THE WONDER: Science-Based Paganism

Confronting Our Demons episode: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/confronting-our-demons-1629088082/

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

We're taking a couple of weeks off, but here is an episode on Ancestors from THE WONDER's archives. See you soon!

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E36 TRANSCRIPT:

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca

Mark: I’m the other one, Mark.

Yucca: and today we are talking about ancestors. So it's an appropriate time of year for that, I think any time of year, but as we approach what some people call Halloween Hollow sa. This is something that's on a lot of people's minds.

Mark: Right, Right. This is the time of year when we think about those who are departed, who are no longer with us. And as well as contemplating our own mortalities we talked about last week.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it's a good time to sort of sit with who are our ancestors? Who do we, you know, who do we feel connected to in the way of ancestry?

And then of course to have observances at this time of year. Vary from culture to culture, but it's very frequent that at this time of year people are doing some sort of the des MUTOs or some other kind of acknowledgement of relatives who have passed on or, or other ancestral recognitions. So the next thing for us to think about really is what do we mean when we talk about an ancestor, right? I mean, it's kind of a fuzzy word. Maybe we should start by exploring how ancestor. Observance veneration recognition fits into paganism as a whole. And maybe where some of that comes from. I mean, one of the theories that I find pretty credible, honestly as a non theist Pagan one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is, where did these ideas of Gods come from,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Because they're all over the place. and one of the prevailing theories for where the Gods came from is that they were originally stories about ancestors. They were stories about heroic activities or other other personality traits of particular figures from history that were actually real people, right. And then their stories got more and more embellished over time until, you know, the guy who did a great job on the Mastodon hunt ends up throwing lightning bolts from the sky. You know, that's kind of the way, it's the way human storytelling works.

Yucca: Yeah. And I think that it's, it's easy for us to forget how long we've been around for.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: On the one hand it's very short in, in kind of the grand scheme of things, but how many generations of humans there's been, And then of course we'll get into this later, but the, you know, before we were even humans, so how many, you know, 20, 30, just for that transformation, The Mastodon hunt to, you know, lightning bolts, but there's, we're talking hundreds, thousands of generations of people telling stories.

Mark: Right, and it's not like they only tell them once a generation, This is one of the reasons why culture and technology. Evolves so much more quickly than biology does, right? Because those are informational and information can, can morph really quickly.

Yucca: Did you ever play the the game telephone?

Mark: Oh yeah.

Yucca: Right. That's a really fun one to do, and you, that's, you watch that happen every day, with in real time, real life. But it's just such a great, even with a small group of people for anyone who's not familiar, you have one person tells somebody, whisper. This is great with a group of kids, whisper something to the next person and then they whisper it to the person next to them, next to them, and then at the end, the last person says it out loud.

And you see how much it changed from the first person to the last person.

Mark: Right, and this is when they're trying to get it. Right. Everybody is trying to transfer the information correctly, and even with a small group, a small little circle of people, what comes out at the end can be really hilariously different than what was originally said to the first person.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: You know,

Yucca: what you're, with, what you're talking about, when we do it on lifetimes with stories that have emotional meanings to people, you know, It's going to change based on the teller, but what's happening in the lives of these people at the time, the stage of their life. I mean, so much changes over just a lifetime.

But then over cultures, as those cultures evolve and change,

Mark: Sure, Sure. Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, it's like maybe the guy with the Mastodon who turned into the hurler of lightning bolts from the sky. Maybe that particular figures story doesn't have anything. It doesn't have anything particular to do with getting through times that are hard and adversity and that kind of thing.

But when there are times of adversity, you can bet somebody will make up a story about that figure that has to do with how they survived hard times because people need that story then, and we create the stories we need in order to get through the times we.

Yucca: Right. Or not even, you know, just completely make it up, but slightly shift a little bit of the interpretation of the previous version of the story and not even know that they're doing it

Mark: Sure. Yeah, exactly. And, and there's nothing there's nothing devious about it. It's, it's not like anybody, you know, ever probably intended to deceive anybody. But these stories evolve. They evolve to become the stories we need. Right? And that, that's the nature of human storytelling. You know, we can see that in the kinds of movies that get produced.

We can see it in the kinds of books that are popular. They are, they are the stories that are needed at that particular time.

Yucca: Yeah. So I like that idea a lot. I think it's probably not the only part to it, but I think it's a, an interesting component, right.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: I think that there's also a that this, the honoring of, of ancestors and even as far as ancestor worship is something very common throughout the world. There's lots of different groups that do it, and I think some of that comes from simply a place of originally of, of gratitude and recognition of how much we have received from.

Whoever ancestors are, which we should talk about in a moment, but that, you know that we come from them and they worked hard, and without their hard work, we wouldn't be here.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Literally, very, very literally would not be here,

Mark: Sure. So that gratitude in that veneration is deserved.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: There are also darker aspects to it, For example, Plugging people into a system of ancestor veneration is a pretty good way to keep them obedient to their family.

Yucca: It is.

Mark: It's a way, it's a way for their, their particular clan group or familial structure, whatever it is, to have a lot of influence over their lives.

And what ends up happening in cultures that have very strong traditions of ancestor veneration is of course, that the elderly hold tremendous amounts of.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: they're on their wage boards becoming ancestors.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. or are depending on how you are looking at an ancestor. Right. They're not, they're not gone yet, but they are those who came before. Right. You know, I don't know if you, I'm guessing you probably were told many times as a kid, respect your elders. Right. That's something pretty common in our, our culture.

Mark: I don't know that I was encouraged to respect anybody rather than my father when I was a kid. But I'm, I'm an

Yucca: you didn't, didn't have any, you know, folks who lived on the same street as you, who got mad when you. You know, doing something loud or talking back to a teacher or something like that. And we're told to respect, We're told to respect your elders.

Mark: Oh, I imagine. I probably was, I just can't think of an example right now.

Yucca: We just didn't take it serious. They just forgot it.

Mark: Well, yeah, it's, for whatever reason, I'm just not, I'm not remembering an instance of that right now.

Yucca: Maybe it's a regional thing as well.

Mark: Could be. Yeah, it could be. But when I was a kid you still called adults, Mr. And Miss and Mrs. And that's how you were introduced to them.

Yucca: Well, that's still a regional thing though.

Mark: is it?

Yucca: Yeah, that's, I think that has to do with what part of the, at least, at least within the United States, what part of the country you're in.

Mark: So ancestors very important part of the practice of many Pagan traditions particularly at this time of year. But we should talk more about what we think of when we individually, what you and I think of when we think of ancestors and what our orientation to those is. You wanna start?

Yucca: Yeah, I mean this is, this is a. Interesting area cuz we can go in a couple of different directions with it. One is you know, my line of the people who made me right. So we can start with, Okay. My parents, their parents, their parents on and on back. And I tend to think of my ancestors as being anyone who was in that line.

There's only. Who's alive out of that? So my father's alive my mother and all four grandparents, et cetera. You know, they're not but I kind of still think of my father as being, you know, one of my ancestors. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say necessarily he's one of my ancestors, right? One of the ancestors but I also think about that going beyond. The humans

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: if we go far enough back then my grandmothers weren't human,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: We go back and we were, some were still apes, some other kind of ape. Before that we weren't apes and keep going, you know, we were little furry creatures curring around when the asteroid hit and keep going back and back and fish.

Mark: fish.

Yucca: And all the way back to what gets called Luca, right? The last universal common ancestor. But actually that's the last universal. That doesn't mean that that was the start, right? And I, I just really love thinking about how there is an unbroken chain of life. You know, there's all of these arguments going on about when life starts and all of that and, but life hasn't stopped.

I mean, it will eventually. Right. We talked about that. Right? Like it's gonna stop in me, but the, but, but the cells that are me were made out of the cell. Out of a cell that was in my mother. That and her cells were made and her mother made in another and just keep, It's just so amazing to think about.

It's just kept going and going and it's not had my consciousness in it,

Mark: Right.

Yucca: but it's been there.

Mark: It's like a relay race lighting torches, right? You know, you run a certain distance with this torch and then you light the torch of the next runner, and that runner keeps going until they get to the next runner. So asking the question, when is, when did the fire start? Becomes a really thorny issue, right?

It's like, well, my fire started in 1962, but the fire started a long, long, long, long way before that.

Yucca: But did it start in 62? Like that's, you know, because what is the, you that started, I mean, you were born in 62, right? But what is the you part of that? Like, are you, you know, was you the, the egg that was in your grandmother? Right. The egg that you, that ended up becoming you. Your mother was born with that.

Mark: That's right.

Yucca: Right. You know, so going back with that, but, but that was her right? Or was it you? You know, all of that. But that's where I love that, how blurry it becomes where the identities just a blur. And I know some people are gonna have very strong feelings about the answer to that. About, no, you are this moment or that moment, or you know, and in

Mark: mostly out of a desire to control people and take away women's autonomy. Let us

Yucca: yeah, let's be that, That's definitely one of the, the major factors right now. But, but for me, setting all of that whole very important side of it aside for a moment, there's this blurry line of this, this continuation of. Life and beings who, who have come to this moment. That's me. But it's also, I, I get very inspired and kind of delighted thinking about, oh, well I'm part of that though.

I'm a, I'm gonna be an, I'm gonna be one of the ancestors, right? Life continues and. We know long after I'm gone, there's presumably, right, We never know what, what the future actually holds, but presumably there's gonna be thousands of people, millions that I'm an ancestor to, and that's kind of inspiring.

Mark: Yeah. Of course that isn't true of me because I'm not having children.

Yucca: Well, that. On a genetic level. But on a cultural level, that's another thing to explore with the idea of ancestor, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: ancestors, not necessarily dna.

Mark: right. And that's, that's something that is very true of my practice when I, when I think about, you know, venerating. People or features of the past. I, for one thing, I go directly to what you talk about in the way of thinking about, you know, very early evolution and you know, the tetrapods that flopped up onto land and, you know, all those kind of wonderful steps that life has made on its way and venerating all of that, but also about, Figures from history that I find admirable and worthy of emulation.

And I may not be in any way related to them on a genetic level, but I still feel like culturally they've influenced me. And so they qualify as ancestors and I certainly hope to be. Seen that way. You know, with the development of atheopagan and that kind of thing, I mean, it, it it doesn't need to circulate around my name at all, but if, if the ideas are worthy and people find them useful and they perpetuate, then to me that's something that's really valuable and I would feel like I was an ancestor of.

Yucca: Yeah. Mmm. and the idea of ancestors. Some of us know the actual names of people going back for many generations, and some of us don't. But, but the, the concept of ancestor doesn't necessarily have to have a name attached, Right? Yeah.

Mark: Right. Yeah. I mean, on my father's side, I actually know. the way back to almost the 16th century because I descend from people who are on the Mayflower and those people have been heavily researched. There's a lot of information about them. But as it happens, the particular people that I'm descended from, Were the daughter of two people who died almost instantly upon reaching the the Americas and an indentured servant

So they were sort of not particularly impressive people. And as I've studied the history of the people who descend from them, there's just been this tremendous. Uninteresting nature of my family for 12 generations in the Americas.

Yucca: But you. We, we often focus on, in history on like these, what we call great people, right? The great men of history, but most people simply are people and the amazing, beautiful moments in our lives. Those, those don't get written down and have stories told about them, but they're still, that's what we get.

Those are the things that really, that I think really matter, right? Not necessarily that they were some great businessmen or you know, they led a war or you know, anything like that.

Mark: no, I, I, I don't disagree at all, although I do find it a little appalling that nobody in my family bothered to go west.

Yucca: Hmm. But do you know that? Well, nobody in your direct line,

Mark: Nobody in. Well,

Yucca: it branches off

Mark: of course it does. Yeah. And there's a, there's a giant volume called the Greens of Plymouth Colony that, that actually goes as far as my grandfather as a baby.

Yucca: Oh,

Mark: in, it was published in 1913, and my grandfather is in the book as a.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And so it has these, all these lines, all these lineages of, of the, the various greens and boswick and all the people who, you know, got involved with them. And it's just really remarkable to me. These people showed up in New England and just kinda stayed my, my grandparents made it as far as New Jersey.

And then in retirement moved to Colorado and that's where my father was raised. And then he came to California. But all of that happened just in the last generation.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it surprises me, not that I think that, you know, manifest destiny and colonialism and settling and all that kind of stuff was good cuz I don't, But were a lot of people that were taking advantage of those opportunities at that time, and none of them seemed to find it. They, they either didn't have the courage or they just didn't, They were happy where they were.

Yucca: It. It seems to me like it might be tricky. I've impressed at how much you've been able to do because you do have a more common last name. So there, I would imagine that there are multiple different groups of that. All the greens in the states aren't one big family. Right. They're actually lots and lots of different families because that's a, you know last names that are colors seem like a pretty common kind of name to go to.

Mark: right. I'm very fortunate that this book was published in 1913. This, this gene who was a part of the family. He researched all the birth records and the marriage records and the death records and the, I mean, he just did this exhaustive work that must have taken him decades and then published this book, and it was available as a, as a free PDF download.

The whole thing was scanned as a part of what is it? Google. Google Library? Is that what it's. There's a, there's a huge free archive of books that Google has that are like,

Yucca: That are in the public

Mark: that are in the public domain. This book probably didn't have more than a hundred copies printed cuz it was a privately published thing.

But

Yucca: somebody scanned it and put it up.

Mark: and there it is. And I have the pdf so I've been able to piece together a lot of things from that there.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: But it stops abruptly because there's not very much known about the first William Green. Who first who first came, He was not on the Mayflower, but he came like four years later or something like that, and then married into the Mayflower families.

Yucca: Oh, cuz it the because of the changing of the names,

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Right? Okay. Yeah. The paternal line. Hmm.

Mark: so, well, anyway, there's your tension for the day, the, the bland vanilla history of Mark Green's ancestry. The but so why don't we talk a little bit about how we fold this stuff into our observances.

Yucca: Hmm. Now I, before we do, I do wanna add one other angle that we can come at Ancestry from. So we've been talking about the, the, you know, who came before. Whether that's a, like a cultural or genetic ancestor. But I think that this is a place where we can also add in the idea of what other life came before that made ours possible that isn't, you know, genetic line.

That isn't something that we inherited from, but all of the life. Makes life now possible, right? When

Mark: All the, the food that

Yucca: the food Yeah. Every, you know, the, how many millions upon millions of living things that we have consumed, regardless of whatever your dietary choices are, we all. Other living things, right?

Nobody lives on salt alone. So , that's how many lives those were. And for those lives to be the lives that had to come, that supported them. That supported them. And when, when we look around at Earth, and, and we'll talk more about this when we talk about the decomposition, but when we look out, we're used to seeing soil, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: Soil is kind of a new thing. This planet is a big rock. So soil is a mixture of, yeah, it's got rock in there, but it was made by living things and it's the bodies of living things. And from that other living things came up. And just knowing that, that the moment in life that we are in this moment of being part of Earth is.

Because of, and now we're talking about the trillions upon trillions of life that each had their little moment before us to create the system that we are now part of and continuing on.

Mark: Right? Yeah. And all of that to think about. It's really kind of all inspiring. As you say, we'll talk about this when we talk about decomposition in a couple of weeks, but the, the miraculous thing that life does is it takes dead stuff and turns it alive. It assembles it into things that are alive.

It's alive itself and it takes dead stuff and it assembles it into stuff that's alive. And that sounds pretty simple, but when you think about it, we are still not able to do that. We,

Yucca: well we do

Mark: we're working on it.

Yucca: we can't do it outside of the context that already is happening. Right? Because we certainly as living creatures, That's what we do. That's what we're doing when we're eating and breathing and

Mark: I meant like in a laboratory, we, you know, we, we can't artificially create organisms. We can tinker with organisms, we can do all kinds of genetic modifications now.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But it still has to have that initial operating. Quality of life.

Yucca: Yeah, which is just pretty amazing.

Mark: It is.

Yucca: And even the tinkering that we're doing is just kind of borrowing other life that does it anyways to do it

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. It's, it's not like we're starting with jars of, of raw, pure chemicals and assembling. Maybe someday we'll be able to do that. Maybe someday we will be able to,

Yucca: Figure that out and

Mark: to assemble DNA chains from nothing. You know, just, just from plain peptides. You assemble the peptides and then you, you know, put the nucleotides with the peptides and, you know, put them all together into the proper ladder and create something. But considering how much can go wrong in genetic design, probably the thing we'll be doing more than anything else is just copying copying life that already exists rather than actually making something new.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, let's talk about rituals, cuz we like to talk about ritual. This is, this time of year is a great time for it. I see you have a little pumpkin back there in the back of your room, so

Yucca: I do, I love penins. They, I love 'em so much. Yeah. On a tangent note, we have a trampoline and we're going to try to grow. Pumpkins underneath the trampoline in this coming year, and the kids are really excited about that.

Mark: that's cool. So keeps the sun from beating on the.

Yucca: yeah. And we can, we can fence it in

Mark: Oh yeah. Keep all the

Yucca: the Yes, because we, we'd like to you know, we want to grow to share with them as well, but they, you have to cover it up to give it long enough so that the, the Sprout can actually.

Do anything. If you don't cover it up here, you know the moment those first little baby leaves poke out, then you, you come back and they're gone. So,

Mark: We actually have something like that here, just on my back patio. We had a whole patch of basil and the rats love the basil, so they come and they eat all of it. We see rats out there. And Amaya gets really annoyed even though she had pet rats for years and loves the rats. But But that's outside.

It's not inside. There's nothing we can do about trying to control the rat population of the greater Sonoma County area.

Yucca: Hmm. Well, we, I thought, Okay, I will plant some stuff in the yard and we have to water everything. Like planting is a big commitment. And I went, Well, what am I gonna plant that the squirrels and chipmunks and all of that aren't going to eat? So, okay, I'll plant something that has a real strong smell like min.

Mint is often used to keep rodents away. So we plant it, we grew 'em inside and we transplant them outside. And then like an hour later we look outside the window and they have ripped the mint up and are eating the roots and throwing away the leaves. So, Well, Okay.

Mark: Barbara

Yucca: we'll, we'll have to cover it.

Mark: Barbara King solver writes a wonderful story about how. She and her family moved to somewhere in the southwest. I think it may have been, it may have been in New Mexico, actually. And she was putting in a garden and she had this idea that, well, okay, I'm I'll, I'll over plant everything so that there's some for the wild critters that are gonna get it, but I'll get some too.

And of course all of it went.

Yucca: Right

Mark: Because they don't make that deal.

Yucca: They don't, No. I mean, I still plant like that. What is the old, There's a whole lovely little rhyme about, it's like one for the rabbit, one for the house, one for the something, one for the mouse, or, you know, So you're supposed to plant four or five times. But yeah, you, they'll, there's just so little That is that lovely herbacious, fresh green.

They just want it.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: So if you're gonna plant outside, you cover it. You have to put your little pins on it. So we still love them though. They're wonderful. We love their little drama, but that is not a ritual. So let's return to

Mark: let's, Yes. Okay. This has been your tension

Yucca: Yes. It's been your tangent for our episode. Yep.

Mark: So. I actually have an, it may be sort of a surprise because I am not particularly invested in my personal recent lineage ancestors, but I have an underworld focus. That's a part of my, my, my focus. My alter is a bookcase, and the bottom two shelves are full of supplies, you know, lots of fancy jars and incense.

Toro cards and stuff like that. The and above that is a shelf that is the underworld, and there are pictures of people that I've known who have died and cave paintings from France, you know, the old Paleolithic Cave paintings and bones, and a very high quality cast of a human skull. And my human femur.

And other sort of deaf imagery, you know, stuff, skulls and bones and all that kind of stuff. And then above that I, there's a, a double high shelf. I took out one of the shelves to make kind of an open area where, which is the upper world, which is the world and the cosmos and all the beautiful, amazing, cool stuff.

Yucca: That's where like the seasonal things will go and the, Yeah.

Mark: the seasonal things go. The little section for evolution and the section for science and the section for music and creativity and all that kind of stuff. So I have this underworldy space that I celebrate all year round. And I have, I have, there's a thing on there that belonged to my grandfather and. Something, some fossils that sort of speak to deep time ancestry. And I find particularly at this time of year that lighting the candle on there and acknowledging the Sacred Dead is really an important, meaningful thing to me. I, I find it more impactful this year than. Around the rest of the time of year.

Yucca: Mm, It's beautiful.

Mark: So how about you? How about the kinds of things that you do with ancestry in your observances?

Yucca: Hmm. Well, like a lot of things, we really try and integrate it into our whole lives, right? The, the holidays are, are special and extra to, for an extra focus to help us kind of remember about it. But you know, with the naming of the children, they, they have names that. That are, you know, tied back to old, you know, I have an old family name and we gave an old family, you know, old family name to the kids.

Their last names are actually a, a mixture, like a port man toe of our last names because we didn't wanna do. We didn't want to continue what felt like a weird kind of tradition of like the wife and children belonging to the husband kind of thing. Right.

Mark: And Hyphenation just doesn't work for more than one generation.

Yucca: it doesn't, and it, it just ends up with the same problem that you're still having to choose from one family or the other, Which do you pass on? Right. So we just, and we just mixed it together and it's a lovely name and it completely sounds like. You know, and like a name from the, the kind of heritage that we come from, or the ones that we look cuz we're extremely mixed mixed background.

But, but there are certain sides that we kind of identify more with. But like a lot of families, we have you know, photos up of the, the recent family members that we have photos. So there's in the kitchen we. My let's see. So my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. So a line of, of all of them together.

So we've got that, that kind of thing. But this time of year is also the time where we're thinking about ancestry and, and we make a point of kind of changing what sorts of documentaries we're watching. We like to put documentaries on in the evenings. Not every night, but that's the sort of thing that, you know, maybe three nights out of the week there'll be a documentary that we all watch together.

And so we'll watch things about, you know, early humans or neanderthals or evolution and that kind of stuff. This time of year. addition to all of the wonderful halloweeny looking things,

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: But we'll talk, we'll get more into that. So, but really it's a, just a normal remembrance of them.

Mark: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. That's great. So I, I know that for for. A lot of people, they don't have a sort of standing recognition of their ancestors. And so this time of year becomes a time when they'll set up a focus with pictures of ancestors and, you know, offerings.

Yucca: of theirs.

Mark: Things that belong to them. Offerings of things like flowers.

Depending on their tradition, sometimes alcohol sugar, you know, candies and cookies, things like that.

Yucca: Buy them a pack of cigarettes, you know that if they were smokers kind of thing. Yeah.

Mark: Well, yeah, and that kind of gets into a whole other tradition around offerings of tobacco, which is a whole other,

Yucca: That too. Yeah, that's a

Mark: that, that that's a huge thing. So, be interesting to hear from our listeners about how they are acknowledging ancestry and what kinds of things they're putting into their seasonal celebrations this year.

I mean, obviously we're still, you know, on the long tail end of a very serious global pandemic and a lot of people have gone Over the course of the last two years or so. And so there's been a lot of loss. There's been a lot of grief, and this is the time of year when we, we tend to kind of face up to that and, and recognize recognize our mortality as we talked about last week.

So, drop us a line. We're at the Wonder Podcast Qs. The Wonder Podcast cues at gmail.com and send us your questions, send us updates on, you know, send us a picture of your, your ancestor altar. We'd love to see it.

Yucca: That's always fun. Yeah. So, and we really do love preparing from you, so thank.

Mark: Yeah. We're, we're so grateful for our listeners. There's still this part of me that's very, very skeptical that every time I look at these, the download figures, I'm like, Geez, are people actually listening to this thing But it appears that a lot of you are, and I could not be more pleased. I'm, I'm so glad that this is something that you choose to have in your life because your time, as we talked about last week, is the most precious thing you have and that you choose to spend some of it with us is really a great gift.

Yucca: Yeah. We're just so grateful for all of you. Oh, thank you,

Mark: So we'll be talking about Halls or Halloween or Saan whatever you want to all Saint Steve whatever you want to call it next week, and talking about rituals for that and all that sort of wonderful spooky celebration stuff.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And we look forward to talking with you again then.

Yucca: All right.

Mark: Have a great week.

Yucca: Bye everyone.

Dreaming Spiders: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2204754119

Do Bubble Bees Play: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222002366

Death packet workbook: download from https://atheopaganism.org/2018/10/07/a-gift-from-the-dying/

We are unable to record this week,so we repeat an episode from last year around this time. Enjoy, and see you next week!

Revolutionary Witchcraft- Sarah Lyons 

Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Emergence Magazine podcast

 https://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.pdf

S4E32 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science Paganism.

I'm your host, Yucca.

Mark: and I'm Mark.

Yucca: And today we are honored to have another guest. So Lauren, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council. So, welcome, Lauren.

Lauren: Thanks. I'm so glad to be here.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: We're really excited to have you, so thank you for taking the time to come on the show.

