129. The Cosmogony Of Life, in conversation with Sophie Strand

Join us for a heartfelt conversation with the one and only Sophie Strand. We really talk about everything under the sun in this one… Iconography, chronic illness, friendship, love, death, magic, turkeys and more! 

Sophie Strand is an author, story teller, and poet who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, ecology, mythopoetics, and love. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, and mythical gradients. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, the memoir The Body Is a Doorway, and the forthcoming poetry book Make me good soil.

You can (and should!) find Sophie Strand on substack at http://sophiestrand.substack.com/ instagram  https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny or  https://sophiestrand.com/ 

COME TO FRANCE WITH US THIS SEPTEMBER <3 

We’re going on a Magdalene Pilgrimage and would love to have you there with us. Find out more at https://www.sueellenparkinson.com/pilgrimage

Join us for our next monthly community care circle Sunday June 28th at 5:00pm PST. This is a space to come together to be in community, get centered, prime the creative pumps and have some room to just be as you are. Mark your calendar! 

The zoom link will be accessible through our substack  https://littlegifts.substack.com 

*** Join Perdita Finn for a free online event on Thursday, June 25 ***

What Is the Long Story of Your Soul?:

Remember Your Gifts & Passions Across Lifetimes to Awaken the Intelligence of Who You’ve Always Been

… and explore what becomes possible when you view your life through a much wider lens. 

Sign up here https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/syysSW/a28052/

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Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and leave us some stars over on Spotify. You can email us at littlegiftspodcast@gmail.com or find us on isntagram @littlegiftspodcast. 

Find Sue Ellens artwork at www.sueellenparkinson.com or connect with her on instagram @sue.ellen.parkinson. And the same goes for Savanna! Find more about her practice at www.savannawonderwheel.com or connect on instagram @savannabeing. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Our body is built of matter that is created only in the superheated explosions of the death of stars, supernovas. We are reincarnated dead stars. We are matter constantly reincarnated. A lot of the elements that are crucial to human metabolism and human physiognomy are they're really only created in these incredibly violent supernovas. And then they're scattered and then woven into aliveness. And for me, it's just that's that's magic.

SPEAKER_04 0:33

There's no way it's not magic.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

I mean.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

Right, come on.

SPEAKER_05 0:38

Welcome to the Little Gifts Podcast. This is Sue Ellen Parkinson. And I'm her granddaughter, Savannah Wonderwheel.

SPEAKER_04 0:45

And we're on a journey together to find deeper meaning and magic in the day-to-day.

SPEAKER_05 0:50

We're so happy to have you join us. Hi, Grandma. Hi, Savannah. I've got tears in my eyes. I'm feeling so much love.

SPEAKER_04 1:00

Oh yay! We haven't even started talking yet, and we're there. I love that.

SPEAKER_05 1:06

It's a good way to start.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

Yes, we're just so excited to be joined by the one and only Sophie Strand for what I am sure is about to be a really just nourishing and enlivening conversation. And we are also really excited because we have a pretty big announcement that we're gonna be making at the end of this episode about uh upcoming offering of ours. It has to do with Magdalene. So I'm just gonna drop that little nugget there. And if you're curious about that, you'll just definitely want to listen to the whole thing. But to get on to the good stuff, so I'm gonna go ahead and read a little bio that we have for Sophie Strand, just to introduce her to those of you that may not know the amazing human that she is. Sophie Strand is an author, storyteller, and poet who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, ecology, mythopoetics, and love. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially between beings, ideas, differences, and mythical gradients. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, The Memoir, The Body as a Doorway, and the forthcoming poetry book Make Me Good Soil. And personally, I'm eagerly awaiting the announcement of her forthcoming romanticy series publication, but that's just a little seed to plant that's not here quite yet. But I'm hoping with fingers crossed that that happens soon. Sophie is just a true connector who brings story and life and myth and the unseen and the seen all into relationship together. And we are so, so excited to get to have you here for a conversation. So, Sophie, welcome. Welcome in.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

That was so generous, Savannah. And Sue, and I just want to start this by saying I began my book, my rewriting of the Magdalene story, with your images as the inspiration, you know, on my desk near me, my phone background. I mean, for years I lived inside a world that was symbiotic with your visual channeling and creation. And to get to have your image of Mary Magdalene on the cover of my book is one of those moments in my life where it feels like a miracle happened. Um I am so deeply woven through with your with your vision, Sue Allen. So it's an honor to be here today with you.

SPEAKER_05 3:34

Oh, that's wonderful. That makes my heart happy hearing that. I'm sure you'll understand this as a creative person, but those visions just came to me like I I was blessed by being a vessel.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Yeah, I know. It's getting out of the way, right? And letting somebody come in.

SPEAKER_05 3:53

It's getting out of the way. And that one that you chose for your book, it's so interesting for your book cover. It it it was the one, the second painting of her that I'd done. And my prayer at that time was just to connect with her. And I remember the first time I painted her, I was just asking, Who are you?

SPEAKER_03 4:13

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_05 4:14

Not trying not to project anything. That was my that was my deepest wish. And then these images started coming forth. And I I feel like she was there, you know. I feel a direct communion through those paintings myself.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Yeah. Well, I think I think the the fans and audience of your work, the pe the readers of the book, all feel that. They feel that that is that is her.

SPEAKER_05 4:39

So yeah, well, the power of imagery, that's a whole topic in itself. But we want to get back to what you've been writing recently and the the um the body is a doorway. I, you know, I was just telling Savannah before we started that because of my own time restraints and then knowing we were gonna be talking with you fairly soon after we talked to your mom, Perdita. I read, I listened to the book fairly quickly. And I that is not the way this book should be read. It should be read a few sentences. You should meditate on it or read another little chapter and talk with a friend about it, things like that. You know, I would have wished to have gone much slower, but an eaching hexagram of the clinging fire that kept popping into my mind when I was reading your book. And I just looked it up this morning to see if my brain was accurate. And it says, in spite of challenges, cling to what is luminous in yourself, in others, and in life itself, never forgetting your positive attachment to the highest good. And I really think that that's right on for the spirit of that book.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

I I love that description. It's something I'm I'm still a novice at trying to do that, and I'm always frustrated with myself, but I I hope to, I aspire to cling to the luminous.

