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
Remembering Our Rootedness with Veronica Stanwell of RootedHealing
In this Unshod yarn, Veronica Stanwell of RootedHealing and Daniel explore the themes of community, intentional/slow living, and the importance of stories and ceremonies in our lives. We dialogue about the challenges of modernity, the impact of technology in our little and mammal lives, and the need to reclaim our roots.
Veronica shares her experiences living in community in the Southwest of the British Isle, while she also emphasizes the significance of slowing down and participating in embodied practices, from story to ceremony.
The conversation centers on the interplay between storytelling and ceremony, and the potential for these embodied memberings to foster healing and transformation in such a modern, fast-paced world.
Toward the end, we also get to explore the themes of interconnectivity and language, and the importance of reciprocal relationships with nature using our syllabaries. Touching on animism and ancient languages as a deepening to our connection to the land and our ancestors, while also reflecting on the limitations of modern language.
About Veronica: As a multidisciplinary healing + creative arts practitioner, Veronica weaves her love for embodied ecology, land lore, ceremony and song into intimate explorations for connection, healing and growth. MSc studentship in Consciousness + Transpersonal Psychology with the Alef Trust, alongside work with Rooted Healing (as founder + director), are driven by her fascination with the fabric of life and our belonging within it. Veronica's background in professional theatre continues to guide her work, carrying reverence for the power of story, music, expression, catharsis and playfulness. Her longing for a collective intimate relationship with life is apparent and contagious. She serves to remind you that we belong and that the mystery of life is worth falling in love with, again and again.
Learn more about RootedHealing HERE.
Learn more about Daniel's work HERE.
Hello, welcome to the podcast. We take a break from our usual God is Red series with my dear friend and brother, taylor Keene, to share this episode, this marvelous and just beautiful yarn, with my dear friend, veronica Stanwell. Veronica she weaves her love for embodied ecology, land, lore, ceremony and song into unbelievably intimate explorations for connection, healing and growth. Both her master's of science in consciousness and transpersonal psychology and her work with the organization Rooted Healing, of which she is the founder and director, are driven by her fascination with the fabric of life and the human belonging within it. Veronica's background in professional theater you will see in this episode.
Daniel Firth Griffith:She doesn't do any sort of display of her art, but you can hear it as it laces her language and guides her words and her work, as she carries this reverence for the power of story and music, expression, playfulness, even. The conversation talks about ceremony, about medicines, about story, about the human place within our world, rootedness, the languages that we speak, how we speak them. We dive into the ideas of a proto-Celtic language set that predates the modern languages of the British Isles and stems from the even older proto-Indo-European or PIE language, ancestral, genetic, if you will. It's a riveting conversation. I enjoyed editing it almost as much as I enjoyed having it. Just getting to relive this episode with Veronica in some sort of retrospective glance was a pleasure, and so I'm excited to share it with you. I'll see you on the other end. Well, I'm really excited.
Veronica Stanwell:We're bringing our hay in, so as soon as we do finish, I'll be running out to join everyone on the fields.
Daniel Firth Griffith:How's it bailed?
Veronica Stanwell:It's bailed with a tractor. Yeah, there are some very enthusiastic scythers.
Veronica Stanwell:Is that what you do. So who knows, maybe one day we can get there. It's quite interesting the community we're in. I kind of see it. When I was exploring different communities and where to put my roots down, I see this sort of spectrum of normalcy and modernity and then going all the way to many of my friends who are hardcore you know, tanning and processing and doing what you're doing, um, and I feel like Trillay. The community we've decided to call home is maybe a little bit further to this end than I had aimed for, but actually I'm just realising how many gifts come with that sort of diversity of people here and it being more like a different snapshot of time, like that little village without a through road, rather than this very intentional spiritual yeah, so yeah how many people and where is it located?
Veronica Stanwell:right we're 34 adults and children and we're on the north coast of cornwall um between boscastle and bude, so I need to open a map england.
Veronica Stanwell:Yeah it, it's very beautiful. If you ever come this way, you will want to come to Cornwall. It's really got this threshold place and we've got the most populated stone circles in the whole of the country, just in this peninsula, as you call it, peninsular archipelago. And, interestingly, where I grew up on a farm in west wales is exactly on the same longitude line but just on the southwest of wales, with the same proximity to the coast. So my soul obviously likes to reside in this yeah closeness with the sea yeah, that's, that's amazing.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Um, yeah, I'm looking at a map here. You're gonna have to forgive me, I don't, I don't know much, but yes, yeah, it's definitely a peninsula, um, southwestern peninsula. Yeah, how close do you live to the? Uh? Is that technically the atlantic or the irish sea?
Veronica Stanwell:the atlantic yeah we're. We can walk there in an hour and a half through a valley or it's a five-minute drive. Had a swim last night just after sunset.
Daniel Firth Griffith:It was really nice. That's amazing. That's so cool. And how many hectares or acres is the community? Where do you guys grow? That's so cool. And um, how many? How many hectares or acres is the community? What do you guys grow? That's so interesting.
Veronica Stanwell:It's interesting to me, yeah yeah, 32 acres, and we've got a really nice big veggie garden where it's very organic. It's almost like an allotment, but it's. But we're all just joining and weaving and then we have cows and sheep and chickens, eggs.
Daniel Firth Griffith:That's really cool. These communities are so interesting to me. America is so individualist To some degree. That's the immigrant's process, and coming here right To a culture to leave that which we know to become Americanized To some degree, that's the horrid history of the 1900s, in my opinion.
Daniel Firth Griffith:But what that produces is this rugged individualism, this pioneer mindset that one has obvious negative implications outrageously negative implications to outrageously negative implications to the native and indigenous life of the continent, both vegetative and bipedal, and everything in between. But it also creates the real lack of. I don't mean this as an institution, I mean this as a human way of gathering, but like intentional living, intentional communities, intentional gatherings. And then you have the omnipresence of industry and Walmarts and targets on every street corner and all of that stuff, where so much of our landscape is new and it's bustling and it's industry and it's newness. And so the communities that do start, I don't know. It just seems like they collapse faster than they even began because at the end of the day they don't really need each other. What's it like over there? Is it similar to that? Is it a real struggle for people to be able to handle that much more kinship or ancient way of living, or is it pretty well accepted?
Veronica Stanwell:I think there's quite a big movement happening, feeding into the mainstream soon, and I've come to appreciate the many different expressions of communities. So there are, I think, a lot that don't succeed. I get it, I understand if you have a group of friends and you're putting everything into this project or there's a sort of disbalance and it's quite hard, I think, to create true egalitarianism. So Trillay, the community I live in, is quite amazing actually because there's a truly egalitarian structure. So there were five original founders but they have all since left and I don't know everyone's different stories, but what we have now is an ecosystem of people and animals and everything else, that where there is no original founder, bringing that kind of pushing, leadership, energy and actually, um, it's full consensus.
Veronica Stanwell:So I think it's it's so beautiful really feeling into that and learning about that. And in my community of friends, beyond this living community, I think there's a huge hunger for communal life ways and lots of people are exploring it in different ways and, I think, seeing things pop up all the time. So I don't know if anyone's doing a social science survey of what's happening, but I think it would be really interesting to know. Yeah, it is happening. I think some of the barriers are definitely around planning permission and access to the right kind of land and that sort of stuff.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Interesting comment about the founders. I wonder your opinion stuff. Interesting comment about the founders. I wonder your opinion do you think that the community could well exist in that communal, true egalitarian way if the founders were still there in physical reality, like have you seen that work?
