Bridging Earth and Spirit: Derek Jensen's Evolution from Faith to Environmental Activism

When I sat down with environmental activist Derek Jensen, it felt like we were perched on the precipice of a new understanding, one that bridges the gap between the spiritual and the ecological. This episode takes you through Derek's personal metamorphosis from a faithful Seventh Day Adventist to a tenacious defender of our Earth. Our conversation is a journey through the landscapes of conviction and contradiction, exploring how the values of community and a deep moral compass can coexist with legalism and hypocrisy within religious structures. We peel back the layers of how these experiences have shaped his environmental advocacy, recognizing the sacredness in all forms of life.

As we meander through the ideological wilds, Derek and I confront the historical shift in perspectives toward our planet—from a living, breathing entity to a mere exploitable resource. This shift is profound, touching on the dichotomy of religion's role in both fostering a moral framework and yet often contributing to environmental degradation. We unpack the stories of how indigenous cultures embody a symbiotic relationship with nature, a stark contrast to the narratives that have driven modern society's detachment. It's a call to reforge a connection to the earth, one that respects its agency and intrinsic value.

The crescendo of our dialogue bridges the personal to the collective, the individual to the ecosystem. We discuss finding one’s own path within the grander narrative of activism, harnessing personal talents, and committing to causes that ignite passion. The episode is a homage to the mutual relationships we can cultivate with the natural world, understanding its rhythms and respecting its needs. By the end, we're not just contemplating environmental stewardship: we're envisioning a future where our actions and spirituality are intertwined, where we stand up for the world that sustains us, and where every voice, human or otherwise, is heard and honored. Join us for a conversation that is as much an introspective quest as it is a call to arms for the planet we call home.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Aloha and welcome back to Leaving the Church to Find God, your safe space for exploring faith beyond traditional walls. I'm your host, Melissa, and whether you grew up in the Evangelical Church, like I did, or any other system, while seeking answers, you're in the right place. This podcast isn't about judgment or attacking institutions. It's about honest conversations, diverse spiritual paths and celebrating the unique journeys that we all take in search of meaning. We've all experienced indoctrination in some form, and here we explore how it shapes our understanding of ourselves and the divine. Each week, we'll dive into thought-provoking topics, share inspiring stories from guests and listeners like you, and offer tools and insights for navigating your own deconstruction journey. Remember, leaving the Church doesn't mean leaving your faith. It's about finding your own authentic connection to something greater. So buckle up, embrace the open dialogue and join me as we explore what it means to move beyond confines and discover the deeper personal connection to the divine that exists within us all.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Today, we are so lucky to have this guest on the podcast. He is none other than Derek Jensen. Derek Jensen is a leading voice in environmental activism. He's an author, teacher and co-founder of Deep Green Resistance, a radical environmental group. But Derek's journey wasn't always focused on dismantling harmful systems. Today, we'll hear from Derek himself about his experience growing up in the church and the path that led him to become the outspoken advocate for the environment that he is today. Alright, hello, Derek. Thank you so much for joining me on the Leaving the Church to Find God podcast. A lot of times we start these conversations where the when people left the church, but I haven't seen any of that much into your work, so I think I'll just start with how did you get into this work of environmental activism?

Speaker 2: 2:02

We can certainly talk about Leaving the Church too. Would you rather start with that, or you want to?

Speaker 1: 2:08

start with the activism.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Yeah, let's start with that, definitely. Okay, excuse me, this is Seventh Day Adventist and there were parts of it that I liked, and one of the parts I liked was that it was too legalistic, but in retrospect I really liked the idea of having a day that you don't watch television and you don't shop, and you don't do, you don't work. So my family, which had many problems, did spend Saturdays Sabbath for Seventh Day Adventist, did spend Saturdays out in nature and taking hikes or out somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, and that was a very important part of my childhood. Another thing that I like about having been raised in a church like that is that I recognize people can have morals outside of churches, obviously, but it did give me a strong moral sense, and I have critiqued Christianity and critiqued other major religions in my books. And, having said that, I have to tell you that for many, many years I drove cars that were pieces of junk A lot of them cost me a dollar and so I would be stuck by the side of the road quite often, and I can't tell you how many times in my life that the person who stopped to help me was a Christian, and it was because they had a moral sense of it's important to help other people. So there are huge problems with religion and in my own case I am glad that it gave me a moral sense.

Speaker 2: 4:08

And again, it was way too legalistic. I remember when I was in high school, the first you're not allowed to eat pork in Seventh Day Adventism. And I remember my first ham and cheese sandwich when I was 17 and people talk about chasing the dragon on drugs and trying to recapture that first one, and I've spent the last 47 years trying to recapture the taste of that first ham and cheese sandwich. Anyway, so I got out of it because I was. I saw a lot of hypocrisy in the church and I saw a lot of, and also there was a bunch of legalistic stuff that didn't make any sense. Sorry to get graphic, but I remember thinking like why would they declare masturbation bad when it doesn't actually hurt anybody? It's like there's no, there's no negative consequence. And then, like I said, just some problems with the church itself and I sort of. And then also there's the idea of having a sky god who is out there, as opposed to divinity being inherent and all everywhere. And so I just drifted away from you know, starting when I was maybe 16, 17. And by the time I was 24, 25, most of it was pretty gone, actually a lot, pretty much all of that was gone by then. But from 1516 to 1819, I don't know. And so far as activism. Another thing I didn't really like about the church is it was pretty much accepted that God created the world for humans to use and that never stuck right with me and it just never felt right.

Speaker 2: 6:18

And so far as how I started becoming an environmentalist, there's a couple couple directions, three directions related, to explore very quickly. One of them was when I was in second grade. They put in a subdivision next to where I lived and I remember thinking, if they keep doing this, where will the butterflies go and where will the grasshoppers go? And so I recognized in second grade that you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. It just doesn't make any sense. I didn't have that language, I couldn't articulate it, of course that way, but I recognized this was this was harming wild nature. So that was one part. Another part was that my father was extremely violent. My brother was epilepsy from blows to the head. He broke my sister's arm right by mother mistromy, and so I became.

Speaker 2: 7:19

I was sort of spun out from society because of that. That made me question a lot of a question I was having when I was a kid is if his behavior is making him happy, why is he doing it? And you could say, in some ways a lot of my work is centered around that. It's like if the destruction of the natural world isn't making us happy, why are we doing it? So I really was sort of spun out and given a question for life of how and why do people commit atrocities and how do we stop them. And then the third part was in. When I was at high school and college I sort of had this hobby or habit of asking people if they like their jobs. About 90% said no and I started asking what does it mean when the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing things they don't want to do? So that just seemed like I didn't want to live a life where I woke up when I was in my 60s and retired and like where did my life go? I realized that, so far as we know, we only get one life. I wanted to live it doing things that mattered and doing things choosing. Well, this takes us back to religion, and then I promised you would get another question at some point. Takes us back to religion.

