Long, long ago, longer than the memories of stones, somewhere in the primordial star-dust soup of the primitive Earth, five elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus – were electrified.
We do not know how or why the ancient lightning came, but we know it did. Because it left a very curious mark in the wordless record of Earth: Life.
Elements joined hands, formed chains of molecules, and these molecules, agitated by the storm-charge of the young atmosphere, began to replicate themselves in an insensate urge. Copy, copy, copy. Over vast eons, these self-replicating molecules became the instruction manual for new alliances. A phospho-lipid bi-layer. A cell wall. Semi-permeable membranes.
Cells.
These cells began to eat. To consume one another in order to assimilate the chemical and photic energy of the young cosmos.
Over even longer stretches of time, one visionary cell, rather than eating another and digesting it, entered into symbiosis with it. Together they were stronger, more energetic. Possibilities opened. And the mitochondria was born. The mitochondria that produces the chemical energy for you to walk in this forest today, those very mitochondria are the descendent copies of some of the earliest, free-living bacteria which joined the primitive eukaryotic cells.
You are not yourself. Even in your cells. You are defined by community, even at the smallest division of your body.
Separated by millenia, it happened again. A different rebel cell joined forces with a little, green, free-living mote. And the chlorophyll was born. All plants on Earth descend from this one, revolutionary ancestor. These trees all around you, they are their children. They, too are in-divisible, cannot be individuals, for if you cut the photosynthetic chlorophyll away, you have a dead plant cell. Neither can make a tree without the other.
Once the cells understood the power they had when they chose to work together, multicellular life forms were born and proliferated across land and sea. The exquisite vascular tissue, spores and flowering plants. The smallest aquatic life and the whales with four-chambered hearts the size of a wild boar. Legs. Wings. Reptiles and birds. And later, mammals.
So much creativity.
All unfolding from a little lightning. A few atoms joining their electron hands.
Atoms that formed in the intense heat of collapsing stars.
You know the hemoglobin in your blood is able to carry its little cargo of oxygen because of iron born in a fusion reaction at the heart of an exhausted star. Life depends on death, always. Life eats death, tears it to shreds, and re-organizes it.
You are star-dust, self-organizing.
Light itself is the union of wave and particle. Fast-moving light is energy, radiation, heat. And when energy slows, it cools, it transforms into matter. There are no individuals. Even light itself is in-divisible.
All the universe’s brilliant creativity is defined by union. And you, you are the perfect expression of the universe’s creativity.
For all of time, your ancestors, long before they were human hunter-gatherers eating their way through Eden, joined electron hands and released them in the unending fractal dance that is Life.
Look at your body. Is it made according to the instructions inscribed over four-and-a-half billion years in the language of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus – which were themselves born in the death of untold-billion-year-old stars. You are already ancient. You are already reborn. There is no need to fear age and death.
The body-building code you see today was inscribed in your DNA over the 200,000 or so years that humanity wandered lightly across the land, gathering fruit here in spring, nuts there in fall. Do not despair that you find modernity stern and unyielding; you are perfectly created to be a peripatetic gardener of the savannahs. Humanity can change its environment, but we cannot change ourselves. Despair is natural to a caged bird.
Still, sing.
This time is but a blip in the cosmic order. It will pass. But the self-replicating light that forms you now, it cannot die. Because energy can be neither created nor destroyed in the universe. It can only change form.
And it must change form, always. Constantly, it flows. Energy that does not flow… becomes infinitely dense. Infinitely cold.
So dance. Dance now. The divine light is your divine structure. It is perfect.
Hello and welcome to Ducks of the World Tree, the podcast that waddles across the manicured lawns of suburbia, flaps wildly in front of a speeding Tesla, and then dives deep into the tepid waters of some kind of pompous drainage ditch masquerading as a natural water feature.
In today’s tales of neurodivergent, animist wanderings through end stage capitalism, we’re talking about ADHD, and the fracturing of the self, and desire, and we’ll prolly take at least a few dark alley sidequests.
So, I started writing this episode months ago, and a lot of shit happened.
One, because America hates actual healthcare, I couldn’t get my ADHD meds for several months. And if you’ve ever wondered what kind of effect that has on a person, well, have I got a brief but colorful narrative for you.
