Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Conversation about relearning the kinship worldview with author, horse-drawn woodwright, and renowned storyteller, D. Firth Griffith. Unshod is a podcast and community that believes to rebel, we must pause, that we live with Earth as Earthlings, that we must approach creativity, curiosity, and compassion in conversation.… but we must approach this ground UNSHOD. This has nothing to do with "saving the world." It has everything to do with leaving the right kind of tracts in the mud.
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Any Human Power and Writing Our Way to A Future We Would Be Proud To Leave Behind with Manda Scott
Have you ever wondered if our society's obsession with control is writ in the stories we tell? Perhaps, even, carried in our stories themselves?
Join Manda Scott and D Firth Griffith as we humbly challenge conventional thought-beliefs and unravel the tapestry of community and cooperation that could very well reshape our modern lives and relationship as nature, with nature.
Join our online community HERE to discuss this episode with us!
Our conversation spans the cultural evolution from trauma to an initiation-oriented society and culture, drawing inspiration from thinkers like Francis Weller and Tyson Yungaporta. We ponder the spiritual resonance of ancient sites and their ties to the cosmos, offering a fresh perspective on how we might realign with natural cycles in our control-driven world. As we navigate the narrative of a mytho-political thriller and thrutopic novel, Any Human Power, Manda's latest book, we uncover the creative journey sparked by shamanic visions and the emerging concept of Thrutopia—a harmonious future that we would be proud to leave behind.
With a thoughtful examination of generational divides and the dual nature of technology, we share stories of digital innovation and connection. Our discussion features compelling anecdotes, including a grandmother's gaming bond with her grandchild, illustrating technology's potential for both connection and existential pondering. We explore the delicate balance between dopamine-driven instant gratification and serotonin-fueled communities of respect, urging a shift towards gratitude, compassion, and presence in our digital age.
Read Manda's book HERE. Learn more about Thrutopia HERE.
Read Daniel's latest book HERE. Pre-Order Daniel's next book HERE.
How are you? How has been life over the last? Maybe what six months, nine months, since we last spoke?
Manda Scott:Good. Good, because the book has come out and it's yeah, I'm really happy with how it's going.
D Firth Griffith:Wonderful, I know when you write a book, you Wonderful, yeah, Is. Uh, I know when you write a book you have all these dreams. Is it living up to a portion of the dreams? How's it being received?
Manda Scott:Yeah, it's well, the old, straight white men hate it, but that actually is completely fine. Um, everybody else, you know the. There's been a lot of people for whom this is a completely novel idea, which I kind of forget. But yeah, you know, they're the people who write reviews for science fiction stuff and actually they've other than the. There's two old white men and one in a national newspaper, one in a sci-fi. I could just completely didn't get it, or at least chose to allow themselves to be very triggered. But everybody else has been really interesting. Really, I've had some really generative conversations with people who, for whom this is clearly totally outside their comfort zone. Um, but they're still running with it, which is which was the point. So I'm extremely happy. I'm just I'm in the middle of a kind of tour of book literary festivals. I just went up to way north scotland for nairn and then I'm back I I live in Shropshire and then back to Scotland for another one in 10 days time. So it's cool. Yeah, it's good.
D Firth Griffith:Do you find and this just might be an American thing. I'd be interested to see if it's a thing over there. I find that the bigger the reviewer, the more uninterested I am in their thoughts and reviews. It seems like the stories that they want to be interacting with today are very popular sort of ideas, mainstream business as usual. Yeah, maintaining the usual maybe, is what I would say.
Manda Scott:I think they wouldn't have got their job as a big mainstream reviewer if they were likely to go off piste, frankly would would they. They'd have been sacked a long time ago. So you know, those ones you just have to. You know, thank you for reviewing my book. I got the cover of my book in your newspaper. That's as good as it gets, um, but but others, you know, it's okay yeah and I listened to you in one of these very long drives that I've done.
Manda Scott:I listened to you on grazing grass podcast, oh interesting. Um, I'm really, really interested in what you're doing with 400 acres and the cattle allowed to roam. And tyson I don't know if you've read tyson young caportes new book, right story, wrong story, and there's a bit where he says he's in the dugout canoe making and the kids are playing on a bend in the north bank of the river because today it's safe and tomorrow it won't be. No crocodiles today, crocodiles tomorrow. And he just leaves it at that.
Manda Scott:And then, about 100 pages later on, he says we don't have the paleolithic fight and flight that you speak about, because we know where the predators are always. And I think that's a game changer in yet another colonial assumption. You know, along with the colonial assumption, that there must have been massively high infant mortality rates because and we have, you know, superbly high infant mortality rates in victorian times. Therefore, everybody always has done. And tyson's saying the women choose who's going to have a baby and when. I think, therefore, probably not supremely high infant mortality rates. But also we know where the predators are. And then I'm thinking do your cattle also know where the predators are, were you saying. I thought I heard you say that basically, one of them chooses to give itself when it's time to die.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah, there's a lot to it and we can talk about it at greater length, at supreme length, at another time. But to quite our whistle, the historical narrative which you say so well, straight white guys, I think the same thing is true in agriculture. We've been instructed for 30 or 40 years of this better or green or organic or regenerative agricultural movement that predators push prey animals naturally in nature into type groups of mobbing, mowing and moving herds, that cattle or herbivores I mean you can use the idea of cattle from a domestic sense, you can see the idea of elk from a wild sense. In yellowstone the narrative of sim is simple without predators pushing prey animals naturally in nature, you don't have regenerating environments.
D Firth Griffith:And about about 10 years ago, my wife, who is the main character in my most recent book and more well-loved than I am in the book, which is applicable to our real life, it's reminiscent of the thing and you know, as it has legs and in the real world of things. You know she looked at us, the team at the time, our small team, and then she just said I don't understand. We look to the matriarchy today, those of us, probably you included, and we see a particular virtue of indigenous and traditional societies run by this um more uniform but definitely um favored to the feminine wisdom over the patriarchal dominance. But when we look to cattle and we look to herds of herbivores, we just see this very aggressive, this very colonial, this very top-down competitive approach of predators doing all of the work and the prey animals are just running around. Like you know, scared little women in translation, and so she started to challenge that and the rest of the book is really the story about this.
D Firth Griffith:But there's so many ramifications. I mean number one it is strange that in the ecological, you know, dendrology and forest research of modern life, we have this idea of communication and community toppling, very competitive, exactly Finding the mother tree by Simard Wonderful, but in herbivores you don't see that extend. It's not convenient because as it extends, you know Simard's work in finding the mother tree, as you mentioned. You can boil it all down to, in my opinion, that when working in the woods, while partnering with the woods, while nurturing a forest, we have to be very humble Because this tree isn't this tree. It's actually connected in three steps to all of the trees on earth and so if those three steps are honored, then we have to walk humbly and agriculturalists we have a great trouble in walking humbly.
D Firth Griffith:The ramifications, the tangents of these become herds that move themselves with predators in the ranks. They don't need polywire and electric fencing. We see matriarchal lineages as these adaptive landscape genomics that spread over the land causing this wonderful phenotype to develop that is just immaculate but also unbelievably magical and healthful and everything else. We have what we call herd calling, which is what you mentioned, where we have witnessed a bet on about 10 to 12 different times that I can think of right quick over the last maybe seven years, where an animal in the herd who is not as healthy as the rest will actually be pushed not forcibly, almost invited out of the herd and will be taken by a predator that next night, almost as an offering, as a sacrifice. There's a lot of medical research that humans can smell cancer in other humans and I don't think that that's entirely dissimilar from all other of the created worlds of guilty Dogs can definitely smell it.
D Firth Griffith:Exactly.
Manda Scott:Do we choose to be aware of it? Probably not, yeah.
D Firth Griffith:It in some sense is a relieving of our control, which I think is scary to many Like. My most recent book is probably very similar in its reaction to yours. I say you know the big, bad white men who lead our movement. Hate it, absolutely hate it.
Manda Scott:Like, I received an email after publication that I'm single handedly destroying the regenerative movement, because it hasn't really taken off yet, it's still quite fragile and you're saying the narrative it's got is wrong. And they think the industrial agricultural leap on what you're saying and run with it.
D Firth Griffith:Exactly.
Manda Scott:Yeah, exactly, they have to be very selective in what they leapt on.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a good, you know it's, it's interesting and and we're in the early throngs of it I tell everybody about. Maybe my great great grandchildren have a better idea of what they're doing, um, but it's just asking questions in the world where they have a life.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah, and and we're so focused on climate change this is another tangent and soil health and the soil carbon relationship and everything else that occupy your life and occupies my life, and something that I think we have to start realizing is we see this very instable world around us, societies collapse, all these things that you write about that we can talk about later in the episode, not directly, of course, but in our own bardic way, shamanic way, whatever, but something that's become very clear to us agriculturally, my wife and I is the phenotype, that is to say, the like observable realities of the epigenetic responses in these animals.
D Firth Griffith:It's getting to the point where the landscape, ecologically, is evolving and adapting to the crisis of today, the changing of today, however, you want to see it much more slowly than the animal lives depend upon, and so what we see is that these animals do not have the ability to actually live in the world that we're creating, and so, while we're trying to create a world of healthy soil, the soil is still not able to keep up to the sense, to stop the great wave from rolling in, and these animals are starting to struggle.
D Firth Griffith:I don't think that in 20 years, you will have an herbivore that could live on grass and that's such a strange thing to say. But if you ask any regenerative farmer, at least in the States here and I wonder about you know abroad and overseas, you know if you were to take out their mineral program. If you were to take out, you know the shade that you give them, you know all these external realities, you know, do they still live healthy lives? And the answer is no. I mean it's absolutely no, anyways. I mean it's absolutely no Anyways we can get lost on that but.
Manda Scott:I think focusing there is something interesting. Yeah, yeah, where do we take the focus? But just before we move off that I wondered were you aware there's a woman in UK called Rosemary Golding and she and her husband they had 300 acres and broadly they did what you did and she wrote a couple of really beautiful books the name A Cow's Life I think one of them was, but I'm not absolutely certain.
D Firth Griffith:The Hidden Life of Cows or the Secret Life of Cows?
Manda Scott:Yes, and the one that really struck me was that the multi-generation cow lineages and the heifers would go off in their own little group. You know, I don't need mother anymore, I'm with my friends, until they came to calve. When a heifer would come back and her mother would stand over her when she had the first calf, I thought there's so much that we don't let them do. Yeah, by by having the barbed wire and the polywarrant be separating everything out and right, yeah, rosamund, uh.
D Firth Griffith:Rosamund wrote the uh forward to my first book in 2021.
Manda Scott:Yeah, yeah and maybe we'll get to. I'm really running with Francis Weller's initiation culture versus trauma culture at the moment.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah.
Manda Scott:And the initiation culture. Per Tyson Yungaporta knows where the predators are and also isn't trying to control anything. It's listening, asking what do you want to me? Answering responding connecting with things, building what needs to be built. Me answering responding, connecting with things, building what needs to be built, maybe moving afar somewhere, but only giving it a nudge, not going this, this couple acres, not that couple acres. It just doesn't happen exactly how do we get?
