Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 19: Belonging Is Something We Build: Community, Motherhood & Finding Home with Kimberly Ann Johnson

Transcript

Ep 19: Belonging Is Something We Build: Community, Motherhood & Finding Home with Kimberly Ann Johnson · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: 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_02: 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_00: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: 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_02: Okay, welcome back to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: I am incredibly honored to welcome Kimberly Ann Johnson to our podcast today.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Kimberly, I have admired you for many years, ever since oh, postpartum with my first baby, and that was 11 years ago or so.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: I happened upon your book after having just an incredibly challenging labor and birth of my daughter.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: And the fourth trimester came into my awareness and just really opened my awareness to really new and different ways of approaching postpartum.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that was my first introduction to your work, I feel like.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been blessed to be a part of just some of your online offerings and dream of connecting with you in person one of these days for one of your trainings.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I appreciate so much about you.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate the way you teach.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate the space you leave in your teaching and the pace at which you teach.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I really appreciate the way you share online as well in a way that feels hopefully, I would imagine, very authentic to you and not trying to fit into any real particular box.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I just want to say those things to yeah, just honor you.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: And we would love it if you could just introduce yourself to our audience just a little bit about you and your work.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for that introduction.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: I guess probably what's most important right now is I have one daughter.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: She's gonna be 19 tomorrow.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: Prior to that phase of my life, I was a yoga teacher and a rolfer.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I came to the threshold of the motherhood already knowing I wanted a home birth, even though I'd never met a midwife, and I don't really know how I knew it, I just knew that.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: I also prepared quite a bit for the birth, but I at the time that I was living 20 years ago, I had never heard of really postpartum the word outside of postpartum depression.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I had no idea that there was something to prepare for.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: So I just prepared as much as I could for the birth.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: I put everything on the line, I spent all my savings.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: I moved from an island to a city, ironically, to work with a midwife.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then it feels like everything changed after I had a baby, and so it took me about six years to heal myself.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: I had a pelvic fluoride or tear, it didn't heal well.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: I got stitched with material that they were experimenting with, and my body didn't really accept that.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I really was had a lot of pieces to put together like a lot of people in a postpartum time, the earlier unresolved biochemical, biophysical, a lot of unresolved things came to the surface.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: And that journey took me about six and a half years, and the outcome of that was my first book, The Fourth Trimester, which talks about preparing for the fourth trimester, being in the fourth trimester, and beyond the fourth trimester.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then from there I started doing internal pelvic floor work.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: I had already been a Rolfer, so working in the pelvis wasn't such a huge leap for me.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, it is very different territory and very different responsibilities and different shame matrices and all those things.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: But as far as the courage to go there, the necessity felt so great that it allowed me to skip over what a lot of people hesitate about in terms of legality and many other considerations people might have about doing that work, their scope of practice.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so after that, I did about 800 sessions in three years that were all pelvic sessions with birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, sexual boundary ruptures.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: And right around then, the Me Too movement, the second wave of it, 2017, happened.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of what I'd been seeing in women's nervous systems that was also inhabiting their tissues in the pelvis came to the surface.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I felt like I had a piece that was there between the predator-prey dynamic in the female nervous system.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so out of that work became the online course activate your inner jaguar.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_03: I think the first one was called A Real World Understanding of Your Nervous System.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: And out of that, I wrote my second book, Call of the Wild.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: And uh since then I've written two more books.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: One is called Reckoning, Grief and Elderhood in a Me First Era with Stephen Jenkinson, my elder, who I met about five years ago.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then I have a book coming out in November called Erotic Seasons, tuning into the rhythms of women's sexuality and spirituality, which includes more because now I'm postmenopausal.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: I described that the other day to someone, a beautiful woman in her early 30s, in a period of heartbreak, and listening to her heartbreak.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, wow, I feel like I live on another continent now.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: I remember those times.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_03: I remember that feeling.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not immune to heartbreak, but without that same hormonal composition, it registers completely differently in my body and in my system.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: So now I'm stewarding a body of work that's called Mothering the Bones.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's a lay practice teaching women how to hold each other's pelvises and uh learning what it's like.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: I'm newly married.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: So learning what it's like to be newly married at the same time as having a child that's going to school.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: I live in San Diego and she's going to school in Scotland.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_04: Oh wow.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a bit of the territory at the moment.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for sharing all of that.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I'd seen that your daughter was going to school in Scotland, and I have a special love for Scotland, but I was thinking it's so far away.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: And as we have three kids, our oldest is almost 11.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: And when I think about that period of time when she will potentially leave our home, it's hard to picture.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, I feel that resonance of what you were describing of living on a different continent than some people, just the lifetime of experiences you've had.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm in my early 40s, but I have younger women that I come in contact with where I'm like, oh yeah, like I remember what that was like, but it's just not the same anymore.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: I feel it as I'm getting into perimenopause or closer to those years, I feel like I feel a shift happening, even if I haven't had a lot of the really specific biological change that I'm noticing yet.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: I feel it more in my kind of alignment and boundaries and really just what I know to be true for myself, maybe.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that resonates at all, but that's what I'm thinking about as you share.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's very different.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: Speaking as someone who had a big life change at 40 and moved continents, and I hadn't even written a book by the time I my first book came out when I was 42.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: That level of alignment and boundaries, but still together with sex hormones, is quite a powerful combination.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a lot different without the hormones.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: I would imagine.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: But it's I'm so bummed out that perimenopause is being framed so negatively because it's to me, 40s is absolute sexual prime because you have the wherewithal of what you know you need.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: You've had some practice talking about how it works, and then you still do have fertile sex hormones.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: So to me, that's like a home run combination.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so I'm bummed out that everyone's like, yeah, it's terrible.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: I'm in parimenopause.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, oh my God, like early 40s.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: Are you kidding me?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's like the best.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm doing well where I'm at this moment.