The Gaggle

Isaac Gendler is a climate adaptation researcher and an advocate for sustainable housing policy. We talked bay area wildfires and why fire is not the real problem. Warning: this conversation questions the broadly-accepted sanctity of single-family homes. You can read more of Issac’s work at isaacscienceblog.com. Terms to know: NIMBY (not in my backyard); YIMBY (‘yes’ in my backyard); Infill = building more densely in developed areas, the opposite of sprawl.

We invited interior design and psychology student Natalie Ricci for a conversation on all the myriad ways that the objects and colors and beings around us impact how we feel inside. Natalie is full of both information and advice for anyone wishing to improve their mood and well-being both inside and outside the home. Specifically, anyone dealing with chronic stress, anxiety or depression would greatly benefit from Natalie’s insights into the nervous system and the need for restorative places.

Our first attempt at a themed episode! We have so much raw data and piping hot research to share with you about the essential question: “How do I, like, feel good?” Let’s talk about: nature restoration, jagged edges and curvatures, listening to the body, the wisdom of the wigwam, the truth about modern buildings, what evolutionary biology means for highways, hobbits versus beasts, and the secret to true happiness. All of this in under two hours. A world record no doubt.

Balding. There’s nothing like it. Did you know men have weird body-image issues? Let’s tell you all about ‘em. Is cyber-reality better or worse than reality? Both, maybe. How can we connect with our emotions on events when we don’t know what really happened? Finally, is America heading towards a violent war over ideology and what would that mean about the increasingly tyrannical nature of this presidential administration? P.S. Was the internet always toxic? Or did it devolve from a more innocent state? Perhaps this one depends on which corner of cyber-reality you hail from.

In celebration of the final lap of Sumac’s 20s, we contemplate Saturn’s return and emerging from the cocoon. We are blessed with surprise visits from Phat Wiggy and Cinco, long-time friends and bonafide members of the Gaggle. Horsetail interviews his seniors on questions of growing into oneself at this stage in life, offering advice to younger beings and finding balance between an open heart and self-care.

Men have been raving about their sexual desires in popular music for decades and few have taken notice. In this episode we confront the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality that allows men the privilege of making a public show of their sexuality while revolting when a woman tries to do the same. Of course, we’re talking about Cardi B’s wet-ass P-U-S-S-Y. Let’s dive into the deep of our collective white man comfort and be shaken by the celebration of flesh and blood and the spirit of the people rising out of captivity. In other words, let’s get over ourselves and join the party, the fight, the revolution.

It sounds like an oxymoron: challenging yourself to accept and love yourself. We are ever-becoming creatures, though, and for some of us it may take a challenge to find new ways of treating ourselves. Following the theme of our recent episodes, this conversation is again gushy, a little weighty at points, but finds an overall optimistic tone about our ability to rewrite personal narratives and embrace the things we have denied in our lives and ourselves. Before all of that, however, we take up the “dark psychic force” (Marianne Williamson’s words) of Q Anon, the phenomenon sweeping the globe with promises of a great awakening. While we don’t buy into the politics or beliefs, we also hope there is an awakening, one free of violence and floods of misinformation. On Bright Eyes Day, we honor the question so eloquently offered in 2011’s The People’s Key: How did we get so far away from us?

Is anxiety a concept or a condition? Is it personalized in how it has formed in the minds and bodies of those who struggle with it? Horsetail is not sure what he thinks about anxiety anymore.  How far back can we go in our physical history and our energetic history that will objectively inform our sense of reality and perception? Why do we tend to focus on what has caused so many problems in our mental health rather than encompassing all the beauty from this life and the energy of lives before us? We have zero answers to any of those questions, but Horsetail wants to dig into it... and pulls Sumac along for the journey. 

This one’s heavy, y’all. If you grew up in an unstable household or were part of a fundamentalist Christian church or were heavily indoctrinated with a world view as a child, this may bring up some discomfort, but our hope is to be a friend. Our discussion goes deeper into what it means to search for meaning as a recovering evangelical Christian and why it is so damn hard to find inner peace after leaving the church. We also look into the roots of our culture of radicalized sects, each finding meaning in the purity of their beliefs and actions. I think we can all feel the heaviness of our moment, but the question asked here is how much of that weight are we carrying with us from the past for no other reason but that we can’t seem to let it go?

Follow us on a detour through the colonized mind of a Christian empire, into the dark backdrop of European Celts, the Gauls of the continent, as we struggle to find an expanded self-identity against the will of power-thirsty overlords. Our final destination: the early-2000's "screamo" scene and the 2004 spark lit by Underoath in the untouchable, "They're Only Chasing Safety".