Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz, and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all the beings. It's a podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and an emerging new and yet very ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with earth.
What it takes is humility. It takes deep listening and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth. My guest today is Vanessa Wihngaarden. She's a researcher at the University of Liège and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg, and she's part of a small but very growing group of people that are asking a question, a question that most of our entire culture has learned to ignore.
What if communication with other species isn't a fantasy, but what if it's a capacity that we all have that we've forgotten? And even more deeply, what if the wisdom of the other beings, what if they're necessary for us to navigate these transformational times? Well, Vanessa's the one who's going to help answer that question and with much intention.
She's a bridge builder trained as a social anthropologist with years of field work in East Africa. Her work explores what happens when different worlds meet, especially where power and perception and othering shape that encounter. She's been a ethnographic filmmaker in her award-winning documentary, The Maasai Speak Back, created this rare dialogue between Maasai communities and European visitors revealing just how much is misunderstood and what becomes possible when people are actually able to listen to one another.
And now she's taken that question of listening even further. Vanessa's new project bridges Indigenous knowing with scientific knowing. She's the founder and the lead of ANICOM, a European research council funded project that explores the intuitive interspecies communication across cultures and contexts.
So what she does is she brings together indigenous animal communicators or knowledge holders and other animal communication practitioners together with a team of hard scientists, researchers, to ask what would it look like to work with animals as participants in knowledge making rather than just simply studying them.
What most animal communicators are focused on is the wellbeing and the needs of a particular animal, a pet, or a wild animal in sanctuary, but Vanessa's team is interested in what these beings have to say about our shared world. The scientists were wary to expect other beings to be able to think abstractly, but what they discovered might surprise you as it did them.
Vanessa's enthusiastic presence made this conversation so fun. I left the conversation full of hope and like actual joyfulness. So I hope you enjoy this beautiful, loving human who's listening deeply to the beautiful, loving world.
[ transition music plays]
It's a beautiful cloudy day, but it's getting warmer and warmer every day, feeling like spring. I like to begin just by welcoming all the others that want to be here with us. Those we can see, those we can feel and know and and the sacred that is in the between all things. Opening this space with compassion and love and anticipation, that what wants to be witnessed, what is yearning to be seen might be how our direction leads.
May we be led by spirit, by our own hearts, and by the will of that which we know connects us all, the Christ that lives, gives us life, that is in and between all things. And with that I say, selah, pause, 'cause may, this whole conversation be a prayer.
Vanessa: Amen.
Victoria: Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me today. I know you have a very busy life and lots of demands and so I really appreciate you taking time.
Welcome.
Vanessa: Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm really glad that we can do this and I'm really looking forward to, yeah, what evolves in this discussion.
Victoria: We had a little bit of a connection to get to know each other a few weeks ago and I just, my heart burst open being with you. It was, it's just an honor to be present with you.
Since we last talked, I was able to watch the trailer of at least one of your films, so I kind of wanted to start there. In your deep relationship with the Maasai, and I know that that's something that has formed you, that has shaped you, that has, not just in your perspective about life, but in your spirit, the way you approach all of life.
So normally I might ask our guests, tell about the land who raised you, and this is the land and the people who have been raising you. So I would love to start there, Vanessa.
Vanessa: Wow, beautiful that you ask about that. I talked a little bit also about, yeah, the land that raised me when I was a little child. My time on vacant lands and wastelands in between the houses and the little town where I, uh, where I was staying and where I was actually meeting my first animals, which were mostly insects.
And, uh, spent time with them and discover new places and new beings and where I learned like how to keep myself safe, how to orient myself, and also how to get myself back home when being in I never was before.
Victoria: and where was this?
Vanessa: This was in the Netherlands, so I grew up there and I never stopped that kind of explorations, I think, wherever I came. And when I think about Maasai Island, my first time living in Maasai Island was in, in Kenya, I think it was 2007, close to Maasai Mara. So I had to be careful when I was exploring that I wouldn't get seen by the tourist vehicles because you're not allowed actually to walk on foot on those lands if you're not Maasai.
Victoria: Okay.
Vanessa: The Maasai, of course, walk from village to village, but if they see a white girl walking around there, they probably won't let her. I was discovering there, but most of the time I've been living in, in a small village in Tanzania, and when I'm talking about it, I can see the mountain we call, uh, Ol Doinyo Lengai, the mountain of the sheep and the goats. It's a place where I used to climb up to pray. Yeah. It's right behind the homestead. These are like small circular villages where the cattle and the goats and the sheep are kept in the middle pen, and then the houses stand around to protect the animals. Yeah. And the houses are, it's normally a man and his wives and sometimes some of the, yeah, some of the children have maybe already married their first wife, so they've also built in that same village.
In that kind of landscape and that kind of place, I really learned a lot, because you might have seen that a little bit, in the trailer of the film only relates to this a little bit, but the film is actually about what is called Osotua, which is, I see it as the basis of the Maasai cosmology that informs the way of living with each other and with the land and with all the beings. And it has a lot of aspects that are maybe similar to concept like Ubuntu. It is a relational kind of worldview. It's actually, the word literally means the umbilical cord.
Victoria: Oh wow.
Vanessa: So it is the connection between the mother and the baby, to which actually very selflessly she gives of herself and feeds the baby cow, most of the time. There's a bit of a focus on cows, of course, in Maasai. But it also means to be kin, to be related to each other. As kin. It means friendship, especially if there's an exchange of gifts, it means peace. So it is an overall way of being in the world where life is considered greater than you.
Life is not about you. Life is bigger than you and it flows through you and who you are in the world is not as we have in this individualist capitalist society about what you have achieved or what you have, but it is about the relationships that you have. All your relationships make up who you are. That is your maybe legacy or imprint, or your agency in the world is in your relationships.
