Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone - it is never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, create a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on the values we care about: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just lack the visions to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
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Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
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Manda: Hey people, welcome back to the second part of the conversation with Daniel. If you missed the first part, please go back and listen to that first, it will make what you are about to hear make a lot more sense. If you just listened to the first part, then absolutely here we go with what was pretty much a seamless conversation. And because we talk about his courses and his books a lot, I want to let you know here at the top that I have put a link in the show notes to his website, which is danielfirthgriffith.com. If you want to support Daniel, who is living pretty much outside the death cult of predatory capitalism, then go and buy his books. Share them with your friends, give them to other people. If you have the means and the opportunity, then go on one of his courses. You will learn so much about who you are and how you can connect to the land. And while we're here and on the topic, if you want to support this podcast, the best possible way is to join the Accidental Gods membership, because not only does that help us to pay all the bills that keep this going, this podcast (they are substantial) but you will get an entire integrated program designed to help you do exactly what Daniel and I are talking about. To connect to the web of life, to find and to be able to ignite the three pillars of your heart mind so that you are able to move around in heart connection to yourself and everything around you.
Manda: As far as I'm concerned, this is much, much better than asking you to put something into Patreon or Substack or anything like that. This is a whole program that will help you do what we need to do. It's at accidentalgods.life. And if the monthly fee is too much, please let us know. Nothing is carved in stone. It matters that everyone has access to this. So go and explore, see how it feels. And if you can give us the time one way or another, me and Daniel, I genuinely believe your world will be different and your capacity to connect to the web of life will be more than it was. So here we go for the second part of this astonishing, deep, vibrant, multi-layered conversation. People of the podcast, please welcome Daniel Firth Griffith.
Daniel: All right, Daniel, part two. Because you are such a font of valuable, thoughtful information and you have gone where I think the rest of us need to go. You are living a kincentric life. So for people listening, I would really like to just take a quick look at the emotional, spiritual, physiological beingness of the farming practice that you have. So you're raising cattle, sheep, goats, you're working with horses. We might have time to go to the horses, I think that's probably a whole other podcast. What do you do and how do you do it? And is it that you're seeing a change in the people in your web?
Daniel: Yeah, I'm going to try to put words to that. I don't know, I have a lot of feelings and I hope that they can translate. When you turn to concentric rewilding, according to my own definition, the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are. That last bit petrifies me, and I think it needs to petrify everybody. What is the acceptance of the basic conditions as they are? As they are. In writing the book, in Living my Life I have a dear mentor, a friend, his name is Don Jacobs, he's a pipe carrier of the Oglala Lakota. And, I was leaning into him one day, maybe six months before I actually started writing the book. And I was overwhelmed because I was playing with these ideas. I was thinking about writing a book, but more importantly, I was overwhelmed thinking about the future for my children. I was thinking about my children and their future. And I spoke at a conference about a year previous to this point, where I held up the idea of my son, he wasn't there, but I put my hands up in the air and held him in front of me and I said, we're all going to have to do this. You know, and I think a lot of your work, it speaks to this. We are going to have to hold up the future generations and say something. And that petrifies me.
Daniel: In many religions, they talk about an afterlife. From Egypt to Christianity, our hearts being weighed on the scales of Mott, that's Egyptian religion. And then you have Christianity, which is obviously heavens and the pearly gates and everything else. This a concept is not new to many people, but I think the idea that we as ancestors will have to look to our future generations, even if we've passed, even if it's just in dream work and say a couple things, a couple words; I tried, I did, I didn't, I didn't try, we didn't understand. Something. We have to say something. And I was dying in this moment, thinking about holding my son up, saying to him, I tried. I know you're dying in wars based upon massive land grabs and oligarchies and people being sacrificed. And I know you are starving to death and just the thought of even washing a cup out with water so you can drink water in that same cup is just outrageous to you, because there's no water and I know you live in that world, but I tried. You know, I was really fumbling with this because part of that vision that I had and that I was delivering to that audience that I was speaking to at the time, was around letting go.
Daniel: Because if you let go, you now are letting go of your ability to construct a future that you're proud of. And I realise that that language is hard, especially in this conversation between me and you and me and your listeners. Because to some degree, that's what we need to do. But we're confused in the application of what that means. So we want to build a better future, we want to build a better pathway, we want to leave behind, as you say, a future that we'd be proud to leave behind. That two way dream walking, if you will. I love thinking about it this way; we two way dream walk. We dream forward and we dream backwards. That is to say, we remember our ancestors, but we're also ancestors at the same time and there's that two way dreamwalking that needs to happen. But to force it to happen is to negate the essence of what we're trying to do. You can't force happiness. You can't force relationship. And I was dealing with this, and I was confiding in my friend, the pipe carrier, my mentor, etc. and he looked at me and he said, Daniel, let me tell you a story.