SPEAKER_04 6:11

We were just saying all your writing is so relational in the way that you weave together the natural world and people and animals and the unseen world. And as Graham and I were kind of talking about your book, I had the realization that your writing isn't only relational in like the content of the writing, but your writing invites relational, like relationality between people who are reading it or haven't read it, or anybody who's reading it, kind of that idea how Grandma Sue was just saying, like, I wanted to read some of it and then go and talk to somebody. I wanted to read some of it and then go and dialogue or journal. And I also have your books and I've have read them in very nonlinear ways of kind of opening them and like she said, reading some and coming back to it, or just doing. I like to do kind of oracle practices with books where you just zoom to a page and see what message you need to get on that page, and have heard so many excerpts from yours and quotes of yours in group discussions to kind of start the circle, and I'm just really having that aha now that, like, that's one of the things that's so unique about your work is that invitation to being in relationship with other people through exploration of what it is that you're writing.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

It's really validating to hear that. So thank you for sharing. I mean, I think that my career as a writer under my own name. I mean, I supported myself for many years as a ghostwriter of other people's books. But my more public-facing career as a writer began during COVID, during an experience of profound isolation and depression, and of wanting to connect with other people and out of a desire to find relationality and to cling to relationships to keep me here. And that impulse to connect with others is integral, foundational to all my work. So I am glad that it is kind of promiscuous and that it leaks off the page and creates other connections. And yeah, that's that's the best possible scenario for it's the it's very mycelial.

SPEAKER_05 8:13

I I I like that you talk about this this uh experience of when we we become very ill, and I've wrestled with chronic illness myself and just had a big health crisis, and that that you sort of people are often feel like they're put into exile or you're separated somehow, or you become the patient who needs to be cured or fixed somehow, and that really when people are are ill, they're often vessels for this deeper wisdom. Something's going on, they're receiving some kind of critical m message and knowledge that the world needs. Have you thought about how we might change our culture or get back to a place where we can integrate more instead of separate the ill from our lives?

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Oh, that's a good question. And one that I don't have an easy answer for. I do think that more people are getting sick, that our exposome is filled with microplastics and toxins, that our climate is disrupted, our lives are disrupted, and more and more young people I know are sick. People of all ages are sick, more people I know are sick than definitely than when I was younger. And so I think that just by sheer number of people navigating different flavors of physical dysfunction, we're gonna be forced to navigate it together and to have new paradigms, new ways of holding it and interpreting it. Especially when it comes to illness that isn't legible or easily cured. There's, you know, there are high, high levels of diagnosis of autoimmunity in young women right now. And autoimmunity is not something that's super well understood or treated and doesn't have like a clear treatment plan, or you don't necessarily get better. And I think that as we're all forced to navigate this eligibility, this non-narrative quality to some of these conditions, we may collectively be forced into more interesting ways of holding this together. Um, I do, I mean, I am biased towards storytelling. And when I say storytelling, I mean what you do too, Sue Ellen. I mean like like creating some kind of container, some kind of creative container through which to channel, through which to try and change people's experience internally. I think that in storytelling, in art making, we can try and show people alternative ways of being, adjacent possibles. And so I am I am dedicated to that. Um I do think people are very scared of mortality and very scared of people who are close, in a way, like close to what they feel like is immortality. And I think that our the death phobic is so interesting to me that the death phobic quality of the overculture right now conversely, paradoxically, produces the deaths of so many. So I do think the ways that we can get closer to the like, you know, that we could literally learn to be with people who are dying, who are sick. What does it actually feel like and taste like? That's the real, I mean, don't go to an ayahuasca ceremony. Go be with your friend who's dying and like really be with them and learn from them. That's much more psychedelic than going to some boutique experience in Costa Rica. Um I mean, I have a friend who's a hospice worker locally, and you know, I mean, I I think her job is is is not the bureaucracy of the job makes it untenable. And yet she's still having these mystical experiences every day with people who are in the borderlands. And the stories she shares are just, you know, people are channeling, they're seeing their ancestors, they're they're remembering past lives. I mean, you know, these experiences of illness, of liminality are profoundly fertile.

SPEAKER_04 11:56

I would highly recommend anybody go and work with death in some way. I'm a I'm a body worker and massage therapist and Pilates teacher, but I for a while was volunteering at an end-of-life facility. And yeah, it's just so profound getting to be with people and see that it doesn't have to be scary, you know, it can be intense, it can be uncomfortable, it can be extremely visceral, but it's it's not something that needs to be so feared in this way that our culture does. And I'll share just like a super short little story. One of my favorite interactions I had there was with this like older gentleman who was very, you know, far in the spectrum of woo. He was definitely somebody who wasn't, I wouldn't have said would considered himself to be like in touch with the unseen forces or anything through multiple conversations I had with him. But um, at one point I go in and he's working with the remote and is kind of trying to find a channel. And I I ask him, I was like, Oh, do you need help getting something on the TV? And he just goes like, he's like, No, no, I'm just I'm trying to find the source. I'm trying to find the source, the source. And I was like, the source button. And he's like, No, I'm just trying to find the source. And I was like, Okay, you know, do you want, do you want help? And he was like, No, I've really, I've really just got to figure this out myself, like so pragmatically, so just like focused on doing it through this way. And it just, it, it's something that has so stuck with me and that I think about on a fairly regular basis of like when we're interacting with these quote unquote mundane or very man-made objects, like a TV or a remote or a computer, even that there can still be that divine connection or that divine interface through these very man-made plastic objects that we can sometimes vilify. And I just it's such a good reminder for me all the time.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

No, I'm yeah, I think the universe has a great sense of humor. So I love that. So Ellen, I do have a question for you, which is when we talked about channeling a little bit when when we're making our work. And for me, I oftentimes feel like moments of profound physical breakdown or illness are the moments when I'm a clearest channel. And it's hard because I don't wanna I don't want to conflate suffering with with with creativity, and I'd love to learn from pleasure and well-being. But I also do think there's this way in which being so rooted in your body and in the present moment makes you really available. Um, and I'm wondering how you how how that has played into your own creative practice.

