Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
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So now let's jump in.
Welcome back to Re Ride Free.
I've got Jared Anderson, the author with me today, and lots of people have
been asking me to get him on the show.
Why?
Because he writes amazing nature with the imagination.
Stuff you like cryptids, you like if you dunno what crypts are, you kind of
will by the end of this you like real nature, but mixed with your imagination.
You maybe are stuck somewhere feeling you can't get into nature, but how
does one ima one's imagination?
Take one in there.
How do you enter your own private Narnia?
I think we've got the bloke here who's got some decent roadmaps to that.
And he's been successful at it.
So he's someone who has also been able to self-actualize, if you like, through
his imagination, and I think there's a lot we can all learn from him in terms
of our own attempts to do the same.
So, Jared, thank you so much for coming on.
Please tell us who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you got there.
Jarod Anderson: Thanks Ru.
Good to be here.
Yeah.
So where to begin?
So right now I'm a, I'm a full-time writer.
I out of sort of a small town in Ohio in the us.
And how I got here was, was a bit of a winding, a winding trek.
I've always loved writing and words and imagination.
I have a vivid memory of being 10 years old and I had a very
influential teacher named Miss Willard.
Used to take all of us 10 year olds and hurt us out behind the school
and let us go into the woods.
There was a huge hill beside this school that we called the Land Lab,
and she would read Mary Oliver poetry to us and then give us notebooks and
then say, Hey, just go find a place to sit and write about what you see.
And I was hooked.
So I've written nature, poetry and, and dabbled in nature writing ever since ever
since I understood the value of sitting still and letting my imagination meet
what I found out in the, out in the world.
But flash forward from that experience as a 10-year-old, and I was a
person who did and still do struggle with chronic major depression.
I grew up in an environment where we really were not
encouraged to talk about it.
So it was a silent and unacknowledged presence in my life.
Where was that for a very long time?
Was that, what's that?
Rupert Isaacson: Where was that where you were growing up?
Jarod Anderson: Rural Ohio.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Jarod Anderson: So kind of small town.
Rupert Isaacson: Stoic wasps.
Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
You bet.
Yeah.
And especially, especially the men folk were not encouraged to
have feelings or talk about them.
Rupert Isaacson: No.
You're supposed to go and quietly end your life with a shotgun behind the barn.
Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Yes.
Yeah.
Not
Rupert Isaacson: complain about it.
Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
I mean, feelings, you know, you can have like anger that would be okay.
That's true as true a feeling.
But
Rupert Isaacson: Provided you kick someone's ass.
Jarod Anderson: Yes.
Or,
Rupert Isaacson: or silently fme.
Yeah.
Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
Absolutely.
So it got a little awkward for me here and there as somebody who once missed football
practice because I won a poetry contest and got to the awards, awards ceremony.
So I think I was always confusing to people 'cause I didn't fit
into one camp necessarily.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, because of the mental health issues, because I, I sort of
never learned the skills of addressing them or acknowledging them, which
would be the first step to opening the door to getting more help.
I really kind of stuffed it down where it could simmer quietly.
Sometimes it was more intrusive and sometimes it was less.
And I kind of faked my way through building a career.
I did a, a bachelor's in literature and then a master's, and I taught
English for a little while.
Rupert Isaacson: So you always knew you wanted to write?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, I mean, as soon as I really understood what it was.
And, and then when I paired that understanding with me as a little kid
in the eighties with like a big tape deck, and I would rent these, these
puffy book on tape books from the library I remember those, you know, I'd
borrow 'em and especially The Hobbit.
So it was, you know, under the covers after everybody was asleep.
I've always had insomnia and so I would just be listening to,
to these fantastical stories.
And and then when I realized it was a craft, it wasn't just this, this thing
where I could open a portal and see into another world, it was, it was a
craft that I could, I could actually bring that to other people and to myself
that was intoxicating from the start.
So, it, it took a little while for me to think of it as a possible profession.
'cause I, I had no real role models near me.
Rupert Isaacson: Sure.
And breaking into writing successfully is not an easy thing.
Jarod Anderson: I mean, it's, it's really, I can't even say it was ever a plan.
You know, we'll get to it, but I'm, I'm excited to be there now, but
I'm always a little bit surprised,
Rupert Isaacson: right.
Jarod Anderson: But
Were
Rupert Isaacson: you doing everything else along the way, working, construction,
doing all that kind of thing that one does as a writer to become a writer?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
And, and at first I didn't like school.
My parents didn't go to college.
I tried to go when I was 18 and basically failed out, was put on probation.
And looking back on it, it's because I had no idea why I was there.
It was that I had other friends that were going and it seemed like the thing
to do, but I got there and, you know, I didn't want to go to class and I didn't
want to get up early, and I didn't want to do anything that felt arbitrary, which
doesn't play well with academia, you know?
And so I, I left, I, I did take jobs in construction and real
estate and all over the place.
Mm.
I worked at a factory making rakes once
Rupert Isaacson: And always Did you get to tread on one and bang your nose?
Jarod Anderson: What's that?
No.
Rupert Isaacson: Did
Jarod Anderson: you get to
Rupert Isaacson: tread and one and bang your nose?
Jarod Anderson: No, these were like the plastic, the big lawn rakes.
So it was getting the plastic heads out of the press and they were hot and you had
to like, trim the, the excess fun stuff.
But then years later sort of in my mid twenties, I went back and then
was a good student because I had some understanding of myself and what I wanted.
And I had started dabbling with little night classes at, at a local college
and realized, oh, okay, if I can do this in a way where what I'm doing is
talking about books and stories and writing and find a community centered
around that, that was what I needed.
And so then I really lit up with it.
But I, again, I think going off movies and tv, thought to myself, okay, I
need to be a literature professor.
That's the respectable gig I can get where I'm allowed to just think about
words and stories and books all day
Rupert Isaacson: and actually pay the rent.
Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
But after doing the masters and teaching for a few years, I started to understand
that like, the job was to teach, you know, a hundred students a semester
and then you go home and you have these piles of, of a hundred essays written by
people who did not want to write them.
And I found it.
That when I did that as my day job, I did not wanna write in the evening.
Right.
I was so sick of words
Rupert Isaacson: that would make you allergic.
I could see that.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Yeah.
The the last thing I, I would wanna do after finishing my obligation
was to sit back down at a, at a computer or, or, you know, open
the journal and, and try to write.
So I left academia and did the thing that people who leave academia in,
in English often do, which is, I went to marketing and nonprofit work.
And I actually ended up on the other side of the desk as an administrator
at Ohio University, working as my, my title was Director of External Relations.
So it was marketing and fundraising and pr.
It was the which does
Rupert Isaacson: involve telling stories.
Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: yeah, yeah.
It was sort of the business side mm-hmm.
Of being a, a words guy, a storyteller.
But during that time, my, my mental health issues really came
to a head and really got bad.
Partly because, you know, I had a director title, which was like, I
had climbed the ladder to sort of the logical end point, and I thought I was
sort of staring down the barrel of the next 40 years and thinking, this is it.
Huh.
My, my job was meetings about other meetings.
Theoretically there was a storytelling component, but that wasn't the day to day.
And all of this is happening under the umbrella of this major depression that
I just had never done anything about.
Mostly because of shame.
You know, some part of me understood that there were experts in medical
professionals, people who dedicated their lives to support for the sort
of mental health issues I was having.
But no part of me wanted to talk to those people.
And so I blamed it all on the work.
And then I, I found myself in this, this place of intense privilege where my
wife Leslie knowing my struggles, just sort of said, Hey, quit, you know, we
have health insurance through my job.
Like, we'll be fine.
Quit.
Like, what does
Rupert Isaacson: she do?
Jarod Anderson: She was also a marketing director.
She writes horror novels.
And, and I met her she was doing a master's in poetry.
I met her in grad school.
So she, she gets it in terms of writing and my relationship with it.
And yeah, she just, you know, it was scary.
It's not as if we were well off, but she, she just sort of said, this is.
She could see the, the weight on me from those, those months and years and, and
just she had to talk me into it really.
But I did, I quit.
And that really began this process of reconnecting with things I, I knew
when I was younger, like prioritizing time in nature, prioritizing
creativity, taking it seriously.
And then the scary new stuff, which was I started to talk to
people about suicidal ideation.
I started to talk about depression.
I, I, I went to a doctor.
I eventually started going to a counselor.
And, you know, that, that has made all of the difference for me.
But this, this strange thing happened 'cause I really focused
on the mental health aspect first.
And, you know, I, I found a medication that kind of helped take the edge off.
I found a counselor who I felt like got me.
He was this, this dude with a big gray beard who always disappeared to
the Smoky Mountains for vacations.
And, you know, I could talk to him about he, he had the same feeling as
I did about being out in the woods, but he kinda got me to understand
that all of the stuff I was doing for depression, was geared toward bringing
me back to neutral, bringing me back to sort of a level playing field.
And that's not the same as happiness or contentment as a skill.
And there was this odd moment in trying to troubleshoot my own brain, my own point of
connection with reality, where I thought, you know, what does make me happy?
Where does contentment lie?
You know, if the disease is under control, then what?
Or so what?
And I started to go back to the woods in an intentional way.
I grew up with a mother who would take me on nature walks most days,
and we were never religious, but she called the woods, her church.
And we would go and see what was blooming or we would go gather mushrooms or
find an interesting skull or, you know, it was just sort of a daily thing.
And, and yet when I was career focused and when I was dealing with all these mental
health issues, I started to think of that stuff as juvenile or that it was like
locked in a glass case labeled childhood.
And there was this awkward period of reconnection where I would go to the
woods and think, I, I'm doing this wrong.
I don't know the names of what I'm looking at.
I'm gonna fail the quiz when I get back to the parking lot.
And somebody asked me what species I saw.
You know, I don't know what it was.
But it was this fear of doing it wrong.
It was the kind of capitalist pressure to always be productive that would tell me
that there was no, no way to justify just going to the woods to connect with nature.
But I did.
I did.
And I started to do this little podcast called the the Crypto
Naturalist, which was me thinking, all right, I wanna reconnect with
my creativity in a serious way.
What, what would I do if I was just playful and did exactly what I wanted?
And I thought, all right.
I love nature.
I love these single voice nature shows.
I grew up with there's Marty Stauffers, wild America and David Attenborough.
You know, there were so many certainly Steve Irwin and I was like, I'm
gonna do that, but I'm gonna leave facts out of the room entirely.
I'm gonna do a love letter to nature and these nature shows,
but I'm gonna invent everything.
I'm gonna bring in that fantasy aspect.
I love from listening to The Hobbit under the covers.
So the crypto naturalist was this guy who loved nature, but it was cryptids.
So things like Bigfoot, the Loch Next Monster.
But I never did any established cryptids.
I wanted each episode to introduce people to something entirely new
so that they could always have that, that moment of surprise.
Something that you had
Rupert Isaacson: invented or a, a really obscure crypted from another culture
that they might not have heard of
Jarod Anderson: it.
It was almost always something I invented entirely.
Like I didn't want to be beholden to any source material.
Rupert Isaacson: Give us some examples, please.
Jarod Anderson: Oh, geez.
There was one that was the orbital King Fisher.
Is this or
Rupert Isaacson: the kingfisher?
Tell
Jarod Anderson: us about that.
Yeah, so like, if you can picture a, a kingfisher sort of a, a diving bird
that, that hovers above ponds and lakes and then dives in to grab a fish.
Okay.
This was that, but it was in lower orbit.
It was this huge bird that was kind of shimmering and, and looked like it made
of, of fractal pieces like a prism.
