Amy Tuttle: Collective Change Conversations with The Hive

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and structures of belonging.  For this week's episode, Troy Bronsink and Joey Taylor speak with Amy Tuttle as a part of a live podcast series with The Hive about Collective Change.

Amy Tuttle has supported local and international efforts in the field of Creative Arts Programming for the past 10 years. She is the Executive Director of WordPlay Cincy. Tuttle has an MA in “Community Arts: Arts in Transformation” and her experiences range from leading professional trainings around the world to offering creative arts workshops/classes with local organizations. Tuttle loves engaging in community-building via expression/art-making and she especially loves supporting Teaching Artists as they share their gifts with the community. She has also served the community as an Arts & Healing practitioner, supporting individuals and communities with creative expression, story-based connection, and trauma-support. She believes that practices of re-connection and expression play an important role in personal growth, community-building, and cultural transformation. Locally, Tuttle has worked closely with Indigo Hippo, Price Hill Will, Baker Hunt, Imago Earth Center, Cincinnati Arts Association, Pones Inc., and Grailville.

Troy Bronsink founded the Hive in spring of 2016 with a desire to collaborate with facilitators from various traditions and backgrounds, making space for transformative individual and group encounters. He brings 25 years of experience in small group facilitation ranging from corporate consulting to community organizing, to spiritual formation. Through the Hive, Troy has developed the curriculum for The Common Good Fellowship, as well as hosting the weekly podcast, From the Hive, interviewing local and global contemplative leaders about their work and practice.  Troy is a member of the Living School, an ordained Presbyterian minister, retreat leader, author, spiritual director, entrepreneurship coach, author, speaker, and consultant. He and his family are residents in Northside.  

The Hive  is a grassroots mindfulness community curating multi-week classes, workshops and a Membership community. It has been formed by facilitators asking the question, "What are the resources that lie within our vast lineages, traditions, and modalities of healing, and how can we place them in service of the common good?" In this series we’re talking to The Hive’s 6 core faculty members, all of whom have a unique perspective on navigating collective change.

The shared poem was What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte.

The music excerpt was Navajo Prayer (When You Were Born) composed by Jody Healy.

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.

Transcript

First of all, thanks for being here. For folks listening, watching  I think Amy and I've known each other for 10 years, maybe. I think that's about right. I know you've got a wealth of experience in rites of passage that you've done the work, but also that you're a guide that helps folks in the transitions in life. So I'm interested to dig into all of those things, but I also know that there was a time where you talked a lot about this as art. There was public art you would talk about building art experiences. Certainly that intersects with your work with wordplay and words and poetry and that. But when we were talking about this interview, you mentioned beauty and I'm just curious how you would describe the evolution from art to the notion of beauty and  how much change is a part of that.

I think being alive today inside of this  layered and entirely multifaceted overly sensorial experience, we have so much to digest and to process every day. We have access to more information than humans have ever had access to, we can watch the world fall apart and be rebuilt in the matter of like moments, minutes, even, and how to compass, how to orient, how to like keep a sense of self, a sense of soul, a sense of connection and, I'll use this word one more time, orientation. Inside of that really has my attention. There's so many different skills that we need to be able to process and to be able to engage to access and to respond. And art making for me has always been one of those. I think there's all of these worlds of art for social protest collaborative art making for social change and the arts are this way that humans have skillfully and beautifully express themselves outward toward the world for a long time. There are also tools for us to internally process to like write poetry to the experiences that we absorb that we see that we engage with and to try to make sense, make meaning of our worlds, which can be nonsensical. There's a lot happening in the world that does not make any sense and how do I as a human, like one little teeny little human, how do I deal? How do I deal with all of that?  As I've become more and more attuned to my, my way in the world of navigating activism, navigating contemplation,  navigating the digestion of the world as it is and orienting myself,  art making and those skills have really translated as beauty as beauty. And how can we stay in touch with this inheritance that we have to alchemize to transform, to use our bodies and our minds, our intellect, our spirit, our skills, our tools, our connections to take  anything and create something of beauty, beauty to me feels accessible. It feels innate. it Feels inherited by everybody.  It feels like it's not objective. lIke we might have very different opinions on what beauty is and how to make beauty out of something.  So beauty is some sort of process that's deeply personal and can also be truly connected and collective as well.