Lauren: Yeah, no, my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. I'm so tickled to be here.

Yucca: Yeah. So, Lauren, will you tell us a little bit about you and your, I guess, so we were saying atheopagan origin story?

Lauren: Sure. And you know, I think like a lot of these stories, it's a little long, so forgive me if I get kind of long-winded here, but I hope that, you

Yucca: so much fun. We love to listen to it, so.

Lauren: I'm glad. Yeah, I'm sort of hopeful that some of what I talk about could just help someone else. So I figured I would lay it all out there. So yeah, I'm I'm from New York, I'm from New York City, and I grew up in a, I would say, fairly Catholic family.

We went to Mass regularly outside of just like Christmas and Easter. I was an altar girl I had my first communion, sort of like the whole, all the steps that you do as a child in the Catholic Church. And I really loved it, like I loved being an altar girl, I loved, being part of rituals and ceremonies and made me feel important and special, and I really loved the community that we had in the church as a kid.

But as I got a little bit older when I was sort of like in early adolescence, my mom came out as a lesbian. And, as you can imagine, this was like the early 2000s being part of the LGBTQ plus community, and the Catholic Church didn't really mix, so, we left that community. And at the same time, again, early 2000s, there was a lot of just like witch stuff happening in pop culture, like the Harry Potter books were like exploding, all this stuff was going on.

And I expressed an interest in that. And an adult in my life was like, Oh, hey, you like it. Thank you. Witchy things, like let me bring you to this New Age bookstore. So, I went to this New Age bookstore and I bought a couple of books on Wicca, and it was just like a complete revelation for me. I was so enamored with, with Wicca, with Learning about this whole religious practice that was, it, it felt magical and empowering and, you know, feminist and accepting and all of these things, and I was just still a really deeply faithful person like, you Completely believed in God, and I remember reading a passage in one of the books that I got that was like, you can imagine God as a diamond, and in Christianity, you're just looking at one facet of the diamond, and this was a way to like, look at all of these other facets, and I just loved that.

So throughout my, my whole teenage era, I had this like fairly serious solitary practice. I never tried to build any sort of real life community. I think the stigma was just like too high for me to ever even try, but I would like read stuff online and, and I would do ritual by myself. When I was in my, I guess, around 20 years old late teens to, to 20, sort of two things happened that kind of pushed me to a different place.

So, unfortunately I had this tragic experience where my best friend from childhood passed away. And that triggered like a classic crisis of faith where it's, you know, why does God let bad things happen to good people? And I couldn't find a satisfying answer to that question. And I also met the person who would become my, my life partner and now spouse.

who just moved at that time from the UK to the U. S. and I think sort of found himself in this place of like, wow, like, everything is really Christian here in this way that I feel really uncomfortable with. And he was sort of one of the first, like, loud atheists that I'd ever encountered. So for the rest of sort of my early 20s, I just I was in this process of deconstructing, and I remember being about 25, and I, I totered around like those same books I bought from that New Age shop, like to all these different apartments, all these different moments in my life, and I recycled them because I couldn't reconcile the idea of hanging on to that stuff with just not believing in God anymore.

And I cried, like it was a really painful moment, but it just sort of felt like this is what I have to do to be. to not have that cognitive dissonance in my mind. So that's where like this other big thread of, I guess, my origin story picks up, which is like the environmental activism piece. So I've, I've always been involved in social justice movements of various kinds, like basically from childhood.

I'd always done environmental and sustainability work through like high school and college. And then I was living in New York City when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. And for people who aren't particular, aren't familiar with that particular climate disaster, it was really devastating. So after that, I, I was trying to figure out how to make climate action my job and how to like make a, a career fighting for a livable planet.

So, eventually, it took me a couple years, but that led me to law school, and I decided to try to become an environmental lawyer. I started law school in the fall of 2016 in Washington, D. C. And people listening from the U. S. probably remember that we had a liberal election that year, and Donald Trump was elected basically right as I started law school.

So... I spent those three years that I was in law school just like completely burning the candle at both ends, 110 percent in on like all of the things. So during the day I was like interning at environmental law organizations and taking classes. And evenings and weekends I was like, if you can think of a way to take like civic action, like I did it.

I attended protests. I organized at least one. I called Congress. I worked in Congress. Like, I just did all of those things. It was a really crazy three years, but I think a lot of us who were in law school, in particular at that time in DC, felt like we had this huge responsibility being physically there to, like, do everything we could both on the democracy front and on the climate front.

So, I was, I was glad to be there and glad to do it. So after I graduated, I spent a year working for a judge in New York. We were trying to come back to New York and we were able to do that. It's this thing called clerking, where you spend a year working for a judge. And when you're clerking, you're not allowed to do any political activity at all.

And You could do a whole separate podcast about why that's like unfair and a little bit silly, but it is what it is. So it was this strange sort of pause in my life where I couldn't do all of the things that I had been doing, you know, basically for the previous decade. And then in the spring of my clerkship year, COVID happened.

So it was like a doubling down where it felt like You know, I think maybe in some ways, particularly where we were, right in the heart of it for many months, everything was falling apart and I felt like I could do nothing about it. And that was really hard. I was, I think, tired and scared and I remember saying to my partner, like, I, I need to pull on something that is not myself.

And I don't know if that makes sense outside of my own head, but... It was this moment where I think I was really longing to like turn to prayer like I would have when I was a person of faith and I just like couldn't do that. So it just tugged me back towards paganism and thinking like, is there, is there any way that I could work this back into my life in a way that feels authentic? The other thing that was sort of happening that year too was we had just gotten married and we were thinking seriously about starting a family. And that raises all sorts of questions too about like, well, how, how are we going to raise this kid? And we're two people who don't believe in God, but we want community around our kid and thinking hard about those questions and the sort of life that we wanted to build in that way.

So I just started poking around on the internet and I think, you know, many Googles in, I found the sass Reddit page and On some, some post, I saw a comment that mentioned atheopaganism, and I like, found the community from there. So, I guess I've only really been in the community, I think it's been like, less than a year, but I've just been, you know, it was such a wonderful moment when I found it, because it's like, oh my gosh, not only are there other people who like, believe how I believe, but...

They've like built a community and a whole thing and just the more I read the more excited I got. So, I've just been really thrilled to be here even though, you know, it took me a long time to find it. I'm really glad that I'm here now. Yeah, so that's my origin story.

Yucca: That's

wonderful, 

Mark: that is, that's a great story, wow. Myself, I got bitten by a radioactive spider, but that's, we'll, we'll talk about that another time.

Yucca: For those who aren't familiar, Stas.

Lauren: Oh yeah, I think it's something called, it's something like skeptical atheist and science seeking witches. So it's folks who are into sort of, Rituals and practices to help them develop themselves, but they don't believe in what I would call like Harry Potter style magic. It's sort of the magic of working with your own psyche.

So that, that really resonated with me. And I think there's a fair amount of crossover, like folks who are in that community and folks who are in this one. Yeah.

Mark: yeah, yeah.

Yucca: And what were some of the things that when you found the atheopagan community that really stood out to you, that you were like, Oh, this is, this part is what I'm connecting with.

Lauren: Yeah. You know, I think just sort of the basic framework that we are all folks who are here because we think the earth is sacred. Yeah. And we want to find ways to celebrate that and celebrate life and community and, and just a rejection of things that aren't verifiably real in a way that didn't feel, I guess, demeaning or, or like there was any ridicule.

And that mattered a lot to me because like some of the most important people in my life are people of like deep faith and I've, I've never been super comfortable with the sort of like, let's all just like make fun of. Christian sort of tact. And I didn't feel like I saw that here a lot. And I was also really struck, like, when I joined the Facebook group, there are those three screening questions that basically, I think, are designed to, like, weed out folks who, you know, are not ready to say, Black Lives Matter, or to, you know, be willing to live their values.

So the fact that those were right up front, I think, immediately put me at ease. Yeah, it's, you know, probably not obvious to listeners, but I'm a Black and Latina person, and I think, you know, the pagan world, as I've encountered it, it's like a fairly white space, so there's a little bit of guarding that I have coming into any sort of Pagan community.

So there were signals right off the bat that like, this was a place where it was going to feel comfortable. And I think once I kind of got past the screening questions, all of that, that held true.

Mark: I'm, I'm really delighted to hear you say that, because it's a really important priority for us. You know, we're, we just had our quarterly meeting of the Atheopagan Society Council, so you had your first meeting there, and we're working on our strategic plan, and our number one goal of the three goals we've identified for our upcoming couple of years is a focus on belonging, equity.

Diversity, inclusion, justice. The, the activism element of atheopaganism is something that that's really important to me, the idea that we're not just doing this to be the best people we can, but also to make the best world we can. You know, to redress wrongs and to live in sustainable harmony as best we can with, with the ecosystem the biosphere.

Lauren: yeah.

Mark: I'm really excited, you know, to hear you articulate, you know, all that political passion, because I have a ton of it myself, and it's, it's just, it's just so important at this time.

Yucca: Hm.

Lauren: Yeah, I think so too. And I think something that has been so wonderful for me coming into this community I think I didn't know it, but I was really looking for some way to both soothe my own eco anxiety and, and climate anxiety, and, and sort of elevate the work that I do, like during the day and sort of the organizing I still do in the evenings, as something sacred and something that, you know, wasn't just an intellectual exercise.

Mark: Yeah.

Lauren: I was always... During like the Trump D. C. era of my life, when I would go to actions that were led by, you know, like progressive Christian groups or, or sometimes indigenous folks, and they would bring that element of a spiritual connection, I think there was Like a longing on my part that I felt those things too, but I had no, I felt like I couldn't lay claim to those feelings in any way, and being part of the atheopagan community I think is a way to sort of, like, say loud and proud, the earth is sacred, and we all believe that, and we're here for that, and Thank you.

Thank you. And you can do that without appropriating anyone's culture or sort of claiming things that aren't yours to claim, but by, I think, acknowledging what's, what belongs to all of us as human beings it's a framework to access that, and I really appreciate that about this community.

Yucca: Hm.

Mark: Ah, yeah, it's wonderful to hear you say that. I just kind of like to sit with it for a while, it's the because we're living in quite a time, you know? It's gotten very late on, on a number of fronts, and and it's been far too long on other fronts, and it's just, A lot of things are coming to a boil now at the same time, and so being active participants in that is just so essential.

I've been really encouraged to see how much interest there is in, in the community, in, you know, standing up for those principles, standing up for for, for inclusion and for environmentalism and for feminism and for the LGBTQ community and the BIPOC community and, you know, really saying, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, this is where we stand.

Lauren: yeah, it's really great and really special. And I think one thing that I would love to bring to the community as in part of my role, I guess, on the council is just helping people. Find their voice if they're having trouble doing that, or otherwise facilitate or provide opportunities to act on our principles.

I don't know, I don't know if I said this at any point, but, you know, in my day job now I am an environmental attorney. I bring, thank you, it's, it's pretty awesome, I'm not gonna lie. I do a lot of legal work to try to protect communities facing environmental racism or to try to protect ecosystems and I think that As an attorney, part of my job is to make sure that people who aren't attorneys know that the attorneys can't do everything, right?

And not that I'm accusing anyone in the community of having those sentiments, but sometimes I, I worry a little bit, but it's like, ah, someone will just sue and it'll be fine. Like, no, it won't.

And there are a million ways that everybody has to stand up for, for things they care about and places they care about.

And those places aren't just like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or whatever. They're like that polluted block down your street or, you know, the water coming out of your tap. I mean, there is, there is something to protect and fight for wherever you live. You know, I don't exactly know yet how I can be that sort of resource in the community, but that's, that's my intention, I guess, just starting out now.

Yucca: And you've also been active in the affinity groups, right?

Lauren: Yeah, so, I noticed that we had these things called affinity groups when I first joined, and that there wasn't a BIPOC group, so I, I guess I started that.

You know, I think that in predominantly white spaces, often, At least, you know, speaking purely for myself, there's this sort of impulse to be like, Alright, where are the people of color?

How do I find them? You know, because it's, it's sort of a, it's another layer of like, signal that like, this is an okay place to be if there are already other people there who look like you. So, I didn't really know how to do that without an affinity group, so I just made one. And it's been really great.

It's, it's a, it's a great community of folks. We're reading a book together now, which is, is fun. And we're hoping to do sort of a book club type meeting soon. I will say like, you know, speaking particularly as a Black person, I think that atheopaganism has this particular appeal as like an explicitly modern creation.

And. think, you know, again, speaking from a distance, I've never been in a community like this before, but I see a lot of hints of sort of pagans meticulously recreating their own genealogy to, like, figure out what gods they should worship or what practices they should have or whatever trying to reconstruct these, like, ancient practices.

And if you're a Black person in America, odds are that's not even an option for you, right? There's only so far back you can go. So I think that there's a, there's a little psychic relief that I found and like, oh, well, I don't even have to worry about my ability to know, you know, exactly what corner of what place my ancestors came from to like use these tools.

I can just focus on the now and focus on the land that I'm on. And I'll say too, now I'm just sort of riffing, but

Mark: hmm.

Lauren: you know, I would really love to just serve as an example that, That this space isn't just for, like, crunchy white people, and I think that that is a stereotype of paganism that

I've encountered in the Black community, personally, that, like, you know, it's, it's just a stereotype that's out there.

Like, we have just as much need and, and right to access these practices as anyone else. So, I think there's maybe some unlearning that I had to do and, and some unlearning that lots of us have to do to be Anything we want to be and not just what society says we should be or should stay away from. So, I like to, I would like to think that I can help just make explicit that this is a path that is open to everyone no matter what your origin, no matter what your skin color.

Mark: Absolutely. And I was so grateful when you created the BIPOC Affinity Group, because I really wanted there to be one. Obviously I couldn't have anything to do with the creation of that. And other people in the community were just too busy they, they, you know, they weren't going to make the lift in order to make that happen, but it was so important that it be there.

I will say a thing about what you were riffing on, which is that when I first created atheopaganism, it was just for myself. As, you know, an American who doesn't have any, like, family legacy of English or Irish or Scottish things, just kind of a person plunked here on Turtle Island with a relationship with land, but no inheritance of culture other than capitalism, and so I, you know, I crafted it with the idea that it would be modern and informed by modern values.

But there are people in the community for whom, you know, like Indigenous people, for example, you know, for whom drawing back on those cultural threads is really important. And so, it's not... It's not that you can't do that, it's that you don't have to. You can still have a powerful practice that's very meaningful to you, starting from modernity and your own life and your own experience.

Lauren: Yeah,

Mark: yeah.

Lauren: yeah, I completely 1000 percent agree. And I should say, like, the, you know, some of the folks in the BIPOC group are like reading a book about hoodoo, which is a magical practice developed by people who came to America through enslavement. And, yeah, I definitely see value in looking back and drawing on, on traditions and, you know, white, white American culture in the last 400 years, that's a culture too.

And there's, there's stuff to draw from everywhere. I think that, sorry, I'm losing my train of thought here. No, there, there's something to draw from. And, and there, in every culture, right, there are magical traditions in your, in your family tree, right? And often for people of color, I think they're a little bit overlooked.

One great little fact that I read in trying to educate myself more about these traditions in the African American community was that when folks were escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, they would carry magical totems with them to give them bravery. And I just love the idea that You know, sure, there, maybe there's no quote unquote real magic there, but the bravery is real and the political action it led to is real, so, yeah, I absolutely don't mean to say, like, working, looking backwards isn't, isn't good or isn't worth it or anything, but I, I really appreciate the, the emphasis on modernity and, and that you can make this what you want, whether or not you have access to looking back in your own ancestry.

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: And we've been using the term BIPOC, I think that might be a little bit new for some people. Some people are familiar with it, but can you define that for our listeners who haven't come across this term before, or have only seen it written?

Lauren: Absolutely. Thanks for that flag. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, BIPOC. That's what that stands for. And I should say too, you know, our community, the BIPOC group is, is small, it's still developing, as it should, and I think that we aren't necessarily committed to using that term forever.

There are Interesting debates happening within various cultural groups in, you know, I can only speak about, I think, the U. S., but within the U. S. about what umbrella term we should use to refer to ourselves and, and those things are in flux. So that name isn't chiseled in stone, but it's a handy shorthand, I think, for racialized groups in the United States to, to come together in this moment for the purposes of this community.

Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. You know, I, I was just in DC a few weeks ago on a lobby trip. And I had the good fortune of getting a reservation to go to the National Museum of African American Culture and History. I've I mean, honestly, I think every American should be marched through there the, it was profound and infuriating and tragic and inspiring and just an extraordinary experience and I really recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel that they have a grounding in, in what that experience is, at least to the degree that I can get my mind around it as not being that kind of person 

Lauren: got the chance to go before we left DC and it's, it's an amazing museum. Hard recommend. Yeah.

Mark: So, you're now on the Atheopagan Society Council and you've talked a little about, you know, some of your, some of the roles that you kind of see yourself as playing within the community. Where, where do you see us going? What I mean, we're, we're relatively recent. We I, I published the essay that became the book in 2009 which is now starting to be some years ago but time is slow that way

Yucca: council's been around four years at this point.

Mark: right, right, the, we only just got our non profit Thank you. You know, status a couple of years ago and but that was an important step to say this is more than about individuals that are working within this community now. We want to create a container and a vehicle for these ideas, you know, to be sustained into the future.

So, you've, I know you've been to one meeting, but do you have 

Yucca: a member of the community for quite a while now as well,

Lauren: Yeah, yeah, a year ish or so. Yeah. Man, I, I guess my hopes are really simple, that it just keeps growing, and it stays inclusive, and that it We become a place where folks from all walks of life feel comfortable. I should say I'm also part of the parents affinity group. I have

a young child and we've been talking about some really cool stuff, like maybe a scouting program.

And... I think that there are so many people who are in a similar boat to me, where like they're, they're parenting, they didn't necessarily grow up with a pagan, much less an atheopagan, orientation towards things, and they're trying to figure out how to raise kids with these values, so I hope that that space in particular continues to grow.

I think I've, I've heard you, Mark, maybe on another episode talk about a book of rituals that you're coming out with. I think it would be wonderful if... We start seeing folks sharing examples of how they celebrate the seasons and, and life transitions, and I know that like some of that is out there already, but I think for, for lots of people, including myself, there's both.

There's like a path paving there that can be really helpful to see examples of how you actually like do atheopaganism. And. And also a sense of community when you know, you know, of course, like, you know, a ritual for me here in New York City probably wouldn't relate with the land and in the same way that it would for either of you in different parts of the world, but it's nice to think about some commonality, because I think You know,

Mark: mm hmm,

Lauren: when you're in Catholic Mass and you know that this Mass is really similar to a Mass happening hundreds of miles away, that, that builds that sense, so, finding common threads if we can, I think, would be a nice way to keep the community cohesive, even as it continues to grow and, and spread and, and morph based on the geography of, of the particular atheopagan or atheopagan family.

Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, now that you mention it the idea comes to mind, I mean, my book is coming out in April, and it's much more of a how to book than the first Atheopaganism book, which was, the first half of which is theory, really and then the second is about the principles and, you know, doing rituals and the holidays and all that kind of stuff.

But maybe another project would be editing a crowdsourced ritual book.

Yucca: like an anthology,

Mark: Yeah, so, you 

Yucca: out to the community and getting

Mark: yeah,

Yucca: not everybody, but whoever wants to share their insights and sharing that, that could be really, that could be amazing, I

Mark: That could be really good. Yeah, I mean, the other thought that I had that I floated a while ago, and it just seems that nobody has the spoons for it, is a parenting book that I would edit. But I can't write because I'm not a parent.

Yucca: Well, I am really interested in that one. It just needs to, gotta get the timing to work on that if other people are interested as well.

Mark: I really 

Yucca: I can't do the whole book, but I think that there's some sections that I'd be able to do.

Mark: great, yeah, and I mean, I, I think the, one of the things that we are presented with now as an opportunity is the whole question about families and kids and how we engage families and, you know, basically build Culture within family units, right? Which I just think is so exciting. And I know John Cleveland Host, who's currently the chair of the Atheopagan Society, I mean, his, he kind of stumbled into all of this because of wanting to have culture for his children.

So, yeah, it's that really presents a, a great opportunity, I think.

Yucca: And we're getting folks now with different ages. I mean, his kids, his oldest are probably going to be off to college soon, right? And a lot of, I know there's a lot of us with real little ones, but there's a good range of... of ages as well.

Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah oh, I'm just, I, I can see the book sitting on a shelf right now, and it's not, it's not very thin either. There's a, there's a lot in it.

Yucca: Well, and even just within the, the umbrella of paganism in general, there aren't a lot of parent books. I mean, there's Circle Round, there's, Lauren, can you think of any others that

Lauren: I mean, when I was pregnant, I looked and I have Circle Round sitting on my bookshelf.

Mark: too.

Lauren: I think there's I'm, I'm blanking on the title, but there was another book with sort of like things for, you know, stories for kids. Of course, I think there's all sorts of. of material for kids to engage with the seasons, but in terms of actual parenting tips or, or guides, no, family practices, no, no.

I don't think there's, if there's stuff out there that I haven't found it, so I would be really grateful for some sort of anthology coming out of the community.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Gotta happen.

Yucca: And then, of course, I don't think there's anything specifically from an atheist point of view. Right, there's plenty of like you were saying, the seasonal kind of secular stuff that's like, yes, it's fall and the leaves are changing,

but not really something that is, that's coming at it from that angle.

Mark: right.

Lauren: Yeah. And I know that Like I know some folks who are involved in like Unitarian Universalist congregations, and I think they might have some curriculums and things for kids, but, so there, and I think the Humanist Society, I don't know, they might have some stuff. So there's probably like things out there that we could draw from, but nothing that weaves together all of the pieces that make the atheopagan community special.

So I think it would be neat if we could make a contribution like that.

Yucca: And I like books, I like to have a book in my, like I appreciate podcasts and blogs and all of that, but there's something very different in terms of the experience of turning a page and sitting on the You know, sitting cuddled under the blankets with the kitty cat next to you as you, like, turn the pages and sip your warm drink.

It's just a very different experience. Yeah,

Mark: Yeah,

Lauren: yeah. And I will say I think Mark mentioned the John Cleland Host and Pagan Families episode, and Arwen, I think you were on that one too, right?

Yucca: it was,

Lauren: I bookmarked it and listened to it several times because, like, oh, there's so much in here! Yeah, I think that there's, there's endless wisdom that folks who have been parenting in the atheopagan community could pass on to folks like me who are just starting out and it would be wonderful to have it as a book that you could cuddle up with for sure.

Yucca: How old's your little one, by the way?

Lauren: He's one and a half.

Yucca: and a half. Oh,

Mark: tiny. 

Yucca: That is a

Lauren: little. 

Yucca: so fun, though, right? Everything is opening up now.

Lauren: yeah, tons and tons of fun. Yeah, we're, we've been really happy as parents and Yeah, I just hope that we're able to raise him with a sense of community and I think we have that in lots of ways, but I would love for him to feel a connection to this community if that feels right to him and to you.

To give him the good parts of being raised with religion that I received without any of the baggage would be, would be great if we can figure out how to do that.

Mark: One of the things that I'm really excited about when I think about atheopagan parenting is giving kids the skills to do rituals themselves so that they can work with their psychology. We don't really give kids very many tools in terms of emotional regulation and, you know, kind of changing your mental state, your emotional frame, all that kind of stuff.

We just, we don't see that modeled. And, you know, I just... I'm really excited at the prospect of a 12 year old who decides, okay, I'm going to light a candle, and I'm going to contemplate that candle, and it's going to calm me down, and I'm going to be okay about what Marianne said at school, you know, that kind of thing.

So,

Lauren: Yeah, like you, you know, as your brain is developing in those teenage years, that's when you need those tools the most in some ways and I think that's why I was so drawn to it as a teenage girl myself and You know, I have read a fair few, I guess, gentle parenting type books that, that, talk about introducing things like breathing techniques to your kids.

So I am hopeful that some of that stuff that we might call rituals and other people might call, you know, just mindfulness practices,

Mark: mm hmm.

Lauren: are making their way into parenting culture with folks who are becoming parents now. There's, there's so much more that could be explored and could be articulated for kids and I would love that for my own child for sure.

Mark: Yeah, because the world of ritual, it feels so good, and it can be so... Enlightening with a lowercase e in terms of understanding yourself, seeing what your proclivities are and what your core beliefs are, and kind of understanding what your lens is on the world, and maybe seeing some of the limitations of that, and being able to better understand how other people see the world.

There's just so much in it, and, you know, I've been a pagan since 1987. And Yucca, of course, you know, you were raised pagan and I still feel like I'm only kind of nibbling at the edges of all of the things that it can do for me.

Yucca: Yeah 

Mark: and the richness that it brings to my life. Yeah, I think so too,

Yucca: we're really, you know, sorting through that.

