LOVE & the Power of Stories w— Michael J Morris Artwork

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sacred sound waves hosted by grace allerdice.

home—body podcast

LOVE & the Power of Stories w— Michael J Morris

June 05, 2025 • grace allerdice • Episode 203

Too often we think of the truth as an objective reality we find outside ourselves. But what if it’s actually a story we tell together?

Today we welcome Michael J Morris back to home—body for a soulful conversation about the stories we tell and how we tell them. We explore the nature of Beauty, Life and Time as we weave astrology, mysticism, physics and myth together.

What shifts for us in our day-to-day lives if we understand that what’s happening right now is part of countless cyclical stories unfolding at the same time? How then do we take action differently? — Michael J. Morris

Guest bio: Michael J. Morris is an astrologer, tarot reader, dance artist, writer, and educator. They began their consulting practice Co Witchcraft Offerings in 2019, through which they offer astrology and tarot consultations, movement-based rituals, and workshops to support people in cultivating personal and collective healing and liberation. They hold a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, and they were a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University from 2015-2021. Michael’s work has been presented in galleries, universities, community spaces, theaters, bars and nightclubs, films, and domestic spaces.

we discuss —

Telling stories about the “end” of the world
How story situates us within Time
What truth is + isn’t
Astrology as an artistic practice
Stories of Beauty, Love + God
How the qualities of our lives tell a story
Resonance + dissonance
Loving the world exactly as it is
What breathing has to teach us about loving
Death as a story of Life

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thanks for listening. peace, be well. 🙏

grace allerdice [00:00:05]:
My name is Grace, and you're listening to the Homebody Podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Homebody Podcast, and I'm excited to welcome back to the show my friend, Michael j Morris, who I believe has been on the podcast. This might be the sixth time. So definitely the most visited guest for the show. And I'm always happy to welcome back Michael and share the conversation cauldrons that happen between us with you all. This conversation sparked because we were having what's become a bit of an annual Zoom tea. And when we were having one this past holiday season, a lot of the conclusions or the threads, the wrap up of the conversation was love and stories. And so that's what we're exploring with you today.

grace allerdice [00:01:09]:
And I think the wide range of knowledge streams and interests in media and ways that Michael is skillful in expression and also teaching. And a lot of those threads are things that we share, even if we our brains work differently and we go about them differently. I think it makes for a very, nuanced and also relaxed and, invigorating conversation that I'm really excited to share with you all. Michael J. Morris is an astrologer, a tarot reader, dance artist, writer, and educator. They began their consulting practice, Co Witchcraft Offerings, in 2019, through which they offer astrology and tarot consultations, movement based rituals, and workshops to support people in cultivating personal and collective healing and liberation. They hold a PhD in dance studies from the Ohio State University, and they were a visiting assistant professor at Denison University from 2015 to 2021, where they taught in dance, women's and gender studies, queer studies and environmental studies. Michael's choreographic and performance work has been presented in galleries, universities, community spaces, theaters, bars, and nightclubs, films, also domestic spaces.

grace allerdice [00:02:35]:
Be sure to check out the links in the show notes to learn more about Michael's work or more about my work if you're new to the podcast. And there's also a link now where you can send me a message. So if you have a question or a topic or something that you would like explored more in-depth or for the first time for conversations on the show, please send me a note and a message. I will read every single one, and I'm excited to hear what you all think. If you enjoy the conversation, I also invite you to share it with someone that you think would also enjoy it. And that gesture in and of itself means so much. I know both to Michael and to me. So without further ado, I invite you into this beautiful, holistic, interesting weave and conversation cauldron where we dive into love and stories.

grace allerdice [00:05:16]:
Speaking of stories that I really love as we're recording this, I'm about to drop an episode that's sort of like a little preamble to this where I'm, like, thinking about stories as lenses and stories as magnets. And I was also fondly remembering how your home in college was like this Venusian oasis outside of school. And also where I watched for the first time so many films that I still think of as like in my cosmic backpack, the fountain being one of them. I remember seeing that and being, I think this is what I think about reality.

Michael J. Morris [00:06:00]:
Yeah.

grace allerdice [00:06:01]:
So the power of story and the power I think film I know that you love film and TV so much as well to really shape how we view what's happening. And it's interesting looking at even just that movie, for example, now in hindsight and where I am. Death is the road to awe comes to mind so many times. And I have a feeling will be something that creeps up in our conversation today. The key is sometimes different than what we think it's going to look to the everlasting moment. So we spilled in, but I was like, the fountain has been on my heart and I cannot bring it up. But these power of like myth and mythos and storytelling to like shape how we view reality and what's happening is so important. And I think we have a creative role in that.

grace allerdice [00:06:51]:
I know you have a lot of thoughts and beautiful quotes about that as well. So do you wanna kind of dump us into that?

Michael J. Morris [00:06:57]:
Yeah. You know, I think that story shapes so much of how we make meaning of the world, how we understand the world, and then by extension, what becomes possible in the world because of the stories that we tell. One of the quotes that I think of often in relation to story comes from Donna J Haraway, who's a feminist biologist, and she writes in a book called Staying with the Troublemaking Kin in the Fulu Scene. She says, it matters what matters we use to think other matters with. It matters what stories we tell other stories with. It matters what nots not nots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. And what I take from that, or what I've taken from that for many, many years is that it matters what stories we tell or phrased a different way.

Michael J. Morris [00:08:08]:
It matters how we tell the stories that we tell. Stories are consequential. They are part of how we make meaning of the world as it is, which includes all kinds of things like ancient myths and scriptures, but also things like quarterly reports and data narratives, but also artistic practices. And then things like astrology and tarot readings. These are all various ways that we are telling stories of the world as we understand it and the meaning that we're making of it. And that meaning that we make, the way we frame our understanding of the, of the world through story then conditions and enables how we take action, how we understand what might be possible, how we understand this moment to be part of a series or constellation of events that give this moment significance. It makes me think of, you know, we have some things in common in terms of how we were raised and our background and our upbringing. And it makes me think of the significance of creation stories, but also the stories of the end times that those stories matter.