I've been to a few of your classes and how do you see that play out actually in class? As a faculty, as we're putting together material for the next two years I have some thoughts as you were talking about, I'm curious what you thought about that encounter with beauty being coming outward, that there's different perspectives of what it is, but then there's honoring that something is coming out from someone. How does it play out in an actual class? 

Okay. So, in our classes we have people coming from all over the region, all over the city and beyond. To sit together and we're all coming in with like a kaleidoscopic experiences, you know, like your kaleidoscope is really different than my kaleidoscope and we might have some common pieces and parts and shapes and colors. But, what happens when we really learn to tune in and listen to each other and to put those pieces and parts and colors together to create something new. And so I think collaboration in all of the different acts of collaboration that happened inside of our classes is one of the spaces that we start to engage and interact with beauty making. And to see like, there's differences, there's commonalities, our stories my Connect and thread and weave together in a way that makes perfect sense, or there may be dissonance that emerges and there's a disagreement and we have something to work out together inside of a conversation. And so for me, the conversational nature of collaboration that emerges in our classes, which could be The collaborative process of a conversation, it could be collaborative art making, it could be creating a collaborative poem. It could be collaborating to generate inquiries or questions that are worth asking. What questions are relevant in our world today? Can we spend 30 minutes together asking as many of those questions as possible without answering any of them? And would that be enough? Is that beautiful?

As a guide, as someone who values,  transformation and accompanying folks on transformation, tell us a little bit about what that's like to be an accompanier, even if that's your word, what it would mean to guide someone through, in a time of transformation and to be able to Bear witness to that. What's scary about it? What's life giving? 

Great. I love to talk about this. Thank you for the opportunity. It doesn't actually come up as often as I would like for it to come up. So I just found myself wondering why that is. I don't know. But I just somatically found an excitement rise up. Like my heart went, Oh, yay. A chance to talk about guiding. And, I'll speak practically and then I can kind of edge out into some of the accompaniment pieces guiding for me is, is happens in a couple of specific ways. One is what I call threshold guiding and what we call threshold guiding. It's not just my term and threshold guiding is being a support person for someone during a major life change. And so that might be,  death and dying, the process of dying. And that's one that I've really become familiar with and spent a lot of time with people on that edge.  It could be the edge of mental health. And, either finding oneself, falling into a pit of unknown or a vast unknown space of trying to, to calibrate to the mind and how complicated the minds can be, or the process of emerging from that. And then, re encountering life. Like, what does my life look like after a mental health crisis or opportunity?  That's something that I guide people through. What does my life look like before I have a child and then after I have a child? So threshold guiding is really like taking a look at the thing that is about to change. Who am I beforehand? What am I saying yes to what am I saying no to. And then who do I want to be afterwards and how do I integrate all of that together to make something that makes sense like a story that makes has some coherence to it. Back to orientation back to coherence. A lot of that is guiding guide work. And then I also guide folks through wilderness rites of passage. And that's a whole really rich and super awesome world. Um, part of 

that's not just a metaphor. You go into, we'll 

go into the wilderness. I'm part of a really awesome international collective of guides called the wilderness guides council, deeply engaged with them. Have elders from all over the world to provide like really awesome support and coaching toward myself. And then I guide people, on all sorts of different configurations of just really dropping in and listening to themselves and their souls in wild spaces. The wilderness is a mirror for the human soul and psyche when you're out, severed from all of the comforts of your day to day life, all the distractions, all of the people, all of these things that want our attention. That can sometimes create reactivity or a response. It's not as in sold or fleshed out as we want it to be.  Sometimes just taking a step out into a space. It's a little more wild. We can be mirrored by nature really beautifully and we can start to hear ourselves. And so for me, one of the greatest joys in my life is accompanying people through change. This changes, you know, this is kind of trite, but change is one of our only constants and it's just true. Like we're always on some sort of myself included journey of change. And there's so many surprises for better or worse in life. And how do we encounter them? Like, who am I going to be to this thing that is unfolding? It's not about why is this happening to me, but what for? And, sometimes it just takes like a little support. 

Just say that again. That was a good, that shouldn't be just passed by. Go for that again. 