Mark: yeah.

Lauren: Yeah,

Mark: That was one thing, you know, when I thought about, okay, you know, how we're going to merge atheism with paganism, how is that going to work it occurred to me that the big piece that comes with the paganism is 50 or 60 years of experience accumulated in how to do effective rituals.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: Because the atheist side didn't have that.

We, we have lots of folks that come into our community and they're like how do I get started? What do I do first? I, I, I get it with all the values and the worldview, but how do I do this practice?

Yucca: Yeah.

Lauren: yeah.

Yucca: One of the things that I really value about that from the parent perspective is that one of the things that we're doing for our kids is helping them to develop skills. And then when they grow up, they're going to go in the direction that they went, right? How many people do most of our community were raised in different religions than their parents, right?

And that's okay, right? People make different choices. But I want my kids to have whatever religion they end up being. Whether they stay in the pagan community or not, I want them to have those tools to be able to calm themselves down, to look at themselves, all those things that you were just talking about, Mark, and have the, those ritual skills, even if, you know, I would, doesn't fit me, but if they decide they want to become theists and they believe in a god, then, then great, they have these skills that they can use within that context that's going to help them live a happier, more fulfilled life.

Lauren: Yeah,

Yucca: it's really beautiful that we're trying to do that as, as, you know, atheopagan parents.

Lauren: I think that's beautiful, too. And, you know, while we're on this topic and we're talking a little bit about practice, it just occurs to me to name that I, I really found the, the tools that I had available to me through my practice to be so helpful in getting through like pregnancy and the newborn stage and, and birth.

And I had a really tough childbirth experience and it took me a long time to sort of bounce back from it. I found the newborn stage really hard and like, man, if there's ever a time when, like, you've got to lean into your, your meditative or your, your safe place exercises, it's like those first couple weeks postpartum, right?

It's just, it's really tough stuff. And If there, if there's anyone who's out there who's, who's pregnant and thinking about making space for this in their life, like I, I could not give enough of a thumb. Obviously, you know, postpartum, also do all the things that you need to do for your mental health, the therapy, or whatever other support systems you need, but I think that this is,

Yucca: too,

Lauren: and the physical stuff, absolutely, like this is, you know, I'm, I'm not trying to say anything that discounts, like, Traditional Western medicine or, or psychotherapy or anything like that, but just having another set of tools, I think, really helped me in early parenthood and the sort of the transition between pregnancy and birth and parenting.

I'll also say that I think You know, for folks who are trying to figure out ritual practices and maybe are also parents of young kids, like, it doesn't have to be an hour. It doesn't have to be like, I don't have an hour. It's a lot of my practices are just extremely short. You know,

Yucca: 45 seconds with the bathroom door locked?

Lauren: Exactly, you know, or picking up a, I do a lot of sort of like, I guess I'd call them like totems, you know, I have particular little objects that help put me in a particular mindset, you know, it could just be as simple as picking up that particular ring and putting it on your finger, you know, and, and that's enough to shift your mindset.

So I think talking about ritual in an abstract way can be a little bit intimidating, but it can be as simple, as simple or as elaborate as you want it to be.

Mark: Yeah, I find that the things that I have on my focus are all, they're things that have stories associated with them in my mind. So they have an associative meaning, right? It's not just a seashell. It's a seashell that I found when I was 11 on the Costa del Sol in Spain. You know, it's, it's got a, that was stirred up by a huge storm that Brought all these shells up onto the beach.

So, the charging of items... Which obviously isn't really a physical process. It's a psychological process. It's building a strong association between a thing and a state of mind, right? That's a very, very powerful practice and it's one that anybody can do and it's, and it's a way to do a quickie ritual, right?

Yeah, you pick up the ring, you put it on, okay, now I've got my bravery ring.

Lauren: Yeah, exactly. And I guess it occurs to me, I don't know if totem is like a word I'm accidentally appropriating from some group, maybe I should say talisman, but yeah, the idea of having an object that just has that story. I think that can be really powerful and it's really short and simple but isn't enough to sometimes turn your day around or give you that extra boost and I think a lot of my practice has been, you know, especially sort of before I had a kid.

It was all stuff to just, like, make me work harder or make me braver in, in political action, and I'm trying to have a more open mind these days about what I can use it for, that it, it isn't just a thing I should use to help me churn out another couple pages on a legal brief. It's like something that I can use to just, like, expand myself or, or heal myself or just have fun or, or whatever it is it, I think I'm trying to broaden my mind and, and encourage other people to have a broad mind about what it can do for you.

Mark: yeah, one of the pieces that we That we often, it doesn't get talked about in the pagan community very much is how pleasurable ritual can be. It just feels good. And that, in and of itself, is a perfectly fine outcome. That's a great outcome, right? You know, you're in a bad mood, so you go and you do a thing, and then you're not in a bad mood.

Well, that's wonderful! 

Yucca: Or you're not even in a bad mood to start with.

Mark: No, you're just

Yucca: You're just, yeah, it

Mark: messing around with candles and incense and cool objects, and it just feels really cool, and you feel sort of wizard y, and it's all fun.

Lauren: Yeah, it's inherently fun, often.

Yeah. 

Mark: It's play. It's a form of play.

Lauren: Yeah.

Mark: Well, Lauren...

Yucca: there resources that you, you'd mentioned that you had some resources and things you wanted to share with the

Lauren: Yeah I do, I have a couple of things. So the first takes like a little bit of explanation, but I don't know if listeners are familiar with the concept of environmental justice or environmental racism, but Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color.

It's a term used at least in the U. S. and I think also internationally. And environmental justice is the idea that basically in short you're going to stop poisoning people, period, all people.

Yucca: Sounds like a great idea.

Lauren: it does, doesn't it? Nice and simple. And that definition is from a website called ejnet. org. And there... On that website, and I can share the link for the show notes, there's a list of principles of environmental justice that I find really inspiring, and it was written by a group of people of color, environmentalists, environmental activists in 1991 at a convening.

And the very first principle of the, I think it's, yeah, 17.

Yucca: And is that environmental justice action? Is that what

Lauren: This is ejnet. org is the website, ejnet, yeah, I can, I can send a link, but, the first principle in that document reads, environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity, and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction. So I just think it's really, really special that In my mind, part of what atheopaganism is doing is affirming that sacredness of Mother Earth and opening up a path for all people to do that, that really aligns with this foundational document of environmental justice.

So I just think that's cool.

Yucca: Hmm.

Lauren: Yeah,

Mark: up a little bit.

Lauren: it's really

beautiful. 

Mark: it is. It's

Lauren: yeah, it is. And I encourage everybody to, yeah, check out those principles and, and to get involved in environmental justice wherever you are. Yeah, just a couple of books that I feel like have sort of helped me in this intersection between action, political action, and pagan stuff.

There's a great book called Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons.

Mark: Yeah,

Lauren: A short book. I can't remember if there's theism in there, so sorry if there is, but it's really great. It's short. Everyone should read it. There's another great book called Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hershey that I just read, and it was one of those real aha books.

It just talks about... Ways to honor yourself, honor your body, and kind of break free of what she calls grind culture. So this idea that you have to be productive all the time, that's a product of like capitalism and colonialism, and it's something that I really struggle to resist. So I thought that that was great.

Two more things. There's this book called Hope in the Dark Solnit, I think is how you say it. Really short book that just sort of emphasizes Don't give up hope that we can make the world a better place. The world is really complicated and Things can and do get better even when they seem really bleak.

And then the last resource I'll share is this wonderful podcast from Emergence Magazine, and I think that's actually the name of the podcast. And it has episodes on all different topics that explore the connections between culture, spirituality, and ecology. And they've had like Robin Wall Kilmer on all sorts of, of authors exploring this intersection.

And again, some of it might be sort of more like a little bit more woo than some of the folks who listen to this podcast like, but there's a lot of really great stuff there. Listening to each episode is just like a gift, so I recommend that as well and I can, I can share like links and, and all of those, those names and authors in case people want to look them up.

And then the last thing I would just say if you'll indulge me in this like quote this quote I really love I'm not a teacher, only a fellow traveler of whom you asked away. I pointed ahead, ahead of myself as well as you, so please, like, I offer everything I've said with humility. I'm working all of this out myself, and I'm really happy to be working it out with other folks in this community.

Mark: that's really beautiful. Thank you. You know, fun fact. The first pagan ritual I ever went to, when I was invited by a friend back in 1987, was to a coven which included Rebecca Solnit's brother.

Lauren: Wow. Small world.

Mark: Yep, very small world.

Lauren: Well, I guess that's another example of these connections between the activist world and the pagan world run, run deeper and are everywhere.

Mark: Yep, they are. Well, Lauren, 

Yucca: so much. They're saying the same thing, but no, really, this is so exciting to have you here with us and part of the community and just everything you're saying is just, just yes. So wonderful. So thank you so much.

Mark: and thank you for your work.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: You know, those of us that are in the environmental field can feel really beat up a lot of the time, and the organizations we work for, even the big ones, are under resourced relative to the industries that they're up against. and the headwinds politically that they're up against.

And so, thank you for all the effort it took to get the credentials that you needed to be able to do the work you're doing and for the work that you're doing in the world. Thank you.

Lauren: That's very kind and it's, it's my pleasure to do it and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to just come on here and, and riff on all these things and You know, thank, thank you both for creating this community that's been such a source of, and for everyone really who's involved, who, who are co creating this community that's been such a wonderful space.

It's, you know, after a hard day of doing hard stuff and thinking about pollution on long timelines, it's such a wonderful treat to just like listen to an episode of this podcast or check out the Facebook group. It's been a tremendous source of, of solace for me, and I hope that it is for everyone. for other activists who might find their way into this space.

So yeah, really, really grateful all around.

Mark: Well, thank you so much. And with that, I think that's a good place for us to stop. Gratitude is always a good place to land on. So, thanks once again. Thanks to all our listeners. And we'll be back next week with another episode of The Wonder of Science Based Paganism.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at [email protected].

S4E31 TRANSCRIPT:

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we are fortunate to have with us Susan, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council, and we're interviewing the new members of the Council over the next... A couple of months or so the ones that, that want to be interviewed, just to get to know them and find out what their thinking is about all this stuff we're doing.

So welcome, Susan.

Susan: thanks for having me on.

Yucca: And some of you who watch the YouTube channel may recognize Susan from there, who's been, who's part of the media team, and has been making excellent videos.

Mark: Yes, yes. Susan is the glue on of the media team. She holds us all together.

Yucca: which is not always easy appreciated with all of the emails that have been chasing us down to make all our schedules work, and yep,

Susan: I try to balance it so that everybody doesn't think I'm super annoying, but helpful, not annoying.

Mark: So far, so good. So, Susan why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to atheopaganism and, you know, all that good kind of stuff.

Susan: Yeah. Well, the short answer like it seems a lot of people is COVID brought me to atheopaganism. I, and I do have a short video, I think it's the first one that I did on the YouTube channel if anybody wants to check that out of my, my non theist upbringing and, and this kind of channel, so I'll, I'll make it a short version, but I live in the Midwest, in Ohio, and I've lived here my whole life, and I was raised without religion, but also not specifically atheist either.

It was just sort of, we didn't talk about it. I didn't know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat until I was in high school because it was just, you know, I was left to my own devices. And I appreciate that for, for some things. There's definitely parts of me where I'm like, well, it'd be nice to have a little bit more direction.

And I, we're kind of taking that track with our, with our daughter. I am, I'm married and I have six, soon to be seven year old, and kind of navigating that that space. My husband was raised Catholic, so we're kind of marrying together. He, he likes to call it ethnically Catholic, because he doesn't believe any of the stuff there, but so yeah, we, I, from a, Medium age started dabbling in stuff about the time when I was, you know, I'm an 80s baby.

So by the time I was in high school, it was late 90s. And all of the witchy stuff started showing up all over the Barnes and Nobles. I'm like, Ooh, what is this? And especially the tarot card section with lots of stuff to touch and play with. So I I explored that area and the pagan, which at that time, at least, you know, Wicca was the super dominant thing in, at least that was publicly available.

And so I dabbled in that for a while, and I kind of got It's like, this is fun, but I also don't really believe in this whole, you know, people try to rationalize it with, oh, it's the energy, and you're affecting the energy, and I was like, yeah, yeah, that, that makes sense, sure, and I, you know, doing the little, the little lie to yourself thing for a while.

And then I kind of walked away from it for a while and just didn't, didn't bother with my, my spiritual life for a while until I got married. And we wanted to have a community for our child to grow up in so we joined a UU congregation, Unitarian Universalist, and they have, in our particular one, a fairly decent showing of pagan folks.

And so I kind of picked that back up and we had a little bit of a range from full capital W witch to people who I think, you know, if I talked to them long enough about atheopaganism, that would be more up their alley but didn't, you know, know the words for it at that time. So it kind of came through there and then COVID hit and, you know, that community was sort of, sort of gone.

But I was on the board and I was doing all of these committees and doing all the, I was doing all the work of being in a community, but not getting the community out of it. It was also right after we had merged. So my, my group went from 40 to 60 members to 200 and some people. And I didn't know all these people I was doing the work for and it just kind of, I kind of drifted away and was I was focusing more on what is it that I do believe in, since I had spent so much time just defining what I didn't believe in, and I found, kind of simultaneously, Druidry, which is something I'm, I'm pretty involved in, is my personal path, but also atheopaganism, and actually found I found out about atheopaganism through a blog whose, I can't remember what the blog was about but there was sort of an about me page and the person was describing, yeah, I don't really, you know, believe in the metaphysical part of this, but I still think it's really helpful check out atheopaganism, I'm like, yes, thank you, I will, and signed right up on the spot and I remember I read the, the principles And I don't know what bits of the, of the pages, but I remember running to my husband and being like, oh my gosh, I found them.

I found my people. They're here, they exist. , I found it. I didn't know this was the words I needed, but I needed the word these words, you know, there's the validation of other people

Yucca: was that during lockdown or was that a little bit afterwards?

Susan: That was, I think, during lockdown 'cause I remember. We had still the the Earth centered group at my UU congregation was trying to do monthly Zoom get togethers, and I remember one of them, I was just, like, very excited to share with people that I had found both atheopaganism and the Druid organizations that I had joined at the same time, so.

Mark: Well, that's very cool. I, I always love hearing these stories 'cause people, you know, people come to us through all different kinds of ways and and there is very commonly that I found them. They, they exist. I'm not the only one I am feeling which. I actually share, even though, you know, I, I wrote the essay in the book and stuff, because when other people started showing up, I, similarly, I was like, oh, I'm not the only one, there's more of us.

This is great. So, very exciting. Well, it's great to have you with us, Susan. Thank you so much. So, You've just joined the Atheopagan Society Council and and you've been helping with the media team for a while. You're a very organized, get it done kind of person, which is really great. 

Susan: Thanks.

Mark: so, I don't know, what are your thoughts about this community and where we're going and, you know, what things would you like to see happen?

You know, like new programs or any of that kind of stuff, if you've thought about it.

Susan: I think my main thing that I want to see is that I hope you're going anywhere soon, but, you know, I want to make, I want to show up so that down the road we don't trickle and fade away when, you know, you, Mark, or, you know, the, the original set of people doing the council you know, are gone or, or, you know, have to be pulled away for whatever reason.

I just don't want it to, to fade and be the thing that, that used to be really great for a while and then just nobody could keep up for it, keep up with it. And so that's something I'm interested in is, and I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what infrastructure we, you know, are going to end up with to make that be something that really sticks and stays and has standing.

I imagine it'll be Getting a lot of volunteers and getting a lot of structure in place for volunteers so that people, you know, we don't avoid burnout. And that's I know, that's one of the things that we're talking about at the council meeting coming up. But that's, that's kind of my priority. But I am excited about the idea of getting more, not necessarily content, but getting more things in place for people to do in person, even if it's not with other people, but just more of an idea I was in a sorority in college and it was a One of the things that I thought was fun about that is that there were certain things that you did and you're, you know, it's, you know, a secret and secret rituals that everybody does, but you knew that even though you went to a different school than this person that you maybe met down the street and they went to school.

different school, but they were still part of the same sorority as you. You knew they had the same ritual as you,

Mark: hmm.

Susan: and I love that we have so much open endedness of, you know, build your own adventure within atheopaganism. I think it might be fun to get something in place that is something we can all share, or those who are interested can all share, and like, I don't know if that looks like a standard ritual format or something, which is what some other organizations do, like some of the druid organizations, I mean, what they have.

Here's our official format, and I don't know that that's something that we would really want, but something that has that feel to it, that essence of, hey, here's how you can feel a part of this, On your own, but still together kind of a feel. I think more of those kinds of things would be. And I think that would help a lot of people who seem to be clamoring for structure, you know, there's definitely the people in the community who are like, I am totally happy to do this by myself and come up with my own thing.

And that's great. But then there seemed to be a lot of people who want a little more hand holding with their practice too.

Mark: Mm hmm.

Susan: So that's kind of,

Yucca: of the insights that you have that I've really appreciated is that you're a fellow parent with, with a kiddo in the same age range and it's been nice to have someone to bounce off some of that, you know, how do we make that feeling available for, for kids who are growing up in this community?

Because that's something that, for me, growing up as a pagan kid, there wasn't really anything for us. It was like, it was all the grown up stuff, and we were just sort of, you know, put it at a third wheel, right? And I think that it'd be nice for our community to have something a little bit more, more community for the kids as well.

And I know that not everybody has kids in the community, but that's something that... There definitely are, there's quite a few of us, so,

Mark: hmm. Sure.

Susan: yeah.

Yucca: something that you've brought that I've really valued, Susan.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, I don't have kids, but I, I absolutely support that. I think that having activities for families that that work for the adults as well as for the kids is something that I really would like to see us have more of.

Yucca: Mm

Susan: Especially for parents who maybe only one of them is into it. My husband is very supportive and so,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Susan: I, I know that I'm lucky in getting the amount of participation that I do, and there's plenty of people who are parents who it's very one sided and, you know, they may not get the, the family feel, like we can, I at least can say this is what we're doing as a family, but if you don't even have that, it can, it could be really nice to have.

That feeling with other people,

Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We're gonna be talking about some ideas for that at the upcoming council meeting on Wednesday. 

Yucca: And those are quarterly meetings.

Mark: yes,

Yucca: We do them after each solstice and equinox.

Mark: yeah. So I'm, I'm pretty excited about some of those ideas. Some of them could be a lot of work to implement. But once they kind of got up and rolling, I think there would be so much excitement about... The activities themselves that that there would be a lot of, that that momentum would create the excitement that would create the volunteerism to keep it going, if you know what I mean. So, let's see first of all, I guess, do you have questions for us?

Susan: man I feel like I'm trying, I'm trying to think of questions you haven't already answered on the podcast before or things that

Mark: Oh, don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. You're, you're, it's okay if it's been asked before, that's, that's perfectly all right.

Susan: No, I just mean, I'm like, I feel like I'm like, no, they said they answered that question for me before because I've, I've tried to keep up on it. I don't know that I've listened to every episode, but, 

Yucca: we certainly do have folks who've done every single episode, but we have a lot of people who kind of come in for a few episodes, and then out, and then people who just find the podcast, and lots of different listening styles, or people who've listened for every year. But how many years are we at now?

Mark: We're in season four,

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: so. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's closing in on 200 episodes, I think. So it's, it's a, a chunk of work and time if you really wanna listen to all of them, which is why we, we do an episode for every Sabbath every year. We don't just say, go and listen to last year's, you know, Mayday episode.

Instead, we do a new one every year because we've got people that are new to the podcast and you know, the stuff may be new for them. Uhhuh

Yucca: Well, and it's a

Susan: And hopefully there's something changing.

Yucca: I'm curious to go back and listen and be like, did I even say remotely the same thing? Probably. But,

Mark: you know, Susan, you were talking about a shared ritual. And what immediately popped into my head is the pouring of a libation, which is a very old, I mean, the Greeks used to pour libations, you know, in honor of their gods and stuff. And I wonder if we might have something like that, that would be kind of a shared atheopagan ritual that everybody would do to do that kind of offering to the earth.

That might be kind of neat to put some, put some ritual trappings around and turn into something that we all share. Thank you.

Susan: Yeah. And maybe I'm thinking do it on a, have it as a day that's not necessarily one of the spokes of the wheel, if you will. So it's, we're not interrupting anybody's already scheduled programming for this thing, like an extra, maybe it's on Earth Day or something, you know, like a,

Yucca: Pi

Mark: Huh.

Susan: people won't already have their own set

Mark: Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I'll think about it. I love the idea. Yeah. The equivalent of an atheopagan secret handshake. Uh

Yucca: Hmm.

Susan: Another thing I've been thinking about that I would be, I would love to do, at least for myself someday, is there's been a lot of chatter in the community lately about atheopagan saints, and I'm, I recently picked up from my friend who's in one of my druid groups, a Celtic Catholic set of prayer books, and it's kind of like a daily prayer thing, and I know that, I don't know a whole lot about Catholicism, but I know there's like a saint for every day, and I think it would just be fun to have a, like a solid atheopagan devotional kind of a thing, right, with Like, oh, today is, and I was, I started collecting things, so there's a day in February, I don't remember which day, it, of course, because everything, you know, gets mushed around with, over time and history, but I want to start celebrating Fornicalia in February, and for the Thank you.

ancient god Fornax, who was in charge of baking bread in ovens. And it's like a day that you clean your oven and bake bread in it. So I'm like, Ooh, this might actually motivate me to do the thing that I don't want to do if I make it into a holiday and say, this is the thing that we're doing.

Yucca: Very practical, right?

Mark: you said Fornicalia, I went in an entirely

Susan: Yeah, that sounds fun. It's less fun than you think. But bread

Yucca: that day is in February, isn't it? The 14th? Isn't that day already in February? The 14th?

Susan: Fornacalea is like the Like the 28th or something. I'll look it up and put it in

Mark: think you may be thinking of Lupercalia.

Susan: I'm going to find it. But yeah, it's, I have it as the 17th in my calendar, but you know,

Mark: The day to clean your oven and bake bread in it. I love it.

Susan: Yeah. Now I just need another one, you know, six months hence, so that I clean it more than once a year, but that's optimistic

Yucca: Could there be, could there be one for air filters, too?

Susan: yeah, right. That can be our shared ritual is clean your filter

Mark: is replacing your, your air filters. Yeah. I love that. I, I love, I love the idea of I mean, I have so many regular observances that I do just for myself, and I never, you know, I'm, I'm very careful, I don't, I don't want to prescribe them for anybody else, you know, it's like, this definitely is a choose your own adventure kind of thing. Thank you.

Religious path. It's like build what works for you, but it would be nice to be able to offer to people, you know, here's this compilation of, I don't know, five days every month or something that are special days that are the birthday of some significant, you know, scientist or innovator or creator in history and little bit of history about him and something that you can do, pour out that libation. You know, in honor of, oh, I'm spacing on the name. I just shared on Facebook to my friend group a a biography of this woman who actually figured out that the universe was mostly made of hydrogen. And I don't remember her name, but she's responsible for us understanding what the universe is made of.

And she didn't even get any credit for it. Her somebody else published the results. You know, pretty typical for women scientists in the, in the

Susan: hmm.

Yucca: Yeah, yeah, I don't know, I don't know who that is, right? Which, itch is a problem that we don't know that.

Mark: yes, yes, well, I'm going to look it up right now. So this,

Susan: yeah, people really liked the 13 different atheopagan principles applied to the moon cycles, and that's great. It's, it's an offering, not a prescription, and, and people are just like, oh yes, thank you, give me, give me ideas.

Yucca: yeah, maybe, I mean, when you were talking about those things, like a daily Right? Like a book that you read about, your little paragraph. I know a lot of different religions do that, and things that are totally secular, too. Like just a daily something. You know, I certainly use those in my practice that are just, they're really nice, right?

It's just like this little thing, and it's like, oh, okay, cool. Just kind of think about this for the day,

Mark: little

Susan: Mm hmm.

Yucca: right? And you take it or you don't take it, but it's kind of nice to have, to see how it just fits into whatever your experience is. And even if you use the same book more than one year in a row, like, by the time you get back around to May 14th or whatever it is, like, you've had the whole experience of a year and you're gonna see it in a different way, it's gonna fit into your life in a different way.

Mark: mm hmm, Cecilia Payne,

Yucca: Pain, okay.

Mark: Cecilia Payne. Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Really amazing.

Susan: Well, that's an idea for if we for, for listeners, one of the things we're thinking about maybe doing is the scout program. If we have that, we can have that as the capstone project for somebody

Yucca: Yeah.

Susan: her a plaque.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Some kind of a memorial. The person who figured out what the universe is made of probably deserves some kind of recognition.

Yucca: Do podcast.

Susan: Yeah, I don't know if it's a good idea.

