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Tamar Reno · Relatively Stable

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to relatively stable.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, I'm talking to Tamar Reno from her farm in the North Carolina mountains.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Tamar is a visionary, but she would hate me calling her that.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Her ability to connect people and care for her community in crisis is unparalleled.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: With an academic background in Native American studies focusing on language revitalization,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Tamar has taught at a tribal college,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: developed curriculum for universities and cultural centers,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: and collaborated on language immersion programs.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: She also has worked extensively in the nonprofit sector.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: She and her husband,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: John,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: live at Bear Creek Farm on the Aboriginal hunting grounds of the Cherokee near Tryon,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: North Carolina.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Her days begin and end in the shelter of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: John and Tamar coexist with their three horse relatives and a dog,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: a dog who puts the great in Great Pyrenees.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Centering on kinship,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Tamar utilizes indigenous ways of thinking to explore and deepen horse-human relationships.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: She also traffics in words.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get started.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome and thank you so much for joining me today, Tamar.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Tamar Reno, you found me online.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And can you talk a little bit about how you and I connected in the beginning?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's really good to be staring at your face.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say that.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to interject here and say that you and I have,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: we have written,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: we have written parallel to each other with our daily words on the internet.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: We have written messages to each other.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked to each other on the phone, but this is the first time we're seeing each other face to face.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So this is like a beautiful reunion.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's wild because I feel like I've known you for 50 years.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of wild that we're just now seeing each other.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you and I, I think that we were Facebook friends in kind of a peripheral way for a couple of years.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because I remember I read some of your
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: your writings, and I had loved your writing.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I had, you know, loved it on Facebook, but I don't think we had much interaction.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then last spring, I went to a Lockheed Phillips clinic.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that happened at that clinic was that in the afternoons after
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: the clinic exercises were over,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: he would do
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: these talking circles,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: and everyone would drag their chairs into the middle of the arena and sit down and talk.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that kept coming up was the need for community.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I have often found the equestrian world to be a hugely uncomfortable place to be.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that clinic was different.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was completely different.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the conversations were really candid and people were talking about things that
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: are really hard to talk about.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that idea of community kept coming up.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember at the end of the clinic, I had forgotten something back at the arena.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I was walking back to the arena to get whatever it was I forgot.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he was walking away from the arena.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so I bumped into him and I talked to him for a few minutes
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I told him that it had felt like home.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So then I came back, I came back home from that experience and I realized I really wanted more of that.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a post about the clinic and you commented on the post and you said,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: let's make home space together.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the beginning of our, our serious interactions.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: I can't even remember what inspired that in me, but I remember, I remember writing it.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember that it might have been one of the more honest things that I had
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: written in a really long time.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a really complicated relationship with home myself and what home means.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, the horses have always provided the closest sense that I can come to home.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: But like you were saying,
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: how the equestrian world's a very uncomfortable place to be,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: it feels so much like a dysfunctional home.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that we're living in a really cool time in the equestrian world because
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: there's so many people who are tired of feeling uncomfortable.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't quite know where we're going yet.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: We don't quite know how we can systemically make this a more comfortable place to be for more people.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: But when you,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: in your experience,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: are talking about the equestrian world being a very uncomfortable place to be,
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: can you describe that more with your experience?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to say it.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very uncomfortable place to be, not white.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Aha.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also a very uncomfortable place to be if you're more interested in the
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: horse than you are in whatever the social structure is.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's an uncomfortable place to be if you are really listening to the horses,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: because most of the horses,
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: even at the
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: air quote, best barns are profoundly suffering.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: We have done them a great disservice.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a very normalized place for us to be deeply uncomfortable and for us to be
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: in pain and still functioning.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And for us to not feel like we belong or have a place, but continue to show up anyway.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we're asking the horses to do the same.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're asking everybody to quote cowboy up.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's always a bad idea.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's always a bad idea.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Pushing through fear and pushing through trauma and acting like there's nothing
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: wrong when there's lots of things wrong does not make you more functional.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: It makes you nuts.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: It makes people crazy.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then crazy people want other people to be just as crazy so they don't have to be crazy alone.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the cycle continues.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: The cycle continues.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it was, as you said, it is toxic.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that we are so blessed to be in discussion with other people within the
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: horse industry who are looking to create a different way.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And again, we're in the beginning stages of that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is the beginning?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: What is this new way going to look like?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: But can you give me a little bit of your story of what led you to Western North Carolina?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that you and I are coming together to talk today about
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: The huge reason is to continue to spread the word about what is happening after
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hurricane Helene blew through and decimated so many people's lives.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: But your story is so important to that.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm so intrigued by your story and what has brought you your entire life.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: So not a small ask here,
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: but what brought you to Western North Carolina and the sense that this is now your home.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: I thought about that after, because you and I spoke on the phone yesterday afternoon.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so I thought about that a little bit.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that came up when you and I were talking yesterday was that I
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: was remembering coming to the Blue Ridge when I was a little girl.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: So my parents got divorced when I was really young.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot to that story that I'm probably not going to get into right now.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, my life did not have a first chapter.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I hit the ground running after I left the birth canal because that's what I had to do to survive.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember being maybe five years old and knowing as a five-year-old,
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: all I have to do is live through this.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's all I have to do.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the framework of my childhood was surviving it.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway,
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: so after my parents divorced,
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: my dad would get me on certain weekends and he would take me to the Blue Ridge.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember as just a little tiny person thinking, I'm going to live here someday.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because these mountains called to me.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: They called to me from the time I was tiny.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: But then life happened and I did not live in the Blue Ridge.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: I lived all over the place and I spent
