Sophie Strand: Rewilding myths and storytelling (ep365)
“The transition from oral cultures into written cultures, for me, really signals a conceptual change that then uproots us from an embedded, environmental, relational existence, in such a way that a certain analytical, linear, and reductionist thinking becomes possible.”
In this episode, we welcome Sophie Strand, a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe to her newsletter, and follow her work on Instagram.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include how the historical transition from oral to chirographic cultures might have reshaped how people perceive of and relate to the world, what it means to reroot myths and storytelling, the relationship between myth and science, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Episode references:
“Contaminated Diversity in 'Slow Disturbance”, an article by Anna Tsing
Entangled Life, a book by Merlin Sheldrake
Braiding Sweetgrass, a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, a forthcoming book by Sophie Strand
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, a book by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
“The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”, an essay by Audre Lorde
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Sophie Strand: I was raised by parents who really encouraged me to be outside. I was raised in the wilderness. We rehabilitated wild animals. We had a big backyard that led into the forest in the shadow of a mountain. I spent a lot of time outside.
I'm also a childhood sexual abuse survivor, so I had a very alert nervous system. I think we problematize that a lot [within] our culture, because when you are neurodivergent or your body is different, and you can't necessarily produce work or be effective, in capitalism's narrative, [that] is problematic, and you need to fix it. But in a lot of ways, it made me notice more about the environment. I noticed small things: insects and slime mold and mushrooms, and rootlets, perturbations in pressure changes and weather. It seemed strange that this thing that made me hyper-aware and often very fatigued also opened me up to more aliveness.
I was very aware of mushrooms. I liked how they were capricious. They were neither good nor bad. They were very like fairies, in the old, classical-Irish sense—really not interested in human beings. Sometimes they could do you a favor. Sometimes, they'd be really, really naughty. Sometimes, a mushroom would be poisonous, sometimes neutral, sometimes it would be delicious. I loved that about them, that mutability.
When I was 16, I fell very dramatically ill. It was about six, seven years of different diagnoses in and out of the hospital, life-threatening organ issues and not being able to figure out exactly what was going on. As that was happening, I was deepening my love of fungi. I was learning a little bit about forest ecology and how mycorrhizal systems constitute ecosystems. They tie orchids and grasses and trees together. They help trees communicate, they ferry bacteria along highways. They actually create the health of the soil. They break things down so that they keep unlocking minerals so they can feed all the other beings in the forest. They're doing all of these different, incredibly interesting things.
I was thinking about rhizomes, reading Deleuze and Guattari, thinking about rhizomatic thinking in a philosophical sense. I asked, “Can we plant that in actual ecology?” when I got the diagnosis of connective tissue disease, finally. I realized that the thing that had been causing me so many physical issues was perhaps an opening to a more-than-human connective tissue, mycorrhizal fungi.
When you have a connective tissue disease like I do, which is Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (and we're recording this in May, which is Ehlers-Danlos Awareness Month) your connective tissue doesn't work correctly. So, your joints sublux, you dislocate, your veins get lazy, and things don't fit together correctly. There's too much interstitial space. I was thinking, as I was falling more and more in love with fungi, that what I needed to really do was invite them in to colonize me poetically, and to make myself a mouthpiece for them.
My condition doesn’t have a cure. It's incurable, but perhaps I could meld my idea of what individual healing looks like and use my particular plight as a doorway into empathizing and advocating for another being.
Kamea Chayne: I'm just so moved by how poetic everything flows through you, and I very much feel and agree that mycelium and fungi blur a lot of the boundaries and rigid categories that we've created and challenge a lot of identities of selfhood and individualism.
In trying to trace the beginnings of when our relationship with our ecosystems and the planet started to unravel or become more hierarchical, various past guests have named different things like the Industrial Revolution or the advent of agriculture, the beginnings of map making, colonial capitalism, and so forth. There are, of course, elements of truth in all of that. I don't think we can ever neatly pinpoint one event because everything feeds into one another and constantly builds off of what came prior... Everything, essentially, is interactive.