Victoria: That must just to comment on that or draw it deeper, it's like that's the fundamental difference and what we're fighting against in our Western culture is a worldview exactly the opposite. For me, that's behind everything that I do, and there's a lot of people like us in the world who know that this fundamental worldview, if that doesn't shift, which is a spiritual, like you said, cosmology way of seeing everything, then there are all these constant little fixes and we can't maintain that.
So just hearing this helps me to put some puzzle pieces together about how that leads into the work that you're doing now with reconciling that broken relationship with the rest of the alive world, much less with one another, but it's also interconnected as one place shifts that could impact the next.
Vanessa: It's interesting what you're saying because for me also, it was a big shift, and I must say that when I first started living in that context, I was suspicious. I was wondering if these people are for real because what they were telling me about how they saw the world and how they wanted relationship.
Yeah. I was simply not believing that I was. What is in it for you? What is your strategy behind this? What are you gaining from a relationship with me? For example, what is your thought behind what you are telling me? And it really took time to be living in that context for really a longer period of time, I stayed in Tanzania most of the time, six months at the time. Then I went out back to the university. I was doing my studies and then come back again into Maasai. It took time, relationship takes time, eh? The relationship thing. And this trust, it is something that I think in a lot of the more Western society, we have been taught not to trust and to be careful and to take care ourselves because otherwise other people will take advantage of you and it is a totally different mindset.
But the most interesting thing is that when you get all the way deep into that mindset, that cosmos of Osotua, when you go all the way in it, you can't even see anymore that there's anything not relational or not right, or you even lose that perspective. And it's really beautiful, but it's really interesting also, especially for someone like me who is going in and out of these different worlds, and also for Maasai themselves nowadays, who are getting much more in touch with other ways of being in the world to also protect and to hold that and to cherish what can be seen as being naive and maybe silly sometimes.
But on the other hand, that is maybe a deeper truth that is always there, even if we are playing another game.
Victoria: Right? The gameness of it, it's like the questions we ask reflects what we see.
Vanessa: Yeah.
Victoria: And so just even asking the question that Westerners do, because our worldview is, like they said in the little trailer of your film, you know, our worldview is all about money and getting ahead. It really is. That's what domination is all about and extraction. And the scene that I saw in, in the trailer was a young boy saying, "white people aren't stupid. They're just focused on money."
Vanessa: It's actually a young lady.
Yeah, of course. This kind of way of thinking is coming inside everywhere, and it's actually also from the other side, a beautiful miracle that on the other hand, we are still living together and building bridges and yeah, trusting each other and seeing what is more important despite all the things that are going on.
I believe for me, it is something so powerful that it actually cannot be broken or forgotten ever because it is basis of all of life.
Victoria: Because it's reality.
Vanessa: Yeah. We all get born out of the body of our mother. Now we get fed through another body and we die to give our bodies back to the earth. It's not going to be different than that.
Victoria: Well, that is so much the center of life and how much, and then it makes sense how much damage a culture has done without that worldview that we're doing exactly what our worldview has set up for us to do. Is to regard the rest of the world as inert and it and objectified.
That leads me to ask you around the work that you're doing now that is really prophetic and revolutionary because that's exactly what your work is, is bringing these two cultures together to find what's real, to find the truth that is right here in Earth and we've forgotten, but we can remember.
We've forgotten how to listen to the land, those insects you met when you were young. All of these others that hold the wisdom that are our elders. And so, when I first heard you, I was enchanted just because here you are, you're doing that, you're bringing these, our culture that is forgotten, but with a culture of people who have not forgotten.
And we have so much to learn from that and how to find the right reciprocity with those relationships. I think it's a worldview honoring of what's real. And those people that you made those films with at their invitation really have a lot to show us. And now you're going to step deeper in the relationship with the animals.
You wanna share what that is, and the link is very clear to me from the work that you did when you were younger to what the work that you're doing now. But maybe you could talk about that a bit.
Vanessa: Yeah, the link is, I think there are so many moments that I had in nature, especially with animals. Yeah. That sort of lifted up the wheel for a moment that I was like, oh wow.
I can remember I was in Australia and this was the first look into the eye of an humpback wheel that I ever had. It's like she was pushing up the baby next to the boat. I was of course thrilled to see them there. I was still very young. I was just 18. I was on my first travels.
Victoria: Oh, wow.
Vanessa: And it was, of course, amazing to have this huge animal. And then I had that look in the eye and this was the moment that I felt, I just knew that. Oh wow. This is another consciousness looking back at me. And I didn't think about that before that. I was just enchanted by the whole thing, but not realizing like, oh, someone is looking at me and I can remember like for example, falling asleep in the middle of a group of wallaby and feeling so safe as part of this little herd.
Victoria: Oh my gosh.
Vanessa: I don't know. There was just this feeling when you are inside. I had it later with the herd of oryx in Namibia as well. They took me into the sand dunes and they really, you can feel it when the energy becomes that you are inside the group. It's a different kind of feeling and it feels so wonderful and so safe. That kind of herd feeling is, is amazing.
So many instances now, but I think one of the biggest ones was when I did a period of fasting to pray for the new year. And I learned this from my African friends in church. We actually did it together. I never grew up with church, but in Maasai I started to go to church because for them, Christianity and this cosmology of Osotua is actually matching really well. And I think your book, Church of the Wild, you can see why there is a very clear match between the two that maybe is illogical to some people and they feel like it's just a missionary who brought Christianity. But there is also an inside connection to the teachings that are in there, not always in the same way as they are explained or understood in Western context, but there is an inner link as well.
And through that I started to be curious because I saw some people had that light that I couldn't explain it. But it was so good. And as I said in the beginning, I was even suspicious that something can be, you know, can something human be so good?
And I did the fasting and this is when it shifted for me because while I was on a prayer walk in the forest, I found the deer. I always used to find them because I'm quite good at tracking them. I can feel where they are because the place feels a little bit different. But now they didn't run away. And that was the first time actually, that I started to be really close to the animals and even have them at ease with me when they had their babies and that I could just, it felt like a Garden of Eden feeling that, that kind of harmony.