Michael J. Morris [00:09:29]:
And something I think about all the time is the consequences of some of those stories with which I was raised, with which we were raised, stories like the rapture of Christians in the end times. Right? And the idea that there that those who are chosen by God will just one day be taken away to be with God in a better place while this place, this place, this planet collapses into destruction and ruin. And if that's the story that we tell or that someone tells, and if you believe that story that you will be taken away from all of this, then what responsibilities do you have to this place, this planet, and those with whom we share this planet? You may even believe if that's the story that you tell, you may even believe that it is your role to accelerate events in the end times stories, such that the rapture becomes even closer, that you make it more of a reality. And I think often, if not always, that things like ecological justice or a multi species ethics of care feel potentially incompatible with that story. If part of the story that you tell is that our place is elsewhere, that we don't actually have responsibilities to this place, that this place has already fallen. And then in contrast to that story, I think about things like the book, mArchive After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, which she describes as a speculative documentary written in collaboration with the survivors, the far into the future witnesses to the realities that we are making possible or impossible with our present apocalypse. And that was a direct quote. But in other words, that book really imagines the end of the world through the ways that we are already destroying this planet and one another, but from the perspective of survivors, those who continue to find ways to live on a damaged planet.

Michael J. Morris [00:11:44]:
And that is a very different kind of story that has different consequences for not only how we imagine the future, but also how we live right now in our roles, in the stories that we are telling or the stories that we are a part of. Does that bring anything up for you?

grace allerdice [00:12:02]:
I mean, it makes me think of a lot of things, but the thing that's feeling the loudest right now is also how stories are inherently situated within how we think about time.

Michael J. Morris [00:12:14]:
Mhmm.

grace allerdice [00:12:15]:
And I think with the end of time story that you're talking about that we were particularly raised with, there's an end. An end is this linear final point. And that's such a exclusive monotheistic view of the world, but it's it was presented as all encompassing. And now it would be I don't even know if it's possible for me to think that way anymore because there is no end. And even just thinking about too some of the things that were pinging me as, you know, the book of Revelation is used often in Christianity is about the end times. And as opposed to maybe something that's already happened and is maybe happening again. And something I've been thinking a lot about, which may be a random thought in context of this conversation is, is the holy whore who becomes the bride, the apocalypse? Is she the unveiling? Like, is this there's this way that it's like we move through squeezes of death and life and death and life and death and life. And if it's not an end thing, even the squeeze, the constriction of death on one end is a liberation and a birth on another end.

grace allerdice [00:13:39]:
And something that just feels so real for me right now, as I'm sitting with that is like, where are we gonna go? We're already here. Where could we go? Someone told me the other day that the latest data coming in from the James Webb telescope is that we're all, we live in a black hole. Like our, the Milky Way is in a giant black hole. I'm like, we're already here. The magicians were right. We're surrounded by a giant snake dragon eating its tail. That's true. Where are we gonna go outside of the thing? And there's something that's been very grounding, but I think also very accountable about that.

grace allerdice [00:14:17]:
Like, what if we really are responsible? I think karma is the best word that we have to describe that, but what if we really are responsible or connected to our thoughts and our actions and our stories and our pictures and the things that we make, there's a profound level of stewardship there that shows up for me that arises. Which then means that I have to slow down to pay attention to what it is I am stewarding consciously or unconsciously. Those are the, some of the things that kicked up for me when you were talking.

Michael J. Morris [00:14:54]:
It's so important. I mean, well, first the idea that story situates us within time and also story creates the possibilities of different kinds of temporalities. Like you're pointing to, is it a story where there is a great ending, which feels like a very linear and terminal kind of story. Or perhaps, and this is the way that I think often, is that we've lived through many endings of the world. Some people's worlds are ending right now as they're being forcibly removed from this country or they're being denied the reality of their even existence. Like some people's worlds are ending right now. And I think of just the countless waves of colonization and genocide that have happened all over this planet and how many times those worlds have ended. But then in again, and this is so beautiful because it's getting a little meta, but the way you told the story was moving through many, maybe cycles of death and rebirth.

Michael J. Morris [00:16:12]:
And in that story, even as we're moving through the endings of worlds, there is something else on the other side. There is, as you said, the squeeze of the death, but also a kind of birth or rebirth at the same time of that. And that's like, I mean, it's one of the many ways that I think about astrology as a kind of story, you know, as a practicing consulting astrologer is the temporality of astrology is inherently cyclical. And so what shifts for us in our day to day lives or in our understandings of personhood or ourselves or our relationships, if we understand that what's happening right now, including us, is part of countless cyclical stories that are unfolding at the same time, how then do we take action differently? And if we locate ourselves in a linear story that has a final absolute terminal ending, that creates a different context within which we live and act. And that's one of the things I think about the ways that story makes possibility. How we tell the stories that we tell makes some things more possible and other things less possible. And that's that brings me back to this language of stewardship that you were using in terms of, in what ways are the stories part of a practice of stewarding reality, experience these lives that we're living and by lives, I don't mean individual separate lives, but all of the ways in which our lives are woven through one another, threads of many stories in a tapestry that even that, like, tapestry, as soon as they use that metaphor, it's like, that's a there's a bunch of lines in that. So maybe it's like a, I don't know, a cloak, like something that's wrapped around, like they're something that gets us out of that flat linear space of all of these threads coming together somehow.

grace allerdice [00:18:34]:
Yeah. I feel like it's so human of us to like, our ways of understanding are so grid like, which is us just doing our best. And I think even from the get go, there's so much humility there when we're realizing too that the way that I'm speaking about this is I'm doing my best. I was thinking too about when you were talking about the cyclical nature of or even the ongoing nature of apocalypse, perhaps the root of the word, which means unveiling, How my husband likes to watch a lot of the big, like, quantum biology or, like, quantum physics documentaries with, like, really boring narrators and lots of information. So I tend to tune in and tune out. However, there is something that happens when you watch just earth over billions of years, as opposed to two hundred years Where, oh, look, there was all this life and then a meteor came out of nowhere and the planet burst into flames. Oh, look, then there was even more life than there was before. And then this other thing happened, like there's this way that there's something very magical.

grace allerdice [00:19:47]:
That seems to arise at least from all of the science documentaries I've eavesdropped on that life seems to reemerge, not less, but more complex and biodiverse after each round, which is something really beautiful and draws me me personally into something about the profound fertile magic of this planet and maybe life in general. Such a proliferation of, like, it there's some sort of program or code for that that seems indestructible. Even if the skin falling off is dying, there's something within that that's geared or oriented towards evolution going that way. And I find that something that brings me again, a lot of peace and grounding. And again, makes me wanna be a part of whatever that is. And there was something else that you were saying that was pinging me and it's gone now, but I think something too that's really common. I think of storytelling has become a bit of a lost art. We've really lost some of the spaces of oral storytelling.

grace allerdice [00:21:09]:
And I think as dancers, you and I are oriented towards temporality because the things that we have been most wired to make perhaps are things that don't last. They are inherently insoluble and telling stories is the same way. Sitting around a fire, you're not recording it. It's not a documentation. It's something that comes and it goes, and it's gonna be different next time because the listening of the moment will be different. The people there will be different. The fire will be different. And something about that level of presence and skill and something again, which I know is something that you talk about, like the meaning that is made together, whether everyone is speaking or not is something that I think a lot of us in sort of urban North America at least are really have lost a lot of skill with not just in telling, but in listening as well.

grace allerdice [00:22:01]:
And something about that wispiness and that aliveness to how things can change over time feels really important to me. And I've personally always felt really intimidated by verbal storytelling because I don't think linearly and stories tend to wanna go that way to be understood. But it's something that I really want to lean in as far as crafting a skill, being able to tell a good story, not so that I can make a point necessarily or a sermon, but, like, how does like, I would more like I would make a dance. Like, I would give it to someone and then it's not my job to make it digestible for you or tell you what it is. Like, I just did it. Have it, eat it, and see what happens, which I think when we're in content making world or news media world, there's a way that we've lost some of that. I think, I don't know what you think about that.