Speaker 2: 8:47

There's a great line by Joseph Campbell where he said for those in whom a local mythology works, there exists a sense of meaning and a sense of accord with the universe. But for those in whom those authorized signs don't work, then there exists a sense of meaningless and a sense of quest that you need to go find a life that has meaning. And that's really the hero's journey that he wrote about. And if the signs and symbols of Catholicism work for somebody, there's a path that's 2000 years old that is there for you to be able to find meaning in your life.

Speaker 2: 9:38

If communion works for you, if all the rituals work for you, or if capitalism works for you, if getting up every morning from your alarm clocks warning, take me at 15 into the city works for you, then you have a couple hundred year old or a hundred year old path that's made for you. But if those don't work for you, then you got a lot kid. You got to go search for it on your own and that's like I said, that's the hero's journey. So for me, the authorized signs and symbols weren't working, and so I had to set out and try to find, try to make a life that was meaningful to me. Does all that make sense?

Speaker 1: 10:26

Yeah, it makes total sense. Thank you so much for sharing about the things that you experienced in your childhood and such. I have found that to be common in a lot of religious households the abuse of children, and I think that the church is teaching of blind obedience and the father being the head of the household and just the family order that the church teaches, I think allows for a lot of that type of abuse, and thank you for sharing that. I feel like it's important for people to know that they're not alone in that. Also, I agree that when you know from the church, that's something I always say is that I did retain a lot of goodness out of that and that sense of community is definitely something that I gained from being in the church.

Speaker 1: 11:15

It definitely was a rude awakening when I got into the world outside of the church and realized not everybody had that sense of community. But I feel like I've seen that kind of especially in today's political climate. I've seen like more and more of a separation from those morals. There are definitely still people in the church who feel that way, but I feel like the church as a system has really become more of the legalistic side and this is what we believe everybody needs to get on board than the loving community that I grew up in. That's what I've been observing. But how do you feel like that? Do you see that the way that the church I mean like for me, the way that the church is working now, the church as a system is working now is really so destructive to our planet, to our environment, to our sustainability of human life and of life in general on this planet? Like, how do you see that worked into the systems?

Speaker 2: 12:20

Well, I would ask first, what do you mean by the church?

Speaker 1: 12:23

Well, that's kind of broad for me. Like, when I started this journey, the church was like the evangelical church. I grew up in a costal and the more that I've dived into this work, the more that I see the church as a system, as a system basically just as like a political system or any other system that, due to colonization, is built into our framework of how we function as a society. So I guess when I'm talking about the church I'm talking about this God versus humanity system that has been developed. That you know I guess I don't really know another way to explain it. I just see it operating as a system as a whole and affecting, you know, one civilization after the other.

Speaker 2: 13:13

Well, I have. I have a few responses. One of them is that I remember reading somewhere I think this is right that the root religion comes from the Latin of relegare, to bind, and also comes from the Latin relicco, which means good faith and ritual. It may also come from relegare, which means to tie fast. Okay, so the point is that we, I think that we need religion. I think that, in its most generic sense, I think we need something to tie us together in a community and we need something to bind us to land.

Speaker 2: 14:21

And so far as I'm concerned, religion has a couple of three purposes. One of them is to teach us how to get along with each other, another is to teach us how to get along with the land, and the third is to help us to experience the divine, to help us experience moments of connection and awe and ecstasy. So that's generically what I think religion is supposed to do. And so a couple of questions I ask about religion are does it help us get along, does it help us to live with the land and does it help us to experience the divine? So far as the land, I have a huge problem with all major religions in that it would seem clear, to me at least, that if a purpose of a religion is to teach you how to live in place and to teach you how to experience the divine in that place, that religions would have to be local. Because if a religion that would work to help to connect you to a desert would seem to me to be, there's going to be different sets of rules on how to live than there will be in a temperate rainforest, and your relationship to water is going to be different.

Speaker 2: 16:08

And that's just one part, and also a sort of generic criticism that I have of religions as they're sort of existing today is also, as I mentioned earlier, the movement of God away from the earth and out, sort of the creation of a distant sky god, because once you've removed affinity from the earth itself, the earth becomes a collection of objects that you can just use up, and so I know I'm going all over the place, but if you know my work at all, then you know that that's what I do.

Speaker 2: 17:01

And the Christians like to complain about atheists, but I think, in terms, I mean, christianity and atheism are kind of two sides of the same coin in terms of you've already moved this distant sky god away from the planet and the planet's just a veil of tears, and the real divinity is out here, and then all the atheists had to do is come on and turn off the light. It's like that's the heavy lifting was already done by pushing deities, plural infinitudes, away from. But that was, I think, a much more cosmological and much more historical answer than I think you were probably asking for.

Speaker 1: 17:46

No, I think that's perfect. I think that's beautiful and I'm not asking for anything specific. For me, this is more about conversation, just exposing each other and the world to new ideas and understanding like there are other ways of thinking and other ways of experiencing spirituality, and I personally have found God or spirit or source energy or whatever you want to call it more in nature than anywhere. So I think that's beautiful that you bring that out, and I can't escape the irony of everything that you're describing of what you believe that religion should be is basically how indigenous cultures were functioning before Christianity came in.

Speaker 2: 18:32

Yes, and that's not to say that when circumstances okay. Here's another thing I think is really interesting is that it's pretty obvious but it took me reading this in a book to understand it that cultures are, by definition, conservative in that they need to maintain a certain set of structures, a certain set of rituals, a certain set of beliefs, because if they're not conservative that way, then it's not a culture, because there's nothing being passed on. Do you see what I'm trying to say? And so, and there is reason for cultures to be conservative, Like I said, that otherwise they don't exist, but when faced with a new set of circumstances, the old rules might become maladaptive, and you see this.

Speaker 2: 19:39

And then, in addition this is interesting there's a book Female Power and Male Dominance by Peggy Reeve Sand. It's a really interesting book. Basically, she's asking why is it that some cultures are high rape and some cultures are low rape? And I mean, we can talk about various indigenous cultures being sustainable or being whatever, but there have existed some indigenous cultures that are pretty nasty too, yes, and so she was asking so there is this notion that men just rape women, that that's just how nature works, and she was really disagreeing with this and showing that there are some traditional cultures where rape is either extremely rare, non-existent, and she wanted to ask what are some of the characteristics of the high rape versus low rape cultures? And some of this stuff was pretty interesting and pretty straightforward Like, if it's a militaristic culture, it's probably higher rape. If it's got a male creator deity pretty interesting as opposed to a female creator deity or a couple, and that makes sense too and that really elevates males over. So the male creator deity chances are better, it's a higher rape culture. And then one of them the reason I'm saying all this is because another one was sort of a history of ecological trauma or dislocation within the past couple hundred years. And my point of bringing all this up is that, yes, religions might help you function, but then if there is a trauma in your society, your mythologies, your religions are going to change and then it can take hundreds of years for that trauma to get metabolized and for you to sort of settle down and to have a functioning, good mythology again that there can be.