SPEAKER_05 14:29

You know, what I think happens during illness or extreme physical crisis, and I know you've been there quite a bit, is that the non-essential falls away. So you're you're existing with the essential truth of things. A lot of illusions drop away. So there's that that's going on. And what I think happens when you do enter a creative process, and I do it as a practice and as a form of prayer, I think all our memories, our ancient memories, our ancestral memories that we carry in ourselves, I think they all get activated. So if we're open and receptive, you just you're you're hearing the messages of this, of all of it. And it's very different than, oh, I don't know, most of what we get as information in our culture. It's very different than the than the knowledge that the knowledge, the words we usually receive. I find a total absence of any kind of judgment or anger or rage. It's usually just this influx of encouragement to be my essential self. Oh, yeah. But I'm kind of curious about how you and I have connected in this way. I I I'm wondering how you're how my images first came to you.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

You know, I think I am a I write by ecrascis. Like, but you know, that's this idea that you are inspired by images and you write to them. So in college, I was studying poetry, and so I would often pull up images and write to images.

SPEAKER_05 16:09

Oh, interesting. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

And when my parents were working within the divine feminine and in that space, I think in the early 2018, 2017, 2018 time period is is how I would place it, I think. That's when I started to write the Madonna Secret. And I was right, I was starting the story, but I didn't have images to work with. And I was, and I I like to have images around me when I'm working. It's really I have a Pinterest board. Like I'm always like, you should see my desktop of my computer right now is like just covered in images. And it's funny, like, you know, I I'm always I had a lot of friends who were painters and photographers in college, and it was always important to me to have that cross-pollination to be able to see through someone else's eyes and to be able to really understand because I have words at my disposal, but I'm not as much a visual, visual person. I need, I need my my symbiotic person to help me see better. Um, and so I think I was looking up online for images of Mary Magdalene and not feeling like any of them resonated. Not like they were all red-haired, like, and and and they're beautiful, but I just didn't feel like they were the Miriam that I was writing. And so I didn't feel like I had an image of her. And when I found your work, I mean all of it. I mean like I was just like, oh, this is like the whole, this is like my belief sphere made visual. But I also felt like, oh, this is Miriam. This is I recognize it was a sense of recognition. So I don't know. I mean, I was I was on Instagram, I was on Pinterest, I was on Google, I was on Tumblr, I was looking everywhere. Yeah, you were you were in the divine feminine space of the of that time period, you were very regularly, you still are, of course, but like your images were what people chose. And I immediately was like, oh yes, this is it. And so, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 17:56

Yeah, you know, when my first right before I started painting her, I went to um, and my experience was that I just woke up one morning thinking, I've got to study Mary Magdalene. Now, where that came from, talk about ancestral messagery. I feel like this was a great grandmother who was just, you know, really getting in touch with me too, to reach out to Magdalene. And um, I went to a workshop that was taught by a wonderful, wonderful teacher, Kayleen Asbo. Oh wow. Three-day workshop. And uh, Kayleen ended her first evening with just a slide presentation of all the images she'd collected of Mary Magdalene. And I didn't know anybody at this at this gathering, and I didn't know that much about Mary Magdalene. And it was just, you know, probably 45 minutes of looking at images in the dark, and I just found myself broken into tears. And my feeling was that this one woman, this one extraordinary ordinary woman, Mary Magdalene, it had so much projected on her. Right. And did anybody even really see her? You know, there's something about being a beautiful woman, and you're a beautiful woman, Sophie. Are you seen? Is your whole soul seen? What is seen beyond that exterior beauty, you know?

SPEAKER_02 19:19

I know. I always I I think a lot about what it means to be underestimated or misread. I've had I had a two different psychics say to me when I was quite young, they said, your superpower is also gonna be a curse your whole life, which is that you're gonna be underestimated. Oh jeez. And I've realized that, but I think it's a really it means that you catch people unawares, that you that you can surprise people. That's that surprise is is a tool you can use. But it is hard to puncture people's projections. Absolutely. That's what resonated about your work was, I mean, about your work at large, not just about Mary Magdalene, but just you you give a texture to different female archetypes that I haven't seen a lot of people give visual body to. There's there's so often the fetishized maid, the crone. There are these these stereotypes, but there's no living, breathing being behind them.

SPEAKER_05 20:12

You know, and I'm sure this has been the case throughout history, but I just I'm using the people that live in this little town that we live in in Northern California. You know, those are my models. Every once in a while, some exotic creature will cross my path and I'll say, can I can I paint you? But that usually, usually I I have to know that there's some kind of heart relationship there.

SPEAKER_04 20:37

Yeah, it's so sweet. Anytime we go to one of her shows or anything, all these people come by and I'll be like, oh my gosh, you're you're that person and you're that person. It's like I'm getting to meet Bridget and Thekla and Magdalene and all the people in real life in these personified forms.

