I don't want to be walking around without having to be attentive with movement that doesn't involve my mind, my intelligence, my imagination.
Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Lyanda Haupt, an award winning author, naturalist, eco philosopher, educator, and speaker whose work explores the beautiful, complicated connections between humans and
the wild natural world. Leanda's writing is acclaimed for a combining scientific knowledge with literary poetic prose. She's a winner of the sigourd Olsen Nature Writing Award, the Nautilus Book Award, a finalist for the Orion Book Award, and two time
winner of the Washington State Book Award. Leanda has created and directed educational programs for Seattle Audubon, worked in raptor rehabilitation in Vermont, and has been a seabird researcher for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the remote tropical Pacific. Her newest book is Rooted Life in the Crossroads of Science, Nature and Spirit.
Hi Land and welcome to the show.
Hi, Eric, I am so happy to be here.
We're going to be discussing your book called Rooted Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature and Spirit. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do, which is with the parable. There's a parable where there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, and the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Thank you, Eric, you know, thinking about this before speaking with you, I went back in my mind to the very first time i'd heard that parable. It's been out in the world for a while and there are a lot of thoughts about it, but the first time I heard it was maybe ten or twelve years ago at a huge venue, like probably a Ted talk or something. So there's thousands of people in the room, most of us haven't heard this story. And when the speaker gets to that line, you know which one is going to win.
With thousands of people, there's always kind of a hum of conversation or just a little background noise, even if people are being basically quiet, And at that question, there was this hush, and when the speaker said the one you feed, you heard this palpable kind of kind of a gasp of recognition. You know, it just landed. Never heard. It was like, we know what that means. It's like and we have that wolf right in this moment, all
of us in different ways. And so since that time, I've heard this parable deconstructed and interrogated and complexified and non dualized, and you know, all this stuff, which I think is fascinating and valuable. But I just wanted to go back to that beginner's mind that just thunk. I know what that means, yea. And for me personally right now, I am in a transitional moment. A year ago, my now former husband and I decided to complete our twenty five year marriage, and we just signed the papers on
that really a couple of weeks ago. So I'm in this sort of shedding of a certain kind of skin, a certain molting of feathers that leaves when raw and open. And for me in this time, I've been struggling with a little bit of acdia, that kind of fear and uncertainty that leads to a listlessness with regard to the choices we make. And so for me, feeding the good
wolf is all right here, Eric. I'm on the very most basic things, like putting my yoga clothes at the end of the bed so I get up, you know, having that already so I don't even have to make the choice to do yoga before going into the sort
of overcultural productivity day. Literally keeping good food in you know, holy basal tea and blueberries in my fridge right now, to nourish body and mind and spirit, just all those little basics that move me into brightness and awakeness and a lifeness and also turning to some of the earth
based practices in my book. So the way that manifests in my work life is on not so basic a scale, that idea of drawing people through connection to the ecological whole, into their truest, most life selves from which they can be in service to the earth and community.
It's interesting the way you put completed your twenty five year marriage. I love that phrase, and even with that, I will offer my understanding of how difficult that period is. And I love how you're doing the very simple things when life feels difficult, because that's the way we get through these things. So maybe we could explore that word completion, because that is a very different word than we ended our twenty five year marriage. We're getting a divorce, which
is technically what's happening. But I'd love to know a little bit more about the use of the word completion and how that helped you in the process, and maybe how it helped you and your husband's relationship in the process.
Right. Well, I don't want to sound overly enlightened. The mediation process of the last year, you know, was hard, and it does not bring out the best in anyone. I pictured myself being, you know, this sweet body sought for like being during the process, seeking both of our higher good. But uh fell off that way and know and then as did my former partners. So but that's okay.
It's part of the process. But that language completion, I thought was really meaningful because the cultural language around divorce and ending the marriage is the language of failure, and we talk about failed marriages, and people have always even said that to me, Oh, I never thought your marriage would fail, And I think, what are you talking about. It didn't fail. We lived together for twenty five years,
We created a beautiful household, We raised this daughter to completion. Eric, you and I both have a twenty four year old offspring, and she's radiant and wondrous, and I'm proud of everything we did. That is not a failure. You know, in our culture, the only successful marriage is one in which both partners, you know, just kind of limps along until someone dies. I mean, maybe they do really well until someone does. But one person dying, right, is what a
successful marriage is. And I'm thinking we have to reframe that and bring back the honoring of you know, the families and the homes and the lives that we create, and then recognizing when we grow apart that what's best for our journey might be a farewell. It might be a certain kind of closure, a completion, a different framework for being family. And so I want to rethink that language of failure.
Yeah, I love that idea because it assumes that the only metric of a successful relationship is its permanence, right, And I, like, you don't think that's really true. I think there are lots of different ways to think about relationships. And I have had two, if we call them that, failed marriages, but I don't think of them as failures. I think I learned a lot from them. And like you, I've got a twenty five year old child who was part of both of those marriages, and I'm so grateful
for how he has turned out. And you know, we just we never know what the past would be. And so I really like that way of thinking of sort of completing something and transitioning into a new way of family. And my thoughts are with you as you go through that, because it is a big change and can bring up some strong feelings.
Right, no matter how right it is, there's still some grief around. Yes, you know what you had imagined, loss of a certain kind of identity.
Yep. Yeah. So let's pivot now into talking about the book. And I want to start with where I thought you might go with the wolf parable, which is to talk about Francis and the wolf, because I don't know if that story has ever been told on this show, and if it has, it's been once sometime in the distant past. So I love Saint Francis, that prayer of peace that's traditionally attributed to him as such a beautiful piece of writing and was so instrumental to me early in my
journey of sobriety. So I've always had sort of a warm feeling for him. So tell us the story about Francis and the wolf.