Victoria: Oh, oh my gosh.
Vanessa: Yeah, and I was so honored. That was the deepest thing maybe, that I was so honored that they allowed me and that they were at ease with me present. And I know you've had some of these experiences yourself as well. No?
Victoria: Well, it's that I often say like, the biggest compliment I can get from a wild one is that they don't pay much attention to me. They'll just ignore me. And I love how you talk about that, that something in you shifts that's very, very familiar. Very much home, very safe, and a huge honor. Like the fact that I, when I've had these encounters, I am flummoxed. You know? I'm just like, this is amazing. Amazing. The fact that it's so unusual tells you how immersed we are in a worldview of disconnection.
Vanessa: Yeah. Because when you're in it, you also realize that it's actually so normal. It's actually finally normal. Yes.
Victoria: Yeah. Right.
Vanessa: Yeah. So yeah. So that is how that started. I started being interested in, yeah, some animal communicators, people who, for their profession, trying to be that bridge between humans and other animals. But I also connected it in a way to some of the things that I had learned in Maasai.
So I felt that there was also a lot of knowledge, although maybe slightly different from indigenous communities, from around the world. So I did a pilot first, so I got some small funding for that, and then I got actually a big grant from the European Research Council and managed to obtain that. They're very competitive.
Victoria: I can only imagine. Congratulations on that.
Vanessa: Thank you. Yeah. It was a hard for my system. I think it was not easy because it goes deep into another kind of world. No? To be able to obtain such funding and what you, how you have to work and think and yeah, you spend your life behind a computer, huh? So, yes, yes, that happens.
But the ground is there now. I found a team, very, very beautiful people from all over the world, from different backgrounds. Three PhD students from anthropology, environmental governance, and health studies from Burundi, Indian Canadian, and a German postdoc who is a biologist. And we're working with collaborators mainly in eight different locations.
There are smaller collaborators in other locations, but we try to focus on eight, yeah, main collaborators who are partly indigenous peoples and partly professional animal communicators and what we are trying to do... yeah, it's always a little bit hard to explain maybe, we are doing a lot of things.
But what we're trying to do is to see if that intuitive way of communication, for lack of a better word, knowledge somehow flowing between people like human and non-human people, if that can be part of academic knowledge making and how. So that means we're collaborating with these different indigenous peoples and animal communicators to think about that. To think about what is this kind of communication actually, how do people from very different places do this? Because there's a lot of parallels in how people do this, and that actually led me on to do research on this because if people from very different cultures and backgrounds, very different places that have never met each other are doing this in the same way, then there must be something.
Victoria: Tells you there's something about reality, right? There's this is bigger than, uh, a local learned from my grandparents and this is what I do, which is amazing enough. But you've found people from very different cultures bringing different disciplines together and asking these core questions. Yeah, I wanna hear more.
Vanessa: I'm trying to learn that. And then together with the animals to also include their knowledge and to see how there can maybe be methods for other people as well in academia to use so that they can also include the knowledge from the animals and converse with them. And it's focused on animals. Now, I must say, because that is for science, that was the first step. There's a lot of now biological research on animal consciousness, animal languages. Science starts to accept that animals are communicative, social, sentient, conscious beings with knowledge and culture and, and all that. But it actually goes beyond animals. It doesn't stop there. The plants for sure.
Victoria: Yeah. And, and a lot of that science is happening. But I see what you're saying. The animal science is a few generations ahead of the plant science. And with this culture, you, you can start with the experiential 'cause people have all felt this, but they don't wanna talk about it. They don't know how to talk. We don't have permission culturally or personally, until you start to give people permission and you start telling stories and they're like, well, I have these experiences too. And or you start from the science and what you're doing is bringing those together, giving people permission, to say those feelings, those thoughts, those instant memories, those unexplainable sense of peace and belonging are real.
It's not just because you've been doing your prayers right or something. It's because this is reality. And when we are able to pull those layers, like you said in the beginning, the veils, when the veils start falling, they keep falling.
Vanessa: Yeah.
Victoria: And maybe that's the answer like in the beginning of like, how do you go from a opposite worldview? You do it by experiencing it and then having words for it. And placing it in your world, and not all of us have opportunities like you've had to be able to feel it in real time to live within a culture that is so centered on interrelationship.
Vanessa: Yeah, for sure. And it's really beautiful because what I see also in our workshops is that we have scholars coming there from all sorts of different backgrounds and often in their professional lives, they do not feel safe to talk about the things that they experience as a person, as a human. So, and those experiences, you mentioned, for example, with animals, you said like we all have had those experiences, and I don't wanna talk for everyone, but I think really a lot of people have had those experiences, but that is somehow not official or something like that.
And what we're trying to do also in our team, and we're trying to create a space where as humans, we can also really be ourselves. And that all of our being is allowed to be there when we are doing academic work, when we're doing science. Because I think that that sort of artificial separation between a professional identity and then your personal life is actually detrimental to our knowledge making because it means losing a lot of things and if people are safe enough to really be themselves. And we saw that also in our workshops. Um it's sometimes very emotional. Also in our classes with the master students, uh, a lot of time emotion comes up because it is all allowed to be there and people are like, wow, I've never set this in front of colleagues, or, I was never able to present on this or to do this, although it's close to my heart and my heart is calling for this. And I hope that we can somehow bring those things together because I think what we want is a global knowledge system, which feels true and real to us in the best sense that we can. And yeah, for me also that differentiation, that separation that was created with modernity matter, secularization and different real for science, which is supposedly about reality. And then, the spiritual, which is about beliefs, that there is artificial separation there. That for me is at the root of colonialism as well.
Victoria: Yes,
Vanessa: because that was to say like, okay, our cosmology, our auto epistemology. It is about reality and what you as other are thinking, that is mythological. That is a belief.
This is for me the root of colonialism and that's why it's also so important to address that in academia and to question that because it is about the repression of most of the people in the world. Human as well as beyond the human. There's something there in my point of view.