Basically I couldn’t sit still long enough to type much of anything, whatever I did write was jumbled and unintelligible, and the issues with task initiation and task switching that I always have, even when my meds are perfect were like… fuckin’… just no. I was totally disabled.
So cool.
Simultaneously, all the pillars of my life crumbled. Like all the things that I was doing that made me, me started to implode around me. So compounding my medical distress, I was having what amounted to an identity crisis, a lot of heartbreak, general disappointment, existential fracturing…
And because I am very much an ADHDer, I’m already really existentially fractured. I’ve lived in/worked in/traveled through/ridden my bike through/lived on an off grid farm in like 16 countries. I’ve got degrees in Latin and Ancient Greek (which I remember almost none of) and I’ve studied Old Norse, Old English, modern Korean, Chinese (both traditional and simplified character sets), Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish, modern Icelandic all to at least an A2 level, a couple into B1 and C1 territory. I’ve won contests of poetry and painting, had music gigs in a couple countries, and promptly lost interest in doing the thing at all. I’ve lost interest in more hobbies, degrees, and certifications than most people have ever even had.
Which brings me back to what I initially wanted to talk about.
Desire.
What do you want?
On the surface, that seems like a fairly straightforward question. But it isn’t.
What do you want economically for yourself? What do you want in terms of what will make you happiest? Can you draw the venn diagram of what-I-like and what-I-can-get-paid-for and get any overlap?
What do you want for the planet? For future generations? For the trees and critters of the forest and field? For the seas?
What do you want for dinner?
I think maybe I bit off a little more than I can chew.
…
I want to take a little detour now through the concept of multiple souls, because I think it’s a really useful theoretical lens through which to really interrogate desire, the self, a fractured identity and neurodivergence.
Quick background info lecture mode:
Various cultures throughout the history of the world have posited that human beings (and other beings) have multiple souls. In Chinese Daoism, you have at least the hun2 and po4 if not also several other function-specific souls. Many shamanistic cultures have a belief that a separate “free soul” or a “wander soul” is what goes off to the other world when the shaman is journeying. Indigenous groups as diverse as the Inuit and the Bakongo hold a variety of beliefs regarding multiple souls. And in pre-christian, Germanic-speaking Europe, we surmise, based on the textual evidence found in translations of the bible into Gothic and the Heliand in Old Saxon as well as other texts, that Germanic-speaking pagans also held complex beliefs about multiple souls – or at the very least, they had distinct words for different aspects of their minds, emotions, and personalities and in the context of translation, it sure looks like they’re thinking of them as separate souls.
Winifred Hodge Rose has spent something like 25 years researching Gothic, Old Norse, Saxon, Old High German, Old English… I’m forgetting some, but you get the idea… and really drawing out the idea of multiple souls, what each soul’s character might be, and so on. If this idea makes you happy and excited, and this sidebar sparks joy, search for her books.
If you’re wanting me to get on with things, just focus on this:
The Will and The Wish, the Mod and the Hugr, are two different ideas for speakers of the old Germanic languages. One soul can want one thing, and the other soul can want something totally different. Your Will, and your Wish can be pulling you in different directions.
If you take it as a metaphor, great. That works as a way of getting the inner workings of the mind out on the page so you can understand them and maybe do something about them.
But I think it works better if, for a moment, you take it literally. Because that really describes what internal conflict feels like. It feels like one of your souls, one of your selves, is determined to do one thing, another soul, another self is determined to do something else, and your meat-sack-midgard-ship of a body is going to break apart.
…
I feel like I should take another dark-alley-aside here to tell you that I often have double or triple vision with respect to these things. I can simultaneously hold a materialist, atheist perspective, an animist, multiple souls, shamanistic perspective, move back and forth between taking all this very literally and very metaphorically without any problem. That’s just who I am. I am large. I contain multitudes.
So while I think the most useful and probably the most true default framework for thinking about life on Earth should be animistic – that everything has its own mind and will, and pantheistic – that the universe is a manifestation of the divine. And I think it’s quite likely that not only do we have a spiritual reality that infuses all the meat, our multiple souls are literally separate spirit beings within us. At the same time, I’m like… anti-orthodox. Metaphor is also powerful and helpful.
…
Ok. So back to will and wish and desire.
