Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 24: Take Back the Magic: Ancestral Wisdom, Reincarnation & Love with Perdita Finn

Transcript

Ep 24: Take Back the Magic: Ancestral Wisdom, Reincarnation & Love with Perdita Finn · Homestead And Heal Podcast

0:02
SPEAKER_04: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
0:04
SPEAKER_04: I'm Scott.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.
0:26
SPEAKER_04: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
0:32
SPEAKER_04: Our bodies are part of it.
0:34
SPEAKER_04: Our healing comes through it.
0:35
SPEAKER_04: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
0:54
SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to Homestead and Heal.
0:56
SPEAKER_04: We're so excited to have Predita Finn on the show with us today.
1:01
SPEAKER_04: I first became introduced to your work when I heard your interview on the Medicine Stories podcast.
1:09
SPEAKER_04: And I told Amber, we interviewed her earlier this year, and I told her it was, it's I've listened to I think all of her episodes, but the one that I've listened to on repeat the most is the interview with you because it really honestly provided a sort of framework that I feel like I've been searching for my entire life.
1:30
SPEAKER_04: And so then from there had a major interest in reading your book, Take Back the Magic, which Lindsay and I have just loved so dearly.
1:40
SPEAKER_04: And it just feels like an opening to, yeah, again, a world that I was looking for, or a point of view, or a framework that just resonates so deeply with me.
1:52
SPEAKER_04: So thank you, and thank you for being on.
1:54
SPEAKER_04: And we would love for you to introduce yourself and your work, if you would.
2:00
SPEAKER_02: I always I was just talking with my nephew who is here, and he's a very wise and mystical being.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: And we were talking about how important right now it is to be no one.
2:09
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, and that this need to relentlessly situate ourselves in one identity or another often sets ourselves against each other.
2:20
SPEAKER_02: So lately I've been saying this morning, I'm remembering what it feels like to be an oak tree whose leaves are turning red and getting ready to fall.
2:29
SPEAKER_02: I'm feeling that bear self within me that wants to go hibernate in the mountain and have big old dreams.
2:35
SPEAKER_02: I also feel that sheepdog sense in myself that wants to collect all my kin clothes and circle them around and keep them safe.
2:45
SPEAKER_02: So, who am I feeling within me today?
2:47
SPEAKER_02: There are always so many different beings and there's so many different treasures within me of being.
2:52
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's what my work has been about.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: I've been asking myself for a long time how do we get sober from this catastrophic civilization experiment that has got us all addicted to it?
3:06
SPEAKER_02: And it seems to me the only sobriety from that is what I call the long story of our souls and that memory of living in the deep mystery of all that we've built been and all that we might be.
3:18
SPEAKER_02: That means I write a lot of books, I have a substack, I do all those kinds of things.
3:22
SPEAKER_02: But that's really my work is to help people recover a long story of what it means to be alive on this planet.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: I love that so much.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, one of our other guests, Pam Montgomery, she talked about this remembering and the amnesia we have around our connection to the earth.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: And I think just the older I get, the more I feel what you're describing, just how much mystery there is, how much magic there is, and how trying to figure it all out is just dumbing it all down so much.
4:02
SPEAKER_02: That that idea about figuring it all out is the kind of first impulse of civilization, right?
4:09
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna we're gonna get everything organized.
4:11
SPEAKER_02: Anybody who wants to get anything organized terrifies me.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: I live in the Catskill Mountains of New York, and we'll have people who move up here from the city and they start telling me they're gonna clean up the woods.
4:23
SPEAKER_02: And you're gonna clean up the woods?
4:26
SPEAKER_02: What are you talking about?
4:28
SPEAKER_02: Feed themselves and feed the earth and make soil and get the mushrooms going, and you don't know what you're looking at.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: And so that desire to compartment, to clean things up and get things organized.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: And people sometimes will come to my work and say, Oh, I'm praying for clarity.
4:47
SPEAKER_02: And I said, You will get no clarity with my work, but I will lead you into the dark and show you how to walk barefoot in the dark.
4:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's just it, right?
4:57
SPEAKER_02: It's and you might get a star, and you'll know when you're looking at your star, and you'll know what star to follow through the dark.
5:04
SPEAKER_02: And learning how to walk barefoot in the dark is a really good skill.
5:08
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, learning to be in the dark, period, is so frightening for people of this modern time.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: My husband wrote a whole book about it, actually.
5:16
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
5:17
SPEAKER_02: Called Waking Up to the Dark since he was a little boy.
5:20
SPEAKER_02: He couldn't explain it to anyone.
5:21
SPEAKER_02: He used to pretend he was sleepwalking, he would wait till the whole family was asleep, and then he'd go out and walk in the woods by himself.
5:27
SPEAKER_02: Oh wow in the dark.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: He said it his whole life.
5:30
SPEAKER_04: Wow, that's amazing.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've just this morning looked and seen your other books, the books you co-authored and his book.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh, we have so many more things to discover, which is really exciting.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: We'd love it now that you've introduced yourself.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: If you would introduce your place, where you are right now, what's happening outside, and anything you feel like sharing.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: I love I live in the Catskill Mountains of New York.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: It's autumn.
5:58
SPEAKER_02: We have had a deliciously wet year, which has made this one of the most beautiful golden red autumns we've had in decades.
6:08
SPEAKER_03: Nice.
6:08
SPEAKER_02: And it's been, although in a playful reminder, I was out in the backyard the other day, and there was a single dandelion blooming.
6:20
SPEAKER_02: And it was like that feeling I sometimes get, oh, it's the most perfect autumn, and spring is held inside of this autumn, even now.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
6:27
SPEAKER_02: And it was so beautiful.
6:29
SPEAKER_02: I have a lot of owls who live on my property who swoop in and out or wonderful messengers and hawks, fishers who live nearby.
6:37
SPEAKER_02: They're really, I don't know if you know what a fisher is, it's a big weasel, and they're really it's why I no longer keep chickens and ducks.
6:45
SPEAKER_02: I felt like I was feeding the fishers.
6:47
SPEAKER_02: Um it's we have a lot of bears here, black bears, and but they're all in the mountain now.
6:53
SPEAKER_02: And I'm very close to the bear.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: I can my husband once wrote a short story about he hadn't realized he married a bear.
6:59
SPEAKER_02: And I love to dream with the bears, and I'm very interested in bear medicine and bear people and the old stories about the bears and being in communion with them.
7:09
SPEAKER_02: I had a great experience one night of a bear coming up on my deck, and we have a sliding glass door, and I crept over to watch it on my deck, and I pressed my face against the glass.
7:20
SPEAKER_02: I was being so quiet, and the bear looked up, it saw me and pressed its face to my face.
7:25
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
7:26
SPEAKER_04: Wow.
7:27
SPEAKER_04: That's amazing.
7:28
SPEAKER_04: Incredible.
7:29
SPEAKER_02: So that's the best thing that ever happened to me here.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: That sounds like the best thing.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, we're here in Vermont, so we know all of Oh, you're close.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're neighbors.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: Where in Vermont are you guys?
7:42
SPEAKER_04: We live in a town called Shrewsbury, which is near to Rutland.
7:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
7:46
SPEAKER_02: I spend a lot of time in Vermont.
7:47
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
7:48
SPEAKER_02: As you probably know from reading my book, Take Back the Magic.
7:50
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
7:51
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
7:52
SPEAKER_04: So we've had bear encounters on our back deck, on our porch.
7:56
SPEAKER_04: We had a massive bear.
7:57
SPEAKER_04: I'm trying to remember.
7:59
SPEAKER_04: Our son is very wildlife oriented.
8:02
SPEAKER_04: So my dad is a major hunter, fisherman, and just has oriented his whole life, and actually his sort of spirituality resides in the world of being out there, connecting, hunting, fishing, all that sort of stuff.
8:16
SPEAKER_04: And that seems to have come directly through to our son, who is just from the time he could walk, is so oriented towards animals and catching them.
8:25
SPEAKER_04: And he's really interested in hunting and fishing and eating, actually.
8:30
SPEAKER_04: So a story I told earlier on in the podcast was I grew up in this hunting culture, but I was so sensitive around death.
8:38
SPEAKER_04: I was like very fascinated with or scared of, I really should say, scared of death from the time I was a little kid.
8:45
SPEAKER_04: And I couldn't bring myself to kill an animal.
8:49
SPEAKER_04: So a couple of times I actually one time I was with my father when we saw a deer, and I pretended to miss, I missed on purpose, pretending to be a big deal.
9:01
SPEAKER_02: My husband did the same thing.
9:02
SPEAKER_04: Oh, really?
9:03
SPEAKER_02: My husband did the same thing, Scott.
9:05
SPEAKER_02: He grew up down in Arkansas.
9:07
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
9:07
SPEAKER_02: So as you can imagine, with a lot of old uncles taking him hunting.
