Rewilding Myth with Sophie Strand
A podcast
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Episode Description
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:DHave you ever felt a profound sense of grief for "the environment" and wondered how this heart-sense may ties into our kinship and ancient stories?
In this episode, Sophie Strand and I explore this complex interplay, highlighting how symbiosis and mutual aid have played pivotal roles in evolutionary advancements and how consuming food, metabolism, is an act of metamorphosis.
From the intimate dance between plants and fungi that reshaped our world, to personal reflections on seasonal changes, Sophie and I share our collective journey through climate grief and adaptation. We emphasize the essential nature of being grounded in our surroundings and fostering a kinship with the land.
We also discuss the idea of uncertainty. What if embracing uncertainty could open up new ways of understanding our environment? New and old ways made new in their re-rooting. We tackle the topic of binary thinking, drawing on cognitive science and Andy Clark's work on predictive processing, revealing how rigid certainty can alienate us from nature. Sophie also carries the fascinating language of fungi (mycorrhizae and hyphae) to illustrate the broader ecological implications of communication, communion, and community. Through these connections, we underscore our often misguided efforts to control nature and the false sense of predictability it brings.
Lastly, Sophie weaves together ancient myths and modern reinterpretations to uncover their ecological wisdom. Whether it's the symbolic cave art of Lascaux or the misunderstood roles of plants like autumn olive and Johnson grass, myths serve as durable vessels of environmental and social knowledge. We invite you to rethink these narratives as not just cultural artifacts, but as repositories of scientific data and ecological insights.
Join us in this rich tapestry of stories, science, and spirituality, and rediscover the interconnectedness of life, death, and rebirth within our ecosystems.
Read Sophie's Books HERE. Follow Sophie on Substack HERE.
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.
Chapters
0:00 - Climate Grief and Land Connection
12:10 - Embracing Uncertainty and Predictive Processing
19:16 - Metaphor and Reality in Ecological Context
31:49 - Symbiosis and Healing With Nature
36:31 - Ecological Mythology and Storytelling
49:37 - Invasive Plants and Ecological Perspectives
57:55 - Ancient Mythology and Modern Reinterpretation
1:04:42 - Mythology Reimagined
1:08:48 - Connecting With Sophie
Transcript
Sophie Strand: 0:00
I'm very interested in symbiosis and how evolution actually doesn't happen in this neo-Darwinian sense of forking and individuating, but usually the biggest jumps in biological novelty happen through anarchic fusing, through horizontal gene transfer, through two species burning the bridge to their old bodies behind them and jumping into each other's bodies. Something I think about is to be whole, is to be isolated. To be incorrect is to be relational, to need help. I think about when plants first came. They were like, basically like little puddles of algae with no roots, and mycorrhizal fungi had already had a rhizomatic root lifestyle for a millennia and they reached up and they plugged plants into the soil and into community, brought them into the underworld and they taught them how to have roots. And it was that anarchic collaboration, risky collaboration between fungi and plants that has terraformed everything. Well, locate me. Where are you based? Where are you right now?
D. Firth Griffith: 1:22
That's a really good question. I was going to ask you the same, so after I answer I'll reverberate it back on you. We are in central Virginia, ancient Monacan and Siouan land. My wife and I we live on 400 acres here. I guess we farm we can talk about that. Don't really farm but sometimes smells like a farm Right on the James River. So the way that the appalachian mountains sit in this region is you have like the shenandoah valley to our west and then you have like the atlantic coastal plain and marshes to our east and then the piedmont where we live. It's a land of hills and valleys and you know tributary river streams, the headwaters of the james river etc. Where the piedmont, uh, really walks into that beautiful edge between the east side of the James River et cetera, where the Piedmont really walks into that beautiful edge between the east side of the Appalachians and then the coastal plain, and so it's wonderfully beautiful. How about yourself? I understand you're up in New England somewhere.
Sophie Strand: 2:18
I am upstate New York. I am in the Hudson Valley, the land of the Muncie Lenape people. I am in the Hudson Valley, the land of the Muncie Lenape people. I live right outside of Woodstock in the shadow of Overlook Mountain. Yeah, I was raised here. I mean, I was born in the city but I was raised here and I moved back to this area, specifically to the Overlook Mountain area, like the start of the Catskill Escarpment, that um line of mountains, about a year ago. Um, yeah, so this is my land my ecosystem Marvelous.
D. Firth Griffith: 2:51
what's it like this time of year?
Sophie Strand: 2:53
Well, that question, I think, no longer has a typical answer in this area and I had a very strong. You know, I was raised by environmental parents and I was outside, so I was very ecologically conscious. I think as I grew up and in the past four years, every phenological cascade, every predictable seasonal marker has melted Like. The past three summers have been so utterly unlike any Hudson Valley summer I've ever experienced that I'm like I don't. This is a new world. Um, it's been tropical. We've had pollution, ozone um, wildfire, smoke in the air, extremely hot every single day. It's been a very intense summer. Um, I think a lot of people who consider themselves to be summer people have been reflecting that they spent most of the summer indoors. So it's been a strange. There's been a lot of like grief climate the summer in this area, just feeling into the inhospitability of a season that used to be remarkably mild and generous. What about you?
D. Firth Griffith: 4:09
Yeah, I think I echo your grief. It does seem to be in place though, like when you're truly grounded in place and you can come to an expectation of what should be upcoming. Right when the moon is waning, waxing, when the seasons are coming in, when the golden rod is flowering, right, that's the beginning of autumn for us and the golden rod is flowering, yet it's 99's the beginning of autumn for us, and the golden rod is flowering, yet it's 99 degrees here in Central Virginia. And you're just and you're just. You're starting to question things, but you can only question it because you're grounded. So I both like rejoice in the grief and I mourn in the grief, as I'm sure you do as well.
D. Firth Griffith: 4:38
But this you know, we've been farming in this region for maybe 10 years full time, and every year is different. And every year is, I would say, more interesting than the latter, in the sense that, like you're saying, you have these seasonal markers that indicate, you know, particular life ebbing and flowing or emerging in this way or that, and you can use those seasonal markers, those flower flowering types, those animals and migrations, like the fawns this year uh, we have a lot of deer population down here, as most all do on the east coast, obviously you as well. And uh, all of the fawn were late, like we're still very early in the fawn's life as we're approaching the autumn, which is strange, like a deer, odd, I mean.
Sophie Strand: 5:19
I think some of the fawns were just born um in this area. Wow, that's so interesting actually, I also have seen baby bears that have been born late there. I worry a lot about the mismatch in between these these markers and how it will affect them if the winter comes at the right time um there's.
D. Firth Griffith: 5:41
There's so much to be. Um, I think there's so much to be said by people like you in this space, because I find it quite interesting you have a fine language for the thing but so much of the climate change, the climate chaos, all of these words, they have everything to do with all of these very big systems. Right, we have very large macro problems, but when it comes down to it, anybody who's truly actually in the land, as the land, they have kinship with, their place there or they're grounded, however, you want to say that what you really see is that it's a disparity between the natural cycle and the way that nature is cycling.
