 12:13
  There's the awareness that we've caused harm, and that can translate to an apprehension.
• 12:19
  And
• 12:21
  And I'm really about helping people to feel like they can get in there and get grimy and generate some feedback and learn from that.
• 12:35
  Again, a long-winded response, but hopefully that gets a little bit at the heart of all of that.
• 12:43
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:45
  What I'm really taken away, particularly from that last piece and what my experience of you has been, is kind of awakening
• 12:53
  Participation.
• 12:56
  Nature is something we actually are a part of and can participate in, and are not separate from, and it's a relationship.
• 13:04
  That, like any relationship, takes tending and is interactive, right?
• 13:09
  And what you said about, you know, learning to
• 13:13
  Teaching people to see the land.
• 13:15
  I mean, that's one of the great joys of working with you on the retreat is, you know, I'll maybe source this a bit in your poetic side, but you're an incredible storyteller.
• 13:25
  And you tell a story of the land in particular that we're immersed in, that it's kind of a matrix moment in a sense of there was me walking through those forests before
• 13:39
  I had received this transmission from you.
• 13:41
  And then after, and after, it's like, wow, I can see the story of the land now.
• 13:47
  And once I see it, I can't unsee it
• 13:49
  And that in itself was quite transformative for me to see, okay, this is the impact of the relationship we've been living, at least since the
• 14:01
  the industrial age here of the last couple hundred years and the very real ramifications that is now creating.
• 14:08
  And this is
• 14:10
  what one of the great joys of the work we've been doing together is the parallels we can see behind and we've talked about
• 14:19
  Dealing with the ramifications of how we've treated the land and even in our own selves, right?
• 14:27
  Our lineages, our families, and what are we willing to take responsibility for.
• 14:32
  And how are we going to work that?
• 14:35
  Because this has been a theme I've been talking about recently.
• 14:39
  It's like
• 14:41
  Even if we didn't necessarily cause the damage, if we don't take responsibility for it, who will?
• 14:47
  Right.
• 14:47
  Right.
• 14:47
  And it doesn't necessarily just fix itself.
• 14:50
  I think that was another really interesting
• 14:55
  thing I got from you is, you know, there can be this kind of fantasy of like nature can just da da da da da.
• 15:04
  But no, actually, it's been quite a long time that we've been living as humans in relationship to it.
• 15:10
  And it's a co-creation.
• 15:12
  And I would love for you to kind of, yeah, just speak about.
• 15:16
  That experience you've had, and maybe even some of the stories of the land that you've learned in your studies and in your growth
• 15:25
  Yeah, thanks for that question.
• 15:28
  That's a rich one.
• 15:31
  And I appreciate that reflection from you, too, about just the
• 15:35
  The kind of before and after, you know, experience of like before you've heard the story and then after and how it's changed how it changes you.
• 15:44
  And there can be a lot of grief connected to that, too, that I want to acknowledge because
• 15:53
  As with the story of patriarchy, you know, as with the story of so many of these systems that we've inherited, that
• 16:01
  That bears a lot of harm.
• 16:05
  It's it's we inherit it and we're suddenly aware and
• 16:11
  And what do you do with that?
• 16:13
  There's something that Aldo Leopold, who's a great, a great ecologist.
• 16:20
  He wrote Sand County Almanac, and he kind of came up with the land ethic.
• 16:25
  And he said, One of the penalties of an ecological education is to live alone in a world of wounds.
• 16:34
  And that's true.
• 16:36
  And it's true that as my awareness of land grew,
• 16:44
  My experience of the like delight and just like pure joy of being outside
• 16:53
  shifted because suddenly I realized that a lot of these these ecosystems, these wild places that I thought were just these pristine wild places were actually really impacted and really needed care and attention.
• 17:05
  And so that was a shift.
• 17:07
  And it's important to acknowledge it.
• 17:09
  But again, in that, I feel empowered to, like, as you say,
• 17:16
  Into the conversation to remember the relationship, and that is the case because we've
• 17:24
  We've been in this co-evolutionary relationship with our ecosystems for a long time at this point, and as ecosystem managers, that's one of our roles as a species.
• 17:34
  And so, yeah, here and here where I live in Northern California, a lot of that has to do with the relationship to fire.
• 17:46
  Of course, the metaphors there are profound and layered, and we could go on there forever.
• 17:53
  But essentially,
• 17:57
  Many of the ecosystems around where I live have been in relationship to fire for millennia, and particularly anthropogenic fire.
• 18:05
  So fire caused by people.
• 18:07
  And
• 18:09
  California's Indigenous people had a very different relationship to fire and to obviously to ecosystem management than we do in the modern area and in the kind of settler era of California.