What do you want? You probably have a lot of mutually exclusive answers to that. I know I do. The more honest I am, the more I see all these different aspects of my self that feel irreconcilable. It’s a fucking high school cafeteria inside my head and heart.
How can you share the one meat-ship that you have with all these selves? You only have this one timeline that you know about for sure. You can’t count on reincarnation or heaven. Nothing but death is like for-sure, definitely promised. So. For the time in between your mom and some maggots, what do you want?
(All praise be to Ani D for the mom and maggots line).
A lot of western, modern thinking is solipsistic – main character syndrome – you are the only subject, the only do-er, you’re the only one who matters, and you just march around doing what you want. You cut the forest down for money and don’t lose sleep because – they’re just TREES, they’re not subjects, they’re objects. They don’t have VALUE until you turn them into toilet paper, duh. YOU are the only subject, anyway, right? It’s kind of a lonely, sociopathic way of thinking.
But desire becomes complex if you are not the only subject. If you live in a world of subjects, desire becomes more of a negotiation, which I think is healthy – healthier than the typical western materialist perspective, anyway.
First, it’s like who even am I? Am I singular? Am I a community of souls or soul parts? Next, it’s like, what do I want vs. what do my friends and family want? My roommates? My romantic partners? What do they want? What does my future-self want vs. what does my now-self want? The world is filled with people who have soft bodies and delicate hearts. The way you act on your desires impacts them.
Here’s a line of thinking:
If I stay in America, my mom and dad will be happy. My friends and students and the kids I babysit will be happy. But I will be increasingly sad. Because the more time passes, the more I feel their plans and their desires have become a cage. Am I an individual? A community? Do I need to take my multiple souls to therapy? Am I a thread in a tapestry? I mean, it’s a lovely metaphor for thinking about ultimate reality and deity, but does it just make me feel trapped in the boots-on-concrete world? Am I just a selfish little contrarian turd? At what point does ones own unhappiness actually start poisoning the others in the vicinity?
“What do you desire” rapidly becomes an equation, not a number.
Second, if you include a billion billion other life forms, from trees to nudibranchs in your equation, it’s easy to feel paralyzed.
In many religious traditions, desire – and how we deal with desire – makes the world go ‘round. Desire can cause gods to arise, it’s the driver behind reincarnation, desire turns the wheel of samsara.
And if the Nordic story of the Fenriswolf is – at least on some level – a story about fairly ordinary desire becoming a murderous greed-monster because of the way people dealt with it then desire is also a central feature of the premodern Nordic storyworld.
The barest of bones of the myth is that Fenris was a huge wolf. The Aesir gods took him from his mother because of a prophecy, and when he got so big that he made the gods nervous, they tricked him into allowing himself to be bound with a magical rope. He wound up with a sword jammed in his mouth and his eternal drool makes a river called Hope.
At the end of the world, he breaks his bonds and kills the King of the Gods, Odin, who may represent wisdom (or maybe folly in this case) and along with his buddies, Fenris destroys pretty much everything. It’s a fairly dark story, as it comes to us. Tho, I suspect it’s been pretty jacked up by being filtered through the lens of medieval Christianity – but still. That’s the jist.
I see the wolf as a symbol of desire, or greed. In the beginning, it’s chill. The wolf, desire, is besties with a god named Tyr, who’s more or less a justice god. Things are under control. Fenris hasn’t done anything to the Aesir. He hasn’t gone against them, but he has gotten really big. As Desire becomes huge, they trick him, bind him, and essentially torture him with that sword jammed into the roof of his mouth because they’re scared of him. And in the end, they have created the monster they feared he would become.
Desire becomes monstrous when it is … tortured?
So, let’s consider that inner conflict, friction with the outside world, and desire itself is natural. It’s normal. How we acknowledge and deal with it all is of absolutely paramount importance. Straight up suppressing desires, ignoring desires… this can make them stronger, more powerful, and turn us into mutant murder greed monkeys. If greed becomes huge, it kills wisdom.
But indulging every desire is also a disaster, right? Isn’t that just overconsumption? Isn’t satisfying every desire literally the reason our ecosystems are collapsing as we speak?
Well, maybe. But that brings us back to the first question of what do we actually want?