Yucca: And I know we have, there's not, like things aren't set in stone, but what, when you say scout, like, what are you talking about?

Susan: yeah, well at least it was sort of talked in the community about this. I think it would be fun for adults too, but like, it's hard to, as a parent for me at least my husband was an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scout program, but I know, and I know that they have made some reforms and some steps in the right direction, but for me it's still not enough to feel comfortable enrolling my daughter in it and I have reservations about Girl Scouts for different reasons.

Capitalism, and genderification, and just different things that I'm just not, there are certainly troops that I'm sure do a wonderful job, and there are certainly troops that don't but

Yucca: A lot to navigate though. Mm-hmm.

Susan: It's, yeah, it's a hard thing to navigate and I don't want to start it and have it come crashing down on her.

So, and I think we sort of chatted in the community about this being a common thing and I had posted a few things a few months ago asking people about spiral scouts, which is a more pagan oriented group. And so now the, the scuttlebutt is, you know, maybe we can be an atheopagan chapter of that. Maybe we can create our own thing, like what is and what would be a nice thing.

But a lot of parents have commented on it and said, Oh, yes, please sign me up. Dude, let's do this.

Mark: hmm.

Susan: We can't necessarily do things in person, not for logistical reasons. I'm very fortunate that I have A handful of atheopagans right near me. It's really great. I think I'm the only one with, with kids that I'm aware of, but it's not the case for a lot of folks.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, we are, we're spread pretty thinly. So, our, most of our opportunity for face to face stuff comes through mediation like this, like Zoom. But that said if there Thanks If Spiral Scouts can be done in a way where there's like, kind of a learning chapter set of activities that get sent to a family, either as a PDF or in a physical package or, you know, however that works, and then, you know, all the different families that are doing it can do that and then come together over Zoom and kind of share their experience and show off their cool thing that they made and all that, I think that would be a really wonderful thing both for kids and for parents.

It'd, you know, be a real, you know, wonderful thing to share with, with your kids, I would think.

Yucca: I know my kids are definitely excited about the idea of badges , because they see that in, in the media of, there's so many different things where it's like, where it has that setup, like, oh, the comic, you know, the, like lumber Janes for instance, and there's like badges in that and the oh, what's it called?

The, there's a Netflix show.

Susan: Hilda?

Yucca: Hilda, yes, with this, with the I'm forgetting the name of their scouts, but they had, it was named after a bird, right? And so they see that and they're always like, I want badges for that, right? So I'm sure they would be very enthusiastic about anything badge related.

Mark: I really like that the Spiral Scouts has kept the badges but gotten rid of ranks.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: So there's, there's no hierarchy of, you know, in the Boy Scouts you start out as a tender foot and then you work your way up through all these levels until you're an Eagle Scout, right? And, you know, some of the stuff in there is very useful and wonderful stuff to do.

I mean, you have to do a community project in order to become an Eagle Scout, and those are, you know, it builds a sense of responsibility to the broader community, which is great. But the rank thing, I mean, I was big into Cub Scouts. My, my Cub Scout shirt looked like a a Latin American dictator from the 1950s.

I had so many pins and badges and medals and it was ridiculous. The thing must have weighed five pounds. And I was really into that. But when I got to Boy Scouts, suddenly it was like paramilitary training and I just didn't want any part of it. It was, you know, it's like lining up for inspection of your uniform and stuff like that.

It was, Hmm. Not, not my idea of a good time. So, no ranks in in Spiral Scouts. Just skill attainments.

Susan: That's what I think my little one would be interested in too is just the gamification of learning life skills.

Mark: Mm hmm.

Susan: That's what I would love badges too. I would love a an adult 13 principles and four pillars set of badges and you do, I don't know what it is, like you do a small project for each one and you get a badge or, I don't know, honor system.

Mark: we should absolutely do that. Just, just create a, a checklist of things that you do for each of the, the principals and then, you know, we'll have badges made and or, you know, or people could download the the... The software for the patch sewing machines, and then they could go, go to a local producer and have the patches made for them bunch of different ways we could do that.

Well, I really have my mind spinning around all this now. It's going to be terribly disappointing if we decide we can't do it. But

Yucca: Well, there's also, we can always, you know, spiral back around to ideas too, because we have to, we have to look at what, you know, what can we currently do, and what are the priorities of the community at the time, and see how things go. So, so Susan, if you were talking about the future, right, what would be your fantasy for 50 years from now?

What would you hope to see? What would atheopaganism be in, you know, 50 years? It's, it's not us on the council anymore, right? Definitely other

Mark: And I'm dead.

Yucca: Maybe, hey, you might hang in there. Maybe,

Mark: 50 years from now, I would

Yucca: maybe medical technology will change.

Mark: eleven.

Yucca: Oh, that's a great Bilbo, right? Okay.

Susan: As my, my daughter says, when you're 100, you're compost.

Yucca: so what would you hope? Just, just fantasy, right? What would, what would we look like?

Susan: I mean, I would love to see us be at the scale of, like, UU, where maybe, you know, there's not necessarily Church building on every corner kind of a thing like you get with, you know, your Baptist churches and your Catholic churches and all that kind of stuff, but I would love to have expanded enough that we have so much in person opportunity, and maybe it's not, you know, a congregation where everybody comes together on Sundays or that kind of thing, because I don't, I don't know that that's a right fit, but just to have, I don't know, your local atheopagan community center place that everybody comes together for their monthly meeting or whatever it is, but just more, just more.

I think I would just love to connect with more people, because I think there's so many, there's definitely people, at least in my life, who are happy just being atheists, and that's fine for them and that's great, they can enjoy that, but I think that there are a lot of people who I know who could benefit from something like this, and anybody that I've talked to for more than two minutes Where I've been had a chance to answer their questions about it because you just say the words and they're like, that doesn't make any sense.

Why would you do that if you're an atheist? Right? Then they're like, Oh, okay. Yeah, I can see that. I understand. I understand why you would want to do that. And I think maybe a lot of people who are trapped. who feel trapped by atheism or who feel trapped by more traditional religious practices would find peace and joy with us.

And I think, I don't know, I'm sure everybody feels this way about their own religious path, but I feel like if there were more of us, then the world would be a nicer place. But

Mark: Yeah, I like to think so. We're we're, we're, we're about people being happy and the world being a better place. It's kind of hard to go wrong with those as your touchstones. It's God, it's, you know, we're doing this strategic plan in the Atheopagan Society, which by the way we created so that atheopaganism would have a container that could persist past me or anybody else, any other individual.

You know, that's, that's why the society exists. And my book, I'm, I'm willing the rights to my book to the society. So, you know, that will always be available to atheopagans in the future. But I was saying, we're doing this strategic plan for like the next two or three years because it's hard to imagine much beyond that.

So thinking about

Yucca: So I said fantasy. Yeah.

Mark: yeah, 50 is like mind blowing. I can't even, can't even get my mind around that.

Yucca: I have a 20, Mark.

Mark: 20, 20 years. What would happen? Well, for one thing, we would have enough of us that there would be opportunities for regional gatherings in a lot of places, you know, maybe two, three regional gatherings in Europe maybe one in Australia and so more opportunities for people to meet in person and You know, because that's really the gold standard of relating, right?

I mean, it's wonderful that we have these tools to be able to communicate across distance, but there's nothing like being able to actually just sit down next to someone and have a conversation. I'm hoping for a lot more of that. Speaking of which, we have the Suntree Retreat coming up again in 2024, and we will soon start taking deposits to reserve space.

Yucca: That is less than a year away.

Mark: it looks like, yes, it's less than a year away. It's about 11 months away. And so we're working on what the content of all that's going to be. So that's locked in place. And now it's just a matter of, you know, figuring out the pricing on everything, and looks like the admission prices for, for the event and all the meals combined will be about 250. And then lodging. And lodging is as cheap as, and it can be more if you have a space in a cabin.

Yucca: Mark, we're losing you into the robot.

Mark: People should be able to do this event. How's that? Can you hear me now?

Yucca: We can hear you now. You're frozen. Yes, now we can hear you. If you'll start again with people should be able to.

Mark: Okay. Go to this event for less than 400 plus transportation.

Yucca: Okay.

Than 400 plus transportation.

Mark: yes. Yeah, that, that's, I'm sure that that's going to be possible. In fact, it'll be... It's possible to go even less if you tent camp, so it's a good, good time to go tent camping. Tent camping only costs like 20 bucks for lodging for the whole three days. So, you know, if you set up your own tent or we can accommodate I think one RV

Yucca: And that should be late summer, early fall weather wise, so that's a good time of year for it.

Mark: Yes, yes, and, and unlikely to be, to have any rain. We actually got really lucky in May of 2022 because it snowed at La Forêt the week after we were there.

Yucca: Wasn't it snowing several hours after we finally left?

Mark: I don't know 

Yucca: I know I was, as I was coming, I thought there was snow and then certainly as I was coming down, headed south down by the Rockies, it was raining, which was blessed because it was, we'd been having those horrible fires in New Mexico at the time and it was just raining the whole way

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: But I think that they were getting more rain than I was getting as I was driving down, or I was driving up, but down south. It's confusing. I think.

Susan: yeah,

Mark: Well, we have the big the big hall, Ponderosa. If it does, that isn't a problem, but the weather should be beautiful. I, I looked up the, the average weather in Colorado Springs that first weekend in September. I think the high average is 75 degrees or something. It's just perfect. So,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: should be really great.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: we're already talking about what all the content of things is going to be, and we'll put out a call for presentations and workshops in a couple of months, and before we know it, we'll be in Colorado Springs.

It'll be, you know, with, with, with the gang.

Yucca: Ball's rolling. Yep.

Mark: Yeah,

Susan: excited. I've already planned for it. So

Yucca: Will the kiddo be coming?

Mark: That's great.

Susan: I think it's going to be all three of

Mark: Yeah, is your hood

Susan: they're not going to do all of the things, but

Mark: There are beautiful places to go right around there. Garden of the Gods and Rocky Mountain National Park. Just gorgeous, gorgeous places to go. So if they like hiking in the outdoors there are lots of opportunities for them to enjoy that as well.

Susan: yeah, and we might do, we might do tent

Mark: Yucca, were you saying something?

Yucca: oh, I was gonna say my, will at that time be five, almost six and eight year old will be joining me. Last time it could only be the, the older, but the, the youngest is, is excited for that rite of passage to get to go to, they call it the Ponderosa Pine, so, cause of the lodge,

Mark: Huh. Nice. It's so great having her there. That was just wonderful.

Yucca: Well, she'll be excited about the idea of more kiddos. I think there were other parents who had, who were there last time who were like, Oh, I should have brought mine. Right? But they didn't know that it was gonna, there were gonna be activities. So we'll have more activities for little people next time. So we'll have a little gang of them running around.

Mark: Huh. Yeah, I think for some of the parents, because it was a first time event and they didn't know what to expect and, you know, pagan events can be pretty raucous sometimes, they kind of wanted

Yucca: Yeah, we lost you again, Mark. You said they kind of wanted.

Mark: to do, you know, reconnaissance first, go in and check out what this was going to be like. Can you hear me now?

Yucca: Yes. We can hear you. Okay. So you were saying some parents, sometimes they can be a little ruckus y. Ruck that wasn't the word.

Mark: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, pagan festivals can be, you know, kind of uproarious and sexy and, and, you know, lots of, you know, carousing, and I think some parents were kind of leery of that and wondered what the tone of this was going to be like, and, you know, after having been there and discovered that we were able to have a good time without things sliding over into inappropriate conversation.

Boundaryless mess that that it's a fine place for their kids to come, and I, I really encourage parents to come. Tickets will be actually, I think we said that Attendance was free for those 10 years old and younger, and tickets are discounted for those 16 and younger, or under 16. So, yeah other than having to get a bed for them if they're, if you're not tent camping kids should be very affordable to bring,

Yucca: Was there anything else that you'd like to talk about or share, Susan? Anything you think that people should know about you?

Mark: anything you'd like to say to the community.

Yucca: Yeah. Mm

Susan: I guess I'd like to say, tell us what you want to see, because You know, I think you both have mentioned this before about the podcast, but it's true of the YouTube channel too, is there's only so much creativity, the same, and there's so much overlap with both of you being on the the YouTube media team as well, like, there's only so much creativity we all have, so please tell us what it is you want to know about, what you want to hear about, what kind of content You, you want to see so we can get that out there you know, I, I generated when we first, when first I first got involved with the YouTube channel, I generated this big old list of, oh, here's a bunch of ideas and now I don't know if any of them are in the comments.

Not resonating with me, or at least I'm like, oh, I'm not the right person to talk about that particular topic, but I'm like, what am I, I'm supposed to write a video. I don't know what I want to talk about. I guess that's, this is why maybe some of the days, even though I'm the glue on, my things are a little bit late later than they're supposed to get to, to the right people.

But yeah, let's, let us know what you want to hear about. I'm, I'm happy to I'm Write stuff or record stuff or be in front of people and but I don't know what it is people want to hear about so Tell us

Mark: Yeah, yeah, I really echo that, because after four years of producing these, new topics can be challenging.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: It's, when we think of one, it's like, oh, oh, a new topic! We can do that! It's very exciting. It's a little easier in October, because we've got Ancestors and Death and Dying and Decomposition and Hallows and all those things.

But for much of the rest of the year, we're... We could really use input on, you know, what kinds of things you'd like to hear about.

Yucca: Especially like in July, like, hmm, what do we talk about?

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Because this time of year, yeah, October, and then we're going into solstice coming up, and yeah,

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: busy next few months.

Mark: Well, Susan, thank you so much for joining us today. It is wonderful to have you on board and to have you be a part of the community. And

Yucca: Thanks for all the cool ideas today, too.

Susan: Thanks.

Yucca: think about.

Mark: Absolutely.

Susan: I'm good at ideas for fun things and not so much the follow through, so.

Yucca: Oh, that's not true! You make the follow through possible!

Mark: Even if that were true, it's still a really important role. You know, being, being a creative person who comes up with cool ideas, that's really important. So, we need cool ideas.

Susan: I'm hoping that, you know, eventually we're going to hit a critical mass of people in the community that somebody, you throw out an idea and somebody's going to grab it and just run, who, you know, has the skill set and. I hope. I guess that's another thing I want to tell people is if you feel like you want to contribute something, please do.

Like, I just showed up one day and was like, hey, I can help with things and now I'm on the media team and now I'm on the council. So don't be scared.

Mark: Absolutely.

Yucca: Well, thank you so much, Susan.

Susan: Thanks for having me.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks so much. We'll see you next week, folks.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at [email protected].

An Atheopagan Declaration of Policy Values (2022):

https://theapsocietyorg.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/an-atheopagan-declaration-of-policy-values-2022.final_.pdf

S4E30 TRANSCRIPT:

Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca.

Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark.

Yucca: And today, we're talking about religion and politics.

Mark: Yes, but don't turn it off.

Yucca: Yes, we were saying, what should we call this? What should we call this? But no, this is, this is important. This is what we're going to talk about. And there's a lot to say here. But today it was inspired because, Mark, you just got back from a trip, which you got to do some pretty cool politicking.

Mark: Yes I went to Washington, D. C. as a part of a fly in delegation by the Conservation Alliance, and I'll tell some of those stories later advocating for protections for public lands, including the designation of some new national monuments. So, I, as I said, I'll, I'll talk about that stuff later but yeah, just got back from a lobby trip,

Yucca: Yeah. So one of the things that... It is very common to hear in pagan circles, and I think probably not just pagan circles, but a lot of new age things and kind of, mini counterculture sorts of groups, is, you know, don't bring politics. into this, right? Don't, don't bring politics into my religion. Don't, you know, we, we aren't going to talk about that.

We're not going to be this is separate, right? Let's be, let's be off in our realm or our magical experience and leave that other stuff out.

Mark: right? And there is so much to be said about that. I mean, it has a nexus with toxic positivity. This idea that, you know, we should only talk about happy, shiny stuff, and that, you know, we're going to have this nice, warm, glowy, serotonin oxytocin experience by doing our, our spirituality, and we're just not going to engage with anything that doesn't stimulate that.

It has to do with the toxicity that we see in the societies around us where the mainstream religions are engaging with public policy and they're doing it for really destructive and antisocial reasons. And so that becomes sort of the poster child for why you wouldn't want you to have politics in your spiritual space.

But a lot of it, in my opinion, is simply... We don't want to think about any of those issues because they might bring us down.

Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. But, and there's just so much to say because there's, it's going to depend on every different kind of situation but I think that if we think about the values that We often claim to have that we value the earth, that we think the earth is sacred. You know, we may have different interpretations on, you know, whether divinity is involved with that or not, but hey, we're agreeing, we think that the earth is important, we're agreeing about believing that love and freedom and all of these things are important, then I think that...

If we really believe that, then we have a responsibility to those things.

Mark: Yes, yes, we it's because they won't happen by themselves. You know, there are interests which are destructive interests and are not filled with love and are not about advancing liberty and are not about supporting the biosphere in a manner which is consistent with biodiversity and with the sustaining of humanity.

And they're out there advocating for their stuff every day. And if we absent ourselves from the process because we think that it is too negative or too gross or too demoralizing, then we are leaving the field to those who would do us harm. And it's just not, there is no logic to it that makes sense to me, other than at the most sort of Self indulgent, I just want to feel good for me kind of place, where it makes sense to say, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going to advocate for what I care about, I'm not going to be interested in any kind of activism.

I mean, everybody's circumstances

Yucca: become informed about it,

Mark: right.

Yucca: right?

Mark: Everybody's circumstances are different, and not everybody can be a big activist, right? You know, if you're, you know, you're raising kids, or, and you're, you know, scraping by, and, you know, there's a lot of different, I mean, poverty is a social control strategy.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: So, it is, it is one way that people who have the common good at heart are kept limited in the amount of power that they have. So let's, let's not mince words about that. But even with the limitations that we have, I have always felt that it was my responsibility to do what I can to try to advance the values that matter to me.

And I'm pleased to say that the community that's grown up around atheopaganism is very much the same way. We're gonna, we're gonna put a Link in the show notes to the Atheopagan Declaration of Policy Values, which came out last year and was developed by the community with tons of community input and editing and all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: There was a lot of back and forth and lots and lots of people participating and, you know, wording things just for, it was quite inspiring, actually. Mm hmm,

Mark: the level, level of collaboration with the minimal amount of argument was very inspiring to me. And so now we have this document, and it can be downloaded from the Atheopagan Society website. So we're going to put the link in the, in the show notes so you can download that. But that's an example of the community speaking out on issues that really matter to us, and saying, this is where we stand.

This is what our activism is going to be built around. This is, you know, we... We embrace LGBTQ people. We do. And it's not just, it's not just You know, so called virtue signaling, we genuinely do, we want those folks, we want people of color, we want indigenous people in our community, you know, we want them to be safe, we want them to be seen, we want them to be heard as, as an example.

And similarly, along the environmental axis, along the axis of personal liberty and autonomy, bodily autonomy, all of those you know, the importance of critical thinking and science all of those pieces are a part of what our movement is about. And so, when we talk with the public, That is, that is core to what we express.

Yes, we're here for happiness. We're here for people to feel good. We're all for that. But as one of the atheopagan principles says, you know, responsibility, social responsibility is one of our principles.

Yucca: right.

Mark: It is an obligation that we have.

Yucca: And so those values, they're not just about talking about them, they're about, those are what inform the choices that we're making.

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: Right? And being able to reflect on what those are, right? is really important. Have conversations about that, because we're not, there's going to be nuance, right? We're not always going to see eye to eye on things, and being able to, as individuals, talk about that with each other, and as a community, be able to, to talk about that and, and, you know, have that conversation is really important.

Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. And we learn from one another, right? I mean, that's a really important piece because As strongly as I feel on a value level about supporting people of color in the LBGTQI plus community I'm not one of either of those groups. And so I have to listen a lot in order to understand, well, what is an appropriate statement to make in support, right? How do I show up as an ally and as and as an advocate? Or a supporter for their advocacy, you know. So, you know, it's not as simple as just having a laundry list of policy positions.

And it has to also recognize that we live in a world of subtle differences. Right? Subtle gradations of change throughout the whole natural world, and that includes humanity. So, I get really kind of bent sideways when I hear the lesser of two evils, or I'm not going to vote for that person because of this one little position, when the alternative is so much worse on every position. The best analogy that I've heard is that voting isn't dating, it's selecting, it's selecting the best possible option off of the available menu. And the available menu only includes people that actually have a chance of getting elected. It's not just some fringe outlier who tells you what you want to hear.

Yucca: mhm,

Mark: that can actually get into a position to make change in a positive direction.

Yucca: mhm, mhm, mhm.

Mark: So, we had a bunch of stuff on the outline for this podcast. What else have you got?

Yucca: Well, certainly the, the issue of privilege is definitely

Mark: Oh, yeah 

Yucca: and this is something that I think comes up where people will be unaware of the place of privilege that they may be coming from to be able to say, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want this coming into, you know, my religion or my, anything about that, because that, that isn't the position that most people are going to be in that situation, right?

Yeah. Mm

Mark: Yeah the, I think the clearest way to express that is that if you have the luxury of saying, Oh, I don't want to vote that just encourages them, or I'm not going to consider any of those issues because I just want to be on my, you know, spiritual path of lightness and joy thing. Is that people that are marginalized and endangered by the way our society operates, they don't have the luxury to do that.

If you look at voting rates, for example, African American women vote astronomically in high proportions in the United States. And the reason for that is that the interests of the community that they are in are, are, are stark. The, you know, the threats that certain people like a Donald Trump and the people that he brings with him present to that community are so real.

They're not, they're not theoretical. It's not just something where, where as a white person, you look at it and go, Oh, gee, that's too bad. This is life and death for them. And they turn out to vote. They're organized. They're knowledgeable. You know, these are people who are, are leveraging the power that they have absolutely as much as they can.

And when I hear people say, you know, oh, well, I'm not going to vote because blah, blah, blah. What I, what I really hear is, I am so cushioned from the impacts of the policies that get made by people that I don't... Agree with in theory that I can just skate on this and ride on, on the, the, the privilege that I enjoy in the society in order to avoid having to deal with something that I might find icky.

Yucca: yeah, I'm being served by the system, fundamentally. Yeah.

Mark: So, you know, I'll give an example. It's like, an argument can be made that the certain proportion of people who in, in key states who supported Bernie Sanders, And then refused to vote for Hillary Clinton may have given us Donald Trump. It's not that they had to agree with everything that Hillary Clinton said because they didn't, I didn't. But the appointees that she was going to make, the appointees to the Supreme Court, the appointees to the, the cabinet positions, the appointees to federal judgeships.

All of those things were going to be head and shoulders above any of the things that Trump ended up doing. And it's painful to say, but those people needed to look at the big picture and go and vote for Hillary Clinton. And they didn't. And it's that, it's that, that sense of privilege, that sense of it not mattering that much that I really think needs to be interrogated on the left. And I am on the left, right, but I'm on the left that seeks to achieve progress because I'm a progressive, and progress happens in incremental steps most of the time. Progress isn't a home run. Progress is a base hit, and electing Hillary Clinton would have been a base hit on the way towards achieving better policies.

And instead, we have what we have. So, you know, and I realize that there are going to be people that are going to be fuming when they hear me say this but seriously, look at the playing board, and look at what we got, and You know, think about, well, what does this mean for the next election? Where, where should I be putting my support?

Yucca: Hmm, yeah definitely was not expecting that, I was not prepared for that direction of the conversation. That's something that I would have to really think a lot on. I understand some of the sentiment behind it, but I would want to look more at some of the numbers. And some of the assumptions about who is entitled to what vote, and whether those, I think that there's a lot to that situation, and I don't feel comfortable, I mean, you certainly have the opinion that you want, but necessarily agreeing and and um humming without really looking at that particular situation.

I think that there's a lot that was going on there. But I've certainly heard that argument a lot, and one of the things that I have been uncomfortable with is, and I'm not saying that you're saying this, but this is something that I have heard often, is the sense of entitlement of those people's votes.

That, you know, somehow this party was entitled to people's votes. What about... So, you know, do the numbers actually work out of how many Democrats voted Republican in that situation versus how many Independents voted one direction or the other? I think that there's a lot to really look into there.

Mark: Sure, sure. And I have looked into it some.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: I should be clear, I'm not saying that Hillary Clinton deserved anybody's vote, or was entitled to everybody's, to anybody's vote. I'm saying she deserved them from a strategic standpoint.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: That when you look at the playing field, And what was the right next move, that that was the right next move.

And in certain states like Wisconsin there were, there were enough votes that dropped off. That the argument can be made, but, but let's,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: let's make the whole thing abstract, okay? Rather than talking about that, that election in specific, let's talk about elections generally. When you have a situation where somebody who you agree with 50 percent is running against somebody who is agreeing with you 10%, And then there's somebody out there who agrees with you 100%, but they have no ability to be elected.

