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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.
HW S1E11 Craig Chalquist
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Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hello and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all 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 ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with earth. All it takes is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
I can't help but asking myself these days what to do. What to do when we open up our headlines every day, and there's just crazy messages of essentially collapse and I can't help but asking myself how reconnection with the holy wild matters.
How a sacred conversation with a Cedar Tree or the wind or beetles can possibly make a difference at a time of this fast motion collapse. Even when you just say it out loud, it sounds so insignificant and playful and metaphorical at best. It's hard to talk about. It's hard to use old story, linear thinking to approach this new story.
So I need to stay connected with clear thinking and open-hearted people like those in Seminary of the Wild and the voices of emerging wisdom that comes through all those who are on this podcast. I wish I had a chance to meet each of you, each one of you who are downloading and listening to these podcasts because we are in this together, we are co-creating this new story.
Today's conversation is with my friend Craig Chalquist. I had read several of his brilliant books before I had the privilege of meeting him, but Craig is a professor and a fiction writer and a TikTok phenomenon. Dr. Chalquist holds two PhDs and he serves at National University as the program Director of Consciousness Psychology and Transformation.
He's held a lot of other leadership roles like Associate Provost, administrative roles in several other influential universities. His background includes public presentations and group counseling, and depth psychology, mythology, ecos, psychology, terror, psychology, philosophy, wisdom studies. He presents and publishes and teaches at this intersection of the psyche and story and nature and re-enchantment and imagination, all things that never should have been separated.
He's published more than 20 books, including his series that's a post collapse hopeful. How about that? It's called Lamplighter Trilogy, and his motto is converse with everything. And in this episode, we cover a lot of territory as we explore what it means to live through collapse with an open heart, to ground yourself in love and in relationship no matter what.
We talk about how our dreams are connected with the land and with one another, and how paying attention to these synchronicities and encounters with the more than human world actually matters. It shifts the way that we see ourselves and the art place and how these false severances between spirit and matter and human and nature and psyche and place, those must be healed if we're going to move into a new way of being.
So it's really easy to say that we hate the current system, but where the real power can come from, as Craig says, is by allowing ourself to focus on visions of how things could be. And these visions aren't things that we work hard to make up, but they come from a deep belonging and relationship and sacred conversation to a land that is alive and responsive, reminding us that nature is not a backdrop, but a participant in the conversation.
Guiding us, grieving with us, and offering companionship. I always learn so much from this gentle and humble and brilliant man. I'm excited that you get to hear from Craig Chalquist today. May we together envision the ways that we can co-create communities that can act as reality laboratories, as he says, places where people experiment with new ways of being together, and we can practice rituals of grief and belonging and learn again how to listen to earth's voice.
[ transitional music plays]
Craig, thank you. I feel like you're a kindred spirit, a close friend, companion along this way. I feel such a deep resonance with you and your heart and your work, and I'm so grateful to call you my friend.
Craig: Oh, same here. Thank you Victoria. it's good to see you again too. It's been a while since we talked, so I'm happy to have the occasion to do that.
Victoria: I know. Craig joined us as participant and as teacher in Seminary of the Wild a few years back, and it was so fun to be able to see you at least see your face every week.
Craig: Oh, I missed that. Yeah.
Victoria: I've said this before to you and to our participants, that you can literally get a master's degree just going through your website and listening to your teachings and your wisdom.
You have so much to offer at this time of active collapse and because at this time of every day is just a, I don't know, a deepening gut punch of the reality of this. And I do have to work a bit to hold on to the aligned reality that when something collapses, there is something else emerging and it doesn't happen.
Even though we are in a liminal space of the old way is collapsing, it's also got a ton of power right now. The new way is emerging. We can feel it. There's more and more people who are living it and wrestling with it and struggling to live in this new way, in the midst of the old way, especially in this time of collapse.
But the new way has been gaining definition and shape and form and power really. And you've been a really central part of that in your ecotherapy work and your ecological spirituality work. We actually haven't talked about this, that when you first considered joining Seminary of the Wild. It was a sense of needing to deepen into the spiritual part of the work that you're doing and you thought maybe it was a need for some kind of certificate or communal ceremony, which it still may of wild ordination, but I feel like where you ended up is that you've been doing something very deeply spiritual all along.
We just didn't have the words for it, we just have so separated it.
Craig: Yeah. Oh, I wanted to mention too, as I answer this, that part of the many values of that year experience with you and those wonderful teachers you brought together was, for me, part of it was actually trying on what it feels like to overtly step out and say, I'm doing this as spiritual work.
This is work that's embedded in and on behalf of Hearth and nature and place. Because as an academic, oftentimes you are asked to keep that out. I've done institution programs where you can say that, but it's different to say it publicly, which I've been doing that for some time. And to say, yes, it is spiritual work and I'm happy with it, and it feeds me and hopefully other people too.
Victoria: That's it. These are false severances. We are not separate furniture. And it's one thing to say that on a bumper sticker, and it's another thing to really deepen into the barriers we have that are layers, cultural, personal, religious. And so that reconnection with spirit and with nature, with the holy wild is a bit of a journey of unlearning and then really stepping in, like you just said.