9:11
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
9:11
SPEAKER_02: I knew he was a very good shot, actually.
9:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
9:15
SPEAKER_02: But very overwhelmed by that encounter.
9:19
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: So which he wasn't given a container, I think.
9:23
SPEAKER_04: That that was the same.
9:24
SPEAKER_04: I actually have a story that I can relate to it as funny now, which probably when people hear it, they don't think it's funny.
9:31
SPEAKER_04: But I had been introduced to this idea from my mother that, like, when dad goes out and kills things, that their spirit lives on, sort of thing.
9:42
SPEAKER_04: Just a sort of simple way to bring me some comfort.
9:45
SPEAKER_04: And I think that was her honest belief, too, is her honest belief.
9:49
SPEAKER_04: And so I was taking solace in that.
9:51
SPEAKER_04: And my dad and brother were like watching a hunting show on TV one day.
9:56
SPEAKER_04: And I had brought this concept up to my dad.
9:58
SPEAKER_04: I was probably six or seven years old.
10:01
SPEAKER_04: And my dad could teach me anything about hunting.
10:04
SPEAKER_04: And he always talked about how his church was in the woods being out there.
10:08
SPEAKER_04: But he found this to be comical, this idea.
10:11
SPEAKER_04: I don't know if it's because he didn't believe it or he thought it was funny that I was thinking and asking about it.
10:17
SPEAKER_04: But they were watching this hunting show, and I think they showed them shooting some geese that fell into the water.
10:24
SPEAKER_04: And my dad, with a sort of funny grin, looked at me and said, I think they got that one spirit.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: I don't remember that story, but yeah, I mean And laughing about it.
10:36
SPEAKER_04: And him and my brothers laughing at that.
10:38
SPEAKER_04: I was concerned of this.
10:39
SPEAKER_02: But we have a story to I have to tell you that you can share with your son.
10:43
SPEAKER_02: And it's at the heart of my work.
10:45
SPEAKER_02: And my my son is also, he and his partner are foragers and hunters, and really and it's really important to eat the white-tailed deer where we are.
10:55
SPEAKER_02: It looks really a health issue.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
10:58
SPEAKER_02: Because they don't have any other capstone predators right now.
11:00
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I think one of the things that's really hard.
11:03
SPEAKER_02: I my husband and I have talked a lot about ecology, not theology.
11:07
SPEAKER_02: And ecology says everything eat gets to eat.
11:11
SPEAKER_02: You can't escape the cycle of eating.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: Everything and everything is eaten, everything dies.
11:18
SPEAKER_02: That is the heart of my favorite fairy tale, which is Hansel and Gretel.
11:22
SPEAKER_02: Hansel and Gretel go into the woods and they find a house where they can eat everything.
11:27
SPEAKER_02: They've been living in civilization where they're starving to death, and now they're in the woods.
11:31
SPEAKER_02: And they're nuts and they're animals and they're mushrooms.
11:35
SPEAKER_02: It's that paleo diet, right?
11:36
SPEAKER_02: Which is not a carnivore diet, it's an omnivorous diet.
11:40
SPEAKER_02: And but there's one caveat, you get to eat everything.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: And the witch gets to eat you.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: And that that is the last piece of it, I think, that's really important.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: So the story I often tell is I've read about the Kung, the Kung people in South Africa.
12:01
SPEAKER_02: They're one of the last hunter-gatherer peoples.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: And this was research that was done in the 1950s when they were still less these days, they're so compromised.
12:09
SPEAKER_02: Their lifestyle, their ecological experience has been so minimized, and they're not really living the way they used to.
12:15
SPEAKER_02: But this anthropologist goes out on a hunt, on elephant hunt, and the elephant is killed very slowly.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: It's killed with a dart gun, they follow it, then they kill it.
12:26
SPEAKER_02: And the first thing the hunters do after the elephant dies is they do Greek rituals for the elephant.
12:33
SPEAKER_02: They mourn the passing of the spirit together.
12:36
SPEAKER_02: And then the women arrive, and the women do, we're eating an elephant dance.
12:40
SPEAKER_02: So those are celebratory.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: Yay for elephant.
12:44
SPEAKER_02: And then there's a big party, right?
12:45
SPEAKER_02: And there's no hoarding and no hierarchy.
12:49
SPEAKER_02: It's really beautiful.
12:50
SPEAKER_02: And at one moment, the anthropologist is sitting there.
12:53
SPEAKER_02: Old hunter starts to weep as he's eating his elephant.
12:58
SPEAKER_02: And the anthropologist says, Why are you crying?
13:00
SPEAKER_02: And the hunter says, Until I tasted her, I did not know this was my wife.
13:05
SPEAKER_02: Oh and the anthropologist goes into a long, symbolic, metaphorical explanation of this moment, which is a literal moment.
13:16
SPEAKER_02: Which and what it was he knew that his wife, who had died, had come back as an elephant to feed her children and grandchildren.
13:25
SPEAKER_02: None of those grandchildren would get pregnant and bear her and bring her back to the world.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of to live in these the missing container that we live in, that I think so that my husband feels horrified, and you felt horrified by that first moment is something's missing from this container, which is the geese is my mother, mother goose, the the deer is my mother, my grandmother, literally my great-grandmother come back to feed my people.
13:58
SPEAKER_02: And what if we ate like that?
14:00
SPEAKER_02: What if we ate knowing we were eating our literal kin that when we call ourselves Sam people or deer people or bear people, we are saying, these are my ancestors who have come back in these bodies to feed me and keep me alive so that I can rebirth them into the world.
14:18
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
14:18
SPEAKER_04: And you talked about this on Amber's podcast, and that to me, like I have goosebumps right now, your description, and that was what was missing for me.
14:26
SPEAKER_04: I came full circle.
14:27
SPEAKER_04: I'm a hunter now.
14:28
SPEAKER_04: I spend the whole fall really, we don't have a fantastic deer density where we actually live, but I plant lots of things for them, and I generally am successful.
14:40
SPEAKER_04: Last year I was not against my greatest efforts, but like having that specific framework, and that's always what I felt is this like knowing that our real mother is Mother Earth.
14:52
SPEAKER_04: And you're bringing up like our earth is literally our ancestors.
14:57
SPEAKER_04: It the body of the earth is it just resonates so deeply with me in such a satisfying way.
15:04
SPEAKER_04: I worked as a commercial farmer for 15 years, an organic vegetable farmer.
15:09
SPEAKER_04: And I was always in conversation.
15:12
SPEAKER_04: I let some of the nicest produce go to flour rather than bringing it to market because some of the lettuce didn't want to be chopped off and brought to market, as far as I could tell.
15:23
SPEAKER_04: Lindsay's laughing.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm laughing because you're so cute, but I love you.
15:29
SPEAKER_02: I want you to meet my son and his partner because my son also worked at an organic farm, running an organic farm for a long time.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: And now he's in such a wilder, deeper place because of those just the same instincts.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: It was very obvious to us after this many years farming, which the name of our farm was Alchemy Gardens.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: And it was all about the magic within this little seed and that it produces something better than gold.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: And but after this many years, it was like, okay, Scott doesn't want to scale this business.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't want to manage people, he doesn't want to treat the plants like they're a commodity.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: He wants to be with them.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: And now he's an herbalist and hunter and does so much to provide for our family.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: It makes so much more sense.
16:16
SPEAKER_04: But I still get to spend all my time in direct relationship with plants in the earth, which is suits me so well.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, and I have to say, Pradita, that story, I got teary because my son Remy and I were just having this conversation recently.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: He was asking, what do you want to come back as when you die?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And he was kind of choosing his this ant animals.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: And we were having this conversation because our dog that we used to have, Murphy, he's buried under this beautiful maple tree.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: And Remy's like, he's the tree now.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: And it's just he Remy is just tuned in this way.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I was like, I guess I better choose wisely because if I choose something that you might go out and hunt, then you might kill me and eat me.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: So literally, like this story, but you flipped the switch for me, and I'm like, wow.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: So he was like, I think a hummingbird is good for you, mama.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: And that is actually like a spirit animal for me.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: So it was perfect.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: And we had some jokes around like what it would be like to kill and try to eat.
17:15
SPEAKER_02: You as a mother, but you as a mother who fed that child with your body would feed your child with that body again.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I love I can't wait to tell him this because it's just such a beautiful, a beautiful switch.
17:30
SPEAKER_02: And we don't have one mother.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: We have so many mothers from so many lives who are feeding us with their bodies lettuce bodies, broccoli bodies, tree bodies, flower bodies.
17:43
SPEAKER_02: It's I often say the opposite of goddess that goddess, it's everything.
17:49
SPEAKER_02: Everything remembers what it means like to be a mother.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: And what it means to be a mother isn't a for me not a gendered or biological world word.