SPEAKER_02 20:55

That's so interesting to me because I actually think this is what makes your work so fresh and so potent. And I think it's what makes good writing good too, which is I can always tell when a writer isn't really imagining a real character. For me, when I'm writing a character, I have to base them on like real people. Like I have to like take parts of like a real person and their real quirks and personality so that I can make someone real. And I think that yeah, you have to be able to be using the materials, the characters, the people of your your ecosystem.

SPEAKER_05 21:27

And you know, the the message that I've gotten through Mary Magdalene and through doing the practice of Visio Divino with her, where you meditate on an image and then um what does Benedict say? He said, Um, they speak to you through the ear of your heart.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

Oh, beautiful. I love that.

SPEAKER_05 21:46

Yeah. So it's over and over again. She's just talking about our essential goodness. I'd say, I want to connect with you, and she'd say, When you weep for the world, you're weeping my tears, or would When you when you connect with yourself, you've connected with no you know, it's just that kind of uh constant encouragement just to be true to yourself. And everything in this culture asks us not to be true to ourselves. We're ill, we're supposed to not be ill, we're supposed to be healthy if we're some shape or some age that doesn't fall into the category of acceptable. You know, we're always supposed to be trying to change ourselves, and this is a whole new way of looking at it. Of no, you you just love and accept your essential self, whatever that might be in the moment.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

And your essential desires, I think we've been hijacked by cultural desires that don't belong to us, and to get really in touch with what we really love and what we really care about. Yeah, I think that's such a powerful reorientation.

SPEAKER_04 22:50

Well, it's like our iconography that we've interacted with for centuries beforehand have all just been replaced by billboards and magazine covers that aren't even real humans. I mean, for one, aren't real humans just through like Photoshop and editing, and now aren't real humans because they're images made by AI. But I think we we started talking briefly before we started recording about the imagery and icons and using, you know, Grandma Sue, your images as icons to be in relationship with. And I'd just be curious if we could mention it on here because I think it's really, it's really important the images that we surround ourselves with and that we work with.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

So, Sophie, if you want to say what you were I mean, I have a friend who writes a lot about images, and we were talking about this recently, and just about how like human beings are remarkably drawn to images, like like we have a real susceptibility to them. He was telling me, and I don't know if this is true, but people who are blind are never like I I don't know if this is totally true or if it's a generalization, but people who are born blind do not tend to manifest schizophrenia. That there's something about the visual apparatus that has us in interact with a whole different level of reality. Because I I personally don't pathologize mental illness. I think it's we're paying we're getting more sensory stimuli, we're seeing more than other people normally do. And I do think that there's there's something extremely potent in both a powerful and a scary way about imagery. And yeah, that in the before the stripping of the altars, before the iconoclasm and the split the schism of the church, icons were God. Like, you know, you were when you were praying to an icon, you are there. Like, you know, when you're with a statue of Shiva or Parvati in India, you're feeding that statue because it's real. It's like it's the embodiment of the goddess or the god. Um and I think for me, if if if we look at that orientation of as images as not being a metaphor, but as being like a real relationship, and then we plant it in our secular age with all the images we have now, what unintentional relationships do we have? Like what images are we? We're looking at the image of our own face all the time. The icon we're praying to most is like is is our own face in this like Zoom thing and and how it's deviant and how it's not correct in other people's faces to to the human world. It's yeah, it's curious to me. But yeah, I really do think that we have to realize that when we're making images, we are make we are making God to a certain extent. I love that.

SPEAKER_04 25:31

Yeah, and that's just such an aha for me, too. Right now, I'm like, I feel like I could just sit with that one statement. I'm like, okay, there's a lot to unpack there. One of my housemates, a really good friend of mine, she's a photographer. And we've had all different conversations around imagery and photography. And she was telling me how the iPhone camera, the camera that's on a phone, be it iPhone or Android or whatever, it warps, it warps us in a way that original film photography didn't. So it's like when you have pictures of yourself on film and you're like, oh my gosh, it looks so good. And then you look at these pictures of yourself on a phone and you're like, what is happening? How is that? Like, is that me? And she was just saying that it's not you. The camera literally warps the length and width of you, and it does these things that isn't true to what you actually look like. And that was just such a big aha for me, too, of just like, okay, so this image that I'm seeing of myself so often through my phone isn't even what I actually look like. And then to put it under the reframe of the images that we're working with are, you know, theoretically these connections to God or divine or what we're like giving our attention and our thoughts towards. And they're these warped ver, even if they are ourselves, they're a warped version of ourselves. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

And I and I also I think about, I really don't love having my picture taken, and I don't like being seen. And it's very uncomfortable for me. I mean, I think there are historical reasons why that makes sense with my my history, but I also think that, you know, it used to be that like there was an incredible intentional relationship for someone to take your portrait or paint your portrait. That you were choosing who is the mediator of your image, who is translating you, who is making you into an image. You know, that that was a really conscious experience. Who is translating me? And con now we're just in a panopticon. You know, we're getting surveilled, you know, there are hidden cameras taking videos of us all the time, other people are taking photos of us, our phones are recording us. I mean, I don't want to be superstitious, but sometimes I feel like it makes my soul feel a little thin. It's a strange experience.

SPEAKER_05 27:42

Well, there's a reason why I live up on the end of a dirt road on a mountaintop.

unknown 27:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 27:47

That kind of explains it. But I will I'd like to bring us back to this death phobic culture and death, because you know, your I think your book, The Body as a Doorway, really touches in on this. And I've often thought, you know, we need to we have this distinct separation, like we have life, boom, and then we have death, you know. And and maybe we need to stop separating them. Maybe it's the same thing, you know. And I think your bot your book is kind of pointing to that, and you're, you know, just what what is the next book of poetry? Make me good soil. You know, and so could you talk a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_02 28:31

Totally. I mean, there was this realization I had, I was quite sick in high school, and this deer was hit on the road, and then Oh my gosh, I have that quote tagged here that I was gonna maybe read during this conversation. Speaking of like that, it was one of the most profound spiritual encounters of my life, and it was visual. It was also like a I it was participating, it was audience, I was watching, it was I couldn't understand the spiritual lesson if I had read it. I needed to watch it happen.