Veronica Stanwell:I think, yes, um, I've heard wonderful stories and we know some fellow communities where there's very much a founding energy still in the space. Um, I think it's just always going to depend on the personality. So it's going to depend on how much inner work is being done to truly let go of that role that that they played to manifest this beautiful creation and and become a member of the village. So, yeah, and there are so many you know, there's an expression of community near us where there's very much one person who's making the end point decisions, but he's such a loving Buddhist, really deeply devoted Buddhist. So I think it seems to work. From what I can tell, I've met many people who live there and really enjoy it. It wouldn't work for me because it's a vegetarian community and I'm a recovering vegan.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, yeah, and it's just, it's, I don't know. I just I anticipated the conversation here to exist somewhere in that rooted dimension, for obvious reasons, based upon not only the work and the soul of your work and also maybe the the writings that you sent over that were wonderful, by the way, Absolutely wonderful but it is it the thing that I guess what I'm saying is the thing that always rises as a hurdle to me and to truly being rooted is all of like the rocks in the way, like how strong can our roots be if there's piles of rocks in place of dirt? And and what do you do? Do you sink your roots into that rock? Do you move your roots to where the soil? Is there? Questions like that, so I do. I find myself quite interested in these conversations.
Veronica Stanwell:And I love looking at ecologies to find our place, our human place, in the web as well. So all of the different symbolism we find in nature, I feel like we can take so so much meaning from, and actually gardening teaches me so much. Just watching a plant that I have uprooted from its pot and put into the ground and sometimes I'm putting them into ground where it's not great, there's plastic piping that's been buried underneath and it's not gonna keep much wet. You know the soil's gonna drain too quickly. And just watching this plant find itself and make do and flourish but also lose some parts or I don't know there's I feel like I'm watching my whole story of being uprooted and the process it is to really put roots down, which I'm only at the very beginning of. I mean I made rooted healing as an absolute balm for my soul in a very uprooted place.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, a balm to the soul. What I want to get to here is maybe just play in this fluid space. Stories, when you're thinking about being rooted, stories to some degree, especially stories in the modern written sense, seem to be very passive, right, we're told stories, we read stories, we sit and we listen to stories, we experience stories that are told to us, and, to some degree, stories are what we intake. I think that's true for many people.
Daniel Firth Griffith:I don't think it has to be true, though, but what you're writing here, and something that really exists in the spirit of a lot of this chapter that you sent, is the idea of stories maybe still being passive, in a sense of listening but also of becoming, of building, of future, dreaming, maybe like this two-way dreamwalking, where the stories are looking back but also looking forward at the same time. How does that idea of stories being living maybe mythology, in the ecotone or in this bioregionalism that you write about, how can that affect a displaced and modern humanity's ability to root in earth that is also displaced and modern? Does that make sense? It's like the I don't want to call it fertilizer because I hate that term, but, like you know, worm castings, or, you know, poo and wee of the horse in the bovine, or whatever you want to focus it as, how can stories be that inoculator of life?
Veronica Stanwell:essentially, you have such a way with words. Um yeah, when I sensed the poo and we was to bring it back to the soil and the roots, that's right.
Veronica Stanwell:Yes, we're story beings. I think that story creates the architecture of art in a landscape. We're archetypal, we're symbolic, and the form of story inhabited in our bodies by far predates the written word and this sense of information overload. And there's something about the awareness we need to cultivate to catch the stories that we're inhabiting our lives with and garden them into really good soil, because most of us are inhabiting stories that prevent us from really embodying the change we wish to see in the world and actually also honoring those stories and how painful those stories are and how real some of those limitations can be for people to, I suppose, hold the reins of multiple stories at the same time and starting to orientate our lives through, I think, a habitual compass, a place-based compass, I believe, is the way towards a story that we absolutely know to be true and that we celebrate and we honor and we feel our sensuous humanness and aliveness. And so I mean, joanna Macy has done a lot of work around the different stories of our times and she's putting on other threads as well, but there's this, you know, the great forgetting.
Veronica Stanwell:I think maybe Daniel Quinn or someone like that first called it that the great remembering the great, remembering the great turning, the great unraveling these different stories.
Veronica Stanwell:The business as usual, obviously, is the story that we just keep going and somehow someone else out there might figure something out, but if not, we'll just keep going with the same old thing that we've been given by the generation before. We'll just keep going with the same old thing that we've been given by the generation before. So I I find that a lot of the work we do and it's trying to tend the fire, the hearth of the great remembering or, as Joanna Macy would call it, and others, the great turning. But I love this word remembering because it's like you know, we are bringing back these parts and for me, that's why ceremony has been such a key piece of of how I like to inhabit space and people and relationships is because it's so deeply familiar, no matter what our stories we come into the space with, there's a familiarity and there's a remembering that happens that I haven't quite found the words for, to be honest yeah but that.
Veronica Stanwell:But that's the story. It's like a living art, this sort of restorying, when we come back into spaces of remembering and remembrance and honoring and kinship.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, I wonder how much the technological age and I use that term very loosely, I don't necessarily mean microchips and computers and such, I just mean the technological age, the complicated world about us, denuding us, deforming us from who we really are. I wonder how much of that is the subtle retraining of what a story might be, because I think what you're describing sounds wonderful and marvelous. Obviously, I agree, but I think to many people it sounds unnatural. Like what you're describing is that all fairies are disney movies, they're fairy tales, all stories are fairy tales, right, um, that they're beyond the plane of current human existence. I don't know. How do you think?
Daniel Firth Griffith:about these things like what's. I guess the real question is very simply put how can a modern humanity remember themselves when their limbs seem so decrepit? Does that make sense Like a remembering, a putting back together? How can we stitch ourselves back together when there's so much necrotic tissue everywhere? How does that work?
Veronica Stanwell:there's all these technological solutions and people thinking that this is a part of the awakening and the happening. But I am absolutely sure that we remember those dismembered parts through ancient craft and slow time together and we realize when we inhabit slow time, that the story, the illusion, that technology made our lives better and more convenient and of course, it's not totally black and white. There are some things I think that could stay. But when we remember that slow time together, we start orientating our lives towards it and we leave those systems and it's just a myth. With AI now, I'm seeing it everywhere.
Veronica Stanwell:I see the pattern structures, I see the sentence patterns, I mean, and everyone using it and this people saving time by not working with creatives anymore, by not thinking, by not really pulling the story from their body and by externalizing that creative input.
Veronica Stanwell:I think we're losing something and we're losing time again and we're expected to achieve more and we're giving a laptop that can send emails in a second and we're expected to achieve more and actually know the most beautiful relationships we will have will be in that space that is free of screens and free of those pulls in a million different directions and they're just with our kin around us, the human and the more than human, really slowing down enough to truly notice the beauties and the wonders of this world. I mean, I think tyson yunka porter has said something. I've got his book here, you know he he really problematizes the criticism that we overly romanticize a certain time in our lives and this sort of historical time where we tanned skins and spun wool or whatever it was, with whatever it was, pre-sheep, um, and he said I'm just going to read this little please, yeah, go ahead.
Veronica Stanwell:He said, quote I'm often told that I should be grateful for the progress that western civilization has brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work or die is not an improvement on pre-invasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly holidays fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits and the expert crafting of exceptional objects.