17:57
SPEAKER_02: It is that I know how to feed other beings with my body.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
18:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and there are a lot of ways to do that in the world.
18:06
SPEAKER_02: And I always say to my kids, when I go, it's because I can do more for you from the other side and with my next body than I can do with this body.
18:15
SPEAKER_04: I love that.
18:16
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: I can't wait to talk with him about that.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: He'll be fascinated.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: I think it'll be kids are, and you have such a range of them.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes I ask grown-ups, what did what did you want when you were seven years old or eight years old?
18:30
SPEAKER_02: What did you know?
18:31
SPEAKER_02: Like, how do we recover that?
18:33
SPEAKER_02: And I would our job was to listen to our kids, our kids are our elders returned, literally, right?
18:42
SPEAKER_00: It's funny that you just said that because that really is our next question that we ask everyone is like, what was your childhood like?
18:49
SPEAKER_00: And we know bits and pieces of this from your book, but can you see the makings of who you are today?
18:55
SPEAKER_00: And what are some of your earliest memories of that?
18:58
SPEAKER_02: We all get what we've been praying for lifetimes, but sometimes it's hard to make sense of that in a single lifetime, right?
19:05
SPEAKER_02: So if my daughter says, Whoa, I I ordered this off the menu.
19:09
SPEAKER_02: Really?
19:12
SPEAKER_02: I pray for my next life to be reborn to parents who can recognize me for who I am.
19:20
SPEAKER_02: And I don't mean that in some airy, fairy, abstract way.
19:24
SPEAKER_02: They go, It's Perdita.
19:26
SPEAKER_02: She's back.
19:27
SPEAKER_02: Let's give her books.
19:28
SPEAKER_02: Let's get her.
19:31
SPEAKER_02: That used to be the job of grandparents and elders, which was, who are you?
19:36
SPEAKER_02: Who are you grandma?
19:37
SPEAKER_02: Are you auntie?
19:38
SPEAKER_02: Who have you, and how do I how do I get you up to speed so that you don't have to spend six decades recovering the memories of your last life?
19:49
SPEAKER_02: But you can really, we're gonna need people who can remember and build on what they have already achieved in one life for the next for the world that's coming.
20:04
SPEAKER_02: So that so I had I asked this as some of my long-term students recently, and one of I said, What were you doing at six years old?
20:11
SPEAKER_02: And one woman said, I could make shelters at six years old that could withstand the snow.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: I could go outside, I knew how to go out and build a shelter, no one taught me, and I would make these shelters, and everyone joked about it, and I kept saying, begging my parents to let me sleep out in it, and they wouldn't let me.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: And I was thinking like that was the essential information she brought from one life to another.
20:40
SPEAKER_02: And then another woman said, I used to grind acorns and soak them, and I didn't know how to do it, and no one had ever taught me, and we were all like little kids playing, and I would spend hours collecting and grinding acorns.
20:52
SPEAKER_02: Like, but we what we need are lots of grandmothers and grandfathers who are watching these children, not one Harried preschool teacher, and saying, Oh, this is what you've remembered, this is what you're bringing through.
21:05
SPEAKER_02: These are the skills we're gonna need going forward.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: I love that just I'm thinking of you, Scott, and your stories of making potions in your life, and now he's a clinical herbalist and making potions.
21:19
unknown: Yeah.
21:20
SPEAKER_04: Potions and grafting plants without knowing anything about it as a kid.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: That you you had this, and it sounds like you were reborn to someone who could keep you out in that wildness and that but what if you'd been born in a city and you'd been told to sit still in a desk?
21:36
SPEAKER_03: And I mean absolutely yeah.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: And I think for me, when I think of that question, I think about what I actually was doing.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: I was holding space for my parents, and now I'm a fascia body worker.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: I hold space for people working through their trauma.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: And for a long time I grieved that loss of innocence that I had to be the one to hold my parents as they cried.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: And processed all their emotions, but now I can see that's just that is a skill that I came in with, and I love that work now.
22:07
SPEAKER_02: So and I think this is a very hard thing, and nobody else can ever tell you this.
22:12
SPEAKER_02: And but sometimes we have very old prayers that we have been carrying lifetime upon lifetime.
22:20
SPEAKER_02: And it means that we have certain forgings and firings in childhood that may not be a lot of fun, but bring forth from within us knowings, abilities.
22:35
SPEAKER_02: My daughter has a terrible connective tissue disorder and that has created a lot of complicated problems for her in life.
22:43
SPEAKER_02: But she wrote a book about it and Healing Beyond Hope, Healing Beyond the Human, about this illness has awakened in her an urgency and an awareness of things that would never have been awake.
22:54
SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
22:55
SPEAKER_02: Like would she pray not to get sick?
22:58
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
22:59
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
23:00
SPEAKER_02: Has this been fun?
23:01
SPEAKER_02: No.
23:01
SPEAKER_02: Has it demanded of her that she access things that if she'd been well, she might never have might have taken her 60 years to access?
23:10
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
23:11
SPEAKER_04: That's fascinating.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm really excited to read.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: I've read The Madonna Secret and it was amazing.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: But I'm the best book.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm really excited to read her other book or books because The Body is a doorway and anyway.
23:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, The Body's a Doorway is that that's the book, The Body is a Doorway, Healing Beyond Hope, Healing Beyond the Human.
23:29
SPEAKER_02: And yeah.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: And her own list was a forging for me as her mother as well.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: That to me seems like that would be really big as a mother.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how you I'm I guess my the thoughts in my head are like, so what does this mean for you and your soul that you are having this experience with your daughter?
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Because for me, the just the challenges with my own children are they're huge.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if you want to speak on that at all.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: There's this moment.
24:00
SPEAKER_02: I pray the resurrection.
24:01
SPEAKER_02: I'm not Catholic, I'm not Christian, I'm not attached to any religious institution.
24:05
SPEAKER_02: I'm an equal opportunity, get rid of them all.
24:07
SPEAKER_02: Really.
24:08
SPEAKER_02: But I do this old folk practice, which has a lot of folk magic and alchemy attached to it, and is connected to the deep mystery tradition traditions of the Mediterranean.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: And and one of the mysteries is that the mother brings her child to the community to present her child to the community.
24:24
SPEAKER_02: And as she's walking into the community with this child, two old psychics approach her and say, one, they say, Oh, oh, you are the great mother.
24:37
SPEAKER_02: So they recognize this bigness in her.
24:40
SPEAKER_02: And then they say, And a sword shall pierce your heart.
24:44
SPEAKER_02: And I sometimes say, every time I see someone, a friend of mine just had a baby, you don't want to say that to someone with that's a horrible, what a nasty thing to say.
24:53
SPEAKER_02: I want to slap those psychics on the side of their head.
24:55
SPEAKER_02: But they're also right, which is having a child pierces your heart.
25:01
SPEAKER_02: And that heart piercing opens your heart.
25:04
SPEAKER_02: It is that open, vulnerable, compassionate heart.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: And if we can, I believe that we can all have that heart, whether or not we have biological children or not, whatever our gender.
25:17
SPEAKER_02: I my most recent book, Mothers of Magic, is about what does it mean to step into the world as a mother beyond gender, beyond biological certainty, but to show up as a mother to all other beings on this planet.
25:32
SPEAKER_02: And and it is we will weep for some of the things that are happening in this world.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm curious, I just have a question around that.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: Do you is there something also then about the father?
25:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking of Scott, and I feel like Scott is a great mother.
25:52
SPEAKER_04: I'm identifying as a great mother.
25:54
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I know.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: I can tell he's a great mother.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: That's what I was gonna say.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: I feel like Scott is one of them, he's so in touch with his masculine and his feminine and such beautiful balance.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: And also, we all have here's the thing.
26:09
SPEAKER_02: If we begin to live in the long story of our souls, we've all been men and women.
26:12
SPEAKER_02: We've all been heroes and villain.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: We've been 36 different genders of fungi.
26:16
SPEAKER_02: We all are more complicated than we know.
26:18
SPEAKER_02: And I'm married to a man from Arkansas who has all this Arkansas frontier energy, but who's also one of the gentlest, sweetest, mystical, you know what I mean?
26:28
SPEAKER_02: And he's married to this very seemingly outward feminine woman who's got more testosterone on her than me does.
26:35
SPEAKER_02: So who, you know what I mean?
26:36
SPEAKER_02: Like, why the need to identify?
26:38
SPEAKER_02: One of the things that's interesting is if you look in anthropological, I'm always fascinated by paleoanthropology, if you don't mind me going into it for a minute, sure.
26:47
SPEAKER_02: Is this the idea of the creation of a child?
26:51
SPEAKER_02: The dominant image in civilized cultures is the man plants his seed and the woman.
26:57
SPEAKER_02: It is an agricultural, the woman is the fertile soil, the man is the progenitor, right?