It's not about why is this happening to me. It's about what for what for and can I connect my experience to a larger sense of purpose and I'm thinking about that poem we started with in this like, what if I'm not an accident amongst other accidents, like what if this is on purpose. And if it was on purpose, then what are some of these other parts of my livingness, other realities, whether that's my soul or my sense of spirituality or just my sense of creativity and my community and my connection. What are those telling me about my Why? Like, why is it important to be alive? And I just really think that in life, we're meant to accompany each other through those phases, through those moments, it's really completely and entirely normal as a human to go through massive life changes. It is an up and down process and how do we love ourselves? Do that?  

As I'm listening to you talk, maybe I can try to just pull a thread. So you talked about beauty. You talked about how so much of life doesn't make sense. And then you talked about how, this act of guiding people through thresholds through change in their life is an act of creating coherence. So is. Is creating beauty and creating coherence. Are those synonyms is, would you say they're the same, or how would you differentiate those?

 This is a lot of our work with wordplay um, it's really hard. This question that we sat with this, like, what do I suspect I've inherited that might be worth building into, right?  Where am I going is really what that question is about. What's next? Asking young people to encounter that question before supporting them in clarifying like what happened, and where am I right now is almost impossible. And  I've asked plenty of young people, what do you want to do in the future? And it's a dizzying question. It's like almost an unfair question. Like we got to stop and make some sense out of things. And what's interesting because I actually quite paradoxically believe in the unknown, in the mystery. I don't think we need to make sense out of everything. I don't think we can make sense out of everything. I have certainly not been able to make sense out of plenty of things. It's part of life, but, When we can create a story, understand a story, pull some meaning, it can give us this thread, this through line, this backbone, a spine, some image perhaps even that we can then work with. And I do think that's beautiful. I think that's beauty. Making. So yeah, I do think beauty making and coherence have some sort of relationship though some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen don't make any sense at all. And mystery is super beautiful and there's plenty of experiences that I've had that if I even tried to make some art out of them, it would like ruin the experience. And so also just with a big dose of like, yes. And to that question. 

So,  and folks and change, change being what is, the human experience or the, the experience of life of, of living as to be changing, to be becoming, I'm kind of thinking of a conversation earlier when we were talking about ease. Also, the way that I think you talk reverently about grief and the way that, I experience you as joy. Those all are like the static electricity that comes off of change, it seems like. Like, change is happening, and like a Van de Graaff generator, your hair sticks up. And it can stick up as grief, it can stick up as Joy, it can stick up as those things. wHat is it like to re enliven or introduce that charge in a situation in contrast to a dampened way of a lot of us move through life or, or life kind of can dampen us and so then we aren't sensing Yeah. Joy, ease, grief. Just to give some context, we meet at the coffee shop. Amy walks in and there is something energetically that just moves to, there's reverence and spark happening at once. And I think that there's a lot of folks, folks here that I get that experience with. There's a lot of the other facilitators, but you do that in a unique way. And so I maybe just want to invite you to tell a story of what it's like to walk between that dampened state and that spark state, whatever comes to mind for you. 

Wow. That's a, a question that comes from a story that holds a lot of potency and deep relevance for me in this moment. What I hear in that is like how to navigate how to walk through many worlds and many experiences and what stays constant and what changes along the way, how to stay alive out there. really do think we live in a world that can flatten you in like four seconds. It's so easy to go flat. It's so easy to go flat. And when I say go flat, what I mean is, become exhausted,  go gray in the vision, visual field and like the sight of things, to numb out, to cut the cords of connection and sometimes on purpose because it's crazy. It really is. I just want to affirm crazy out there and that's coming from me in this body politic in this moment. So if it's crazy out there for me, I know it's crazy out there. And, that's one of the myriad of promises from the world, is that like, if you want to go flat, like, go flat. And sometimes, you like, need to go flat for a minute, that's okay. That's a reasonable response to being alive. Completely reasonable response, response to being alive. Is to have crises still like, feel depressed to feel stressed out to, encounter shadow. So like walk amongst some of the darker spaces of our, of our world, of our livingness, of emotionality of connection. And so just normalizing that for a moment then also pulling in and starting to like weave ever so gently the thread of magic, and aliveness, and beauty making, and,  song, and the senses. And like, part of how we encounter this opportunity every day, every moment to like live into our livingness, one might even call it like birthright. If anything, our birthright is to be alive, is to start to stitch in the senses and this like, what do I see? What do I really see? What do I hear? What do I really hear? What do I feel? What do I really feel? Is it okay, can I give myself permission to really see and feel and hear, to taste, to like, uh, even edge and start to flesh out into some of the senses that are a little more nuanced, less easily accessible, And then I'll add one more layer, which is just the space of imagination, which I think is another birthright, the space of meaning making, which we sometimes as human overuse, we overuse meaning making, we rush too quick to making meaning out of something that maybe doesn't need to have any meaning, But it's part of our imaginative inheritance. It's part of our birthright that we're imaginal creatures. And we actually have the capacity to like, not only imagine, but then to build the worlds that we vision and imagine. And I think that's one of the most spectacular things about humans, especially about young people is that like anything you can imagine is real. It's real and you can create it. And I know that could easily sound like it's not grounded, but I actually think it's really quite practical and I think it can become even more practical with basic skilling and tooling up there's human skills that we've forgotten about that plenty of other cultures have not forgotten about. That might be like dreaming. It might be the artistic skills, it might be the world of songs and singing. The importance, I had several conversations today that were gorgeous about the importance of food and food culture and how what's left in the pot after you make something really delicious is all of like, not only the wisdom, but the best part of the meal and then you make a meal out of what. Is left in the pot after the meal, and there's something really special about that. And that's so nourishing. So imagination is nourishing and it also helps us build something we can live into and believe in, that has the opposite effect. It's like the antidote to the flattening,  that the world also offers us. 