Veronica Stanwell:I know this is true because I have lived like this. Even in this era when the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was, even in this era when the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was, we have been lied to about the harsh survival lifestyles of the past. There was nothing harsh about it, and if it was harsh such a brutish, menial struggle for existence then we would not have evolved to become the delicate, intelligent creatures that we are. So I like that, because I get that criticism a lot with the work I do, making these ancestral embodiment immersion, village pop-ups and people say, well, we can't all just go back and live like that and I think, well, embody it for a week and you, you probably will take the next five years to get as close as you can to it right, yeah, it is, it's.
Daniel Firth Griffith:It's just this morning, my wife and I we were um, moving the cows and, um, we were talking and, as we often do, we were making the comment how it's so interesting, like today is easily one of the greatest, the largest, that is, um, if not the largest holiday, like bank holiday, political holiday, uh, for the united states, and uh, we didn't, we didn't even remember, like it was just, it's just a day, we're just moving cows, we're just being here, right, like, but it was so interesting. You know she made the comment about so much of her and i's. Life is constant and it can become draining, uh, because you have one foot in it and one foot out of it. If you had all of your feet in it, it wouldn't be as draining. I see that. I mean, I see that living in Tyson's words and I see that living in my own life. You know, it's like you're deep in this work, like, for me, I'm in the middle of writing a massive, a massive book. That it's not massive in size necessarily, although it's the biggest book I've ever written, it's just massive in length. I've never dreamed for so long and I'll say it that way, and it doesn't go away. It's five o'clock in the evening and it could be two o'clock in the afternoon, it could be eight o'clock in the morning. The point is it's just like I'm not clock clocking out right With farming and living the life we do and foraging, there's no clocking out Like if I can use that modern cliche and so it feels constant in some sense.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And we were talking about how so many people live their lives in such a way that, like today, all they're doing is they're off work, they're home, they're doing the things that they wanted to do, that they've been waiting to do for a month, or at least you know the five-day work week or the four-day work week this week, and they're living a very different life today, whereas today is just today. I don't even know what day it is. I mean, I know the date, I guess, but oh, it's Friday, I see that now. But there's that. I was going to say the contrast. I don't want to say a conflict, and I hate to think that it's polar. But what about slowing? What is formally rebellion against the machine when we slow down? Or maybe the spirit of it? Like how does our spirits respond when the body slows? Either positively or negatively?
Veronica Stanwell:Yeah, it's this peeling away, and also the foot in one world and the foot in the other world is a dance, and I very much feel it in my body when I'm not honoring the slowness of our innate nature. I just had a huge gut flare up because I've got a deadline coming up that I have been disbalancing my equilibrium of machine versus sensuous real life and my body is speaking up and saying nope, I'm not going to do this for you for a month. And so, yeah, just naming that, there's definitely a bridge that I keep crossing and bits keep crumbling off in this attempt to truly inhabit slow with a capital S, but I think, in terms of it being rebellion, it's coming back to that story piece. It's when we inhabit a different story that is, our lives, when we step out of the story that progress is king and our success is measured in the eyes of that king, that systemic, strange, competitive, toxic masculine energy and we step out of that and come into the sensuous and come into the cyclical.
Veronica Stanwell:In many ways, I think it's dropping back into the feminine, it's dropping into the body, the intelligence of the body and intelligence of the earth. It's an absolute descent process, I think, or a webbed, relational, expansive and contractive breathing process that completely defies this straight line or stairway up to this illusory top. And so it's radical in that, you know, we change all our practices. It's radical in that it changes how we relate to people. It's radical in that it changes how we parent and how the next generation are coming through into the world. But it's hard. Slowing down takes real commitment and focus and intentionality, and it's so easy to get caught up all over again. So there's an art. I really think that there could be a whole year's training. In fact, I think, deep New Roots. In many ways that's not the big thing, but I think it is an attempt to accompany people through that, the challenge and the art of truly slowing down and inhabiting a new story yeah the kind of inhabiting that is in the bones, like that's, that's.
Veronica Stanwell:We're not just having to think these things analytically and try and embody things slightly. It's really okay. No, I don't feel insecure when this happens anymore. I feel amazing stepping out on this thing that was toxic to me and my body and my life and truly breaking the bonds of that conditioning. And I don't think I think people get put off by this idea of completely stepping out from the rest of the world and sort of entering this bubble of ancient living.
Veronica Stanwell:I think most people, some people do completely step out and I really honor them because they're accumulating the skills that they're passing on orally to the people around them and that we just have these immeasurable ripple effects. But there's a lot of us that are still bridging and that's tiring, but we're doing that because something in us is telling us to, and so there's a role for that as well. There's a role for what we're doing right now and being having a foot in the dying indigenous world which I don't want to call it that, but alistair mcintosh wrote about that in a really beautiful way growing up in this apparently dying indigenous world in the hebrides of scotland and the other foot on the fast accelerator of progress and seeing the first landing on the moon, after just fishing with a grandparent all day and learning about life through an elder's eyes, it's really fascinating. His work, his writing, is such an inspiration of mine.
Daniel Firth Griffith:It is really interesting A lot of the pains that we see in modern day, like this anthropologist his name was Lawrence Angel or maybe J Lawrence Angel, I think he published in 1983, I think maybe 83 or 84, this large study on the homeosapien physiography where he tracked between the younger dryas, so let's say 12, 000 years ago till today, and we see this steady decline. We see a plateau of human, let's say, health, so lifespan, height, age, and then the really interesting thing was the pelvic inlet depth index of the feminine, uh, bone bones that we have. So basically the birth canal size, right, the hip size of the females that were studied. And he tracked all four of these metrics from, let's say, 12,000 to the modern day and from like 12,000 to 10,000, it's pretty well stagnant, like we see a pretty stable, healthy, long living, large birth size, so large in the depth index, and then about 10,000, maybe 9,500, we start to see it decrease and it decreases and decreases and decreases the age length, the age quality length, the birth canal size let's just bring it down to that and many other factors are just decreasing and decreasing and decreasing and decreasing and we don't see it rise until about 1830 with the advent of modern medicine. And then we just see it rise exponentially back up, never really reaching 12,000 BC but when the Younger Dryas existed, but rising back up.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And so in ecology we have this thing called shifting baseline theory, where we look at a forest and it's a closed canopy forest and we say, oh, it's a forest, we have to protect it, whereas that forest is not in any way indigenous to that environment. Closed canopy forest really doesn't exist in many places, maybe outside of some boreal regions and others, mythologies and histories and and uh, living, uh, gods of their modern cultures, all the way through pollen and you know, collections and bogs and peats and moors and mirrors and everything in between, like the forest that we have today is not necessarily the forest that we've had for tens and tens of thousands of years following the last glacial maximum, the last height of the ice age. Um, and I think the same thing is true for human health. Right, we look like tyson wrote. Like you're saying here, this idea of slowing down seems to be so foreign to us because as we slow down we drift into the past and our modern minds and the histories and the education and the intellect that we've been given and told and taught, teaches us that further back in time, it was painful, it was, it was hard, lives were short, et cetera.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Um, what we look through anthropology, right, like I said, uh, lawrence Angel or J Lawrence Angel wrote, like that's not exactly true at all. Like, as we go further back, we get healthier. It's just this fake, uh mirage of modern medicine that makes us think anything different, which is just fake, and we know this. Um, like, our lifespans are going up, but our life quality metric, like in the United States, we have two metrics life quality and lifespan. Lifespan is increasing, life quality is decreasing. For the last maybe three or four decades, we've seen the increase in life expectancy, so the age that you live to, but a decrease in life quality. That is the age that you would like to live to, if I can say it that coyly.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And so, again, slowing down feels so alien to us because we've so purchased this narrative, like you're saying about the story, would you say we have to inhabit a different story about our lives? What do you think? Maybe there's something there that you want to address, and then I'll throw a question onto it anyways. What? What do you think? Cause, like, we're not missing story today? I don't think so. Right, there's more books published in 2023 than there was in 2022. And it seems like the 2024 numbers are going to be about identical, or publishing more and more, telling more and more stories every year. There's more rooted healings today than there was 10 years ago. Storytellers are alive and well today, but I don't feel like we're going in the right direction, and so it's not just the existence of story, but the essence or spirit of story that seems to matter. How do you see these things?
