THE WONDER: Science-Based Paganism

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S4E19 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 gonna talk about wonder. So that's what we're about, right? We're about, this is the wonder. So we're gonna explore the idea of wonder, and then we're also gonna talk about a few things that inspire that in us as well.

Mark: Things that make us go Wow.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: Yeah. The. The reason that I suggested that the name of the podcast be The Wonder is that I think that that is at root, the spiritual motivation, right? That you know to, yes, there's the desire for meaning, there's the desire for a sense of place in the world and purpose in life and all those kinds of things.

But fundamentally, I think. That sense of just being awestruck by the, the fact that we exist, the fact of the universe and the world existing. I just think that's really a core spiritual sentiment and or, or experience. And so a lot of what I focus. My rituals on and, you know, efforts at creating oth, you know, materials to support other people in creating their rituals is about fostering that sense of wonder and awe.

Yucca: Yes. Yeah. And there's. There's so much of it really, it, it, whatever, wherever your interests lie, there's, there's just so much to explore and and it's one of those sensations that's very hard to describe, but it's really feeding in. Its to experience that.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, the more I learn about the world, you know, in, you know, in microcosm or in macrocosm, the more often I wanna say, wow, that's amazing.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: You know, I, I think about, I mean, there's, there's millions of examples, but talk so toxoplasmosis. Let's, let's start there. Okay. This is a virus that is communica that cats get, and it's also communicable to humans and to other mammals.

Toxoplasmosis controls your brain when it goes into rodents. They get careless, they get bolder and braver and And more fool, hearty. And that works perfectly for cats, right?

Yucca: Yes, it works out right.

Mark: so now cats have toxoplasmosis, right? And cats that have toxoplasmosis are friendlier. They are more apt to be domesticated.

So then they move in with the humans, and the humans by contact with the cat's. Feces can get toxoplasmosis, and one of the things that it makes them really want to do is to feed the cats.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: So, I mean, literally all of this stuff is scientifically demonstrated. All of this is this little tiny virus, which is, you know, just a little string of genetic information.

And all of this stuff is true and it, you look at this and just go, my God, how is this possible?

Yucca: Mm-hmm. And it's, and it's all over. Right? I know that that's something that is regularly tested for. If you're, if you're pregnant, they test, they go, oh, do you have a cat? Okay, let's test you for that.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Yucca: yeah, and I don't know if there are, what health implications there are for that other than it does have some impact on personality, right.

For people as well. That it makes them more like that they. Their relation to ship to risk is a little, just like with the mice, is a little bit different than it might be if you didn't have the infection.

Mark: Yeah, and it makes them a little bit more agreeable as well, just a little bit more amenable to going along with whatever somebody else suggests which is just a hell of a thing. You know, we, we think we have free will. We think that we are piloting our ourselves through our lives, and here comes this little bug and it actually distorts our decision making process.

Yucca: Well, it challenges the, the idea of who self is. There's a lot of things today that do that, that really have us look at what is me really,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. What, and especially when we start getting into the realm of, of the microbiome and where do we start drawing the line between my microbiome and my cells?

Which ones are me, which ones aren't? Are we saying we distinguishing between d n a? What about mitochondria? All of that stuff starts to we're starting to find that the lines between all of that are a lot more blurry than we used to think.

Mark: Right e each of us is a, a functioning interpenetrated ecosystem. One emergent property of which is this thing called consciousness. But that is that because it is an emergent property of a body, which is an interpenetrated ecosystem is heavily influenced by what's going on in that ecosystem. And some of that is human, d n a and some of it's not. In fact, more of it is not than is.

Yucca: So let's, let's, before we can, there's a whole bunch of different things we can discuss, but let's come back to the idea of wonder a little bit before going into some of the specifics of things that that feel, that evoke that sense in us. One of the things that we were talking about when we were coming up with what topics we wanted to discuss was the idea that, that some people have that wonder has to also include ignorance that you can only have wonder if you are ignorant about it.

And that's something that I wanna say that I don't agree with.

Mark: Me

Yucca: think that wonder often has a, has humility as part of it. That's certainly for me, is often a sense when I look at the night sky. There's this, I'm just overwhelmed with the awe and the wonder of all of it and the knowledge that I know very, very little about it, but I also know a lot about it.

Right. That's my, that's my field. I know a lot about that little red dot right there that we call Mars. Right. For me only makes it more awe-inspiring because there's even more, the, the knowledge of all of that is part of that awe, but also the recognition that there is a lot that I don't know.

But it doesn't have to be. Awe isn't just what I don't understand. There's awe at what I do understand as well.

Mark: Right. Yeah. When we were talking about this, I was mentioning that a, apparently there's some academic who has written that naturalistic paganism is somehow. Either faulty or not real in some sense. Because the awe that happens when you don't, the awe that comes from mystery is somehow has a cache that the awe that comes from knowledge doesn't.

And I really disagree as you do Yucca. When I'm standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I can be awestruck by what a gigantic big hole that is. But the fact that I know that it's billions of years of accumulated layers of sedimentary rock that I'm looking at, that just changes everything.

Understanding that the slow uplift of the Kibab plateau allowed the Colorado River to carve that amazing, magnificent earth temple. Is that really blows my socks off. So, so, you know, in the same way that I'm, you know, filled with wonder by a, a beautiful rainbow, even though I understand how refraction works

Yucca: And then you get to be awed by that

Mark: yes,

Yucca: and then thinking, and then it leads to, wait a second, our eyes perceive those particular colors. Why is that right? And tracing all of that back and we're back to, you know, jellyfish. We'll come back to jellyfish in a while. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So, you know, what I find is that scientists who. Truly embrace the scientific mindset. And there are many scientists who don't. There are many scientists who are, they're either ego involved with their findings or they're just very, very narrowly focused and you know, are very invested in being emotionally dispassionate.

But, but the scientists that I know that are truly filled with that, that humble curiosity. Just to, you know, I just want to find out how does this work? Einstein was one, Fineman was one. Hawking was one. Carl Sagan was one. You know, these are people that are, you know, elated at, at what they know about the universe.

Filled to the brim with joy about. About what they know and about what they can observe. Because they're looking with informed eyes, not, not just looking at something and go, wow. Going, wow, that's very cool. And it's mysterious. I don't know what it is.

Yucca: Yeah.

You know, last episode you'd mentioned the pale blue dot.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: From Sagan. Right. And that's one that often comes up for me thinking about with the awe, just seeing, you know, just that one image you can think of, that particular image. Which by the way, the new Horizons. Which is the craft that went to Pluto and is currently exploring the, the Kuiper Belt is in its second extended mission.

And one of the things that they are currently investigating whether they can do, is seeing if they can turn it around and look back because the camera that they have aboard new Horizons is first of all, far farther out. But it. Much more advanced camera being something that was launched in the two thousands rather than something launched back in the seventies.

And so fingers crossed that we might have another image looking back from even farther at the moment. It's currently studying the ice giants from the other side, which we'd never done before. So, but, but coming back to the, to the original one that. Just looking at that image that it is something big that we're looking at.

Right. But we had, we've used the examples already of thinking about awe in terms of the Grand Canyon or the night sky, but there's also awe in that tiny dot, right? It is huge because we're looking at an entire planet, but we're also just looking at a, what looks like just a moat of dust and that, and awe doesn't have a.

A limit to size. Right. A is not only in the giant, in the huge A is also in the tiny and the quiet, and it just at any angle that you're looking or listening at, there's just that, I mean, I just don't even have the words to say it because it's such an experiential thing.

Mark: Well in the, in the contemplation of scale itself. Right. Even just contemplating the nature of scale, you know, we know so much about the subatomic world now, right? We, we, we know quite a bit about, you know, the realities that are happening down at the quantum level, and here we are. I. You know where microorganisms are.

Incomprehensibly small to us. Our own cells are incomprehensibly small to us. You know, we have dust mites living in our furniture and we have eyelash mites living in our eyelashes,

Yucca: Those delight me. I love those so much.

Mark: me too. I think they're so cool. So, you know, the tiny goes all the way down and the big goes all the way up.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And that in and of itself is awe inspiring, that the universe is so intricate, so, so amazingly finely, finely defined that it has all those different layers of scale and that it has since the Big Bang. You know, from the very beginning, from the Big Bang, we started out with little, tiny, tiny, tiny proto particles and. Things have been snapping together into increasingly complex emergent phenomena ever since. If we didn't know anything about physics, if we didn't know anything about evolution, if we didn't know anything about cosmology, we couldn't appreciate any of that, and it is awesome.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It's just awesome.

Yucca: One of my favorite things that I do with my students is I have a four minute video that is of the scale of the universe, and we start at a plunk length and we go all the way up to this, the observable universe. And it's just you're zooming out, right? And you're just going out, you know, each time it's 10 times larger.

And yeah, I start by asking them, okay, everybody, I wanna get a vote. Do you think humans. Are, do you think humans are big or humans are small, right? Are we big? Are we huge or are we tiny? And I get a vote from everybody, right? And mark that down. And then we, we watch this video and it takes about two minutes to get to humans where you can see humans from going from the smallest theoretical size, and it still takes a while to get to the smallest confirmed size, but just watching their faces.

As we're going out and them going, wait, what? What? And then we start getting up into the bigger scales and the bigger scales, and we're getting all the way up to galaxies and super clusters, and then we're up to the observable universe, which probably there's way more universe, but there's a limit to how much we can see.

Right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: And then asking them next. Okay. Does anyone wanna change their vote? And the quality of their voice is different after watching this video. Right? And you're just seeing them for the first time go, wow, wow. There's nothing like that. And of course, almost all of them change their vote at the end to both, right?

Is yes, we are unbelievably huge. And then, but we are tiny.

Mark: But we're minuscule. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's, that's a super great lesson for, for science students. 

Yucca: I think for any, I mean, these are specifically for my science students, but I, you know, in any, I think that's a great one. In, in any field, right? Whether somebody's going into science or not. Just a perspective on the world.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And So, you know, one of the things that I've said about atheopagan is that it's the spirituality of the verifiably real.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: You know, there's, there's, it's possible, theoretically not consistent with any scientific theory, but con contextually it's possible that there are gods, right.

We don't have any evidence that would lead one to conclude that, but you know, we can imagine that that might be true, right?

Yucca: Sure.

Mark: Irrelevant to me

Yucca: Maybe me too. That's the thing I was gonna say, I don't really care if

Mark: if there's so little evidence for it. There is so much here that I am just knocked out by, and it gives me so much of a sense of meaning and joy and, and appreciation that I don't need to extend to stuff that requires me to suspend my disbelief in order to, in order to embrace it.

I just, I don't need to go there.

Yucca: Right. Well, why don't we talk about a few of the things that that recently have given us. That sense of, of wow. And also I wanna put in a, an overlapping feeling as well as that delight, right? I think that delight and wonder aren't necessarily the same, but for me, they often come together,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: right? So a couple of the ones I wanna talk about are just ones that I just find delightful as well as awe-inspiring. But do you wanna start?

Or,

Mark: why don't you start while I'm figuring out what I'm gonna do

Yucca: sure. Well, we, we've been on the space one for a while. So there's, I have some non-space stuff as well, but there's, I. A, a paper that I read recently, and actually it was by the PI of the mission. We just talked about New horizons. So Alan Stern and he's talking about I wows.

So I Wows are internal water, ocean worlds. So these are planets like, Europa, like Pluto and Celis, it turns out that oceans are really, really common in our solar system and presumably beyond our solar system, right? And so what we are seeing is that we've probably got these worlds that have water, liquid water inside with thick crusts of rock or ice on top. And we've never been able to go down into any of these oceans. There's not yet. I mean, maybe one day. But. There's a lot of conditions in these places that we think would really be good for life. For instance, with Europa, we think that there's probably hydrothermal vents at the bottom of those oceans that there's, you know, that's probably saltwater organic compounds, all the things that we would need for Earthlike life.

And so in this particular paper, which I think is gonna end up being one of those papers that people look back on like Dyson's paper about trying to find extra solar civilizations and things like that. But what he pointed out in this is that these eye wows are much better places for civilizations to evolve.

Than worlds like our own, which are ews, external Water, ocean Worlds, because worlds like Earth we're subject to how cranky our star is being. Right? It depends on how close or how far away from we are from our star. Asteroid impacts, right? That's how to pretty big impact, so to say on the ecology over the years.

So, Civilizations now and again, we don't know if anybody else is out there. We suspect there's, you know, trillions upon trillions of planets. That's a lot of opportunity for there to be civilizations, but that these worlds would be more likely than Ewos to develop civilizations. Now, if that was the case, this is the part that makes me just delighted to think about if there are civilizations, they would be very unlikely to know that stars existed.

Because their world would be under 60 kilometers or hundreds of kilometers of ice. And eventually maybe, maybe they might drill through that and go up to the surface and find out that something's there. But they wouldn't necessarily have the same drive that we've had to go explore the stars because we see them, right?

We see the stars right there. Now. It's harder to get off of our planet than we'd be to get off of one of those planets. Assuming that we're talking about eye wows that are. Smaller planets, right? Like, like Europa is the gravity's much, much lower there.

Mark: but you have to get through those kilometers of ice or rock

Yucca: oh yes. And bring all your water with you. I mean, we gotta bring our air with us too. But if you're from that, you're gonna have to bring your water. You're unlikely to be using the same sort of light. They probably wouldn't see what the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we do. Also, if they're there and they are using radio, which would be very odd for them to have figured out radio if they didn't have.

Other type of using visible light, but that probably wouldn't leak through the ice, so we might not even know they're there. So it just delights me to think that the universe might be, we might be the weird, weird aliens that live on the surface of planets in the harsh light of a star where everybody else out there is, you know, swimming around and, you know, they're the occupy people, right. So that delights me.

Mark: Very cool. We've talked about this before, but if you haven't, go see the movie Europa Report.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: was, it was made on like a shoestring budget. It was made for like $8,000 or something. Some insanely low amount, and it is a fantastic science

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: really worth seeing. 

Yucca: Also before we do, I just wanna make a comment real quick. Some of you might have noticed my usage of the term planet that is consistent in planetary science. We do not use the IAU definition that is never been used, actually used in any science. So referring to. Bodies like Europa, Pluto, ENCE, all of that as planets is consistent with the scientific usage of the term.

So just if anyone caught that, that is that's how we use it in the field. So, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. That it is, that's all inspiring. You know, the idea that these self-contained worlds could be, and of course what that, what that does is it begs the question well, okay, is our universe a bubble of something that's in a matrix of something larger?

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: It's seen seems that that's the way that reality works.

Could the Big Bang have been an extrusion of force space into, you know, further dimensions that have other stuff in them that, that's going on?

Yucca: One of my. Personal favorites is Black Hole Cosmology, which of course is still outside of the actual realm of science because it's not something that's falsifiable at this point. But it's a very popular idea among cosmologists is that inside each black hole is a new universe. So the Big Bang is basically a white hole from the black hole of another universe.

And inside of each of our black holes is another universe that just keeps. You know, creating more and more and more universes. That one makes me really happy.

Mark: Yeah. And there, once again, you see the, the magic of fractals, right? That same repeating pattern happening over and over again with every iteration, slightly different. None of them, none of them identical, but repeating in patterns over and over and over again. 

Yucca: Slight difference between each universe, that actually allows for natural selection.

Mark: yes.

Yucca: Because if you have universes which are more likely to make black holes, then they're more likely to pass on their slight differences. But again, we don't know. This is, we're just playing with ideas at this point.

Right. This is, we don't have any evidence to support this, but it's, but they're fun ideas.

Mark: and they're fun ideas that can inspire awe and wonder just through being somewhat scientifically informed. Right. That's all I wonder that you can't access if you're not somewhat scientifically informed because you don't, you don't understand the concepts. So once again, this idea that things need to be capital M mystery in order to be awe-inspiring is just, it's just not right.

I don't understand where that person's coming from at all. 

Yucca: Well they do them. We'll be over here talking about Wonder and new research and all that.

Mark: and having joyous and happy lives and building community and making the world a better place.

Yucca: Sounds pretty good. Count me in.

Mark: sounds, sounds okay to me. I'm, you know, that, that's, that's worthy use of my time. So what was I had a couple of examples, but you know, I'm looking out the window right now and I'm just watching tree branches blowing in wind.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And understanding that there is a mathematical language that can describe that,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: one of those leaves has a friction coefficient. And it has a particular springiness of its stem and of the branch that it grows from, and the wind is turbulent and it shears through all those different surfaces and it causes very specific kinds of motions, none of which are ever exactly the same.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Time, but all of which can be somewhat predicted. You can, you can predict that it's gonna go back and forth in some kind of way. And I mean, in the, in the einsteinian sense. What that means is that chaos mathematics is the language of God, It's not in a, not in a literal deic being kind of sense, but that the, the, the universe has a mathematical language that will describe it,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and that I just find stunning. Just stunning

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and, and, and particularly the constants. Which are just weird. They're all irrational numbers, right? They're, they're strange, but they're there. They're,

Yucca: those numbers. Yeah,

Mark: yeah, they're demonstrably real, you know? So e and pi all, you know, all of those I, which of course is impossible. You know, and all of these can be used to describe actual stuff happening in the universe, and it's just glorious.

Yucca: it is. And we come back to that tree. is gonna come in a slightly different direction,

Mark: Oh, right,

Yucca: that tree is doing some pretty amazing things that until recently we didn't really give credit to plants to be doing. So that tree has roots that goes down into the ground and what it's doing up above. Cuz it's photosynthesizing, right?

It's taking air. And from the air it's taking co2, so carbon dioxide, and it's taking water up from its roots and then it's taking photons, it's taking light coming from our star, and it's making sugars out of that. And oxygen. Now it's not making the atom of oxygen, it's making the molecule, right? Stars make the atom right, but it's sticking them together and make that oxygen that we're breathing and it's gonna use the sugars in its cells.

But one of the things that it does with those sugars that it makes is it makes what we call exudates, basically these sticky liquids that it sends down to its roots and it releases into the soil. And it can make different kinds of exudates depending on what its, let's call them nutritional needs are.

So the, the plant is made outta the same stuff we are. So it's a carbon-based life forms. Of course, it's mostly carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, but it also needs things like calcium and it needs boron and it needs all of these other things. And they're in the ground. These, they're just pieces of the earth.

So the rock, but the plant can't get it from the rock, but who can get it from the rock is microbes. So there are microbes that are really good at getting that, let's say calcium, getting that calcium out of the rock, and then through the food web, getting it into a form that the plant can then take up with its roots.

So if the tree needs calcium, it will release the right exudates to actually breed. And grow the bacteria who can get the nutrients that it needs. So plants figured out farming hundreds of millions of years before we ever existed.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: And one of the really cool things that just in the last few years we've been finding out about is something called Rizo.

So, The roots of plants. And we're not just talking about some special plants, we're talking about the whole kingdom here. Not only will they grow the particular populations of bacteria that they want, but they will literally take them into their roots and eat them. They abs, they take them in and literally eat bacteria.

They feed on the bacteria, and some of them they will actually. Like partially eat and then spit back out so that they grow again and they actually move them right because that, that root will continue to grow. And so they'll move them several centimeters or even farther before spitting them, half digested back out, they grow again.

And so they're cultivating, they're ranching and farming bacteria. And so it's a just. That would look out your window at that tree. That's what your tree is doing right now. Not just your tree, but the grass, the flowers, the ivy growing up, your wall. They're all doing that and they're interacting on these on levels that we had no idea, and we are just barely beginning to learn about the incredible interactions with them.

Mark: It's pretty awesome.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: Pretty, pretty awe inspiring. It really is. And yeah, I mean, The kinds of things that we have discovered. Like when I first learned about complexity science, I read this book, I read, there's a book called Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop, and it's a popular science book. It's, it's really, it's about creation of the Santa Fe Institute,

Yucca: Yeah, I actually read that book as a, so I'm from Santa Fe and in high school well the equivalent was high school. Yeah, I did a, I did a program at the institute and we, we literally read that book,

Mark: Uhhuh.

Yucca: so, yeah.

Mark: Well, that was my introduction to complexity science,

Yucca: Oh,

Mark: and I literally would, you know, read four pages and then skip around the room

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: you know this question about, you know, about emergence and about, you know, scale

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: is so central to the entire story of the universe. It's everywhere. It's in everything. And asking those fundamental questions about, well, why, you know, why, why, when you put these disparate elements together, why when you combine two gases, does it create a liquid? What's up with that? The, the, the property of emergence itself is one of those things that just makes me awe-inspired. You know, why?

Why stars?

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: You know, why, why are there these accumulations that, that cause transformation where suddenly you've got this gathering that gravity has been pulling together of dust and gas, and then all of a sudden at this one transformational moment, Kapow, you've got a star.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: It's asking those kinds of cosmological questions that I just find just thrilling.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And again, in whatever direction Right. It, you know, we've been talking about our particular interests, but I mean, there's just, it's just any, anywhere you look, any direction,

Mark: sure. Zombie ants that are colonized by particular molds. Right.

Yucca: Yeah. The cor decept.

Mark: yeah. 

Yucca: And ants, speaking of emergence, that's where a lot of the research has been done is with ants and how the ant colonies work and how they end up with their behavior as super organisms where they're, it's made of lots of little individuals and yet they have personalities. A whole colony has its own personality that grows and changes over time, which studying helps us better understand.

Humans on that way too, because we're each individuals. But if you look at communities and communities on different scales, but also communities on the scale of like countries where the, the countries will have their personalities that they're this made up from just these smaller parts and we're just following these, you know, simple rules that then translates into this emergent behavior and it's.

I mean, it's fascinating and something, again, we're just barely, barely starting to even grasp that that's there,

Mark: Right, right.

Yucca: so,

Mark: Yeah. So look around. You know, there's so much to be just wowed by and, and the, the next step in that process in my experience is gratitude. I am, so, I. Thrilled to be able to be taking this ride and appreciating all this incredible stuff that's happening, to be a part of this universe that's just amazing.

Just amazing. At every level, at every scale, it's doing stuff that's just like, oh my God, how, how, how, how is that happening?

Yucca: Right, and just for the briefest tiniest moment, we get to be a piece of the universe that gets to think about itself. That gets to see itself and experience itself as a conscious being, but it's just a moment. It's a blink of an eye,

Mark: Yeah. What good fortune a

Yucca: right?

Mark: what? Incredible luck. You know, when you consider the odds. The, the astronomical odds against any one of us, you know, particularly having arisen through collision of genetics and, you know, the, the experiences that happen to us through our lives. There, there will, there will never be another one of you.

There has never been one of you, and it's miraculous.

Yucca: Yeah, and every single thing that happened before in every one of your ancestors, it had to happen exactly the way it did for you to even exist. And just, there isn't a word to describe how unlikely our existences.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. Astronomical is not a big enough word.

Mark: no, it's not.

Yucca: It's just, you know, in my house we've been talking a lot about grandma, grandmother Luca recently.

Right. And how so Luca is the last universal common ancestor and about how life has never stopped between each of us and her.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Or it, or whoever they were, right? That we're going back at least 4 billion years of choices. Now there's been, it's split off, right? There's lots of things, places where it stops, right?

But in order for you to exist, it hasn't stopped that whole time,

Mark: Right. Your ancestors all the way back to microbes never died before they could reproduce.

Yucca: Before. Yeah.

Mark: They never did. All the way back. Billions of years,

Yucca: life didn't stop between you and because you didn't, you didn't, you weren't magically just suddenly alive when you weren't before you rewind to the times all the cells that made you, you rewind to that back. They were a single cell inside of your mother. And rewind her cells back and you keep going.

That cell, that life has just been there the whole time. Now it started at some point and think, trying to think about that. Wow.

Mark: trying to figure out exactly how that is. Although there's behavior that we can see in long chain molecules and modeling that we can see through things like the Game of Life, which give us some tantalizing hints about how that all could have worked,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: but we haven't been able to replicate it, and maybe we never will.

It's entirely possible.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Or maybe we will, and that will raise a whole bunch of new ethical questions for sure.

Yucca: My goodness. Yes.

I am hoping and also not hoping that we get to, speaking of Europa earlier. And just saying you're Oprah. Cause it's the closest of them. There's a whole bunch of other ones that we could go to too, but it's a lot easier to get to Jupiter than it is to get to Saturn or Neptune. Right.

But, you know, I'm hoping, and also not hoping that we get to, in the next couple decades, go down and take a look and see somebody else down there.

Mark: Boy,

Yucca: we do,

Mark: pretty amazing.

Yucca: that's a, that's, that's Pandora's box right there. But, you know, eh, it'd be a incredible,

Mark: Yeah. Well, we have kind of bombarded you with our enthusiastic WOWness about, about the universe. 

Yucca: Which any of these topics could be their own podcast and themselves.

Mark: Sure. They, they could be their own podcast series in and of themselves, you know, any of these topics because they're gigantic topics and we're only skipping over the, the, the top high points of them. But, you know, one of the, one of the worst things I think that. Our mainstream culture does is discount the value of appreciating these sorts of things. Oh, well that's just a sunset happens every day. 

Yucca: There's a limited number of sunsets that will ever happen.

Mark: that's right. And there's certainly a limited number of sunsets for us.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: We're only gonna get a certain number of them, so it might make more sense for us to go out and go, oh, how beautiful.

Yucca: And you also don't know how many you get.

Mark: Yeah. You don't.

Yucca: Hopefully you get a lot more, hopefully you have thousands and thousands to come, but you might just have the one. Right. And that's another one of those just amazing things about, about being alive, about be about being

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: just existing at all. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. we could go on forever,

Yucca: Well, we couldn't,

Mark: I think but I, well, we could go on until we died,

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: but I think we should probably stop and maybe save some of that time and energy for other things.

Yucca: Sounds good. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.

Mark: It was, it

Yucca: you everyone for being here with us. So.

Mark: We'll see you next week.

Talismans video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML-sED3fAzY

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

S4E18 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, mark,

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we are talking about talismans and touchstones and things that we do during the course of our day to remind ourselves that we are on a naturalistic, pagan, pagan path and to remind ourselves of our practice.

Yucca: Right. And these could be things, we could have objects that help. Remind us but also moments in the day or activities that we're doing that we can use as, as metaphorical touchstones, right?

Mark: Right, right. I mean, we've talked about a daily practice before. Those tend to be. In the beginning and the ending of the day, not in the sort of rush of the middle of the day. So what we're really focusing on, on with this podcast is more about what do we do just to bring back to mind that we're on this path and that these are our values and that kind of stuff, while we're in the midst of all the various business that we have to take care of during the day.

Yucca: Right. So why, actually, why don't we start with one? You were just telling me about that. This was one of Michael's suggestions who we've had on the podcast before he was on the council. And you were saying it was 13 o'clock.