SPEAKER_04 28:58

Can I read this for some context for the listeners? So you write, Sophie. Many years before I became ill, a deer hit by a car. I think I was I think that's wrong. I think I was sick, but continue. All right, we can make an edit to the coffee here. We'll just say, I became ill. A deer hit by a car managed to struggle into the woods at the periphery of my parents' property where it died. It was high summer, frying pan hot, the peeling birch bark almost crisping into cinders under unrelenting sunshine. Day after day, I would visit the carcass and watch as one life melted into a riot of lives. Worms, ants, maggots, beetles, mushrooms. Death was the moment when life overflowed its cup. Death wasn't an end of life, it was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive, generative plurality. One narrative diverged into 400 narratives.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

I really feel like death is the womb of life. It it's the, you know, the s if the soil is the decayed matter of dead trees and animals, it's also the womb that grows the food and seeds of the future forest. And that it's such an important part of the cycle of death and rebirth. I think for me, you know, whatever we're so worried about what comes after death, but what came before birth? John O'Donohue, uh, I think frames it in one of his amazing books. He's one of my secular saints I love so much. That we are embraced on either side by the unknown. We have there's a life, and then there's the whatever came before birth, and whatever came after death. And and it's an embrace of of who knows. I think a lot about monarch butterflies. They're, you know, native to the Hudson Valley. I love them. And every at the every fall, they migrate down south, down to Mexico, and then they come back in the spring. And that migration actually doesn't encompass one butterfly. It's five different generations of butterflies. So the butterfly that begins the migration doesn't end up in Mexico and isn't the one that ends up back here. It's five different butterflies. And I think about none of us, we think of our single lives as holding all of this weight that we have to accomplish everything. But what if we are just one butterfly enchained in a long migration process whereby we are not personally responsible in this one life for figuring everything out? And what if death is just the alembic, the chrysalis, that turns us into the the next butterfly that helps us to continue the story? Um, I mean, on a very material level, our body is built of matter that is created only in the superheated explosions of the death of stars, supernovas. Like we are reincarnated dead stars. Like we are matter constantly reincarnated. And so for me, it's important to remember that death is this is this moment of changing shape and changing name, changing address. But it's oftentimes when one life becomes many lives.

SPEAKER_05 31:55

Thank you for that explosive statement there, because I'm thinking, I'm thinking, well, I often think I'm connected to all this around me, this world, the trees, the dirt, the you know, all of it. But then to think, oh, it even gets bigger and bigger. I'm connected to all those stars.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

I was researching about it. Yes. A lot of a lot of the the elements that are crucial to human metabolism and human physiogamy are they're really only created in these incredibly violent supernovas. And then they're scattered and then woven into to aliveness. And for me, it's just that's that's magic.

SPEAKER_05 32:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

There's no way it's not magic. I mean, right? Come on. What is it that Terrence McKenna said, like, you know, all of science rests on one magic trick, like whatever came before the Big Bang. I love that. It's rationalist, but it depends on one original magic trick. Oh, that's so great.

SPEAKER_05 32:55

I have a really personal question I want to ask if it's okay. Yeah. What was it like being raised by your mom, who is a kind of amazing woman, and your dad, who is this Buddhist poet, haiku poet. Do you have some memories about that? I'm wondering how that fed the person, how you view feeding the person you became.

SPEAKER_02 33:19

Oh, I mean, it's it's it's everything. I mean, my parents were feral spiritual animists, and we moved up from the city when I was three onto an unofficial animal rehabilitation farm whereby our house was filled with like swans and ducks and geese and possums and rabbis and nuns, eco-anarchists. I mean, it was incredible. I think I really my parents were incredibly inclusive with me. Like they'd invite me to the adults' table, they would help me to participate in conversations that were well above my age level about like you know, my dad had a group that did co-ons of the Bible that read Bible stories, read the Bible as with a Zen Koan paradigm. And I was like a three-year-old, and he would invite me to that. And then, of course, my mom was incredibly integral to giving me books and stories and also instilling in me this deep reverence and humility in relationship to plants and animals, that they were alive and they were agencial and had an experience, and I had to always be asking questions and always be aware of that. And you know, that looked like her taking me through the forest and introducing me to plants and animals, reading me folk tales, reading aloud, lots and lots of stories. I mean, the house was was crazy. It was like it was filled with people, it was filled with animals, it was filled with books, and it was an incredibly fertile compost heap. My parents are incredibly loving, wonderful people. And it was chaos, but it was good chaos.

SPEAKER_05 34:46

Yeah, thank you for that chaos. Well, and then when you when you went away to college, did you feel like you'd come from another planet?

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Well, I I think I was in a ho I was pretty much in a hospital for two years before I went to college. So I think I'd been exiled to many different places by the time I got there. So I think I felt like an alien in many different ways when I got to college. But weirdly enough, I felt home homecoming when I went to college. I I finally met people who were as weird and like the type of uh like queer intelligence that I have or like diagonal intelligence that's like mixing arts and science. Like, I I don't think I've ever felt quite as happy as I did in the first three weeks of being at college. I finally felt like I come. Um and I th these are those are still my closest friends. They've moved back to the area. So yeah, it was and of and all those people love my parents. It was amazing. Like I was, you know, my parents were kind of like the home away from home for all of my college friends. So yeah.