Craig: One direction I'm going in that I never expect it to be, and I think it started when I began working, actually before I began working on my second doctoral dissertation, which is specifically in philosophy and religion, was the idea of fiction as a wisdom path fiction, imagination, storytelling as a wisdom path, writing my own fiction, including my lamplight trilogy, and using fiction in a way to say things that are spiritual and philosophical that have to do with our relationship to the planet and doing it that way.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Tolkien's distinction between worlds that he was working in, and I'd probably reverse it in terms of the terminology. The way Tolkien holds it is the primary world is the one we all live in day to day. We're having this conversation in the primary world, the secondary world is the world of imagination.
He used that wonderful little term fairy and wrote some fiction that's said in there as a realm. And one of the things I learned from him and others is that when we start trying to make the secondary world of fairy into a tool for changing the primary world, we get in trouble unless we're cheerful with how we do that.
So if we turn it into an overt form of activism, sometimes it falls on its face. You read it and it doesn't feel like a good story. It feels like propaganda. But if you do it in a way that serves the story and the beings who show up in it. It has a different feel. So part of what I'm trying to do with my work now, which includes writing more fiction, but also forming my own kind of story and Wisdom Academy outside of higher ed, walking that line, and here I'm gonna borrow one of your terms that you taught me, which is Edge Walkers walking between the absolutely urgent emergency need for social change, systems change.
We're really feeling that in the states right now, but other many other parts of the world have felt it for a long time, as so on the one hand, there's that part of it, that's one side of the edge. And the other side is to really get into the experiential fictional storied life. Balancing them without leading, having one bleed into the other.
It's a difficult edge to walk sometimes.
Victoria: And I think it's kinda like an ecotone where they do blend. And so I think that is a reality. And I love how you said you would say it, oppositely that world is the deeper world is the sort of primary world, but we're so disconnected from it that we're able to bring little pieces into this.
What would it be like to bring little pieces of this everyday world into that world? And I feel like that's what you live, that's how you have created your life like, and one of the things that I first heard from you that was like, whoa, this is a piece that's really not talked about anywhere else. I've not read it, seen it, heard it anywhere else, is that our relationship with our place, with the more than human others with this, with a particular spot on earth is a embodied relationship that is necessary. I, you're gonna say this so much better. This is what, how I heard it, it is a, is real like that these beings, these trees these waters, and that we have a way of communicating that happens every day.
We just, there's internal blocks to even hear it, but if we can remove those blocks, like it's real and they take shape for you in particular, in dream forms and in synchronicities. I'd love for you to talk about that a bit.
Craig: Many years ago when I was studying all this and trying to understand my place in it, there was a period where I went through multiple losses all stacked up at once the way they sometimes do.
So I was out walking in the evening through the neighborhood I was living in Northern San Diego County at the time, and was feeling all kinds of grief and just sitting with it. And at one point, it's so exhausting even when you're letting it flow that it, it's physically tiring. And so I was leaning up against this tree, this little tree that was growing in this suburban neighborhood.
And this odd feeling came over me. Like the streets, the grass, the leaves, the tree itself, somehow were not only aware of what I was going through, but actually holding it with me. The analytical part of my mind. He was like, oh, that's an interesting fantasy. And then this leap was fluttering down and indifferent.
I, I held my hand out like this and it fell into my palm. And the way it fell, when I looked at it, it was a teardrop shape. The feeling intensified. And I thought, what would happen if I just allowed this fantasy to my role? That everything here is aware of my distress, and it's telling me that.
So since then, I and other people have collected countless examples of things that we often use the Jungian term synchronicity for, meaningful coincidence, where two things happen and they seem linked, not causally, but by meaning. And we're starting to wonder whether that's actually more of a gesture.
These things that happen as though the place itself we're giving us a message of some kind. And I've been asked oftentimes, how would you prove something like that? And I'm like, who cares? It's a form of play. Like why don't we just try on and see what happens?
Victoria: It's requiring us, in order to. Maybe we should even back up because I wanna, why is this important right now? Why is it important to go talk to a tree? It's something I have to feel through, think through all the time. But if indeed we are connected, which we all, most of us who are aware at all know we are, then we can easily see how silly it is to act as if we're disconnected.
And then it is a process of reconnecting. But there's something about, it's not just reconnecting physically, of recognizing that the air we breathe is dependent on these others, the food, the water, but that emotion and spirit is not disconnected from body. That's a false thing too, right?
So just when you start healing all these false separations, it all goes, oh of course. And if. We believe that. And if that is true, then we need to reconnect and listen to one another. The more than human others are already listening. So it's not up to that, which even like Romans eight talks about, it talks about within the Christian tradition of all places about Paul talks about how that the earth is groaning, waiting for us to wake up and grieve with them and emotionally reconnect with them.
So it's not just they're waiting for everybody to become Christian or something. It's like they're waiting for a relationship to be restored. And so this, what you're talking about is so foundational and it's built on compassion and it's built on love and relationality of that beautiful story of the teardrop is real.
