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
About Animism and Ceremony for Settlers with Kelley Harrell
What does it mean to truly live the relationship of the animate world around us? How must our path as Settler-Colonialist effect this relationship? In this episode with my friend Kelley Harrell, we discuss this and many surrounding topics!
This conversation explores the profound challenges and opportunities of cultivating animistic awareness in these uncertain times.
Kelly, an animist, death walker, and author, shares her journey of navigating America's settler culture while developing authentic spiritual practices with runes. She articulates the crucial difference between intellectually believing in animism and embodying that life-way through direct relationship with place. "Animism for me is the thing that I strive for," she reflects, "but I often feel that I'm so entrenched in American settler culture that I will never be able to really claim it."
As climate "chaos" disrupts our seasonal patterns and ecological relationships, Kelly calls us to develop new ceremonies that honor both ancestral wisdom and present realities. The Land remembers what our ancestors did – and it remembers what settlers continue to do today. Holding both of these truths becomes essential for authentic animistic practices today. Or just in being human: a good kin.
The conversation turns toward the end to Kelly's work with Runes as living entities rather than static symbols. When approached from an animistic perspective, these ancient symbols offer a bridge between worlds.
Perhaps most powerfully, in the end, we explore death – both literal human death and the countless transformations that comprise ecological cycles. We explore how our culture's fear of death manifests as our impatience with natural process. We see that it takes Earth 100 years to create an inch of soil, but we want it in 1.
Kelly is an animist, author, deathwalker, and death doula held and tended by Tuscarora, Woccon, and Sissipihaw land. For the last 25 years, through Soul Intent Arts, she has helped others ethically build thriving spiritual paths. Her work is Nature-based, and centers soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes oracle, animism, ancestral tending, and deathwork. Kelly also host the podcast, What in the Wyrd, and also writes The Weekly Rune as a celebration of the Elder Futhark in season.
Learn moe about Kelly HERE.
Ceremony is used to like center that, that believable experience that your body is constantly looking at, tasting, touching, smelling, feeling, and bring it into a new state of hypnosis where that which shouldn't be believable, that is to say beyond our senses, becomes believable, becomes believable. He says that's the role of ceremony. And then I asked him in a podcast many years ago. I said well, my friend, like what do we do? We don't have ceremonies. And he says find them, that's the future. Find them. I've only really driven through Raleigh or that general region. I've spent much more time on the west side of the state, for good or ill Mostly good.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, mostly good, that's awesome.
Kelley Harrell:That's where my family is from.
D. Firth Griffith:Got it, got it, it's beautiful. So we live's beautiful. So, like we live in central Virginia, so in like the true Piedmont, the heart of the Piedmont, to some degree like the Atlanta coastal plain, it's an arms outflung reach to our East, and the Appalachian mountains and beautiful forests are to, you know, just to our West, and uh, it's, it's, it's wonderful, it's beautiful. Um our West, and uh, it's, it's, it's wonderful, it's beautiful.
Kelley Harrell:Um, but when you drift into that Western North Carolina, that land is is different now and still recovering in a big way.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, there's this like recurrent pain that I feel like is already etched into this conversation, but it is. It's like omnipresent in the world around us. I think we've been struggling with a lot of ecological pain, or really flirting with it or feeling the early signs of it, for the last so many decades. But 2025, and really the conclusion of 2024, it does feel a little different. It feels like we've kind of passed that fulcrum.
Kelley Harrell:I think for a long time, during the pandemic and whatever this side of it is, I don't even know what to call it there was this sense of normal being on hold, and now it feels like it's wobbling. We have a better stance than we did, but it's not stable by any long shot and, like you were saying about hope, we have to go find it. I think we have to go find stability, and whatever center is right now, it's going to wobble. That's the nature of it for now.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, yeah and it's kind of exciting. I don't know if that's an improper response to for now, yeah, yeah and it's kind of exciting. I don't know if that's an improper response to the thing, but it's kind of exciting it is.
Kelley Harrell:It is it's kind of like what we were here to do.
D. Firth Griffith:Imagine I have a dear friend he's been on the podcast before, I believe he's predominantly from a genetic perspective Cherokee, but he's an established member of the Omaha Nation now and medicine carrier there, and he always jokes with me anytime we talk about how his people have been leading up to this for six generations the prophecies of the buffalo calf, the white buffalo calf and so much more. And he said imagine that the world starts to truly collapse when we all start to turn inward, that is to say, you know, all start to actually turn towards our kin and see this animistic relationship which I know you write and talk a lot about.