Okay, And you're right, there are a lot of wolves in my book, and I pondered that, but I still went back to that original telling. But there's the wolf that Little Red meets in the forest. There's the literal wolves that are you know, clyying for continuation as climate changes and as they continue to be reviled as predators.
And then there's this beautiful story about Saint Francis. So as the story goes, so it's the twelve hundreds, he'll site in Italy called Gubio, and the mayor calls on Saint Francis because he has a reputation for being peaceful and maybe being able to speak beyond you know, the human species boundary. He's known for giving sermons to birds who come to perch and listen. So he calls upon this wild Saint Francis, and he says, you know, we
have this problem. This wild, hungry beast, ferocious wolf is surrounding our town, eating our shepherds, carrying away children. You know, Soldiers go out to kill the wolf and they come back either dead or their sword is snapped, and everyone's living in fear. And you know, the more these tales are told, the more ferocious and horrible the wolf becomes in the people's imagination. Now they're all just staying indoors
and inside the gates of the city. So Francis arrives and he says, well, I'm just gonna seek out this wolf and see what I can find out. So he finds her, and he speaks with her, and he listens to her story as she tells tell him that she has been injured, she's separated from her own pack of wolves, she's struggling to find sustenance, she's starving. She hates killing the villagers. It is not what she wants, but she has no other way of sustaining herself and the cubs
that she is about to bear. It's the only thing that she can do. So Francis goes back and he reports this to the villagers and they listen, and they figure out a way to offer the wolf food so that she can sustain herself, and she, for her part, leaves the village alone. So the interesting turn that I want to make on this story is that in almost every telling, the title of the story is Saint Francis tames the wolf, tames the wolf as if he makes
it subservient to human wants and needs. And what I get from this is that he hasn't tamed the wolf. He just listened to the wolf in a way that allows her continued true wildness.
Yeah, I love that story, and unlike you, I think that the parable hits immediately and you immediately get it right. It's as a boom, right. But the interpretation of it that I get more and more from people as we begin to learn more about our trauma responses, as we begin to learn more about how our circumstances have shaped us and all these different things, is that we do want to listen to the bad wolf. We want to understand what's happening there, right, you know, we don't want
to starve it. And so that story speaks to that so much, because it really shows that, you know, the wolf was acting a certain way for a reason, and when the wolf was given other options, it chose to do the less destructive things. And I think that is often so true in our lives, is that these things we would call the bad wolf, when we give it different options, when we give it what it needs in a healthy or less destructive way, it will often, you know,
turn into our good wolf in many ways. And so I love that story both because I love Saint Francis and I like that way of thinking about these darker sides of ourselves.
Right, And I love too, that it's not just a story about giving the wolf options, but realizing that from the side that is afraid of the wolf, Understanding the fear from the other side is you know, a form of integration. And I think so often in your Wolf parable, the so called bad wolf becomes conflated with things like our anxiety or our fear of death, or our grief, you know, pushing those things down. And as you so often discussed, that's not what's bad. That can be part
of the good side. What's bad, if we want to use that word, is are the actions that remove us from bringing those things into wholeness, that keep us in isolation and disconnection. Yeah.
I interviewed somebody yesterday and she had a line in her book which is just a very simple statement of a very obvious truth, but one that we can all hear, which is, emotions are not bad, but the behaviors that spring from emotions can be bad, you know. And I think, you know, that's certainly been very true in my life. And there's another line from one of the first probably fifteen podcasts we did that just came into my mind.
It does periodically because it hit me so hard and the basic idea he was saying was when our behavior is under control, we are safe to really feel our emotions. Yes, And that really hit me because once upon a time, strong emotions caused me to go into just deep, deeply
self destructive behaviors that were nearly fatal. But now that I know that's not going to happen, I have a whole lot more window to say, Okay, I can feel the emotions that are coming up, and now I know how to work with them in a far more skilful way.
Just yesterday, I was thinking about it in terms of this parable the idea of food, you know, and what the feeding and food food is in the story. You know, As a writer, I'm cognizant of not wanting to over torture the metaphorm. But I was thinking as I fed my cat. You know, when we're feeding our cats or our dogs, or ourselves our own bodies, we don't wait, you know, meal by meal to go oh, meal time, I got to go out and get some food, you know, to feed the cat or myself. We have a stockpile.
And so I was thinking for myself, in this sort of marriage completion Acedia, what is the stockpile? Yes, it's literal good food. It is the yoga clothes, it is the meditation practices, it is the nature connection practices. In terms of our seeking to deepen our connection as members of the earth community. You know, all of the practices of rootedness that I explore in the book and life, you know, of putting our bare feet on the earth, of being in communion with trees and every day weather
and wildness. Now having that stockpile of practices and things that positive physical comfort, this is the kind of literal food. I sort of like that idea about having all these things in the cupboard so that when the wolves are there, we have the right food for the right wolf.
Absolutely, as we move into the book, I'd like to talk about a theme that shows up in this book and in several of your other books, also around the idea of hope, And I just want to read something that you wrote to sort of set it up. You say, hope is our positive orientation towards the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility, and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it
dependent upon a specific outcome. It's not an antidote to despair or a sidestepping of a difficulty, but a companion to all these things. Talk to me about hope.