If our anterior cingulate has been suppressed by a lifetime of doom scrolling and the mind-numbing torture of everyday capitalism – basically, if our brains are mush from working way too long in conditions that are way too stressful and unnatural and overstimulating for our hunter-gatherer bodies – all our otherwise normal desires may already be tortured into monster wolf greed and that’s why everything we do manifests as the overconsumption and violent, fear-based control that is killing us and killing the planet.
We are already tortured into Fenriswolves. And it’s the context of modernity, of capitalism, the lack of awe in the world around us, the long hours, the inflation, the stress. It makes us want weird shit, we act like mutant murder greed monkeys, because of the shitty context that we can’t escape.
We’re not fucked up because of an innate flaw.
Our souls, our inner selves, our hunter-gatherer animal – is all probably pretty healthy if given a healthy context.
So what do we actually want? If we were not already tortured out of shape, what desires are natural to us?
I don’t believe that we really want all the bullshit plastic shit. We don’t actually want super fancy cars or dumb expensive purses or whatever. In the context of modernity, we may be deluded into thinking that shit will bring happiness – but that kind of happy is fleeting. It’s like binge-eating. It makes us sick after a while.
I think that what we really want is freedom from anxiety. We want to be loved. We want connection, community, basic security, and because we’re thwarted at every turn, we become mutant murder greed monkeys. We become the Fenriswolf. We are the murderers of the gods, and the destroyers of wisdom.
Most of us just want a house. A nice, secure, healthy place to live. We want a family, happy kids, meaningful work, an extended family, community. When we imagine a perfect life, most of us, with a little prodding, a little push toward honesty… we imagine living near friends and family. Being able to hang out with our people. Leisure time. Cookouts. Playing sports with our friends.
We want to sit around with our kids and our friends and feel relaxed. We want to eat, play, make music, and enjoy being alive. Maybe go on an adventure and come back wiser?
And those of us with the ADHD, we’d make great explorers, fantastic traders – a trip down the Volga to trade furs with people whose language I can’t understand sounds PHENOMENAL! Let’s go! And in a preindustrial world, that would be really important. I would be an integral member of society serving an important function. Not an unemployed loser.
What I think we actually want is the premodern, preindustrial, small village, small scale gardening and hunter-gatherer existence that we’ve been robbed of. Our desires are in our genes. We can’t get rid of them. But in the modern world, we can’t satisfy our desires.
We can’t have a real tribe. Home ownership is out of the question for most of us at this point. We’re buffeted by corporate whims, on a sea of anxiety and price hikes and a system that actively works to make us frustrated and indebted at every turn – so that we will mindlessly consume to get a litttttttle drop of dopamine because our brains are basically mush.
Capitalism only works because capitalism makes most of us miserable and holy fuck we try to self-medicate – but our attempts wind up unsatisfactory – because the fancy bag or the fancy car were never it.
Fine, you say. Observing this problem is basic. We already know we live in a fucked up society and our desires are tortured out of shape. Fine. And we have internal friction either because multiple souls inhabit our bodies or because capitalism sucks or both. Whatever.
So what do my souls desire? Beyond something that was imminently accessible to 100,000 years of humanity but which is utterly out of reach today.
Have I, personally, become the Fenriswolf? Probably. Am I in the process, right now, of gnawing on the cracked femur of a god who gave his eye for wisdom? I mean, maybe?
And how do I back out of that?
How does anyone get out of this cage?
Remember, no one can sell you the cure.
No one can tell you what to do to heal and reconnect. I mean, you can get super into daoism or buddhism or Winifred Hodge Rose’s Heathen Soul Lore. Or you can ignore all that. You can join an intentional community on India’s east coast or build a hut deep in the forest on federal land. You can keep trudging along in suburbia. The possibilities are endless. Kind of.
I think any act of conscious defiance against consumerism and against the commodification (and toxification) of the total environment is a step in the right direction. Every moment you imagine the crepe myrtles on the firehouse lawn as beings with souls as unique and complex as your own, is a minute you retrieve some of your own crushed spirit. Every hour you spend chilling with your friends at the lake not buying anything, painting a picture, making music, doing anything creative is an hour you’re not buying more fucking plastic piece of crap. Every second you spend not engaged in the game of overconsumption is a a second you are shrinking – in a good way. You become less Greedwolf Wisdomkiller and more Overlarge but maybe dumb Pupper.