Daniel: And the story is about Sitting Bull, Tatanka-Iyotanka. And after years of fighting the reservation system, after years of starvation and genocide and the eradication of the bison and the buffalo and the American plains, and moving the entire Lakota people after Custer's deadly sin, if you will, and the Battle of Little Big Horn, if I understand the name of that. He moved up to Canada and the Blackfeet took them in. And still genocide, still death, still famine. The Canadian Mounties actually helped them out a little bit. It's an amazing story, but still, they go from a massive tribe to a couple hundred people at the most, maybe a dozen or two. I mean, it's unbelievably infinitesimal in their size. After decades and decades of this genocide committed by the American federal system, absolutely and entirely white encroachment, manifest destiny and everything. And he's looking at a white reporter and the white reporter from Chicago or something is looking at him maybe a day or two before he died, I can't remember that exact part. And my friend, he's telling me the story, and he said the reporter asked Tatanka-Iyotanka, Sitting Bull, why didn't you just give in? Why didn't you just go on to the reservation? And at this point, I think the reporter is thinking to himself, you know, because I'm a fighter, I'm a Lakota, I'm a killer, I'm a scalper. I'm a whatever noble savage you have in your brain, right? And he simply looks at him, the reporter and Tatanka-Iyotanka says, because I'm human.
Daniel: And then my friend, he pauses, and he says, Daniel, be human. Do what you were put on this earth to do, and no more. Don't try to save the world. Be you. And in being you, find hope in the pathway of what you were meant to find. And you see this in a lot of different spiritual pathways. This is not some sort of revolutionary thing, but it was given to me as this gift, as a revolution to my own core of thinking. And it was entirely revolutionary and rebellious to me. And I thought to myself, If I'm going to go through this, we have to change the story, right? As I said in our main episode, there's two worldviews: you have the we are intelligent, and animate and wonderful because the world already is. And the second one, we are animate, intelligent and wonderful because we can help the world. And the second you become human, you have to live, you have to become the first world view. You have no choice. You truly have no choice but to live there as that choice. Not with the choice, not alongside the choice, not in relationship to the choice, but AS the choice. You are the choice. You are that. You are that worldview. And in that worldview, story matters. This is why when another reporter went to come out and talk to and interview Black Elk, another Lakota elder and medicine man.
Manda: Black Elk the younger or Black Elk who had the visions?
Daniel: The visionary, the elder. All he did was tell stories. I mean, the entire thing, the manuscript we still have today, is just one massive story, right? Story, I truly believe in this moment in the human evolutionary experiment, I think matters, maybe more so than ever. Or maybe it just matters more so because we've gotten away from it. Like its gravitational pull is stronger in some sort of reverse physics sense, that the further we get away from it, the further it needs to pull us back. Regardless, it is the story of Sitting Bull, Tatanka-Iyotanka. It is a story of black elk. It is a story of our own peoples as we migrated to the lands of Ireland. These stories matter. It's also the language that I believe the land speaks in. I believe this. I don't believe we are going to have change without pain, but I don't necessarily mean it needs to be your pain. See, this is where I totally diverge from this mainstream thought. I know a lot of people that truly believe, they've been on my podcast, they talk about it that we can't have systemic change without pain. And I believe that. We need to experience pain, but that's also the power of story, to lift us up and allow us to experience something new. Like your book Any Human Power, I have never played World of Warcraft. I have never played these games, I have never had dreams like this. But I do now, because through that story, I have experienced something out of myself that really is myself.
Daniel: That is the power of story. And so in Stagtine, the stories, the transformation in our animacy and meditation, the Land story matters. It's understanding the story of the poison hemlock plant and understanding it and being there and watching that story unfurl, that we can actually start to have a relationship with poison hemlock. Not just in the sense that, you know, from a battle perspective, if it has red dots on its stem and a hollow core and is milk white juicy and it looks like a wild carrot, but kills you instantly if you eat it. That's poison hemlock. It's like, that's not poison hemlock. And there's a lot of writers that that have done this.
Daniel: C.s. Lewis is the one that I can remember in this moment, but I think it's in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, one of his fantasy books. There's this boy who meets this old man, a hermit. And the old man, the hermit is actually a dead star, like he fell from the heavens and he was a star and he's just now an old man hermit. And the boy says, what are you? And the old man says, well, I am a star. And the boy says, I know what a star is. And he goes, no, you know what a star is made out of, you have yet to know what a star is. And I love that. It's simplistic. The second you hear it, it's true. But it's only true because it's a story. Like I could tell you, there's a difference between being and knowing, but in that story, it's so much more living.
Daniel: And so that is, to me, the way that we move forward. That is the way that humanity remembers in this two way dreamwalking sense what we have been and what we've become. And then we need to take from the now what we have become and turn it into what is needed. This new pathway forward is through story. And it's not through fiction, it's not just through fantasy. It's not just through novels and literature and writing. It's through the entire process of what that story is. It's podcasting. It's oral storytelling. It's humans gathering, it's humans co-living on landscapes where that entire story becomes multi-character. It's through a long time relationship with cattle that have no productive value. That's the power of story, that's the necessity of story, but that's where story also imbues. Farmers are so quick to look at a cow that isn't productive and to call it. They don't fit within the aesthetic parameters of what I'm breeding for, etc. but it's that cow as a storyteller that's going to move our civilisation forward. And when I say our civilisation, what I mean is our community, the actual society, the community of all life, forward. I'm very, very into my statements here, but it moved that society forward into a new state of being, which I believe is an old state. Like I'm in the middle of writing a book with a number of my friends.