• 18:23
  And one of the first things, major changes that happened as settlers kind of imposed their will on the land here in California was
• 18:35
  was suppressing fire and preventing the First Peoples from burning.
• 18:40
  And before that, in the Indigenous management era for
• 18:47
  At least ten thousand years, likely much longer than that.
• 18:52
  Millions of acres of California were burned every year.
• 18:57
  And
• 18:59
  And always in these very often in these very low intensity burns, basically, because when you're burning on that basis and on that scale, you're managing your biomass
• 19:11
  such that it doesn't accumulate.
• 19:13
  And so the scale of the fires that you're creating are smaller.
• 19:19
  They're lower intensity, and they actually have a really profoundly regenerative
• 19:24
  Impact on the land, um, especially on oaks, which are
• 19:33
  very important trees in terms of biodiversity.
• 19:36
  They support the broadest array of biodiversity of any of any trees.
• 19:41
  And so
• 19:43
  This regular deposit of ash, the oaks loved it, many of the other native food plants loved it.
• 19:52
  And so there was this effort to manage the land to arrest this process called succession, which is
• 20:03
  A kind of familiar trajectory through which ecosystems change over time.
• 20:09
  And we think of like when we're in a meadow or when we're in a forest.
• 20:14
  We often can just kind of assume this is a meadow or this is a forest, and this is what it's always been, and this is what it will always be
• 20:22
  Because we live in these small human lives, right?
• 20:25
  But the reality is those things are constantly changing and they're changing in a slower time line.
• 20:31
  Over time, that meadow could eventually become a forest, and it does so on this familiar trajectory.
• 20:38
  And so here in California,
• 20:42
  A familiar trajectory would go from kind of oak woodland or oak savanna habitats, which again support this incredible biodiversity over time
• 20:52
  Those will often shift into what we call a closed canopy conifer forest.
• 20:57
  You'll have usually Douglas fir trees will come in in the understory of these oak woodlands.
• 21:05
  And they can germinate in those shady conditions under the understory, and their objective is to grow straight up
• 21:12
  They grow really fast, go straight towards the light and the canopy, and they'll pierce the canopy of these hardwoods.
• 21:19
  They'll send out these big lateral branches.
• 21:22
  They'll shade these hardwoods, these oak trees, and kill them.
• 21:25
  And what you'll get if that happens is a climax conifer forest, and you lose about eighty percent of your biodiversity when that change happens.
• 21:36
  And so California's Indigenous people were very aware of this cycle.
• 21:41
  And because their food system was reliant on that biodiversity
• 21:45
  Their management practices were to arrest succession at Oak Woodland, essentially, Oak Savannah, Coastal Prairie, these other ecosystems that support this high biodiversity
• 21:59
  Before it could shift into that.
• 22:00
  And the way they did that was by these intense these small intensity burns because the fire would come through
• 22:09
  It would kill the encroaching conifer trees, which are not resistant to fire, and it would preserve these hardwoods, which are resistant to fire.
• 22:20
  That's kind of the pattern that we saw throughout California and in many of the other Western states as well.
• 22:29
  And now we're living in the reckoning of fire suppression, of one hundred and seventy five years basically of fire suppression.
• 22:41
  And you see these massive fires as we all have in the news and for many of us in California firsthand.
• 22:51
  And they are unfathomable.
• 22:55
  I mean, we're talking about fires over a million acres footprint.
• 23:01
  It's hard to fathom that kind of scale.
• 23:04
  And they're creating their own weather systems.
• 23:07
  You've got fire tornadoes ripping through
• 23:10
  a wall of fire, a hundred foot flames, that that kind of stuff is happening.
• 23:16
  And it's happening because of a number of factors, but a a large part of it has to do with
• 23:25
  suppressing that those those those earlier practices and the accumulation of biomass, the accumulation of fuel and
• 23:38
  It's a similar thing, right, to our experience of modern masculinity.
• 23:41
  We're living in the reckoning of this inheritance, right?
• 23:46
  And it's the same thing now with our relationship to land in the West, where
• 23:54
  You know, we didn't, it wasn't us that made the decision to start this regime of fire suppression, right?
• 24:01
  But
• 24:02
  Now we've got it.
• 24:04
  Now we're here, and we're the ones in control of it, and we're the ones that have to manage it and figure out what to do next.
• 24:11
  the reality is it's not so simple as just well, let's just start burning again.
• 24:17
  Because again, you have all that fuel load, you have all that biomass, you have all that accumulation.
• 24:22
  And so what first has to happen
• 24:26
  Is a lot of a lot of composting, a lot of decomposition, and a lot of
• 24:36
  Really, what I feel is a lot of again, reckoning with the inheritance.
• 24:44
  I mean, of course, the metaphor is right there.