So what do you want? Really? I bet that you, like me, want loving kindness, connection, friendship. You want safety, community, — some amount of material comfort, sure, but do you actually give a shit about expensive shoes or bags or cars… or did you maybe think those things were going to make you more likable? More worthy of being seen, cared for?
If you have trouble with people, do others not like you because you’re not rich enough, or is it because you behave like an insufferable toddler because you’ve been running from your own pain all your life? Do you have the courage to confront yourself in the dark alleyways of your souls and answer that question honestly?
What do you actually want? And what are you willing to do to get it?
This has been your friendly neighborhood neurodivergent here to be awkward and say weird shit without ever actually digging up any substantial answers, just circling the great drain of our collective conundrum.
Until next time, flap good, waddle hard, swim deep.
If you’re one of the approximately 16 million Americans who take a daily stimulant medication, you’re well aware of the impact the ongoing shortages/supply chain issues/general bullshittery and fuckwittery is having on our lives.
If you don’t have ADHD or narcolepsy or another condition for which you are prescribed Ritalin or Concerta or Adderall or another related medication, congratulations. I’m officially jealous of you.
If you do have one of these conditions, particularly ADHD, fuckin’-a friend. What the actual fuck?
I won’t bore you with the truly long and fabulously convoluted story, in part because it’s so long and so steeped in Bible Belt fuckwittery and so convoluted that I don’t even remember all of it (small mercy?). But let’s summarize by saying that due to insurance fuckery, I had to see a new PCP. This Doc was displaying a bible and lots of scripture prominently in the office, and they essentially decided that although Adult ADHD has a billing code for the insurance company, it’s not really a thing that an upright and moral human might need medication for… or perhaps more accurately, that stimulant medications are evidence of evil in this world, adults seeking to take their prescribed stimulant meds are clearly drug seeking, and I was obviously a meth addict.
Now, they drug tested me in the office, presumably because I looked like I was speeding my titties off. And I had no amphetamines in my system. See, THAT WAS THE PROBLEM. Because if I have amphetamines in my system, I am calm, focused, collected, low stress, pretty able to sit still and carry on a conversation. WITHOUT meds, I can’t sleep. I can’t stop moving. I can’t stop talking… I look like I’m speeding my titties off.
But I did have THC in my system. Which was legally purchased. With a credit card. From a brick-and-mortar store. That pays sales tax. So obviously… I’m a meth addict. And a drug seeker. Very dangerous individual, me.
Bible Belt logic.
I’m just lucky they didn’t try to involuntarily commit me. Because I am 100% certain that if the cops here saw a grown woman, apparently on speed, with “drugs” in her system they’d happily drag me off. And psychiatrists STILL, if they see an adult woman presenting like me, they assume bipolar mania. And those drugs have zero effect on me… so they keep me. They keep me and keep giving me the wrong drugs. And…
I’m pretty sure American mental healthcare is actual hell.
So, back to the main story. Combined with an older prescription that had been written for a dosage that the pharmacy simply could not get (due to the shortages) and all the fuckwittery of insurance and Bible Belt doctors, it took me a solid SIX WEEKS to get in to see a new Doc (who, thankfully, was sane and immediately re-started my meds).
And shock of all shocks, 20 minutes after swallowing my Concerta, I was immediately calm. Quiet. Still. Relaxed. I went and finally took a fucking nap.
But like, seriously. Fuck you, American healthcare. And fuck you, American health insurance system. And fuck you, weird religious freaks practicing your weird version of a weird religion instead of medicine.
And fuck you, stigma against adults with ADHD.
Fuck the lack of research done on adult women generally and particularly women and women’s hormones in ADHD. Fuck the decades-long notion that only little boys have ADHD. AND FUCK THE POPULAR IDEAS OF WHAT ADHD EVEN IS. Little boys vibrating off the walls in class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the issue, m’kay? And if you’re a healthcare provider, you should know that.
End rant.
______________________
So, it was a really hard spring.
But it did get me thinking this:
All natural systems are diverse. A forest isn’t made of one species of tree, or one species of bird or beast. Most trees depend on at least a few potential fungal partners. The vast majority of plants depend on multiple pollinators. Those that specialize risk extinction. Soil isn’t dirt, but rather a vast cooperative ecosystem of bacteria, nematodes, fungi, and more.