Speaker 2: 21:55

There are a few people Robert Graves was one of them, and there was some female anthropologist and archaeologist I don't remember their names right now who really pushed the idea that stories like Medusa were really made either by the conquering patriarchal cultures to make. The Medusa was a beautiful woman and she was in the temple of Athena and Poseidon wanted her and, depending on the translation you read, they either had sex or he raped her. Original translation was he raped her, but then later on they said we'd rather they had sex, because the guys didn't want to admit that he had raped her. And then Athena gets really mad because they had violated the temple. I don't know why she gets mad at Medusa, but she does. And Medusa's turned into this horrible creature who anybody looks at. Her turns to stone and then she's killed by or CSI think.

Speaker 2: 23:01

Anyway, the point is that there are a lot of mythographers who believe that that story was the story of the conquest of matrophocal cultures by a patriarchal culture and they had to demonize literally demonize the female goddess or the female character, turn her into a monster. And you can also see this as descriptions of a traumatized people responding to the trauma. Think about this you have some responses to trauma vary, but one possible response to trauma by a woman who was happy and having a nice life and then she gets raped by a guy is to end up putting up barriers. In this case it's the wall of snakes. That's how my point of bringing all this up is that it is also possible.

Speaker 2: 24:17

Religions both create society and their reflections of society and they manifest what has happened to the society. But I would argue that a lot of the stories in a lot of our religions are trauma stories. They're stories of how a people become traumatized and unfortunately, since we live in a culture that's traumatized, we come to valorize a lot of those stories instead of seeing them as perhaps cautionary tales. Sorry, I'm again rambling all over.

Speaker 1: 25:00

No, this is really important. I do want to ask because I think a lot about energy and the more I connect with nature and my own intuition and the divine within me, the more I really understand energy and I can see. Now we've been in this patriarchal society that was once more of a matriarch, but I've noticed in healing and trauma and in everything that it's a pendulum swing. So I don't know, I'm kind of seeing like it was really matriarchal. The Neanderthals came in. The men didn't like that. It became more patriarchal and I see at some point this may go on.

Speaker 1: 25:47

Women are coming back into power, kind of standing up to this. They're like a few hundred years or whatever. And then, if we're still here, you know, kind of swing back towards the patriarchy direction, but a little less far than we did the first time. And then it's that pendulum swing where eventually things kind of equal out. On this level of pendulum swing, what you were saying, with like the mythology and having these stories as a cautionary tale, I feel like being able to be like that information is the kind of stuff that keeps the pendulum from swinging too far back, like it kind of stops us when we can see the mistakes that were made and we're like, okay, we're correcting, let's not overcorrect too much. But when they're interpreted in ways that are meant for control instead of guidance, then we get a different result and we don't get that natural evolutionary like hey, we can swing over this wave, but maybe not go that far with it. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1: 26:47

Yeah yeah, it does.

Speaker 2: 26:52

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1: 26:54

So if you were to like because I know your work kind of does the whole gamut which is what I love, because so much of what inspires me is this conversation around, you know, injustice basically around our environment and the patriarchy and white supremacy and imperialism and the way that it's affected society. So I just kind of wonder, like, what you feel like if we were in a more matriarchal society? What are like how we're approaching the way that we treat the earth and the way that we treat each other and the way that we treat the environment from a historical standpoint and mythological standpoint, like what do you see? Like what do you feel like the differences would be?

Speaker 2: 27:39

Well, I think one of the most harmful notions that humans have ever come up with is something called the Great Chain of being, and that's a scale of perfection, basically, and you have God at the top, and God is pure, disembodied and also omniscient and omnipotent. And then you have angels below that, and then you have humans, really men, and then women below men, and then you have non-human animals, and then you got plants, and then you got I don't know soil or precious gems, and then sand, and then soil, or vice versa. And it's a scale from pure disembodied perfection down to purely embodied corruption, with humans being a battleground between perfect mind and imperfect body. And we can say, oh, that's ancient Greek history. Who cares? But it still manifests constantly. And I mean, think about this.

Speaker 2: 28:58

If I were to say name three of the greatest pieces of art, you might say the Mona Lisa, sistine Chapel and something by Van Gogh or something. And what about birdsong? What about lightning? What about thunder? What about the sounds of frogs? But those aren't considered creations, those aren't considered artistic creations. That's just nature. Why? Because it was created by bodies. It wasn't created by this up here.

Speaker 2: 29:35

Or let's think about it. What are three of the greatest inventions, or five of the greatest inventions of all time the lever, the screw, water pump, gunpowder, the wheel I don't know if I said the wheel. So these are the great inventions. What about sex? What about proprioception? Proprioception is how you tell what your hand is when it's behind your back. If you can't see it, that's how you can move. We couldn't move without proprioception. What about metabolism? Oh, but those don't count. Those aren't inventions. Nature made those up at some point, but those don't count because we didn't create them with our heads. Instead, they were created with our bodies. They're created with everybody's bodies.

Speaker 2: 30:32

It's like about 20 years ago now, I was listening to this interview with this astronomer and somebody asked him why do we need to explore Mars? And the guy answered to answer that most important question of all, which is are we all alone? I'm thinking you're nuts. Look around, man. There's life all around you. But we get so excited when we scientists create enzymes in a lab that are one step closer to creating life, like humans can almost create life. It's like dude. I hate to tell you, but humans are creating life all over the place. It's like this Jimman's. In fact. We're doing it too much. Rabbits are creating life. Bacteria are creating life, but that doesn't count.

Speaker 2: 31:27

What this ends up is that we can destroy huge swaths of forest without blinking. It's like Thomas Berry used to say this is like destroying the great works of art. We can do that because we're in this great chain of being where we think that humans are more important than those down here. And then we can say well, the great chain of being doesn't work anymore because we don't believe in God. But the secular version is at least as bad, if not worse, which is now. It's pure mathematics at the top. Now it is machines at the top. Oh God, he's a machine, he never makes any mistakes, and it's like that's what's. The whole world's being destroyed really to serve this machine culture.

Speaker 2: 32:20

So one of the things that comes down from this great chain of being is a hierarchical perspective that I think is really incredibly harmful. That the problem is not that there are no differences between men and women. The problem is putting them into a hierarchy. If the problem is looking at it as men over women and it's the same with white supremacy, it's the same with any of these. The problem, the two problems one of them is not the perception of difference, because there are differences that we can perceive. I mean Africans. Many Africans, many Sub-Saharan Africans have a resistance to malaria. There are some physical differences between. You can see them, but the problem is not recognizing differences between Latvians and Hungarians. That's how we can separate between the Latvians and French people. You can see the differences, but the problem is not recognizing these differences. The problem is putting them into a hierarchy and presuming that that makes Hungarians better than French people or French people better than Hungarians.