And it hovered above the earth and it would dive down into these mountain lakes.
And then what it would come up with was sort of an Eldridge horror, you
know, it would come up with these things that were mostly mouth and the
person seeing it didn't understand how that could work in physical space.
So I like these creatures who mirror something in real nature.
Are also totally outside it.
Rupert Isaacson: Just tell me again, what, what, what did
it come outta the lake with?
Jarod Anderson: Something that was like, looked like mostly shadow and it
was covered with mouths and so it, and
Rupert Isaacson: that was its prey?
Jarod Anderson: Yes.
So it And what was the name of other strange
Rupert Isaacson: that it was after?
What was the name of?
Jarod Anderson: Didn't have a name.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Jarod Anderson: You know, it hunted other things.
Yeah.
It, it hunted other like
Rupert Isaacson: instable things.
What think non shadow represents is that like, do you think in your
subconscious, you were thinking about, for example, a almost like a sort
of divinity that can take the shit side of human experience out of earth
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Happens to be buried in that these lakes.
And is that sort of the metaphor for what's going on?
And wouldn't it be nice if these divinities came and took these
shit sides of our shadow pollution?
Yeah, we might,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
I'll tell, I'll tell you them.
Rupert Isaacson: Something like that is, is that what's going on with,
Jarod Anderson: so in this case there is sort of like a meta narrative where
I have these species that are kind of, guardians of Earth in different
ecosystems, these singular creatures.
And so they will hunt things that are, are kind of, an invasive
species from outside our reality.
And so the whole thing to me is sort of a metaphor for the way
nature seeks balance and adapts and sort of, takes care of itself.
Rupert Isaacson: Nature, including the human psyche, right?
Jarod Anderson: Oh, absolutely.
The balance.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
And so, you know, in the, the cosmology, the, the world of, of
that, that podcast, there are these guardian creatures that own sort
of specific regions and ecosystems.
Like there's one for the Appalachian Mountains.
Tell me
Rupert Isaacson: about the Appalachian one.
Jarod Anderson: Ah, well that one is is the horned wolf,
is what I, what I call him.
And I can't tell you too much about him because he's he's a
major subject of the, the novel I have coming out in, in February.
Okay.
Which is just, which is just false.
What
Rupert Isaacson: is, what is the name of this novel that's coming out?
Jarod Anderson: Strange Animals.
Rupert Isaacson: Strange Animals.
Jarod Anderson: And that's coming from Valentine books
Rupert Isaacson: As two reading lists immediately.
Yes.
Says man, who spends lots of time on planes.
Yeah, yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Well, it's, it's, that story is about, it's kind of the
backstory of the main character, the
Rupert Isaacson: podcast.
Okay.
But why did you come up with the horned wolf?
What, what basically does the horned wolf do without, you know, we'll
still buy your book, but come on.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
He does the same thing that the orbital Kingfisher does, but he
does it beneath the mountains.
The Catskill Mountains.
The Appalachian mountains.
He goes
Rupert Isaacson: under the earth.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
He's he essentially looks like the skeleton, like a, a, a grizzly bear sized
skeleton of a timber wolf, except that he has flesh that is like, coalesced shadow,
but there's never quite enough of it.
So sometimes he will have the face of a wolf with the ears of a wolf.
Sometimes that flesh will roll back and it will be a bear wolf skull.
Rupert Isaacson: Why does he never quite have enough shadow flesh?
Where's the scarcity there?
Why, why?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, I think what I'm playing with there is if you look at.
What the mountains are, the Appalachian mountains that are older than the moon.
Mm-hmm.
You know, they're, the Appalachian range is in Scotland and it's in the US You
Rupert Isaacson: said they're older than the moon?
Jarod Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
There we
Rupert Isaacson: have to return to that in a minute.
Okay.
Jarod Anderson: Keep going.
The Appalachians were around on Pangaea, you know, when there was one continent
and so you can trace where those mountains are in Scotland and in the US because,
Rupert Isaacson: but people assume, I think that the moon has always been here
as a planet, as an offshoot of our planet.
So you're gonna have to come back to why the moon is not as hard.
Alright.
Yeah.
But not, but I'm just gonna hold you to that.
I've also got questions about Mary Oliver that we want to go
back to, but, alright, good.
So the Appalachian mountains older than the moon.
All right.
But why has this creature not quite got enough flesh?
Jarod Anderson: If I think of what the mountains are, I think
of all of the sort of inert rock.
Mm-hmm.
And yet my nature loving brain sees a kind of life in stone that
isn't the same as biological life.
But there's still some sort of essential wholeness to the universe that feels
like life and, and sort of spirituality to me, in the rocks in the same way
that I might sense in a pine tree.
I guess I was pointing out with the horned wolf that, that, that rigidity, like I
wanted to always see the skeleton, like the scaffolding beneath, because if I'm
thinking of a creature that is of the mountains I like that there's always
like the rigid curve of a, of a pelvis or a spine or a skull showing, right?
Rupert Isaacson: Like the shoulder of the rock showing under the moss or the
Jarod Anderson: Yes.
Yeah.
So that, that shadow, like it is a creature flesh.
It does, it does represent and protect the living things, but
it's also of the mountains in a way, way that, and what does it
Rupert Isaacson: hunt?
What does it need?
Jarod Anderson: Oh, so many things.
The premise is that much like in the real world, we struggle with
invasive species sending ecosystems out of balance in a metaphysical way.
I wanted there to be invasive species that were always kind of
knocking on the door of reality.
And because the Appalachians are so old, I thought like that there's
a rich pantheon of, of things from the outside trying to get in.
And I'll often talk about it in you know, sort of an essential otherness
to the creatures that are from outside reality and nature that, that this
wolf is, is always hunting and eating.
Rupert Isaacson: So again, he's trying to, he's trying to or
she is trying to secure harmony.
Jarod Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Because harmony is always being so restoring balance.
'cause balance is always being lost and it's, it's that,
Jarod Anderson: It's balance is always being lost, regained, reimagined.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm.
Jarod Anderson: But, you know, balance is struck by, you know, opposing forces.
And so if I'm gonna create a fictional world in which there are really serious
threats from the outside, then you know, I need a, a very serious predator
guardian pushing back against that force.
Rupert Isaacson: Got it.
Jarod Anderson: And, and all of that, you know, it all arose from that
first decision to, to do exactly what I wanted, which I often find is the
most successful creative path of, of trying to get out of the way of my own
enthusiasm and, and not interrogate it.
You know, too much of like, why am I doing this?
What's the point?
But just thinking, all right.
I feel enthusiastic about these nature shows.
I feel enthusiastic about mingling the fantastic with the sense
of fantastic in the nature.
I, I know and love and observe every day.
I was
Rupert Isaacson: There, there is, as you know, a, a a a a sort of philosophy
within the philosophy of manifestation to say that, you know, you must always
follow when they say follow your passion.
It's really follow your excitement.
What makes you feel excited, what makes you feel joyful.
If you follow that, you'll probably get there because you will keep going.
And if you don't, you probably won't 'cause you'll get pissed off and stop.
Jarod Anderson: Oh yeah, that's, that's so true.
You know, I, I've definitely started novels I didn't finish and usually
it's because the kernel of the idea wasn't as exciting as I thought it was.
Rupert Isaacson: Luckily, they sometimes get recycled into
the later novel that comes.
But no, I agree with you.
And just for those of you, by the way, who are busy giving up on
your novels, don't worry lads.
We understand.
Yes.
But don't assume that's wasted writing at all.
It will, it will bear fruit in your next thing.
I just want to talk about this moon being older than the Appalachian things
I, 'cause I had to quickly get on Google while you're talking, and of
course it says the moon here is 4.5
billion years old and it says the Appalachians are approximately
480 million years old now.
Course this is just what I just pulled up on Google, so it doesn't mean
it's true, but when you say the moon is older than the, the app or the
Appalachians are older than the moon.
What do you mean?
Or is that almost more an an imaginary construct?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, maybe I'm, maybe I'm misremembering.
I, I know that at one point I wrote a little, little essay about
the Appalachians and I remember them being older than, than
Bones and older than warm blood.
And I thought the moon was in there too, because yeah, at some point
the Earth is what, six, six point something billion and at some point
there was like a, a huge impact.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, and there's some people who say that the moon
is just an, a hollow space station for various types of aliens who
the, the lizard people or whoever.
And if you throw rocks, love that it, it resonates and rings
'cause it's hollow on the inside.
And people say all sorts of things about the moon.
Right?
So I don't see wine in one's imagination.
Two, one couldn't have a mountain range that's older
than that, older than the moon.
But,
Jarod Anderson: It's, it's, it's funny, I I sometimes love those age comparisons.
Yeah.
You know, like, like, sharks being older than trees was one that I latched onto
for a while, or, you know, in Halloween I would, I would post something like,
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Jarod Anderson: You know, tentacles are older than, than leaves.
So, you know, sweet dreams
Rupert Isaacson: it seems, and what I'm pulling up on Google now is, is
ev it seems to be telling me that the earth and the moon are about 4.5
billion years old.
And that the Appalachians are 400, but 480 million, it's still pretty old.
I mean, it's, it's older than.
If the Cretaceous period of the dinosaurs is what, 60 million, you
know, and then you're going back, you're going back, you're going back.
And what's interesting too is I think that it, there comes a point where these
things are almost moot because in our experience, like from my mind, if, if
one believes that the moon is a God or a goddess, or if the moon is an alien space
station, or the moon is you know, younger than a mountain range, or these things are
I think we're allowed to have mythologies and mm.
You know, I, it it'd be very interesting, wouldn't it, if we, if
I was interviewing now somebody who was, you know, from a culture that
believed that the moon was a goddess.
And I said, well, that's rubbish.
'cause it's like someone might say, well, Rupert, you're racist.
You know, because that's, that's their belief.
Mm.
So I, I totally actually get that the, that belief systems are really important.
And that they're also true.
I think they're all true to a certain degree.
And I think, I think that's the important thing about, about writing
like yours, you know, if someone say, well, it's fantasy about cryptids.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And you can say yes, yes.
And at the same time, this is a product of the modern human brain.
Reinterpreting a mythology of nature as well.
And it's also, you know, a metaphor on mental health.
And it's also a metaphor on where we are in our relationship with nature right now.
And in finding ourselves precariously balanced.
And, and, and, and, and why can't it not be all of these things at once?
Why, why, why does it have to always be a hard and fast dry sort
of allopathic, you know, thing?
'Cause I don't believe that's the way the world works, you know?
You know what I mean?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
You know, I'm, I'm, I'm so often looking for points of unity and it's zooming
in and zooming out is a thing that I like to do in kind of my own, my own
practice in both imagination and mental health of like, you know, if we zoom
out further about me misremembering even the Appalachian Mountain thing, right?
It's like, all right, but the rocks of the Appalachian are older than the moon,
but the moon is also of those rocks.
Indeed.
Like how far back do we wanna go about,
Rupert Isaacson: about the arrangements?
Well, I mean, that's the thing that the moon and the earth are the same.
And the, and the moon was a bit of earth that broke off or something.
Well then it is of those mountains.
And those mountains are of it.
Jarod Anderson: Which I love, you know, I love, I love yeah.
Kind of looking up at the moon and thinking of it as distant and
disconnected and then, and then taking a moment to think, well, not really.
But then you can sort of do that with any aspect of the universe
is, is the way I, I often view it.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Jarod Anderson: Because connectedness has become something of my, my spirituality
in general that has developed in concert with the mental health practices
we're, we were talking about the novel, but, you know, the first writing that
really, that really found me an audience was I would write nature, poetry and
poetry about, about mental health.