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, the being inside that portal is quite different than being on one or the other side.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: But as it comes to an 11-year-old, I remember when my daughter was born, like at two months old, and I was basically like already telling my mom, like, I'll be moving into her dorm.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like this, we will never separate.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: And those are all the things we're supposed to feel.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: And it changed even so much between her senior year and the summer after senior year.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_03: And people are like, How is it having so far?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_03: Because we were, it was just her and me.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: So it's quite an umbilical stretch.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: But she loves it so much where she is.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: And if she was one hour away but hated it, that would be so much harder on me than being where she is.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: That feels like, and it was a risk, we didn't know, but it actually is like the perfect fit for her.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: So the image of the emptiness, like people are like, because they know how close we are, so they're like, How are you doing?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, zero times I've walked into her room and looked around and cried like that has not happened.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: And she's like, Yeah, because you changed my room into an office, but I'm also not like I'm not happy to be quote unquote rid of her anything.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: I also just had a biz big piece of work to do when she left.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: I had to finish a book, so it was like, okay, made it, made it to this threshold.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, good.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: And then I feel very victorious that number one, I can afford to pay for college.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: Number two, that she chose something that's completely out of what many people can even imagine doing.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: They can't even imagine how could I even I wouldn't do that if I was that far away.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it was edgy.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, are you gonna be okay that far away?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: I know I'm supposed to act like I think you are, but are you?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: And my mom was just going, it's gonna be fine, she's gonna be fine.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: So thankfully I have like other elders that are like standing with me, like, nah, it's gonna work out.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so are you in Southern California right now?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we love to just ask what the natural world if you could introduce the space around where you live, just what your land looks like or what's blooming, anything like that.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, compared to where you live, the word land means something very different here.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: I am not, I am a very wealthy person, but not wealthy for the context I live in.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's cement under me where I live.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: I have a very small, little tiny piece that's got a non-fruiting prayer tree and a sago palm, but I spent a lot of time mulching it, laying down mulch and cardboard, trying to create soil, and then one summer I was gone for a month and my landlord just had someone come and raise the whole thing because it didn't look good.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was a real bummer.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, that was really my kind of big attempt.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a suburban girl, I know nothing about farming, so I was really giving it a go because, like a lot of people, I wasn't sure I'm gonna stay in the apartment where I am, so it felt like, oh, should I really put that much time and energy into it?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then it was like, but you don't know, so start now and do that thing.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: So I was really taking a page from Stephen Jenkinson, my elder who farms, and he was kind of convinced I was gonna go into farming life.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I was like, all right, start here.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, that was like a three-year project of runs to the dump to experiment with different kinds of mulch and then try to deal with the crabgrass that's underneath it and all that.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: So I've given up for now.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: My husband moved here a year ago.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: He is very in tune with plants, and so he's caring for some herbs and plants that are on our balconies because they're part of his offerings to the deities that he bows to and lives with in his religion, which is Condom Blé.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: So I live with an actual animist.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's not convenient.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: We just we've had a Christmas tree on our back porch for the better part of the last nine months.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: My landlord just found out about it and was like, I can't believe an educated person would have a fire hazard like this.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: We'd lose our insurance then.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: But my husband, he thought when we bought the tree, I've never bought a Christmas tree before.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: So this was the first year.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: He really wanted one.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_03: He thought it was alive.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: So when we got it home and he found out he wasn't gonna be able to plan it afterwards, he was just bereft.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I watched the pennies drop in the slots of like, whoa, but all Americans have these, and there's so many of them, and how many trees got cut down?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, I know, hon, but I just it's only it's it was my one shot.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: I've never done it before.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: So then he was like, No, we're keeping it, and then he loved to watch the colors change, and then he said it was gonna be part of a work of art.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: Additionally, though, when I look out my window, I see the Pacific Ocean.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_03: I live on sandstone cliffs, and I don't live exactly on the cliffs, I cross the street and get to the cliffs, but yeah, very warm water right now.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: We have we're having like 73, 74 degree water temperature.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_03: I'm pretty sure that's never happened before.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: My memory of growing up is that the water would get if it got to 70, that was a warm summer.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: So we're having more tropical microclimate now here because this is desert.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's desert that comes to the sea.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: So the landscape is succulent, natural landscape is succulent.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: And if you think about the Dr.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: Seuss books, Theodore Geiselle, he lived here.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: So they're his those funny plants are basically animated versions of the plant landscape that's here.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: So what's indigenous here is sage and all of the sage family, hakaranda citrus, a lot of citrus, a lot of avocados.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: My parents just have like lemons and oranges just falling all over, even just with a few trees.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: And like basically people pay people to come and they're not eating what's there.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: There's just like excess everywhere.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: My my I live on the same freeway exit as my parents, but they live like 10 minutes inland.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: So there's mostly orange, avocado, and lemon, but a lot will grow here.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: Almost anything.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_03: We have passion fruit vines all up and down our street.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: Our next door neighbors are growing dragon fruit and figs, and it's a very kind of Mediterranean climate, but we are in a drought.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure if we're officially in a drought right now, but we're in and out of droughts since the 80s.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: So we would have times when you could only water your lawn on certain days of the week, that kind of thing.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: We don't I don't have a lawn, but people do.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a bit what it's what's going on.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody's in flip-flops.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_03: The surf's been insane the summer, meaning like big summer surf.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: We usually don't have big summer surf, we have cruising surf in the summer, but we've had some really big swells, so it's been very electric here because the water is warm, it's breaking so far out.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, that's one way that even though Southern California is very it's a very superficial, looks-oriented place, it we do have that contact with nature and that like a lot.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: I don't surf with boards, I body surf and I get out in the water, but I know how to talk surf.