Daniel: A lot of them are indigenous wisdom holders and authors in their own right. But it's all about why is it so hard for farmers and agriculturalists and people connected to ecology to accept change? Because all we live with is change. Every day is change. You go to plough a field and it rains. You don't then plough it, right. You go to harvest cow and you can't, sow you don't harvest it. Like we live and change. The seasons change. We understand the seasons and weathers and barometric pressure and the rain coming more than anybody else alive. Because all we do is live out there and we work out there, and our entire livelihood is dependent upon all of these factors. We live in change, but we don't accept it. And it's because we don't accept our relationship as Earth. The seasons are the seasons. Manda, you are not the season. And as long as you are not a season, as a season is a season, then you are separate from that season. And as long as you are separate from that season, now you can see the regenerative language arise. You can now control that season. You can heal that season. Imagine if I said that you can heal your lungs without healing your liver. That is to say, you can have healthy lungs, but an unhealthy liver. But Manda, you're still wonderfully healthy. That's asinine. That's crazy. I mean, maybe the modern medical system would believe such a thing, but that only illustrates their craziness.
Manda: It's predicated on, exactly.
Daniel: But if we believe that human society that you Manda Scott can be healthy while you're forcing health upon an unhealthy soil, but you can only do that because you've separated yourself from that medium, from that other life form, while also believing that the life form doesn't have agency and animism to be able to make its own self understood decisions; this is not a healthy body. And so it's the story of that land speaking, of telling us this, of letting us experience what it means to be soil. Not through a scientific lens, but from a mythological lens. From a hearth fire lit, communally intense winter oral story. Right? And you get that by fostering a relationship with that land. Not by forcing it, not by colonising it, not by spreading manure or compost. And maybe you need to do some of these things, especially the manure and compost sounds great. But asking it first, finding that humility.
Manda: And hearing it clearly because we can project a lot.
Daniel: Being open to hearing it, right. Like I have a dear friend, she's a Maori medicine woman. There's a particular word in her language that I'm skipping right now in my head. But basically what we would translate as a medicine woman of the Maori people in New Zealand. And we talk quite often, and she always jokes that a lot of people believe trees can talk, but nobody wants to believe that trees actually want to tell them something. And a lot of people go into the woods to talk to trees, but very few people listen. And she always jokes that if you go into the woods and you don't hear a lot of voices, like a cacophony of voices, to the point that it's just like this acapella symphony flying all around you, then that's your fault. It's not that the forest is quiet, you're just not listening. And you've asked two questions that I've yet to answer, and they're both the same question, both in the real episode and in this bonus episode. So let me be very clear in this moment: how do we create space? How do we allow the communication to happen? You've asked two questions in this way, and I'm kind of rephrasing it so that I answer it exactly how I want. You have to create the quiet space where the harvest doesn't have to happen. So I said agriculture is a forced harvest, right? When a boy cow is born, we call that a bull calf. We castrate it because it's going to be meat, so it could become a steer, so that it's manageable. And then we harvest it. So when a boy is born, it's harvested on a date such and such later. This is the regenerative system, this is the conventional system. I can give a whole podcast on all of the details about all of the different commercial to animal husbandry techniques and reasons and everything else.
Daniel: Like there's a lot of details there, but when a boy is born, it's going to be castrated unless it is of excellent breeding quality. Excellent. 99%, maybe even more than that, are not. So they all get castrated. In order to be able to listen to the story of the Land, you do not (and this is everybody gets this confused) you do not have to go lay in a field of daisies and just dream. Do that; go take a nap, go spend a lot of time outside. I'm not saying don't do that, but you don't have to do that. I'm going to give you an agriculture example, then I'll give you a city based example, because everybody in all different spheres of life are listening. Agriculturally, you have to provide yourself the space in your day that the harvest is not forced. And so what does that mean? When a calf is born, you have to be able to be there in that moment to talk to that calf. And again, I don't care if it's vocal talking, I don't care if you even think that you're able to communicate. But just to be there and allow the vibrations, the energy, the spirits, the feelings, the wind, the colours, the smells, etc. to have a communication with you in this unbelievably Holy Communion that you are participating in.
Daniel: And then you have to allow that to affect management, whatever that might mean. So for instance, maybe there's a field you're ready to graze, and you go out to the field and you're like, wait, something's wrong. I have a feeling that this field is not yet ready to be grazed. How can you, many days in advance of that, have created a world where you don't actually have to force the cows into that? You're not running behind. You're not overstocked. You're not overly demanding of particular amounts of profit at certain times. Like, how can we structure our lives so that when you go to harvest that cow and it says, not today, it doesn't have to be today. That's that. And the other side is just to be aware. Like I said, I'll give you a city example and I tell this to people all the time. Everybody lives near ecology. I don't care where it is, you live near ecology. The breath you breathe is predominantly dominated by fungi, like airborne fungal debris that is ecology. And if you find yourself to be moving too quickly through life that you can't stop and say, oh, hello, fungi, I recognise you, and then keep walking. Or it could be a tree, it could be a bird, it could be a particular squirrel.
Manda: The water coming out of the tap. It's part of a water cycle.
Daniel: The water coming out of the tap. Exactly, exactly. Then you're moving too fast. And I'm not requesting that you go and you meditate with your local japanese maple that was planted as an ornamental in front of your suburban house or your condo complex, or the boxwood that grows outrageously in the nice line that they've created. I'm not saying you have to go meditate. I'm just saying recognise.