Manda Scott:how do we get our 21st century digital techno culture to move from a trauma culture to being an initiation culture, because I think that's our way through. How do we do that? I haven't got an answer to that, but it's it's the big question I'm sitting with at the moment remind us manda, where are you in this world?
D Firth Griffith:what's the landscape around you?
Manda Scott:south structure. So it's right, it's that edge place, the liminal place between england and wales. Um, it's, it's hilly, it's not mountainous. The liminal place between England and Wales, it's hilly, it's not mountainous. I come from Scotland where we have actual mountains and so there are no mountains down here, but there is. I live on the edge of a hill and we've got our little 28 acres and the lady who owns the hill it's 750 acres of organic. So it's very, it's lovely, and we're surrounded by Iron Age hill forts one, two, three.
Manda Scott:I don't think they're hill forts. I've visited a lot of hill forts in my exploration for the Bodica books. Not a single one of them has a source of water on it and I don't think that our Paleolithic ancestors were so stupid that they built fortifications with no water. So you can be under siege for three days and then your cattle and your people are all going to die. So they're not hill forts, but that's you know, it's the victorian mindset of people who find them and they see earthworks and they assume they must be defensive. And they're not. You walk around them and there's notches in them, at at the points of the solstices and the equinoxes, but anyway, there's iron age and older yeah.
D Firth Griffith:do you think they're religious? Yes, well, I think they're spiritual. Yes're spiritual Spiritual? Yes, totally.
Manda Scott:Yeah, I think. I mean it must have taken huge amounts of time and effort. They're big, big earthworks. I mean 10, 15 feet and then a ditch, and then another one, and then a ditch, and then a wide space in the middle, and the only way to get up to it is this winding path. I mean, it's 2,000 years. The path may be different, but I don't think it's that different. And then you've got this view across a landscape that you can see the other ones. So I'm imagining beacon fires lit on them and a trilogy of things connecting, and the sun's rising over there and setting over there. And yes, of course, I'm sure they're ceremonial in some way.
D Firth Griffith:Back in a time when we had a lot less overt control. I'm reminded of a conversation a dear friend of mine was an indigenous uh medicine carrier, um of the waitaha nation in new zealand, and uh, they just recently celebrated their new year, which is totally different to my western mind.
D Firth Griffith:Their new year is between june and july, or really the end of the year, and the year's rebirth is between, because they're in the southern hemisphere, so the middle of winter then exactly in the middle of winter and there's a particular constellation they have a name for, but it's the nine sisters that sets below the horizon and it goes into a period of darkness, the night sky.
D Firth Griffith:You know, in view of this, of this, of these sisters in the sky, and, uh, every morning, at 4 am, there are people, they wake up, they look at the sky, they witness what is there, what might not be there, and then, if the seven sisters, or the nine sisters, if they haven't risen yet, they say okay, not today, and they continue in the darkness for as long as the darkness exists. And then you know, whatever it is, on the 10th day, the 12th day, the 5th day, whatever day, the nine sisters rises once more, the new year begins, and so it's a period of watching, it's a period of waiting, it's a period of memory and living together in silence and celebrating the death before the rebirth. You know that chaotic middle ground.
Manda Scott:Total looks within Exactly.
D Firth Griffith:Exactly, and I don't know what else to do with my face so I laugh. But the New Zealand government I think it was about five years ago, you can check me on that, but very recently they instituted a uh, a national holiday for the maori new year, but it's on a particular day, like hard as our calendar doesn't function exactly exactly, and so I think of your hill forts, you know, and I think of my ancestors hill forts.
D Firth Griffith:I'm predominantly irish, so is my wife. It's interesting, our children are more irish than the both of us. Um, which is a really cool genetic, mathematical way of looking at it, you know, and to anyways it's epigenetic and you know the phenotype of your land.
Manda Scott:Whatever, we don't know exactly exactly so.
D Firth Griffith:I mean, I'm thinking about that and it just, it just calls back a very different era of human development and human consciousness Maybe that's a much better word than development where our lives were so much less dictated by technology and technology's calendar and I don't necessarily mean the digital technology, I mean the clock.
Manda Scott:Yeah, days, weeks didn't exist. Everything was the month and the stars, as you say. And in Ireland they had the passage tombs. Have you ever been and visited the passage tombs? No, but Newgrange every winter solstice.
D Firth Griffith:they have a lottery, I'm sure you know I've entered the lottery and I'm taking it as a sign. If I'm the one who gets to go into the passage tomb ofnuchranj on December 21st, I am getting a flight. Yes, I'm coming.
Manda Scott:You know I have no plane tickets, but even if you don't get there at the solstice, you can go in and they'll mimic it for you, and even I was there. It must have been September years, decades ago.
Manda Scott:It's an extraordinary experience it's worth experiencing, even if you don't win the lottery. When I was there, they had a waiting list and I was there in 1997. The waiting list lasted until 2010. So I was like, okay, I'll just do it now, shall I? Because it's a very long wait and I might not be around, but they're astonishing For people who don't know, who are listening.
Manda Scott:This is a big stonework.
Manda Scott:Ireland is basically rain country and it's dry inside this place and has been dry for three and a half thousand years.
Manda Scott:Right, and you go down a very a declining tunnel that you you have to hunch over to get down, and then there's a space inside of the room for maybe 10 people to sit in an arc, shoulder to shoulder, and you're facing the entrance, but because the entrance is slid downwards, you can't see any light come in there and there's a light box which is a long square aperture in what's otherwise a very thick stone wall and at the winter solstice the rising sun moves across and you get this astonishing sense of this knife blade of light gradually widening and then narrowing again to be a knife blade and then vanishing in total darkness. And it's even now. It changes your DNA, it sinks into the marrow of who you are, just to be in the earth, with the stone, tons of stone above you, connected, deeply grounded to the earth, and then the fire comes in to meet you and moves out, and moves in again and goes. It's just genuinely magical, yeah.
D Firth Griffith:So, yeah, worth a visit no matter what we want to do with digital technology, with modern life, with these systems, these very post-colonial systems, capitalistic type systems that you write about and speak so well about. It's hard to mimic that Because it's immimicable and in some sense it's innumerable in its effects and our very binary systems have a very hard job understanding the innumerable.
Manda Scott:I think, yeah, we have very linear minds and we need to learn to embrace complexity without thinking that we need linearity. And that's hard because our culture I don't think indigenous cultures, but our culture has been linear for a long time.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah, yeah, yeah, your last book, any Human Power, an amazing beauty. I thank you. I read the Boudicca series, which is the topic of our last conversation to some degree, or at least the entry point of your and I's relationship, and I loved them. And then you so wonderfully sent me Any Human Power, which arrived in gorgeous hardback form, it did arrive in time, thank goodness.
Manda Scott:Gorgeous hardback form.
D Firth Griffith:Thank you so much. We live in a very small region of this world. There's about 109 of us that live in this little city in the middle of the Appalachian mountains, and our post office is a singular room in the back of this maybe early 19th century building and it's run by our postmaster, who's kind of like the mayor of the town.
Manda Scott:She knows everybody.
D Firth Griffith:Everybody gets their mail at the postmaster every day and the package came in and I went down there to go get it and uh, she's like what are you getting from Scotland or England or whatever it was? And there was a little stamp of Prince Charles or whatever on the on the copy and she was. You know, it was the talk of the town, that you know, that, that, that, that the old kingdom is sending you stuff.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you know what I want to do in this conversation. There's so much that we can dialogue and sit with. I have no intention of any spoilers, but this book, any Human Power, it just came out. You know you talk about it as simultaneously a political thriller, but also like a Thrutopian novel, and I want to explore both of these two things with you, both of these two phrases.
Manda Scott:We're calling it a mytho-political thriller.
D Firth Griffith:A mytho-political thriller, as in, mytho-poetic but mytho-political.
Manda Scott:Because it has the dreaming that the Boudicca books had, but it's totally contemporary.
D Firth Griffith:Wow. So let's just start in the very beginning. Let's do something that I don't entirely find enjoyable, but you're going to make it enjoyable for me. Let's just define some terms. So let's talk about the mytho, political thriller, and then also what Thrutopian or Thrutopia is in novel form, and then what I want to do from there at least I envision this. We're just expanding all different directions.
Manda Scott:Sure See where it takes us Radio circle.
Manda Scott:Exactly right, yeah, alrighty all different directions see where it's a radial circle, exactly right, yeah, yeah, all righty. So this is going to sound a little hackneyed because I have done it before, but my easiest route into mythopolitical is to tell you how the book arose, because I was. It's been five years since the last book actually 2017. The last book was launched. This is 2024, so what's that? That's actually seven years. Seven years, um, but five years when I started writing and I thought I'd stopped writing, partly because I did 17 drafts of the last novel and it broke me. Also, I was kind of tired of large scale publishers. They're lovely, lovely people, but it wasn't my thing.
Manda Scott:I'd done the master's in regenerative economics at Schumacher. I was looking for regenerative things and writing historical novels just wasn't it. I loved it, but no. So I'd started the podcast and that felt really alive because we could be doing this actually live. I don't know when it's going to go out, but it won't be obsolete by the time it's out. So that seemed like a fast way of really getting ideas out into the world, to show the depth and the breadth of the metacrisis and that we have a solution set. We're in a complex system. All we can ever do is get to the emergent edge of interbecoming. But we can do that if we all coalesce around a value system that we all agree on and then turn the astonishing creativity of humanity to building towards integrity, connection, agency, accountability, being becoming belonging instead of all the tribal fighting and capitalism. So, anyway, I was not going to write any more books and I was teaching.
Manda Scott:I teach contemporary shamanic dreaming and I was teaching a class in the middle of lockdown June 21st, so summer solstice 2021. And while I was drumming the major journey for the students, I ended up having a series of visions, which is not usual, but you know you go with what comes and it was a remarkably clear text. Series of visions, so you will know you do whatever spiritual work you do. Series of visions, so you will know you do you do whatever spiritual work you do, and usually you get metaphors and felt senses and nudges and you kind of go with a hunch and intuition. And three times in my life I've had total, clear text.
Manda Scott:And this was the third one and it was take the 30,000 year old fossilized horse's tooth that holds this southern edge of the southeastern gate on the altar, find some ethically sourced horseced horse skin, go up the hill. I live on the side of a hill, as we established. This farm has been here since tudor times, so there are some hedges that were laid hundreds of years ago, so some big, thick boughs going up parallel to the land. Bind the tooth on one of these boughs so that I could sit with my back small on my back against the tooth, looking southwest down the valley in a particular frame of mind, and do that for an hour as the sun went down every night until further notice. And it was that clear cut. And I've been doing this long enough to know I've learned that you don't argue, you don't say but why? You just. Okay, that's what I have to do. I will do that. And I was sitting homeopathy exams at the time, first exams for 40 years. It was doing my head and but it took me until the day that I sat the homeopathy exam and then the horse skin arrived that I'd managed to source. So that was cool.