Michael J. Morris [00:22:55]:
I mean, it makes me think of, and again, this comes out of primarily dancing, but is true of almost anything that feels like a repetition is that it is both again and for the first time. And there's something about, you know, every time, I mean, it's a question, it's actually a point of crisis in the field that I have a PhD in, which is dance studies. Where is the dance? Like where does it exist? Especially if we think of a dance as something that's like in a canon of some kind or in a repertoire a repertoire where it's like, this is a piece that gets repeated again and again and again. But when you get into the nuances of dance history or just the craft of dance making, you actually learn very quickly that even a dance that's quote unquote performed again and again changes every time it's performed. If for no other reason that the people who are performing it have changed, the circumstances or conditions in which it's performed, like you were talking about in terms of telling stories around the fire and it's a different fire and it's a different configuration of people and maybe the stars overhead are at a different point in the year. Same thing with a dance that the performers are different. The conditions within its perform with within which it is performed are different. But also sometimes quite literally choreographers change pieces because like, oh, this performer that's stepping into this role because maybe it's a different performer.

Michael J. Morris [00:24:30]:
And so they shift the choreography to make it work for that performer. Well, is it the same dance anymore? It has the same name. It's got a lot of the same parts, but at what point does it become something different is one question that actually I think can kind of come back recursively almost as a an axiom, which is like, it's never the same. We just have to accept that even when we call it by the same name, I mean, I'm thinking of course here in some way of the mythology of the Argonauts and the ship that was gradually replaced piece by piece until none of this, none of the pieces were remaining were of the original, but yet it was was it the same boat anymore at that point? And similar with a dance, similar with a story. And, you know, in my work as an astrologer, I spend a lot of time, especially with the asteroids that I work with, telling the stories of myths, ancient Greek and Roman myths. And there's a way in which even that is also again and for the first time, that there's something that connects me to ancient stories by telling this story again with a client in the context of their life. And also it becomes a different story. It becomes a new story, sometimes intentionally so.

Michael J. Morris [00:25:53]:
Sometimes I'm actually intending to do a kind of feminist recuperation of these brutal myths that are wildly patriarchal, and yet there's some kind of wisdom inside of them. So sometimes the differences are intentional, and then sometimes it's simply that, as we were saying, the conditions are different, so the story emerges differently. And I think there's a you used this word a couple of times. Like, there's a magic to that. There's a magic to how can something be both again and for the first time. And whenever I think about magic and story, I can't not think of the beloved transistor, Rachel Pollock, who before she died, Rachel Pollock is very well known for her work in tarot. She wrote a very famous book that a lot of tarot readers work with called 78 Degrees of Wisdom, But she actually wrote many books, not only about tarot, but on many different topics about ritual and goddess religions of the ancient world, but also she wrote a lot of she was an award winning science fiction writer. So she wrote many, many, many novels.

Michael J. Morris [00:27:03]:
She also wrote comic book series. And so we could say that Rachel Pollock was engaged with story in many different ways. And before she died, she wrote this short article in which she was reflecting on what she might want as an epitaph if she had a tombstone. And she tried out several ideas, and then eventually she came to one, which was story. It's all story. And then she goes on to connect that idea specifically to tarot and kind of thinking through what that might mean. And in that article, there's this one piece where she part where she says, So some people love the cards because they give, they can give us a glimpses of the future. Still others love tarot as a spiritual science.

Michael J. Morris [00:27:55]:
To me, these two are stories for all time and all science are sets of interlocking stories. For some, this might sound as if I'm suggesting that nothing in the cards is true, that it's all made up, but I'm not sure truth is something that simply lies there like a rock. We engage it. We bring it into being. This holds true for our own future, and it holds true for such complex structures as the Kabbalistic tree of life and even physics. And I love the kind of diffraction that she does there from starting through thinking with tarot as story and this question of the ways that tarot connects us to maybe glimpses of some future or possibilities for the future. And then this question of, but is it true or is it made up? And bringing us maybe closer to a version or possibility of maybe truth and made up are not mutually exclusive categories, which isn't to say that nothing's true or that all we can make the truth whatever we want it to be. Although we're seeing quite a lot of that in the world right now.

Michael J. Morris [00:29:17]:
And so I wanna, like, hold these ideas alongside a kind of critique of the, like, the truth is anything I say it is, but which is not what I'm saying. And I don't think that's what Rachel Pollock was saying either, but that even the things that are true are also made in some way. And that we play a role in that, which again, brings us maybe a little bit towards the magic of story, but also the consequence of story as well, that it's consequential how we make stories because they shape how we not only know what's true, but maybe even they shape what is true, how we tell the stories that we tell whether again, as she moves through, whether that's through tarot or through Kabbalah or through physics or through all of the other ways that she engaged in story in terms of writing fiction and comic books and stories of ancient goddess religions and so on that. Yeah. But all of that is maybe part of the process or the practice of making what is true.

grace allerdice [00:30:31]:
I love the image where she says it's truth is not something you just go pick up like a rock. It's such a great image. But I do think that people still think about it like that. Yeah. It's like an object that we can fix and pinpoint and point down. And it makes me think of Richard Rudd, who is the the Gene Keys Merlin man. And he talks about which is basically very beautiful Hermetic swirl loosely not loosely, combining some of the wisdom from the I Ching with DNA and genes and all of that. And there was one time he said, I think it was in a meditation that I was listening to, but basically, the DNA is the snake and we are the skin.

grace allerdice [00:31:21]:
And I think about that a lot because I think that's how I also think about truth. It's how I also think about reality. I think it's also how I think about time. There's a wave that's consistent. The flicker of life is consistent, perhaps. But what it looks like, how it's sloughing off at the moment is different. And when you were talking earlier about the Argonauts ship, I was like, well, we are that as well. And there's something like highly creative and poignant about that for me.

grace allerdice [00:31:55]:
For me, some of the images that come to mind, it becomes something more prismatic, something more holographic, something that moves, something that breathes. I use the word writhing a lot. Like something that it's like the opposite of something that you can pinpoint and, like, put in a thing and put in a lab and have someone look at it under a microscope and then tell you with absolute certainty, it is objectively this. It's something else. And holding holding those two, it's like the line between, like, reality creation and then just denial is very thin. Like, it's, you know, it's a really it's a it's a thin ropey slithery line, I think.