The human body is more bacteria than human cells by weight, no?
The notion that there is one neurotype that is “right” and all other neurotypes are “disordered” flies in the face of all evidence from the natural world.
Each “disorder” carries with it advantages — in context. Advantages that modern industrial systems and end stage capitalism have seen fit to pathologize because “mental health care” is a multibillion dollar industry.
And I’m not saying I don’t need Concerta to function in modern society. I do. I’m saying that in another context — in the context of 4.5 billion years of evolution — there’s nothing particularly wrong with me. Or you.
Also, that dual truth thing, the apparent contradiction, that’s also something that is evident throughout natural systems. And it’s a capital-T Truth that modernity cannot fucking cope with.
Context is the determiner of meaning. Context is perspective. And context is (almost) always the determiner of “good” or “bad” or “healthy” or “disordered.” Modernity has distorted and contorted and modified and manipulated 4.5 billion years of context. And then declared that some of the products of that evolution are a moral failing to be fixed.
And I’m tired of that shit.
Can we smash this bullshit system already? It fucking sucks.
I. 我好想回家, I want to go home, 但是… 我的家在哪裡? But where is home?
I have lost all fluency. 我的流利不留. The jagged edges of grammars, fragmented vocabularies, Jostle in the jigsaw puzzle Of possible expressions.
Mouth sounds grappling to describe The perfect fractal immensity, These jumbled, bubbling impressions, boiling up From the cauldron, Life.
I may have grown here, but I am always non-native now. 我從不本地人. (Yes, I know I didn’t say exactly what I seem to have said that I said. It’s what I meant.)
To call us “Third Culture” Implies a physical space In which the venn diagram of they and they Overlap and we Snuggle cozy and warm There in between.
I have not encountered that space, If it exists. All is familiar. All is 意外，精彩, defamiliarized.
II. Can I sink into the soil somewhere? 土地公公’s realm, Jorð’s body beneath us, Sand, sea, mycelial mat.
Not yet Do I deliver this treasure hoard to Hel.
In the meantime I have questions:
Have you ever seen the snow Sliding sideways over the frozen rice paddies Carved between Korea’s mountains? Do you know the blue-tile temples, the gray tunics, cloth sandals?
The pears of 평택?
Can you smell the tan dirt trails that wind through the paddies? Taste the flat, dry persimmons and fat, autumn grapes?
Lychee in a 北京 June？
Can you feel the September evening Rolling down your skin across the yellow fields South of Київ, north of Одеса?
Do you know the old Soviet bakery perched at the cusp of the Black Sea? They used to sell cheese.
Hungarian trains bearing black-haired women wrapped up in color to the border Romanian horse carts, The discarded children of Bucureşti, Ceaușescu’s hubris.
By all of this I mean to ask, Do you know me?
For the verb, I, is all this – and so much more. Fitting together, awkward and dense as the 10,000 Daily denizens of Hong Kong’s Chungking “Mansions.”
III. So home must be like Whitman’s I Space for multitudes.
我好想回家 哪家大夠嗎 What home could accommodate me now? I am large as Hyrrokkin And teeming with the maggots of my memories.
Only I. Only whole.
This poem and many more are in the collection Ten Thousand Yous, available on Lulu.com and nowhere else, because, ya know, capitalism.
Transcript: Welcome to Ducks of the World Tree, the podcast that waddles across the manicured lawns of suburbia like an overfed pet peking, flaps wildly in front of a speeding Tesla, and then dives deep into the cool waters of – well, hopefully a pond, but probably some kind of pompous drainage ditch masquerading as a natural water feature. Anyway – come with me for the next few minutes. This one’s short. I promise.
I had grand plans for something organized and focused. And then I realized… who am I kidding? I’ve never pulled off anything resembling organized or focused in my entire life. My disaster-ass self is smeared across like 16 countries, 20 jobs, and three or four languages.
But I do have some things to say.
In this podcast, I’ll be documenting my artistic, autistic, radically animistic, ADHD journey as I stumble through life in end stage capitalism, in the endgame of ecological disaster, with a poet’s heart, a dirt-worshiping heathen’s souls… and a glimmer of hope that we can somehow reawaken something wild and authentic and rebellious and beautiful in us – in time to watch the sun set on the catastrophe of industrial civilization – together.