But in terms of a deeper shift that you name as disenchantment, you take us way back to when our ways of storytelling changed to become more abstract, that later may have become decontextualized, or you say deracinated, and also calcified—or as you say, ossified. I would love for you to take us through this thought process, on how the changes in our dominant modes of storytelling and tools of language may have translated or affected how we relate to the living world, and the world at large.
Sophie Strand: All of this is back forming and all of it is in a certain way fictional. But as we learn about space, time, and matter, in quantum physics—the feminist Karen Broad—we realized that our experience of the present is tugging on the past. It's changing the past, too. There's something playful and creative about it.
The transition from oral cultures into written cultures—which are technically in academia called, chirographic and textual cultures—for me, [this] really signals a conceptual change that then uproots us from an embedded, environmental, relational existence, in such a way that a certain analytical, linear, and maturial reductionist thinking becomes possible.
What I'm really interested in is that for thousands and thousands of years, most human history storytelling has been oral. That's almost too simple to say. Knowledge has been oral. That if you didn't speak the knowledge constantly, you had no history book or dictionary to look it up, you had to constantly be telling stories. You had to have storytelling gatherings every week in order to keep knowledge alive. There was no residue. There was no object where you kept knowledge. Knowledge lived in relationships. It was never a solitary activity.
We have a chirographic lens of looking back on oral cultures, which is problematic. We think of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. We think of them as thinking with chirographic textual minds, but they wouldn't even have had a book in mind. They would experience themselves as remembering a story, word for word, but what they were really doing is constantly adapting the story to shifting political, and ecological climatological pressures.
So, stories were always updating. There's this idea that Homer and the Odyssey were one memorized story that was unchanging. But the truth is that Homer was a tradition. It probably was a collective experience by a whole culture, where you would memorize certain themes, certain epithets, that then you could recycle into these episodic shapes, so that you could tell the story in your own way.
For me, oral culture is about knowledge as relationship, and knowledge as movement. I always say oral cultures totalize. They see the whole archaic nature. They see that there's no such thing as an individual node of cognition: our intelligence is interstitial. It only exists when we come together.
Chirographic textual cultures dissect and monumentalize.
So written words are residue. That's the interesting thing for me about writing. Writing makes us think that words are similar to things. When you write something down, suddenly you think an elephant is an object. Rather than [with] breath: a word disappears as you say it. It's an event rather than an object.
So, for me, the movement from oral culture to written culture is the movement from relational consciousness to objectification. The biggest difference is you cannot and you would not tell a story alone in an oral culture. It was always about communal knowledge.
In fact, one of the interesting things for me that I'm writing about right now is in oral cultures, there's an incredible honoring of the elders because the elders have the oldest reserves of knowledge and stories. So, you really want the elders to always be telling their stories so that you can understand them, adapt them, compose them, and keep the knowledge alive.
In a written culture, the elders are trashed for books, and suddenly you make elders into an object. So you don't need to pay attention to the elders in a community. You can pay attention to a book. But the problem with books is… books are not ecological objects. Textual culture pretends we are these typographical, assembly-line words on a page, rather than entangled, messy relational beings.
Kamea Chayne: I think that really speaks to the concerns when we take the word or the concept or the constructed system as being more real than whatever they're actually created based on.
To give a more concrete example of the trouble with ossifying or calcifying something that maybe should be allowed to be much more dynamic, you talk about cities and communities that don't change with the seasons and don't shift with migrations of animals and plants and other more than human beings.
This is something I've been ruminating on, which I don't have an answer to. But I think about the vibrant culture that the melting pot of diverse peoples co-create together in these mega metropolitan cities like New York. It's lively, it's unique, it's beautiful, and in many ways, examples showcase the brilliance and creativity of the people that are there.
But at the same time, I can't help but sense that it's still ultimately a co-creation that is a cultural disassociation from the culture of the land base that it has been layered on top of, because that type of a metropolitan culture is being co-created while being shielded from the evolving culture and elements of the land. There seems to be an insistence on systematizing what can't really be systematized, and maybe should be worked with, and for people to become more attuned to, to incorporate into the culture, rather than to tune out of.
What comes to mind for you here as we think about the relationship between the role of our senses to help keep us rooted in the evolving characteristics and gifts and needs of our landscapes, and the rigidity of how cities are often designed to disassociate people from that dynamic ecology?