Michael J. Morris [00:32:35]:
Oh, that makes me think of so many things. Even the point when you said something like, like the flicker of light might be constant, but what comes of that might vary. And even that my first thought mainly was a workshop that I facilitated yesterday was like, even the flicker of light, like according to whose visual perceptions that my visual perception of the flicker of light is very different than the photosynthesizing leaf or to the motor sensory apparati of an insect. Like even that it's like what we might assume is the most objectively verifiable is still wildly subjective to the extent that the mechanism of perception and measurement varies widely, especially if we get beyond the frame of the human as the sum total of all things. And then even within our human practices, you know, like not to go make, take too strong of a detour through feminist science studies, but even what gets passed off as quote unquote, objective, verifiable, empirical, scientific knowledge is still crafted. It is still created through a series of practices and particular systems of measurement. You know, I mean, this is one of the many insights that have come out of quantum physics, that the same thing measured differently is a different thing.

grace allerdice [00:34:12]:
You look at the same thing a different time. It's something else.

Michael J. Morris [00:34:15]:
Precisely. And so there is this and I actually prefer even that I've already used this language. I prefer to even get out of this binary of well, is it objective or is it subjective? It's like that framing might be missing the point in some crucial way. And then the piece that you pointed out in Rachel Pollock's piece about truth not being just something that lies there like a rock that we just pick up and engage with feels related to this. That, like, what is true or what is real isn't just out there waiting to be discovered. Like, we figured it out. We can prove what's true now, but that how we engage with it is part of what it is, part of what shapes what it is. And that makes me think of this quote from Elizabeth Gross.

Michael J. Morris [00:35:06]:
She's writing about art, which I think is implicated within and also adjacent to a conversation about story, but she says art is created always made, never found, even if it is made from what is found. And that concept is something that I can apply broadly. I mean, I literally gave a presentation years ago about our astrology as an artistic practice. And that was one of the framings that I offered that even astrology is not about from my view, from my understanding of astrology, it is not about trying to decode some specific unilateral message or objective truth about someone? Like if we can just figure out the right mechanism to decode this.

grace allerdice [00:36:00]:
Not the proverbial space rock lying on the ground, if you will.

Michael J. Morris [00:36:04]:
Exactly. Yeah. It's something we make of what we find. And in astrology, what we find is the observation of the movement of the planets through the sky, and then we make something of that. It's not simply like, well, Venus is doing this, so the so then it means x. No. It it has never worked like that. Astrology in the thousands of years that has been practiced, it has never been any kind of one to one correspondence of decoding unilaterally messages from sky gods or something.

Michael J. Morris [00:36:39]:
Like, it's always been a creative practice of making meaning of what we find. And I think that is very close to, if not entirely synonymous with the way that Rachel Pollock is talking about truth here, that there is perhaps something that is found, but the question is what then do we make of it?

grace allerdice [00:37:04]:
Yeah, it made me think too. It's especially linking to astrology. It's also making meaning of where we are. Like the place has so much to do with how we see what's going on in the sky. Someone's having an eclipse, someone else is looking up and doesn't see anything. And I think too, the the belonging of stories situated within certain languages and places and cultures. And the specificity of that particular fractal feels really important. Like, where we are matters as well.

grace allerdice [00:37:41]:
Because I think it's a a practice that not a lot of people have done well, I think, if we're looking at percentages of the wider world, at least where I live, deconstructing and rebuilding a paradigm. I remember when I left Christianity, I left the church. Like, I remember having no idea what I was. I didn't know. I didn't have like a. A lens or a frame. Like for me, it kind of, it started slowly, but then it was very sudden. I was like, I don't know what's after this.

grace allerdice [00:38:12]:
I just know this is done. And there was a beautiful moment that kind of crept in at one point. And I remember it landing, like, what if what you think about the world and God, and what is true is also something that you have artistic license with. It's not the rock that you find on the ground. It's, it's a painting that you make. It's a dance that you make. And that's still something that I tell clients today where they're like, I think I might be open to having an idea about what spirit is. I can feel how that would be meaningful to me.

grace allerdice [00:38:49]:
And I'm like, just start putting things in your cosmic backpack. Just start making a story. Just start resonating with an image. Just start pulling the story together because you get to paint that story, which is so different than the lens of this one thing absolutely happens if X happens. And there's something really beautiful. And again, we're back to that stewardship level again. But to me, it's inevitably follows with the question, well, which story is the beautiful one? Like, I wanna tell the beautiful one. I wanna tell the one that makes me feel like there's meaning.

grace allerdice [00:39:23]:
I wanna one I wanna tell the one that makes me feel that life is beautiful, even if it's like piercing in some way, because I think it is also that. I think beauty has that quality as well. And I think it also now the phase of life that I'm into is, like, which which story is leaning me towards the next phase of alchemy, which story is pulling me towards, like, this next layer of evolution that I can feel I want. And we don't have to start talking about love right now, but I know that's kind of where we're gonna go. But to me, love as the story is the one that's always gonna do that job for me.

Michael J. Morris [00:40:03]:
Well, you were just saying in terms of the creative agency around even the stories of our, whatever language we wanna use, our faith, our beliefs, our spiritual practices. It reminded me of something that Elizabeth Gilbert said, a story she told on a podcast a few years ago. And she was talking about how not everyone needs God, but that she is someone who feels like or has always felt like she needed or wanted God as part of her worldview. And my memory is that she talked a little bit about struggling with, like, well but, like, lot of what I've been given in terms of God doesn't really work for me. And a friend said, I want you to write a list of what you're looking for in a God, almost like a want ad. And she said, like, I thought of myself as an open thinker, but I was like, well, you can't just do that. You know, you can't just do that. I mean, you get the God you get, you know, and like you get the God that's been assigned to you.

Michael J. Morris [00:41:18]:
But then she asked, why? One of the, one of the features of God that I could love would be allowing itself to move into the shape of whatever I needed it to be because I needed that. And it would provide that and be like, okay, you need a God in this form. I'll be that. And, you know, I don't work with the idea of God very often in my life or in my practice anymore, really since leaving Christianity as well. But I remember taking a lot of delight in this idea of describing a God that you need or that you want, because literally that is what all of the religions that we've been given have already done. They created gods in their imaginations and their desires in their own image in CA in lots of ways. And then told the stories of those gods in ways that made those gods real in some way. And so, yeah, I think we have a creative agency in that regard as well.