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: Like, you know, I run into people on the street that like I ran into a friend when I came home and she was just absolutely like she was basically running in a shorty, just ecstatic because she just got out of the water, you know.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: So there is that kind of just you know what the tides are doing, you know what the surf's doing, and that's determining kind of people's moods and what's going on.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, it's so interesting as to how that shapes the culture of the place, to have like uh an activity that so many people are into there that like just has them out in the waves in the ocean, and how that sort of bubbles up through what the culture is, and like your friend being like ecstatic to have had that experience.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: I love it.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: I it's one of the things I love about being here.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_03: And there's I've lived in a lot of places with surf culture.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: I lived in Rio de Janeiro, it's like islands, they make a certain kind of people, right?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not the place where you want to get a lot done.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's not the place where you're gonna have a lot of really enriching intellectual conversations, but it is a place where there's a vibe for sure.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_04: That's cool.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm wondering if you would take us back a little bit to your childhood and kind of the path that you've traveled to end up where you are right now with the type of work you do, specifically with regard to your connection to either earth or body, and like your earliest memories of those, your connection with your body, for example, that you can think of.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people have asked me if I grew up in an ashram.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I did not.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: I had yuppie parents for people who don't know what that means.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's what does that mean?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yuppie, young urban professional.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I didn't even know it it was an acronym, but yes, I know what yuppie parents are.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: I my parents were young when they had me, and my parents went to CU to they met in Boulder, and so everybody thinks, oh, they were like hippies.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: I was raised by entrepreneurs and very loving people, people who love children.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: I don't have much in common with my siblings to speak of, looks or otherwise.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the things we all have in common is how much we love kids and how comfortable we are with children and how much we choose to be around children.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: I've always loved the water, so I feel like earliest memories are like learning how to swim, being underwater.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_03: I've always loved to be underwater.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: My mom taught me how to swim when I was a toddler.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'm the first, so she spent a lot of time with me.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I also was super curious about reading really early.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: So she taught me how to read when I was like three and a half, and I was writing when I was four.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: And when I went to kindergarten, I was writing in cursive, and my teacher I was getting punished because I needed to just go back to just writing and printing, and I was like always pushing ahead, very curious.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I think being underwater, I was quite uncoordinated on land until I was like 11.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I was I skipped a grade in school, so by the time I was 11, I was in seventh grade.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: By then I seemed to get some more coordination.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: So the dance studio was really where I was always in my body and in ways that I loved and ways that I looked forward to, and clearly were also ways for me to balance my intense mental cravings and reading.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: I it would be if I was at a family thing, it would always be like, Where's Camel?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: She's in the corner reading.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I was yeah, I think those are the things that stand out.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: My mom comes from a farming family, so I'm what only one generation from ranchers with my mom, Fresno, Central California.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_03: So it's the breadbasket.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: California produces, I think, something like a sixth of the world's produce, something insane like that.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: So melons, vineyards, grapes.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so I would spend some times in the summer with my mom's great uncles, and they were cattle ranchers too.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: So a little bit more of a tradition of making food from your land, knowing where it comes from, that kind of thing.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: My dad comes from more generations of college.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: My grandmother went to college on my dad's mom went to college after the war.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: And less connection to a known my grand great-grandparents met in Springfield, Illinois, but their parents came from Ireland as more generations between a land-based connection.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious because everyone has different stories around this, but was your mom was she eager to live a life that was different from growing up on the farm?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or did she we've interviewed some people that it was like their parents grew up on a farm and they were like just so eager to get out of there and live a different sort of life.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious about that.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: My mom didn't exactly grow up on a farm.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: She grew up in a farming area.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Fresno at the time is a small city, but she d not even a city really.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: Now it is, but but she she knew how to do stuff, right?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: If she went to her grandparents' house, they had chickens.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: My mom knows how to butcher an animal, that kind of thing.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: No, I don't think I think her parents, my grandmother is Mormon, and her father was a butcher.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: So their family did really well during the depression because they had food and they would all feed a lot of other people.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: Gotcha.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: My grandmother married a non-Mormon, non-farmer.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: My grandfather, his mom had a music shop in town.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: So by marrying a non-Mormon and non-farmer, that was already a step out.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: For sure, my grandfather, I don't know if he wanted to get out of the farming because he there's all kinds of stories about him getting super hazed by my grandmother's sister's partners because they could put him on a horse and he'd get thrown, or they they would just really jerk him around because he didn't have the same kind of upbringing.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they thought it was funny to just message.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: They thought it was funny.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess he thought it was funny too.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: But take him hunting and he doesn't really know how to work stuff, that kind of thing.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: He learned.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: But he was much more interested in cosmopolitan life.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: He moved them to San Francisco.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: He was more interested in the world, taking my grandmother to Japan outside of just that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Small town life.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: As far as my mom, I think that my mom she has all the homemaking skills.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: So she was home ech in college, and those are the things she's really good at.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: She's a she became an interior designer.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: Great cook, sewed my bathing suits when I was a kid, made my costumes, loved it.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: Really a devoted mother and who loves the art, the domestic arts.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't really re realize that because I'm not she also doesn't love to teach.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: So she's she does those things, but she's she does them her way, and she's not she didn't really try to pass it on in a way.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I don't think she was in a rush to to get out.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: But at the same I think she was went to college like a lot of women in her generation.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: What do they call it?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: The you went there to get oh, I forgot the acronym.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway, she went there to find husband.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_04: Gotcha.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: And she did.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: And my dad got drafted, and he had just graduated and he got a low number, so he's gonna have to go to the war.