So I'm going to follow up on that question. some of it was listening to last week's, conversation that Shonda and I had and, the hive, sometimes we can sound theoretical because we're observing the thing. And so the podcast might start to feel that way. And you're giving these physical, like, I can sense this, that what a lot of y'all might not know is like as Executive director of wordplay, Amy's job is. Like today we were talking like learning tax codes and working with spreadsheets and you're working to direct boards  so how have you brought in your senses to those moments that a lot of us would call mundane or even  something you pass over in order to get to the sensual imaginative space.

I think it's  first, it's just true that there's some things that are boring.  

Shoot. That was not the answer I was looking for. 

And  There's like, there's just really practical stuff that sometimes has to happen. And,  I started in the world of art as a mosaic mural artist. It's my deepest, longest, love in the arts, and I studied with Isaiah Zager, who's this really amazing artist in Philly, and he's probably installed hundreds at this point of murals around the city, but also around the world. And, what I learned from the process of creating a mosaic mural is that everything finds its place. There's a purpose to every single piece, and you don't ever really throw anything away. That each piece kind of finds some sort of harmonious connection to another piece and there's some practicalities that have the felt sense of simply being a task. And that task, though, fits into, it has a place in the larger harmonics of the thing. And so, for me, at Wordplay, the work is super soulful. It's very oriented to the articulation of story and of narrative, narrative medicine, the ways in which, making art and articulating, expressing ourselves can support us in our human ing, in our human journey. And there's pieces inside of that process that are just entirely essential to the harmonics of the whole thing. Maybe one other piece I'll layer to that is that like, whatever I'm bringing to the table is what I'm bringing to the table. So I might ask myself in the midst of kind of a boring task what's happening in my interiority. If I'm in that space that day, it might be like, well, what's happening. It's like, what am I listening to while I'm completing our, tax return? You know, like, so, So different ways of layering beauty into things that I think can certainly be mundane. And then also doesn't the mundane and or the profane really highlight the special and the sacred when it happens, kind of gives it. A little extra sense of magic. 