Michael J. Morris [00:42:38]:
And I was also really struck by the ways you were talking about story that's situated in place and like the where we are and like, you know, in astrology, depending on where you are in the globe, like like you said, maybe you're seeing an eclipse and maybe you're not seeing an eclipse, or maybe there's constellations that you see all year round, or maybe there are other constellations you've never seen because of where you are in terms of latitude on the planet. And so then different stories become possible depending on where you are. And then that where also connects us back to a certain kind of when and what futures are possible from where we are. And that makes me think of some ideas that came to me through the work of Norma Wong, who is a native Hawaiian Zen master and the abbot of a temple in Hawaii. When she was on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast with Adrienne Maree Brown and Autumn Brown, and then she also wrote a book called When No Thing Works. And she talks about story and storytelling in both that podcast and in the book. And on the podcast, she was talking about the importance of storytelling in terms of creating future worlds. And she says, it's like telling the story of what that would be, what is required of us, that all of us, the things that we say are broken.

Michael J. Morris [00:44:14]:
Okay. What is it that we say about what needs to be built? What is this mutual story that you would tell with each other that would then tell you the actionable items that need to occur? That may take many, many years to come to fruition. But if you tell it as a story, I think I would say it will come to fruition faster. And then in her book, she writes, First and foremost, the far horizon story is always beyond the apocalyptic time when everything eventually fell apart and the skies were dark for so long, no one knew lightness nor blueness. The far horizon story is the embodiment of everything we hope our descendants will live into. It is the product, the destination, and the time made possible by hard choices, consequential decisions, big leaps. It is beyond the sight line of knowing only if we work toward this time place inch by inch as we fiercely search the ground for clues. It is entirely within the embrace of glorious possibility when we lift our gaze and tell its story.

Michael J. Morris [00:45:40]:
And so again, there's this sense of telling the story makes something possible, but specifically both in the podcast and in her book, she talks about like, if we get really granular in the story, really describing what is this future that we're living into, we will come to recognize and articulate what are the steps that would need to take place for us to get from here where we are to this future possibility. That something in the process of formulating the story starts to fill in those gaps of, well, if we're going to live in a world where there is greater care for our waterways, for example. What gets us from here to there? What connects those dots? What are the steps that we would have to take such that that became real or became true to connect that back again to Rachel Pollock of like the telling of the story as part of what makes it possible for it to become true in some way, which then I think gives a lot of gravity to the work that we do as artists, the work that we do as astrologers and tarot readers, that when we tell the stories of our lives or with our clients telling the stories of their lives, that puts things in place that make some things more possible because we told the story in the ways that we did. And so there's a, again, a kind of magic to these practices of storytelling because the telling of the story makes something more possible. And that's not the only definition of magic that we could use, but it is one way of thinking about magic that these things that we do rituals or spells or stories or all the the steps and actions and things that we do day to day make some things more possible.

grace allerdice [00:47:57]:
Two things came up as you were saying that thinking about how your life, not just what you're saying, but how you were living the qualities with which you're living your life, are telling a story, whether or not it's one that you're consciously telling. If someone were a storyteller looking at you as their subject, what would the story be? What would the story be about? Who would be in it? And how we tell the story also informs what's possible. What we would like to be possible also informs how we tell the story now. And even if none of those are guaranteed, it's still weaving a beautiful story. It's still making now beautiful. It's still making now meaningful. And so it feels win win to me. It feels magical to me either way, whatever happens.

grace allerdice [00:48:53]:
And so there's this mix of like co creative, magical investment and stewardship combined with surrender that I think is a really powerful, at least in my experience, a very powerful combination.

Michael J. Morris [00:49:12]:
I mean, that makes me think of in terms of the, what we want to be possible informs the story that we tell, makes me think of, and we could frame this as a story, Harriet Tubman saying my people are free at a time when her people were not free by any sort of social political standard of analysis in terms of like being in deep, deep in the period of American chattel slavery. And yet it was the desire for freedom that told the story in that way, my people are free. And it was because she told that story in that way, my people are free, that she then acted in alignment with that truth, with that reality. And in that process of acting in alignment with the story, my people are free. Her people became free. And that is to me, big magic.

grace allerdice [00:50:31]:
Oh, for sure. For sure. It re thinks makes me think of, like, Zogchen Buddhism where the fun like, one of the fundamental principles is everyone is Buddha nature. You just can't see it. And what a what a sandpaper of a story. What a what a thing to work on one. And when you were telling that story about Harriet Tubman, it just made me think of, like, pulling this, like, drop of gold from the future and dropping it into now. And so the gold just starts, like, permeating through the water of now.

grace allerdice [00:51:01]:
It's yeah. Yeah. I think that's exactly true. Yeah.

Michael J. Morris [00:51:06]:
And even what you just said is yet another way of telling the story of a kind of nonlinear time where the resources of the future can be brought into the present so that that future becomes possible. Like that is a timeline I wanna live in, probably a timeline that I am living in. I mean, that's probably why we are like witches and astrologers and like, we're very practiced in this nonlinear time and drawing on the resources of what we might think of as past and future, but they're part of the present that's available to us here and now and how we shape both what has been and what might be. And, yeah.

grace allerdice [00:51:53]:
Yeah. 90 I would say 99, 90 eight percent of the things that I do are highly dependent on the story. The time is not linear.

Michael J. Morris [00:52:01]:
Yes.

grace allerdice [00:52:03]:
My life makes no sense if time is linear.

Michael J. Morris [00:52:06]:
All of our talking around the significance of story and what story makes possible and the language I was using in terms of stories being consequential in terms of what they allow us to do, makes me think of love and how we tell the story of love. And, you know, as soon as I start thinking about love, I immediately think of some of my greatest teachers on love. And I think first of beloved black feminist, bell hooks, who wrote a whole trilogy of books about love, most famously her book, All About Love, New Visions. And, you know, again, you and I were raised in evangelical contexts that we've left behind. And so I tend to really resist any impulse toward evangelism, any attempt to like get other people to read this book. Cause I think it's important. Cause you know, I grew up with a lot of like, you gotta read this book because it's important. But I do actually think that most adult relationships would probably benefit from having read All About Love by bell hooks.