That these synchronicities were only called that because we have no dominant culture context for it. But once we start allowing the context and the very way you said, just allowing it, saying what if meaning actually we're co-created, what if we could really be present with what our body and our soul and our heart tells us is true?
And allow our mind to step back just a little bit, what would happen in a playful way?
Craig: Yeah. I think the playful part's important because it gets us away from the power of the inner critic. So often we'll say you're crazy to think that way. Things are talking to you. That's what schizophrenics think, and it actually isn't.
I've known people who have schizophrenia, that's, it's a different story. But, sometimes my way of playfully sharing this with my students is I say, let's do a thought experiment. So which of these is crazier to entertain the idea, the fantasy that everything speaks? That we're in a great conversation that we're deaf to, but can learn to hear or to go on thinking like we already do and destroy the whole planet.
I'll take the fantasy one for 500.
Victoria: Yeah. I know. It just seems so obvious when we really look at what these worldview is. That thing that you don't question, you just don't even see. When you start to see it and you see it in such an obvious way like what you're saying, then it becomes a no brainer, which is a great way of saying no brain or, and how urgent it is to surrender.
Craig: Yeah. I wonder if that's part of this collapse that's happening too, which is taking so many awful forms. Hurting so many people and other creatures on the planet. I wonder if behind it is a certain real collective realization that the current worldviews don't work. They're worn out. They have been for a long time.
And there's a wonderful line from Albert Camus, I think it's from his essays, and he says, it happens that the stage settings collapse.
Victoria: That's so good here it is happening. And it's happening in a tragic way as it usually does that harms the most vulnerable, and so it's hard to hold both. And I think this holding both is always the spiritual journey, holding both the joy and the play of this love.
Love this like courtship, this relationship of joy. And the very serious harm and grief, which is what any relationship is. You enter into some other person's life, you're entering into their wounds, the grief of their journey, as well as your own, as well as when that is broken through death or other things like, it's just part of relationality and we're so scared of that in our culture.
We just want the good side and the good side doesn't work anymore. We're ready to walk away.
Craig: Who has a deep understanding of all this, including the need for play and even hope are some of the global south activists. I've been over the past year meeting and working with people from Nigeria and Mumbai and Argentina and Brazil and others who are doing really hard work to build resilient communities. They're facing all kinds of political and ecological challenges. So these are like the practical people, right? These are the people who are gonna be the first in the world to say, if it doesn't work, I don't want to hear about it.
And to hear them talking about hope and story, imagination and joy is so moving because they're beyond that dichotomy.
Victoria: Right? They're living it right now. What we are all afraid of and we know is coming, they're doing. So these are our teachers. Anyone actually who is sidelined by the dominant culture are the voices to be listening to right now.
Craig: Absolutely. That's beautifully put. Yeah, absolutely.
Victoria: There's something about this collapse that I know, I'm sure you feel too, that is tragic and what's necessary. And so there's a bit of not quite giddy anticipation, like this is going to be very painful and it's the only way through and I am at the work of doing what is emerging, and I remember you, you said something to me when we first met about the resistance to whatever is in power is part of keeping it in power and there's something to when that resistance, the feminine ,the resilient, whatever we wanna call it, comes with its own resistance.
Like the resistance is a necessary part of it. And so how do we move our energy from resisting the powers that are great, that are having so much power right now that it feels almost futile? Is there something to moving our energy from resisting that to creating the new. Or do we do both or are some people called to do the resistance still, or does resistance actually to the point?
It's a good question. I don't know how to even, there's no real answer, but.
Craig: I've been thinking about that a bit. A couple of weeks ago, there was a particularly hard week for me where three of my mentors died.
Victoria: Oh, wow.
Craig: Diana Macy, Lionel Corbet, and I'm blanking on the third one, James.
I don't know why I can't remember his last name right now. It'll come to me. They all died. I met James recently when I went up to Point Reyes for at visiting Scholar thing. And so one thing that they all had in common was that they did make a place for resistance. Joanna Macy talks about different kinds of activism that are necessary.
Lionel talked about and actually did some videos where he was talking back to mainstream psychology and saying why it could be so harmful in some ways. And James was doing permaculture design and he talked a lot about alternatives, but had some resistance going too. And I thought one of the ways that I'm different from what I learned from all three of them is that I put, and this is something we each have to decide for ourselves.
Some of us are resistance people and we have to do that, but in my case, it seems more effective to lead with inspiration, imagination, new stories, play, things like that because that's what appeals to me. I can come up with my own reasons why I hate the current system, or I can talk to people who are less privileged than me and collect many more reasons.
But in the end, I think what drives me are visions of how things could be. That it doesn't have to be this way.
Victoria: Yeah, that, I mean that just that it doesn't have to be this way addresses the despair. Addresses that downward spiral that I'm certainly prone to, like I had a experience, I was one of those weird kids that I read all the Holocaust literature and stuff in high school.
And so I just had this like both sense of thank God that's then and not now. And an immediate check of like you just wait kind of thing. So I felt a sense of dread of what's exactly happening now my whole life.
Craig: Yeah, me too.
Victoria: So I can easily go down that path. And I think that's why it's so important for us to be doing this work.