Sophie Strand: 6:13
That is presenting a lot of these problems, and so it's a very micro, small problem of adaption, almost it is, and I mean something I think about a lot is, what we consider to be a normal climate is actually like a very it's an oddity.
D. Firth Griffith: 6:29
Right A Goldilocks epoch A.
Sophie Strand: 6:30
Goldilocks epoch, in the grand sweep of deep time, and we have a very human, supremacist idea of like climactic ecosystems and you know the correct climate. And I do sometimes try and problematize my own discomfort and say to myself that the earth is very good at stabilizing itself and figuring out how to deal with all sorts of complexity. And we have presented quite a bit of complexity and it is dealing with it and if that's uncomfortable for me, that might actually be better for the long-term aliveness of the whole. So that's a it's a tricky thing. Yeah, how do you hold grief like that?
D. Firth Griffith: 7:17
It's a good question. It's a really good question. This summer we had a wonderful drought, a very long and extended drought. The Piedmont of Virginia is a very non-brittle region historically. That said, we do get seasonal rainfall and the large majority of that seasonal rainfall is in later January, february and March, a little bit into April and to a large degree our very hot and humid summers depend upon the spring precipitation to do a lot of our growing. We don't get a lot of summer storms A few occasional large ones, but not a lot of summer storms, not rhythmically record.
D. Firth Griffith: 7:56
And then March came and all of the dew left, which is very strange. Usually we have dew all the way into June. We get into the hundreds. You know temperatures up to 100 degrees in June and so typically that burns off too early for us to witness. You would have to be out there at like midnight to really see any dew. But the dew burned in March and it didn't rain. And then April came no dew, no rain. May came no dew, no rain. May came no dew, no rain. July or June came no dew, no rain, and everything was brown, completely brown. You would walk through a clad field of grasses and struggling wildflowers where you would walk through the forest and dust like your feet would cast up dust, not even over bare soil, just it was dust. And it was interesting because during that time you have one or two options you can either fight it or start to speak with it.
D. Firth Griffith: 8:51
A dear friend of mine, a Maori healer from Arturia or New Zealand, she talks a lot about utilizing grief as a conversational point, slowing yourself down and conversating with that sickness and with that grief, which is actually not unlike something that I want to drift a little bit into this conversation.
D. Firth Griffith: 9:06
If you're comfortable with it, we'll see about that in the future, we'll taste and play with it, but this idea of grief or sickness being a conversational point, and so we spent a lot of our time during that, you know, wonderful drought period meeting. You know the kin and our cousins around us that we typically don't spend a lot of time talking to. You know, cause usually there's grass up to our eyeballs. You know all over the place and it's very, like I said, non-brittle region, very similar to where you are. And so as that dissipated, as it browned and dropped away, it did reveal new when I say it's newly experienced kin that we got to conversate with trees that I don't usually see because of the forest right, flowers that I don't usually see, that are ephemeral, growing below large canopies of grasses that we actually got to, you know have relationship with, and so I don't know if I answered your question.
Sophie Strand: 9:57
The conversation Although I don't think the answers are ever the right. I mean, what we're doing is we're living inside the question, and I think that's probably the thing to do um at this moment in time.
D. Firth Griffith: 10:11
Human certainty, human answers are actually what's creating this grief so much I love that yeah how do you, how do you work through the grief, or understand, or hold the grief?
Sophie Strand: 10:26
You know, I think that my own body is kind of like a tuning fork with the larger ecosystem that I'm planted in, and so, in terms of my hypersensitivity and my own long-term chronic health issues, so I think that I always feel like my body is in some way echoing with chiming with what's happening on a grander scale, and so I think the ways I deal with my own bodily disruptions are the ways that I also handle the wider climatological unpredictability, which is, like, can I every day wake up and be available to be surprised by what happens, by limitations, by openings? Can I maintain 1% curiousness about something that feels really hard? Um, like, I'm allowed, I allow myself to be frustrated, to be angry, to be upset, but like, can I also just keep the aperture open enough to keep asking questions, to keep wondering if, yeah, if there's a species of being that wants my attention because everything else has been damped down? Um, I think that was a great observation that you just made, which is every deck is also an opening to something else. Every drought also shows you the horizon and the distance. When the trees are all leafless, you can see more sky. Nothing is always simply slotted into our human dualisms of good and bad, it's always so much more.
D. Firth Griffith: 12:10
I was recently on Substack and I've taken to using notes a little bit more for dialogue because I can tag people so like I can present a thought and I can tag people in the thought and I'm like what do you think? And then they feel maybe called or not called to respond and I don't know. It's been a thing I've been playing with and I've been people into thought and I'm like what do you think? And then they feel maybe called or not called to respond and I don't know, it's been a thing I've been playing with and I've been enjoying it. Recently and somebody, a dear friend of mine, a past dialoger on the podcast here I asked a question and she surprised me with the simpleness that you're talking about. I asked the question about you know we live in this binary world of either or and it seems very reductionistic and at the same time, a lot of the thoughts, be them good or bad, right or wrong I don't know. That's not the point of the question, of course you know do stem from this like you know, binary, hemispheric brain, you have the left and the right and I and I queried, I said you know it is interesting that to solve the binary world. We're talking about the brain to be binary and we're okay with that. Like how, how can we develop this? You know how, binary brain, binary world, one is good, one is bad, are they both bad? Are they both good? Is there anything as good or bad?
D. Firth Griffith: 13:14
And we were developing this thought and Harmony Cronin, um, a wonderful, uh, calls herself an animalistic, animistic, magical Viking or something like this Wonderful, wonderful person, she comments, she goes I wonder if all of this just revolves around us thinking in our head and not our brain. And it was just very simple like that, and it's written exponentially more poetic than I write or speak here. But so often we have these problems that confuse us up into this ether of our mind and as we pull this down into our gut, into our actual brain, into our heart, into the heart sense, all of a sudden the simplicity is overwhelming, right. And that curiosity is not a curiosity where we ask questions for answers but just answer, or sorry, but just questions. That like ebb the curiosity on and like that seems to be the point.
Sophie Strand: 14:09
Yeah, I mean. Something I always say is that answers are bad flotation devices. When you're out in the ocean they'll eventually deflate, like an answer will always become obsolete as things evolve, as things change. And for me, the better thing is can I learn how to swim with uncertainty, can I learn how to hold the bothness of certain things and how to change my mind? That I think that developing a more muscular approach to unknowability will be helpful as we move into increasingly unpredictable moments, will be helpful as we move into increasingly unpredictable moments ecologically and socially.
Sophie Strand: 14:55
Yeah, I mean for me, I think I've lived through several distinct so I think of like extinction or like like.
Sophie Strand: 14:58
I think of like apocalypses on the earth, like the great oxygenation event where, you know, oxygen bloomed and everything died off and burned, you know, and I, or like all of these different pivot points, these bottlenecks where a lot of species were killed off. I feel like in my own life, metaphorically, I've had a bunch of like apocalyptic bottlenecks where all of my ideas have been eradicated or like proven to be false and I've had to completely restructure afterwards and I'm really glad I've had that, because now I know that I could be wrong and that feels like such a safer place to be than radical, brittle certainty. I think for me, the danger in my life is when I'm so devoted to an answer that I stop taking in the prediction errors of my environment. I love cognitive science. I'm so devoted to an answer that I stop taking in the prediction errors of my environment. I love cognitive science. I'm very interested in predictive processing and Andy Clark's work and one of the things he talks about. Do you know about his work?