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I spent most of my formative years as a human being in Montana.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then I got to the place where I just could not deal with the Montana winters anymore.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I had some aunties that had lived down in, in Southeast Florida.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I used to go down and visit them sometimes in the winter.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I loved it.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: I loved the water and I loved the beach.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, oh, that's where I want to be.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I loaded up the truck and I moved to Florida.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have horses in that move?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I did not have horses in those days.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Worse, I had teenagers.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Way scarier.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Way scarier.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Terrifying.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Is it harder to find suitable living arrangements for the teenagers?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I moved to Florida and then
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I was away from horses for quite a while.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I rode a lot when I was a kid and as a young woman.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then life happened and kids and school and work and all this other stuff.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I was away from horses for a long time.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Then in 2019, as a birthday present, my husband, John, gifted me a package of riding sessions.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that he felt like there was just something missing.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: I went and I got some boots and I got a helmet and all the things.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I went to this barn, which turned out to be just a shithole of a place, like totally throw down barn.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there was first horse.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was skinny and he was dangerous.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Were you riding him in lessons?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: I did ride him.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I did ride him.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we ended up taking some lessons, which I'll get into in a minute.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that's where I met him.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it was almost immediate that I understood that the reason that I was there was
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: not for myself,
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: but for him.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that it was my job to get him out of there.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so I did.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the guy who owned that barn
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: had no idea who this horse was,
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: but he was a thoroughbred and I had looked at the tattoo under his upper lip and
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: looked it up and I was like,
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: oh my gosh,
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: okay.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't mention that until after I purchased the horse,
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: but later on I told him who he had had in his barn.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me a little bit about First Horse and we're going to go back to your story,
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: but it feels like,
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: and you've mentioned before about how First Horse has called you to places.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Do you feel that First Horse called you to be there?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Find him.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he was crystal clear that my job was now to get him out of there.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: When I first met him, First Horse had been a racehorse and
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: They don't train racehorses to stop.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they stop them by catching them.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: They get another rider to come alongside and catch them.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: They don't teach them to stop.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Way back when I had a horrible riding accident on a horse that took off with me.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say horrible, it was really horrible.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: I like flew through the air and I hit a tree and I bounced off the tree and flew
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: back across the trail and down a ravine.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And literally had to be airlifted out on one of those stretcher things.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And broke my neck in three different places, along with several other bones in my body.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So all this time, I carried this fear of a horse taking off with me.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: That was like my greatest fear when it came to riding.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would be very kind of tense and controlled.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point now, I think I was...
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, it was 50 something.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the universe decides to plunk this complete scaredy cat down on a racehorse
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: that has not been taught the cue to stop.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I saw him bolt with other people on him.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was terrified.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was absolutely terrified.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I also felt like, not that I had to power through it, but that I had to power into it.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, okay, well, I'll take a few lessons and maybe that will help with the fear.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it did not.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: It actually made me so much more anxious and it made him more anxious.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so we parted ways with the trainer.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember I took him out on a ride around the ranch and I was on him,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: but we were just kind of strolling around through the trees.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I told him the story.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I told him about the riding accident and I told him about carrying that fear all this time.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I said to him, I'm scared.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it was as clear as a Zoom meeting that he said to me, I've got you.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'll keep you safe.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he has been a horse of his word and he has never taken off with me, has always kept me safe.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he's a whole lot of horse and there was no method.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: There was no big method to training him or, you know, I didn't follow any particular protocol.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: I had,
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: I got some help from,
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: from listening to some trainers that gave me some ideas and some ways to think
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: about it,
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: but it was relationship.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was relationship that saved us both.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Were you aware of that idea that the relationship was saving you both before you
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: connected with the greater world of trainers that have been kind of pushing
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: relationship for the first time?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because I didn't go looking for that world until after I got first horse.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: When I when I first met him, I was just going to go ride a horse.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that everything about my life was about to change.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that everything inside of me was going to expand.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know any of that.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have known who Warwick Schiller was if I bumped into him on the street.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know who any of these people were or what they were doing or any of that stuff.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was just gonna ride a horse.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And to give the background, Warwick Schiller is the trainer that is...
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: He launched a podcast that began as horses and horse people.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this happened during COVID when everything was just sort of closed up and
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: trainers weren't out giving clinics like they normally do.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And Warwick Schiller,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: who just recently had a New York Times article written about him,
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: he started connecting that intersection of human growth and relationship-based
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: training with your horse.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I discovered his work at a time where I was more interested in what was
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: happening to the humans as a riding instructor than I was about what was happening
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: with the horses.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: But it grew into this greater understanding that happens daily of putting the horse
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: first and listening to the horse's story,
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: listening to the relationships that want to form.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: And just like you were saying, not powering through, but into the
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: And just like you were saying with first horse, being able to tell the horse the story that I'm afraid.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's amazing what opens up through that.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: and starts to blossom.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And just like so many things that are a part of the shifts in perception and
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: cultural and all of that stuff,
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: it feels like there were so many of us,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: like you were saying,
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: that were out there doing these separate things in our different parts of the world.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I thank Warwick Schiller for bringing those people together in the beginning so
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: that we can realize there's more of us out there
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I have been so thankful through the different relationships that have came as a
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: part of the greater worldwide equestrian community with the idea of having
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: relationship at the heart of what we're doing with the horses.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got this thoroughbred who you were afraid of.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: You realized that you needed to get him out of the place that he was at.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you guys were just very clear with each other.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: So where did First Horse take you next?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: First, we took him to another boarding barn there in Florida.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that was really important to him
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: has always been really important to him is the freedom to move, to move around, to not be confined.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Confinement is, it's like his worst nightmare.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: He hates confinement.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: We found another barn that I felt like we could trust that they would feed him.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: We couldn't trust at the last place.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, at the last place I was buying feed
