Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Conversation about relearning the kinship worldview with author, horse-drawn woodwright, and renowned storyteller, D. Firth Griffith. Unshod is a podcast and community that believes to rebel, we must pause, that we live with Earth as Earthlings, that we must approach creativity, curiosity, and compassion in conversation.… but we must approach this ground UNSHOD. This has nothing to do with "saving the world." It has everything to do with leaving the right kind of tracts in the mud.
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
What is Sacred Ecoliteracy, Acknowledging Kinship, and A Reading from Stagtine with Daniel Firth Griffith
If Earth asked you to stop forcing her to regenerate, would you? If you cows asked to be let go, would you? We often find that animism is fun to believe in. But it is hard to listen to.
Join us as we recount our transformative journey to Lockhart, Texas, where Morgan and I led a sacred ecoliteracy course for 30 passionate participants. Through serene forest meditations and profound dialogues, we challenge the colonial mindset of "fixing" nature and advocate for a symbiotic relationship with our environment. Drawing inspiration from my book "Stagtine," we unravel the threads of regenerative agriculture and delve into the animacy of Earth as Earthlings, exploring the interconnectedness of all life.
After this introduction, enjoy a grouping of chapters from my latest book, Stagtine.
Join our community and receive a FREE COPY of Stagtine HERE.
Or, you can purchase a copy of the book HERE or HERE on Amazon.
Welcome to another episode of Unshot. We were traveling last week, morgan and I, to Austin, texas, lockhart, about an hour south of Austin, teaching a sacred eco-literacy course. We were joined by 30 wonderful people, were joined by 30 wonderful people. I couldn't believe the turnout that the event had to sit in the forest, in the Texas scrub mesquite and briar and cactus scrub with 30 wonderful souls meditating under the canopy, learning to ask questions, learning to lose so much of the predisposition that I think modern humanity has when we start to work in the quote-unquote natural world and we see this great story of separation writ, you know, when humanity comes into these natural environments and we try to fix it, and we see the problems and we start scoring it and we think that through a good heart and an intent spirit on this idea of regeneration that we're able to impart knowledge and wisdom and success and heal the world. This is to some degree the colonial myth, the dominant worldview writ in the veins of a trying people, yes, but it does not make it a good myth. In fact it is the opposite. This is to some degree the essence of what we teach in the sacred eco-literacy course that instead of imposing the dominant worldview upon nature to force a healing. Instead, it is to sit and meditate and ask questions. You know, I wrote in my book Stag Time, which just came out earlier this summer so much does modern humanity spend our time forcing health upon the quote unquote natural world. So much of our time is spent telling animals and plants what to do, where to be, how to grow. In some very large sense, maybe in a total sense, we need to flip this question around. What if we spent our time asking the land what it wants its earthlings to be? So, instead of telling cows what to do, what if we asked cows, or their grasses, or the microbiota at their feet or their kissing canopies that stand above them, what should you have us do? And then, what if we sat and listened?
Speaker 1:After the sacred eco-literacy course this past weekend, I was blessed and honored to sit down and record a live studio audience podcast with Kyle Kingsbury, where all of the students all 30 of them got to participate and listen and there was some Q&A at the end. I think it was absolutely wonderful. I mean it was truly a pivotal moment for me and, I think, for many other people, as we got to sit with these thoughts and conversate, I think for about two and a half hours. It felt like 30 minutes to me. I hope it went that fast for everybody else in it.
Speaker 1:It's hard to realize that time still matters, which I think is a much bigger conversation than I'm allowing it to be in the moment. You know we're so often concerned with time and the time things take, but when we really get in flow, when we really get to participate with the life that we are in and of, when we become an earthling, when these dialogues get to happen, time seems to vanish, which is a really wonderful thing that when you actually live life, time doesn't matter Something to chew on in the future. But I wanted to bring up in the podcast conversation Kyle asked me about regenerative agriculture and holistic management and so many other things and, as many of our listeners know, things have gone through a bit of a change with us and Morgan and I's communities and organizations. Historically we've been a hub of the Savory Institute. I've taught holistic management and ecological monitoring all over the country to hundreds and hundreds of people over the last five or six years and we've really enjoyed it and I still believe in these things.
Speaker 1:Soil health obviously, is of importance. Biodiversity from a vegetative and basically all living sense matters, how we integrate our understanding of consciousness and decision making into the landscape, with the landscape as the landscape. These things matter. But when Kyle asked me this question, it was interesting. My first, you know what do I think about these modalities or methodologies or paradigms today? My initial response to him was that I was uninterested in his question, which I think was a little bit of a shock as it would have been to anybody interviewing me at the time Like, okay, he's not interested, now what do we do? But I told him the reason I'm not interested is, I think for long we have confused the idea of regeneration or the idea of managing a landscape holistically, without ever questioning our role in that. And what I mean by that is this Soil health is a fine thing, but forcing the soil to have health is uncomfortable if the soil is animate, meaning that the soil can decide what it wants to be on its own, in the same sense that you can decide what you want to be on your own. And so in the Sacred Ecoliteracy course and in this podcast and even in the book that I wrote that came out this spring, stag Time Concentric Rewilding Science and a Tale of Letting Go that's the title.