Manda: Say Hello
Daniel: Because the second you recognise, you acknowledge. And as soon as you acknowledge, now we can attend, that is the pathway. But if you're moving too fast because you're overwhelmed with acknowledgement and attending, and you do not recognise, you do not say hello, you're never going to get past that. The first phase of listening to trees talking is to recognise that they can talk. You don't even have to be in a forest to get that done. You don't. And maybe it's going to take a particular story to get you there. Maybe it's the story that the tree gives you in order to fully accentuate that transformative process. But you have to recognise. You have to be humble enough to realise that you aren't the capitalistic saviour of earth. That while we can destroy, doesn't necessarily mean that we should force healing. And maybe that's a huge turning point. Maybe it's not. But recognise and then acknowledge and then attend.
Daniel: I think that's very doable. And I want to be clear, when it comes down to the physiological results of the wildland, we have no data. I have nothing. And I don't mean to dismiss the question, but I also don't want the data. When you ask me, where are you? My response was I am Wingina. I am this land. This is the land that I am. That's where I am, I am this. When the Monacan, our local indigenous peoples, we live in Virginia, in the Piedmont, we live on the James River. And early 1608, John Smith, the infamous Jamestown settler, he travels up the James River, because the Powhatans or the Tsenacommacah as they're called, it's believed that they were trying to kill him by sending him upriver to the Monacans, which is the land that we currently live on. This is their land. And as the story goes, they were a warrior type people. And the Tsenacommacah, the Powhatans, maybe were trying to terminate the Jamestown settlers by doing this. Anyways, when they met the Monacans, there's a couple of other people in the story that do some really bad things and they capture some of them. And anyways, it's a conversation that's documented.
Daniel: And while I mourn the reason for the conversation, the capturing of these indigenous chiefs of the Monacan, it does provide us a really interesting insight that they still tell today. They're asked, who are you? And he says, we're the Monacan, which just means Earth people. That's what we are; we are Earth. In our language I think we would've called it Earthling, like we're just an Earthling. Monacan doesn't mean anything, it just means Earthling; Earth people. And he goes, well, who lives over the mountains? Because we live on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains, and John Smith and the English Empire, everybody wanted to know what lies west of these mountains. So we have the tidewater, we have the east side, and we have the mountains. And he goes, well, who lives over the mountains? And the man responds, the sun. The sun is west. Who lives over? The sun does, right? So not only does this demand animacy, but also deal with yourself. Who lives? The sun does. You know, who are you? I live here, this is me. The earth IS me in this place. And when you actually allow that to be manifested around you in a physical way, because this is this is philosophical, this is spiritual, this is relational.
Daniel: But when it becomes manifest in the material, that's when it becomes overpowering. That's when the physiogeographic emerges into the unscientific. And what I mean by that is, if there were scales to measure stuff, we've broken the scales. And I'm not saying that from nutritional analysis. I'm not saying that in some sort of utopic mathematical perspective. What I'm saying is, I do not actually believe that the way we have to measure nutrient density is accurate. And I can tell you this for one reason. This is not a full reason, but this shows that the boat has a lot of holes, so maybe you shouldn't sail across the ocean in it, that's all I'm going to say here. But I mean, in Stagtine I write quite in depth about this, so if this is interesting, just read it there. You're going to get 70 to 80 pages on the science. But long story short, if an animal experiences stress during its life, when it's processed, that stress is stored in blood memory, and when that stress is stored in blood memory, we see an increase in the pH, basically lactic acid. So we see an increase in the pH of the meat. When the increase in pH of that meat occurs we have something called dark cutting.
Daniel: Dark cutting in meat is going to decrease by a magnitude of about 50%. It's complex, i'm giving you way too high level of an analysis, over 80 pages worth of research. But generally speaking, it's going to cut the bioavailability of those nutrients in that meat by 50%. So let's pretend I tell you that all of our cows have such great nutrient density in their meat, and it's healing all of these chronic illnesses of all of our local community, but they're still processed in a stressful way, or they're still raised in a stressful way. I have cut that bioavailability of those nutrients in the humans that are consuming it by 50%. And so what I'm saying is, until the human mind, which might be the human heart, has the ability to understand what health truly means. Our cows are the Land. And as soon as the land gets healthier, our cows would get healthier. And as the land gets less healthy, the cows will get less healthy. And they're connected to it in that way. And obviously, they're under our care. And obviously, I can't let them graze the entirety of Turtle Island here in eastern North America. And so I have to make sure they stay alive. And so it's not necessarily a 1 to 1 relationship, but it's going to be a 1 to 1 relationship as much as I'm physically and legally allowed to do.
Daniel: During a drought when the land is dying, my cows aren't going to die. That's just animal abuse. I put them here, I have to make sure. That's that's the nuance that I'm talking about. But that nuance aside, as the land heals, it's vibrations, it's energy, it's spirits, it's relationship. It's understanding of a future, it's understanding of a past. As we release that control the cows partake in that, but we partake in that. So what's the scientific measurement of happy cows? I don't know. Maybe we can figure that out. I talked to one guy, he's this huge leader. His podcast has, every episode has like 2 or 3 million listens. I mean, he's like this huge guy that you would know the name of, and for the last decade he hasn't been able to stomach meat. And I said, well, have you ever eaten an intact bull that's been raised in a Land for five years with all of its sisters, with all of its mothers, with all of its aunts; it was able to suckle on its mother until they decided not to?