D. Firth Griffith: 15:57
Only minimally. Yeah, please dive into it.
Sophie Strand: 15:59
Well, he of course, popularized the idea of the extended mind, but most recently he's really researching and thinking about predictive processing, which is this idea that sensory stimuli doesn't just come in, it actually goes out and it's a feedback loop between the two, and that much of what we do is actually an outward projection, a sensory prediction based on what we have expected. And this works best in environments or situations that are predictable to us, familiar to us. But the sign of a really healthy, like survival, um, like adapted to survival nervous system is a brain that's able to understand when it's made a prediction error, when it when it's, when it's projecting onto the world and not receiving the same thing back.
Sophie Strand: 16:49
And I was, I'm thinking a lot about how, in our culture, we've gotten remarkably bad at receiving prediction errors, um and like realizing that there's a mismatch between our world and our certainty.
D. Firth Griffith: 17:01
Wow, wow, yeah, there's, there's so much there because at the same time, we are also crafting an environment that we would call nature. Um, that can't do that in its own way, right? So we're removing that, that power from nature herself by crafting a very false point.
Sophie Strand: 17:22
Yeah, no, I mean, of course that's the danger, which is when you predict your environment, you're also making it in your own image. This is kind of like narcissus feedback loop yeah.
D. Firth Griffith: 17:33
Right, yeah, I'm thinking so much of your work that I've been able to participate with read experience and I've listened to some of your talks on podcasts or online or such, and so much of it is woven with fungi and mycorrhizae and hyphae and stuff, and I want to make sure that that language infuses this conversation.
D. Firth Griffith: 17:55
We'll get to it, I promise, um, but even still kind of jumping way too fast, way too ahead.
D. Firth Griffith: 17:58
You know, I say I could see this same thought extending into, like the micro sphere, in the sense that you know, I was reading this one German, uh, forester and he was writing that kind of based upon Suzanne Simmer's's work, um, you know, the northern turtle island biologist or whatever she would want to call herself, uh, who really developed or extended the idea of this wood wide web of fungal communication, communication and networks and such.
D. Firth Griffith: 18:23
He was speaking a little bit about that and how, if a tree emerges within its own familial community, the mycorrhizae, the fungi, have a particular relationship with that tree. However, if a human were to take that tree as a bare root, seedling or something, so rip it out of the soil and place it in another environment, it struggles to actually communicate well with the native fungi or mycorrhizal fungi of that system, and so not only, I think, our humans, creating a world in which nature as as an essence, as our kin, as that which we are, and uh and of, of course, uh cannot function well within this, this adaptive feedback loop, as you say but also we're creating a world where, by good intentions right that we also can look right past this feedback loop. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean.
Sophie Strand: 19:16
This is a metaphor and a reality that informs a lot of my work, which is that we are contextual, contingent beings, and a metaphor I've often used in my mythic writing and my analysis of history and the history of religion is that you cannot take uproot a tree, a myth, a story, like a spiritual apothegem, from its ecological context, from its mycorrhizal system, and then transplant it to another ecosystem and expect it to make sense or still be ecologically relevant.
Sophie Strand: 19:59
You know, for me, the long standing metaphor I used through my research was you cannot take a second temple period Palestinian illiterate, northern Judean storytellers with them about farming techniques in late stage, about farming techniques in late stage like industrialized, commercial Roman agriculture, and translate it out of Aramaic into the language of his murderer you know, greek and then into many, many different languages, bring it to America and still expect any of that wisdom to still hold any of its original meaning.
Sophie Strand: 20:35
So you know, the Michael Reisel metaphor is really really important to me, which is we always have to analyze and understand beings, trees, stories, cultures, ideas, spiritual wisdom as being contextual rootings of an ecosystem, a specific ecosystem. So one of the things that worries me most about psychedelic culture is people going to different countries, taking plants that aren't grown from the soil that they live in and then expecting their atomized, individual, like visionary experience to possibly give them any information about how to be more ecologically aware, responsive people. There's something about it that feels so abstracted, so this Michael Reisel contextual argument is something that's really important to me. It sounds like for you as a farmer, as someone whose hands are in the dirt in a specific place, this is like high stakes for you. I'm wondering how it resonates.
D. Firth Griffith: 21:37
It is. It is an interesting question because it's high stakes for everyone, but it's first high stakes for me because it goes through our hands into your bellies, and so that is a really interesting question. I think a lot of people are disconnected from the importance of this in in a very physical, physiographic, grounded perspective. I think we keep it up here, or maybe we should keep it here regardless, but we keep it inside of us as this philosophical reality that this, this, this, this kinship, this ethic, this, this understanding of contextualized story and woven threads and all of this that it matters in context. But I think a couple of us, a few of us I mean today it's 3% of us that spend our lives agriculturally in the soil. It is a daily observation point, a daily communicational pathway where you get to witness the grief and the glory, the death and the metamorphosis, and sometimes just the death with no metamorphosis coming about.
D. Firth Griffith: 22:36
It Like, for instance, we teach a it's called a sacred field harvest course we just started this last weekend, so it's omnipresent in my mind but we lead a field harvest of a cow and a group of students come out. It's a sacred process. There's ceremony, all sorts of highly contextualized events surrounding that harvest and what most quickly, I think, infuses the student's heart, is that this idea of like reincarnation, something that they've kept very far away from them up until this point, become so entirely real. To spare the details, you, you harvest the animal and there's crying and there's skipping the details. It's very sacred. And then, about 12 hours later, you return to that which you basically offered as a sacrifice to the land. You return about 12 hours later and there's nothing there, like there's there's no stomach, there's no awful, there's no head, there's no hooves. It's all been digested already and it's a very quick and it's a very fast process.
D. Firth Griffith: 23:37
And in that moment again, details aside, just two days ago, I was with 10 students talking about this and I said you cannot now deny metamorphosis because, because you see it, it's gone right and, and I think that, um, while being very apparent in a very human-esque way, right, humans have long lived with and and and, uh, been created by animals, I think I mean the lakotas and the many of the plains indigenous peoples. They have their stories coming from the blood clot boy, and you know that is the blood of the bison, and the bison or the bison calf, or the white bison um woman, or the spider woman of the hopi. Like you, have a lot of these mythologies, as you probably very well know, where humans came up from animals, or at least animal instruction. That is to say, we are animals, um, but it also exists in these different, deeper moments, these, these, these forests, you know, connection moments. And the last thing I'll say, in this ramble cause, I want to do less talking, especially with, with, with somebody like you, there's so many. I just I have a lot of visions for this and I'm very excited to sit and learn from you, but the last thing I will say is my wife and I, we, we breed, draft horses, breed and train draft horses for horse logging and we hand-hewn log cabins with just horses, saws, axes and ads, very simple, silent, meditative type work.