Speaker 1:You know I talk quite a bit about this that in some sense there is two worldviews the worldview that humans have intelligence and animacy and that we can use this intelligence and animacy to make better the world around us. But that world is not intelligent, neither is it animate. And then the second worldview is obviously the opposite that human intelligence and animism is a product of our relationship in and of and as earth, as earthlings like every other. One of our relations and cousins are earth, are earthlings, and so is it a shared animacy and intelligence or is it a unique animacy and intelligence that we get to place over the world, to save the world? And it's the way that we answer this question, I think which is to some degree the pivotal question in my next book, cliffhawk, which comes out in spring of 2025,. I believe it's how we view this question and answer this question that determines everything else.
Speaker 1:Because if I believe that I am special, that I have animacy and intelligence and I can use this animacy and intelligence to autonomously decide to make this soil healthy, to some degree I'm using my power to force health upon earth. But if earth is animate and the animacy that I have is the animacy that we all have, then to some degree forcing to a very large degree me, forcing health upon a system that is living in animate doesn't seem to be the right option. It has always interested me that when I speak like this, the first response I often get from folks is that of course earth is animate. Of course we believe that earth and all of her components have animacy and intelligence. This is the wisdom that our regenerative systems mimic, they say. But the interesting thing is the deeper reality is that very often we want to believe that she is animate, but very seldomly do we act in response to the acknowledgement that she is speaking.
Speaker 1:What I mean is if the cow were to look at you and say I don't want to be mob grazed, would you listen? If a meadow looked at you and it said I don't want to be biodiverse, I want to sit here in my sickness and heal slowly, and that's going to take a hundred years, would you listen? If this tree said, no, I won't be lumber? If this closed canopy forest said I won't be a Savannah, would you listen? Does our understanding of animacy have actually acknowledged relationship with management, that is to say with communion and community. That is the question, so many of us kneeling in that Texas scrub under that mesquite and over-neglected, over-rested, even over-grazed to some degree, landscape. We wanted to impact change. We wanted to bring animals in or machines or forestry mulchers in to reduce the mesquite, to allow the live oaks and their wonderful, wonderful communities back into the conversation. But when I asked, did anybody ask the mesquite what they wanted to achieve, why they are here and if they want to continue to be here? Silence, absolute silence. We believe in Earth's animacy, but we don't Because if she were to talk and that talking were to go against our own personal context, we wouldn't listen. And so this is why I'm not interested in regenerative agriculture or holistic management or permaculture or synt, syntropic agriculture and everything else.
Speaker 1:It is so much about mimicking the natural world by forcing her into this idea of animacy, but actually lacking the animate autonomy to decide her own fate. It doesn't have to be this way. None of these paradigms or modern methodologies for human management with land or co-creative opportunities, whatever you want to call it, none of these things are bad or intrinsically immoral, of course, but they're built upon the wrong worldview. They're built upon the dominant worldview, a worldview that colonizes that which even it perceives to be minorly animate, entirely animate. This is what Stag Time, my latest book, cliffhawk, the book that is coming up after it in the Wildland Chronicles book two, I believe it is going to be released this spring really discusses. And so, in this interlude between recordings of episodes, we have about 10 conversations lined up for the rest of August and we're just giving some space and time to record those, to prepare for those, but also to edit and produce those as they so deserve, with deep honor and time and attention. We wanted to release this short solo cast with me rambling good or bad, and then provide some chapters of Stag Time, my latest book, some audio book chapters, selected chapters for you guys to listen to in the intermediary time between episodes. So enjoy.
Speaker 1:Lionel, son of Lynette, is a bull in the wildland. One day it came to pass that his death, speaking in a torrent of wind and hooves, awakened deep memory and changed life forever. His blood welled across the misty dawn like a velvet carpet laid for his arrival. Our hearts together thumped deeply. Earth pounded as life pulsed rhythmically, outward and thick, like awakened spirits rapping against their cage of bones. A river of magma played under the pale metal sky and gray clouds covered everyone. The land in front of us fell in long shallow slopes. Forgotten hills of cedar and olive, barren and knotted and twisted together toward the river valley below His life flowed slowly and scutted across the hillside. It released summer's one-screen grasses from their frozen tupper unhurriedly. The frost steamed as the warm blood freed blade by blade from the ice. The winter's gray hold and the world seemed to gather under mist and steam. Magma is a world builder and a new world was building slowly. It was a spectacle for the coming of life's luminaries, our celestial celebrities, to carry him away gently into the second world, just below the clouds, the spirit land.
Speaker 1:Mercy without justice is indolorable. So also is justice without mercy, and I wondered if the gods know what it feels like to be human, to be here, to be man, to witness death, to give it and to live alongside it all. Do they know, I often wonder. From the east extended a west of a hole in colored wardrobe, with its wooded hills heaped up by some ancient war or maybe the growing sickness that followed? Not humans, for we have only the little powers of little men, rose these hills, but monsters gurgling up under earth's crusts like dragons, descending down their wrapping wings, their inflamed breath, their bullient blood together formed these crags, the eternally blue ridge, the forgotten dragon's back, eroding down, down down. Lionel's eyes rolled back gently. A paleness washed over his great horned skull chaos germinating. Haleness washed over his great horned skull, chaos germinating. She was taking root like mountains, growing up, up up. She was working that master shipwright in an ocean of monsters and he was returning home.