And it's clear

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You know, I need to go for the 50 percent because, again, I'm a progressive. So I want to see things advance, even if they're going to go a lot slower than I want them to go.

Yucca: Right, well I think in some of that case it's going to depend on what are the particular changes that, and what are the things that you are placing at highest priority, right? And if one of the things that you're placing at high priority is trying to do something about the monopoly, then that the two parties have, I can see the logic of making a different choice there.

But I think that the point, I think the point where we probably agree is that when you're voting, it's something to be very strategic about. It's to look at what is the situation where you are and what are the possible outcomes and thinking about You know, what are the values that you are, that you are fighting for in that case, right?

What are they, right?

Mark: and the key takeaway that I would, that I would leave this particular rabbit hole with is that not to vote is to vote. If you don't vote, you are

Yucca: is voting, yeah.

Mark: It is voting. So it is you know, you, you don't get away with your hands clean just because you don't vote, right? You, you bear a responsibility for election outcomes just like everybody else does.

And that's a really important thing for people in democracies to understand. And I'll talk a little bit later on about democracy and the degree to which we have it and all that good kind of stuff.

Yucca: And

This is just one area, right? This is an area that we happen to be talking about because this is an area where, where this is something that there's some strong opinions on, and this is an area where people do have influence, but of course there's a lot of other things. As well, in terms of you know, commercial choices and lifestyle choices and all of that kind of stuff that we can but one thing I really want to highlight, and you touched on this a little bit before, but I think it really deserves its own section of the podcast as well, is that being able to spend large amounts of time on these issues is a form of privilege itself too, right?

And this is not something that everyone has. And you don't have to be guilty and beat yourself up and you're not a bad pagan because you've got to do a 9 to 5 plus your two side jobs to even be able to Barely make rent, right? That's not, so we're not sitting here saying, oh, shame on, you're failing because you're not fighting oil rigs in the, you know, gulf and how come you're out there?

Like, that's not what we're saying at all. And I think that it's really, really important to think about and balance in our lives the self care component. And, that sometimes, yes, it's, sometimes it is okay to just have your celebration and to not necessarily be talking about, you know, let's raise money for this, this particular candidate at this time, or something like that, but know that it does, that this stuff does have a place in the community, it is important, but it isn't, The, you don't have to be doing it all the time, if that's not what your, what your mental health needs.

Mark: No, no, definitely not. And it's important for those of us that have the privilege to be able to engage the system in that way, either from the outside or the inside, that we recognize that privilege and use it. Right? You know, those of us that have the bandwidth, those of us who have You know, the thick enough skin and that have the energy and sometimes the money even just to travel, to go somewhere.

I mean, the trip that I just took, I didn't pay for because otherwise I wouldn't have gone, right? But but it's, it's, that kind of privilege is very visible. It's like, The D. C. is a very, very African American town. It's a very Black town. Lots and lots of Black folks, and, until you get into the Congressional buildings, and there it whitens up considerably

Yucca: Mm

Mark: with the lobbyists and the, you know, the constituents that are going not, not universally, of course but noticeably, and it is incumbent upon those of us who have been there.

The privilege to be able to engage, to do what we can to improve justice, and to speak for the things that we care about so that they can advance.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: So, I could talk about my trip.

Yucca: Yeah. Yeah, you were just talking about D. C., so,

Mark: Okay, well. So, I got sent on a fly in with the Conservation Alliance, which is a consortium of businesses which was originally founded by REI, the North Face Peak Design, and Patagonia.

And they came together to create a unified voice for speaking up for the outdoors, for for wild lands and outdoor recreation. That was a long time ago, and now they have 270 businesses from a variety of different sectors, and what they do every couple of years is they gather a bunch of the leaders of those businesses along with, and they make grants, right?

They pool their money and they make grants to organizations that are doing organizing and advocacy for the issues that they care about, and the organization I work for, Cal Wild, is one of those.

Yucca: mm hmm. So that's how you were able to go on this trip?

Mark: Yes, CalWild was invited to send a representative, and I was selected to go, and so I went. This is not the first time that I've been to Washington to lobby, but the last time was in the 90s. So it's been a while. And everything has changed, of course. I mean, technology has changed everything, and 9 11 has changed all the security.

So, it's, it's just a completely different experience. So, so I went and I was going to speak on to, as a grantee, to speak as a content expert about the positions that we're trying to advance. My organization right now is working very hard. for the creation of three new national monuments in California.

My organization is limited to California, so that's why, you know, that. But we're also advocating for some policy changes at the administration level, which would affect the whole of the United States. And I should say, you know, we're talking a lot about kind of American politics in this podcast, but if you have a representative democracy of any kind, the things that we're talking about are really applicable to you too.

Yucca: Right. Yeah, we're just talking about our experience with our

Mark: the stuff we know about. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the idea here is not to get everybody all plugged into American politics. It's to use that as an example of what citizen participation or resident participation looks like and why it's important. I go on this trip and I go to Washington and I meet with the team and we have a training briefing and all that kind of thing, and my take, we, on the first day, I had two meetings with administration offices with the Department of the Interior and the Council on Environmental Quality of the White House now when we're meeting with staff, we're not meeting with the people that are in charge in those agencies, we probably would have met with the Secretary of the Interior, but it's Climate Week in North Northern New York, so she was away at Climate Week,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: Um, so, and there was something going on with the Department of Environmental Quality such that we had the staffer that we had. But these are sharp, smart, influential people that we're talking to, and the sense that I got, and then the second day we had meetings with California delegation members both to the Senate and to the House of Representatives, including my congressman which I had a very interesting experience with talking to my congressman's office in Washington, so I'll get to that in a minute.

Yucca: hmm. Mm

Mark: The main takeaway that I got from, especially from meeting with the administration, was that they want to do what we want them to do. Their, their hearts are in the right place. And they are delighted that we are coming to Washington and talking to people, and organizing on the ground in local communities, because they need the political cover to be able to do what we want them to do.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: And in that

Yucca: like that's charging them up, right? They want to do it, but they need to be charged with the power of the people.

Mark: yes,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Exactly so. And... It gives them something to point to when opponents say, we don't want that,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: right, they can, you know, they can point to the organizing that my organization is doing and say, well, the people in the community who live right next door want it, you know, the elected officials of the county where the expansion of the National Monument is proposed, they want it.

So, You know, those are their representatives and they elected them to office to make those decisions, so why shouldn't we do this? So it's really important to be doing that kind of community organizing and talking to other people about the things that you care about in a, you know, in a focused way. So that was really gratifying to me because, of course, American democracy has taken a beating over the last 20 years, but it's still functioning.

Thank you. The elections are kind of messed up, and we could certainly do without gerrymandering and and all the dark money, and I could go on, but as well as the occasional insurrection, which I really, really think we could do without. I walked

Yucca: that's not an, let's have that be a singular thing, please.

Mark: yes. I walked several times, because the house office buildings and the senatorial office buildings are on opposite sides of the capitol. I walked back and forth in front of where the insurrection took place a bunch of times. And there it is, you know, large is life. And, you know, there are the windows they broke, that's how they got in, you know, there's where they hung their banners, you know, all that. So, that said it was encouraging to see that at least under this administration, There was a commitment to listening to constituents and to hearing, you know, they were very appreciative of the businesses that were represented there, you know, in, you know, speaking up on behalf of protecting public lands so that their ecological values last forever, their recreational opportunities there, all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: Actually, is that something you can, I know that we're talking kind of more process here, but for a moment, you were, talking about trying to get more national monuments. Why are those important?

Mark: Oh, good. Very, very good question. My organization focuses on conservation of wild lands on public lands. And a lot of

Yucca: you keep going, can you define conservation? Because that is a term that has a lot of different baggage attached to it. So what do you mean when you say conservation?

Mark: man protection of the land so that it will not be developed in certain ways. And management of the land for the resource, for the benefit of the resources that are there, of the ecological resources, cultural resources in some cases historical resources, and recreational opportunities for people to go camping or hiking or whatever that might be.

So, one... One misapprehension that many Americans have is the idea that public land is protected land. And it is not. Most public land in the United States is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or by the U. S. Forest Service. And those have been managed primarily for extractive purposes like logging and mining and

Yucca: Oil is big

Mark: and oil exploration.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: Yeah, very big. So we're advocating for chunks. of undeveloped land to be protected in perpetuity and managed for the benefit of those values.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: That's what a national monument does. Or a National Wilderness Area, which is declared by Congress. We're not asking for a National Wilderness Area in the areas we're focusing on because Congress is broken, and there's no way to get anything through it. the President can use the National Antiquities Act to declare a national monument. He can do that on his own.

Yucca: So, by taking , these areas, you're setting aside, you're allowing ecosystems to stay intact, right? So that you can have the populations of these animals and plants or whatever. Particular kind of species you're looking at, they have a place to be, they can continue to play the roles that they would play in a hopefully healthy system and to help manage for that,

Mark: Right, and that helps us to accomplish a couple of important things, one of which is, you know, we have a biodiversity crash problem, you know, the, the biodiversity of the earth is the, which is the number of different species and the number of individuals of those species are both on a steep decline.

Having habitat is necessary in order for, you know, organization, organisms to live. And but not only that, this is a very interesting one. One of the things that we're advocating for is the expansion of Joshua Tree National Park.

Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm.

Mark: And the reason for that is that because of climate change, Joshua trees are migrating out of Joshua Tree National Park.

Yucca: Interesting.

Mark: Over time, they're moving north because it's too hot

Yucca: Because it's warm. Yeah. Okay.

Mark: Yeah. So, it... Protecting these areas also enables the natural systems of the earth to do what they do in terms of adaptation, right? So, there's a place for the Joshua trees to go as the southernmost of them die because of excessive heat, and conditions become better for them outside of the park to the north.

So that's just one example. 

Yucca: And may I add that we of course want to protect these for simply the innate value of that being , has any right, as much right to be there as we do. But they also, the functioning system performs ecosystem functions, which is like cleaning the water and the air that we all breathe. So it's, it's not just that, oh, we like there being lots of animals and plants and fungi.

It's that there needs to be. these plants and fungi and animals for life as we understand it to continue to function,

Mark: right, exactly. And that requires, because everything is so fragmented now, it requires some level of active management in order to protect from invasions by invasive species, for example, which will wipe out all the biodiversity.

Yucca: right? Or in my area of the world where we're missing keystone species, so we're missing whole ecological roles, there used to be these animals that aren't there anymore, and if you just take your hands off and you don't touch it, you fence that area off, that area will starve, quite literally, right? If you don't, if humans don't try, because it's kind of like the voting.

No management is management.

Mark: yes.

Yucca: Right? It is a choice that we're making as well. And so we have to really be thoughtful about and understand the systems that we're dealing with.

Mark: right. And there is so much science. I'm not saying we know everything, because we don't. There's an awful lot that we don't know, but there is a tremendous body of science about how to manage lands in order to improve biodiversity at this point.

Yucca: And we're getting better at it.

Mark: One of the things that we who work in the conservation sector, in the environmental sector, actually need to fight against within our own ranks is the group of people who still advocate for putting a fence around things and leaving it alone.

Yucca: That's why I asked you a little bit about how you are using the term, because where I am, the term has been kind of changing a little bit, where we have kind of two different camps, which are the restorationists and the conservationists. And the conservationists are the people who, who are, you know, an anti gras, who are like, don't touch anything.

Don't just fence it off. Don't know people know nothing. And then you've got the people who are going, well, let's look at the way the whole system works and maybe we do need to, you know, one, let's not keep kick the people off. 'cause you know, It's been here for 20, 000 years. But also, like, what, you know, what about the animals?

What do we do for the, you know? So that's why I was kind of asking a little bit about that terminology there.

Mark: here's a great example in California. There were devastating wildfires. that ran through Sequoia National Park. And in Sequoia National Park are the giant sequoia trees, these, you know, huge, vast, amazing, amazing

Yucca: Amazing.

Mark: awe inspiring. Well, because humans had been suppressing fire in those forests for a hundred years, when that wildfire ripped through, it burned much, much hotter than it ever would have otherwise, and killed a lot of those trees.

Now, there's a big debate. The Park Service wants to replant seedlings of giant sequoias. in the burned area. And there are environmental organizations, self styled, that are saying, no, you can't do that. You just have to let nature take its course because that's the right thing. But we have been suppressing fire for a hundred years.

We have been doing the most invasive, destructive thing that can be done to that ecosystem for a hundred years, and now you say we're supposed to leave it alone? That's ridiculous. You know, reseeding giant sequoias in that area is absolutely the right thing to do in order to keep the species from going extinct.

And, I, I don't know, I mean, obviously this is what I believe.

Yucca: I'm smiling as you're saying that because I used to work in stand management in the Jemez, and we had very, very similar, like, I can hear the two sides right now and it's, People get, have very, it's very emotional, right, and one of the things that happens, I think, is that people have very strong emotional connections without having some of the background to understand what is happening.

And that goes back to what we were talking about before with some of our responsibility, I think, is that we have a responsibility to become informed about these Issues and learn about them

and and be able to, if you're going to be involved in making choices about how these If this land is going to be managed, you need to understand the ecosystems that you're dealing with. Because our system, our ponderosa pine systems are very similar in terms of the fire ecology. You know, people become very, people are very concerned about thinning and controlled burns and things like that, and I think that they're coming from a good place.

Their hearts in a good place in it, but are very, very misinformed about what the results of their actions will be if we do that.

Mark: And there are two big pieces there that I think really are takeaways from all of this. The first one is that they are coming from a good place, but it's a romantic place. And we need to recognize in ourselves when we are romanticizing something rather than basing our decisions on facts.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: The second is...

We have seen a terrible onslaught on the appreciation for expertise over the course of the last 40 years or so. And we need to respect the people who have letters after their names and understand deeply how things work. We need to listen to them. And they don't all agree with one another, that's fine.

But in generally, in most cases, there is a scientific consensus. To some degree about what is the right course for these sorts of decisions. And we need to be listening to people that have devoted their lives to understanding these questions, rather than just thinking that because we like trees or we like nature, that we are in a position to make those kinds of decisions.

Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah.

Mark: I'm speaking to you and you're in the process of getting letters after your name.

Yucca: I have plenty of letters. I'm getting some more letters, but yes. Yeah. . Well, I had cut you off when you, in your story, to ask you to explain a little bit about the monuments, of why that was such an important issue for you to go across the entire continent. to talk about.

Mark: That was a really important question. And as you mentioned this, yeah, it's true. I mean, there are a few reasons that I would put myself into an airplane at this point because of the impact on the atmosphere, but this is one that feels like on balance. 

Yucca: Potentially for your lungs, too.

Mark: yes, yes, that's true boy, although I came back here and oh my god, the smoke, we're, we're really, we're really buried in, in wildfire smoke right now.

So, Going to, and, and, you don't have to go to D. C. in order to advocate for things you care about. First of all, a lot of decisions are local, and you can go and talk with local officials, or organize a contingent to go and talk with local officials. But also, your congressional representative has an office in your area.

You can go and talk with them and let them know what you feel about things.

Yucca: Well, and state level as well,

Mark: state level, absolutely.

Yucca: right? And it, you know, it's going to depend a lot on your state. The experience in a smaller, population smaller state it may be A lot easier, like in my state in New Mexico, going down to the roundhouses is super easy you just walk in and there's everybody and you just go up and talk to them.

I would imagine in a more populated state, it's a little bit trickier, but it's still possible, right?

Mark: The culture contrast between, you know, California, of course, is the most populous state, almost 40 million people and the culture in Sac, yes, between Sacramento, our state capital, and D. C. is really stark. When you go to lobby in Sacramento, If you're a Democrat, you almost never wear a tie. I mean, registered lobbyists will probably wear a tie.

But if you just go as a constituent or as an advocate for, you know, one of our groovy left enviro positions, You can wear an open shirt and a sport coat, a pair of slacks, I mean, and, you know, you don't have to hide your tattoos and your piercings and all that kind of stuff, it's great. You go to Washington, it's a suit for a man.

You wear a suit, you wear a tie. I left my earring in, but that was my one sort of concession. And and you're right, it's very organized and very regimented in Sacramento, just because of the sheer volume of people that are, that are traipsing through there.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: But I, I really, I want to come back to this idea that elected officials are there in a democracy to represent you, and they may not know what you think,

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: so go tell them.

You know, get informed on an issue and, you know, go tell them what you think, what you, what you would like them to do. It's more powerful when you've organized more people to be a part of that voice. And that's why the Conservation Alliance exists. And that's

Yucca: many other organizations too,

Mark: yes, yes. That's why that's why community organizers exist.

To gather the voices of... Individuals into a collective voice that's able to make change happen and that's true in any representative democracy, so it's, it's well worth, you know, you know, sticking a hand in, and the people you're talking to are just people. They don't bite. At worst, they will frown.

That's, that's

Yucca: wrinkle their brow at you.

Mark: Yeah, that's, that's about the worst of it. I didn't have any Republican visits this time, so, we were very welcomed and just very encouraged, and I think there are going to be some declarations coming up here in the next few months that will make us very happy. So it's bringing all this back around politics is How we as a collective society make decisions about what's important, what's not, and what's going to happen. And if you care about your world, and as atheopagans and naturalistic pagans, I believe our listeners do care about their world and about their fellow humans then it's incumbent on us to say so, and do things that make things better.

Yucca: I keep having the image of Mary and Pippin sitting on Treebeard's shoulder and shouting, but you're part of this world too!

Mark: Yeah, yeah, there's, because there are things in this world that are worth fighting for. Right?

Yucca: Yep. Well, we could certainly go on for a long time, but I think this is a little bit of a longer episode, so we should probably finish up here. And we are going into October, and we have some fun, and some spooky, and some great episodes coming up. And Stinky, and all of those great things that we love to celebrate, and recognize, and all of those things, and this great Time of year.

And happy autumn, everybody.

Mark: Happy autumn! Yeah,

Yucca: So, thanks, Mark.

Mark: yeah, thank you so much, Yucca. It's a pleasure talking with you, and I'm still obviously really kind of jazzed about this trip, so thanks for welcoming a conversation about that into the podcast.

Yucca: See y'all next week.

Mark: All right, take care.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at [email protected].

S4E29 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: and once again, it is time for us to talk about the autumnal equinox, one of the eight stations of the wheel of the year of holidays.

Yucca: That's right. It just keeps turning and turning. So here we are.

Mark: Here we are once again, you know, looking at The, the the calendrical arrival of autumn anyway. I mean, I I'm pretty clear that I'm into autumn here where I am already, and I think you are too, Yucca but,

Yucca: though, because the beginning of autumn and the end of autumn are very, very different seasons here.

Mark: yeah. I mean, autumn and spring are the transitional seasons, and they things change pretty radically during the, during their extent. Yeah, so, well, we can talk about kind of what tells us that autumn is coming, but we can also talk about the holiday, and what it means to us, what we call it, how we celebrate and kind of its positioning within the wheel of the year and how that relates to the things around it, and all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: Sounds good. Well, let's start with names.

Mark: Okay.

Yucca: So, for me, the equinox, and of course it's one of the equinoxes, but it's pretty clear which equinox we're talking about during this time of year. And it's also first fall or first autumn,

Mark: Mmhmm.

Yucca: because here I look at the seasons like there's either eight seasons or there's two seasons.

Mark: Mmhmm.

Yucca: So there's the Because the traditional temperate four seasons, really as we were just saying, early or first fall and second fall are two very different seasons

Mark: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Yucca: But then there's also really, there's just the hot time of year and there's the cold time of year. And this is the transition between the hot into the cold. This is one of those, those gateway or door holidays. For me it feels like we're going from one season to the next and so it's a very busy season.

Very busy holiday, very busy season here.

Mark: Sure. Yeah, you've got to get everything prepped and everything buttoned down for, for a cold winter.

Yucca: That's

Mark: Yeah I call this holiday Harvest. And of course it's not the only harvest holiday, but this, this is the time when kind of the cultural imagery of cornucopias and all that kind of stuff really, you know, starts to pop up in all the media and all of the winter vegetables are producing abundantly out of people's gardens and the earlier vegetables are pretty much petering out at this point.

The, the grape crush. The grape harvest and crush is happening right at the point of the equinox, it starts usually in August but it extends, what happens is the whites get harvested first, and then the reds, and then there are what are called botrytis vines, which have the botrytis fungus growing on the berries.

And they create so they, they sort of shrivel and they get very, very sweet and concentrated in flavor. And those are used to make dessert wines and ports and things like that. So there's this, you know, there are several phases to the grape harvest and crush. And it's just... It's a lovely time. The leaves are changing in the vineyards and and in some of the trees around here, and there's a feeling of industriousness

Yucca: hmm. Mm

Mark: uh, you know, people have gone back to school, they've gone back to work, all that summertime playing is pretty much over now so there's just, it's just a, as you say, it's a very busy time, but it's also a very lovely time and so I call it harvest.

Yucca: Yeah. And neither of us are in areas where we have lots of broadleaf trees that are churning, but I have a few here and it's just so lovely. to see the, to see them changing and watch that, that very traditional fall look start to, to start to happen. And there's a, there's a smell to it too. There's this very lovely crisp smell that comes with the changing of the leaves.

So, do you smell the Like, when the crush is happening, is there a, you smell that in the air,

Mark: If you, if you drive around the country roads, it smells like rotting grape juice everywhere. It's,

Yucca: you like?

Mark: I do. It's a, it's a it's a sort of quasi wine smell. It's not quite there, but it's working on it kind of smell. And you know, and there are truckloads. So grapes going by and, you know, farm equipment all on the roads and all that kind of stuff.

We do have a lot of broadleaf oaks here. We have a lot of valley oaks and California coastal oaks and black oaks. 

Yucca: Do they change during the autumn? We have a, we only have a few oaks here, we have these little scrub oaks, and they hold on their leaves, really, they, they really hold on to them for a long time, and then it's just, they turn brown, and then they're... They, they don't even drop them really till the spring, till they're growing new ones.

We don't, and we just don't really have any other oaks at all. So I

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: do all oaks do that, or is that's a very special

Mark: No, I mean, there, there, there are what are called live oaks. There's California live oaks here, too, and the live oaks, they don't drop their leaves at all and and they're kind of unpleasant to be around because the edges of their leaves are prickly.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, you know, you end up walking on them and it hurts.

We had one in the last place that I lived, we had one outside of our yard that leaned over into our yard and dumped huge numbers of those sharp pointy leaves into our yard every year.

Yucca: If they don't want to be eaten,

Mark: no.

Yucca: that, yep,

Mark: And they have adapted ways to prevent that from happening.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: So, but yes, the, the oaks do change, except for the live oaks, they do change and they do drop their leaves.

But they don't turn red and yellow, they just turn kind of a rust color. And that then eats in from the outside of the leaf into the, into the center of the leaf and then it drops. And I particularly love the look of the oak trees in the late autumn and winter.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: Because they're so crabbed and Halloween y and, you know, wonderful in the shape that they have.

And, you know, there's just such a stark sort of gothic quality to those trees when they've dropped their leaves.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: Um, So yeah, harvest. And thematically, that really is kind of the centerpiece of how I think of this time. It's, it's a good time for feasting with friends and relations. Sometimes I think of this as pagan Thanksgiving. And, of course, Canadian Thanksgiving is right around this time. They have it figured out much better than, you know, late November. I don't know who's, I don't know who's doing harvest celebrating in New England in late November. That, that just seems a bit off to me. 

Yucca: Well, I suppose you have all of your harvest in at that point, right? You're not in the process of harvest, you've gotten everything ready,

Mark: historically that first event almost certainly didn't happen in November. It just got declared as a holiday by Abraham Lincoln some, you know, century later. Or quite a bit more than that actually. Fourscore and seven years ago plus. The, so I think about this not only as a time for, you know, coming together with loved ones and feasting, but also to reflect on what the last cycle has been like and what the fruits of that have been, of the cycle of the last year, what I've invested my energy in, and my creativity, and, you know, what I've had hopes for, all those, all those dreams and aspirations and plans, you know, that happened around the February Sabbath and And the, the spring equinox, you know, those got implemented, and there was a lot of work involved, and all this energy got invested, and all that kind of stuff, and then now is the time when it's like, well, how did that work out?

What, what actually emerged? Oftentimes it turns out that what emerges as a harvest from your year is not what you planned to, to have happen. And that... That's a very useful exercise, I think, that this holiday really lends itself to a lot of gratitude and appreciation for living, which I think is true of all of the holidays, but this one particularly, I think, is really a life is good kind of holiday but it's also a time to think about what didn't work out, you know, what, what crops did you plant that did not come up you invested OK, And why?