SPEAKER_05 35:49

It was really that's wonderful. That makes my heart happy hearing that. I I wonder because I'm at my youngest son, who's now 44, I raised pretty close to home and he was just completely into nature and and also storytelling and all that, but I also feel like he often feels like he's a little from another planet or something when he goes out into the world.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

I mean, I feel that. I feel that when I go to the city or I like, you know, I I I always feel like a weird country bumpkin or like a weird hippie. Um, absolutely. Um, but I also kind of the the moments I think in high school actually, I tried to become part of the dominant culture before I got sick. I wanted to be a cool girl. I wanted to be a term, I didn't like what my parents were doing. Like, you know, I definitely rebelled, and I I I that was not good for me. It was not nourishing. I trust my weirdness. I don't think that being well adjusted to a sick culture is necessarily a good thing. So at the moments when I feel bad like it's a bad fit, I'm like, that's probably a good thing.

SPEAKER_04 36:59

It's good information, it provides us a different lens of information when if you feel like you're a little on the fringes to then go into different spaces and be like, okay, does my fringiness maybe not necessarily fit here, but is it at least accepted or somehow enjoyed by these other people? And if not, then it's like, well, this probably isn't a space that that I need to be in.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

Exactly. It's a good, it's a good signal. Savannah, did you have that experience? What was your upbringing? Did you feel kind of like a feral animist in the world?

SPEAKER_04 37:33

I mean, I I have always felt like I'm somewhat on the fringes of whatever it is, but I didn't grow up, well, I don't know if I grew up as rural as you, but I was definitely out in the country and in a very, very small town. I think our town had like 4,000 people. And I had an amazing mom who had me pretty young. And so I feel like I grew up with a lot of play. She was just always down to to play and do, you know, have fun and and go and romp around and definitely prioritized like getting me outside, going camping, or or even just traveling a lot as a kid. You know, I I think that something that I really value that a lot of a lot of people don't get is the amount of travel that I got as a kid and teenager. And in retrospect, I'm like, how the fuck did she do it? Because she was a single mom and like working full time and you know, keeping a roof over our heads and all the things. And then I had grandma Sue getting to visit her. And I mean, that was definitely like as a kid going up to her house, which is very much in the country. People in the city would say that I lived in the country, and then being somebody who could go to more country, I was like, I don't live in the country, even though technically it was like the town was unincorporated. We were out in the woods, all the stuff. But like I remember being a little kid going to Grandma Sue's, and she would put little there'd be little gemstones hidden around, and we'd be on a walk and she'd be like, Oh, what's what's that? And and I'd go and find it. She'd be like, ah, that must have been left there by the fairies or by the gnomes or something. And and I think that aspect of magic that was curated for me truly did lend me to like fully believe that magic is real. And I still try to choose that belief. And it's like whether it was those little moments or Christmas and my mom taking the oatmeal and putting little hoof prints in it and being like, oh well, you know, we have to put glitter in the oatmeal because this magic reindeer that can fly need magic oatmeal. And I think those things have really shaped who I am as an adult, where I full, full heart believe magic is real and refuse to hear anything different. And I think there was a period, like you said, kind of rebelling or going against the grain and being like, oh, mom and grandma are doing another poetry reading. Like poetry is so boring. I can't, I'm not somebody who likes poetry and now full circle coming around. And our last episode was we did a poetry reading, just me and grandma with each other. And it's like these things that you kind of swing the pendulum away from and then it comes back. And yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:13

Yeah, I think that the choice to return is really powerful. And I think, yeah, I I think that when I came home to Woodstock and to my parents and to this paradigm of animism, it was with renewed vitality, like, you know, really I'm committing this time.

SPEAKER_04 40:31

Yeah, and having seen them really lean into different community groups, and even if they didn't work out long term or whatever it is, get it just like seeing people trying to be in community and join different circles and and be in a slightly different way of living in society. And now again, kind of full circle coming around to being like, oh, that's something that I really, really prioritize in my life is like what different community spaces can I join and what like consistent things can I be a part of, even if it does get a little uncomfortable, or if there's times where I'm like, oh, I don't know, just like the act of returning and like you said, choosing to return.

SPEAKER_03 41:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:09

Well, we're close to time. Grandma, was there any last burning questions you had for Sophie?

SPEAKER_05 41:14

I just feel like it's uh your work is such a blessing, Sophie.

SPEAKER_02 41:18

That's very kind. Thank you, Sue Ellen. It was it's a blessing that it keeps me alive. I really like the writing of it, it's kind of it's it's it's always a uh a lifeboat.

SPEAKER_05 41:28

Yeah, I guess that's something that maybe we could end with is the importance of a creative practice.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 41:36

And what that what that really does for people to enter your imagination. And imagination is sometimes interpreted as just being this fluffy non-real thing. But I often feel like, well, I feel that you are a visionary and maybe the difficulty sometimes of being a visionary because the world is not always in agreement with you or understanding what you're doing, but what you're doing is so important.

SPEAKER_02 42:04

I feel the same about you. I mean, I think for me, I always come back to this idea of Shaherazad and the 101 Knights of the Arabian Tales, which is she's married to this murderous king who marries and kills a new wife every night. She's forced to tell a story that will convince him to keep her alive for another night. Thereby an entire manuscript of stories comes into being. And for me, that's that's what is behind really important creative work is urgency. What is your emergency? What do you care most about? What do you want to stay alive? What will keep you alive? And you know, I as a young person when I was dealing with some pretty intense stuff, there were books that really convinced me to keep to stay here. That when reading them, they showed me, you know, Tolkien says, like, you know, you can be mad at fantasy as being escapist, but if you're a prisoner, escape is the right thing. And I think that our culture is is in imprisons us in many ways. And I think that art can be a way of drawing an escape door into uh onto a wall, and actually, you know, like Harold and the purple crown walking out, making a new world, making a new possible, imagining ways otherwise. Um, so I think it can be profoundly liberatory and life-saving. And I always like to encourage people. Inside capitalism, I think we're oftentimes encouraged to make things that are profitable or like might make us money. I always say that nothing you do to make money will ever make you any money. You have to do the do the thing that matters to you most that will keep you alive, because if it keeps you alive, it may keep one other person alive. Um so it's that it's that urgency that is really the engine for me.