Speaker 1:I had taken my shot at a considerable distance, some seventy yards. Some of the cows on the periphery had smelled us before the rest of the herd saw us and one of them, an aged cow and matriarch in the herd, affectionately known as Horned Mama, gently bounced her spiraling, damaged armaments of wonder and pain towards us, indicating that she saw us and that she was watching us and that she was here. Do you see me? She said. Morgan slowly bounced her head in return, indicating the same I see you. I kept the gun lowered beside my leg and Morgan kept the knife sheathed on her belt.
Speaker 1:We daily walk amongst the herd keeping a healthy distance, with long sticks in our arms, so they become accustomed to weaponry, so that they understand our presence and become comfortable with our many and sometime reflective appendages, privileges. Field harvesting is an allowed practice by our generous governors if it is wild or exotic meat, like wild deer or farm bison, or if it is your animal and the meat is for your own consumption, if it is your property. We live our lives here at the wildland, in the muddied middle ground between these two options. These mammals are quite wild and these mammals, I guess, if they have to be, are ours, although we take no ownership over them. If anything, this is their landscape. We're just happy and blessed to be here Spotted.
Speaker 1:We stopped and waited, patient for the moment to speak. We stood silently, careful not to shift in the snowy ice. Weight moving from left to right would compose a loud crunch in an otherwise silent landscape, drawing attention to our attention. Attention to our attention. Our hearts wrapped, our bones rattled. Our cage would soon burst open. The moment would come soon.
Speaker 1:A whispered energy descended and covered us like gentle rain as Lion walked away from the herd that was collected like a copse under a stand of aged white oaks and ventured step by step across the hillside. His path brought him neither nearer nor further from us, strayed in its own way across the hill under the dead, tumbling black walnut veiled in ivy. He plotted and then stopped, positioned broadside to us and between us, in the adjacent rock-clad ridge, nearly a mile across the valley, a perfect backdrop for a ricocheted bullet. He is giving this to you, morgan whispered. Her arms hung still by her hips. Her fingers tapped mine gently, softly, but with a hunger of iron in their veins. Lionel pivoted with her words and spun with her tap, as though the winter's frozen mist echoed her words and pounded her movement's vibrations down into the valley and back up again. "'he can't see us', I whispered back inaudibly. "'that does not matter, he sees you'. As always, morgan was right.
Speaker 1:Lionel was now staring directly at us, his body behind his eyes, his eyes behind a muzzle of rhythmically rising mist, all below a wall of spiraling horns. Take the shot. Morgan's voice was louder, building and growing in some ancient way, now like molten iron, her modern impurities, rising, rising, rising to the top, purifying as they went. He looked at us, he bounced his horns. I see you, I know. I bounced my head in return, the whispered energy released with a sharp snap. I reached one finger into the slot, my hands closed around the grip. All settled into place as I was born for this I was. We are In place of a bowstring. My fingers found a vertical pad elevated by a twisted metal. The decision bouncing on springs, he fell, fell swiftly, I see you. The trigger bounced back into place.
Speaker 1:His blood pooled across the now soggy soil as aged hoofprints eddied the tributary brooks. A vicious stream swelled from here to there, collecting in puddles and little ponds. It worked to cover frozen furrows of mud. Embodied in their own way and impressed by the combined weight of happiness, purpose and pain, distanced from its source, all froze once again like gray clouds and falling dragons and mountain monsters. Dolmens formed. The grass refroze in the ice. The magma hardened. A new world under the new winter's morning was born. Below us lay a vast tumble of hills and forested valleys, with undulant valley springs like veins in some great body, carrying not earth's blood but her surging spring waters. Or maybe those are the same things.
Speaker 1:Lionel, the bull born of Lynette, the mass of peaked and veiled muscle was running home, but not yet like spring water. It was a moment you had to see to believe, or maybe a moment you had to believe in order to see. But it was only a moment and it was his moment. Slowly, the west faded above the grey and war-torn hills and everyone collided as life boiled together into a chill but welcoming chalice. The dawn was coming and it would soon bounce in. Hello, I see you, she would say, as her layered dawn of purple and purple-red pushed back the west. When she would come, he would be gone. The carpets rolled up like finery to be locked away until his reincarnation, until life beckoned gently once again at the door, like a passing priest, like an erupting dragon of ash and magma.
Speaker 1:When the table was set, crouched over velvet in the lake of life, somber before the billowing mountain canopies and kneeling before the now still mass of muscle, morgan and I prayed and we fell back in time in memory. What do you remember? She whispered slightly above the purr of the inert embers, a remnant of this morning's fire at our feet. I whispered back as though my answer may release a secret too important, too powerful, too sure to speak atop a murmur. But it was to be our secret. My mother and I held jointly, and so we whispered together. We sat on her bed all morning and watched the fire smolder and beat the cold early spring, my mother religiously fed and poked the hearth, and while its flames often dwindled with the dawn, she never let it go out. Fully Kneeling, she breathed life through her soft pursed lips and the flames roared alive, strong. Time passed, the dawn expired, pursed lips Whispered memories. Held back and forth, the day ripened, the fire dwindled. Held back and forth, the day ripened, the fire dwindled. Her lips again pursed Childhood.