Mark: 13 o'clock.

Yucca: o'clock, yeah. So what's this 13 o'clock thing?

Mark: Which is one o'clock in the afternoon of course. Michael is Irish and apparently there is something that happens at noon every day in Ireland on the public television stations which is called the Angelus, and it used to be a. Catholic thing with, you know, images of the Virgin Mary and all that kind of stuff.

And the idea was that you were supposed to stop and pray or contemplate or just kind of remember, you know, that this is your religious path. Well, it's, it's become much more secularized now. They have images of the Irish countryside and. That kind of stuff instead. But it's still kind of a lovely idea.

And so Michael suggested that because we have 13 principles and there are 13 moon cycles, and we just like that

Yucca: 13. It's just fun. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, it's, it's a cool prime number. That we celebrate something like that at 13 o'clock every day. And just take a minute. That's all, you know, 60 seconds, that's all that it takes.

What I do, I've put it in my phone as an alarm to remind me when it's

Yucca: buzzes at you at one o'clock,

Mark: Well, I actually get a 10 minute warning so that I can finish up whatever I'm doing right there and have a minute, but at, at, at the stroke of one. What I do is I just grasp my suntry pendant that I always wear, that I got at the Suntry retreat last year, and just imagine that I am floating in space, looking down at the earth.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Watching it slowly turn underneath me and just recognize, you know, as Carl Sagan said, this is everyone you've ever known. Everything that's ever happened in human history, all that you'll ever

Yucca: king, every baker, every, yeah, every conflict we've ever had. Right. Every.

Mark: event, every birth, every celebration, every cataclysm, all those things are embodied in this little planet floating in space.

And so I just sort of meditate on that for about a minute, and then I let go of my pendant and go about my day. But I find it's a really wonderful addition to my practice and it's nice to have a little intercession in the middle of the day. That's about my spirituality.

Yucca: Hmm. That's great. I love that idea. That's, that's where noom comes from the term originally, isn't it? Weren't there

Mark: I think it, yeah, because it was originally Noce

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Noce, which is one of the. Catholic masses that celebrated through the course of the day.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I don't know what I, I know the first one is Matins and the last one is Vespers. Leys in the middle.

Yucca: Yeah. So I think that's where the term is coming from, but I don't know enough about it. I just remember hearing that at one point that that's the origin. So it's a but I, I very much like those. I. And Islam has a, a similar structure of throughout the day having the different, the, just a small ritual throughout the day just to remind us.

Right. And I think that there's a lot of, of power in that. Just stop for a moment and kind of have that reset. Right.

Mark: Right. Yeah. Because I mean, it's so easy to get caught up in all the busyness of everything we have to do in order to keep the functions of our lives going. But one minute of time just to. Refocus on the big picture I think is really, for me, it's been very meaningful and has kind of contributed to my happiness.

So, it's something I'm doing and I really appreciate Michael for suggesting it.

Yucca: Yeah, that's fun.

Mark: So what are some other things that we either practices or. You know, carrying of objects or keeping them in a, in a, a bag or a purse or putting them in our car. What, you know, other things that we might do to remind us during the day of our path.

Yucca: Well, there's one that in my family on my adopted side, my stepmother is having a by the door.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Which is like a the other versions what might be like a Honda Fatima or it's like a protection against the the evil eye, but it's this beautiful, stylized hand. And the traditional belief behind it was, you know, it's protection from the evil eye.

But that's something that, you know, growing up we would always have by the door and it would be something that We would just touch on the way out of the door,

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: Not as a belief literally that that's somehow going to protect us. But just as a reminder of, hey, I'm stepping out of the home. I'm going out into the world and just to be more aware.

Right. And just to kind of, you know, shields up, right? So it's almost like the button of like shields up right? Going out, leaving the, the sanctuary of the home. And so having something like that and I actually have the one that, that I grew up with in, in my home now, and it's just by the door and it's.

It's just a nice reminder every time of coming in and out of the home space.

Mark: And does everyone in your household do that?

Yucca: The grownups do, it is too high at the moment for these smaller hands, but as they get older, I think they, they will. 

Mark: Ah-huh.

Yucca: the one that we have is, If enthusiastically touched, could come down and break, so

Mark: Oh, okay.

Yucca: get a little bit older. Yeah. It's one that's made from broken pottery.

Mark: Oh

like

Yucca: made from broken.

Yeah. It's a mosaic made from broken pottery from Jerusalem. So it's, it's really beautiful and I would rather it not get crushed, but when they're when they're a little bit calmer, Then maybe they'll get, they'll get to do that particular one.

Mark: Okay.

Yucca: So in the meantime, they're, they've got plenty of other stuff to do.

But that's, that's a type of object that's really nice. And I, although I don't drive a lot anymore in my hanging on my rear view mirror, I have a little bead that when I get into the car, it's just a, I just kind of give it a little boop. And just as a reminder of, Hey, I'm getting into the car, I'm taking on a big responsibility with the life of the passengers, my life, the life of anyone else on the c the road.

And just take a moment to center and ground and then, then be on the way before just rush. You know? Cause a lot of times we're so tempted to get in the car. You've got the keys, you know, you've turned the car on before your seatbelt's even on and just, no, hang on. Slow down. About to drive this, you know, very, very heavy piece of equipment, very, very fast.

So let's take a moment. So those are two that I have on a kind of a very practical level, but they, they really have that special meaning, so,

Mark: I, I like that. I mean this, this sort of illustrates that you can imbue anything really with a particular meaning if you associate a practice with it. So, you know, just a little bead. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. It can just be a little something so that you you know, it, it becomes a part of your pattern as you, you know, you put the keys in, you put the seatbelt on, you, you touch the bead, you start the car, and it's just a part of the routine.

Yucca: Yeah. So what about you? Do you have any other ones that you do?

Mark: You know, what I do is I carry I carry some talismans and I've, there's a, there's a blog post, or it may be a YouTube video actually, because I think I did it while my arm was broken and I couldn't type. 

Yucca: Think it is a YouTube video. I think I've a long time. It's been several years, but yeah.

Mark: Yes. That would've been 2017 when my, when

Yucca: I'll see if I can find the link to that and put that in the show notes.

Mark: Great. Yeah, so that's about talismans and the ones that I carry and what they mean to me. And what a talisman is really is just a little. Something a little token of some kind that reminds you of something specific. So, for example, I have an Arrowhead, which was one of the giveaways from.

A, an earth honoring ritual that we did at Pantheon a few years ago. And it reminds me of the broader Pagan community and also of deep time being a, a, you know, a found arrowhead. So that's one. There's another, that's a smooth stone. That I got at a fired circle gathering, and it reminds me of that community and the, the people that I have in my life that really love me.

So I have fi and there's a little mala bead that looks like a skull that is a memento mori. It reminds me that I'm gonna die and that I need to seize the day. So there are five or six of these little things. And as well as the suntry pendant that I wear around my neck. All of those serve to, kind of, to bring deeper meaning to my daily operation.

You know, if I reach in my pocket for my comb while there are those talismans reminding me again that I'm on this path and I'm, I'm doing this, and it's more meaningful than just kind of wandering through life without. A sense of purpose or meaning?

Yucca: So do you have a, is it. Is that part of a ritual in the morning, just to stick those into your pocket or are they already in your jeans and when you put your jeans on in the morning? There they are.

Mark: They're already in my jeans and when I put my jeans on in the morning, there they are. The only time they come out is when I wash my jeans and then they go in another pair of jeans.

Yucca: they're, they're switching pants. Okay.

Mark: Yeah. But like for example, I bring them, you know, when I'm wearing dresses, Slacks to like a job interview. I bring those with me because they, you know, they're the, the emotional underpinning for me, right?

They, they serve to represent all that community support and enthusiasm and history that I have as a basis on which to be confident and put myself forward. So, Yeah. So, and I've been doing this for a very long time, and of course, once in a while you'll lose one. And that's okay. These things happen.

And, you know, I, I do a little ritual to charge each one when I first start carrying it,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: To give it its meaning. To associate it with that particular meaning. And I find, you know, this is a very old tradition. I mean, Roman soldiers used to carry little, you know, rolled up lead tablets with inscriptions on them of things that they, you know, wanted to happen for them, or ways they wanted to be protected. And we as atheopagan and, and naturalistic pagans, we can do the same thing.

Yucca: Yeah,

some of the ones that you mentioned reminded me of a few things that I have. But they're not objects. They're actually tattoos.

Mark: Ah,

Yucca: So a few years back at this point, we did an episode on CILs and I hadn't, sigils weren't really a big thing for me at that point but I played with it. Afterwards. Well, we, we did it a little bit before and I had kind of experimented with it so that we could prepare for the episode.

And then I ended up deciding one of them after a few months, I went, you know what? This is really working for me, and I decided that I actually was gonna tattoo that on myself. So I did. Now I have on my left hand because I'm right-handed. Well and multiple other reasons as well. Cuz I wear my watch on my right hand.

I wanted to access it on my wrist, but I did some white tattoos, which barely show up because I'm, I'm very very pale skinned. So the white just looks kind of like a scar almost. And so I put some marks on. And so I have one on my wrist. Which is for, for fo remembering where my focus is throughout the day, right.

And to be paying attention to the things that I actually have influence over and I can control and not stressing constantly about the things that I. I do not have control over. Right. I have no control over what this weather is going to do, but I do have control over how I'm going to respond to that.

Right. And another one I have on the back of my hand is a Memento Mori reminder. And throughout the day, I actually touch these on a regular basis. Just to remind, remind myself. It almost feels like pushing a button, like a Oh, right. Okay. Remember, Where's your focus, right? Or hey, this is, this is what you've got, right?

Today is what you've got. You don't have tomorrow promised. And you know, that's okay. Right? What are you doing today to, to really live? Because nothing is guaranteed every day, every new day is a bonus. It's a gift, right? So those are. Those are, those are things that I felt strongly enough that I wasn't going to change my mind about whether or not I had that in 20 years.

If I'm lucky enough to be here in 20 years, I'm still gonna be thinking about being lucky to be here in 20 years and where I'm focusing my energy on. But if there's certain other things that I'm working on in particular, I actually really like to use Henna.

So Hannah's really nice because it, depending on where you put it on your body, right, there's certain areas where it's gonna fade right away.

If you put Hannah on your palm, for instance, it's not gonna last, last for very long. But other parts of your body, it might last, you know, or you're not touching things as much or you don't produce as much oils. But you'll get several days to maybe a week out of time of having that symbol literally on your body or that reminder literally on your body.

So.

Mark: That's a great idea. I, I love that. I don't have any tattoos. I have design for two tattoos that I want to do, one of which is the Sumtry symbol. But I've just never had the free money to invest in having somebody do it. But one day I, I love that idea and I love the idea of You know, of, of recognizing that some of these things are permanent modes that you're, that you want to pursue in, in life.

You always want to be aware of your mortality and its implications that you always want to be able to, you know, focus on what you're able to influence and not stress about the rest. Yeah, so tho those are very tallman. And I think. As, when we look at like tsi, the ice, the so-called iceman, the the,

Yucca: Yeah, they had lots of tattoos in various places.

Mark: right?

And they were very obviously magical symbols of some kind. They, they were not, they were not particularly decorative. But you know, that that man had tattoos, which were clearly meant something.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: We will never know exactly what they meant, but we can conjecture that they were protective or for luck and fortune in hunting or, you know, any of those kinds of things.

And so I, I think the history of tattoos, you know, really kind of feeds into what you described for yours, Yucca. That's really, really great.

Yucca: and I think there's, so I have, I have other ones too that were done by artists. I've got quite a bit on my back and And those were very meaningful and special too. But there's also something about, for the really simple ones, the doing it yourself. There's something very,

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: there was, it was very nice to do that.

So just the poking stick, the old style, you know, you just have your, you can buy the kits right, and get the right ink. You don't wanna just do any ink. You have to get the right ink to put in your body and you don't wanna be putting in your lead ink or things like that, right? But that in itself can be a ritual.

And actually having an artist do it as well,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: you can really make that a really special thing.

Mark: Sure. Well, and you've got all the endorphins that are provoked by the pain of the, of the tattooing. That puts you in kind of an altered state. I mean, people talk about how tattoos can be addictive

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: and I, you know, I understand that. But that, that trans state, that state of being altered by the tattooing process is.

Very much a ritual opportunity. It's you know, it's a, a state where you can, being in that trend state, you can apply a layer of meaning beyond simple decoration.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: To the, to the, the symbol that you're putting on yourself. And, and most of the people that I know who have tattoos, they associate meetings with them.

They, they, they're not just decorative, they, they, they're there for a reason.

Yucca: Yeah. That seems to be pretty, I mean, I can't think of anyone who I've asked about their tattoo and they haven't had some elaborate explanation about, you know, oh, this is, you know, the pair of sewing scissors because my mother and grandmother and I used to this and that, and you know, there's often, often stories that go along with it or, You know, things like, you know, this is my this is my five years sober tattoo, or my, you know, that kind of stuff,

Mark: Or the semicolon for people who have survived suicide attempts, for example. Right. Not the end of the story. There's more to the sentence.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: All, you know, there are, there are a lot of different kinds of symbols like that that are very meaningful to people and that I think are some of which are intended to be communicative. You know, they're supposed to tell a story to someone else, and for others it's just you telling the story to yourself when you see them on your body.

Yucca: and that's why for me, I chose white. I wanted them somewhere that I could see all the time, but I didn't want something that was gonna be flashy to someone else. Right. So that's why, I mean, I don't think most people even notice it. Right. But it's about,

Mark: I certainly never did when we met at the Century Retreat last year, I. Yeah, I, I never noticed them.

Yucca: Well I had, when we, then I had the one on my wrist, I didn't have the one on my hand. But again, I don't think it's showing up on the

Mark: I can't see it on the screen through Zoom. No, I can't see it.

Yucca: I think maybe it shows like you can barely see it, but I see it and that's what matters for me.

Mark: course, of course.

Yucca: my more visible, my more like elaborate ones.

I do still have them so that I can cover them if I want, but the, the stigma around them is really faded, right? People don't get worried about that anymore. It used to be a big deal, but now it's a I don't know if the statistic is real, but it's supposed to be like a third of American millennials have a tattoo,

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: like that.

Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Mark: Me neither. I mean, you see them everywhere and you know, I, in professional office circumstances, I've, you know, worked with a lot of people who, you know, they have sleeves and and all that. So yeah, it's, it's very common to me. I've just never really felt the opportunity. It's, it's not that I'm in any way morally opposed So, yeah, what we're talking about here really is about how do you create symbolic meaning that reverberates through you in the course of your daily operations as opposed to your daily practice, which might be, okay, I do this formal thing in the morning, I do a formal thing in the evening.

That's great. But you know, I, I wanna be reminded of my values on a regular basis, and I want to be reminded of the things that I've learned that help me to be wiser and kinder.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So, you know, having those kinds of practices I think is a good way to have a touchstone to go back. those principles because, you know, the world can frazzle you,

Yucca: He can't. Yeah.

Mark: you know, really pull you out of any sense of centeredness in yourself.

Yucca: As you were saying that it occurred to me. There's other points throughout the day that aren't things that I use, but that would be opportunities for other people if it's something that they do. If you wear makeup every morning,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: a great time. Right to c incorporate some something in there. And just the act of getting dressed too, like you talk about having the items that you keep in your jeans, but you know, is there, is there something when you are dotting your clothing that you are reminding yourself about the, the values that you have or so things like that.

Mark: Not ordinarily, but certainly when I'm dressing professionally, like if I'm putting on a suit, I'm putting on a suit of armor. And, you know, I put on a suit to go to war because the kinds of contexts where I need to be dressed that way tend to be ones where I am advocating. Yeah, I'm advocating for something.

I'm, you know, I'm, I'm trying to make a change.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And either that or I'm defending myself which is, you know, another, another possibility. So. You know, clothing and costume is another whole conversation we could have. And, you know, maybe we will at some point

Yucca: think we should, yes.

Mark: I think we should too. Because decorating ourselves in various ways is highly communicative to the people around us.

And We make choices about what we wanna say. You know, we, it talks about what class we are, it talks about what gender we are. It talks about what what kind of work we do. It, it, it says a lot of stuff. Our education level.

Yucca: views, our, you know, yes. All kinds of things.

Mark: Yeah. So let's, let's put a pin in that and,

Yucca: Yeah, we'll come back to that.

Mark: Yeah, we'll definitely come back to that.

But you know, the whole self adornment thing, you know, beyond the practicalities of being warm enough or cool enough I, I think are, are an interesting vein to explore for people that are working to fold meaning into the operation of their lives.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So this is, you know, sort of a. Whirlwind examination of all this stuff, but I, I, I think the, the fundamental point that I want to communicate is that you know, if there's a special rock that you like and it reminds you of something like a beautiful day at the beach or something, don't feel weird about carrying that around.

That's, that absolutely makes sense to carry that around.

Yucca: That's very human. We've been doing that a long time.

Mark: Yes. Yes. And we can do it intentionally and it can become a part of our, of our practice.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, this was a fun one. Thank you. A.

Mark: Yeah. Thank you, Yucca, and we'll see you next week.

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

S4E17 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca,

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

Yucca: and today we are going to be talking about the power of imagination and how we as Pagans can use that in a very conscious way.

Mark: Right. Yeah. Because our brains are so powerful and we are so built for the creation of narratives, of stories that we can harness. That propensity and that talent to be able to take ourselves places and have experiences?

Yucca: Right. We're the storytelling apes. That's who we are, right? Yeah. And that's what we do, right? Wh wherever you're from in the world, that's what humans do. That's something that all cultures have in common, is the storytelling that we do, and, and sometimes it's. Very subtle that we might not even notice it, you know, telling you about my morning.

And other stories might be these long epics to, you know, the Lord of the Rings and this and that, you know, but, but we do it all the time throughout the day,

Mark: Right, the, the connection of events into an arc that starts one place and ends in another place. Science is a storytelling process

Yucca: right.

Mark: in science. Just because it's a story doesn't mean it's not true. I. There are many stories that are factual stories. I mean, we, our hopes of history are that history will be as factual as possible.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Science is all about developing narratives that explain stuff first. This happens, and then that process happens, and as a result you end up with this.

Yucca: A and with science there's just very specific narrative rules you have to follow. Right. And in other types of stories, there's different kinds of rules that are being followed in, in the creation and the telling of those stories. And we do it, it, it's just the way that we're even understanding the world.

And so, Sometimes our, our imagination can not be in line with someone else's understanding of events or of a more objective perspective on what happened. And that can, either way, whether it's reflects other people's understanding or you're not, we still have an emotional response. To the stories that we're telling.

And that's where I think a lot of the power is in, is what is the response that we have to that story. Because stories they, they invoke a response.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And a part of what's very interesting and powerful about our brains is that the same systems that are used to assess real world events and then draw, connect the dots between them to create a narrative, are also used in the imagination. And our brain is actually not very good at differentiating between what is imagined and what is actually experienced.

It's the, those kinds of narratives, they just run right parallel in our minds. And as a result, you can have a memory of how an event went that conflicts sharply with someone else's memory of how that exact same event went. And neither of you are necessarily right or wrong. Because we edit our memories.

We remember different things from different points of view, and our memories are constantly evolving. So if there's a car accident, for example, the two drivers might have very differing stories about who was responsible for what and so forth, and they believed them. Absolutely. And this is why eyewitness testimony is taken with a grain of salt in a court of law because just because you believe something absolutely doesn't make it true.

Yucca: Right. We were saying, Lord, the Rings earlier, it's, it's Gollum with, it was his birthday present. Right. He firmly, he told himself that enough times that he's rewritten his memory to believe that. But yeah, we do that with, you know, Whether you actually had your turn signal on or not. And what was it that, the, what, what was your tone?

What was your intention with that argument that you had with your spouse last night? And sometimes we're rewriting things in a way that is beneficial to us. Right. And sometimes it's not a con, it's not a conscious thing where it's like, oh, yes, I'm gonna talk myself into this. It's just. It just kind of happens, right?

You're just a little bit unclear in the details and your mind just fills in details for you

Mark: right. Fills in the gaps

Yucca: right now. This is,

Mark: what we don't like is a story that has holes in it.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: Because it makes us uncomfortable. A narration that smoothly explains everything is more comfortable to sit with than one that's got these holes in it where it's like, okay, this happens. And then a while later this is happening and we don't know why, which is kind of what science is all about.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and a physical, a perception example of this is actually our vision. We have blind spots and you can actually detect it by, if you take your thumb and you take it all the way out to your side to your peripheral vision, and then you slowly move your thumb to the front of your face, you're gonna find that there's a, a blind spot that you have, but we don't notice it because our brain fills it in for us.

Right. Our imagination fills that in, but it's, it's there.

Mark: What I've read is that what we experience is a, is a, an edit of about 15 seconds of sensorium. So the reason that your brain can fill in the stuff that's in the blind spot is because it caught it earlier when your eyes were looking in a different. Place and it just cuts and pastes over the proper location, which is miraculous when you think about it.

It's just, it's extraordinary that this thing is able to happen. Not to mention the fact that we should be seeing upside down, but we're not, cuz our brain turns it over. Our brains are very, very powerful in terms of editing this stuff to make sense to us so that we can create a coherent story about the events of the world.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: All of that is to say that we can create stories that we experience with as much vividness as if we were actually going through them.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: And we do that with books. We do it with movies, and we do it with radio dramas, and we do it with theater. We do it with all kinds of immersive sorts of experiences.

And in the context of Paganism, we can do it in our minds by doing what's called Pathwork or journeying.

Yucca: That's right. Well, and even on a much broader level, that's what a lot of our ritual work is. So we're gonna talk specifically about Pathwork or journeying, but those are, that's. It is more of a subset of ritual and working with the mind and working with imagination. So when we imagine that we are casting this circle, that's us working with our imagination.

Do we know? Do we actually know that? No. That we're not, there's not really this magical force that we're putting out. Yes, but the, there's still so much power in the imagination that it still helps us to feel things.

Mark: It reassures us, for example, that within that circle there is safety. And feeling safe is a prerequisite to being able to be vulnerable. And if you're vulnerable, you can access your emotions better, and then you can more easily kind of manipulate the sort of experience that you want to have coming, you know, out of this, this ritual.

So, you know, when we talk about creating the sacred container, for example, a lot of that, I mean, it's imaginary, right? I mean, hopefully you're not. Doing your ritual in a place where people are gonna come barging through. But but there's no physical impediment to them doing that. If there are, and I have had people come barging through into a circle that I've drawn and it's uncomfortable.

It, it really kind of throws you off. So, when we do this, when we do rituals, usually a ritual has a story. Right. A ritual has a story. Okay. The story is we are now in sacred space. We invoke powers to come to help us, whether that's elements and directions and gods and goddesses, or whether it's qualities that you invoke or whether it's, you know, spirits or.

Ancestors or whatever those things might be. Okay. We bring all those powers to help us, and then we go through a transformational process in which something that started out one way ends up a different way afterwards, you know? And then we thank the powers that have helped us and we express our gratitude, and then we close the ritual.

That's a story,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: yeah.

Yucca: And so for Pathwork or journeying, it's a story that might be a little bit more developed than. In terms of maybe you're imagining yourself going on a physical journey where it's more like depending on for the person, more like playing a movie out in your mind. So why don't we actually, let's, let's step back and talk about what, what this is.

So from your understanding, when somebody says journeying or Pathwork, what do you, what comes to mind for you? Mark?

Mark: Well, I, I think of two general categories. There is the solitary journey. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's a solitary ritual, but one person is going through the process of developing and experiencing the story, while others may be drumming and chanting or something like that. And then that individual, when the journey is over, will kind of report back to the rest of the group about what they've discovered.

And this is a very traditional kind of healer magic person. Kind of tradition, like those that happen in cultures like in the Siberian North, for example, where you go on this, the, the, the shaman, then that's a Tousk word specifically to talk about those cultures uses the, the rhythm of a drum.

And other magical techniques in order to go off into their mind and have an experience. And then when it's over, when they come back, then they will explain to the rest of the people gathered there, what they learned for the tribe, what important information they gathered what actions they recommend, all those kinds of things.

So that's, that's the first bucket, is the kind of the individual journey, earth path.

Yucca: Which could also be solitary, right? You just described a, a kind of a group ritual, but it could be something that somebody does in the privacy of their own home by themselves or some, or, you know, in the forest or wherever they are.

Mark: yes, yes. And then the other category is one where, Once again, it can be solitary, but it can also be a shared group experience where there's a guide and the guide is telling the story and everyone else is hearing it and experiencing it in their mind. So, and we call those guided meditations. And yaka, I know you've created a whole lot of 'em.

You've got a YouTube channel with them and all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: On the nature guided meditations is the podcast I, I updated every couple months now for a while during the pandemic, I was doing it every week. It seemed like that was something folks needed. But now it's kind of when I've got a little extra time here and there, I'll put it, put one out. So,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: yeah.

Yeah, so a, a guided meditation and in those, there's different structures, but often there's a, it is a. A physical journey that somebody is imagining that they're going through. 

Mark: And in these journeys we can meet characters. We can meet people from our lives or from our memories. We can meet people we've never met before. We can meet we can encounter various kinds of challenges, like a wall of fire that you need to get through, or a big river that you need to cross. One of the, one of the prompts that I really enjoy for solo journeying is a giant plant growing up out of the ground, like a giant bean stock, and you climb and climb and climb and climb and climb until you get to this land in the clouds.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And then the adventure takes place. The experience takes place in this sort of cloud-like, like place, right? Which I call the overworld as opposed to the underworld.

Yucca: I've heard the upper world referred

Mark: Oh, Uhhuh.

Yucca: So yeah, the underworld, the upper world. And then there's the mid, the mid world where we are. And you know, there's a lot of different frameworks to, to think about that with.

Mark: Right. And that's one of the places where your own imagination and creativity really come into play, because you will imagine this in a different way than anybody else, and it works for you. That's great.

Yucca: and in, in either way, whether you're doing a guided journey or you're doing a self-guided one, so let's say you're listening to something that somebody's recorded or they're speaking live to you, and there's a. Two of you listening to the exact same thing, your experiences are going to be different of that, right?

You are going to imagine different things. The details will be different for you and the responses that you have to those those images are going to be different.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: And there's, you know, you can discover a lot about your current state by simply. Noticing what responses come up for you.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yucca: And there's, you can really play with how do you, if you're something you're guiding yourself how you.

Influence how you choose to respond. I find that, you know, trying to just be like, no, in real, like stern, like I'm not gonna do this fight. It just makes the idea stronger and stronger. And so learning to kind of go with the flow of it and redirect kind of, it, it makes me think of like a keto, right?