Speaker 2: 33:55

And also anarchists generally respond to this in sort of an equally knee-jerk way. That doesn't help either, by saying that no hierarchies are ever acceptable. But the way I get around, that is by thinking about when somebody taught me to go hunting when I lived in Spokane, and anybody who hates hunting don't worry, the only thing I ever got was lost. But anyway, the people who taught me how to hunt were all equal. When we're in the truck, we get out to where we would go hunting and they hand me a gun. And once they hand me a gun, I do what they tell me, because they're experienced hunters and I'm not.

Speaker 2: 34:36

And so there are times it's like Noam Chomsky says about he believes not only in authority but coercive authority sometimes because if he was with his great-grandchild and his great-grandchild started to run into the road, he would coercively stop that great-grandchild from running into the road. I mean, there are times and places where it's appropriate. The problem is that these roles can become ossified, they can become set in stone and anyway. So that's another sort of long digression on. I don't know what your original question was.

Speaker 2: 35:14

We were just talking about like what our, if we were acting like the perspective of like women, like how we were treating their so the perspective that I think would be much more important and would be much less harmful would be to recognize that it's like so many indigenous people have said to me, that one of the biggest differences between Western indigenous ways of being in the world is that even the most open-minded Westerners generally perceive listening to the natural world as a metaphor as opposed to the way the world really is, and they perceive the world as consisting of resources to be exploited as opposed to other beings to enter into a relationship with. And that's really crucial, because how you perceive someone else affects how you treat the other person. So if, when I there's a great line by a Canadian lumberman when I look at trees, I see dollar bills, and if, when you look at trees, you see dollar bills, you're going to treat them one way. If, when you look at trees, you see trees, you'll treat them another way.

Speaker 2: 36:19

And if, when I look at this particular tree.

Speaker 1: 36:20

I see this particular tree Giving us the air that we breathe.

Speaker 2: 36:24

And also as other beings whose lives are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me, which doesn't mean nobody can ever kill each other, because bears kill salmon to eat them. And the question is just recognizing this. I mean that when I take the life of another whether it's it doesn't matter whether it's an apple or a potato or a cow, but I'm taking the life of someone whose life is as valuable to it as mine is to me, and this is also why I am so strongly opposed to pornography. Is that one of the things that pornography does is teach men to perceive women as orifices. And if, when I look at a woman, I see orifices, I'm going to treat her one way. And if, when I look at a woman, I see a woman, I treat her differently. And if I look at this particular woman, I see this particular woman, I treat her differently still. And so I think, oh, but this gets a little bit complicated too. Not the orifice part, but the objectification part.

Speaker 2: 37:43

I was going to say that objectification is something. I think that's really harmful, but it's the same deal. We can't go through life never objectifying anybody, because life is just too complex. And I mean you are asking me questions and that's great and I can perceive you as a human being with whom I'm having a conversation, but that's probably because there's only two of us and like if there were, if I was walking through Walmart and I just need to buy some toilet paper, I can't be thinking at every moment oh my gosh, this person is having relationship troubles, this person has hemorrhoids, this person over here, I can't go through life perceiving and that's just humans, and I know about every little fly who's flying through the air. I can't perceive everybody as an individual at all times, or existential. I'll just collapse.

Speaker 2: 38:38

Martin Buber had this great book called I and Thou, which is there's two types of relationships IU and IIT, and IU is the world of relationship and IIT is the world of experience and exploitation. And he says anybody who never goes into IU is not alive. I mean you're dead inside or something, but anybody who is only in the world of IU would existentially explode, because you can't get up from what we did today and then walk outside and then think every single insect exist. You can't do it every moment, but the point is we need to be doing it more than we are, because we objectify everybody, which is how we've sort of turned into a sociopathic culture.

Speaker 1: 39:26

Yeah, yeah, and with that, my own experience have really been turning to nature more and more over the years and recently had an experience where I was trimming some limbs for a project, for an art project, and very respectfully. I'm in Hawaii and have learned a lot about asking permission before you harvest a plant or move a stone. Everything has its own life, energy, and to ask its permission, not just to own it and I appreciate that I feel like it makes my whole life better approaching it in that way. But I was trimming it and I was in a hurry and I finally just was getting impatient and I grabbed a whole pile of branches and went to go cut it and I literally heard the tree scream at me like no, and so I stopped and I dropped it and I looked and then this whole big tree, that one area that I had grabbed, had all these little hidden blooms and it was the only place on the tree that was blooming.

Speaker 2: 40:26

Right.

Speaker 1: 40:28

And I know that, going into a church, I never felt God like I did in that moment. That was the God in me and the God in that tree having a conversation with each other. So in that, what you're talking about objectifying, I can see that because we don't see the soul in it, and by taking God and putting God somewhere else, other than this planet that we're living on or the life that we're in or whatever, it is easy to objectify and be like. This is a tree, I'm doing an art project, I'm cutting down these limbs. But by recognizing that there is life in all of this and that it doesn't just belong to us, I feel like for me it has brought a higher quality of life. I don't have dominion over all of these things, necessarily, but my life is just of a higher quality because it's not just me conquering the world over here.

Speaker 2: 41:24

So, that's exactly the point that that astronomer was accidentally making when he said are we all alone in the universe? It's like dude, that's a really lonely statement. And you're not, because you could just go talk to the tree outside and the tree will say hey look, I got blooms on one branch. Don't take that one.

Speaker 1: 41:44

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 41:45

Exactly, but you said the thing about not ever feeling that inside a church. That reminds me of when I was in my 20s. I lived in North Idaho and I was riding around somewhere with a friend and we were on some back road and then there was this church of somebody, built in the middle of this beautiful valley, and my friend started laughing and she said why would you make a house for God here? And the point being that God was everywhere around it? Right, of course, I can also see it. I can also see it because you might want a place to gather in the winter in North Idaho and get pretty cool. I can get that too.

Speaker 1: 42:29

I love that. I love that your perspective is not like anti-church or whatever and I'm not anti-church either. I'm in my own journey of deconstructing and kind of really understand. I've been deconstructing for 15 years but really deconstructing the pathways in my brain that have developed as a result of the indoctrination and just really seeing at the core of my beliefs and how it's affecting my life in different directions. So for me right now there's a little bit of rebellion against the church and that.

Speaker 1: 43:03

So I really appreciate the balance that you bring to that and understanding, because there have been wonderful things that I did find in the church and solace and comfort and stuff like that. But for me, the communication, the feeling of I'm not receiving this good feeling or this understanding because I was a good girl and you're giving it to me, but the feeling of we're here together, we're of the same source, like let's genuinely be in this together. That's how I felt with that tree. That's what I didn't feel in the church. It was really just like we're all in this together to make sure that we all stay in line and make it to heaven. But it was really every man out for themselves at the core of it. So I think it's really great that how you're bringing these perspectives of there is still a place for that for a lot of people and that there can be purpose to it.

Speaker 2: 43:58

Your questions are really great too, thank you, and your comments are really great too, thank you, just enjoying this.