D. Firth Griffith: 25:02
And it is always so interesting.
D. Firth Griffith: 25:03
You can walk into a forest and very, very quickly, because it's so large, just like the field harvest. It's so large that you can truly, if you're attuned to such things, which obviously you would be you can truly attune yourself to the beings in your surroundings and you could start to actually look at the. You know the hyphal chains and you can see exactly where they've been broken and while past loggers came in and took a very expensive tree but that was the mother tree and now everybody else is struggling in their adolescence. You know things like this. And then you can take that and you can place it into a system where you're not small like a grassland, where you're the giant towering over the species around you, and you can flip that Right. And so the people who are grounded, the some agricultural people not obviously all ecologically minded people, people like yourself there's this daily practice of that curiosity, I think, and I think that's really wonderful, especially for somebody like yourself who could then put that and well, write it into a book for everybody to experience.
Sophie Strand: 25:59
And so I guess I'm saying thank you. Well, thank you for what you're doing, which is, in a lot of ways, much more important and you know, my brother is a farmer too, so this is something that I'm thinking about all the time in conversation with him, which is, you know, my brother is a farmer too, so this is something that I'm thinking about all the time in conversation with him Um, which is, you know, metabolism is my spirituality, that's my resurrection, it's what you're saying, which is the fact that we are only self through other, that the minute we stop in taking otherness and rebuilding our bodies from it and looping metabolically with our actual ecosystem, we start to die. For me, that's just that. That's the biggest spiritual lesson I'm here to learn.
Sophie Strand: 26:41
I think of Linda Hogan, who's one of my favorite poets, who says like to enter life, be food. So we have to. We both have to eat and also make ourselves edible. So I think my long term goal is to make myself edible. I mean that practically. Also, like you know, when I die, I hope that I, my body, can be fermented back into the place that has fed it and sustained it.
Sophie Strand: 27:05
Yeah, something that's so interesting to me um, it's what I was also struck when I was talking about, which is this imaginative empathy, which I think is so important right now. It's about the ability to like. I just think of this like a kaleidoscope, like can you imagine yourself as being very small and in infantismal? Can you imagine yourself in the mind of a bear, a horse, a mycorrhizal system like a tree, an entire ecosystem Like can, and, of course, you know a kind of like anthropocentric language to create that dialogue, that open conversation, and so for me, it's always like yeah, I'm going to fail at trying to imagine, to be a tree, obviously, but I think it's important for me to imagine it.
D. Firth Griffith: 28:07
Yeah, yeah. Well, if metabolism is metamorphosis, then to some large degree there is an essence of you, sophie strand, that is at some point you know. And so finding that feeling that and and maybe that's too far for some, but at least acknowledging that to me seems to be that tuning fork, almost not in the way you used it earlier, but in the way we're using it.
Sophie Strand: 28:30
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I always struggle with with a lot of like very reductive modern ancestor practice is this idea that there's a linear ancestry and for me, like ancestry is rhizomatic, multi-species with multiple doors of entry. Like I always say, like my body is an ancestor, like there's carbon in me that was in a pterodactyl or a hummingbird, like you know, if I want to trace, I can definitely trace back my maternal line, but I can also think about my, my body as being, you know, recycled minerals and stardust and many other beings. And that's not just fanciful, that's also about culpability and intimacy, that, like, if I feel like I have a kind of ancestral connection and responsibility to my maternal line, I also have an ancestral culpability with the minerals and the ecosystem that physically builds my body outside my home.
D. Firth Griffith: 29:27
Yeah, I write about in a recent book. I write that it's two-way dream, walking right Like we walk the dreams of our ancestors, but we're also dreaming forward for our children or grandchildren to walk in. And I like culpability. I think that's very good. I think it's very clear.
Sophie Strand: 29:42
It's a much more beautiful way of putting it. Yeah, I love that.
D. Firth Griffith: 29:54
Yeah, but it's not as clear I like. I like culpability as well. That, to me, is very clear. I'm in a moment I wonder about you Cause before we go on, let me make this short little statement, then I'll ask a question. You have three books that I know of um the flowering wand, the Madonna secret and then your new book, the body is a doorway, I believe Um, and so I want to make sure that that is mentioned as early in this episode as possible. I have not read the Flowering Wand, but I know so many people who have. I have actually just finished Well, I shouldn't say finished. I'm so close to finishing the Madonna Secret, so I don't want to talk about that yet. One day in a future conversation we will. But I'm very excited to read the Body is a Doorway. Do you mind, just for a couple minutes, if you feel inclined, to discuss that book?
Sophie Strand: 30:31
I understand it's coming out spring 2025. The Body is a Doorway, is like an experimental eco-memoir about chronic illness and ecology. So I have a quote unquote incurable genetic illness. That causes a lot of complexity and escalating multi-system wide issues and there's no fix. There are like lots of band-aids and I think it took me a really long time to get diagnosed and I think that I was really inculcated with. I mean, I experienced medical malpractice. I experienced incredibly bad care in the new age realm, in the holistic realm, in the material reductionist medical industrial complex, like I it was.
Sophie Strand: 31:12
It was a real initiatory experience being sick as a young person and struggling to find a diagnosis, and I think I was really programmed to expect a healing journey, to expect a diagnosis, a cure and then an ascent from the underworld, and unfortunately, what I got was something much weirder, which is something that I had to live with and had no cure and could kill me in so many different ways, and that that experience, paired with a lot of other personal inquiry, made me question our ideas of atomized health. What? What is health in a sick culture? What does it mean that we burden individuals with healing themselves when the fact that they are sick is caused by system-wide oppression they can't possibly fix with their therapy session. And I started to compost these ideas with the beings that have really helped me, with fungi, with ghost pipe, which is a micro-heterotropic plant which depends on fungi to live, with woodchucks there. Something more beautiful, beyond our ideas of of health and wholeness, is is there a place in the eco tone between health and um disease that I can inhabit generatively without trying to push in either direction? Um, and I really needed to write the book that I wish I had been given.
Sophie Strand: 32:50
When I was given an incurable diagnosis I felt so exiled. Um, you know, people always see you and they say I hope you're feeling better. And it's so hard to say I may never feel better, I probably won't, but I'm feeling everything and that's so much and it's so big, and it's good and bad and everything all at once. And I think that as a culture, we're very bad at staying with things that feel like they are hard to resolve, illegible, and I think, as someone who has a chronic illness that could cause many other issues, I feel illegible to other people, and so I wanted to offer something multi-species, something mycorrhizal to my fellow people, and so I wanted to offer something multi-species, something mycorrhizal to my fellow animals, my fellow kin, who are dealing with this and and say I see you, I understand what it's like to live in between shells, you know, to always be in the cocoon, to never quite grow grow wings.
D. Firth Griffith: 33:51
I have a similar story that I won't get into.