• 24:47
  You know, it's the same.
• 24:49
  It's the same with men's work.
• 24:52
  We got a lot of
• 24:54
  We've got a lot of grieving to do simultaneous to stepping into what's needed now.
• 25:03
  Yeah, I mean, oh man, every time I hear the story, it just kind of gives me chills in terms of the parallels.
• 25:10
  Yeah.
• 25:11
  You know, again, even that reckoning and even that word debt you used, right?
• 25:16
  There's 175 years worth of.
• 25:19
  That we kind of have to work through.
• 25:22
  And I think at the bigger cultural level, that is part of what we're reckoning with, with kind of traditional patriarchal masculine.
• 25:31
  Yeah, we didn't cause it, right?
• 25:33
  I didn't own slaves.
• 25:34
  I didn't dominate women.
• 25:36
  But there's repercussions to that.
• 25:39
  In that whole system.
• 25:40
  And there's repercussions within ourselves of, you know, in some sense, you can think of trauma as accumulated debt, right?
• 25:47
  That the
• 25:49
  The culture wants to sell us the thing that makes you have to not think about it.
• 25:55
  Oh, just buy this thing and you'll feel better
• 25:59
  Versus actually having to do that kind of, like you said, raw and often full of grief work of really coming into contact with the reality
• 26:10
  of the moment and situation, whether we're talking about the natural world we're part of or whether we're just talking about ourselves and the secession we're part of in our lineage, right?
• 26:21
  That oftentimes part of the work
• 26:26
  I'm passionate about doing with men is really surfacing sometimes the pain that goes back generations that just wasn't dealt with.
• 26:35
  And it's not necessarily someone's fault.
• 26:36
  They didn't have the tools or whatever.
• 26:39
  But the moment we kind of become aware of that, of, oh, I am carrying this pain, this trauma, this trigger, whatever, only I can do something about it.
• 26:52
  Even if I wasn't the one that set it into motion, right?
• 26:55
  And I think this is the kind of hard truth a lot of men are being faced with
• 27:02
  How up for participating in that process are you really?
• 27:06
  And I think that's to tie it back to some of what you were talking about, part of what I enjoy about
• 27:12
  The transmission you create around the land is to not be afraid of that participatory process
• 27:20
  That actually get the only way this is going to work is if we kind of get our hands dirty, in some sense, are willing to make some mistakes and get engaged, get activated.
• 27:34
  And that's something many of the guys that we've worked with over the last couple of years, many men come to the work I lead feeling alone.
• 27:45
  And disconnected.
• 27:47
  Right.
• 27:48
  And I tend to focus more on the relational aspect of that, of kind of getting them plugged into other men.
• 27:54
  But part of where I think we have such a synergy is
• 27:59
  That matters with the land, with the very fact that we are part of a system.
• 28:04
  We're not on top, outside of it, right?
• 28:07
  Which is kind of that.
• 28:08
  More scientific, rational Descartes thing that was kind of pushed on us that we're now having to rediscover the reality and truth of no, we are simply part of a system, and we're an integral part of it.
• 28:21
  Like you said, you know.
• 28:23
  Part of my background is in integral studies.
• 28:28
  And this guy, Ken Wilbur, I studied with, right?
• 28:31
  He always talked about the goal is to promote the greatest depth for the greatest span.
• 28:37
  And what I hear, that managing the ecosystem, that's what it's all about, right?
• 28:45
  That it's like, well, yeah, we could let a thousand furs grow.
• 28:49
  Or we could prioritize some oaks, which actually has so much of a bigger ripple effect into life and what's possible and the resiliency of the system
• 29:01
  And that was something I just like, it was not part of my reality because I, you know, I kind of came up in the 80s.
• 29:09
  Proto-environmental movement.
• 29:11
  It was just like, leave it wild, let it do whatever it's doing.
• 29:14
  And it was totally ignoring the reality of, no, it takes consciousness.
• 29:18
  It takes consciousness to kind of manage it.
• 29:20
  And it doesn't mean we know the right answer, but there's certain patterns that nature reveals that we can then support.
• 29:29
  Absolutely.
• 29:30
  Yeah.
• 29:30
  And I mean, the parallels are so similar too with all this because it really is the same thing.
• 29:37
  It's the same stuff we're confronting, right?
• 29:39
  We're confronting dominance hierarchies.
• 29:41
  There we go.
• 29:42
  Yep.
• 29:43
  And um, you know, it's it's the r we think of like
• 29:50
  You know, when the settlers came to Turtle Island, to North America, they didn't come seeking to understand it.
• 29:58
  They came.
• 30:00
  America, we have to acknowledge, it's a Eurocentric concept.