And that built up a surprising social media following for me.
And then a lot of people would reach out to me and wanna talk about their
own, their own mental health struggles.
And that led to me writing a book called Something in the Woods.
Loves You.
Rupert Isaacson: That was what I was next gonna ask you about.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
So that really arose out of those conversations where I was getting a lot of
these messages from people who, and, and sometimes especially men sent me a, a kind
of message that I, I recognized myself in as the sort of hesitance to talk about it.
And the idea that I was talking about it I think they, they were either directly
or indirectly asking me how I got there.
But I said to my wife, like, messages on Instagram were not the
best context for this conversation.
Like I, I, I needed to take these people on a camping trip, like we needed to
talk about it for, for days and days.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Jarod Anderson: And so I started to talk about it as the long talk.
And, and Leslie, my, my wife, said like, all right, well,
you know what this is then.
This is a book.
And I just had a, a fortuitous moment where the publisher, timber Press,
who, who does Nature Books of all Stripes, reached out to me and said,
Hey, we, we really like your poetry.
Have you ever thought about nonfiction?
And I, I could say, well, here's an outline and here's the first six chapters.
So I was just in this, this position to accept their, their offer to take a look.
And that book is really my thoughts on, on my journey of, of
getting a handle on mental health.
But it is focused on my relationship with nature locally.
The book's divided into four seasons, and then each of the seasons has five
chapters titled After a Planter Animal That, that I have a, a relationship with.
And so each one weaves metaphor between nature and, and the self
and my struggles with mental health.
And you know, I, I was nervous writing that book because I didn't wanna
tell people I had it all figured out.
That sort of wasn't the point.
I didn't want to universalize my experience and say,
this is the way to do it.
I, I, I had one review I really liked that said the book was a
me too, not a how to that Okay.
That I really appreciated.
And it still felt so important to me because I felt so alone and isolated and
in my own struggles I didn't talk about.
So I really wanted to be open and vulnerable and, and
put it out into the world.
Rupert Isaacson: Some, someone who is becoming a nature writer, who's,
who's a good friend of mine and has also has a social media following.
She's called Jane Pike, who's New Zealand.
Yes.
She often talks about how when you're going through the landscape and
observing the landscape or admiring the landscape, what if the landscape
is observing and admiring you?
And, you know, I think many people, we, you know, awe is something that's been
talked about a lot now and the healing power of being in that state of awe where,
you know, one's own problems melt away in the face of, you know, the oneness
of the universe, blah, blah, blah.
The.
Idea though of feeling small and sometimes perhaps a bit threatened by
being not the top of the food chain or, you know, potential potentially,
you know, washed away by that wave or fall off that cliff or whatever.
Which leads to that or I don't think many of us get the message
very often that the landscape is really benignly relating to us.
But the reality, and she's pointed this out and I think she's right, this is
where I was very interested in your writing and your perspective, was that
well, actually no, most of the time what nature is trying to do is keep us alive.
Mostly it's trying to provide us with foods, it's providing us with medicines,
it's providing us with warmth and shelter.
It's providing us with what we need.
Mm-hmm.
And whether that's our gut biome or whether that's the mountain
that's sort of what it's doing.
And it does mean that, yeah, sure.
Sooner or later you're gonna return to the mountain and give your bits to the
mountain back, and then the mountain's gonna re, you know, reinvent you as an
earthworm or a tree or Jared Anderson.
But I liked this idea.
That's something in the words, love you.
And the person who turned me on to you, let me tell you about her.
So she's this really interesting person who's I think going to emerge as a
writer soonish called Leanna Tank.
And she works within, she's an occupational therapist.
She works within the criminal justice system in, in Michigan with people who've
committed some gnarly crimes and they can't be allowed back into society.
But they committed these things in moments of psychosis.
So they're actually acquitted but they just can't be allowed,
you know, properly back in.
And she exists as an interface between those people and, and she uses nature.
And she turned me on, said there's, there's this bloke, Jared Anderson,
who I find his writings very useful in the work that I do.
So you should know, Jared, that I can, I can report directly to you that at least
one person I know is using stuff from something in the woods loves you for Thank
you, you for that, that sort of work.
So it's clearly doing what it needs, the job it needs to do.
I would be grateful if you would read something.
I was trying to find on my cell phone just now what she had sent to me, but then I
thought, Sodi actually, you know, Jared should pull up what he wants to read.
So could you read us a bit?
Jarod Anderson: Sure,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Let's see.
I'll give you a choice.
Well, no, you're, I I have a, I have a thought.
This is a, a thing I sometimes reflect on about this book, where the fear
going into it was that as somebody who struggled with depression, I just really
didn't wanna write, go touch a tree and you'll feel better at the same time.
Even though
Rupert Isaacson: one often does actually.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Right.
At the same time, I often touch a tree and feel better.
So that's sort of the, the joke here is that this is a little section about
me touching a tree and feeling better.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Jarod Anderson: Pardon me while I find it here.
Alright.
Right.
So this is from something in the woods, loves You.
It was a chilly wet 11:00 AM on a weekday.
In October, there was nobody at the park.
Why would there be other people have real jobs?
Depression always has a comment.
I didn't wanna be there, but I was committed to running a small experiment.
I wanted to see if it was possible to have a miserable, successful day.
Whether I like it or not, all my versions of success require effort.
It's one of my old beliefs, and I can bend it, but not break it.
Human worth is innate.
Success means overcoming resistance.
It means work.
The air was crisp and misty.
I trudged through squelching mud, churning red and gold leaves
down into the hungry Earth.
On that walk, I didn't feel happy with either my beliefs about success
or the day's experiment, but I asked my legs to move and they did.
One more commonplace, miracle, moment by moment, stubborn, step by stubborn
step, I reached the shag bark hickory.
I reached out to the rough bark, the cold, wet, depressed, and contrary.
Part of my mind wanted to be cynical about the tree and dismissive of its presence.
I wanted to mock myself as a cliche, a crunchy, new age fake.
I wanted to call the day a waste, but that part of me fell
silent when my fingers met.
The tree here was 80 feet of hickory.
Over a century of life, turning dirt and pale Ohio sunlight into food.
I could eat straight from the ground into the oxygen.
I'd been breathing since before I knew what breathing was.
There was no ignoring it.
I could feel it there, really feel it alive.
Electric beneath my aching fingers, an ancient creature, silent and grand
beside a crooked little footpath family.
That Hickory stood tall over me.
And for a moment, it was the only tree in the woods, the only tree in the world.
The first tree, the last tree, the concept of a tree.
I tried to calculate its value, and in that moment I saw how
absurdly useless the word value is.
When applied to nature, like trying to pin a price tag on rain or sunlight or
gravity, I tried to imagine the tree as a human technology, and suddenly
I was standing in the presence of an impossible work of science fiction, a
solar powered self-replicating carbon, fixing automaton, producing oxygen, and
building materials on a planetary scale.
I tried to shift genres, fantasy and magic, and I found I was a small,
fleeting pilgrim who walked in the shadow of giants living off of their size.
How much of my own form and evolution was quietly shaped by trees, an opposable
limb for climbing posable thumb, for climbing shelter and refuge from
predators, fuel for cooking, unlocking more nutrients to build larger brains.
I know touching a tree does not cure depression.
Of course, I know that.
I also know that on that October day, the hickory didn't need to cure my depression
in order to take away its power.
Rupert Isaacson: That's good writing.
Jarod Anderson: Thanks.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: I've practiced.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, that's some good shit.
Okay.
What I like very much there too, apart from the fact it's just really
good writing, is I like this idea that you don't have to cure things.
So I don't know if you've probably haven't read any books that I've written, but
the book that I am sort of known for is a book called The Horse Boy, which
follows a journey which I did with my autistic son when he was five, across
a chunk of Mongolia on horseback.
And I've lived a lot of my life with hunting and gathering people, so I have
engaged in a lot of shamanistic stuff because that is what goes on if you spend
time with hunting and gathering people.
And so it was very natural for me to go look for that, but I never had in
my mind that I was looking for a cure.
Mm-hmm.
That to my mind, the autism was who my son was and is.
And that there were enormous gifts with that.
And that's like saying, I, I, Jared, I want you to stop being an American
man, or Jared, I want you to.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: I don't know.
Be, be something else, but No, you're gonna be Jared, you know, so you
don't want to, you're not trying to take someone's personality away, but
let's say I'm your friend or your dad and I see that you're suffering.
Mm-hmm.
Through some aspect or other, then yeah, I would, I would like to see if I can
help ameliorate or assuage that somehow.
And so the journey that we were on was about healing amelioration,
assuage, not about cure.
Yeah, of course.
What happened was that every single person who interviewed me about that book I would
explain that and say, I'm not looking for a cure and I do not believe you should
have a cure for autism and dah, dah, dah.
And of course it would always be titled he went to Mongolia to look
for a cure for his son's autism.
And then everyone would shit on me, you know, for saying, you can't say that like,
well I never said that, but journalists will say whatever they wanna say.
I know that 'cause I'm a journalist.
And one just accepts that that is the case.
But the fact is there is this difference between healing and cure.
And I think it's a really good one to talk about for a moment there.
'cause you've touched on it twice.
Once with this.
And the other thing with your cryptids, that the cryptids are not,
I think from what you've described, it's not, it's as if they know.
That like everything in nature, that there's an always a falling outta balance
and a coming back to balance and a falling outta balance and a coming back to balance
and the falling outta balance is as necessary as the coming back to balance.
The, the horned wolf could not survive if it didn't have prey, right?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: If unless there were your, your orbital
kingfisher, unless there was this many mouth shadow would die out.
Right.
Because that's, its, that's its food.
So we might say, well thank God for the orbital kingfisher because
it's taking away this shit thing.
And the orbital kingfisher will say, thank God for the shit thing,
otherwise I wouldn't be able to survive.
And both are true.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
This, this book I structured it starts in winter where I was really going
into a rough time with depression, but, but I end in autumn and part
of the point I am making is that depression is not a thing I cure.
It's a thing that I understand has cycles and seasons that my own mind is a part
of nature and has cycles and seasons.
But reaching for nature metaphors helped me get past my
main hurdle, which was shame.
The idea that I needed to be cured or fixed.
Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
people with neurodivergence, either who are professionals in the field.
Are you a therapist?
Are you a caregiver?
Are you a parent?
Or are you somebody with neurodivergence?
When my son, Rowan, was diagnosed with autism in 2004,
I really didn't know what to do.
So I reached out for mentorship, and I found it through an amazing adult
autistic woman who's very famous, Dr.
Temple Grandin.
And she told me what to do.
And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
That not only is my son basically independent, but we've helped
countless, countless thousands of others reach the same goal.
Working in schools, working at home, working in therapy settings.
If you would like to learn this cutting edge, neuroscience backed
approach, it's called Movement Method.
You can learn it online, you can learn it very, very simply.
It's almost laughably simple.
The important thing is to begin.
Let yourself be mentored as I was by Dr.
Grandin and see what results can follow.
Go to this website, newtrailslearning.
com Sign up as a gold member.
Take the online movement method course.
It's in 40 countries.
Let us know how it goes for you.
We really want to know.
We really want to help people like me, people like you, out there
live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
Jarod Anderson: And I mean, we could get into the idea that a lot of mental
issues have more to do with arbitrary and unwelcoming context we create for people
indeed, as much as the issue themselves.
But the metaphor that I got to through reconnecting with nature
I mean, it sort of goes like this.