Speaker 1:It would often become so warm in that little basement of a house that, no matter the temperature outside, my siblings and I would escape through whatever crack would have us to endure anything but the rigid deep heat. When our parents bought the house only a handful of years prior, there was a pig living in what would become their bedroom, a flock of chickens in their bathroom In place of housewarming. Their early work was housecleaning. One evening after a day of rain around my second birthday. As they worked to undo the basement pig pen in its walk-out patio that served as a covered run for the animals, they stumbled over a large stone block some four feet square. The northmost edge of the run, reminiscent of a rough, shabby shack, was constructed atop of it, a cornerstone. It punctured upwards from an otherwise unmemorable landscape in the poor construction of the previous inhabitants, and its time-rounded and moss-aged form seemed out of place. It was strength amid rot, stone amid mold. My parents worked to scrape back the pig manure and piled the rusted metal and weathered rotten boards to the side An archaeological finding history rising up to greet them At once, they discovered markings on its front. It was a gravestone, the stone was dry, but its letters wet. Yet holding the day's rains, it was readable only for a moment or two A union flag planted atop the words of faded and forgotten carving of a master, mason.
Speaker 1:Warren F Wilbur, wounded in the Battle of Chancellorsville, died May 16, 1863. My mother's birthday May 16, but exactly 100 years prior. There was always magic in that we would come to learn that Warren fought and served in the 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He enlisted willingly. He walked with vision and died for values. A road one mile to the southeast was named after him, but no one ever knew why. Old stones, equally worn and covered with moss and soil, formed a square attempt of a circle around his center stone.
Speaker 1:Years later, our family ventured, thanks to a kind park ranger, to the spot in Chancellorsville, virginia, that Warren had fallen. As I remember, we stepped out of the car that was parked on the side of a busy road, followed the ranger a few yards into a fallow farmer's field, a miniature forest of Johnson grass and poke weed and only recently planted and struggling corn, and stood there anticipating some plaque, some memory of the 17,000 Union soldiers that lay in front of us, their blood and their bones enriching the soil that the corn and the grass and the poke now grew. But the ranger stopped short, stood in the empty field and said Right about here, the 29th would have been fighting, but we do not know for sure. With that he nodded at my father and walked away. We stood there alone, nothing moved, nothing remembered the 29th. We got back in the car and continued.
Speaker 1:On A lost grave, a lost on A lost grave, a lost monument, a lost hero. Does anyone know, does anyone remember? Warren's memory covered many pigs from the harsh Ohio winters and they at least must have been thankful. My mother is and was then a slender woman with surprising strength and her feet rarely stopped moving. Those feet with hardened, dry soles walked the day long and sometimes they walked her alone into the forest or the west meadow below the house and over the rock-wall terraces covered in ancient hostas where they stepped through leaves and twigs and mosses and undertowering canopies of maple and ash and the great cottonwoods that held to the riverbanks and flecked the spring landscape with the fresh coverlet of their seed snow.
Speaker 1:There was also a hand that held us, scrubbed us, cared for us. It provided a peculiar impression, a permanent sensation, something drawn like a bad dream in the dark night, or a splinter from the skin itself bulging and infection and beckoning to explode as something else is given deeper, poured into us like energy through wires, poured into us like energy through wires. I would light up a gentle touch of verve that, once given, could never be forgotten, a fire that could never be snuffed out. When we joined her outside, the world cleft and life seemed to dance around us like hornets from a grounded hive. But welcoming and kind Look she would voice gently as a silvery, yellow and toothed lance, dropped from the hickory above our heads and wafted gently to our feet, as if she called it to drop there in that moment for some purpose.
Speaker 1:See, she pointed as the wind played in the garden row, sightless forces bouncing amid stems and flowers like lost fairies, cross-pollinating her many vine tomatoes in the erupting vim of conjoined herbs like chamomile and basil, steeped around us into a fine remedy. The celestial forces were themselves within her reach and her movement was medicine. Lunch, she said, as she clambered into the deep green mass and emerged with a rainbow of peppers piled hastily into the loose bowl of her stained shirt, crimped just above the waist. She would don anything that was strong enough to hold back her hair, and it was not uncommon to find her clothed in random articles of torn fabric, duct tape, even whatever made sense at the time. Magic followed her steps and her hands and she taught it to follow us if we would allow it. What do you remember, she nudged? What do you see in your mind? She inquired just above a whisper, lifting her head from the emboldened hearth that flamed with her life. The fire roared in the once big pen.
Speaker 1:I was lost deep in memory in the leaf-lit green of the maple forest that grew in an open grove to the east of our childhood home. The grass like tiny islands encased within a patchwork of sugar and ash and shagbark hickory speckled in the spring and quilted softly under buckskin jackets of pearls on wings, the winter-age seeds of the maple tree. New life was afoot and the first lantern festivals of spring would soon be upon us. The worm moon, spring's first celestial awakening, a magical illumination. Years from then, my mother would escort us far past our bedtimes to the roof of our home to watch the moon rise and to watch the stars descend, pointing and commanding the heavens with her finger. They were wonderfully untroubled hours, jaunty and jovial. Our lives lived magically and under the deep blue and calmulous white of heaven, unimaginable now. As lights blur the deep night sky into a pension, a servant of the day. What do you see Again, pursed lips in flame. On the horizon floated simple planes in their altitudinal urgency. Little sunlit clouds rose often, but not always in the spring, in a sheaf of thunder ready for its reaping. The mumbled rumble of a highway carrying cars into their city clapped in the distance. Around me spanned a silvel pasture of arms, grasses waving their long spears and trees lowering their little shields.