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they were giving it to the other horses and not giving it to my horse.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: First horse weighs about 450 pounds more now than he did when I got him.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he's a little rounder than maybe he should be, but he's sexy.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: He is sexy.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's sexy.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Really sexy.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And oh my gosh, he's just so, so glorious.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, so we found a barn with trustworthy people.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, they had a really nice pasture situation.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: They were just starting out and they had, I think it was three or four mares.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they put him out with these mares.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now he's a ladies man.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he loves the mares.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the mares love him.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: They follow him around with hearts in his eyes going, oh, he's so handsome.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So he was in heaven.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: He loved it there.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he stood sentry for those mares and he loved on those mares.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really nice.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: then the barn kept,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: they started adding more and more borders and the barn kept getting bigger and bigger.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so they started cutting into the pasture
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: by creating more individual turnout paddocks.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so the pasture started getting smaller and smaller.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then they started rotating days that the horses could have turnout in the big pasture.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he started to lose his mind.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we found another boarding barn that had wonderful turnout for Florida,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: wonderful turnout for Florida,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: really big pastures.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Each pasture was probably
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, two to three acres.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they rotated the pastures, but all the horses were always out.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: They bring them inside during the hottest part of the day, but other than that, they were out.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the isolation was really an issue there because they didn't pasture horses together.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: First horse had already loved and lost several friends and
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: during the time that we owned him because of decisions made by the other horse owners.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to move their horse or whatever.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: At the last barn that we were at before moving up here,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: he had been pastured with another thoroughbred and they were very good friends,
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: very close.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the owner of that horse decided to separate them.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: John and I had been out of town for a couple of days and we came back and the decision had been made.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he was in a paddock by himself.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I told John, we have to get him another horse right now.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's when we got Geneviève.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the purpose of getting Geneviève was so that first horse would have a horse of
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: his own that nobody else could take away from him.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't remember where I was going with all this.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that we were meandering your way up the East Coast to the Western North Carolina.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: I really liked living in Florida actually until I got him because before I had a horse,
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: I could be outside when I wanted to and inside the rest of the time.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: But once I got him, I was outside in that Florida heat all the time.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also a horrible place to keep horses because they're not suited for that kind of heat.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: We were spending two hours a day hosing off the horses to keep them alive,
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: not even to keep them comfortable,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: just to keep them alive.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: We were thinking we've got to get out of Florida.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: John said, well, why don't we move to Montana?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, winter, that's why.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to live somewhere that had four seasons, but mild winter.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: kind of somewhere in between.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I really wanted to be in the mountains again.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I had been hearing about Asheville.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: We came up to Asheville in fall of 2019.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: I knew right then I was like, I told John, we're going to live here.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And our plan was to come back during the following year, which was 2020.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, 2020 COVID happened.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: He and I both got COVID in March of 2020.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that was at the beginning of the pandemic when the strains were really strong.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we almost died.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we almost died for a long time.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like we were sick for, I don't even know, weeks, months.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then we didn't die.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: And when we realized that, you know, holy cow, we're not dead.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: I told John, we're going to create the life we want right now.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we came back up here in 2021.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when we stayed at that cabin, that little cottage that I had posted pictures of.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we stayed there for several weeks and started really doing the investigative
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: work to figure out how to move up here.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And what was it about the cottage and its proximity to the area that had been,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: there's so many areas that had been hit so hard with the hurricane,
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: but what was it specifically about the
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: where that cabin was close to?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Did you take another trip up to that area?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we went up there a few weeks ago.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that cottage is on Hobson Branch Road.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Hobson Branch Road is,
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: as the crow flies,
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: it's sort of in between Barnardville slash Weaverville and Mars Hills.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Hobson Branch itself is just this little creek that flows down through this sweet
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: little valley,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: and that's where Hobson Branch Road is.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it meanders down and it feeds into the forks of ivy.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the forks of ivy are where there's so many ivies.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there's the big ivy river,
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: and then there's ivy creek,
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: and then there's the north ivy creek,
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: and there's so many of these
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like those settlers just named everything Ivy.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway,
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hobson Branch flows into the forks of Ivy,
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: sort of at the bottom of that road,
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hobson Branch Road.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that area was hit really hard, really hard.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: The cottage that we lived in was fine.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of up on a hill.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: But at the bottom of Hobson Branch Road, there used to be a little single lane bridge
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: that crossed over the forks of ivy.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: That bridge is gone.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: We found it.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's downstream.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a mangled, twisted pile of metal.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there used to be this really sweet little house right there near that bridge.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they had a hammock in their yard.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I would think about how they would sit out in that hammock and they could listen to the creek.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: We would always feel bad when we came home at night because our headlights would
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: shine right into their living room.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then we would cross the bridge.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gone.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not there anymore.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not there anymore.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the ground that it was sitting on is also gone.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if they were home when that happened.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that they weren't, but I don't know.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And where did First Horse eventually land you?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Bear Creek Farm.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Bear Creek Farm, you are located in the Green Creek area.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, near Tryon.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: First horse is a powerful manifester.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he has these really big dreams.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he has a big voice.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: He knew what he wanted.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: I remember later after moving here,
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: I remember thinking back to that other barn where he had been pastured with the mares.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: I remember watching him at that place and he would stand sentry over those mares and just look at them.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I later realized that he was literally visualizing the life he wanted for himself.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's what he wanted.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted his own mares.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted his own field, his own autonomy with his mares.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: In an ideal world where humans have not intervened in the lives of horses,
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: tell me if I'm wrong,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: then we wouldn't have geldings,
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: we would have stallions.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the male horses,
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: they're programmed,
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: they're designed to have a band,