I instinctually and easily love nature, and so I do not easily and
instinctually love myself in finding the connection between these two
things is a way for me to understand that I can turn that instinctual
love for what nature is on myself.
And I did that with the shame hurdle too.
And I'm a, I'm a poet.
I'm a writer, so I work in metaphor and, and the metaphor
I landed on, it goes like this.
If I planned a picnic and it was canceled by a thunderstorm, I could be
disappointed, but I wouldn't be ashamed.
Why?
All right.
Well, the thunderstorm is a known natural thing.
We know that I don't steer the clouds.
I didn't invite a thunderstorm.
So why would I be ashamed if a thunderstorm arrived?
Okay.
Depression's no different.
It's a known natural thing.
Nobody invites it.
I don't steer those clouds.
So with my day is derailed by depression, disappointment perhaps, but not shame.
And I, I tie that to this Nordic saying I love, which is there is no bad weather.
There is just bad clothes.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jarod Anderson: And so if I think of my own emotions, my, my struggles
as brain weather, all right, maybe I can't steer the clouds, but I
can change what hard weather gear I have hanging beside the door.
I can improve my shelters.
So, so no, I'm not vanishing depression from my mind.
I can't.
But what I can see it as is, is brain weather as part of the same push
pull, natural cycles that I see in love and recognize the importance
of out in the natural world.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Well, I, one thing I've often thought about that as, as people's moods, emotions
as weather or similar to weather, and we even use those metaphors, right?
You know?
Mm-hmm.
He's got a dark cloud over them or something, or he is a sunny person.
Makes complete sense that our endocrine system, which creates our moods, would
reflect the nutrition and the ecosystem that creates the endocrine system
that creates us in the first place.
Why would it not reflect the thing that creates it?
And something which I have been fortunate to discover in the course of spending a
lot of time in nature with hunting and gathering people, is that what sits, I
talked about the shamanic, what sits at the center of any community like that is.
Are the healers.
And it's really interesting.
Why are they there?
Because the human in the natural wild state is not top predator, right?
So we are halfway up the food chain, but we have this superpower.
You know, people talk about us being homo sapien sapiens, but that's actually
not descriptive of us because the thinking ape anything with a brain
thinks, and lots of things have brains.
In fact, some things have many brains.
So, but what is this, this atoms apple that I've got here that you've
got, which is this enlarged larynx through testosterone, the larynx with a
speaking ape, with a storytelling ape.
That's our thing.
So with a strategizing ape, and of course when we get together in a group and we
strategize, we are sort of unbeatable to the point that we're victims of
our own success destroying the planet.
But when one sees that at work, what one realizes in that halfway up the food
chain existence, which is the reality of say, living hunter gather existence
in Africa or something, there's lots of predators out there that will eat you.
That if there's fragmentation within the group, everybody
will get eaten by the hyenas.
So if conflict internal or external gets beyond a certain
point, then we're all at risk.
So therefore, all of the healing stuff is about conflict resolution.
And that is naturally who we are, which means that there must
always be a conflict to resolve.
And indeed when one is with those cultures, it's about every 10 days
there's some sort of healing ceremony.
It doesn't need to be because I fell down and broke my leg, or you
got bitten by a snake or something.
It could be for that, but it could also be just to wash the psychic dirty
laundry of the group to kind of keep us all cool, to make sure we don't
all fragment and get eaten by her us.
'cause we're funky monkeys with funky brains that are quite
brilliant, but also fragile.
So that mechanism which is there in our most natural state is inbuilt.
And in our culture, we don't have it.
And we, we've gone from the predator never being your fellow
human because there's so much out there that you gotta band together.
I guess to now in our society, having wiped out all those
predators, the predator is always and only your fellow human.
And that I think, drives us insane.
So I think, you know, when one is, you know, in a position where one says, well,
you know, I have, I have depression, or I have a tendency to psychosis, or I have
one of these things, I think there's never been a human that hasn't had those things.
But now we're in a, in a, in a state of living where those things
are no longer able to be addressed.
In the natural way, and now we have to flounder around.
But that's why I think that kind of writing that you're doing is very good,
because it takes the place to some degree of the shaman and the healer.
Jarod Anderson: That's, I mean, that's part of the hope, right?
Is that that's strategizing a part of you know, I, I love to
think of writing as a magic, as a magic that connects mine to mind.
Sometimes I, if I'm struggling to write, I'll go sit in a library where
I can see, I can see sort of this temple to words where people come for,
for real reasons to have real impact.
And so, you know, that that was a huge part of why I
wanted to, to tell the story.
And I love writing as entertainment, but I do think that, like the brain
weather metaphor, if I can explain that.
Well, I, I've had speaking engagements where somebody had come up to me
afterwards and said that they wrote it down and just kept staring at
it and thought like, okay, I feel lighter every time I read this.
And it's like, all right, well that can be the power of that storytelling.
Hey but only if, you know.
I actually bother to, to write it down.
And to get it out there.
I'm sure you've gotten the same sorts of comments on, on your story.
And, you know, it's, it was so scary leaving that academic job, but, but
this, this just feels like such an amazing calling and an ama amazing
privilege to, to get to do this.
Rupert Isaacson: How long ago did you leave the academic job?
Jarod Anderson: Geez.
I feel like it's been like seven years now.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Jarod Anderson: Right
Rupert Isaacson: around there.
And that's not, that's not that long.
And the reason I ask is for someone with depression, I know very much as
a professional writer, it's a scary puff because you are only as good
as the last book that you wrote.
It takes, I was
Jarod Anderson: just talking about this.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
You know, just the fact, you know, and maybe your last book was
successful doesn't mean your next book is, and doesn't mean that your
publishers or your agent necessarily think your next book will be.
Doesn't mean that they'll, it's,
Jarod Anderson: I was just talking about this in terms of like, things
are going well right now, but as you said, I have no control over, over the
market or the next book, or I don't know, supply and demand that stuff.
And so.
I, I, I'm constantly thinking about hedging my bets and part of that is, is
sort of a, a mental health thing where, because I feel good right now, that's
the time to build support systems.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I'm like, who will value these, these publishing accomplishments?
And it makes me think like, do I need to get an MFA so that I
could teach creative writing?
Do I need one?
Like I, I, I'm, I'm constantly looking at these other paths and it's
Rupert Isaacson: never a bad idea to add some skills to your hunting kit.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, as a hunter or gatherer,
Jarod Anderson: well, that words, that was the thought with like the M FFA
or teaching creative writing is that there's synergy there because it's not
as if I'm going to stop writing ever.
Right.
So Neat.
It would be fun to be in a, a, a creative writing degree program.
Because I would be doing what I would be doing anyway.
Rupert Isaacson: So think you then have those stacks of essays to mark of the
people who didn't wanna write them.
Jarod Anderson: That's the thing.
Right.
It's like, why would I go back there?
Paying
Rupert Isaacson: the rent is, is a little bit more
Jarod Anderson: less.
Well, yeah.
My, my, my wife kind of teases me about it because she's
like, everything's going well.
Like, you're, you're kind of living the dream right now.
It's like, yeah, but this, this isn't a dream that comes with a, a pension.
Exactly.
So it's, it is.
It, it always is tub
Rupert Isaacson: me at the back of my mind.
Yeah.
How do you, because, you know, I, I, I also like everyone have my ups
and downs mentally and emotionally, and I've definitely gone through
times where you know, the fear.
Jarod Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: And also, you know, as you know, having had a book
that has been successful I had a book that was successful and that,
but leading up to that had lots of books that were not so successful.
And there is that thing of when you finally do get something that's
successful, and it could be anything, I think anyone who's listening
to this or watching this Yeah.
You know, can, can put their own professional life into
this doesn't have to be a book.
It could be whatever, but when suddenly people are giving you
validation in a big way, it's very, very hard not to get attached to that.
And in fact, I think you're going to, you, you, you can't not you're only human.
And then of course life goes on and it might go from strength to strength,
but it's more likely to have cycles and, you know, troughs and, and, and
crests and waves like anyone else's.
So this is a particularly challenging field to be in if you're someone who
struggles with self-concept, with mental health, with so forth and so forth.
You know, this the ups and of the downs.
So tell us, tell me how you navigate that.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, I have, I have a few answers for this.
Kind of the, the meta stuff and then the day-to-day stuff.
It took, it took me over a decade to break in and get an agent,
like in fiction, for example.
And
Rupert Isaacson: by the way, lad's listening, it really does, it takes
a while before someone was back here.
Yeah, yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And so, Leslie, my wife, she was in the same boat.
We, we were both sending novels out to different agents.
And, and so the thing we would say to each other when we got really
frustrated, the kind of running joke was, what are you gonna do?
Stop.
Because we'd always loved telling stories.
And so my, my advice to writers who feel like they're banging their head
against it right now and the thing that worked for me as somebody with
depression was, was process goals over outcome goals, which can feel a little
fuzzy, but I mean it in this way.
Like, I never controlled if an agent liked a query or if I sold
a story or a poem or whatever.
I didn't control that.
So that would be an outcome goal, process goal.
I could control.
I'm gonna do six queries this month, or I'm gonna send out this many stories or
poems, or, or I'm gonna write this many words, you know, a week process goals.
Keeping in mind that I like this, I know it gives me energy.
Focusing on that and the process and then letting all that other stuff be on the
back burner was really helpful to me for that long span where I couldn't find an
audience and I couldn't get a foothold in any kind of traditional publishing.
And then as somebody who has serious ups and downs with depression, then the
challenge is how do you write a book?
You're not gonna write a book because you have a good week.
It's, you know, it's a, it's a marathon.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
And often your best writing actually doesn't come in those times.
Jarod Anderson: No, no.
Rupert Isaacson: Comes at your times of most vulnerability often.
Jarod Anderson: I, I also firmly believe that, like, I can't tell,
I can't tell until much later.
What's the good and what's, what's the bad like for me?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: But what I do know is that if I'm not consistent,
I lose hold of the pacing.
I'll lose, I lose hold of the story I'm telling.
And so even on the bad days, I have a sliding scale for that process goal.
Like if, if I'm in a book, I, I try to do at least 500 words a day, but I do have
an out where I can also do a half hour.
Where if I'm, if I'm in the chair sort of rereading and planning and writing
notes, if nothing comes I can still call a half hour of victory because
I'm still attached to the narrative.
I'm still squirming in the chair.
And I have to do that because of the way my brain works, where if
I say 2000 words a day or nothing I know where that leads for me.
Yeah.
That means like writing becomes touching a hot stove and Yeah.
I, I am not a rules guy.
Like that was a, has been a problem for me in the past.
Like, I, I, I am not motivated by, by rules, external or internal.
So like, I have to find ways to celebrate victories, to stay friends with writing.
So I really do kind of move the goalposts on what counts as a win.
Rupert Isaacson: That's, that's very, that's very clever.
I think.
'cause you know, I struggle with that too.
And, and sometimes I go through times when I, I won't write.
And I'm asking myself, why, why aren't you writing?
And well, we know the answers 'cause I'm scared.
But the,
I haven't cracked it, I think even this far into my career to always get to the.
Computer daily.
And I distract myself 'cause I have other thick ways that I make a living
and other very pressing things that I do.
So particularly, you know, work with autism and things like that.
So, you know, I can definitely kid myself that I'm doing such a necessary
work over here and it is necessary that I can kind of ignore yeah.
The call to write and then I know that if I do that for long enough, it will
punish me.
Yeah.
Emotionally, mentally, and so on.
So it's amazing if you can bend the rules like that, but do you ever actually
fuck up to the point where you look up and you say, actually fuck, you know,
two, two months just went by there.