Manda Scott:So up the hill end of July, find the thing on, sit there, and by the end of the first week I had the first scene of this book which we can talk about it's not a spoiler and and the three void walks and the concept of a through topia. And then the instruction was okay, now you have to write the book. Yeah, forget about being a homeopath, forget about you. Can come sit up the hill if you want. You don't have to, but you do have to write the book.
Manda Scott:So the first scene because this was you we've given you the first scene, don't mess it about is a woman in her 60s lying on a bed and her 15-year-old grandson is at her side and he says when you come home, can we go up the hill and watch the crows go to bed, which is exactly what I've been doing for a week. And she says no, I'm not coming home. You know this. We've talked about this. I'm dying. There is no coming home from this. And in the course of the ensuing conversation he says you're the only one who gets me. I do not want to live in a world with you, not in it. And she realizes he's serious and she says I don't know what happens next, but if you really need me and you call, I will come. I promise. And he and she and we all feel the gods stop. Everything just freezes for a moment and there's a okay, you are held to that. That's an actual promise.
Manda Scott:And then she dies and the rest of the book is told from her perspective, caught in the between place between the lands of life and the lands of death, as she has to honour this promise, which is the mytho, part of mythopolitical. And the second thing that I saw was there's a concept within the work that I practice, called the void, and if you know what you're doing and you've had huge amounts of training and you have someone as your guide and Lan is dead and she's still terrified of this place, but you can get to the void. If you can root deeply enough, if you can hone your intent and really sharpen it, you can split time to see possible futures. And she sees many of the futures in which Finn, her grandson, does succeed in killing himself. And then the implication is, if you can get there, if you can split time, if you can do that, you may, if you can take agency, be able to create a future that hasn't happened yet, that, therefore, you can't have seen because you haven't made it happen. So then she's kicked back into consensus reality as a, not a living person, with the instruction of okay, you don't want him to die, see what you can do, and then she does it twice more.
Manda Scott:The second time is for the family and the intergenerational global movement that is building around them towards transformation and change. And then the third time is for the whole of humanity and the bus hurtling towards the edge of the metacrisis cliff, and, and each time is the implication that if she can take agency and by now we're 15 years later on if she can take agency, she may be able to affect the otherwise bus hurtling over the edge of the cliff, and so her arc really is learning how to take agency, how to listen to what's given her, because, again, it's not all pure text and then it's increasingly difficult. I believe I did a lot of reading up of near-death experiences and people who've been in believe they've had influence from people newly dead, and it's much easier to have an impact when you're very newly dead than 15 years down the line. So that's the mythical part, and the political part absolutely comes from the Thrutopian concept. So, rupert Reed Professor Rupert Reed defined this in 2017 in a post in Huffington Post, a blog in Huffington Post, and I've, with his permission, co-opted it, and my definition is somewhat different to his.
Manda Scott:We diverge, quite interestingly, on the definition, but my definition is we don't need dystopias anymore because it's not easy, it's not hard to work out where we get to. We let the worst concepts of humanity go. And also, you and I know if you're working with energy, where you put your energy is where you get to. Let's not do that. I get really cross now. It's lazy and it's not useful. We do not need any more dystopian fiction, thank you.
Manda Scott:Utopian is all lovely and dancing through the bluebells, baskets of kittens gorgeous, but you can't see how to get there. That utopians. By definition they're on another planet, or something has happened and miraculously, everybody thinks like I do, whoever I am, who's writing it, the idea and everything's beautiful and it's. There's a jump cut from here to there Through topias, t-h-r-u topia. It takes us through from exactly where we are, a recognisable present, towards a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. That's my working definition over the summer. You know we're talking a little while ago about um doing book tours and things, and I did something called the big green gathering, which is kind of what it sounds like, does what it says on the tin, and the nature culture connection camp, which was john young people and a completely straight literary festival up in there in Scotland, and each one I was able to do a guided visualization where I took people back, back, back, back, back, back back all the way till we were at the Big Bang, then brought them forward to their present life, and then seven generations down the line to look in the eyes of those seven generations now and go okay, did we make it?
Manda Scott:Are you proud of us? What do you need me to know? Because that I want seven generations down the line would go. So did we. And they go. Yes, yes, you did, and you left it way too late and you made catastrophic mistakes along the way, but when it really mattered, everybody together, united around a common value set and brought the astonishing creativity of humanity to bear on creating a world that I, certain generations down the line, I am flourishing within a thriving ecosphere. So there we go. That's it. And the political part is how do we get there? Because it involves massive political governance, economic, business structure and human change. But the Thrutopia walks us through the steps we need to get there. It doesn't hit you with okay, this is what we need to be. It walks through an evolutionary process to that.
D Firth Griffith:There we go. There's two characters early in the book Lan, obviously, and then uh, yuri is how I would pronounce her name, but yes and uh, and you get this idea. That's this, this vision that that dreams are practiced death. Yeah, is that honest? How, how do you? Yeah, that's what I.
Manda Scott:That's what I teach, what's what I've been taught every single night. You've got the practice. If you can hold your sense of self from when you fall asleep to when you wake up, you have a reasonable chance that when the the deep sleep that you don't wake up from, you will hold your sense of self. Otherwise, I think one of the features, one of the roles of a shamanic practitioner I am am not pretending to be a shaman, but I have been given the tools and I can use them in our culture is psychopumping, which is helping those who've newly died move to where they need to go.
Manda Scott:And in indigenous cultures that's a particular thing and it's a very different thing in our culture, because we haven't practiced and most people have no expletive, deleted clue of what to do once they're dead. And so and some people get a bit lost and some people don't. You know a lot of the near-death experiences. People experience astonishing flight straight to where they need to go, and if that happens, that's great. But getting lost can be a thing, and I think it's jolly useful to practice. Why would you not, once you know that you can?
D Firth Griffith:yeah, yeah, well, I think you know we were talking about agriculture and in in our oh desire for overt control over the agricultural and ecological realities around us in this very modern industrial capitalistic society and I won't divorce dreams and dreamlike states from that same control, I think. I think controls take ownership of us when we're, when we're sleeping, and and I and I'm only using that language in regard to the control that we have when we're awake, that our culture so entirely seeks, and so it seems petrifying to believe that when you enter the dreamlike state that you are no longer in control in regard to or in relationship with the control that we so well demand and occupy in our, in our waking life, I think a lot of the lucid dreamers want that control in in dream state and and I'm not speaking as a lucid dreamer, I'm not really a lucid dream practitioner, but I am a dreaming practitioner.
Manda Scott:But my point is to not control the dream. My point is to to experience the dream as an emergent process, but to be aware that I'm dreaming, which is which is really different that's really interesting.
D Firth Griffith:Again this this will be the last time I I feel uncomfortable taking over the conversation but, it's there and the vision is there, just just, uh, this the the unbelievable parallels, unbelievably sad and unfortunate parallels, between what you're talking about in the modern agricultural era of domination for positivity and production sake, right. And so this emergence that you discuss, when you do allow the emergence to occur, you are not foregoing your ability to learn or benefit. But I think that's the initial assumption. When we release control over the operations of our kin, our relations around us, we release the benefit of that relationship as well, because our understanding of that relationship is so entirely based upon hierarchy and patriarchy and control. Then, when we release that, we think we release the relationship. But it's the opposite. When you allow the emergence to imbue the system, your life. But it's the opposite when you allow the emergence to imbue the system, your life, whatever it might be the dream state, it becomes more alive. The relationship becomes that much more having worth having.
Manda Scott:Yeah, yeah, definitely, and you've worked with indigenous peoples and they exist in that alive, amazing, vibrant, constantly renewing itself web of which they are an integral part, and our culture is. We've cut ourselves off from that and as children, I'm sure, when your kids were born and I'm guessing your kids are probably still connected but kids in our trauma culture are born expecting to arrive in that web and I, the horror that that affects us and that then is acted out as we try and control everything else, is the discovery that we're not in that web, or at least we're not allowed to be in that web. We're domesticated into the western capital trauma culture and and that connectedness is is kind of shaved away. So how do we find our way forward into a reconnection?
D Firth Griffith:I think is a really valuable inquiry yeah, earlier in this already lengthening conversation we were talking about new grange, in the solstice, the winter solstice that shines that wonderful blade of light into the depths. And it has always interested me new Newgrange because the sacred symbology contained within the cave is not facing the entrance. I mean, there's symbology all over the stones and artworks you know surrounds the outside and there's those marvellous or whatever they're called on the outside stone. And even the mantle that holds open, you know, has these X-like, cross-like, you know, symbols of life and death or kinship and oneness or whatever you want to read into them. But there's also this sacred symbol inside of the cave that I've obviously never been there or been led inside, but it's only revealed when the reflected sun's light, or when the sun's light on that solstice reflects off the back wall and reveals it. But it's on the wrong side of the entrance, right, it requires the darkness of death, right, it's a passage to it, but it requires the darkness of death for light to then enter. I think our society, we want light to enter without the darkness of death first, and what? Any human power, I mean. This book, it's not a short book, it's quite sizable, but it begins in death like, but it begins in death, like more of an outrageous beginning of a book I've read recently where, like the main, I have to share this with you.
D Firth Griffith:I just finished a novel, which we'll talk about it another time, but in the very first scene. This is not what a novelist should do, at least this is what I've been told. I decided I was going to dream the novel into fruition because of another dream that I had and I didn't have a plan for it. I was just going to start writing and the characters were going to be created and I was going to whatever I'm putting more details here than I'm willing to at the time but in the very first chapter the main character dies and I was like shit, you know, like well, the novel's over, I didn't know what to do because I wasn't expecting this right, whatever just flat out dies and the novel, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pages later, you know, has been finished and obviously we recover from that. And then you sent me your book Any Human Power. At the very beginning, the main character dies, or at least what I perceive to be the main character, the main character that we can interact as yeah that we told from her viewpoint certainly.
D Firth Griffith:Exactly, and she passes in the very first moment. And I think about, you know, the Celtic New Year. It begins in darkness. The Maori and Waitaha New Year in New Zealand begins in darkness. Your book begins in death and it forces us, I think, to reconcile something that our culture, I don't think we like to touch that often, or really at all. We're not good at it. So maybe we can talk about this the idea of death that your book forces us to confront at the beginning. We can't undergo this very transformative, this wonderful trace that you're laying out, for us to look back in future generations to say we've left a world that we're proud of without first reconciling but also becoming death itself and passing into this void that you speak about. Why is this important? Why does your book begin in death?
Manda Scott:that's an astonishingly good question and the honest answer is I don't know.
D Firth Griffith:I was given that scene and I don't argue, I don't argue.
Manda Scott:When I'm given stuff, it's, that's it. And and there was a long time with my very lovely new publisher where we considered cutting the whole of the first section and just starting at the kind of more thriller bit, and every meeting we had I can see why you want to do this but I can't.