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: So they got married and he went into the reserves, and so they moved to California, and she was 20 and he was 21, and she left with one year of college left.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: She didn't finish in order to get married.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think that's what she was raised to want.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I also think that unlike a lot of women today, she was actually quite satisfied with that because she wasn't in an existential dilemma that there was something out there more meaningful for her that was like her creative opus to birth.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: She really that she was very fulfilled in that until my brother went to high school, then she went back to school, she got a business degree, and then she started an interior design business.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: And her parents were also entrepreneurs in lots of different ways.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: So that was modeled for her.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, I feel that fundamentally there was there were definitely challenges, but because my parents had very strong role divisions, my dad worked and provided, and my mom took care of the house and was char in charge of all of us.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: It didn't seem like that was adrenally taxing for her.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: It was stressful in certain ways, but there was an acceptance to it that feels really relaxing when I think about it.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it and I feel is almost relaxing to this day because they still they have different contracts, but there's still just a sense that she can relax into something.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's beautiful.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like the those domestic arts are they really are arts and a really beautiful place for creativity to flow.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: I personally don't have that feeling.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I've just come to acceptance that my hands are meant to work on bodies and not really meant to knit and all the things that I wish I could do.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: But it is just such a beautiful creative outlet, especially like you said, if she didn't have this feeling of looking outward and thinking there's the grass is greener and then there's somewhere else she needs to go.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's a just knowingness from my grandmothers and my mother line about the importance of a hearth.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: And an importance that someone is there taking care of something, so there is something to return to and a place that everybody wants to return to.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: And she's the one who makes holidays incredible.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I used to frown upon that.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, these are just Hallmark Hallmark holidays, and then I realized, but this is the rituals that we have.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: If we don't have this, we have nothing.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: So I've come to really appreciate it because in some ways I didn't have to do it because she's been doing it.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: And now that she's 70, gonna be 77 in the last couple of years, she's she's been less interested in doing it.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: You girls just do it, and it's like, whoa, this is like a big thing that mom was doing.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I did take it for granted a little bit.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciated it a lot too, but until you're doing it yourself, you don't quite realize what goes into it.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I think also the intelligence of some people in the we need people in the culture that aren't working.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody can't be working, or the culture doesn't work, it just can't function.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: Everything can't be a paid endeavor.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there was just a knowingness about that within her because of the mothering that she received and the grandmothering that she received and the way that really it is a lot to do with Mormon family structure, honestly, that even though my grandmother didn't practice anymore for a long time, that there was those habits in place of when women meet and what they're responsible for.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I love your bringing in that recognition of the importance of the hearth, just to just say that, and how beautiful for somebody to be able to find their purpose or find their joy or beauty in doing that.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then the conversation at some point got just so distracted and weird around perhaps if women were like more oriented that way, that perhaps there was something wrong with that, or that it wasn't, they weren't like coming into the modern time where there was different opportunities or more opportunities or whatever.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not as familiar with your work.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: I know Lindsay loved the fourth trimester, that was like a big deal for her, but she's just been introducing me as we're approaching talking with you today.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I listened to a couple interviews.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Your elder mentors, Steven Jake.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: I was listening to an interview that the two of you did that was really fascinating.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you were this oh, what was that?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Never land, like this, and I'm I'm not sure that I got the entirety of where you guys were headed with that, but you had this mention of this feeling of never landing, of like there's something always being like out there to be seeking, and it really reminded me of of this Wendell Berry, some of Wendell Berry's writing, and he talks about people being afflicted with this idea of a better life elsewhere.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that really I was thinking a lot about that as I was listening to the two of you talk.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think about this a lot myself, just like how much we how much wisdom there can be, how much beauty there can be in just being able to settle into the place that you find yourself.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And not in a way of if there's also having the freedom to call out what doesn't work for you or what's not serving your life.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know where I was going with that.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess I'm curious for you, Kimberly, on that note.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: I know you have some of that lineage going back in the Fresno area, and I know you've mentioned Ireland, and I think one thing that we've talked about on the show is that Scott's very rooted where we live here in Vermont.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Our kids are seventh generation right in this area where we live, so there's this really deep lineage on his side, whereas my family traveled and moved around more, and I have had more of that seeking or that feeling of not quite being as tethered to place.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm curious for you, with some of that lineage in California, even if it's not right where you live, has that place always felt very home for you?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: Or do you feel drawn to these British Isles ancestors of yours, particularly?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's been a thing for me, is I feel like I've been continually called to go back to the British Isles where a lot of my ancestry is from.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: Curious if you have anything to say on that.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_03: These are huge topics, I know, in so many different ways.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Very simply, has California always felt like home?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: No, I never felt like I belonged here.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm redheaded, I'm freckled.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: What's attractive here is long, lean, very thin, blonde.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, I'm built very muscularly.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: I the minute I landed, I went to college in Rhode Island.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, oh my god, this is amazing.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: I can I felt like I looked different.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't think I was beautiful at all because I was so outside the norm here.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so, no, I absolutely have never felt like I belonged to San Diego at all.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: And no, I haven't been drawn to the British Isles.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: I was drawn and lived for a long time in Asia.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I've spent several really long periods of time in Thailand.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: I've spent long periods of time, like cumulative years in India, then I lived in Brazil for eight years.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: And at that point, really, what I felt was my job as a responsible civilian citizen was this idea of like world citizenship.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: I need to understand other cultures, what a good life is.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_03: Travel and you work to then travel.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: Or I was really, I didn't think of myself as a tourist.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: I thought of myself as a traveler, but I thought I was doing my civil diligence as well as following passions of learning.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: I was really impassioned about yoga, and I still am, but in a different way.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I went to Thailand because I felt, oh, it's a Buddhist country.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: What it would it be like to be in a country where compassion was an orienting feature.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I absolutely not even one time thought about what about my ancestors.