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: a harem of mares that they're not in charge of,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: but they're there to protect and there to care for.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: With horses, no one is really in charge.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's so much more fluid than that.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: And people talk about, well, there's the boss mare and there's this and there's that.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are mares who are bossy.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Their relationships are so fluid, they do what needs to be done.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And whoever is best able to do what needs to be done in a given moment, in a given situation, does it.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the rest of the herd says, oh man, thanks.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: They're masters of living in community.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's one of the lessons that they can teach us is that living in community.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we talk about connection.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Boy, nobody knows how to do that better than a horse.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was last year when the study,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: the actual science study came out that stated that horses lived in fluid roles and
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: not hierarchies.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember the world was kind of like, oh my gosh.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Mind blown.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Mind blown.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: But if you watch them, that's the way it is.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: When they're able to live in a state of regulation.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I think he visualized this life for himself and he visualized it in such a
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: powerful way that I started to visualize the same thing.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: We literally moved into his dream space,
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: like packed up a moving truck and brought our stuff and moved into his dream space.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: When I found Bear Creek Farm online, at that point, I didn't know.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know what our budget was yet.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I was pretty sure we couldn't afford it, but I saved it anyway.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I would go back and look at it.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then it worked out by the time that we were actually ready and we had put all the
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: things in place that you have to do in order to
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: sell one house and buy another and all that stuff, that we were able to afford it.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the owner accepted our offer in spite of the fact that he had another offer for
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: $75,000 more than we could give him because he wanted us to be here.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: You found yourself living in Western North Carolina.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you walked into the call that you had felt since childhood,
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: guided by First Horse,
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: telling you this is the place.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: And for no reason whatsoever, the landowner took your offer, which was less than the other offers.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: So this home definitely found you.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: What was it like becoming a part of this mountain community?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was like finally arriving home.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it was like.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: I remember before we moved here,
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: I had this fear,
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: I guess,
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: for lack of a better word,
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: that I wouldn't have
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: community when I got here and that I would have to like,
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would have to make community,
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: create community because that's what I had to do in Florida.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had to create community and it was not easy and it often wasn't even possible, but I managed to do it.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I managed to have enough of the community that I had the resources that we needed for our horses.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was concerned about that after I got here, like, would that happen?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it was completely unfounded.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was just completely unfounded.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: By the time we got here,
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: everybody knew who we were and they knew all kinds of stuff about them because the
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: previous owner had talked to them and told them that we were coming and we had
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: neighbors bringing food.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: We had one neighbor stop by and she brought a muck fork as a housewarming present
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we went to the local feed store.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: The old guy who owned it, who has since passed, it now belongs to his grandson.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like he knew who we were and everybody was just so welcoming.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: By the time we were here, had been here for three weeks, we knew enough people to host a party.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't even have any furniture yet.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we threw a pool party and it was so much fun.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just like being welcomed home.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like we had been,
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: off at war and had survived and we had come home and- This place that was waiting
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: for you.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: With open arms.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in love with your dog.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Those of us who follow your daily writing, which we're going to get into that even more.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: So whenever I'm talking about horses and writing in the same place,
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: we have writing,
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: we have writing,
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: but your daily writing that you put out for people,
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: what has become a daily love letter from the mountains talking about
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: what people have or are experiencing post-hurricane helling.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: But we get a daily picture of your dog with these missives.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that the daily Juno,
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: and that's your dog,
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: was a part of your life before you started to add larger posts to that.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell me about how Juno acclimated to life in Western North Carolina, the new farm?
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: he was like finally oh I'm home this is great you know Juno's a great Pyrenees so
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: he is genetically a mountain dog Juno's happy wherever Juno is so it's not like he
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: was an unhappy dog before we lived here but he loves it here this is home
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: absolutely this is home he does his job of barking to keep the predators away and
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: watching over the horses and do the horses like having him near no not especially
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: they mostly ignore him every once in a while he'll like bark at first horse and
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: first horse will be like tough talk for a pipsqueak like you
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Gessant.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Gessant likes him.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: Gessant, I'm going to say her name correctly.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: When did she join your herd?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: She came to us in March of 23.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: So she's the newest addition to the herd.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you have two mares, a galsing.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: A gelding with a lot of testosterone.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the jury's out on that.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: And for those who don't know, a gelding is a horse that's been been neutered.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I will throw the word out gelding all the time.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I have so many people ask me, what does that mean?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: But there's also a chance that the neutering was not complete.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you can have a horse that has very stallion-like tendencies and higher levels of
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: testosterone that otherwise you would think they would not.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I can never say the right word for that.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Can you say the word?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's not kryptonite.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hard word.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: It means that one of the testicles might not have descended.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we suspect that that's the case with him.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I've had a few horses in my life that we have suspected that.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: We've never ultrasounded to see or really kind of check the testosterone levels.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: But you can tell.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely is a swagger.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's definitely got the swagger.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me about your relationship with Story.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: In your life.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: What does story mean to you?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: Story is, is everything.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: So language, language is what holds our worldview.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's how we, it's, it's what holds how we perceive our relationship to everything.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Human beings for thousands and thousands of years have been programmed to think in stories.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's why when you,
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: for instance,
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: let's say you're taking a class and there's an instructor who's just rattling off
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: bullet point facts,
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: chances are really good you're not going to remember anything that that instructor said.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: But if that instructor sits down and tells you a story, that's going to stay with you.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's how we connect with ourselves.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's how we connect with other people.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's how we connect with the world around us.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: We think in stories.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: And stories are one of the reasons why I survived my childhood.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: I could read at a very young age.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I read everything.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I read David Copperfield and did a book report when I was in third grade
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: and was accused of,
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: plagiarizing or whatever.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was too.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's very interesting.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's a story that we haven't shared with each other.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like how could you possibly have read and understood David Copperfield?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're eight years old.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I did.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: I did read it and I did understand it.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I read everything.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons...