D Firth Griffith:I'm sorry, let me interrupt you. I hate doing this, but it's so present. The way that you wrote and now I'm asking more as an author the way that you wrote, the whole style, the linguistic apparatus, the symbology of words, even the choppiness, the rawness of that first chapter. I don't want to say it's not your voice, but it's Amanda Scott that I've never interacted with in book form.
Manda Scott:You have read historical novels where I was using a lyrical flow, I think for people listening. Daniel's read the Boudicca books, which also arose out of a very explicit shamanic process, and in those part of it is told from the perspective of the ancient British tribes, people, our indigenous people, and part is in a more Roman voice. But the language and the rhythms of each are distinctly different. But neither of them is contemporary Any.
D Firth Griffith:Human Power is a contemporary novel and so Lan is basically in her 60s when she dies in 2008. She's a very modern person. It's, from a literary perspective, to be very clear, it's unbelievably gorgeous and beautiful. I don't mean to say it casts it in any other light, but it's easily the most gripping, enticing, just in one little moment, big moment really. And I said, morgan, I've never cried in the first chapter when the main character dies so immediately, like the writing immediately pulls you in.
D Firth Griffith:So many books today, I believe, are written almost like the word count still actually matters in terms of what you're paid or something, and maybe that's true to some degree, but like it takes like the first hundred pages for you to even care about the characters you you establish with the first page, maybe the first page and a half, in this unbelievably raw English writing style, this un unbelievably magical yank, like the reader just can't get out.
D Firth Griffith:I mean it and and don't get me wrong, the book continues in this language. It's definitely a more of a you know, not a historical novel, but like I cried In the first chapter, I cried Thank you. And so it's so interesting to me that the publisher and you worked through that chapter and you spoke about that chapter and such, because to me it's like that chapter was like a short story. Obviously it has, you know, great relationship with the rest of the story. I don't mean to isolate it out like that. That chapter was like a short story, um, obviously it has, you know, great relationship with the rest of the story. I don't mean to isolate it out, of course, um, but it achieved in very few words what entire books I think achieve in, and so much more. And so I was curious about that, if, if the writing style was unique to that moment, or your dream, or I think it I think, yes, you put if I.
Manda Scott:I came down off the hill I switched on the computer and I just let that scene evolve into into what it is and and it had very little editing it, other than the occasionally asking did we need it at all? Yes, we definitely do, um, but it it? There were a couple of bits that I had to tweak, but broadly it it just arrived and that's not my usual, you know, a lot of stuff gets massive, massive, massive it. We did eight drafts, but that was eight me handing it in, thinking it's finished, and then in the interim between those is is many, many, many iterations of any given scene until it's polished. So but occasional bits and the bits that come out came out whole.
Manda Scott:Were that the bit with the she lion, the bit with the salmon, bits of the bit with the little black cat? You know the bits. The bit where hail arrived, I wasn't expecting hail, so for those listening, hail was a character, he's, he's a hound and he was a character in the booty kibbutz and I look up onto the cliff and there's a also. So okay, you're back, cool. So a lot of it was very imbued with the dreaming and then other bits of it were just incredible hard work of okay, I know kind of what we need to do politically. How do we actually make it happen, right?
D Firth Griffith:So we were going on a particular arc and I interrupted you and now we're on a new arc and so maybe we'll come back to that primary arc in a minute. But how much of your writing process, especially in this book, exists in that very creative dream state. Because if you were to like go into Google and type in, like how to write a novel, and Brandon Sanderson were to be there, like I'm not saying he's a bad writer or he's a good writer, no, no.
Manda Scott:but he's a very different style of writing.
D Firth Griffith:I'm not saying he's a bad writer or he's a good writer, no, no, but he's a very different style of writing, very different style of writing, like you know, plotting things out and first drafts as more of an outline, and then you come back and you fill in the details and then it's a very mechanical process, and I'm not saying it doesn't arrive in an interesting way, but this you're describing to me as something very different. You had a dream. You wrote all of a sudden the character appears and now he's there or it's there. They are there and it's much more well, it's much more dream state. Do you write in this state? What's your?
Manda Scott:process, like I'm not always there, but that's my intent and I'm not a very good plotter.
Manda Scott:So in the days when I used to go around literary festivals where you'd sit in a platform with people, particularly in the days when I wrote contemporary crime novels way, way, way back in the 90s we all, you know, five of us on a panel or something and we'd be talking about who are the plotters and who are the and the word is pantsers, which I hate, which is a seat of your pants. And I've never yet been a plotter. I just don't know how to do it. When I did the historical novels, there were historical events around which you have to loop things.
Manda Scott:The Romans did invade and they did come in these particular places, and I'm not going to argue with Tacitus when he tells this stuff. I might argue with how we got there and why, but I'm not going to argue with the actual event. And then I have to work out, fill in the gaps in between, but other than that, I have to let things evolve. I can't just hang on to a character and tell them what to do. They wouldn't do it, it wouldn't survive, and I wouldn't get the interesting characters who just arise because they're there to balance the end of a sentence. If I knew where a book was going. There would be no point in writing it.
D Firth Griffith:That's marvelous, though. So in previous conversations that I've listened to of yours I don't know if it was on the Accidental Gods podcast, or maybe you on someone else.
Manda Scott:I think it was actually on the Accidental Gods podcast you made the comment that storytellers and bards will be held accountable for our times, like politicians and whoever else, that's an Amitav Ghosh act in the great derangement, as they should, but more they will hold writers and creatives and artists culpable, because it's not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures. That's our job. That's our job and I would say and this is not Amitav Ghosh, this is me if they were capable of imagining different futures and showed any sign of making them happen, they would not have the jobs that they have the system is designed to perpetuate the system and bureaucrats.
Manda Scott:Yes, I was invited to something recently, which in the end, I didn't do because it was how do we create narratives for policymakers around climate change? And my first question was why are we only talking about the climate? It's not all about the carbon people. And two highly intelligent, very committed people looked at me like I'd just spoken in Greek and we had the long conversation. I am not traveling to London once a week for eight weeks if all we're talking about is climate, because I'm sorry there's no, but you know, these are the people desperately trying to do the right thing in the heart of government and they still don't get it.
Manda Scott:Yeah, and we need a new system. It's not the current system. I don't think we'll get to where we need to get within the current system. That doesn't mean that we can't make the current system the best it can be and it can act as a holding station, while you know Joanna Macy's three pillars of the great turning holding actions, systemic change, shifting consciousness. We need the holding actions, but we also need the systemic change and the shifting consciousness, and those don't arise out of the current system.
D Firth Griffith:Why do you think I want to get into the power and role of the storyteller and storytelling in such in a minute. But before we get there, just based upon your words, I want to press pause and ask a very different question. Why do you think we're so lost in this climate narrative? And the reason I ask is you know, I've interviewed a lot of people of late, and one of them was quite interesting. It actually never made the air, and they made the comment that the only thing today that matters is soil, nothing else. The only thing we should be focusing on is soil. Now, they've never written a book on soil, they're not even agriculturalist. They've actually written a book on regenerative economics and so many other things, but they've so well purchased the narrative that soil alone matters. And so we can either answer the first question or answer this second question, which is a flavor of the first. Why do you think we're so interested in one thing?
Manda Scott:Linear thinking, because our head minds are very good at linear thinking In our trauma culture. So I think I would very briefly, because you'll have heard it before but in case people haven't, francis Weller learned from Patrice Maladoma-Somme who wrote Of Water and the Spirit, which is essential reading if you're in this field, and Francis Weller has the concept of initiation culture, trauma culture and an initiation culture is how we evolved 300,000 years plus of human evolution and all of the indigenous cultures around the world. And the hallmark of an initiation culture is that individuals within it undergo periodic, episodic sorry, intermittent, episodic, contained encounters with death. And the containment is held by the elders, the shamans or white people, whatever you want to call them, the greater community of the tribe and the more than human world, and the individual is pushed to the edges of themselves such that they have to ask for help of those three the, the elders, the wider web of the people and the web of life, the more than human world. And if they can ask, receive and implement that help, they survive the contained encounter with death and it becomes an initiation process and they come back to the people stronger, more able to ask for help in that continual flow with the web of life, more able to connect, more able to know what's mine to do and I will do it as well as I can. And that's a serotonin culture. If we do Neurophys 101, and I am completely aware that it's more complex than this, but this isn't a bad model of two sets of reward centers in the brain serotonin and dopamine.
Manda Scott:And serotonin is characterized by a wide mesh of connection and pride and respect. I have pride in what I do and people whom I respect are proud of me and I am proud of them. It's reciprocal and it's justified because I know what's mine to do, because I have connected to the web of life and asked and I am doing what only I can do, what I can do well in the company of other people who are doing what only they can do and what they can do well. And the connection of the web is a self-maintaining, self-reinforcing mesh where everything that we do together helps to build the serotonin mesh and it can be as little as singing together once a week or eating together once a week. The kibbutzes that survive are the ones that eat together once a week. The intentional communities that survive are the ones that have some kind of reciprocal interaction on a regular basis In genuine indigenous cultures. Obviously these reciprocal interactions are happening all day, every day. Trauma culture doesn't have the containment when we have our encounters with death, we just have trauma Because we don't have the elders, we don't have that serotonin mesh of connection and we don't have the connection to the web of life we have.
Manda Scott:What vanessa andreotti's grandfather said was that core concept of separability not even separation, but separability, the concept that separation could happen. And somewhere along the line and this is mine, not francis weller's, but I think it happened when we instigated the kind of agriculture that we do with our trauma culture, and that's 10 to 12,000 years ago the certain person or group of people owns this bit of land. I will put fences or walls or hedges or whatever around it and I will kill anyone who tries to come on it. And every product of this land is mine and I will define what the land is going to have. I will have monocultures. I will domesticate buffalo, which must take many generations, because you're not going to harness a buffalo to a plough and tell it to go in a straight line. That doesn't happen. So you know, I will breed these things until I can harness them to a plough and make their life hell, because that gives me competitive advantage per Daniel Schmachtenberger for the next 10 to 12,000 years.
Manda Scott:But I can only do that if I am not an integral part of the web of life. And by cutting myself off from the complexity that is the web, the constant emergence that is the web, I come to live in a linear world where I must make things predictable and therefore, you know, I pull lever A, I build fence A, animals are contained within area B. Nothing is allowed to change that. I can then predict what's going to grow. I plant it and it will bloody well grow where I tell it. I will give it enough water and I will endeavor to make variability as little as possible and I will then extract maximally in a zero sum game where who dies with the most toys wins. And we are now at the apogee or the nadir of this, depending on how you look at it. Capitalism is that capital head ism of. I am so disconnected that I will create a system where the entire economic system is destroying the life of the planet. Social media is destroying the emotional worlds of the people that it connects with all of those things. So I think the answer to your question is our western head mind is so cut off from our heart mind and our body mind, which would otherwise be connected to the web of life, that we want linearity and we want to think that there is a solution.