27:04
SPEAKER_02: That's not the metaphor that's used in hunter-gatherer cultures.
27:09
SPEAKER_02: The metaphor that because they don't plant stuff.
27:12
SPEAKER_02: So the metaphor that's used is that the man is uh feed his semen is milk, and he is feeding his milk as the first milk to feed the baby.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
27:25
SPEAKER_02: Oh wow, and so it's an it is a metaphor of nourishment and care and offering and devotion to a being that already exists but needs to be fed.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love that.
27:38
SPEAKER_02: Right?
27:39
SPEAKER_02: And isn't that beautiful?
27:41
SPEAKER_02: And so there is no word for father.
27:44
SPEAKER_02: There's a word for father mother.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: And what's also so interesting is in these cultures, frequently a baby is nursed by more than one woman, which would be nice, right?
27:55
SPEAKER_02: Someone to nurse for seven years solid.
27:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: I'm still nursing.
27:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:00
SPEAKER_02: I know.
28:01
SPEAKER_02: I did good for you.
28:02
SPEAKER_02: I nurse forever.
28:03
SPEAKER_02: I nursed until I nursed until I thought it was my husband looked at me and said, things are getting a little dicey right here.
28:10
SPEAKER_02: You're not gonna be able to go to college.
28:13
SPEAKER_02: Yay, Woodstock.
28:14
SPEAKER_02: But then I would nurse again, but I would nurse again in a moment now.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:20
SPEAKER_02: And the amazing thing is post-menopausal women can still nurse.
28:23
SPEAKER_02: They can still generate milk in the right situations, which is an amazing thing that we no longer tap into.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: But also the ab the child in a hunter-gathered community is held by an average of 17 people every day.
28:37
SPEAKER_04: Wow.
28:38
SPEAKER_04: That's incredible.
28:40
SPEAKER_02: So the idea of mothering being something we do collectively as a community.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: Right?
28:51
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
28:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: I my dream is, and I have a son like this, my farming, hunting, six foot five son is one of the great mothers.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
29:04
SPEAKER_02: And he really is.
29:07
SPEAKER_04: I love that.
29:08
SPEAKER_04: A couple things that you said, you know, having a child pierces your heart but opens your heart.
29:13
SPEAKER_04: And I can, like I said, I had this fascination or terror actually of death growing up.
29:21
SPEAKER_04: I have this memory of recognizing the idea of death.
29:24
SPEAKER_04: I was probably the same time frame as the other story.
29:27
SPEAKER_04: I was probably six or seven years old.
29:29
SPEAKER_04: And I remember going hysterically into my mom's room at bedtime and recognizing that she was going to die someday, that my parents are going to die, that I was going to die, and all of this just hitting so hard and in such a real way.
29:43
SPEAKER_04: And even in my adult life, even still, I've sometimes had this moment of startle at the realness of my own mortality.
29:53
SPEAKER_04: I not as often anymore, because I think I have a wider framework, but a lot of that I think came into Starker.
30:03
SPEAKER_04: There was a focus when our daughter was born, our firstborn.
30:07
SPEAKER_04: I was like, okay, I'm 33.
30:11
SPEAKER_04: Best case scenario, how many years do I get to spend with this child?
30:16
SPEAKER_04: And it just re-ignited this sort of conversation in me.
30:22
SPEAKER_04: And I think for so many people, without a framework of the long story or that there's something other than this one life that we remain connected, it is terrifying to think it's so pr utterly precious.
30:37
SPEAKER_04: And if we don't have a framework that brings us into the long story, it is terrifying.
30:44
SPEAKER_02: We feel like we're on an industrial conveyor belt that's slowly edging us to the end, and we're going to be dropped into a bin of heaven, a bin of hell, or a bin of nothingness, right?
30:54
SPEAKER_02: Those are the options.
30:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
30:55
SPEAKER_02: And you only have one life to get it right.
30:58
SPEAKER_04: Right.
30:59
SPEAKER_02: What if, as the physicists tell us, we have all the time in the world?
31:06
SPEAKER_02: What would you do today if you knew you had lifetimes being thrown at you for love?
31:13
SPEAKER_02: Now, here's the truth, and I will speak a reality.
31:15
SPEAKER_02: I love my body.
31:16
SPEAKER_02: I got, you know what I mean?
31:18
SPEAKER_02: I love my body, I love my husband's body, I love my children's bodies.
31:21
SPEAKER_02: These bodies are really precious.
31:23
SPEAKER_02: And if you said, My mother has been dead for 20 years, and if you said to me, you can walk into the room and hug her and sit beside her for five minutes, I would sign on the dotted line, right?
31:35
SPEAKER_02: Just to be near her body and smell it again.
31:38
SPEAKER_02: Bodies change all the time.
31:41
SPEAKER_02: But everything, if the first law of nature is everything that eats is eaten, the second law of nature is everything is always changing.
31:54
SPEAKER_02: And it's the great hard thing, right?
31:58
SPEAKER_02: We're always I would also, if you said that to me, you can have five minutes holding your daughter as a nine-month-old or wouldn't you like every wouldn't you if you could ever my children are all just arriving at the house right now, of course, in a total chaos, even though I don't have a podcast, everyone's here.
32:15
SPEAKER_02: If you could have them back, those bodies, the baby body back, the toddler body back, the stinky 12-year-old back, you know what I mean?
32:24
SPEAKER_02: It would it's all delicious, right?
32:26
SPEAKER_02: But we don't, you know what I mean?
32:27
SPEAKER_02: It's all vanishing, and it's all coming back.
32:31
SPEAKER_02: And I think the agony about deaths, that moment when you look at your mother and think she can die, you look at your daughter and think I will die.
32:40
SPEAKER_02: I look at my husband, we've been married for 35 years, and we're in our 60s, there's no guarantee about how much more time we have.
32:47
SPEAKER_02: And like you, I keep going, like a lot of those old Arkansas relatives look into their 90s.
32:54
SPEAKER_02: And you start making these calculations, and there is no promise.
32:58
SPEAKER_02: None of us know the time of the end.
33:00
SPEAKER_02: So the I always say we cannot know what the future holds.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: All we can know is what we want and what we love.
33:07
SPEAKER_02: And so, my prayer every day, we do prayers together every morning wild unbox prayers, but they all end with my same prayer, which is may we find each other again, may we find each other quickly.
33:19
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's been my prayer for lifetimes to find my husband again, my children again.
33:24
SPEAKER_02: But we're often always changing places, right?
33:26
SPEAKER_02: Our mother comes back as the elephant to feed us, is reborn, is the grandchild we hold in our arms.
33:31
SPEAKER_02: We know is going to rebirth us into the world.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: It's we are all changing places.
33:37
SPEAKER_02: There are so many different ways to love each other.
33:44
SPEAKER_02: And I think the more we love, the more our hearts break, and the more the joy increases, and we know how many different ways there are to love each other.
33:53
SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you a story.
33:56
SPEAKER_02: A friend of ours, her husband was diagnosed with an incurable cancer.
34:00
SPEAKER_02: Stage four, this is we're gonna do a little treatment, but it's gonna buy you months.
34:05
SPEAKER_02: It's not gonna buy you more than that.
34:06
SPEAKER_02: And so they decided, while he still felt well before he began treatment, that they were gonna do the trip they'd always dreamed of doing to Europe.
34:14
SPEAKER_02: They'd never done it.
34:15
SPEAKER_02: So they went and took this month, they went on this trip, and they sent postcards home to their kids, and they took lots of photos.
34:22
SPEAKER_02: And then he died two months after they got home.
34:26
SPEAKER_02: Next year her daughter got pregnant.
34:28
SPEAKER_02: And that was she went to go live with her daughter and to help her with the baby.
34:32
SPEAKER_02: And when her grandson was two and a half, one day they were sitting on the floor together, and he took a card and he did a scribble on it, and he passed it to his grandmother and said, It's a postcard for you, but we're not going to Europe together this time, are we?
34:55
SPEAKER_02: She didn't know.
34:56
SPEAKER_02: Did she did she miss the body of her husband, the life of her husband, this companion for life?
35:02
SPEAKER_02: Of course.
35:03
SPEAKER_02: But what this unaccountable mystery of love returned to her, of the child she took onto her lap and held to her heart.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: I can see Scott's holding back tears.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's so beautiful.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: So beautiful.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking so much of my son.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: I he just he's he's someone that I feel like I can really see.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: I can really see the magic in him.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: And I was just thinking of, we just got a couple of cats.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't know why this is coming to me, but he was holding these kittens and he was like, it's that the first time it sat with him and purred, he was like, it's that feeling when I see you cry when you're happy.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: And it's it was like love, is what he was feeling.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: And that whole experience came to me from doing this plant medicine journey with Hawthorne with the Hawthorne tree.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Oh, and the only thing I got from this experience with Hawthorne in the course of the whole weekend was you need to get a cat and something about it being for Remy.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: But I just I don't know why that I that's not a great response to everything you just said, but I'm just thinking of that line.