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or one of the things that literacy did for me was it helped me to imagine a different life.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew that the life that I was living in was not the only option in this world.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that was because of stories.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it allowed you to think beyond your circumstance.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_02: Mm hmm.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: How have words, story, narrative followed you then throughout your life?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Did it, did it inform your work?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Did it inform?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I taught for a while.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that was, it was definitely part of that.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: I actually wrote a piece about it recently.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote about stories
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: In one of your recent daily posts on day 59,
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: post Hurricane Helene,
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: you wrote that there are stories inside of us.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Some occurrences are so significant, they demand our whole attention.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: They hold our attention long after they're over.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: How much longer, I don't know.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps I'll be around long enough to find out.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Helene was that kind of occurrence.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: If 40 trillion gallons of water barreling down a mountainside doesn't warrant our attention,
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what does.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you go on to talk about your inner historian and your witness,
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: and you have written so many beautiful words about bearing witness.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you found yourself at home in the Western North Carolina mountains and you guys
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: were very,
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: very much already a part of your neighborhood,
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: a part of your community.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have this thousand year storm happen.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: And since Helene is where you and I have really connected on such a deeper level,
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: because for myself and I,
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: my farm and in the town that I'm in is at the foothills of the mountains.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: We're on the outskirts of where the epicenter is.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: I talk about driving around in our community right now,
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: especially now with all the leaves off the tree,
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: and I haven't been really leaving the farm much in the past few months,
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: being able to see into the devastation and see into how much of our forest is no
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: longer there and how many houses still have blue tarps and so many houses still
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: have red slips on the front from FEMA saying that the place is uninhabitable.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: In my little world, which is nowhere near the center of the disaster,
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I needed to almost create a new language for the grief that I felt rolling off of
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: the mountain because I was I found myself in a very interesting nervous system spot
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: because I was experiencing physical reactions to things that felt like it was
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: beyond the scope of what I had experienced.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: And.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: my connection with you and your finger on that nerve center of bearing witness
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: after the storm has been immensely healing just for me in my own tiny way.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: So can you tell me about how your writing transformed from just the Daily Juno
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: where you were showing us your dog,
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: you've experienced this geologic event that reshaped the landscape of where you're living.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: and then started writing about what you saw?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think Helene sure got my attention.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've been,
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: like you said,
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: I've been posting these June of morning pictures for a number of years.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing that, oh, back in like 2017, I think.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And a friend of mine at the time who was
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: who was and still is kind of an activist.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we had just gotten this beautiful dog at that point.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was eight months old and I had posted some pictures.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I'm probably gonna be that person that posts way too many pictures of their dog.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so she reached out to me and she said, these are bleak times.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when I see Juno, it makes me happy.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna ask you this favor.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna ask you if you will post a picture of him every morning.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: Before you do anything else,
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: before you post anything else or share anything else,
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: just post a picture of Juno.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been posting these pictures of Juno for my friend Evelyn ever since.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he's developed kind of a cult following and people really like him because he's
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: this big,
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: fluffy,
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: gorgeous dog.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: He's beautiful.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's a beautiful white bear.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: He is.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: He absolutely is.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: Then when Helene happened, for the first few days,
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't really know anything.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know anything because you couldn't leave the neighborhood.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't get out our road.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the day of the storm, our cell phones were still working, but by the next day, they were not.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't, at that point, we didn't even have roaming data on them.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: The emergency, you couldn't have called 911 if you had wanted to.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that went on.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say that went on until day seven.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was day seven that I started doing the posts.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: And after a few days, kind of before day seven, we were finally able to get out our roads.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Some neighbors had come out with chainsaws and cleared just enough that you could get through.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we had gone out to get gas for the generator.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: We went to an area where they did have cell reception.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I started to see the reports of what had happened.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: I saw the story of Chimney Rock.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Chimney Rock is like 20 minutes from here.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: We take our grandkids there to play in the river and take them out to lunch.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: We've taken out-of-town relatives to go up to the top of Chimney Rock.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's an area that... And there's a beautiful flowering bridge there.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the flower bridge that's the rainbow bridge where,
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: and I was hearing the reports as they were talking about like the warnings that
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: were coming of potential dam failure throughout the day.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the dam didn't fail.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't fail.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so that alarm kept kind of blurting on my phone.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: When I saw a picture of the Rainbow Bridge where people put the collars of their
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: dogs and their animals that have passed on,
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: something inside of me broke when I realized that this memorial to so many
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: different people for so long,
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: something that's so intimate was gone.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that was just a drop in the bucket.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gone.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, really and truly gone.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so is Chimney Rock Village.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: Although, you know, they're working on it.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not gone forever, I guess.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it is changed forever.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the things, this is kind of off topic, but it's all the same topic.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: Our topography has changed forever.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: We have rivers where we did not have rivers before.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there are people in other places that are saying, well, why don't you just put them back?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do that.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do that.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can't, you cannot do that.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: We have mountain sides that are gone.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine, her ex-husband is a farmer up in Swannanoa.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: He can't rebuild his farm
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: because the land his farm sat on isn't there anymore.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can't rebuild on air.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: it was sometime between the first day and the seventh day that we were able to go
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: somewhere and that had internet and we started to see what was actually happening.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you talk about how you felt the grief.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: The grief is, it's in the air.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's in the air.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's like,
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: when you can smell something and you don't know what that smell is and it drives
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: you crazy because you don't know if you're,
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: did you leave the iron on or is your house on fire or,
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: what's going on?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you try to find the source of that thing that you smell, but you don't even really know what it is.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: What we are smelling is Appalachian grief.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's everywhere.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it is unavoidable.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in every air that we breathe in and every breath that we breathe in and
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: every breath that we breathe out.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: And are living in a society where grief doesn't have a place before.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why we're crazy.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why we're crazy.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: We are living in unsustainable systems.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And these unsustainable systems are collapsing around us.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: They were always going to collapse.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: They were a house of cards.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think about what Kim TallBear talks about.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: She's a indigenous scholar from up in Canada and she talks about the settler apocalypse.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: What that is, is unsustainable systems.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: And these systems are crumbling.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: And boy, nothing reveals everything like 40 trillion gallons of water barreling down a mountainside.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: It leaves nothing to the imagination.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: Everything is laid bare.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that's laid bare is our true selves.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that,
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: if there is such a thing as a silver lining,
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: and I think the idea that there's always a silver lining is just crap.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: OK, because sometimes there isn't.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: But if there is a silver lining, it is that we have been, as you said, reduced all the way down.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe you were one of the first people who called people out on their platitudes,
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: that cold removal from having to deal with or look at the grief and the pain of the
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: greater community around you.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that's our first line of defense, it feels like.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to throw out a meme or we're going to throw out a greeting card or
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to offer thoughts and prayers and move on and get closed back up into
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: our own cavern of grief that has no place to express.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And writing for me has always been the place where I can lance the wound,
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: where I can,
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: whether I'm writing privately for myself in journals or if I am writing a piece
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: that I plan to put out to the outside world that's more polished and more tidy and
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: trying to have a beginning,
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: middle and end.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: Story and the story that I tell myself expressed back out into the world through writing.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: is is the place where I can try to make sense of what's around me and it's been so
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: beautiful to watch the in the midst of the horror the way you're and I think I
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: compared this the other day to your candle that's in the window like I can see your
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: candle across the woods your ability to gather
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: to just cut through the BS to find the people who are out there doing the work is just unprecedented.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't wanna tell you how important,
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: not just for me,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: but for so many people,
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: your daily words and your ability to allow us into your processing.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: Your ability to tell us that, yeah, everything is chaos right now and there are no answers.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a solace in somebody telling the freaking truth.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the characters,
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: the cast of characters that are out there,
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: those lightworkers who,
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: and I think of Beth Trigg,
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: and there are so many others out there.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: The piece that I'm writing this week is my first kind of deep dive into where we're
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: at from what I see,
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: where we need help,
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: how we can help individuals after the storm.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it was,
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't realize how much we wrapped back around to,
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: like you were saying,
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: coming back
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: You had it was basically local guys who were cutting people and women who were
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: cutting people out of their neighborhoods before the larger organizations could
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: reach the ground.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that we have we we've gotten so thick.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: outside of the landscape that's still recovering so deeply from the storm into
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: having turned this into a political argument that we forget that it's not that FEMA
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: isn't helping.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: FEMA's helping as much as FEMA can help.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that the Red Cross wasn't there with shelters.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: They were helping as much as they could help.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: Same with Samaritan's Purse.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: Same with all of those bigger organizations.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the $24 million that came in from the concert were Carolinas.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: It has to go to these trusted, vetted, big behemoths
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there's only so much they can do.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it's those people like the Beth Triggs out in the world who are talking to people,
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: hearing their stories,
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: seeing the needs that they individually have,
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: and then turning it into art,
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: being able,
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how she actually still has energy,
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: to be able to then present that back out to the public.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: So somebody out there with the resources might be able to help these individuals.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you have been a bomb through all of that.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love you so much.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: I really do.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: You are such a gift in my life.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: My goodness.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: So like, I just want to backtrack just a little bit about the post.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, so I was, I did those June and morning posts.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then after, after cell phone roaming came back because I had cell phone roaming and
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: For,
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say six weeks,
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: give or take,
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: after the storm,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had cell phone roaming,
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: but no actual internet.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: How long was your internet?