What lessons did you learn? Because maybe it's just that that sort of thing is not really the sort of thing for you,

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: or maybe it's that it was just a bad time for it and you can take another crack at it later. But, you know, Part of learning is assessing how things have performed.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: And it's interesting that we, we have a society, the economy of which is built around all these performance metrics all the time and annual performance reviews and, you know, all that kind of stuff for, for people who work.

Yeah. But we don't do that very much in our personal lives very often,

Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Are you still there?

Mark: and I think it's, it's helpful to reflect, not in a self critical way, but in just a, you know, sort of transparent and open minded way to take a look at, well, what was I trying to accomplish this year? What were the strategies that succeeded?

What were the strategies that failed? What has, what is the result? What is before me now? And what does that tell me about The next cycle, what, what I would consider doing next.

Yucca: Yeah, I think that's really important, and having, I think that's something that we should be doing throughout our life, but that it's very useful to have a time that is dedicated to thinking about that in particular, right? And that's one of the really lovely things about the Wheel of the Year.

And, you know, next month we'll be talking about the death stuff and all of that, and then, you know, getting into the dark part of the year with the real deep self reflection and it's just lovely to have, to have it sort of built into life that, oh yes, this is when I come to this time and do the reflection upon what did I harvest, right?

Maybe literally and in terms of a metaphorically.

Mark: Yes. Yeah, I agree. I mean, that's one of the things that I find very beautiful about the pagan practice of the Wheel of the Year is that it, it programs for us the kind of good human habits of thinking about certain things at certain times of the year and remembering to be grateful and, you know, all, you know, Remembering to to pay attention and you know, to be frank in our, our assessment of ourselves and, you know, looking at, at who we are and how we behave all that kind of stuff.

I, I just, well, I wouldn't be doing this practice if it wasn't very, you know, moving and meaningful to me but it really is and that's one of the main reasons that it is.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And another thing that I do that I should mention because I always. But in a plug for it is that, and I've spoken about this many times on the podcast before, that I think of the Wheel of the Year as metaphorically embodying the arc of a human life. So with birth you know, with, so, sort of, conception at at the winter solstice, and then, you know, birth at the February Sabbath. And then, kind of toddler childhood at the spring equinox, and young adulthood at May Day, and then kind of full adulthood, and then middle age, and now this comes around to the time of the elderly. This is the time when, because that's the time of life when you look back and you realize, you know, what did I, what did I achieve? What's, what, what is the harvest that I... What is the crop that I grew in, in my life, right? It doesn't mean that your life is over, that you can't do anything else, but it's a time when most of your years are behind you and you can kind of assess.

You know, hmm, I did that. That was cool. I'm glad I, I'm glad I did those things. And it's also a time to really be appreciative of the accumulated experience of people that are elderly, which we don't do much in our mainstream culture. We don't value old people very much. And I really would like to change that.

I, I really, I, I think that elderhood is something that should be honored. Rather than viewed as something to avoid through all kinds of surgical and

Yucca: and whatnots, yes.

Mark: and exercise regimes and diets and, you know, all that kind of stuff that people do desperately to try to prevent themselves from being old. So, yeah, that's another, another piece that I think of here. I think of you know, toasting the old people in the community when you're having your harvest feast.

Yucca: hmm. In fact, I mean, I think it was created mostly as a marketing thing, but wasn't it just Grandparents Day? Actually 

Mark: I don't know.

Yucca: I think it was, yeah I think that's in mid September.

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: I love, I, I really love the way that you structure your Wheel of the Year and the different stages of life. And I really appreciate seeing, sometimes in the Facebook group or in other groups, people will share their different approaches to the Wheel of the Year.

And I also assign different meanings. to the different seasons, but I have a slightly different approach. So when I'm looking at the seasons, I look at different components of the ecosystem, or large ecosystems, like the grasslands or the forests. And for this time of year, It is a recognition of the decomposers and the microbes the fungi and the bacteria, because this is the time where, this is the only time of year that you're going to be able to walk around in the forest and see mushrooms, first of all, because it's just too, too hot and dry during the rest of the time of the year.

We have lots of types of fungi, but in terms of seeing, like, there's your bright red mushroom, don't touch that one, right, like, that's only going to happen. This time of year and really up in the mountains but this is also when for temperate climates, the, the fungi are just getting going, right?

They're really doing their work. We forget that the mycelium, it's all down below the debris, the leaves that have fallen and the old plants that have died down, and they're down there. This is their feast, right? They're getting ready to start decomposing, and they'll be working all through the autumn and the winter into the spring breaking that down, and returning it into a form that then life uses again.

And the bacteria, and it, it leads quite nicely into, the next season for us is about, is the ancestors. Everything that came before, and of course we start first. We go far enough back and our grandmothers were microbes, right, and so it kind of is this nice lead into that. So we, we really like to be thinking about that sort of on an intellectual level.

And recognizing that, you know, we're making some of our pile, you know, compost piles and things like that. Of course, we do that throughout the year, but this is when it's going to be sitting and doing that.

Mark: Mm hmm. Mm

Yucca: And then, as I was saying at the beginning, that we sort of see there being two, either eight seasons or two seasons.

And this is the, this is the beginning. of the cold time of year. But not quite. The days are still hot, but the nights have a chill in them, right? The wind, we're closing the windows at night and we can kind of, it feels that chilly in the morning, and you might have to, you know, in the morning you've got to, for the first half of the day, maybe have a sweatshirt on, and then you take it off by the end of the day, and you're like, oh, it's so hot.

But there's just so much that It's clear now winter is coming and you've got to get ready for winter, and it's lovely to watch. Where I'm sitting right now, I'm looking out, and I'm seeing we have jays and squirrels, and they're doing their, that industrious feeling you were talking about.

They're out there right now, getting... Plump, and we've got our, we have a little bear family that lives nearby, and you can see they're trying to get all plump as well, and and so that's what we're doing, too, is going, okay, well, the cold's not here, but what do I need to have ready when the cold does come, because there's just certain things you can do at one time of the year and others you can't, right?

So there's some flashing that I need to put on some of my windows. That's not going to stick once it gets cold. That has got to happen before the cold comes. It's time for us to change the angle on our solar panels and to open up the, the shade cloth on the greenhouse to let the heat in. And so it's just a time of making lists.

And making sure, okay, before the winter comes, does everyone have hats? Do we all have hats? Because it's a, it's a hassle to need a hat and not have it. What about boots? Because when the mud comes, we're gonna want those boots, right? And it's, there's, there's a, it's one of the two big prep times of the year, right?

There's the spring prep and there's the fall prep. And I like to do like a big, lots of people like to do spring cleaning. I like to do a fall cleaning before we're gonna be inside for... Months and months. And so that's sort of the other side of the harvest, right? Like there was this whole year that happened, but now there's the whole half that's going to happen.

And how am I going to prepare for that? Not in the the growing way. It's not the starting new projects kind of way that is in the spring, but it's the being ready for and prepared, sure that everything is, is buttoned up and finished up and that there's no, you know, we haven't missed any loose ends or anything like that.

Mark: mm hmm, and if you have outdoor projects, you gotta get those finished

Yucca: Absolutely, yep.

Mark: before, because you can't bring them indoors, and you gotta get it done before it starts to rain and then snow,

Yucca: Right. And I mean, and there's some that, there'll be a few projects that are much more pleasant to do when it's cold. But there's things that have to get done to have that prepped to be ready to do it. So there's just a very, it's a thoughtful time of year. It's another one of those pause and think,

Mark: mm hmm,

Yucca: be prepared times.

And, and for us, these are our specifics of the way that, that Our climate is, but each climate is going to be a little bit different and so for some people, maybe this is, right now, that's not when it's happening, because that's not when the seasons are quite changing. For some people, the seasons are changing earlier, or later, or, you know, what you're going to be doing if you're getting ready for a winter in Wisconsin is very different than a, you know, a winter in Southern California.

Mark: yes, because they hardly have winter in Southern California, oh no, it's freezing, it's 70 degrees,

Yucca: Well, but that's the thing, like there's, that each climate is going to be different, and it's not, it's not less valuable to be in one climate versus the other. What's happening in your climate, some of those themes may be still happening, but what that holiday means to you in Southern California may be somewhat different.

different because that, it might be a little bit more appropriate to have that sort of prep time happening at a different time of year. Or maybe it's not quite as intense, right? For me, it's really an intense time period, we've got these few weeks, and it's gotta happen in these few weeks. For somebody in a climate that doesn't have quite as huge swings as mine does, Maybe it's something that you spread out more throughout the year, and you think about a little bit each you know, maybe each full moon or something like that instead of, boom, it's, it's fall, right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that, that, that completely makes sense to me, and I even think about how... In a very, you know, very temperate climate like Southern California, you know, if you're, if you're in the coastal area, for example, it may even be like an opportunity to do things that most of us associate with the summertime, because like the beaches aren't going to be nearly as crowded as they were in July and August, right?

So, as the weather cools off, you might be able to get a little bit more privacy and, you know, time to yourself and stuff at a beach.

Yucca: Mm hmm, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, so, as always, we are really interested to hear what how you're celebrating the holidays, our readers. You can reach us, or, sorry, listeners, what am I saying? You can reach us at thewonderpodcastqs at gmail. com, and we always appreciate getting your emails. We are not going to have a show next week.

Because I am going to be flying to Washington, D. C. to lobby for wilderness protections so that's kind of exciting. And I've decided that I'm going to wear a Sun Tree button on the underside of my lapel, where they can't see it, but I will still be wearing it on my lapel in the Capitol when I'm going to meet with congressmen and senators.

Yucca: that's wonderful. So you'll still, it still has the meaning for you, you know it's there.

Mark: That's right. Yeah, yeah, but the problem is, if I wore it the other way, then it would always be stirring up conversations about what does that mean, and it would derail from the conversation we want to have, which is about new national monuments, BLM's new public lands rule, things like that.

Yucca: right. So it's one of those things to be thoughtful about is when do you... So, what are you trying to accomplish, and what do you need to do in each of those cases to accomplish that? So, very fitting for the time of year we've been talking

Mark: Absolutely. And actually, as I mention it oh, never mind, the public comment period is closed.

Yucca: Wow.

Mark: There's a Many people don't know this, the largest holder of land in the United States is the Bureau, it's the the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management. And it does not list in its priorities for land management conservation.

It, it lists things like mining, and oil and gas extraction, and timber, and grazing, and all that kind of stuff, but It does not list conservation values at all. So there is a proposal that has been launched by the Biden administration to change that, to add conservation into the mission statement of the BLM so that they will make decisions not only for extractive purposes, but also for the purposes of the ecosystem.

Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. That's

Mark: And that's one of the things we're going to be advocating for. You know, it sounds like a bureaucratic thing, but it's really not.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You know, these agencies are legally bound by their mission statements and and they will make decisions and allocate resources accordingly. So, it's it's an important thing.

The, as I said, the public comment period has closed. The public comments were overwhelmingly in favor of the rule.

Yucca: That's

Mark: They got something like 300, 000 comments, and they were, you know, they ran like 90 10 in favor of the rule.

Yucca: That's great.

Mark: Yeah, so

Yucca: I know my state, I have to look at the numbers again, but my state, BLM is, owns most of my state. Forest Service has a lot of it too.

Mark: Huh, Forest Service is the second largest landholder in

Yucca: it's more, yeah, it's, it's, the federal government owns most of New Mexico.

Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

I, I got to meet your senator, by the way, Kurt Heinrich at an event a couple of weeks ago. Martin Heinrich, I'm sorry and wonderful guy very, very thoughtful, very strategic around climate change and You know, we had a good conversation about public lands management and just good.

Yeah, great leader.

Yucca: Yeah, well I hope you have a fun I guess fun, a very productive and enjoyable time talking with all, all those DC folks.

Mark: I'm gonna get to meet a bunch of atheopagans from the D. C. area. I'm arriving on the 17th and on the afternoon of the 17th. If you're listening to this and you're in the D. C. area, I am saying, staying at the Yotel on on Capitol Hill, and you are welcome to come. I'm going to set myself up in the hotel bar at around two o'clock, and people are just going to drop by and we're going to visit.

So, I'm really looking forward to meeting some of our East Coast folks that I haven't met before.

Yucca: Great, well give them hugs for me, if they're hug folks. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, I'll ask first, of course, because I know you would. I would too, but...

Yucca: Yep. Well, wonderful.

Mark: All right, so

Yucca: you

Mark: you in a couple of weeks. Thank you everybody so much.

Yucca: Have a wonderful equinox, harvest, whatever you call it. So,

Mark: I hope your harvest has been bountiful.

Yucca: take care folks.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at [email protected].

S4E28 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca.

Mark: And I'm Mark.

Yucca: And today, we're talking about the senses, the other senses in our practices. So, the ones like smell and taste and touch that sometimes we can forget about.

Mark: Right. Yeah, I mean, humans are very visually oriented and they're very sound oriented. That, that tends to be the senses that we lead with, those of us who have those senses. And so, Our orientation towards what we do in ritual, what we do in our practices, all that kind of thing, will often kind of lean into those senses because that's what we're used to leading with.

But the other senses are also very compelling Very compelling, and can be powerful instruments in changing our consciousness and influencing the effectiveness of our ritual practices. So, today we're talking about that.

Yucca: That's right. And before we go much further, we should say that Yes, there are other senses. We're talking about the classical senses, which I think are useful because they are senses that, one, we have a specific organ, which is dedicated to that sense, and it's also about our interaction with the outside world, where we do have other senses like proprioception or things like that, but that's it.

Those are a little bit less obvious. Now, not that they aren't important and that you couldn't bring awareness of that into your practice, but for now, we're just going to be talking about those three in the more classical sense.

Mark: Yes. Yeah, I think That's plenty.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: We could, I mean, we could certainly dive into other things, but I think, you know, that'll, that'll certainly take up our time.

Yucca: which is a fun rabbit hole if you're looking for a research rabbit hole to go down is how do we define senses and all of that stuff is delightful.

Mark: Sure. Okay.

Yucca: Now, let's start with, with smell, right? I think that's a good place to start. 

Mark: Smell is a particularly powerful emotionally evocative sense. Our olfactory receptors are hooked pretty deep in our brains. You know, when you think back to, I mean really back to our earliest ancestors, the single celled organisms, they were able to detect the chemical nature of what surrounded them and move away from what was harmful, move towards what might be food.

That is, in essence, smell. That, so that, that sense has been coded into us from the very beginning, and in fact we've lost a lot. Of what we used to have in the way of smell in, in the way of, of the olfactory scents but it's still very powerful for us and it's very influential over our mood.

Yucca: It is, and it's one of those that is often hanging out in the background that we're really not conscious of, sometimes if there is a strong, potent smell, but we often start to tune smells out, even though they're there, they're there. And we don't think about them consciously, but they are influencing our mood and our, how we feel about things, and I'm guessing that most people listening, that if you have a sense of smell, that at some point in your life, you've encountered a smell.

And all of a sudden you're just, memory wise, just back at some previous scene in your life, right? The smell of walking into a coffee shop or the, you know, cigars and you're sitting on your grandpa's lap again or something like that,

Mark: Mm hmm. Yes, exactly. And the, the challenge in some cases with really cultivating that sense and its ability to influence our mood is that we have some social rules around acknowledging smell. There are a lot of smells that we're like supposed to pretend are not there

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: because it's embarrassing for people or, you know, whatever it is, or you're not supposed to be critical of how somebody's house smells, that kind of thing.

Yucca: And humans are not supposed to have any smell whatsoever. We're supposed to... Be completely smellless. Yeah, 

Mark: unless it's some goop that you apply to yourself, which has no relation to what a human actually smells like.

Yucca: Something that vaguely smells like a flower from the other side of the world, but maybe not, because you've never actually smelled what this flower really smells like. But they say on the bottle that that's what it is.

Mark: right. There you go.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I have a natural deodorant that I use once in a while when I'm going to be wearing a bunch of layers. And It's it's scented with ylang ylang. I have no idea what ylang ylang actually smells like. There it is, ylang ylang. So,

Yucca: enjoy looking at the bit. The names of, like, when you go through the aisle at the store, and, like, how they will name products, because sometimes it's just the name of a flower or something like that, and other times they just, they just give them these really weird names, like, it's like Spicy Night Out or something, and you're like, wow.

Yes.

Mark: fresh garden scent.

Yucca: Yes. Fresh garden. Okay. Compost? I have yet to see that one. That would be a good one.

Mark: that would be a good one. Yeah, compost musk.

Yucca: Yes. Yeah. Anyways. You were saying that they're, first of all, acknowledging That the, that these things exist that they're a part of our world. Mm hmm. Mm

Mark: so, and, you know, I'm not, I'm not recommending that people suddenly start violating all the social rules around, around scent and smell. I'm just saying that it's helpful to be aware of that so that you can suspend those rules when you're engaging with your practice so that you can really let yourself kind of drift away on the associative memories and that the scents bring up for you.

Yucca: That you can be aware of them and make choices once you're aware of that, those norms, then you can decide. A lot of them are there for perfectly good reasons, right? Like you're saying, we're not saying necessarily just throw them all out the window, but you have a choice once you're aware of it, that awareness is the first step.

Mark: In terms of practice, I not infrequently use incenses and sometimes I don't burn them. Sometimes I just kind of sit them out because they're, they smell good without burning. I'm particularly fond of the resinous incenses, like frankincense and myrrh and dragon's blood. Those, they smell super sacred to me.

As soon as that hits my nose, they're just like, wow, here I am in the temple.

Yucca: hmm. Frankincense is one that I use in my house on a regular basis. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So your kids may come to associate that with home.

Yucca: They may, yeah. We use a lot of, of... Synths in the house, and I change it throughout the year so there's some that that's just like the frankincense, that often feels more like of a fall kind of wintry one to me but I still use it throughout the year simply because I love it, but we have a little diffuser that I'll put the oils in And then in the winter, we heat with a wood stove.

And since we're such a dry climate, I'll often have a little humidifier on top of the stove. So I've got a little iron kettle that is just for making sure that the house isn't so dry that you get nosebleeds from it, because really, we are in such a dry climate. So I'll usually put some drops of different oils into that.

And throughout the year, the It is a conscious choice, but there's just certain smells that just... They just feel like they fit the season better.

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: And I was, I was mentioning to Mark before we started recording that here, it's really feeling like autumn is coming a bit early this year. Like it's the end of summer, but most years this would still be the end of summer.

Right now it feels like the beginning of fall. So I noticed the, the choices that I am making in the morning when I'm putting some little oils in, they're more, they got a little bit more spicy of a. You know, I put some clove in the other day and some things like that and it just, it just changes the feel and the mood of the, the house.

Mark: It does.

Yucca: think the kids really will grow up with that, right?

Mark: for sure. Yeah, there's something about kind of curating your olfactory experience that is, I mean, Here we are. We've got these senses, right? And we can either be just sort of buffeted by the winds of whatever comes along in a literal sense or we can we can make choices about what we choose to surround ourselves with in the way of, of olfactory cues.

And what I find is that the, the incenses that I use are so specific, each one is so specific in its felt sense. I mean, I wanted to say vibe. I mean, we know what that means, right? That sort of felt emotional sense that comes up when you smell a particular thing. That I'm afraid I have a lot of them and I kind of hoard them. I mean, I haven't bought incenses in years, but I have them all in sealed tubes and jars and boxes and things like that. Actually, this brings up a little story that came up recently. We were having the Thursday night atheopagan Zoom mixer. And I got to telling a story about this one particular incense that I just love which I said was called Five Grandfathers, and it was made by a metaphysical shop in San Francisco called The Sword and the Rose.

And a person who was on the call typed it in and the shop still exists.

Yucca: Oh,

Mark: And, and they, they make, they craft all their own incenses and they do it in the, you know, in a ritual way and all this kind of stuff. They have oils and all that kind of stuff as well. I think it's the swordandtherose. net, I think is their shop.

But it turned out it was six grandfathers, not five. I had just misremembered and the label fell off years ago. But now that I know that I can get more of it I burned some the other day. And it is this incredibly earthy, evocative really unusual it has a couple of kinds of pine bark in it and tobacco and some really unusual things that you don't usually find in incenses and it, it just seems super earthy to me and, and very evocative.

The story that the man at the shop told me was that his image of it is of the six grandfathers sitting in a kiva. And I can just see that image so well when I, when I burn this incense, it's so cool.

Yucca: Oh, that's one I can, I'm just imagining what that smell might be right now.

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: We don't have a word for it. Picture, we can't, I can't picture it, right? We don't have a, we don't have a word to say that, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: Because when it's a, Visual scene, I can picture it in my mind, but I can't, we need another word for smelling it.

Mark: I wonder if it's possible to learn to imagine scent.

Yucca: oh, I, I certainly can,

Mark: Can you?

Yucca: absolutely, yeah.

Mark: Okay. I, I can't imagine it.

Yucca: to, okay, yeah. Well, different people have different relationships to what they can imagine and what they can't.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: I know my father doesn't see things in his mind,

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: right? We've talked about it, but he doesn't. He doesn't dream in pictures, he doesn't see things but feel has a very strong physical awareness of how spaces feel, right?

I haven't asked him about whether he can smell things, but I can smell and taste things the sensation of a touch of something, right? Like I can imagine petting a big fluffy dog right now, and it's a very strong sensation, right? And I can, I can smell the smell of the dog's breath, right? Dogs have that very distinctive, they're stinky, but it's like you still kind of like it anyways.

You're like, oh, you're such a sweetie, right? Like that happy dog breath.

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: Like, that's just very visceral, and we just, I think our language lacks words to really talk about those sorts of experiences in the same way we can talk about visual things.

Mark: Yes, yeah, I, I really think that's true because what smell evokes in us is a felt sense, sort of an atmosphere or a, you know, what some people call an energy or a vibe, right?

Yucca: It's a body awareness, but it's not body in the sense of, I don't, it's not something I'm experiencing with my hands it's not something I'm experiencing with my eyes, but there's a, there's something much more primal about the experience.

Mark: yes. And I, and I agree with you that we don't have good language to describe those kinds of sensations. Like, like the feeling of shame, for example, when you're suddenly embarrassed by something. There is a very definite felt sense in my chest when that happens. And it's a physical sensation.

It's not just an emotion. It's a physical sensation in my body, but we don't have words for those kinds of things.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: Yeah. So scent very powerful very useful in rituals for creating a sacred space. You know, and it, and a little goes a long way. I mean, I've, I've been to rituals where there were great fuming braziers of incense and it kind of smoked me out and, you know, had to leave early.

Yucca: It can be such a challenge because that's one where people experience it so differently, right? What is a small, a strong smell to you may not be to somebody else. And what emotional state people are in is going to influence how much they can perceive it or not. We'll talk more about this with taste as well, but taste and smell are very connected.

When we're a lot around really loud noises and vibrations that can change how we perceive it, right? When, and I'd have to go back and find the original sources on this, but my understanding is that when we are in airplanes, with all of the noise and the vibrations, we don't actually taste as well as we do when we're in a calmer setting.

Mark: That's interesting.

Yucca: that

Mark: That explains airplane food.

Yucca: right, that if you eat that same food on the ground when the engines are off, you will have a very different experience of it than when, I don't know how loud it is in an airplane, but it's...

Mark: It's

Yucca: loud. It's loud, right?

Mark: Yeah. And it's kind of amazing that the brain is able to, in many ways, kind of filter that out. It resets your baseline, so you're able to have conversations with people and so forth, despite the fact that there's this very loud noise going on.

Yucca: I find I get exhausted. I can sleep very easily on airplanes because it is just so except if I have to sit by the window and then I can't not look out the window the whole time. I do not have the money nor do I want to spend the fossil fuels to do this, but I would be the person that If those weren't an issue, we'd just buy tickets just to sit and look out the

Mark: And look at the, look at the landscape, look at the clouds. It's, it's amazing. Yeah, I'm, I'm taking a red eye to Washington, D. C. in a couple of weeks and I'm, I don't sleep well on planes, so I'm really not looking forward to it.

Yucca: Well, maybe you'll have to listen to some good podcast or something like

Mark: Yeah, yeah. You know of any?

Yucca: So some, you're talking about using scents intentionally in ritual,

Mark: Right,

Yucca: So, so one thing that we can do with scents, and this applies to any of the other senses as well, is we can purposefully associate them with things

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: and be our own little Pavlov's dogs. Where if we want to invoke a sense of comfort or something like that, we can, when we get into that state, bring out the thing that has that smell.

Right? Like, I'm thinking, for instance, of like a lavender pillow. Have you seen those little bags that people stuff lavender with? Well, that's something that you, if you wanted to use that scent, you get into that space, you smell the scent, you think about the scent and you experience the feeling that you have, and you intentionally do that several times and just reinforce that so that your body That's just a clue that you use just to do that.

Mark: I have an example from the annual hallows ritual that my, my ritual circle, Dark Sun, does and I introduced this, but I use it every year, but sometimes. I got a little vial of cedar oil, and the reason I got cedar was because for some reason cedar reminds me of coffins.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: seems like cedar would be a good material to make a coffin out of.