36:20
SPEAKER_02: Because cat, and here's the thing: if you said to me, we had this cat, and we he was like a mother to my children.
36:28
SPEAKER_02: He was one of their mothers.
36:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was a male fixed cat.
36:32
SPEAKER_02: He was like Nana and Peter Penn.
36:34
SPEAKER_02: Sophie would have a nightmare when she was a little girl, and he would be up the stairs and in her arms before I could get there.
36:40
SPEAKER_02: You know, we had a family bed, and we had two, I actually we had a sleeping room.
36:43
SPEAKER_02: So I created a sleeping room with all these futons on the floor and lots of pillows, and all the animals, and all the people who had everything still, he'd be the first.
36:51
SPEAKER_02: And we don't know.
36:53
SPEAKER_02: We had a mother goose.
36:55
SPEAKER_02: What if the animals would show up as our mothers too to love us?
36:58
SPEAKER_02: I think many of the animals we've had.
37:01
SPEAKER_02: We had a cat, a big orange cat.
37:03
SPEAKER_02: He just died at 22.
37:05
SPEAKER_02: He might, he may have been my lover from another life, I'm just saying.
37:09
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I always say our polyamory is mostly with the animal world.
37:17
SPEAKER_02: But I really miss him.
37:18
SPEAKER_02: His name was Sputnik because he was out of this world.
37:21
SPEAKER_02: And Sputy died.
37:23
SPEAKER_02: Very old man.
37:24
SPEAKER_02: And my daughter said to him as he was dying, she said, Come back as my little boy, come back as my little boy, come back as my little boy.
37:32
SPEAKER_02: And that's right, like what we want to say to each other.
37:38
SPEAKER_02: And that is the third ecological truth, which is we do all come back to each other.
37:43
SPEAKER_02: This I was born knowing this.
37:46
SPEAKER_02: This is my message I carry forward.
37:48
SPEAKER_02: There is nothing that we have lost that will not come back to us.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: Everyone we have lost.
37:53
SPEAKER_02: We love is gravity.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: Love is how we find each other.
37:57
SPEAKER_02: The more we love, the easier it is to find each other.
38:00
SPEAKER_02: Love is gravity.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: That's yeah, that's it.
38:03
SPEAKER_02: We love this earth.
38:06
SPEAKER_02: Boom, we're sticking to it, right?
38:08
SPEAKER_02: It's not up, up and away.
38:10
SPEAKER_02: It's down, down with love.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: I definitely, yeah, I definitely feel the, and I shared this in a voice note to you of just when I read in your book about how you felt you became obsessed with Atlanta and gone with the wind, right at the exact age that Clark, your husband, moved there.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: And I have this similar story of just becoming obsessed with Maine in when I was 12 years old and starting to write a book about it.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: And then that was where I went and met my husband.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: And Scott and I These are these aren't coincidences.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: No, they're not.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: And I do feel, I just I do feel that soul love that is just so deep with Scott.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: And that you're the only other person I've heard tell a story like that.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: I wonder how many more are out there of there must be a lot.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: There are tons.
39:03
SPEAKER_02: Everyone has them.
39:04
SPEAKER_02: Everybody I've ever met has these stories.
39:07
SPEAKER_02: The problem that we have is we live in a culture that tells us we're crazy or we're making it up, or it's just imagination.
39:15
SPEAKER_02: And so people keep them to themselves privately.
39:18
SPEAKER_02: I try to create spaces in my workshops where people feel the invitation to share these stories, right?
39:24
SPEAKER_02: And people share them with me because I've written these books, being so vulnerable.
39:28
SPEAKER_02: I do have a caveat, Gone With Them is like the most racist movie ever made.
39:32
SPEAKER_02: And it's so horrible.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: And this obsession that I developed after watching the movie at 10 years old for people who are listening was I came away from this movie wanting to know about Atlanta and obsessed with going to Atlanta.
39:48
SPEAKER_02: And I went into our local rural New England library and said, Can I have books about Atlanta?
39:53
SPEAKER_02: And they looked at me like I was nutty.
39:55
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
39:56
SPEAKER_02: And this was in the 1970s, so there was no internet, and here's a book on the 50 states, and that wasn't satisfying this thing in me.
40:06
SPEAKER_02: So then I became obsessed with Clark Gable, who stars in Gone with the Wind.
40:10
SPEAKER_02: And so much so that my family teased me about it because I watched every Clark Gable movie when I was like 11 years old.
40:17
SPEAKER_02: What was going on?
40:18
SPEAKER_02: My husband's name is Clark from Atlanta.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's so wild.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: And I will just mention because I selfishly just want your take on this without telling too much of my story.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: But I had this amazing journey with Rose, similar, like this plant spirit medicine journey with Pam Montgomery and Rose.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: And I had this grief come up that I considered ancestral grief, although I'm realizing now it's whatever, maybe soul, who knows what.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: But I saw myself on a ship watching as my homeland disappeared from view, and like I was immigrating to a new place.
40:54
SPEAKER_00: And then it started me on this journey.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: I started having visions and dreams bringing me to England.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: And then I went to England, and the to tell this story briefly, as I was about to board the plane to England, I called my dad and just asked him, I feel like I'm being drawn to Cornwall.
41:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't know why.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: Long story short, he found this family Bible with a whole lineage written in it of our family.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: And there was the name of a town in Cornwall also handwritten.
41:23
SPEAKER_00: And when I went to that town, it was the exact same landscape as where I met my husband in Maine.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: It was a tidal river emptying out into the ocean, but on the opposite side of the ocean.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: And I just felt maybe there's nothing to maybe there's no take here.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: It's just the magic, right?
41:36
SPEAKER_00: It's like there was so much, there's been so much magic for me with this one experience with Rose and being drawn to these places where my ancestors were from.
41:47
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I just yeah, go ahead.
41:50
SPEAKER_02: I call I call those what it's funny.
41:52
SPEAKER_02: I was just telling my nephew about them today.
41:54
SPEAKER_02: He's had a lot of experience with them.
41:55
SPEAKER_02: I call them paper folds.
41:56
SPEAKER_02: Time is not linear, space is not linear.
42:00
SPEAKER_02: The physicists tell us they're folded over each other like origami, like all time is happening now, all space is happening now.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: What does that mean for our poor little fuddled brains?
42:10
SPEAKER_02: Is that we experience a place as two places at once.
42:16
SPEAKER_02: This place and that place are somehow the same place.
42:20
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I know you.
42:21
SPEAKER_02: We've met before.
42:22
SPEAKER_02: I don't know how I know you, but we've met, we all know, we've all had those experiences.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: We come to a place we've never been and say, I know this terrain.
42:29
SPEAKER_02: I've been dreaming my way here my whole life.
42:32
SPEAKER_02: We are, we experience, and I think one of the things about those moments that the magic of them, the alchemy is important, is that we start to touch into the non-linearity of time and existence.
42:46
SPEAKER_02: And that's where the magic happens.
42:48
SPEAKER_02: That's where anything can happen.
42:51
SPEAKER_02: So I think it's really important to feel those portals.
42:54
SPEAKER_02: Like I have this little place, it's this, I love this mountain, I climb a lot.
42:59
SPEAKER_02: And there's this one ridge that I walk on the mountain.
43:02
SPEAKER_02: There's sort of a ravine down to a stream that's very mossy, very beautiful.
43:06
SPEAKER_02: But there's something about this ridge through the mountain laurel that I'm in that place in my dreams a lot.
43:12
SPEAKER_02: And I have discovered, I have just looked down sometimes when I'm on that ridge, and I've found fossils that are 350 million years old.
43:20
SPEAKER_02: Just and I walk in that ridge in my dreams so much, I was like, that is a paper fold.
43:28
SPEAKER_02: That's a place where I can time travel.
43:30
SPEAKER_02: That's a place where I can.
43:31
SPEAKER_02: It sounds like that place in Cornwall, that place in Maine are places where you time travel.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: And it also just, I feel like I be I came so much more alive when I went to Maine and met Scott.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: It was like all these pieces I'd forgotten about who I was, that I'd I'd just forgotten.
43:53
SPEAKER_00: I'd stopped playing music, I'd stopped singing.
43:56
SPEAKER_00: There were just all these things that I'd forgotten.
43:58
SPEAKER_00: And then I got there and it was like, oh my.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: God, I remember so much about my essence and who I am.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: So can I just put in a vote for Eros and love?
44:09
SPEAKER_02: Because life wants more life.
44:12
SPEAKER_02: The way we come back is through love and life.
44:16
SPEAKER_02: And so the desire for love and love is I'm gonna panic that young people aren't having enough sex.