D. Firth Griffith: 33:55
Maybe some other time but diagnosed genetic issues since I was 17. And I always think about two things and I get both of these images from you, which is the only reason I bring them up the first of which is, you know, outside of people always asking you like, how are you feeling? And you have to provide a response. I always feel like people ask you know, when they walk past me or something like this, they're always like, oh, I hope you're staying busy. I'm always like always thinking, oh, I hope I'm not.
D. Firth Griffith: 34:22
But the second thing is this I think it's section 11 of the Tao Te Ching, but it says windows and doors are cut into a room. The room's use comes from emptiness. Yeah, and I and I, obviously I don't think emptiness is a final state, but I think obviously I don't think emptiness is a is a final state. But I think, like we were talking with drought, with drought, with disease, with sickness, with grief, that it's a marvelous place to be full, to be filled, made full. And so I have also often thought about my life with that. And when I saw your book come out for pre-order and I saw the title, uh, I did wonder. I wanted to ask you about that how, how do you view your life's uh, you know, physical state, this, this, this mirror of the eco tone, um, you know, written inside of your own clay body, uh, as a door and use and emptiness you for that um question.
Sophie Strand: 35:24
So one thing I I'm very interested in symbiosis and how evolution actually doesn't happen in this neo-darwinian sense of forking and individuating, but usually the biggest jumps in biological novelty happen through anarchic fusing, through horizontal gene transfer, through two species burning the bridge to their old bodies behind them and jumping into each other's bodies. The example I always use is two starving unicellular bacteria tried to eat each other, failed and that's the, that's the birth of mitochondrial multicellular beings. Um, you know, our very selves are the product of this anarchic, botched cannibalism. Um, but for me to kind of widen into disability and and emptiness and opening and how that can be a more receptive place, something I think about is to be whole, is to be isolated, to be incorrect, is to be relational, to need help.
Sophie Strand: 36:31
I think about when plants first came onto dry land, like 500 million years ago, they were like basically like little puddles of algae with no roots. They or, like you know, the dust weeds that just kind of like roll around in the desert. They had no way of plugging into community, into mineral and resources, into conversation with many species, and mycorrhizal fungi had already had a rhizomatic root lifestyle for millennia. Mycorrhizal fungi had already had a rhizomatic root lifestyle for millennia, and they reached up and they plugged plants into the soil and into community, brought them into the underworld and they taught them how to have roots, fungi and plants. That has terraformed everything, every smell, every flower, every fruit, every tree. That is the product of that moment when another species lack is an invitation to collaborate bodily. And so for me, I think of myself as being a risky collaborator. I have to because I can't metabolize certain minerals, because I can't take care of myself. Every day I am forced to collaborate with other people, with other species, to stay alive in ways that if I was well or whole, I might not necessarily risk. And so I think that the sick person, the disabled person, the person who is neurodivergent always is open hand, saying I need help, and that help actually has the potential to change the biological face of the earth. Yeah, so I think that people who are open physically, neurologically I mean, I think of trauma also is keeping your sensory gating open.
Sophie Strand: 38:20
That's another interpretation of the doorway for me is. I experienced pretty violent early childhood trauma and it definitely primed my nervous system to stay hyper alert. As we get older, our sensory gating narrows and it narrows in a way that is culturally informed. Of course, in earlier, healthier cultures, that gating is very ecologically responsive. You're gating out certain plants so you can identify edible and herbal plants, you're learning to read weather patterns, but in our culture you're gating out the sensory aliveness of the world, dating out the sensory aliveness of the world. For a traumatized person, where sensory data is, you know, supposed to be about your survival and you feel that you're constantly under attack, you actually keep those sensory gates open and that's bad for your nervous system, perhaps, like it definitely makes you more liable to fatigue, to autoimmunity, to all sorts of issues. But for me it's also keeping the doorway open to that animism, to that ecological dialogue that many people who are well, who are neurotypical, get out.
D. Firth Griffith: 39:32
You mentioned earlier this imaginative empathy and then you said risky collaborator, and I see these two terms really being wed well together. I can see how they can interrelate.
Sophie Strand: 39:42
That's a wonderful connection. Thank you, yeah.
D. Firth Griffith: 39:47
So we've progressed through the first 45 minutes of this and we have yet to really dive into a lot of the story, mythology, rewilding conversations that I'm really excited about. This was the intro. I don't know if you feel it was, but I think of every conversation as just being a beginning um yes, yes, absolutely right.
D. Firth Griffith: 40:10
Well, let's just, if you will dive, let's just drive straight into this. Um, you did mention this a little bit about you know, uh, ripping out, uh, creation mythologies or stories and mythologies in general, from the ecotone in which they were constructed, and you mentioned that that was negative in some sense, or at least it changes them and we have to see them as a changed thing. Maybe we can just begin there, walk down that pathway, maybe with a question like what is this rewilding of mythology that you, I think, began with in the Flowering Wand and some of your other writings? But let's just start there and see where it goes.
Sophie Strand: 40:45
Definitely. I mean, you know, one of the great observations by a myth teller, by a myth interpreter, is by Robert Brinkhurst, interpreter is by Robert Brinkhurst and Robert Brinkhurst definitely in conversation with the writer, sean Kane, which is that science quantifies nature and myth personifies it. And they're actually very similar impulses, which is they're trying to understand and dialogue with the natural world. And so for me, myth is always a way of creating a story that helps you remember how to remain in conversation with the weather, with the trees, with the agricultural tides of a certain place, and I think we have forgotten that myth is ecological, that it comes from bodies that are grown in a specific place and that myth is always ecologically responsive. Sean Kane, in his amazing book the Wisdom of Myth Tellers, always says that you know, you take this, you take a Haida myth from the North Pacific about fox. You know getting the runs and getting food poisoning from eating these berries and being a trickster and you think of it as being a kind of cutesy trickster tale, when actually it's a highly specific story about needing to bleach these certain berries in the ground before you eat them and not over harvesting them Like it's a highly specific piece of information. Myth is a very durable way of passing along environmental and social information from generation to generation. The oldest piece of human artifact we have is a 37,000 year old Aboriginal story. It's also the earliest piece of scientific data we have, because it records these asteroids hitting Earth in Australia we now know.
Sophie Strand: 42:47
I'm very interested in the idea of geomythology, which is that a lot of mythology is actually encoded stories of things that actually happen, and we think of books, we think of materials as being durable, but the most durable thing is a story, and a story that is compelling enough that you know it summons our heart that we want to spread it generation to generation. You know we have the story of the Titans and the Greek gods defeating them, and it seems like it is Hesiod's story of it is in the Theogony. Is this grand mythic story of gods? We now know that it is probably the exact cultural memory that precedes the Bronze Age collapse of the eruption of Mount Terra and the destruction of Akrotiri and Minoan culture, and it's incredible to imagine that myth making it through the bottleneck of a complete cultural collapse. So for me, myth is this way of sending your ecologically precious beings through the bottleneck of cultural collapse. So right now it feels really important to think about.
Sophie Strand: 44:05
You know, I oftentimes say that our books, our technology, are sandcastles. The thing that might actually make it through the bottleneck of collapse are really really, really good stories, stories with love in them, with heroes, with anti-heroes, with villains, with animals, with many, many different species. Those are the stories that last boats of breath. And so I think that you know the myths that have come to us are. They've come to us with, with precious cargo, and we can also choose the myths to send forward with our precious cargo and they will be ecologically rich.