Like instead of trying to block the punch that the person is, is sending it, you just. Take it and, you know, pull 'em right past and move 'em past to you. Right. And you, you can kind of play with that when you are journeying with your own mind. Right. And just be like, okay, well I'm gonna redirect and how do I practice redirecting to go on this in this particular direction?

Mark: and you learn things by choices you make. So if you find yourself looking out at this vast landscape, well, Am I gonna follow the river off into the trees or am I gonna climb the mountain? Or, you know, you, you will learn things about your own inclinations. Like, okay, here's a huge, deep, scary mountain looking.

I'm, I'm gonna climb that. Well, do you always pick the hardest way to do things? Might, might be something,

Yucca: Oops.

Mark: might be something to consider. So if you're paying attention, which of course you really wanna be during this journey You, you can learn a lot about your own proclivities and habits and blind spots and all that kind of stuff just by watching the kinds of choices that you make.

And we'll be talking about ritual later. But one of the things that makes for a really good guided visualization is that key pieces are left vague so that you can fill them in with specifics that are really pertinent to you.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So you might meet a wise guide figure, right? But you yourself know who that person is.

So you, you will put that specific person in the place of the wise guide figure.

Yucca: Right. And. You can, you can approach this in a lot of different ways. You can go in seeking a particular answer. Or working on a particular issue or problem that you're, that you're facing right now or mulling over. Or you can also go in as simply a, let's explore what's going on in my mind right now.

This is a landscape of my mind or whatever it happens to be. And so the, there isn't really a right way to, to. To be doing this. It's what's gonna, just like everything that we talk about on this podcast really is, you know, you can have different goals and Mark's goals. My goals, your goals, those are gonna be different, right?

And so what do you, this is a tool to, to approach those goals with.

Mark: Yeah. And and it really helps to capture as much as you can about the story. If there are particular things that you notice, like along the side of the path that you're walking along, you, you know, you notice mushrooms, well take note of that. You know, your mind put those there for some reason. You probably want to explore what that reason is.

You don't necessarily have to interact with them at all, or you can choose to, but the fact that they're there probably means something.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: So, I mean, it can actually be helpful if you're doing like a solo journey, like I'm, I'm talking about it can actually help to sort of narrate your experience as you're having it.

And I've even recorded myself as I'm having this experience so that I can go back over the journey later and remember the pieces that I might not otherwise remember.

Yucca: Wow. So speaking doesn't take you out of the experience

Mark: It doesn't, but I, I'm sure that it does for some people though,

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you'd kind of play with that and see does it, if it takes you out of the experience, then. You know, maybe write it down afterwards. If it doesn't take you out, then recording that sounds like a great approach. Right. And then you can come back and transcribe that later or something like that.

Mm-hmm.

Mark: right.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So there's the, the guided meditation approach is one that I think more people in Western Paganism are more familiar with. Because we've been doing that sort of thing for a long time in, in psychological circles. And of course its analogs are things like books and movies and, you know, having a story told to you and having that come to life in your mind is very familiar to us.

But the exploration of the open landscape of the interior, can be really powerful. Very moving can be terrifying. It can be a lot of things. And you, you learn stuff. I mean, you, your, your subconscious knows stuff. You don't, and you, you will learn things if you do this kind of journeying.

Yucca: And this is one of those practices which I really encourage people to be patient with themselves on. If this is the type of thing that you've never done before, it's, it's, maybe it's gonna take some practice, maybe you get into it and you find yourself kind of being pulled out of it. That's okay. It's really, it's a skill, right?

Just because it doesn't come supernatural the first time doesn't mean that it isn't something that could be useful for you given time. Right. It's like, it's like any other thing. I mean, remember the first time that you were learning to drive and how weird and awkward and how much your ankle hurt afterwards, right?

Or whatever the experience is. This is one of those types of things where it, it really just does p take practice. And it becoming skillful at something like this can also help you in other ritual practice as

Mark: Yes. Yes, because. The state that you're in when you're doing that? Inner journeying is definitely a form of trance, and lot of what Pagan ritual is about is going into a trance state so that we can tinker with our subconsciousness and Learn and discover things and grow as people, transform things that have hurt us, things like that.

So, being able to induce yourself into that trans state is a learned skill, as you say, but it's very useful. Once, once you've gotten good at it, it's, it's really a helpful thing to be able to do. And there are things that you can do that will help. You along with that, like there are certain kinds of music, for example, that can be very facilitative for particular kinds of journey.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So it's a, you know, there, there are some things that you can do to make it easier on yourself.

Yucca: Right. A classic is a, a drumbeat, just a very simple drumbeat. I find the sound of running or rushing water for some people who have a deep connection with the ocean, the waves, those really repetitive but very natural kind of sounds. I mean, I suppose for some people maybe, There, you know, some screeches might work for me.

That doesn't work. Right. It's, it's definitely gotta be a very kind of a primal, natural type of sound there.

Mark: Yeah, but not an alarming

Yucca: Not an alarming. Yeah. Something that is, is very rhythmic. You know, it, I think of it as almost like being back in the womb and hearing your mother's heartbeat. Right or the, or you probably could hear her, you know, the gurgling of her digesting things and all the types of sounds that you'd kind of hear back in that most, most early beginnings of you coming into awareness.

Mark: Right. Yeah, I, I think that's really well said. And, and, and I mean, there is a lot of variety. Like, there's a, there's an electronic music album, a very, very old one by a group called Tangerine Dream, which I mean, they're, they, they existed in the late sixties into the 1970s, and I think there's some configuration of them that exists now, but I know that two of the three people that were a part of it are, are now gone.

They're dead. And there's this

Yucca: it hard to keep making music.

Mark: really? Yeah. Unless, unless you're, unless you're John Cage. And it's just that long silence. Do you know about that?

Yucca: I don't know.

Mark: John Cage has a piece, I think it's called seven and a half minutes, and it's

Yucca: Oh, I do know this. Yes. Yes.

Mark: it's subs absurd.

Yeah, I mean you can see the sheet music right. Rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest. The

Yucca: I could play that song

Mark: yeah, me too. So, the. This particular album has a very soaring, rhythmic kind of quality to it. For me. It makes me feel like I'm flying and particularly flying at night, like kind of gliding over the landscape, very low altitude.

So sort of following the contours of hills and valleys with lights below.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: it's very, very visual to me. And So I, I will use that in journeying sometimes. So a, and you know, we've talked about this before, but that kind of, you know, repetitive, rhythmic, transi kind of electronic music, there's a reason why people dance to that stuff.

It's very trans inducing. You can submerge into your body and have this, you know, full. Non thinky experience moving. And I mean, dance clubs, they do it with low light conditions and, you know, colored lights and all the various things that we say are great for ritual, right?

Yucca: They're good at it. It's, it's literally their job,

Mark: That, that it, that is their job.

And so anyway, there, there are a bunch of different ways that you can facilitate these things. One of the. Tactics that's used in various kinds of religious practices is scent incense, right? Or essential oils, or, you know, or other things like that. I, I know that some people will choose a particular scent for their journeying.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mark: it becomes a trigger. You smell it, and then you're in there, you're, you're on your way.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Right. And so that scent, the sound people could probably do that with particular, Physical sensations as well. Right. Do you have a the particular comfy sweater or the robe or cloak that you put on and, you know, all of those sorts of things. The, the physical sensations can really pull us into a, into an experience more quickly.

Mark: Right, right. And the complete absence of those things can also pull us into a very altered state very quickly as well. You know, the, the isolation tanks that people submerge in and things like that. Or, you know, noise canceling earphones and a and a blindfold or a, an eye mask, for example. To really reduce your sensorium so that you're inside yourself and your imagination starts to take over and give you imagery.

The brain is strong, it does lots of cool stuff. So experiment, you know, have a, have a good time playing around with it.

Yucca: Right. Yeah.

Mark: So I guess we sort of segued into talking about ritual things that you can do. To do this kind of journeying. The, the thing that I think is really important when you're doing the solitary internal journeying is to have a really, a really firm sense of what it is that you're seeking to find out.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Because otherwise you'll be shown other stuff, which is also true, but may not be relevant.

Yucca: Hmm

Mark: Uh, at least that's what I find.

And maybe that's just cuz I have a d h d and I'm kind of all over the place. But I, I have found myself going down into cul-de-sacs that were about stuff that was entirely unrelated to what I was trying to do

Yucca: Great.

Mark: in some of these experiences.

Yucca: And I wanna make a clarification that I think our listeners will probably already be clear on. But when we talk about this, the framework that we're coming at it from is not that there's some outside entity giving us these visions. Right. This is, this is ourselves. This is a way that we are communicating with ourselves.

And this is this is our minds coming up with all of this and interpreting these just like, with dreams or this is the same framework that we talk about with practices like tarot or other divination. I mean, this is kind of a, I suppose you could. Kind of put this in the class. In the group of being a form of divination in some

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, in a way, I mean, it's the same sort of psychological temperature taking and trying to sort of get under the hood to find out what's going on in the subconscious mind.

Yucca: Right? And seeking understanding.

Mark: Right, right. But what's cool about the internal landscape that can be explored through this kind of journeying is that unlike the real world, where there aren't these super powerful supernatural beings that you can call on to help you and all that kind of stuff inside your mind.

Yucca: Oh, absolutely.

Mark: there is, and you're, it

Yucca: Right.

Mark: you, you are the all powerful being that can actually make decisions about what's gonna happen in this thing. And so that's a very powerful kind of experience to have.

Yucca: Right, and maybe, maybe you experience that by having characters, right? Maybe you come to the rattlesnake who swallows you or whatever that is going to be for you or the, the wise old, you know that that conversation with your grandmother who. Died many years ago or something like that. It's all you, but, but you get to, but you get to use whatever story and characters and anything that really is gonna speak to you on that real primal, emotional level.

Mark: Right. And that doesn't mean that you have to deliberately, consciously choose those things.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: A lot of that choice is gonna be made for you. And that's good because that means the subconscious is talking.

Yucca: Right, so the subconscious is making that choice for you. You still are the subconscious, but it's not your conscious self. Maybe

Mark: Yeah. It's not your thinking.

Yucca: it's not your thinky logical part going through and saying, Hmm, well what would be the next thing if this was a story that I was writing as a script, right? Just, you just kind of let it happen

Mark: I think I'll put a rattlesnake here.

Yucca: Yes. It's like, oh no, maybe, maybe that rattlesnake just is there. Hmm, maybe. Maybe I've been thinking about those. Maybe that's a powerful symbol in my life right now for someone else, you know, grew up in Alaska, you're probably not gonna think about rattlesnakes all that much, but it's really gonna be really, really personal to you experiencing it as the.

As the journeyer or the practitioner.

Mark: Uhhuh. Yeah. So, talk a little bit about ways that groups can be involved in that solitary journeying. As I mentioned before it can be really helpful, you know, that that simple drumbeat is something that a group can do together.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And they will get all trad out too. They may take their own journeys. Just sitting there beating a drum repeatedly over and over and over and over again, and feeling the sound welling around them and through their bodies, they may have, you know, experiences to report out as well.

Yucca: Right. So you might all choose to, okay, we're going to together. We're going to intern to a ritual space, and then we're each going to go and have these journeys and maybe report back to each other what you're comfortable sharing or maybe not, right?

Mark: right. Yeah, and, and I, we should say at this point that this kind of activity is a universal human activity.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Cultures all over the world have specific protocols around it. You know, particular symbols and particular practices that they do, that they've evolved over time in order to be really effective for them.

And we don't wanna steal those. That's cultural appropriation. We're, we're, you know, we don't wanna steal those and we don't need to steal them.

Yucca: right.

Mark: This is something that people have done from time immemorial. And so you can have your own journey and practice in a way that doesn't steal culture from any other, you know, marginalized or oppressed people, and still have every bit as vivid an experience as someone else in another culture.

So, so it it's about learning the skills and about Letting your mind be free in that way to, to go and have those kinds of experiences.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you. I think that's really important to, to add into the conversation. Right.

Mark: Right. Well, we were talking before we recorded and you know, I, I had mentioned that word shaman before, and that's, I. Kind of been glommed onto by social scientists as sort of a generic term for this kind of journeying. And the people who actually use that word, who have that word in Siberia are not happy about it at all.

They don't feel that their practices should be lumped in with everyone else's. And people in other indigenous cultures don't feel that they should be labeled with a Siberian word. So the whole thing just gets really messy. So, We don't call it that. We, we call it journeying and, and path working.

Yucca: Yeah. Yeah, and there's, there's a lot of examples of of places where things like that have happened and it gets tricky because then you're going, well, okay, how do we talk about it and how do we be respectful and, and. You know, there's, there's just so much to really think about and reflect on in these areas, so,

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So, I, I mean, I guess in, in summation, just really encourage you to check this out. You know, try this if you feel like you aren't very good at this sort of visual imagining thing for one thing, it doesn't have to be visual, it can be words or however your mind works. People's minds work in different kinds of ways.

But start with guided meditations. You know, start, start with someone else helping you with imagery, and then see what comes up in the spaces that they leave for you to create your own things. You know, if a figure gives you a gift, what's the gift? You know, that's an important message from your subconscious.

What is it? You know, is it a container? What's inside it? What does it do? You know? It's funny, when we talk about this stuff, I'm reminded both of us are Dungeons and Dragons players. Although here's a complete tangent, I'm probably moving away from Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons because I'm very angry at

Yucca: SRDS shenanigans that

Mark: Yeah, well that, and then this thing that happened recently where they accidentally released a set of magic, the gathering cards to a YouTuber who made a video about them.

Yucca: that. Yes. And they

Mark: And they hired Pinkerton detectives to raid their house

Yucca: can you believe that the Pinkertons are still like, I can't believe they're arou. Yeah. Yeah. They got essentially hitman like, yeah.

Mark: just what, what we, I'm not giving you any more of my money. I'm

Yucca: Yeah. Wizards has made some real bad calls. I mean, they've got some folks there that I really like, but. They also have some executives making some really, really dumb choices.

Mark: absolutely. I mean, I think the creative team is great, but yeah, anyway,

Yucca: but there's plenty of other awesome systems out

Mark: there are, there are, and don't get me started on those cuz then this gets too long. 

Yucca: For that.

Mark: Huh. So, but I'm reminded of role playing games, which is this collaborative storytelling enterprise where the imaginations of the participants fill in the blanks of what's gonna happen next, what the characters are going to do.

And there's a rule framework, unlike in journeying,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: BEC, because that gamifies it, right? That, that creates more tension because you don't know whether events are going to,

Yucca: There's risk. Yeah. You, you roll the die and what happens as a respon? Yeah. You don't, you aren't automatically successful, like in the make believe stories we all played when we were little. Right. I remember getting so frustrated with some of my friends because they'd never let anything bad happen. Right. And you're, you know, when you have the die, that's, that allows you to let bad things happen without it being someone's fault. Now, maybe that isn't necessarily what you want to be doing in your journey but you know, you've got, when it's just you, you've got the freedom to make it just the positive things happening that you want.

Or you can kind of let some of those struggles happen and kind of, and explore what happens with those.

Mark: Or some sort of a mid ground where you find a magic mirror and you look in the mirror and you witness events that are challenging or threatening or dangerous, but they're not immediately threatening to you because you're just watching them in a mirror. You're not actually there. Being threatened by them, right?

So there are, there are lots of techniques that you can use in this imaginable landscape to keep yourself safe while at the same time addressing, you know, really very sensitive issues that you may struggle with or that are up in your life or that are up for your community, whatever it is.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, this was a lot of fun.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I really enjoyed this one.

Yucca: And you know, we actually

Mark: like I always say that.

Yucca: well it's fun talking with you. We talk about great stuff and we actually did touch on this this topic, but we were looking back through some of the episodes that we've done and we hadn't talked about it since 2020.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: So, yeah.

And you know, I didn't re-listen to the episode before we did this, so I might go back and see, did we say the same things or did we say something different?

Mark: Yeah. I mean, one thing, we've, we've been doing this for more than three years now, and that means that there are more than 150 episodes, and that necessarily means that we're gonna be repeating some topics. I. Just like we do with the holidays when they come around, we always do we always do an event a podcast for each of the Sabbaths of the Wheel of the year.

So that's just something to be You know, it's part of the package, it's part of what we come with. And that way you don't have to go back all the way to episode one and listen to all of them to catch up. Although I know some people do that, which is really kind of amazing to me.

Yucca: Yeah, but it, it kind of, it means that, yeah, there are some of, some of you who have, and some of you've just jumped in more recently or you've been with us for years, but maybe not three years, maybe two years. So, but it's also, it's fun to, to go, to come back around and just see how, how our perspectives have changed and.

You know, because even on, in only three years, on the one hand, that doesn't seem like a long time. And on the other hand, there's so much that's happened in the world and so much that changes about us and you listening. And so I, I, I really appreciate the, we have the opportunity to revisit some of these topics together.

So thank

Mark: too. You're, you're welcome and thank you. All right, so, that's another in the can. And really thank you to all of you for listening. As always. You can reach us at the Wonder podcast [email protected] and always appreciate your, your emails and suggestions and questions and all that good kind of stuff.

Yucca: All right. See you next week everybody.

Book mentioned: “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” by Cal Newport - https://calnewport.com/writing/

https://theAPSociety.org/AWW2023/

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

S4E16 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----

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

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: Today we're going to talk about bringing the natural world that's outside where we live. More into integration with the natural world that's inside where we live. Having more of a sense of connectedness between the two of those and kind of a, an approach to worldview that helps to feed us and help us to be happier.

Yucca: Right, so really talking about cultivating our environment. Environments, both on an external level and on that emotional internal level as well.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: Yeah. So I think this is a really fun one, especially as we're getting more into spring and into this warmer kind of time of the year. But yeah, let's, let's go ahead and get into this idea of kind of, Bringing that in, or as you were saying before, kind of blurring the lines between the outside and inside.

Mark: Sure, and I really agree with you. I think that springtime is a great time to talk about this because. There's so much that's really beautiful that's happening in the world right now in the, in the spring season in the Northern Hemisphere, and a lot of how much we're going to get out of that depends on our mindset,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and it depends on what kind of habits we've developed for ourselves.

We were talking before we started recording about how the, the human sensorium is geared to look for problems. Because problems threaten us. Right? And so solving problems becomes a way that you keep yourself from getting eaten,

Yucca: Right. The person who didn't worry about that, Those weird noises that they heard around the campfire got eaten and then didn't have babies. So those people aren't our ancestors. The ones who were anxious and worried are our ancestors, right?

Mark: Exactly. So we're already swimming against the current a little bit when we decide that we want to cultivate a worldview that actually reaches out for what makes us happy, for what brings us awe and wonder and contentment, and a sense of hope and aspiration, all those kinds of things. So we're gonna be talking about all that stuff today.

But to begin with, there's this nature in nature outfit,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: and if you're anything like me and all the pagans, I know you've got rocks and sticks and plants and dried flowers and just all kinds of stuff, seashells and. Fossils and just all kinds of things from the natural world inside your house because those things bring you joy.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yes. A lot of those things end up in our pockets and you know, first they end up in the laundry pile and then it all has to come out of the laundry, and then it gets arranged around the house and, and all of that. And I think that's, it's about what are we paying attention to? Right. Because those things are everywhere, the beautiful, I mean, next time you're sitting next to some gravel for a while, right?

Gravel seems like it might be boring, but if you are sitting there because you're waiting for a bus to come or whatever it is, just start looking at each of those individual rocks. And just the way that the light is shining off of each of them and thinking about the history of how that rock formed, how many millions of years ago, and how it's been tumbled and all, what has happened to it.

And I think that the, the collecting of those things is a reflection of the interest that we have in them and the interest that we have in the world around us.

Mark: Right. Right. And that kind of curiosity, which of course is one of the Ethiopia Pagan principles, that kind of interest in the world is part of what engages us with the world, gives us a sense of being connected to the larger whole. Gives us a sense of valuation of. Of all that is right. So, yeah, when you're looking at that gravel, I mean, you'll, you'll see there are stones of different colors and obviously very different derivations all there kind of mixed together in that gravel.

And each one of those has a geological story. You know, it's, it's got a chemical story. You know, the reason that they are particular colors is because they're made up of particular chemicals and. Being curious about those things and. To be, to be completely honest, you don't need to have a deep background in geology or in chemistry in order to appreciate this, to understand that, that in the earth, these rocks were formed.

And then tumbled in the, the process of erosion, usually by water, but sometimes also by air. In order to form those little beads of gravel that you have before you. And when you have that revelation Sometimes what will happen is the, the, the ground will drop out from underneath you metaphorically, and you'll find yourself falling into this sense of amazement about the whole nature of deep time and the fact that we're here and the fact that we're a part of this wondrous, amazing hole that is planet Earth.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And you'll probably take the rock with you.

Yucca: Yes. Now if you don't, right, if you are practicing some form of very strict minimalism or anything like that, no judgment,

Mark: That's fine.

Yucca: fine.

Mark: It makes you happy

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: that, you know, we, we as, as we keep saying in naturalistic paganism, in atheopagan, there is no. Cosmic task master that wants you to do things a particular way, there is no Pope who's going to lay down the rules for you. It's about developing a practice and a perspective and a set of personal habits that feed you on a spiritual and emotional level so that you can be a happier and more contented and more effective person, and you can experience more joy out of your life.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: That's the deal.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: Yeah. It's amazing. It's, it, it's amazing how rarely you hear anybody say anything like that in our society. You know, do what? Just do what feels good.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: anybody, just do what feels good. Do that, do that some more. Cuz it's, cuz it's good for you.

Yucca: Right,

Mark: But we're here to tell you weekly that, that's, that's. That's what we recommend.

Yucca: right. So what are some of the things that you particularly enjoy in terms of do you, you know, is it dried leaves or sticks, or, you know, is there something that you really enjoy bringing into your home?

Mark: You know, it depends on the season. I live about 30 miles away from the Pacific Ocean, and I don't get out there nearly as much as I would like to because 30 miles is enough to be a little bit of an impediment. I. But and I have to go through all this magnificent redwood country to get there, which kind of sidetracks me sometimes.

But when I do go to the beach, I inevitably come home with a bunch of rocks and maybe a shell or two. And it's because. It's a combination of them being polished very to, to a pretty high gloss for nature. And also that they're often wet and so you can see their colors and their patterns more vividly than when they're dry.

And so I'll end up, you know, bringing those home I Anne, a participant in our Saturday mixer on a regular basis. Had a suggestion this morning that she says she puts them in potted plants. You know, the, okay, I got a cool rock. Now it's going into potted plant. If you're getting them from the ocean, rinse the salt off first.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: That's important because you know, most plants are not very salt tolerant. They don't like it.

Yucca: Right. We actually do that as well for very practical reason as we have a cat in our house. And sometimes he decides that other things will be his litter box, and so we put pine cones and, and rocks and things like that into the potted plants and that prevents him from doing that.

Mark: Oh, wow. I, I have not heard of that problem before, but that

Yucca: Oh, really? That's a, that's a cat. Yeah. I mean, he's pretty good about not doing it now. But when we lived in a smaller apartment, yeah, sometimes he would just decide that that was gonna be his litter box instead. So, but the shells and the wet rocks we actually, so. Two weeks. But the reason we missed the podcast a couple weeks back is that my family, we went out to Florida for my brother's wedding.

And so I took the kids to the beach for the first time in their life and they were, they were delighted. And of course, we came back with several gallon bags of shells because that was, we, I mean, how, how could you not, right? Shells and rocks and little you know, dead. Dried up coral things and, and all of that.

And one of the things that we've done is taken a big vase and put some of the water in it and them in the water, in the, the glass vase. Because there just is something about it being in the water, right. 

Mark: They're just much more visible that way. That's wonderful. That's a great idea.

Yucca: Yeah. And of course we have ones that aren't, and you know, they're, they're being sorted by color over and again and all of that. But that, that's just been my favorite thing so far. And actually we took a few little pieces of dried up seaweed that was left on the, and that's in there too. That won't last quite as long as the rocks and shells will.

Mark: Well, that's really great. I am, I mean, I love the desert and I've spent a lot of time in the American desert, but the op, having the opportunity to see a place that's, that has the ocean and is very wet and all that kind of stuff, you know, for your kids, I'm sure was just really magical.

Yucca: I have to share just one thing as we were, we flew there. And so this was also their first airplane trip and we went, we. We stopped in, you know, Dallas on the way to get there and my daughter was looking out the plane and she looked down the, cuz I made sure to get window seats for the kids since, you know, they're gonna be first airplane try ride.

And she's looking down and she goes, mom, the ground is green because, you know, we, the farthest we'd ever been is, is into Colorado with her, which is very similar. Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico are very similar. So she hadn't really seen anything like that before. And just them seeing that kind of grass, we have plenty of grass here, but it's golden.

Right? And it will pop green for like a month during the, the monsoons, but the rest of the time it's just this golden brown. And so they were just fascinated at seeing. You know, grass on the ground and seeing all those kinds of trees. So yeah, we spent a lot of time and there were so many things we, you know, they wanted to bring back, but I had to inform them and we, unfortunately we can't take this on the airplane.

And, and those big, giant beautiful leaves are not gonna last when we

Mark: Oh yeah, yeah, like the giant monster and the banana trees and you know,

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: wonderful things.

Yucca: and we have a banana tree plant in our house, but of course it gets to like three feet tall. And the ones that we were looking at, I mean, they were just humongous. The leaves were as big as their bodies and going, you know, we're gonna take some photos, but those aren't gonna come, those can't come home with us.

You know, we could take the cool rocks and the shells, those will last. So that's something to think about in your own environment. You know, you know, we cut things and bring them in sometimes, but some things are gonna stay very well in the home and some things aren't gonna stay very well,

Mark: Right. Yeah. So you were asking about what kinds of things I bring in, and one example was, Rocks from the, from the coast. For whatever reason, we have very few shells on our coast now, and that was not the way that it was when I was a child. There's been a tremendous die off of of

Yucca: acidification maybe?

Mark: probably from a combination of warming and acidification.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So I don't see that as much as I did when I was a child. But. But the rocks are there and of course the, the, the California coast is very rugged, that's got these sort of cliffs and bluffs and stuff, and it's really just very beautiful to be there. And even on a weekend, I can usually find a cove on the Sonoma coast where I'm entirely by myself,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: which is amazing.

Makes you feel like the last person on earth.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So yeah, bringing in those things. And you asked about dried leaves as well. I actually go on an excursion to get colored leaves for my focus, my altar.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: In the fall there's a particular breed of a tree called a liquid amber, which I believe on the east coast is called a Sweet Gum.