Speaker 1:A phalanx of spring. The protective detail of memory. I remembered that I took off my shirt and laid it next to my baseball cap, already laying in the grass, upturned. The caterpillar, the first of the year was crawling over its smiling bill. The soft, warm wind played with my hair, like my mother always did, twisting each curl gently around her slim and arthritis-wrecked fingers. The wind played with my thoughts and it played with the phalanx at my feet equally and in equal measure. It did not discriminate. Everything is gallant, everyone is brave, everything is everyone, and that much seems true to me even now.
Speaker 1:That morning, as she warmed me by the fire and as I sat whispering on her bed, she ushered me into memory to recount yesterday's life, to make tangible the day, the moments, the smells, the feelings of spring as grass on my bare feet and the wind as life in my hair. Memory is so important, she would say, or at least memory, if we can attend to it, is life's great medicine. Let's do a tell-back medicine, let's do a tell-back Note. A tell-back was my mother's organized way facilitating experienced transfer into sustained memory, regardless of whether it was a chapter in a book, an experience in nature beyond our home or feelings encrusted too deeply to elucidate in normal situations. She would ask for a tell-back and then sit back and listen, withholding judgment, opinions or understanding of what actually may have happened to herself forever.
Speaker 1:I recounted as one of my sisters danced and disappeared behind the trees. Another laid next to me, a subtle form on her back on a simple sheet placed over the grass, her head cuddled straight, stared openly at the wind that bounced from tree to tree like chimpanzees, discriminating only in the forms that bear greatest witness to its sightless and unseen magic. Sarah, the youngest and always accounted for Her simple face, tepid in time but flaxen alive, cheeks blushed by roses, her chest, laying atop earth's floor, rose and fell rhythmically and intervaled. My older brother, with book in hand and tree to his back, sat nearby A ruby crowned kinglet gifted us a yelp of her song.
Speaker 1:Like a sneaker on the gym floor, in the alabaster branches above all of our heads, I wasted my time fingers deep in the mud. The worm moon needs worms, I thought, and I dug and covered myself. In childhood, I let the memories pour out of me, as though their work in my young body was done, their job now complete, and they had things to do elsewhere. My mother listened unselfed, spellbound, to every word wrapped in the dailiness of my mind. She added nothing, said nothing. Memory in its maintenance was mine, the oral retelling of a life living fully. This was her magic, the tellback, the meaning of memory, the Meaning of Memory. Years later, I am grown up and married to Morgan, and we are back with the herd under the cold gray sky. Lionel's blood is now frozen like the grass.
Speaker 1:But the rest of the herd was not asleep. Their increasing interest in his death aroused us from our prayer, our hunter's meditation, our spirit-infused tellback return. Well, animated the landscape around us. A white spirit infused the February mist with a strange passion and its energy drifted upwards and we felt exposed. Naked, we were at the center of life and our hair stood straight as earth cleft. In front of us, king Lear, another bull in the herd, uttered a deep earthen hum, as though from a lost land of dark moors that quiver and bubble from below. A prehistoric ball and the ethereal spirits that floated amongst us instantly landed as a grounded force. His ball was their call. The spirits grew legs and walked. They grew arms and danced with them atop their heads, fingers twirling and palms spiraling, as if they were fumbling with the heart of the world. They smiled and we smiled back. What do you see? Morgan asked through pursed lips, herself kneeling next to me.
Speaker 1:Shaking, the land felt simultaneously stable and unstable. As it shook and quaked beneath us, earth trembled. One hundred head of wild horn bovine started kicking and running as they formed a singular unit around us, like ancient and horse-born armies of old. Their ceremony had begun. The spirits, now forward-legged and clad in thick leather and oily manes, surrounded us. The herd's ceremony shattered Earth's perceived stability and they encircled us in a great stampede. Fear poured like flowing magma and Morgan tried to climb atop Lionel's now swelling corpse in order to gain the high ground. The forgotten leaves of autumn formed tornadoes around us. King Lear led the herd in three complete rotations around the three of us and stopped as abruptly as his prehistoric ball began. The herd stopped behind him In less time than it would take for the dust to settle.
Speaker 1:A small bull calf, unleavened by age, left the amass herd and entered the ground between us. A messenger, a spirit walker, a dream teller, he passed into the middle ground, that which stands between this and the other world, between life and death, and looked right at us and we could not help but look at him. Nothing moved, no one bounced. He looked right through us, he uttered a gentle but thick note, a simple ball, and then receded back into the herd Like exhaled breath. The swelling weight receded and the leaf-gilded tornadoes returned to their forgotten resting places and our hearts became heavy and their pulse became normal. What did he say? Morgan whispered aloud she was crying. What did he have to say? I thought Life was moving and death was moving with it. But that is the funny thing about life it moves regardless of if we would like it to or not, and sometimes its movement is more like a quake than a quick step. Death and its life are like ships whose sails cannot be furrowed, and earth is a wonderful shipwright.