• 30:07
  It came from Europe.
• 30:09
  It was imposed on Turtle Island, on North America
• 30:15
  And so we we didn't come.
• 30:17
  Our ancestors didn't come with an seeking to understand so much as seeking to impose their
• 30:26
  Their conception, their preconception.
• 30:30
  And so
• 30:35
  Again, it's part of that relationship, part of that participation is about listening.
• 30:42
  It's about like seeking to ask a lot of questions, seeking to get to know the other.
• 30:49
  And so it goes with, again, with
• 30:53
  With masculinity, with this inheritance of patriarchy, right?
• 30:57
  It's like we need to do a lot of listening.
• 31:01
  That's a big thing about it, right?
• 31:02
  Is learning to listen to women, you know?
• 31:07
  You know, that's one thing, right?
• 31:10
  I'm sure that there was a point in your life where you recognized, oh, whoa, I need to.
• 31:17
  I need to listen to women a little bit differently, you know?
• 31:20
  And I certainly had that realization at a certain point because, again,
• 31:27
  Through just the cultural osmosis, that's not the messaging we're receiving.
• 31:34
  And so it requires consciousness, it requires participation.
• 31:40
  Yeah, it's just it's so profound, the parallels there, and so much of, again, I think that
• 31:50
  It works because underneath that will to impose, that will to dominate, again, is actually
• 31:59
  Emptiness, it's a desire for a relationship.
• 32:04
  And so if we can get past the fear of that and start to regenerate
• 32:14
  The desire for complexity that you speak to, that Ken Wilber's speaking to, this depth and span.
• 32:24
  That's an embrace of complexity is how I see that.
• 32:27
  And we find that that's actually that's what's satiating.
• 32:33
  That's what's satisfying.
• 32:36
  And anyone who has ever grown a garden will tell you that the difference between going and
• 32:47
  And harvesting a ripe tomato from the vine from your garden that you grew versus going to the sword and buying one
• 32:55
  is a big difference.
• 32:58
  Or anyone who hunts will tell you that the experience of hunting that deer to feed your family that season
• 33:07
  Is a really different thing than going to the grocery store and buying some beef ground up in an old plastic package.
• 33:15
  It's so different.
• 33:17
  And the kind of gratitude, the kind of
• 33:21
  Depth that you feel from that, again, it all speaks to that longing for a relationship that we're primed for.
• 33:28
  We're primed for it.
• 33:29
  That's what we're
• 33:30
  As a social creature, as these beings with profound capacity to recognize patterns and to explore them.
• 33:41
  Um, we need that.
• 33:43
  We need that to be well.
• 33:46
  I yeah, I love that.
• 33:49
  Right.
• 33:50
  The growing your own things, the being involved in the creation of your meat.
• 33:56
  It's being part of the process, right?
• 33:57
  It's again, it's that connecting to, oh, I'm part of something.
• 34:01
  That it's so easy to be disconnected from.
• 34:04
  And we're being fed it more and more and more, right?
• 34:06
  This kind of frictionless existence where I can live in my apartment, order everything, and it just shows up, and I don't even have to see a human.
• 34:14
  Right.
• 34:15
  And that was never possible back in the day.
• 34:18
  We had to be actively engaged with others.
• 34:21
  We had to be actively engaged with the land.
• 34:23
  And I think the lack of that is something I've seen.
• 34:27
  Is part of what causes a deep depression and malaise.
• 34:31
  In men, because then it's like if I'm not part of the process
• 34:34
  I have no way to impact it.
• 34:37
  And it's incredibly disempowering in a sense.
• 34:40
  And one of the real things I've seen come alive with men in the land work we do on the retreat is
• 34:48
  Shit, I do have a capacity to impact my choices, my body, my being.
• 34:55
  It really can make a difference in ways that I think sometimes
• 35:01
  We don't realize.
• 35:02
  And it doesn't have to be like the huge global NGO kind of like it could, you know, it happens at these small, small levels sometimes, but it brings something back alive.
• 35:14
  For us, men, in that what you're saying about listening, man, I've been on my high horse about this one, in just that, you know, it's so clear to me.
• 35:25
  When we don't when we haven't developed, particularly as men, the capacity to hold complexity and be in relationship
• 35:34
  We default to power over to dominance.
• 35:38
  I'm just going to tell you it's this way.
• 35:40
  It actually takes a real type of growth and development to be in a relationship
• 35:47
  Wow, you want this, I want this.
• 35:50
  How are we going to find something that works best for everyone?
• 35:54
  That's harder.
• 35:55
  That is harder work.
• 35:57
  In the fantasy, so many guys are being sold right now, in this kind of resurgence of, you know, old masculinity is simple.
• 36:04
  It's simple.