D. Firth Griffith:That that's so exciting, Cause I think you get lost you know, I think you really can get lost, Um, like a number of people of my generation. They, they get really fearful and I fearful and I get the fear and I share the fear. And at the same time, you talk to people like him and other friends and leaders and mentors, and there's hope there, there's actual, actual hope. Well, let's talk. So, kelly, you, you're a prolific writer.
D. Firth Griffith:I have not been able to dive into a lot of your books, um, but the two of which that I've been able to touch, from elder to ancestor, and then I've also been able to uh handle the uh runic book of days, um, and so I don't know where this conversation leads. I want to talk about animism. I want to talk about your worth, um, worth your work as a death walker and a death doula. If that brings the conversation any spark, let's stay there for a while, uh, but I don't want to miss runes. There's a lot of conversation that happens around this space, but very, very little of it like dives straight through the heart of, like runes and runic being. I don't know you can put some language to that. I'll let you do that part, but let's just start in the beginning. So you describe yourself as an animist, a death walker, a death doula. What does that mean? Who are you? How does your life live in this way? What do those words really actually mean to you?
Kelley Harrell:For me, that means I have to be very aware of how I'm standing on the land, where I am. I tend to have a very global perspective. I see the whole planet when I look, and I've had to learn to dial into my ecosystem, listen to my ecosystem. Who are my allies here? What do they need from me? System, who are my allies here? What do they need from me, and how do I engage those relationships in a way that blesses everybody who lives in this space? Animism for me, is this thing that I strive for and often feel like I'm so entrenched in American settler culture that I will never really be able to claim if that's the right word. I'm not sure that's the right word, but yeah, this lens that we're all in relationship. We're all affecting each other all the time. Tremendous amount of responsibility that's my medical alarm speaking of in a relationship.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, I think animism it's a very fun word. I think it's also talismanic, maybe that's an improper way of describing it. It seems like it's. Wield wrote a book about farming in regard to relationship and it was very animistic and very philosophical in its approach. It's not necessarily telling you how to raise cows, it's telling you how to speak to cows to some degree in that framework and it's just introductory. It's about 150 pages long and you know, I think I got a lot of people who read that who came to me and said yes, 100%, that's true, but they weren't actually willing to give the cows agency. And I talk about that a lot. I realize I'm middle of writing a book on it to some degree with a couple of friends, but, and so maybe I kind of draw on on the affair. But there's a huge difference between wanting to believe in animism and actually believing that the life in around and as us is agent has agency. Does that make sense?
Kelley Harrell:It makes sense because it means we're small. It means we're much smaller than we want to believe that we are. Whenever I hear people talk about animism and they say the word belief a lot it throws up flags for me, because it is about how you experience being in a place. It's about how you experience land-based relationship, about how you experience land-based relationship. And if I pull on the strings of belief too much, if I make it philosophical, I'm not there.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, belief versus like being. Wow, that's really interesting. Settler culture you spoke about that. Let's not pass that without maybe putting a definition on it, because I think it's so unbelievably crucial to put that in perspective. What I mean?
D. Firth Griffith:A friend of mine, an unnamed indigenous gentleman. He always tells me that he gets so frustrated because everybody wants to support him and quote, unquote his people. You know, reparations and such Like. It's a political phrase that makes a lot of sense to your political viewpoint to some degree, depending on your viewpoint, of course but it feels good, right, it's like that belief in animism, but it's a red flag because we still live in a very heavily plagued settler culture that profits from the destruction of many peoples the peoples that live here, the peoples that used to live here, their memories, their histories, their stories, their languages, but also the people around the globe. And so, to some degree, you can't be kin until you actually become that kin, right? Not like believe that you are, but like become that. So that's a massive hurdle to people like you and me, right? So when you talk about settler culture, what does this mean? What does this mean to you?
Kelley Harrell:I feel like the conversation around colonization, decolonization, has settled in fairly well.
Kelley Harrell:I don't know if I would say it's a mainstream conversation, but in the majority of circles that I move through there's awareness of colonization as this thing that's sort of like in the rearview mirror, but there's no real ownership of the culture that still thrives from colonization.
Kelley Harrell:It's like colonization was this singular thing that happened a long time ago. But the culture that has sprung up as settlers, as people who are here through no effort of our own, but the lineage of how we got here is highly relevant to our placement here. That is what settler culture means to me, and when I was writing From Elder to Ancestor, I still had this like the West kind of perspective when I would talk about, I don't know, colonization, capitalism, all of that. And then I realized that's enormous and it's speaking to groups of people that I'm not part of, but this one I am and I really had to dial it in to American settler culture and I used that phrase a lot. But I do think we're positioned in a really different way in terms of other places on the planet and as somebody who has lived in the South my entire life, that just dials it in even further.