Before we set off on this strange and rambling journey, I want to lay out a few premises:
The first is that there are no individuals – not the way conventional western thought conceives of them. We are communities.
I am a community. All of us are communities. We’re communities of multiple fractious spirits in bodies that are communities made of animal DNA that creates a symbiotic planet for uncountable bacteria and fungi. We’re embedded in entangled communities of plants and animals who have their own soul communities and wills and desires. And we all move in a greater web of spirit communities in a kind of endless fractal magic mushroom trip vision – and all of our edges – I mean ALL of them – are kinda arbitrary.
If you’re familiar with the science behind mitochondria and chloroplasts’ independent evolution, you know that all plant and animal life on Earth is literally a community. There are no plant or animal individuals. And we’re only alive at all because photosynthetic bacteria decided to join forces with another species about 900 million years ago. Forests stand because of the communion of mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots within the soil. Human beings are band animals, in the same way that dogs are pack animals or ants are hive animals. There is no place where we can draw real, hard lines between self and other that don’t involve caveats and approximations and oversimplifications.
The second premise is that nature is alive, conscious, animate, intelligent, and willful. Trees have desires. Mycorrhizal fungi have wills. Viruses and horses and dogs and bean plants and soil all have spirit and intelligence, each in their own way. And if we utilize the time-honored techniques that traditional cultures around the world have used to open our consciousness, we will know this for ourselves. It is possible to directly experience the animacy of the world. And we should do this. We must. Because reconnecting with the huge and beautiful and consuming, spiritually alive reality behind nature is the only thing that can save us as an animal species on this planet.
The third premise is that disconnection is death. When human beings began to turn toward an increasingly mechanistic worldview, when we began to sever our understanding that we are as embedded in the world as the cells of our hand or our heart are embedded in our bodies – that is when we began to wither. We, human beings, are, in fact, threads in a great tapestry. When we remove ourselves, the tapestry begins to fall apart. We are meant to be communities held in the constant embrace of a thousand-thousand other communities. We are never alone, and yet, the specter that haunts modernity is loneliness. The feeling of disconnection, of isolation, of feeling completely adrift is the absolute hallmark of contemporary life. And it will lead to ecological collapse, as we seek to soothe our abject despair with more plastic crap we bought off another plastic website.
The fourth premise is that we can heal ourselves if we can reconnect – to the enmeshed communities of our souls, other people, the spirits of nature, the bigger spirits we might call gods, to ancestors, to the directly observable animist truth of our physical reality.And a corollary: it is difficult, if not impossible, to do any good in this world if the wound of disconnection is not repaired. Basically, hurt people hurt people. No matter what their intentions are. If someone’s ego is all big and swollen and their heart feels all dark and icky, they’re going to leak that ick. They can’t help it. And that’s why most organizations that try to do good wind up eating themselves. Everyone is still fundamentally disconnected and thinking of themselves as individuals in a hierarchy. It’s all bullshit. I pinky swear.
A fifth premise that tags along with all this talk of healing: No one can sell you the medicine. There are no saviors out there. You have to learn to breathe. You have to face the chasm in your chest and the maggots in your belly. There’s nothing to buy. There are no courses, no books, no lecture series, no $500 drum circle that will save you. Go out in the woods. Breathe. Beat a stick against the dirt. Maybe find a mushroom on a cow pattie. Make friends with people you can touch and smell. Only you can save you. Anyone trying to sell you a cure is a faker and a cheat.
With those premises out of the way, let’s talk wounds, vultures, and crochet.
If a wound has been open a long time, (10,000 years?) it’s probably infected and festering, so the first step in healing is that you’ve got to get rid of that necrotic tissue. In the natural world, the organisms that eat dead and rotting things are the detritivores – vultures, maggots, earthworms, fungi – they eat death and break it down into nutrients that new life can use to build new connections. Vultures are holy. Maggots and earthworms; Holy. Fungi – probably the holiest.
In human society, artists do something very similar to these holy creatures. We take in the pain and rot that humans have created, the dead and dying social tissue that no longer serves us, we digest it, and use it to support healthy, interdependent social tissue – healthy, reconnected, vibrant, entangled communities.