• 36:05
  This is the way it is.
• 36:06
  And you can just make the choice and assert your will.
• 36:09
  And that's what being a man is.
• 36:10
  And I just love that you brought up listening because
• 36:15
  You know, a lot of guys will sometimes have a reaction to that word.
• 36:19
  Oh, that's soft or that's feminine.
• 36:21
  And it's so not, because what it really is is awareness.
• 36:25
  It's taking in.
• 36:27
  Information using that information to then make some kind of discerning judgment, ideally in service of depth.
• 36:36
  And span, right?
• 36:38
  And so that observational listening capacity, to me, that's actually incredibly masculine.
• 36:45
  It's I'm going to take in the big scene
• 36:48
  So then I can make the choice of the deepest impact for the greatest good, or whatever that might be.
• 36:55
  And that gets me all excited here to maybe pivot a little bit and just bring in
• 37:01
  I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your love of poetry, which in some ways I could see I can start to see how that's related to a type of listening and observation
• 37:12
  And then, in a way, consolidating into some kind of transmission.
• 37:18
  Yeah, thanks for that.
• 37:20
  It's poetry has been such a wellspring for me, you know.
• 37:26
  It wasn't something I really grew up with around.
• 37:29
  My parents weren't interested in poetry or anything like that.
• 37:33
  And really, what kind of generated my initial interest in it was
• 37:39
  My older sister actually, who also has had a profound impact on me, as a strong feminist, a leader in her own way, who
• 37:53
  Really awakened me to a lot of these inquiries in some ways.
• 37:58
  So, huge credit to my sister Rachel, but she
• 38:02
  She's a couple of years older than me, and around the time I graduated high school, she and a couple of her friends who were all
• 38:10
  Students in our art school were writing poetry together, and I just thought it was cool.
• 38:15
  I was like, this is cool.
• 38:16
  They're writing poetry.
• 38:17
  I'm like, I want to read this poetry.
• 38:20
  And so it started this inquiry into an interest in poetry.
• 38:25
  I started finding other poets that I liked.
• 38:27
  I started reading Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, these amazing kind of naturalist poets, Mary Oliver, you know.
• 38:35
  And uh but it didn't really occur to me to write my own poetry until one time I was hanging out with my sister and her friends, and we were talking about poetry, and one of her friends, um, Allison, said
• 38:49
  Well, Roy, do you ever write poetry?
• 38:50
  And I was like, oh, no, I've never really, I've never really tried.
• 38:53
  And she was like, well, you should because you're a poet.
• 38:56
  And I was like,
• 38:59
  Huh.
• 38:59
  I just kind of think I really responded.
• 39:02
  I just kind of like shrugged, and but I went home that night and I wrote a poem.
• 39:06
  And then it was like this
• 39:08
  It was like a dam broke loose.
• 39:10
  I just started writing, and it was terrible, awful poetry, you know, as it often is for someone who's starting out.
• 39:19
  But I loved it.
• 39:20
  It was such a, it was, I've realized that there are all these things latent in me
• 39:26
  That wanted to be expressed.
• 39:28
  And my relationship to poetry now is interesting because I kind of go months sometimes without writing a single poem.
• 39:39
  And um and I've learned to just trust that.
• 39:42
  I used to have judgment in myself for that.
• 39:45
  Like, oh, I'm not writing, I'm not, that means I'm not paying close enough attention.
• 39:52
  That means that there's something deficient in me.
• 39:54
  I'm not being disciplined enough.
• 39:57
  But I don't really have that kind of relationship with poetry.
• 40:01
  A lot of the great poets will say you have to keep the appointment, you have to show up every day and write
• 40:05
  And I respect that.
• 40:07
  I respect the discipline, but it's not for me.
• 40:09
  It's not the way I write.
• 40:13
  I write when I need to.
• 40:15
  And when the poem arrives, it's usually I don't know where it comes from, but it's usually fully formed, and I just write it down.
• 40:24
  Sometimes it's in a voice memo on my phone, or it's in the notes app, you know, or something.
• 40:29
  But it's that's how it comes.
• 40:34
  There's this thing that Leonard Cohen said about poetry that really resonates for me.
• 40:40
  And he said, poetry is just the evidence of life.
• 40:46
  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
• 40:51
  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
• 40:55
  And that feels really true to me that when things are, when my life is burning well
• 41:04
  What I interpret that as is when I'm able to metabolize my experience as it's happening, poetry comes.
• 41:12
  And I can't do that all the time.
• 41:16
  I'm a highly sensitive person.
• 41:20
  I'm often filled with grief and despair at what I'm seeing in the world and overwhelmed by it at times.
• 41:28
  And there are other times when I can hold it and metabolize it and make something from it.
