The Serenade of the Woods: Rediscovering Our Bond with the Wild

What does Nature teach us?

Trees whisper secrets of connection and life, and I'm here to translate their language straight into your earbuds. Welcome to Season 2 of Give a F*k, where we're shedding the sales pitch and focusing on the sheer joy of discovery.

This episode takes you on an auditory hike through the fascinating realm of arboreal communication, guided by the natural wonder that is Pando—a single organism posing as a forest, stretching across the land like the arms of Mother Nature herself.

Tune in, and you'll be treated to a narrative that not only celebrates the majesty of this vegetative giant but also rekindles your innate bond with the natural world.

As your award-winning storykeeper, I'll lead you beyond the surface as we unearth the mysteries of Pando's expansive network, a true testament to the interconnectedness of life. Prepare to have your awareness ignited as we embrace the splendor and complexities of our planet. Join us for a transformative trek through the whispers of the forest—no hiking boots required.

Resources noted in Episode:
Sounds
Kristi

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Trees talk, and not just to slightly nutty people like me. Join me for Season 2, Episode 1 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to learn more. Hello and welcome to Season 2, Episode 1 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness. Before I dive into today's content, I want to take a second to explain to you what's different about Season 2 versus Season 1. And really all of it comes down to me needing to show up and be authentic, as I was saying towards the end of Season 1. We're also going to have a different release day. As you may have noticed. Season one, everything released on Fridays we're now releasing on Tuesdays. These episodes are going to be shorter and they're going to be more just fun topics of interest, kind of like.

Speaker 1: 0:56

The beginning of season one was and less salesy and focused on what I offer. That was not aligned for me. This is not meant to be a commercial. This is meant to share some fun facts and make this informative and get you excited about the world and the ways in which everything is connected. So, as I said, welcome to season two, episode one.

Speaker 1: 1:19

We are dropping knowledge bombs and answering your burning questions about nature, animals, spirituality, mental health, women's empowerment and other profound topics. This podcast probably won't change your life, but hopefully it will give you some food for thought, some guidance on this twisted path we call human existence. My role as an award-winning story keeper and catalyst for healing humanity and mother Earth is to help you reawaken to your own connection with nature and, through this reconnection, reacquaint with your intuition. What you do with it, how you incorporate that into your life, is completely up to you. I hope you'll make changes that benefit both you personally and Mother Earth as a whole. I hope you'll share what you learn here with others and that they'll make different, more compassionate and enlightened choices too. Either way, take what works for you, leave the rest. Always work to be the best version of yourself and try to leave the world a little better than it was when you arrived. As a quick shout out, I just want to say thank you so much to Christy Omdahl. As some of you may be aware, my life kind of took a little bit of a not so great turn at the end of season one and I needed some help to find my way back to my center, and Christy has been amazing in doing that. She is a Wayfinder coach and I will put her link down in the show notes for you, because if you are feeling a little lost and like how do I find my way back, she is amazing at that. Another thing that has not changed this season is that we will still be answering questions from listeners right here in this slot, but as it is episode one of season two, we don't have any right now, so we're going to just going to skip right over to the seitan of the show and, as I mentioned, we're going to be talking about trees. And do they actually talk? Spoiler alert they do so.

Speaker 1: 3:30

This article actually came out about a year ago in NPR Very valid source, and it's amazing and cool. It's all about Pando, which, for those who are not familiar, Pando which, for those who are not familiar, Pando is the giant organism that on the surface of the planet, looks like individual aspen trees, but in fact, underground, they're all connected by a single root system. Now Pando spans I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of miles. It's huge. It's in Colorado, it's in Utah, it's amazing. Now, pando is the Latin word for eye spread, hence why it's used for such a large and amazing organism. This all started as one seed. One seed and it now spans 80 football fields. I don't know how big that is, but big, and it weighs like 6,000 tons. Like I said to us, it looks like trunks but really scientifically they're stems and they go up to 80 feet in the sky. It's pretty cool.

Speaker 1: 4:38

And so this guy he was really inspired by this. He directs a nonprofit called Friends of Pando and he was trying to get his head around it and figure out other ways to sort of share the amazingness that is Pando with other people. And he hit on this really creative idea and I love when creativity and science come together and so he invited this sound artist named Jeff Rice to visit Pando and record it. And so, not really knowing what to expect, but game for the adventure, Jeff went off and said yeah, okay, let's check it out. And in doing so he realized that it's not just art, it's actually a record of this place in this time, of this species and also the health of not just this particular species but the overall planet and the environment, and he feels like they could be a baseline to record environment changes. I think that's probably true Now.

Speaker 1: 5:50

Aspen trees for those not familiar, they look kind of like birch trees, and so in summer the leaves are very green and big and they really shimmer and it's just very soothing to walk through them. When the wind blows In the fall they turn sort of this bright lime, lemony, yellow color, again, kind of like birch trees. And so what Jeff did was he wanted to first just capture that fluttering that the trees make. Now I'm not going to play this because I can't guarantee how well it's going to carry over into the podcast to actually try to play this sound and it's not really mine, but I will drop the link to the article where you can find all of the playlists for this so that you can hear it.

Speaker 1: 6:41

And so this first one it's like a thunderstorm type of vibration that he wound up recording and that's not what you hear when you're there, but when you record it with these high-tech devices that he has, you hear this vibration and, of course, like the trees hear it themselves, right, and he says he was hunkered down and huddling, trying to stay out of the lightning. There was no lightning, he says, but when you do it in the midst of the thunderstorm it's actually even more big and more dramatic and it's a pretty profound experience. And so he then was like all right, I want to get inside. And they found this opening in one of the stems and he calls it the Pando Portal, which I think is pretty cool and he lowered a microphone down until it was touching the tangle of the roots beneath it. And when you play that back, you hear this.

Speaker 1: 7:46

It's this vibration and you can feel it in your body. It's like the actual vibration of Earth herself is the only way that I can describe it, and it just it makes you feel connected to earth and to humanity and to all of life in ways that maybe you're not used to feeling. It's kind of a similar grounding experience, I guess, as to if you were to go, like, lay on the ground and stare at the sky and truly tune into that vibration beneath you when you're laying on the ground. Except for this, all you have to do is play it through your headphones and it's pretty cool. Highly recommend listening to that. Again, link will be down in the show notes for you. And so they now understand that Earth is in fact communicating and this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, long before humanity lived here. And it continues to change as the environment changes and the fact that we have now discovered a way to listen to it and to embrace it is amazing to me and it means we can find ways to work with it to heal ourselves and to heal Mother Earth, and I think that is so special and I really hope that you will jump back down and actually listen to those recordings because they are truly spectacular.

Speaker 1: 9:27

Did you feel a glimmer, a spark, a light in the dark during this episode? You will absolutely love my online course, the Soulful Seeker. I encourage you to check it out at sparkconsciousnessnet, slash, TSS and again, that will also be in the show notes for you. You can also support the show as a Patreon member or episode sponsor. You can learn about all of these. A Patreon member or episode sponsor, you can learn about all of these opportunities and also find all of those sound recordings I mentioned in the show notes. And to help you remember this, just hold on to the word Aspen to help you jog your memory and remind you to hop back on over to season two, episode one of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to find all of that awesome info. And I will see you next time. You.