Three months just went by there and I didn't actually do anything.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, absolutely.
Rupert Isaacson: Good.
I'm reassured
Jarod Anderson: at, at, at, at this age.
Like, you know, now sort of deep into my forties here.
Now, at least what I have though is the track record of thinking
Yeah, this happens, you know?
Right.
I come back to it like,
Rupert Isaacson: and I probably will get there.
Jarod Anderson: It, it's also, you know, there comes a point where
it's, it's, it's part of the, the furniture, it's part of the identity.
Where I think that's part of why it feels so bad when it's not happening
or when you have a, a bad month or two or three, is it's like, all
right, well, you know, writing is who I am and I'm letting who I am down.
Yeah.
In, in some way that's more painful than, than not folding the laundry.
But again, like I, I, I try to come back to the, like, seasons and cycles thing
that I firmly believe, but I don't wanna lie to you and say that I always feel it,
you know, it's funny having written this book, sometimes I have to crack it open
and remember my own viewpoint on things.
You know what I mean?
That's interesting.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
I
Jarod Anderson: do be because
into what?
Because one also forgets what one writes.
Yes.
And, and, and baked into being a human being is knowing things and
forgetting them and relearning them, and knowing a thing and failing anyway.
Or having good advice for yourself and not taking it.
I mean, the best thing I can say about it is it's all just such a
natural and inevitable part of the process that, that you try to shrug
at it a little bit, even though, even though it's painful sometimes,
Rupert Isaacson: what, let's go now to the other side of the scale.
So when you are on that successful wave and
one self-concept gets tied up with, I'm now a successful author.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and therefore, you know.
It's like a football game.
You know, I've, I've scored a touchdown, you know, now I've
gotta keep scoring touchdowns.
And you know, that inevitably, you know, you may or you may not, but
you, you may well score quite a few more touchdowns, but you will also
not score quite a few more touchdowns.
And anyone looking from the outside says, well, that's perfectly fine.
That's just normal.
That's just, but of course, from the inside it's, it's, it's much trickier.
Now that you've become successful, how do you navigate that?
Because that's another tricky one for mental health.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, I was listened to writer v Schwab's podcast, I
think it's called Know Right Way.
And they were having a conversation about this and the conversation was, if your
book does well, you need another book.
And if your book doesn't do well, you need another book.
Like, ugh.
True.
That's so true.
True.
But how, how brutal to hear it said that way.
That is
Rupert Isaacson: brutal.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And the problem with books is you gotta write the bastards.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
It takes a long time.
Rupert Isaacson: Oh, it takes forever.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
I, I find that I have to do this serious compartmentalization, right?
We're like, I've, I'm very interested and here's one compartment and I'm very
deeply interested in this book I'm doing and this idea, and it's my whole world.
But.
I have to keep it in its compartment because maybe
it'll do well, maybe it won't.
I'm gonna read brutal one star reviews for it.
I'm gonna read five star reviews for it.
But I'm, those aren't the ones that I'm gonna remember exactly.
You know, and so it's like, all right here's this thing that
was, my whole world still is in a way, it's in this compartment.
And I have to say to myself, in some level, the reception
of it is none of my business.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes,
Jarod Anderson: because like, I believe that art is a funny thing where like,
I've done my part and now whatever art is happens in this space between the thing
itself and the person interpreting it.
And, and somewhere in that interaction, that space between those two, those two
molecules, the, the electrical bond, like that's, that's where the art is happening.
And all I can do is provide my one molecule.
And then, you know, I've done what I can, and I try to say to myself, if
the book has found its people at all mission accomplished maybe the book
let somebody write a a mean review.
And, and they really enjoyed that.
You know, like I try to, I try to be shruggy about it.
Yeah.
But again, as we've been talking about, then there's the financial
component and the career component
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And all that
Rupert Isaacson: feeding your kid component.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
All that stuff's terrifying.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And the only thing I can do there is think of it as
terrifying in the same way getting hit by a meteor is terrifying.
Like, nah.
I, it's so far outside my control.
I try to say to that fear like mm-hmm Well I'm gonna do the part I can do.
Yeah.
And that's it.
Yeah.
You know?
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
No, good advice.
Alright.
You said that you had ended that book with autumn coming into winter.
So now you've teased us.
Now we've gotta hear it.
Can you read that bit, please?
Jarod Anderson: Oh, sure.
I can read some of that.
Let me find a good spot.
I I'll tell you, a lot of these chapters have to do with learning
something from an animal, right?
Yeah.
Or, or a tree.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jarod Anderson: And much like the art thing I just said, that meaning is
happening between me and the animal.
The animal isn't the meaning.
It's, it's this idea that I, that that fact and, and truth
are sisters, they're not twins.
It's like there's the fact, here's a raccoon and then the meaning, the
truth behind it is something else.
Mm-hmm.
It's related.
Mm-hmm.
But, but I have, I have a, a, a part to play.
And so.
As I am making peace with the idea that depression isn't gonna be gone forever.
The animal I reached for was the raccoon,
Rupert Isaacson: big fan of raccoons.
Jarod Anderson: Me too.
I I run into them a fair amount.
I around
Rupert Isaacson: here.
Yeah.
In, in, I just have, I've been living in Germany for a long time and raccoons were
released into Hesen, which is the part of Germany we're in and about a hundred
years ago now, there's raccoons around.
Mm-hmm.
And I get a kick out of the fact that there's raccoons in Germany just being
a little bit anarchic there in the woods and people Oh yeah, they're invasive.
Dunno.
Well, maybe, but they're there and I'm certainly en as entertained by
them there as I am in North America.
Jarod Anderson: Okay.
I think this is a part that's relevant to what we're talking about.
Let's try this.
I once growled at a raccoon that was approaching my campfire and he just
stood on his hind feet as if to say, if you're feeling froggy, then jump.
Big guy.
I laughed and shared my sandwich.
The primary thing raccoons seem to do is thrive.
They thrive in human spaces and wild spaces.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jarod Anderson: They're versatile, intelligent, and exude an
air of crafty stubbornness.
It can be romantic to glean life lessons from herons and hawks and
deer leaping through thickets.
But there are many seasons in my life when what I really need
is the teachings of raccoons.
The fall the fall we retreated from Seattle was one such season.
The fall when my recent successes in fighting depression seemed to
be slipping away was another one.
I imagine these two disappointing autumns transposed one on top of another.
I saw the raccoon pawing at the apartment door in Washington state.
I saw the raccoon peering out of my dumpster in Ohio.
Both creatures spoke with one mouth asking an essential question, who
says survival has to be pretty?
I didn't want to hear it.
I had spent months working with my counselor Mark toward a stable
mind, and I felt it slipping away.
It hurt.
I hurt.
It was the old hurt.
Winter's hurt the kind of depression that sits on your chest until
your ribs ache and your lungs burn until you just want out.
And I go on a little later in this section to picture that raccoon
sitting on my kitchen counter, you know, eating Doritos with orange
dust all over his face and, and.
Restating that like you're not in a beauty contest, like you're
struggling with mental illness.
You need to change your definition of what success is.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Because, you know, I just had this, this swell of confidence
in my ability to control my own sadness.
And when it came back, as it inevitably does, I felt crushed that, oh no, I
have not solved this once in forever.
Of course I haven't.
And it went back to the way I started that shag bark hickory section
of learning to have sad, hard, successful day and understanding that
success is completely subjective.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm.
Jarod Anderson: In terms of judging my own life circumstances.
So yeah, I could catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and realize that I hadn't
changed out of sweatpants for 24 hours.
But, you know, is that a huge failure?
Who says, you know, and feeling like I have never cured depression,
but wow, I have gotten some great techniques for rejecting shame.
And that has taught me that shame was such a big component in the old
suffering that I didn't recognize.
Because if I can leave aside shame, then suddenly I get to be on my own side.
Before it was depression seemed against me and I was also against me because I
was judging myself for having depression.
So there, there didn't seem to be a lot of people in my corner inside my own skull.
So finding a way past that shame and understanding that there were
seasons when I need the raccoon is, was really a big, a big help to me.
Rupert Isaacson: Interestingly, you know, shame when I have talked
to, again, hunters and gatherers who are not saints, by the way.
Jarod Anderson: Sure.
Rupert Isaacson: They don't deal in shame.
It's so interesting.
And it's not that it, the emotion doesn't come up.
It's not like we've invented the emotion of shame since agriculture, but
their mechanisms for dealing with it are so useful in that what they sort
of say is , it's almost like they, they would almost use, I think, a
metaphor like you would for with your orbital kingfisher or your horned wolf.
That the, the that the shaming exists almost like a demon shadow side of
ourselves that has a function to a degree, which is to basically show us
where we don't wanna be but shouldn't be allowed to get beyond a certain point.
And then you bring in your ancestors or your shamanic help meet your horned
wolf, your orbital kingfish, or whatever.
However, if one wants to get people to do what you want to do.
And of course, in hunter gatherer culture, nobody does that.
Jarod Anderson: Mm.
Rupert Isaacson: It's not built into the economy.
There's no need for it.
In fact, it's counterproductive because it leads to conflict, which
leads to fragmentation, which leads to everyone getting eaten by hyenas.
But when agriculture comes into the picture and toil
and going out there and just.
To plant the crop and to pull that crop out of the, you know, and to deal with
the fact that the crop might fail and actually now you need slaves because
it's, it's so, to which means you need war and you need that and well
then shame is a very useful thing.
Oh, it's so useful,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: To get those people to go out and do what they don't
want to do for their entire lives.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: You need shame.
Otherwise no one would do it.
So here we come along 10,000 years plus ish after that inheritors
of that, especially, you know, if you're in Ohio, why do people go
to Ohio to be agriculturalists?
You know?
Mm-hmm.
And so you're gonna get, you know, huge reinforcement of that.
Not surprising that in the absence then of a good medicine man
who would've been there at one point, but isn't there anymore.
But there is the shag bark hickory under which the medicine man would have
operated and that that medicine man or woman would have drawn resources from.
And we are still the same species as that hunter.
God.
So there's still this innate rebel part of us that knows that shame
is a mofo and wants to absolutely look it in the eye and reject it as
the demon, as sauron as you know.
How does Sauron get.
You to put the ring on.
What does, you know, what's putting the ring on all about?
It's about doing the wrong thing.
It's about shame, right?
And being seduced into doing the wrong thing until you eventually
become a shadow of yourself.
And then you become the nasal who are, you know, consumed, consumed by shame.
They do actually get to ride around on cool dinosaurs as well and live forever.
But apart from that, yeah.
Jarod Anderson: It's How many
Rupert Isaacson: cool
Jarod Anderson: noise?
Lemme lemme just say that like the stubbornness I, I I I locked in on that
word when you said it too, because I think that that was part of what helped
me in understanding that, that shame has most of its power when we think
we have to keep up this silent facade that we are perfect and unquestionable
and publicly or beyond reproach.
And so, like stubbornness and rebellion, like me sharing it all
publicly, continually is a little bit for me rebellion of, of, of
saying, you know, of given, given the middle finger to like that impulse
I had for years to stay quiet.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And then moving past that fear over and over again, I felt
like I get stronger and stronger because I am so open and honest and vulnerable.
And then I have people telling me, oh, me too.
So then the isolation starts to melt away, right?
Rupert Isaacson: Community comes.
Yeah.
Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
Because all of a sudden I don't have some uniquely detestable thing.
I have an issue that lots and lots and lots of people have, and as soon
as we start talking about it openly
Rupert Isaacson: Common humanity
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Then what role does shame have?