Victoria: Well, in the same, that same severance is true within.
You know, I'm approaching the same thing, but from the religious place of that separation makes us feel like, oh, I can't even tell somebody that I felt, I felt the presence of God. I mean, I've been told out in the forest under the water, I've been told that as a pastor, like God isn't a tree. And I said, and just like trying to say, I'm not saying God's a tree, but you just bring it up a little and it, and people start to freak out.
Same within environmental activism and political arenas. The same separation. I was at a, a UN, a gathering, it was a gathering of climate professionals and there was a UN minister there and he was the head of the environmental committees. And, and we talked, I remember my son talked to him one night in the bar and the next day we talked a bit and at the end of the session he was a Sufi, I think he was even an Imam.
And he got up and prayed at the end, and then he said, that's the first time I've ever brought my two worlds together. It's there. It's like this weird idea of that separation in every part of our lives that I agree with you is absolutely the core of the colonialist worldview. The worldview of desecration.
There's a hundred different names for it, but that's at the center. And so any steps to restore that relationship, which is what religion really just means, and what Jesus all essentially was saying. It's the leaders of many different religions at the core of it is that, right?
But I would love to hear a little bit more about this spiritual and physical work, these people working together. Just getting to that place of trust that you felt in the middle of the herd are very different animals that are all happen to be human together. So that must have huge blessings and challenges. And maybe just talk a little bit the process of how this ANICOM, is that how you say it?
Vanessa: Yeah.
Victoria: And what does it stand for?
How this work is progressing? You've been at it about a couple years?
Vanessa: Well, I was busy with the pilot for quite a lot of years, but for this big project we are now in the second year. So we just came back from our first field work period. All of us went out to different locations. And in July we're going to bring our main collaborators to Liège because it takes place at the University of Liège that is our host for the project.
And then we're going to talk with them there. So it's like a counter hospitality, um, thing as well, because normally it's very interesting, especially in anthropology, we visit our collaborators for long periods of time living there, but sometimes they never come to know how we are living and what it looks like here.
Yeah. So that is what we're at now. And I think, yeah. One of the things that is very interesting, I think in, in what you said, let me try to make the link because, we were talking about bringing these two different worlds together. And the interesting thing because one of the objectives of the project is to bring the knowledges of animals into the academic discourse.
So maybe academia should not only be the knowledge of humans or as it is now, actually the knowledge of a select group greatly favoring a certain cultural Western time and and place. Maybe it should be really global, meaning the knowledge of all humans, which means that you have like a plurality of voices.
And maybe it shouldn't even stop at humans, maybe other beings, animals and beyond have knowledge as well. And that should maybe be part of the conversation. So that is what we're aiming for. This dialogic more than human methods, a dialogic way of forming the knowledge of academia. And interesting thing is that we've been trying, therefore, to ask the animals questions because our collaborators now has mainly spoke about human collaborators, but of course the animal collaborators, and sometimes maybe that goes beyond the animals, because in indigenous situations, the land can be also very, very important. So maybe that is a collaborator to speak to as well.
Yeah. What we see when we are hearing from them is that they don't make that separation between the human and the non-human world, between nature and culture. This Cartesian kind of, they are not even thinking in that way. And this is really amazing. It sometimes brings like a new, yeah or another level. Because even when we are critiquing like, oh yeah, this nature culture divide, we are still re invoking it. But to come to a place or to be able to try to represent a perspective in which that is not even real.
One of the lions, I, I got a quote in one of the articles. It was translated by an animal communicator now. So of course it might go through a filter in that sense, because every translation also, when we are speaking with people that we don't understand directly, the interpreter is always interpreting. So it is,
Victoria: It's always part of the room. In the room.
Vanessa: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So you can't say like, oh, the animal said this. But it's a quote in the sense, the way we use quotations, also, when we are working with a translator, when we're working with another culture, we still put data as a quotation. So what the, what the lion expressed to the animal communicator is "don't forget the oneness of everything. That includes everything and everyone, you know, the fences and the cars and the buildings and the trees and the nature and the sense of this one big, whole, wonderful, beautiful world. And we are all part of it. So don't forget that. Don't focus just on the nature or just on the people. Think about everything together. Always, always."
Victoria: [ Transition music plays]
Wow. I'll bet that's a theme song that you and your team hear over and over again.
Vanessa: It comes up, yes. And it depends on the kind of questions that you're asking the animals, because in the beginning when I started, even the professional animal communicators who do a lot of consultations for people, for example, with their pets, if there's a problem, yeah, they were a little bit hesitant.
They were wondering if my kind of more abstract or philosophical or larger scale questions would work for the animals, if that actually works, to ask questions like that. And it's really interesting because it worked really, really, really well. We got answers that blew our minds, things we never thought of ourselves, and also a lot of ways of thinking that the animal communicators themselves thoroughly disagreed with because they often come from a much more environmentalist perspective. So they think against roads and pollution and fences. And then you ask the lion himself and see what's what kind of, what comes back. And the answer that came back that this animal communicator was definitely not agreeing with him. It's wonderful to see that, that we get a, yeah, very different kind of perspective.
Victoria: That's part of how, you know, you've entered into that, what I just call sacred conversation, like an evidence. It's the same evidence for me of knowing I'm in the presence of God, honestly. It's the same feeling. It's like, and they are the same, they're not different things.
I cry, you know, there's tears, there's emotion. Like you said, the things that I think of I haven't conjured. It's like something that's surprising. That's another thing. So that's interesting 'cause we're hitting from different worldviews and there's that bias that animals, sure, they can communicate with each other. They're just talking about food or get off my branch. You know, it's like, that's another arrogant assumption on our part that as if we could understand well enough to proclaim that we understand everything about this other person, much less other being. I mean, I have these same disconnects talking to my daughter, you know, that I think I know what they're saying and it's not that at all.