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was about six weeks.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say it was about six weeks.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I could be wrong about that.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: It could be longer.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was out for a long time.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: but cell phone roaming started working and our cell phone provider told us,
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: sent us a text and said,
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: we are not going to charge you for cell phone roaming.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can do this, you know, and I think they extended that like through January.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: So there's probably still people,
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: there are definitely still people that don't have internet now still in some of the more,
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: more remote areas.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I had been doing prior to the storm, I had been doing the Juno pictures and I had also,
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: done a daily journal practice that was very private.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was just for me.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: Once I was able to connect via the internet,
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: the cell phone roaming back out to the rest of the world,
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: I married the two together.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had a couple of people say, oh, I'm so glad you're back.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do a Juno taco picture.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, you're insane.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: doing that I can't do that I cannot so everybody knows that on Juno would do a taco
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Tuesday post prior to the hurricane yes that brought delight and joy to so many and
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: it wasn't a time for delight and joy no and it just felt it felt like delusional to
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: do it still feels delusional to pretend that everything is okay yeah
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: I still can't do it.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't mean that I don't have moments of being okay, because I absolutely do.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I cannot act like nothing happened.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I started doing the post and I started writing about what was happening,
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: I started connecting to even more people.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I started connecting to people like Beth Trigg and Sherry Barker
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: and other people who are boots on the ground doing what needs to be done.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you talked about these bigger organizations and government assistance.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's true that they are all here and they are all doing some good.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also true that they are not enough and that they are too big to get out of their own way.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: It is not what is going to save Appalachia.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's not what's saving Appalachia.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: What's saving Appalachia is community.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's people like Beth.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: who are responding to real needs in real time with real resources without any
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: bureaucratic red tape at all.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody needs something, they are being given what they need right now.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't have to jump through a hoop and they don't have to submit
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: documentation and they don't have to do all that stuff.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_00: They simply need to say, this is what's happening for me.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think about how,
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: and you are so eloquent in your description of this,
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: talking about doing normal people things.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: So you are somebody who your internet came back on.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: You cut yourself out.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: You had minimal damage to your farm comparatively to what people experienced around you.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was still so weird and shocking to be, I'm going to go out to eat food.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to go to a restaurant.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting back into the flow of just normal people things.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how hard that was without having lost everything.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the more poignant things
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: thoughts that I really had to wrap my head around and to wrap any sort of residual
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: judgment that I might have inside of myself was the discussion that was recently
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: had about victims of the hurricane putting out items on wish lists that weren't
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: basic necessities.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Normal people things.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's what life is,
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: that sense of comfort within not just having the bare necessities of a bathroom,
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: a roof over your head,
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: a way of coming in from the freezing cold temperatures,
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: which a lot of people still don't have.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that makes us feel like we have some sort of shelter from the chaos is
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: those small things like the coffee cup that's in front of me,
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: or having a cup of tea,
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: or I'm going to decide to go out to eat instead of cooking over this campfire today.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: The tiniest things that can make this massive amount of psychological difference.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we have this knee-jerk
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: judgment as humans of well if you don't have the bare necessities how can you be
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: asking for anything that's a remote luxury and i didn't realize that until you guys
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: started the discussion about it and i thank you i thank you for that because that
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: was just it was one of those i think that i'm open and then i was like wow i really
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: need to look at the bigger picture here yeah i was i was so horrified by that that
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: one of the um
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: One of the GoFundMes that I shared and that I shared with you and that you have
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: added to your list is a man who lives up in Swannanoa with his wife.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's got kids.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's got grandkids.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a big family.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: They lost everything.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he earned his living in construction.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's a builder.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: So they didn't just lose their home.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: They lost everything.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: their tools they I mean he and his wife found their chest freezer that had been
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: sitting inside their house a mile and a half away and they recognized it and this
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: was much later this was weeks later and they recognized it because they had a lock
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: on it and they recognized the lock so they lost everything well one of the things
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: that this guy used in his work as a builder is a drone
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: He used drones to take care,
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: to take pictures of jobs and to be able to map out topography for building projects
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: and all of this.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: So he posted a GoFundMe and he posted a wish list.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: And let me back up a little bit and say that this is somebody who has done work for friends of mine.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's a legitimate person.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_00: He's a loving husband and father and grandfather and a vital member of a community.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he lost confidence.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: all of his tools.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, one of the things he lost was his drone.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so he put together an Amazon wishlist.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the items on there was a drone.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: And drones are expensive.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: That thing's like $450.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I keep going back and checking the wishlist because I want somebody to buy that damn drone so bad.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't,
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have the money to buy the drone right now,
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: or he would have it,
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: he would have had it.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_00: But people piled on and attacked him and accused him of being a fraud and a scammer.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: These people have lost everything.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: And not only do they have to deal with that,
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: and not only do they have to deal with all of the finagling and the bureaucracy of
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: trying to get some assistance,
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: but they're also under attack.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: and being accused
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: of like you said, wanting anything besides food and water.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: In the early days,
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: when stories first started coming out from the storm,
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: I had an interesting reaction to something that I would have never seen coming beforehand.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: There was a relatively sensational story that went viral.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: While it may or may not have been true of what this person experienced,
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: it was a narrative that wasn't far off the mark.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the world was still so knee jerk about the extent of the devastation that more
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: energy went towards trying to have this person's story seen as fraudulent instead
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: of taking the bits and pieces that might be true,
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: might have been experienced that were true.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: These things actually happen and accepting that.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that as we are taking stories from the people who have lived the
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: experience in the epicenter of the storm and trying to spread those words out to
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: the greater world,
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: it often feels like we're screaming into a void because of that energy,
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_01: that natural human tendency of judgment.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the judgment's getting in the way of the help.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: I know that we are,
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: for my own self,
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: with this list that I've had going of places that people can go to contribute good services,
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: funds,
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: and that's an ever-changing list that's going to be ever-changing for some time.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: That now so much focus is looking at individuals and how can I directly financially
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_01: help these individuals?