Like our souls knew we needed to be grounded in this deeper, more compassionate, more loving way, that there is another way that is possible. So I'm really rooting around for where are those stories of those edge walkers who were there at the fall of the Roman Empire, who are there? The peasants. I'm right now diving into the peasantry that was created in Scotland, because that's where my mother's ancestors are from.
But just, it's not different than ever that there's the few with the wealth and the power who treat the rest of the population the vast majority as their slaves in one way or another. And so I can just, and I've read all these Sixth Turning and sapien and all these books that are talking about it economically or just historically, that this is just a cycle and humans keep going back to it.
And so it's easy to just go there's nothing we can do. And yet there's always a story after that story and the ones, and it wasn't the powerful who create it ever. It's never that the powerful die off or killed off and something new emerges. So yeah, I think I'm just like convincing my, reminding myself, which I have to do every really?
Craig: Yeah. Yeah. We're only in part of the story when we're at the collapse, the apocalypse, whatever we want to call it. That's only part of the story, right? So somebody was reading my third novel and they, they were about two thirds through and they went, oh my God, the stuff that happens to these wonderful people in this great organization and all that.
And I'm like, keep reading.
Victoria: Did you notice the book's? Not over yet. Yeah. And it's, and then after that, happy ending is another cycle. But we see it throughout our own lives too. That's what young and psychology is all about. That's what psychology's all about, is that these are cycles, this is the pathway to emergence, to evolution, to growth, to maturity, whatever.
And so individually and collectively, we're on this journey. So like my bottom line is how do we love anyway, no matter what, how do we get ourselves resilient enough, active enough in relationship enough that we can love anyway? 'cause it's really hard to do that. It's pretty impossible to do that isolated that there's, no, you're not in relationship.
I was just talking to somebody the other day who's in the reddest part of Texas trying to live this work, live this play. She absolutely needs to be in deep relationship with the land because she has friends virtually because of this time in history, and we need this virtual relationships.
It's that both and of this virtual reality time, and she needs those needs, those deep relationships with the land as we all do. But in our culture, it's easy to overlook that. I get a lot of wisdom from people like John Powell out of UC Berkeley, with belonging without othering. Those kind of people who are really focused on racial justice, but what they're talking about is everything justice.
Relationship is the core of aliveness. Yeah, it's easy to say that, but you know how hard relationships with one human is. But to expand that, and so I think even just knowing that relationship is foundational gives us the energy to invest in our human relationships.
Craig: There's a way of holding this that I learned from my friend Linda Bizel, who, psychotherapist, eco therapist, permaculture designer, very involved in relationships Earth. She was one of the first people who mentioned that in Permaculture Design, where's the relationships? Like we, we get how to grow plants, but where, what about communities?
And I can't remember his name earlier perhaps 'cause the times are stark. James Stark was the other. So he was our recovery mover and he picked that up. That was what he was all about. He was a very relational man. I was lucky to know.
Linda's way of thinking about this is, so psychology, she applies it to psych as a field. But it can go beyond that.
So it begins by looking at our internal relations, right? How do we relate to the unconscious? How do we relate to our trauma? Things like that. And so then it widens the horizon. And then you have couples therapy. You have family systems therapy, which I was trained in and did on and off for nine years, and then it gets wider social psychology.
And so in explaining this to psychotherapists and psychologists, she would say, I'm proposing that we keep the movement going and go out to earth and include plants and animals and everything else as part of those circles of relationship, right? We're expanding our relationships and I think this counters the cultural narcissism of thinking that we can go in alone somehow, that we can be these lone hero figures, which is just narcissistic as hell.
Victoria: The way I always say it is the time of the guru is over, and I have a lot of people that are devastated when their guru or their teacher betrays them in one way or another and it's yeah, it has to happen. Like it, it's time for you.
Craig: I can't resist the urge to say this. So I wrote a scene for one of my novels where the protagonist, simeon is in an imaginal setting of a visionary setting, and he walks into a bar like an old west bar, and there's a circle of chairs. There's an encounter group for mythic heroes that's meeting, and they're all introducing themselves. And Hericles says, I'm Hericles of Greece and I'm in despair because I killed my whole family.
I was always impulsive. Then there's a, the hero figure from Nigerian mythology who introduces himself and he said, I saved everybody, and they turned against me. And they go around, right? So Simeon at one point says, I don't think I belong in this circle. I can't really relate to any of you. None of you really changed anything for the better.
And Thor says, oh, I think what you might want is the savior circle that's in the bar down the street, right? It's this way of thinking has just got to go. It's done.
Victoria: It's the outcome. It's focusing on the outcome which is how the whole psychological insurance movement is. It's like a hundred percent focus on outcome, which is a hundred percent wrong.
It's that's not how it works. And I get it. There, there are people that need support just to function daily. Not to diminish that at all. But in the end, this is about how do we love anyway, no matter what happens.
[ transitional music plays]
I wanna go back to what you said at the very beginning about a storied life and living a storied life. And you have a book even called that. And the role of our stories, like we live in that it's a daily life, normal thing. We do it every single day, but we don't see it as that because it's just part of our worldview.