Michael J. Morris [00:53:20]:
And toward the beginning of that book, she writes, Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word love is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying. And then later in that same chapter, she says, undoubtedly, many of us are more comfortable with the notion that love can mean anything to anybody precisely because when we define it with precision and clarity, it brings us face to face with our lacks, with terrible alienation. The truth is far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack we have to cover up. The connection I'm making here to story is the ways that she's describing how we define love or our commonly held understanding of love. We could think of that as a story. And that part of what she's suggesting here is that many of us perhaps avoid or resist defining love with precision and clarity, because if we were to do so, we would be confronted with the ways in which we have lacked love or the ways we have not been loved in the ways that we need it, or maybe the ways we have not been loving in the ways that we wanted.

Michael J. Morris [00:54:50]:
We may even find that if we define love with precision and clarity, the places where we thought we were loved, maybe even the places where we, we were told we were loved, we would realize that we had not been. And that motivates us to stay in this mystifying ambiguity of like, love is, I don't know. Love can be anything. Love is whatever anyone wants it to be because then there's less risk. But also again, if we stay with this idea of telling a story makes something more possible, I think that when we do risk defining love with clarity and precision, that is a way of telling a story of love that then makes that love more possible. And that when we resist that or we avoid that, we actually perpetuate a culture of lovelessness in this, like, love can mean anything to anyone, which doesn't mean we have to have, like, we have to be rigid. And there's like, no, there's only one definition of love. Cause in fact, I work with a number of definitions of love, but that it does matter how we understand and describe and talk about and tell the stories of love.

Michael J. Morris [00:56:11]:
It does make a difference because it is what allows various forms of loving to become more or less possible. That's one of the connections of the threads between story and love that was coming to mind today.

grace allerdice [00:56:28]:
Yeah. I like that you used the word confronting because the part of me that's I was gonna be like, the part of me that's, like, sun applying to Pluto in the eighth house is, like, if something's confronting, I'm going towards it. But I think that's also a very, like, alchemical and, like, healer's orientation, at least for me. Wherever there's, like, profound resonance or dissonance, it's a cue that, like, it wants to be looked at or that's something I should look at or it's something that if I want to evolve as someone kind of in love with transformation, I should go towards it. Not should. I want to go towards it at this point in my life. I kind of run towards it with my tongue hanging out. I'm excited.

grace allerdice [00:57:12]:
But even if I'm dreading it, I'm excited. I'm like, oh, transformation awaits even if it's going to be hell. So I like that you use the word confronting, and I think something about love in particular is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to that kind of story, when it comes to the impetus for transformation, when it comes to the impetus of, like, refining me as a person, refining my storytelling, refining how I look at the world, refining what I think my stewardship is, what the future is. Like, love is is the gift that keeps on giving. It keeps asking something of me. It keeps asking me to become, and it also keeps giving. It's there's something that I feel I really enter into this question quest of reciprocity and infinity loop when I step into that story. And that's something that's it keeps generating movement and it keeps generating it does keep generating beauty.

grace allerdice [00:58:13]:
And I find that it also keeps refining my vision of how I see and how I receive the world and how I find it also simplifies how I see my role in the world as I get older as well.

Michael J. Morris [00:58:27]:
I have so many thoughts, but I'm curious in what ways does it feel like it simplifies the way that you're moving through the world?

grace allerdice [00:58:38]:
The questions that I ask about how I'm being present in every moment are reduced. It's not anymore. Like, what is the, what is the, the codex of rules I should be following at any given moment? It's more like what quality of presence am I bringing to this? How am I witnessing this? And where is love in this story? That's like two questions max. And it's really simplified when in doubt, witness and find the love. That's really where it's come down to for me. And that's much simpler. And I think for me, it's also packs way more of a punch as far as transforming my presence and how I see the world than externally following a rule list of shoulds. It takes it out of transaction mode, I guess, is what I'm saying.

grace allerdice [00:59:26]:
Because I think when we're following the list of shoulds and the rules and the things, we're trying to get love. Like, we're swiping an ATM card at the store, which is different than, like, what you're talking pulling the drop of gold from the bucket and putting it into now and letting it grow a garden. That's a different, it's not transactional, it's all chemical and those are different things.

Michael J. Morris [00:59:47]:
That makes so much sense to me, especially the getting away from the list of rules of shoulds and here's what I should be doing, or here's what's expected of me. If we are committed to a vision of something like what we are here to do is love, then maybe a question that becomes the most significant is what does it mean to be loving here and now? What does love look like under these conditions? Which is a question probably a lot of people don't always know how to answer. And I love, I loved your, your pivot of the question and the quest and the question that keeps us questing toward love. And also what supports us in that. And, you know, bell hooks didn't just present the, the crisis of we don't know what love is. She went on to write

grace allerdice [01:00:58]:
Right.

Michael J. Morris [01:00:59]:
Entire books about what love could be. And, you know, some of some of the things she wrote that stay with me that I think about on a daily basis, which maybe has something to do with Venus as the ruler of my Ascendant, who knows? But she says in All About Love, love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self love or of loving others, we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice. And what I love about that framing first, it gets us out of this passive idea of love of like, well, I just fell in love. Like, it's something that happens to you rather than a choice that you make, an action that you take, particular things that you practice, that that is actually the substance of love. And whether, as she says, whether we're engaged in a process of self love or of loving others, we have to move beyond the realm of feeling. Love is not just a feeling.

Michael J. Morris [01:02:12]:
It's not just I feel strongly towards you. That could be something else that's really precious, like desire or attraction or affection, but love might need more than that, especially if we're going to sustain love. Because what about the days when you don't feel affection or attraction or desire, and yet you still want to be loving because you love this person or people, then what do you do? If love stays only in the realm of feeling, there's not an answer to that question. Bell Hooks pushes us beyond the realm of feeling and says, love is an action. It is a practice. And then she names some of what that practice might involve. She says, when we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust. So in those moments where we ask, what does it mean to be loving here? We might diffract that question into what would it look like to express care in this moment? What would it look like to show responsibility for myself, for another person, for my needs, for their needs? What would it look like to show respect here? What does it look like to build trust in this moment? How are our commitments holding us in a supportive way so that we can take the actions of love in the ways that we want.

Michael J. Morris [01:03:56]:
And so on that if love is a practice, these are some of the ways that we practice love.

grace allerdice [01:04:05]:
I'm just really loving your earth sign ninth house so much right now. That was just such a you thing to do, which I love.

