Nonsense in the Chaos

#68 Kairos Time; Terri Windling and Some Ways to Navigate the Inferno

• Jolie Rose

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The. Welcome to The Nonsense in the Chaos. I'm your host, Jolie Rose. I have an incredible interview to share with you with the amazing Terry Winding, who is a dear friend of mine. I met through my friend Howard, who has been on the podcast. So we did a couple of episodes with Howard because he had much to say about the archetype of the fool, which is the discipline that I'm trained in, and so is my passion as shared passion with Howard, and he's walked the pilgrimages with me and. I met Terry, his wife, through walking with him, and she is an incredible being. Who I just yeah, there are some people and we talk about it, we touch on it, but how there are women. That come into your life that are female stewards of, mentorship and just support. So she calls me a soul sister, which is the biggest honor in the world because I love her soul. So I love that she sees me as a soul sister. It's a absolute compliment and honor to be seen that way. And that is what's so lovely when you meet a woman. I think it's probably the same for men, but it's something that I feel very strongly in my female experience of meeting women who, who build me up, who strengthen me and make me feel better. Especially I'm here on SARC and there's quite a lot of female misogyny here amongst the women and there's a lot of tearing each other down here and. I'm okay with that because I have women like Terry in my life and other fabulous females that I know that make me feel safe and empowered and open and grow. And that's what I, every time I'm with Terry, I feel like I grow and I expand and I hope that's what I, do for her too. But I get so much from. Being around her that it means that if I, I can take the slings and arrows of other things in the world around me when I have that support from the female like a rope, it's like a rope of female stewardship and mentorship and support and yeah, there are women in my life that, that give me that. And it just means that I can take on anything. And absolute honor and joy to share this conversation with you, and I hope you get as much out of it as I did. So here is the wonderful Terry winding

Jolie:

excellent. Ah, Terry, it's so nice to have you.

Terri Windlig:

Thank you for inviting me.

Jolie:

Just thinking about your lovely studio and the inspiration of what a lovely space that is. And tell us where you are based.

Terri Windlig:

So my husband and I are based on Dartmore in a tiny little village on the eastern edge of the mo. And it's very small actually. There are people in town who would insist that I not call it a village. It's technically a market town, but it's very small, surrounded by sheep farms and it's filled with artists as well as farmers and all kinds of other people. But there are a lot of artists here, and there are particularly a lot of artists here who work with myth and folklore in some fashion or another, which is why I love it so much. There's such a good community as you know, because you've been here.

Jolie:

It's magical. It's so

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

is so special, and so you

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

artists have been attracted to the area. Tell us about where, tell us like your origin story, where you're from and what you do.

Terri Windlig:

I grew up on the northeast coast of America in a working class family. Though we don't really use those words in America. We're supposed to be non-class conscious there, but of course we are. And it was very working class and my grandparents were more middle class and I grew up bouncing between my grandparents and my, my mom who was a teenage un weed mother, 16 years old when she had me. And we lived with my grandparents until I was seven. Then she married a rather dreadful man and we moved, sadly. With him and she had two sons and he was quite violent, so I couldn't stay there all the time. And I'm bounced between her and my grandparents and other relatives. Huge extended Pennsylvania, Deutsche Clan of in Pennsylvania. So this was on both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which are states which are right next to each other. And, and the Klan sort of spread over the Pennsylvania jersey border. And so I grew up in foster care and with lots of different relatives and it was all very, very chaotic. And I ran away when I was 15 and was in university by the time I was in 16, which absolutely saved my life and put me on a good trajectory. And I studied literature and folklore and fairytales and that prepared me for a lifetime of working with those materials.

Jolie:

You are in university by 16.

Terri Windlig:

There was a, back in the day, this was a long time ago, seventies, I'm that old. There was a program called New Directions in America, which was to help underprivileged kids get university educations. And I was just lucky enough to get into that. So I didn't really, because I hadn't finished high school, I had left home before. I was able to finish and do all the exams that would normally get you into university. And in, in that time it was really that time and place and the family I was from, it was really unusual to want to go to university and, but I did and I wanted to get out of there. I just really wanted to get out of there

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

and. So I had the opportunity through new directions to get some funding to go. And they're supposed to give you some help to, to, to help you adjust to being suddenly being thrown in university life. This is a, a private school called Antioch University, Antioch College. And a lot of the kids that went there were from quite well-heeled backgrounds. They, they were like ambassadors kids, and, you know, pretty, it, it was a hippie school, you know, drum circles at dusk every day. And that's why I wanted to go there'cause I, I felt wanted to be an alternative artsy hippie type. And, but people came from mostly pretty well-heeled backgrounds and I was such a fish outta water. And they were supposed as part of new directions, you were supposed to get guidance on how to make that transition. Absolutely none just threw us in and. Sink or swim. Most of the people who came in in that year with me on new directions, I think there may be a dozen of us, only two of us went the distance and everybody else sort of failed out because it was just too extreme a change. It was a real fairytale journey. Like braving, you know, leaving home was scary. Not knowing,'cause I didn't go directly to university. I was homeless for a little bit. And then the, it, it was a real fairytale journey of, no, I'm going to save my life. I'm gonna get out of here, I'm gonna save my life. And. Just like in fairytales, you have to learn to tell f from foe on the side of the, the little old lady on the side of the road, the one who's really an ogre and the one who's really a good fairy in disguise. You know, you have to keep your wits about you. You have to be careful with magic. You have to do all those things. And I had, I had loved fairytales as a kids, so I, I feel like it gave me a good map for how to just keep going.

Jolie:

what it's for, isn't it?

Terri Windlig:

Yeah, exactly.

Jolie:

reason for it. Tell us about your, your writing career. Like what, did you, how did that

Terri Windlig:

oh God, Jolie, I hate to admit this'cause I was such a feminist, even as a young bri of a girl, I followed my boyfriend to New York City'cause he had a job.

Jolie:

Oh.

Terri Windlig:

I didn't wanna go to New York City. I followed my boyfriend. But thank God I did because I'm not sure I going, going to New York, New York is near Pennsylvania, New Jersey. So going to New York for me was going back, even though I hadn't lived in the city before. I didn't wanna go back east. And I did because of this boyfriend. And I think if it hadn't been for him, I'm not sure I ever even would've thought of book publishing. But that was something he wanted to get into and he thought he had a job lined up when we went, he didn't fell through and he really, he kind of didn't make it in the industry, but I took the lowest level job I could get and just worked hard and worked my way up really fast. And was also in the right place at the right time when Tolkien had. Was, you know, on the bestsellers list and all these science fiction lines had like little bits of fantasy, but not much. Fantasy was a teeny tiny field that was the bastard cousin of science fiction. And often in America was mostly published. The editors who were, who were publishing those books mostly were science fiction editors who didn't either, didn't like fantasy or saw it as an extension of science fiction. So it had that kind of very logical approach to magic and myth, and that was not what I was looking for in mythic fiction. And so I was able, within God, within a, my first year of being in New York, I was able to sort of talk my way into being able to acquire books and find the kind of fantasy I wanted to publish. And I. Work with like a lot of young writers who are almost, I was, I was young, I was 19 going on 20 when I got my first publishing job. And then running a line of fantasy books within a couple of years and published my first book in, I think when I was 22, 23. And it won an award and I went on from there. So I just,

Jolie:

So.

Terri Windlig:

was in the right place at the right time.'cause fantasy was just about to become. A big genre, and I, it would, it wouldn't happen today. It's so hard to break into these fields today as a writer, as an editor, and then I was, I'm just, I'm so glad I was there then, and at a time when, as long as I, as long, as long as I had a little budget and, you know didn't spend too much on every book I acquired, they pretty much left me free to do what I wanted. And so I, I found a lot of writers and publisher books, and then the books did well, and it went on from there. And I got as much,

Jolie:

of the writers that you worked with worked with some amazing people, haven't you?

Terri Windlig:

yeah, I, I've, I've worked with most of the people in the fantasy field at one point or another, which isn't to say I published the first books of those people, but a number of people I've published their first story. I, I can list writers, but if you're not a fence, I'm not sure you'd know them. You know, people like,

Jolie:

you've worked with, haven't you?

Terri Windlig:

yeah. Yeah. Neil and I, Neil and I kind of grew up in publishing together, and I've known him for many, many years and I've published a number of his short stories of my anthologies and Charles de Lin and Megan Lindholm, who became better known as Robin Hobb and just yeah, all kinds of people.