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: And they, they hold their leaves for much longer than many other trees. They'll hold them sometimes as long as into December

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: they.

Yucca: Is this a broadleaf tree or is it

Mark: It is, it's a broadleaf tree. And they go through these beautiful evolutions of color until they're, they're sort of a maroon red when they're, when they're at the end of the whole cycle.

But you can, you can pick them in various stages of development. And then you have these. Leaves that are sort of green at the root and then yellow fading into orange and then red at the tips of the leaves. Just, just very, very beautiful things. And I like to decorate for the fall for, for harvest and for hellos with those kinds of things.

There's just an awful lot of wonderful nature out there and, and it's, it's hard not to want to bring it all back.

Yucca: So do you have a certain, so you've got your focus, do you have certain places in your house where you gather things or is it just sort of spread out everywhere around the house?

Mark: we, we have a joke that our, you know how people talk about architectural themes,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: different kinds of architectural styles? Well, In our house, the theme is Welcome to the Museum of Natural History. We have glass cases with all kinds of various interesting things, historical things and natural things.

We have you know, bookshelves and all that kind of stuff. And, and to be fair, every horizontal surface has some cool thing on it. And. If it doesn't look like a cool thing, when you've heard the story about what it really is, you'll know what a cool thing it's,

Yucca: Nice.

Mark: Like here, here's an example. I, I have a piece of obsidian that's about this big, it's kind of, heart

Yucca: about a golf ball to your, your whole, the audience can't see your

Mark: Oh, that, of course. Yes. It's, it's flat, but it's about as big a round as a golf ball, and it's sort of heart shaped and it's heavily worn and eroded. And other than that, it just looks like a piece of obsidian that's been eroded and worn and all that kind of stuff. But what that is is a dinosaur gastro lift.

Yucca: Oh.

Mark: You, you find them in the rib cages of fossil dinosaurs and they're, it's from the gizzard of the dinosaur, right. That collects gravel to help them digest their food.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So, I mean, it's an amazing thing. My grandfather found it. And I've had it since I was a kid. So even the

Yucca: rock swallowed by a dinosaur to help it digest ground up and digest its food.

Mark: That's right.

Yucca: Wow.

Mark: Yeah. Cool thing to have, eh? So, I mean, it's gotten to the point where I actually wrote an interpretive guide for our house so that people know what all the, the various exhibit things are that sense of wonder. Is something that, and we'll talk about this later on in this episode, that's something that I really cultivate

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: that sense of amazement.

Like, wow, maybe a hundred million years ago, a dinosaur swallowed this rock. And then it did duty for long enough to get all the edges worn off of it into a nice, smooth pebble until the dinosaur died. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: know, just extraordinary thing to think about.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: So how about you? How about I. I, I didn't really answer your question.

We do have other places where we'll put things like colored leaves in the fall and stuff like that, but it sounds like you do more elaborate kind of household changes over the course of seasons.

Yucca: Yeah. Our house is constantly moving. Right. And, and part of that is simply the, the age range of the people who live in the house. You can't really have something on a. Flat surfaces that are low down do not get left alone for longer than 10 minutes. So there are certainly, you know, we have got bookshelves and things a little bit higher up that are slightly more permanent, but most things are, are changing very constantly.

And there's just.

Mark: kids are getting taller.

Yucca: And the kids are getting, they're always getting taller and they're climbing, right? No, they're pretty good now about not climbing onto things that they shouldn't, but they've, they've learned,

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: And. That the gravity has helped them learn about that. But, you know, things are, are changing and I purposely change things as well throughout the season.

It's just something that, you know, ev I, I just start to kind of get that itch of I wanna change things around. And, you know, things are coming into the house and things are going back out of the house, and it's a just a, it just seems. To flow quite a bit. Things are always flowing and moving out. There are a few things that do end up staying for, that are more kind of treasures that'll stay for longer.

Like those seashells, right? Those are, some of them will probably make their way outdoors eventually, but those things will probably stay

Mark: Sure.

Yucca: right.

Mark: Yeah. I, I have seashells. I'm, I'm looking at one right now that I picked up on the Costa del Soul in Spain when I was 11, and it's still here with me.

Yucca: Yeah. And so, but then there's certain, like most of the windows are full of the, I really like the glass Vs. With things in them, right? So we've got lots of those things and there's a snake skin in the window that we found a couple weeks ago and a, you know, that kind of stuff. And so it's just a very. I dunno, it just feels to me like the house is cha changes with the season so much.

And that's. Some of that is just the style of how we live, and some of it was very purposely cultivated. You know, it's, and some ways it's easier for us because we are on this kind of homestead out, away from people and live kind of half outside anyways. But when we did live in a city that was, that was kind of a way for me to try and feel more connected because I, I definitely would start to feel very overwhelmed with the city of everything.

So I would try and change the colors. I would bring things in. I don't do this anymore because where we live is so surrounded by creatures and things, but I used to play bird songs, right? I had recordings of water, of water flowing. I'd have recordings of, and birds, and I would just have that going on in the background as just a way to kind of, One to block out the sound of the city, right?

Cause I found that very stressful of there's the car alarm and then the police car going off and the this and the that, and the, you know, all of that. But, but just being able to sort of cultivate that. But now, you know, now the bird is like two feet out my window and, and being plenty loud, so. And then certain places seem to collect certain things.

There's around the bathroom sink, there's just rocks of all kinds, and I think that's because they get brought in and washed off and then, then they start to live there. And so now it just feels like, yes, of course bathroom sinks is where rocks go, right? Yes.

Mark: Sounds reasonable to me.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I mean, I can't think of anywhere else in the house that's more reasonable for rocks to go set maybe in a potted plant.

Yucca: In a potted plant. Yes. My four year old seems to think the shoes by the door. But you know, it's amazing how often Legos end up in shoes by the door.

Mark: You know, as you talk about all this and and I give my own examples and stuff, the word that comes to mind is curation,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and it seems as though. One of the things about being alive is that there's this fire hose of information that's just kind of blasting us all the time. Right. All the different sensory information and the news and the internet and, you know, the, the community events and scuttlebutt and gossip and what's happening with all the different people.

We're connected with all that stuff and it is, so we're kind of being bombarded all the time and. I think a part of the, the life that we, you and I Yucca envision for folks living in naturalistic paganism, and certainly I do for myself, is one where we curate our experience in a way that's empowering and happiness.

Producing rather than stress inducing or depression inducing or anxiety producing.

Yucca: Yes. Yeah, I love that. I, I think that's a wonderful way of putting it. Because really there's, there is so much around us, right? And, but what do we choose to focus on? What do we choose to bring into focus? That's something that we do have. Power and influence O f R. Right.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: You know, we don't get to, there's a lot of things that we don't get to change in life.

There's most things, the vast, vast majority of things we have absolutely no control over, right? But what we're focusing on, what we find important we do have control over that. And that really changes our experience of what it's like to be us.

Mark: Right. Yeah. We do have control over those things and. It's, it's one of those situations where you have to make the decision to grab the wheel, right? Because otherwise you're basically at the mercy of two things, which is the randomness of whatever information is flying towards you, and that evolutionary pre predilection for looking for problems and the negative.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So if you choose to be in more control around this, if you choose to be a curator of your experience, then you can get in the habit of smelling the roses along the way when you're walking from the parking lot into your workplace. Stopping to look at what the clouds are doing. Stopping to watch tree branches blowing in wind.

You know, enjoying those rocks and shells and leaves and seed pods and all the cool things that nature makes.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. You know, this reminds me of a book actually that I read a few years back and it was really, really influential and it was, it's called Digital Minimalism. It's by, I believe, Cal Newport. And it isn't what the title sounds like. At first the title sounds like being like anti-tech or like a Luddite or something.

But it's actually about really. Being thoughtful about the role that the screen and digital things play in our lives. And he does this a very beautiful job of one he does spell out. Kind of the, the terrible state some of that is in and how the attention that that's all designed to hold our attention as long as possible.

And it's not really done in a way that is, that's thoughtful about our wellbeing. It's more about the pockets of the people designing these programs. But it, it does a really lovely job of, of. Walking one through to think about what are the things that they, that you really value, and how do you cultivate that?

And how do you create a life in which you can focus on those things? And how do you use tools like the, how do you use digital tools to help you do that? And how do you let go of the ones that aren't helping you to do that? So I just,

Mark: great.

Yucca: Yeah, so I'd really I, I like quite a bit of Cal Newport stuff, so that's digital minimalism if anyone is interested in

Mark: Why don't we put a link to that in the show notes?

Yucca: Yeah, let's do that. 

Mark: Yeah, because when you think about it, one of the few things that we really have choice about in our lives is our attention.

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: Right. We, we can make considered thoughtful, informed decisions about where we're going to apply our attention, and that can be on things that. Bring anxiety or bring, or, or help us to, you know, re-experience trauma and we call those triggers.

I heard a wonderful term in the mixer this morning from our community member Summer who said that she heard this term glimmers, which are like the opposite of triggers. They're things that fill us with hope and inspiration and a sense of joy in living.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: can, we can look for those things. Right? I had this moment yesterday.

I was sitting in a cafe waiting for a friend, and the door to the cafe opens and this little boy trots in. He's on the move. He's, he's, he, he must, he couldn't have been more than four. I don't think he was three

Yucca: Okay. So real little, little

Mark: Yeah. Beautiful little black kid with this gigantic grin on his face. And his mother comes in behind him and closes the door and he was just, and, and then he stands there with his feet planted and his hands kind of out by his side.

He's like, this is a cafe. Wow. And you could just see that he was drinking In this experience of having come into this new space and looking around, you know, what are people doing? What are they doing? This place, what's it all about? And you know, with, with this, this. Just this glow of happiness and I just, I, I couldn't help but smile.

I wanted to watch that kid for a while, you know? So that was a glimmer.

Yucca: Hmm. That's such a delightful idea about a glimmer. Right. Because, and I, I think that there could be a lot of power in just taking a moment to think about what are the things that, that are your glimmers or could be your glimmers, right? Because we can, we can choose to have those associations as well.

That you're taking the time to focus on, okay, what are the things that inspire awe in me and that make me hopeful, or whatever it is? And just taking the, the time to think about those I think is really, is really great. And then finding them throughout the day, right.

Mark: right. And, and figuring out maybe some. Rules of thumb for how to keep yourself in that state to as great a degree as possible. Now, I'm not saying never watch the news. You know, I, we ha I feel like as a responsible person, I have to be engaged with what's happening in my society, and I need to make what effort I can to have things go in, in a way that's consistent with my values, but that there's a difference between that and being obsessed.

With the news and it's just wave after wave of, oh my God, they can't do that if they're, oh my God, they're doing that. You know, this, this terrible, terrible, you know, wave of feelings. So you can curate that. You can narrow it down. You can tell yourself, okay, I'm gonna log on to my favorite news site once a day and I'm gonna read the headlines and I'll read a couple of stories that seem like they're useful.

You know, for me to know, and then I'm gonna move on and I'm gonna do other stuff that feeds me more.

Yucca: Right. Yeah. I think that's really important and to create that balance and that by, by choosing to log off after that time, you're not being. A bad citizen, right? You're not being a, like, you don't have to buy into the, the guilt around it because those moments of joy, like you were talking about the little kid coming in that is as valid as.

Any of the other stuff, right? That is as much valid part of existence and this life in this world and giving it your attention is something that it's one, it's worth the attention in its own, but also it's good for you.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: are gonna do a better job being a more effective person in the world when you are.

More balanced and, and healthy and happy. If you are miserable, you're not going to do it. You're not gonna be able to do a good a job taking care of the things and helping whatever the situation is that you want to help. Right,

Mark: because despair is disempowering.

Yucca: right.

Mark: Fundamentally, when we despair, we throw up our hands and say, well, that's the way the world is. Nothing I can do about it. And it, it just sucks. But that's life, and that's a terrible message to tell to yourself and to anyone around you. I, you know, I, I frequently go back to the deathbed test, right?

How am I gonna feel about how I chose to operate in my life when I'm dying? And what I hope is that I'm gonna look back at all this and go, wow, what an adventure. There was just such amazing stuff all along the way with that and just such beautiful times and moments, and what a world this is. Rather than, well, I didn't solve world hunger, so I guess I failed.

Right. You know, something like that. Some kind of unreasonable expectation that's informed by a, a situation that's really kind of beyond any one individual's capacity to change.

Yucca: Right.

Now I think that there's also another part, another kind of side of this is when we're looking for the things that are going to bring us joy and the things that make us hopeful and inspire awe and all of that, that there will be times in our life when we don't feel those things. Right. There will be times when we aren't happy about something.

There will be times when you get cut off or in traffic or your spouse says that thing again, or all of those. And that's, those things are part of life and those are things that for the most part, we really don't have control over. Right. And that's okay. But

Mark: Yeah. I mean, if you're in

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: if you're in grief, you should not be expecting yourself to. You know, carefully cherry pick all the, the beautiful things about the world because you are in grief. And the same is the same, I, I have to say, as someone who has lived with major depression since I was a little kid depression does not indicate a failure of what we're talking about in this podcast.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: Depression is a neurochemical condition. It's something you can't help. It's something that's not your fault. It's not a moral failing. And if you find that your world is really dark and gray and and dismal because of it, don't pile on top of it. All the other messages you're getting from your brain that you should be, you know, Looking for butterflies.

That's, not fair to you and it's not accurate to the situation That is, that's, that's not a realistic statement.

Yucca: Right. It's not a, and it's not a failure on your part.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yucca: So there's, there's things in the world that we really, we do not have control over. But. But a lot of the things that we're talking about today are the things that we, that we can influence and focusing on which of those things can we influence And, and those are the, those are the places where I think we have a lot of power is figuring out what, what do we actually have power?

Over, which isn't a lot, but actually when you really get down to it, it is right. I don't have pow power over what you're doing, mark, but I do have some influence over how I'm gonna respond to whatever you're doing is. And that's gonna take time, right? It's not like I can just magically say like, oh, I'm not, you know, I'm gonna respond this way.

Like, no, it doesn't really work that way. It's something that we practice, and that's where I think a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the podcast, like rituals and different kinds of practices can really help because they're a way for us to practice and learn how to change our responses.

Mark: Yes. Yes. That's really well said. I'm, I mean, I know, I know some Pagan people, just a few. A handful who's, Ritual practices have fallen way off after years of, you know, religiously, literally religiously observing all the sabbaths and, you know, having a personal practice and all that kind of stuff. And what's happened is they've gotten to the point where they're able to curate their lives. that there is a sense of celebration and interconnectedness and appreciation going on most of the time. And when it's not, it's for good reasons and they have tools for, for working with that.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So, you know, when we talk about having a ritual practice, The point of having a ritual practice is not to have a ritual practice.

The point of having a ritual practice is to create moments. Moments when we celebrate, moments when we're joyful, moments, when we're connected, when we see ourselves in the true magnificence of what we are. Right. And. So that, that's why we encourage a ritual practice, right? But, but the point, the point was always the outcome.

The point was the happiness and the improvement of happiness in the world. That's, that's, that's where we're going with all this. So if you don't have much in the way of a ritual practice, And you still find yourself feeling very contented and appreciative, and humble and connected and all those things.

Well, good for you.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: You, you know, if it ain't broke.

Yucca: Right. But you know, there's, the great thing is that there's a lot of different ways to, there's a lot of different ways to live,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: right? And each of us is gonna have something a little bit different and our goals are gonna be a little bit different and there's gonna be different ways of, of meeting those goals.

And so that some of the things we've been talking about today are, are tricks and. Tools that we can use to cultivate some of that, right? And sometimes that may be really paying attention to that gravel and bringing a little peace home with you. And sometimes it, maybe it's that finding what your glimmers are, and maybe it's having a nightly practice with your focus, right?

Or a circle. At the solstice or something like that. So I l I really appreciate mark, that we get to explore some of these ideas on the podcast and that all you folks are here listening and sending your emails in and being part of that discussion.

Mark: Oh, me too. So much. And it is so gratifying when I see. On the atheopagan Facebook group or the Discord server, or in one of the Zoom gatherings, when people say, you know, oh, I, I discovered this through the podcast, or you know, that podcast episode two weeks ago really resonated with me and it's changed how I do X and y.

I mean, that's what feeds me and keeps me going, right? The idea that you know, it's not like you and I have all the answers. But we can share what perspectives we have

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and collectively we can all get better.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Which is you, you know, the rising tide, right? Raising all the boats And so, you know, that's, that's really what I find moving and, and motivating about, you know, doing this.

And once again, I am so grateful that you you suggested doing a podcast and we were able to collaborate in this way. I think it's worked out so well.

Yucca: that's, it's been a joy really. So,

Mark: This sounds like we're stopping. We're, we're, we're not we're, we're

Yucca: oh yeah.

Mark: we're just a mutual admiration society.

Yucca: Yeah. But we do have something that we wanna mention another venue format for more of this great stuff,

Mark: Right.

Yucca: that's coming up.

Mark: You, you may, if you're in the atheopagan community in one way or another. You have probably heard by now of the atheopagan Web Weaving Online Conference, which is going to be held by Zoom on June 3rd and fourth. And we just wanna remind you that that's gonna happen. If you, and we'll put a link to the, the.

The webpage where you can go to register and download the program and all that kind of stuff. In the show notes, the the keynote speaker is going to be Jared Anderson, who also goes by the crypto naturalist. He's this beautiful poet of nature and appreciation for the cosmos. Just really lovely stuff.

And I was interested to learn, he's, he's actually got a book coming out, I think in two years which is about his struggle with depression and how that has led him to the natural world which sounds awfully familiar to me.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: So I'm looking forward to reading it when that comes out. But in the meantime, we get to hear him as our keynote speaker.

And so really encourage you to register for that and to come to that event. It's over those two days, June 3rd and fourth. Lots of interesting workshops and activities, opportunities to socialize. So, go ahead and click that link down below and we hope to see you there.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: So thank you so much, Yucca. This is, this has just been another lovely conversation. I really appreciate it.

Yucca: likewise, and we'll see you all next week.

https://atheopaganism.org/2018/04/22/hows-that-maypole-thing-work/

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

S4E15 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca,

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

Yucca: and today we have another holiday episode, so welcome to the next spring holiday for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.

Mark: Yeah, and of course we're gonna talk about all the different things we might call that holiday. But this, this episode will drop on May day. Which is May 1st and is kind of the traditional day for celebrating this. As always, we view these holidays as more of like, kind of a week window, you know, seven days, give or take.

So if you have to do it on a Sunday or on a Saturday, that's all fine. Don't have to be super, super precise about it.

Yucca: Right. There's no, you know, cosmic being with a clipboard, keeping track of how on time you were. So, yeah. So, yeah, let's talk about names. So Mayday Beltane is another very common name for it.

Mark: Which is a Scottish derivation of what was originally an Irish language word, which is

Yucca: Which is the month of May, I

Mark: Yes. It's the month of May.

Yucca: yeah. So it's the beginning of the celebration of going into, into May what do you call it, mark?

Mark: Well, I call it mayday unless you're talking about in the summer, i in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case calling a day in November, mayday is probably counterintuitive. What I call it then instead is 

oh, I think it was summer Tide. I think that was it.

Yucca: Some are tied. Okay, so you live in the Northern Hemisphere, but if you were in the Southern Hemisphere, that's the name that, that sounds like it

Mark: would, that I would use. Yeah. Because obviously it's pretty weird to call something in November, may day. 

Yucca: I have.

Mark: And the reason that I do that is that I try to avoid all of the cultural names for. The holidays. And the reason for that is that when crafting atheopagan, I deliberately wanted it not to be rooted in any particular cultural tradition.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: I wanted it to be something that was modern and belongs to everybody who chooses to practice it. And that didn't have any cultural appropriation in it.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: that's,

Yucca: And of

Mark: why I went that way.

Yucca: there are plenty of folks who are atheopagan who do have a really strong tie. To a particular culture and do then apply some of the traditional names from their culture to that. But when you were creating it, you didn't have that tie right. And you wanted to make it so that it was, that it was welcome to everybody, right.

That

Mark: Right, and well, and, and you need to bear in mind that when I was creating it, I was only creating it for myself.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It, it, the, the whole idea that this was gonna turn into a movement was really a surprise to me. And I don't have a strong feeling of cultural derivation from anywhere. My antecedents came here 400 years ago, and any englishness that they had has long since been lost.

So I just feel like an American settler who doesn't have a claim to being indigenous to this land. But has a primary relationship with this land anyway. So I didn't want to use words like Beltane and SA and those kinds of words because they're derived from other places that I didn't have a, a connection with.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So I call it mayday. And then there are the, the variations of beta or bina. Are there any other names that you're familiar with?

Yucca: Were you second spring? Yeah, but I haven't, it's not like some of the other holidays that have, you know, 15 different names. Usually I just hear either Mayday or Beltane. Those are the ones that are pretty common. And I'll end up using those. I'm not a particularly verbal person. Right. So I don't really associate the holidays in a strong way with a name.

The, I will use names to communicate with other people, but when I'm thinking about it inside of me, I don't think in words. So it, it isn't, it doesn't have that, which is funny because I talk and I write for a living, but, but inside it's, it, none of it is attached to words. It's attached to feelings and to smells and experiences.

It's a, it's a very different ex interior experience and it's but it's really about, it's, it's spring is what it really is for me. Right. There's different, we split the year up into eight seasons in my family instead of four seasons. It's really more like, well, there's different ways. There's also, we also split it into two seasons, right?

There's summer and winter. There's the, the the hots and the light side of the year, and the cold and the dark side of the year, and then there's the official four seasons of the calendar. But those don't really match with what's happening in our environment. But the eight seem to work a little bit better.

And this is sort of the, the midpoint of the second spring, which really is more like the spring that, that most people would picture for a spring. The spring where you have warm days, but little bits of chili nights and the flowers are coming back and the, there's insects. The hummingbirds have just arrived back.

Right. So it, it feels very spring now for us.

Mark: Great.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I, when it comes to, to seasons, I mean there we have something similar here. We have the gold time and the green time from about July through December is the golden time when all of the hills turned gold because all of the grasses have gone to sea, then died off, and then. When the rains come in the winter everything turns emerald green and it stays that way until about June.

Yucca: How beautiful. Mm.

Mark: so there's the golden time and the green time. That's one way of dividing the year. And then there's the dark side, dark half and the light half, which. They're sort of offset from the gold time and the the green time. When it comes to four seasons, I really prefer the way that they count them in Ireland, which is that this holiday is the beginning of summer.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Rather than being the middle of spring, which is how it's figured in the official calendar of the United States. And the main reason for that is that there's all this wonderful early music about May and, and the beginning of summer because that apparently is how it was calculated back in the 16th century and earlier.

And I just love singing that stuff.

Yucca: And that's what works for that climate too, right? For he here. It really doesn't make sense to say it's the beginning of summer because it's still freezing at night. Right?

Mark: Well, and, and for you, I mean, summer is something that's unimaginable in Ireland. It's, it's so much hotter and so much drier than anyone who's never left Ireland has ever seen.

Yucca: Yes. I mean, we we're not too bad in terms of the heat, but compared to what, what they experience, it's a completely, it might as well be a different planet.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. Just in terms of how different climates are

Mark: So all of this goes to one of the principles, well, no, I won't say principles cuz we've got official 13 principles, blah, blah, blah. One of the ideas that, one of the concepts that that we have in atheopagan, which is adapting your own wheel of the year. I mean, you're, you're hearing from just me and Yucca and tho those are two of, you know, millions of possible different ways of parsing the year, depending on where you live and what's happening in the natural world.

So in

Yucca: are important to you? Right. Which of those things do you focus on and which things don't matter as much?

Mark: Exactly, exactly. So and so, really encourage listeners, you know, if you're in the process of organizing your practice and kind of figuring out how you want to do what you're doing you know, be thinking about that for yourself. You, you can decide for yourself when you think spring starts and when you think summer starts.

You can decide what to call the holidays.

Yucca: And you can change.

Mark: yes.

Yucca: if you did something, you came up with, you painted this beautiful wheel and you put these labels on it, and now a few years later you're going, mm, that doesn't really match with what I'm experiencing now or what I'm valuing. You can change,

Mark: Yes, that's, that's what post-its are for.

Yucca: Yeah, exactly.

Mark: So, You know, just to put in, put in a word for people doing their d i y spiritual practice, you know, that is something that's really important in, in Ethiopia, paganism and naturalistic paganism generally, you know, we're not doing this to appease any invisible creatures. Were not doing this to be in conformity with some invisible forces.

We're doing this for our own wellbeing and our own happiness and our own celebration and our own wisdom and learning. Right? So that's a thing you can do and really encourage you to, to take that up. What are some other themes that we might talk about for this time of year?

Yucca: Well, this time of year often has, is a celebration of sexuality,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: The young adult, the sexuality that that kind of beautiful fertility all of that stuff is, is often a theme that people look at for this time of year.

Mark: Right, right. There's that old that old poem. Hooray. Hooray. The 1st of May, outdoor Sex Begins Today. Which of course goes back to the old tradition of going a main because it's finally warm enough that you're not going to freeze to death

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: in the forests of Europe. So this was sort of a loophole practice where.

Young couples could go into the woods ostensibly to be collecting flowers, right? But the reality was that they were being unchaperoned, and so it was giving them some private time to themselves. One. Story that I've heard. I don't know how true it is, but there's a story that children that were born of mayday couplings were named Greenwood or Green,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Which I don't know whether it's true or not, but my name is green. It's an interesting story, so I like it.

Yucca: Yeah, I've heard that story as well, actually. Yeah. Maybe that's why there's so many greens in the world.

Mark: Could very well be because we're not all related with one another. By any means. There are all these independent, freestanding branches of greens out there.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. I've always liked color names. Find it very fun, but there's some that you don't see. I, I've never seen purple as a last name for instance, but White, brown, green. Yep. Gray

Mark: violet as a, as a

Yucca: first name. Yeah. 

Mark: The flower, I think, rather than the color.

Yucca: mm-hmm. I've known some Indigos as first names as well and some indies, but I'm not sure if those are Henry's.

Or if those are, were Indigos, but yeah. 

Mark: Never known a yellow. I've never known anybody who was named yellow, either first or last name,

Yucca: I don't think I have either. Yeah. Hmm.

Mark: and of course you have William of Orange, and you know all those folks.

Yucca: Yeah. But I like color names. I love tree names, flower names.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Yeah. Star names as well.

Mark: Yeah. I, I, I like all those natural world names. They, they, they seem, they seem better connected to me somehow. Yeah. So themes, yes. Sexuality is a big one for this time of year. And. It's funny, a member of our community was saying that he was doing Google searches on on Beltane, and he said that all the results that were coming up with were how to celebrate Beltane or mayday without sex.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: this, this sort of overreaction of, you know, and, and I think that some of that is because of the rise of consent culture, that you know, that we want to have comfortable environments where nobody feels pressured to do anything and everything is all, you know, oriented around consent, which of course is what we want.