Speaker 1: 44:05

Awesome, me too Awesome. So I'm curious as to you what's been your experience of finding the divine in nature?

Speaker 2: 44:20

So I'm going to ask you, because I don't know, if I can, I'm going to ask you to define divine. I used that word, but I don't know if I can define it. I'm feeling bad now.

Speaker 1: 44:33

Oh no, please don't feel bad. This is like this is a place where different opinions and feelings are completely welcome. I just like I say, I just try not. I try to be a little less wrong every day. There's no part of me that believes I have anything figured out. I'm finding out what works for me. It works great. Talking about it openly, that's kind of it. But the divine for me is the source like love, unconditional love, source to energy, like life, the source of life, or God for some people, like whatever your connection to something greater, I guess.

Speaker 2: 45:12

Yeah, I like that a lot better than the dictionary definition. I don't know. Looking at the etymology, that's why I'm frowning. Look at the etymology. It's not helpful. Pertaining to, of the nature of or proceeding from, god Got it Relating to deus, god, deity. So I'm not going to use their definition of divinity. I'm going to go with yours of connection to the source, yeah, and connection to life. And also I want to extend it.

Speaker 2: 45:52

I've just been writing something for the last couple of days about this and this is about a page and a half and the book is about taking care of my mom as she was dying and at this point in the story she's gotten her diagnosis of cancer and I'm driving her all over and I'm helping her and I'm really tired. On one trip over we stopped at the rest area between Grand's—I just wrote this last night, so it's all first draft Last two nights. So between Grand's Pass and Medford we get out of the car. It's a beautiful summer day. I hold my mom's arm as she walks up the sidewalk to the building with the toilets. After she goes inside I turn back, walk across the grass and sit on a picnic table. I close my eyes, lean back my head, feel the sun on my face. Birds chirp in nearby pines. I lean my head forward, shade my eyes with my left hand and open them. The slant of sunlight through tall pines, their soft smell, noticeable even past car and truck exhausts carrying on a slight breeze, the feel of the sun warmed wood through my pants. The moment was calling me, wanting me to fall into it, the way so many other moments in my life had wanted me to fall into them, to open, into a state of grace and embodied, remembering that everything fits with everything else, and a remembering of myself and the extraordinary community of life that surrounds, infuses and suffuses all of us. These usually small moments of participation make up many of the best parts of my life. They are, so far as I'm concerned, a primary point of existence. These moments where I'm fully alive and privileged to be immersed in probably mundane beauty require crucially for me to be simultaneously aware of the beauty in which I'm immersed and to have dropped the dissociating effects of noticing myself being aware of this beauty.

Speaker 2: 47:50

Joseph Campbell called this quote that principle of disinterested delight and self-loss in a rhythm of beauty which now is termed aesthetic and what used to be called more loosely spiritual, mystical or religious. Such an impact is beyond worlds, for it is not as can be explained by a reference to anything else. The mind is released for a moment, for a day or perhaps forever, from those anxieties to enjoy, to win, to be correct which spring from the net of nerves in which men are entangled, ego-dissolved, there is nothing in the net but light, which is everywhere and forever. The Zen masters of China and Japan called this state the state of no mind. The classical Indian terms are moksha, release, bodhi, enlightenment and nirvana, transcendence of the winds of passion. And Romain Rowland, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, described it as an oceanic feeling, a sensation of eternity, of being one with the external world as a whole, and believed this feeling to be the source of all religious impulse. I don't know about no mind, or enlightenment, or eternity, or, especially, release or transcendence. I just know I fall into it sometimes and I like it.

Speaker 2: 49:07

Standing next to a raging river and a Canadian coastal rainforest, mist turning to rain, just above rough stone-thrown waves, watching the colors of night come up over a distant ridge, pine trees silhouetted first against orange, then red, then purple, dark blue and a black homely, slightly less dark than the trees. Lying on my back on a high desert night, hearing no machine sounds, the sky, a textured mass of stars just a few inches beyond my reach, lying in my bed at home, lights off, no sounds except frogs and frogs and frog, loud enough to make human conversation impossible. Today, sitting on the picnic table at the rest area, life opens to me, invites me to join. I feel the invitation. It's as real as someone had walked up to me and handed me a note. But I can't, just, I just can't open up. I'm too tired, I'm too worried and I'm too distracted. I think of another line that applies this by the historical fiction writer Mary Stewart the God will not speak to those who have no time to listen. My mom comes out of the bathroom. I smile, push myself off the picnic table, walk toward her, take her arm and help her to the car so we can finish our trip to the medical appointment.

Speaker 2: 50:23

So for me, that's just a story about those experiences, that those. For me, those are those connections and I've also felt that I hope it's okay if I say this, but it's kind of like sex, that it gets better with the relationship continuing. Yeah, you know that it's years ago. I interviewed Vine DeLoria and he would tell his students to go outside as college students, and then we'd go outside, they would take a hike and they'd come back and like, oh God, I had such a great nature experience. He says, no, you didn't, you had an aesthetic experience. For it to be a real nature experience, you have to be with it over time.

Speaker 2: 51:08

I mean it's like again, it's just like a human relationship, just being in relationship over a long time and asking what is it like to be you and asking the other how can I make your life better? You know, dear Abby has this great question about relationships, which is the central question of relationship is better in than out? And are you better off in the relationship or out of it? And it's the same thing with the relationship with the church Are you better off in than out? It's true with, and it's true the other way too.

Speaker 2: 51:49

We forget to ask so often is the other person actually better off in this relationship with me than out? How do I make it so the other person's life is better by my presence and recognizing, of course, that with an abuse of relationships, that's the only question that gets asked is how can I, the victim, make the greater life better. So I'm not saying that in a codependent way, I'm saying that in a fully mutual way. But if you're in a mutual relationship and that's what I'm trying to talk about with wild nature too is like it's also not a spiritual resource for us. It doesn't exist so that we can feel awe. It has its own life and that's pretty awesome. Right there, that's even more awesome.

Speaker 2: 52:34

Life is full of all of these other beings and so, funny years ago, when I was interviewing Vindaloria, he said that according to Dakota mythologies or stories, the dreams came from like the wind, and dreams came from the spirits and some other people who live in different places, like a lot of. He was telling me that a lot of the South Eastern, the mythology of a lot of South Eastern nations, is going to be completely different than that of the Dakota, because the Dakota lived in the plains areas and the others lived in forests. And he said a lot of what your cosmology would be about there is how do you deal with all these other beings impinging on your psyche constantly? Because when you walk through a forest, there's all these trees talking to each other. All these trees are interacting. They're interacting with you, even though we don't pay attention to it.

Speaker 2: 53:33

It's like how do you and he said it can be difficult in a jungle to maintain like integrity with all of these beings just chattering all the time, anyway. So what would I bring up? Oh, so, nature experiences. Yeah, for me that's one of the points of life is just to experience those states of grace where I am, I just feel my immersion in the larger life.