Daniel: It's from a generation of a Land raised cattle that's been here for seven generations. That is to say, they've seen this place evolve. They've never been weaned, they've never been sold off. They were able to make decisions when they could, they were able to forage what they could, they were never forced into a position where they were bred or forced to breed or starved or forced to eat. And then was that animal then field harvested in the open, in the field, with the animals, with a long distance rifle? Dropped immediately and bled out. And then did you do a ceremony? And I don't care what ethnicity, what culture, what society you come from, the ceremonies are all different. We do a ceremony. It's a very Western European giving thanks. Did you give thanks? So did the animal have to ride in a trailer, you know, the modern processing? I'm sorry, I'm rambling a bit, but this is very important. But modern processing, you separate the animal from the herd automatically. It's cortisol is up automatically. It's stress is going through the roof. You then put it on a clanking, clacking metal trailer over blacktop for 2 or 3 hours.
Manda: It's horrible.
Daniel: Then USDA standards have to leave it in a windowless concrete stall for 12 hours before they're processed, or put in a knock box. A guillotine comes down and squeezes their head so they don't move, and then they're just sitting there and they're they're bellowing, they're kicking, they're thrashing. Cows die not from stress, but from another cow's stress. I've brought cows to a USDA processing plant and the plant call me and say your cow is dead because another cow attacked it. Because it lost its brain, right? No. What if we take all of this adaptive landscape, matriarchy led, beautiful, beautiful family unit and then harvest it with its family? Did a ceremony, whatever that means. Allowed the blood to soak back into the earth. And by the way, in stagtine, there's a chapter dedicated to a story that I will not tell you here, about a field harvest where even now I get goose bumps the size of islands on my arms. The spirit of earth rose in this moment, I kid you not. And it animated. There were stampedes, there was literal communication happening between us, my wife and the cows. I mean, it was the most intense moment of my life. And I've seen some things. Did you eat the meat from that? I asked, and he's like, no. And I was like, well, then you're not allergic to meat. Because that's meat. That's what every one of our ancestors got to participate with. That's what all of the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples have been talking about for hundreds of thousands of years that us white people, us the colonisers, us the patriarchal saviours and democratic minded people of the world have just squashed, generation after generation. This is nothing new. I'm sorry, this last thing I'll say, but even in the introduction to the book I say, if you hold Earth's wisdom, you may find this book to be uninspiring and I hope that's the case. Nothing in here that I am saying should be inspiring.
Manda: I don't think you will. Having said that, anyone is going to find that book inspiring.
Daniel: Yes but if you hold this and you're indigenous and this is the way that you've been brought up and these are the stories that you've been given, you might learn some things scientifically, but I'm not saying anything new. I'm just a white guy that finally learned what we've been missing this whole time.
Manda: But you are the white guy that learned it, and the white people are the people who need to know it.
Daniel: Yeah, it's written for white people.
Manda: So I have so many questions again, but let's narrow it down. Did the podcaster who couldn't eat meat try some of your meat?
Daniel: No.
Manda: Oh, damn.
Daniel: I'm not a good salesman, I guess.
Manda: Well, I don't know. It was pretty good selling to me. I am imagining, and this may be my projection, that there's kind of rippling out from your wildlands. A sense of ease. That for me, exactly as you said, when I was a young veterinary student, we were supposed to spend I think a month in an abattoir, and I lasted exactly two hours. Until I said I don't care if I don't get my degree, I can't do this anymore. And the guy who was running the place said, everybody says that, love. I'll just sign your sheet for you. I don't think there was a single person who went through that abattoir as a veterinary student who ever lasted a month. And I was vegetarian for decades after that, because anyone who goes to a traditional abattoir, you would never touch meat again. It's psychically annihilating and it's a spiritual wasteland. And it's horrible in every sense of the word. We're really lucky, we live in a tiny village and there is there's a abattoir run by a guy who's 85 now, and it's it's literally five minutes, and you're only allowed to take 2 or 3 animals, and you walk them in yourself and you hold a bucket of grain. And it's not quite a rifle in the field, but it's not far off. But, you know, when he gets to 86 and decides he can't do it anymore, we're all going to have to do a crowdsource and buy that place, because otherwise that's it.
Manda: However, I am imagining you have exactly what you described and the the psychic impact. I remember an indigenous elder from your land coming over here, and one of the things he said, he ended up in a supermarket and he was walking around in that state of shock that people are when they see dead bits of animal lined up in plastic for yards and yards and yards. And he said something to the effect of if this is what you eat, it's not surprising that you're all crazy. And yet you are eating healthful, emotionally and spiritually whole-some food. And the people around you are. And you're teaching the people around you how to do this. So I'm imagining little concentric circles ripple out of spiritual, emotional, energetic healing such that people are more able to have the space. To relax into not having to fix everything with their heads, and being able to connect to the web of life with heart mind and ask, what do you want of me? And do what is ours to do, that only we can do and that we can do best. All the stuff that we talk about that people might know as an idea, but it doesn't live in the marrow of their bones. Am I just projecting or is that actually happening? Do we all need to move to East Virginia?