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Zero times.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: I was I studied African American studies, and in that study, it was like, okay, I need to learn about non-normative history.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: I need to learn about how people who grew up who don't look like me, what their contribution to this country was.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: But again, at no period of that time did I think, sure, people would say to me, like, look, just you're white, go talk to white people.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: Of course that would happen.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_03: But I still thought then I would be talking to white people about racial history.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't think I would be talking to white people about our own history and our own inheritance.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's really only since this like cosmic collision with Stephen Jenkinson that I seriously considered he wanted to go to Ireland with me.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: I've never wanted to go to Ireland.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: Zero times in my life did I want to go there.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: I've my whole life, everyone's told me I look Irish, and there was a little curiosity like, if I go there, will people think I look like them?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: Or would I how would that be?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: But it was for me extremely painful to go to Ireland.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: It was emotional and beyond beyond what I could have imagined because the Irish side of my family is, I would say, probably one of the darkest parts of my inheritance.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: Then you go there and you see the famine houses and you see the desnification of what is clearly a very alive, animistic, and also very female-centered on some levels, place.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: But there was no sense of, oh yeah, I've returned home.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's Stephen feels that a little bit more.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: He he loves being there.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: He it's one of his favorite places, and so that was also why I wanted to go there with him.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_03: But I have been a lot in the UK.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_03: I'm teaching, I've been teaching annually in Wales.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_03: I've been teaching in Oxford for the past five or six years in a row.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe there's some intelligence larger than me at work there.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: But no, as far as I think I'm like a lot of North Americans, it's like I'm attracted to anything else other than what I am.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_03: I'm attracted to the exotic.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm attracted to, I can put the exotic in quotes, but I was attracted to the wildly different from where my people are from.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder, do you feel like some of it is just that you really fully I'm thinking about you living in a place that doesn't feel like home, but how I imagine you feel embodied and really inhabited in your body and that being a different experience than a lot of Americans.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if you think that's part of what has you staying in a place that doesn't feel like home?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think I stopped asking that question.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: I think I stopped caring, thinking that was an important question to ask because those are feelings.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: What belonging?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: Do we feel like we we belong?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: But how do we make our like how do we devote ourselves to the place rather than expecting that the place be not having an extractive relationship?
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: Also, I think it's just part of growing older.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: Once I the place that I felt most at home in my life so far was in Rio de Janeiro, which makes no sense at all, was not ever a big dream of mine.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: I wasn't even thinking I was gonna end up there, and I did end up there, and then it was like that's where I felt most at home.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: After you have that pinnacle experience, and I needed to leave there, it's like I that wasn't really the question anymore.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_03: The question is an adult question of not just what works for me, but what works for my family unit, and then what works for the world.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: Right now, I'm still here, and part of that is my parents, and part of that is be of the land, and part of it is because I just don't like moving.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: I did buy a house recently and I bought it in Florida, a place that Californians don't like Florida in general.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_03: We're very uppity about that.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I bought it because it's across the street from a young family that I'm very close to.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_03: And my daughter was gonna go off to school, and my husband didn't have a US visa, and I was like, okay, it's a little bit closer to Brazil, and I can be involved in children's life because I have a single child, which means that when I'm gone, she doesn't have a lot of horizontal network, and so part of creating that for me too, and having young children in my life and having the support that I can offer and be offered by living in proximity.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_03: I I bought a house there, and then since then, a lot of things have changed.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: I thought maybe if I go, my parents will go too because it's way more affordable there, but they're not budging.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so I don't know.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what's gonna happen, but it's nobody's it's like every everybody's also got this homestead dream, right?
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna just go have a little farm.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's the flight fantasy of so many North Americans and I'm gonna have quote unquote community.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: But everybody's we have grown up in this globalistic way, most of us.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_03: So my daughter's dad is Brazilian and my husband's Brazilian, and so I couldn't even just stay put if I wanted to, because I then I would not be creating, I would not be taking care of the responsibilities that I already have endeavored based on the choices in my life that I've made to this point.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: So it's I think it's just all about how we're wrestling with the complex algebra and also realizing when our personal angst is really, is it ours?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: Is it a collective thing or is it a personal thing?
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_03: Because everywhere I go to teach, people are like thinking of moving for more community.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: But the reason they moved to where they went was because they wanted more community, and then that place where they were didn't people left and it dissolved, and so they think, okay, this other place might have this more community, but I don't think that's I think that's a hungry ghost.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's the emptiness of what you mentioned, this inheritance in the Orphan Wisdom School.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: We read a book that's called Law of Dreams by Peter Barns.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: I recommend it, and it's the story of an Irish man coming to Canada and the generational movement of that, and there's an intercessional voice throughout the book that's saying, keep running, keep running.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: And to what extent is this also dovetailed, really, with white wellness and with the idea of individual freedom, that what a good life means is no responsibilities and doing whatever you want and not feeling pinned down by anything.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like we have a serious crisis of commitment that's not even to place, but is also to at this point what I see is people not really being able to sometimes even identify a deeper want than what this collective story is.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that just leads into like if your experience is that you travel around and see people with that yearning, no matter where you go, they moved there for better community, still have that, don't find it, want to be somewhere else.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: That lack of taking responsibility in that way is at the heart of that, really.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's we had a guest on recently, uh John Kemp, who grew up in an Amish community and was just talking about the dissolution of family and how that has like how that has rippled out.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: And also talking about these, we were talking, I was asking him about like the work culture of the Amish, that like from the outside we think of these like like raising of a barn and all these people coming together to do these things.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he introduced us to the term, and I said, I phrased my question, I ended it with saying something about people coming together to work out of necessity.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to reframe that because like it's actually not out of necessity, but he introduced us to this word that's used in the Amish world in the United States at least, which is when they get a ton of people together to get some work done, they call it a frolic.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so this whole idea is that it's actually like a social, like it's fun.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's fun to get together and do work with people.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's not a lot of that's a hard sell for the this latest generation that's trying everything possible to get away from work, right?