We live at a time where hope is presented I think so often as a shiny ideal, an expectation that things are going to go well and look better in the future. And there is alongside that the sense that the reason that we participate in the unfolding of the future, the reason that we create selves that are able to be responsible activists and artists in the world, is because we are creating a future that is going to look better. And I hope that that is true, But I don't
know if that's true. I don't know. I mean, we look at the science around climate crisis right now, we look at the things that we know we are no matter what happens, or unless something very extreme happens, we know that we're not going to be able to turn so many things around, and that there are things very
very difficult unfolding in our ecological future. Does that mean that we throw up our hands and say, well, I'm not going to do anything because there's no hope, or that we act only because we think that we can absolutely turn that around and create an ecotopia. No, I just think we have to absolutely decouple the rightness of our actions in the world. The acting with love, the acting with compassion, the acting with an eye towards the unfolding future, whatever that may be, has to be absolutely
decoupled from Uh. It's hard to speak about this without using the word help, without hope that it's going to look a certain way that it does in our imagination. I mean, we just can't wait for that, because if we do, we'll either become mired in an inability to go forward, admired in a kind of paralysis because we're
scared that it's not going to work. You know, if all we're hoping for is a certain outcome, and we see how difficult that is, I think part of us just want to, you know, go in a cave and eat pizza and drink red wine, and you know, we act in hope just as we act in love. This is kind of a difficult metaphor, but I'm thinking, if we have a loved one who is very ill and who may not survive, we don't just go out the door and say, oh, well, I know they're not going
to make it. Now, what do we do we go by the bedside, we hospice, we hold the hand of our beloved, and in a sense, that's what we're doing in this earth and community. Maybe not, maybe there are still many many things that can improve, but we show up with that love no matter what.
I love that idea. And there was an ecological writer and I cannot remember her name right now, which is a shame, but I saw her speak in Atlanta, Georgia, and she was talking, you know, she was alluding to hope a little bit, and I was working on a workshop around hope, and so I just asked her, I said, you know, given everything you've said about the climate crisis and all the fears and how bad things are, is
hope and appropriate response or do you have hope? And what I remember from her response was basically she just focuses on love and when you love something, you take care of it. I think that's a great analogy with
someone in our family. It's not like we give up caring for someone and if we don't know whether they're going to make it or not, because honestly, none of us are going to make it at the end of the day, right, So that's not how we orient to so many things we orient out of care and love, and that is a way of I think, relating to most all challenges where we can sort of get out of this hope or despair element, but it is hard
to stay that way. I mean, I think I saw yesterday that maybe the hottest day ever on record happened yesterday or the day before anywhere, you know, and you hear that, and there's just a party that just feels like ough, you know, inside just like oh. And so I think some degree of hope is important in moving forward in our lives, but I think, like you said, sort of turning it away from hope in a specific outcome.
I know in my own life, what I tend to have hope towards is when I'm looking at my own challenges, is my ability to find a way through them. Like I don't know what the outcome is, and I often don't even know what the right outcome is, but I know I can find my way through. You also say elsewhere I chose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, impossibility, where we cannot predict what will happen, but we make space for whatever it is and realize that our participation
has value. And then you have a line that I love. This is grown up optimism. That is a phrase I love, grown up optimism.
Grown Up optimism means we know that we're not necessarily going to get our way, and yet we act from our highest self. Anyway, I think about the work that Joanna Macy is doing in the world that honors both our love and our hope in terms of our ecological connection and our ecological responsibility. But recognize is further that
our grief has to be part of that that. I mean, we're kind of going back to that parable again, right, the integration of that parable that our grief has a place in our love, our optimism doesn't outweigh the reckon of the depth of our grief and the love that both of those things dim from sorrow and optimism.
Yeah, you use a phrase in the new book. I don't know if I'm going to pronounce it right, add some oh, adsume and soon Okay, Yes, any sort of word that needs pronunciation, you can be fairly certain I will get it wrong. So ad soom talk about that? Right?
So I have a friend who is a monk and a Benedictine monastery and actually the process by which they make their profession of vows is usually really sacret. But he spoke to me about it one night and told me this one part where they are asked to commit
to this life of psychological wilderness. Basically, it's when you're committing to a community, but you are also committing to a certain kind of solitude and psychological depth and exploration, which in a sense is the life that we all, you know, where we don't know what's going to happen, but we're asked to commit wholeheartedly to it anyway, And that Abbott says, will you do this? And the monk who is professing says, at zoom, it's Latin. It means
I am here. And I talk about that in the book in relation to I Think, I have a section called that I Am here of hope. It ties in looks like we look at all this tangled complexity, we turn our ear to the other beings, to the beyond human world, to the voices of the trees and the birds and the earth, and we hear the call to presence, to service, to meaning, and we just kind of go, well, what do I do? The first thing is just that response at zoom I am here, I am listening, I'm here.
We all know that genuine self compassion and self love are absolutely crucial in the quest for healing, transformation, and everyday growth, But what if we struggle to get there. One of the most powerful, yet effortless ways to settle our nervous system and reconnect with our true selves is by spending quality time in nature. It's for this reason that this August I'll be offering an in person Awakening
in the Outdoors Retreat at the Beautiful Cropollu Center. This summer, I'll be co teaching the retreat with Ralph de l Rosa, who's a three time guest of the podcast, author, psychologist, meditation teacher and friend. During these five days together, will enjoy hikes, outdoor meditations, art in, insightful workshops, and lively discussions. Our goal is for you to walk away feeling restored, with a firm awareness of new resources and a new
relationship with the gifts nature holds for us. To learn more about this special retreat and sign up, go to oneufeed dot net slash nature. I'd like to change direction a little bit and talk about attention and being with things in our world. In a different way. You quote, here's another name. I'm going to mess up, Paul Ellard.
I think that's good.
Yeah, oh yeah, it was close. Okay.
I actually don't know any better than you. So let's okay, let's go with that.
Let's go with it, all right. Paul be forgiving. He says, there's another world, but it is in this one. And you also talk about, you know, believing in the power of sacrament, not as a Catholic, but as a human who's open to the truth that something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it.