So there's this sort of funereal solemn quality, I think, to the scent of cedar oil. And we've used it to anoint foreheads and things like that so that that scent is kind of around during the ritual and it's powerful. It's very powerful. I don't use it for anything else.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: It sits on my ancestor and underworld altar for the rest of the year.

I'm looking at it right now.

Yucca: Cedar's one that I tend to use around this time of year,

Mark: Is it?

Yucca: right? It is one that I associate with a late summer, early fall. Kind of, and then as we get into the winter, I'll definitely switch more into some of the piney, sappy kind of smells.

Mark: yeah, for sure, Yeah, and maybe this is a good place to transition into taste. Because taste and smell, as you say, are, are very deeply related with one another. I can imagine tastes.

Yucca: Interesting.

Mark: So, and considering that taste is other than the, you know, the, what, six, seven types of taste buds that we have, all the rest of it is olfactory.

So, maybe I'm just, I need to practice imagining smells.

Yucca: Well, what if you start with a really strong one, like walking into a coffee shop that roasts its own beans?

Mark: I just, I just imagined a smell, ammonia.

Yucca: ammonia, oh, that's a, yep.

Mark: Dead.

Yucca: say that and I've got, right

Mark: there it is.

Yucca: I can even feel the part of, of my nose where it is,

Mark: Where it burns.

Yucca: it burns, yeah oh yeah,

Mark: Okay. So I can't imagine since I'm just not very practiced at it. Okay. That's good to know. So taste. I have used taste in rituals where in order as kind of a part of induction into the ritual state, into trance, that very present flow state that That is, you know, what we seek to create in ritual space.

I've used cues like a single dark chocolate chip,

Yucca: hmm,

Mark: for example, you know, you put the chocolate chip on the tongue of each participant because there's, there's a way that that flavor, it kind of floods your sensorium with this. Deliciousness, and it's kind of a full body experience. It pulls you into, into being in, in, in your body rather than thinking about other abstract things.

Yucca: right? Reminds me of communion when you say that, right? Like, I think that's probably some of what's going on with that, that, little sip of wine, right?

Mark: I've used sips of wine as well. Now, under COVID, it's not so convenient because you're not going to have a single chalice.

Yucca: That you can, yeah.

Mark: just kind of wipe the lip and, and move on. But it could still be done. You could have a tray of, you know, little, little cups of wine and,

Yucca: Well, that's, you know, depending on, different churches have done different things, but ones that I have visited, I've seen they have, like, basically the little shot glasses, that there's just a little sip for each person, right? And then they have, like, the little wafer In fact, I visited one once in which the wafers came pre packaged and they're a little, like, plastic, like, thinking of, like, it would be, it sort of looked like the thing that Like, the flight attendant would give you on the plane, like, one of those little cookies.

Of course, that's somewhat wasteful, but it's, it was, I found it quite charming, right? It was like, oh, okay, that's a good solution. This was even pre COVID, like, okay, yeah, so, but that's something that humans, I bring up communion because it's, we've been perfecting this ritual thing for, you

Mark: Yes. Yes. There, there is nothing in a traditional Catholic mass service that isn't carefully calculated to create a particular mood, a particular set of emotions, a particular worldview. I mean, it's all very carefully curated. And. And, I mean, I, I find, you know, cathedral architecture and Gregorian chant and, you know, ritual music and the simple incense that they use and, I mean, all that stuff is just really amazing as a kind of sensory experience.

I, I don't care for the theology,

Yucca: I don't like, I don't particularly care for the theology or the message, but I, I I really do enjoy mass.

Mark: mm hmm,

Yucca: That, you know, that's something my, our father taught us when we were little, like, how to, you know, he was raised Catholic and obviously did not raise us Catholic, but taught us how to go through the movements and everything so that we could experience it.

And I just loved the whole ritual of all of it, and the, you know, the kneeling as you go in, and the water, and the pre like, all of this stuff is just, it's so effective,

Mark: It is super effective and that's why I reference some of those things in the Atheopagan Ritual Primer and in my book, my first book, the Atheopaganism book, because Because we've been doing these ritual things, you know, for tens of thousands of years, and we've learned a lot, and it's not, you know, these, these techniques, you know, we're not inventing them now.

They've, they've been used for a very long time. We're repurposing many of them to create modern pagan rituals. 

Yucca: And they were repurposed before us, too. That's the, you know, they came from other sources as well.

Mark: So taste it is traditional in many pagan denominations, I guess I'd call them, or paths that cakes and ale is a a segment of the ritual that takes place after the main working of the ritual. In the structure that I've proposed which is arrival invocation of qualities. Deep working or deep play or working, gratitude and then benediction the cakes and ale or sharing a ritual meal piece happens during the gratitude phase because we're grateful to eat and it makes our bodies happy to food into them.

So that, that's another thing where. You know, you pass bread or cookies or, in some cases, meat depending on who's doing it and what time of year and all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: hmm. Yeah.

Outside of a formal ritual, something that I like to do when I go in my own land, when I'm just hanging out and being like, hey! Friendry. But when I go somewhere that, like on an adventure with the kids a couple months back we went into the Carlsbad Caverns and things like that, is to actually taste the air.

Now, that's again mixing in with the smell as well, but there is a very, places have really distinctive tastes, and you can take a deep breath in, kind of, it makes me imagine like the wine tasters and it's kind of the same way that you might taste the wine in your mouth and like move it around and all of that.

You can do that with the air and taste it. the back of your, on your tongue, in the back of your throat. And every place is very different,

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: right? It's a little, it's subtle, right? Because it's not the same as like putting a chocolate chip on your tongue. But, but the taste of a city and different cities have different tastes, right?

And I'm not talking about putting things literally in your mouth other than the air. In some places that might be perfectly safe. If you're in the middle of a forest and you want to taste a pine needle, that's probably fine. Other places you might not want to pick up a rock and taste it because it's got diesel on it or something like that.

But experiencing the environments that we're in on a, consciously choosing to experience them on a level that isn't just site, I think, can really help us. Actually, I did a video on the YouTube channel about that a couple weeks back. 

Mark: Go check that out.

Yucca: but yeah, that's there. So, I think that that really helps to connect with the places where we are and slow down a bit,

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: right?

Because the more that we're experiencing things, the more new and novel things, the slower the time becomes. Your awareness of that. So a lot of this talk about how, when we were little, it seemed like our childhoods took up so much more time in our lives, and now the older we get, just the faster and faster time goes.

But I've found that this is something I've been working very consciously on, is trying to slow that down. and going, I can't actually signif like, I don't really get to choose how many years I actually get to be alive for. I can, you know, make certain choices that will help me to live longer, but, you know, I could be in a car accident tomorrow.

But what I can do is I can experience the moments that I have more deeply, and doing things like pausing and tasting the air, or really smelling the environment. around you, I have found really helps to get back a little bit of that stretched out time the way it felt when I was a child.

Mark: Huh. Huh. Yeah, I can really see that. And that brings us to touch, which is kind of an entirely different thing. And I, I think the reason it's a different thing is that when we breathe in a scent or we taste something, we do not yet consider it to be a part of ourselves. It's something that's in the process of becoming part of ourselves by being breathed in or by being ingested, but it's not us yet.

Whereas touch is very intimate. Because it's engaging with our skin, which is us. Does that make sense?

Yucca: Does, I mean, when we, when we're smelling something, or we're tasting something, it's, it literally is going into our bodies.

Mark: I know, but we don't think of it that

Yucca: yeah like, with smell, it's almost like a lock and key thing happening,

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: but yeah, there's something different with the touch that,

like, I think it's, it's tapping into something a little bit more Like a different kind of instinctual reaction because the touch is, well, first of all, there's a lot of different touch, but some of it is there so that we know, like, get away, don't get eaten so going back to when we were way, way pre pre mammal ancestors, we were just these tiny little worm things we bump into something, oop, don't get eaten by that, go somewhere else Yeah

Mark: Yeah, so,

Yucca: I think I see what you're saying with that, like there's a

Mark: well, there's a question of safety. The immediacy of touch raises the question of safety. You know, am I, am I safe being in contact with this, whatever it is? We, there are ways that things that you breathe or things that you ingest can harm you. They're more the exception than the rule. We, you know, we eat every day, we breathe all the time.

We kind of assume that what we're doing in those regards is, is gonna be okay for us.

Yucca: right, and the, I mean, taste is there partly to let us know, oh, spit that out, that's poisonous, don't eat that but then we spit it out and it's, it's out, it's gone yeah, but yeah, the safety, and safety in both ways like, are we not safe, and are we safe? Because again, going back to that mammal side, when we're, when we're born, we're we clinging to our parents, right?

We hold on to the other animals because we're a social, we're a social animal. And we're held by and we don't wanna be put down. We'll, we'll make that pretty clear.

Mark: When people have a traumatic experience, Very frequently, what's done by emergency personnel is to put a blanket around them. And it's not because they're cold. It's because the blanket provides a feeling of safety. The, the, the tactile experience of having the back of your neck covered and, you know, all of that is, it And I've actually done this in ritual circles where if somebody was having a really hard time, they were, you know, going through an experience because the ritual had brought things up for them.

I've, I've actually brought people a blanket and put it around them for, for that purpose. And it makes a lot of difference. So these,

Yucca: a weighted blanket that is just amazing for that.

Mark: Yeah, my partner Nemea has a weighted blanket too and she loves it.

Yucca: Another one, this is a little bit more, more extreme than a blanket, but it's a squishbox. If you ever feel like you really, really just, you just really need to climb into a hole you can make a box that is big enough for you to get in, so maybe, you could also do this with a bathtub if you happen to have it, and just fill it with blankets or, you know, pillows and things like that, and you just get in it between all of those things.

That stuff, and you just feel squooshed and safe and surrounded. Because sometimes when you feel like, I want to be in a hole, being in the hole is the best thing that you can do for that feeling. So, probably you don't actually have a literal hole, so you can just make one, right?

Mark: Well, and, and I've seen memes, I mean both of us are neurodivergent, obviously in different ways because everybody's different but I've seen memes from particularly people on the spectrum where that sort of being crushed feeling is very comforting. It's like it keeps you from flying apart. In some way.

And so, you know, just kind of a bear hug from a trusted person can give a similar sort of, you know, squash me until I'm safe sort of feeling.

Yucca: yeah. Oh, I just love that name, Bear Hug, too. It just makes me think of, that was something that I remember as being a little kid, is I would ask for the bear hug, I want the bear hug, and they go, rrrrr, give the growl, and the big hug, and with the, you know, the big arms of the parents. So, yeah, those things, those never, you know.

Talking about how short, it's amazing how short our childhoods are, but how that never leaves us, right? Even though a lot of times we don't, we don't remember most of our lives, right? We cannot remember most of our childhoods, let alone our adult lives, and yet it influences us so much.

Mark: Yes, yeah, so many of the associative memories we were talking about was sent and so forth. So many associative memories that pop into your mind at a random time are from your childhood. They're just, that's, that's when all this baseline stuff was being laid down and we go back to it over and over again.

So, so yeah, touch. And I have used. Textured things in ritual like fur or even things like steel wool or like a pet brush, you know, that wire, the, the, the sharp wire pet brush, you know, those kinds of things, you know, if you very gently brush it along the skin or if they brush their fingers along it all of those are, are, Ways of once again, you know, pulling someone into being in their body and being in immediacy and presence rather than the past and the future. Yes.

Yucca: yeah. Temperature as well. Temperature's a big one. And you can go either direction with that. And there's some simple things that you can use, like, like those little heat pads, those hand warmers.

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: But there's also the ones, you can get the little cold packs, that they're about the same size, they're for if, you know, somebody hurt their ankle or something like that, but, which by the way, I carry those whenever hiking because if somebody is getting overheated, you can open up one of those packs and have them put it underneath their armpit, or between their legs, and that really helps to start to cool them down faster.

Same thing in this. In the winter, do that with the, with the heat pack.

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: But that's something that you could do in a ritual space as well.

Mark: Yes. Yes. All of this stuff. I mean, you know who really specializes in this stuff, who's really, really good at it is the BDSM community.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: of this is called sensation play.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: And, I mean, they have, they've got feathers, and they've got horse whips, and they've got everything in between. They've got thuddy things, and they've got stingy things, and they've got gentle things, and they've got cold things, and they've got hot things, and, you know, this is all, you know, something that they really narrow in on, you know, dialing in exactly what works for people in, in all those circumstances and People that are on the receiving end of that are also exploring, okay, that works for me.

Okay, that doesn't, you know, this evokes a particular emotion in me. So it's all, it's very interesting stuff. 

Yucca: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Mark: yeah,

Yucca: And I mean, so that could be a really good resource, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a sexual experience.

Mark: right.

Yucca: So that may be the focus in that particular community, but the knowledge could be applied to, to any sort of sensation that you're, that you're intentionally invoking.

Mark: Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, because there are multiple axes of That, that community explores. There are things around power, there are things around shame, there are things around physical sensation. There, as I say, there are these multiple axes that people will explore with one another. And that's all great, but what we're talking about right now is the sensation piece, the touch piece.

And yeah, so, I mean, Welcoming a blindfolded person into the ritual circle with a soft caress of a feather on the side of their face. You know, you, you just, particularly if, if they're blindfolded so that they're not depending on visual cues for everything. There's a way that that can really make the body's senses come alive.

And then you have powerful experiences of these other sensations that are provided.

So,

Yucca: the blindfold, sometimes just closing your eyes or having a blindfold is enough to get you to shift to thinking about and paying it to paying attention to the other senses, because they're there. But it's whether we're really engaging with them or not. And then learning to use them, like just a couple minutes ago, with the imagining it when you said, Oh, yeah, I can imagine. I just have to practice it. I think that applies to all these other things, right? We, most of us can physically smell. It's just, do we practice noticing that and refining that? Most of us do have a sense of touch. So how much attention are we paying to it? How much are we not?

Mark: Huh. Yeah. And so, I guess, kind of moving towards a summation of all this, this, you know, the senses are kind of a playground. And they, they are very influential over what our psychological state is. And we, as practitioners of paths that we add. Deliberately work to affect our psychological state in ways that benefit us and that enable us to have, you know, experiences.

Really, you know, need to look at that. We, we need to be aware of all the different ways that, that our senses can be helpful for us. Particularly those that we don't tend to pay as much attention to, like, like scent and, and taste and touch.

Yucca: Right?

Mark: Well, this has been super interesting again. Thank you for, for a great conversation. Yeah, this was a good idea. I'm, I'm glad we did this.

Yucca: Yeah. Thank you. And thanks everyone for hanging out with us and listening. And we really appreciate you being here with us.

Mark: We sure do.

Yucca: We'll see you next week.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at [email protected].

S4E27 TRANSCRIPT:

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we're talking about truth and reality.

Yucca: Yes. So, there's a lot to talk about here.

Mark: There is, there is, and that's, that's why we chose this topic, right? Because a lot of the places where we come into friction with other parts of the pagan community, and certainly friction with other religious perspectives other than atheism, is in the question of what is real and what is true, right?

Yucca: hmm. Mm

Mark: And I think what I want to start out with... The problem is that we have terrible language for this stuff.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: Very imprecise language that uses one word to describe a lot of different things.

Yucca: Right. I want to start also with with a little story from something my father used to say when I was little. And I don't know where he got it from, but when he would tell a story, and I would ask him, I'd say, Dad, is this a true story? He would say, Yes. The events didn't happen. But this is a true story.

Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, like fables,

Yucca: The

Mark: Fables that illustrate moral principles. The moral principles may be something that we want to subscribe to, but that doesn't mean that the story about the chicken that was afraid that guy

Yucca: sky was falling, or that nobody would help her make bread, or... Oh, there's a lot of chicken ones.

Mark: are there?

Yucca: Yeah, right?

Mark: You would know more than me. 

Yucca: But, so, when we say that word true, It can mean so many different things, right? Sometimes we mean it as, is it correct as in, you know, a mathematical problem, right? Is 2 plus 2 equals 5? Is that true or not, right? But we can also mean, is it true in that more, does it have importance, does it have meaning?

So,

Mark: or even in very broad philosophical senses, like, is it true that supply side trickle down economics benefits everyone in the society? And some people will say yes, that's true. I think the evidence is that it does not, but ultimately it comes down to what you believe and what your, what the underpinnings of that belief are, what your philosophies are, right? So when I see Truth. I used to just mean the objectively factual, the verifiable, right?

Yucca: right, so sort of like a positivist approach to truth, right? So what is real can be verified empirically, and the best approach to find it is the scientific method. Right? That would be our positivism, yeah.

Mark: that is true of phenomena in the objective universe outside of our skins. The earth is round ish, it's not flat. Doesn't matter what you believe about it, it's still round ish and not flat, right? We have overwhelming evidence that this is the case. And so, it's not 100% sure, because nothing in science is ever 100% sure, but there's so much evidence that it's not considered an open question at this point.

It's considered settled science. It's a fact, right? But when you get to truths like... Justice and morality and good. There are truths in there too, but they're much more rooted in the philosophy and belief system of the person that's expressing them in the culture that they grew up in

Yucca: Mhm.

Mark: than it is about something that can be measured and factually checked. against other alternatives, right?

Yucca: Right. And while we're giving things labels that would be more of a constructivist philosophical approach, right? That those beliefs are constructed from the society that you're part of and your experience and your species and that all of those things are building on each other to create reality or to create truth.

Mark: Right, right. Your, your familial ideological context, all of those, all of those things accrete to form something that more or less hangs together as a, as a philosophical belief system, right? So, that I think is a part of the reason why it becomes very difficult to talk about what is true. Because as you say, the story, the events, May not have happened, but the story can still be true, and that's why myth is so important to us.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You know, we are the storytelling apes, as we've said before, and telling stories, even science tells stories, science, you

Yucca: Oh, absolutely. That's what it's about. There's very strict rules about how you tell that story, but that's what we're doing. Yeah.

Mark: it tells, you know, chronological procedural steps, events that take place, where, you know, something becomes something else, or something comes into being and, and so it's important for us to recognize, I think, The value that storytelling has for us in the abstract,

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: because just because something is not objectively factual doesn't mean that it can't be emotionally moving morally instructive eye opening in perspective,

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: You know, broadening your, your understanding of the human condition and the life that we live. So, all of those things are, are true, right? And none of them is, you know, can be subjected to a grass, a gas chromatograph.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You can't, you, you can't measure those kinds of things.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So, I actually made a little Venn diagram using the wrong tool for making Venn diagrams. I used Microsoft Word earlier today. And I've got four circles. I've got objectively verifiable facts. I've got believed truth, cultural truth, and then what overlaps all three of those is personal reality.

Yucca: How are you distinguishing between the believed and cultural?

Mark: Well, here's a good example. The cultural truth of the United States is Christian.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: It is, you know, that, that is, You know, the cultural truth is what I would call the over culture,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: whereas the individual's personal reality might vary from that, the believed truth. You know, so we don't subscribe to many of the values or or even cosmological beliefs of the cultural truth.

But we do. And so we have our own believed truth.

Yucca: Okay,

Mark: That make sense?

Yucca: does, yeah. So just getting a sense of how you're using those words.

Mark: Yeah. And this, once again is where language is just really not very useful. I mean, having to use all these qualifiers for words, words like truth and real and fact and things like that is, it's frustrating. And because I have spoken a couple of other languages, I know that it's not entirely capturing what I'm trying to say.

Yucca: right.

Mark: We don't have quite the right words in our language to capture what I want to say.

Yucca: So I don't know if any language, some might have words that are, that are better fit, but, but language is just something that we're trying to to, to communicate these ideas, but the ideas are, language isn't enough. Right? And so I think that it's helpful for us to try to articulate it anyways, because that forces us to clarify our thinking around it, right?

We can't just throw a word on it and say that's, that's what it is, right? We have to really think about what are we trying to actually say. And that's tricky, because we're trying to think about, we're trying to think about our own process of thinking.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: more challenging than it sounds like on the surface and then put down, and think about other people's approach to it, and of course we are just these limited, limited beings, right?

We don't experience everything, we only get to be around for, exist for a very short period of time, and most of the time that we're existing for, we're not even conscious for.

Mark: Right. And our brains constantly edit, massage, invent fill in the blanks. of our perceptual array filter our perceptions in order to create an inner model of the universe that we can interact with, right? And so we can determine that things are true when there's very little evidence that relates to them.

Even, even people conclude that things are objectively true, like ghosts and... Spirits and gods and stuff like that with very little evidence, but they will conclude that it's true because they have experiences that are filtered through their own filtration process that will make what appears to be evidence for them.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: And while I tend to be very, very skeptical about those kinds of processes and skeptical, you know, when I have an experience that strikes me as violating the laws of physics, and I have had a few,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: um, My immediate question is, okay, you know, what went wrong with my sensorium? You know, how am I, how did I misperceive this and misinterpret what it meant?

Others may not do that.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: And one thing that I also wanted to talk about today is the way that we relativistically value certain kinds of truth relative to other kinds of truth, which is a cultural thing, and I think that, particularly in the West, with with our domination of of science and technology and, you know, the, the kind of linear thinking.

What's the word I'm looking for? When you take things apart. Reductionist. That's what I'm looking for. The, we, we tend to,

Yucca: reductionism.

Mark: yes,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: We tend to place that which can be verified up on kind of a pedestal. As being somehow more important than the other flavors of truth, the other varieties of, of truth

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: that we experience in our lives.

And what's weird about that is that in an actual human life, that's not how it works at all. I mean, yes, when you're young, it's useful to be able to determine, you know, what a fire is so you don't burn yourself with it. But as we get older, the questions that we ask ourselves are, what does this feel like?

Yucca: Mm

Mark: You know, does this feel like the right thing to do? Is this, is this moral? Is this just? Is this kind? Those kinds of questions, and those are things that there is no meter to measure.

Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm. Mm

Mark: So I think, for example, about, like, take the Lord of the Rings, right? This is a semi sacred text to many people you know, there, there are lots of folks out there who read it every year and are, you know, deeply steeped in the whole lore of,

Yucca: My family read it every single year.

Mark: Huh. Huh, you know, just immersed in the beauty of and the drama of Tolkien's imaginary world. Now, Middle earth doesn't really, I hate to break this to you, but Middle earth really doesn't exist to our knowledge in any material sense.

Yucca: Right. It was, you know, loosely based off of Europe, but not in the sense that of an actual book. You can't go and say, oh, you know, Mount Doom is Vesuvius or something, like it doesn't actually line up.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: It was meant more to be spirit, right, than in physical body.

Mark: Right. Right. Right. But it can be profoundly impactful on us emotionally and even in terms of our thinking about Ethical questions, moral questions, you know, what would Galadriel do? So I think that the discounting of the mythological, the, you know, the fictional, but still containing kernels of, of meaningful human knowledge, narratives that we have, And certainly the the the culturally developed principles like fairness and justice and so forth.

I mean, these are very important. And what, even though you can't measure them, they're, it's still very important. And I think that we, especially as atheists, we can get accused of over, overemphasizing

the, the material positivist verifiably, Extant stuff

Yucca: Right.

Mark: relative to the rest.

Yucca: I think there has to be a balance, too, though. Because so many times we have seen people's that reality that approach being valued over some of what's objectively happening, right? We think in ecology, right, there was a cultural belief about predators being bad. And we went and got rid of the predators.

That did not help the ecosystem, though. Objectively, the predators had to be there. Same thing with the grazers, right? We take the grazers out, we take the predators out, the system falls apart. No matter how much you believe about, oh, the poor little deer, Right? Like, the system still falls apart if you take the predators out.

Mark: Absolutely.

Yucca: so I think that it's a tricky balance when looking at and trying to, to figure out how to make choices how to balance what knowledge we're looking at, what, how are we approaching the, the cultural versus some of the objective, and not saying that one is better than the other, but that there are places for each of those.

Mark: Yeah, that, that's exactly where I'm going with this, because what I'm, what I'm expressing is that I think that we need to elevate the value of the mythic, but that's not an excuse for scientific illiteracy.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: You know, we having a good story about the nature of reality is not the same thing as having good knowledge about the nature of reality.

And, unfortunately, there are an awful lot of people out there who simply choose, okay, I'm gonna go with this story, I'm gonna go with this story about, you know, this resurrection and original sin and virgin births and all that kind of stuff, or I'm gonna go with a story about Odin, or I'm gonna go with a story about, you know, anyway, name, name your divinity of choice, right?

Yucca: Well, and I and I would like to say that I don't think it's just within believing in deities or things like that. But people will also do things, stories that don't really line up with current scientific understanding, but is they like their version of, and I see this with a lot of like the really a great aggressive atheists who like they get this idea of like, this is what science says.