Daniel: Well, you're more than welcome to. Please do it.
Manda: I'm not certain your current government would let us. I think we might be considered immigrants, so that probably isn't a thing. But leaving that aside, is it a little island of connectedness?
Daniel: To some degree, yes, to a large degree, no. And this is very difficult and it makes it very hard to do a podcast about, so I appreciate your listeners giving me some grace when I say what I'm about to say. But there is an inverse relationship between doing what is right, and capitalism. And I'm not here as an economist to tell whether or not capitalism at its very core, is positive or negative. All I'm saying in this moment is that I guarantee you, the more you give agency to the Land, the more abundance you will experience, but the less profit you'll be able to generate. Because our world is not built for agency.
Manda: Or even for genuine abundance.
Daniel: Or for genuine abundance. And that's not to say that we're not generating financial dollars to run our family. We've had to structure our family in a particular way, with a particular diet and a particular way of eating that allows us to totally live off the land. Like, I'll be the first person to tell you we eat meat and we forage for everything else because I don't I don't have the discretionary capital to buy $12 a dozen eggs in the local supermarket. You know, I don't have that. So I'm going to live in a certain way, and that takes a particular sacrifice. Now, I also think it's actually a wonderful sacrifice, and I'm very glad to do that. And I have the blessing and the privilege, that is to say, the chemical free landscape all around me to do that, and I recognise these things. But I mean, I was talking with somebody who was a huge fan of Stagtine when it first came out and was a part of all of the different cohorts and everything that we had and the classes and such. And he was very much enthused and inspired and he said recently Daniel, I still have to castrate and I still have to wean, because if I don't, I'm not able to produce enough to do X, Y and z whatever.
Daniel: I don't remember what the whatever was, pay his mortgage, etcetera. I have no idea, I've let that go. And it is true, but I also think that the image of me holding up my hypothetical son at the conference is not a bad image. Because while I believe that we cannot engineer a better future, and while I also believe that we can't neglect the visioning and dreaming of this better future, which is a weird place to be, I realise. It's do nothing but do everything and find yourself in that crazy chaos, which is kind of why I think chaos would be a fun word to use instead of concentric rewilding. I believe it is our generation that has the responsibility to make non-economic decisions for the future of the world. And what I mean by that is the future cannot be democratic systems that also flirt with oligarchies and techno feudalism, based upon free market capitalism. I don't think that's a future for humanity. It can't be. And if it is, we'll all die and then there's no future for humanity, thereby making my claim there's no future for humanity in that...
Manda: It's a self-terminating algorithm, to use the phrase that Tyson Yunkaporta uses.
Daniel: Exactly. However, what we have to realise is. And come to our farm, go to any place in Scotland or England or Wales, I don't know much about Ireland in this sense. But go to an old fence line in a rural community that used to be agricultural, go to an old fence line and see how many fences have been built there. So maybe in your landscape it would be hedges, so maybe it's not relational to you, but here it would be old barbed wire, rusting fences. And I thought to myself, maybe a year or two ago, because I was thinking about this and I was putting up a new fence, because all of the previous fences have rotten. And I didn't know there were even fences there, that's how rotten they are. They're just like in the soil now. And I was putting up a new fence and there's just layers and layers of rusting metal. And my daughter, she's seven, her name is Ella and she says, dad, were these the old farmers? She always asks questions like these. And I was like, yeah, these are the old farmers. And she asked, well, what happened? And I think this is really important consideration. The climate has steadily gotten worse, but the climate 50 years ago was much better for agricultural husbandry here in eastern Piedmont, Appalachia.
Daniel: And so why do we have a network of old fences, but no cows? Why do we have a network of dilapidated and neglected fence lines, but no farmers? Where'd they go? And I'm not saying anything negative about them as people, but what I am going to say is this: when the economics got hard, they got out. And now we have degenerating, neglecting, old fence line rotting, excuse my language, but piles of shit with no hope. And now my generation are supposed to come in, we're supposed to buy the land, we're then supposed to fence it all again, then we're supposed to go out and buy all of the cattle. Then we're supposed to spend a whole generation acclimating the phenotypes of those cattle that we bought from Texas to the Virginia scrub land of the eastern Appalachian meadows and forests. And then after all of that, you still want me to be economic? And what I'm trying to say is, this is an agricultural land that has no fence lines and no cattle, but we're supposed to come in here while still being economic and put up all the fence lines and buy all the cows. One cow cost $2,000.
Daniel: I mean, it's a six year turnaround. If I buy one female cow, it's six years before I make any money and the money I'm going to make from that is about $200 to $500 in net profit. When I say net profit, I mean based upon the rising costs of that child alone. But I had to raise that mom for six years, and I had to buy the mom for $2,000. So it's about nine years until you're 'economically profitable'. So I need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in cattle breeding stock, to be able to farm enough land to make any money, that nine years later I'm finally going to start to turn a profit. In a world where people are still buying the meat, but nobody wants to buy the meat because it's easier to go online and get meat cheap to your door than have to drive out to Wingina, Virginia, an hour away from anything and buy it directly from me. And so we're losing that battle ten times out of ten because of economics. So if the world is going to collapse agriculturally, that is to say, if the eco tone of our environment is going to stop providing the nourishment for us, it's going to be based in economics and not anything else. Until our generation, that is to say, the people who currently have boots on the ground, I don't care if you're 80, I don't care if you're two, do not care. But the generation on the ground today have to start making generational decisions.