Jolie:

The

Terri Windlig:

Yeah. Which is how I got to Dartmore. I met Allen Lee, who's the illustrator of Tolkien's books among many other books. He is illustrated and he designed the Lord of the Rings films with Peter Jackson. And I met him in publishing circles in the eighties and started coming over to this little town I live in now to visit him and his wife way back in the eighties. And thinking every time I came, God, I'd love to live here someday. And then I met Brian and Wendy proud through them, who also live in the same little town. And and then in 1990, I got cancer, had ovarian cancer. And as you do when you're not sure you're gonna make it through something, you think, if I survive, you know, what do I wanna do differently? I thought, well, what I wanna do differently is I wanna, I, I wanna fulfill a dream of going, living in a rural place, and I want that rural place to be this town on Dartmouth. I don't know how I'll do a. I wanna do it. And so I did survive

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

and and I did it initially. I could only be here, I could only be here six months, a year for visa reasons. And even that's changed that, that would be really hard to do now. But then as long as you were,

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

didn't overstep six months by even a day. And as long as your mother, your money was coming from out of the country, you know, I wasn't working

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

a job here, taking a job from somebody else. It was fine for me to do that. And I did that for 18 years initially thinking I would stay in, at the time I divided my time between New York and Boston.'cause I had a lot of artist friends in Boston and I thought I would spend like the summer half of the year here and the winter half of the year in the city, in New York and Boston. And because I. Needed a place to recuperate. After three cancer operations, a friend in a, the Arizona desert invited me out to this nice warm place, you know, hottest summer in the middle of winter to recuperate. And I got there and I looked at all the, at the desert and all these tall cactuses in the strange landscape and just thought, who the hell would wanna live here? I really didn't see the appeal at all. And within a few weeks it was like my entire vision of it changed. And by the end of that recuperative stay, I would tell something and decided that would be my winter place and this would be my summer place. And so I literally moved east and west at the same time, moved outta the city altogether

Jolie:

Wow.

Terri Windlig:

and for 18 years, that's what I did.

Jolie:

Wow.

Terri Windlig:

I had met Howard. In 2004, so that would've been 14 years I'd been doing, doing it at that point. And we got together and he was starting to come back and forth with me, but then all the Visa rules changed and it wasn't possible for me to keep doing this. And, and so, and I got, I had a really scary time coming through customs one through the immigration one time where they basically said, you've gotta stop doing this. You're here too often and we don't like the pattern. And they kept me, they interrogated me for a really long time. And when I finally came out of immigration that Howard was like, why did his sheet saying What happened? What happened? And he, and I told him what happened and I said, okay, we'll let you go this time, but clean up your affairs here and don't keep coming back and forth like that. Unless you have a valid visa to be here.'cause everything's changed and. So Howard thought about that, and as we're driving down the, I guess the M four in the rain on a shitty day, he said, we're getting married. That was my proposal. We're getting married.

Jolie:

Oh, bless him.

Terri Windlig:

And he said, well, what do you think? And I said, well, I, if I, I've never been married, you know, I, I was in my forties, I'd never been married. I said, I always imagined if someone proposed to be a be a little more romantic. I said, don't be ridiculous. We're getting married. And so that's what we did.

Jolie:

wonderful.

Terri Windlig:

But then I, we had to kind of, yeah, for, for both visa reasons and for things that happened in the family that I won't go into his family, we needed to settle down. We couldn't keep going back and forth. And we settled down here and I've been here since. It was 2008. I've been here full time ever since.

Jolie:

I love it. I mean, I, there's so many things in that that so resonate with my whole, you know, like I, I was

Terri Windlig:

working class girl, right?

Jolie:

to university. Yeah, exactly. Totally. Yeah. My mom was the first person in our family to go to university. She just knew she wanted to be a teacher. Like, it was just absolutely all she wanted to do. And it was out of nowhere, she then suddenly decided to become a preacher and she went to America when she was like 18

Terri Windlig:

Wow.

Jolie:

in America for a bit.

Terri Windlig:

Gracious.

Jolie:

is really random.

Terri Windlig:

wild. Wild. My mother wanted to be a teacher, but getting pregnant with me at 16 in those days

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

no, no college. No, no. No school would've hired her. No, no. It just, it ended everything for her. But a preacher, what kind of a preacher?

Jolie:

was 21. I know she, so she was preaching in like Harlem and places and, oh, and she's this really small little blonde lady, like a little

Terri Windlig:

like an

Jolie:

And,

Terri Windlig:

or another domination.

Jolie:

She was part of a thing called the Christian Crusaders, which was this sort of very hippie Christian

Terri Windlig:

okay.

Jolie:

they

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

believed that God was in the fields. And yeah, it was Cliff Richard was sort of connected to it or something. Baptist, I think

Terri Windlig:

Okay.

Jolie:

it was affiliated with. But she just it was very, like, they, they didn't think that God would be in a church. It was like he's there, but he's everywhere else as well. He's in the fields and you know, he's everywhere. So my kind of pagan beliefs match up with hers. They don't, they're not at odds with each other. And then she came back and had met my dad through the Christian group and had got married and had me by 21. So it was all very quick. And then she did her open university. To become a teacher and then became a single mom when we were growing up. And then me and my brother went to university, but we were the, the, the second and third people in our family to go to university. And yeah, and then growing up, Neil Gayman, the Sandman comics were my Bible. Like they were literally my bible. My whole kind of belief system is based on his books. And then Brian Frow as well, the fairy books again, they were like from, I think I had them when I was like 12, 13 and just, they were my everything as well.

Terri Windlig:

They were my everything.

Jolie:

when I met them, when I came

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

yeah. But they're just such magical people and it's just the

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

sees fairies and talks about them was so brilliant. You know, just the everydayness of them and the like, the breadcrumbs in your bed fairy and the rust spot fairy. Like, I loved all of that so much.

Terri Windlig:

I found him his work in university and I never dreamed that, you know, they'd be, they'd become good friends and that we'd work on books together. It feels so magical.

Jolie:

It's mad because I read his books and I imagined where he lived and then when I actually kind of met you guys and saw where you guys are and then that view just out

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and it's like, this is exactly what I imagined. It was like, this is what,

Terri Windlig:

So much of his, his artistic vision is born of this landscape, so that's not surprising.

Jolie:

What's your relationship with the landscape? Like, you know, do you, how do you relate to it and connect with it? And talk a bit a bit about your, the Earth Day thing that happened at the church as well.

Terri Windlig:

For me, the, when I moved outta the city and came here and went to the desert, I suddenly it, it was revelatory for me. I had been studying myth and folklore and fairytale, you know, for years and loved it for years, but I hadn't really understand until I was in these two enormous, powerful landscapes. How much story comes out of the bones of the land and is affected by the bones of the land and therefore how much we, through story and through walking the land and being part of the land are affected by it. So I feel like the land is my teacher when it comes to making our, to understanding our, to understanding story. I just, for me, everything comes back to the land. And I know there are other ways to approach myth and folklore. Not the only way, there's never just one way in, but it's my way is to, is to really be grounded in the place where I live and to know about its stories and to know about its weather and to know about its creatures and to have a relationship with all of that, which art comes out of and story comes out of I, I can't.

Jolie:

Yeah, absolutely.

Terri Windlig:

I love, I still love cities, but I can't imagine being divorced from land now. I mean, you live in a powerful landscape too. That must have changed the way you approach your art.'cause every, every new landscape will do that.

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and it was what my body was craving. Like I loved living in Brighton. I love that I had that foundation of living in a completely liberal environment for 20 years. So when people think I'm weird or you know, I seem a bit kooky, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.'cause I have my tribe, I have my people and I know that I'm normal compared, you know, in amongst them I'm normal. But it. had to be in the land. Like Brighton's got amazing land. Like the downs are beautiful and Albion in general, you know, doing the pilgrimage images and walking across England and the uk. I love it. I love that land so much. But there is, I needed to be in nature and I can't drive. And so to move somewhere where there aren't any cars and to just be completely immersed in this absolute like community,'cause that's what I love about where you live. It is such a community and it's so rare to find that. And I just, I love that I'm absolutely fully in a community and surrounded by this beautiful landscape that I'm always finding out more stuff about it. And it's the history and just all the different ways that it's been used and working

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

I love it.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

feels so, and it's different every year. You know, it just, it the spiral nature of us going through this cyclical process, but it's never the

Terri Windlig:

Oh gosh, yes.

Jolie:

season is different. I love it.