But when you start to see it and say, I can actually change this story and to do it sideways, like I was just talking to somebody yesterday, they were talking about movies that are like, here's an example of the wild robot. It was animated, and to me it was just too straight on. It felt too propaganda ish.
Whereas the movie Flow, which actually won the Academy Award, thank God which was animated and about the same thing, Post-Human, was beautiful because it was just a beautiful piece of art that was revealing this story in an artistic way that gets to your heart and not to your head. Yeah. And so when you try to be too direct, you're trying to, I felt that in the climate movement, like anything that's too direct, just too didn't work.
It just appeals to the head. It leads to burnout, but art is from the heart. And that's the difference. I think
Craig: I had an argument some years ago with one of Al Gore's climate presenters and I appreciated the work that, that they were doing. But I said when I got from your slideshow, they were asking for critical feedback.
And so I, I praised it 'cause it was really good and accurate and all that. And I said, but it was 99% bad news. The takeaway message at the end was, join, recycle. Yeah, recycle and individual stuff. That's gonna change anything. And he, I said, psychologically, you're asking for people's defenses to get triggered when you show 'em that much disastrous news and you're not giving him anything to hope for.
And and he said he, he was such an in the head rational guy, something like we feel that if we give people the facts about what's really happening, then they can move in a different direction. And I thought, when in human history has that ever been true?
Victoria: On what are you basing this feeling?
Craig: Even scientists, you ask them what motivates you? And they always go back to when I was a kid, I had this moment of wonder and stuff like that.
Victoria: Yeah. Always. And just to encourage you, I was just at a climate reality presentation a month ago. And Karina Gore, Al Gore's daughter, who runs the Center for Earth Ethics out of union Seminary, invited me to be there to see, 'cause I had spoken to their board a few years ago and it was met with this pin drop silence and so anyway, and then it was like three years later that she said, I'm sorry I haven't been in touch.
But we've gone through a lot of change and transition and things are, and when I saw the climate reality, which was given by the Director of Climate reality, it was like, it was about, I would say 60%, the hopefulness, it's changed. And so they've heard, they've listened and they have been recognizing and we're in a different time, and then maybe, I think it was probably needed.
Absolutely. It was good for me to sit through it again to hear the updated, devastating realities. So I needed to hear that, but I didn't get lost in it, and I didn't, because then they had a whole thing of despite the fact that Trump was in office through these four years, here's how much alternative energy grew despite his legislation to try to tamp it down.
So it's actually very encouraging that this emergence of this new story is happening, and I think you're the one who told me this, nothing can stop it. Like when a new story is coming, it's nothing can stop it. So all of these attempts to try to reign it all in, to cancel everything that had been put into place is not gonna change it.
So it's like not listening to that story, that's where I think resisting that story keeps you glued to it.
Craig: Did you ever see that movie called The Truman Show?
Victoria: Yes.
Craig: I didn't actually like Jim Carey as an actor until I saw that film. And then I thought this, it was fantastic. This is great. This, the scenes where his fake reality begins to break apart.
And at first, when it just starts, you actually can make that regressive move and, try to live your life normally and ignore the change. But there comes a point where he realizes he's being watched 'cause the radio says something and then something else happens. And so he crosses that line where he can't go back anymore.
His first, I love to show this clip to students, his first expression, it's not joy, it's not discovery, it's nothing like that. It's suspiciousness. And he's walking around this plaza, and he is looking at everybody like this. And I'm like, that's where it begins. So he almost gets hit by a car at one point and he makes this powerful gesture and starts stopping the traffic and he goes like this.
Everybody stops. And it's that's the power of waking up right there.
Victoria: Ooh, that gave me shivers. That's so good.
Craig: It's, wow. It's a great film.
Victoria: It is. There are some great ones and we can name the great ones and the ones that are trying too hard and then it doesn't work.
Craig: Changing the story.
Victoria: Yeah. And that's what psychology's about, isn't it?
Craig: It's supposed to be,
I was thinking about a situation that I think comes up for all of us where in terms of including the natural world in our network of relationships, when you get to know a human, in order to be in relation to them, you have to know something about what they like, what they don't like, who they are, things like that.
And years ago there was a student of mine who underwent a sort of spiritual conversion in one of our classes where. She got that the world is a presence that it's speaking to her. So that weekend she went out hugging trees. And so she came back the next week covered with red patches on her skin, and she was hugging oak trees and she didn't know anything about poison oak.
We when we were hearing it in class, we were joking about it a little bit. And I said you now you've been marked by nature and, but we all do our version of that, right? All of us who have bought into this artificial separation of us from the natural world, we all have to relearn the rules, right?
So even people who know him really well, there was some kind of a, I think he was a ranger or something. He went through an ecos psychology class years ago. And he went camping out in the back country and got eaten by a bear.
Victoria: Oh, wow. Okay.
Craig: So and that's how it works out there.
Victoria: And that's part of it too.
Like people ask me, I got Lyme disease from a deer tick.
Craig: Yeah.
Victoria: After, talking about falling in love with deer. And I've been asked, yeah, does that change how you feel about deer? And it's no, of course not. In fact, while I was in the most painful part of it, and it was painful, I mean it was 10 days of the most excruciating pain I've ever had, and I've had two babies, but in, even in the middle of that and knowing that the deer tick is the one who causes Lyme disease.