D. Firth Griffith:How do you approach that Like still with animism in view, how do we, as especially settlers, not lose that which connects us to our own ancestors right, because I believe personally that that's of immense importance While also being here in the ways in which we are here with the feet that we currently have? How does that relate back to animism and the struggles, but also maybe, the hope, found in that wonderful, beautiful relationship?
Kelley Harrell:It's complex, and when I'm teaching people how to cultivate animistic awareness, that's what I want them to bump into.
Kelley Harrell:Animistic awareness, that's what I want them to bump into. That very question is what I'm wanting them to bump into, because there's so much well, I'm Irish and my family is German, or whatever as if we can go claim those in the present, as if we can claim what those lands relationship is to humanity in the present. We cannot, and what our ancestors experience of that was often gets romanticized. There's just this, um, there's a sort of beauty around it that people bring forward as the stake in the ground of their spiritual path, but they're not paying attention to what that stake is pinning down where they are, which is relationships for thousands of years with people who don't look like me. And I dial it in further for folks and say and your land remembers that, again, it's not a singular experience that happened your land remembers that people who look like you are the ones that caused this. And you want to go ask who your allies are in your ecosystem. How are you?
D. Firth Griffith:bridging that. I think a lot of people, when they hear the word animacy and I don't know the number of these people that would be listening to this podcast, I would imagine there's some but I think a lot of people, when they hear the word animacy, automatically think trees with legs, cows that speak English, dirt that speaks as we would listen, you know that kind of stuff. I think they think very modern fairy tale, very modern Disney channel type film, animism. I don't think that's what you mean. Could you describe what animism is in like a sensorial, like an experience, sort of way? Does that question make sense?
Kelley Harrell:It's weird, it makes sense to me and I don't know if I can answer it well, because I feel like I experienced that through my body through season, and our seasonality is a hot mess now, I mean especially right now, we wobble into spring and summer so dramatically.
Kelley Harrell:We truly go through multiple seasons to make the transition from cold to warm to, like now, smotheringly hot in the later part of the year. For me that dictates so much and I have a major issue with ritual now because I have to check myself if I'm calling in seasonality and directions that are my memory of what these spaces used to be as opposed to how my body actually experiences them. Right now. Winter is not winter anymore and that is a huge facet of how I experience animism of my place and, frankly, it's, it's messed up, it's, it's discombobulated. Right now I don't, I don't know that my nature place is discombobulated, it seems to roll with it. It's, it shows signs of confusion every now and then. I had a cantaloupe blooming in in January, very, very strange, yeah, just one, and it was so I could tell it was like, and I was like sorry, but I feel it through my body being still enough to get out of body's way to have experience and feel that there's tension in that right now.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, it seems I want to throw this thought at you and you can maybe play with it and see if you agree or disagree, or you feel like you can mold it a little bit better than I do, but this is so interesting to me. So what you just said I've been thinking about for a while and I have a very poor language for it, but there is this thought that has been sparked where this discombobulated, strange seasonality that we're living in it seems to be entirely counterposed to the nature of our society rigid, linear, mechanistic, but like, beyond the idea of mechanistic, into like predetermined, machine-like living. Like that's to me modern culture especially American, settler, colonial culture especially, but maybe also Western culture A little bit more globally particularly us, though, that is for sure. And so it seems to me like the seasonality that is all discombobulated and almost chaotic. It almost seems like it's asking and this is the way I would experience the animism today and how I'm writing about it, how it's speaking to me through these words too is it's almost asking us to reinvent what it means to like live ceremonially, like live ritually, like live within these seasons, instead of trying to meet it halfway in the sense that like when you say, like when somebody like me would say on a podcast, hey, live seasonally.
D. Firth Griffith:I think a lot of people would think eat seasonally, uh, heat your house with wood, whatever. It's gonna be a little bit more ecological, a little bit more agricultural in your understanding of it. But to me, and don't get me wrong, do those things, of course. If you have the privilege and ability to do so, please do it today. But the what I really feel like this discombobulated, chaotic lack of seasonality in the true sense is really ushering us into is a state of accepting chaos, dismantling the linear, entirely mechanistic regime of American predetermined settler colonialism, and meet it there Like, not on our terms, but on its terms, her terms, like that. Well, I don't know, what do you think?