Sophie Strand: 44:43
Um, you know, uh, um, mankin magen, who's one, a collaborator, one of my favorite writers and thinkers, who works in ireland with preserving gaelic um, oftentimes says that like a single irish word is concertina. It has so much mythic information in it. It's like it looks like just a word, but like, if you unpack it and look at all of the different things inside of it, it's carrying so much precious ecological cargo. And I think about what we need to do right now is to build boats of breath and then plant the golden rod, plant the stags, plant the species that are going extinct, plant the bird songs that are dying out in these stories to send forward.
D. Firth Griffith: 45:26
Yeah, it's like we destroy a people's ecological kinship when we handle their narratives or their mythologies, you know, in any way negative, exactly. It is interesting that, like the work of colonialism over the last maybe 1500 years, is really, first you know, attuned to this destruction of myth yeah, and it's about co-option of myth.
Sophie Strand: 45:50
It's also, it's, it's, it's, it's what we've done with a lot of species and with globalism, and and trade is like we will uproot something and then try and plant it somewhere else and pretend it means something else. Yeah, appropriative, I mean. I also think there's no purity to it, which is, I do think there's a way in which you can take a myth and bring it somewhere else and then replant it in your world and say, well, how does it change here? What does it do? What is it asking me to pay attention to here?
Sophie Strand: 46:23
One of the examples I use is so Yeshua, the Aramaic Jew, is not necessarily going to recognize the Hudson Valley, but I can look at his storytelling concerns and then replant those questions in my ecosystem. So a question that he seems to be asking within his context anthropologically, climatologically, um, ritually is the idea of impurity. So all of his stories are. I always say like you like draw a fishing net through his parables and you come back with like the rejects, like the things that people hated at that time period, and not in a like cute way. Like you know, he was really touching things that were very, very hot, and my favorite example is the mustard seeds. Is the kingdom, is the mustard seed, and at that that can seem kind of precious right now, but if you replant it in that context, the mustard seeds were these incredibly invasive species and they could destroy your crop in like a week and if they destroyed your crop you couldn't make bread to pay your taxes and you were going to lose your land, the land where your ancestors were buried and you also could be punished capital punishment and killed. So a mustard seed holds this like incredible and also your family would starve Like there's so much there. This weed that has the potential to destroy your entire life is the kingdom, and at that time period, people also thought of as the kingdom as being this moment where the scales were finally balanced and the Romans who had been destroying your livelihood would be kicked back out of your land Not your land, but the land that was God's land, that you were tending and so to say, the kingdom actually is now this moment of oppression where nothing is right and it's this weed that has the potential to kill you. It's pretty radical, pretty wild. We have to expect that. It probably made people pretty angry, you've heard it People who had known serious violence and oppression for a long, long time.
Sophie Strand: 48:33
So I replant that kind of interruptive pedagogy that like agitate, like, like that, that desire to agitate towards the things that we have a lot of bias towards, into my own ecosystem and I look at the invasive species. You have very simplistic ideas that the invasive species in this land are bad, they're kicking out the native plants, they're causing havoc, and one of the things I have to ask is this is a what is not weed doing? What is the grapevine doing? What are these beings doing that seem like they're interrupting this ecosystem? Are they the kingdom? Are they actually doing something bigger than my narrow human perspective can see, can see? I guess a question I have for you is like is there a being, is there an animal, is there a thing in your life right now that represents that kind of conundrum, because I don't know your ecosystem the, uh, the, the ecosystem here, this, this biome of the piedmont southern blue ridge valley, a couple other that we touch.
D. Firth Griffith: 49:37
Um, we have a great problem, most people consider, with two plants that come to mind immediately, the first of which is called autumn olive. Autumn olive is a bush. It's very similar to shrub lower story tree, if you let it, very similar to a native variety called buffalo bush or bison bush. That has been long eradicated and so to some degree it's coming in to fill this niche. But it's the second most herbicide plant in this entire region. I mean, it's illegal to harvest and transplant, it's illegal to save the berries. I mean literally by our state government. State's forestry service has made it illegal because it's so invasive and so negative and all these things like you write about. Like you, I don't actually believe in an invasive plant linearly being negative. And it's so interesting. I I say this quite often people hate it because we do. We transplant it, we harvest it and we eat it all year long. Its leaves are edible. Its berries actually have the highest amounts of antioxidants, zinc and vitamin C on any berry that grows in this region, any berry that is native or non-native but grows well in this region. So it's a highly medicinal plant. It also fixes nitrogen into the soils and nitrogen fixing shrub. Its leaves are full of protein for herbivores, like, if you bring the cows, go cheap, doesn't matter if it's a deer or wild undulate, they're going to attack those leaves before they even eat the grasses. And so during the strout, to a large degree, um, you know, a shrub's leaf is not going to be attempted by the dryness of a couple months. A grass's root, especially in the modern world of short, you know, organic soil structures and shallow soils, if you will, it will be tempted by that. And so, to a large degree, a lot of cows stayed alive this summer because of the autumn olive, let alone of all of its other. You know beautiful things.
D. Firth Griffith: 51:29
The second plant that I was thinking of is called Johnson grass, which is a grass it's a warm season grass that grows, I mean, just sky high, um, but it has a lot of, you know, negative connotations around it, very similar to mustard. I mean, johnson grass is the top most herbicide plant in this entire East coast region because it occupies corn fields and can very quickly compete with the corn or even the soy or the wheat. But it is interesting because you know, when you think about this ecologically, this landscape, you know we have a lot of indigenous fire that has been taken off. When I say a lot, I mean almost all you know we don't really have the wild undulates moving through, we don't have humans living in kinship with earth. So this is a very different landscape, you know. As you imagine, then you know it was even 500 years ago, let alone 5,000, 50,000, 500,000, 5 million, whatever it would be, and um, but the grasses that grow in our agricultural fields, in our meadows, in our home yards, they're all transported from Europe.
D. Firth Griffith: 52:28
The truly native grasses all around us are all warm season grasses. This happened after the last glacial maximum, when bison latifrons antiquitous came down to bison bison and we saw a reduction in a million grazer sizes and the elk decreased in size. You have a lot of transition at that period. But the landscape also transitioned from ancient, maybe cool season dominated grasses that grow during the cool season of the year to a predominantly considered warm season landscape. A lot of details that lead to this.
D. Firth Griffith: 52:58
Johnson grass is about the only warm season plant that many agriculturalists have access to today, because all of the other plants the yellow Indian grass, the big bluestem, the little bluestem, the eastern camagrass, all of the warm season grasses that should be going have all been pushed to the side, and now, as we call them back, johnson grass is the first to come, and so, in my opinion, it is the only grass that grows during the warm season until the landscape is ready for those other truly native, truly pivotal, truly keystone prairie species to come back in and occupy, and so it's like a hello friend, thanks for helping.