So it's really just practicing that. Can you give another couple like concrete examples of questions you ask? 'cause I agree with that. Even with people, like it's how you ask the question is the answer you'll, you'll get.
Vanessa: Yep. What we're trying to do now is, and of course we're very much at the start, but we're trying to ask more questions also about humans and about doing research with humans because that is first one of the things that we're interested in how to do that in a good way together. So we trying to get their perspectives on that. Yeah, and I mean the team has been, they've been learning this way of communication, IIC, we call it- intuitive interspecies communication.
They've been learning it, trying to learn it themselves as well through their different collaborators who have different ways of entering, but there are a lot of parallel.
And yeah, for myself, I can remember a conversation that was also in South Africa with a house cat. I was asking about. Yeah, how she perceived humans and especially more concretely maybe the humans that she met around that house where she was living.
She explained to the animal communicator, the answer that we got was, "humans are so interesting because, a lot of the time they're not even really there. So they're doing something, they're like walking or, but they're not really there." And to her that was mind boggling. How can you be walking around and you're not even really present or something like that?
I guess I, I related it to this kind of way when I'm in my mind and I'm not even really in my body and I'm not even really noticing, ah, what is going on around me, because that was how she noticed that they're not even seeing what is going on around them. They don't notice anything. Huh.
Victoria: Wow. That's so, that's so conflicting.
I can feel that with my cat. Like,
Vanessa: Uhhuh,
Victoria: she'll come up, I'll be busy, I'll pet her. And that's irritating to her. Like, don't, don't. So I do it a lot and I'm getting more and more aware of it that they're always present and they can feel when you're present. So that's almost it. It's like our work of being present is what we have to do. The rest will happen once we avail ourselves to what is.
Vanessa: An interesting thing is that she said, "lose the self importance."
Victoria: Mm.
Vanessa: And for me, it really hits me because I never realized that that was why I was not present. I think I'm so important. All my things are so important, more important than everything that is going on around me, and that is being there.
And it really, it was a very interesting, like this moment of a light bulb going up and I was like, oh my goodness. She is right. That is the thing. It's arrogance also. It is.
Victoria: Right. And we commit this every day because we've been so steeped in it, not just our own life, but generations of separation from our ancestors and beneath all of that is the connection. So it's not like you need to take a two year course in animal communication, but it's about presencing yourself. Just being present to the moment, like that's just so foundational. It's a huge learning and getting that kind of feedback is so helpful.
Vanessa: Sure. Yeah. When you realize that life is not really about you, then you stand or, or walk through the world in a really different way. You are in your body in a very different way. It all goes beyond you. You are not that important, and that is a relief. It's really, really beautiful. Then life becomes a gift that just flowing through you and you're allowed to experience all these things and nothing can go wrong because life is going and life is flowing and it'll continue to flow.
Whatever you, whether you are aware of it or not. And whatever you do, it is bigger than you. And this is really, really a relief. I think for us. It's wonderful to be able to trust to that extent that life is doing itself. Life is being, and it's not dependent upon me. Good. It's better than me. Yeah. It's bigger than me.
Better than me. And I can't break it. It's amazing. It's so nice.
Victoria: It's so good. I mean, what you're saying again is this, is I, is how we are meant to be. That's our wild self, our wildness in action. And yet there's something about humans that tend to exile ourselves. You know, I feel like a lot of the Judeo-Christian stories are about that exile and that return, and I even like the core meaning of religion is reconnection.
So there must be something built into humans where we leave and then where we return in a deeper way. Like it's not, I don't know why we don't begin there, just stay there. That's reality too. So even just like accepting that, it's like, oh. I could start to call myself spiritual and religious again. You know, it's like if we're really truly practicing reconnecting as our core cosmology and seeing ourselves as part of a bigger story, which is what every religion is about 'cause that is the pathway back to return to relationship and return.
Vanessa: I mean, for me it is, it's actually, for me, it is a huge, huge, huge gift that has been given to humans because it is only in being away from God or relation or uh, whatever nature, whatever you, however you want to call it, that you can experience what it is like to have relation and to come together.
It is true that contrast. The contrast makes experience possible. And we humans, we are very far in the contrast. We are like on the, yeah, sometimes on the outside of that expensive universe. And we create the space that feels dark. No space is empty, dark, it feels not like us because we are also the light.
No? But we create the space for light to fill it and to become bigger and more. And for me that is part of the process of life. And this is the service that we are also giving. And, and I see that also in the story of Christ and in the suffering that is there to make possible the experience of becoming one, of becoming one with God again, if you were never apart.
Neale Donald Walsch has said it really beautiful. He repeated that story of the candle in the sun, which doesn't know it is the light, and only when it comes out in the dark to realize that it is the light and through that to bless all these candles around that are dimming their light because they are the ones who are suffering for me to be allowed to know that I'm the light.
So it is, yeah, there is no, for me, there's no mistake in the universe. It's not, there's nothing wrong.
Victoria: I mean, I just call it the Pascal mystery in all things. It's like the pattern of, every year the pattern of every life, the pattern sort of emotionally as well as physically, as well as vocationally.
Like it just, this life hits a place where it needs to be lost and to die. And in that compost, new life comes up. It's just the way it is in everything. I love that they always, I would always say like, every preacher has one sermon. I think it's every human has one message that they say over and over again, and that's it.
It's like, life is just that. It's, there's something in this collapse that's happening right now that's really tragic and really essential. You know, sort of our cultural collapse, the things that are, you know, it's hard to say that about the planet herself because there's so many places and beings that we're losing that we, that will not be recovered.
And that's a time of, I wish we could stop it, but we can't. It is, and. So what can we do? We can only do what you do within that story. That cosmology of with loss comes that time of grief and release and allowing, and that's the compost, that the new life is birthed. And to trust that even when it's so dark in that composting time, I feel like we're in a bit of a composting time for our culture.
Vanessa: Yeah, yeah.
Victoria: And the planet.