44:22
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna panic that old people aren't having enough sex.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna panic that how does the world re-green itself through love?
44:30
SPEAKER_02: And that the desire to find your person is the most profound of desires, right?
44:35
SPEAKER_02: Because it brings us into bloom.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: I literally wrote a poem that is it basically says those words that meeting Scott is how I bloomed.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: Me too, meeting my husband is how I bloomed, and how he bloomed, by the way.
44:49
SPEAKER_02: Meeting we both in the other room.
44:52
SPEAKER_02: He's nodding at me.
44:54
SPEAKER_02: It's it is and however that that love is really important.
45:00
SPEAKER_02: Love is so important.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: And my daughter has pivoted, all she wants to do is write love stories.
45:11
SPEAKER_02: It needs more love stories.
45:17
SPEAKER_02: I love stories.
45:18
SPEAKER_04: Good medicine.
45:19
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
45:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
45:21
SPEAKER_02: Now she's writing one of the wildest love stories I've ever read, but it's about somebody who's in love with the earth.
45:29
SPEAKER_02: That's exciting.
45:34
SPEAKER_02: It's very sexy.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: I wonder we have a standard questions, but we've just gone all over the place and I think it's just been perfect.
45:44
SPEAKER_00: So a big part of this podcast was really trying to help anyone who has forgotten their connection to the earth, that we are Earth, to bring them back.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder, were there any times in your life where you got a little disconnected or have you always maintained that thread?
46:02
SPEAKER_02: The earth for me has always been my safe place.
46:06
SPEAKER_02: And what was really interesting for me was I grew up on near Cape Cod in southeastern Massachusetts in a spit of land that's stuck into the Atlantic Ocean.
46:15
SPEAKER_02: So you walk two feet and you're at the ocean in any direction, basically.
46:19
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
46:20
SPEAKER_02: Was really wow.
46:21
SPEAKER_02: And I loved it.
46:22
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
46:23
SPEAKER_02: I loved it.
46:23
SPEAKER_02: It was, and I went to college in the mountains, and I went make basically I chose my college because it was the mountains.
46:29
SPEAKER_02: I chose the mountains.
46:30
SPEAKER_02: And then I mostly walked in the mountains.
46:33
SPEAKER_02: And I, but I spent, I went to England, interestingly.
46:37
SPEAKER_02: My mother's family's from Cornwall.
46:39
SPEAKER_02: And I went to live in London with a lot of ideas about what that experience was going to be like.
46:45
SPEAKER_02: But what I didn't realize is I'd never lived in a city before.
46:49
SPEAKER_02: And I've never lived without having trees outside my window and not having easy access to green.
46:57
SPEAKER_02: And it was a really profound sensory deprivation for me.
47:03
SPEAKER_02: And it plunged me into a state of almost existential despair.
47:07
SPEAKER_02: Now it changed my life because I I it awakened in me a knowing of what was important to me.
47:16
SPEAKER_02: But it was really, it was really hard for me to live in a city.
47:22
SPEAKER_00: And do you miss the ocean?
47:24
SPEAKER_00: I sometimes, so I grew up in Kansas and was not near the ocean at all, but now I find myself craving the ocean.
47:34
SPEAKER_02: So here's the thing.
47:35
SPEAKER_02: So I had a dream, this was your long-winded answer, and I'll get there.
47:39
SPEAKER_02: I had a dream one night where I was swimming in the ocean.
47:41
SPEAKER_02: I often have dreams where I'm swimming in the ocean and on Cape Cod, and the dunes are off to the right, big cliff dunes, and the water's rough.
47:50
SPEAKER_02: It's a real rough Atlantic day.
47:52
SPEAKER_02: White caps, big waves.
47:54
SPEAKER_02: And I'm swimming, I'm feeling really strong and happy in the water, but I realize my son is swimming behind me.
48:00
SPEAKER_02: And I get worried about him and I look behind.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: I think, is he gonna be okay?
48:04
SPEAKER_02: And then I think, he's one year old, he's fine.
48:07
unknown: Okay.
48:08
SPEAKER_02: And then I woke up.
48:10
SPEAKER_02: I thought that's a weird dream.
48:12
SPEAKER_02: My son is a very strong swimmer.
48:14
SPEAKER_02: He very he was a swim team captain and a lifeguard.
48:17
SPEAKER_02: He's a very strong swimmer.
48:18
SPEAKER_02: But at one, he was not a strong swimmer.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: And I was what is this dream about?
48:23
SPEAKER_02: And so my son came over and to do laundry properly, and I said, I had this dream about you.
48:29
SPEAKER_02: And he looked at me and said, Oh mom, that's when you and I were seals together.
48:36
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
48:37
SPEAKER_02: And he didn't mean it as a metaphor.
48:41
SPEAKER_02: And he was right.
48:42
SPEAKER_02: So what is it like for a seal to live in the mountains?
48:48
SPEAKER_02: My husband says he has to keep my seal skin in the attic.
48:54
SPEAKER_02: What it means is I had to put in his extra deep bathtub in the bathroom.
49:00
SPEAKER_02: And I get in it up to my neck at least twice a day.
49:05
SPEAKER_02: I need a lot of water.
49:08
SPEAKER_02: I really I they my husband knows you have to get me up to the ocean every summer and often in the fall because I like it in the fall.
49:16
SPEAKER_02: It's a real hard one for me to.
49:19
SPEAKER_02: I live in a place that I've been dreaming about my whole life.
49:22
SPEAKER_02: And I know that we will, my husband and I will re find each other, and our children will re find each other through this land.
49:27
SPEAKER_02: People used to know that the way you found each other again was through the land.
49:34
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I just said, I know that's how we'll find each other.
49:38
SPEAKER_02: We must root deeply where we are in order to find each other here again.
49:44
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I love that.
49:46
SPEAKER_04: I I was close.
49:47
SPEAKER_04: I was fortunate to know five of my great-grandparents.
49:52
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
49:53
SPEAKER_04: And some of them lived very near to my great-grandmother grew up on a farm three two miles, three miles from where we live now.
50:04
SPEAKER_04: And her husband, so she was born here in our town in Shrewsbury, and her husband was born in Italy.
50:11
SPEAKER_04: She was Italian, also.
50:12
SPEAKER_04: Her parents had moved here and had her, and then her husband came from Italy when he was a kid when he was like nine years old.
50:20
SPEAKER_04: And I just recently found out, and they farmed in the next town over, and I had the great fortune of spending a lot of time with them as a kid.
50:28
SPEAKER_04: My mom was my dad brought in that connection to nature, really.
50:32
SPEAKER_04: And my mom really brought in connection to family.
50:35
SPEAKER_04: They had the intact Italian family Sunday dinner.
50:40
SPEAKER_04: Every week the family would come together and have dinner together and lots of family around.
50:45
SPEAKER_04: And so I always felt connected in that way.
50:48
SPEAKER_04: I think from early on, and I actually, my great-grandfather was getting ill when I was like from the time I can remember, but he was such a sweet and amazing guy.
50:58
SPEAKER_04: And we he called me his little paisano.
51:01
SPEAKER_04: I was like, I was the most Italian-looking of all the He's very jealous.
51:07
SPEAKER_02: This is what I want to be reborn into.
51:10
SPEAKER_04: Grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
51:12
SPEAKER_04: I was the one who just looked the most Italian to him, or we had some special bond.
51:16
SPEAKER_04: But I just recently found out from one of my great aunts that when he first came to this country, actually, interestingly, when they landed here, they went to Kansas, but only stayed there for less than a year.
51:30
SPEAKER_02: And then they moved to Coincidentally, yeah, right.
51:33
SPEAKER_04: And then moved to Vermont.
51:36
SPEAKER_04: And the first house that they lived in is a quarter mile up the road from where the farm that Lindsay and I live on and own now.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: And where you went to help the neighbor too?
51:47
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
51:48
SPEAKER_04: And where I helped an elderly neighbor who had fallen this morning, actually.
51:53
SPEAKER_02: But we've lost in the modern world this idea of identification with the land, commitment to the land to be a place.
52:01
SPEAKER_02: I think it's what a lot of people are feeling a lack of.
52:05
SPEAKER_02: My kids are in their 30s, and they but one lives five minutes in one direction, one lives five minutes in the other direction.
52:11
SPEAKER_02: And everybody is jealous of my husband and me.
52:15
SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
52:16
SPEAKER_02: But how did you do that?
52:18
SPEAKER_02: We've worked really hard at it, and we've really had to defy a culture that says your kids are supposed to go off and break from their parents, and right?
52:26
SPEAKER_02: That what does it mean to really part of it is that we love where we live.
52:31
SPEAKER_02: And because we love where we live, they love where they grew up.
52:34
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
52:35
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: Same.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we talk about it with our kids a lot.
52:38
SPEAKER_04: This is always my mom's stated desire in life.