SPEAKER_05 43:48

Yeah, boy, I'm thinking of this quote, and I can't remember who said it. I wish I could do it, but it was it was that the visionary gives us um a larger Reality is showing us a larger reality. And what is real right now? I mean, what's going on in this world right now is literally taking the planet to the brink of extinction. So we need a larger reality more than ever.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

And that's going to be many different people with many different capacities imagining. It's going to be a collective reimagination. So yeah, everyone is needed.

SPEAKER_05 44:26

Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_04 44:27

Well, to close our conversations, we like to just do this practice we call of sharing a little gift. So it can be something small, big, anywhere in between, but something I always think of it like just a little kiss from the universe that's happened maybe recently in your life.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

Share my little gift. My little gift is I have been feeling all of my friends are getting married and having babies. And I am not having babies or getting married. And it can feel sad. And in some ways, living alone is an incredible thing. As you know, I look at my grand great-grandmother and my grandmother and say, like the fact that I can support myself with my work and live alone is amazing. Some ways it's also sad. So I have complicated feelings about my solitude. And then lately I've noticed that there is a giant turkey living in my yard. Just one. And she sleeps. This is crazy. I didn't know turkeys do this. She sleeps high up in a tree every night. High. And then in the morning she comes down and she lives in my yard now. And I did research, and apparently, she apparently it's a woman. Um, based on her characteristics, it's a woman. She's mature, she's an adult, and she's doesn't have a community. And apparently, sometimes that happens to female turkeys. And I was thinking about how I'm not lonely and she's not lonely because we have each other. Me and this lone turkey are now like a dyad. Like we are here together. She's very funny, and I love her, so I want to share her with you.

SPEAKER_04 45:57

I love that so much. I just have to say, there's a movie that just was recommended to me that I haven't watched yet, so I can't say it's good or not. But the people who recommended it said it was amazing. And it's um it's my turkey the teacher instead of the octopus teacher, and it's about a man who befriends a flock of turkeys and all the lessons he learns from them. So next up.

SPEAKER_05 46:21

Yeah, isn't that amazing? Well, um, I was I was at a retreat once with a friend who I like to get up really early in the morning and watch the sun come up. And so this friend also has this practice. So we were out sitting talking very quietly before the dawn, and we were by a huge oak tree, and all of a sudden the sun started coming up, and all these huge turkeys. There must have been 30 of them up in this oak tree. And I was like, you know, and and but it open opened me up to the fact that there's so much out there that we were unaware we had an audience of people listening to us there up in the tree.

SPEAKER_04 47:05

I'll just share quickly, too, at my other grandma's house, she had a tree outside of the bedroom that I would sleep in as a kid, and it would also all the turkeys would go up into that tree at night. And it's so funny because we would go out as like a little kid in the morning and we would go shake the turkey tree. And so we'd be standing at the, you know, sorry for the turkeys, but with a rude awakening, but we'd stand at the trunk and kind of jiggle the turkey tree, and all these turkeys would fall out around you, and it's just such an absurd thing to have happen, especially as like a five-year-old being like the turkeys are falling from the sky.

SPEAKER_05 47:42

They're they're huge birds.

SPEAKER_04 47:44

Yeah, yeah, they're amazing.

SPEAKER_05 47:47

My little gift this week is was a big gift. They're always really big gifts, but um, I'd had a oh, I had a misunderstanding with a friend, and I was holding it for about a couple years, you know, it was really troubling me. And I finally had the courageous conversation yesterday about confronting her and sharing my feelings and just getting it out in the open because I knew that it was time that I didn't want to carry that. And uh, it turned out to be just a total misunderstanding, and we both cried and it was clear we loved each other, and it was just like makes me wonder why do we wait so long to discuss these things? You know, when we're hurt, we tend to insulate more, and um anyway, it was like the best thing I could have best resolution to the conversation I could have hoped for. And and when I went into it, I thought, but there's no way that'll happen. And it happened.

SPEAKER_04 48:48

So that's pretty miraculous.

SPEAKER_05 48:50

Yeah, yeah, it was beautiful.

SPEAKER_04 48:53

Yeah, so inspiring to me. Anybody having a hard conversation with a friend, it's like it's so tender. And I I'll just say too that like that's again one of the reasons I love your writing so much, Sophie, is that you know, yes, the love story is something that we all maybe not we all, but many of us want. But finding that love story within all these different relationships that aren't just romantic. Yeah, and how important those love stories are within our friendships and just heart, heart opening can come from that and those conversations. So well, mine is that yesterday I I've been out of town and then was in a massage training and just really doing a lot of things that didn't involve looking at emails or messages or anything, and that had quite the backup of things that I needed to reply to. And I've been trying to do it at home and just unsuccessfully engaging with any, you know, correlation. And so I was like, I need to leave the house, I need to get out of the house. I went to my coffee shop that I like to work at. There was no tables. I was like, okay, well, where else am I gonna go? And so I just went over to there's a cemetery that I live by, and I was like, well, I'll just go sit by a tree and use a hot spot and try to answer my emails there. And I was walking around and I just had this sense of like so much support from them. And I wandered around a bit, and there's a lot of cemeteries that have photos on the headstones of this place, and I ended up finding one that was of this really friendly looking older man, and I just had this moment of like, this guy knew how to reply to an email. This guy did not let them sit. This guy was good at his correspondences, this guy has got that figured out, and so I just posted up near his headstone and did all the little administrative things I needed to do, and I got them done. Thank you, Sergei, for helping me out. And then I I took a really great nap in the cemetery, and it was just my best little work day afternoon I could have asked for. So my little gift is having Sergei's help answering my emails yesterday.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

I think I'm gonna have to take a leaf out of your book. Um, I love cemeteries and I have a hard time with my email. So maybe it was great.