Veronica Stanwell:So many wonderful threads to pull on. What's coming up for me is the sense of participation. I I think we're in an age of information overwhelm and I'm an avid reader. I love reading, but most people I know and speak to on a daily basis will possibly read one or two books a year and of course we receive stories in other mediums. But I think we need to participate in an embodied way and towards this animacy, like you said, the spirit of story I think of Arwen in the Celtic Welsh tradition and this divine inspiration.
Veronica Stanwell:When's the goosebumps you feel on the back of your neck and along your arms when a song has just moved you so much? You don't, you don't know how to put it into words, but there's just truth there. There's this divine thread, this animacy, and I think that's what we've lost in most modern lives. Is that truly sensuous, participatory response to story and to experience. Like we've somehow dulled our senses so much, and a lot of that is the dulling of emotions, which is another symptom of modernity. Is this emotionalness being literally burnt at the stake? Um, and this great fear being built around emotion and lunacy, for lack of a better word. Um in catharsis.
Veronica Stanwell:And so we've become a very numb modern culture, and so to really feel that sense of truth and inspiration, move through the body is where change begins, I think, and my roots are in theatre and I think I pursued that probably for a lot of really vain and egotistical reasons, but also because I would just get those tingles in theatre with the music and with these stories of loss and renewal and uprising, and so I wanted to go towards inhabiting that, and what's beautiful is that ritual and theatre have the same start point in our time. So it's very, a very similar thing that we're doing, because actually it's a relationship with animacy, it's a relationship with story that brings our one into the body and move spirit, moves us towards some kind of change or transformation of consciousness, empathy, interweaving of hearts and stories.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, there's an interesting connection that I know, you see, and I think it's interesting to play with here between ceremony and story and I want you to talk about this. So I'll just intro it and then provide the floor, I guess. But ceremony, you have to step into it. To me that's a very important part of ceremony.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Leslie Silko is an indigenous author here in Turtle Island, western Hemisphere. She wrote many books. She's gone now, but I think she was a Kiowa. That might be off, no, that feels living. Anyway, she wrote a book called Ceremony which is about this. It's a novel, it's a story, it's about this. Uh, let's, let's say a kiowa. Uh, no, he might have been crow, to be honest.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Anyways, I don't know why, I'm lost in these details, but the point is this indigenous man who goes off to fight in world war ii into the pacific theater and he develops a pts, ptsd, and gets sent home and lives a very sad life and it's really explicit book into the effects of stress and trauma and the human response and war, especially in world war two. And he comes home and, anyways, it's ceremony, it's his people ceremony that heals them. And there's just moment in the book where the main character has a step into it. It's a big moment where it's physical, it's active, it's determined and it's non-retrievable I like to use that word in the harvest ceremonies that we do. Um, there's a point in time where the harvest becomes irretractable or unretractable I never know the right word for that but you can't retract it, you can't pull it back. And when you find that point, like when you meet that point, to me that is when the ceremony goes from preparatory to everything like that, that's, that's that veil that you tear through, that you breach to get into the heart of the thing, the spirit of the thing, and and dealing with that in a harvest is obviously very dealing, different than dealing with that in another version of ceremony or something like this, but it's all dealing with that inner heart truth.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Um story to me is like when I read a really? Um, stephen Graham Jones is a horror author, which I don't. If you would have asked me five years ago what I've been reading horror authors, no, I would not. Um, stephen Graham Jones, he's a Blackfoot um man. Um, he writes unbelievable books that just happen to also be horrific, but he wrote one called Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I don't know if you would ever find yourself reading this, but if you want to watch a Bukhani Blackfoot running around killing a bunch of Nappuquans or white people that are trying to kill the buffalo in this genocide, it's a little bit of a righteous, unbelievable experience to read it. Um, but it is.
Daniel Firth Griffith:It's vivid and it's hard and and you have to deal, like ursula le Guin, a lot of her books you have to deal with a very similar, similar subject where it's it's so irretractable, right, so like even participating the story it's irretractable. Your, your experience with the story, your life within the pages, and a good author, I think, does this really well Kendra Slytherin, stephen Graham Jones, so many others do this well, but it's uncomfortable and I think a lot of people see story as the opposite. It is comfort, it's escapism. It's sitting down, it's leaning back in your chair, it's holding a story that has a modern trope. You know like just gets shivers down my spine when I say those words, but like enemies to lovers and all of these. You know things that people are looking for in plot.
Daniel Firth Griffith:But again, my point is what would? The point that I'm getting to is, I guess, maybe a question which is something along the lines of what happens in ceremony, cause I know you study these things. What happens in ceremony when you breach that veil and the story becomes not something you necessarily participate with, but become Like when you truly cross that veil? Is that possible also to be held in story in the modern written way? Oral, yes, fireside, yes, ancient, yes, but in the modern written way. Oral, yes. Fireside, yes, ancient, yes, but in the modern written way. Is that possible too?
Veronica Stanwell:I think in some senses, yes, personally, when I open a book, especially of an author I already know to love there's, there is a bit of a ritual, crossing a kind of okay, here we go. And I know I was just telling you I recently finished manda scott's buddhica series and yeah each new book is.
Veronica Stanwell:Each book is introduced, um with a sense of storytelling, around the fire with one of the characters, um, in his wonderful irish or scottish, I can't remember now Scottish accent, and every time I just wept, dropping into this our massacre and our history on these islands. So there is something there, but it's much, much smaller than the physicalization, the symbolic embodiment that designed threshold creates for us and that crossing of a threshold quite deprived of thresholds in modernity, with, you really see it, with young people today there's so much mental health issues and suicidal ideation because of that, just no honoring of the threshold into adolescence, into adulthood, of that, that lack of right of passage, that lack of community support and witnessing um. Someone on our course recently said that she, you know she works with young people who are struggling with their mental health and someone who she was speaking to who had already attempted suicide. So something along the lines to her of I didn't want to die and never come back. I wanted to die and come back as someone new and come back as someone new. And that's what these threshold points for young people used to do or still do in indigenous communities that still have these rights. And so the lack of threshold in our culture has left us creating these very strange rituals like stag do's and binge drinking and you know all those sort of things. Yeah, um, but actually the ancient technology of creating threshold, and of course they, they naturally exist in nature in some places as well, and whenever I see two hawthorns I'm like, oh wow, threshold. You know, you can walk through that and set an intention and you are, you shaped, you're shifted, your consciousness. But these, these very careful, intentional ways of designing threshold crossing are such an ancient technology of I.