Manda Scott:I heard something similar on my podcast. Somebody said if we solve for agriculture, we solve for everything. And again, solving for agriculture would be lovely, but we're not going to solve for the PFAS in the rain or the microplastics in the cloud or the fact that the oceans are dying. If we had the capacity to solve for agriculture, that would mean no more industrial agriculture. It would mean that the entire global trade system was no longer running on a system of competitive advantage. We'd be a long way towards undoing the damage. But it isn't solving for everything. But people like you know become vegan. So you know, save the planet or stop having plastic straws, that'll do it. They want something that is measurable and they can see the parameters of how to do it. Sorry, that was a bit long no, it was gorgeous.
D Firth Griffith:I think one response is when you do operate within that serotonin culture, that initiation culture, that more concentric or kinship-based relational.
Manda Scott:As you do. That's the wonder of how you're living.
D Firth Griffith:Trying to, trying to live, you become overwhelmed, I think you know, with the idea of linearity, which is a strange transformation that happens. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the idea of holism or you know everything, or the opposite of linearity. But when you enter a very holistic space or concentric space or kinship based space, you know the idea of linearity is petrifying because it's alien.
Manda Scott:It's foreign.
D Firth Griffith:It's unnatural, it's it's a gooey substance, substance like oil. It's foreign, it's unnatural. It's a gooey substance like oil, casting unnatural rainbows in the rainwater around you. It's scary, it's nebulous, it's ungrounded and it's so interesting to me the number of individuals that find themselves talking about this subject without ever having that grounded tendril into earth right and so ungrounded that linearity to some degree feels like the solution.
Manda Scott:Grounded. That linearity feels like the problem Right. Yes, Thank you. Thank you, yes, yes, and I think the kind of corollary to the serotonin mesh is the dopamine culture that we have. And dopamine is the opposite it's single hit, it's not additive and it's subject to the laws of diminishing returns. So I can have as many boxes from Amazon as I like and they each give us a little tiny dopamine blip. Or cocaine, or white carbs, or music, or sugar, or alcohol, or coffee or porn or whatever is the addiction du jour, or coffee or porn or whatever is the addiction du jour. They and they isolate us because I want my little dopamine hit, just for me, and and then it wears off and I need another one. And and the same amount of cocaine or the likes on facebook or twitter or jonathan height did the work where, if my tribe is losing, oh dear, how sad and then it seems to win over the other tribe, whatever the other tribe is, it's as big a dopamine hit as if I'd taken a noseful of cocaine, which is why we get the tribalism that we've got and why they move backwards and forwards from yay we win, yay they win, you know, because each tribe needs its big hit.
Manda Scott:How do we break away from that to the serotonin mesh? And I think you've done it. I think this is, you are a living exemplar. And and then my question is how do we scale this? Because it's not. You can't impose it on people. You have to come to it and experience it and find that your life feels so much more fulfilled. You have meaning, you have being belonging, becoming, you have agency. The people around you have that sense of reciprocity and relationship and respect and responsibility and all of the R's that arise out of this. But you can't force it on people.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah Well, I think you know, diving into your book again, there's an interesting extension, which is why we're talking about it now. I think it is interesting and planned. In some deeper sense, I think. When I find myself seeking the dopamine I have found myself very easily being able to be checked about, not being grounded. It's like a wonderful check. It's like when you're hungry, you know you should eat. When you're thirsty, you know you should drink. When I find that I'm seeking dopamine, it means that I haven't found that connection, that kinship, that wonderful relation of myself to the world around me. And you know, the opposite is true. This is true in the opposite sense. When you're really busy being you, your emails stack up, the messages that go ding and dong and bing and ling ding on your phone they start to pile up right. This digital world starts to take a back seat, and we can see both of these things being true in this.
D Firth Griffith:The interesting thing about your book that I found so entirely engrossing to me is, while any human power is massive, not in volume of words but in scope and I want to talk to you about fiction and nonfiction here in a little bit paving this trace to a new future that we'll be proud to leave behind to the generations up ahead. It's also entirely focused. It's one wonderful woman in one wonderful void looking at one wonderful living human being, right, her grandson and while everything else is happening around, we're focused there. And so it's so interesting that, while all of the metacrisis exists, we're also drawn into the life of two people, and only really in one viewpoint of these two people. And again, I'm not trying to reduce it. I mean the story is nuanced and complex and it's marvelous, I mean it's thrilling, I mean all these things that people say about it, is true, but at the same time it's also here.
Manda Scott:It's a grandmother's relationship with her grandson.
D Firth Griffith:And that's all. It is right. And so that speaks to me of the same kinship-based worldview, in the sense that when we come home, everyone is able to come home, but as we come out, we force everyone to come out. And so to some degree it's owning that responsibility, not of trying to solve soil health for everyone, but trying to look into our own lives and say where is the soil unhealthy here? And it might not be in the carbon cycle or in the nematodes pooping out plant available nutrients in the rhizosphere. It might be somewhere else, entirely more distinct than that right. It might be in a relationship between a grandmother and a grandchild yeah, or it might be between two parts in my heart space.
Manda Scott:I think everything in the end comes back to what's happening in my heart space and then and then how does my energy spread out into the world? How do I connect to myself, to the people around me, to the more than human world? What am I? If I have a choice in any moment of spreading despair and distress and despondency, or gratitude, compassion and joyful curiosity. That is a choice and it doesn't mean if I'm, if I am evoking gratitude, compassion, joyful curiosity in my heart space, it doesn't mean I'm not feeling utter grief and despair and despondency at the world, but I'm choosing what it is that I radiate and in the moment of radiating I'm particularly working with those three and the joyful curiosity of wow, the world is so magical. I am completely in love with being alive and I wonder what happens next. Freeze up my head, mind from that. I know I can predict everything is linear. I know exactly what's yesterday will be like, tomorrow will be like yesterday. I can make everything happen. If I get genuinely into that space of awe and wonder and being utterly in love with living, then for me the sense of connectedness, as long as I've got grounding. Definitely.
Manda Scott:You're right about the grounding, sense of connectedness to the web of life. Everything becomes sharper and I can feel the tree, the hill, the kite, the river, the stones, and then my sense of what is mine to do is sometimes just to be. I feel sometimes like a prism or a lens, and the all that is, all of us, are prisms and lenses. Every node within the web of life, most of which are not human, are prisms and lenses, and we're just there, consciously, to connect to the all that is and let the wonder of it flow through, and that's our job. Sometimes that's our job and I think being able to do that is is useful and important, and sometimes it will be enough and you don't then. And then the soil. You know, if you need to go and do something about the soil or the water, then it will be obvious that that we need, that's what you need to do right, right, yeah, it's.
D Firth Griffith:It's a difference between individual human action and the action potential that can occur in relationship. Yeah, I think we get often lost in the first. You know what? What do I need to do here, where we're also distinguishing ourselves from that environment in which we operate? That is to say, you know our relation?
D Firth Griffith:I think about time, but you know, here in the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains, the Piedmont ecotone, we live in this wonderful edge between elevated raised forests of these very ancient mountains and the Atlantic coastal plain. So about 30 minutes due west is elevated forests, you know 2,000, 3,000 foot elevations, you know in the ancient Appalachian Elevated forests, you know 2,000, 3,000 foot elevations, you know in the ancient Appalachian ridgelines. And then 30 miles to east is the Atlantic coastal plain and the dismal swamp and marshlands. And so it's a wonderful edge, red edge ecotone, and through the edge ecotone from the heartwaters, the head springs of the Appalachian mountain, runs the James River into the Chesapeake Bay. It's a large river. It's 150 yards from my window here and commercial and conventional agriculture runs alongside of its bank for most of the entirety of the river.
Manda Scott:Oh, God leaking glyphosate and NPK into the water. And this is where we end up with dead zones in the oceans the size of Belgium.
D Firth Griffith:Well, you know, the Chesapeake Bay is like oh, everybody needs to stop spraying glyphosate on their yards along the Chesapeake Bay and their rich little homes. And it's like well, you have an entire river system of glyphosate and Paraquat. Well, I guess not so much anymore Paraquat, but Grazon and 2,4-D.
Manda Scott:Yeah, but glyphosate will do it.
D Firth Griffith:Right, and my point is we have a human problem, a worldview problem. While I have individual life choices to make in my individual entity that I so live, I love how your book draws us into this whole other dimension. It's not heaven, it's not hell, it's not here, it's not there, but this wonderful void that land occupies, where there's multiple individuals that don't necessarily feel like individuals I understand it's a grandmother and a grandchild but at the same time their lives are so interwoven, right Broadcated inside of each other in this rich tapestry of the story that you so well, I think, created. In my opinion I think a lot of people's opinions too that this idea of individuality seems to recede, but at the same time, the autonomous what do I want to say? The autonomous animacy of the decision maker, of the individual in action, in thought, in these heart spaces, it's not overlooked. Does that make sense?
Manda Scott:It's complex coming out of my mouth yes, yes, and what you're saying is life is complex and in endeavoring to write a novel that is a complexity, a complex unit in and of itself there's many, many, many layers and lots of strands connecting and interconnecting and and they move and they flow, and they and your relationship with any novel is an emergent process. If the novel is endeavoring to be in itself an emergent thing, then emergence is going to happen and emergence is how we move to other systems. So, yeah, I think that's lovely. Thank you, yes.
D Firth Griffith:When I think about Thrutopia, when I think about writing a path through to the future again, as you so well put it, that we'll be proud to leave behind. Future again, as you so well put it, that we will be proud to leave behind. The essence of nonfiction is is what predominantly comes to my mind, and then I see how to books and then I feel the how to books and I feel like, again, there's a place for how to books. I get this, but in the, in the depth of the conversation you and I having they feel out of place and I wonder why, in your, your, your paved trace it, in the pathway that you're creating through these words, why you chose the medium of a novel fiction story rather than nonfiction. And, to some degree, how to this linear arrangement of thoughts, which obviously has its point in linear modalities, of course.
Manda Scott:So? So the obvious cop out question is that's what I was given in the visions and I am, as previously stated, not going to argue. However, I think also what became apparent it wasn't just the visions of the book, it was the concept that we need I didn't have the word through to help you then but that the world desperately needed this throwing ghost lines across the landscapes of tomorrow, and it needs more than me. But people read stories. If I can create a thriller that is absorbing enough, many more people will read it than if I sat down and wrote. Okay, guys, the world is complex here.
Manda Scott:Let me create a fiction, a non-fiction, with multiple different, interrelated concepts of politics, governance, electoral systems, economics, regenerative farming, permaculture, regenerative transport, how we could bring technology into all of this. How do we build trust in a world where the established system is doing its best to undermine trust All of those in a non-fiction. It's going to be hard, whereas if I can help people to engage with, empathize with, identify with characters that feel real and we know from neurophysiology that these people are now as real to you as people that you actually know, right, um, you know, if we have a, a memory of something that didn't actually happen. Our brain is completely unable to distinguish between the memories of things that did happen and things that didn't happen. And similarly, if I have built a relationship with somebody that I read about and that is astonishing alchemy, where there are black marks on a white page, and however many people read those black marks and a white page, there are that many iterations of variants on a reality.