But that

Yucca: various ages, right?

Mark: right,

Yucca: That might not be something that you'd be comfortable bringing your pre-teen to or your, you know, seven year old or something.

Mark: Right, exactly. You've got families that are, you know, that still wanna celebrate the holiday and, you know, can maybe incorporate other, you know, sort of quasi sexual themes like fertility, right? Like planting vegetables or, you know, whatever it is. 

Yucca: Or flowers, right?

Mark: planting flowers,

Yucca: Flowers are the reproductive organs for these other beings. Yeah.

Mark: explaining how flowers work, why, why flowers exist. Because in the natural world right now, at least in the Northern hemisphere, in most places, it's an orgy going on out there. You've got, you know, all of these, these plants waving their sexy parts at one another and bees busily stir, you know, running around all the pollinators, running around.

Yucca: And there's just clouds of pollen. I dunno if this happens where you are, but we'll just see these golden clouds going by of just, and I don't have any allergies, so it doesn't bother me, but I know it makes some people miserable to.

Mark: I'm, I'm in. I'm the same way. I don't have allergies either, but particularly when the Acacia here in February and then when the oak trees start to bloom in May, there are people here who are just miserable.

Yucca: Yeah. For us it's the Junipers. And then Chaisa, which I think in other areas is called Rabbit Bush. It's this beautiful bush that we have with the golden flowers. Those are the ones that are the worst. And there's isn't really any time of year that in the spring, summer or fall in which there isn't some sort of.

Pollen. So it can be kind of a miserable experience for folks who have strong allergies. A lot of people will just be allergic to one particular thing, and then the other ones don't bug them,

Mark: Right. So if you are going out to have outdoor sex, first of all, make sure you have privacy. Secondly, take your antihistamine. 

Yucca: And maybe something a like a picnic blanket or something like that.

Mark: Yeah, because there's all kinds of stickers and bugs and All kinds of stuff. Yeah. So, that's one of the major themes of this time of year. And as you mentioned as I reckon the Wheel of the year, one of the aspects is the, the developing arc of a human life. And so this station on the wheel of the year is that of young adulthood.

You know, the, the late teens, early twenties all that sort of passion and juice and fearlessness and cluelessness and and horniness, right? All of those are, you know, things that are right in there with that population of people. And so all of those kind of passionate, creative, colorful, excited kinds of qualities become things that we can fold into our rituals and our celebrations.

Yucca: Yeah, it's a fun time of year.

Mark: It is. Yeah, it is. It's a great time of year. What else, what are some other themes? I know that you have different sort of families of creatures that you recognize. What is the one for this time of year?

Yucca: This is actually the annual plants and the early succession beings. So this really is the, you know, the. Flowers and the grasses and the, you know, things that we think of as weedy species that are coming in when there's been some sort of disturbance that are coming to cover up that bare ground and grow as quick as it can.

The dandelions, all of those sorts of things. And that a lot has to do with what's happening in the environment around me. This is when the annuals are That this is when they're starting to grow. This is also when planting is beginning. Right. So for annual gardens it's still, we really shouldn't be putting our annuals out for another week or two cuz we'll still get a frost or so.

But you know, this is when the leafy greens can be out. This is when you've got the stuff indoors that, you know, should be our tomatoes are, you know, two feet tall waiting to go out, you know, that kind of thing. So that's, that's the, the big theme for us. And then of course, it's also. There's just, you can finally be all the way out, In the, in the earlier spring you could start getting out, but there'd be days where you couldn't work outside. Now, The wind has died down. We can eat lunch at, we can eat our meals outside every day. It's the back, it's the back outside. It's the, so I guess that is kind of the summer's beginning part for us, even though it's not really summer, but it's the, that part of the year that's the outside part of the year has really begun.

Mark: Yeah, and I think that in the historical stuff, that's a lot of what it is. It's like, okay, it's finally okay to go outside again. The weather has eased enough and I mean, you know, you look at Northern Europe and they're definitely still getting freezes at this time of year, but the problem wasn't so much the freezing as it was the snowing or

Yucca: The wetness, you know.

Mark: Yeah.

All that kind of stuff. So, Yeah, I, I think that that whole idea of returning to the outdoors is really kind of bound up in this holiday. We,

Yucca: Oh, and all the baby animals are here.

Mark: right, right.

Yucca: you know, the, the baby animals in terms of the wild ones, but also, you know, the, the calves have been born, the lambs have been born, the little chicks are here. You know, all of that. They're, they're all here.

Mark: piglets and all of them. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's definitely, you know, a time of year when, you know, this whole reproductive thing is really kind of up. So. So that whole creativity, fertility thing becomes something that you can really fold into your practices and rituals. Because the, I mean, there's lots of ways to do that, right?

It doesn't have to only be like physical reproduction. It can be all kinds of creative endeavors that, that bear some kind of fruit, whether it's throwing a pot or painting a canvas, or writing a book, or, you know, Planting a garden, whatever that is. It's still something that feels like a fertile expression.

Yucca: Yeah. I, I really appreciate you bringing that up because, Fertility doesn't just have to be a physical, literally reproducing thing that it's a idea that is, is much broader than that. Now, that's a component of it, although funnily enough, this is not human reproductive or this is not our season, right?

Humans can be born any time of year, but humans tend to be born in the late summer, early fall for whatever climate they're in that just

Mark: sense cuz that's when all the food is available.

Yucca: Right. Well, and backtrack to what was happening during what time of year was it when the baby was conceived, you didn't have much else to be doing at the time.

Mark: That's right.

Yucca: Right. So it makes sense biologically, but it, that's not, it's just very interesting that it, our reproductive cycle isn't matching up with what we see with so much of the rest of nature.

Mark: Right, right. Well, and I mean, that gets you into the whole, you know, the mystery of menstruation versus a heat cycle and. You know, those are so different and why are they different? And you know, there's a lot of unanswered questions evolutionarily about why humans are the particular way they are. But we don't have answers to them.

So we have conjectures, but that's about it.

Yucca: Just pretty interesting ones. Right? And that a lot of that probably has to do with there being so little dimorphism between the sexes

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: compared to other other apes and other primates in general.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: So it's a fascinating field.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. That was your tension for today. We hope you enjoyed it.

Yucca: Yes. But why don't we talk about some of the. Rituals and practices that we have or ones that we've heard that are quite common, kind of give some inspiration for the folks listening.

Mark: Sure. Well, first and foremost, the most famous one, of course is the maple. And the May pole is a big phallic pole stuck in the ground with ribbons, depending down from the top of it. Usually there's some kind of a crown full of flowers that's put over the top that has the ribbons flowing down. And then there's a dance that you do around the may pole, which weaves the ribbons around on the pole, and it's, it's really fun to do.

It's a very joyous activity and it results in this very beautiful creation. On the, on the pole. I've danced a lot. I made poles in my time and it doesn't get old. It really, it's just, it's, it's like a spiral dance at, at Hallows. It's just one of those things that's really a beautiful old European tradition that is just, it's a Kuiper.

It's, it's one I really like.

Yucca: Yeah. We were laughing before, right before hitting play. Cause it's saying that we haven't done one of those in my family and I was imagining what would happen where I think my oldest would be able to do it, but my youngest would think it would be so funny to run the other way and just tie everybody to the pole.

The way dogs tie, you know, like will run around a pole on the leash and, you know, tie their human up. I'm. Positive that that's what would happen just almost instantly. So we don't do a pole, but we do take colorful ribbons and tie them into a tree that we have, and we see those ribbons blowing in the wind and fluttering around and it's.

It's really very beautiful and it's exciting too to go and tie them and probably some of them are getting snatched by the birds too, to incorporate into their nests, so,

Mark: Yeah. That is very consistent with an old Irish tradition, which is the may bush,

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: In which ribbons are tied into a bush. And there are, there's, there's a wish or something that goes with it. I, I, I don't remember the specific details, but It's a lot of the, the lore there is fairy lore, so it may have something to do with appeasing fairies or something like that, but it's, it's an old tradition that I know some people are still practicing. I. We, my partner Neman, I have done hanging of ribbons in trees before when we haven't had a maple celebration or even when we do, cuz we have these ribbon things that we can hang in trees. Last year, the Northern California Affinity Group for Ethiopia Paganism which calls itself the live oak circle.

We had a, a maple without the pole.

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: we had a, a ring of metal, which was actually from a mason jar. And then we tied our ribbons onto that with a wish for the year. And then holding our ribbons. We danced around in a circle, so it was like, You

Yucca: Oh, cool.

Mark: spokes on a wheel. Yeah, yeah, it was fun.

It was really a fun thing. And I still have the thing with the ribbons on it. It's on my focus right now. And we are meeting tomorrow actually to do a, a real may poll. The couple of members of the, the group got aole and stand for it and all the ribbons and everything. So we'll be doing an actual may pole tomorrow, and I'm excited about that.

Yucca: Now I'm remembering some. Did you have a story about a PVC pipe? As a

Mark: Oh, yes, that was a problem.

Yucca: is that what didn't work out so

Mark: No it, it was the, the maple was constructed of one of those heavy cast iron Umbrella stands, outdoor umbrella stands. So that was the stand for it. And then the pole itself was PVC pipe with a, with a wire assembly crown at the top, which had the, the ribbons coming from it.

And the problem was that, The tension as people were dancing around and weaving it around, the tension was stronger on one side of the pole than on the other. And so the whole pole began to band over and I ended up having to kind of stand there and hold the thing upright. While people were continuing to dance around it in order for it to work properly.

But the next year, the, the same person that had brought that napole had gotten rebar to put inside the pvc. So it didn't do that anymore.

Yucca: Alright.

Mark: But you know, one of the things that's challenging a about a maple is not everybody has a place to store an eight foot or

Yucca: Or, or greater, yeah.

Mark: you know, telephone, pole sized pole.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And so these, you know, using these heavy bases so that the thing doesn't topple over. And then some kind of a rigid e either wood, if you can get a big enough dowel, like a four inch diameter dowel or five inch diameter dow or even P V C will work, but you've gotta put something really solid inside it so it doesn't bend around.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: And it's still fun to dance around.

Yucca: I wonder if, you know those basketball hoops that you fill the base up with water?

Mark: Yeah. That's a great idea.

Yucca: right? You just take the, the hoop off. That might be something. I mean, that's still kind of big to, to store, but it's easier to store that, that you can just leave outside under a tarp or

Mark: Well, yeah. Or you put the basketball hoop back on it and shoot basketball.

Yucca: That too, right?

Mark: yeah, so it, you know, it could be a multi-use kind of thing. Little outdoor exercise and, and then your maple in the spring. That's a great idea.

Yucca: Yeah, because there, I mean, it's gonna depend on where you are, but you know. Yeah.

Mark: And I wrote a blog post a long time ago called What's Up With That May Poll Thing, or something like that. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. It explains everything you need to know about how to do a May poll ceremony and how the dance works and all that kind of stuff. And trust me as someone who is. For whatever reason, whether it's actually a brain development thing or whether it's a psychological thing incapable of learning dance steps, you can still do this one. All you have to do is just walk and raise the ribbon and then lower the ribbon and raise the ribbon and lower the ribbon. It's, it's really easy to do.

Yucca: That's good to hear cuz I am terrible at beats and remembering dance moves and all of that. Okay, well and what about some non maple. Traditions. I know there's giving flowers, baskets of gifts and flowers.

Mark: Even just little posey, little bouquets, leaving them on the doorstep of your neighbors is a thing that that is an, an old tradition gathering dew on May morning and washing

Yucca: rumor of such a thing.

Mark: have you.

Yucca: Yes. Do I hear it's moisture or something in the

Mark: Oh yes. Well, yeah, you, you, you don't have dew where you are. What you have is very thirsty soil that will suck up any molecule moisture.

Yucca: I'm sorry. Continue. Yes.

Mark: but anyway, you know, if you're in a place that does have Morning Dew, then you can gather that and wash your face with it. And it's supposed to re pre preserve beauty and. you from aging or something like that? I'm not sure, but it's supposed to be a nice thing to do.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it's traditional for Morris dancers in England to dance the sun up on May morning.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: I, on Monday, I'm actually going at five 30 in the morning for our local Morris team to watch them dance up the sun.

Yucca: Nice.

Mark: Which is,

Yucca: that may be when many of you are listening right now, mark is maybe dancing up the sun right now.

Mark: that could be, no, I'm not dancing. I'm observing.

Yucca: oh, excuse me.

Mark: I, I, I tried learning how to Morris dance and I was as bad at that as I was at waltzing, so just didn't work. So, Those are all, and, and actually that's a really wonderful thing cuz you've got, you know, people with the horns and they're clacking them together or sticks or swords or whatever it is.

And it all seems very old. Like an old, old tradition. What else?

Yucca: Paper flowers, that's one that we do, right? And we put things in our windows because we have a lot of birds around here. And so we put like kind of sticker things. And so in the winter we have paper snowflakes that the kids make and we will be trading those out for paper flowers. And that's just so that the birds don't.

Fly in because they have a, a, I'm sure this happens everywhere, but they have a really hard time seeing the windows. So we put little things into the windows so that they know, hey, this is not an open door. You can't fly through it and, you know, smack yourself. So, but paper flowers are just a lot of fun.

For that. And all around the house. And that's another great thing to give to neighbors too, is make some cute little paper flowers. And some people do really elaborate, you know, make roses and things like that. We just cut out petals and blue, stick 'em together and, you know, make our pretty, you know, rainbow flower.

And this is our all pink flower and our all blue flower. And how does that flower have polka dots? But it does. So.

Mark: Yeah, so generally speaking, flowers, ribbons, and expressions of love.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: You just, you, you can't go wrong this time of year with those three things, you know,

Yucca: And seeds.

Mark: seeds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.

Yucca: So it was just a fun, fun time of year.

Mark: It is. Yeah. Yeah. I really enjoy it. Yeah, so I'm excited actually to have a couple of things to do this year. Last year there really wasn't much to do. The community that I used to do a Beltane ceremony with, well, a whole weekend celebration It's kind of having some problems right now, so I'm, I'm staying away.

What else were we, I think that may be about it.

Yucca: Yeah, I'm sure we'll think of some things as soon as we hit stop,

Mark: Right, of course,

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: as always. But yeah really encourage you to get out of the house and away from the screens at this time of year. You know, go see some nature, go, you know, smell some flowers. There's a lot going on that's really lovely right now. And you know, I, and I hope that you'll have a ample chance to enjoy it because, Like everything, it goes away and then a new cycle has come and there's new stuff to enjoy, but it's not the same.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. We hope you have a wonderful mayday Beltane second spring summer tide, whatever you call it, and we'll see you next week.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks so much everybody, and thank you Yucca. 

Hi, everyone! Yucca is unavailable this week, so we're taking a little break. Here is a rebroadcast of our episode interviewing Mandisa Thomas of Black Nonbelievers, in case you missed it!

blacknonbelievers.org

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

S4E14 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, mark,

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we are going to talk about children's activities for springtime. In most places by now spring has sprung and there are green shoots and leafing trees leafing out and flowers and the sweet smell in the air. And the weather has become, if not mild than milder. And it's, it's just a time for celebrating spring and.

And we often associate childhood with spring.

Yucca: Right. And I wanna say that before we get going, we're gonna be talking about kids, but a lot of these activities can be for kids of all ages, right? Just because we're going to be thinking about children doesn't mean you can't be your. 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, whatever age you are. Right? So if you've got kiddos in your life, that's awesome.

And if you just wanna feel a little bit young at heart, then that's great too. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, that's a really important point I think, because I mean, at least as I celebrate the Wheel of the Year when there's a focus on children around the time of the spring e Equinox, and then going into young adulthood around mayday. It's, it's not only to celebrate those members of the community that are at those stages in their life, it's also to celebrate those qualities in ourselves, right?

We, you know, we all still have a kid inside us and that playfulness and Astonishment of discovery and kind of wonder and awe that that comes in a childlike view of the world are great things for all of us.

Yucca: Yeah, so this time of year we've. The new life or the waking up of life happening, the popping back in a lot of our holidays have to do with this reemergence of life and newness of things. Is there anything else that, that really speaks kid to you about this time of year?

Mark: The bright colors.

Yucca: Hmm mm-hmm.

Mark: You know, the colors of flowers, the, the mating plumage of birds the, the fruit trees leafing out and flowering and we associate bright colors with this. Both with childhood you know, those kind of primary colors that are used in a lot of children's toys and so forth. But also with this time of year with brightly colored eggs and jelly beans and things like that as well.

So, that's something else that I associate with this time of year is just really super colorful, bright color palette.

Yucca: Right. Yeah, I see that too. And for us also, the getting back outdoors. And our climate, this really is when we can be spending lots of time outdoors again. I mean, we, we do anyways, but it's far more pleasant to do it when it's not literally freezing, right? When you can go out and, oh, you don't have to have the shoes on and you can not worry about bundling up every, you can just go out, right?

You don't. Make it this whole ordeal to get them all wrapped up and to get you and the, you know, you can just go, there's just, there's a, there's a freedom, there's a just sort of, what's the word I'm looking for? Like 

Mark: Well, there's, there's an exuberance that goes with that, right? I mean,

you, you feel that soft air on your skin.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: You know, that wonderful soft spring air on your skin and after being indoors for months,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: that's a, a very pleasant change of pace.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, why don't we get into some of the things? Yeah.

Mark: okay. That's what I was gonna suggest. Let's do that.

Yucca: All right. Well, we were brainstorming a little bit before and came up with a huge list of stuff to get into and I'm sure that we'll miss some of the things. 

Mark: will.

Yucca: but the first thing that really pops into my mind is the spring cleaning. I know you might think of this as more of like a grownup sort of thing.

But I think that at least for us, having the kids fully involved with all of the household activities is really important because they're part of our society too. Right. And if you want them to be able to do their laundry when they're 20, well, They need to start doing their laundry earlier on. They need to be part of that process, not have it be this huge ordeal when suddenly they're on their own and Oh goodness, right?

Like, no, they just, you know, they're part of the household. They're, they're involved in that. And so same thing with any other activity we're doing. And so the spring cleaning it, there's something about spring. I know it's cliche. There's, I think we've recognized it for a long time, that it's, you know, you're opening up the windows, you're letting that fresh air in.

There's that new beginnings happening in the outside world, and so we kind of bring that into the inside world. And I, I think it's really important for the, you know, their agency, their self agency and that, and getting to choose, okay, well, you know, let. Get rid of these things, they don't fit you anymore.

Is there one or two that you wanna save as a keepsake? And if so, where are you gonna fit that? Because there's a limited amount of space right there. Right. And just having them be part of that process and, you know, making it kind of a fun thing, I think is, is really powerful.

Mark: Sure. Yeah. When you've been closed up inside for months, things pile.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: just, just a lot of junk. You know, you, you put something down and forget about it and then two months later it's still there. Well, it's time to move that thing now.

Yucca: With three things on top of it.

Mark: well, yeah.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And one thing, you know, kids really like doing adult stuff.

They like being involved in things that feel real. Right. So, you know, you'll. You know, kids with like toy razors and, you know, stuff like that cuz they, they want to pretend to be adults

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and so, you know, hey, why don't you help me clean out the garage is, I mean, you know, to an adult that may sound like I don't want to clean out the garage, but to a kid it's like, Hey, I get to clean out the garage.

Yucca: Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you sell it. Right. And it depends on what else they're doing. If you're saying, why don't you stop playing Minecraft right now and come do something else, you might not get the buy-in, right? 

Mark: Yeah. 

Yucca: you, you gotta kind of think about how to do it and have it be an invitation. And I mean, it's such a tricky balance that, you know, every family figures out what works for them with their values and the particular people that are involved.

But for me, I, I try and be very careful about not making it a requirement. Right. Not making it this sort of, well, if they aren't, you know, if they don't wanna come work with me in the greenhouse, like that's okay. I wouldn't force my partner to do that. Right? So why would I, you know, force my kid to do it?

I don't wanna make it this obligation thing. And so there's a, there's some trust in there, right? That kind of has to be built between the people involved. And, but most of the time I find that it ends up is, you know, if I'm mindful about what space they're in, they often are pretty interested in coming and participating and doing.

You know, their share of it. That's not to say that we don't have things that are their responsibility, right? They certainly have their chores and things like that, but when it's inviting them to come do new things and learn new things and participate with, fully, participate in that, like the adult world of running the households making sure that it isn't this gloomy pressure thing I think is really important.

Mark: Yeah. And I think as you say, there are ways you can sell it. You know, if it's, if it's like, you know, in the morning at breakfast, The next three days are special days. They are spring cleaning days. We're going to, we're going to, you know, get our whole place together here. It's really exciting. So I'm gonna be working in the garage who'd like to help me?

Yucca: Yeah. And ooh. You get to pick out the music when we're in the garage, right? You're working with me in the garage, you're the one who gets to pick the song or you know, that kind of thing. And again, it's just always gonna depend on the particular person, because for some people that's exciting. And for others they're like, I get to pick out the music, so what, like, that doesn't mean anything to me.

Right. But, you know, yeah. But setting aside, it's that time. And. This is one thing that this kind of general parenting thing that we found because I know that a lot of other parents really struggle with the, ourselves included. I'm saying this is something that we as a society have is that struggle with the balance between screen and non-screen time.

That we try and set an expectation of, well, during the morning time, like that just isn't screen time. Nobody's doing screen. And the hardest thing is just if parents aren't doing screen, kids aren't doing screen. It's just not, that's not, when you do screen. Screen is something that happens in the afternoons and sometimes into the evening, but not at night.

Right. Like you just set up the expectation. And just kind of have to stick to it and, and be the, the model for it. And I always find that the hardest part. It's easy for me to like tell them what to do. Be like, you can't be on the screen. It's a lot harder for me to put mine away, but it's absolutely ineffective if I tell them not to do it while I'm sitting here doing it because they're not stupid.

Right. They have humans. Humans have a fierce sense of fairness. yeah. So,

Mark: Yeah, and you know, the, the, the concept of injustice is something that we developed very early.

Yucca: Oh,

Mark: Yeah. You know, if you're doing it and I'm not allowed to do it, there's something wrong.

Yeah. So one thing that, it occurs to me, because we were gonna talk in a moment about decorating the

house for, for the season.

Right. And it occurs to me, you can actually tie this to the spring cleaning piece, where it's like we clean it first and then we decorat.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. 

Mark: to get to the fun, crafty decoration part, we gotta clean it first. And so it becomes, you know, a kind of a seamless project where the whole thing, you know, we're decorating, but of course to decorate we've gotta get this stuff out of the way first.

Yucca: Yeah, you, you gotta have a clean wall to do that with. Get rid of those hand prints. We all have those hand prints. You know what hand prints I'm talking about, right? Yeah. There's just so many of them everywhere, so I love that. Yeah. And again, just always making it into that kind of fun thing. The point of it is to, is I think of it as to be joyous, right?

That this is, this is life we get, you know, why is it that we want our houses to be clean well, so that it feels good to be in them, right? So that we're healthy so that we enjoy being in them so we can be productive. But why do we wanna be productive so that we can be happy, right? It all comes back to, you know, what's to.

Just enjoying the life that we have. Right. And, you know, we we're taking care of our loved ones, but again, so that they can be happy because we love them. 

Mark: Really well said. Yeah, I, I think it's important to always, you know, root. Root, our actions, our re you know, and our recommendations of actions in exactly that, you know, how is this making your life better or how is this making the world better or both?

Right.

You know, those, those, those are the, you know, to, to my mind, those are the two edicts that we have being alive, you know, live a really full, joyous, amazing life and.

You know, leave something better than it was when you got here. And I mean, that's a very fulfilling kind of life to have. And so, yeah. Exactly. So

Yucca: Yeah, so there's the decorating, the spring decorating. I always think bringing some of what's happening in the outside world, into the inside world. I was just sharing with Mark earlier, our daffodils have just start, so we're recording on the 15th. So where I live, our daffodils just bloomed. And Mark, you were saying they were blue for you.

It was January, right?

Mark: of January. Yeah.

Yucca: Yeah. But a couple cut daffodils, you know, in, in a little. We don't have any fancy vs. So it's mason jar, right? So we have it sitting in a mason jar on the table and bringing in some of the things. We still have a lot of our feathers up and things like And just bringing some of the stuff from outside in.

And of course, my kids love bringing in rocks. We have piles of shiny rocks all over the place. The cat then goes and knocks down cuz they're the perfect size for knocking down. So in the middle of the night,

you're 

Mark: You got a whole ecosystem going there.

Yucca: We do, yes. And then you step on them. And it just reminds you that you're alive when you step on rocks, brought in by children, knocked over by cats and all of that. I think the, that gets at just to re to remember also that, that. When it comes to kids, you just kind of gotta go with the flow with them sometimes.

And they're not gonna be perfect at things. They're learning. This is them learning for the first time. And we've had years and years of practice at everything from, you know, how to move our hands to regulating our emotions when we're disappointed and, and they haven't yet. And this is them learning to do that.

And so, It can be tricky to let go of some of the expectations of how it's gonna look and how well to get it done and just say it's okay. It, it's really okay. As long as it functions, as long as, you know, nobody's in danger and gonna get hurt and it's healthy. Right. You're not, it's not dirty to the extent that it's unhealthy or something like that.

It's okay. Right. You know? so, and I think that's good to remember with ourselves. Coming back to the, there being inner children and all of us just to, to give ourselves that Grace A. Little bit sometimes too. So

Mark: Yeah, that's, that's well said. I, I really agree with that.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: you can bring in flowers from the outside. You can bring in like bows from a lilac bush that's blooming or cherry tree that's blooming. All of those things make for pretty nice sort of tabletop decorations. You can bring in bright, bright spring leaves.

I mean, we tend to think of leaves as being more of an autumn thing. But those bright green spring leaves, you can string 'em on. And hang them up or just use them sort of to carpet the horizontal surfaces in your, your house, whatever,

Yucca: Or a little clear bowl, like if a little glass bowl, put those in them. It, you know. Very beautiful. Yeah. So next, why don't we talk a little bit about crafts. So art, there's art and craft, right? And people are gonna, there, there, there's a vinn diagram there and where they overlap people is gonna depend on each person's preferences, right?

For me, I think about art as something that doesn't necessarily have a purpose other. Just the, the process of making it and the enjoyment of looking at it. Right. Whereas the craft has a, has another purpose behind it. Like a, kind of, the traditional kid craft is weaving the pot holder or something like that.