Veronica Stanwell:I think, and from what I'm learning from all these wonderful interviews, is creating a receptivity. A receptivity to transformation, to change, to, to perception, to symbolism, to the world around, um, to spirit, definitely to spirit, um, in whatever expression that finds truth in people's hearts, um, but this receptivity, I think, is also quite conditioned out of us, that sort of deep listening state, that really present state. We've gotten so good at being really busy and being in our heads and thinking we know the answers, or getting annoyed if we don't have a clean answer on something. But actually can we just be receptive and enter the wordless state and be in a space together where we have crossed a threshold that marks time. Out of time. We're going to that timelessness place together, um, and this receptive state is primed. That's a word that could be used negatively, but someone I've interviewed recently talked a lot about this priming, that the preparation and the whole art of leaning in and setting intention really creates that receptivity and that's where the cup is emptied. I suppose that's where we can begin again. We, we become students all over again and humble, and it's an equalizing force.
Veronica Stanwell:And sitting in circle and you know, of course the thresholds can look like many different things, not necessarily entering into a circle. So I I your link between story and ceremony I love, because I've been in some ceremonies where story is quite a core part of it and the wisdom carriers in that space are just sharing amazing pockets of wisdom from that tradition and culture. And then I've also sat in spaces where it's very simple and minimal and there is just this holding and allowing for the medicine to do its work. But I recently facilitated a bridal blessing for a really dear friend of mine and there were children around and running across the altar and we weren't engaging in any medicines but we all shared some tea and put herbs that we had collected from everyone's different lands and we put them into these amazing bath salts. I had this huge jar of bath salts, but every time we put those herbs that we had harvested into the bath salts we were offering our prayer, our blessing, our story.
Veronica Stanwell:And what was so beautiful about this circle was that it was full of women from all different parts of my dear friend's life, and so not everyone there had experienced any kind of sitting in circle on the floor like this before or the sense of ceremony. And people said afterwards I grew up very Christian and the thought of some kind of ritual instead of just organically having fun and you know, was really daunting, but actually that was just so, so special and amazing and I and felt really familiar in a safe way, and so I think the reason that came to mind was because the stories that everyone shared of this dear friend and these webs of support that were infusing these bath salts, of obviously that symbolism really for what was happening to her on an energetic and spiritual level, um, that's really where I think there's power in, in how we rekindle these ancient practices in our modern lives and the weaving of story and ceremony. I like that prompt.
Daniel Firth Griffith:There's this implicit need, I think, for ceremony. I think the more work you do around it at least for me and perhaps for you you run into more and more people who want it, almost more than anything. It's like a marrow yearning, like not, it's not even bone deep, it's like there's a yearning in the marrow that is just searching for something for that, that meaning, that connection, that purpose, um and like we're talking about the crossing ceremonies of children into adolescence and into adulthood, like nothing has prepared them for the actual hurdles you know in their lives, the actual processing and meeting of grief and drama and drama too. And yeah, the leslie silko's book ceremony that I mentioned earlier. It begins with uh, there's no greater medicine than ceremony. I think it's the first word in the in the.
Veronica Stanwell:Thing it's just like all other medicines come second yeah, the dagara tribe as well, was, you know, they really the threads there with the grief tending practices were hugely influential in bringing ceremony and ritual over to the West. And Maladoma, somme and Sabomfu Somme they received that message to do that, to transmute and befriend the enemy, as scripted in their name, well, in Maladoma's name. Scripted in their name, well, in Maladoma's name. And there's so much wisdom in that bridging of cross-cultural offering back to us and, of course, as we do from, I truly think, not a totally deliberate space, we can also extract these practices and forget their origins and make them a bit too modern and a bit too instant gratification. I think that is in part. You know, I'm hugely grateful to plant and fungi earth medicines, to plant fungi, earth medicines, but I do recognize the cultural tendency there to want that instant gratification.
Veronica Stanwell:The peak experience, and in many ways I think, well, that's probably going to really do it for a lot of people.
Veronica Stanwell:You know that peak experience is going to be that first proper doorway into hopefully more slower, more regulating, integrative practices roundhouse, with people crafting, with our hands, being in council about our modern times, our current times of crises and disconnect, and how we're exploring the gifts we bring and how we can play our part in a way that is sustainable and and so on, and I feel a lot more energy personally in those spaces but I do recognize, recognize the huge, huge role that these medicines are playing in helping open that door to people to learn to appreciate that because we have so many layers of stigma that many people have to move through, whether it's growing up with any kind of religious doctrine and leaving that and then any kind of sense of spirituality is just, or whether it's the hippie stigma and just feeling that you know the cringiness about being with people who are barefooted and playing their drums slightly out of rhythm in a field somewhere.
Veronica Stanwell:These are all barriers to us really dropping into space. I think we also have a role and responsibility in trying to really invite in in ways that are inclusive. I think that's very much an ongoing learning process that I'm trying to inhabit daily. Daily is how to, how to invite in in a truly inclusive way, um, without losing the integrity of the practice yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.
Daniel Firth Griffith:That's interesting, because, because we don't have that living culture right anymore, even even the ones that are closest to it, it's still not as alive as it once was, and so, to some degree, ceremony always to me feels like an invitation into a sacred space that no one is really indigenous to. Um, we've all been separated, that is to say, some more forcibly than others, some more recent than others. Of course there's a lot of complexity there, nuances, you know, but it's an invitation into this older space, which also to me seems to be like manda scott, who you brought up earlier, a dear friend of mine. She talks all the time about this idea of through topia, which I'm. Have you heard her? You've heard this conversation?
Veronica Stanwell:I've had heard a lot about it.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, the idea of Thrutopia, and it does. It seems really interesting to me that that, like, just as we have stories, we have what I'm going to roughly call this, the plant medicine or ceremonies of today, and the same blessings and curses to me seem to live on both sides, like they seem to be equal in their pains and equal in their joys, in the sense where, on the story side, we have stories, um, that are utopic or dystopic and there's no end and it's we're not there and they're not productive for our time, right to some degree, that the bastard, bastard bastardization of potential, an opportunity loss maybe. And then you have, through topia, as she calls it, these stories that pull us through. You know, you see that two-way dreamwalking again, where in the story you might be looking back but you're also looking forward and it's wonderful. So you have on the story side what I will colloquially call, let's say, utopias and through topias, or dystopias and through topias.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And the same thing seems to be on the ceremony side, and I see this in harvest, I see this in many ways, but you have the ceremonies that, um, they're filled with those you know good, uh, social media influencer type I don't want to like, you know good good bros, you know, or whatever you want to call them, who are just doing these plant medicines over and over and over and over again, in their entire life centers on this fact of going to costa rica or going to here and doing it, and yeah, they're with shaman, like I'm not saying all of it's negative, but it's.
Daniel Firth Griffith:It's a life sustained through ceremony and not like a life that sustains ceremony. I don't know if that language is clear enough, um, but it's like the dystopia versus the through topia. It seems like ceremony that provides medicine, not earth. Medicine play, I mean like medicine, health, life, abundance, verve, vitality, whatever those words mean to any of us. Medicine in the truest sense pulls us into a better place, but then it also allows us to cultivate that better place to sustain generations and generations and generations, whereas the opposite just the use of medicines, like the bastardization of weed and marijuana from 19, maybe 20 or 30, to the 1970s, when you saw THC content go from 7% to 70% and everything in between, and it's just like the bastardization, the genetic modification of these plants is creating an experience that to some degree feels utopic, but also no degree. Is there potentially health there?