• 41:35
  Something emerges from that.
• 41:36
  Something creative, something regenerative emerges from that.
• 41:40
  And for me, that's often what my poetry is.
• 41:42
  And you know, it's an interesting
• 41:48
  Thing because it does feel very wild to me.
• 41:52
  There's a relationship for me in terms of like the natural world, the wild world, and poetry, because I don't know where it comes from.
• 41:58
  It feels unpredictable.
• 42:00
  It feels.
• 42:02
  It feels like a wild god of its own.
• 42:08
  And I love that about it.
• 42:10
  It's been such a boon to my life.
• 42:14
  Reading the work of great poets is such a profound gift that I wish everyone had the same kind of access to because I know that poetry is
• 42:26
  This isn't exactly the high point of poetry in the world, you know, in terms of like daily readership, right?
• 42:33
  I think that there have been other eras in human history where people embraced it more in the mainstream a lot more.
• 42:40
  Um it's it's such a profound gift, yeah.
• 42:46
  Yeah amen.
• 42:48
  Again, it's great how that ties right into the listening, even in terms of you listen to yourself, right?
• 42:54
  Right.
• 42:54
  Sometimes something needs to come through, and that's a capacity in
• 42:59
  Again, what I love about something like poetry and different work I've done, I often support this is art itself
• 43:10
  Is a process.
• 43:12
  It's like our it's a metabolism.
• 43:15
  It's how we metabolize our grief, our trauma, our fear, our experiences
• 43:20
  Even the good ones, right?
• 43:22
  The overwhelming beauty or awe, it's the way we work with it
• 43:28
  To create a relationship to some kind of experience.
• 43:31
  And the creation of art is healing.
• 43:34
  It just, it's healing, right?
• 43:36
  It's that participatory process, just like in terms of.
• 43:41
  Working with the land.
• 43:43
  And it's something one of my teachers, yeah, would have us do on retreats, right?
• 43:47
  Sit down and like write a poem.
• 43:49
  I'm not a poet, I can't do it well.
• 43:50
  And then guys come to share it, and the first thing they say is, oh, this is crap.
• 43:53
  And it's like, no, no, no, no.
• 43:55
  This is the truth of your heart right now.
• 43:58
  This is the best you got.
• 43:59
  There's no need to minimize that.
• 44:02
  But it's incredible the transformation.
• 44:05
  It can create.
• 44:06
  And again, in a sense, it's that same, what I would say can be a deeply powerful process of kind of sitting and listening and feeling.
• 44:19
  And then concretizing it into something deep.
• 44:22
  That's a transmission of that experience.
• 44:25
  And again, I'm not nearly as well read as you, but
• 44:30
  Something beautiful about poetry is in a very short amount of time, you can feel deeply connected to someone who had an experience
• 44:41
  God knows when, in where, and in what context, but it's oh I I feel kinship there
• 44:49
  I feel gotten.
• 44:51
  And that in itself is another antidote, I think, to so much of the loneliness and isolation and this.
• 44:58
  You know, we're not part of a thing that so many men that I work with are really stuck on.
• 45:07
  And
• 45:07
  Just the idea that you know to slow down and listen and express that that is a type of tending
• 45:17
  in a sense of our inner world, just like we need to tend the outer world.
• 45:21
  And yeah, I just love how these two things clearly interact in your world and life.
• 45:28
  Yeah, yeah.
• 45:29
  I mean, and it's so true that this like interior, exterior, you know, duality that you're describing is so alive in poetry.
• 45:41
  I used to lead these outings with a friend when we were in our early twenties.
• 45:47
  We called it bioregional orientation.
• 45:49
  And it was like these free events that we'd put on where we'd
• 45:52
  People would come to like a state park or something.
• 45:56
  We'd take them on a hike.
• 45:57
  And then in the first half was like an astralist interpretive walk, kind of like what we've done.
• 46:04
  As we're walking, I'm kind of
• 46:06
  Interpreting what I'm seeing in the land and trying to help people understand what's happening.
• 46:10
  And in the second half, we'd stop
• 46:13
  We had to eat lunch and then we would everyone would fan out and sit and just write, and then we would all come back together and share what we wrote with each other.
• 46:23
  Of course, there's so much of like the exterior things that we were learning about in that day are expressed, you know, through these poetry, through these interior
• 46:33
  offerings.
• 46:34
  And there's always so many powerful parallels that emerge.
• 46:38
  And there's also something that you said, too, when you spoke about
• 46:43
  Art is what helps us metabolize our experience.
• 46:45
  And I think that that's very true.
• 46:47
  And it also just brought something to mind for me around culture, which I think is all of this that we're talking about relates to culture.