It's like I felt a bit of, I don't have the right emotional word, but that I was able to be in a collective vulnerability. It took the wall of my protection that I can use bug spray, I can avoid certain places. It's this happened to me. I got bit by a tick at a backyard music concert in the middle of the city of Minneapolis.
So it wasn't like I was doing backcountry stuff, but it's just, it happens and our false idea that we can protect ourselves from the dangers of aliveness is not real. It's have you read Val Plumwood, her experience of being death rolled by a crocodile?
Craig: I haven't read that. I've read her work, but not that part of it.
Victoria: Yeah. I mean it's and she almost died, obviously. She's miraculous that she escaped and then she had to walk totally bloody, like a mile back to, wow. Somebody to help her. But it was just fascinating to, to read it, to hear her just be in awe of this being's eyes, while it was happening.
And to have that love, that connection that in the middle of being eaten alive, is fascinating. That's it. Or just like being eaten by mosquitoes. That was my little version of her intense experience was just like, I realized just recently, like within the past year, that when I got a mosquito bite, I didn't immediately feel like this cursing of mosquitoes.
It was more like, at least I got to provide some sustenance for that little being. Like that was just an autopilot. I didn't have to force myself to think it. So you can feel your worldview shifting little by little, but to get to that place where Val Plumwood got is like another world. But it's, but it is it like.
I don't think I've talked about this on this podcast, but it's a story in my next book where I won't tell the whole story, but basically this barred owl was getting my attention through a branch down right in front of me. So I stopped and looked up at her, and then she swooped right over my head so I could feel her.
The air landed on a branch behind me. I'm instantly in that, liminal space where what world is this? And then she moves from there to right next to the path that I was walking on. She lands, not on a branch, but on the ground behind a tree that was right next to me. So she's six, eight feet away from me.
She lands behind the tree, looks right at me again, like she's making sure are you paying attention? Sticks her talon out. So she's standing one leg and these little squirrels that I've been noticing are like Chip and Dale, like freaking out, like chasing each other. They literally look like adolescents who were small, smaller than the normal, than the adults.
And this one, as I'm standing there, one runs right in front of me, which right there is odd one's right in front of me, straight into the talon of this owl. And I hear, the screech of the little squirrel who just, it seemed, gave his life to this owl in the owl's family. Like what? So it's like this, there's meaning even in the craziness of predation of that ranger being eaten by a bear of the even that there is some way of living this life and honoring the reality that for one being to stay alive, another has to give their life.
And it totally shifts like our fear of the wild. Not that we're like all gung ho to get eaten by a bear. Obviously we're gonna self protect like every other creature does. We're gonna do our best to not be that little squirrel squirreling around. And yet that's how life works. So how to hold that, even that with love.
Craig: Yeah. Speaking of love did you read a poem by Ernesto Al, who I believe was Thomas Merton's roommate?
Victoria: Oh, wow. No.
Craig: At the Trapes monastery, he wrote a poem called Love. It's been translated into English, and in part of it, he says he puts it so much better than I could. But he says, the reason we eat each other in nature is that the creator intended us to stay in relation to each other. I read that in college and I never forgot that.
Victoria: Ah, yeah. And it's not just happy little rainbows, it's the whole thing, but that's what relationships are with. One person is not that, and it's we expect it to not be that, and we get messed up and that's why the divorce rate is so high.
Like it's, and I'm guilty of it too, I've been, I've done the same thing. But yeah, to really live into that, that not just that Jesus was a sacrifice for us, but that we are a sacrifice for each other. That's how life works. I think that's what he was actually even meaning. Yeah. So we're in this time where sacrifice, which was a not thing we didn't like to talk about culturally or religiously.
We want Jesus to sacrifice, not us, yeah, but we're in a time where sacrifice is gonna be asked of us, and it's gonna be painful and it's gonna be difficult, but how can we enter into that in that we're sacrificing because that's reality. And we feel it more deeply right now. And I think it is the passageway into this new story that we are co-creating.
And so it doesn't mean it's all, it's like reframing all of our inadequate language that was created in a particular worldview that was pretty militaristic and subjective as being object to a subjective other kind of thing. But as we're in this time of the great turning. Yeah. How are you framing that within your mytho poetic reality?
Craig: It's difficult for me not to lapse into hero psychology that I was raised in both by my family, I should say families, birth and adoptive full of real heroes, soldiers, first responders, you name it, they're in my family somewhere. So that's what I grew up with and it's easy for me to want to go into action that way.
I've done it in the past. It's very comfortable for me, it's probably very comfortable for a lot of us in this country 'cause it's part of our national story. I think we have a huge hero complex in this country, so I don't mean hero favorably at all. I think part of our complex is that we, the hero for us is an exclusively good word.
Absolutely disastrous consequences and shadow, right?
Victoria: Yeah.
Craig: So it's hard for me to even for me, who have been looking at this for years, to avoid doing that during difficult times like this. And so what I'm having to do instead is. Think of it as an affirming the need for the yang side of things, to say it in Chinese philosophy terms, but to know that I need to serve the yin part of the process by gathering together people who want to change the story I'm building, as I'm building that online community to do that.