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to be trying to keep my list updated as things change and trying to
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: stay on top of that as the stories are coming through.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: But what can you, from your vantage, see as how somebody can help?
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody wants to help, what do they need to do?
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_00: They need to put money directly into the hands of the people that need it.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: And those people know what they need.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_00: They should have the autonomy to make their own choices.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: I know that people,
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: especially in this day and time,
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: when there's so many scammers and people get worried about being scammed,
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: the risk of living an ungenerous life is far greater than the risk of being scammed.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if you get scammed out of your five or $10, who gives a shit?
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: OK, seriously, who gives a shit?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't need to edit that out.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mind.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not going to.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: That going out into the world, because that's the truth.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: People can they can look if they want to.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: They can look on your list.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: They can look at at ones that I've posted.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: They can certainly look at what Beth Trigg has posted because she's posted a bunch of them.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: Give money directly to people.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing you'll hear people say,
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: if I give money to people,
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to get the tax deduction.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, unless you're wealthy, you're not getting the tax deduction anyway.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to take the standard deduction because you're not giving $25,000, right?
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you are giving $25,000, then maybe you do want the tax deduction.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: But if you are giving less than 25 grand, you're not getting a tax deduction.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to take the standard deduction.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm writing about that this week.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lame excuse.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lame excuse.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_00: And like we talked about earlier,
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: all of these organizations,
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_00: even the ones that are doing a lot of good,
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: are by their nature cumbersome and slow.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't have time for cumbersome and slow.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't have the time.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I will say Grace Covenant Presbyterian Baptist Church, if you give them money,
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: The money that you give them today will go out the door by tomorrow.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: They are giving,
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: they are paying people's rent and pulling people out of emergency situations left
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: and right.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the smaller nonprofits, they're in Asheville.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's Grace Covenant.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: And they have set up like a minister's discretionary fund.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so the money that goes in there, their minister can give those funds out
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: at her own discretion.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: And she's given them out left and right.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: And North Carolina has not passed legislation to halt evictions, correct?
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, we don't have an eviction moratorium.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even have an aid package.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like we don't have an aid package out of the state of North Carolina.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: What we have is a lot of posturing and a power grab that's been wrapped up by virtue signaling
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: but we don't even have an aid package.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I know that some aid has been given, but not on the scale that it needs to be.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: We can't even agree about the numbers.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it was estimated that there were,
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was like somewhere between 100,000 and 125,000,
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: Pisgah Legal Services was saying 125,000 and some other source was saying 100,000
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: homes that were damaged in Western North Carolina.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_00: as a result of the storm.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: And some 200,000 people have been displaced because generally in a house,
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: there's more than one person,
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: right?
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: But these are not, these numbers have not been confirmed.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: These are estimations based on models that I don't even know what any of that means.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: Buncombe County says it's 900, 900.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_00: So somewhere between 900 and 200,000
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: is the right number.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just insane.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why government and big behemoth organizations are not what we need in this situation.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you only have $20 to give or $5 to give or $200 to give, find a person to give it to.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_00: Find a person to give it to.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you give, say, $200 and somebody else gives $200, pretty soon that person has enough money
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_00: to be able to put a roof over their head.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's my understanding too, that we're reaching the end of FEMA hotel vouchers, correct?
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_00: They've been extended and that's another thing.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was just talking to John about that yesterday because they keep extending them in
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: these little tiny increments,
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: okay?
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's great that they're being extended, but why are the tiny increments necessary?
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: What that does is it puts a person in a perpetual state of anxiety because they
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_00: think that in a few days they're going to be out in the cold.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why not extend them indefinitely?
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_00: We have the money.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: FEMA has the money.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: We absolutely have the money to extend them indefinitely.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, because people...
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's this, I have to back up a little bit.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's this idea, there's this built in superiority that thinks that poor people deserve their poverty.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that hurricane victims deserve what happened to them.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: And people can sit in their, you know, warm, cozy living rooms.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they think that because they made good choices or they're in alignment with the universe,
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_00: that bad things won't happen to them.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they're delusional.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so people that are struggling are made to jump through all of these hoops and
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_00: live in this constant state of terror that they're going to be cold,
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: that they're going to be hungry,
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: whatever.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's unnecessary.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes everything so much worse.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Why not just extend the hotel stays indefinitely?