So you have the process of making it, but then it's also an object that has a, has a, a purpose afterwards. Right.

Mark: Uhhuh Uhhuh.

Yucca: so springtime, there's definitely lots of the sorts of, you know, making the bird feeder or that kind of outdoor sorts of things. What we look for is things that the kids can do that's important to the.

The household where they get to be part of what needs to happen, and that has a real purpose to it. Because again, coming back to they're, they're not, they're smart, right? They know when we're just making something up to give them busy work and they know when it's something that really matters and it's so important for their.

Like they're self-efficacy, right? To, to know that they are contributing and they are able to contribute. So when we can come up with things, tasks for them to do that can be uniquely theirs that are kind of crafty sort of things. I think that's a really nice opportunity. Right. And that's just gonna depend on what's happening in your, what your household is like.

What are you rural, urban, are you. Temperate, tropical. You know, all of those things are gonna vary.

Mark: Right. Although that said, bird feeders are a pretty good choice because there are birds pretty much everywhere

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: of one kind or another, and if you put out food for them, they will eat it.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: They, they, they will show up and they will eat it. We have a very active couple of bird feeders here at our place.

One for hummingbirds and one for PA birds, and yeah, they they sure go through that bird seed. It's amazing.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and that's one of the, the jobs, which is my kids, they go out and they. They take out the bird seed and they clean the water dishes as well, because we we're in a very dry environment. So having water out is almost more important for our wildlife than. The bird, the seed, right? It's easier to find food than it is to find water.

But we wanna make sure that that's clean so that we're not spreading diseases, right? So they go out and they swap out, depending on the dish. We have a couple that they bring the dish in and we just swap it out every day, right? So it gets washed every day with the dishes and then it goes back out.

And and so that's one that that they know. If they don't do, then the birds. Get their food, the, then the chipmunks don't get their food and the squirrels

don't. Now, I could imagine for a kid who struggles with anxiety, that might not be the, a good fit for them, right? Where if they, that might be anxiety inducing.

But depending on the personality, you know, for mine, that that's something that is an empowering experience for them and just as, as their grownups, we just need to be kind of tuned into how is this? How is this likely to be received with the particular person that we're shepherding and, and helping?

Right.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: But it's lovely for them to be like, oh, I haven't fed the birds yet. The poor things. They're gonna be so hungry. Right. And it's like all the eight in the mornings like, yeah, it's okay. You could go do it. They'll, they'll appreciate it.

Mark: they're not quite that fragile, but yes, you, you remembered and it's your job and that's great.

Yucca: So, and I think I shared my favorite one. This is not a spring activity, but just for a suggestion of types of activities that we did this year that worked out so lovely. Is our, our house We heat with passive solar and a wood stove. And so we have to light a fire in the cold months of the year.

And so in the fall, the, the kids gathered lots of little sticks and made the little Kindle bundles. And that was their job. And so, When every time we lit a fire, we were lighting it with the bundles that the kids made. Right? So that kind of activity, and that was just so lovely because every day it was something they, they're a little bit too young to actually be starting the fire on their own right.

We're really big on them doing. Doing lots of stuff in the household, but they're still, my, my oldest is only six and a half, so I th you know, wait a few years till she's lighting fires. But she still got to be part of that really important thing. And the littlest, he got to be part of that as well and get to feel like, wow, I contributed, I'm part of the family.

I'm important and. You know, I, I plan to be there as long as I can for them, right? I, I wanna make it to the triple digits if I can, but there will be a time when I'm not there to help them and they have to do it on their own, right? And so I want them to be as, as prepared for that as possible in a way that is as Smooth, right?

As, as could, can be, right? Because people, we'll figure out how to do it. Humans will figure out how to survive. But if it can be as painless a process as possible, I think that's nice.

Mark: I think so too. Yeah.

Yucca: then they can spend that effort on, on something else. 

Mark: Mm-hmm. So yeah. So do you want to talk about other kinds of craft activities? I mean, the, the, the classic for this time of year is dying eggs.

Yucca: Absolutely.

Mark: It's a little late in the year this year for doing that. But it's still really cool especially if you use, especially if you use natural dyes. And.

There are techniques you can use to put like leaf prints on the sides of the eggs and stuff, really make them beautiful. And it just then, then you have hard boiled eggs you're going to eat. And just a little more color to your breakfast.

Yucca: Yeah, and you can also if you're using natural dyes, you can boil your eggs, peel them, then dye them. And then you actually, when you eat your eggs, you have colorful eggs. And that usually goes over pretty well with the kids,

Mark: I

Yucca: right? It, it won't go all the way through to get that top, you know, few millimeters or so.

So you get like the little ring and if you slice the eggs in the like discs, that's really nice.

Mark: Okay.

Yucca: oh, and doing deviled eggs and dying it different colors. That's really fun.

Mark: Okay.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I can't imagine deviled eggs with blue blue yolk mixture.

Yucca: yes. Well, and if you, if you dye the the outside of it a little bit too, and this is, and this might be just a little kid thing, but a lot of kids that I've known really like when you, when you play, when you present the food in a more fun way. Right.

We, we we'll make little like scrambled eggs and I have cookie cutters and so I'll fry them in the pan in the cookie cutters.

So it's the shape of a T-Rex when they eat their eggs. Right? So much more fun. Now you have t-rex eggs, right? So, and you could definitely 

Mark: And then,

Yucca: the sort of spring themed things, right? 

Mark: then they can, they can tell their friends that they had dinosaur eggs for breakfast.

Yucca: Well, and they did My, my kids are very fond of telling me that chickens are dinosaurs, 

Mark: Oh, okay. There you go.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: They sure act like dinosaurs.

Yucca: Yep. Well, why don't we talk also about the outside stuff, because since spring, you know, this is when we can get back outside. There's all kinds of fun games. There's all the, you know, the classic childhood games.

You're capture the flag. Hide. Yeah, hide and seek. You know, setting up little like scavenger hunts. Oh, speak. As long as we're talking kids. One of the traditions that we have started doing now that, that we're in the losing teeth time period, is we don't do any of the like tooth fairy or Santa Claus or any of that because I'm uncomfortable with.

Lying about it. Right. And I know some peop that's just something that is not comfortable for me. So instead of having a tooth fairy come and give the kids money, we do a scavenger hunt every time they lose a tooth. And then there's something like a little prize at the end. Yeah.

Mark: Nice. Nice. So there's still a ceremonial recognition of this thing that's happened and a fun activity and a little reward. Yeah.

Yucca: For the, my oldest one, they lost their first tooth. They'd been asking for a watch for a while because I wear a watch. And I had been reluctant to give them a watch because the. Pretty rough with their hands and breaking things and all of that. But when they lost their tooth, I got a watch for them and that was their prize.

But each of the steps on the scavenger hunt was going to places where they have done things that they've been growing up and maturing in the family. So they went to the greenhouse where they help water the plants and we went out to the wood pile where they help go get wood and out to the bird feeder.

Where they feed the bird. Right. And going from spot to spot with a little note about like, How you've been contributing and growing up. And then at the end, they got to get their watch. They were mature enough and that they had shown they were mature and old enough to get their watch when they lost their first tooth and all of that.

Mark: Oh, that's love.

Yucca: so so I think that they're with families, it's, there's so much. Possibility. And it's just, it's coming up with ideas like that. It's just you get to play, right. Play with these ideas of what, what is it? And, and bringing in some of the silliness to it or the fun, you know, I tried to write as teeny, teeny tiny as I could with that, right?

Cuz we were, pretend we were playing with the tooth fairy thing. She's very insistent though that that stuff doesn't exist. She's. You know, we don't believe in God's. They're important stories, but we don't believe in them. And the tooth fair is kind of like a God, but not really. Because I don't have any books about her.

And I'm like, okay, well we could give you a book about her. So, but coming back to the, the outside stuff, I think that getting outside, playing outside and something that we don't, it's amazing how much we don't have of this in our modern lives, but just having free unstructured time is just so critical.

important for littles and really important for adults too. Just to be able to be out and just do whatever your curiosity leads you to, or notice that butterfly that's going there, or, you know, enjoy. Taking that stick and seeing how many times you can break it in half, whatever it is that coming up with your adventure games, your make-believe stories about how you can transform into a giant snake or whatever it is.

It's just so, so important for kids. And the spring just feels like perfect for that because we, you cannot do all, you can do that stuff inside, but there's something very different about being outside out of the physical structure. Right. Out of these boxes that we live in, these literal boxes, right?

If you're inside, I'm guessing that there, a few of you might be listening to this on a walk right now, but the vast majority of of people listening, I bet you're inside a box right now. You're inside a metal box, which is your car. You're inside a, a wooden frame box, which is your house, or maybe it's concrete or steel.

But we spend a lot of time in these really defined structures that just feel very, very different than being outside with. Messy lines and flowing forms that are moving because there's a little bit of wind going through them in the clouds and there's just so much more,

I don't even know the words, but you know, it's, it's outside is messy. Right.

Mark: Yeah. There's so much more to experience out there, obviously.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It's, it's always moving and changing. The sky is always changing. And it's full of those shaggy fractal shapes, right? The repeating patterns that make up the shape of a, of a coniferous tree or a particular kind of shrub or whatever it is, and having those kinds of patterns.

For some reason is very reassuring to people. It's good for our mental health to see those kinds of things and we find them very beautiful which is, it's good for us. The experience of beauty is good for us. So, while you're outside, you might want to have something to drink. So I have a recipe for raspberry lemonade.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And so let me give you this, it's pretty, should be pretty simple. You can jot it down, you know, you can stop the podcast, jot things down, and then continue. It is tasty and refreshing childlike beverage for spring.

So, what I'm, what I'm about to, to tell you about serves 12.

Yucca: Ooh.

Okay. 

Mark: So you need three quarters of a cup, and I'm not gonna give the metric conversions. I've got 'em, but I'm, I'm not gonna give them three quarters of a cup of fresh or thawed, frozen raspberries, nine cups of water, two cups of freshly squeezed lemon juice, which is about 12 lemons, and then two cups of very fine or powdered.

Which is less than was in the original recipe that I adapted this from. Because I like my, my lemonade kind of tart. I don't like it. Super sweet.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So you puree the raspberries in a blender and strain them through a siv to take the seeds out into a pitcher, and then you add everything else and whisk it together until the sugar dissolves and pour over ice and. It's very simple, but it's delicious. Really, really good. And if you need an adult version of this, it goes well with vodka.

Yucca: Yeah. And with the sugar you could probably put less in, taste it, and then just keep adding to taste.

Mark: Yes, that's a, that's a good idea because people have different amounts of tolerance for sugar, different amounts of, of taste for sugar, so

Yucca: But it seems like it's such a simple, easy recipe that you can just add in as you need. Yeah. 

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: Yep. And it's, it's a delicious, tasty beverage to have on one of those warm spring days.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: When kids have been running around and running around and running around and running around and they're finally starting to flag, might be time to plunk them down and have something with some electrolytes in it and you know, get some water into

'em. 

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then before we know it, it'll be the hot time of year, right?

Mark: yep. Yep, indeed. It's not far off for sure.

Yucca: Hmm. Well, is there anything else, mark, that we should touch on in our 

Mark: You know, not that I can think of 

Yucca: activities?

Mark: other than just to encourage everybody to go out and play, you know, go out and, you know, kick a ball around or, you know, do whatever it is that you like to do outside. That's fun. It's this is a great time of year in the Northern Hemisphere to be out under the sky and just really enjoying the great outdoors.

So, really encourage you to do that in whatever manner works best for you.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us, everyone.

Mark: Lovely to, to have you with us. As always, thanks so much for supporting the podcast. And just a quick reminder, the conference that we're doing in June ticket sales are still registration is still open and will be until a few days before the conference. The. We'll, we'll put the link to how you get the information and register and all that kind of stuff in the show notes.

Yucca: And I will be doing a kids activity. So there will be an activity for kiddos if they want to come and join us for this, for that. So,

yeah. 

Mark: Okay. 

Thanks everybody.  

theAPSociety.org/AWW2023/

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

S4E13 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca,

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

Yucca: and today we are talking about Christianity and Paganism worldviews and really kind of exploring that idea.

Mark: Yeah, because when you really drill down into a pagan. Way of understanding the world. It starts to really rub sharply up against the, the models for what's important in the universe and how we should live and all that kind of stuff that are taught to us by the mainstream culture and in the mainstream culture, in the English speaking world that is entirely suffused with Christianity.

Yucca: Right. So much so that I think we're very unaware of the extent. It really takes some deep reflection and. And exploring an investigation of other world frameworks to even be able to recognize what is coming from Christianity and what's influenced by Christianity and how what we're doing is different in some ways.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: right. It's the water we're swimming in

Yucca: right.

Mark: and so it becomes background to us. We, we don't notice that we're swimming, you know, we don't notice that we're moving through air because air is around us all the time, right? So we don't pay very much attention to air unless it's moving at high speed or carrying water or something like that, or smoke or whatever it, it may be.

Yucca: little bit off. Yeah.

Mark: Right. So it's a. So let, let's dive in and let's, let's talk about what some of those kind of core Christian beliefs are, and not so much beliefs, but frameworks for how to live and what's important and those kinds of things. Moral frameworks.

Yucca: Well, I'm doing a lot of reflecting on this throughout the week because we, we talked about last time, oh, what, what are we gonna talk about next week? And so we had a little bit of time to do some brainstorming and what it, what kept coming back for me is the relationship and role of authority. And I think that this is something that, that in our conversation today, we are stick.

To Christianity, but I think this is something that is shared with other monotheistic religions in general, at least the ones that I've been exposed to. And the approach to there being a God or this deity who is the ultimate authority, who is something of a parent role. But parent in a very authoritative kind of way I think is really central to a lot of the other topics that we're going to get into in terms of why you do good things versus why you do bad things and how do you see what is good and what is bad and what your roles are.

I think it, a lot of it really comes down to that relationship to a.

Mark: Yeah, I really agree with that. That, I mean, we, people talk about. The father. Right. It's, it, it's this patriarchal idea of first of all, male supremacy, which is sown pretty thoroughly throughout

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Christianity. But beyond that, it's this authority figure who hands down the law and you obey it. And if you don't obey it, then you get punished.

Yucca: Right. And they know best. They know better for you than you do for yourself, and

Mark: Right. Well, in this case, they know everyth.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: Right?

Yucca: And so don't question it.

Mark: Yeah. Cuz they know everything. They're always right. They're, they're not capable of making a mistake. All of those things are true and that is a very powerful model, but to my mind, not a very realistic one. even if you believe in and, you know, the, the medieval philosophers would get themselves all twisted in knots about this, the theologians you know, can, can God create a stone that is too heavy for him to lift.

You know, these kinds of questions because there are tons of paradoxes in the idea of something that is infinite, infinite knowledge, infinite strength, infinite power infinite presence, you know, omnipresent everywhere around us all the time watching.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: There are just, you know, kind of rational, logical problems with. But it is a very powerful, compelling set of models, particularly if it's embraced by a society that is similarly constructed. So if you've got a society that's built with an authority at the top, like a king,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And the king is always right. The king can do whatever he wants. Everybody else is subject to the whims of the king.

Then having a religion where that's the same model works out pretty well for the king. Right, and for those that are close to the king?

Yucca: Well, and for the smaller kings underneath that king, right? You might not be the top king, but you get to be the king in your house. If. You're the guy,

Mark: right. Yes.

Yucca: the oldest son, you know?

Mark: the man as the king of his household, you know, and his home is his castle, right? It, it's not a mistake that the coronation of kings throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance was always done by a religious figure

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: it was basically saying, There is a hierarchy in the world that starts with God, and God is acknowledging that you're at this particular high point in the hierarchy.

Yucca: Right, and this is so deeply ingrained that it has, that, it really takes us a moment to step back and think that it doesn't have to be that way. There doesn't have to be that hierarchy of power, but we take it for granted because it's, even in today's world where, you know there are, there's a king in England, right?

But it's not the same way it used to be. But even today that that structure is still around. It's still in the back of our minds. It's still how we think about society, even though. That's not politically how it's working exactly anymore, but it really is at the same time. It's not one single king, but we're still basing our whole way of relating to each other with who has more power over the other person.

Mark: Sure. Think of a workplace, right? You've got either a sole proprietor who is the king or queen. Or you've got a board of directors who are basically kings or queens and they invest power in a chief executive who is like a regent of some kind and everybody else has, is down below on the authority pyramid and has to obey the directions of what edicts are handed down, or they are punished, they are fired, or they are disciplined, or whatever it is. The same happens even in very benign circumstances. Like, you know, like our education system, we assume that, you know, a kindergarten teacher is a very benign figure, but in the process of going through kindergarten and grade school and all that, children are learning to obey an authority figure that stands in front.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: That's, that's core to what they're learning about how they should relate in the world.

Yucca: Yeah. And that's, that is the system of, that is school. Right. Whether you're, whether it's a private school, whether it's a public or a religious school or whatever, that's, that's the process of school.

Mark: Right. And it's hard to break that even when you want to. When I was teaching undergrad students when I was in graduate school, you know, you, you try, you move the chairs into a circle and you try to make it more about a sharing of experience and expertise rather than an authority thing. But you still have to turn in grades. You know, you still have to take attendance. You know, these, these things are mandated. You don't have any choice about it. So, and if you just arbitrarily decide that you're going to give an a to everyone in the class, you get in trouble.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: they don't, they frown on that, right? Because the entire academic model is constructed around the validity of those as, BS, CS, deans, and f.

Yucca: Right. Well, and even when you purposely choose to, to use a different model, you're still working with, having come from that model to begin with, and you fall back on what you know and what you're comfortable with and when you're working with adult students. They have a whole, they've got their whole life of experience behind them as well.

So you spend a lot of the time working on the system and the process instead of the content for that. yeah, and that's something, you know, as a, in our family we don't use, even though I am a teacher and, you know, working on my doctorate in this and all of that, but we don't use that, the schooling as our framework for education.

Very, very consciously, but we find ourselves slipping back sometimes into that. Well, yeah, but I'm the parent and I said so right And have to go, wait a second. Is that I, is that really what we want? I mean, sometimes I do have to like swoop in and be like, Nope. Can't touch the fire. But, but outside of that, it really takes a lot of dedicated thought and self-awareness to step out of that and, and try to, Different because it's, it's how we were raised, right?

Mark: And we're not encouraged to be different.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And that is in, in the broadest sense, we are not encouraged to be diverse because a part of what's necessary in order to get everybody marching in the same direction in order to fulfill the desires of some hierarchy, is that they need to submerge their diversity in their conform. And conformity becomes a very important value. And this is true. It's not only true in in Christianized countries by any means. I mean,

Yucca: We're

Mark: conformity is a big

Yucca: it's our experience, right?

Mark: Exactly, but conformity is a big value in much of Asia as well. The, so when we ask ourselves, And, and we'll get to what we're talking about with Paganism in a minute.

But you know, what, what would it mean to be a person with agency rather than a person who's framed in the world as a servant of some higher authority?

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: You know, what, what kinds of choices could we make? What kinds of responsibilities would we have? What sorts of freedoms would we have? think that those are some of the deep questions that becoming a Pagan really asks, being a pagan isn't just about, well, I'm now, I'm doing this groovy stuff with all this, you know, witchy aesthetic or you know, you know, old cultures like, you know, the Norse culture that died out, or the Greek culture that died out kind of, you know, reconstructing that.

It really, it's much deeper than that. It's, it's really more about how can I see the world through eyes that are less informed anyway, by that authoritarian model.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: So the, the relationship to authority is a big one. The idea of relationships as possessory is another big one.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: The, you know, the idea that children are possessions of their parents, that spouses are possessions of their spouses and that then ties into the whole bodily shaming. Contempt for the material world with the idea that there's this other sort of spirit world that is higher, more elevated.

And that's not just in Christianity.

Yucca: Yeah. You hear that. Oh, some higher power or lowly and you know, and the things that are, that are earth earthy are the things that are, that are bad. Right. That are given that

Mark: Those are the things that are dirty, right? Because they're associated with dirt, which is a bad thing.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, and then, then you start pulling on that thread and you get into all the body shame and all of the the sexual shame and the just all the many, many, many ways that self-hatred gets sewn into.

The idea of being unique and individual and fulfilling your desires rather than running away from them

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: suppressing them. All of this stuff is, is the, is the operating system for our, for our culture folks. Even though our culture is rapidly de christianizing, those same paradigms are still very much up and.

Yucca: And even for those of us who were not raised Christian, right, even those of us who were raised pagan or were raised in any other religion, it's still. All around us. It's still, I mean, I loved how you called it the operating system, right? That's what it is,

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's it's in the ways that we have to. Edit ourselves when we talk about our lives to keep the stuff that's gonna freak out ordinary people out.

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: Right? It's in the, it's in the ways we have to tell our kids, well, it's fine for you to do this at home, but don't do it out there

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: people aren't gonna understand that they're going to disapprove. There are, there are countless little moments in every day when we ask ourselves, how is this gonna fly with the others

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: in a way that is deeply informed with that authoritarian shame-based earth denying kind of modality. Taken to its extreme, which it is in our modern times, that modality leads to the kind of exploitation of the planet that is causing us such existential crises, right?

If, if you denigrate the material to the point that it's nothing but a pile of resources to be mined, which the Bible very clearly spells out, it is according to. Framework how can you hold a pile of resources as sacred instead of, instead of understanding it as a a, a living fabric, an interconnected set of relationships of which we are a part and have both benefits and responsibilities.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: It's just such a different way of looking at the world, and it's not the one that drives our economic system, our political system, or our culture.

Yucca: Right. Now there's definitely places in Paganism because we have to remember Paganism is a, is huge. It's a big umbrella. Right. And there's definitely places where some of the things we've been talking about have been brought in and are. Are shared, right? There are some traditions in which the, the hierarchy and that structure is very important.

And there are other traditions that, that are purposefully breaking away from that and not embracing that kind of framework or trying not to. So certainly when we talk about paganism and we. We as always, cannot speak for every pagan and every form of paganism, but are talking about the our experiences and our particular flavor of Paganism.

Mark: Right, right. Well, and I think that to some degree, that's a generational thing. I think that when. When modern neo paganism really kind of started up again which was in the fifties and sixties, I don't think any many could really imagine a fully non-hierarchical way of organizing anything. You know? And I'm sure that there are some, you know, communes and intentional communities and so forth that we're trying to do something else, but.

By and large, an average person, much less an a retired English civil servant, would probably think, well, this is the way things should be organized. You should have things in tier. And people go from one to another tier and they get higher and higher in status and power.

Yucca: Because that's just how society works, right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, but here we are, you know, almost a third of the way through the 21st century, amazingly enough, and we are able to imagine now alternatives for one thing, our ability to have conversations about something other than Christianity in a religious context. O other than Abrahamic religions, generally in a.

Other than in, in that context, has jumped markedly just in the last 20 or 30 years.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. And you're speaking about the, the broader community, not just Paganism in this case,

Mark: Yes, yes. I, I, I think you know, more ideas about how we can relate with one another, relate to the world, relate to the cosmos are being bandied about now than were before. I mean, Bertrand Russell caused an absolute outrage when he published why I Am Not a. Which I believe was in the 1940s, maybe a little earlier than that.

Not sure. That kind of thing just sort of disappears without a ripple these days. There's plenty of people writing stuff like that.

Yucca: Right. Yeah. Just it gets a shrug. Yeah. And

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: what other percentage of the

Mark: Yeah, you and a lot of other people. And so my big question to those folks is, well, what are you then, what are you gonna do? Which is what Athe, paganism was a stab at answering.

You know, I'm not just an atheist and I'm not just an an earth revere. How am I gonna, how am I gonna implement that?

Yucca: Right,

Mark: So,

Yucca: and I, I think it's kind of like accents. Everybody's got something. You just don't notice it when everyone around you has the same as you. You only start to notice it when it's different than what you're hearing.

Mark: right, right. And I mean, these things continue to be a challenge as. Time rolls forward, even though the level of credulity in authority generally seems to be falling, there haven't been very many alternatives presented to that framework. And so people just tend to drop back into it because it's what they know.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So let's talk a little bit more about what. What aspects of Paganism really fly in the face of that conventional paradigm? I mean, certainly the whole relationship to the body and sexuality are very, very different.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And that doesn't mean we're in about a f, you know, a free love, free for all. But we're, we're about responsible relationships, however they work for you.

Yucca: Right. Well, and just the idea that pleasure is not bad, right? That just because something's pleasurable doesn't mean that it's a negative thing. I think that's huge because that is a big. Underlying assumption that if it, if it feels good, it must be bad for you somehow. And we don't have that assumption, or we try not to have that assumption.

Mark: Yes. Yes. That, that's better said, I think because the truth is, you know, we, the, the two of us and you know, the, the people in, in the English speaking world who are practicing pagans, You know, we were still raised in our society and we're still gonna be, it's like soaking in tea. Even after you get out of the teacup, you're still kind of tea colored, right?

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: There's, there's just not a lot that you can do about it, and you can spend time over time, you know, washing that off and can become, Stronger, less shame filled more, more about your own agency and decision making, more courageous, all those things. But it takes time and it is a process, and I don't think anybody ever completely gets there.

Yucca: Right, and you're continuously exposed.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: not like you decide, okay, now I'm, you know, I'm a pagan now and now none of those things are going to continue to influence me. It's just everything in the past that I'm healing from. I was like, well, no, you, you read the newspaper, you talk with your friends, you read a book, you listen to podcasts, you watch like all of these things, those are still influencing you every day.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, especially. It's one thing if you've kind of carved out a little economy for yourself where you work for yourself and you, you don't have to plug into big hierarchical structures very much. That's one thing. But most of us have a job and jobs are organized tend, you know, they tend to be organized hierarchically.

Yucca: Well, and even those of us who are self-employed, we still are dealing with clients and we're still dealing with banks and you know, that whole, that that's all still there. It may not be quite as in your face as, you know, going and clocking in and having your supervisor who was their supervisor and their bo, you know, but it's still around us.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah. And because it's still around us, I think some people, especially folks who have escaped very authoritarian religious contexts, they often unconsciously drag a lot of this framework along with them into paganism

Yucca: I think that certainly happened with the idea of faith. Faith being such a big deal. Belief, yeah. The, the literal belief and in deity and the, the faith in your, in your faith. Right. With a capital F,

Mark: Yeah. The, the faith in magic, the yeah. All, all of those things and, and the idea of sort of, you know, driving out the heretics. Kind of goes along with that. It's like, well, if you don't believe the way we believe, then you're not one of us.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Whereas you know, to my mind there are few enough pagans as it is.