 So wherever it is that you find yourself tonight, today, depending on where you're calling in from and where you're coming in from, find a way to sit that feels really cozy, comfortable to you. Maybe the feet or the lower body finds a point of connection. also perhaps the spine finds a way to be easy,  at ease. The eyes.  And the hands that keep us busy working all day  and just rest,  maybe find their way to the lap.  Sometimes they say that if the palms are facing up, it's a way to receive wisdom or blessing or information or curiosity. Sometimes people say if the palms are facing down, it's a way to release.  Maybe there's something tonight that you'd like to just, let go. And say perhaps tonight you came in with, a fist or two fists.  You know, sometimes we have days that cause us to clench our hands. see if you can loosen, enlighten, and let them go.  And now, an invitation to focus for just a few moments on the breath and the deliciousness of breathing. Breathing in,  breathing out, and simply start by noticing. There's no need to change the breath, just notice the breath.  Now perhaps a deepening of the breath.  Invite the breath to  enter and expand.  A little bit deeper, a little bit further into your body  each in breath   and allow the exhale to carry you,  carry you a little bit closer  each exhale to presence,  simply  being here  with yourself, with us right now and  somewhere on the body that just needs a little support   and let yourself on purpose, on purpose, breathe into that hand,  offering support to yourself  and warmth.   And maybe find another place that could use a little warmth or support and change the hands and breathe into that space.   from this space of love for breathing,  just notice  Where you're at right now,  notice  how you feel physically you, what kind of emotions are emerging or with you,   perhaps there's even a seed of hopefulness.  What are you looking forward to?   And simply notice.   and let the mind, for just a moment, focus on a seed, a future seed, something that you're looking forward to.  Give it a name, a word, or a phrase, something simple.  And just scoop up that seed in your hand, this word or phrase of something you're looking forward to, and set it on top of your heart.  And we'll just carry this with us for the rest of our time together. You can slowly, gently start to blink your eyes to open if they're closed.  And take a moment with these fresh eyes, this fresh perspective to look around.  Just notice who and what you notice. Maybe it's a space you've seen a million times.  Maybe it's totally new to you. Just lens yourself toward curiosity.   All right. And we're gonna, with the same  level of curiosity just listen with all of the different kinds of ears that us humans have to listen. We've got truly like a million ways to listen to a poem. This is one of my Favorite. And there are perhaps some seeds, some connections to our theme tonight, which the theme of our series, which really has to do with birth right, birth right. This is called what to remember when waking by David White.  What to remember when waking. In that first,  hardly noticed moment  in which you wait,  coming back to this life from the other, more secret, movable, and frighteningly honest world where everything began.  There is a small opening,  there is a small opening into the new day.  There's a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live.  What you can live wholeheartedly  will make plans enough for the vitality that is hidden in your sleep. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.  Here's where it gets really juicy.  To be human is to become visible. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others to remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.  You are not a troubled guest upon this earth.  You are not an accident amidst other accidents.  You  were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you just emerged.  Now, looking through the slanting light, Of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything,  everything that can be.  What urgency calls you to your one love?  What shape  waits in the seed of you?  What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?  Is it waiting in the fertile sea?  In the trees beyond the house?  In the life you can imagine for yourself.  In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk,  what to remember when waking  by David White. 

 The story that is in the way of the collective living into its birthright is disconnection from purpose and this wash of forgetfulness or amnesia that purpose can be a tool of orientation and that we actually have all of the skills that we could possibly need to build a world that's worth living in. A world that we want to live in, a world that we want to raise our children in, a world that we feel really, really good about passing on to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation.  We are constantly surviving a haze, and that haze fragments us, and it puts us in this space of  feeling like we Might even have to like super duper overly struggle and work really hard to even know what our purpose is And so the purpose itself becomes like this mythos that's almost Untouchable and the thing is that it can be so accessible. It can be so accessible purpose is highly accessible What is it that you suspect about yourself Today that's juicy enough and meaningful enough for you to live into and to create a purpose with Today, tomorrow, and then also what's a bigger vision version of that, when you flesh it out on a larger scale, what does it look like? And so I think we've been confused into a state of lack of coherence in which we forgot that we're building the world. We're making the rules. If we don't like the rules that we have, we can recreate them truly, and we can change them. And,  this is a cry for creativity. And it's a cry for skilling up in a way that makes it possible for passion to meet vision, to meet social change, to be respectful, responsible, and full of integrity. What's it like for us to collaborate on that kind of a level? To pull our chins up from our individuality and to really try to connect in a deeply, deeply meaningful way. So fill the world with color. think it's important to layer in. That the space where the vision or the esoteric meets the pragmatic and practical is really a space for us to flesh and live into. That it's. It's. It's not just about saying pretty things and having beautiful language and vision, that's not real or realistic. It's about really finding a pragmatic articulation that discipline is the articulation of dedication that we can do it, we can create change. It's beautiful if we partner or marry, the sense of beauty with practicality. 

So in the spirit of practicality,  tomorrow you wake up and you say, purpose is accessible. How are you articulating your purpose tomorrow morning? As you wake up, what's the question you're asking yourself, what is the thing, how are you articulating it? What does that look like? 