And the academy, which going back and forth on the name, I think it's probably gonna be pronoia. It just, I think it has to be at this point, she's in my dreams. She's a wisdom goddess for those of you who haven't heard that word. But I feel called to, not so much to preserve what's left. I think of the image of monasteries, preserving learning in Christian communities during tough times, but more laboratories, maybe something along the lines of what Ignacio Martine Barrow called Laboratory Reality Laboratories, where you imagine new possibilities together.
Brew things up and not underestimate the power of story and ideas to make that happen in the world in one way or another. Part of that split you were talking about earlier for me is how we divide reflection and story and even prayer on the one hand from action on the other, which is a very pathological way of looking at it.
Other cultures don't do that, so I think that's where I'm being called by my dreams, my fascinations, things like that.
Victoria: Oh, it's so good. I love the word laboratory too, 'cause it's like experimenting then it's also challenging that old story certainty. Like even just meaning you, you're never certain about a meaning.
It's what's the meaning of your daughter? What's the meaning of your relationship with your friend? It doesn't work like that, but you can tell the difference between when you're forcing meaning on your own and when that meaning is co-created with spirit, with land, with people, and so you can feel the difference.
So there is, it is something, not nothing, but it is co-created. It's co-created through you have to let go of certainty. Like you said at the beginning of this podcast, like a lot of people are, am I crazy? Am I making this up? I had this dream and I think it means this, like, how do I know that's what it means?
That's just the wrong question. When you ask the wrong question, you're not gonna get an answer, yeah.
Craig: What if you can't know?
Victoria: Yeah. And I think we need to practice not knowing because we're so unfamiliar with it.
Craig: You need to be in the cloud of unknowing.
Victoria: And how do we practice that?
And you do that through laboratories. You test it, you go, this is what I feel like it is. And then you're not clinging to the outcome again. It's I think it means this. I think it means I need to move to Washington and I do it. And then, disaster happens and you and okay, it's like you trust, it helps you to trust life with these experiments, 'cause otherwise you're always waiting to act. Yeah, you're always waiting to the perfect circumstances or waiting till you have to, which is how most people change.
Craig: I think of some of the philosophers and psychologists through history who have been all about search for certainty. Descartes and bunches of others.
Even Plato, search for the eternal for certainty. For something you can count on. And then you look at their philosophies afterwards and it's yeah, they're okay. And then you were wrong about a ton of stuff and it's like even you spent your whole life doing this.
There was this one psychologist who of the behavioral turn of mind, he amassed massive evidence for a behavioral view of the psyche. And at the very end of his life, he went I think it applies mostly to rats actually. What a way to spend your life,
Victoria: that's funny.
Craig: All fear driven. in my dissertation. I that the need for absolute certainty or belief is an operation of fear. It's a defensive operation on the part of those of us who can't sit with our fear of being wrong. Our fantasies and our optimism.
Victoria: I remember I was asked once to write a little thing for a evangelical Christian research institute and they were doing a study on certainty and doubt. They were doing it on doubt. And it's like they asked these different pastors to write on something about what do you think about doubt for pastors? And I'm like, it's dangerous to not have doubt.
Craig: Yeah.
Victoria: And they wouldn't print it.
Craig: Yeah. It's such a fragile position to be in. Psychologically it's, and you miss out on all the fun, it's to be so busy clinging to what you think is absolute truth. And you miss out everything in life that doesn't agree with it.
Victoria: And then it's devastating, like life devastating. Which is a grace actually, because when you're not listening, you're not listening, you're not listening.
Devastation happens.
Craig: I think that's something that needs underlining too, is that there's a line of thinking in some circles that the sacrifices will somehow be made up for, and you can tournament 'em at the end and everything will be good and, joke, family back and all that. Good. Or new age circles.
It's not a real sacrifice. Yes, it absolutely is.
Victoria: Yeah. Even just as we're facing now, I love that the sacrifices, there is no outcome. It's not I'm doing this so that then it's not love anymore. It's like a system again. But we have to work hard to work against those systems that are so deeply woven within us, not just within our lifetime, but many generations of disconnect of creating this worldview.
And we are living beings of this old worldview. In a transitional time of unraveling. I guess we always are, but it just is really pronounced right now. Oh yeah. Which comes back to what I said I was gonna refer to again, like I've been, I love etymology of words and I've always known the word re, religion means religios means re ligament, re reconnect, and then thinking about the cycle of the move from life to death, to new life, or, belonging, exile to return home. That religion is actually necessary for that return home after the exile for that post death experience. Because we must grieve together.
We must have rituals and ways to be together again in bringing ourselves back home. People that have gone through when you don't do communal grieving, which our society has zero idea how to do. It remains within you and keeps you from that return to deeper love.
Craig: Yeah. Realizing that was a big surprise for me when I studied for my second PhD, the religion and philosophy one, going into that I was a spiritual but not religious guy, I thought, and I started looking, I've studied religion over the years, but not for a degree, not talking to teachers about it, who themselves were steeped in it and things like that. And then at the same time I was going through your program as well and seeing how people showed up for that and how you do, and the sense of community and all of that was having an influence on me.