I mean, I think the estimate is a million and a half in the, in North America, something like that. There's few enough of us as it is that we don't need to be splitting with one another. I'm reminded of the. The scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, where the Judea and people's front and the people's front of Judea are yelling at one another.

Yucca: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's one of the things that, that definitely got. Pulled in, and that's something we've talked about before on the podcast

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: of how on some levels, some of that is very new, but it's also been around for a long time as well. So,

Mark: Yeah. But there was definitely a cultural shift that happened with, with the big influx there. There was a big influx into paganism in my experience in the 1990s and A lot of those folks were fleeing patriarchal, authoritarian, kind of punishment oriented religions, various flavors of Christianity, almost exclusively.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it was only a few years later that this idea about having to have faith and believe literally in Gods as, as actual beings rather than ideas. All that stuff really came to the fore. And, you know, maybe that wasn't a bad thing. Maybe it was, maybe it was okay. You know, for those of us that don't follow that way to get a little bit more organized and, you know, explore the ideas that underpin our way of looking at the world, you know, which is, you know, part of the result of that. That expectation.

Yucca: Yeah, it's certainly something that I don't remember from my childhood. Now, some of that might be simply because of the particular style of my family and who were the people that we would, that we would spend time with and celebrate with. But it, I didn't start really encountering that until. Late teenage years, early adult years, finding people who literally believed that way, or at least were vocal about the literal belief, were vocal enough to tell me I was wrong.

Be like, you can't be a pagan you. That's not what Pagan is. That's just a philosophy. I'm like, okay, whatever you do, do you.

Mark: Yeah. I've heard that one too. That's just a philosophy or I've heard it's it's secular humanism with LARPing or You know, a lot of really kind of insulting stuff. And before, before that arose, we never even talked about theology. We just got toge, you know, it was a doing thing. We got together and we did our seasonal rituals and we celebrated and had our events and all that kind of stuff.

But

Yucca: I, I do

Mark: have their beliefs.

Yucca: God talk about goddess, but I don't remember like the goddess being. Like, I don't remember the goddess being the way like my Christian friends would talk about God.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: it didn't seem like, like, I mean, this is, this might feel a little bit offensive for somebody from a theistic perspective, but my child understanding was that like God was your like imaginary friend that you could talk to, that you could use as your justification to do whatever you wanted.

It had never, like when I heard people talk about the Goddess, it wasn't really like, Person that was like your imaginary friend that you like prayed to and stuff. It was, I always kind of understood it as more, they were talking about like the force of nature and life itself, and it was very more of like this kind of metaphorical thing.

But again, that might have just been

Mark: and the power of femininity, I mean, the whole sacred feminine piece too. And you know, I know a lot of folks are still doing, you know, that that kind of wicked god and goddess thing, but it seems to me that some of that, when it really arose in the 1980s, it was really kind of a product of its time.

Third wave feminism was just starting to break and. You know, and with it, the, the sort of hiding off from hardcore secular Marxism of some, you know, earlier generations and there was just a lot of exploring going on. And one of the things that women, especially were realizing is we're not in any of these stories

Yucca: Yeah, well, not in the way that, that is very good for us.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Your, your

Yucca: We're littlest.

Mark: cautionary tales and you know, object lessons and stuff like that rather than people in charge and heroes and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah. I don't know. I just, it still feels very strange to. When I encounter somebody that is just burning with rage over the fact that I call myself a pagan and I don't believe in literal deity, where is the harm to them? I mean,

Yucca: Well, it'd be, it's an identity issue, I think, right.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: That they've built their, their identity around this. I am a pagan and this is what it means to be a pagan, and there's this kind of strength in the gatekeeping and there's like, it feels empowering and in like a very, in that, that righteous kind of anger way.

So I understand the, I don't. I don't think it's very constructive in the long run, but I, I can understand where they're coming from with it, but I think it causes a lot of pain in the long run.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it would make a whole lot more sense if we could put all that aside and sit down and have a beer and, you know, enjoy one another in a, in a pagan context. And I've seen that a lot. I mean, I see that at, AT conferences and so forth where you know, we're able. I, when I go to a conference, I don't see the devotional Polytheists huddling in one corner.

You know, while the non theist pagans huddle in another corner and the Wickens are in another corner. That's not how it works. You know, we, we do, we do big rituals together. We socialize, we go to parties. It's a, it's a generally a very amicable kind of environment. And, you know, bringing that, that burning rage into it, I guess is what I really don't understand.

You know, it's a hard enough world out there as it is, and I find pagan spaces to be so much generally, so much kinder and more open and more tolerant. That's what I want to foster.

Yucca: Yeah. I mean, I find myself just being delighted to be around other pagans and, you know, just enjoying that. Wow. You're pretty interesting. This is fun. Oh yeah. That's a nice chant. I like that. That feels good. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Yucca: Hmm. Well, we had, we had talked about this. Doing this topic this week because it's Easter. And that's one of those, Easter is one of the two big Christian holidays. There certainly are lots of other ones, but those are like the big, Christmas and Easter are like the big ones that even the kind of mostly Christian just by name folks will celebrate.

But it is one of those ones that's interesting because it does have a lot of overlap with what many Pagans are doing this time of year with the Equinox. Right. And so it's one of those interesting ones where there's kind of. That Like, Hmm. What is, what's, what part of it is Pagan? What part of it is Christian?

It's always very funny to hear the complaints from some of the real Christian folks about, oh, this is just so pagan like, like it's a bad

It's like, yeah, yeah. Say it is pretty pagan. You're talking about like, Fertility and Yeah. Yeah. And celebrating fertility and you know, and the springtime and all of that, you know.

Ah, terrible. But it is, I do get a

Mark: but that said, but that said, I mean, Easter is celebrated by many, many Christians as a, a celebration of sort of the redemptive quality that Spring has, right? The, the renewal of the world,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: That comes in the spring, which is lovely. It's. Human sacrifice to, to pay off the debt of sins that we didn't even commit.

Things that, it just baffles me. I, I just,

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: I mean,

Yucca: It was Women's fault,

Mark: I don't know why anybody would buy into it. What was that? I'm

Yucca: It was

Mark: Although it was women's fault, of course. Of course it was.

Yucca: Yeah, I mean the, the, the mythology behind all of it is very interesting and, and tracking and learning about that is, I find that all fascinating, right? And the, how some of those stories are, you know, far older than

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Judaism itself.

And I was learning about Noah recently actually, about how the story of Noah, there's. The, the great flood and the, the hero saving people from the great, like that's way, way older than Judaism is really interesting. So, and there's a lot of, of those in there.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, I can't say that I put a whole lot of effort into sort of, you know, biblical history study. It's just never been something that's appealed to me very much. 

Yucca: It wasn't for me either, but my kids are really interested in mythology right now.

Mark: Uhhuh

Yucca: Right? They're,

Mark: and I'm sure they're curious about these stories that are driving the society they're in.

Yucca: Absolutely. Yeah. And they're very clear. You know, my, my oldest, who you've met several times is, you know, regularly likes to remind me that we don't believe in them. That they're just stories, but they're important stories. That's what she says. They're stories, but they're important stories. And so, you know, they're just Just reading up all the mythology books that we can get right now.

It's very, and it's really interesting cuz they'll notice connections between, well this story we're reading about in the Norris mythology, that's kind of like the story that, sort of like the one in the Egyptian or the Greek mythology and the, that's really interesting to see their, them tying together.

And I wish that we would, could know, we can't really, but know what relationship there is between those stories. Did

Mark: For

Yucca: somebody a version that got passed on word of mouth for, you know, hundreds of years? Or is it just coincidence or, you know, all of that is,

Mark: Well in sailing trade, you know, overland caravans and sailing trade, you know, for as long as there have been people living in communities, they've been trading with one another. And when you know, you don't just trade resources, you trade culture because you know, there you are after a long day. You know, selling your barley for leather hides or whatever it is.

And now you're, you know, sitting around, seated around, abrasion, having a drink with whoever you did the trading with, and you're gonna share stories from your culture and that that means they're on the move.

Yucca: Well, and marriages between different groups. Right. Your mom's from one place, your dad's from another. You grow up with both. You know, you grow up with both stories. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, so I, I guess to sort of sum up all this, I mean, maybe there was a time when it actually was an improvement in the lot of humanity for this authoritarian, patriarchal kind of model to come into place. I. Necessarily think that's, so, I think it may just have been what happens when suddenly you've got an economic surplus and people are fighting over it and somebody wins which, you know, came with agriculture.

Yucca: Came with end of the ice age.

Mark: Right, right. But if there was a time when that served us well, it's well,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: serve us well anymore. And so, you know, a part of what I have been about in my paganism has been wanting to increase the agency and the liberation and the justice for people and for the earth throughout the world. I. It's time for us to start unpacking all these assumptions and making other choices about how we organize our societies, about what life is worth living for. Is it worth is, is life really about the accumulation of stuff?

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: I mean, honestly, it's a big question because. There's an awful lot of people out there whose identity is deeply tied up in what kind of car they drive.

Yucca: Right. So it's a, it's an ongoing journey, right?

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: I'm glad that we're doing it. I'm glad that we're thinking about it and, you know, working on it every day and getting to have conversations like this on the podcast.

Mark: Yeah, me too. Because as I said, I do think that it's generational and I think this is a moment, right. And things will continue to evolve from here. I mean, I don't, I don't expect that we've got all the answers or that we've figured everything out, but We're working on part of the big puzzle, and if we can do our our part and kind of figure that bit out, then we will have done our work for the larger whole.

Yucca: Yeah,

most of

Mark: you for a great conversation, Yucca. This was cool.

Yucca: yeah, likewise. That saves a good, good talk and enjoyed it. I've got more to think about than I did coming into the conversation, so that's always fun.

Mark: a great thing about, that's a great thing about inquiry. It always leads to more questions than you had when you started.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: Wanted to remind people real quick. We are doing an online Zoom conference of the atheopagan community, which is called the atheopagan web Weaving. That's gonna be on June 3rd and fourth, which is a weekend, and you can register for that at the link that we'll put in the show notes.

Yucca: That's

Mark: They're on the atheopagan Society website, which is v ap society.org. So, hope that we'll see you there. And in the meantime, have a great week and we will see you next week.

theAPSociety.org/AWW2023/

https://www.jarodkanderson.com/

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

S4E12 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark.

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today, we are just going to have a short episode in which we announced the exciting thing that's coming up in June, so let's get into it.

Yucca: That's right, which is June is not very far away. So welcome to April, everybody. Here we are. So in two months from now actually, why don't you go ahead, mark. What are, what's happening in two months from now?

Mark: two months from now, we are holding an online conference, which is going to be called the atheopagan Web Weaving 2023, and it's an opportunity for us to gather together over Zoom Potentially hundreds of us because we're, we have the infrastructure to accommodate that. And we'll have workshops and informational SEC sessions and classes that will happen in breakout groups.

We'll have a keynote speaker. We have a special session of the adult salon, which will be a burlesque class that'll be happening by some well trained professional burlesque dancing people. Yeah. So, and there's just, you know, we're gonna do community acknowledgements of various rights of passage.

People who got married or had a baby or got divorced or retired, or. Whatever, you know, whatever those things are. There's just, there's gonna be a lot of really cool stuff at this conference and we'll talk a little bit about some of those offerings today. But the main thing to know is the conference is from zero to $50 to register

Yucca: Right. So no

Mark: can't afford.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: That's right. No, nobody will be turned away for lack of money. We're asking people to shoot for $20 as a registration, and the money is going to be used to compensate the people that are teaching the workshops as well as the keynote speaker. And we're, we're hoping to at least break even on this event.

So that's what your money's going towards is actually producing this conference. You can find out all the information about this at the atheopagan society.org, which no, which is the ap society.org/a w w 2023, which is short for atheopagan web weaving 2023.

Yucca: and we're gonna put the link in the description so you don't have, yeah, you can just go click on it from your whatever app you're using to listen to this. So you can just go ahead and click right there.

Mark: You can download the program there. There's a button that you can click to register on, sign ingenious. The whole thing is very transparent and easy to do. We've got, since we since we launched this morning, we've already got a bunch of registrations. So it's all working and we'd really like for you to come and join.

We're gonna have breakout sessions that are just for socializing, so you can hang out with fellow atheopagan and non theist naturalistic pagans and get to know one another. So we're really excited about this. We've been working on it for a while, and hope that you'll come.

Yucca: Yeah, and, and it's really exciting to have an online gathering because last year we did have an in-person gathering, which was amazing, and we're gonna have one again next year. But that's not something that's sustainable for us to do. Every year on a large scale, right? Maybe local groups might be able to, you know, there might be the California or Col, Colorado or UK or something like that.

Groups that can do it every year, but for bringing people in from all over, and of course we can't all travel. That's not, you know, necessarily a possibility for everybody. So being able to, Gather and connect with each other. Get to see each other's faces, although you don't have to. Right. If you're not Yeah,

Mark: video. If you don't want to, or even your audio, you can just sit and.

Yucca: Right. So we, we really want it to be as welcoming and open for everybody, right? And so that's why one of the reasons that this is so exciting is it's gonna be a chance for us to connect. And of course, you know, we can connect through Discord and Facebook and all of that, but there's something very different about it being an event,

Mark: Yes. And being able to see one another's faces it's, it's, it's not as good as in person and we all know that, but it is still pretty amazing to be able to see people from all over the world who are of like mind in terms of their, their religiosity. Your spirituality and to share ideas and information and get to know one another.

So I am, I'm really pretty pumped about this. And you know, as Yucca says, one of the things that was. Kind of a sad thing about the Suntry retreat that we had last year is that inevitably there are people that just can't afford to buy a plane ticket or to, you know, to go

Yucca: Take off of work or whatever it is. Yeah.

Mark: whatever it is, and this really will enable anybody that can simply get the time on June 3rd and fourth,

Yucca: Mm-hmm. Saturday and Sunday.

Mark: Saturday and Sunday.

Just to log in and, and have this experience with us together.

Yucca: Point, and it's nice that there's, there's some just social time, but there's also workshops. So I find, personally, I like to have a structure when I'm meeting new people. So that we have something that, oh, we're coming and working on this together. Right. That's kind of nice sometimes to have that, that structure to.

To center the social interaction around. But then also there's just the, for people who just wanna just hang out and just talk, that's an option too. And so throughout the day, different times, different options. So if you work in the morning but you don't in the evening, then there's plenty for you to come and, and do in the evening or vice versa.

Or you can do one day but not the other. Or if you wanna spend all day, both days, that's awesome too. There'll be a lot. So,

Mark: Yeah, so what I'd like to do now actually, is to read off some of the program offerings that are in the program for this. In the first workshop slot on Saturday, there are three offerings, sarcastic tau which just is very intriguing just for its title the way of the atheopagan cleric, which is one that I'll be teaching about performing that kind of service in the community, and Stardust communion, connecting with our stellar roots through science, observation, and ritual.

Yucca: Ooh, I think I know who

Mark: Pretty cool, huh?

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: Yeah. And then in workshop, slot two is reclaiming the sacred, how to heal after leaving Abusive Religion. I know that'll have appeal for a bunch of people in our community. There's a, a workshop on imaginal practice, which is about sort of the inner world of creativity.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and then there's a, a, a sciencey presentation on wastewater treatment and the magical world of microbes because a member of our community is the manager of a wastewater treatment plant.

Yucca: That's

Mark: that's, it is, yeah. I'm so excited about it. Do a community Bardic circle, which is an open mic where people can read poetry, and you don't have to have your camera on if you don't want to. You could just have your microphone on. You, you can read poetry or spoken word

Yucca: camera on and have, and be, have your whole costume. Right. That's an option too. Yep. If you want that, that excuse to, to dress up in that fantastic feather gown and cloaks that you have. Here's your opportunity.

Mark: Yeah. And in fact, you don't even have to do anything else. If you're dressed up that fancy, you can just show us your beautiful duds.

Yucca: That's right.

Mark: Yeah. So we'll have that. We're later in the evening on Saturday, we're having a dance and cocktail party. So, one of, we'll, it'll be in breakout. And we'll have several of them open.

One of them will be streaming dance music for people to enjoy. And the rest of them will be social groups. So you'll be able to move from room to room and visit with people that are, that are there in the breakout rooms. And that's just Saturday, so I'm gonna leave it there. So you can, if you're, if you're interested, you can go and look for the program and see what the rest we're offering.

But it's I am, I'm so grateful to the folks that have been working on this. I, I know that our community members are atheopagan Society Council members. Rona and Michael have both done a lot of work on this, and it's super exciting. And now we get to talk about our keynote speaker,

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: pray. We, we just announced this this morning.

We are really excited about this. The keynote speaker, which will be during the lunch hour on Saturday lunch hour Pacific time is Jared k Anderson, who is also known as the crypto naturalist. He is a poet and a writer and a podcaster. His material gets shared in the atheopagan Facebook group pretty frequently because his, it's just lovely stuff.

At, in one of his pieces, he talks about how we are all part of an explosion and at a certain point, apparently, Adams just get sort of haunted, and that's us,

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: The, the, the arisal of consciousness to be able to to look back at the universe and see ourselves and see what's going on here. It's, it's all there.

It is. It's all kind of mysterious. Adams sometimes get haunted. I love.

Yucca: Mm. That's wonderful.

Mark: yeah. So I'm really looking forward to seeing him and actually he has a sale on his audiobooks right now. He has two books of poetry and they're four bucks a piece on audiobook, so go and look for that. We will put a link to his website in the show notes for today as well, so you can go and learn more about. So, Yucca, do you have other questions or things to offer about the upcoming conference?

Yucca: Hmm. Well, you said it's two days, right? Those are two full days. So

Mark: Sunday. The Sunday is a little shorter. It starts later in the morning and it runs a little bit shorter,

Yucca: So you can do those Saturday evening activities, be rested for the morning. Yeah.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: And of course Mark did not mention all of the Sunday activities. There's, there's quite a few of those. 

Mark: Are, there's more workshops and all kinds of stuff.

Yucca: Right. You know, I'm, I'm not thinking of anything else. Of course. Any of you listening, if you've got questions about it go ahead and, and take a look at the link that we've got there. Anything else you can think of sharing, mark? Yeah.

Mark: There is a, a question button on that page that I, I said the URL to. So if you have a question, just fill out the contact form and we'll, we'll get back to you and answer your question.

Yucca: Yep. And of

Mark: So,

Yucca: the sooner we know who's planning to come, the better it is for the organiz. So if you are planning to come, it is really helpful just to let us know right away or sooner rather than, you know, the day before. So,

Mark: Yeah, that's really important because if currently our Zoom account capacity is a meeting of up to a hundred people now if we have. Of more than a hundred registrants, we will simply buy more capacity from Zoom, but we need to know that they're coming, right? So

Yucca: we would be delight if

Mark: can register, the better.

Absolutely we'd be, you know, over the moon if we had more than a hundred registrants. But we, but we would need some warning on that so we can buy the capacity from Zoom and people don't get bumped out.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So please register early and often, just like they say about voting.

Yucca: That's right. Well, and hopefully this, we, this will be something that we can do again in the future. I think there'll be a lot for us to learn, and I hope that it, it becomes an ongoing tradition.

Mark: me too. And in the lead up we'll have interviews with a couple of the program presenters who who are going to be doing workshops or offerings at the conference so we can learn more about them. And I think that's pretty much about it, but we should talk about what we're gonna talk about next week as well.

Yucca: Oh yes. Yeah. So we've got some interesting topics coming up. And we are. In a interesting month, right. We're in April, which is a month where there's a lot of kind of mainstream religious holidays that are taking place.

Mark: Yes, yes. It's Earth Month, which is cool. We're, we're all cool with that. But of course Easter is also coming up soon and so it's a, it's a good time and Ramadan is also happening right

Yucca: Passover. Yep.

Mark: Yeah. So it's a good time for us to talk about the contrasts between Pagan values and our perspective on the world and those other kinds of religious path.

Yucca: Right. And I think we'll probably get into a little bit about how some of those other paths have influenced the larger culture within which we live. Right, and even us as pagans, how are we influenced, even though we're not Christian or we're not, whatever those particular religions are, we're still steeped in a culture that has those values and you know, which ones are ones that, you know, we're choosing to examine and step away from and which ones were not, and how do we differ and, and that kind of thing.

So I think that'll, that'll be a really interesting conversation.

Mark: I think so too. The, well, I'll save it all for next week. That's, that's what I'll do

Yucca: Sounds good.

Mark: I've, I'm, I've already, I already have wheels turning, so there you go.

Yucca: Yep. Well, this

Mark: Um, once again, oh, go ahead.

Yucca: Oh, I was just gonna do a wrap up. Sounds like you're doing a wrap up though

Mark: Let's do them on top of one another and see if people can understand us

Yucca: the same time. Okay.

Mark: No, no, no.

Yucca: No, go ahead, mark.

Mark: Well, as always, we really appreciate your listening. Thanks for the emails and comments that we've had recently. We really appreciate it. If we haven't gotten back to you yet, we will. We, we do always respond to our emails except for the ones that pretend to be invoices that we don't actually owe.

So,

Yucca: of those. Yeah.

Mark: yeah, it's a.

Yucca: Apparently our crypto wallet keeps getting hacked or something like that. Right.

Mark: Yeah. And we don't have a crypto wallet, so that's, that's a, a

Yucca: we've had a few Nigerian princes too that wanna give us a lot of money, so, yep. Anyway,

Mark: but we have to, we have to

Yucca: to. Yes. Yeah. Alright.

Mark: Yeah. All right, everybody. See you next week.

Atheopagan Web Weaving 2023 https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/aww2023/

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

S4E11 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

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

Mark: And I'm Mark.

Yucca: and this week we're going to talk about dreams.

Mark: Ooh.

Yucca: Actually can't believe we haven't talked about dreams yet.

Mark: It is kind of surprising. We were, we were both kind of mystified as to why we haven't done that yet.

Yucca: Yeah, and I'm quite curious because we've never had this conversation. Not only have we not had it on the podcast, but we haven't had it off of recording either. So I don't know what your thoughts, opinions, experiences with dreams are. So I look

Mark: Oh, well, I, I, I hope, I hope they're shocking.

Yucca: Shocking. Okay. Well, I think a good place to start is def definitely with what are dreams.

Right?

Mark: Yeah. And I, as you say, I don't know whether we'll have a similar perspective on this. I tend to think of dreams as kind of like the, the brain running a screensaver, drawing on bits of memory and themes of concern, and. Things that are kind of weighing on your mind, whether it's your conscious mind or your unconscious mind, and then putting together these fantastical sort of stories in a.

In a very, in an almost random sort of way. There's a lot of random generation in, in dreams that you can see. So that's what I think is the brain doing that and contributes to imagination. It solves problems. You know, we have so many examples of people who have discovered things waking up in the middle of the night going, aha, it out.

Right?

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So that's what I think it is. How about you? Yuck.

Yucca: Yeah. Your, your understanding. It really reflects mine as well. It's something that I haven't dug into research on. Right. I don't have a deep understanding of neurobiology. You know, I certainly have read articles here and there and things like that, but it's not something that I've really done a lot of research in.

But, but what you were saying about it being basically our, our brains. Processing stuff, right, our experiences, putting together ideas and there being a randomness to it. But I think there's also sometimes parts of it that aren't quite as random though, because we are trying to figure stuff out.

Mark: Yeah. Oh,

Yucca: we're definitely trying to figure stuff out, piece it together, and there's definitely. There. I mean, there's different kinds of dreams that we can get into. But that sometimes it's just our brain rerunning through the stuff that we're doing during the day. Right. And sometimes it's working on, you know, particularly difficult experiences that we had, you know, running through trauma or things like that is, but I, I think it's a way that, that our.

that our brains are trying to make sense of what's going on. And it seems like there's something in there tied in with the sleep that we don't really understand a lot of the mechanisms for yet. We know that sleep is really important for us. We know that it evolved. Really early on because we see it in lots of other species.

We see it in very, very different species than us. I remember a few months back there was an announcement about a scientist suggesting that they had recorded what appeared to be spiders having r e m sleep, which is. Type of sleep that we have dreams in that of course they're not inside of the, the minds of these creatures, but that looking at the way that they behaved seemed to match with what we thought other creatures did at the same time that they were going through r e m.

And so if it is so widespread, there has to be a really important purpose for it.

Mark: Right, right. Well, there's no. . Well, there's two questions there, right? I mean, the first one is, what's the point of sleep? And we have really not very good answers

Yucca: Yeah, we know what happens when you don't get it though.

Mark: Yes, we, we know that all kinds of things go very, very wrong when you don't sleep. So apparently it's staving that stuff off, but we're not entirely sure why those things go wrong.

So that's still a point of investigation. And then on top of that is this layer of. Well then these dreams happen and, and what's that about? I tend to agree that I think it's the brain. Some of it's just random. Some of it's just sort of, you know, rerunning stuff that it's experienced before or imagined before.

But some of it is the brain chewing on naughty problems that, that just. You know that aren't easily solved and that are bugging us,

Yucca: Right. And we should say before going too much farther, that not all sleep has dreams and not all types of, so there's different stages of sleep and then there's different types of dreams as well. There's these sort of surface level ones and then there's, we were talking about the REM sleep a much.

Deeper, more vivid kind of dreaming, so,

Mark: Right. And RM sleep tends to be more narrative as well. There tends to be a story, whereas in lighter phases of sleep, it can literally just be flashes of different kinds of scenes and events that don't really tie together. And even though the story can be very fantastical there can be a kind of a line that you can draw through it, and then you can try to figure out what's going on there.

And that's, that's part of the age old human attempt at interpreting what dreams mean.

Yucca: Right. So that's a nice segue into the next section, which is, you know, what are they mean to us

Mark: Mm-hmm. yeah. My answer to that is uncharacteristically vague. Cuz I tend to have very, you know, kind of concrete opinions about things, but I think sometimes they can be very meaningful in very concrete kinds of ways. They can be telling us something. Our subconscious wants us to do or thinks is the right thing to do or you know, or expressing a fear or an anxiety or an anger, you know, something that, that relates to something real in our lives.

And then other times, as I said, it's just screensaver and there may not be a lot of content there.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And part of the trick is differentiating between those categories.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, I think. There's a component to dream interpretation that's very popular. You'll find lots of books about it where it has certain symbols mean certain things. And I don't buy that on a universal level. I don't think that when you see a Blue Falcon. Flying through a cloud that to every single person that is going to mean the same thing because that I think that each person is going to have a different association with those types of symbols.

And I think there might be things that specific cultural groups might have, certain associations with things that would be more likely that, oh, well if you grew up in this particular, Culture and in this particular religion or something like that. There, the symbology might be very different to you than it would be to somebody else.