Daniel: And this is what all of our indigenous neighbours are saying. You have to make generational decisions. You have to look seven generations ahead. Anyways, this is not anything new that I'm saying, but still in the United States, which should not be a surprise to anybody living outside of the United States, looking at our entire electoral system and everything else going on in the federal system; in the United States, people are still making decisions based upon economics. And I realise that some people have to. I did not want to let that pass, but we have to use our positions and our privilege to basically eradicate and alleviate the pressures of forced economics, so that we can actually give space to things. So we can give space to not harvesting. So we can give space for the deer, not just for combines and everything else. It's those sort of decisions. It's the rebelliousness of peace that is needed. That is what I'm really interested in.
Daniel: And I realise there's many other people, you interview a lot of these other people who work for NGOs and nonprofits and organisations and institutions all over the world, philosophising and doing and doing all these wonderful things. I also equally think that's really important. But where I am, where creator has put me, the human that I am going to be, that I believe that I was put on this earth to be, re reawakening Tatanka Iyotake's words, is here. How do we nurture a matriarchy that can lead us into the future? How can we use the women in the herd to generate lasting abundance that is economic in the now, whatever that might mean, as much as we possibly can, because we can't escape that. While still creating that parallel system that economics don't need to matter. What does it look like to teach consumers, and this is our main job; if I spend 100 hours a week working, the majority of them are in teaching consumers how to process meat. That is our mainstay, that is our main offering. Like, if you're listening to this and you want to learn how to field harvest or cut up your own meat or participate in this process.
Manda: There are courses on your website.
Daniel: We have courses. They're all over the place. And even if you have zero interest in picking up the knife, our courses, we call them sacred harvest courses. They're sacred, they're ceremonial, they're emotionally intense. Bring tissues, guarantee you'll need them. Everybody cries. Everybody dances. Everybody's eyes are awakened to the beauty that is death and rebirth. I've had people come who are vegetarians for 30 years. I've had people come who are USDA inspectors, who are so fed up with the ugliness of that system, and they wanted to know if it could be better. And they came to our course and they're just like, wow, I didn't know this was possible outside of the USDA paradigm. I had one USDA inspector here last year, and I'll just give you this as a short little tidbit. I'm speaking too much, but I'll give you this and I'll stop rambling. Our courses are entirely student led, so no other course in the entire United States that I know of will allow a student to come onto the farm, learn how to do a sacred field harvest and finer processing; it's a four day course, and I don't do anything. I literally don't pick up a gun or a knife. I don't do a single thing, the students do everything. I want the students to leave with the full capacity and surety that they could do this again. Like that is the reason for them being here. While also allowing them to have this unbelievable experience of covering themselves in the warm blood of the animal, if that's what they wanted. This is your moment to partake in the story of your food at a level that you have never been able to do in the history of your life, right? That this is your moment.
Daniel: So come and do this. We had one student last year who was responsible for taking the animal at the distance with the rifle, and he was a big hunter. He trained with me for a little bit of time before the course started, you know, I don't just hand somebody a rifle. But he was the one that was selected to do the hunting aspect, if you will. Something happened, not bad, but the cow ended up in a pond. I'll just say it like that. The cow ended up in a pond, and I ended up jumping in the pond with a completely, fully alive cow that didn't have any bullet in it, and jumped on his back and ended up taking the animal down in the pond. One of those moments that you had to do something a little outrageous, not something we could have planned for. And still in that moment, literally with a dead 2000 or maybe 1,500lb bull in a pond, you know, with blood everywhere, and me just in the pond like a crazy maniac with my long hair like a crazy maniac. The pictures we have from this is unbelievable. And the USDA inspector's right there. She's one of the attendants at the course. We then basically carry the cow out, all of us, and process it on the dam of the pond. So think about the USDA. Think about bleach. Think about white facilities. Think about abattoirs.
Manda: And yes, I'm thinking about how many regulations you just contravened.
Daniel: Yeah exactly. And we finished processing it and she pulled me aside afterwards. And she said, Daniel, I want you to know I have never been a part of a cleaner processing than what you just facilitated. She said that had the opportunity to be a crap shoot. I mean, just a bacterially infused, horrible health, crap shoot. And she said what you were able to do with a knife and nothing else (we don't have any other tools out there, we just have knives, there's no tarps or cradles it's just you and a knife. Just as if you were 20,000 years ago in a cave in France) She said what you were able to do in that situation with us idiots, there was 15 students there and they did it all. But I was able to point and say, okay, no, no, no, we're going to change this, we're going to do this. With a little bit of experience and a lot of intentionality, while also still being in the human element. We didn't give ourselves over to technology. We held a knife. Just one. And so we were able to retain our humanness and our ancientness, that two way dream walking. And you can say Daniel was experienced, but no, I really believe it was much more intense than that. We kept our humaness about us. We were able to do it.