• 47:00
  I always feel that that is the role of healthy culture is to help us frame and metabolize our experience
• 47:09
  And this is part of what, again, what I feel we're lacking, you know, is that many of us are we though we live in
• 47:21
  Modern civilization, we're bereft of culture.
• 47:26
  We have these proxies
• 47:29
  Society, social networks.
• 47:33
  These are not the same things as village, as culture, as community.
• 47:40
  And they don't serve the same functions at all.
• 47:45
  And so again
• 47:48
  What is required for real culture is that messiness, is the participation, is the getting in there
• 47:57
  And I feel, again, this again ties into relationship with land because
• 48:06
  There's an interesting thing that happens when you start to look at Indigenous cultures and Indigenous communities where the lines between
• 48:15
  Cultural custom and ecological function blur, you know, where
• 48:24
  Where a lot of the cultural customs, like, for example, prohibitions that certain indigenous cultures might have about
• 48:33
  Only fishing at this time of the month or hunting at this time of the month, these also serve these ecological functions, right?
• 48:41
  Because
• 48:42
  Because there is no distinction between the human community and the broader ecological community
• 48:52
  It's a given that we are embedded.
• 48:54
  We're embedded in that system.
• 48:58
  And that is always true.
• 49:01
  That's the big illusion
• 49:03
  That we have to confront, right?
• 49:05
  Is that like you said, we've got Descartes, and we're so past all that stuff, and we're beyond it, man.
• 49:12
  We're like way up here looking down.
• 49:15
  And as men, again, we're conditioned to live in our heads and not in our bodies so much of the time.
• 49:24
  There's this reintegration, there's this reintegration that I feel is needed in all of these levels.
• 49:33
  You know, I think that as we seek to know our places, um
• 49:41
  Culture is like an emerging byproduct almost of that of that inquiry, in my opinion.
• 49:50
  So
• 49:53
  It's an interesting confrontation because, again, for so many of us displaced from our original homelands, right?
• 50:01
  It's like my ancestors were not from North America.
• 50:06
  And, you know, in my own inquiry into ancestry and like into in like what who were my indigenous ancestors at one time
• 50:16
  My ancestors were indigenous to some place.
• 50:18
  Who were they?
• 50:19
  What were their customs?
• 50:21
  And I can seek to know those things, and yet at the same time,
• 50:27
  I don't want to impose those things where I live now because it's they're not from this place.
• 50:33
  But at the same time, I don't want to go and appropriate the customs of this place, right?
• 50:38
  And so what is what is
• 50:41
  In all of that, for me, is that there must be something emerging.
• 50:46
  There must be something new.
• 50:47
  There must be something that needs to be lived into.
• 50:55
  It's going to be a process, a generations-long process for all of us.
• 51:01
  It's not going to happen overnight.
• 51:04
  Man, speak in my language here, and that reminds me of another beautiful thing you talk about.
• 51:14
  a co-creator of on the land we work is is a long-term vision for it, which the scale of which is we're talking like hundreds of years
• 51:22
  And I think that's another thing that is missing in a sense, is as we've moved more and more towards immediacy, media gratification, there's this lack of I'm part of a scale
• 51:36
  An actual time span that, you know, certain things, you know, back in the day to create them, it would take more than one generation.
• 51:44
  It would take generations.
• 51:46
  And for a lot of us, we're disconnected from that.
• 51:48
  And again, part of the story I think you eloquently kind of reconnect us to both on the natural landscape and inside of ourselves is
• 51:59
  It can't all happen right now.
• 52:02
  Yeah.
• 52:02
  Right?
• 52:02
  Like it actually can't all happen, no matter how badly we want it to.
• 52:06
  We're now part of a process.
• 52:08
  And all we can do is show up and do our part and try to kind of create the conditions that it can keep going.
• 52:16
  And our work as men, I think, is very similar to that.
• 52:21
  And, you know, the men's work, I'm lit up by the way it.
• 52:26
  We get to integrate teachings like yours is about what is the culture we're creating.
• 52:31
  Because so many men, the culture we're given
• 52:35
  of masculinity is just fucking terrible.
• 52:38
  And even more than that, it's to judge it less, it's just not sufficient enough
• 52:45
  For the complexity of the time we're living it.
• 52:48
  It's inadequate.
• 52:49
  That's a great, great way to put it.
• 52:52
  And something is being called for, something more.
• 52:56
  And
• 52:58
  Men's work, men's retreats, getting into the land, these are all really core pieces of it that we're all having to figure out together
• 53:07
  And it's not perfect.
• 53:08
  And there's learning for all of us along the way, but it does reignite something.
• 53:14
  And I feel like really, you know, one of the great joys I have of the work I do is
• 53:20
  Seeing men come back alive, just like literally life force coming back into the system
• 53:28
  In a way that, you know, land management, you can start to see the impact.