Vanessa: I'm really hoping for, you know, at the same time, like a restoration of the trust in the earth. Because sometimes some of the environmental and destructive perspectives, I believe that the reason why they're feeling so wrong to me is not only because they're going against like this expansion of the light that is in earth, in life, but also because for me, there's a truth missing there.
Very important truth missing there, and that is the immense power of our Pachamama, of our mother earth. We are thinking we are so important, but look at this being, which is being so, so, so far beyond what we are. Every corner where I look, she is giving and she is flowering and she is, she's thundering. She's amazing. She's so powerful. And to realize, again, that I think will shift maybe more than any fear can ever make people shift.
The fear is it's not a very good motivation compared to that love and that admiration and that gratitude that actually, you know, we can easily have because she sustains us all and it's, yeah, it's, it's amazing all the things that she's doing and will do and has been doing.
It's, it, it goes beyond the, yeah. All this, all this little trouble that we're making, huh. If I may a little bit disrespectfully, maybe say that, but I think
Victoria: Hmm.
Vanessa: From a larger perspective, it is a little bit like that. The earth is here and she will be here for quite a while still. She's, yeah.
Victoria: Yeah.
Vanessa: And she will live.
Victoria: I love that.
Vanessa: Yeah.
Victoria: And the destruction is part of it. And so that, that whole cycle is just, is, and so it's, I can feel that it's just like the, the idea of suppressing wildfires. Eventually that's gonna backfire, so to speak. I was just reading yesterday about cultures that the land was kept healthy because of the intentional fires that were caused by the humans. And if the humans don't start at the lightning will, you know, it's like that is just part of the cycle. And so our, our resistance to that reality keeps the other cosmology in place. You said that before too. Like the, the resistance to something is part of the something, and so how do we just let go of that resisting enough in order to live in the way that our bodies and our ancestry and reality asks us to, in that place of love and reciprocity and our religions ask the same, you know. It's like, how do we actually live in that no matter what? That's what I hear from the birds and from the trees around here. It's just like, don't you know what's going on? That these, the other owls here are being targeted by our government to be removed. Doesn't that concern you? And they're just like, yeah, well,
Vanessa: Yeah, but look at the sky!
Victoria: But, but I Yeah, but look at this. Yes.
Vanessa: Like how, yeah, I, there's something that comes up for me with this, what you are telling because, uh, not that long ago, I was in Botswana and I was at Victoria Falls.
Victoria: Mm.
Vanessa: And I'd been there before. It is such a powerful place. It is amazing. And when I was there, I was there to do prayers because people have been coming there for millennia, I think, to do prayers there. It is an unbelievably powerful place. With the rainbows all surrounding you and the thunder of this water. And it's, it's, it's, wow, it's immense.
It was very interesting because there were about, I think even about 80 or 90, and I am quite sure they were marabou. They are big, big species of birds that actually eat like the vultures they eat animals with already died.
Victoria: Oh, wow.
Vanessa: And they were rising up in a spiral. Rising up there and it, it was so many of them and it was above the falls. It was an unbelievable side.
Victoria: Wow.
Vanessa: And the interesting thing is, at the falls, there's always a lot of tourists, especially during the morning. In the afternoon, it gets a little bit more quiet. You can do better prayers because you know, you don't have so many people around. But there was a lot of people and they didn't even notice. And for me, I was wondering, there is, something happened. Something happened there. There is something going on there. And for these humans that's not even part of their world. Because they come there.
Victoria: Literally couldn't see it.
Vanessa: No. They come there and they use the Victoria Falls as a background to maybe their photos, their Facebook or their Instagram post. They're having a totally different kind of conversation.
Victoria: They're not present.
Vanessa: They're, it's like they're not really being there. They're not feeling the place. They're just using it as a beautiful background to show where you were. And it is so interesting to me because this was one of the moments that I really realized, because for me to be at that place and not to shout and to dance and to scream and to, because it's so much power.
And if you connect to this, you just don't know what to do with your body because it is just, it's so divine, it's so amazing. And to see then this different. And sometimes there was someone who came up to me and they were saying like, I feel like how you feel, and they will not understand. But I also have this, but it's, we're not really allowed to express it now.
Even me, I felt like I have to hide a little bit because these people will think I'm crazy. Yeah. So you feel like you have to hide a little bit. But it was, there is a sadness. There was a sadness also in me, and maybe it's a confusion, but for me also to see that this place, people have been coming there.
Here, humans have been coming there for thousands and thousands and thousands of years and the place hasn't changed, but the people have. They don't come there now for sacred prayers and to give thanks and to ask their questions, or they come to take yeah, Instagram, uh, video.
Victoria: Which brings them all that place back to objectifying.
Vanessa: Yeah. It's just outside for them. And this was so beautiful when I read your book also about Jesus going into the mountain, and this for me also, it is, when I had that shift, it opened up that for me. That also, when I see a mountain, I feel like, I mean, I often feel like going in into the mountain and going in there, but even when I'm just staying physically at the same place, I feel like I can feel that mountain.
How is that mountain, the power that it has, like how is the air moving or what is how it is? It's like you go inside and that is that kind of, I don't know, communication relation that. I think we actually all have all the time, but most of the time we've blocked ourselves from feeling that. So we also feel very, yeah, non spatial.
Now we just feel our own body and very, it's a very limited kind of feeling of being in the world when you can't send your senses out far, far, far over kilometers to here to feel, to see how are things in other places.
And I don't know, it, it reminds me of one of the elephants that I had an animal, uh, IIC experience with.
Victoria: Uhhuh.
Vanessa: And this was also very profound for me because it was so different. The sensing was so different. It was like as if I was sensing like the elephant.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Vanessa: And I didn't know much about it. I read more up about it afterwards because often animals of course have very different senses than we have. And you know, there's a lot of limitations maybe also to what we can know because we don't even know what that is like.
Victoria: Yeah.