Manda Scott:If a writer writes well, you are emotionally linked to those people. You will then extrapolate beyond what Finlandland and Niall and Caitlin and Connor and Hale and all of those you will. They will have a life that moves beyond what I've written for you, and that doesn't happen with nonfiction. So so I could easily give you that as a reason for why it was fiction, and the honest answer is because that's what I was told to do. And also, you know I've spent since the mid nineties writing how many decades? That is three decades. It's a reasonable apprenticeship and I am comfortable doing it. I haven't written a lot of nonfiction and I was doing the podcast, so that is the nonfiction arm, so I don't think it's my thing to do.
D Firth Griffith:To be honest, it's a good point, yeah, I, yeah, I wonder you know you speak so well and obviously right, equally well, in this idea of new stories or stories that carry us into new places, new systems, new visions, new values, old values writ new in some, you know, creative way, way, this sort of language, but it's pure, I feel, in story.
Manda Scott:We are a storied species. Everything we do is precursed. It has been beneath it the stories that we told ourselves and each other, about ourselves and each other, about how, the way you move the cattle on the land or don't, or the way we move the cattle on the land or don't, or the way we interact with the people in town everything has a story attached to it. And then you know, for millennia we sat around fires and told each other stories, and now we sit around screens and tell each other stories in 280 characters. But story is what? One of the things that makes us human. I don't think it's necessarily unique to us as a species, but it is ours, and and so I think stories are what will take us forward.
Manda Scott:As we said earlier, dystopias are really not useful. Utopias are lovely, but we can't get there. If we could have enough, imagine a world where no publisher could get any script in anything Crime, novels you know the triple acronym thrillers, rom-coms, whatever they're all through to open. They're all predicated on the idea that the existing system is not fit for purpose and is dying and we're going to build a better one that we would be proud to leave behind. No producer in Hollywood or Amazon or Netflix could get a script that was predicated on anything other than that. So Marvel Comics or James Bond or I don't know soaps they're all predicated on. The existing system is not fit for purpose and it's dying, and we can do better than this. The world would change overnight, because it's not that we don't have the answers. Everything that I wrote in terms of the politics and the structural change is being done somewhere and we have. We have a very broad set of possibilities.
D Firth Griffith:We're just not implementing them all in a coherent way, all at the same time I want to experience this thought with you, although I think we're going to agree very quickly. If that is the way our hearts and our creative story listening capabilities are so constructed, why are we in the place that we are? Like? It seems antithetical. Does that make?
Manda Scott:sense we cut ourselves off from the web of life and then we told ourselves stories of separation, scarcity and powerlessness. And they're very, they're self-reinforcing and they like the bits of our brains that like the dopamine. We have a different answer, which you may wish to cut out later, but I was on a podcast with Natalie Nahai, who's a lovely and wonderful woman, and her first question is always what do you think is going on in the global human psyche right now? I've been on it twice before and I've listened to it for years. So it's not that I didn't know this question was coming, but I chose not to prepare for it because I wanted it to be an emergent response in the moment.
Manda Scott:So I sat there, went deep inside, grounded, and what came out was I think there's something that feasts on despair and despondency and fear and terror lodged in the psyche of our culture. It's not the whole global human psyche, but the culture that destroys everything, and I think we perhaps it's time we moved that on, and I think it's been there a long time and that's, you know, that's a very on the edges of everybody else's perception. I've been reading a lot of it. Doesn't matter what I've been reading. There's a wonderful guy called Robert Faulkner who wrote a book called the Others Within Us. He's an IFS practitioner and it's very interesting.
Manda Scott:But I think there is something that really enjoys the terror and the despair and the pain and the suffering and I think it's time it wasn't there. But I think we could analyze that and rationalize it as trauma culture. There is a very, very longstanding generational trauma that began we will never know how or why or when about 10,000, 12,000 years ago that cut our culture off from our connection to the web of life. And if we can do the healing work in ourselves and between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and the web of life, and if we can do the healing work in ourselves and between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and the web of life, we can step forward into being an initiation culture again.
D Firth Griffith:Do you think it has something to do with the idea that we don't know where the predators are?
Manda Scott:Which is what we talked about. And Tyson for those who haven't yet read Tyson Deon Caporta's Right Story, wrong Story, he has a brilliant bit Early on. He's describing the making of a dugout canoe and he says the adults are all doing the stuff he describes and the kids are playing on a bend in the north bank of the river, jumping in and out of the water because today it is safe and tomorrow it won't be. And he just leaves it at that. And then, about 100 pages further on, he says we don't have the paleolithic fight and flight response that you in the Western culture talk about, because we know where the predators are always. And I also remembered that Vanessa Andriotti in her book Hospicing Modernity she's Brazilian, she's half indigenous, half German and she wanted to marry a Spanish. A person of Spanish origin and her indigenous side of the family were horrified. Two reasons he won't know how to laugh and he'll get bitten by a snake. And she just says these and he comes along and he's quite a strapping young man and he does know how to laugh and they think, ok, you can carry stuff in the forest, this is good and we'll teach you how to know words, but they're afraid he'll get bitten by a snake, because my my implication is he will not know where they are, and we, the indigenous people, do. But I think if you are an integral part of the web of life, then you do know all of that.
Manda Scott:There's a beautiful story in the other side of eden, hugh brody.
Manda Scott:It's wrote in in probably in the 60s, 70s, I don't remember, but he was an anthropologist, straight white capitalist, whatever colonialist, but he seemed.
Manda Scott:I don't remember, but he was an anthropologist, straight white capitalist, whatever colonialist, but he seemed like quite a decent person and he was living, I think, with tribes in the northwest of the United States. It's a long time since I read it, but he describes an occasion where they say going to get up at four o'clock tomorrow morning because the elk are here, the elk are coming, and so, oh God, he sets his alarm clock and he's up at four and nobody else is up and he's really happy and he goes around waking people going it's four o'clock, we have to go to the elk, and they all look at him going no, the elk didn't come and he's oh, and you all knew and you didn't tell me. And they said well, we didn't know. And he's, oh god, so blurry and not ready and then they walk for three days and they end up having to make a travel and drag him because he can't walk for three days.
D Firth Griffith:So the elk are here was for a given version of here, which is three days away, and everybody knew no, that's, that's, that's just super interesting because the, the question begs and and I realize that it might feel trite to both you and I, but I get questioned quite often, you know, as the more podcasts we do, you know these very simplest questions, like you know, if the system is, you know, I don't think they're. I think they're really great questions actually, which is why I'm posing one. But, like, if the system is quite so poor, then why are so many of us accepting it? Or why did we accept it? Or why do we like the idea of having this fear nestled inside of us? If it is so bad, why are we so accustomed to it?
D Firth Griffith:guess, the, the grounding, the the the the deep assumption that I'm trying to lift out of the uh, you know a natural soil deep inside of us that serves for dopamine and not serotonin. That serves for, you know, hits and not hugs, if you will what do you think the answer is to that cool?
D Firth Griffith:I was hoping you would know well, I have ideas, but I I would like to hear yours first. So well called the two worldviews, or one is a worldview and one is a world sense, and you kind of get the definition of what they both would include in the very essence of that differentiation. But the first worldview is is that, um, you know, the nature is nature, humanity is humanity and humanity's power is to shape nature for nature's use. Maybe you know, I'm not saying that's evil, it's not some evil intention, but it does have evil consequences. And and when you actually start to unpeel it, looking at the secondary world view, a world sense, it? No, it is. It is universally unnecessary, it is universally abhorrent, in in in our kinship views.
D Firth Griffith:And then obviously the second one, which is that we are nature, nature's intelligence is our intelligence, nature's animacy is our animacy, nature's beauty, beauty is our beauty, our beauty is nature's beauty. And they go back and forth. And obviously one is held by indigenous cultures all around the world, what your and I's culture held many thousands of years ago but we struggle to reawaken today. The other one, the first one is obviously the opposite, that we are here to shape nature for our use for nature's use and that our plan dictates overall our use for nature's use and that our plan dictates overall. The interesting thing is, I think, that when you accept that primary worldview, that dominant worldview, the worldview of dominance number one, I should say two things happen, I think. Number one is we start to trust only what we can see right, it's a worldview.
D Firth Griffith:It's not a world sense. We're not open to sensing the world, feeling the world. We talk about thinking about the world that is through sight. We're not open to sensing the world, feeling the world. We talk about thinking about the world that is through sight. So we reduce the great panoply of kinship, of relationship, of truly interacting and living and being in and of and around the circle, and all of these different ways. And it's this great multidimensional sphere. It's not necessarily a two-dimensional circle, but it's a circle and we pull ourselves out of that. And when we pull ourselves out of that, we have the ability to dictate it.
D Firth Griffith:Like you know, my latest book, stag Time, which came out earlier this spring, is an entire chapter dedicated to the idea of biodiversity to some degree, biodiversity being a metric that we're all searching for, but biodiversity being a metric that we don't yet understand because we've never met her. And what I mean by that is, in order for a human to create a biodiverse meadow, we have to be a part from the meadow, that is to say, a part from removed from that meadow. But we have so well purchased that narrative that biodiversity matters, or soil, health, carbon you can place anything you would like into that conversation. I picked biodiversity because that's what I was talking about at the time. But biodiversity doesn't actually occur until all of the relationships, the kin, the cousins, become that circle right, that we cannot actually achieve biodiversity until we realize that we are biodiverse and that our entrance into that system, our life within that system, our kinship within that system, is an aspect of that biodiversity. And so my point being, if we are an aspect of that biodiversity, we can't control the necessarily linear arrangement that we have once perceived biodiversity to be. And if we not control that, we can't actually, you know, produce an outcome that we can predetermine. And if we can't produce an outcome that we can't predetermine, then all of these higher or loftier goals of saving planet earth ecologically are not in our power set, they're not something that we can control. We can be health on earth, but we can't control health, return on earth. And that's that separating linguistic phenomena that I think the colonial, the dominant, the capitalistic worldview, this dominant worldview, the first worldview, allows us to operate and live within. I think.
D Firth Griffith:Number two I said there was two. I think we have so well, very, purchased the narrative of this enlightenment thought which obviously extends both ways from the enlightenment. It didn't occur in the 1700s or 1600s, but obviously it occurs many, many times, being born and reborn in many cultures that exist previous and post, but it's easily identified in the enlightenment, which is, that is to say, that there's this linear progress of humanity coming from the state of nature to the state of civil society that you get that I don't need to get into it and you have enlightenment.
D Firth Griffith:You know malcontents like Rousseau in some part, or you know Pascal in some other way, like there's a lot of really interesting thoughts that are coming around, like Descartes no, I'm sorry, not Descartes. Rousseau has this marvelous phrase and again, rousseau has his problems in his own way. But he says the great joke of modern life was when the first human being looked at a plot of earth, erected a fence and said this is mine, pay me for it. And then somebody else did. The joke isn't that they did it, but they convinced everyone else that what they did was what they did. Right? That's comedic to him at the time.