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: Work's book on like a bad word.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I guess that's what I was getting at is that really that community building piece is some level of self-sacrifice, for sure.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's some level of stepping up to realize that what you're describing is a myth and it's you're never going to get to the promised land if you have these silly childish ideas of what a good life is.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and just being satisfied with the messiness of community, because we live we've lived in the same place in the same town here for I don't know, 13, 14 years, something like that.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: 15 years, maybe 16 years.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not always easy to live in community.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: People it's challenging, especially just we live in a town of a thousand people, and you have challenges with your neighbors, and you're still gonna see them at all the community events.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to some people want to brush it under a rug, but you're still gonna see those people.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: So you either need to be able to work it out or or whatever that looks like.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I totally agree with you on well, yeah.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: The pivot point can't be personality, right?
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: It can't be attunement.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: That can't be what the whole thing is circling around, and that goes against the culture of psychology, which is that everything is about relationality rather than everything is about this common mission that we have to get done.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_03: That also has to do with legitimate skills.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's incredible because I've spent so much more time at on Stevens Farm, and I see what happens.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: People roll up with pickups full of tools, and it's yeah, that's helpful.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's really helpful.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_03: Something I never would think about being growing up in the suburbs.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's like what makes you a valuable community member?
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's not just being a good person, it's not just wishing people well.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: Certainly, that's that's a good foundation, I guess, but it's really totally outside of these other skills that are necessary.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_03: And this happened, there was a dock that broke in on the farm.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so every gathering we try to have some kind of uh offering to the place.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing is, that's really hard because people like me fuck shit up, basically.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not an asset on a farm.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, I'm actually a liability, a good-natured liability is pretty much how it works.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's better than not being good natured and a liability.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe, but then if I was not good natured, they could just they'd just be like, fuck her.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: This way, they're like trying to not make me feel too bad when I am cutting.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, we're gonna go prune this tree grove.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, okay.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_03: And then all of a sudden it's like decent trees are getting cut down, and they're like, wow, okay.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, there was a dock that needed to get fixed, and there was no real plan on how this dock should be.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: So five people got together who decided they were willing to come every day and talk about it.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_03: And these five people in Portuguese say não tem nada veio.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_03: They're like in they're like totally incompatible, end quotes.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_03: And yet, that what they had in common was they love the land, they want to help, and they have a mixture of skills.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_03: And some of them are professional carpenters and some of them are not, and some people just wanted to learn.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_03: But it was, it's every time I'm in a situation like that, we've at the end of Orphan Wisdom, we have to do a kind of a ritual, and you just see this is an absolute shit show.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_03: And if this is a shit show, how is it out in the world with people trying to do this?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_03: These people have all been studying together for two years, and let's say it's 15 people and we have to figure out how to do a certain task, and there's absolute mayhem in terms of who's gonna be in charge and who's gonna step back and who's gonna talk.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like how can something that's simple become so challenging because we don't believe in hierarchy.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_03: And there there was no time when it was like, hey, who here knows how to do this?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: That seems like a pretty good question to start with.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_03: And then it was like the young people running forward, the old people stepping back, being super quiet.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_03: You're like, okay, this is also weird.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, why are we not asking the older people how they might move forward?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_03: So we have to really change what the currency of relating is and what our expectation, because as you said, I lived in a small town, not a thousand people, but I don't know how many people Santa Fe has, but it's very small because it's so small that you go to a restaurant and you don't gossip about people because you know someone at the next table might know who you're talking about, even if you don't name them.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: So you gotta just be freaking careful or else shit's gonna come back to you, right?
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_04: Sure, sure.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: That's a kind of feedback mechanism that until four generations ago we would have all just had ingrained.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because that's just how it would have been.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I feel when I think of I guess this is the feeling I have when I go to cities now and have that anonymity of just walking around and knowing that I'm not gonna see anyone I know or something like that.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's a really different feeling.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't, it no longer feels like freedom the way it felt maybe in my 20s.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: It just feels, I feel like for me now, being in a city feels so much lonier than being out on the land we live on with no humans around or whatever that is.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously, not everyone can live that life of living in the country.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: Not everyone, definitely not everyone wants to live anywhere like that, like where we live.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: But it is a curiosity I have around, like you said, can people connect with the land or the ocean or whatever?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: Can they connect with the earth kind of no matter where they live?
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: What can they find it in their surfing or whatever it is?
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: Can they find community in being out in the ocean?
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or you started to mention common mission or common goal, people coming together, and which reminded me of this mentor of mine, this woman, she worked in land conservation, but she ran a kids' summer camp that I went to as a kid.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it was what will it the inquiry of the summer camp for kids was like, what will it take for the world to work and who do we need to be?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: And she in her conservation work, she started having these community forums where there was like a lot of people that really had a hard time sitting down across the table from one another just because of politics and ideas around conserving land and a lot of animosity between people that she needed to bring to the table to get this conservation work done.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: And she started leading these community forums where she just asked the question what do you love about this place?