Rupert Isaacson: If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm
guessing you're somebody that, like me, loves to read books about not
just how people have achieved self actualization, but particularly
about the relationship with nature.
Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
what started Live Free Ride Free.
And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
Land, which tells the story of.
My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
Come on that adventure with me.
Yeah.
Well, shame gets you to pay your tithe to the church is what it does.
Jarod Anderson: Oh, that too.
Yeah.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah,
Jarod Anderson: too.
Rupert Isaacson: Interestingly, I have a raccoon kitchen
story, a really cool, real one.
I lived in Texas for a long time.
We had a cat door for years and years and years.
The cat door was not exploited by raccoons until one day when it was.
And you always know when the raccoon has come in because it lands with
a particularly heavy thump on the floor that it's, that's thump enough
to wake you up in the bedroom.
Wow.
That is away from the kitchen.
And I remember waking up going, I bet that's a raccoon.
And going in and finding the raccoon in my kitchen and like looking at him
and like I'm standing there stark us and thinking, oh, you know, I really
wanna, I really don't corner this animal.
Yeah.
Without a suit of armor on, you know?
And sort of suggesting to him a little bit with the broomstick look, dude.
Yeah.
And having him kind of go, no bummer.
All right, fine.
But it's not like he ran and this went on and this went on.
'cause he was after the cat food.
And no matter where I put the cat food or whatever, he always found the cat
food or she always found the cat food.
And so finally we came up with the idea one day of buying
like this really super duper.
Difficult complex Tupperware thing with this big complex Tupperware thing,
lock thing on it with the cat food.
And sure enough, I hear thump and then I hear the door, and then I
hear the stuff comes out of the cupboard and blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, I wonder if you've got to open that cat food.
Yeah.
I've got a know.
Right?
So, so I go in and there was this bonding moment between me and the racoon.
The racoon.
He's like there and he's trying to figure it out.
And you can see, he's like, I've got a thumb out.
And his tongue out and his, and he looks up at me.
And in that moment it's like he's got any ideas.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: And I'm like,
Jarod Anderson: don't just stand there.
Pitch in.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: The reason I bought that Tupperware was to protect that
cat food, but hats off for, and then you could seem like a bummer.
Yeah.
And then he just kind of moves out of the
Jarod Anderson: Around here.
Rupert Isaacson: What I
Jarod Anderson: often, yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: It was a, a bonding moment.
And there was this part of me that really actually thought rather,
like you saying, well actually then I just shared my sandwich.
You know?
Jarod Anderson: I have, that was a real story.
Yeah.
I mean, a raccoon came right up to me at, at the fire and I, I thought to myself
like, should I run this raccoon off?
And I'm like, I'm gonna give him half of my sandwich.
And he took it like with hands.
It was such a strange moment.
And more than once.
Now around here, I've, I've rescued them from my, my dumpster outside.
'cause they crawl in to look through the trash and then have a moment of, oops.
They can't get out.
Rupert Isaacson: Isn't it interesting how, particularly in our culture,
there is this real kind of, you're not supposed to like raccoons,
you're not supposed to tolerate them.
Yeah.
You're supposed to wag the finger at them, but they're so charming.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And as you say, also, I think they are a real
metaphor for thriving, not just surviving, like anywhere they can be.
Anywhere you'll find raccoons.
And one things I also love about raccoons is that you can be in the
really shy urban environment in the US well in Canada too, and actually
Mexico, and you'll always find a raccoon.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And that raccoon will always be doing well.
In the uk we have a very similar thing with foxes.
Urban foxes, urban red foxes are a real thing.
And you get these people like, oh, I'm like, no, they're
reminding us of the wild.
Yeah.
Like how amazing that you could have that
Jarod Anderson: We have urban coyotes on an uptick too.
Indeed.
Around here now.
Indeed.
I indeed.
Talking about shame and what animals are, we're allowed to like I have a chapter
about gray squirrels and the whole metaphor there is, you know, I went to a.
Store that sells bird feeders.
And they had half the stuff there was aimed at how to keep gray squirrels away.
And you know, I have this moment of like, wait, why I love gray?
Squirrels are great.
I I love seeing them.
You know, there's all this bird seed laced with cayenne and all these baffles
and I, I reached for that as the metaphor of of society arbitrarily making any
kind of neurodivergent unwelcome.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it's the, it's the, it's right.
It's the wild animals that can thrive in our controlled environments Yeah.
That we detest the most because they, we fear them.
I think because they remind us that the wild is just as you can pave over
nature, but then cracks will appear and that forest is gonna come back
up and that we cannot control things.
Jarod Anderson: I'm writing a short book about dandelions right now
for the same publisher that did something in the woods loves you.
And it's the same kind of thing of suddenly there's this billion
dollar industry of herbicides trying to get rid of dandelions.
And why, you know, why, why do we hate dandelions and one of
Rupert Isaacson: the most nutritious plants on the planet?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
And health
Rupert Isaacson: giving
Jarod Anderson: great for pollinate.
I mean, you know, the deep tap roots area of the soil on and on and on
about the values of dandelions.
But all of a sudden because of lawns and this weird 18th century European.
Aris, you know, aristocracy, landscaping trend.
Like now we, we don't want dandelions, like monoculture lawns are, are terrible.
They're, they're really broken landscapes.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
Jarod Anderson: Absolutely.
But I, I also think we distrust things that are free and
things that are, are abundant.
Like yeah, dandelions are more nutritious than spinach and kale, but like, but
they're growing along the roadside and you don't have to pay for them.
So we just trust that.
I
Rupert Isaacson: think we attach value to them.
Yeah, absolutely.
We better shame them so that and they were too, too common, nor were the red screw or
nor were the raccoon, nor were the coyote.
It's, it's interesting.
I, I've got a, a great squirrel story, so then I want to hear yours.
So I, I have a couple of stories that are I live in Texas moments.
Jarod Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: And one of them was shortly after I moved into rural Texas.
I let the battery of my truck run down accidentally.
And so I had to try to wave down someone to jumpstart my truck.
And I waved down a truck at the bottom of the driveway and it's this old
black dude with his granddaughter who must be about 21 or so, two loaded
shotguns pointing out of the window.
They're both drinking beer and as they pull out and I'm about
to say thank you for stopping.
I've got jumpstart before I can open my mouth.
Bloke says, garnish squirrel.
And I'm like, garish squirrel.
Garish squirrel.
What does that mean?
Oh, do I have any squirrels?
I'm like, well, yeah.
I mean, the woods behind the house.
I see them.
I mean, but I wouldn't say I have one.
But anyway, here, here's the problem I've got.
And I go, ah.
So he comes up and he looks at my engine and he criticizes it and he says, oh, your
engine is, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And he says, where are you from?
And I'm like, well, I'm British.
And he goes, well, that's in Europe.
Yeah.
And then because he turns out he was stationed in Europe,
you know, during the war.
And he, you know, he's actually traveled a lot and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he's right.
My engine is a bit of a shame.
And he, but he jump starts me and wishes me Good day.
And then he and his granddaughter drive off sipping beer and I watch him
go outta the driveway and then I see them put the brakes on like that, the
two shotguns come outta the window.
Boom, boom.
As they're shooting at the squirrels in my trees below on the road there.
And then they drive off.
And that's an, I live in Texas moment.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, that's pretty Texas.
Yeah.
Nice.
Rupert Isaacson: Could you read us your gray squirrel?
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Can do that.
Rupert Isaacson: Another will not be shamed animal.
I love it.
Jarod Anderson: Let me find it.
You'd think I'd have ency encyclopedic knowledge of where
things are in this book, but
Rupert Isaacson: I can't remember anything that I write about.
That's
Jarod Anderson: just not how my brain works, you know?
Rupert Isaacson: Also, I love to think about long, long format
podcast is, it doesn't matter.
You could take 10 minutes to find it.
We weed, you know?
Jarod Anderson: Oh, I love it.
Yeah.
I yeah, this is, this is my, my strange squirrel story here.
I went to school for, for my master's in Athens, Ohio, which is this hilly town.
It's in Appalachia, Ohio's interesting.
Two thirds of it, flat corn fields, and that's where the
glacier came down and stopped.
But where the glacier stopped, that's where what is officially
Appalachia and the US begins.
And so a third sort of southern eastern counties of woods of
Ohio are steep hills and woods.
And that's not what people picture for Ohio.
And
Rupert Isaacson: stunningly beautiful, by the way.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Oh, I love it.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And so that's where I went.
I went to, to university I, my memories of Athens, Ohio, the brick
streets are always wet with rain.
It's an unseasonably warm winter day that smells like overripe autumn.
The sycamore is gleam like bleached bones, jutting from the hilltops, bright and
distinct among the sober university halls re tan, bronze, and weathered concrete.
On one such day, the one endless day of my Athens memories, I was walking to my
English department office in Ellis Hall when I noticed a line of halted traffic.
I couldn't see why they had stopped until I reached the front car.
I made eye contact with the driver.
She looked to the road and I followed her gaze.
There on the wet bricks was a gray squirrel tailed down, limbs
tucked inward, seemingly awake and aware, but stoned still.
The driver gave me a micro shrug and continued to wait for the
squirrel to do whatever it would do.
Somewhere down the line of cars, a horn blasted, an angry
voice rose and fell on impulse.
I did something foolish.
I walked up to the squirrel.
She didn't move.
I reached down and laid a hand on the squirrel's back.
She was warm and her heartbeat drummed against my fingertips.
She still didn't move.
I scooped her up with two hands and carried her out of the street.
And the years since that day, I have been acquainted with wildlife rehabber
who have puckered scars from squirrel bites, but I had no such experience.
Then behind me, I heard the traffic resume, tires muttering on slick brick.
The squirrel was a soft furnace vibrating like a tiny engine.
I considered what I knew about tending to injured wildlife,
which was nothing at all.
The Road University Terrace was cut into the hilltop, hemmed in
by sidewalks and a low stone wall beyond which was a vast lawn.
I don't recall anyone commenting on my actions, but Athens is an odd
place, a small Appalachian college town where a man carrying a squirrel
might not rate a second look.
I placed the squirrel carefully in the grass and expected to spend the
next few minutes as an uncomfortable witness to the small creature's final
moments, standing sentinel as whatever injury that had stilled her body.
Finished taking hold.
I withdrew my hands and stood the moment.
I did.
The squirrel rose and raced off toward the nearest tree, a sprint and a leap.
Her plane of motion shifting from horizontal to vertical as
she skidded up the trunk, then vanished behind thick bows.
I wondered at her experience of events, imagining her perspective, the fear
in the road, the inscrutable cars, the touch of human skin, the return
to grass into a frantic moment of escape, a rush, an arc through the
air, the flat winter sparse horizon, transitioning to a branching highway,
stretching up toward a limitless sky.
I don't know if the squirrel had fallen and was momentarily stunned.
I don't know if she visited the road to lick salt and lost consciousness
due to some unguessable malady.
All I know is that the change in position brick to grass, a return to
a familiar context, unlocked whatever mechanism had held the creature.
Motionless.
We understand the world through stories, the stories we hear of others,
role models and cautionary tales.
The stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves, the constantly
unfolding saga of identity.
But what of the squirrels, they clearly function just fine.
In a world without human narrative.
Is it possible for us to step outside our own stories and imagine their worldview?
So that story and placing it in the grass, unlocking it is kind of the
beginning of me getting to the metaphor of sometimes the context is really what is
important, and it can often be invisible.
This idea that our identities are built of stories, our understanding
of the world is built of stories.
And at a very young age, we're handed a lot of stories that we
internalize and those become.