D Firth Griffith:It's unfortunate and tear jerking for us in the now and obviously something that must be reconciled. But I think it comes down to this idea that one we're living in the dominant worldview and thus we have the ability to control to an outcome that makes us feel safe in a predator-less world, in a world without predators that we can identify, feeling safe from the forces that don't have physical relationship to us anymore. It's not a wolf in the bushes, but it's some unknown person on social media. You know, casting hate or canceling us like this is not something that we can quickly identify. We have, you know, so we, I think, we feel a lack of safety and stability there, even if it's deep within our subconscious, and so we seek to find safety and stability through control. That's the first, and the second is that all of the people who live with outside of you know, outside of this dominant worldview, the indigenous around us, they're just, you know, existing 12,000 years ago. So we have that indigenous savage, that noble savage, you know, existing 12,000 years ago. So we have that indigenous savage, that noble savage, you know. All of this stuff that arrived, you know, in the colonial era so well into our literature and our nation building and our empire building and our destiny to, you know, spread all around the globe and spread this Christian capitalistic ethic, and we can't get out of that dominant worldview.
D Firth Griffith:I don't believe this is true and, at least as I see it now, I don't think we can actually escape the dominant worldview until we reconcile the lives that we've created through genocide, exploitation, colonialism and enslavement that currently live outside of that worldview. The first step is having hard conversations about our history. The second step, I think, is allowing those conversations to manifest into a welcoming arm, the embrace of those who you know obviously still hold this kinship pre-colonial worldview. And I don't think either of these two things are comfortable.
D Firth Griffith:It's much easier as a thought leader to say that the bacterial and mycorrhizal fungi you know, balance in the soil, the sacrophytic you know, and nematode balance in the soil, whether or not it's wooded or pastured, or you know bacterially based or fungal like. That's just so much easier. We don't have to reconcile our history. We don't have to reconcile our post-colonial or even colonial, you know, worldviews. We don't have to reconcile the capitalism that allows us to otherize all of the life around us, that is to say, this matters, the other doesn't, and as long as the other doesn't, we don't have to pay attention to it. We can continue to rape and pillage and colonize and everything else, and so we don't actually have to own that which and that who we are yeah that was.
D Firth Griffith:That was big, I'm sorry, no no, it's really good.
Manda Scott:It's really good. But also, if I'm invested in a particular scientific view of soil biology, which is a relatively new science, I can then pit myself against the industrial agriculture people who don't care about soil biology and just treat the soil as an inert growing medium. And that gives me a sense of agency, and I think agency is one of the things that we seek. So, yeah, but I agree with absolutely everything that you said, and the work starts within yeah we've got to somehow or we don't.
Manda Scott:We don't have to. But I think if we're going back to john and macy and holding patterns, holding actions, systems change and shifting consciousness, if we're going to shift the consciousness, we have to start really doing the internal work, because if we come at something with internal fractures and we don't, we aren't completely grounded and connected and and in some kind of reciprocal relationship with the web of life. Then all we're doing is perpetuating the trauma within ourselves to each other and and that's how we end up in these tribal conflicts and, and you know, they're not useful. We're.
Manda Scott:Daniel schmatterberger talks about us all spinning our wheels in the friction of of my tribe right, your tribe wrong, whatever tribe that is, and every bit of our human creativity we use in trying to prove to other people that we're right, rather than how do we all get together? And because we human creativity is astonishing. Yeah, if we could learn trust and come to come into interreaction, interaction in good faith and compassion, with a sense of the welfare of the next seven generations at the heart of everything, we do be in a different place.
D Firth Griffith:Like I mentioned earlier, we live very far distant and we had a recent family move into the area, wonderful, spent some time with them, shared a meal, and they were asking about just a couple of evenings ago. They were asking about our prepper mentality. They had a particular view of the way society is functioning, which is not entirely dissimilar to my view, and they asked you know, how are we, you know, preparing for this? They come out of the military.
Manda Scott:How many tins of beans have you got hidden in the cellar?
D Firth Griffith:where we live. And I told him. I said not only can I identify every aspect of life around us in some sort of physical, material sense that's all I mean by this but I know what is edible, I know when it is edible, I know what is poison and I know the time that it's not poison, because every single day, my kids and I you know, my wife and I and our three children we forage, we eat. And I said in order to kill me, you're going to have to kill earth, and I'm comfortable there, but in order to kill you, I just have to attack your larder. Right, and I think this is as a metaphor to some degree. I think a lot of us, we look to the ruins that we are approaching and there's some of us that want to just respond by putting beans in the larder, and there's others that want to actually find the life around us and then realize that, well, that life is us right.
D Firth Griffith:And then there's wholeness there, and this is where emergence arises yes, and exactly right, exactly right, and and I and I realize that the metaphor, you know, doesn't extend for everybody who lives in the city or something like, but, but the point again is, do you turn truly inward, selfishly, or do you turn inward, that is to say, holistically right? And I guess what I want to ask is, in your book, as an author, as somebody who is walking through a very dreamlike, shamanic emergent, like state, to craft the book like anything could have happened. I don't think a lot of people understand this, people who don't write. When you sat down at the computer or in a journal, or however you begin the writing process, you could have written anything.
Manda Scott:Yeah, that's the wonder of the blank page. It's also why it's so terrifying. Yes, it's both of these things.
D Firth Griffith:You could have written a story in any way. You could have written a story of a woman who passed away, entered the void and then stepped into the lives of our bureaucrats and politicians directly. You could have written a story however you would have liked, but you chose to write a story that was entirely singular. It's here, it's home, it's inward, but it's also so expansive in many other ways. And I just wanted to ask why, when you had an entire world at your disposal to do whatever you liked, you wrote about a grandmother and a grandson, them helping each other that promise that we learned about in the first chapter, and I realized that you might answer me, because it's what the dream gave you, and so I welcome that, and if you have any other further thoughts.
D Firth Griffith:I welcome those as well.
Manda Scott:Well, that is what the dream, the dream, gave me, that first scene. And then I just sat with Lana and went okay, so what's happening for you now? And literally I mean certainly for her arc, which is a kind of discovery of agency arc, because I knew there's a kind of loop that happens and I knew, I had an inkling that that might happen. I wasn't sure how we were going to get there, but I had a feeling that it was perhaps a potential, although also, I have a concept of three books and it might've been going to happen at the end of the third book and it came sooner. And then, for the rest, it's her relationship with Finn, but there are other grandchildren, there's one who's conceived on the night of her funeral, because that happened, and it sounds like a real cop-out. But so much of this is. I just go into the characters and ask them what's happening in the world, what I need to know, what matters to them, and what matters to them is what matters to me. I guess that's a pretty obvious thing and it's not always overt. And you know a 14 year old kid who's on TikTok. I've never been on TikTok in my life, it's, you know but. But Caitlin was able to tell me what it felt like up to a point. I think I haven't had any 14-year-olds read the book and then write to me and say it's not like that, please, if it isn't, let me know for the next one. But you're right, there's an infinite possibility. But I think there's something.
Manda Scott:One of the things that I do as a writer is I strive to feel the textures within myself of the narrative that I'm writing. And that's a very hard thing to teach people or to show, but I for me it makes sense and I knew from the beginning the overall texture of this book and I was doing meditations where I was envisioning having the finished things in my hand, the thing in my hand, and I knew what it felt like, and so having the feel kind of gives an energetic envelope to the narrative. I think it's really hard to. This is you know, I'm not teaching writing MAs, because partly I think you can't teach people to write. Also, I would be very incoherent. You know, go do some meditation, find out how it feels and write what it feels like. It's not probably a useful instruction set for people. So, yeah, I mean, it is what it is.
Manda Scott:And then I had a really good editor. The original draft was several hundred thousand words longer and we probably cut a third of the book and rewrote it to get it sharper, clearer, the sense of agency more crisp, and having that as a relationship is actually really important. I think in writing, an editor that you this is is my child. This is the dream I have a promise to the all that is that matters to me that we produce a book that we're all really proud of. Please help me to do this right. And and I happen to get a really, really good editor. This is a new publishing house, as in new to me, new, new publisher, and she's amazing. So that also was a really key part of it, and I don't ever want people to think that maybe I mean everybody's different, but in my writing process, having the right editor is absolutely crucial.
D Firth Griffith:Yeah Well, I think it extends, either metaphorically or in a very real sense, to what we've been talking about this whole time. It's to some degree drawing in, dealing with that vision, that dream, etc. That you get from that singular source that is to some degree vertical, and then extending out horizontally right that if you held it only in that vertical there would be an entirely horizontal dimension. I always think vertical is the oneness. The horizontal, I feel, is the kinship, the relational that we can't really have until we have that vertical connection to the dreams, to to everything else, like you so well describe. That's wonderful. We've been talking for quite a period. I wonder, is anything that you want to add? Any conversations? You feel like we half had, half explored.
Manda Scott:There's one bit that keeps rising up, and this is within the meat of the thriller arc of the book. I think it's useful to say because this again was another conversation we had with the editor. There is a tweet. So Caitlin is the granddaughter who was conceived on the night of Lan's funeral, and we jump quite fast from Lan's death to Caitlin sending a tweet 15 years later, 2008, 2023.
Manda Scott:And the tweet that Caitlin sends I did not make up. It was sent by a 12 year old girl who was the child of someone who was quite well known in the British establishment, and it lasted half an hour. And then the people I'm guessing, the adults around her. It just vanished. Her entire account vanished and and this wasn't at a time when, you know, shadow banning was happening or it wasn't twitter, it will have been her family, I'm guessing, and it was an we're not going to say what it was, but it was an incredibly courageous thing, I thought, for a child to write, and I think if that had not been the case, it probably would have been cut, because it is really quite. I found it shocking, and Twitter's boomer heads was exploding in the half hour that it was out. You can't say that Not. Oh, my goodness, is that really what's happening? How can we help you? But no, you can't say that and it was just taken down, and so I think this is as unmetaphysical as you can get, but I really would like people to know that tweet did exist and part of writing it, I wanted the thriller arc of the book to hinge around things that mattered to that generation. I didn't want it to be the climate, because I didn't want that character to be a kind of mirror of greta thunberg, basically, um, so it's. It's something completely other, but I think that's that's really.
Manda Scott:And then the other thing that we haven't talked about much is the level to which gaming and technology really matters to Finn and therefore to the book. And I think what's very interesting is the intergenerational or the generational divides of the people who have read it, of older people going I have no idea about that technology, I really don't understand it and the the younger people going. That was the single most important thing, thank you. And the people in the middle particularly when I've been out at nature connection camp or gregory and gathering or other um literary festivals is the parents when we talk about the technology and gaming and how the connections that are made, let's say, in in a world of warcraft and, and you're in a battleground three times a week and you know these people and you trust them with your digital life is when you're up against it, when you're having to find who you can trust in a political environment where everything is being done to destroy you and to undermine your group's trust within itself. These are the people you know you can trust and I think those of us who don't surf the web the way a dog surfs a scent trail need, at some level, to understand that there is an entire generation that really does. I was very moved.