Kelley Harrell:As you were speaking, I had this feeling of if we could do that, seasonality would settle out. She's waiting for us.
D. Firth Griffith:Yes.
Kelley Harrell:We're the missing piece. I remember years ago, like maybe two decades ago, melodoma Somme was talking about how electricity dramatically changed, like alone, like to just single out one thing their relationship to land and seasonality. Because they walked the same path every day for water and multiple times a day for water, and they would know what was blooming, they would know how the ground felt, they would know exactly how much dampness the ground beneath them should have at this time of year and just how the air should smell and how their skin should feel. And gaining electricity dramatically changed that because they didn't have to make that walk anymore. So if we had to make the walk, it would probably imply certain mechanistic things had fallen away that are contributing to the wobble to start with. We might save some of the wobble if we just met it.
D. Firth Griffith:Let's say that so. So separating nature out is harmful Maybe it's a source of that harm, and yet pulling nature back in to me seems equally as harmful, which seems to be more of that like animistic problem, right, like that's what you're getting to earlier. How do we, as very white settlers who didn't ask to be here, how do we, when nature is chaotic, when the seasons are just collapsing and bursting and doing crazy things all around us, how do we live in enough peace where we're not pulling nature back in, we're not forcing them, you know, as an it, to come back in and save the soil? How do we live in that peace to nurture a much more kin-based or kinship-based or concentrically-based environment in us, around us, in our communities, in our minds, in our communities, in our minds, in our spirits, in our land, et cetera?
Kelley Harrell:That is the question. The introduction of the book is called the Problem of Animism, and that is exactly what it's getting at. I think the thing that I ask myself, and when I'm working with other people, when I do mentoring sessions, is what are you willing to give up? This idea, this perfectionist, romanticized idea of what animism is is wonderful, it's wonderful and maybe even nostalgic in some way, however, perhaps not accurate. But what are you willing to give up in your immediate present, to move closer to that? Because my feeling is, nature is not, it doesn't need to be pulled back in, it's here and our antenna is the issue, our how we see ourselves, how we see each other and what we are willing to say. We will do differently to live in accordance with an animism experience. And that, to me, is that's the hard part, because we're we're not going to get there it. We're not going to be a hundred percent animist, whatever that means.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, it's like a. It's like a I've I've talked about this in the past, but it's like a like a dream walking, I feel more and more convinced that it's a dream walking that needs to occur.
D. Firth Griffith:It's like we want to be the ones that create something you know, whereas these elder cultures, especially modern indigenous cultures that still hold onto this very ancient wisdom, To me it seems entirely different. We want to carry that which is created and maybe that's improperly said, but I think it's close enough that I can get now with the language that I have. They want to carry what has been created, Whereas we, in this American settler culture especially, maybe even the Western culture, we want to carry what we create.
Kelley Harrell:We even want to claim it, we just want to clutch it and hold it. And that's missing the whole point of nature and cyclicity, and it's also missing the whole point of being a good elder, because part of being a good elder is realizing you never see the end of what you create. Your interest, your initial motions in creating have to come with understanding that you never get to see the end of it. You never get to see how it turns out Right and you still have to do it.
D. Firth Griffith:Right, which requires, though and this is going to seem plain, but I think the effect is just magnanimously large it requires a particular view, like a long view, Because when you think about the climate, when you think about climate chaos, when you think about all these ecological problems, especially agriculture, all of our views are, and this is what you see, and I'm sure you've seen this everywhere. It's almost plastered on every agriculturally available billboard there is, and conferences and news and books and everything else. It's nature grows soil. In 100 years, I've been able to grow soil in three years, two years, one year, through this particular mechanistic process, and while people like you and I, I think, and maybe I can speak for you, I can definitely speak for myself in this sense. I see that and immediately it gives me just a sliver of hope, like I realized that in my own heart I do. I see that there's hope in the sense that, while it takes nature 100 years to build an inch of soil, we can build it in three. One inch of soil holds, I think, 27 000 gallons of water, as long as it's organic, you know, material, and that's good, because the soil doesn't have water, and, like, I see that scientifically right, but it may be in the last maybe four or five years it is my the shift has really occurred, especially in my writing, especially in the way I speak too. I guess I'm starting to ask the question like, why? Like, let's not even debate the science? Because I don't believe that if it takes nature 100 years to build an intersoil, that you can do it in one. I think your science is off. The measurement of how you're doing that is just off. I don't believe it. But because you and I both can't speak to that, let's just throw it to the side.