Daniel: And she said, Daniel, I would eat this meat ten times out of ten. This is better than a lot of the meat coming out of the abattoirs and this is cleaner than the meat that I've been able to inspect in the abattoirs. This is possible, and I'm not trying to sell a course. What I'm rather trying to do is say the system around us is collapsing. And all I find, ten times out of ten, all I find in the world around me is the world literally sticking out its hand. When I say the world, I mean us, Earth, and it's Earthlings. She's sticking out her hand and she's saying, it's okay, I got you. Like, there's still time. And we can keep engineering political systems, and I think we should. I'm not geared to that. What I'm good at is feeling the earth reach out and say, here, do this, be this, stop doing this. That's where my 'genius' is, that's where I'm comfortable.
Manda: That's what's yours to do.
Daniel: That's what's mine to do. And there's so much hope there. It's possible, you know. I look at our current federal executive system right now, and I look at the fricking H.J. 452 that gets tabled in the Virginia House and that's impossible for me. And let other people work on that, other people are, and I'm so appreciative of them. But let's go experience the sacred. Let's go tell these stories. Let's actually write our way into a better future and bring people with us. And when I say people, I mean bugs and plants and trees and let that be the magical realism that creates this new world.
Manda: I think that's an amazing place to stop. You and I could talk for another ten hours and it would all be interesting, but at some point we have to let you go to your life and me go to bed and the producers have a break. So this has been amazing, truly. And I'm so grateful that you are so honest and so authentic, and you're doing the work that you're doing. Because that USDA person, and the person with the rifle and the other 15 students will be in a different place now. They will have opened heart space to the web of life. And I'm so grateful that you said it, that there is hope. And certainly our experience, the people that I talked to over here, the web is crowding closer and is more available and is asking louder for us to listen. And maybe we're in a different space, but I think it was Handsome Lake who said the distance between life and death is the thickness of a maple leaf, but the distance between us and the web is less than that. Yeah. And it's there.
Daniel: Or not at all.
Manda: It's just the quieting of our mind and choosing to listen. And you're living that. So everybody, Daniel's courses are available online. You can buy his books online. Please go and read them. They're gorgeous. And the new one comes out in May, am I right?
Daniel: We've changed the date to March 20th, but yeah, it comes out in the spring.
Manda: Okay, you need to change your website because it currently says May '25. All right, so it's coming out in about a month from when this goes out. The Plain of Pillars. It's beautiful, it's truly one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. It's gorgeous. I was very glad and honoured to be able to read it ahead of time. So that's there. But also everything that Daniel has written you will want to read. Thank you.
Daniel: Yes, Manda, thank you. It's been a blessing. Thanks for listening to my rambling.
Manda: I love your rambling, Daniel. I could listen all day, but just thank you for being who you are and where you are. And your children are extremely fortunate individuals. It sounds like an amazing life. If I thought it was safe to come to the US, I would definitely come. I'm thinking about it. I think I would be arrested on the way in or the way out, but you never know.
Daniel: Just make it to Virginia.
Manda: And hang out in the hills, and they'll never know I'm there. Yeah. Alrighty. Thank you. We'll talk again.
Daniel: Yes.
Manda: And there we go. Was that not worth staying for? Huge thanks to Daniel for everything that you are and that you do. I am so honoured to count you as a friend. And yes, one day, if it ever feels safe and if I can find a way to cross the Atlantic, that doesn't make me feel really bad, I will come and visit. But in the meantime, our capacity to build connections, to build communities across time and space is part of where we are in the 21st century. Yes, we need our communities of place, but we can also build communities of passion and of purpose. And so here we are helping you to connect to the web of life where you are, and then to know that other people are doing this too. Our old system is being broken apart in real time. And yet the cracks are where the light gets in, and we can be the light. And genuinely, nothing else matters now. We need to be the ancestors that our descendants will want of us. I so hope that when Daniel held up the representation of his son at the conference, that that image landed, that the concept of being the best ancestors we can be, settled in the minds of those present. And I hope it settles in your mind, too. I am in the very early birthing of a new module for Accidental Gods, which will be devoted entirely to working out how we can be the best ancestors we know how. It can take quite a while for me to get these things sorted in my head, to work out what I need to say, and how best to say it, so that it lands with people. To record many iterations, work out where the holes are, fill them in, record them again.
Manda: This is not about to happen tomorrow or next week or next month, but I'm working on it. And in the meantime, there are the early six modules connecting you to the four elements of the web of Life, to building intent, to working out how to let go, which is absolutely key to what Daniel was saying. And then there's the most recent module, Building the three pillars of the heart mind or the three fires of the heart mind; gratitude, compassion and joyful curiosity. And I don't think we can become the best ancestors we know how without having all of those as foundations. So, as I said at the top, if you want to support us, head over to accidentalgods.life and see what grabs your attention there. And if you want to support Daniel, go to danielfirthgriffith.com. Buy his books, sign up for his courses. Immerse yourself in all of the amazing wild intelligence and great heart and glorious, blazing courage that he offers. So that's it for now.
Manda: We'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot and for this week's production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the Accidental Gods website, and for all of the conversations behind the scenes. And as always, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who really wants to understand how we can move into being an initiation culture, please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.