Our fundamental building blocks of reality.
And so seeing those stories and understanding that as storytellers we have
a role to play in shaping and reshaping them is such a key part of, of what I
wanna tell people about mental illness.
Rupert Isaacson: It's really interesting when one encounters these things
in nature that seem to go against the physics of what should happen.
Like when a squirrel not only sits their motionless and lets you pick it up, but
then also doesn't panic and bite you.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: But then seems to return to its immediate health and go,
you know, what on earth is going on?
And you have to walk away and say, I just don't know.
Jarod Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: But I'm so grateful I had that experience.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And I think experiences like that in nature,
those kinds of ordinary miracles, but nonetheless, when you tell anyone that
story, they're like, whoa, no way.
Because all of our understanding, all of our story around squirrels is not,
that means that somehow something went on that allowed you to have that
experience and then relate that experience
in healing context.
As you say, the context is always invisible, is often invisible.
I like that.
That I think in.
A lot of things happen for healing.
And I, I, I, we can't see it frequently at the time.
Serendipity, I think, you know, comes into that.
I'm often intrigued by why do animals and plants and rocks seem
to sometimes see what we need and generously offer it across species.
Why do you think that is?
Jarod Anderson: I think, I think honestly the question is, is the thing that we
have to interrogate because that idea that we internalize all these early
stories, I think one of the big ones is this idea that we're visitors to
nature, that we're like aliens coming and, and visiting and tending and
controlling which is, you know, nonsense.
It's manifestly untrue.
Like every, every breath we take is a call and response with phytoplankton
and the nations of forest.
It's, we're only alive because we are fundamentally
intrinsically part of nature.
So why shouldn't it be there as, as family for us?
Mm-hmm.
And, and be reaching toward us anytime we reach for it.
I mean, sometimes I, I find that just the intention of going to
nature, and that could be the woods.
You know, it could be, it could be looking into the sky.
It could be finding a patch of like, and on a sidewalk, but going with
the intent of connecting with the broader world and sort of the, the
wholeness of, of the life around us.
And, and that's part of our story and part of us just that intent
is, I think where you find that nature is reaching back to help.
Right.
Give us what we need.
Rupert Isaacson: We have to do the outreach.
If
Jarod Anderson: yes,
Rupert Isaacson: yes, if we reach out it, we'll reach back.
Jarod Anderson: And it can be imagination, you know, it can be
physically going to nature, nature.
Often it's both for me.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Jarod Anderson: But I find I do different kinds of reaching for different days.
Like, there are days where I need movement and I will go and I will, I will do
three miles in the woods pretty fast.
And the movement and the trees and scanning my environment
is what feels healing to me.
And there are other days where I go, I walk until I can't see a, a
parking lot or a car or, you know, I, I can't see anything but trees.
And I just sit, I sit at the base of an oak tree very still and
just let the scene unfold and.
There's nothing stagnant or stationary about it.
You know, as I sit all sorts of different animals come and
visit, I see different things.
I hear different things.
It's a completely different experience than when I'm
trying to put miles behind me.
And it can be the same location, but those are very different experiences
that fill different needs for me.
So what we take with us is, what I'm saying is, is so important.
Rupert Isaacson: I I also like the fact that you say it's all right to go
into nature in these different moods.
You know, frequently we're told we must go in there to be still, or we must go
in there to forage, or we must go in.
And, and, and the truth is we must go in there to do all these things.
And, and no, no one is better than the other.
'cause nature is where we live.
It's planet Earth.
We might have forgotten that, but outside the walls of the apartment
that we are living in, actually it's, it's the same as it ever was.
It, these ideas, these kind, you know, storytelling can be as negative as it's
positive as you know, shame is a story.
Mm-hmm.
So your orbital kingfisher hunting out.
The shame perhaps, and, and, and I'm projecting my own story
onto your orbital king Fisher.
'cause I'm deciding that I like the fact that it's hunting out shame.
'cause that makes me feel healed in some way.
It may at all not be what your idea of it was, but that's a
lovely thing about stories.
We can project ourselves, you know, into and through story.
But the fact is it is a story.
And you know, animals presumably must be living their own stories too, and
having stories and trees must be having stories because we cannot be, if,
if, if things are, if it's, if it's a conscious universe, if it's, if it's if
interlocking fields, if, if the quantum state of reality is what physicists are
now beginning to agree upon then how can we be the only storytellers out there?
We can't.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: It's just that, you know, so did your squirrel have a story?
And the other thing I like about your squirrel story is that what
really stands out to me naturally, of course, is the squirrel's
behavior and, and the enigma of that.
But also the lady in the car who was willing to stop and wait, knowing
that all those people behind her.
Eventually someone will probably get out and probably give her a hard time.
But she was going to.
Not run over that squirrel.
And she also wasn't gonna get out of her car and try to chase the squirrel off.
There was something in her that was saying, it's worth instinctively
in this moment to give this squirrel the space, even though
I'm going to be shamed by the Yeah.
People behind me.
And then also something that instinctively, and you
said, this is the moment to
take that story to its next chapter,
that lady stopping the car.
You picking the squirrel up, the squirrel not biting you.
Again, just makes me think about how loving nature is this idea that it, you,
you say something in the woods loves you.
And we are the same.
We are a very loving species.
You know, not everyone automatically tries to run the squirrel over or chase it off.
Not everybody instinctively thinks, well I, I can't pick that squirrel up because
it might mess me up and, and it might.
Jarod Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: But maybe your gut in that moment for whatever, you know,
so they're the animals living this, there's nature living it's stories
in, in relation to us, and there's.
Th those three, you, the squirrel, the lady are all
behaving in a very loving manner.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And that, that seems to me the basic energy
of nature is that it is love
Jarod Anderson: to, to go on a complete tangent here, but it's related my mind.
That's, that's a thing I'm often thinking about in terms
of modernity and social media.
That worries me.
Because I mean, what's the opposite of the idea that there's sort of
internal loving mindset to reality?
Well, social media and a lot of people seem to be living inside
these virtual non-space as if it's their real environment these days.
And
I don't think everyone really understands the fact that it's
not a natural environment.
Like the algorithms we have science that show that it steers you toward posts,
engagements meant to trigger kind of fear, anxiety, anger, because those capture
your attention and keep you scrolling.
And so we have these evolved brains that, you know, walk,
walk the path, scan for threats.
And then we have these, these marketing engineers who have
found a way to kind of hack that.
All right.
We'll give you a thread, every three steps and then, you know, give
Rupert Isaacson: your attention.
Yeah,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
And we find ourselves living in this, this space, and I feel like it's really
doing some damage to the idea you were saying that nature is loving, that the
world is loving, that there's something intrinsically loving to the universe.
Well, there are a lot of people who are living through their screens and
thinking that it's a window, it's not a window, it's not showing you reality.
It's showing you a very specifically crafted kind of experience that is
telling you that you live in a world of threat and, and danger and outrage.
And that's not to say that, you know, a, a lot of the issues aren't
real, are manufactured, but it's the concentration and intensity of
the way you get them presented when you're living through, through screens
instead of walking a landscape.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Jarod Anderson: And it really worries me kind of about, about the general
outlook I see in the zeitgeist about what nature is, what the world
is, what our role is in nature.
I yeah, go, go ahead.
Rupert Isaacson: No, you go ahead.
Jarod Anderson: Well, I, I got a, I've gotten messages before from people who
just see humanity as a cancer and that it's a mistake and that, you know,
we are, we're a but you'd be behaving
Rupert Isaacson: like that that way a bit.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
And, and certainly, you know, the, the threats and the harms are real.
But the idea that there is no positive interaction between human beings
and nature, that the best thing you can do is stay away or not exist.
And, you know, that's, that's kind of heartbreaking as someone who
feels like, you know, we're intrinsic parts of nature that we're, we're
animals on the, on this planet.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, also somebody who, who's, you know, you're wearing
the mental health, you know, thing on your sleeve that, you know, it's,
that's letting the, the shame story win.
Right.
You know, and you don't have shame.
You
Jarod Anderson: are shame.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: That's, that's brutal.
Indeed.
We are shame all of us.
Yeah.
But the, what I would say to that, 'cause I'm an eternal optimist, is while
it is true that people have replaced sex cells with fear cells, with anger
cells, and that is kind of been the progression of the social media evolution.
What is also true in those algorithms is people are going to find your book and
they're going to find this conversation through an algorithm, and they're going
to find a conversation about why shame is actually a construct through an algorithm.
And they're going to find a conversation about why we are a loving species.
And nature is essentially.
Benign, I think, through an algorithm.
So no matter how much social media tries to do that, or the architects
who are perhaps not such great actors who are controlling it,
Jarod Anderson: yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Even they can't control the natural mycelium type
growth of the whole thing to say.
Yeah.
But, you know, Ru and Jared are gonna kind of come together through Ru's
mate Liana, who's doing this work for the, in the, you know, penitentiaries
or whatever, the Lockdowns in Michigan and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And, you know, well that's gonna come through an algorithm too,
so I wouldn't have found you.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: It's,
Jarod Anderson: it's a
Rupert Isaacson: good point.
I, yeah,
Jarod Anderson: I live on a little one way street next to a, a cemetery
in a town that isn't very big.
So Yeah, I'm, I'm having a lovely conversation with a writer in Spain right
now, and that's, there's no reason that would be happening if not for Right.
We're the technology
Rupert Isaacson: because this will go through YouTube and
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Apple or something or other, and all those other portals
that people find these conversations.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
The connection is real.
I just sometimes worry about, about you know, in terms of intentionality,
ly context, a couple of old
Rupert Isaacson: buggers, but Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Well, yeah, but the, the intentionality and context
and just kind of being aware of.
Storytelling animals.
We understand the world and our place and through stories, but there are so many
people there ready to hand you a pre-made story and without your participation.
And just being a little bit aware of that and what impact it has
on you is, is, is a huge just a vital, a vital task for all of us.
Because a lot of people will hand you stories that, that have nothing to do
with serving you or, or your happiness.
Rupert Isaacson: Certainly.
Certainly.
And we've had that since we've had, you know, cautionary fairytales and scaring
each other around the fires at night.
Jarod Anderson: Homilies
Rupert Isaacson: right now, some of those things are actually
designed to keep you alive.
But also you can just tell 'em 'cause they're scary just for the sake of scare.
Yeah.
The thing about, you know, one could say, well, all you need to
do in order to rebel against that is go for a walk in the woods.
And then I thought, yeah, but what if you can't reach the woods?
Mm-hmm.
And I had this writing student who was a little girl from South Korea who
came to us in Germany to our stable.
And she was.
Passionate about horses, had her between the ages of eight and 10, and she was one
of the sweetest human beings I've ever come across to the point that people in
my team, we'd almost fight for who got, who got to go with Suji that day, we'd
be like, no, no, you had her last week.
Because just being in her presence was really healing.
She was just one of those people that carried that light.
And she knew she was gonna have to go back to Seoul, and that when she got
back to Seoul, there would be no horses and there would be no German forest.
And when the week came approaching her having to go back, I was
thinking, what, what can I do?
What can I do?
And I thought what I need to do is implant this experience of riding in the German
forest in her psyche in a way that she feels she can call upon it anytime.
So we made these rides, meditations into imagining herself in an apartment
in Seoul, imagining this ride, and then imagining where the ride would lead
and watching herself grow up and making money, and then being able to buy horses
and then being able to buy a place in the forest and being able to find
a partner that liked horses and live that life and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And she then really ran with this and began to construct
her own stories as we rode.