Vanessa: And with that elephant, it was like I realized that this elephant is not seeing the world through the eyes is seeing the world through the hearing. And it makes a 360 degree vision that goes very, very, very far. I didn't know that it was that far, but you know, later on I read up and they can have, they have this low sound. They can feel like very deep sounds with the soles of their feet. They can know 80 kilometers away if other elephants are there. So, to hear how the wind is blowing a little bit different when there is a certain grass or certain bushes or where there is a river like it is. It was a totally different experience of sensing the world around.
For me, it was very eye-opening, so much more spatial and 360 degrees, very different than this kind of feeling that I often have as a human myself. That I am in a sort of tunnel vision and my feeling stops very close from my body. Like I, I don't sense very far away because I'm just, in my mind, I'm thinking, I'm planning, I'm working, I'm doing stuff.
Yeah. And to come back into that also relation with everything around connection, with everything around.
Victoria: Oh, so beautiful. Oh my gosh. I just want to eat everything that you're saying. There's, when you were talking about working with what your outcome will be with the studies is to help and inform others who are researchers. And I heard about this too with Cesar Rodriguez Garavito, how he also is involved in the ethics, the ethical foundation of this research. It's just even, I feel like we need a new word because it's how would you like to be researched and have somebody recording all of your movements and, without relationship?
So it sounds like what you're doing, how do we shift to relationship? And if you are welcomed in, like a lot of researchers are, and like you experienced and talked about at the very beginning about being welcomed into the wallaby herd and the. Then it's relationship and then you're just learning about each other with consent of like often I would guess that it's not only consent, asking for consent, permission to be in relationship, but also I would guess it would be invited by the other, that they want us to know about who they are and how they see the world and how we're, there is a bit of, we need all the help we can get and I sense that from the others that they want to help us to come back into relationship.
Do you sense that as well? Have you found that?
Vanessa: Interesting question. Yes. I do sense that there is a lot of openness, so I feel received a lot of the time and that really touches me a lot of the time as well because I know that maybe as a person I'm not always in the best energy state, so to say, or connected state and still there is a yes. Still there is a, a reception that is really beautiful and that is grace. No, it is. It's very, yeah. You receive this kind of mercy as a big gift.
On the other hand, I do feel that the whole academic enterprise or doing research or something like that, it is a very human endeavor. It is humans who are wanting this or needing this or thinking that it is important. It really comes from the human world.
And this is of course, it sometimes I'm thinking, oh, it's very nice to think about dialogic more than human methods and bring the knowledge of animals in and of other beings. But it's still a humanly motivated kind of thing. And then sometimes I'm wondering, because then I'm thinking like it's very good, but maybe it's actually not shifting enough.
Because if we would be in deeper relationship, we may not even feel the need to ask these questions because we may be living our lives in a completely different way. So that is something that I do think about and I see my work most of the time as creating a bridge between different worlds. I've also tried that between the Maasai world and, or Maasai worlds and our Western worlds. And now with the animals, it is sort of the same that try to create a bridge and understanding. So maybe this kind of step, it is necessary and it is needed in order to create that bridge, but it is necessary and needed for us. And not for the animals. Like I think for me it is, it is a very reflexive kind of work to reflect upon ourselves, to think about ourselves, to critically rethink who we are and what we do.
And that other perspective that we're connecting with that gives us new ways to actually see ourselves and think about ourselves and yeah, try to remember or rethink what we want now.
Victoria: And yeah, like you talk about too, relationships are reciprocal, you know? So I feel like we're receiving so much, but they must be receiving something too, or they wouldn't wanna stay in relationship, I would guess 'cause it's not all a divine, even a divine love is reciprocal. So I wonder about that. Like I love this, you know, I've been encountering this little Otter mama and it's about time for her to come find, make her new nest. I can't wait till she comes. And so I am all excited every time I see her, but I wonder, you know, when she doesn't run what she gets out of the relationship.
And I think it's like just to be, to be witness, to be in relationship, that there's some mutual blessing in that. That's kind of mind blowing to our worldview that the others, the tree actually cares that to heal trauma, which we haven't gotten into or anything. But to heal trauma is to witness the pain of ourselves and of the other that there's something to going to a deforested plot of land and just witnessing it with love. There's something that I can imagine it feels like, like I would feel if somebody witnessed me in my pain. So yeah, I love imagining that. I can't know exactly, but that there must be something to that the others receive from our true presence.
Vanessa: Yeah, I think there's also, when you go deeper into this relationality, a place where you come to see that we are finally the same. So the gifts that you give to someone else is the gift to yourself. And I think I have to think now about, yeah, about uh, Jesus also that whenever we give the stranger, we give to God.
Victoria: And to, and back to our own souls. You know, sometimes that's been bi-polarized of saying, well, if you're giving to God, you can't take anything. You know? Oh, that's all God. It's both. It's like, it's, yes. It's a gift to you as well to give. Yes, you're right. I do get something out of this. As long as you're also giving, you are gonna receive.
And so like the tourists that you were talking about that aren't there to receive, also aren't giving and that's there's the broken relationship.
Vanessa: Yeah. 'cause if you don't realize that, to be able to give, and this, I learned very much in Maasai also, to be able to give is like a blessing and a gift from God. You know, in the beginning when people told me like, it's a gift to you if you give your money away. I was like, wait a minute, are you you manipulating?
Victoria: Is that a propaganda?
Vanessa: But then I came to realize like, oh my goodness, but this is true. I am so blessed that I am actually able to do that, to give something to someone else. Wow. What a blessing is that. And when I think about your otter mama and the joy that you feel when she's not running and, and she's allowing you to be with her. Yeah. I think that is the same now that for her to be able to give you that. It is realizing a huge blessing. And that is so, so, so lovely. Like even more beautiful than, yeah, than what we can hope for to be received in the world like that. And that is actually the natural way in which we are received by everything. It's only in our interhuman, certain culture time that, that we are doing something else, but it's actually not like that. It is really? Yeah, it is. It's very, very good out there.