I think there are so many different ways to show up to yourself and to your purpose on a daily basis. And the inquiry is one of the most effective tools to do so. And so often for myself in the morning, I might listen for a really good question for the day. And the question might be, here's a couple of favorites one,  and the series sometimes rocks my world a little bit, but like, who am I? Am I who I think I am, and how would I ever know, can I face that set of questions today? I might ask something like, what does integrity look like for me today? Or tomorrow I might wake up and say, what do I need to forgive? How can I forgive? What's a radical act of beauty? So I think that this living on purpose can be really well accompanied or guided by questions and beautiful questions, audacious questions, questions that pull us into like deeper senses of our self, questions that connect us with each other to, another great question is like, why does this matter? And if we show up to something over and over again, and we realize it doesn't matter, then find another way to invest your like precious energy, like find another place to put your leg. It's okay. Doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter anymore. Maybe it matters to somebody else. Why is it important to me to show up here? Why did I come here tonight? So questions over answers. And one step at a time, and this is especially important for me, but the shift out of perfectionism into a space of flexibility, fluidity, and creativity. So that,  can I measure myself doing my best with a sense of rest and ease? Like we talked about earlier with a sense of growth mindset that I know, like I'm growing, I'm trying, I'm connecting, I'm trying, so that when I encounter my barriers, which are plentiful, that I can like, just be a little kinder to myself about it. Cause if I can be kind to myself about my barriers, I can be kinder to someone else about their barriers. And ultimately that's all I want to do is have some mercy around the fact that we're all constantly encountering and surrounded by massive barriers. So can I do that for myself too? The medicine that I put out there that I think is medicine. Would I take it? Is it good enough for me? Did I practice it? Do I guide myself? Who guides me? Find questions worth living into. 

I wanted to stop you right then and say, who guides you 

I'm really lucky in my life. I'm going to answer this question in a couple of different ways. One is like the human way.  I'm really lucky in my life  to have elders, people who are legitimately elders in my life. They're like beyond mentor into the space of like passing along and handing over what they've lived their life into to make sure that I understand it and to support me in integrating and articulating it. And they're people that hold accountability and they guide me with a lot of graciousness and a consistent element from them is that they are constantly telling me that they're learning from me, which blows my mind because I'm learning so much from them. I can't even honestly imagine what they could learn from me. So elders or mentors are people who have lived life for a while. So I lean on them and they guide me. And I would also say in the opposite, in like, Purely, deeply as important direction children and my life is full of young people and I always want it to be that way and they push me to the edge of myself all the time in ways that are pretty shocking and often have to do with compassion and whether I can have a heart that's big enough to meet them, whether I can like really encounter them with audacity and courage, courageous encounters, children provoke that and guide that in me. And then also like my friends and my family and my community and people on the thresholds I spoke about, especially folks who are dying, like a lot to say about that.

 can a person, grow past their leader because you're grateful and there's a wholeness to you and you attribute it to elders. So how do you deal with kids in CPS do you tell them what is it a story? What's going on there? 

Yeah. Wow. Okay. So I heard a couple of different things in that question, which is a really  question. One is what happens when a student outgrows their teacher? And how do we encounter that? And it's a common question. Dynamic of growth and power and also purely evolution. And so what I would hope is that we would permit and create possibilities within which each coming generation can outgrow the generation before them. That would be in my perspective, progress. If the folks coming up behind me expand beyond capacities that maybe I had a chance to really explore in my lifetime, then my greatest hope is to be able to celebrate for them and to put aside dynamics of power and concern. But I think what happens often is that we're really as a culture as a society, especially in the West, we're pretty nervous about people outpacing and outgrowing us. And we often like keep gates and we set boundaries in front of people. And we make things really hard for them on purpose, just so that we don't have to do the painful thing of seeing something outlive us. And it's all about it. How we encounter our own death and this, like, guess what I'm going to die. And at some point, I hope that whatever I passed along gets integrated in some sort of way becomes beautiful. And I especially hope that those coming up behind me, have everything they need to like live an even more audacious and beautiful life than I did. So that feels like a power dynamic that really wants more attention, especially in our culture.