Sophie Strand: I really want to first situate myself within Anna Tsing's idea of disturbance regimes. I don't really believe in the dichotomy between city and nature. I think that when you use the bathroom, you're involved in nature. The plastic, the Mesozoic ferns that have been churned into exhaust, are nature. So, I [first] want to situate [there]. I'm not fetishizing some pristine option “as opposed to” cities.
The thing about cities that worries me is they outsource their waste to other populations, usually minorities. [They] oppress populations.
Cities for me are a real intensification of what it means to abstract yourself from your shit.
They don't understand food webs. Cities are an incredible intensification of collaboration and symbiosis, culturally multi-species, multi-language, and in fact, I think in a lot of ways, cities are where some of the best environmental thinking is happening right now. So, I don't want to problematize them totally. But I also think that they don't operate like food webs, [where] one person's waste becomes another person's food. In cities, they create a lot of waste that then is outsourced to other communities.
My thinking about cities is shifting right now. So, my answer to this question reflects that uncertainty. And uncertainty is a good place to live.
For thousands of years, human beings lived in a liminal realm between nomadic living and cities where they would live in cities occasionally for seasons or for ritual purposes and then they would switch back to a nomadic existence. Those situations, which we find all across the world, seem to have been much more sustainable. I think I'm interested in urban living as something that's not quite as static as it is. As something that is celebrated, but also understood that doesn't work in every climate and every season.
Kamea Chayne: I love the acknowledgment that these are evolving thoughts. Nothing is ever set in place. If I were to listen back to the things that I said a few years ago, I've changed so much, so I love the acknowledgment of humility, that our thoughts and feelings are evolving as we speak with more people, and take in more information and open up our senses even more.
This is piggybacking off of my past conversations with Bayo Akomolafe, Vanessa Andreotti, Cate Sandilands and others as well, but it very much feels like we, or those in the dominant culture, are often trying to systematize what cannot be neatly systematized, control what cannot really be controlled, and conceptualize frameworks and rules, but based on a reality that actually is much more dynamic and ever-evolving.
I don't even really want to even name this human supremacy because I'm realizing that naming it this way sort of reduces our understanding of who we can be as humans. So maybe it's more of intellectual supremacy, that privileges thinking over our many other senses that we may have muted or that have been systemically suppressed or co-opted.
But back to this idea of rerooting our storytelling and your love for mycelium, I was very much drawn to how you use mycelium as a metaphor for us to understand the diverse mythologies that have been produced from different times and places throughout history. How exactly do you see these myths as mycelium and these gods and legends as the fruiting mushrooms of different historical moments and environments? And then consequently, what does that tell us about our need to let go of stories of universality?
Sophie Strand:
We live in a culture that's fixated on gurus, on the heroes’ journeys and on individuals. Individual authorship is also another product of textuality. In an oral culture, no one believes they own a story or wrote it themselves. Everyone understands that everything they do is relational.
You're composed of all of your kin who help you grow the food. Every time you breathe in, you're breathing in spores and microbiome that are then reconstituting your cells.
So I think it was important, when I was looking at mythology, to begin to problematize these myths of human supremacy, individualism, the hero's journey, and also the myth that masculinity is patriarchy. That was my entry point. There's always a biodiversity underneath a mono-myth.
As I was thinking about this, of course, fungi have always been my way of thinking through things. You have aboveground mushrooms, but mushrooms are really reproductive events. They superficially look like individuals. Underground they are long-living, huge, vast, spreading mycelial networks of hyphal thread, fine webbing that has no body plan.
And the really interesting thing about fungi, that they teach us, is they don't have a distinct morphology. When you pour them into an ecosystem, they find the best shape that maps the relationship. They're a cartography of relationships. So they teach us a lot about how although we think we are individuals, we really are embedded in environments that are shaping us constantly. And we're probably going to be most resilient and most healthy when we acknowledge that embeddedness.
I was looking at, I'm very interested in vegetal gods. Dying, resurrecting gods in the Mediterranean basin associated with resurrection, invasive species, insurrection, fermentation. A lot of people are back-forming psychedelic use—I think it's a little questionable, given the actual information...