And then at one point I was, I remember looking back through some text or others and I went, there's no point. And there's no society on earth where there's no religion. Yeah. Some people sometimes go China, and I'm like, but do you see all the rights in the music and the Confucian emphasis?
Victoria: They just called it something different. Yeah.
Craig: Yeah. It wasn't monotheistic religion, but it was religious. Yeah. If we think of that the spiritual but not religious piece. And by the way, that's the largest religious group in the states now, right? Yeah. So all those people I think are longing for community.
And part of that is I think the transition out of our lone pilgrim on the road, which we all need to do at some point in our lives, to the place where we could do community together. And that may not look like traditional religion at all, but it is religious,
Victoria: right? And it's necessary in order to grow as a human, in order to mature, because we all are gonna have those solo and the solo road, the exile.
Is also necessary and to trust both of those. But that you can't get past that without religion. I've totally changed too. It's like spiritual and religion and religious, but I have to redefine it, of course. But that's what we're left with. We either have to redefine the words we have or create new ones.
And you are the king of creating new words. I love that about you.
Craig: In, in working on these novels, I keep mentioning they're on my brain a lot today for some reason. But part of what came out of that is there's a character named Miriam, who's very much kind of a Sophia character, a wise spiritual leader.
She creates a religion, a post patriarchal religion, a vision and imagination and terror in the heart of New York City about 60 years from now. And I had no anticipation of this. I just, working on my first novel and it was just a plot element. I wanted to see the protagonist exposed to a really spiritual person and, 'cause he's a cynic and what would that do for him?
And then it grew and I was like, this is turning into my vision of what, of the kind of religion I would like to be a member of.
Victoria: Totally. That's what Seminary of the Wild has become. It's become what I was envisioning church should be. Where each person shows up with their own unique call to be part of the co-creation of life and how do we support one another.
And I tried doing that in traditional churches and it just, it didn't work within that format, but it's possible. And this is what this is, it's not, I don't see it as a new religion. I see it as like your character, but I see it as a way of integrating this way of being into whatever tradition you, you wanna integrate it into spiritual but not religious.
You can call it whatever you want. I don't care. You're Jewish, you're Christian, you're agnostic, you're Hindu, Buddhist. It doesn't matter because all of them are good foundations to connect with the essence of what is love and real. And they all mess up and they all are off. All of them.
And so to bring this in helps to bring each of the traditions and the not traditions and your own personal life into deeper reality and deeper love and deeper everything that we're at the essence wanting to be about and what it's about.
Craig: I was thinking that might be part of the collapse too, is just for some of us anyway, just.
Things we can't do anymore. There's this magnificent pastor, she's very funny, she's Lutheran and she's getting popular right now. I'm forgetting her name or I would name her. But she, I seeing her and having had the experience of growing up in this really stodgy Lutheran church full of hypocrites.
I was watching her at one point and I thought, if she had been my pastor, I would've had a really different experience. But I have to realize also, and she can't rescue Lutheranism for me that the dead are burying their dead. I can't do that. Yeah. I love her work. Her stuff though.
She's great.
Victoria: It's probably Nadia Bolz Weber.
Craig: Yeah.
Victoria: Yeah. Agree. And I think more and more people are, they're part of the movement. They're part of this movement that you're part of, and we're all holding our own place, respecting and welcoming in all the others who are on this path as part of the same movement.
It's not, like I'd say in my welcome call for Seminar of the Wild. It's whether you do this program or not, I'm just grateful you're hearing the call. and you're following it. 'cause this movement is way bigger than even the organizations that are doing the networking. But that's part of emergence too, like how Margaret Wheatley talks about it.
That these communities of practice are connecting with one another and that's how a movement happens. And so we're connected by lots of webs and I'm so deeply grateful and literally I say this meaning it, every time I talk to you, I want it to be more time. There's so many layers, but I'm grateful for this and we'll have to definitely plan another conversation 'cause there's a lot of wisdom that you're holding, carrying, and needing to share.
Craig: I always appreciate the chance to talk to you. I learn every time I do and stuff.
Victoria: Aw. That's how I feel. Much love to you Craig.
[ transitional music plays]
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we're open to them. When we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart. Each week I'd like to offer an invitation for you to wander in the wildest places in your home and to do so with reverence to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
For this week, try to do what Craig did when he was faced with layers of loss and he sat beneath that tree and then that teardrop shape leaf landed in his hand. He appreciated that gesture, but his first response was to call it a fantasy. He challenged himself though to wonder, was there actually intention from the tree?
Was the wholly in involved in this, and he challenged himself to say, what would it be like to allow myself to approach these synchronicities, these encounters with the wild as if we really are connected, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. What if we really are in sacred conversation with the holy, wild earth?
After all, how then would I live my life?
Stephen: [ transitional music plays]
Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being or a particular place that felt sacred? Maybe it's an everyday occurrence or something more mystical. Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation if you have such a story? We'd love to share your voice and your story in sacred conversation.
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.