Speaker 1: 54:15

Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful and thank you for sharing. I can't wait till the book is a book and I can read it. That was really awesome.

Speaker 1: 54:23

I was listening to because of my memory I don't know her name right now but I will add it to the show notes because I do want to give her credit but I was listening to an Indigenous woman speak on another podcast about this mutual, what you're talking about this mutual relationship with the earth. She was talking about how we had this idea of we can just do all this, but the earth is made to heal. The earth will bounce back, the earth knows how to heal. And I don't even know if I can say this without crying, but she was like, how often do we stop and ask the earth like how you doing? Like are you okay? Like you're carrying so much and everybody just believes that you can just carry it and deal with it. But like, really, how are you? And that just hit me so deeply. It really changed me. It's changed how I've operated as a person ever since that conversation, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 55:16

I think that that's the question to ask. And I think about nature like any other. I mean the notion that nature can survive. Anything we throw at it is merely putting, is merely projecting our notion of an omnipotent God onto nature. And it's just like any other community. It can get hurt and it can heal. And the body is extraordinary, you know. You can get a cut and then it can heal itself. You don't have to do anything, you just let it go. And but the thing is, if you're injured too badly, you die.

Speaker 2: 56:01

And it's the same with with. You know forests or anything else. Iraq, when you think of Iraq is the first thing you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground. That's what it was before the beginning of this culture. The Mediterranean was heavily forested. They're all cut. North Africa was heavily forested and you can push it so far. But then the same is true in a relationship. You know there can be some friction in a relationship, but if you push the relationship too far, like it breaks. Same thing can happen with with, and I think that's partly what happened with my relationship with with the church I grew up in, but I liked it at first, and then there was just too many. You know, as as, as I say, in relation, we grew apart.

Speaker 2: 56:48

Yeah, I think that that that question of how are you doing is is the most important question to ask. And also, what do you need? What do you need from me? What do you want from me? And you know the land where I live. I try to help it however I can, and there are many ways I can help it. And then also, there are some places on this land I just never go because I figure it, the place has been cut over twice long before I was here, cut over a hundred and some years ago and then cut over again 50 years ago. And you know, I just figure probably some of it's just I've had enough of humans for a while.

Speaker 2: 57:40

Yeah, so, just you know, I knew some tree sitters back when there was a lot of tree sitting going on to try to halt logging and logging of old growth, redwoods, and the tree sitters that I knew would say to me some trees, we'd throw a rope up and there'd be like, yeah, please come sit up here to protect us. And others are like I want nothing to do with you. They wouldn't accept a rope. They would keep trying to throw ropes up and they wouldn't be able to do it and they would just be getting all these vibes from the trees saying you know, frankly, I can't stand you people and no, I don't want one of you.

Speaker 2: 58:22

Living up here for a year, I hear people say if I tell a story about a coyote, somebody will say, oh, a trickster. It's like no, it's not a mythological coyote, it's actually a coyote. And I've heard people say you know, oh, trees, trees are just full of light and love and they have all this wonderful energy and they give you love. No-transcript, I don't think so. I think trees are trees and some of them might be fairly happy and some of them might be not very happy, and I think everybody is pretty much just like everybody else. I mean, we're radically different in that, you know, bears have a sense of smell that's like 10 times or 20 times or 100 times stronger than dogs. So how different the world? Or honey bees can see ultraviolet, which means that flowers look a lot different to them. A lot of flowers have like little arrows pointing to where the bee is supposed to go to get the nectar. So we all perceive the world very differently. Like how would the world?

Speaker 2: 59:21

There's all sorts of plant communication going on through pheromones. They send out, sent signal, chemical signals, as how they tell each other hey, there's some caterpillars over here, you might want to change the composition of your leaves so that the caterpillars don't want them. They send out messages to ladybugs. I've seen this happen. It's pretty cool. So the aphids will be chewing on a plant and then 24, 36 hours later, there are all these wasps who are coming in, who like to eat aphids. And the world would be so different if we perceive those.

Speaker 2: 59:57

You know, because trees don't talk, they don't yak with their mouths, then we presume that it's not speaking. But they're communicating and we can't perceive, we don't have the receptors to perceive how the tree is. And this isn't even cosmic stuff, this isn't even like the tree saying to you, don't cut that branch. This is just how they normally communicate. There's this guy, stefano Mancuso, who's developed a live of a dictionary of like 1500 terms that some plants use, its chemical terms that say all sorts of different messages.

Speaker 2: 1:00:30

So my point is that, yes, the world is really different.

Speaker 2: 1:00:33

For for dogs, for trees, for salmon, they all perceive the world radically different for trees, and then this, of course, is projection, because I don't even know what it's like to be another human being, but I strongly suspect that trees and and we know that dogs and bears and others have their own personalities and I'll see this all the time. I'll see two baby bears, and one of them is really aggressive and one of them is really timid, and that's actually a really good survival strategy. I know this is off topic, but I love this. I was trying to figure out why would that be? Because the aggressive one will usually take more food, and so that's just an advantage. But why would there be aggressive and timid? And it's because the aggressive one is also way more likely to get killed. Oh, wow, because it so there was. There was a mother bear a couple of years ago, put left her babies up there and then she disappeared. She might have died or whatever, and I noticed that one of the two bears was way more aggressive, that they're little.

Speaker 2: 1:01:40

They're tiny, little babies and one of them was way more aggressive in terms of coming down the tree and so if there was anything around he was much more likely to get it. But also, I came out one time, started streaming and there was a big bear attacking the baby bear, and the other bear was way up the tree. So again, that more aggressive bear is much more likely to die. But when things are going fine he's getting a lot more food. So anyway, I think it's the same with trees. Some trees are going to be, you know, more relaxed, some of them are going to be and, frankly, at this point they're probably all terrified. But anyway, back to the original thing, that question, and I guarantee that if you were and well, you've already done it I guarantee that if your listeners go out and they really listen with an open mind and they just say to stream, forest a tree, any of those you know, if they just do it five or six times, enough times the other can they will hear something they'll totally hear.

Speaker 2: 1:02:51

I was trying several, many years, two decades ago, I was trying to write a piece about what it's like to be to be a river, and I'm trying to write it for weeks. I can't do it. It's just terrible. And then one day I realized that this is really stupid. That'd be like me trying to write what is it like to be a woman when I can just ask one.

Speaker 2: 1:03:08

So I walked down the stream. It was a stream like 40 yards that way. I walked down the stream and I said, what is it like to be you? And literally within a second the stream was like I've been waiting for somebody to ask that question, for a human to ask that question, and then just gave me the most beautiful thing I've ever written in my life. And I didn't even write it, I just I basically just listened for about 20 seconds and then ran inside as fast as I could so that I could remember it and then just wrote it down and hardly edited at all. And your mileage may vary, but I think that asking that question is hugely important. Yeah, and it's a better way to live your life. I mean, you brought this up a couple times about how do you? You know, your life is just better this way and it's just a better way to go through life, less lonely.