Speaker 1:The first day of August is etched into my memory like a name in the bow of my life ship. During the warm-up lap around the athletic field for the first football practice of my last year in high school, I fell and I have never really gotten up. I did not trip or stumble, I exploded. A genetic time bomb that had hitherto ticked silently detonated loudly instantly its final tick, my final healthy moment. That August afternoon I lived in Columbus, ohio, in the upstairs spare room of the athletic director's home. The school systems around Northeast Ohio, where I grew up, did not allow homeschooled students to play sports, and so my parents allowed me to move to Columbus, two hours south, to live with strangers and play on their football team. It was an independent team that played top tier schools and attracted players from across the area. But under that August sun, as I laid helplessly writhing in pain, life changed Forever. Here, take my hand, offered Luke the Ohio State athletic trainer let's take a look.
Speaker 1:I was diagnosed in the field with a severe hip strain, a pulled muscle really claimed an orthopedic doctor at Ohio State. You just need some rest, a good stretching Ice don't forget to ice. By November, however, it was only worse. By December I could barely walk. By the end of January I had undergone numerous procedures and substantial surgeries and was bedridden until late April, at which point I underwent two more surgeries and lived fully in bed until late August.
Speaker 1:Over the next six years, I collected over 300 doctor appointments, traveled across the country multiple times, visiting various experts, underwent a multitude of extensive surgeries, lost the ability to walk, learned how to walk again and weighed less than I did in the sixth grade. My body undulated under the torrential weight of insecurity and its pains. Lost in a whirlpool, it spun and rotated within periods of intense, unexplained weight loss and intense, unexplained weight gain. I would lose 80 pounds in the span of a month and would spend the next trying to gain it back again. I was nestled in a cyclic and painful exchange between life and death and I was going nowhere. I lost the ability to eat most foods and still today I can only eat 21 things, such as Celtic sea salt, brussel potatoes, horseradish and beef.
Speaker 1:Still today, 12 years later at this writing, I have not consumed any food, water or washed my body with any ingredients, not from this short list or not from my own home's kitchen Not once. No restaurants, no holiday meals my wife and I have never dined together breaking the same bread or bread at all. Still today, some days are too much, and I find myself inside, unable to do much more than look at a ball or read a book. What do you remember? My mother asked?
Speaker 1:As I sat under the maple grove in the backyard of our childhood home, a fire crackled in the patio's chimney. It was spring, the fresh grass was quilted with buckskin jackets of pearls on wings, and I was reading a book that was given to me by a dear friend. It was on agriculture, namely a version of agriculture that was presented as good for both the climate and for its humanity. It was titled Folks, this Ain't Normal, and I remember thinking yes, I am not normal, daniel. She said this time, getting my attention. I set the book down and looked up. I weighed 130 pounds, struggled to move, had blisters all over my body that bled profusely when I walked or moved too quickly. I was depressed and I lived under its dark and forever darkening shadow. She held my hand. I half answered, half mumbled, my eyes drifting in the empty space between us, and I flushed when the feeling of surgery gloves and the smell of latex and powder drifted over me.
Speaker 1:Once again, memory returned, filling, slowly, undergone an exploratory procedure whereupon, laying anestheticized on an operating table, a team of doctors probed my body with large, long needles that injected peculiar dyes and, while inserted, other doctors or nurses perhaps rotated and moved my limbs around to pinch the needles in their dyes in peculiar ways, all in order to determine something that I now entirely forget. The reason for the pain, however, is yet unforgettable. Mom, it hurts so bad at once, feeling like a child embarrassed, that I said anything at all. I know, I know. She returned, walking closer to me, closing the space between us, the vernix white lights in the vernix white garb of the doctors, conjoined in my memory with the pain in the blue surgery gloves. I remembered everything and the memories flowed from every direction. She held my hand and her gloves glow, glowed blue and she looked at me, into me, my eyes now entirely closed, their lids exposed to the gentle wind and the heat of the fire. She held my hand and we just looked at each other. I understand, honey, my mother's face contorted between joy and pain. A single tear trickled down from her eye and splashed horizontally when it collided with her smile that was growing laterally across her face.
Speaker 1:Her magic was at work. This all will soon pass, I admitted hesitantly, as though revealing this truth exposed me left me naked open. The words flowed like water over rocks, sure, steady but jagged, as they danced a foxtrot slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. This all will soon pass, echoed from tree to tree, from bird song to bird song, in the wind and through the wind, and because of the wind, the fire itself flickered under its weight. Or was it just the wind, honey? She closed the space between us even more.
Speaker 1:We have tried everything. You know that right. This all will soon pass. Again, echoing, the bird songs increased. I did know, Since that August day, we had tried everything.
Speaker 1:We were laughed at of doctor offices and cried with others, from surgeries to procedures, to months in hospitals all over the country, to Western and Eastern medicine alike. We had tried everything, or so I had thought this whole time. She thought out loud herself, now staring into the compressed space between us. I think we have searched for help. The fire crackled we have begged and pleaded Again. The wind. We have done everything. Then silence everything. Then silence.
Speaker 1:My fingers fumbled over the book's cover. I was sweating, t-h-i-s. My fingers traced. This ain't normal, but our search has been passive. She continued interrupting my thoughts, my fingers'. Mindless work. Her words echoed rudely. The bird songs stopped, the wind hushed as earth herself held her breath Inhale, hold stabbing, emptiness, no release, passive.
