Bristlecone Firesides

This is a special 3-part episode of Bristlecone Firesides. Abbey and Madison are joined again by poet and mystic Kathryn Knight Sonntag as well as new guest Amber Richardson to explore the Wild Woman archetype. Within the shared collective unconscious lies the Wild Woman — a mythic symbol of pure womanhood, undefiled and untamed. The Wild Woman runs with wolves and embodies all the beauty and terror of life and death as well as shamelessly embraces pleasure, pain, and everything in between.

This is a special 3-part episode of Bristlecone Firesides. Abbey and Madison are joined again by poet and mystic Kathryn Knight Sonntag as well as new guest Amber Richardson to explore the Wild Woman archetype. Within the shared collective unconscious lies the Wild Woman — a mythic symbol of pure womanhood, undefiled and untamed. The Wild Woman runs with wolves and embodies all the beauty and terror of life and death as well as shamelessly embraces pleasure, pain, and everything in between.

This is a special 3-part episode of Bristlecone Firesides. Abbey and Madison are joined again by poet and mystic Kathryn Knight Sonntag as well as new guest Amber Richardson to explore the Wild Woman archetype. Within the shared collective unconscious lies the Wild Woman — a mythic symbol of pure womanhood, undefiled and untamed. The Wild Woman runs with wolves and embodies all the beauty and terror of life and death as well as shamelessly embraces pleasure, pain, and everything in between.

Bob Rees, the Director for Mormon Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, joins Abbey and Madison around the fireside today to talk about the rare, radical, and challenging book of Job. This book is a theodicy which is a defense of God’s goodness in the face of the vast amount of suffering experienced by humans on Earth. It is drama, poetry, theology asking nearly unanswerable questions of God and the Universe. This serves as a good introduction to the spiritual idea of wildness and wilderness as it deals with deep moral responsibility. God’s strange answer to Job’s questions about his suffering is to take Job on a tour of the wild Earth and Universe. God seems to ask “yeah, but have you seen the whales and the ostrich?”

This special episode of Bristlecone Firesides: Summer Sessions is all about the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. While this poem has been referenced in a previous episode, it is just so good that Madison and Abbey thought it’d be worth a full episode to break it down, line by line. Topics covered include: accepting the soft animal of your body, shedding our loneliness by joining the family of things, and participating in the great good flow of reality. This conversation turned out to be one of our favorites and actually serves as a good teaser for season two. So please enjoy.

Utah has two great lakes that straddle the northern and southern borders — Lake Powell and Bear Lake. These two lakes are icons of aquatic recreation in Utah. Bear Lake is a natural deep blue body of water that is surrounded by cabins and raspberry shakes. Whereas Lake Powell is the beautiful bittersweet gem of the southwest created by flooding the temple-like Glen Canyon system. Abbey and Madison break down the intricacies of both lakes and the role they play in the Mormon imagination.

In this talk, Theric snacks on a bag of SunChips while extolling the sacrament ritual and describing the cycles of life, death, and recreation we are all a part of.