Speaker 1: 1:04:13

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know I spend a lot of time in solitude. I enjoy it. I also enjoy my friends and I enjoy my good conversations and stuff like that. But I don't ever feel lonely. And it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:04:25

I'm noticing like you're surrounded by trees and you're close to a stream and I am also in the jungles around my trees and I can hear the stream running down below right now and I do feel like they're. Yeah, I couldn't, couldn't possibly be lonely. I'm surrounded, like I literally, you know, talk to the trees across the gulch and then the ones above it will start waving in the wind, like don't forget about us, like I'm on us, you know, and I'll say hi to them and and it's just like I'm I'm never alone, like I'm always, you know, communicating and yeah, it is. It's just a happier way to live. Like it it feels good to not just be trying to figure out my own stuff all the time, but just to be, and I also like have learned that we can learn a lot just by. You know, I love this like listening instead of just like talking, like listening to nature concept, but also just in watching, like I've noticed, like I did a really powerful breathwork class the other day and the message that was coming through was like, why are we so afraid to be big? Like, trust yourself enough to be as big as you can be.

Speaker 1: 1:05:32

And then I walk outside and I see all these huge trees everywhere and all these. You know, I'm in Hawaii, so the plants are very prolific and everything is bigger than it would be, you know, in a regular climate. And that's what the trees were like. We never stopped being big. We just get as big as we can be, you know, and the flowers and the bushes, we just get as we just keep growing, and if something's in the way we grow around it. You know, and it was just like, yeah, I just feel like there's so much. If we can listen and we can watch the world around us and stop thinking that we have all the answers, then we could be more students to it than trying to be the masters. It's all been here longer than we have.

Speaker 2: 1:06:12

I can totally agree, and it's. I think it's really crucial to have that humility. There's another line I want to quote you that has to do with what you're just talking about. This is see who wrote this in conscious. This is not my writing, this is somebody else said this.

Speaker 2: 1:06:32

In contrast to today's existentialist who holds that in a world devoid of meaning, is man's humans job to create his own meanings, the romantic felt that the world was full of meanings if he can only see it whole with his do-it-yourself kit. The existentialist must make his own universe. The romantic usually assumed that God had already done a lot of the work, and I really like that. And it also brings up something else, which is, you know, we, we talk about the problems, and I can talk about the problems with Christianity and with monotheism. I think that we are in a difficult place for the last couple hundred years because there was one story that ended and the news stories that have taken over are not sufficient. I think the scientific revolution was great in terms of increasing human power. Don't know that increasing human power is great, but it's been great at increasing human power and it has accomplished many miraculous things. And it's not a cosmology, it's not.

Speaker 2: 1:07:49

I think we we have a need for a way to connect to the divine, like we were talking about, to connect to the larger we evolve, connected to the larger community of life, and God was one way of doing that. Religion was one way. I think it was a. It was a way that had a lot of problems, but that way is gone, and I think one of the reasons that we're mucking about so badly is that and this is not original to me you know there have been plenty of books written about how, at least prior to the Industrial Revolution, there were limits on what humans were allowed to do, like God would tell you, don't do this, or the church would tell you God told you not to do it.

Speaker 2: 1:08:40

To be more accurate, part of the problem is that with the removal of those limits, we have been cast adrift and we've also become really lonely. We're lonelier than we've ever been. I think we're casting about for language, for religions, which also is one reason that sort of the SJW and a lot of postmodernism has become a religion itself. I think we have an inherent need for religions, but the religions are all that's how, a lot of young kids end up getting.

Speaker 2: 1:09:15

This is a bigger deal. When I was younger probably maybe, but a lot of kids get sucked into gangs because they're looking for that larger connection and so I had to go a completely different direction. But I love this the Felicitas Goodman I don't remember the name of the book, but she was really good stuff about how she thinks we are ecstasy deprived and how our lack of ecstasy leads to a lot of problems like drug addiction or consumerism, television those are all ways to try to fill that void that's lacking, because we don't have ecstatic connection to the more than human world and we don't have ecstatic connection to our communities. And I mean, that's the thing I don't. I'm not much of a singer, but I don't care how corny it is. Listening to a terrible church choir can still make me cry because it's the humans coming together and I think that's a thing that we have done forever and is necessary. But then because we're not getting it in the churches anymore in our communities it doesn't have to be a Catholic church or something, but in our communities we're not getting it.

Speaker 2: 1:10:41

So we end up with and I know, okay, don't get me wrong, I like rock music. I've been into so many concerts in my life. It's all you know, I was a total UFO fanatic. Ufo is a band from the 70s. A total spirit fanatic is another band from the 70s total fanatics for those bands. That's all great. That doesn't alter the fact that when I look at a video of, and I've seen ACDC in concerts I'm not attacking ACDC but when I see a video of 50,000 people in an auditorium pulsing along and singing, I'm on the highway to hell.

Speaker 2: 1:11:25

I think that's really worrying because I think music is another way that we. I think that music is sacred too. Sacred means that which must be maintained whole, and I mean that's that. I love that, that the forest must be maintained whole, that our bodily integrity must be maintained whole. That's why there's the sacredness of our bodies, that that sacredness must not be violated. And music is sacred. And I think that a rock concert again, I've been to a bazillion and I enjoyed them very much and I would, if the right band came around, I would still go. But I think that that's a toxic mimic, because I remember listening to this interview with some rock star and I don't remember who who went to Mongolia, did a tour there and he said it was really cool to hear children to play for children and youths who had never before heard power chord progressions and to see them responding physically to that, and that lets us know that music opens us up somehow, and that's fine. But then when music opens you up and the message that's being delivered is can't you see how, what that woman she done to me? Or if the message is I'm on the highway to hell, or even we could take a bunch of hymns. I think it's nice to know that Jesus loves you, but there are other hymns that we can talk about. I can't think of it off the top of my head, but the meaning is pretty nature-hating or pretty woman-hating or pretty body-hating, but I would love to see churches where they sing. Isn't it wonderful to be loved by a tree? I love the redwood, the redwood loves me, or something.

Speaker 2: 1:13:23

John McKibben made this point in his book Missing Information Age of Missing Information, where one of the things in there he had a little essay about. He had watched a whole bunch of TV shows and it was commenting on them and one of them was a dance show and he said all of this dancing seems to be about basically shaking your booty, and so the dancing is all about sublimated sex, and sex is a fine part of life. This is probably my favorite thing Bill McKibben ever wrote. But where is the dance for the harvest? Where is the dance for remembering the salmon? Where is the dance for? And traditionally, people would have dances for all of those things, and I guess it's the same. Within a church, it's great to sing about how much you love God, but let's have some songs about how much you love the rain. Anyway, I've gone way the hell off topic yet again.