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really interesting because she was super effective in her work because she brought people together over recognizing that we have another mentor who was like running for a political office and was saying the same sort of thing.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're we have this divisive culture where we're just banging our heads into each other and just so at odds with one another.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: But if we were if we had the ability to be civil enough to have dinner with these people that we're so opposed to, what we'd probably recognize if we could suspend our hatred for a moment is that we have so much in common.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: We really we all care about freedom and autonomy and the ability for people to have get what they need.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: But we're we're just caught in this dichotomy of we are right, they're wrong.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I think it's I don't know, it's like a challenging moment that we find ourselves in.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_03: For sure.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: We're still also in the wake of the pandemic.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_03: I'm present to that more and more when I'm bringing people together because I'm gathering people that it's not that diverse of a group.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody is diverse, but in terms of interest level, like the kinds of things people are interested in that come to my work.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: And and nevertheless, it's still a lot of people that really are retracted like caged animals, and that are still very shy to come forward and be in full body in public space and bump up against other bodies in that public space.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel that I also am still in the aftermath of that.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't my first book created quite a bit of controversy.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's my second book, Call of the Wild, created quite a bit of controversy for me.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_03: And not just me, other people also, but because I said it was a female nervous system, then like women and children first in Chicago wouldn't carry my book, and that's a bookstore that I've loved.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: And they said it was anti-trans and that it wasn't inclusive enough because of the label of female.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then on the other side, I got notices from like the Rolfing Institute saying that I couldn't put sexological bodywork next to rolfing in my bio with a comma because that was reflecting poorly on rolfing and people would get confused.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_03: And those things are products of the pandemic and how highly volatile everything was.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: And now I have a new book coming out, and there's still register in my body.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: My my teacher, Peter Levine, who founded Somatic Experiencing, because he taught with me, he had to defend his professional license in Colorado at 80 years old, and that really negatively impacted me.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_03: I was humiliated, but also I feel very good about standing up for my own choices in terms of what kind of legality I work under and how I work with that, but I did not feel good about jeopardizing somebody that I care deeply about because of that.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there's coming to the table in conflict, coming to the table with different this went all the way to Brazil.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: I had friends in Brazil that would not go to holidays with their own family because their own family voted for someone who said something extremely racist and they're a black family.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: In in a culture, a Latin culture, that's way, way slower to undo family ties for disagreements.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's like that the social media frame of for, against, thumbs up, thumbs down, everything is polarized.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: The US has actually exported that to other places in the world as well.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just taking time to and I I hope it's recoverable.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_03: I hope enough people care about it that it's something that we will recover.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: Because I I think there's a reason, for instance, at least among the people that I roll with, that we laud Ruth Bader-Ginsburg and Scalia, right?
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: We look at these friendships with radically different, as polarized as possible, politics of people who would still go to the opera together and still love to sit down together and were able to.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's not that long ago.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I think most people do look up to that as something like we should be able to do this.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: I definitely feel that.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: I definitely want to be respectful of your time.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so just a couple quick questions as we finish up.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_02: And thank you so much.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: This has been a meandering conversation that I think our audience is really going to enjoy.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_02: Just curious if you have any advice that you wish you would have gotten early on or earlier on.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_03: About anything.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I guess I should I should preface that by saying that something that we're trying to do with this podcast is really just highlight people and their lives and their early lives and how that led them to the work that they are doing now, for example.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think we are probably in agreement that this there's a younger generation that's a bit lost and they're seeking advice.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they maybe they need to trust that they know what they need.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_02: But just any advice you would give to someone who's young, and not that we're not young, we're all young, but someone who's in their say early 20s and they're Well I'm not young anymore.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: You're young.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: You're young.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: You're still young.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, fine.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_03: When are you not young then?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what that is, but I'm thinking early 20s.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: Early what I think of.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I honestly though, Lindsay, I think it's important.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not young.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm 52 years old.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not old.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're not no longer young.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's fair.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if I consider myself young.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: Not exactly.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: I also don't consider myself old, so I don't know what that label is, but just for the people that are starting out on their path in life, and maybe look up to you and just are curious what advice you would give them.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: Well, first of all, you don't know the why before you know the what.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I made all kinds of decisions out of erotic impulse, not knowing what it was gonna lead to.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: And on this side of things, I understand.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_03: On this side of things, it makes sense, but it wouldn't have made sense to most people at the time.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_03: One example, I graduated first of my class, undergraduate in social policy and African American studies from Northwestern.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_03: And everybody after I gave my valedictory speech is like, what are you gonna do?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_03: And it was like, they think I'm going to Harvard Law School or I'm going to Washington to be in a think tank.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: And what I did was move to New York to dance.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_03: And every everyone was like, What my own parents are like, really?
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what my heart was calling me to do.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what I did.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: And Steven says it's not our successes, it's our failures that makes us worthy of being an elder.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_03: So the idea that we're gonna make the right choice and the perfect choice, and it's gonna turn out, and that we even have control over that is so much less important than really apprenticing what it where that impulse is for you and letting yourself go for it.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I see it.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people told me, Why are you sending your daughter to college?
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_03: They tell her, Why are you going to college?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_03: College is out of date, college doesn't mean anything.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's not gonna you need a trade, you need to this, and it's but what if she wants to go to college?
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: And what if that actually does mean something to me and mean something to her?
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's a lot of people trying to overcompensate for the culture in their personal lives, and I think that causes a lot of stress because we actually can't undo the culture in a single individual life.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_03: I also really urge everyone to consider family very early on.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I encourage people to absolutely put in their minds plan having a family before 30.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_03: Now, does that everybody get so mad?
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's like they're so mad at me for saying that, and my poor daughter.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: Do I think that's definitely gonna happen because she's thinking about it?
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: But do I think that it's very irresponsible to raise specifically girls and tell them, don't worry about it, have your career first, see how it goes.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's profoundly irresponsible, and I think it's led us to an extremely challenged place right now.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_03: I feel very passionate also about the limits of biology.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't believe that female empowerment or empowerment overall is extending all limits.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_03: I don't even think reproductive rights really include extending reproductive limits.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's a huge amount of fallout that we're already seeing and we'll see more with how we're playing fast and loose with exogenous hormones.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it has to do with our food supply.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: I think it has to do with just fertility overall, and there's a lot of indoctrination happening that's under the disguise of empowerment and feminism, and women do whatever you want and get yours, that's actually really coming back around to be very painful and also very dysfunctional.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of child behavior that, yes, is exacerbated by older parenting and exacerbated by incorrect ideas about hierarchy and egalitarianism and an unwillingness to set limits.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: But also, if you only have one kid, you don't have to set limits like you do if you've got three or four, right?