Terri Windlig:

Walk, walking the same path again and again and again. The way that that deepens your understanding of, of the place you're at, the way that opens up new parts of yourself, as well as

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

visions of what the land is and can be, and sharing it not just with the human community, but with the more than human community, the animals, and the birds, and the unseen things. It is an extraordinary thing. I think we are very lucky and privileged to get to live these rural lives that a lot of people have, can't, you know, their lives are very connected to urban or suburban spaces and the work they do in the families they have. And I think as artists being able to bring some of that magic through us, into story, into theater, into, into folk arts in a way that allows people to touch it, who can't have it all the time. I feel so blessed to have it all the time that I walk out the door every morning with my dog and I'm in this exquisite landscape. And it was the same in the desert where I lived outside the city of Tucson out in the desert and would walk out the door and there'd be desert animals and mountains. And it was just such a privilege. And I want to express that through art so that even if a, a story or a painting. It doesn't seem to be all about the land. It still is all about the land. The land is still a character. It's still informing everything that those characters go through.

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

Do you find that true?

Jolie:

getting involved.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

I mean, the thing that, like, in terms of what I sort of think of of in terms of my Gia man, the way I would call myself a is through art and creativity. Because as soon as you invite nature to play a part, she just gets involved. She loves it.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

And so it began with doing sisterhood where the first we went and toured the play to all the places where Matthew Hopkins, the witch finder general, had tortured and executed witches in East Anglia, where I'm from. And we went around to all these places and the first couple of nights there was thunder and lightning. And at one point I said, oh yeah, we are, we are forgiving and forgetting Matthew Hopkins. And there was this massive crack of thunder and everyone was just like, whoa. And then, we had a ceremony, or we did the performance at the pub where he accused his neighbor of being a witch. And that's what began the whole witch trial. And it was on the full moon at Soane. And we got there and it was all thick fog and it felt really eerie and just very oppressive. And then we did the performance and we did a ceremony and we went outside and the sky cleared and the full moon came out and shone, and it shot down. It shone down on the three trees. That had been planted for the three women who'd been hung from him. and everything just felt like it cleared. And then the next day we turn up at the venue and there was a rainbow over the venue. And then for the rest of the tour it was sunny. And that was when I clocked that if you allow nature to be part of it,

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and acknowledge it, you know, I was telling that story as we were walking and doing the performances. It was like, oh, these, this has been happening. It added to it. And then when we started doing the pilgrimages, that was exactly what happened. Again, it was like rainbow after rainbow, like at your house

Terri Windlig:

Yeah,

Jolie:

in a row, two days in a row. There was a rainbow for like two or three hours just in

Terri Windlig:

I know. It was wild.

Jolie:

which I've never known happen, ever. So yeah, she loves it. She loves getting involved. And it adds to the story. I was just gonna say the story of us coming to you and getting the mamas playing happening as well

Terri Windlig:

Yeah,

Jolie:

connection to the community. that just feels really special, that it's sort of kickstarted this folk tradition in your community, which feels amazing.

Terri Windlig:

yeah. We've

Jolie:

and have

Terri Windlig:

been,

Jolie:

horses. That's outrageous.

Terri Windlig:

yeah, we've been, we've been doing some, you know, folk. Ritual here for a while and we all, we already had the ABIs that Howard, my husband for those. If you don't know, Howard's my husband. He's, he's, the reason I know Jolie people is because Howard walked with Jolie on the Cop 26 pilgrimage and they've been friends ever since. And I

Jolie:

fooling, although I didn't know

Terri Windlig:

Yeah,

Jolie:

I didn't know, I wasn't in the same cohort as him with the

Terri Windlig:

yeah.

Jolie:

that's how

Terri Windlig:

With, with Jonathan Kay. Yeah. So, and then through that I got to know Jolie during the Momming. Pilgrimages,'cause you were through Chegg for bus times, but I heard about a lot about you before I actually met you. So, so Howard, like Jolie is in theater and does a lot of fooling and clowning and all that stuff. Good stuff. And where we connect is our love of e. Everything he does comes in one way or another out of the Pope tradition, whether it's c dete or clowning or it's all grounded in these, these old folk traditions. And everything I do is grounded in old folk in myth traditions. So when we met, we realized that we had a similar, similar vibe to our art, a similar interest, and it, it came from the same place in us, but but was manifest in very different ways with me on the page, either as print or paint. And with him in three dimensions through theater.

Jolie:

Hmm.

Terri Windlig:

And we wanted to, we were both interested in folk ritual. He came over to Arizona when, after we had first met, and we, we were, this was not love at first sight. We met and we were just like, you know, we liked each other. We were friends. We had a lot in common. We had, you know, we, we, we talked a lot about trickster and clown and masks and all this stuff. And he, that was when I was still living in Arizona and in that half of my life I was, I helped run a, an arts retreat out in the desert. And he said, oh, I've always wanted to come out there because Arizona has all these Native American tribes that use mask work in their rituals. And I said, well, if you came, you know, I, I have a lot of. Friends in various native communities, and I was at that point through these friends doing quite a lot of Native American ceremony of different kinds and was deeply immersed in that world for quite a long time. I said, I can introduce you to people who, you know in the the, and the, the yume, the Yaki tribe, and we can go up to Hopi land, which he wanted to see and you know, and. Hopefully catch some dances depending on when you come or talk to people about mask work. And he said, oh, that would be great. And I thought, oh, you know, one of those things of, oh, that would be great. And it didn't know that he'd actually do it, but he immediately turned around and wrote an art council grant and got it to travel over so we, we went all the way up to Hopland, Arizona is a big state. It's like 18 hours, you know, to drive from one point to the next. But we drove up to Healthy Land, we drove to. I took him out to various ceremonies and things we did. I took over the times that he came to Arizona, I took him to a Sundance to peyote meetings, native American Church to the the yo e Yaki deer dances, the Easter time and all these different things. And it was an interesting experience going with him.'cause I kept saying, I know you have a lot of questions about the sacred practices, about how they use their mask, but you have to be careful about how you as a white person. A stranger ass. These, you know,'cause a lot of these are sacred, serious secret things. And so just be very, you know, gentle and humble and respectful and don't necessarily feel like people are just gonna spill the beans on everything you wanna know, because it doesn't work that way. You have to build relationships. So we go around to all these different places and I was totally wrong. Everybody was like falling over themselves to talk about these deep secret, sacred traditions with him, because he was a fellow mass dancer. I realized what was going on was it was an exchange. They wanted to know how he did it, what he did, what his thoughts were. And it was an exchange and it was really quite marvelous. It was really quite marvelous. So during those, so during his first trip to the desert is when we suddenly realized this was not just a friendship and, so he was coming back and forth and in those, going to all those ceremonies and dances and talking to mass workers and all these different things we were talking about how, how could we do this in our town in on Dart Mar, you know, how could, there's not an unbroken tradition here, but there, there were folk arts. We know what some of the traditions were. We could recreate it. How could we do it? How, you know, we certainly have a, a pagan friendly community here that would, of people who would be interested and artists who could create the costumes and, but how could we do it? And one of the things Howard was most interested in was how. The masked figures, whether it's the cola clowns of the Yaki or the, the masked dancers of the Hoppi, how they would come out of like a Kiva or for the Yaki. They'd come out, they'd be out in the desert for weeks doing things you never see as, and then they'd bring it into the public plaza. How do you do that in modern life on Dart Mar? And so we came, we started, we got involved with Andy Letcher, who's had been doing a lot of folk music and folk drama sadly we've lost him and his wonderful wife, Nomi, to the other side of the mo. But they, they helped get our first mayday together and Nomi made the hobby house costume that Howard dances and. And is a pipe player. And we got a group of people together to start this Mayday Beltane tradition of ABI and Music and Ceremony and which has been going for many years now. So that existed before the Moming, but so we had the Abi and it was coming out once a year for that. But then Howard met you and he loved that. That first pilgrimage was amazing for him going up to Cop 26. But the momming pilgrimage that he did next with you was life changing because momming he, he was saying,'cause he does ch that kind of mass theater, he was saying it was like getting to the roots of what was before comedia in this more rough and ready.

Jolie:

It's

Terri Windlig:

yeah, rude.

Jolie:

version.