I was thinking that, yes, they're all different. When they fruit in specific places, they're very specifically mushrooms that are adapted to a specific time, specific oppressions, and social situations. Yet they all seem to have dominant themes. So I was thinking, what if we could think of all of these vegetal gods, like Osiris and Dionysus and Orpheus and even Jesus, as being those aboveground mushrooms of a shared mythic mycelium?
As I was working with this, I was thinking… Well, did you know that plants didn't have root systems until fungi taught them to have root systems?
Kamea Chayne: No, I did not. That’s so fascinating.
Sophie Strand: So this is one of my favorite pieces of information ever, which is that over 400 million years ago, plants made it out of the ocean, but they were jelly blobs or tumbleweeds. They had no root systems and they had a really hard time accessing minerals or creating stable, complex ecosystems. They had no way of rooting into the soil.
And fungi had been around longer than plants, and they'd been around longer in the soil. Fungi have a rhizomatic, root system lifestyle. That's how they decay food, explore ecosystems, create relationships. They acted as the surrogate root system for tens of millions of years of all plants.
And slowly plants learned how to have root systems. But even to this day, there's a misconception that plants get all of their nutrients from the root systems. They have a relatively small radius of where their roots can actually go. I think it's 90% of plants have mycorrhizal systems that help them do most of the work. So every vegetable you eat today, every plant you see, is the product of a fungal collaboration, of a multi-species, interpenetrative, anarchic, inter-corporeal, long-lasting, collaboration.
Just as fungi taught plants how to root into place and access the nutrition of a specific place, so do myths teach us how to root into a specific place and how to have a more ecologically correct and resilient relationship with all of the beings in a specific place.
If we look at storytelling, for thousands of years, what it was really telling us was what time things flower, how much do you actually harvest, what do you do to maintain the right relationship with the land.
Right now, there are a lot of problematic ideas of homogenizing universalisms that erase differences. But the truth is that the ecological wisdom of one valley cannot be transplanted across a continent. We all have myths and ecological wisdom that is going to be particularly adapted to our particular place. So I think it's really interesting to look at myths as being rooted in specific places.
I think the best example of how this is done badly is when a Galilean rabbi[—Jesus—]in Second Temple period Palestine is uprooted from his language and his place, in his context, and then disseminated across the globe to many different ecosystems for thousands of years, without adapting his story.
Kamea Chayne: This is really giving me flashbacks to my past conversation with Alnoor Ladha, where he invited us to recognize ourselves also as contextual beings and recognize various forms of spirituality also as having come from very specific contexts.
I think we live in a dominant culture that tends to underplay and undervalue the role of myths in general, as much as it also undervalues our feelings and emotions and other senses in order to perceive the world.
I know you see science and myth as being much more similar than they may be portrayed to be. So, what compels you just not to see science and myth as antagonistic, but as spilling over into one another? And what is the role of myth, and our other sensorial experiences that tend to be deemed as not credible as sources of information, in helping us to actually better understand the climate crisis and broader socio-ecological, spiritual crises that we find ourselves in today?
Sophie Strand: The poet Robert Bringhurst (to whom I owe a lot, for his environmental thinking) says that myths aim, like science, at perceiving and expressing ultimate truths. But the hypotheses of myths are framed as stories, not as equations, technical descriptions, or taxonomic rules.
While a scientist quantifies reality, a myth teller personifies it. Because mythologies and sciences alike aspire to be true, they are both perpetually under revision. Both lapse into dogma when this revision lapses.
Science and myth are both trying to make sense of the world: they're just using different toolsets. Science is a tool, it's not a theology. Scientism has become this theology… which is a problem, because then, of course, myth and science are opposed to each other. But when we can see them as being in conversation, suddenly, a lot more becomes possible. The philosopher Isabelle Stengers, who writes a lot about the history of science, says we need to have an ecology of practices in science that all overlap.
I think one of those practices needs to be storytelling. Maybe it's not mythology, but we need scientific storytelling that makes these ideas accessible to people, and also invites in Indigenous science and qualitative ways of knowing. There's so much we don't understand because we're only allowing in quantitative evidence. But the truth is that so much is qualitative.
For most of history, most people have known that it's these intuitive, sensory, embodied experiences of what's happening that are going to give you the best information about how to live correctly. It would be nice to see a diffusion process between storytelling and between science.