D. Firth Griffith: 53:35
And then one day it'll leave as it wants to leave. It doesn't want to be in a warm season dominated grassland. It wants to occupy the system, to clothe it during the summer season, the drought season, and then to move on. I believe At least that's my conversations with it. So I couldn't agree with you more about the mustard seed. I'm smiling through and through when you were talking about that, because a lot of us see that as like a positive thing, like the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, and like a good thing, you know, because we like mustard on our hot dogs. Maybe I don't know.
Sophie Strand: 54:02
We don't know that. It was like the scariest thing you could possibly hear. Yeah, you, as a farmer, much closer to that precarity of, like you know, weed can really, like you know, tip the scales. But I'm listening to you talk about the grasses and being like that's your myth, like that's your story, that's the story you need to to, to tell the story of the johnson grass, like that's what I want to hear. Um, I'm these, it's ties, but it's doing, I mean, for me.
Sophie Strand: 54:31
An interesting thing I'm watching happen is we have a lot of really really shallow rooted, very tall deciduous trees in this area, like pines, and they are not suited to the climate that's developing in the Hudson Valley, which is we have really really big rain and wind storms. We have like big storms all year and erode and flood the soil. The soil is really really wet and unstable and it's also really really hot all the time. And we have these grapevines, we have these fungicidal, mycorrhizal mustard greens here that are killing off the root systems of these trees. So there are a lot of we have passed. We have all of these different things that are killing off these beautiful sentinel deciduous trees that we think of as being, you know, representative of the Hudson Valley and so a lot of people are very upset about these trees being killed off.
Sophie Strand: 55:27
Part of me watches every storm bring down more of them anyway, and I think that like there's a kind of midwife thing, there's a doula-ing of the land that's happening right now. Like these invasive species are saying, like these shallow rooted trees will not survive in this changing ecosystem and we need to open up space, aerate space for smaller growth to come up in the open depth sunshine, for smaller species to grow in the shrubs. Like it seems like there's a grand midwifing of the ecosystem happening right now. Um, that I'm not totally able to see.
D. Firth Griffith: 56:04
Yeah, it's, it's. Uh. A mentor of mine has always talked about invasive species as community-less species, because the second they actually form a community like a symbiosis. They're not invasive anymore. Right, and, and that's like even patty querrick and anishinaabe writer. She wrote this marvelous book becoming kin, and that's what you write about. It's about the settler, colonial narrative. You weren't not welcome, you just came and never formed community. That's's the problem.
Sophie Strand: 56:30
Yeah, exactly. Everything is invasive until it puts out its hand.
D. Firth Griffith: 56:36
Yeah, and asks, asks for help, and gives the help. I think I think that's true. I feel like it's true and that's good enough for me. I wonder what science would say. Sometimes science says some funny things. Sometimes it wonderful things like you were saying about, uh, bringhurst. I believe, robert, science qualifies, myth, personifies. Sometimes the personification of truth or even just curiosity is good enough yeah, I mean, I also.
Sophie Strand: 57:02
We have such a. We have such a weird idea of science these days. That's more scientism which is like dot yes, the truth right like the science. Yeah and the truth is that science is not truth. It's a way of asking questions.
Sophie Strand: 57:18
It's like it's a verb and it should keep asking questions and coming up with new answers, and so much of our science is biased or it's funded in kind of secret ways by big business impulses and we don't know that, and so we have this idea of like if science says something, it's true. It's more like if science keeps asking questions, it keeps seeing things in a different way.
D. Firth Griffith: 57:44
Yeah, that's really interesting, and I want to go back to the geological mythology that you were speaking about earlier. Not that this is pure in its sense, but it's a connection point between you and I. In 2013, my whole life I wanted to be an archaeologist.
Sophie Strand: 57:58
That was my initial thing. I wanted to be too.
D. Firth Griffith: 58:02
Really, I still dream about it, but in 2013, I spent the summer studying ancient Paleolithic and Mesolithic cave art in the like, southern France, sturdone Valley of like, lascaux and Great Rock Lascaux, brielle. So we spent the summer having a lot of fun in deep, dark caves and studying the ancient symbols and symbology and pictographs of these ancient, ancient people. And, uh, something that has always really interested me is the extension of this symbology, not in any way to, in the moment, connect cultures I have no interest in that but just to see the same ideas, that is to say, the same curiosities, ebbing through our species as we relate to our surroundings. So, like the in in Lascaux, there's this wonderful hall you walk in. It's called the Hall of Bulls and it's just gorgeous and it's near the cave's entrance. And Lascaux is a very wonderful cave to study in ancient Gaul or Western Celtic regions of the ancient world, and to a large degree, because a lot of the painting that happened there was during what was called the ultrathermal period, when a large transfiguration of the landscape and the mammals, especially the mammals that humans really lived with and lived as, to some large degree, everything was changing, and so it's a moment recorded in time with symbols during that very changing, transfiguring period in their lives. Well, anyways, you walk into this great hall, it's the hall of bulls and it's just, it's a cathedral. I mean, we also spent some time in Paris and Paris has no regard. I mean it's just infinitesimal in my opinion, as you compare the two, like you walk into, like Notre Dame, you know, and you see the paintings and the whatever, and you look into the hall of bulls and it's just totally different. It's totally more real, more tangible, more, more bloody. I mean it's wonderful, um, well, anyways, and that's what people stop.
D. Firth Griffith: 59:52
But if you get to study, this is not actually shown to the public. If you study, there's this vertical shaft it's called the shaft at 25 feet deep, it's almost perfectly straight down and at the bottom of the shaft, archaeologists for hundreds of years, maybe 150 years, depending on how long. We've studied less. Let's go from a modern science perspective, I don't know, but there's tons of bones. I mean, it's, it's the other world to some large degree. We don't know if it was burials or not, it doesn't matter.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:00:15
The point is that there's some large degree, there's an underworld underneath that the shaft connects us to, and about midway down the shaft. How a human got there without technology is unknown to us, but there's a picture, and the picture is of a man who's supposedly dead and he's laying next to a bison that is also supposedly dead and his spear is cast through the back, through the anus, out of the stomach of the bison, and they're looking at each other. There's a lot of symbology that I'm going to skip over. But the interesting thing is it's a little bit strange but comfortable once you think about it is the man's penis is erect, right, he's fully into the reproductive process, and there's a staff it's believed to be the shaman staff, whatever that might mean in that culture at that time um, with a bird on top of it, and the bird is probably a crow or a crow Raven, it's unclear. But the point is you have, you know, a man in reproductive form, you have a bison and you have the animal or the bird, the crow raven, standing on top of the staff. Well, you like, jump 40,000 years in the future when, you know, this same culture gets to inhabit the plains.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:01:22
Peoples of the central Great Plains, turtle Island, lakotas, dakotas, many, even the Blackfeet, I believe, share in this way. So does many, even the Blackfeet, I believe, share in this way. But the Wiwong Wasapi ceremony, the Sundance ceremony, at the center of the Sundance ceremony, which is to a large degree the essence of their I don't want to say ceremonial rites, but it's very important to their spirituality, you see those same motifs being exemplified. You have to kill a bison and you have to hang its head. You know, above the ceremonial space, that's very important. So you have the dead bison and then you have a pictograph that is being displayed of a man with an erect penis it's the idea of reproduction again and there's a bird on a staff.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:02:01
There's all of these connections in the symbology where you know, unlike you and I, or the cultures that you and I emanate from, this ancient people is not connected Again, don't take it from that. But they're connected to the landscape in their own particular way. And this shaft experience in Lascaux is to some degree the lifting of the veil between, maybe, the other world and the world in which they lived. And it was that beautiful space that maybe like Samhain and the modern Celtic people in our own modern practice, maybe Samhain would be relatable to that, or the Sundance and the Lakotas, and I want to focus, maybe you can want to respond to that, but also kind of drift into this essence or this idea of how do we as modern humans maybe approach the ancient mythologies that we have or want to have in an appropriate way, while also being grounded, because I think that's very important.