Speaker 1:I questioned, my heart dropping and my words inflaming with anger. What is passive about years of serious surgeries and years spent learning to walk again? I questioned, my heart dropping and my words inflaming with anger. What is passive about years of serious surgeries and years spent learning to walk again? What is passive about laying in hospitals with doctors touching your quadricep muscle and asking for you to flex it, and you simply cannot, no matter how hard you try? What is passive about losing dozens of college scholarships, your future, in a singular instant as a fragile child? What is passive about weighing a meager 130 pounds when only a handful of years prior you played at a healthy 240 pounds. What is passive about bodies covered by bleeding sores? What is passive about withering away a winnowed wheat or its litter, the chaff? What is passive? Yes, honey. What if we forget about all of that? She hesitated, as if her mind was unsure how her mouth would follow Her words hung in the leaflet wind. Sure how her mouth would follow Her words, hung in the leaflet wind.
Speaker 1:The herd retreated silently. Stillness fell in the spirits that only moments ago had danced around us, left as they came. Earth cleft like a bathtub, drained, gurgling diaphonic songs as it swallowed everything, everyone. The dawn sung over our shoulders, setting fire to our knife blades, and I looked at Morgan with the same smirk and tear that my mother had looked at me with all those many years ago on the fire-warmed patio, and happiness and its health descended like gentle spring rain.
Speaker 1:Lionel, meaning little lion, the gift of the field, harvested under the winter's mist. We worked all morning and we talked and cried, remembering his life, remembering our own. Remembering his life, remembering our own. We dreamed together and anticipated his rebirth, our nourishment, when his memory would flow through our veins, becoming our body. Health is the muddied middle ground between death and life, like the unleavened bull calf, but it is also the union of activity under the waning morning mist and the ceremony, the lantern festival, the sacred Above underneath pulsing through it all, through all of us.
Speaker 1:What if we forget passivity and become active participants in life itself? Passivity, it'd become active participants in life itself. My mother's voice echoed in me, through me, a memory. My hands covered in life, my heart wrapped around her voice. This feels normal, I felt myself saying out loud. This is normal.
Speaker 1:Morgan and I steadily worked and the dawn gave way to the day. Silence beat down upon the misty meadow and its valley. Below us, life, lionel's blood, sweating the soil into rust. We had spent many years passively searching for help, like a blind man in an unfamiliar place. We had met many kind people along the way who ushered us from here to there, and some even that helped us to where they thought we should go, across the street or closer to home. But we never made it home. Our eyes remained closed.
Speaker 1:What if we become? My mother inquired, become what? I replied inflexibly, immediately them. Her voice was flat and simple. The words flowed as commonly from her lips as though she had said anything else, like the weather or the day. But the four letters galloped like a small band of wild horses across her outstretched arm. That pointed to the nearly awakened squirrels that danced and played in the meadow. They bounced, now juggling her words, under the spring-lit and waving translucence of maple leaves. They jumped from bough to bough, sometimes to a shagbark hickory, and skied down its ashen moguls, darting and drifting and hot-dogging this way and that with a flip of their hips. They seem happy, she said.
Speaker 1:I was silent, my eyes and my mind had left with the horses and we were now playing with the squirrels. There was nothing for me to say. What if we buy some chickens? Chickens? Reality snapped back in two directions, like a rubber band stretched too far and one that tore in the middle. That night we bought some chickens. It was a moment of change, of emerging into the unknown, the tentative light of the new day that strides patiently, slowly in. And then is there fully, as though her gloried and glittering yellows and blues had been there for eternity. The new colors of dawn, a new hope, rushing in like mountain water over rocks.
Speaker 1:We gave up, we let go, we threw off our search for health and decided to become it, health that is. We immediately amended my lifestyle and dietary choices. I began consuming raw, whole and real foods. I began to acquire local food and found them to be fresher, tastier and to contain higher levels of nutrients than their conventional counterparts. Energy as we understood it then, food, that substance I had known all my life but I never much cared to be friends with, transformed into the very substance of my life. These are living. Yet one farmer at a market said to me as he handed over a bag of asparagus I picked them this morning Watch out or they'll bite you, bite me they did. I became awakened to the idea that, while real food is good, local food is better. And while local food is better, participating in the story of your food is best, that is to say, let your foods bite you.
Speaker 1:My health saga, to my great surprise, emerged ultimately as a romance. As I fell in love with food and then with local food, I also fell in love with the local families producing that food. As I fell in love with our local community, I ultimately fell in love with the lives that echo and sustained that community the cows and the sparrows, the sheep and the deer, the squirrels and the humans. We became farmers. Health steadily returned, like the seasons and like the dawn Slowly, gently, but always surely. We planted a large market garden atop my mother's old home garden and raised pasture chickens in mobile shelters in the front yard. We were slow at first, keeping in mind the pace my body would allow. The meadows that once nourished the tellbacks of my childhood now grew in me like memory as we worked and harvested gifts from her soil, incorporating the life of our place into the life of our soul's clay form. We became her earthlings. The people became the land through the act of becoming in health. Like the cottonwood spring, snow of seeds returned, its fluttering wisps and flurries, its pyramid leaves emerging from the land of the dead, its roots holding the riverbank and seeping and sinking into the river herself the healing depths of sacred wells.
Speaker 1:Early in this journey, morgan and I realized that while food matters and what your food eats matters grass-fed beef as opposed to grain-fed beef, for instance this is not the full story. In fact, understanding this extended nuance is to understand the full complexity of this book. Everything else is just details. One evening, around the dining table, morgan looked at me and asked who is this Gertie? I replied casually and offhandedly I had never thought about it in that way. I was focused on the meal.