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we're compounding.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_01: already pre-storm insecurity with a magnitude of insecurity that is off the charts.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you for bringing that up.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the Asheville area in particular,
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: there was already this deep judgment towards already marginalized societies,
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: especially the amount of homeless.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's also kept numbers from being truly accurate.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know how many people were lost.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you think about the number of encampments that were by the river already, just in Asheville proper.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: People we didn't know were there.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's the in-between, which is so much a part of Appalachian and mountain culture.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Families that were on land that had been in their families for generations living
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: in a house that probably wasn't updated.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think about my own great grandmother's house when I moved into it.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_01: The electrical system was, you know, still, you know, the the fuses that you screw into the wall.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: that land richness,
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_01: especially for these families that were living in homes that were part of
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: generations before them,
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: they now find themselves in particular cases with there's no land left to rebuild on.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you were talking about that before,
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_01: but it was already a population that we turned a blind eye to.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: that were rich in so many ways that modern culture doesn't see as rich.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_01: And populations that have been marginalized prior to the storm are completely being
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: forgotten about as rebuilding happens.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so thankful for the people who are working within the community to take stories
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_01: that wouldn't be told and continuing to tell those stories and to build on those stories.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_01: What is your hope with the work that you're doing as you move forward in the coming days,
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_01: weeks and months?
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_01: What do you want people to most know?
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my goodness.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: I want people to know that this is still happening.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's huge to let them know that this is still happening.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think I wrote about this recently.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I wrote about this yesterday.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I can never remember.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember what I said five minutes ago.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So people talk about, oh, now we're in the recovery phase.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're not in the recovery phase.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Recovery doesn't happen while trauma is still unfolding.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the trauma is still unfolding.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard for people who aren't here
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_00: who haven't seen it, to wrap their head around that, they're just going to have to trust us on that.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're just going to actually have to trust us on that.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The trauma is still unfolding.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the news media has moved on.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's still some media coverage.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not enough, but there's still some.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just want people to know that this is still happening.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've lived through other disasters.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived through an earthquake in California.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived through hurricanes down in Florida.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived through forest fires in Montana.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have never experienced anything like this.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have never experienced the scale of this.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_00: More than 20% of our forest is destroyed in an area that is almost entirely forest.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just the magnitude of what has happened here.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can go up to Swannanoa, for instance, and it still looks like a war zone.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a little better than it was, but it's going to look like that for a long time.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say a long time, I don't mean for a few more weeks.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for years, maybe decades.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it will.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's never going to look exactly the same because the land is different, but
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: for it not to look like the site of a disaster, that's gonna take years.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna take years.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I want people to understand that this is not over.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing I want people to understand is that,
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: and this is something that applies whether you live here in Appalachia or you live
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_00: in Jersey or wherever,
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: or England,
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: is that
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_00: The only healthy response to what's happening in life is to feel it and see it and
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: talk about it and be into it and be in it,
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_00: be inside of it.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only way that human beings can be healthy.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you are telling yourself or you are telling somebody else to brush themselves
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_00: off and pull themselves up by their bootstrap and cowboy up
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_00: you are perpetuating disease.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are perpetuating a diseased society.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_01: My question for you,
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_01: as we are getting to the end of our talk today,
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: and I know that we're gonna have so many more in the future,
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_01: is what wisdom from your herd can you send out into the world,
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_01: whether through your experience with the storm,
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_01: through your writing, through what is First Horse and his women telling the world right now?
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, just this morning, he reminded me, he said, ask a different question.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I got up this morning and I sat down to write and I
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: stared at my laptop and I had no idea what I was gonna say.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was cloudy and overcast and I was foggy and I'm tired and my knee still hurts.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I just kept hearing something that he tells me all the time, ask a different question.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that requires asking and then waiting.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: You have to ask and then pause and then wait.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then you might have to do that again.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then you might have to do it again.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then you might have to do it again.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually you'll figure out what is the right question.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll know it's the right question because you won't need to ask a different
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_00: question once you've asked it.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what First Horse gave me this morning.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, First Horse.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have,
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_01: for those who are looking to put their dollars,
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_01: their holiday dollars,
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_01: where they can do the best good for small businesses that have been affected by the storm.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know that the,
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_01: is it the shops at Chimney Rock that have taken up residence at the Tryon
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Equestrian Center.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you can go in person there and it's a lovely place to be for the holidays.
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you can shop.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_01: directly towards small businesses that have been affected by the storm and on my
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_01: list I'm going to continue to update individuals that need your financial
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_01: contributions directly today and following your words and I know that daily you are
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: posting information that comes to you and you also are a rich collection of just
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know follow the people who are following her and
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_01: and that are engaging in discussions on your Facebook.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been so interesting how Facebook has been the place, the hub to be.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of those few pieces of social media for all of the griping that we can do about social media.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Why Facebook has become the hub is we're not limited with the number of words that
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: we can post with pictures and video.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Instagram would be that hub if we didn't have limits,
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_01: just how we can reach the greatest number of people.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll notice that on my list,
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of those things will link up to Facebook and individual blogs and individual
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_01: writing and Instagram.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_01: That it really is a one-stop place where you can look for things.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I had hoped to have a list of small businesses together.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: But where I've discovered a lot of those businesses that I wanted to link to are artisans.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And when we're looking at spending holiday dollars and getting things to people
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: within a certain amount of time,
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_01: these are people who have lost their kilns.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_01: They've lost their art supplies.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_01: They've lost their studios.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: They've lost the places to be able to do that.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that sending people to Tryon Equestrian Center and I'm going to try to
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_01: find the direct links for this,
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_01: especially out of the Asheville area,
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_01: collections of artists that you can find gathered together with links that direct
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_01: you to their work for those who are up and running right now.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I thank you so much for being with me today and for me being able to look at
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_01: your face over Zoom as we record this.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for being here on Relatively Stable.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed today's episode and want to dive deeper into stories of resilience
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: and passion,
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_01: be sure to join my community on Substack at Stable Roots.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_01: There,
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_01: you'll find more insights,
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_01: behind-the-scenes content,
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_01: and a place to connect with others who are navigating their own paths.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Visit me at stabileroots.substack.com and subscribe to stay grounded,
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_01: inspired,
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_01: and always relatively stable.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, take care and keep moving forward.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Love, Kim.