Terri Windlig:

It's English version and it's the rude mechanicals of Shakespeare. It's the, you know, that wonderful. Yeah, it's the rude mechanicals and his, he just, you know, he flipped for it. He just loved it, loved it, loved it. And when he came back he said, let's, you know, I really wanna, I really wanna do mommy. So I was, I've been involved since cop while he was on pilgrimage with you, walking from London to Glasgow for Cop, we had a little group here, started by my friend Todd. He decided that for cop, we should do something in our local church. We had to our vicar at the time Reverend Paul, incredibly pagan friendly, bless his little heart, and he wanted, he, he too wanted to do something to for cop and also something that would not just be for the Christian community, but would bring our large, I mean, I'm saying pagan for the back of a lack of a better word. It's not like an organized, you know, for those who don't. Aren't familiar with pagan waves of doing things. This isn't an organizer religion here. There's people with lots of different beliefs that are alternative to Christian or sometimes blended with Christianity. But, but there was a real divide between that kind of part of the community and then the, the Anglican part. And years I've been here, barely ever been in the church, even though it's medieval and beautiful, just, you know, I'm not a Christian. I didn't think of it as a place that I would go, but Reverend Paul and Todd decided that for the, for two weeks over the stretch of cop, there would be something happening in the church that would be artful or a lecture or, you know, lots of different things. Music and puppetry and relating to the environment. And there would be. Every single day over that two weeks, there'd be something interesting going on and Todd rope me into it. And I really loved it. And I love I, it was odd. Here I am in the church helping put things on. It felt very odd at first, you know, the church, I thought of it as a place where, you know, they burned witches. They, I, I did not think of it as a friendly place for me. And I this proved very much otherwise, that there are places like you say about you and your mom, where Christianity and and Earth spirituality do overlap and it's just different ways to the same place. So, and I think a lot of us on this side of the community discovered that through those, working on that project for two weeks and it was such a beautiful, beautiful thing. And. That at the end of it. And we got kids from the community involved and the old people and you know, it was, it was just such a cross section. The, the Buddhists in the community and, you know, everybody from the atheists, everybody was involved. Such a beautiful, beautiful thing. We didn't want it to stop, so we decided to start doing it monthly from there on in. And that's what we've been doing ever since, except for the, a couple of months in the summer where we take a break each year. But and we, and it's always an hour long and it's always related to nature and it brings people of all backgrounds and all faith and no faith together to celebrate this gorgeous landscape. We live in our landscape and to. To, you know, talk about ways to heal it and save it and, and love it. And through music, through art, through talk, through everything. And so when you guys were coming through as mums, it seemed natural to have you stop and do your mum show. As one of our Celebrate the Earth events and our, our Beltane May Mayday Beltane event started becoming, was sort of taken over by celebrating the Earth. And what happened by doing that is suddenly a Reverend Paul was part of it, and the Christian community was part of it. So there was a pagan blessing and a Christian blessing going on side by side. And our, our us and our green men were being blessed at the font in the church, which still makes me almost cry when I think about it. What a amazing thing that is, you know, to see. This incredible Abbi, you know, with its big horse skull, painted horse, skull head, and his ragged cloak, you know, standing at a font, getting a Christian blessing. And then, then in the same space in the church, he's smudged with sage and gets vegan blessing. And it's all fine with everybody. It's such a beautiful thing. So, and so the church Howard and I realized that the church has become archiva. So when we do Beltane, for example, we, the, the abeo and the green man dress in the church and they do it ceremonially and gets blessed and smudged, and it's all in the quiet of the church with just a few people there, a few drummers, a few smudges, and then a, a larger group of drummers stands outside the. Church door, like, it's like it's the entrance to a Kiva and drums them out and drums them out. Like, like the Hopi dancers come out of the, a Kiva in the earth. They're, you know, they're pulled out, they're called out. We call ours out of, of, of a church. It's of a midieval church. It's the most extraordinary thing.

Jolie:

It's so magical. And the fact that it's a Michael Church on the Michael and Mary energy lines.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

you know, that's the reason why we came to you and, and walk that route and

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

is because it's literally on the line. And, and so when you are doing that work, it's reverberating all the way through the land as well. You are, you are on that energy line, so that's passing all the way through, know, like the meridian line of the body running through Albion. So it's perfect. But that's what's happening. You know, it feels, it feels very right that that's where it ended up happening.'cause like of course it did. is, this is where the magic's gonna flow. It's

Terri Windlig:

Now our

Jolie:

I love it so much.

Terri Windlig:

and our moms group now that Howard's part of, and you know, you met the other moms. I mean, they're going strong. They're, they're, we're doing a winter solstice celebrating the earth event on Tuesday. And so we have three different asses are gonna come and go, run down j dance in the aisles as part of that. And then they're doing the, the basic mum's pub crawl right after Christmas. So, but that you, that, that is your, you know, your child, that group, they, they would not exist

Jolie:

it was what? Yeah, I was when I first worked at that, the Tudor reenactment where this all came to me, I was 11 and I was working in the dairy and I would watch the Mama's Pro like rehearse and practice and there was this amazing woman who had this cloak called Penny. She reminds me, you, you remind me of Penny. She had a long plat. She had a long hair and a long plat and this fabulous multicolored cloak. And I just was like, I want to be like Penny when I grow up. Like she's just everything. And I would watch them perform the plays and I just dreamt of doing what they were doing. And then when I was 13, I was allowed to be a mama. And Penny had stopped working there at that point. I think I was about 14 or something when I was sent to go and get the basket of mama's props from the attic. And I pulled the basket, and as I pulled it, this pile of dirty rags on the floor like moved. And I saw this chink of color and I straightaway recognized that it was pennies multicolored cloak. And I picked it up and it was all rotten and it all fell apart in my hands. And I took it home and I hand washed it and I sewed it all back together again. And now I wear Penny's cloak. Yeah. And when I told this story at Ken, well in recent years some of the 18, 19 year olds there, they were like, you know that you are, are Penny, don't you? I was like, oh my God, that's the best compliment anyone's ever given me. Just

Terri Windlig:

that's amazing.

Jolie:

it's such a, and we had a, a cart, so we pretended that we were like traveling from village to village to performing our plays and we'd sleep underneath the cart and we'd perform our plays on top of the cart and my twenties was

Terri Windlig:

That's so traditional.

Jolie:

this cart. Yeah, it was wonderful. And so like all I've been trying to do really is to turn my life as much as possible into being a mama like all the time. And for that to be my actual life and living on sarc doing the pilgrimages is pretty, pretty much achieving that.

Terri Windlig:

I think Howard had a taste of that touring with Chlamydia del Arte, where, you know, a small group of, of players that he worked with for many years touring all across Europe every year, putting on these old, this old form of mass theater and Buing is, has brought him back and he misses those days even while he's kind of aged out of it now, you know, it's, he says it's a young man's game to be. Putting up play boards every day and working that hard.

Jolie:

definitely

Terri Windlig:

But, but Moming brings him back to that. He's really loving it, and I get such a thrill as a folklore. I get such a

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

watching it. I love seeing folklore come to life. I particularly love it when there's anything animal involved, you know, animal heads and, and, oh

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

I just, I, I have a deep love of animal transformation folklore. And to see it enacted in these theatrical ways makes me so excited. I, for, I mean, I do not act myself. I mean, that, that is, that's not my thing. But I love being around it. I love helping to facilitate it.

Jolie:

Yeah. how magical for it to all blend? One of the best moments of my life is doing the mama's play at the church at St. Michael's Church and Alan Lee and Brian fr getting up to be horses the play. I was just like, what? This is amazing. Literal magic. We should pull some cards.

If you enjoy this podcast, then please consider supporting me on Patreon, which is patreon.com/jolie. Rose, I am heading towards digital detox. So this will, this is the penultimate. Podcast, I will do one more next week and then we'll be having a break so I can go inwards January and February and properly mulch and compost what happened during the pilgrimage and to write a new book and to just give myself that space to stop and to be in nature and to walk and rest and take the time that is needed to fully. Incorporate and assimilate and integrate this year before being ready to start a new one. And I invite you to join me if you would like to be part of that. Process. There's creation hibernation where there's a group of us that meet online every week and we write together. Some weeks we just meet up and write and then alternating weeks, we'll do some workshops. We'll do some different writing exercises, but it just means that we keep the writing process going and support each other in that journey. Then it will be the a star immersion, which will be when I'm coming back out of this process and back into the world. And that will be the 20th to the 23rd of March. And if you book that now, then you get 10% off the. Whatever it is you put in. So if you're paying the deposit now, you get 10% off the deposit. If you're able to pay in full, then you'll get 10% off of the full amount so do come and enjoy that. That would be wonderful. And also still doing tarot readings for the new year. So if you want to do a bit of a check-in before the year gets going, then I'm doing by donation tarot readings. That will probably be till just a week or so into January. And then that'll probably be the end of that process. So if you want to come and get an reading, then you can get that as a gift as well for someone else. And I can give you a voucher but that's by donation. So you just let me know what you want to, pay and then we'll do a reading either online or in person if you happen to be living in the China Islands. And that's everything for the moment. I've got the moon ceremonies, which will carry on even during the digital detox. So yeah, lots of things to connect with and do, but I'm looking forward to having that downtime and for us to chill out and. Immerse ourselves in the yumminess of the dark winter months. So yeah connect with me if you'd like to, and if not, then I will see you again in the new year. But next week is the last podcast, so back to the show.