D. Firth Griffith:While we probably agree that it is off, I think the question is why? Or really what? What's the effect of forcing nature to move 100 times faster than she wants to? Because it's not can To me. It's not that I think she could build an inch of soil if she wanted to. I don't think that me. It's not that I think she could build an interest soil if you want it. I don't think that she doesn't have that ability. But she doesn't seem to want to deploy that agency to produce that outcome, right?
D. Firth Griffith:So if we can do it faster, I think I want to ask why, why should we right? Because it can't be that we've ruined the world, because we can't ruin earth, we can't enslave her into our mechanistic process, because we, we we ruined it. That's not the way that works, right, that's it doesn't work that way, right. But then what do we do? Right, cause that that's that's what I keep coming back to. I know you just kind of touched on that, but I want to push us a little bit. World is collapsing politically fine, economically fine, but like ecologically it is right. Is that okay? That's that's a question I want to bring to you. Is that okay?
Kelley Harrell:I have leaned more to the response of yes. Part of me thinks I shouldn't. Part of me thinks I should be alarmed to feel that way. But you know, when you're talking about compressing a process that takes a hundred years into a year or even, you know, five years, there's a, there's a very eloquent respect for and understanding of relationality. In a hundred years, there's a lot of beings in agreement, a lot of processes that need to happen and play out. In a hundred years. That forcing feels like enslavement. Yeah, it feels like enslavement.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, forcing it to move more quickly, to compress in a shorter period of time and accomplish the same thing is omitting those relationships. Yeah God, there's so much there.
Kelley Harrell:Like, just like turning relationships into a process, and for me that makes the experience of not having had fit animistic elders all the more challenging and grievous, because we know somebody is supposed to be holding that relationality between formed being and the ancestors. Somebody is supposed to be holding that together and teaching it to us and filtering what we need to know. The way I always word it to people is when to run, when to stand there and help, when to scream your head off, when to just lay down and play dead. Somebody is supposed to tell you these things and then to leave that little bit open to say now you go figure it out for yourself. We don't have that.
Kelley Harrell:From an animistic standpoint in American settler culture means also that we're missing lore, we're missing ritual, we're missing certain land-based relationship and we're missing certain relationality into the ancestors themselves.
Kelley Harrell:Sure, we can work our ways and rituals to find those relationships with the ancestors, but it still doesn't feel the same. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time and it doesn't feel. I still feel like I'm figuring it out. I've been doing this for almost 40 years and I'm still like, well, this piece goes here and that piece goes there, and no, no, no, back that out. I mean, the ancestors are the keepers of all of it, all of the lore, all of the things that we know about being in form and being out of form. They hold all of that as animists are these beings who have their own experience of living into what being in form means. From my perspective, they would have been held by a collective container that is in agreement about the cosmology, that is about the land, relationship with the room to still cultivate unique relationships to aspects of that land. You don't have anything like that, not unbroken.
D. Firth Griffith:How do you feel or how do you see maybe that's the same thing the role of ancestors in non-human life forms? For instance, last year I wrote a book, to some degree, if you were to really actually boil down that, 500 pages of random thoughts. I mean it kind of centers on this idea that in a time of chaos and maybe it's needed chaos and wanted chaos, and beautiful chaos, right of course but in a time of chaos, which I believe is a fine example of our, a fine word to exemplify our times what if the land around us actually becomes us? Or maybe we become the land as the land and then learn from her as if they are human? And it's not to go out to the soil, dig a hole, find some nematodes, right, and be like, hey, will you be my elder, right? But it's rather like what if this very American, very settler, colonial, only an old bearded man, can be my elder? Does that make sense? What if we were to dissipate that? And it becomes more broad. How do you see these things?
Kelley Harrell:When I sat down to meet my ancestors, when I said, who's ready, who's well enough, who's crazy enough to try to, to work with me in some way, to, um, to do this life and to to weave us back together, a mountain came, an anthropomorphic mountain, and I've told this story a lot and it always cracks me up and I remember how I felt when this happened and I was like sorry for bothering you, you know, I mean, it was enormous, it was very specific, I knew where it was and just could feel it on my skin, all of it. And I just said, you know, sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you, I'm looking for my ancestor. So I turn around to walk away and I hear like footsteps behind me and I'm like shit, it's following me. What have I done? What am I bringing back? What have you know?