• 53:35
  You know, last
• 53:36
  Last year, I mean, it was such a visceral thing.
• 53:38
  This we worked the Manzanita, right?
• 53:41
  And it was like, once you see it, it was like this thing was under attack.
• 53:46
  And to liberate it was like unbelievable that I could see the impact it was having on the men.
• 53:52
  And they still talk about it of like, that was so wild and that was so crazy.
• 53:57
  And some of the stories of guys realizing
• 54:00
  That it does take care and it does take intention around all of this.
• 54:06
  And so, man.
• 54:08
  Uh, we're gonna have to do this again because I feel like we're just barely scratching the surface here.
• 54:14
  Um, so I want to have you back on, and I really just want to ring the bell for men.
• 54:17
  You know, if you want to come meet Roy.
• 54:19
  Come get me, get your hands dirty.
• 54:21
  Like, quite literally, yeah.
• 54:23
  Um, let's get out there a couple weeks from now.
• 54:25
  We'll be in Northern California at
• 54:27
  the Labor Day retreat I lead.
• 54:30
  And it is one of the most impactful parts of the retreat.
• 54:33
  I get feedback on every single year now from that.
• 54:38
  What that kind of before and after of the men is, and just what the feeling of, you know, a simple medicine, I think, for us guys is just to get our hands dirty.
• 54:48
  Offline in nature with each other, moving our bodies.
• 54:53
  I teach a lot of stuff in my weekend, and that does a lot of it right there.
• 54:57
  It's just there's just something really
• 55:00
  Potent about that, that I think a lot of men are malnourished around.
• 55:04
  And I really thank you for helping to create and co-create that experience for men.
• 55:11
  It's such a privilege and an honor and a pleasure.
• 55:14
  So I really appreciate the invitation to be involved.
• 55:19
  Yeah, I look forward to it.
• 55:21
  I look forward to it.
• 55:23
  Each year that we do this, it's richer and deeper.
• 55:26
  So
• 55:27
  Yeah, I got some ideas kicking, so I'm going to be in touch with you around some things too.
• 55:32
  What's the best way, Roy, for guys to keep up with you in terms of just what you're doing in the world?
• 55:39
  Yeah, you know, I'm a terrible self-promoter, admittedly.
• 55:44
  I do have a website.
• 55:45
  It's just my name, royarthurblodgett.
• 55:47
  com.
• 55:49
  It's not current, unfortunately.
• 55:51
  I need to do a better job of keeping it current.
• 55:53
  But you can find some of my poetry on there, some of my older work.
• 55:58
  I'm on Instagram at Roy underscore Arthur.
• 56:01
  If you want to follow along there, I'll occasionally post a poem.
• 56:05
  That's kind of the most I do do there.
• 56:09
  Or just by email.
• 56:10
  If anyone wants to reach out, they have questions or any follow-up from this, you can reach me at royblogget at gmail.
• 56:17
  com.
• 56:19
  Jason, I wonder if I could leave you with the poem.
• 56:22
  So I feel like that would be good.
• 56:24
  Yes.
• 56:24
  Okay.
• 56:25
  Cool.
• 56:28
  This poem I wrote called, it's called Privilege.
• 56:30
  And this poem emerged from an interaction I had with my partner, Catherine, who
• 56:38
  I've been blessed to spend most of the last 15 years with since we were really since we were teenagers.
• 56:47
  Here's how it goes Seeking to be free, I invite you into the room.
• 56:53
  All around is my inheritance, massed over millennia
• 56:59
  It is the spoils of war, all that which I did not earn, which I did not ask for.
• 57:07
  I say to you, in my voice, which itself was not come by honestly
• 57:12
  Make of this place what you will rearrange it as you wish make yourself sovereign of this place but you say no
• 57:24
  Pleading now, I say, Please, I'll take it all out, I'll set it outside and light it afire.
• 57:30
  The space is yours to fill of it what you wish
• 57:34
  But you say No you say Sit here with all of this
• 57:42
  In my thirst to be on the other side of it, this feels like punishment, but somehow I know it is a gift.
• 57:58
  Thank you.
• 57:59
  Man, incredible.
• 58:01
  Thank you for that.
• 58:04
  Pleasure.
• 58:04
  Yeah, feeling that.
• 58:06
  Really feeling that.
• 58:07
  Well, Roy, man, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 58:10
  Looking forward to seeing you in the flesh in a couple of weeks here.
• 58:13
  We'll drop your website in the notes here.
• 58:16
  Guys, definitely reach out.
• 58:19
  And until next time, till next time.
• 58:23
  Thanks again, Jason