Jolie:

So I'm gonna hold the deck up gonna run my finger along and there will definitely be a delay. So I might not get the exact card that you are pointing to, but if you just say Stop and wherever

Terri Windlig:

I assume you'll,

Jolie:

I'll get

Terri Windlig:

I assume you'll get the right one.

Jolie:

it will be the right one. Definitely. So I'll move my finger along and you say stop. Ooh, the Princess of Wands. So this is a very fiery woman on a throne, and she's got her hand on the head of a cheetah or a leopard. It's a spotty, spotty cat, and she's just very powerful and fiery. I mean, it feels like the Arizona element is interesting. I would be interested to know more about,'cause again, I mean, yeah, there's so many things that you do that I love. Like the doors, the film was my favorite film when I was growing up, and I always dreamed of going to the desert and taking pote what, talk about like how you came connected to the indigenous people in that area and just Yeah. Some, some of your experiences to do with that land.

Terri Windlig:

Well, let's see, where do I start? I have some Native American blood, but that's true of a lot of Americans. My, my grandmother on my biological father's side who I didn't grow up with and didn't know from the east Coast Band of Cherokees and. I don't claim that that makes me Native American. I didn't grow up in my, in that culture. I don't know that language. It, it, I don't claim that. I would never claim that, but it did always give me an interest in, you know, that's an interesting fact about this missing piece of my life, this whole biological father bit that I didn't know. And so I, I just have, while I was studying folklore and myth, I, I would always read folklore and myth drawn from the various tribal peoples of whom there are many, many in America and had a great interest in it. And so when I moved out to Arizona, which is there's so many different tribes in that great expansive a state and there just. Ranging from cultures that are quite intact, like the, the DNA, the Navajo have kept the culture quite intact to ones that have been quite decimated depending on the circumstances. Again, a story of a boyfriend. I was going out with somebody who, lived on a ranch where he, he was Anglo White, but he lived on a ranch that was the home place of the Apache oh, I can't remember what it's called, Apache something. Anyway, they, they, it was, it was a group that did a Apache that did activism around saving their sacred mountain Mount Graham from development and telescopes and all these other things. And on this ranch there were sweat lodges and, you know, a lot of. Apache and other people coming and going. And one of the things that Monroe, my, my then boyfriend and still dear friend, one of his, he was sort of managing the ranch and one of the things he did was keep, you know, all the, the sweat lodge area going and do fire for sweat lodges and things like that. So when I started going out with him, I started participating in those ceremonies and through that got to know a lot of other people from different tribes. Mostly the ta Autumn, which are the largest group around that area of Arizona, but also Apache and yo, which is the Yaki the DNA, the Navajo, and getting invited to ceremonies a lot. And when, whenever I was invited. And so, you know, for many years doing weekly sweat lodges and doing regular peyote meetings and just going to sun dances. And I did a al put up on the mountain for four days by a friend of mine who's a medicine man for the on the autumn. And just, I don't, I just loved it. I just loved it. And there's a, I'm always, I don't often talk about this Jolie in a public way. Certainly when I'm doing, you know, book talks, book festivals, that thing, this whole sort of spiritual side of my life, I keep kind of under wraps and talk about fantasy and myths and, you know, at all as more as metaphor. Because it is very personal to talk about spiritual things, but also when it comes to the, the spiritual practices of cultures, other than my own I and cultures that are very have very clear ways that knowledge is disseminated from between people and how that happens and when that happens and how you honor it. There, there's a limit to how much that I feel able to talk publicly. Like I would talk to you personally about some of this, but but I did quite, quite a lot of ceremony and it really changed my experience of not only just my experience of spirituality, so it, so that infuses all of my English now dartmore centered spirituality, that understanding of traditions comes into this understanding of traditions. But it also infuses my work.

Jolie:

Yeah, and it's the la it's the land, the different land as well.'cause I think

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

of the things that I sometimes get a bit glancey at people who, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I, I've, I have a very strong connection to Aborigines culture without, you know, it is just, there's something that draws me to it, I always think that one should be. Working with the medicine plants of your land and the folklore of your land and the stu'cause it's your land, it's your roots and your connection. And I think that was the thing that I got

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

the Tudor reenactment was that I was, you know, we would go to like Glastonbury or go to festivals and there'd be, I mean, I'm not being, I'm not being horrible about people doing this, but you'd be sat around a fire and there'd be people singing Indian chants.'cause they'd spent time in India and they kind of spirituality from being in India. And the chants would go on for ages'cause they, they don't stop. So they would just sit there doing these Indian chants then they'd finish. And then me and my mama's treat, we'd sing like a traditional English folk song, which, you know, would last for a bit, but it was much shorter. then they'd do another chant again. And it was like, oh, that's really not like, hurry up and finish the chant. We wanna sing another folk song. But it felt really important because actually for a very long time as a, you know, in my twenties and thirties, there wasn't the folk revival that's happening now where people are reconnecting to the land here.'Cause that was all severed, you know, that, like you say, it's a, it's a broken line and we're having to remake it up and

Terri Windlig:

And the attraction to these, these less broken traditions. You know, I I, I have a, you know, a lot, a lot of people I, I understand that pull to want to be submersed in. I, I feel that for me, that was an apprenticeship that helped me learn about ritual in general. And while I can't claim it as mine, it has a, you know, I, I still use tobacco to pray with, you know, some, some of the ways that I, I learned in those years, I still do. And I, and I do sing some of the songs that I sung for all those years. But, but I do, it's a con boy, this is a fraught area.'cause you, you say we, our tradition, that's your tradition. I'm not English,

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

you

Jolie:

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Terri Windlig:

as an American.

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

we're an immigrant culture aside from the native peoples. We're a totally an immigrant culture, which is, you know, we won't go into politics, but why it's mad that there's even an issue about immigration when we, we are all immigrants there, except for absolutely pure blood indigenous people,

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

even a lot of indigenous people are not 100% pure blood.

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

we are, we're all such a mixture over there. What do we call our tradition? I mean, I think what the American tradition is, is the mix, this cultural mix of all these things and trying to be respectful of all these different traditions. But also, you know, the, if you, if you're born on that land, you eat that food, you are battered by that sun. You're, that is who you are, that is in your blood and bones and it's mixing all these things. When I wrote the, my Desert novel, the wood wife, I had to really think about. How to create a magic world for that novel set in the contemporary Arizona desert that reflected some of the things I feel about all the native ceremonies and experiences I've had without talking directly about those cultures and those traditions. And, you know, fantasy allows you to do that. You can kind of create something that is mythically true without actually being factually true. But I, but even so, even though I was creating like magical creatures that were born out of the desert landscape, in my experience of the desert landscape as a, as a child of many generation of immigrants, primarily, but as you know, one native thread. Even as I was creating that I, I still felt like I wanted to be true to some of the things I'd learned on that land because going to the ceremonies was felt, first of all, I was invited and secondly, I, it felt appropriate because I was living on that land and loving that land and learning that land and learning that land's ceremonies felt right. So I tried to take the spirit of that into the book, but also some of the strictures about it, which like there's a point at which one of the characters basically makes a sweat lodge for himself, but I don't call it a sweat lodge because a lot of European and other cultures also have what looks like sweat lodges and. I also don't ever go into it as the author with that character because it is disrespectful to talk about what happens in a sweat lodge outside the, outside the lodge. So I don't do that. But you get, you know, you have to, I think you just have to, with all these things, you have to feel your way along into what feels right, what doesn't, check with the people around you of what you know, what they're comfortable with, what they're not. Just be respectful and humble and not claim things for yourself. But I,

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

I love British folk music. I love British folk Arts. I love all of it. I haven't got a speck of UK DNA in my blood. Not a, not a speck all Northern Europe. And I love this stuff. And I think of it as mine because I've loved it since I was a kid. But you know, if we go just by blood, it's not. How, how do we, in a world where people aren't living on the land, that their grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents and back and back and back farm for generation. In a world where people do move, where immigration displacement, enslavement, all these things have caused people to move and move and move again. How do we relate to tradition? I don't have the answer to that, but these are questions that I think those of us working with folk arts need to just be cognizant of. I don't think there are easy answers.