Speaker 1: 1:14:22

No, I get that and I agree about music and I am very careful because I still find a lot of solace in some hymns because of my ancestral roots. But I always change the words because I don't want to sing with my heart and say something that doesn't feel right. So I'll change the words to something that makes more sense to me. But with what you're saying, that's what's happening in Hawaii. With the songs about Hawaii, like, most of them are about nature and it's like this.

Speaker 1: 1:14:50

One of my favorite, like hula dances, is about a cloud that starts in the ocean and it comes over East Maui and, living here, I see this cloud every day and its progression and how it moves across the island.

Speaker 1: 1:15:02

Every day this cloud comes and it comes over the volcano and it goes over to the other side of the island where it like leaves and it brings this little rain with it in the afternoon and it's personifying this cloud, of course, and it's like a love story. But they like sing about this cloud and how it moves and it's just like a love story to the cloud, you know, and every there's not a Hawaiian song or a hula that I can see without feeling that sacred in me, you know, without feeling that like connection, that divine connection, and without tearing up, even if I'm seeing five year olds dancing hula and like hearing these songs, it makes me cry because I recognize that and so I can see that like the value in that and how it really does bring us closer to that. You know source. It's like recognizing the oneness in it all. Yeah, and I can talk to you all day. I still have a million questions. Maybe one day we can do another follow up interview.

Speaker 2: 1:15:58

Yeah, let's do another one sometime, because I'm going to have to go in a minute.

Speaker 1: 1:16:01

Yeah, me too. So I love that. But just to kind of like, leave us a place to end for those who are listening, where would you recommend someone starting just starting to get involved in like a way that feels sustainable for someone who hasn't been before, or whatever? Just a place where they can start to get involved and being a part of the bigger conversations and being a part of change for our planet?

Speaker 2: 1:16:24

I think a couple of things. One of them is find what you love and it's probably under assault and defend it. I mean, if what you love is a specific species or a specific place, defend it, and it doesn't have to be nonhumans. I have a friend, Charlotte Watson, who does fabulous work stopping men's violence against women, and I would never ask her stop doing that and work on salmon. You know that's the good thing about everything being so messed up is no matter where you look, there's really great work to be done. So find what you love and could be long form discourse. That's one reason my books are long and that's one reason that these conversations are long is long form discourse is under assault. I saw this thing back from the 70s where some media critic was saying you watch how the news is going. Soon the stories are only going to be 60 seconds long. Like you have no idea how bad things are going to get, I mean, I'm delighted when we get a 60 second story at this point.

Speaker 1: 1:17:40

Right, Right Now it's like, yeah, seven seconds, you got seven seconds to hook them. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 1:17:47

And so long form thinkers are. Independent bookstores are under assault. You know it's whatever it is that you care about. Find it, dig in and defend it. That's one thing. Another thing is to find what your gifts are and how you can use them. I mean, different people have different gifts. I am terrible. I'm good at writing the stuff I do. I'm terrible at writing press releases. I would be just horrible. People have said Derek, quit writing and become an organizer. I can't even organize my pens, you know. And also I don't really like. I mean, I like doing interviews like this, but I could never stand outside a grocery store and talk to strangers about signing a petition. That would freak me out. I can't do it. And so I know other people who don't mind doing that. They enjoy it. So find the things that you're good at and that you can do and do them. And then the last thing that's really important is do something. The big distinction between those who do something and those who do nothing and make a tangible commitment.

Speaker 2: 1:19:03

And the way I started becoming an activist in the first place was in the 1980s. I realized I wasn't paying enough for gas. I knew everything was messed up. I knew that plants getting killed. I knew all that stuff was too big. I don't even know where to start, so I didn't do anything. And then I realized I'm paying too much for gas, and by which I mean my cost wasn't covering the ecological and social costs of it. So for every dollar I spent on gas, I would give a dollar to a local not national, but to a local environmental organization. So at the time you could fill your tank for 10 bucks, and so I would give $10 to a local environmental organization. But I didn't have any money. So I started paying myself $5 an hour to do activism, and so if I fill my tank once a week and it costs 10 bucks, I commit no excuses, absolutely no excuses. I'm going to do two hours of activism.

Speaker 2: 1:19:59

So a local circus came to town I just know circuses are bad animals and so I went down and I held a sign. I didn't even bring a sign, I just walked up and said, hey, you want an extra person for your protest? And I said, sure, here's a sign. I'm like circuses are bad. And then I was doing letters to the editor, and it started off with me doing letters to the editor. I was too scared to sign my own name because I was, and now I've got 20-some books out. This is like at the time. I was too scared, so I didn't let the fear stop me. And then there was a local Air Force base. I used to go out and hold signs saying bombing is bad, whatever. And then I graduated from there to Timber Sale Appeals, which I couldn't figure out how to do on my own. That's another thing.

Speaker 2: 1:20:51

Once you get to a certain level of confidence, then go to some organization and say how can I help you?

Speaker 2: 1:20:57

An organization you like, but be aware that they may not welcome you with open arms, because, a sometimes people are just jerks may happen or B because it takes them time to train someone, and a lot of times they don't want to take time to train you if you're not going to show up again.

Speaker 2: 1:21:21

So if you do show up at a place and say can you teach me how to do Timber Sale Appeals or this or that, make sure you say I'm absolutely positively committing to doing at least 20 hours of this after you tell me how to do it. And then after 20 hours, if you hate each other, then you just go find a different one. Or if they tell you no, just go find somebody else, because they're starved for help. It's just again. And the reason I know this is because when I was a teacher at a university, sometimes my students would want to go volunteer and they would all go to these local environmental organizations. They would say the same thing, which is they didn't really want us. And I asked the local environmental and they told me that thing about look, we don't know if they're going to show up again. I'm not going to waste five hours training somebody when they're never showing up again.

Speaker 1: 1:22:12

That's really helpful. Thank you very much. I appreciate that, and thank you again.

Speaker 2: 1:22:17

Go outside, that's the other thing. Go outside. Go outside and ask your neighbors what they want. You're non-human neighbors. I love that.

Speaker 1: 1:22:25

That's perfect. Thank you so much. I'm going to put all your information for anybody who's listening in the description so they'll know how to find you and all of your wonderful books and your wonderful work. I appreciate you so much for your time and I'm already looking forward to our next conversation. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 1:22:39

I'll support you too.

Speaker 1: 1:22:41

All right, aloha. Thank you for joining me on this journey. If you enjoyed this episode, the best way to show your support is to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, share your thoughts by leaving a five-star review. It really helps more people to find this space. Want to go deeper? Head over to my website at leavingtheturchdefinegodcom, where you can make a donation and make sure that we continue to have these conversations, no matter where you are on your spiritual journey. If you or someone you know would like to join the podcast and tell your story, please reach out to me on Instagram at authenticallymelly. Remember you're not alone on this journey. Keep exploring, keep asking questions and keep finding your own unique connection to something greater. Until next time, stay authentic, stay open and aloha.