Kelley Harrell:I broke it and and then it occurred to me, my ancestors can only ever walk behind me. They will never walk in front of me because that's not their job, that's my job. And a mountain came to see me and stays with me still and walks with me still. So, yeah, and I broke myself even further recently by experimenting with who the off-planet ancestors are and I'm like, because my fishbowl wasn't big enough, I guess, and yeah, I mean, our ancestors are the ground, they are the wind, they are the water um, can we talk about ruins?
D. Firth Griffith:is that, too, too bad of a switch? It's just jar no way no way, it's so interesting to me please I just don't hear.
Kelley Harrell:I okay, I didn't when I wrote that book. I started writing it I think in 2016 okay, maybe 15 and no one was talking about the Elder Futhark from the standpoint of it being alive, of it being animistic, and I had the thought and I couldn't unthink it. And anytime you're talking about the runes, you're talking about people who are extremely academic and they're very, you know, it means this and it doesn't mean that, and they're not an oracle. And then you have the extreme other side, which is, you know, like, well, it only means this, it can only ever mean that, and it doesn't matter how they used them in historic context. And I wanted to be in the middle somewhere. I wanted to be able to hold both of those pieces in a way that let them be alive now. And the idea of an indigenous oracle. We're talking about symbols that have been in human hands for nobody entirely knows how long. I mean that's one of the cool things about the last few years is how we've seen the dating for the runes go further and further back. That has been fascinating to watch real time. But I wanted to sit with them from an animistic standpoint, meaning I just wanted to listen to them, I wanted to experience them in a way that they were moving and thriving and still evolving forbid. And that is what happened.
Kelley Harrell:And then I stumbled into this idea or not an idea a reality of runic calendars. And I couldn't and I want to be mathy, but I'm not. I'm not on any level, I can't hold it. I want to hold it. There you go. But I knew immediately that you could not be animistic with the runes in a calendric system and plop them on the Gregorian calendar. They can't do, they cannot do.
Kelley Harrell:And then I rediscovered an old favorite author, who was Nigel Penick, who had written his book Runic Astrology, I think years and years ago, and he did it mathematically of course, based on different calendric systems of Western and Northern Europe. He just kind of deduced here's what we do at the Sabbaths, here's what we do at these cross quarters and equinoxes, and then what we know of runic calendars. He worked it out and so I'm like that makes it even more alive. If it can have a seasonality, it's even more animistic. And I realized also that the only runic calendar that could really like be true to me is the one that I spend a lot of life doing and observing exactly where the sun is and exactly what the moon is doing on this land.
Kelley Harrell:And I'm not going to do that Like I'm. I'm not, like I will make my observations lifelong, but I needed some sort of container now to be able to start that sort of larger journey with the runes. And so I started working with his calendar and realized how much I missed devotionals, how much I missed having that. Just tiny bits, just little prompt steps, and I was like that's the runes, that's what they are, and when we work with them in season, we don't have to say it from the standpoint of well, this is Fehu, so all the Fe explore our deeper relationship with these runes for two and a half weeks at a punch, and that's plenty. It's not too small, not too big. We get to touch base with those relationships. After doing that for like a decade myself, there's like a whole conversation that emerges from that and I had to write it down I'm taking notes here.
D. Firth Griffith:Um, that's fascinating. I want to get into the nature of runes here and and we can speak about them from some you know, from its symbology to you know, the seasonality and its livingness, and however you want to approach that, I want to get into that. Before we do talking about that, that devotional, a good friend of mine, um honka pitopa, uh maglala, pipe carrier of the lakota, he, he's written a lot of books on, he's co-authored a lot of books on, um, I'm going to lose, I want to say neuroplity, which is probably not a word that he uses, and indigenous ceremony and all of these things. And his life, uh, many, many, many years ago he's very old now many years ago he was a horse trainer but he trained horses through hypnosis, which my wife and I, we train horses and he's been a mentor in this way. But he writes that I mean I've even had conversations to this regard to him and so I guess he, he, he lives his life in this way. He writes that hypnosis is a dream state or some word, maybe that's what he says at a believable brain frequency which I really like. That's really interesting to me. I've never had it so clear because in my culture, hypnosis is something that the evil witch of the dark forest does, right Like that's, that's anyway. So I have this new language. But he says but this is the role of ceremony, indigenous ceremony, especially to the Lala, the sacred carriers, and the Lakota people, ceremony is used to like center that, that believable experience that your body is constantly looking at, tasting, touching, smelling, feeling, and bring it into a new state of hypnosis where that which shouldn't be believable, that is to say beyond our senses, becomes believable. He says that's the role of ceremony.