We see some books that are doing that right now in an interesting way. I'm thinking about Entangled Life. I'm thinking about Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My new favorite is Otherlands by Thomas Halliday, which I think is really interesting because it takes you out of the human and back into deep time. It's interesting. Because the humans disappear in the first chapter and the whole rest of the book is so disinterested in that story.
Myth, when it's rooted in a larger context, when it decenters human narratives, and centers weather systems and landscapes and invasive species, can teach us to think on scales that are not just human. We need that in conservation science. Right now, conservation science is really stymied by its very short span of what species are “correct”. What makes a climactic ecosystem? What is a pristine environment?
If we composted conservation science with a little mythology, a little deep time, it might be deeply helpful.
Kamea Chayne: We certainly learn so much from scientists, the field of science, and the scientific method. So I really want to hold that front and center and honor that.
[But also to] take a step back, I wonder what we might miss and overlook with its foundation of needing for findings to be replicable, for them to be considered credible. Because if we consider what we talked about earlier in that mushrooms are the fruits that synthesize and are reflective of their particular environments, and that they cannot be studied outside of that very specific context because they embody that context, then I think about how the ways we sense and perceive our environments can also never be replicated either, because our environments are ever-changing.
One might never be able to replicate the growth of one exact mushroom to have it turn out exactly the same, just as the ways we sense our world might not ever be able to be replicated—but it shouldn't make that less valid. So perhaps this calls on us to give more weight to place-specific and moment-specific knowledge and feelings and storytelling, rather than saying that only repeatable and generalizable findings are true, or that they are more true and more real.
Sophie Strand: We’re even going through a replicability crisis where it turns out a lot of experiments that are supposed to be replicable, are not. So that whole myth is crumbling right now. I believe Rupert Sheldrake wrote a really interesting article about that. I think that it's this desire for control. And you want to be able to control all of the elements of the experiment. But in quantum physics, what you realize is your desire to control the experiment changes it every single time; that you are entangled with what you are studying, in a way that is always going to be shifting your results.
Honoring that connective tissue between you and what you're studying may be the more interesting thing to study. I'm interested in the liminality, the interstices between… You know, Bayo talks about the cracks. Because I have connective tissue, I experience my body as being not in unity, as being full of cracks, and subluxations. I'm interested in that connective tissue between the scientists and what they're studying. That's what I would like to study, not the experiments that can be replicated, but the relationships that constitute the experiments in the first place.
That seems to me to be the work of people who have some storytelling ability, some intuitive sense of how to feel into unknowability. I really wish that there was more room for humility and for uncertainty in these experiments. I think that because funding is so hard to get, and because there's false objectivity that is injected into these scientific papers, you have to pretend a certainty that you don't necessarily have.
Right now, uncertainty would probably be the healthiest place to be.
I think a lot about how when you don't know what crisis is coming (which is where we are right now) it's better to be agile and able to dance than to try and predict exactly what's going to happen. It's better to be fluid, have your lymph system moving, and be able to dance than to try and have a set idea and predict exactly what's going to happen.
Kamea Chayne: To take this further, and to keep pushing back against rigid interpretations or narratives, the subtitle of your book, The Flowering Wand, is Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. And to trouble the dominant and perhaps overgeneralized narrative of the masculine, you talk about how there has been a conflation of masculinity and patriarchal capitalism, and that instead of getting rid of toxic masculinity, perhaps we ought to think about overwhelming it, with a biodiversity of other experiences.
I'd be curious to hear you expand on this, this idea of not giving it a podium, but putting it in a room with 300 different voices, and also, this question that it brought up for me: Is diversifying the narrative of masculinity also another way of undefining and queering it with a multitude of other meanings and forms?
Sophie Strand: Exactly.
I will say Rewilding the Sacred Masculine was not my subtitle. My subtitle was Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transspecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine—but that was a little too much of a mouthful for the general audience. I would probably not have picked sacred masculine, but...
I think a lot about how we live in an antibiotic culture. Not just medically, but [also] philosophically, culturally, and ecologically. We are always trying to manage and clean things up.
We negate things in order to preserve certain ideas. When I first got sick, I was put on multiple rounds of antibiotics. The effect of this was to kill off every good bacteria in my gut as well. It left behind too much open real estate for monologuing pathogens to come and take over my gut and make me really sick. What I really needed to do was not to take more antibiotics, but to take probiotics that would get those pathogens into a corner and keep them controlled.
I think about why so many men I love gravitate towards these figures who I find to be really problematic. And well, it's because they're the only voices speaking right now, and they're speaking in a culture that is actively trying to tamp down the other voices, so that it looks superficially like that is what masculinity is. Masculinity is imperial capitalistic patriarchy. But then it was actually in my research into Rabbi Yeshua for this book I was writing, thinking about how before patriarchal capitalism, there is a biodiversity of different masculinities—masculinities that overlap with many different fields of gender expression that are on a rhizomatic continuity with animals, plants and with symbiotic, lionized collaborations.
I was thinking that perhaps the best way to heal this toxic masculine discourse was not to try and participate in the antibiotic culture and get rid of it but to overwhelm it with so many other older, wilder voices. Composting is another great metaphor for this. A compost heap is not something that is clean or necessarily organized. The oldest examples we have of composting are the anarchic shit fields in Scotland. People would just use the bathroom in the same field that they grew their food in. I was thinking that composting is, you throw these figures on the compost heap who are really toxic, but then you throw some other stories on, and suddenly something unexpected sprouts, that's more specifically adapted to this particular moment.
Kamea Chayne: I love that analogy. I take your invitation to rewild the masculine and more broadly to rewild our own myths, as a call to diversify our narratives and also to situate them in our specific times and rooted ecologies.
With this, I've been thinking a lot about the cultural impact of mass media and digital media platforms that have made it easier than ever to disseminate stories and narratives widely across the entire globe, so that even as we recognize the value in that form of online connection, we might also see that the more rooted and ecologically situated connections and stories may have been compromised as a result.
How have you seen this transformation in our social relations change our ways of storytelling and how we relate to place? How would you invite us to think beyond universalized activism as we think about our roles in support of collective healing?
Sophie Strand: adrienne maree brown writes about how right now, we're part of movements that are a mile wide and an inch thick, instead of an inch wide and a mile deep. We have all these surface connections, but we don't actually understand where we are. We don't have kinship and strong relations with the people who live next to us or the plants outside our homes. The truth is that if the grid goes down or something bad happens—and we saw this with COVID—the people and the beings you're actually going to depend on are the ones that are within a five-mile radius of where you live that's your actual ecosystem.
Because this very image-centered, visual social media has become dominant, we've become attracted to charismatic causes and charismatic places. We'll hop on a plane to go protect the old-growth forest because it's more charismatic. It looks better than the scrubby fields behind your house that someone's trying to develop. It's hard. I did not expect to be talking about this stuff online. My experience of sharing my work online happened quickly and in a way that I'm still very unnerved by, to be perfectly honest, because I'm not pretty. I walk the same walk every day. I say hello to the same animals…
I have a very small, situated existence. My greatest teacher is the woodchuck behind my house, not some guru who lives in a different country. But my woodchuck is not going to be your woodchuck. I'm very worried right now about precious environmentalism and eco-enchantment. There are simple heuristics. “Here are the five things you can do to become ecologically aware.” That feels too easy to me. I almost want to say there's going to be a very specific being where you live that's going to ask you to do a very specific thing. I definitely don't know what that is.
I want to encourage people to have those quiet, weird, unphotographable relationships with the beings that actually constitute you metabolically.
I think a lot about spiders and how they think with their entire webs. And as we're learning more about cognition, we realize it doesn't just happen in the brain, it happens in our whole bodies... I think sometimes that I'm thinking with my whole web of relations, and those are not going to be people I’m connected to online. Even if I'm having really good intellectual discourse with them, even if we're emailing…
The beings that I'm actually thinking with, and thinking for, are the not very flashy dandelions, the trout, the waste plant that's down the road from my apartment. I'm involved and implicated in that. I've got to think about that. So I always want to problematize what I'm seeing as a rather saccharine, eco-awakening discourse that is being easily disseminated online right now.
Kamea Chayne: Just to bring in something that I learned from Tyson Yunkaporta before, he mentioned that solutions and knowledge can't be replicated, but they can be syndicated to where we are. I think this sums up what we just said here. We may be able to learn from this generalized information, but we have to learn to apply them and incorporate them into the very specific landscapes and times and communities where we are.
The last thing I want to touch on is, you've noted before that in moments where salvation and apocalyptic predictions arise, so do ideas about purity and cleanliness because the environment may feel uncontrollable. This really resonated because I think as people learn about the historical backdrop of how we got here and where things went wrong, sometimes that can be romanticized and people may conclude that we need to go back. Or otherwise, some people may misinterpret our curiosity to critique this illusion of progress as a call that we need to turn back the clocks to a less messy and more “pure” time. But you've also had trouble with this idea of purifying ourselves as our ways forward.
So just as some final words of guidance, I would love for you to close off on what you mean by this poetic metaphor of learning to digest and metabolize this increasingly complex and even contaminated substance thrown our way.
Sophie Strand: I think a lot about oyster mushrooms and how they grow towards radioactive material in Chernobyl; oyster mushrooms that learned how to eat cigarette butts.
There's this idea that you can run away to the forest, and the nuclear plants will somehow figure themselves out.
The truth is that we are implicated. There's no exclusion zone. We're all threaded through with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that happened years ago—those are in us, actually molecularly, we are all threaded through with pollution that we cannot undo, but we need to learn how to collaborate with.
I've been thinking that apocalypse is an interesting word and an interesting concept. I was very interested in how Jesus has been misinterpreted as being an apocalyptic prophet, but he actually broke with his teacher, if you look at the time period and the actual Jewish traditions. His teacher, John the Baptist was preaching that the apocalypse was to come. Jesus said, no, the kingdom, the next stage is here right now. The metaphors he summoned were all of the things that within Jewish custom were impure: leaven, invasive species, women, Samaritans.
That in fact is the interesting throughline in his teachings is that the kingdom is impurity. That for me the most radical thing we can do is say, “All right, I can't take these plastic pellets out of my lungs, in my blood." If I worry about this every single day, I'm probably going to stress out my immune system even more. What if I'm on the road to becoming something quite different?”
We think of evolution as somehow having climaxed with us, and that we've stopped. But we are on the road to becoming something different. I'm very inspired by Bayo's idea of monstrosity; that we have to start thinking about the collaborations that are happening within our very physicality right now, that are neither good nor bad but are definitely impure in a way that might be interesting.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are now going into our closing questions. What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Sophie Strand: I was very, very inspired, and continue to be inspired by Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Sophie Strand: The most important practice is something I call gathering counsel, which is every day when I wake up I call on by name—not taxonomic name—but whatever intimate name denotes kinship. Every being fungal, microbial, landform, Indigenous population I know in a ten-mile radius and I call them into counsel around me so that as I go throughout my day, I realize that every decision I make implicates a whole vasculature of relations and so that I can call on them to help me think better, but I also know that I'm not making decisions in a vacuum. That suddenly when I turn on my car, I'm a little bit more aware of how this may affect other beings in my extended body, extended mind.
So I gather counsel every morning. And I started doing it about six or seven years ago and it has been one of my guiding lights.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration at the moment?
Sophie Strand: I would say invasive species in the Hudson Valley, which is where I live, and how they've been really problematized, yet they seem to be doing very interesting work in changing the ecosystem as the climate changes. I'm seeing radically different temperatures and seasonal shifts than have happened here ten years ago. I'm very curious about how the invasive species are arriving in such a way to shift and change the environment and help it adapt.
It's interesting that figures like Dionysus, who are also involved with revolts against the empire, are often associated with vines and ivy and invasive species, and I think of Audre Lorde's essay, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”. I think of invasive species as being not the master's tools. I think they have a lot to teach me.
Kamea Chayne: Sophie, what an enriching and thought and feeling-provoking conversation for me. I'm so honored to be in conversation with you and just thank you so much for joining me here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Sophie Strand: The only wisdom I have is to follow what you love. A bee goes into a flower to suck something sweet up and incidentally pollinates other beings. I think that if you follow the specific things that you love, you will incidentally pollinate something.