Jolie:

No, there aren't easy answers and yet it feels so important because that's where, that sever is where the, the, think like the chain of female lineage and support of women supporting each other that got severed

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

love and connection to the land and the lessons that are in folklore, like you were saying, you, you'd learn those lessons, they protected you. so many things are us warnings and signals and advice through the folklore and, and it's so vital. It's so vital. But, but we are having to start again. You know, we are

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

scratch and so it's important work, but it is to be done delicately because of not wanting to. To tread on what's there because it's so delicate. And also we haven't got that much time.

Terri Windlig:

Mm-hmm.

Jolie:

feels like it's quite an urgent need for us to move forward with it. But then also probably a big part of the lesson is to not do everything fast and urgently.'cause that's part of the,

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

that we are living at the moment. Yeah. To slow down and listen. It, it, it guides you. I mean, it, it guides you when you listen.

Terri Windlig:

yeah.

Jolie:

how

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

share it, you know, thoughtfully and honorably and with integrity is, that's the, you can't make sweeping statements and you can. Force your, and that's the thing, like I, I feel that so much on the pilgrimage because everyone who walks with me has a completely different experience of the lines. There are people who are very practical and logical and, and don't really feel anything, but they enjoy doing the walk. And then there are people who can feel the exact shape and size of the lines. And then there are people that feel the character of them and, and it's to respect everybody's. Personal experience of that because it's, you are inner a world and it's like a child with their imagination. You can't turn around to a child and go, your imaginative world's wrong. And that child's imaginative world's, right? Like they're their imaginative worlds. You know, one kid might be into playing kind of families and another kid might be into bashing on wars and whatever. That's up to them, you know? That's

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and that's their inner world, and that's our relationship to the land is, is in that world. You know, it's based in that same place. So everyone's is different. So there is no right or wrong, but it's the tradition and the kind of cultural appropriation and that side of things.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and like you say, the sacred you know, not sharing people's secrets and of that kind of thing.

Terri Windlig:

What I love about your pilgrimages though is that it's not just, it's also not just a free for all that it is, it is within a structure. There's, there's a, the difficulty of actually doing it, you know, the hardship that you put yourself through. The thing that I, that I've taken from my experience of unbroken ceremony, is these things aren't easy. There, there are certain. I hate to use the word rules, but there's certain ways that things are done that are hard. You know, if you go into, you know, a four day on pcia where you're not eating or drinking and you're prey on a mountain for four days, you, you can't just decide at the spur of the moment that you're gonna go get a hamburger. You know? It's, it's not, it's not that loose. There are, there is a structure that contains the, the magic that contains the, the power of the spirits that contains the, the ritual. Angela is handed down through time and there's always a, a tension between following ritual and ceremony. Exactly. And when, when, and who is allowed to introduce new variants and new changes. You know, a tension between when, when that's okay and when that's not. And it's. Sometimes when I've seen those kinds of ceremonies replicated in entirely white, non-indigenous ways, that lack of structure and that lack of respect for how it's been handed down, and that you don't just change things just'cause you feel like it that day.

Jolie:

Yeah. Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

it, it, it becomes a different thing. It still probably has some, some value, but it doesn't contain the power that comes from these long to.

Jolie:

I mean. One of the thing that, you know, and I experienced, I've experienced this myself, is if someone's not respecting the holding that you are doing or the, the way that, like with the pilgrimage, it, it, it's a bit like again, with a child playing, if a child's playing a game and another child just comes in and starts doing something else with it, you dispel that dream, that imagining that you are holding and that

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

So you are no longer creating it together. It's being dispelled by someone

Terri Windlig:

Because that,

Jolie:

else and doing something

Terri Windlig:

because that power, that build, even that imaginative power builds and builds and builds and builds, and it's like, like it, someone wash, you know, drifts through and kicks it aside. It's like, oh, well there, it's all gone.

Jolie:

yeah.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

And do you see how. The reason why that's so important and so powerful is that you are then, that is how the world is created. You know, that's what we're

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

are all agreeing on a reality all part of, and everyone's chucking their mix in, you know, like that.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah,

Jolie:

that we vaguely have a reality that one can call reality because everyone's just on their own little, you know, game that they're playing and everyone's doing

Terri Windlig:

yeah,

Jolie:

thing. And I think it's amazing that we even vaguely cobble something together that we can

Terri Windlig:

yeah.

Jolie:

is a shared reality, but it's, there's something so about choosing to do something together where you are working as, as a group with an intention and you are supporting each other and you're holding that, that dream together. when it,

Terri Windlig:

Holding that.

Jolie:

and when you

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

it's beautiful. It's so

Terri Windlig:

there is a structure to it. Yeah. Within that structure, all sorts of things can go on, but the, the structure holds it. Structure structure is not a bad

Jolie:

It's

Terri Windlig:

thing.

Jolie:

it.

Terri Windlig:

My friend, the, the medicine man who put me on the mountain and someone asking him, could I just do this for two days?'cause that's all I can get off work. And he said, well, you could, but you know, you won't get to the spirit world. He said, well, why not? He said, it takes four days to get to the spirit Just matter of factly. It takes four days. Well, you could,

Jolie:

Absolutely. I'm, I'm the same with the pilgrimages. It's like you

Terri Windlig:

yeah,

Jolie:

in and just do a week or two, but you won't have the, you won't have the experience of doing

Terri Windlig:

yeah,

Jolie:

'cause it's,

Terri Windlig:

yeah.

Jolie:

it's doing the journey. And it's the whole journey. And

Terri Windlig:

And the hard parts of it as well is that. Yeah.

Jolie:

Exactly.

Terri Windlig:

One of the things that seemed to always be true, no matter what the ceremony I was participating over there, is that you go into a peyote meeting, you go into the lodge, you're, you're going in for, for your, for other people. I mean, you get a blessing too, but you're taking your family in, you're taking your tribe in, you're praying for them, you're looking, crying for a vision for them. It's not, it's not therapy. It's not about yourself. You leave yourself at the door and,

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

and I see that in your pilgrimage that yes, you get all kinds of things yourself by doing it, but you're not doing it for yourself. You're doing it for, for peace, for unity, for, you're doing it for the world, for the tribe, for the land, for i, I love that about what you do.

Jolie:

Thank you. And it's,

Terri Windlig:

Hmm.

Jolie:

a very there isn't, I don't even know what the word is, not, it's inspiring. It is inspiring, but it, it always blows me away seeing how, because again, it's, it's other people's imagination. It's other people's creative inner world it does to them and where it takes them. Because you are just doing, you know, you are stinky, you stink and you're dirty and you're like, you know, I've just like done a poo in a bush. And then to someone who you just meet moments later, you've, you've, it's like the archetypal power of what you're doing. It's, they're the one who are doing the 50% or the 80%, you know, you are doing,

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

nothing. You like, you're literally just there and they're doing their, their percentage where for whatever reason it means something to them and, and that you are just. Holding that space, you're just holding that archetype and they're

Terri Windlig:

But you say you're just,

Jolie:

music out of it.

Terri Windlig:

you're just the archetype. But being an archetype, that's a huge thing.

Jolie:

mean, not just, yeah, yeah. It's. is it, you're the archetype of the pilgrim and the pilgrim. There's an element of that that's the confessional, like people feeling that they can confess and share their stuff with you, which is a real honor to hold and to be up to. And then also the, the fool. And the fool is the stepping off the cliff into the unknown and just trusting and trusting that you're gonna be okay. And sometimes you're sleeping in a bush and sometimes you're sleeping in a palace and, and everything's your favorite thing. You know, the bush is just as much fun as the palace. You know, it is nice to be in a palace, but you don't wanna be in a palace every day. Sometimes you wanna be in a bush. And that side of it is wonderful as well. Right. I'll hold up the cards you say when to stop again. So

Terri Windlig:

That's you.

Jolie:

Swords at Peace. What does that mean to you?

Terri Windlig:

Well, I immediately think of your pilgrimage for priests. Of course.

Jolie:

It was so lovely staying with you. Thank

Terri Windlig:

yeah.

Jolie:

for letting us stay with you.