And so, you know what a snake means to somebody who grew up in a Baptist family. You know, there, there might be some similarities between those people, but not that snakes u mean this, like it's a code that we can translate.

Mark: Yeah, I, I agree with you. I don't think that there is a lexicon of. Of things that can be experienced in a dream that have direct correlations, like a dictionary that, that doesn't, has never made any sense to me. And I think it's one of the places where Freud really went off the rails.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: it just, I mean, there were a lot of ways that Freud really went off the rails, but but that was one of 'em,

Yucca: Yeah. But with all of that, I think that within our own minds that there's a lot, a lot to be discovered there. And as you were saying, the trick, figuring out which is which there's lots of different tools, but a classic one is a dream.

Mark: right.

Yucca: And keeping a dream journal can give you the opportunity to be able to go back through some of the dreams that you are having.

Now for me and my experiences, dreams fade very quickly unless recorded. Once I write a dream down, I norm, I usually remember having that.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: back through and I reread that journal, I go, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, of course I remember that. But if I hadn't written it down, it would just be gone. I don't know that every dream is worth writing down.

I certainly, there were times in my life that I wrote everything down, but now someti, if it, it seems particularly important to me, I'll write it down. Or if, or if I notice that I'm having repeating themes and particular dreams, then I'll write that down and reflect on that.

Mark: I don't remember my dreams very much. They have to be pretty vivid for me to remember them. And what that has done among other things, is make a dream journal really difficult for me because I decide, okay, I'm gonna do a dream journal, and then three weeks later when I finally have a dream that I, that's vivid enough to remember I've forgotten all about the fact that I decided to have a dream journal.

So, you know, that's just sort of a. Particular quirk of mine. But I say this because many other people also have a very hard time remembering their dreams or they don't dream in a way that's conscious enough to capture very often. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just kind of the way we're built.

Yucca: Yeah. And it's, if it's, if it's useful to you, right? It's not, once again, you're not a bad pagan if you don't roll over every morning and record down exactly what it was that you, that you dreamt. There's, it could be useful for you and, and maybe not, right?

Mark: Yeah, and one of the things that I try to keep in mind when I'm interpreting dreams is that, Even if the symbols and things that I've captured and I'm trying to interpret were relatively random, that doesn't really matter because a random symbol set can be very provocative of subconscious discovery.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: like a, just like a Toro deck. The cards, the cards are random, but the symbols on the cards will provoke associations for you because of your particular consciousness that will, that can help you to learn things, so,

Yucca: act of you trying to interpret it is what's going to help you actually figure out what's going on.

Mark: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it sounds like you have more of an active and available dream life than I do. What, what sorts of things do you do with your dreams in terms of interpretation?

Yucca: Hmm. So there's a, there's another piece we're going to get to later on, which is the lucid component. I. Don't do a lot with the interpretation component unless it's something that, that is really reoccurring. Like, and there's certain kind of classic ones that, that people have of like the falling ones or the this or the that.

When I noticed there's a, there's a couple of them that I have that are in the reoccurring, and when that starts to pop up, it's part of a pattern in my life that I recognize of, Ooh, that's that particular. Area that I really struggle with, that I have a lot of stress around. And when I start getting the dream about it, it means, at least for me, my interpretation has been that I'm not giving it the attention that it needs by the time it creeps into reoccurring dream territory.

I have left it unde with for too long. So that.

Mark: very reasonable.

Yucca: Yeah, . But when it comes to the active dreaming, which we will come to in a little bit, that's something that's, that's really central in my practice and something, a tool that I've used for my whole life. So, but before we get there, what about for you with the interpretation?

I know you said that you don't really remember your dreams that much,

Mark: I, I don't very often, and so really more what I reach for. As I'm waking up and remembering bits and pieces of, of these dreams, what I reached for is what was the feeling associated more than anything else, because that tells me what's likely to be going on underneath the surface of my day-to-day operation.

If there's a feeling of shame or a feeling of fear, Or a feeling of happiness. Although for some reason dreams tend to be more warning and work on stuff that's a problem than they, than they are just sort of celebratory. 

Yucca: Do you think that that's a, those are the ones you remember because we are. that there would be an advantage to focusing on the worrisome, dangerous stuff or do you think it is? Yeah.

Mark: it could be. But I think also, What tends to happen is that the, the more joyous dreams that I have tend to be dreams where I'm lucid and I'm making choices. So, you know, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I do find that I can learn a lot just from kind of the vibe of a, of a dream and maybe some of the more prominent symbols that emerged from that. There have been a few times when I've been killed in dreams

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and those have always been very powerful. And I've interpreted them as meaning, you know, major dislocations or transformations. Sometimes they've come at times in my life when I was in a major transition and so that kind of made sense.

Yucca: Was there, did you wake immediately from those, or was there dream after being killed? In the dream.

Mark: Both depending. Yeah, there was one where I got killed right at the beginning of the, the dream, and so I had the, there was an earthquake. At San Francisco State University and I was in the Student Union, which is a concrete building, and it cracked and collapsed and killed me and a lot of other people.

And we all had to go into the basement of the student union, which didn't have a basement,

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: to to stay there then, because we were dead and we couldn't go out in the daylight and we couldn't interact with anybody who was alive. We were still, for all purposes alive, we just had to stay down there because we were dead and some.

People were trying to figure out what they could do other than hang out under the student union. And so at night they would go out and explore. And I finally went with one of these exploring groups and we walked to the Pacific Ocean, to the, to a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Big, bright, full moon.

Beautiful. And I dived because we were going to live under the sea since we didn't need to breathe anymore. And then I realized as I was diving that the salt water of the ocean was going to be incredibly caustic to me because I was dead and it was just, it was going to burn me alive. And then I woke up.

Yucca: Oh wow.

Mark: Yeah. So sort of double death dream. That's, that's, that's one that stuck with me. But I woke up before I hit the water.

Yucca: Oh wow. of that? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

only times that I can remember ever dying in my dreams. I've always been shot.

Mark: I've been stabbed, I've been drowned. I've I've a bunch. I, I, now that I think about it, I don't think I have been shot.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: But on the other hand, you're in New Mexico, which is one of the most heavily armed states in the country. 

Yucca: Yeah. I mean, yes, like, but the, unless you're in like the urban areas, the, there isn't actually the, like statistically the gun violence is not

Mark: oh no. I'm not saying the gun violence

Yucca: yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, we're all, everybody, you know, I grew up around guns. I, yeah. But no, it's never, it's always been . I think it was more influenced actually by seeing TV with like,

Mark: Oh

Yucca: like movie type of, yeah.

It would be real interesting to look into where that is. But that, I mean, that's certainly, yeah, something I grew up around and it's not. It's kind of a, it's a, it's a normal part of life in the, the rural areas. So, but I've never had any, like the roof collapsing on me or, you know,

Mark: Well, I'm an earthquake country, of course. So that's, that's something we think about. You know, whenever the, whenever the earth shakes, we think about the roof coming down on us.

Yucca: Right. Well, and I guess that makes sense that different people are going to. . You know, I've also never had dreams about a boating accident, not something we do a lot of out here. I don't

Mark: Ah-huh.

Yucca: of, you know, boating experience,

Mark: open water.

Yucca: But somebody who grew up on the coast and, you know, went sailing every weekend during their childhood, maybe they'd have a different experience with that.

Mark: right.

Yucca: so plenty of flying dreams though.

Mark: Me too. A lot of flying dreams. Yeah. Lucid Flying Dreams are my favorite.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Cuz then you can go where you want to go. Right. It's really fun.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, let's talk about this lucid. 

Mark: Why don't you define that for folks first? I.

Yucca: sure. So a lucid dream is when you are aware that you are dreaming and you're still dreaming.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Then there's different levels. You can be lucid but not be. Consciously influencing what's happening, but you can also be lucid and be influencing what's happening. So a lot of times when people say lucid, they mean you can control your dreams, but technically it is just being lucid, being aware of that dream.

So there's different levels to that. 

Mark: Yeah, the, the awareness is necessary. You have to be aware that you're dreaming in order to be lucid dreaming. The degree of agency that you have may vary.

Yucca: Right. So, and this is something that people can just naturally do. It's also something that, that you can learn and train yourself to do. and that's, and people have different levels of comfort with that and techniques for trying to stay in the dream when you realize that you're dreaming, because a lot of people struggle with, once they realize they are dreaming, they wake themselves up.

Mark: up. Yeah.

Yucca: So for me, I, I've always been a lucid dream. And that's just something that's been part of my life my whole life. But when I was about nine or 10 years old, I started to. Purposefully cultivate it and use it as a tool. And that was something that, you know, I talked, I had interest in and was talking about that with my father and he got me books and things like that.

So a lot of what I know about for other, for learning how to lose the dream just comes from having read those books. But I never taught myself to lose the dream. It was just something I always. Did. Which I actually think, I don't know if, if it was something that I always did or if it was taught, because I do remember being very little and having nightmares, and the response that my parents would give me would be about how to change it, right?

If I was being chased by the monster, they'd say, okay, we'll go back to. And then you tell the monster that this is your dream, not the monster's dream. And imagine something funny happening instead, right? Like the monster's chasing you, but all of a sudden now you're jumping on the big balls and now you're giggling and laughing together.

They were always very specific about, Hey, when you change a dream, don't, don't change it into something hurt, harmful. Right. Don't imagine, you know, the monster getting hurt or blowing up or something like that may get something that is, that is funny or twisted or like in a, in a positive way. Because the implication, they never said this straight out, but the implication was that the monster was me.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: All of that was just me. Whatever I'm doing in my mind is, is affecting me. So don't make it into like a hurting yourself. Make it into a transformational experience. So I remember doing that, my parents doing that, and I do that with my kids. which is easy because we live in a one bedroom , so anytime they're having a nightmare, I know, I know what they are.

And so it's something that, that I think is just really helpful to, to never have the belief in the first place that you can't control your dreams so that you can't influence your dreams because you can't. Right. We're, we're taught that we can't. And the media around it and all of that, it's like, oh no, you, you don't, you don't influence, you don't have control over it, but you do.

Right. But do you always want to, is a very, very different pick is a different question. So for me, the dreams that I'm, most of my dreams, I choose to not be con, to be lucid in because I don't feel as rested from. So I will choose, it will, I'll be going to sleep and I'll decide, am I gonna be lucid or not?

I'll realize I'm dreaming and go, okay, so let go. I, I literally tell myself, let go and just let the dream happen and let go of that. The lu lucidity. Lucidness

Mark: Lucidity. Yeah.

Yucca: Yeah. But when I do lucid, I, I do a lot of work when I need to. In that dream state is a, is a really powerful state to go into. I will work through problems that I'm having, I'll do actual ritual in that state and I actually do a lot of work in that state too.

So I do a lot of so I'm. Trying to take a whole bunch of information and construct a lecture of how do I take these complex ideas and put them together anytime I need something that's creative but builds it. So I'll go to, so I, I teach a bunch of classes and I need to build a class. I'll go to sleep and then work on the actual outline and structure in the dream state, and then wake up and I'll write it down immediately and I've got the structure. but if I do that too much, I don't rest . So it, it's a, it's a, you know, you're not, I don't know what's going on on a physical level there, but I do not feel as rested when I, losed dream is when I just let myself dream.

Mark: Yeah, I don't either. It lucid dreaming feels like effort.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: To me some of which is some, some amount of effort to maintain the dream

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And some of which is just to, you know, I'm, I have to pay attention, I have to make decisions, I have to do all that kind of stuff. So yes, my experience as well is that a lucid dream is not as restful.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I also. Do lucid dreaming? It's relatively rare because I'm usually just not aware of my dreams. But not, I mean, not infrequently with the dreams that are really impactful for me. I will realize, you know, I'm trying to read something and it's gibberish and oh, I'm dreaming,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: or Something happens that's impossible.

Well, you know, being a naturalistic pagan when something that's physically impossible happens, I go, eh, I think I'm dreaming.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And. I, I, I have a lot of fun in lucid dreaming. I don't really use it for ritual work or even for, I mean, I suppose I should, given that it's kind of down there in the subconscious, but mostly I just use it to have The one thing that I do do that is kind of self-referential is I like to go and look in the mirror

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and I can't really describe what I've seen. , but it hasn't been my face. It's been, you know, deeper layers of who I am. So that's a very powerful exercise. If you find yourself in a dream and you wake up, go in the bathroom and look in the mirror.

Yucca: or pull out the hand mirror that you happen to have in your pocket because it's your dream.

Mark: Yeah. Pockets in me, in dreams are like pockets in cartoons. You can pull anything out of.

Yucca: They're bigger on the inside. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Well, and the, the looking at a mirror, this, that's one where when people are trying to develop the, to be able to wake up in their dream, that's a classic one is to check whether you're dreaming or not look at a mirror. Another one is to look at writing.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Look away, look back at the writing.

Has it changed? And. We tend to do in our dreams, the things that we do when we're awake. So if you have a habit in your, like waking life where you always push your, the glasses up on your nose or you have a habit where you look at your phone or your watch, or you do you think something throughout the day those are things that you'll tend to repeat in the dream.

And so one of the things that people can do to try and learn to lose a dream is to ask yourself throughout the day, am I dreaming? And check if you're dreaming, but you have to actually do the things so that you repeat that in your dream. Because if it's not actually a habit, you won't actually do it in your dream.

But yeah, you check and you go, okay. I look at my watch and right now I look at my watch and there's actually the time on it. I look back and it's the same time, so I go, yeah, I'm, I'm awake. Right?

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: But then once you're in the dream state, you mentioned this, this maintaining yourself in the dream is the next challenge, right?

Is to not wake up immediately. For me, it feels like when I start to wake up, it feels like I'm almost being pulled backwards through like a gel. The image that I think of is if you've ever watched Stargate, There was a movie for it and there was a delightfully campy TV show for a while. Whenever they go through this, the Stargate is going through this, like this jelly plasma thing.

I always feel like I'm getting pulled back through that and I feel like I can't breathe when I'm traveling through that, but if I can just pull myself back. I just like step back into it that I stay in the dream state. But if I let myself go back all the way through, the moment I get through that jelly, I'm awake. But I can go, okay, I'm gonna go right back to the same spot in that dream. That dream's still there as long as I don't fully get up, right? If I have to get up and go do something in the house you know, the cat broke something on the table or the. I go up to go use the restroom like that, then I'm, then I've left the dream.

But if I haven't gone that far from it, I can go right back to the same spot.

Mark: Right? Right. Well, that's cool. My feeling about being pulled out of the dream is much, it's much more vertical than it is horizontal.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: I feel like going deeper into the dream is literally sinking going lower. Whereas I feel like it's, it's like scuba diving in that it's about buoy.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and your natural buoyancy is to go back up and come out of the dream.

And so the challenge becomes to make the motions or do whatever the effort is to stay down.

Yucca: Interesting.

Mark: So that's, that's more of how I experience it. Scuba diving is very dreamlike anyway. Just being down there or, or, or skin diving, snorkeling, same kind of thing. Being down there with all those fish and stuff in that very slow moving language environment because of the density of the water is very dreamlike to.

Yucca: and your body being able to move in ways that you couldn't on dry land.

Mark: Right. And it's a full body

Yucca: twist around and move and, yeah.

Mark: and it's a full body sensation. So, which is, you know, we tend, we tend to just sort of experience with our hands and faces and, you know, not, not have the rest of our bodies engaged so much. Yeah. So that's. That's a cool thing that I enjoy doing. The but, and, and this, this struggle to stay down happens when I realize that I'm dreaming.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: That's the, that's the crisis point where it arises. And then I either win or lose, you know, I either stay down or I don.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But if I do, then I feel I have a lot of freedom to just explore and to do thing, to fly and to jump off high buildings cuz I'm afraid of heights and stuff like that. So I have a, a catalog of many impossible experiences that I've had that are as vivid in my memory as my actual memory.

Yucca: Right. Well, those are actual memories. But they aren't memories of things that you physically did. They're memories of things that, that your brain still thinks you did.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: Yeah. It's, and it's amazing how the, how powerful the feelings. Can be, I mean, probably most of you have experienced, have you ever had a fight with someone in your dream and then woken up and you're still mad at them and you know that they didn't really say the thing, but you still feel it.

You're still so mad at them. And it's like they, they would've never done that thing, whatever it was ever. Right? But, but you still experienced that. I think that's just so fascinating with, with dreams and, and I hope we. To learn more about why our brains do that.

Mark: Yeah, that, I mean, that's the big question to me, the, I mean, the fact is we do it. There's a lot of descriptive literature about what it is, and. kind of patterns of how it works. But the big question of, but why, what exactly are we accomplishing by doing this? Even though I know in my own personal life that I do accomplish things in dreaming you know, I, I have experiences and I learn things.

Yucca: And, you know, as you're saying that, it, it, it makes me think about other places in our lives where we have tools that we use, like meditation, like ritual. These are things that we're, we have some insight into with science. But largely we really don't understand them, but we can still, even though we, we don't yet understand them on that level, we can still figure out how to use them because they still exist.

And that's, that's where the art part, that's where the craft part comes in. These are tools that we're using,

Mark: I think of it as,

Yucca: why. Yeah,

Mark: oh, I'm sorry to

Yucca: go. No, please.

Mark: Well, I think of it as rather like the domestication of fire. We didn't understand what fire really was for. Hundreds of thousands of years, but we were still using it. We were making it, and we were transmitting it, and we were using it to cook our food and to illuminate our dwellings and to, you know, create heat in the wintertime and all kinds of stuff.

And you know, I mean, I've heard it said that the most sim, the most mysterious and complex thing that humanity has ever discovered is the human brain. You know, there are the, the range of possible manifestations of behavior that come out of human brains is just astounding, and we don't understand very much about it at all because it's very hard to observe it while it's.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And to translate the experience of it working, which is consciousness into some kind of objective data about what that process is. So, yeah, I mean, I would, I, I believe we will learn more about that. I don't know that it'll ever be completely done and dusted, but

Yucca: I don't think science works that way, frankly.

Mark: No.

Yucca: that the more we know, the more questions we have, and that is beautiful. That is just amazing.

Mark: About simple things like how fireworks, you know, we, we, we can get pretty good answers that don't leave. A lot of questions left.

Yucca: To on a certain scale. Right, right. We can go. Okay, so we're talking about the splitting of molecules and the recombination of, but let's start talking about, okay, those, but why were those molecules bonded to each other in the first place?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: What are they made of?

Mark: is a molecule and, and what's that made of? And then what are those made of? And then what are those

Yucca: Right. And why? Okay, so why so it's doing this because of this particular force.

Why does that force exist? Is that force connected to something else? You know, there's all, it just keeps going and going and maybe, maybe there's a simple answer to all of it, but I think we're a ways away from finding that if it

Mark: Well cer certainly all the quantum stuff, there's plenty of questions left, plenty of vast. Vast acreage of unknowns. But as you say, within a given scale context, you can understand how something works, and I doubt that we will understand why the human brain works even at its own scale, much, much less at deeper levels.

But even at its own scale, there's. When you have trillions of informational connections working at incredibly fast speeds, I just think it's gonna be impossible to ever chase those things down.

Yucca: Yeah, well, and each one being, as far as we know, very different The way that the, which connections my brain makes versus your brain.

Mark: Well, right. I'm, and I'm just talking about one brain. I'm not talking about brains in general. I'm just talking about one brain.

Yucca: but we have, there are things that we have learned, right? Like learning about the different, you know, kinds of connections and neurotransmitters and the, you know, which particular elements do we use in order, you know, all that stuff.

Mark: Sure,

Yucca: so much progress.

Mark: tend to be associated with particular senses or particular processes?

Yucca: Oh, but then they go and change on us because that's what we find. That's amazing. When, and not in all the cases, but there's many cases where we found when someone's had brain damage in one area and then another part of the brain starts to perform the function that usually would've been in that part of the brain and wow.

Mark: I read a, a fascinating article by a woman, God, where was this? The Atlantic, I think. And she literally has half of a brain.

Yucca: Hmm. Okay.

Mark: it was discovered in adulthood when she had an m r I, that one in,

Yucca: born this

Mark: she was born this way and she's of perfectly normal intelligence. She, you know, she has an absolutely ordinary life,

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: but half of her brain never developed.

Yucca: What's filling in the physical space where the other half would be. Okay.

Mark: Yeah. To reverse spinal fluid.

Yucca: Yeah. Wow.

Mark: Pretty awesome,

Yucca: pretty popular now.

Mark: Yeah,

Yucca: a lot of

Mark: lots of studies and, and all that kind of stuff,

Yucca: yeah. How interesting. Hmm.

Mark: and I mean, that's fully coordinating both sides of her body. That's, you know, doing everything that a brain does and it's just doing it with half as much.

Yucca: Wow. Have they checked in with siblings to see if they, that

Mark: don't, I don't remember honestly, it, it was a while back, but it was a pretty wild article. I should try to find it.

Yucca: Yeah, that's, that's interesting. This stuff is fun,

Mark: It is, it is. And one of the places where we encounter the mysteries about the brain is in dreaming.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Because dreaming is a mysterious process. Why am I being shown these images? Why am I finding my, yeah, why am I finding myself immersed in, you know, these particular situations and these particular, you know, colors and objects and characters and plot lines, and, you know, what, what is all that?

Yucca: Why are those two people actually one person, I don't know how this happens for you, but sometimes characters in my dream are not really, they're rarely one person. There's several different people at once.

Mark: I don't have that at all.

Yucca: no, you'll have a, there'll be someone, okay. For me, they're, they will be several different people and sometimes they'll think about, so why was it that so-and-so was also so-and-so?

Like what overlap am I seeing there? Or did it not really matter for the dream, who the other person

Mark: are, these are recognizable people from your life or they are characters that were created in the dream,

Yucca: Well, people from my life, but also movie characters and think characters. Either a, a human, there's somebody, whether that's somebody is a real person or not. Right. Like there could, there, for instance, is making up there could be Santa, right? Like there's, you know, never met Santa. There's, as far as I know, no real Santa, but Santa can show up in my dream and Santa can also be my second grade teacher at the same time in my. But that's just, you know, why, right? That's one of those interesting things to think about. What's there's, there's gotta be some connection there, or maybe not, but me trying to figure out what that connection is might reveal to me something about my feelings about my second grade teacher, you know? Or why am I thinking about, why am I thinking about her right now?

You know, how many decades later?

Mark: right.

Yucca: So,

Mark: Yeah, it's really fascinating stuff, and I'm sure that our listeners have a very broad range of different kinds of experiences as well. You know, if you want to email us at the wonder podcast cues gmail.com or comment on this

Yucca: you're listening to it online?

Mark: listening to it on

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: You can go ahead and comment there.

You know, what was your most vivid dreaming experience? What's been your most amazing experience? In the dreaming realm because it really is a pretty remarkable thing that we do. We spend a lot of our time asleep and,

Yucca: It's glorious.

Love it.

Mark: we don't spend as much, I don't spend as much time asleep as I wish I did,

Yucca: and that's one that I, that I have looked into the research on, which is very distressing about the sleep deprivation especially in the United States. Very worrisome with, with teenagers in terms of what's happening with their sleep deprivation. It's

Mark: my local school districts here just made a ruling that they were not going to start classes until I think, eight 30 in the morning, maybe nine,

Yucca: Oh good.

Mark: classes had been starting at seven 30 and it's just, that's not good for a developing marine.

Yucca: it isn't. Well, and, and then this is one area where there's research as well into chronotypes. And it, this seems to be pretty universal across cultures that the, that teenagers. Will naturally stay up later and wake up later. That seems to be, that's not just coming from our, like our cultural stereotypes that seems to be across cultures.

And getting less sleep than we need has a negative impact on so many different levels for us, and it increases risk of all kinds of things. So I, I think it's ridiculous to. To be making teenagers get up and be being sleep deprived because of that. And I know we can go, oh, we're supposed to be teaching them, you know, responsibility and all of that, and it's like, hmm.

Not at the cost of their physical and emotional wellbeing and their ability to learn, because you're not gonna learn as well when you're sleep deprived.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: And what, what are we teaching them that them fitting into? These particular hours that we've for some reason chosen that probably have more to do with like the hours of operation of factories.

We care more about that than their wellbeing. I don't know. That's, there's my soapbox. Sorry, I'll

Mark: Well, I don't dis, I don't disagree with any of it. It, it certainly,

Yucca: frankly, eight 30 is still

Mark: I'm just glad that at least. I'm just glad that some of the more progressive districts are starting to pay attention to this research and to think about, and parents complain because parents want the childcare, right?

They, they want to get out of the house in time to get to work. And I mean, you know, just the whole system is interconnected. Levels of dysfunction.

Yucca: Yeah, that's a whole nother area.

Mark: It is, and it's not a particularly cheery area, so let's move on.

Yucca: We should. Yes. Now actually there was a very cheery, exciting thing that you wanted to announce.

Mark: Yes. We've talked about this before, but tickets for the atheopagan Web Weaving online Conference, which will be June 4th of this year. The tickets will go on sale next Saturday. April 1st. Tickets are from 10 to $50. There are scholarship tickets for nothing to spend anything. Nobody's turned away for lack of funds.

We're encouraging giving at least 20 so that we can cover the expenses of the conference, but you can get information about it at. AP society.org/a WW 2023 and we'll put that in the,

Yucca: And the show

Mark: in the podcast

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And you can download the program there and look offerings of workshops and activities and all that kind of stuff, it's gonna be a really great opportunity. To see other people that are following these paths and exchange information and learn stuff. So I really hope you'll take a look and consider coming.

Yucca: and both of us are doing workshops, so.

Mark: That's right. I'm doing one on the clerical path. And you're doing one for kids, right?

Yucca: I am, yeah. I'm gonna do a kids circle, so, yep.

Mark: great. Yeah. Exciting.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: yeah that's two months away, but tickets will go on sale next week and you can look at the program it's downloadable in either PDF or format.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: You can look at those,

Yucca: And it does always help us to get people to know ahead of time how many people to be expecting.

Mark: That's right. If, if all the registration comes in at the last minute, it could be complicated for us. Our current Zoom account, this will be done over Zoom. Our current Zoom account allows a hundred attendees. If we have 98 attendees three days before the event and then another 300 people register in those last couple of days, we're gonna have to call Zoom up at work capacity and you know, all that kind of stuff.

So,

Yucca: So we'd of course love to have

Mark: ask you to get your tickets early.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yes. Yeah, for sure. We would be, You know, arrange for more, more seats with Zoom. But it would be a lot better if we could do that a week in advance rather than two days in advance. So get your tickets early.

Yucca: Yeah, and we'll see you there. And as always, thanks for hanging out with us on today's episode, and we'll see you next week.

Mark: Have a great one.