52:42
SPEAKER_04: She her wish was to have her children land near to where.
52:45
SPEAKER_04: And my my sister now lives in suburbs of Chicago, and my brother lives in Vermont, put a couple hours away.
52:51
SPEAKER_04: And our kids are like, my mom is really a third parent of our third mother.
52:57
SPEAKER_02: Of course, this is the dream.
52:59
SPEAKER_02: This is what I want.
52:59
SPEAKER_02: And also that it used to be that we lived so I just I don't want to be in segregated spaces anymore.
53:07
SPEAKER_02: I really don't.
53:08
SPEAKER_02: I want to be in, I wrote a lot in my book, Way of the Rose, about I don't want to be in any spiritual community where children aren't at the center of things.
53:16
SPEAKER_02: And I that has to be central to me.
53:18
SPEAKER_02: Children are at the center of everything that happens.
53:21
SPEAKER_02: But I also want to be in, I don't want children segregated from old people.
53:25
SPEAKER_02: They need to have lots of old people in their lives.
53:29
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and our littlest one, our two-year-old, who we felt like we were done having kids after our second child.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: And then she just was floating around.
53:40
SPEAKER_00: I could feel her.
53:41
SPEAKER_00: And she and Scott's mom are all of our kids with Scott's mom, but they're just so bonded.
53:48
SPEAKER_00: And it's just the most beautiful thing.
53:50
SPEAKER_00: Our kids are seventh generation, right where we live here.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: And I really can see that the way Scott is in the world and the way our kids are, is it there's something different that I just don't have because I didn't have that long lineage of place in my family.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: It's it is just I'm gonna correct you for a moment though, because the lineage is the conveyor belt.
54:14
SPEAKER_02: And we don't need conveyor belts anymore.
54:17
SPEAKER_02: So if you were to draw your ancestors on a piece of paper, mothers and fathers for seven generations, you would end up not with a line, but you'd end up with a root system.
54:29
SPEAKER_02: And that root system would go in many surprising directions.
54:33
SPEAKER_02: But then layer atop that in the paper fold the root systems of your soul, other lives.
54:41
SPEAKER_02: So maybe in this life, it's hard to trace your relationship to the land here.
54:46
SPEAKER_02: But in a different culture or time, they would say, Oh, we found her, she's back.
54:53
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
54:54
SPEAKER_02: I love that.
54:55
SPEAKER_02: She's back.
54:58
SPEAKER_02: And you know when you have an old relationship to things, and that we can claim it not because of an ism, I'm of this or that group or that group, but uh because my soul remembers this place.
55:13
SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that was so strange when my husband and I both decided to move to the CADS, we got here, we bought our house and we moved here.
55:22
SPEAKER_02: And I became quite frightened because I realized I'd been dreaming about this place my whole life, and I could find my way without a map.
55:31
SPEAKER_02: This was in the days before phones and Google Maps.
55:34
SPEAKER_02: I knew all the roads.
55:35
SPEAKER_02: What was even stranger is I could go out for a walk in the woods and find my way.
55:40
SPEAKER_02: And I knew where the rocks were, the trees were, the bends in the road were, and it was as if my soul had been dreaming to this space my whole life.
55:50
SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't come from a family that's lived in the Catskills for generations, but I come from a soul that remembers this land.
56:02
SPEAKER_04: I love that.
56:03
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and the whole conversation of wanting your kids to live close by, and I feel that's how I feel.
56:10
SPEAKER_04: It's my greatest desire, and our kids are so deeply connected to our farm, and it's so beautiful and rich.
56:17
SPEAKER_04: And we'll see.
56:18
SPEAKER_04: But I feel like earlier on when I said that, because of the culture we live in, there's almost the stigma of oh, that's the wrong thing to say.
56:27
SPEAKER_04: You want your kids to have opportunity out in the world, and it's like, yes, of course.
56:30
SPEAKER_04: But like go get on anti-anxiety medicine because there's yeah, but I love you framing it that way and just bringing it back to that is my greatest desire is for my kids to be there.
56:40
SPEAKER_04: And I'm pleased in the idea of being buried up on the hill behind our house.
56:44
SPEAKER_02: Well, we're looking, we're I'm really interested in composting burials because I I don't know this is my new obsession because I want to figure out if you heard about composting burial, it's like I think they're not legal in every state, right?
56:57
SPEAKER_00: But I know they happen here in Vermont.
56:59
SPEAKER_02: Vermont has good luck.
57:00
SPEAKER_02: Vermont's better.
57:01
SPEAKER_02: You guys are so much better than New York.
57:02
SPEAKER_02: New York has a lot of bureaucratic.
57:05
SPEAKER_02: I really, I really want to be buried on my property.
57:07
SPEAKER_02: And that both my husband and I do.
57:09
SPEAKER_02: We bury all our animals on our property.
57:11
SPEAKER_00: Why can't we bury ourselves on our property?
57:13
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
57:14
SPEAKER_00: And whatever the law says, I feel like you can.
57:19
SPEAKER_02: Having been through, I'll tell you, my father had this idea.
57:22
SPEAKER_02: My father was a doctor in a small town up in southeastern Mass.
57:25
SPEAKER_02: And he said, stick me in a pine box and put me in the ground near my house.
57:29
SPEAKER_02: Okay, there's a little graveyard near his house.
57:31
SPEAKER_02: He's we oh, then the funeral industrial complex gets involved.
57:36
SPEAKER_02: We got to put the body in a plastic bag because of the estuary, and then we gotta put the concrete seal, the pine box goes, oh.
57:45
SPEAKER_02: And I realized my father hadn't researched it enough.
57:48
SPEAKER_02: He's fine, but yeah, I think being goo in a plastic bag was not the plan.
57:55
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think for us, just the way we speak with our kids, you know, we're very often, oh, what a beautiful day.
58:03
SPEAKER_00: It's so beautiful, the land is so beautiful.
58:06
SPEAKER_00: Our kids have connection to we have a 92-acre farm that's conserved, so there's no risk of development or anything like that.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, just to have them connected to the plants, the animals, everything.
58:19
SPEAKER_00: It feels like the way it is the way.
58:22
SPEAKER_02: It's what it's our kids.
58:23
SPEAKER_02: Now, my husband and I met each other in New York City, and then we escaped pretty quickly together.
58:28
SPEAKER_02: And my daughter, who has written about in the body as a doorway, experienced tremendous violence as a child, unexpectedly, and and it saved the woods saved her life.
58:40
SPEAKER_02: The earth saved her, and that our kids could run in the wild, and they're both and it's the medicine, right?
58:46
SPEAKER_02: The plants are the medicine, the animals are the medicine, but the dirt is the medicine.
58:51
SPEAKER_02: And absolutely, yeah.
58:54
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I see so many.
58:56
SPEAKER_02: It's funny, I began my career as a young person as a teacher in the public schools, and in such a state of horror, and what we do to children was untenable for me to continue.
59:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
59:09
SPEAKER_04: I had this thought recently, actually, just a couple nights ago.
59:12
SPEAKER_04: It's our tree season in Vermont, so I've been out hunting some.
59:15
SPEAKER_04: And I say a little prayer as I go out into the woods.
59:19
SPEAKER_04: And recently, as I'm sitting at this tree, I often will grab some soil, pick up some soil, and rub it on my clothes for practical reasons and because it's soothing to me, that rich smell of earth.
59:32
SPEAKER_04: But I know you've practiced a lot of meditation and different things, and I had this idea.
59:37
SPEAKER_04: I've never been, I haven't ever really had a meditation practice.
59:40
SPEAKER_04: I've tried a little bit here and there, and it's difficult.
59:43
SPEAKER_04: And I had this idea of maybe this is something people do.
59:48
SPEAKER_04: But as I picked up this handful of earth and smelled it and was thinking about asking the land to have a deer walk in front of me that I could kill really swiftly, I had this idea of perhaps instead of meditating with a mantra or a sound or a word or something.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_04: What about meditating with smell, with the smell of the earth?
1:00:09
SPEAKER_04: Is this something that comes up?
1:00:11
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so much comes up.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_02: So many wonderful things come up.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_02: Mostly what comes up is we're gonna have to figure out how to continue this conversation for the next 20 years.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_02: But okay.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_02: I often tell people when they begin to work with the dead, and I help people connect with the dead, is go ahead and get some earth wherever you are.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_02: I don't care if you're in a city, go out to that poor little tree in its little box and get some soil, get some dirt, and realize that you're holding nothing but the bodies of your ancestors, literally.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_02: Insects, plants, droppings from birds, tiny beings, stones that were once ocean creatures that have become dust.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_02: You are holding the bodies of the dead in your hand.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_02: Those are your ancestors.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_02: They're literally the ancestors beneath your feet bearing you up.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_02: And they remember who you are and what you are and where you belong.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_02: And so when we talk about the land, we are talking about the ancestors, their bodies.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_02: That our bodies will become the body of the land.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_02: And so smell.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_02: So, yes, get the dirt, get that earth, know that body.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_02: You're calling that's calling on the dead and collaborating with them.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_02: One of the things that's so interesting is the relationship of smell to the ancestral realms.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_02: It's very profound, and I'm very curious about it.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_02: My daughter has a nose like a black bear, and which is more powerful than a bloodhound, right?