Terri Windlig:

Oh, that was such a pleasure for us. We really loved it. I think it, for me, it also means calm. There's there's a wonderful quote from the American writer, SA sa, wait a minute, I have it here. This is what it means for me. Where's my glasses?

Jolie:

It's okay.

Terri Windlig:

It is, I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention. In the midst of distraction. That's what peace means to me. Finding that quiet still place in the midst of the storm, particularly these days when the world seems to be going mad. I mean, we say that a lot in every decade, but. I've never seen it as bad as it is now. And finding that stillness in the midst of all the distractions around us to be, to breathe, to be in family, to be in community, to tell stories, to make our, that's the challenge of every day. That's what peace means to me. Finding, making that peace. Italo who, you know, came out of the war that world War ii, he has a, a, a line in something or other, I can't remember where it's from, but I think of it so often these days where he said in the midst of inferno, find what is not inferno and go there. And I, off, I just think about that, about what for me is not inferno. We are, we are in the midst of inferno. Whether it's politics, whether it's. Climate change, whether it's the madness of the internet and AI and it's hold on our everybody's attention, whether it's bigotry, you know, all these things. We are in the midst of a inferno. So what is not inferno that I can keep going and standing there so that I can breathe, so I can be, so that I can stand on this land and stand in this community and stand in my family. What, what is that place of peace? Is it, and it's everywhere. It's in a book that you read and love. It's in a good conversation with a friend. It's in the quiet of a, a walk with your dog. It's, it's, it's, there's so many places that are not inferno, and if we turn our attention to them and go there, that's peace.

Jolie:

I love that. It's, there was only two moments really on the whole pilgrimage for peace, where I actually felt peace, which was really funny. The peace within your mind, like having that peace in your mind. And you know, like meditation, like you might sit there looking like you are this serene being, but actually you are having a great big battle in your head of, you know, trying not to think. And there was a moment where I was waiting for a, holding a ceremony online. I was doing one of my moon ceremonies and it wasn't until nine o'clock and everyone had gone to bed at seven and I had to just sit there in the dark for two hours and I couldn't look at my phone because I didn't want to run the battery out. So I had to literally just sit there on my own in the dark for two hours and we were up on the Ridgeway. And I hadn't done that for, you know, ever possibly to just sit there just silently for two hours. And I, I kind of meditated for some of it. And I, you know, I had to keep making hot water bottles to keep warm, but I just also was looking down at a, a town glittering. Below us and just thinking how down there it was full of noise and full of chaos and full of fear of World War III happening. And you know, all of the stuff that's going on in the world was all going on down there. And up where we were, there was just silence. And I was like, we're surrounded by peace. It's absolutely everywhere. It's just not where we are. And one of the things that I've got from living here on Sark and from not having that city urban existence is to keep trying to get more from less. And it's something I see in you and I see in your beautiful studio and the lives that you are living with Howard. It's that getting more from less feels like such a joy, you know, because we're so used to. Consume, consume extreme, make it more and more crazy and extreme and bigger and yeah. To just suddenly be like, actually no,

Terri Windlig:

I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's healthy.

Jolie:

No,

Terri Windlig:

I don't think you can do that long term without burning out.

Jolie:

One more card.

Terri Windlig:

Now, right at the beginning.

Jolie:

All right. At the beginning. This

Terri Windlig:

Yeah. No, well, somewhere. Yeah, yeah,

Jolie:

Yeah. Yeah. one is ruin, which I think, you

Terri Windlig:

Oh my God.

Jolie:

kind of what we're talking about.

Terri Windlig:

Okay.

Jolie:

So this is, yeah. Ruin. And it is the head. It's the 10 of Swords. So this is about too much thinking and what, what you think what will ruin us? What do you think is the, the thing for us to watch or be, be mindful of.

Terri Windlig:

ruin to me, I, I'm very concerned with the ways that online life is fracturing our attention. You know, because I work in books and story and I love literature, and I know that the, it's historically, it's just a blip in time that we've even had a large reading public. But I do love literature and I do love the thoughtfulness that it creates in us to read things on a page at leisure, you know, slowly and accrue meaning over time, rather than having things pumped at us, flashing, flashing, flashing, flashing. And I'm really concerned about these next generations coming up. Whose attention is being so fractured by the internet and by, I don't think the internet is a bad thing. You know, I've, I've been, I've used it for many years. I lo my blog is down at the moment, but it'll be back up again. And I, I love having that platform to be able to talk about books and art and nature. And, but I'm worried about the fact that this very powerful, ubiquitous technology is in the hands of some, you know, very, a small number of very powerful men with very bad ethics and who monetize it by finding ways to make us all more and more addicted to it. And in, in a fashion that is not healthy, is not good for society, it's not good for our brain. So I have the luxury of going out in the morning and walking in nature and having time to get my eyes away from a screen. And I read a lot, and I know I grew up in the 20th century primarily. I was born in the middle of the century and a lot of my working life in publishing was pre-computer. So I'm, I'm naturally at home in a, in, in cairo's time, in a slower world and a slower way of being in the world. And maybe I'm just, maybe, maybe we're transitioning as a society into something that is just alien to me and it'll be fine. But I am a little concerned about what this is doing to our brains and our ability to have deep thought, our ability to have deep attention. It ruined me. That's what it speaks to is that concern of going out out the door and watching people like this on their phones, not looking around them, not speaking to people around them, not connecting to people around them. Going to a cafe and seeing three people sitting at a table looking at their phones instead of talking to each other. I would worry about the fact that there's so many people who find it hard to read a novel or follow a film that isn't fast, fast, fast, fast. Projecting things at them because that's, that's a very passive way to take in culture. You're just having a beamed at you. If it, it must be fat, fat bad, rather than engaging with the text and using your imagination with the text and letting it unfold over Kyra's time. I'm worried about this a lot. I've, I've watched, I know, I know. I have so many writer friends who are saying they are having trouble reading. It's like, oh my God. If those of us doing this for a living are finding fractured attention, being a thing because of scrolling the net, what is it doing for people who don't have a commitment to, to words on a page? And it's, I, I know that I privilege words on the page because I love it, but it's more about the quality of attention. And how that's gonna get worse with ai. And I'm really concerned about this. I don't know how, as an artist to address it other than to keep talking passionately about nature and art and slow art, slow nature, slow life to just have, you know, when I, when my blog is up again, to let that be a place on the internet that you can come for long reads that read slowly. And all I can do is be myself and hope that for somebody, I'm one of the not inferno that they step into once in a while, you know, provide that for other people, but

Jolie:

that's a

Terri Windlig:

that, that's what, that's what ruin means to me. I feel like the, I feel like the, some things I really love. Like the beauty of the storytelling human brain and the beauty of our society is being endangered by technologies that are not being regulated and are not in, in good and ethical hands.

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

And I, I am worried about that ruin. And, and I don't wanna be part of it. I wanna be, I wanna be not.

Jolie:

this the thought that came to me as you were saying that was you're not gonna see any fairies if you can't slow down and give attention.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

I know.

Terri Windlig:

And yet,

Jolie:

love

Terri Windlig:

know, there's that, that desire to, you know, tell me how, how do I see fairies right? Give me five easy steps to see. Slow down takes four days to get to spirit. Well, no, it's slow.

Jolie:

exactly.

Terri Windlig:

pilgrimage does that, you know, you have to be in Cairo time, not clock time. There's always in the arts, there's always, if, if you're doing it to make a living, there's always that tension between the kairos time of creating and the the need to like in publishing your own schedules and deadlines. And you ha there's always that tension between the two. And that's not a bad thing. You know, that's where, that's where trickster lives. That's where the spark comes from. When two opposites come together, I don't mind that I mind when one thing is being taken over and is dominating everything else. And Cairo's time is getting lost.

Jolie:

Yeah, big time is the great distractor is what Jonathan K calls it. And and it

Terri Windlig:

Hmm.