Manda Scott:There was a podcast jamie wheel, I think, might have been one of the others of that that group way back in 2017, 18, and he his 12 year old daughter, played minecraft and he wasn't that thrilled about the fact that she was playing minecraft. And he said okay, if you can build something I've never seen on Minecraft, I will give you this amount of dollars, which was quite a large amount of dollars. You could do it over the summer vacation. And she said, ok, can I have some friends? He went yep, go away, go for it. So within a day, she'd got seven people she'd never met, but friends around the world who'd agreed to take part and then they played Minecraft all summer.
Manda Scott:And it gets to a day and a half before school starts again and he's kind of waving the dollars going. Did you actually want these? She said yeah, yeah, and and she whistles them all in and they do their stuff and and he said he watched a thing happen that he doesn't even want to name because naming it would have brought it into his reality and it wasn't part of his reality. He watched seven 12 year old girls self-organize in a flow that he could not have created. And one's writing the manual, one's designing the structure, one's actually building it, somebody else's I don't know doing other stuff I don't do minecraft and at the end of it they had designed something that not only had he not seen before, he could not have conceived of.
Manda Scott:And and this is, you know, the people who grew up in the broadband era their brains are wired differently and I think we still need to move from a trauma culture to initiation culture. But I think we need to understand that the internet is an emergent process of the web of life, because we created it, and we are an emergent process of the web of life and the fact that we're cut off from the rest of the web of life doesn't stop it. And we are an emergent process of the web of life and the fact that we're cut off from the rest of the web of life doesn't stop it being part of an emergent process. So allowing that that is a thing and that we can interact with it, I think is also quite important it's just.
D Firth Griffith:It's a little bit different of a narrative than you see many people interacting with today, especially online in places like substack, where more is being written, I think, today than ever has been totally yes, more uploaded words a day than the whole of human history exactly, exactly, and it I think it's good and bad.
D Firth Griffith:My wife and I we often talk about substack in the sense that when an author sits to write, I think what a lot of people dismiss is not only do years go by, or at least do years pile up into singular moments, it just depends upon your writing process. You might think for three years and then write for two months and you wrote for two years, in my opinion but then you have editing and you have readers and you have interaction and you have a go, you have your back and forth and you get challenged and you say, amanda, that's, that's very stupid of you to say, and you say, oh my gosh, I, I didn't think about that.
Manda Scott:Yeah, you're right and then you change it Right. It has interaction.
D Firth Griffith:It becomes a complex, emergent process in its own right, exactly and and and. So a lot of people dismiss that in the writing process and the author process and then on Substack, it just feels like a lot of people are just writing, writing, writing, hit, submit and everybody's taking it as gospel right, which I'm not saying is not well-formed, and obviously there's people on there that are writing better than others in this way. I don't know, I'm not the judge either, but like you do seem to have good and bad. So I don't mean to say it's all bad, of course, but in that medium I bring it up to say that there's a lot of people talking about this machine of modern culture and technology and that resistance against this machine it's not to become a Luddite, but like a Luddite in the sense that we draw back to an earlier time and we resist the machine. Maybe it's physically, maybe it's not physically, maybe it's mentally, maybe it's spiritually or emotionally, but there's this idea about a war against the technological machine.
D Firth Griffith:And when you read any human power, you the technological machine. And when you read any human power, you don't get that Like. I don't think this is spoiling it. If it is, you can tell me and I can cut it. But Lan interacts with World of Warcraft to save her grandson. She doesn't dismiss World of Warcraft and then go about a different, much more ancient modality of communication and community building. She uses technology for what it is, instead of trying to change what is, to fix what will be, or maybe you know, if he commits suicide, etc. Right. So that seems different. It seems like you acknowledge the idea that technology is a machine, but instead of saying it's only bad, it's, rather you're putting the onus on those who are using it, or maybe how they use it or the intention behind its use. Yes, is that fair?
Manda Scott:Yes, totally, and I got that idea from. I read screens of stuff and in a book that I can no longer remember what it was, there was someone who was, I think, a surgeon or some kind of medical professional and his best friend, and he used to play a game this must be way back in the 80s where when you scored a point they would go whoopee. And he got a phone call one night and his friend had just drowned trying to save their young son from the ocean other side of the world and he was devastated and grieving and his way of managing that was to sit down and play this game that he and his friend had always played and he said through the night it was going all night and that this was not only had it never happened, it was actually coding wise impossible. It was logistically impossible within the structure of the game that you could score that many so often. So that's such that you would get that little noise. And he interpreted that as his friend connecting to say it's okay, I'm all right and so so I I lifted that wholesale and, and lan and fin had paid played warcraft. I I've given up warcraft for the fifth time recently, so you know we can assume it's not the final time and and actually stripped it out of my computer so that that makes it even harder to go back. But you know, you know I've done that before too, so I knew enough about Warcraft to make it such that if someone who's played Warcraft since Findler reads this, you know they can recognize stuff happening in the right order in the right way. So it wasn't even an original idea, but I just pulled it in and then that's the world that Finland lives in.
Manda Scott:One thing that happened this week I've been working with Lan as an archetype and the elder grandmother and I've been doing it doesn't really matter. I've been connecting with her and I was connecting with her really hard on Monday morning, really deeply, asking some stuff, and also she was telling me stuff. And the night before I had done an online book group about any human part and we'd taken the video and it had gone to my senior apprentice, who does the Dreaming Awake early years teaching for me now and also happens to be brilliant technologically Thank you, lou. And she was doing the video of this and I was discussing. Someone asked me what was it like to write Lan, and I was discussing Lan, discussing her connection to the elder grandmother, and I said something else and I can't remember what it was, and in the transcript are the words thank you for listening.
Manda Scott:After I've talked about Lan being co-journalist with the elder grandmother from the Boudicca books, I did not say that Everybody else is muted. It's not in the sound file, but the AI had Lan write thank you for listening, which cheers me up when I get over being completely freaked out. So, yeah, I think we have this idea that things have to be good or bad. Why do we not just connect to the web and ask what do you want to me and see what happens? And that applies to technology as much as anything else.
D Firth Griffith:I wonder your experience with this. It's a very strange question. I've never talked to somebody about this, but as a writer, I often. Mary Oliver has this book about writing poems. I read it many years ago and in it she says that to write a poem it's to wear the same clothes, sit at the same desk, face the same direction and sit there with an open screen and the poem is born. It's handed to you, or maybe it's not.
D Firth Griffith:Maybe it's not the right time and you don't get the poem, but she describes it as a spiritual process. I don't know what else to call that. The spiritual process, that is to say that the physical typing on the keyboard seems to be an outcome of some internal spiritual development that visits you or maybe arises out of you. I don't know. I don't really care about where it comes from, and when I sit down to write it is interesting. I often read what I've written and it's, you know, first drafts. They're illegible to some degree, sometimes they're improper and they are what they are. But you read it and you think to yourself like or I do, I should say it this way. I read it sometimes and I think to myself huh, like I don't think I could ever write that again no, absolutely.
Manda Scott:Where did that come from?
D Firth Griffith:yeah, I just like're, you know, and it's yeah and it. I've spent a lot of time writing recently and so I'm trying to not get into any depth, but it feels go for the depth don't you, oh you, and I would go for three hours, if I even open it.
Manda Scott:We'll have to do this again, then I'll yeah, we will. You're coming on. You're coming on to accidental gods wonderful wonderful, we'll do it there.
D Firth Griffith:but it feels like in the creation of characters, like you saying, you were communing and visioning and meditating and speaking with land to some degree. I don't want to put words in your mouth I forget the exact words you put, but something like that. I think a lot of readers believe that authors create characters and yet some strange degree. It feels like the characters are real and all we're doing is telling their story.
D Firth Griffith:And it's that connection to the characters that matter and I don't know what that really means, and I'm even unwilling to say that Lan is some real person that is in the void talking with you Like. I don't even want to reduce it down to that. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, I don't know, I don't really care.
Manda Scott:No me either deeper.
D Firth Griffith:There's something else going on and I wonder what a part of the writing process, um, that if you could pull the general readership into right because, like, for instance, I'm a reader, I'm listening to this podcast. I bought this marvelously blue and orange book. By the way, I love the colors. They're so wonderful, like the cover is blue and the inside is like bright orange. It's just wonderful, isn't it? Like it's? It's uh, it's like a efflores, I think might be a word.
D Firth Griffith:It like shined bright orange in a very dark room and I just want to acknowledge that. But like people pick this up, they read it as a reader. How might people pick this up and read it more from your perspective and seeing the fact that this isn't a story?
Manda Scott:that you're telling as much as like a story that you're holding or conveying or gifting or passing through you to them. Does that question make sense? That's such a good question. Yeah, it really does. But I also think I can't answer that Everybody brings what they bring to every moment of living, and you bring what you bring to a book as much as anybody else. And you might be listening to the audio book, which is a different experience, so you might be reading the ebook rather than the physical book and and I you know, black marks on white paper evoke different things in different people.
Manda Scott:I've had so many over the years, not just this book, but you get emails from people going why did you write this? And I think, well, I didn't write that then. And then you look at the words and you go, well, that that isn't the energetic evocation that happened for me when I wrote it. But I can kind of see how you get to there and all I can say is that wasn't what is in my mind when I wrote it, but if it's what's in your mind when you read it, that's grand. So I think there are people for whom the dreaming really lands and there are people for whom it really doesn't and nothing, you know. They just want the politics and the governance and the different electoral systems and all of that. And there are people for whom the gaming really lands and people who genuinely just don't even want to look at that because they just don't like it. And then there are people where the whole complexity mesh lands, and I obviously think it would be really lovely if there were lots of people for whom that was the case, but I can't make it happen.
Manda Scott:You just bring yourself in the fullness of yourself and let every word percolate through that. No writer can ask for more than that. You read every word and you let it become alive inside. It is a miracle. Black marks on white paper and a three if not four, if not five-dimensional multisensory experience happens inside you. It's magic, it's actual magic. So be part of the magic. That's all any writer can ask, I think.
D Firth Griffith:Yes, I think so. I don't want to assume you want to be found, but if people were to find you in this digital world or pick up your book, how might they best do so?
Manda Scott:My name is Manda Scott with an M. Mandascottcouk is my primary website, but the people who are listening to this are probably going to find most use in accidental gods. All one word dot life, where the podcast is on there. The membership is on there. That is endeavoring to help people to connect to the web of life. I've just got a new module on the three pillars of the heart mind gratitude, compassion, joyful curiosity and I do gatherings, online, gatherings there where people can come along and we spend however many hours working together. So either of those two places and I'm on various social media Because, hey, dopamine, why not?
D Firth Griffith:Yeah, come for the hugs, not for the hits, maybe.
Manda Scott:No, absolutely yeah. Yeah that's wonderful, Daniel. This has been such an extraordinary conversation. Thank you.
D Firth Griffith:Thank you for the time. I appreciate every moment of it.
Manda Scott:Yeah, me too, and thank you for the generosity of your being and for the kinship of being in your company. It's beautiful, thank you.
D Firth Griffith:Same for you. I appreciate you.
Manda Scott:Yay, mutual appreciation, it's good.