SPEAKER_04 51:15

I was like, all right, this is my new, this is gonna be my new routine. So well, I just want to make sure we include in here any of the ways that you would like for people to find you, Sophie. You have an amazing Substack, you've got a really beautiful Instagram page, and and if there's any other ways you want people to find you, please let us know.

SPEAKER_02 51:38

I'm on all of the social medias, I'm on Instagram, Facebook, threads, I have on Substack. I do paid and unpaid right now. I'm doing a free series on romantic animism, romance stories, and so that's a fun place to be. I have books out there and many podcasts. So yeah, come bother me. My email is, I think, open for business.

SPEAKER_04 51:59

Um your substack is make me good soil and your Instagram is cosmogeny. Yeah, you absolutely want to check out her Substack and her Instagram. Sophie does the best meme dumps out of anybody out there right now. So just 10 out of 10 would recommend you look at those. But on our side of things, we are really excited to announce that we are gonna be going to France on a Mary Magdalene pilgrimage. So we've named the pilgrimage Magdalene's Footsteps, a Rose Path pilgrimage, and we're gonna be going to France in September, this coming September, from the 14th to the 19th, and we are looking for six women who want to join us. I so wish I could do that.

SPEAKER_02 52:54

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_05 52:54

We wish we could do it too. We could just grab you.

SPEAKER_04 52:58

Anyway, maybe who knows? Yeah, and and kind of the thing that we just want to make sure we put forth with it is it's gonna be a very different pilgrimage than many pilgrimages, in that it is gonna be intergenerational and it's gonna be slow, and we're not gonna be trying to pack a million things in. We're gonna go to three different sacred sites, but we'll have transportation, room and board, everything figured out, and we're just gonna really try to let ourselves move through it at a pace that feels like we're actually able to feel what's happening versus so many things that we do that are like we gotta fit in this, this, this, this, and this, and do a million things every day. And we're gonna try to let it be spacious and slow and luxurious and real and down to earth. Have rest and restoration. Yes. So I'm just really, really excited. We kind of put the idea, we had the idea earlier this year and then kind of put it on the back burner when Grandma Sue was having her health issues. But you know, she's doing good. We're doing good, and so we're gonna go for it. If you are interested in that, it's a really small group of people that we're taking. We would definitely recommend that you reach out sooner than later. You can find all the information on Grandma Sue's website at www.sue ellenparkinson.com. And we would love to chat and see if it's in alignment for you. I'm so excited. It's gonna be so amazing. I like really didn't think it was gonna happen. So just what a treat to get to have this come to fruition and to get to announce it here today with you, grandma and Sophie. And yeah, I just can't wait to see who ends up who ends up with us. And I'll just throw out there, lastly, if we have coming up at the end of the month, we do a monthly gathering on the last Sunday of the month. So I believe this coming month, that will be Sunday the 28th. And we're gonna do that at 5 p.m. Pacific time. We call it our community care circle. It's just about an hour, hour and a half or so where people can come together. And we usually do a little somatic movement practice, a little creative practice, and then we bring whatever we got from those practices into the circle and just have a kind of open dialogue. It's very sweet every month and never know who's gonna show up or if anybody's gonna show up, and people are showing up, and every time it's just seems like we're getting a little deeper than the last.

SPEAKER_05 55:31

So, Sophie, thank you so much. It was so good to meet you. And someday I'm gonna do a pilgrimage out to the east coast and see you and your mom and dad.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

Please, we would absolutely love that. Both of you.

SPEAKER_05 55:47

Yeah, we gotta get in the car and go, go, go.

SPEAKER_02 55:50

So we'll see. We'll see who gets there first. Fingers crossed, there might be a book tour next year. Oh, excellent, excellent. That would be so fun.

SPEAKER_04 55:57

Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you so, so, so much. And we just appreciate you and your time this morning and your time that you've spent creating all the things that we love. So thank you both.

SPEAKER_05 56:10

I love you, Sophie, and I love you, Savannah. And we love you, all the little gifters. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_04 56:19

If you're a lover of the Little Gifts podcast, please share that love with the world. Leave us a review or give us some stars wherever you listen to your podcast, and while you're at it, you could send this episode to someone in your life that you know could use some TLC. Word of mouth recommendations are the best marketing a podcast to ask for, and every recommendation means the world to us. To keep in touch, you can find us on Substack or Instagram at LittleGifts Podcast, and we host a monthly community care circle on the last Sunday of every month that can be found through our Substack. You can also send us an email at LittleGiftspodcast at gmail.com, and as always, all of this info and more can be found in the show notes. And we want to give a special thanks to Robin O'Brien for gifting us her music to use for this show. Thanks for being on this journey with us. We do a monthly gathering on the last Sunday of the month. So I believe this coming month, that will be Sunday the 28th. And we're gonna do that at 5 p.m. Pacific time. We call it our community care circle. It's just about an hour, hour and a half or so where people can come together. And we usually do a little somatic movement practice, a little creative practice, and then we bring whatever we got from those practices into the circle and just have a kind of open dialogue. It's very sweet every month and never know who's gonna show up or if anybody's gonna show up, and people are showing up and every time it's just seems like we're getting a little deeper than the last. So there's that. And then the other little nugget we're gonna drop, me and Grandma Sue have kind of been going back and forth for a while now about whether we're gonna do it or not. Her health scare made us think maybe we weren't, but we are going to go to France and we're gonna try to bring some people with us to France and do a Magdalene's footsteps pilgrimage. And we're thinking it's gonna be a pretty small group in.