Sophie Strand: 1:02:55
That's a great question, and I'll kind of take it as my ending, because I have very bad neurological issues so I probably need to get off of the screen.
Sophie Strand: 1:03:04
Yeah, absolutely, I feel myself beginning to glitch, but I mean such an amazing image that you just summoned I just want to sit with that for a second and I do really believe in a kind of morphic resonance of these patterns. As you know, that's Rupert Sheldrake's work, which is like how do we explain that, like animals separated by millions of years and and species have the same shape, how we explain why, you know, these, like spiral shells, will die out, go extinct and then appear again, like is there a pattern in nature behind the forms? And I do believe that there's some. There are patterns that want to come through and it doesn't matter where they're, where they're coming through, it matters that the beings are listening to the dreaming of the land, letting the land dream them. So so yeah, it happens in Lascaux, it happens in the Great Plains people. It's that pattern wanting to vibrate through us.
Sophie Strand: 1:04:01
But, to answer your question, the phrase I use is reroute, rewild, retell, and I really live by that, which is, when you have a spiritual story, when you have a religious dogma, when you have a myth and you don't know where it came and you just take it as true, you're missing all of its richness. So I say like, okay, maybe are you Christian or do you have stories that you've been given culturally but you live in America now? Or do you have stories that you've been given culturally but you live in America now? What kind of research would it take to look at them in their actual context? So for me, I was really interested in the history of Christianity. So I said, can I replant the story of Jesus in the history of the Roman Empire, the history of the Jewish people, the pantheistic animism of proto-Canaanite culture, the ecology of that time period? Can I read primary documents? Can I talk to people? Can I read it? Can I smell the smells? Can I get perfume? Can I remake the perfume that people wore at the time period? I mean, there's no correct academic way to do this. You know research is just putting your body into something completely. But I think it's important to replant these stories. Like you have a Roman myth, well, replant it in the time period. Is this a co-opting of an earlier Greek myth that's meant to justify the subjugation of another culture? Can I begin to be curious about the bias behind a certain myth? I mean, I think that's always to be kind of a curious, cynical reader of something and say, well, is this actually the story of a co-option of another culture?
Sophie Strand: 1:05:50
I often say that myths are palimpsests. Palimpsests is what would happen in manuscript culture, where it was very hard to make vellum, to make paper out of skin, so oftentimes you would wash off the earlier manuscript and write over it again, but earlier pictures would show up. So palimpsest is like the showing up of the older script through the new writing, and a lot of myths are co-option of older myths and you can see how something is poking up. My favorite example, of course, is like the story of Theseus, which is really the story of the Greek cultures coming into Minoan culture and killing the bull god. So of course, the Minotaur was a Styrian. The starry god was actually a venerated god and not a monster. But when a culture is trying to justify its subjugation of another people, they turn. I say, like monster myths or mother myths, which is highly simplified, but saying that like oftentimes, when we have a monster in a myth, we can be curious and say like, is this actually? Is this monster actually another culture we're trying to justify subjugating? Um, so that's, that's the rerouting.
Sophie Strand: 1:06:59
Um, uh, the rewilding is, for me, is bringing in modern science, bringing in our own ecosystem, our funk and pheromones and spores, our own concerns, our own hardship to the story. Like composting, adding stuff onto the pile, seeing what sprouts, putting things together inappropriately. My work is always about kind of like genre promiscuity or like boundary violation, which is, can I throw some quantum physics, can I throw some soil science, can I throw some anthropology? Can I put it all together and see if it creates new soil? So that's the rewilding, and then the retelling is, I think, for me the most important part, which is, what stories do you want to tell? Can you take this original mythic impulse planted in your ecosystem and then tell something new? And that, for me, is really that's the holy trinity that the re-root, re-wild, re-tell, the looking back, the planting, the composting and the re-growing.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:07:59
Wow, wow. There's so much there, and I often say this on these podcasts, but it's true Every time, it is true. I think we could talk for another two hours about that alone and how culture and time and ancestors, the diversity of ancestors as kin flowing through our bodies, just take the last hour and 15 minutes and do it in a different way, and so let's, let's do this again. I agree, I agree, let's.
Sophie Strand: 1:08:27
I also. I for me, most importantly, it's like let's plant the seed of maybe doing some person someday, who knows? I was like maybe more and more. I think it's important for us to come together as real human beings. So if you're ever in the Hudson, say hi.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:08:44
Yes, if you're ever in the mountains of Virginia, you do the same. You do the same. Um, sophie, before you go, I don't want to assume that people should get in contact with you, but if they were in an appropriate medium that gives you life, how might they do this? Thank you.
Sophie Strand: 1:08:58
Well, if you want to like follow my work and like all of my different writing and weird stuff and I oftentimes share book lists or research I'm doing I have a sub stack, sophie strand dot sub stackcom. There's a free version where I offer a lot for free. I've been a starving artist and I know how important it is to share stuff for other people that you can just have. But if you feel like joining my inner community and helping support my steep medical costs, it's deeply appreciated and I try and offer like a lot of an inner look at my research and my projects in my life to my paid subscribers. I'm also on Instagram at cosmogony Um C O S M I Y G N Y, which I got from the indigenous folklorist Paula um and um. Paula and gun, I think Alan gun Um great.
Sophie Strand: 1:09:50
Um and gun. I think alan gun um, great right, um, and yeah, and if you want to email me to ask me to have a conversation, to do something, my email's up on my website and I try and respond with as much care and speed as I can, but I am a glitchy animal and I sometimes lose track of things. So if you don't hear back from me, bug me again.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:10:12
Yeah, yeah, your email response, your auto reply, is simply marvelous, simply marvelous. Yeah, it goes back to that Like I hope you're staying busy, I hope. I'm not you know like I'm trying. I love it.
Sophie Strand: 1:10:24
Well, thank you so much. This has been such a wonderful start to my day, thank you.
D. Firth Griffith: 1:10:30
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Well, thank you for being on, we'll do this again, good Stay in touch.
Sophie Strand: 1:10:41
Thank you, daniel.
Great convo!
Daniel I loved what you had to say about some of our cows favorite plants ;)
Everything Sophie said was so good of course. I’m especially gonna reflect on metabolism as religion!