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_03: A bigger family means there's just you don't survive without certain things sometimes.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_03: So the survival needs direct the way that we move.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I think it's very important to have an accurate message.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_03: Can people have kids in their 40s?
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_03: Can people have kids in their late 30s?
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_03: Is it a good plan to wait to try to get pregnant until you're 38 or 42?
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's not a good plan.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_03: So that means you have to start thinking, maybe it's not the best road that I experiment with relationships in order to decide what I like.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe that's not the only way to do something.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe there's other vectors that are important to consider.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: I love that you said that and your willingness to say that.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I felt that knowing just we we were like 33 when we had our daughter, I think.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or I was you're 32.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I don't know.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the moment she was born, I was like counting the likely years.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh, let me see.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: If I lived to be 85, wow, that's not as much time as I would have liked.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: But just for that simple reason, I've wanted to reframe this idea of maybe there, maybe and I feel like we're so indoctrinated with that's the loss of your freedom.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you do that in your 20s, our culture gives such a strong message, like that's not what you should do.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's abusive to women to ask them to Well, this this is exactly.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_03: I was just thinking about this last night.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's exactly what Lindsay was saying by calling me young.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's like if I'm young, I was thinking to myself, how long because people tell me sometimes they go, Oh, you must have been a young mother.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, I was freaking 32 years old.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_03: My mom already had three kids by 31.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_03: A young mother.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_03: So I was thinking in my head, what to me is a young mother?
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, 16, young, yeah.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_03: 18, young, yeah.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_03: 21, young, 23?
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_03: Is 23 a young mother?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_03: We all know it's pretty easy to get pregnant when you're 23.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's a reason for that.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_01: Not to mention the entirety of human history, like the record of my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my great-great-grandmother.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_03: Like maybe we're actually supposed to be matured by our children.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe we're not supposed to be mature first, and maybe that individuation and that process of individual idea of individuation is actually what's working completely against us where we're psychologizing parenting.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think parenting is supposed to be a psychological endeavor.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's supposed to be a cultural endeavor.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: I hear you, and I do want to apologize for calling you young.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_02: I am also curious.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: How would you describe it?
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_02: I guess we just maybe don't have enough words because I also wouldn't call you old, but aging, I don't know.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think the the There's also this next book I have coming out is called Erotic Seasons.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_03: There's also a rush for people like me, I'm 52 post-menopausal, to call themselves a crone.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not a crone either.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_03: What Steven called me when we first got together is he said he's an older man, not quite old, talking to a younger woman, no longer young.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_03: But that was five years ago.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_03: And now he is calling himself an old man.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know if there's something in the middle as a descriptor.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_03: I just think it's important.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_03: If we're saying that everything is young, right?
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'm young at heart or I have a young spirit or whatever.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder sometimes, because I went to college with my daughter to take her to school, and I was wearing a backpack, and somebody said, What are you reading?
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, My daughter loves telling this story.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_03: Because I was like, that's so wonderful that you asked me that.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, I'm reading Proud Flesh and it's about this.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_03: And what that meant was, What are you studying?
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_03: That's like the UK way of saying it.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_03: She thought I was a student.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, okay, that's fucked up because I am 35 years not 18.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_03: And what about me is not showing my age enough that someone knows that I'm not a college freshman.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_03: I think I've what's happening here?
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not like I'm trying to decide I'm old.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's just that I don't think we know what old looks like.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_03: And that to me goes together with dying.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_03: I have to ask Steven, is that person dying?
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_03: What's the difference between sick and dying?
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because there's a difference.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_03: But because I haven't really lived around that, I don't really know.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's another place where the culture part of things, we want to believe it's all just a version of the same thing.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_03: But what I'm trying to say is, how does how we use the words impact somebody saying, 42 is young?
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_03: I feel young at 42, so I'll have a baby.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you can feel all kinds of ways, but having a baby at 42 has nothing to do with having a baby at 32, has nothing to do with having a baby at 22.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I think anyone with common sense could just listen to that.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_03: And that doesn't mean I'm telling people who are 42 not to have babies either.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_03: It means I'm saying if you're 42 and you've never been pregnant before, it's a different thing.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_03: And the birth is going to be harder, and sleepless nights are going to be harder.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_03: And you may think that's no problem.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_03: You'll just hire someone to help you with that or this or that.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not just about you, it's about the child.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't understand why people are so determined about what they want because it's part of this culture of you should get what you want, just want it bad enough, and the culture should give it to you, and life should give it to you.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, no, there are times when you just don't get what you want.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted five kids.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not kidding.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_03: I told somebody that and it was true.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think I could have done it because I'm a terrible project manager, and I just, I don't think I think I was disilluded to think that I could do that.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_03: But I could do three probably.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I could, I can definitely take care of five kids at the same time.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_03: I can't even understand.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_03: People are like, Your daughter, babysits, do you think she can take care of two?
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_03: When I was 11, I watched three kids at the same time who all were bedwetters and changed all the sheets and watched them for like eight hours a day.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't nobody was like, Are you okay watching three kids?
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, Oh, your daughter already has one friend or over can you handle what happened to just handling five to eight kids?
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's true.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's just the expectation of what that even looks like to me is not globally, and I get it because everyone is very isolated and there aren't these structures, but just the thought that it's just so hard to take care of a kid.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: It is hard to be a mother, it's not easy, but it's like it's just become so out outsized what that's supposed to mean about what a good life is supposed to be for a child.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that a good life is should be easy, which is just not really the thing.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we could talk about this for a long time.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you so much.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: I really appreciated speaking to you as since you are an older woman, not quite old, and we're really grateful that you came on today.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and have a wonderful day, and I'll I might see you in your class.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, sounds good.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_02: Bye-bye.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 1:04:12
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• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_02: For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.