1:01:49
SPEAKER_02: Like it's they a black bear can smell a potato chip bag from 12 miles away.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_02: And and if you've read the Madonna Secret, you would know my my daughter wrote a book, and it's really the sense of smell guides that book all the way through.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_02: And when she was writing it, not only was she reading about the ecosystems in Second Temple period Palestine and the lost vegetation and plants, she filled her writing room with the smells of Spike Nard and Frankincense.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_02: And she me so that to create that time travel portal through smell.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_02: We know if we lose our sense of smell, we lose our sense of memory, right?
1:02:33
SPEAKER_02: It's the first sign that we're gonna get Alzheimer's, right?
1:02:37
SPEAKER_02: That to lose the smell.
1:02:38
SPEAKER_02: And I think there's something very eerie going on with COVID's uh destroying people's sense of smell and that that that deep sense memory.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_02: Incense was created.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_02: Incense people burn in Buddhist monasteries to summon the dead because the dead come to smells, perfumes, roses, the smell of roses to summon the dead.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_02: And when I want to summon the dead, I often my mother was one of those women who had a scent, she wore the same perfume every day for decades.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_02: So I always spray a little Nina Ritchie Lair du Tomp on my ancestral altar when I would call in my mother.
1:03:19
SPEAKER_02: It's mama, it smells like mama, but there is nothing more old than a smell.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_02: Like that smell of petrachor in the earth after a rain, like that brings us back millions of years.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_02: So, what is it?
1:03:33
SPEAKER_02: Is can we meditate on a smell?
1:03:35
SPEAKER_02: I have a lot to say about meditation, and my husband and I wrote a a book about against meditation.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_02: Called The Way of the Rose.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_02: Um about why embodied practices may be one of the things that's interesting is that for hunter-gatherers, meditation was often used it probably derived from hunting practices of stillness, waiting for an animal to come.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_02: Being, you know what I mean?
1:04:02
SPEAKER_02: Like you wanted to make your mind still, you wanted to make your body still, your heartbeat still, so that the animal wouldn't perceive you.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_02: And you could be there and waiting for the arrival of the animal and you're hunting.
1:04:17
SPEAKER_02: But bead practices, which are ubiquitous around the world, grew up from gathering because mothers are being interrupted every five minutes, right?
1:04:26
SPEAKER_02: It's just that and in your own Italian tradition, bead practices go back 50, 60,000 years.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_02: And so we wrote a book about reclaiming the rosary uh before religion as an ancient way of practicing a connection to the ancestors.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_02: Let yourself off the hook with meditation.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_02: My husband was a was supposed was in line to be the first Rinzai Zen master in America.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_02: And as he said, he was the most miserable human being in America.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_00: He left.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm so often I need to read these other books.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_04: Me too.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_02: But but but anyway, forget about it.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_02: Who cares?
1:05:07
SPEAKER_02: Do what you need to do.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_02: That that relationship you're having to the earth and to smell is profound.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_02: A lot of time there's a folk tradition in Buddhism that says children choose their next parents through the sense of smell.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if you know about the t-shirt study with I think about this a lot with dating, the horror of dating apps.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_02: So they did the sense of someone smelling good to you is the best predictor of how well a couple is going to do together.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_02: If they smell right.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_02: And it turns out if a couple smells right to each other, they tend to have a genetic connection to each other that will be better for their children.
1:05:45
SPEAKER_02: And they will tend to last longer as couples.
1:05:47
SPEAKER_02: And they did a test where they took t shirts from men and they put them out, and women picked the t shirt that they like the smell of best.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_02: And those couples stayed together.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_02: They never saw a picture of each other, they didn't know anything else about each other, no information.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_02: Information on a dating app, the smell of a t-shirt told them who they were supposed to be with.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: What are you thinking?
1:06:09
SPEAKER_04: I'm wondering if you would smell a t-shirt of mine.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: It's a that's a I love your sense of what are you talking about?
1:06:16
SPEAKER_00: I love your sense of smell.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_00: I love the way you smell.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_02: But right?
1:06:20
SPEAKER_02: But like this, but with something we've lost, huh?
1:06:22
SPEAKER_02: That of course, right?
1:06:23
SPEAKER_02: That's what animals do when they meet each other.
1:06:24
SPEAKER_02: They smell each other.
1:06:25
SPEAKER_02: We get that's how we're getting all our information.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_02: So I'm very interested in the dead and the living and smell and scent is very important.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_02: And what happened, one of the things that's really interesting is that tell me if I'm going off.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_02: I'm just so interested in this.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_02: Women on birth control lose their sense of smell.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
1:06:43
SPEAKER_02: Birth control pills.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_02: And so they frequently get involved with something and they go off birth control pills, and then they wake up and go, Oh my God.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_00: I can imagine smell right.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_00: And something doesn't smell right.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about how strange it was that we walked, we were in my office today, and we walked into my office, and I've never walked into my office and smelled something, but we both walked in and we were like, it smells like clove.
1:07:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what is that?
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_00: We'll never know.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_02: I it's it's very has smell can transport you more than anything, right?
1:07:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:07:15
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes I've thought I do a lot of work with women who've had miscarriages and had abortions, and I think one of we don't have a very good conversation around that, right?
1:07:23
SPEAKER_00: Like that's a whole nother topic I would love to have a conversation with you about because there was so much resonance for me when I read parts of your book around that.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: It's just so beautiful.
1:07:34
SPEAKER_02: We can say yes to a soul and no to a body, right?
1:07:37
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_02: And if you said to me, You can be in your mother, has a new incarnational reality, but she still smells the same.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_02: Would you like to spend eight weeks in her body?
1:07:48
SPEAKER_02: I'd say yes.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_02: She's probably gonna end the pregnancy.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_02: She's gonna be 17 years old.
1:07:55
SPEAKER_02: She's not gonna want to keep this baby, but would you like to spend eight weeks in her body?
1:08:00
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_00: It's a very there's a lot, there's a lot more to say there.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_00: And I know we need to finish up our conversation.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you had anything left to say on that topic, but the one of the things we really try to ask everyone is just thinking of these people who are just starting out on their path, whatever that path is, just any advice that you wish you would have gotten earlier on.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_02: This is the best anti-anxiety medication I know.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_02: You are not alone.
1:08:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_02: Those hundreds of grandmothers and grandfathers, you may not have had great grandparents you knew or grandparents you knew, but they remember you.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_02: And they love you.
1:08:54
SPEAKER_02: And you have mothers and fathers from lives you don't remember, who remember you, who even now are standing ready to guide you, hold you, love you, heal you.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
1:09:10
unknown: That's it.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_01: You wake up, you are not alone, you are loved and you are worthy of love.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_00: And love is the way.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
1:09:21
SPEAKER_00: Love is gravity.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: Love is gravity.
1:09:25
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this has been just like a highlight of my life.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_00: I am so grateful for this conversation.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_00: I just want to let my emotion move and just say that any little bit of getting lost in the chaos of life when I've had this kind of conversation with you, Predita, or this conversation specifically, it just brings me back to center and to everything that I know is so important.
1:09:51
SPEAKER_00: So I'm so grateful.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, thank you so much, Scott and Lindsay.
1:09:56
SPEAKER_02: I am so grateful for your presence in the world and for your home and life and all the work you're doing.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_02: And I'm ready to ship my son up and his partner to come see you and visit you.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_02: You may find them standing on your doorstep.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_04: That would be lovely.
1:10:11
SPEAKER_02: We would love that.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we would love to.
1:10:14
SPEAKER_02: They need some slight, they need a slightly older couple to show them how to do it.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_02: They're 30 trying to find their way with this and homesteading.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_02: And I'm also just my home is open to you if you ever want to visit.
1:10:26
unknown: Thank you.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_02: We do a big party every June 16th.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_02: It's open to everyone from around the world, and it's all free, and it's potluck.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_02: And we dance and sing and pray and celebrate the ancestors on the land.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_02: And some people camp out, and some people just hang out, and it's always a lot of fun.
1:10:45
SPEAKER_02: And I hope you'll join it.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_02: And it's totally kid-centered.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_02: Kitchen Twitch Moral.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_04: Well, I hope to continue the conversation, and we would love to meet you and spend time with you.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_02: This has been a real gift to me.
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
1:10:59
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
1:11:02
SPEAKER_00: If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_00: For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.
1:11:12
SPEAKER_04: We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.