Speaker 1:Gertrude was a chicken in our flock that always seemed like she could have stayed another couple of days in the egg. But she hatched early and she was a mess Feathers always askew and missing, feet, always running about and a head that seemed always too small for her increasingly featherless body. When we would come near, she would run for the woods. When we left, she would stay there alone. It was her squawks in the morning that awoke the farm. The roosters never had a chance. In the morning that awoke the farm, the roosters never had a chance.
Speaker 1:That night, after nearly a year of positive improvement, I became very ill. Old pains and sores erupted and a familiar deep sting flooded around me. It consumed me, my life and everything echoed and drowned in the dark and sharp rocks and rapids that I thought were upriver behind me. My health plummeted, I became once again bedridden and my mind spiraled into a deep depression. In the coming months I would once again be hospitalized, suffer a 30-day bout of constipation, lose the ability to walk, misplace another 50 pounds and I would spend the next 12 months doing nothing but getting back on my feet.
Speaker 1:Another year lost. What changed what happened? What if all of this is deeper? Morgan asked, changed what happened? What if all of this is deeper? Morgan asked. One early autumn evening, as we sat on the porch and watched the sunset, we rocked back and forth a blanket over my lap on matte green rocking chairs that would crackle and crat as they went. It drove her crazy, but we were both going crazy and we both felt that having something to be crazy about helped at least a small bit, and so we loved those rocking chairs and we sat on them often Deeper. My eyes were still on the setting sun. Yes, what if all of this you I mean is deeper than simply a change in diet, in lifestyle?
Speaker 1:She blushed under the lost simplicity of a statement that felt to run away from her. The moment her heart gave it away, I was silent. I pulled the blanket higher on my lap. The golden Easter of even tide of the day's ashes fell behind the trees, who were themselves falling slowly into winter. The sun's claret reds mixed with Adalia's orange-hearted yellows and all fell together behind a huge homily of one subtle greens and snowy whites, into a raven black night, like the line back of a sabal. Darkness covered our eyes, but we kept them open, staring the crackle and crat of our chairs the only noise.
Speaker 1:Cautiously, my mind peered out over the edge of the porch and snaked its way into the void. For a moment I was afraid Slightly. But it was an intelligent fear, I told myself, written in my genetics and constructed for my survival. The dark has always threatened. Run, fight, run. We sat in the silence and we sat in the darkness. I felt the world's leaving ebb through me, my blood-red veins, the cool waves and my life's hope, a pebble tumbling in the water. I remember only pain Run.
Speaker 1:After a while, morgan broke the silence. I read a paper recently that said a hug releases as much oxytocin as a whole meal of food. Oxy, what, I replied? Feeling even worse. Oxytocin. It can regulate stress and reduce cortisol, help blood flow and overall healing and can even fight depression and anxiety. And she paused to play with the words in her hands to find them in front of her Sincere and soft human touch can give you more of it, oxytocin, than a whole meal full of food. She paused again, finding the words. They call it a hypothalamic nanopeptide.
Speaker 1:I returned blunt silence, punctuated with a mumbled thanks. I was thankful, thankful for the darkness that hit my face, hypo, what I thought? No, I mean listen. She gathered herself, sensing that she was losing me. Harmful chemicals are inherited in foods, right, yeah, that is why we only buy and produce clean food. You mean chemical-free food? Yes, well, oxytocin is a chemical. What I'm asking is what if all chemicals and foods are inheritable? I was silent, I was not following.
Speaker 1:Daniel Morgan said and then paused. It was the kind of pause that often inhabits the moment before discovery, and the type of pause required to allow the moment to rise. Like bread, daniel, she said, gathered and sure, her hands now firmly resting on her lap. What if you just feel everything that everyone else doesn't? Thunder mumbled in the distance and its thick clouds hid the stars from our view.
Speaker 1:Something scratched in the tree to our left, maybe a squirrel. Something scratched in the tree to our left, maybe a squirrel? A gaggle of geese reeled around us like a pyre, gyring for its flame, and their wake raked the bare trees as they descended together in a V into a lake, just beyond the tree line, for safety, for a night's rest. A splash, and then many splashes, and their silent ripples became audible truths as they lapped against the shore. The descending blackness, the day's heat rising from the rocks, a postern into the next life Feel, I questioned, totally missing Morgan's crescendo. She leaned back in the darkness. A crackle and crack skidded across the porch.
Speaker 1:What if the feeling of food, what your food feels, matters more than the food itself, or even what your food eats when it is alive, organic or whatever? Organic or whatever? Again, thunder in the distance and a scratch to our left? That is definitely a squirrel. I thought she found a fine larder for her winter foods, the loving crook of a mother tree.
Speaker 1:Daniel, what if Gertie's stress manifested inside of you when you ate her? I mean, think about it. She was a hot mess, her whole life, totally ostracized from the flock, she said now, waving her hands violently she was never a very peaceful chicken and you're eating her cortisol. A westerly and cool breeze lifted the silent, leafless limbs, the nothing Silence. My heart was crashing, its thud dwindling, the depression of illness and its resurgence was too much. My core, cold and gray, no longer pounding against its cage of bones. What if it isn't what you eat, or even what your food eats, as much as what your food feels? She paused. What if the memory of food matters? An interspecies tellback the hearth's fire, the community's table, a life in remembrance. We were waking up.