Victoria: Oh my gosh. I always, I'm so grateful to just have time with you. I always feel energized and, I don't know, renewed. Your enthusiasm for life and your capacity to love and your relationship with the holy and all the wild ones and your own soul, even in a, on those days when you have to be behind the computer all day and in committee meetings.
What's your next step? What is your next sort of wild threshold that you're standing on for the project and maybe for you personally of what's drawing you forward? What's the next.
Vanessa: In smaller terms, we have our, we have our events. Then we're hopefully being able to bring together our collaborators and then during the next field work, we hope that we can listen even more to the voices of the animals and the other beings that we're working with.
And to think about this dialogic more than human methods, like not as a singular framework or a structure, but more as a process, a conceptual process, a theoretical process through which we can bring this, yeah, really dynamic plurality of all these different kind of knowledges, human knowledges, non-human knowledges in dialogue with each other.
But it is also something that is like ongoing. It's conversational. Yeah. It should be practical and, And in the plural. So you can't really know how it develops because it's collaborative and there has to be an openness for everything that comes. And what I'm seeing now, and this is something that I'm really grateful for with the team that I've got together now, I'm starting to see like, oh wow, this is becoming more and better than I can imagine it alone.
Victoria: Mm.
Vanessa: And that is super, super beautiful. So I don't even know where it's gonna end up because, because it goes beyond, yeah. Beyond what I can make. And that is, that is amazing. Yeah. And, and I think my bigger, yeah, because I'm just in the middle of this, of this project is step now, but on a bigger scale like this, spirituality and science, reuniting science as a global wisdom, knowledge of all humans. Also beyond the human.
I, I recently like in the [unsure...] for, I think it's called Decolonization of Knowledge in Africa or something like that. Yeah. I write also about this and it's becoming more and more alive to me, and this is something that I hope for that I can bring this kind of idea because I really feel that it can create really big shifts and that it's time also for this.
Victoria: It's more, more people are open to it within the science world, within the, I see it within the church. More people are, are awakening in the right now. You might not have been able to raise money for this 20 years ago for this project. You know, I know my books couldn't have been sold 20 years ago, or 10 years ago even. I mean, something has shifted and last like, you know.
Vanessa: It's really, it is because it is such a change in attitudes because it is about what is real and what is true, and if there can be a shift there, most of the world population today, I think believes in science.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Vanessa: It's like science is like a religion. People believe in science, and of course the, the core of science is that we are telling stories like creating theories that can be falsified at any point in time. So it is an ongoing process of storytelling that is open to always listen and to always be in conversation. Science is a conversation also now.
Victoria: Yes.
Vanessa: And if that fundament of science, like in the sense of this ontological fundament of this is real, this is reality and this is truth. Now, this is a fact. If we can start to rethink that and become a little bit softer that this is maybe a truth, this is our truth, this is a truth that has been working quite well in a lot of ways.
This is a, a reality, but it might look different for other people or beings. Then there starts to be an openness towards everything else that is alive. And I think that is what is happening now with also all the scientific evidence. Like this is also facts and evidence now, but the stories changing. We starting to see like, oh, everything around us is alive. Everything around us is conscious and this is where, yeah, where there is starts to be an openness and a respect for all else that is being, and it will be a relief. So nice. It will be relief that we're not the only ones. We don't have to manage everything. We don't have to know everything. We are allowed to just be and yeah.
Victoria: Oh, amen. What a perfect way to close out. Oh Vanessa, thank you. Thank you. Blessings on all of your work. Blessings on your heart and your life, and your friends and your companions, all the people, human and more than human that you are in relationship. May there be blessing and love. Thank you so much for bringing all of this enthusiasm and love and truth and reality to the Holy Wild Podcast.
Thank you so much as well.
Vanessa: Blessings to you and to the podcast in the future.
Victoria: Much love to you.
[ soundscape of trickling water, birdsong, and distant road noise plays]
Encounters with the holy wild happen, but only when we're open to them and when we approach the natural world with reverence in an open heart. Each week I offer an invitation to wander in the wild-ish places of your home. To enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
I felt so energized after this conversation that I wandered down to my little shoreline. I did so just to listen with this more open expectation that I have everything within me to be able to listen at that level of care and love, that I might actually enter into relational conversation with these others that I'm falling in love with.
So I went down to the bay and I felt into the possibility. I, I crossed a threshold and said, before I crossed it. I put my hands to my heart, closed my eyes in a prayer and said, I'm gonna cross this threshold and I'm gonna walk down to the bay and I'm going to speak to the otters and the seals and send them blessings of love. And maybe they might eventually, if I go down there every day, perhaps they might eventually approach me close enough that we might enter into a conversation.
So if it's true, that great and sacred conversation between all beings is happening all the time, which I believe it is. And if it's true that the only reason most of us humans have cut ourselves off of this conversation, which I believe it is, then we can all choose to remove a layer or two of disconnection aside, and then we can enter back into conversation, into relationship on a deeper level.
And, you know, those, those layers of disconnection could be old inherited cultural stories that tell us the trees are lumber and the animals only chatter to communicate about food and mating. So arrogant to assume that. Or that disconnection could be an old religious story that tells us that God is separate from nature and nature conversation is some kind of sin when in fact there's no biblical evidence of that story at all. Or maybe it's a disconnection that you bring on yourself by checking your phone or chattering with a friend on the phone, or even in person while you're in the presence of these wild ones, ignoring them.
Like that kitty, the kitty that tells us, "stop thinking this is all about you."
So the invitation is to enter into your wild-ish place with that awareness. The humility to say, I'm laying down a layer of disconnection, this layer, this particular one, so that I can listen with more presence and more love.
Stephen: [ music plays]
This has been another episode of the Holy Wild. For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit wildspirituality.earth.
And please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who is hearing the call of the Holy Wild.
Music by Alec, Slater, and Sandy from Inside the Silo at the farm.
Produced by Stephen Henning at Highline Sounds and hosted by Victoria Loorz.