Michael J. Morris [01:04:13]:
Me too. Yeah.

grace allerdice [01:04:17]:
I was thinking too. You know, we think of love as something that that happens to us. Right? We get, like, shot by Cupid's arrow or whatever. And I just fell in love, and now I fell out of love. And we think about that with story too. The st the story of what's happening is happening to us. And I think that's something that they have in common as well. Whereas love is something that we create or we grow or we manifest or we we realize, I think, for me.

grace allerdice [01:04:53]:
And that sometimes that's demanding, and sometimes the voice behind that is telling me that I'm actually in the way. I feel called to share a story where I'd gotten in a fight with my husband. I can't remember what about. I'm sure it was really important. But the subject matter isn't important so much as that it was kicking up our shit, and our shit was we were throwing our shit at each other is what was really happening. Shadow boxing, if you will. And I went upstairs and shut the door and just, like, laid down in my pink room and in front of my Lakshmi altar and started cry you know, crying, doing all the things. And I have a picture of, like, us on our wedding, like, on my Lakshmi altar, and it's got a copper scorpion and rose petals and all sorts of lovely things.

grace allerdice [01:05:46]:
And I just really felt myself asking her, like, ma, what do I do right now? Like, I don't know. I'm so angry. I could feel. It's not about be it wasn't about someone being right or wrong. It's that someone is gonna have to laterally shift the perspective where we're not gonna get past our shit story that's happening right now. And I was just, like, straw. I'm like, what is what do I do? I don't see a way out of this. I don't understand how to change how I feel about this situation, much less change the situation.

grace allerdice [01:06:18]:
And I got quiet, and I just felt her lean in. And the advice totally changed my life, and it totally changed my marriage. You have to see him as God right now, exactly as he is, Not this idealized version, not this, oh, you fixed all your flaws. Not this. Like, right now, you have to see him as god or goddess or reality or whatever you wanna call it. And I remember the moment being like, I don't think I can do that, but I just yeah. And but it was like a starting point for me, and it's become a big practice. And then diving deeper into some kind of tantric lineages and meditations and things, that's really a core practice that I didn't know about at the time.

grace allerdice [01:07:13]:
And it totally changed my relationship. And there's something also too about learning about loving a one or loving the one is a way of learning to love the all or is a pathway into loving the all because in our limitation, we can't love the all appropriately. That was the story I felt like I needed to share. And it because it totally changed my life and has really hooked me into all these other it's opened me and also, I think, opened reality to just start pouring into me all of these other knowledge streams that just keep widening and widening that river in a way that's been deeply nourishing and healing about how I see myself in the world, what I what I think is possible, and what I think the medicine is in a particular moment.

Michael J. Morris [01:08:08]:
I mean, thank you for sharing that story. It feels wildly relevant if for no other reason that we are having a conversation about story and love and how appropriate to share a story about your revelation around what it means to love that feels crystalline in some way. And it also makes me think of the episode that you released back in November about now is grace love the world and the kind of, I don't know how you think of it. I experienced it as a kind of like prophecy or prophesying.

grace allerdice [01:08:55]:
That is how I experienced it as well.

Michael J. Morris [01:08:59]:
Great. Which like prophecy is like a whole nother topic. But one of the ways that I think about prophecy is speaking the truth of the times. That's something that Lama Rod Owens says about prophecy when he talks about himself as a prophet, that he's speaking the truth of the times. And my memory of some of the things you talked about in that episode, in that prophesying was loving the world exactly as it is in a way that's very similar to what Lakshmi offered in your moment of need of seeing your husband as God, as is not the idealized version, not the, I fixed all the problems version, but this right here is already divine. And that there is a, seems like a similar call in terms of loving the world exactly as it is, even as we are also working to create worlds that are no longer structured by domination, exploitation, oppression, and violence. Can we also love the world exactly as it is? And then maybe, you know, the most crucial in my life practice ground for that is with the self and practices of self love recognizing that my self is not separate from those who I want to love. Myself is not separate from the world that I want to love.

Michael J. Morris [01:10:40]:
And I can't be loving the world or loving others if I'm incapable or without practice of loving this self that I am. And I guess I'm sort of toggling between lowercase s self and uppercase s self.

grace allerdice [01:10:56]:
This audience can flow with that.

Michael J. Morris [01:10:58]:
I figure. And that's something else that bell hooks writes about in terms of self love. She says that self love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it, our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love, we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else. When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack, which feels similar to, I can see you in your wholeness and your fullness and your divinity rather than your lacks or what you are lacking. Can I also approach myself in that same way? Can I love myself with that unconditional love that maybe I've always longed for someone else to give me and finally awaken to this capital S self and realize that I am the loving companion for myself or my whole life? I am the one who will never leave me. I am the one who will always be here for me, which is not a retreat from the world into an isolated individualism.

Michael J. Morris [01:12:25]:
It's actually, I think, or at least it's been my experience that when I love myself in those ways or practice loving myself in those ways, I come to realize that I am already deeply connected to the world that I belong to, or that I want to love in those same ways that that fountain or channel of unconditional love by giving it to myself, I can move as bell hooks pointed us. She said from a place of fulfillment, I would maybe also use the phrasing of a place of abundance that then I am so much more capable of loving others in the ways that I want to love them. And in that loving, there's some realization that we weren't separate in the first place, that loving myself in these ways is part of what allows me to love you in these ways. And that is, as bell hooks says, the foundation of our loving practice.

grace allerdice [01:13:32]:
Totally. And thinking back about our golden drop from the future that we drop into the present, it's the gaze of that, which then becomes something that can change, but not uncondition like, if you're loving it so that it will change, that's not it. But paradoxically, magically, playfully, funnily, unconditional love as it is. This is good enough. Not only is it good enough, I receive it, and I love it. That is the golden drop from the future of possibility into now. But you have to take the transaction out a bit in order. It's a, you know, it's a funny walk.

grace allerdice [01:14:17]:
And I love what you said there because I think we we share pretty wide paradigms of interdependence and loving myself is loving others and loving others is loving myself. If I'm rejecting the world, if I'm not loving the world, I am also not loving myself. If I have conditions on what the world has to be or do in order to be good enough for me, that is also true of me as within, without, as above, below. Like, that's just how it is. And there's this beautiful dance, I think, with the self love. Like, there becomes a level at which our self love can only complete once it has become love for other. And we're drinking it back from that fountain, and then it becomes an exchange. Like, there's only so which I think is beautiful.

grace allerdice [01:15:12]:
And so we're talking about story. You know, if we're thinking about why have a world, what what could be the evolutionary logic or purpose or telos behind a world with so much differentiation and otherness, or even on a more simplified version, why have two instead of one? I can't really think of a reason except for love. When we have two, we are able to experience love. Everything else is much easier if there's only one of us here. You know? You know? Everything else that, like, getting my way is much easier if there's only one of us here, having absolute total control of what happens, my absolute will being done at all times, much easier if there's one of us here, me being absolutely, like, free and unburdened, easier if there's only one of us here. So I can't really think of another reason why there would be two or three or four or more unless love was it, really. Not because I need other people to think that, but it's really, to me, that evolutionary import impulse towards that creating more and different oh, look at this one. Oh, look at this one.

grace allerdice [01:16:32]:
Oh, look at this one. Like, I can't think of a greater challenge or telos behind that, except I guess you gotta learn to love so that you can feel love and feel that exchange.