D. Firth Griffith:And then I asked him in a podcast many years ago. I said well, my friend, like what do we do? We don't have ceremonies. And he says find them, that's the future, find them. And I asked what that means. And he said find the old ones and create new ones.
D. Firth Griffith:And so when you were talking about, like that devotional, I think so many once very nature I don't want to call them nature worshiping because that's put them in a very weird place of modern language but I mean people who are maybe more like you and I, who sees the animacy and the agency and the creator and this great mystery and the created world all around us, in us as as us, etc. They're all converting today over to Orthodox Christianity. Everybody that I know once from this space is going to Orthodox Christianity and I think it's because this is my personal opinion. I think it's because in our settler, colonial, initial attempts at communing with the great spirit we don't have the ceremonies and we yearn for those devotionals. And what does Orthodox Christianity have but liturgy and devotionals. Like we are liturgical people, those are our stories. And so these runes. This is so interesting. What about the runes, the runic calendars, what about their symbology brings us into that very devotional space.
Kelley Harrell:That's a big question, that's huge. I feel like they exist in that space. That's where they come from. I mean, for me and how I experienced my relationship with them, they exist in that dream state space where we have the opportunity to step, like shape shift, almost to step into that space with them, engage them, become them, let them become us. As you were saying before about letting it become human, you were saying before about letting it become human, and we bring back strong medicine from that over and over.
Kelley Harrell:For me at this stage, like my neuroplasticity has changed tremendously at my age and experience in this culture and I question it a lot because it is my writing is not the way that it was, which ideally I think is supposed to evolve and grow, but it did not evolve and grow the way I wanted it to and my capability of accessing things is just really changed. And I feel like Galdor for me, has become the most prominent way that I experienced the runes. So I write a weekly rune cast. That's kind of sort of like. It's like tithing in a way and it's also offering this sort of bridge into experiencing the runes in this animistic, seasonal way. But I don't experience them in that oracular way anymore. I experience them through sound, through cauldering body. That sound generates resonance, that does shit. Wow, and it is amazing.
D. Firth Griffith:I love it. I love it. There seems like there's a very tricky impasse here Because to some degree our runic ties are Western European but we live in Eastern Turtle Island. There's a particular aspect of the Irish mythology, who I predominantly come from. In the Boko Bada Yiren group of people, they land on Eru's land, the land of Eir, and these two brothers come ashore and these three sisters, the sovereignty, goddesses of the earth, basically the personification, the feminine personification of the land, come by Pidol. They show up, these three sisters, eru, Fadla and Banba, and they say hello, this is us. And one of the brothers. They hello, this is us and one of the brothers. They say hello, this is us. And they say welcome. And the other brother basically says so, we brought our gods and our language. Can we all flow them on the boat?
D. Firth Griffith:And the three sisters say no, you can't come upon the island with rubble in your pockets. And he says, no, no, I'm going to come with rubble in my pockets. My gods are, you know, in my language, they're on the boat. And then the other brother says what if we don't? Are we welcome here? If we don't, we come but naked, unclad, unshot. What if we just come and become. And then she says then you'll be welcome here forever, but you have to call this land by our name, not by your name, not by your language's name, our name, the brother who comes with rubble in his pocket. He ends up drowning in the sea in a beautiful set of these nine waves. That is just symbolic and beautiful and gorgeous, and the part of me that wants to break settler colonialism just loves this part.
D. Firth Griffith:And then the rest of it is a story and it's wonderful. And the three sisters, the sovereignty goddesses, they go back into the earth and they enter the fairy mounds and they become the land again, the animate land that's all around us. You come to a new land, we are, we have this story and the question is how do we celebrate runic symbology and the power that that has over our lives and everything that goes along with it, everything you're talking about, while also learning to become kin and good neighbors to these lands, goddesses, to these lands, people, et cetera? How does that happen? Because it feels like we need both, like I believe we need both, and I want to know do we? And if we do, speak some wisdom with us? How? How does that happen?
Kelley Harrell:I have two responses to that. I ask I have learned the hard way to ask if all of my spiritual tradition is allowed to be in a place. Even when I travel, I ask, ask. I have not had any place or being say no, but I have had them give parameters, which is fair, totally fair. So my approach with that is I always ask.
Kelley Harrell:I do not assume the assumption is the problem in my experience with the places that I have lived. The other part of that is I have never experienced land here having an issue with the ruins. What I experience is more about me. It's an issue with well, what are you going to do with them? Because we recognize those.
Kelley Harrell:There's been some depth of those symbols having meaning before me, like they knew them before they knew me or anything like me was here, and so the question is more like well, what are you going to do with them when you're here?