What you just said around the bigger fear of just dying one day and not wanting to like go holding on. I've heard from so many elders of mine that It's like the little deaths each day that kind of apprentice you for that,  and I think crossing thresholds is can be a form of dying because there's something scary about letting go into a bigger role or a Even if a newness that's being born that is a, a scary threshold. I think of folks who maybe haven't had that space held for them and  the cumulative effects of that over the long haul. And I'm thinking of someone specific and I could probably, it's my dad. He's probably not gonna listen to this podcast. And if he did, hi dad, we'll talk about this over a beer later. grew up just like unstable family had to grow up way too fast and just hard nose, like hardworking blue collar Pittsburgh dude. And maybe I'm trying to answer my own question here, but I want to hear what you've learned in relationships.  he adopted me when I was six and just rules, structure, like we're going to work hard, beating that into me. And my mom was kind of the one that was softer and would maybe hold space for thresholds and that kind of thing. I've actually seen my, my dad, and it was him having, uh, him adopting two more little ones when I was in high school. And every single time I come back home after being away for six months,  I've seen a new part of my dad emerging. Someone that I think is learning how to cross thresholds in the softness and into an intern nurturing fatherhood. that's, That's been a long journey for me to be in a relationship with my dad as that happens, because that threshold crossing is, it's a long journey. So I'm just all that to say, what are you learning in your relationships, maybe with family, maybe you in a relationship with someone who maybe didn't have that threshold space held for them over, over the long haul.

There's an accumulative effect of being alive. And as we continue to like slide down this timeline of a combination of time and experience, relationships, trials, errors, traumas, successes, we have the opportunity to accumulate and add all of these layers into our existence and experience. And sometimes that can be super Um, anything from overwhelming to joyful. And  there's certain predictable human ways of encountering this kind of accumulation. One is to learn to shed along the way to ask, and this is like that little death work to ask, what can I no longer carry with me from this point into next point, even if this point to the next point is me. Going from this conversation back through that door to my home later, where I'm certainly not going to be able to carry this back with me, even though I'd like to. There's some imprint of it that will come, but the whole thing will not come. And so this, what can I no longer carry with me? The little deaths helps us to, accessibly deal with the accumulation of life when we don't know how to do that. And we do live in a culture that maybe on purpose sometimes doesn't teach us how to do that.  Then we end up developing rules and the rules, I think, are about trying to navigate and create safety,  trying to understand how to, like, lens through all of the accumulation in a way that makes coherence. That makes sense. That's protective, which accumulation also has a protective effect for us as humans, too. The more work we do with the little deaths, the more we're honestly like a fleshy, soft heart out there feeling everything. And that is a beautiful experience and also a challenging experience. And so I think there's two different kinds of rules and way more than that, but I'll just talk about two. There's the rules that are meant to control and they're kind of flattening. They're like black and white rules. They're kind of on a gray scale and they can support. Specifically security and they're really, really useful because often they keep us safe and like, Oh, that's really useful. Sometimes we need those. We go through periods of life where like, we actually just need some iron rules. And then there's rules of engagement with life that I would call generative rules. And these are the rules that are like, what are my codes?  What are my ethics? What are my values? My guiding principles? Who guides me? What concepts guide me? How do I flesh out into this world? And, one rule of engagement might be to encounter as often as possible, the little deaths  and to stay curious about them and see what happens.  I also want to just spend a moment addressing something that you brought up that I think is really important, which is around compassion and patience for folks in our lives, as well as humility.  It's not my job to layer the way I've made meaning out of life onto my people, and especially not to enforce any sort of rules of engagement I've created upon their rules of engagement. We're all just trying to navigate, and we're on some sort of spectrum from survival to thrival, and How do we just genuinely support each other in that and like really meet each other where we are? like there's plenty of people in my life who are governed by Rules that I personally wouldn't want to be governed by but they need them and they need them in this moment And can I meet them there in a way that also contributes to their sense of safety? so they don't feel like every time I'm around they're getting blown up by my grandiose ideas or My rules in life. How do I meet you where you're at? How do I like, love into the space of what fathering means to you. And I think we have quite a lot of value around persuasion and being persuasive and kind of like pulling people on one end of a spectrum to another. And I just kind of wonder about what it's like to grow our capacity for encounter without forcing change. That there's something ironically or paradoxically that happens when we encounter each other in that kind of  spaciousness that is kind of exactly what change needs in order to be like safe enough to try. And so spaciousness.  Toward our people, toward our places goes a super duper, super long way in actually showing up in a way that's loving. And maybe it's possible over the course of time to like, start to co create generative rules inside of those relationships where it's like, Well, what kind of practice or whatever between us might, grow warmth? How can we grow warm together? How could we, Like, I see you're carrying this like pretty stressful thing it's been on your shoulders for a long time. Uh, What would it be like to maybe like set it down a little bit and just open up the bag and just tell me a little bit about it so I can understand it. And then you can choose to put it back on, or you can even choose to leave it there, but like, up to you. So, co creating together. difficult because there is a sense of a larger collective urgency at,  the kind of spacious, generative, nourishing change that people need in order to like, genuinely, radically change,  comes up against. Urgent timelines in a sense that like the world also really needs us to try to pick our pace up.  And I don't know what to do with that. That's one of those questions I ask all the time. I'm like, how far can I push this thing to the edge without breaking anybody with being respectful and affectionate? But also like, just putting reminders out there that like, Hey, we're actually really up on some edges, like whether that's edges that create a serious lack of safety for vulnerable people in our communities to ecological edges and what's happening on our planet right now, which is completely undeniable and yet something that we're encountering in such a strange way. So all we have is time, but also that's not true. What do we do with that?