We live in a time I think where, especially with a lot of the health based approaches to nature, you know, where we're looking at the natural world and thinking, oh, if we go outside, we feel better. Oh, when we go outside, it activates our parasympathetic nervous system, and so we are going out looking for something for ourselves. You know.
I spend twenty minutes in nature, I feel better. I'm thinking I want to be very, very careful in this time where literally the earth is burning because of in large part commodification, in terms of you know, are extracting our resources for our use and human consumption. I want to be really careful when we're using these beautiful new sciences that connect our health, the health of our bodies and spirits to nature, that we don't flip that into
another form of commodifying nature. And so I'm getting around to your question, which is what we bring to that then, is the idea of reciprocity. Not when I walk into the world, what can I get? But we will receive. But in that receiving, what do we offer in return to make that continue to spin and spin? And what we offer it doesn't have to be huge, It doesn't have to be you know, the creation of a new nonprofit organization. It can be attention, It can be witness,
simple witness. It can be gratitude in the form of praise, and I mean that very expansively, a kind of honoring and recognition of beauty. Just taking that in and loving it and offering gratitude for that. That is one of the kinds of attentiveness that is most important to me, just like offering our deep, sweet, quiet witness to this earth that offers us so much, and it's one of
the things that we have to offer in return. So often too, we just impose our own story upon the natural world like we think animals are like, or what they want or what things need. And it's also that attentive listening that can bring us into a deeper communion where we can respond from the truth of what the natural world is speaking, rather than what we impose on it. In terms of the human story.
Yeah, I always love that idea of the reciprocity and of recognizing that when I am in nature, as you said, there can be a way in which you could think of me as consuming nature, you know, or I'm paying attention to nature, but it's also paying attention to me, like it knows I'm there. You know. When I say it, I mean I don't mean in a grand sense, I mean like the squirrel knows I'm there. The various creatures, the birds, they all there is a two way relationship
there where they know I'm there. And I love to think about that, that there's this interplay and as you said, sort of reciprocity. And I also just love the idea of attention. I don't know if it was in your book or on a podcast interview, but you talk about the Zen tradition of bringing yourself wholeheartedly to everything that
you do. And as I was reading that line about there's another world, but it's in this one, it made me think of one of my favorite phrases by a Zen teacher I've been a Zen student long time, is from Zenmaster Dogan, who says enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And I love that idea that the more we're intimate with the things around us, you know, the closer we
get towards quote unquote enlightenment or awakening. It's that attention to something that's not just ourselves that is that opening.
Absolutely, And as you speak, I'm thinking about the ways that our modern kind of overculture way of being in society is one that contrives to separate us from that intimacy, you know, just the we are so isolated in our work right now, we're so removed from the natural world
because we are so dependent upon the built environment. There's a statistic that says that ninety three percent of our modern human lives here in North America are spent inside buildings and most of the other seven percent is spent walking bad between our cars and building things.
And so it does not surprise.
Me, right, and so it's no wonder that we are suffering this sense of disconnection and isolation in large part where we're struggling with a sort of mismatch disorder right where organisms are not adapted, they're not up to speed on a changing external environment. Here, we've spent ninety nine ninety nine percent of our lives living in closer relationship with the earth out of doors, and so here we
are spending most of our time removed from that. We're in this constant stress state because our bodies, in our minds are wired to be attuned to the wild earth, and yet we're separated from that, and we're in this horrible like mismatch or dysphoria that prevents that kind of intimacy and attention. So that's why I'm so obsessed practices that will bring us back into that intimacy.
Yeah, so let's maybe turn towards some of those practices right now. I'm curious what sort of things you would offer to the general listener out there who says, yes, I do want to be a little bit more connected to nature, you know, And yeah, some of it is because the science says it's good for me, and like we all do things because you know, it's why we do yoga. We know it to be good for us on some level and just to have a deeper connection
with something more meaningful. What are some practices that you often recommend to people.
I'm just going to start at the most basic. For people that are living in urban places, we'll just sort of often ask the question, you know, what do I do? I don't have trees all around me, I don't have a body of water to contemplate. There's no coyotes roaming my neighborhood, which you know, you may or may not be right about that. We're in Portland or Seattle. We know there's plenty of them around Chicago. There's coyotes among us anyway.
There's coyotes in Chicago.
Oh, so many coyotes in Chicago. Some of the deepest research on urban coyotes that took place in Chicago.
Yeah, okay, well I learned something new today.
Yeah, payeties among us. But anyway, one of the things I want to offer is that we are connected to the natural world no matter where we live. If we open our window, we put our head out out of the window, become aware of the ground beneath us, the sky above us, the wind that teases our hair, and the same way it teases the leaves on the trees, the rain falls on our face, just as it's falling on you know, the forests far from us, just the moon is turning in her faces above our head, just
as all over the rest of the earth. And so just being aware of the cycles of life, allowing that into our daily life, with just recognition moments of pausing to acknowledge our place in these cycles is a form of connection. It's a very radical form of connection, even and in the way that our culture is currently structured to keep us separate from those moments of intimacy. I also think it's important to realize, you know, we hear so often that oh, these little things that we do
from our homes don't matter. You know, we recycle about what doesn't matter if I get on a plane the next day. And for that I want to return to kind of the discussion we were just having that we act from our highest self, We act from the place that we know is right. And people think that we need to, you know, get in the suv and go way out to the wilderness to go on a hike
to connect with nature. But the truth is that ecologically the choices that we make from our home, how we feed ourselves, how we clothe ourselves, how we heat our homes and use our water. These are the things that tie us into the very very stuff of the life of the earth. And so we have every moment an opportunity to recognize that constant continuation in the lives that
we live. So that's just the most basic level. But I do have in the book a lot of ways to just you know, connect with trees and connect with our own solitude, and we can talk about those. But a very first kind of next step beyond the household that I throw out is the idea of removing our shoes and socks and putting our feet directly on the earth.
And if that can't be the soft earth of a woodland trail for you, then the soft grass of a parking strip or an urban park can bring this very, very lively, neurologically connected part of our body into connection with the complexity that our feet were meant to know and walk upon, and that enlivens our whole sense of creativity and connection.
So one of the things I love about your work, and it's in the very title of the book, is the life at the crossroads of science, nature and spirit. And so you are a scientist among other things. And you know when I hear take your shoes off and walk on the earth, and there's something the old punk rocker in me just has a little bit of a feeling towards it.
You know.
It's a crunchy granola yes.
Yes, which as I've gotten older, I've realized I'm very much a crunchy granola little kind of guy. But my eighteen year old is like, I'm not in favor of this, but I have a mohawk, so I'm giving him some degree. You know, I'm keeping some of my eighteen year old self alive. Talk to me about is there science around this groundedness idea?
Yeah, so, I mean there's this weird earth thing, and I want to tease that out. A little bit. Before
I wrote this book, I was walking. I've taken barefoot walks for years, and I was walking in the wooded park near my home and there was this other woman who just seemed to be I was carrying my sneakers in my hand, and this other woman came towards me and she had her sneakers in her hand too, and she had this lovely ethereal look on her face, and I should have respected the silence, but just you know, sometimes things pop out of our mouths, right, So I said, oh,
happy barefoot walking. I was thinking maybe I was making a little clever connection with her, and she just kind of set her gaze above me, off into the world, and she said, I am earthing and she floated past, and I thought, oh, oh, well, then I'm earthing too, And I kind of remembered that phrase. Do you recognize that phrase earthing?
I've only heard it one other time, so yes, I know a little bit about it, but relatively very recently, actually, yeah.
So after she said that, I kind of thought, wait a minute, I know this word. It's some kind of trend. And I went home and googled it and sure enough,
it was. In the eighties, this group of kind of a Motley science adjacent group of folks explored this idea that in a nutshell, that the Earth has a negative ionic charge and our human bodies have a positive ionic charge, and by separating our feet from the negative ionic charge of the Earth with shoes that don't conduct, like if we were wearing leather, it would be okay, we are causing inflammation and all of the kinds of attendant ailments
of that. And I thought, wow, that's kind of this beautiful poetic idea that we actually need to walk barefoot to be in full health. But I explored it. I threw myself into it. I talked to physicists, I talk to, you know, electricians. I looked at the papers that these people had written in support of it, and unfortunately, all of the footnotes that they had referred back to other papers they had written. I couldn't find anything external. And the physics people I talked to about it said, this
is just not how things work. It's not how things work. So leave that out there in the world. Maybe something will come of it in the future, will learn something more. But for now I want to keep the word because I think it's very intentional. And that woman said that I didn't know anything about the ions and all of that, but when she said earthing, I thought, oh, I know what that means. It means walking with attentiveness, with consciousness,
something I do intentionally. I'm not just like playing in the beach, which is a great way to be barefoot, but I'm making this choice intentionally to create a connection, and so I love that beautiful word. So I did look further into the benefits of walking barefoot and found another kind. There's science that supports it, which is biomechanics. It relates with the way that our bodies move in
the world. And it turns out that walking barefoot is an ancient human intelligence, you know, it's one of those things. Until very very recently, our feet evolved around contact with a complex substrate, and so we cast our feet. As biomechanist Kay Bowman says, I really love her work. She has a book called Move Your DNA, which I just highly recommend. She says that when we basically put our feet in little casts, which sometimes we need casts, our feet are injured and we need to keep them from
movement to protect them. But for the most part, we put them in these highly engineered shoes where we can't feel the earth, they don't move, and so it weakens all those little tendons and muscles that if we were walking barefoot would be strengthened. And so when we finally do go barefoot, or try, god forbid, running barefoot without just you know, right out of the gate, without strengthening those feet, we injure ourselves and then everyone goes, oh, see,
we're not meant to walk barefoot. What we are met to do is to work out very slowly to having feet that can be responsive to all of the contours of the earth. Katie Bowman says that most of our walking involves mind anecessary movement, and I thought, Wow, that just hit me really hard. I don't want to be walking around without having to be attentive with movement that doesn't involve my mind, my intelligence, my imagination. And when we take off our shoes automatically we're attentive. We drop
into mind active movement. And we have learned too that even though we can walk faster and take more steps when we put on our engineered shoes and walk on a concrete, flat substrate, whether up and downhill or not, when we take off our shoes and we walk on a natural substrate, our minds become more active, our creativity is enlivened. But also we work our bodies just as hard. Yes, we might have to move so for fitness people we might be moving slower, but we're working just as much.
But it's a beautiful, ancient, innate human movement that are bodies and minds where created to experience.
Yeah, it's interesting. I work out at a gym with a physical therapist. She's a physical therapist slash trainer, and I started working out with her when I had injuries, and I've just kind of kept doing it because I seem to periodically always have something in my body that's like,
oh whch that hurts. But she trains a lot of athletes, like she consults for many of the athletic departments across the country, and there is some of their work where they are very much focusing on, particularly on rehab with people about having them work out in bare feet because there's something again about the biomechanics of it that produces more stability and strengthens muscles and tendons in very different ways.
And so you know, from somebody who's a little bit more science based or to point into like, there's real benefit to this barefoot idea. And for sure, when you you start walking barefoot, I mean I do pay more attention, if for no other reason because I'm like, well, I don't want to step on a piece of glass or you know, my feet are tender, I'm going to be careful. It does bring the experience of walking into much more consciousness and reminds me of a zen idea.
That I love.
It's called work practice, Samu, and it's a way of developing our attentiveness, and it basically means you take something that you could do without thinking about it. Wash the dishes as an example. You could do it without thinking about it most of us do. But by giving it your full attention, you actually strengthen your ability to pay attention. You strengthen your ability to be present with what's happening. It's seen as a bridge between like seated meditation and the rest of life.
And then in just like the biological or the physical science of it strengthens our feet, it makes them healthier, and that goes up we know it's all connected, goes up to making our legs, makes our knees stronger, brings all the joints all the way up to our head and our necks. So can I riff on the philosophical side of this?
Sure?
So one of the things that because you can tell now I'm really obsessed, I went down the rabbit hole of barefootedness, and one of the most famous admonitions to take off our shoes is from the Hebrew Testament where Moses is approaching the burning bush the voice of the divine, and the divine speaks and says Moses, and the translation that we almost always see is take off your shoes or remove your sandals. But I learned when you go into the Hebrew Aramaic history of this word, the word
is a stronger word. It's shed or it is shed. And I think that is a powerful exclamation or proclamation of transformation. Right what do we shed? Snakes shed their skins in the Great turning, Deers shed their antlers. An antler is an organ, you know, it's innervated blood. It's the leaving behind of something that was once an organ of our body, like skin or antlers, to make way for the next space. And I thought to myself when I was writing that chapter, I thought, shed, what do
I shed? What if by removing my shoes figuratively, what am I shedding? And I put a big piece of paper and a bunch of crayons out so every time I walked by, I could sort of think of something and add to this list or something that had come
to me through the day. And I had this list of what you know by removing my shoes, I remove a certain kind of security, right, a certain kind of beauty, an otherness, a separateness, an elevation, potentially a certain kind of comfort, a certain kind of complexity leads me into this deep, deep simplicity. And so it can be a metaphor for just kind of doffing all of the cultural modes of separation that keep us from deeper connection. So taking up her she works on so many levels.
Let's change directions to birds. Oh yeah, I guess I've always appreciated birds, but we have become we can't even call ourselves backyard birders. So we don't have a backyard. We simply have a balcony that I have managed to buy hook or crook, string up a couple bird feeders. But the joy that comes from just seeing these birds that close to us consistently is sort of surprising to me, just how much we enjoy it. Particularly Jenny. Jenny's just
over the moon about the birds. She's always talking about you know, listen to that song and that song, and you know, so talk to me about birds, because you've written a lot about birds. You wrote a book about Mozart Sterling, and I think you have an entire book about birds, right, I do.
My very first book was Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. I read a book about crows, and yes, Mozart starling. I don't want to go off format here, but I'm curious what makes you feel joyful about watching birds? Like, what do you think it is for you?
Well? I have always love to watch animals. I love to see them move. I mean, I love to think about the fact that they're interacting with the world in a way that I can't imagine really, and to try and imagine what that might be like, even though I know I can't because it sort of stretches my mind.
It feels like, you know, I've just always loved animals generally, I haven't had animals that close to me, you know, dogs, But you know, most animals I see are either kind of off in a distance or I've seen them on TV. But here are these birds right outside and we get to see their patterns, be like, oh yeah, that guy comes by every day around seven o'clock and sings his little song and he comes with his partner or he comes alone. And I just love to watch the way
they eat. I don't have words for it. It just fills me with a certain buoyancy.
I love that. I think that you're hitting on something when you say that you don't get to see wild animals that close very often, because I do think that birds will allow us to come close to them. There's this thrill of being in proximity to a wild creature who could choose to leave. She has wings, right, they could fly away. And yet here we are being close together and creating this kind of intimacy, and that makes us feel excited. And there's this psychological word for something
we're feeling now, which is called species loneliness. That humans are so separate from the wild earth that we kind of miss once again, that proximity to wild creatures that we have evolved alongside. And here birds interrupt that species loneliness by coming near or allow us to approach. I think it's important to remember, you know, when we feed birds, we're not really doing it for the birds. The birds are fine if they're around, there's enough food for them.
We're doing it for us. But that's a perfectly good reason to do it. It enlivens our spirits and also makes us more aware of the wildness that's around us. I mean they're hanging out and then all of a sudden, I also love this moment with birds. They have that kind of poetic beauty right being winged, unlike us, most of them. When we're sitting there and we're just hanging out with them, we're like, oh, here we are being
with the birds. They're so pretty. I love them. And then they fly all of a sudden, We're like, oh yeah, oh yeah, they take flight. There's the sky. Off they go into this wild world that we are now connected to. They were with us and now they fly off with maybe a little piece of our heart and imagination along with them. So they offer a rare, rare thread between us and the wilder.
Yeah.
Yeah. The more I learn about them, the more fascinating they are. As I have a question for you that I wonder about my birds. And maybe you know the answer to this, maybe you don't, but I think that I recognize like we get, you know, a certain set of cardinals that tend to come by. We get a certain set of goldfinches that come by. There's some other birds that are more common that I can't remember, their different names that we see a lot of. Do the
birds recognize each other? Do you think, are they like, Oh, yeah, that's that cardinal that comes by. I see him hanging around the neighborhood. Again, I know birds don't think like a human does, but I'm kind of curious what their relationship with each other is.
Right. So, for the most part, the birds that we see regularly in our backyards or our balconies are the same birds from day to day. So that's not always true because there are migration times so different birds come through, and birds can fly, so they can go to different yards.
But by and large, the residential birds, we're seeing the same ones over and over again, and they absolutely recognize the other birds in their close group through a whole variety of ways of apprehending, and that, like you say, we don't always understand. So some birds really connect with one another through vocalizations, some connect with one another through physical movements that they make. And we'll find like different family groups that have the same kind of physical ticks
or vocal ticks. But it's also just like you know, people that look at, you know, a family and say, oh, you guys all look alike. You know, I can't tell you apart. Or we'll look at twins that we don't know, or triplets and we'll say, how do we tell them apart? And their parents are like, what are you talking about?
Right?
You know, maybe we think they're identical, but they're absolutely not. And so bird communities are like that with each other as far as we know. There's many studies that have been done that prove to us that they do recognize one another, or they recognize when another bird from another flock comes in. So yeah, they do.
It makes me think of like how dogs just they key into each other. Like I take my dogs out every morning, and you know, there are other dogs on the other side of the street that walk by. And my dog, Beansy is very old and she's nearing the end, although I keep saying that, so she doesn't pay much attention anymore, but she used to. But you know, there's just certain dogs they just stop and they're like, there's a dog over there, Like they are very keyed in.
They wouldn't be keyed in necessarily to me, they'd be like whatever, they'd pay no attention, but the fact that it's another dog, they're like, oh, I got to check this out.
Being a parent, have you noticed that with raising a kid too? You're out with your two year old, and they spot each other. While the two year olds spot each other, and then the same with the teenagers you're going out. They all spot each other. They don't notice the two year olds, they don't notice the thirty year olds, but they notice one another. And I think that continues on. That's really fascinating and probably has evolutionary value to find our people.
It probably does. In your book, you have a number of what you call the tenants of rootedness, and we're not going to have time to go through all of them, but I thought I might pull a couple out that I wanted to talk about, and one was that truth and fact are not synonyms. Say more about that. I think that's a really interesting idea.
We are one of the only cultures in all of history that has conflated truth with scientific fact. Now, I want to be really careful right now, because we are in a time when science is being questioned, and I want to absolutely honor the significance of science in our conservation choices and climate crisis and health. Then I'm saying something a little bit different, and that is that sometimes
we know things. We know things with a capital and we know things with our heart knowing, and our spiritual dimension of apprehension. And I mean that non religiously. By spiritual, I mean those kind of non quantifiable ways of accessing or apprehending the world. Are wonder our sense of beauty, even our sense of anxiety and grief, all of these things that can't be reduced to scientific quantification but still
have everything to do with human intelligence and imagination. So these are all ways of knowing that though we can't find them in quantifiable or lexiconic language of science, we know that we honor them as a kind of truth with a capital T. It's sort of like looking at a poem a beautiful poem. Is the poem factual? We look at a piece of literature, a beautiful novel. Is it true? Did it happen? Or is it factual? Did this really happen?
No?
But is it true? Absolutely? Is it true in the sense of art, in the sense of that expansive sense of spirit I was just speaking to. Is it true in the sense that we know it in our heart? Absolutely? So. The problem when we pit science against what we would normally call spirit, I think that is a false dichotomy. I think that science, as we find more and more of the minutia of how the wild earth works, the more enamored we can become with fascination and wonder, it's
just really gorgeous. And so that is in itself a kind of poetry. And then when we look at the stories and mythology of science and we bring to it our own imaginations, when we bring that knowledge into our own human stories, then the science becomes enlivened and sold. So I think the problem comes when science is the soul arbiter of validity of any thought or way of
being that we have. And yes, sometimes it has to be that the stringent science is so meaningful right now, So I don't want to say in any way that I'm diminishing the role of science in our conservation and health choices, but recognizing that in creating whole humans that relate to a more than human world, there are other dimensions of knowing that are also true.
I think that example of a poem and a novel makes a lot of sense, and you know, knowing what mode of apprehending might be most useful. You know, as soon as we start talking talking about like that, we absolutely know something like intuitively, I always get a little anxious around that, because that is how often, you know,
many misguided people are misguided. They're like, I just well, I know the science says this, but I know that vaccines are dangerous, And you're like, well, all right, this is a science based conversation probably that we should be having. You know, I used to know on a deep level that Heroin was a good idea for me, right, it felt so true. And yet there is a way of apprehending the world and engaging with the world. It is
not strictly scientific. And you know, I know I have changed in this way over the years, where I've moved from feeling like everything should be explainable via science to recognizing that even when science explains many things, it doesn't necessarily really explain them to me on the deepest level about how life came to be and how things are.
There are these deeper mysteries that I've become I'm a lot more comfortable with over the years about saying like, well, who knows, this is a mystery that is very alive for me.
Just thinking of a really practical example of something like that is spending time with a tree, and this is a beautiful practice even if you just have a backyard or a city park. Is finding a tree that you are drawn to, you know, that you respond to in some way, and then spending time repeatedly over and over again with that same tree. We have this sense of responsiveness. You know, we might be walking along and kind of go, oh, there's my tree. Just this kind of recognition and then
this sense of responsiveness from the tree. If we return over and over again, sometimes you'll get that sense that maybe a breeze passes over and the leaves are fluttering and you think, oh, the tree is saying hello to me. Now. Is that scientifically factual? Maybe, but we don't know that now, and maybe we will come to know that someday. But is it true for me? Is it meaningful to me? Am I in a kind of relationship with this tree
that has a poetic truth? That is an absolutely beautiful thing to live under the.
Influence of That makes me think a little bit about a maxim that's often used in psychology around working with your thoughts, and one of the ones that I found to be the most helpful starting point is is this useful? Right? You know? Because thoughts aren't exactly true or untrue to a large extent. Now, there can be facts within thoughts that are true or not true, And maybe this is a good analogy for what we're also talking about. But
a lot of our thought is interpretation. It's meaning based, right, and so knowing that it's not necessarily strictly true or untrue, this idea of is it useful is a really helpful framework. And if it's a thought that's leading me towards being kinder, more compassionate to myself, to others, to responding more wise ly to the world, to all those things, then it's
a thought that's worth keeping around. And if, on the other hand, it's a thought that isn't contributing to any of those things, it might be a good idea say, well, what can I do to work with this to sort of move it to the side because it's not contributing anything. And I think there's a little bit of that in kind of what you're talking about, Like, is the tree responding to me? We don't really know. I mean, the trees are responding in ways that fifty years ago we
couldn't have imagined. You know, it's astounding the ways the trees are are responsive to their environment that fifty years ago, people would have said you're crazy. So is the idea that the trees responding to you strictly factual? Not necessarily, But is it a useful thought if it brings you into closer community with the world around you. Absolutely right?
And is it true from a poetic sensibility, Absolutely.
Right, because a poetic sensibility is exactly that. I think the novel is a great, great example of that. I love fiction. I don't get to read as much of it as i'd like with all the work I do
for this show. But over the last month I've had a lot less interviews, so I've been reading a lot of it, and I've been thinking a little bit about that aspect of, well, these things aren't factual, but there's a tree truth in them that is deeply profound, that is there and feels very true, even though it's to your point, not factual.
And I also think there's an innate sort of human sensibility. I don't want to press this too far when because, as you say, there comes a point when anyone can say, well, I just know this to be true. I just know it. But in terms of things that tend to be ecologically helpful, I think we often have a sense of that. Sometimes we don't need a scientific paper to tell us that when we plant a tree more birds come. We have
eyes and we have hands, so we know that. So these kinds of things like sometimes we just have this basic common sense knowing that we don't have to wait for science to validate. It comes from observation, It comes from attentiveness, It comes from just walking on the earth with a sense of connection and willingness to listen.
Going back to that, Yeah, And like I said, that's one of the things I've loved about your work is you bring a scientist's view to it, but it's not the only view that you bring. I love it, and I've often thought about You mentioned the nature studies earlier about where we start to quantify the benefits of being in nature, and it made me think a little bit about kind of what's happened with meditation and mindfulness in
the modern world. Right, we've quantified in many ways why it's helpful, and there can be ways in which that strips away some of the broader contexts that have gone around them. You know, there's the term mick mindfulness, right, because you've stripped away everything except that just the thing itself. So there are ways in which that can be problematic, but there are also wonderful ways in which science is
backing up. We see this in a lot of the ecological research, right, is that we see that this interconnection that the mystics have been talking about forever is really absolutely true. And so you know, I kind of tend to like it when different areas of interest in mind sort of align and overlap, and I know that to be true.
For you also, right, And in fact, that was sort of the root of this book. Rooted was a lot of this new science that's coming out that is affirming that the health of our bodies are strongest when we are in continuity with nature, and when we have exposure to nature. We're learning things like trees do communicate both through you know, the movement of their limbs and the chemicals that they release in the wind from that down
to their roots and the mycalial network. We're learning that animals have forms of consciousness that we never dreamed and we are able to observe these days scientifically. What's funny and what I just kind of want to always be mindful of is once again that connection is that science did not discover these things. Science is giving us the mechanisms by which we can understand these things and their beauty and their depth, things that we could never just
simply observe with our eyes, you know. Scientific study offers us this deep, deep window. But what we have to remember is that in terms of again, now we're going back to the truth, just a basic wa awareness of a conscious universe, of an animistic world in which beings beyond humans have consciousness, where we are alive and invigorated
and creative and affirmed when we're out in nature. These are things that indigenous cultures, earth based religions, poets, musicians have known, and just everyday people walking the earth have known for across time and across cultures forever.
Yeah, that's a great point I was saying. Fifty years ago we would have said like that, trees are not communicating in ways, and you're right, the western scientific worldview would have said trees are not capable of doing that. But to your point, many indigenous cultures have been very clear about all the different ways in which these things
are alive and consciousness. And yeah, my favorite consciousness game is to try and imagine what it might be like to be an octopus, which again, you can't do it. You know, It's like, what would it be like to have a thousand individually controlled suckers to be able to change my skin color instantly because my skin can see color.
I mean, like you just are like, well, there's intelligence there that is so vast and so completely unlike mine, right that just to even contemplate it just brings me a sense of wonder and happiness.
I love that because you're tapping into that idea that you know, so often humans recognize intelligence just in so far as another animal is like us. You know, if they think like us, if they make eye contact like us, if they can make vocalizations that we can vaguely sort of get a handle on, we think, oh, that's a smart one. And that keeps us from recognizing all of the myria, just infinite intelligences that are surrounding us every
single time we step out the door. But we don't even recognize because we're just caught in what looks like intelligence to us as humans.
Right, what is our type of intelligence? Yeah? I mean animals are so intelligent, but it's just you have to think of it in a different a much broader and wider context. I was at the zoo the other day and I was contemplating flamingos. I love to look at it, you know, I think we all do. If we've paid a little bit of attention to evolution all that, and you think like, what, like, how do we get here? How do we get a creature that looks like that?
But you realize, given certain conditions, like this thing evolved beautifully and perfectly. It's just incredible.
You know. I love that line, Eric, It sounds like the beginning of a poem. I was at the zoo and I was contemplating flamingo.
Yep. Yeah.
But you know, all of this is what if We're going to use that word hope, which gives me a grown up optimism. Is this idea that we are living in a time so we have this rare confluence now all of a sudden, for the first time of this new super modern science that is recognizing this interconnection that the mystics always recognize, grounding it in ecological science. And so we have our imaginal side, that expansively spiritual side, and the deeply scientific side affirm each other. That's powerful,
that gives us. That's a tool. We can use this power you know.
Yep. Well, we are at the end of our time, so thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed the book. I really enjoyed talking with you of links in the show notes to where people can find you and your work, and again I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
I loved our conversation and thank you for having me Eric.
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