Jolie:

a competition for our attention and they're doing such a good job of it, that it just means that our attention is A DHD

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

the place. You know, there is no, and it's trained, they've trained our brains into being two seconds, five seconds before it's

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

And That's scary. That is

Terri Windlig:

And then, and a lot of money has been thrown to figure out how to get that extra second of attention out of you. You know, it's not by accident. These are, these are not benign technologies. It, it's up to us to take them over and to use them in better ways. But I, I, and people are starting to talk about this more and more, which I'm glad to see. There's starting to be a resistance toward just saying everything, every technological step. Is, you know, we should just accept as the tech overlords present it to us and go, yes, yes, yes, I'll take that. You know, the people pushing back against AI and academia, AI in publishing, the people pushing back on on these things that, that make us less human, make us less immersed in the sensory world. Do you know David Abrams work, the ego philosopher New Mexico. He talks so much about, you know, living in. In a, the sensory that how, how even literacy pulled us away from living in the sensory world, from listening to the conversation of owls and the, the conversation of the weather and the land underfoot, that even, even just focusing ourselves on print has harmed that. And he says, well, the answer isn't to suddenly say, I'm never gonna read a book again. The answer is to, to approach writing and reading in a way that brings the more than human world into that space. And if we can extend that to our technology, how do we bring kairos time? How do we bring spirit? How do we bring artfulness in and humanness community and humanness in. In a thoughtful way into these very powerful technologies being run by men who don't give a fuck except to make money and have some power. You know, how do we, how do we little people down here, how do we counter that?'cause we're not little people. We have powers or siding how to, to how to allocate our attention Is our power and how to allocate our spending is our power. If we say no, I will not spend hours a day scrolling the internet. I will look at certain places that inform me and, and help me have a wider the community than the local community. And I will use this mindfully and thoughtfully, but I will not just mindlessly use it the way they want me to use that. So I think,

Jolie:

absolutely.

Terri Windlig:

think we all need to claim our attention back. Think about how we spend it,

Jolie:

And it is getting more and more boring as well. Like I, I was think looking at the internet today and just like, I'm actually bored. There's, there's nothing here. That's I mean, there are things that are useful, like when I'm looking for things like building the house and, you know, doing research, it's, it's really useful in that sense.

Terri Windlig:

I, I, I heard more and more people say that, and I think that's a good sign that we may have reached peak,

Jolie:

time.

Terri Windlig:

like,

Jolie:

Yeah.

Terri Windlig:

might, might start discerning how we wanna spend our, these, you know, our one wild and precious life. As Mary Oliver would say,

Jolie:

Yeah,

Terri Windlig:

how we wanna spend the hours of our day, we all.

Jolie:

yeah.

Terri Windlig:

Pull ourselves away from that addictive little screen. I mean, I don't, I don't carry a mobile phone for exactly that reason. It makes my family crazy'cause they can never reach me. But I don't, I don't wanna screen in my pocket every time I leave labs. I just don't. I,

Jolie:

And

Terri Windlig:

so,

Jolie:

to get hold of you. I loved it when people could only get hold of you when you were at home.

Terri Windlig:

yeah. Yeah.

Jolie:

I don't wanna be answering emails when I'm out having a coffee with my friend. You know? I wanna be

Terri Windlig:

Exactly.

Jolie:

relax.

Terri Windlig:

Exactly.

Jolie:

What would your chaos Crusade be?

Terri Windlig:

my chaos per se, relates to this, which is finding spaces for kairos time in daily life. And for me, I, I, I think of the, the beginning of the day as a very magically charged time because it's. You know, it's like any door, it's the door into the day. Any gateway, any portal is a numinous space. A liminal, numinous space from ordinary life into the next thing, into enchantment, into where, wherever you wanna send yourself. And for me, it's really important when I get up in the morning for a while, I was, I was like going online, checking my messages, making sure there wasn't anything like in publishing life or something that I needed to know about right away. And I stopped that a long while back and just like, no, this is, this is a supercharged moment. That first hour, at least sometimes two of your day it sets up ritually how you, how your whole day is gonna feel. And I'm not giving it to a computer so. I'm really conscious of what I do in that first out, and so those little things, like the first cup of coffee, the i, I light a candle on the window sill, putting my dog's food down. I think of it all as being very ritualistic. And for me, because I'm, you know, I love books and words. I read, I, I, I don't let myself even look. A lot of my work working in publishing is on a screen, so I have to get on the computer. I do need email, I do need all that stuff, but I make sure that I start the day either in silence, listening, you know, going outside and listening to the land, or I read often both and put language from the printed slow kyro time language into my head. Before I get to that jumpy fast world of the internet. And so what I would like to see people try is to think about how they get up in the morning, what their rituals are, and make them conscious and make them slow. So reading might not be the right thing for somebody else. It wouldn't be for Howard Books don't do that for him. Music does that for him. But finding that thing that is representative of that is not inferno, that is representative of life and humanity and art and all the things you care about most, and have something that lets you start the day with that. Even if then you have to get onto a train and commute or you know, to wake your kids up for school or just having, even if it's 10 minutes in the morning, even if you can't do an hour something. That allows you to start the day in a sacred way, in an artful, or if you're not spiritual in that way, in an artful way, in a quiet way, in a stillness, in the center of the storm sort of way, and not on the internet, just try it. If you're somebody who gets up and checks your phone, first thing, just try not doing that for a week. Try it. See what it feels like in your brain. See what it does to your attention not to do that.'cause when I made that switch, I couldn't believe the difference.

Jolie:

Yeah, no, totally. I, I keep my phone in the other room for, to, to charge it so that I can't just do that automatic, pick it up and look at it thing. And yeah, like you say, it makes such a difference'cause. It will wait. It

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and it, it can wait an hour. It's not a problem. But yeah, I fully agree with you. It completely changes your, your, the quality of your day by starting in that way. I've Yeah, absolutely

Terri Windlig:

quality of their intention. Yeah, just slowing down. I mean, you're such a proponent, Julia, of Kairos time and that, you know, that slow time, which we had so much of in the 20th century

Jolie:

Mm-hmm.

Terri Windlig:

I'm, I'm not glamorizing, you know, 20th century life'cause we also had a lot more sexism and other shit to deal with. But that aspect of it, things were slower and I, there's value in that.

Jolie:

Oh, good. Yeah. It's like the best thing in the world. It's literally my favorite thing in the world, and everything comes out of it. Like art and, you know, you, a poem will come to you or an idea for something. That's when these things come. So the things that I love the most come out of

Terri Windlig:

Yeah.

Jolie:

and that time.

Terri Windlig:

I notice when I'm reading in the morning that all kinds of ideas will pop out of it. Just little things that I scribble down that might be useful later might not, but just all kinds of creative ideas that never happens when I'm scrolling

Jolie:

like your relationship with the other human in your house as well, you

Terri Windlig:

Yeah,

Jolie:

you are in a more present. Loving space than

Terri Windlig:

yeah.

Jolie:

straight away already upset about something or annoyed about something that you've gotta deal with because of an email you've just checked or, you know, it just, it changes the way you are being.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah, it's, it's like you're relating to this invisible world instead of to your present circumstance. That's very true.

Jolie:

Absolutely.

Terri Windlig:

Yeah,

Jolie:

Thank you Terry.

Terri Windlig:

Aw, it's so good talking to you Jolie. We are such soul sisters and

Jolie:

to have found you.

Terri Windlig:

yeah, likewise. I'm very grateful to Howard to finding you first and bringing us together.

It isn't Terry wonderful. I absolutely adored that conversation and yeah, I'm glad that you got to hear it. It was long, but I was thinking as it was happening. I was like this is kairos time. This is us taking time and enjoying. Sharing in each other's knowledge and wisdom and having that space to not, it doesn't have to be fast. So yes, this was a lovely, leisurely, slow conversation, a long conversation, and that is one of the joys of podcasting. It's a long form, medium, and. Yeah, it's not radio. It's not quick, fast paced It has that space to be able to take time and you can listen to it in chunks and you don't have to do it all in one hit. So yeah, I'm really enjoyed that and I'm gonna enjoy listening back to it, and I'm glad to have that space. And connection with Terry. Every time I know that we're gonna be seeing each other, it's a joy. I have a ring that she gave me that I always wear, and, I have my wedding ring and my engagement ring. And then on my other finger I have on my other hand, I have a ring that has Labrador on it, which is a very intuitive third eye opening stone. And that one is my marriage to my inner world, to my twin and my imagination. So that's, that reminds me to, that I'm married to. The inner world. And then the ring that Terry gave me, which was forged by a Viking called Jason, who lives in her community and who I've met and is a lovely man. She he made this ring. And gave it to Terry and then Terry gifted it to me, which I was very honored to have received. And I wear that as my marriage to the land and to mother nature. So they're my special rings. Terry's my special friend and that was a special conversation that I'm very happy to be sharing with you and. Yeah, that made my day. So I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you next week for the final show of this season, two of the Nonsense and the Chaos, and then we can quietly go into little hibernation mode. So thank you for being here. Love you all, and I'll see the anno.