you said, if we have a birthright as a collective. It's to live. I also think that maybe one of the stories that's preventing the collective from living into its birthright is the fact that we're all going to die. And I heard you talk a little bit about,  from an evolutionary perspective, what death could or maybe even should look like. But I wanted to ask you, as you think about your own death, What do you want to be, or to look like on the other side of that, maybe that's a legacy question, I guess 

There's so much mystery around death, we don't really know what happens in that space, but there's some little sense that I have that All of these things that people say that sometimes sound kind of hokey, there might be some truth to it around like that. We actually encounter some form of rebirth or this experience of being like sent back out into life. And so that death itself is like the ultimate threshold. It's the threshold of our ego. It's this question of like, what can I no longer carry. The answer is my ego, like for real. And I've been maybe practicing that through little deaths. My whole life I've been practicing, like, how do I like reorient this awesome, powerful tool of the ego to be helpful.  And with death, it's like, I, as a capital, I know I can't take any of that with me. I can't take any of that with me. It doesn't transfer. It seems that it doesn't really transfer or it radically transforms and changes on the other side of the threshold of death. So if death is the space where I can no longer take myself, then what of myself do I want to leave behind? And that to me feels like legacy. So when I encounter for myself on a future spectrum, which I really do hope it's Far in the future. I really love being alive. So I like would love a like a far in the future experience with that. But like, when I encounter that space, what would feel so delicious to me would be if I felt spent, like if I felt like, okay, yeah, like I did that Amy thing, Amy Jacqueline Tuttle was alive and, I enjoyed that experience and that experience. brought some sort of beauty into existence. I don't think I really get to control the impact that I make. I don't think I really get to control the way I'm remembered. And I don't think I really get to control my legacy really. All of that is entirely subjective is what I'm learning. And the people remaining choose. And then after a couple of generations, it's gone, gone. You're just gone. It's like you never existed, which is probably also the ultimate freedom. So in that space of a threshold moment of death, where I can no longer carry myself, how can I have a sense of, dare I use the word satisfaction in the experience of being alive? Maybe even ah, that would be amazing to like, get to that threshold and be like, Whoa,  I can't believe it. Wow. Ah, would be incredible. It'd be incredible.  You know, also I suspect there will be pain, because wherever grief is the expression of that which we love that we lose and there's at least some aspects of life that we love enough that we'll feel grief to know that we're not coming back. Um, Something that I've learned about death from Spending quite a lot of time with death is that we each only really, truly live one time. Like every single person is a one time anomaly, like an effect, there will never be another Chris LaRue, like there just will not, you're Chris LaRue. That's it. This is Chris LaRue. This is like the opportunity for the universe as it is to express itself in the shape and form of Chris LaRue and that's going to happen one time. And what an amazing, spectacular and completely intimidating gift to receive. And once you've lived out your life cycle and you cross that threshold and you can't carry Chris LaRue any further into whatever happens on the other side,  then Chris LaRue has completed its story. It had a beginning, it had a middle, it had an end, it's finished. It's complete. And that's really amazing, but it's also really kind of intimidating. We kind of live in some sort of world of second chances and yeah, for sure. Second chances, but you, you just live one time. That's it. So like, enjoy it also. Enjoy it. Like, find ease, Like, it's okay to find ease. There's a song that I'm not gonna sing, I'll just say the words, but it goes, When you were born, you cried, and the world rejoiced. Live your life. So that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice