Healing (?) and the Beauty and Generativity of Incompleteness w/ Sophie Strand Artwork

Mystics in the Matrix

This is a podcast with humble roots in my experience with circle-based communities, committed to sharing our wisdom traditions, cultural richness, ancestral teachings, and hard-won personal insights in the service of co-making a beautiful world. The intention within my heart as host is to curate a welcoming and sensual space that brings ease to the nervous system, as well as the heart/brain activation that sparks creativity, openness, and receptivity. This podcast is an etheric meeting place for those free-lancing ‘mystics’ of our current cultural, technological, and mycelial matrix. The highly sensitive, the deeply insightful, those ‘taken up’ on the wings of imagination, attuned to the subtle music of the earth, open to brushing up against other bodies, beings, ideas, and lifeways with curiosity rather than fear. Those whose hearts live in stubborn refusal to harden, choosing to remain soft and permeable, and in service to the Sacred aspects of Life. Those who delight in the path of wisdom, embrace multiple ways of knowing, accept what is not known with humble uncertainty, and practice the subtle art of spell-breaking in a spellbound world. The conversations herein are walkabouts in the woods, lanterns in hand, in which we explore what interconnects us, what separates us, the structures in our world that harm and those that heal, and the beautiful, good things that make life bearable, incredible, magical. These conversations live outside of the halls of academia, they hold paradox rather than polarization, they espouse curiosity with one another and with life, and recognize the folly of metanarratives. May hearts, brains, and bodies ‘light up’ around this charitable fire. I invite you into spaciousness, fellowship, care-fullness. There is room at this table for you, the candles are lit, and a lending library is open.

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Mystics in the Matrix

Healing (?) and the Beauty and Generativity of Incompleteness w/ Sophie Strand

March 21, 2022 • Amber Samaya • Season 3 • Episode 1

This is a conversation with author, poet and brilliant ‘compost heap of ideas’, Sophie Strand. Sophie is kind, generous of spirit and invitational. Our time together was an unhurried meander, getting a sense of each other before we approached the big topics that we planned to speak about. We arrived at things she has recently been writing about, namely challenging our conceptions of both healing and trauma, acknowledging incompleteness as an intrinsic and beautiful part of life, and the generativity that constraints offer us.

We also briefly speak of the craving for rooted relationships, the impacts of pandemic times, the holobiont that makes us a 'we', the profound medicine of walking (for those who are physically able) intentionally and regularly around the places you live to build intimacy with the land and all the beings therein that you are in curious kinship with. Oh, and radical uncertainty. Enjoy Sophie's amazingness.

Below you will find links to her social media and places you can preorder her up and coming book - The Flowering Wand - Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.

Sophie's Bio (from her website):

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.

Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels. She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny.

PREORDER her book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine Via Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Inner Traditions publishing, Bookshop.org, and other book sellers.

Podcast Music:
Podcast intro created by Amber Samaya
Completing song is intuitive song inspired by Sophie's essay "Your body is a doorway"
You can hear more of my music on Spotify under Amber Samaya

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