Kelley Harrell:That's what we need you to be clear on, because we know how we're in relationship with those symbols. What's going to happen with you in the mix is what we want to know, and I've I've I've had to set them down for a while until I could figure that out in some places tell people it's done on my land, it's done on the land that homes me, and it may not be the same. If you did this on your land and you should do it on your land, you should ask those questions of your land and you should ask if the runes are welcome on your land and if they're not, what is the teaching from that? And as an animist and a whatever else-ist, can you set them down to go, foster that relationship so that you can express that these are part of lineage for you that is still alive? I've never had nature spirits reject that negotiation, but I've always had them be shocked that I asked.
D. Firth Griffith:You know, at the beginning you're referencing that you know the time conversation and around that same time is the follow-up to it, which was nature and chaos and how. To some degree, it seems like she's asking us to accept that and I think it would be cliche and, I think, overdone. Like saying that we need to regenerate the earth is an overdone phrase and it will be overdone in the same way, I think, for me at least I feel this to be true for me to say like we're, we don't die well because we're afraid of death. Like that's overused and I don't think it's false. I think a lot of us are afraid of death, but like that's like saying the sky is blue because the sun is up, you know. Like, okay, they might be related all green things are grass. Like yeah, grass might be green, but today it's brown, so is it grass? Like it's a true statement, but it's not totally true yet. What seems to be a little bit more true, or toward the pathway of a finer truth, is what you're saying in the sense that, like, if you take this whole conversation and you push it forward into this one view of death, work, which I I don't want to sound linear, but you know, if you, if you look at it from this one spectacle, this one perspective, um, all of the world dies, all around us and all of modern life seems to be the thwarting of that death, which is why it's so hard to accept the fact that it takes a hundred years to build one inch of topsoil. Because if you're listening to this and you're still saying to yourself, daniel, but we still should be doing it You're afraid of the earth dying, right, like we're afraid of death. Yes, but we're afraid of death, in my opinion, because and only because, initially, foundationally, we are not earth, like the seasons die, but we're afraid of death because we're not the seasons Trees die, but we're afraid of death because we're not trees, right, like everything around us is dying and being reborn. We do sacred harvest courses where people come out and we experience death to some degree, and then we experience life and rebirth as well, and whether or not it's an herb or a cow, it's very wonderful, wonderful time. It's funny we got away from teaching agriculture and now we teach death and rebirth to some degree. What a pathway.
D. Firth Griffith:And the one comment we always get from people is how uncomfortably human the process feels, like to witness death, because when, like a tree dies, it just dies and falls over. But when there's a 2000 pound animal and I say this maybe a little bit too descriptively bleeding hundreds or dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of gallons of blood all over you, it can't but be a ceremony and it can't but be everything right, like I talk about it during these courses, about both grief and glitter. To me, these are very similar things in the sense that you can't wash it off, like you will leave this course and for the next week your fingers, your fingernails will smell of blood. I guarantee it. You can't wash it off, and that's okay. Yeah, that's okay.
D. Firth Griffith:That's the point, because how dare you live your life without ever experiencing death? Because you cause death. You are rebirth, you are the chaotic, dawn darkness that lives in between. That's fine, but we have to experience it. But to experience it right, we have to start becoming like. You have to go through the conversation you and I just had of agency and animism and being willing to shut up. If she tells you to shut up or stop, if she tells you to stop, right, like or cry or mourn or dance or shake or quiver or whatever it like that's that lead Right. And so to me it seems like your your work with death walking and I understand you call yourself a death doula and more. It seems to be all one in the same. Like I see the runes, I see your animism, I see your death work from that same vein of if we are earth, what then? If you want to be found? I don't want to assume you do. How many people interact with you physically, online, with your, with your books and your writing your own words? What's best?
Kelley Harrell:My website is soulintentartscom and that's the predominant place to find information, and since you and I arranged this and I gave you information, I've really dialed out of social media a lot, as we noted. Yeah, so the only place that I'm coasting through every now and then is Blue Sky. Okay, and it is at Kelly Soul Arts.
D. Firth Griffith:Beautiful. I could talk to you for hours, thank you so much.
Kelley Harrell:I'm so glad we did this.
D. Firth Griffith:Thank you. Thank you for sticking with us. It's been many months of trying to make for hours. Thank you so much. I'm so glad we did this, thank you. Thank you for sticking with us. It's been many months of trying to make this work. Yes, thank you. I appreciate you.
Kelley Harrell:Appreciate you.