Veronica Stanwell:yeah, it's interesting you exampled marijuana, because I've had, I think, my worst, most challenging psychedelic experiences with marijuana that had clearly been so sexually frustrated. You know these plants that are just bred to be so strong and so deprived of any cross-pollination and that's interesting and I just felt that I felt this and I couldn't even I couldn't fix it through having sex.
Veronica Stanwell:It was just this rage that I could feel from the plant and very upregulated nervous system and really fast heart rate and a really challenging experience actually. And I recognize that with the coca leaf and tobacco and just these plants being taken, cacao now is retreating into herself again because she got taken from the jungle and put into plantations. This rising interest in cacao and the spirit's just like no, I get sick when you monoculture me, as we all do. And so there is this like to honor ceremony and especially these power medicine ceremonies to honor them. The true measure of how effective that ceremony is is how much we've integrated those teachings of what we can presume are interconnectivity, and with interconnectivity the presumption is well, thriving life obviously needs reciprocal relationships. If we don't start inhabiting reciprocal relationships and we just keep taking and extracting and flying all over the place and sitting in ceremony with these amazing elders or whatever it is that we keep doing, but we're not actively, truly giving back to earth and to the teachings and to our communities, then we're not honoring those practices fully.
Daniel Firth Griffith:I wonder too, you know, if that extension, that simile, let's say, exists between story and ceremony, and we take that as an implicit assumption that it is true and it does exist, then language also now has to, I think, come into it. And with language I think we can not necessarily have to talk about grammar or syntax or culture, necessarily, but also what all of these come maybe to be in an animist sort of way. You know, like a good friend of mine, she's a mokopona, so like a grandmother or auntie, as she says to the Waitahua people, so Maori, the water people of the Maori of modern day New Zealand. She talks about animism a lot with me and we're in the middle of formulating an experience around these things, and so I guess that's a little bit more living in my heart, which is why I just visited her, I guess, and lost my presentness here. But uh, she, she says all the time that. She says a lot of people that she works with, um, she's a medicine carrier and many other things, um, body worker too, and anyways, um, she leads a lot of people into the forest and she says every time, everybody, always the first time, just like you're saying the first time in some ceremonies, like it is, might be that climax high, that is what you need or whatever it is, but she says, when she leads people into the forest and they sit with trees and they listen and they tap into that animistic, that lineage, that tether back into the land both the land as the land, the land as ancestor, and they expect to hear trees be like veronica, hello, I'm white oak, you know, and they classify themselves and their, their genus and their species and they say I'm rubrous, alba or whatever.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Uh, the white oaks genus and species are, you know, and they think that it's going to be this English connection or they're going to speak uh, maybe it's Irish if it's an Irish tree, or, you know, guelga, if it's an Irish tree, or Polish if it's Polish, like, whatever, like they like. That's our first belief, you know, and I do a lot of animistic work with, with land and things, and you lead these farmers out to fields and you're like well, have you, you know, if you talk to the land and you're clearly having a vision for the land and you know how does the land feel about this and you should establish a little bit of a connection there, and they're like well, the land's not going to talk and it's like, well, no, sure as hell ain't going to talk, like it doesn't know English, Like it's not going to low to speak English to me and that's just foolish. And so my friend the Maori medicine carrier, she always jokes that if you leave the forest without hearing anything, come back because it was speaking and you weren't listening. But don't you dare listen in English.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And I think that's very true for stories. I think it's true for ceremony that to some degree all of this ceremony and all of these stories are held in particular bioregionalism or the ego tone and I know bioregionalism is a thing that, um, that you write about, and I guess this is my feeble attempt to maybe carry us into that space but like maybe again, if the simile is true, if the extension is true, that story and ceremony have some shared connection, both negatively and positively, in our experience with them, how might bioregionalism or maybe language play or impact or effect our relationship to that cross-pollination and that fertility and other things?
Veronica Stanwell:Yeah, so many beautiful threads. Well, ben Stockford, who I partner with to bring the program forth, he brings the philosophy of bioregionism and it's a beautiful language and it just gives this lovely kind of packaged philosophy to work with. But I find myself, before I collaborate with Ben and the way I still carry the space is place almost with with the capital P, like our relationship with place and how do we truly re-inhabit place again in a way that you know this is a complicated sort of term to use, but but re-indigenizing ourself to place, um, a part, a huge part of that is language and the way we're relating and a huge part of that is trying to the way we're relating and a huge part of that is trying to develop or nourish and enrich a pre-existing animate worldview. I think there's a common mistake in thinking animism is a naive spirituality, a sort of primitive, like we evolved out of it and got better and more intellectual. But it's just, it's just so innate, like.
Veronica Stanwell:As a child I remember how animate the world was, and even to the point that I remember I don't know how long this phase lasted, but I really felt that even seemingly unanimate objects like the pen I was using or whatever it was, I just felt personality and energy and everything and this intimacy and tactility with life. It's just so innate. And then of course that's conditioned out of us through the schooling system and through becoming much more left-brained. To briefly draw on in a girl chris's work, um. But this right brain, this interconnective, the seeing the patterns and experiencing the broader energetics of life, I think is the more animate experience of the world which they have found hunter-gatherers obviously inhabit, and hunter-gatherers have these amazing relationships with the forest, with the voices of the trees and, yeah, again, some people seem to get very clear sentences come through. I've never been one of those. I always admire that clarity and I always find it really sweet. But for me when I communicate with nature it's sensual, it's feeling, it's awen again. It's those synchronicities, it's song, song that transcends language, making up or tapping into old melodies that are incorporating proto-Celtic that Caroline Hillier here in the neighboring county in Dartmoor has made her life's work as this sort of living ritual landscape of this mother bone language and these words. What's wonderful about working with these words is that they are before what you've spoken about earlier in this conversation. They're before the time where things got more and more political and complicated and more about ownership and more about control, and so touching into these mother words and this mother bone language feels like a huge permission piece.
Veronica Stanwell:As a British person, I grew up in Wales and I like to identify as Welsh, but my mom and dad were English and my mom's paternal line were Welsh and so I wasn't accepted by the Welsh. I was the English girl in my class. So there was this longing to be a part of the richer culture. But this proto-Celtic bone language gives anyone that permission to connect with the ancestors and to connect with nature, because these words for nature it's like six or eight words for a stone and we've lost what the different meanings of those stones were. Like the Sami obviously have something like 300 words for snow, but we can feel it.
Veronica Stanwell:So I went to an immersion where we were given just one word and the invitation was to sit with this word for a very long time before looking it up in Caroline Hillier's lexicon. And I had this word, suerno, and I had already. It's so funny that I was given this word because I had already arrived and I was really with the element air. I was, I feel such, I feel spirit in air moving through trees so much and it the air was particularly swirly that day and I had just landed and I was sitting in this teepee and closing my eyes and just feeling the harmonics of the trees and the grove around us and the wind moving through. And then I'm giving this word and trying to tap intuitively into what it might have meant. And I just couldn't leave this beautiful animacy of the wind. I just couldn't entertain, I couldn't activate the intellectualacy of the wind, I just couldn't entertain, I couldn't activate the intellectual part of my mind. And when it came to looking up the word and sharing in circle, suerno was moving, sound harmony, wow, harmony. And I feel like I now have a totally different understanding in my body, like I now have a totally different understanding in my body of what harmony is, because I've come through this ancient portal of a word and of this animate experience of place that I now. I just have a different understanding in the core of my spirit about what harmony is, which I'm sure will affect song and life and my sense of tolerance. Or I don't know.
Veronica Stanwell:Someone said to me recently you know, unity isn't in our philosophy, but harmony is Like the sense that we all have. We're so different, but when we come together we seek harmony. Not unifying beliefs or practices necessarily. Yeah, I went down for a walk in the woods on a really rainy haily day. Not unifying beliefs or practices necessarily. Yeah, I, you know, I went down for a walk in the woods on a really rainy Haley day and we've got a wonderful patch of woodland on our farm and I went down and I just you know, we were talking about thresholds when I actively engage in that crossing into the woods as a threshold moment, as a permission asking moment, as an animate relational conversation, just magical things happen, whereas when I go down with a group of people and we're all chatting away and I just have to accept that we're not relating in that way, but when I go down by myself, or when I go down with a partner who's willing to go into silence in that sort of receptive state, then these wonderful synchronicities happen.
Veronica Stanwell:And I remember just one time in the winter going down and this hail came through and I hid under the trees, and then this rain, and then there were rainbows everywhere, and then this huge murmuration of starlings moving through the trees above, and then there was a deer in the distance and it was just endless. And then there were primroses showing up through the hail and for me I just felt this elemental blessing and this real calling in, like If I were to translate that into the English language, it was just like remember how magical it is just to be in the woods on a rainy day, on a winter afternoon. I'm just going to show you everything in this 20 minutes so that you remember that I'm here and I'm holding you and I welcome you back into my embrace. I'm here and I'm holding you and I welcome you back into my embrace. You know our when was deeply in my body in this experience. So that's how I find that relationship.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And, yeah, thoughts on language the original proto-indo-european word for earth, planet earth, mother earth, seems to have so much more power than earth, because when I say earth, I can put the earth in front of it like that, that tangible object over there, but when I say dig um, I can't say the dig um like that's. That's not grammatically correct, right? So if I mean my point is, as we get older, as we get into the proto-celtic language, as, as you're saying, this caroline has done, and as you get even older than that, like you just, you start to connect with gods that, like our bodies, remember you know spirits and feelings and anime, like you're speaking, not just gods, I guess, but all of that combined. That just seems so unaccessible in the language that you and I have conducted this conversation in.
Veronica Stanwell:Oh gosh, I know we're so limited in the English language and I can really celebrate when true artists can weave words even in the.
Veronica Stanwell:English language into a sense of animacy yeah, I think you've articulated it so well that sense of inhabiting a vibrational quality, and it's also the knowledge that it's ancient For me. I like having that knowledge because I also work with people who are very good at bringing these words just straight from the body, and they could, of course, be so ancient, but there's something comforting for me about excavating and dusting off these fossils. Like when we learn any other language in modern day, we learn some different worldviews, the different expressions and the different words for things that we don't even have, that don't even exist. In the English language we start inhabiting, and they've done scientific studies on people who learn a different language and have a different personality. In the English language, we start inhabiting and they've done scientific studies on people who learn a different language and have a different personality in that different language, and so it's a dream you know, I felt it for sure, like these slightly different personalities in Spanish and French and Welsh.
Veronica Stanwell:Welsh is a language I adore so much because it's so songful and there's such a songful heart in Wales and I grew up touching that and I'm so grateful and there's a wetness in the language. You feel that there is more rain in Wales in that language, absolutely yeah, when inhabiting these words. There's also this Andy Letcher. Dr Andy Letcher is one of our guest speakers on the program. His recent discussion with the group was around sound, entertaining the idea that sound really is the kind of primordial creation of our world, that vibration creates this emergence of the world around us and it's quite mind-bending actually to think about that because of course, that's ancient philosophy, that's om, that's this coming into creation through vibration, the atom I feel like Alan Watts also talked about the atom and the om and all these wonderful things that exist out there but this idea that that actually everything really is this expression of vibration, of this, this expanding or possibly breathing universe. I'm quite agnostic around my theories of the big bang. Um, and you see it, I, I love, I love being paddling in the shallows of the sea or seeing in the sand those sound vibrations and seeing the way that plants can grow in these incredible, accurate geometric patterns. We are seeing the form of sound, and so the sounds we make are so important. And these ancient words we're tapping back into a mind frame that was animate, animistic, and so that's always going to be an ally for us. I think, tapping into the ancient words, you must yeah, I'm sure you will go and get carolyn hillier's bone, bundle her her book and she's put some chants together. And and we were in the roundhouse and she just gave us a piece of paper, split us into four groups. It was stuffed with women who said so many of us, um, and we each had four phrases of different words, some of them were just a couple of words, all obviously pretty Celtic, and we were given a few moments to feel into them and create a collective song and soundscape together. And then we brought it to this sense of elders and the village tending this hearth, singing these invocations, these prayers, before a ceremony or before a grief tending ritual still a ceremony but I really felt transported to, to, yeah, this, this, this vibrational quality of the land that perhaps we still have in some ways in modern languages, but it just comes with so much politicized and ownership. English is so much more about ownership. There's far less being in the english language. So, yeah, yeah, I love it.
Veronica Stanwell:I think it's an important exploration to have and obviously helps us connect with our ancestors. I sometimes feel I worry that the more work I do through the screen and just through portals that aren't familiar to our ancestors, our early ancestors that lived in ceremony and right relationship, that the less they're able to ally with us. And I could be totally wrong, but I do feel that in like the space of ceremony or in pilgrimage, or intending a hearth and cooking dinner together, that those are the scenarios that are deeply familiar and that's where I sometimes just get these profound, just this feeling of support and warmth at my back and this profound clarity that can come, I think, when I feel the presence of those who've walked this wonderful world before us and through our bones, this wonderful world before us and through our bones.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, so in the, in this new book that I've, that I've written it's it's there's many words, about three times longer than a book I've ever written before. So, like, the words are plentiful. But it's a as we've talked about off off the air here, it's a paleolithic fiction and so it's set right after the Ice Age and it's also horror and it's also fantasy, and so it plays with some of the attributes that I think are really healthy to play with for the modern story to do what we need to do. But the interesting thing was something that I found very challenging in the beginning, because I'm very conscious with the words that I use as I write. I never really can get too much into a flow state in writing, because the way a word looks to me, the way a word sounds to me, the feeling of that word is so much more important to some degree than maybe the story that's being told, which I think detracts from the reading experience to some. I agree with that, I see that through.
Daniel Firth Griffith:But it was interesting living, you know the book has said about maybe 14 and a half, 15,000 years ago, and you know one of the characters might be walking through this, this trail, which I would have called a trace, and they saw an animal and I wrote the word animal and there's an animal in the distance. Let's say that was the sentence. And I realized that the only reason that I classified that which this character saw as an animal is because the scientific lexicon places it into the kingdom of animalia. Let's say, well, we don't have that lexicon in 14,000 BC, western Europe, 14,000 BC, just after the ice age, like that doesn't exist. And so I started to wonder what would a writing or storytelling journey look like if we removed all of the modernity out of it, right? So, for instance, animals are one thing, clothing, right, like the whole essence of clothing is going to have a very Latin base in terms of the I don't want to call it the science, but, like the matter, the material that's being used, which is obviously very different.
Daniel Firth Griffith:And it's taken me so long to write it because I have to sit there, right. And then you're sitting there and you're like, well, what the hell do I say? Like all of your words are missing, like you realize that you have this huge vocabulary. I'm known as somebody who has a very large vocabulary and yet I have nothing to say, because I have not the words to describe that which I see, because all of the words that can describe that which I see automatically politicizes it or seeks to control it, or seeks to categorize or classify it immediately. It's not a being, it's not living, it's an animal right. It's not this beautiful little furry creature that is also many other creatures. It's the fox or the wolf or the bear, the cave bear, whatever that might be. And to have to change your language as a storyteller has been a huge moment in my journey into a truer state of animism, if that makes sense yeah you know, because you have.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Like you can't look at a white oak and say white oak, you have to look at it and say some other name, like what does she call herself? And now there's relationship, and now there's actual animism that's creating the intimacy and lacing that intimacy with a woven web of deeper meaning than white oak or alba rubru. I don't even know what the white oak scientific name is, but it is interesting. It has been interesting.
Veronica Stanwell:And it's an inquiry into origin of naming of othering.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Right.
Veronica Stanwell:Right. So, because our ancestors may have named and othered, but to be with ladybird, to be with oak tree, and I recognize again through the bioregional outlook and the more ecological ethos of our program, that actually we can get to that state in eldership. But now we need to learn the names, the ancient names, the songs of relationship, their stories, their ecological niches, their relational web, their habitat, because then we deepen relationship and, I believe, animacy as well, and then in our elderhood we can just be with and let all of that go, because it's just, it's in the dreams, and it also comes back to bridging and accessibility as well, because how far do we go into origin and how far do we maintain a continual thread of mutual understanding?
Veronica Stanwell:and I love going to storyteller events where they interlace welsh and english or they interlace yeah whatever ancient language they're inhabiting, um, in a way where you're carried through the story but really brought with this vibrational. Even if if you don't understand Welsh, this vibrational quality is there and people love it. And it's so important Again, that's another responsibility, I think, as a storyteller is to carry those old tongues with them in a way that feeds into the collective, that doesn't also exclude them. Yeah, it's fascinating.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Yeah, yeah, just uh, it's a dear friend of mine. I told him we were out there picking blackberries, which you know are important to us and and he said, uh, I said what? And he goes, call them by their name. And then we were out there, me and our kids, we practiced and practiced and practiced to make sure we got that Kli Kanugakli. And we went out there and we said, hello, kanugakli.
Daniel Firth Griffith:Maybe it was just us, maybe it was just our spines, but that feeling that you were talking about in the forest, in the hail and the rainbows and the flowers, and the true feeling of liveness, you know, integrating into your own liveness.
Daniel Firth Griffith:It was a moment where, like I think, to some degree, I've always found in our work, in our time spent in the land, that to some degree, she's waiting, mother Earth. She's waiting to see if our heart is true, maybe respond, so that when we finally reach that blackberry, let's say that Kanugakli, she knows how to handle the presence, she knows how to respond, she knows what sort of information to hold or to give Little testers, little feelers, little tentacles and, to some degree, learning these ancient languages, experimenting, caring, giving a damn's another way of just seeing. It seems to be that priming that you talked about earlier, the priming before this, like just as important as having a good, humble, honorable heart when you're harvesting that. The prep work before that, in terms of the language in the world sense that comes about these ancient languages, seems to be another tentacle, another tendril into that, uh, concentric relationship that I don't know.
Veronica Stanwell:It's interesting yeah, I find those. I don't know if there's so much as tests, as reminders, like it's the rushing to the point that the thorn goes in the foot and it's like, oh yeah, okay, I need to slow down, and or getting all tangled up in in the brambles yeah, yeah, I love the spirit of bramble as also just this really protective, amazing, so resilient, benevolent, just coming out of these forest edges and threatening to swallow up our farm.
Veronica Stanwell:Given the chance and these, these offerings that I think most children, no matter who their parents are I'd like to think that most children have the experience of picking and eating blackberries from the brambles and that relationship.
Veronica Stanwell:It upsets me so much that there are genetically modified, dethorned blackberry bushes. Um, because, because there's so much that we learn through that relationship that's somehow still so accessible to any child, no matter their parent, that that they learn to be careful with bramble and to have a relationship and they also learn that they're going to cover their clothes and her wonderful blood-like juices. And there's this, there's like a sacrifice, the amount of times I forgot to, you know, carry something with me and I would just pick all these blackberries and destroy whatever top I was wearing because I would just fold up my top and go back and I always say oh, no, but I remember, I remember having a natural relationship with blackberry through through that carefulness with the thorns. I know, for me, I think, as a child, is when there was an insect on one or it being out of my reach. The yes felt like the ones that were accessible and there was a conversation there.
Daniel Firth Griffith:I think Right conversation there, I think.
Veronica Stanwell:Yeah, I do find active hope and being surrounded by children who are growing up here connected and one of the children here, she has taught me a couple of new plants that they didn't know and that made her parents so proud, proud.
Veronica Stanwell:And she's homeschooled and has this amazing curriculum of going around different members of the community and engaging in different activities and very actively involved with the farm and and that, I find, is I just, I just can't wait to see what she does with that gift of her childhood. But of course that could be anything and of course, uh, an unmarked adolescence might challenge things and I always have the fear that every generation we kind of venture away from our parents as that act of lack of rite of passage and becoming a new person, so that I do fear that moment where that happens. And for me that was very much just pursuing theater. But in a way, when I was 15 and 16, it was quite a glamorous thing, really stepping away from any sense of what nature was to me and taking my childhood for granted, this growing up on a farm, and not just any farm, a really beautiful wildlife orientated farm but there's something just beautiful about planting the seeds and playing our part and letting go it's powerful.
Daniel Firth Griffith:well, I think, veronica, we could talk all day, and I think we've covered a large space of ground. Is there anything else that you want to cover? Anything else living that we need to put to sleep?
Veronica Stanwell:I mean, I'd love to offer a quote from, well, a snippet from Alistairair Macintosh, because I brought him into the conversation and he wrote this book Soil and Soul. So he has written quote the great disease of our times is meaninglessness. If fresh wellsprings of hope are to be found, we must first cut through the collective hallucination that there is no alternative to nihilism. We must dig where we stand. We must get beneath the grassroots of popular culture and down to the eternal taproot. Here new life can grow from ancient stock. But to make blossoming possible we must embrace our losses. We must face the reality of a brokenness of heart that is both personal and of the world.
Veronica Stanwell:Surprisingly, that is when we discover that the pain is the mantra. Suffering of the world can be what repeatedly calls us back to the imperative of its healing. If we can persist and sit with the reality, not running from it, a music may eventually be heard, the fetters of destructive control loosen, life's dance resurges and there is joy in spite of everything. I feel like that's at the root of our work, isn't it? In many ways, it's this. We're asking the questions and calling people into the sense that new life can grow from this ancient stock, beneath the grassroots of popular culture.
Veronica Stanwell:Yeah, yeah, let's end it there it's ending it with someone else's words is cheating, really.
Daniel Firth Griffith:But no, I just no, it's, just it is. Though it is, it is, it's perfect, like there's no, no further words another.
Veronica Stanwell:Well, another invitation to slow down and I love this because I discovered it after we designed our 13 moon slow study, is David Abrams saying. I can hardly be instilled by this intelligence if I only touch down briefly on my way to elsewhere. Only by living for many moons in one region, my peripheral senses tracking seasonal changes in the local plants, while the scents of the soil steadily seep through my pores. Only over time can the intelligence of place lay claim upon my person.