Michael J. Morris [01:16:46]:
Oh, that makes me think of so many things. The first one is like, I guess, sort of a reflection of a version of what I heard you describing, which is that perhaps the function of difference is love. The reason or a reason that there is differentiation is so that we can learn to love that which is different from ourselves, which includes ourselves. Because again, every repetition is again and for the first time. So if I can learn to love that, which is different from myself, I can learn to love a different self because I am already becoming a different self. I am not the same as I was, which touches into something about like, there can be a rigid tendency to want to remain the same and the, the anxious attachment to that sameness of ourselves, but also, I mean, I'm thinking sort of geopolitically as well of like the anxious attachment to only those we perceive to be the same as us. And how that is like, not only counter to love. It's maybe a misunderstanding of difference and what maybe we're coming to articulate something about the function of difference is so that we can love including the difference of ourselves, which then means we have to like release the white knuckle grip around.

Michael J. Morris [01:18:32]:
No, I'm going to stay the same. And it's like, what if you're not, and you can learn to love or be in a practice of loving every other version of yourself that there could be, but you can't do that as you're saying, if you're holding the rest of the world to some standard of what it has to be or become in order to be worthy of your love. So there is, I mean, again, that's, we're getting into this place of like, there's not such a distinction between self and other, because how we practice loving the differences of others is also continuous with any practice of loving the differences of ourselves or who else we might be or become. And it also makes me think of this quote from M Archive that I referenced earlier, M Archive After the End of the World by Alexis Pauling Gumbs. And she writes in that book, you can have breathing and the reality of the radical black porousness of love, AKA black feminist metaphysics, AKA all of us, all of us, us, or you cannot. There is only both or neither. There is no either or, there is no this or that. There is only all.

Michael J. Morris [01:19:52]:
And I love that she connects it to the breath and breathing as one of the expressions of this radical black porousness of love. This, there is no either or, there is no this or that, there is only all us, all of us, us, because that is quite literally the reality of breathing. We breathe as a planet, not as an individual, as a planet. And we are all breathing together as this planet in this moment, but also all those who came before us and breathed this air and all those who will come after and take part in this breath. One way we could say is that maybe breathing is part of loving or at the very least breathing has something to teach us about loving.

grace allerdice [01:20:53]:
Yeah. Which is life. Breath is our connection to life.

Michael J. Morris [01:20:57]:
Right. Which brings me to another black feminist teacher, writer, poet, June Jordan, who literally wrote love is life force. She says, I believe the creative spirit is nothing less than love made manifest. I see love as the essential nature of all that supports life. And I'll take a pause there and say, anytime I'm questioning, well, what would love be like in this situation? Or what would love do here? I remind myself that love is the essential nature of all that supports life. And life is a whole nother conversation in terms of what do we mean by life? Because certainly that sentence could be co opted by a right wing anti abortion politics, for example, of like, well, if it supports life, and I think think this is consistent with June Jordan's politics, we have to think about life in terms of what makes a life livable. And in those terms, love is that which supports livability. What makes a life more livable? What makes a future more livable? She says later in that same passage, when we run on love, when we move and change and build and paint and sing and write and foster the maximum fulfillment of our own lives, as well as the maximum fulfillment of other lives that look to us for help, for protection, or for usable clues to the positive excitement of just being alive, then we make manifest the creative spirit of the universe, a spirit existing within each of us and yet persisting infinitely greater than the ultimate capacities of any one of us.

Michael J. Morris [01:22:52]:
And so I brought us, I wanted to bring us to that quote because of the connection between love and breathing. And then you said, which is life. And it's like, yes, love is life force. And that love is existing within each of us and yet persisting infinitely greater than the ultimate capacities of any one of us. So again, these insights around love, moving us beyond the separation of me or you and bringing us into. What did you call it? Like a broad paradigm of interdependence. Yeah.

grace allerdice [01:23:32]:
It's like yet again, their snake continues, but the skin falls off. There's something that will move through it all. And I think that thing will be love and life. The capital L is love and life for me. And I think life includes death. And I think if life and love are the continuous thread, which I think they are in my story, they are, then even at great moments where we're witnessing, where we feel death or where we feel loss, there's still somewhere we can hop on for the ride of the life and the love. There's somewhere. And I think standing in the story of witnessing or standing in the sandpaper of the story of, I love myself unconditionally.

grace allerdice [01:24:20]:
I love the world unconditionally as possible as I can hooks us onto that ride in some way so that we can writhe and dance with it in real time moving through the different shapes of impermanence, I think.

Michael J. Morris [01:24:36]:
Yeah. I love that you made the point of death as part of life because then to say that love is life force does not mean to try to deny the reality of impermanence, but maybe it starts to raise questions. Like what does it mean to die? Well, What does it mean to support others in dying well, rather than dying due to senseless violence, for example, like what is the loving way of holding death as part of the story of life?

grace allerdice [01:25:13]:
As a death midwife, I think about that a lot. Yeah.

Michael J. Morris [01:25:17]:
Well, and even, even the framing of, of that as in my story, death is part of life. And again, reminding us that it matters what stories we use to tell stories with that how we tell the story of love and life and death and breath and our connection to one another and the fountain of unconditional love that flows through me and to me and from me. These are all stories and how we tell these stories makes a difference in terms of how we are then able to live.

grace allerdice [01:26:01]:
That feels like a really beautiful bow to me for our conversation. Is there anything else that you feel like you'd like to share or presence while we're we're here?

Michael J. Morris [01:26:12]:
Just a lot of gratitude. I'm really, I'm always so grateful to talk with you and to think with you and to be in the cauldron space of, of finding and generating and co creating ideas together.

grace allerdice [01:26:29]:
Yeah. I feel the same way. I feel like I'm always just smiling super hard and nodding my head like a goofball the whole time. And I'm really grateful that you took the time to be here and be in this co creative space with me and really model, not just talk about how stories and how love can break together in a creative way. So thank you for that. Mhmm. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a few moments to subscribe to the show, leave us a review, and share the episode.

grace allerdice [01:27:11]:
These small tasks help our independent podcast so much. Be sure to also check out the show notes below to learn more about any resources, guests, or sponsors that we shared with you today. Our intro and outro music was created by artists Erin Palovic and Jared Kelly. Our podcast logo was created by Elaine Stevenson, and this show is produced by Softer Sound Studio. Thank you for being here. Be well. Peace.