And it's like, yeah, that's That's like an 18th century understanding, like, science has progressed, you know, significantly since then, but you're going with this one story and you're deciding that that's what it is and not deviating. Like, that's not, that's not how science works.

Mark: And similarly, many critics of science will point back to scientific thought and statements from a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago and say, well, science is just racist. It's a colonialist, racist ideology, and that's all that it is, so you can discount it.

Yucca: Yeah. Which is, no, it, the people who were doing science Existed within a cultural context and sometimes abused the tools to their own end yeah. And that's happening today too, right? But our responsibility as informed citizens and as scientists is to not let that happen

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: we see it, hmm.

Mark: Absolutely. And so, as I am so fond of saying, the solution to bad science is more and better science. It's, it's not to throw that whole system out and say, okay, let's just go with the story we made up. That being said, and understanding that You know, deliberately choosing to believe in a world that is populated by invisible beings and has, you know, invisible forces that you can manipulate in order to affect the course of events and stuff like that.

I mean, I can understand why that's attractive in some ways. It's very um, romantic. That's exactly the word. But it doesn't really reflect what we understand. And. My paganism, my spirituality, is deeply rooted in the idea that I want to be here.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: I love the stories, I love the movies, I love the, you know, all that stuff, but I want to be connected with the reality of what this life experience is as best I can and to celebrate and be wowed by that.

Mm

Yucca: Right. And that's something that we've talked about a lot on the podcast, and we should do another Wow and Wonder episode, right, where we share some of that stuff, but that, that our reality is unbelievable. It is amazing. It's whatever scale you look at, it, I mean, just wow.

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: Right? And you can just go down and down into the single drop of water, and all of the complex, incredible interactions and creatures that exist in that single drop of water, all the way up to the scale of the observable universe.

It's just, there's so much, and we could spend every moment of our waking life discovering more and more, and still not even begin to scratch the surface. And it's just... It's incredible. Everything that, every day when I learn a new thing, it's just amazing. It's just, wow, wow, wow. This is, so personally, I don't feel like I need the invisible beings. Like, and if they're, if they're there, that's cool. Like, could, I'd love to discover them. But in the meantime, like, I'm, I'm pretty happy with tardigrades. It's pretty amazing, right?

Mark: they sure are. Yeah, I feel, unsurprisingly, I feel the same way. The... If there are, if there is a supernatural dimension to reality,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: or a dimension in which the kinds of things that theists and believers in magic subscribe to, whether or not it's natural, you know, maybe there are other physical laws that apply in that context or something.

There's little enough evidence for it that I can ignore it. I, I will cheerfully pay attention to the stuff for which there is abundant evidence.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You know, I don't, I don't have time in this life to go sifting through all of that, much less deal with stuff that may or may not be there. So, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a very sort of pragmatic decision to make as well as a, as a philosophical one, right?

It's just like, well, you know, I wouldn't want to spend a whole lot of time on something that turned out not to be there. So I'm, I'm. I'm just going to look at this gigantic pile of amazing

Yucca: hmm. So, pragmatic critical realism? Is that where we're getting into?

Mark: something like... Yeah, something like. But I do want to say that I think, I mean, part of the problem that we have, I think, with religiosity at least certainly in the United States, is that people are subscribing to religion and then, and then turning off any curiosity and, and deliberately resisting any curiosity from a scientific standpoint.

You know, how does this work? What makes this that, that way? And they just, they've got this. There's a magical wand that they wave at it that said the gods did it, or God did it, and what that enables them to do then is to fill their, their world perspective with stuff that clashes vehemently with the evidence that we have, like people that are climate change deniers and, you know, flat earth folks and, you know, those kinds of things.

Yucca: The second one is the one that always just makes, like, I can understand the first one about the climate change one, right? But the flat earth one, like, like, you, you can see it,

Mark: Only if you believe that we've ever launched anything from earth.

Yucca: but, like, you can see the horizon.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Like, that's the, that's the one that I'm like, well, but you can literally see it with your own, like, the climate stuff, you've got to like, you've got to trust that the data that's being collected is, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But, but you can use your own eyes to verify that the Earth is not flat, that it's not spherical, right?

And that's the one that I've just... It gets me. I'm just like, it's just, y'all, this is not,

Mark: I,

Yucca: that you're saying that you don't want to trust all of these, like, crazy, that we're all in on some huge conspiracy to, like, trick you and make Photoshop documents and stuff, but, like, you can do the trick with a laser and, like, shine it over distance, you can see through the horizon when you're at the sea, like, you can go up in an airplane, like, you know, it's, you can see it.

Mark: yeah. I think that what Flat Earthism is about fundamentally is just a rejection of science as a whole.

Yucca: Yeah, and getting attention.

Mark: yes. Yes. The whole idea of expertise, right? Like, I'm not going to believe those people. I'm going to do my own research, and my own research involves, you know, digging two pages deep on Google as opposed to spending years studying meticulously the, the, the data and the analysis that's been applied by people who are very knowledgeable in these subjects

Yucca: For thousands of years, by the way,

Mark: For thousands of years, yes.

I mean, not, not just in the context of Western laboratories and stuff, but I mean, indigenous people know how all the plants work because they did trial and error and experimented and figured it out,

Yucca: yeah,

Mark: you know, it's, the, the idea that the scientific method is something that doesn't belong to all people just doesn't hold up very well in my,

Yucca: no, the scientific method is a, is based on human, the way that humans instinctually, all humans think, right? It is, it is grown out of that and there are, there's a specific Western tradition, right? But that is one tradition. Out of the thousands, right, that led to, that just gave names, right, like, okay, we've got some Greek names that we're using, but it's not like, you know, here in the Americas, we weren't using those same methods, right?

Mark: right, right. And, mm hmm. Now, now we get into the trouble about, well, what do we mean by science? Do we mean the scientific method? Do we mean the accumulated body of knowledge that has, that has been accreted by the scientific method? Or do we mean institutions that that are scientific? And the institutions certainly have been, they, they've had their problems.

Yucca: absolutely,

Mark: they, they've been informed by cultural biases and,

Yucca: And they still are,

Mark: And they still are. And in some cases, they've been influenced by where their funding comes from

Yucca: yes,

Mark: which is another problem. And, you know, I think it's important for all of us to acknowledge that and to apply critical thinking and skepticism to what we see.

But critical thinking and skepticism doesn't mean I reject the opinion of all experts,

Yucca: yeah, yeah,

Mark: or I'm going to find experts who confirm what I already wanted to believe. What it means is Having knowledge about how methodology works, understanding what actually, being able to parse out whether a conclusion that's drawn in a paper or a statement actually has any meaning.

Coherence with the,

The findings?

Yucca: you would be really surprised at how often they don't.

Mark: I wouldn't.

Yucca: Well you get,

Mark: But, but I think many would. Yeah,

Yucca: many, and there's certain fields that it's more of an issue in than others, but you read the conclusion, then you look at the data and you go, that's not no

If you were my student, I'd fail you. How did you get published?

Mark: you didn't, you didn't prove that. And then usually there's a sort of clickbaity headline in the title of the paper or certainly the press release that is sent out about the paper that then further distorts the conclusion that was drawn by the paper.

Yucca: So yeah, , the science journalism is an area with some real challenges. Right now and there's so much that goes out there. It's just like, that's just not, it's, they're just falsehoods. This is not what was said in that paper, first of all and, you know, just, so I, I, I understand where some of the frustration with the science as the institution is coming from.

But then it just gets, and I think that the way that social media is structured right now doesn't help it because it will, people kind of get wrapped up in this, these groups that are forming identities around objecting to science or othering some particular group or some, you know, kind of extreme position or You know, things that are just not supported by the science or are being represented as science, which really aren't scientific, get incorporated into the mainstream.

And people go along with these beliefs about, oh, this is what the science says, and it's not.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: me a single paper. Nope, you

Mark: Well, and, and you, you, you complicate and extrapolate that when you have leaders who are hucksters, who, who articulate these falsehoods, like from the pulpit,

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: and encourage everybody to disbelieve in anthropogenic climate change, encourage people to, you know, not to believe science, not to believe in evolution, these kinds of things.

Yucca: And then you have got folks using a lot of that for whatever their particular platform is. When it's not, you know, where they're making certain claims or exaggerations that isn't really supported by the science. 

Mark: Well, one thing that, one thing that I have thought about recently is that we really need to make a distinction between skepticism, which is a process of inquiry, and cynicism, which is just the desire to tear everything down that isn't consistent with what you wanted to believe in the first place.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And there's an awful lot of people out there including in the atheist community, many of them, who call themselves skeptics, and what they really are is just cynics. You know, they're, they're not even trying to have an open minded inquiry into what's likely to be true, so much as they are just trying to tear down everything that, that they don't like.

In our lives. In our, you know, in our entertainments, in our in our politics, in our in our religious rituals, we, we do something that we often call suspension of disbelief. But I think what it is more is suspension of skepticism. We choose to turn off that analytical lens that says, like, have you ever sat next to somebody in a movie and they're like, no, the, that light angle isn't right, this was done with CGI.

You know, they're, they're constantly, like, breaking the, the spell. Of the movie? Very frustrating. 

Yucca: My partner won't watch sci fi with me for that reason.

Mark: oh,

Yucca: I have to keep my mouth shut. I'm like, nope! Gravity doesn't work like that! Stop it!

Mark: I, I mean,

Yucca: not to do it in a movie theater, though.

Mark: okay, well, good, good. Then we can still be friends. 

Yucca: My lip, but...

Mark: all right. So, suspen suspension of skepticism. I do that when I do my, my atheopagan rituals. I certainly do that, you know. In that moment, I, Who am I? You know, I'm a wizard. I'm a, I'm a manipulator of grand forces in the world, you know, who's making, you know, who's expressing wonder and awe and gratitude for this amazing life and putting out that I hope that these things will happen in the world.

And that doesn't have to be undercut by all the little niggling voices that might try to cynically suck all the juice out of that moment, right? You know, I don't go to the Grand Canyon and think, well, it's only a hole in the ground.

Yucca: Huh. Mm

Mark: That doesn't, it doesn't feed me in any substantive way. And so I think that the, the excessive elevation of the technological and the scientific in certain circles anyway I mean, it may not be quite as bad as the elevation of uninformed religiosity, but it's still.

Generally, you know, reason, rationality science are, generally in our society, they're viewed by important people, by the, the people that are, that are in the newspaper and are telling us the news and all that kind of stuff as being important. the mythic, and the mythic is not given that as much.

Yucca: Right. I think there's irony in that, though, that I think that there's overall very poor scientific literacy within our culture,

Mark: Yes,

Yucca: right, and so we do elevate that, you know, the science and the rationality, but that I think that we do so in a way that puts it more in that, like,

Mark: mythic?

Yucca: in the mythic box, right,

Mark: Yeah, because we don't understand how it works.

Yucca: Yeah, so we just like, you know, switched what the particular thing is that we're being told to believe.

And said, oh, it's because it's science, right? But without really understanding, without understanding science in any of the three ways that we just used the term, right?

Mark: yes. And certainly there is little effort to foster scientific literacy in the United States, certainly. I think that's less true in some other places. And so we're kind of forced to treat science as this magical black box that answers questions for us and that technologies fall out of that we then get to use and buy and enjoy.

Yucca: fonts and colors associated with it, and yes, and you know, beep boops and sounds like that, right?

Mark: Huh. Yeah, absolutely. And we insist on that, right? We, there's a particular kind of look and feel to a computer that will sell a computer, and there's a look and feel that will not sell a computer, and the people that make computers know very well what the difference is.

Yucca: Right? And if you are... If you're a college kid going into one of those fields, you are expected to look and behave a certain way and,

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Not another way, right? And that gets taught to us from when we're itty bitty.

Mark: Yeah. Yep. Well, and, and this is part of the challenge, because we have accumulated enough knowledge now that no one can Encompass all of it.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: It's just not possible within a lifetime in one human brain. So you kind of have to specialize, especially if you're really going to go into a subject, you have to specialize.

But for a general scientific literacy, it's... It's a work of many years. It's a work of a lifetime, honestly. I mean, you, because there's always new stuff being discovered. So, you know, I'm always reading sciencedailyandnature. com and scientificamerican. com just to kind of keep up with the very tiny crust on the surface of all the stuff that's being done out there.

Yucca: Hmm. This is actually the subject that, assuming that they approve it, that I'm doing my dissertation in for my doctorate in STEM education is... Scientific literacy, public literacy, yeah.

Mark: cool.

Yucca: So there's not as much research in the area as you would think there would be.

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: When I started looking into it, I was like, oh, this is, this is gonna be a saturated field.

But it's not. There's very little.

Mark: Well, new paths to scientific literacy would certainly be welcome. I mean, I know that you're a very strong critic of the traditional American education system. I am too. But the question is, how then do people absorb

Yucca: Right. And I'm definitely looking at it from the...

Mark: Ah.

Yucca: So, because we do most of our learning as adults,

Mark: Mm hmm.

Yucca: right? Certainly, most kids in this country go through a school system, and there's a lot of people working on that, and, you know, we could do a whole episode on that. critiques that I have of the system of school itself and how we've confused that with education and, you know, what the purpose of it is, but as a, as a scientist, I learned a few things in school, right?

I learned some, how to do some processes and things like that, but the vast majority of what I know happened just because I was interested in the topic and just continued to learn it. And I think that most people learn. That way as well.

Mark: Yes. Yeah, that's certainly true for me. I mean, you know, it's all been about deep dives into stuff that I, that I'm curious about. I mean, one of the atheopagan principles is curiosity, understanding that there's always more to be learned, right? And learning is a wonderful process. It's a pleasurable process. It's not only that it informs you more, but yeah. It's, it's joyful.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: And joyful things are things we're in favor of. So,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: go out and learn something today.

Yucca: Well, learning is something that we continue to do no matter what. We are humans and that's part of what we do, but we can be intentional about it or unintentional about it, right? So

Mark: Yeah. So, talking about truth and reality

Yucca: you did, before we started recording, you did, we were talking a little bit about quantum mechanics and you said you wanted to touch on the idea that measurement

Mark: oh yes, yes, this is,

Yucca: how we, I don't know how to tie this in

Mark: You can hear the exasperation in my voice as, you know, when this comes up because there are so many people. There are people in the pagan community, people in the New Age community, people in in, you know, various other kind of religious communities for whom quantum mechanics, which they usually call quantum physics, is a

Yucca: in for magic?

Mark: Yes, yes, it's a, you know, you, you wave your hands vaguely in a gesture at this, and what you mean is we don't understand it and therefore it is the cause of the thing I want to believe in. And one of the, one of the experiments and findings in quantum mechanics that is most misinterpreted is the idea that an observation affects The, the, the decoherence of a superposition particle, particle, wavicle phenomenon,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: um, and that's not what observation means in physics.

What an observation means in physics is a measurement, and a measurement necessarily requires an interaction, and that's what causes decoherence. That's what causes A quantum body to be affected is interaction with its environment. So it's not that your consciousness is changing anything in the quantum world.

We have no evidence ever that that is true. It's that in the act of trying to figure out what one of those particles is doing, you have to interact with it. Soon as you interact with it, it decoheres.

Yucca: right.

Mark: then, you can take a measurement, but You're not measuring the thing that you originally were reaching towards with your measuring stick, you're measuring what it became after the interaction.

Yucca: So let me give a kind of an analogy on a larger scale. So I want to know, I want to see where something is, right? Well, in order for me to see it, Light has to bounce off of it, and that has to go into my eye. So it had to interact, that photon had to interact with it in order for me to be able to see it, right?

So that's on a bigger scale, but that's going to apply on our small scale as well.

Mark: Exactly, exactly. And unfortunately, there was quite a lot of gobbledygook published about quantum mechanics early in its history, which has sort of, Mucked up the waters and created a lot more of this sense of, wow, quantum mechanics is very weird and mysterious. Well, it is weird and mysterious, but it's not nearly as weird and mysterious as a lot of people seem to think it is.

We've, you know, we've learned a good bit about it. The big mystery, of course, is where's the theory of everything? How do you get classical physics, you know, relativistic physics, to, to work with quantum mechanics because they clash?

Yucca: right.

Mark: So, that's the big mystery. There's a lot of very smart people working on it, and maybe someday we'll know the answer to that.

Yucca: It's delightful because each of those different approaches are very very good at explaining specific Phenomena, but completely fall apart when trying to explain other ones, so we know they're both wrong,

Mark: Yeah,

Yucca: right? And that's delightful, that's really fun to think

Mark: We know that both of those systems are flawed, and to the degree that we understand them at all, we understand that they don't mesh. Very well, they contradict one another.

Yucca: But they are still useful,

Mark: Oh yeah,

Yucca: right? And this happens in physics all over the place, you know, we're going to calculate the path of the baseball that I throw, and I'm not, like, I'm not including all of the different Little pieces of information. I'm not going to get it exactly, but I'm going to get it close enough to what I need for it to be useful, and I'm just going to use, do what I need for it to be useful, right?

Mark: So

Yucca: I was going to say,

Mark: oh go ahead,

Yucca: what you were saying with the, you know, a lot of the gobbledygook that's been published about it, there's also a lot of things That, that I come across, especially when teaching, where there's a lot of confusion between what are some really cool ideas, like when people talk about like multiverses or things like that, that, like those are very interesting ideas, but they're not science.

Right? And there's a, you know, and do we know whether string theory is correct, or things like, you know, or a few months ago, you know, the, speaking about the bad reporting, saying that, you know, oh, scientists created a black hole, and it could, like, no, they didn't. There was a computer program that they ran with, conditions that were slightly different than our universe, in which they were able to simulate and show that a black hole would...

form under these conditions. Right, like, so, there's a lot of stuff out there that is science fiction that may one day become science, right? But it's not science until it's falsifiable, right? Can't falsify, but it's not science right now, and it gets treated like it is, right? And it's and it, it can be so, so confusing.

Mark: yeah, exactly, and when you have a population of people who, to begin with, aren't very scientifically literate, but are looking for an answer. Kind of mysterious forces that might serve as an explanation for things that they choose to believe in. Well, quantum mechanics is a pretty good candidate because it has a little weirdness about it.

And it's, it's at a scale that's invisible to us with the naked eye, so we don't actually have to deal with it at all. We can just sort of use it as this placeholder for the magic thing that I wish existed.

Yucca: And there are a few things that, when you hear about, they kind of do sound a little... Magick y, you know, quantum tunneling sounds pretty magick y to me, right, when you think about it, or you're like, okay, yeah entanglement, that sounds pretty

Mark: yeah, Bell's theorem you know, the, the simultaneous snapping into identical spin of particles that are separated by parsecs, right? So, yes, I mean, there are things that are, that are mysterious and weird, and they, they point in the direction of new learning that we need to do,

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: If the data's good, because it's possible that our instruments are not perfect, too,

Yucca: Or that we're, that we're missing something, that we're really, we're interpreting something in the wrong way,

Mark: Ah 

Yucca: is always possible. So, something that I think a lot about is are you familiar with the idea of the ether? It's luminiferous aether. Okay, so we used to think, it was quite common to think that there had to be some sort of substance that light was traveling through, because all the other waves that we knew of went through something, right?

Sound goes through the air, ocean waves go through the water, so what's light going through? So there was this assumption that there was this something permeating. And I'm trying to remember the names of the two gentlemen who set this up, I'm going to look this up real quick so that I get the name of it right.

So, okay. The Michelson Morley experiment. Right? So, it was trying to measure the relative motion of the Earth in the aether. And they did it over and over again, and they kept not finding the aether, because we don't think it exists today. Right? And they said, okay, maybe we need to make it bigger and bigger and bigger, maybe, you know, it's just too small.

That experiment is... The setup for it is almost identical to how LIGO works, which is the gravitational wave observatory. So, if we had somehow been able to make it large enough, that it would have been able to pick up gravitational waves, we would have interpreted the gravitational waves at the time as being evidence for the

Mark: Or the ether.

Yucca: So, who knows, today, what we've found that we're interpreting as being evidence for one thing, which is, is something completely different. And we're just, we're going off in some direction, and we're totally wrong about it. You know, science is a self correcting process, so at some point, hopefully, we'll circle back around and correct it, but I personally suspect that most of what we think we know we're wrong about, but we don't really have a way of knowing that yet, so. But that particular example just delights me that, you know, if we had been able to make it four kilometers long, we would have detected gravitational waves instead of ether,

Mark: Huh.

Yucca: so.

Mark: On a completely unrelated note ether is a very useful trope in steampunk

Yucca: It

Mark: design and fiction and all that kind of stuff. My partner and I did a an etheric explorer's ball party,

Yucca: Ooh,

Mark: party that was so much fun. This must be 10, 12 years ago now, but oh, God, what a good time.

Yucca: I think I've seen some photos of you in your outfit

Mark: Oh yes, Commander Basterton,

Yucca: Yes, oh, that's a great name.

Mark: conquered Mars for the Empire.

Yucca: Mmm,

Mark: Yeah, Raleigh Houghton Basterton whose men call him Really Rotten Basterton.

Yucca: that's great.

Mark: Yeah, pretty fun. I have, I still have some of the business cards. You know, Commander of Her Majesty's Imperial Ship Improbable.

Yucca: Mmm, that's a good one. Yeah, well there's a lot of, there's a lot of good material for sci fi out of all this stuff.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And once again, that's the mythic. I mean, one of the things that's great about speculative fiction generally, science fiction and fantasy, is that it, it speculates, right? It it reaches out into the future or into alternate realities that. Put human or human like figures into different contexts and and then conjectures about well, what would it be like?

What, what would happen? What, you know, what, where would we go? And those are wonderful rides to take and they're often very illuminating. When you, when you take those rides and you learn something more about humanity itself by seeing it reflected in that kind of a mirror.

Yucca: mm hmm, mm hmm.

Mark: So I guess, you know, because we've been talking for a while now I guess to sum up, I both feel that we need a lot more emphasis on the verifiably, factually, objectively true in the way of increasing scientific literacy and curiosity, but we also need to elevate the mythic and the emotional and the passionate, you know, there's so much discounting of, I mean, you know, arguably the rudest thing you can say to someone is you're just being emotional, right?

Yeah, I'm being emotional, I'm angry!

Yucca: yes, which is so interesting when we, because it's one of the things that And of course, other animals, turning out, seem to share most of the, the closer they are to us, the more things they seem to share with us but that's one of the things that we pride ourselves about, oh, that's being so human, right?

And then, oh, look at you, shame on you for being so human

Mark: yeah,

Yucca: but I, I think that we, that it would really benefit us to focus more on thinking about thinking.

Mark: yes.

Yucca: Whether that, whichever type of thinking or the purpose, but just being more conscious of, what our beliefs are, why we have those, and, you know, learning to reflect upon those.

Mark: Well, yes I mean, Socrates, right? Know thyself. Self inquiry is, for one thing, it's an amazing journey. Because each of us really is unique and you will discover unique and amazing things about yourself, right? And since we don't come with an operating manual, it can be very helpful to know what your predilections are, what your prejudices are, what your confirmation biases are and to work

Yucca: that you want to change them, You've got to know what they are to be able to make those, to direct the change of them. They may change over time, they probably will, but if you want to influence where they go, you need to be aware of them.

Mark: need to know what they are. Yeah, it's, it's the full denial of inquiry that I think is the... Really the pernicious problem that we contend with, and it's not just among, say, fundamentalist, you know, evangelical Christians. It's, it's among some in the pagan community as well, you know, who know what they know and are not asking questions anymore.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: I'm, I don't know, I can't stop asking questions. I'm just too curious.

Yucca: Yep. Well, this is fun. I think this is a topic we should circle back around to in the future. And I think it'll, it, it's related to so many things we talk about, but it's important to think about, you know, what is, what do we mean when we say real and true and reality and, and what's all that stuff?

Mark: Yeah. Because it's, it's at the core of everything, right? I mean, we act based on what we believe is real. You know, what we believe is likely to be the, the truth of the outcome that we project. We, we get ourselves scrambled and confused most when we do something and we get a completely random response that we can't provide.

Doesn't fit our projection of what we thought was going to happen,

Yucca: Right,

Mark: So knowing what we believe and knowing why we came to believe it becomes very important.

Yucca: right. And if we want to change it,

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: how do we, knowing that it's there so that we can, we can choose and have that, that agency in our own lives, and not just be, you know, being blown along. The path. All

Mark: It's a, it's a choose your own adventure, either that or you can just be washed around.

Yucca: Just trademarked, by

Mark: Is it?

Yucca: the way. They yeah, the company goes after people for using that. So it has to be choose your own story, or write your own adventure. So.

Mark: Oh, man. Let's not get started

Yucca: All right. Well, Mark, this was fun.

Mark: that's a whole other topic. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Alright, well, it's great spending time with you as always, folks. It's great spending time with you, Yucca. And we'll see you next week. Yeah.