And that occasionally she, of course, she did go back to Saul and
exactly what she feared happened.
Would happen, would happen, happened.
But she does write me from time to time and say, I follow those stories and
I know that those stories will lead me to back to a horse in a forest.
I think the work that you are doing where you say, okay, let's say you
can't get into nature, but you can imagine it and maybe you don't know
maybe you're not a actress, you're not a budding David Attenberg.
So you dunno what tree it is or what bird it is and okay, then there's
the shame of not, or you can imagine something completely different like you
horned wolf or your orbital kingfisher.
And if I've been at the trance fires with the sun Bushman healers and they
describe to me the entities that they encounter when they're in the spirit
world, many of them are not dissimilar from the orbital kingfisher and the many
miles shadow and the, and the horned wolf.
You know, we are love it the species that we are, we're going to come up
with these metaphors, you know, no matter where we are 'cause nature's
in us and we are nature and so on.
But one of the things I love about your work is that for people who are
in that situation, whether they're like my friendly Anna's people who
are perhaps not able to access nature despite living in the middle of Michigan,
unless she takes them out in it or it's.
My friend Suji there in Seoul, or even just someone who is in nature, but
just so locked in their head through depression that they can't feel they
can access the loving side of it.
I think that those works of imagination bring imagination and nature together,
which is a shamanic experience as old as humanity itself, but must be reinvented
and reinterpreted for every generation.
You're doing that work.
Jarod Anderson: Oh, thank you.
I think it's you.
Rupert Isaacson: You are doing healing work.
Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: Can I read a poem or two?
Rupert Isaacson: I
was
Jarod Anderson: reading into this topic.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
Jarod Anderson: All right.
You're you, you made me think of a poem here that this is a poem called
Orcas, which I do not have in Ohio.
Somewhere.
There are orcas.
I'm in my little gray house in Ohio surrounded by the stale air of winter
indoors, but somewhere there are orcas.
It's an easy fact to forget.
It's easy to shrink your world to what you can see, but thankfully
somewhere there are orcas.
Sometimes my world is all sun faded, plastic scrolled along the roadside
and a scribble of petty meanness.
But somewhere there are orcas.
We all know facts that are as inert as chalk dust, but
some knowledge is medicine.
So I, I never see orcas, but they can still be medicine for me.
And sometimes I reach for the fantastical in imagination, and
sometimes I reach for just literal facts.
And sometimes it's animals and sometimes it's a concept.
Let me, let me drop one short poem on you, that it's a concept
in nature poem that, that I love.
This one's called Naming the River.
The water in your body is just visiting.
It was a thunderstorm a week ago.
It will be an ocean.
Soon enough, most of your cells come and go like, morning due.
We are more weather pattern than stone monument.
Sunlight on mist.
Summer lightning.
Your choices outweigh your substance.
Like I, I'm constantly ruminating on what just the bare facts of my physical reality
are, and then taking those and running them through a filter or a lens of, of
my imagination, taking my sense of wonder and connection, and then letting that
interpret these, these bare facts for me.
And even when I can't get out of the house sometimes that's all I need too.
To feel that connection to nature.
Which is funny because sometimes it feels like a leap of faith.
And, and other times I think to myself, well, all I'm doing is looking at sort
of bare uncontestable facts, like, like the water cycle or orcas exist.
And I have a 6-year-old son who, who sometimes reminds me of this process
just, just through his questions.
I mean, he, he came up to me once and asked me if electric eels were real.
And I thought, wow, what a reasonable question and, and what
a bizarre answer I have for you.
Yes.
And I've seen him
Rupert Isaacson: and thank heavens that my answer is the bizarre one.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
But I mean, so much of our, of the bare facts of our world are bizarre.
It's just that it can fade from, from your mind and from your
awareness through familiarity.
But I've seen my son shake with excitement about a bumblebee, you know?
Yeah.
And, and if you think you'd been, let's use our imaginations and think
we've been traveling through space for a thousand years, and you're in
a vacuum, and you're in, you're in a, a clean, white lined spaceship.
Traveling, traveling, traveling.
And you encounter a bumblebee.
What a singular, fascinating alien, amazing mind blowing thing.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And, you know, we, we can take for granted that,
that I see 'em bouncing around the forest floor in, in May.
But, but I try not to let that familiarity rob me.
I mean, I said lichen on a sidewalk earlier.
If you don't know, look into what lichen is like.
Lichen is two animals living together.
It's a garden and it's a gardener.
It's a shepherd.
And it's, it's a, it's a herd and it's hard to tell which is which when
you're looking at the photosynthesizing organism and the fungi and like
lichen is fascinating and I kind of defy you to show me a place where you
can't find it outside of, you know, the permafrost, you can find lichen.
It's just reaching for the wonder.
If you really reach sincerely for wonder and, and you come to it as a student,
I think you will find it reaching back.
Rupert Isaacson: If you reach for wonder and you come at it as a student,
you will find it reaching back.
Have you written that down?
Jarod Anderson: No,
Rupert Isaacson: I think you should.
I should.
Huh?
Should that down?
Jarod Anderson: I have,
Rupert Isaacson: I want 50%.
No, I mean 80.
Sorry.
As you're,
Jarod Anderson: thank you for your writer brain pointing out that I should
Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
Write it down quickly.
That is very good.
Jarod Anderson: I mean, the student part is important, right?
It's, I think
Rupert Isaacson: because it's humility.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
And, and the times I have felt most stuck and trapped and stagnant in my life is
when I, I let my ego get out in front.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: And like, I've figured it all out and it sucks, you know?
Rupert Isaacson: Well, because figuring stuff out, figuring it all out would suck.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Isn't that
Jarod Anderson: and is impossible.
Like I, I sometimes look out my, my window here and, you know, I
can see a blue spruce tree and if I dedicated my entire life to just
being a student of that one tree.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
I
Jarod Anderson: don't, I don't know that I ever stopped being a neophyte,
a newcomer into what that tree is and does and feels and how it's
connected with a host of microorganisms in the soil and on and on and on.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jarod Anderson: And that's just one tree I can see.
Like, the world is amazing and full of limitless opportunities to be amazed.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
Jarod Anderson: But she's not gonna kick down your door, you know,
you do have to, you do have to go.
Or just open yourself up and invite it in.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
Listen, we are at the two hour mark.
I would like you to come back on this show.
Jarod Anderson: Great.
Rupert Isaacson: And talk about some specific things about some of the,
the themes that we've touched on particularly somewhere there at Orcus.
Jarod Anderson: Hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Because yeah, this idea that
the fact that it exists beyond your site can give you fact.
Like, you know, people say, well, prove to me that God
exists 'cause you can't see him.
That's a really nice analogy.
It's like, well, I can't see orcas.
Jarod Anderson: Hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: But I know they're there.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
I haven't seen a documentary with David Ner about God with pictures of
God, you know, ju leaping through the Arctic Ocean, unless the orcas are God.
And then I,
Jarod Anderson: I think I'd rather have Steve Irwin on that one.
I know.
Rupert Isaacson: So I think people are gonna, you know,
find you have a website, right?
Tell us the website.
Jarod Anderson: I do.
I do.
It's, it's jared k anderson.com
or you can find me anywhere on social media as Jared k Anderson
or the Crypto naturalist.
Rupert Isaacson: And the, is the crypto naturalist still going?
The podcast?
Jarod Anderson: It's on hiatus, but there are, I think, 70 episodes up.
And you can kind of start anywhere
Rupert Isaacson: to get their teeth into that.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
And now this, the book I have coming out in February is sort of
a, a capstone to that whole series.
So
Rupert Isaacson: tell us again the, the, the name of the the book,
Jarod Anderson: It's called Strange Animals, and it comes out February 10th.
Rupert Isaacson: Ballantine books.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Which, which I was really warmed by them buying it because I, my copy
of The Hobbit was from Ballantine.
They're, they're sort of an old classic fantasy publisher.
So there were, there were maybe a few tiers when, when they
decided to, to publish that novel.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna ask you to leave us with one more poem.
Jarod Anderson: Absolutely.
Hmm.
Choices.
All right.
I think I have an appropriate one for us here.
This one's called Woodland U.
It's easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel
a bone deep love for nature.
It's less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the
exact same nature, the pathways of your mind, your dreams, dark and strange as
sprouts curling beneath a flat rock.
Your regret bitter as the citrus rock of old cut grass.
It's the same as the nature.
You make time to love that you practice loving the forest, the
meadow, the sweeping arm of a galaxy.
You are as natural as any postcard landscape, and deserve the same love.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm very glad that my friend Leanna turned me onto you,
and I'm very glad that, thank you.
Other listeners asked me to have you on.
I would come
Jarod Anderson: back.
Thank you.
I'd love to.
Yeah, I would love to.
I you might, you might have gotten a sense I could talk about these things forever,
so I I had no idea that was two hours.
If you
Rupert Isaacson: hadn't, we enjoy it.
Well, that's the lovely thing about these long format.
I, I, I love the fact that one has the freedom to explore.
Like this is, you know, I I, it was always something which I always
found, you know, rather stressful.
You know, when people interview you and you know, you've gotta be interviewed
and plug the book, blah, blah, blah, and they, you know, you know, you've got 15
minutes or you've got eight minutes, or you've got three minutes, or you've got
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: That's what I love about podcasts and maybe this is one of the,
the nice things about social media now
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Is actually, you know, you can just let, let it unfold
naturally because, you know, people are just gonna listen to it in chunks.
Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: I've never, I never like a podcast and wish it was shorter.
I don't, I don't understand the mindset of No
Rupert Isaacson: un unless it just happens to be a great
short conversation, then Sure.
Brilliant.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: But yes to say, well this is a 20 minute format.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, it's, it, it's me thinking of, of, of shows.
I know where they cut the interview off because they're reaching the,
the 30 minute mark or something.
It's like, why?
It's a podcast.
It's not like you're, you're in the way of the next show.
Like, just keep going.
Right.
You know?
Rupert Isaacson: It's because the podcaster has to go change the
nappy on his kid or something.
Jarod Anderson: Well, that, yeah, that could be, that could be right.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
This, this has been so lovely and yeah, yeah.
Really nice.
Excited to talk, talk to you again.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm, I'm really grateful for this.
It was, it was brilliant.
I'm gonna go feed ponies.
Jarod Anderson: All right.
I'm gonna try to get some words written.
Wish me luck.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, now I'm feeling shamed, so I, I better go.
It's not your fault.
But it's, no, it's inspiration.
I need to, I need to work a bit more on that.
Jarod Anderson: I'm, I'm up against a the dandelion book is due in, in January.
So,
Rupert Isaacson: but we love a good deadline.
It's, it's, it's, I love a good deadline.
Jarod Anderson: We do.
I, I, I both hate them and recognize their value, and so we need
' Rupert Isaacson: em.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah.
I, I, I keep jumping into them because I know it's, it's how I get things
Rupert Isaacson: done.
It's nature.
Again, you're not gonna go hunt and lay down the meat for winter and the
firewood unless, you know winter's coming.
Jarod Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Jarod Anderson: It's one of the one grateful things I am too, about being
in traditional publishing because I self-publish the poetry collections
and the traditional gives me deadlines.
So
Rupert Isaacson: indeed, you
Jarod Anderson: know,
Rupert Isaacson: and
Jarod Anderson: All right.
Thank you, Ru.
Rupert Isaacson: We'll see you next time.
Jarod Anderson: Bye.
Rupert Isaacson: Cheers, man.
Bye-bye.
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I can't wait for our next guest and also to meet you there.
In the meantime, remember, live free.
Ride free.