So, as an artist, I aspire to the nobility of the worm. I aspire to the vulture’s path. I serve all my communities by learning to eat… shit. And with that, spin wildly uneven yarn that we can use together to crochet new life, healthy connections, and webs of resilient communities.
And it’s no accident that I choose crochet, for my final metaphor, dear listener. Because knitting is the foundation of the entire digital age. And crochet? To this day, crochet cannot be done by a machine. It can only be done by hand. By human hands. Slowly, laboriously, with love.
And so, kind listener, I invite you to stumble along with me as I, the quintessential awkward duck, waddle along the riverbanks toward reconnection to the animate holiness of vultures and crochet.
I didn’t have my good camera, so you’ll have to believe that those dark balls up in the tree are heron’s nests, not mistletoe.
I went on a little adventure yesterday. Paddled upstream 4.64 miles in 3 hours. The current wasn’t bad in spots, but there’s a long stretch that seems unnaturally straight. It’s shallow and fast. Had to wade and drag the boat along behind. The whole business was much harder than I had anticipated (probably because I’m not very good at anticipating), but it was a wonderful experience.
The herons were not impressed.
I had paddled the kayak over to the bank to rest a moment, and two huge herons were suddenly upon me. They swooped and yelled, startling me. I hadn’t realized I was invading their nursery. When I paddled back from the bank, they retreated to their nests, watchful and irritable.
A little while later, having navigated maybe a dozen fallen trees (red-eared-slider conventions) and several areas where the limestone has eroded deeply in a long, sinuous channel, but where it is a wide, shallow shelf toward each bank, I came upon a place where erosion from a hilly area in the forest has created two little islands. As I passed the first, a raccoon (or beaver, I never really saw it) launched himself at my boat in fight-or-flight terror.
Of course, I screamed like a blonde in a slasher film.
And then I laughed and laughed and had to stop at the next little island to have lunch.
But it struck me that no matter how many plants and animals I had seen and recognized, there were countless others that had escaped my attention altogether. And I wonder about that.
Humans think we see a lot. We’re quite keen on how awesome we are. But we’re so rarely aware of what we don’t perceive. I hadn’t seen the herons, the raccoon or beaver, or several of the turtles who loudly protested my intrusion on their home. How many lives escaped the approach of my little kayak and never made a sound?
And what could I have learned from them if we could have made friends?
I wrote the first version of “Loki’s Laughing” during the height of COVID shutdowns. It lay there, incomplete and in rough recorded journal form (page turns and all) for three years before I pulled it out to really look at it again – which is kind of a funny story all on its own. I had been chatting with a friend about how paralyzed I felt, creatively. So paralyzed, in fact, that my song about creative paralysis was stuck in limbo. She wanted to hear it, so I uploaded it to SoundCloud for ease of sharing… and then 300-odd people wound up listening to my unfinished, unpolished journal entry within 48 hours, which was both thrilling and horrifying.
Thinking about the song again got me thinking about the feelings behind it.
From the time I was about 13 years old (when I started learning to play my dad’s old 12-string guitar) until I was 36 or so, I was an active artist. I played shows and open mics (in a few countries), I entered (and sometimes won) contests of visual art and poetry, and all my free time that wasn’t spent hiking or biking involved the creation and performance of art in some form.
But right around the time I turned 36 – so, just a little under 10 years ago from the time of this writing – I stopped creating. Altogether. I just shut down.
It was as if this horrific Paralyzing Spirit of Perfectionism took over and hollowed me out. Suddenly, after decades of creating freely, I just couldn’t. I was consumed by the fear that I would somehow create something that would trigger a cascade of online vitriol. And my fear of trolls absolutely invaded my skull. Imaginary bullies followed me into my living room. Before I even sat down with the piano or began to daydream about a story, legions of imaginary bullies were screaming at me. It was ridiculous.
What happened when I turned 36 was that I got my first smartphone.
And what had completely paralyzed me was my very first observations of the comments section on social media like YouTube and, well, the whole of Twitter.
I was tying myself in knots because I was terrified that some bored jerk on Twitter (or Tik Tok or whatever) was going to – what? Be mean to me? I spent my childhood being teased on the playground. I’ve been told I was a weirdo all my life. What’s new? What was so scary about it happening on the Internet that I was suddenly a committed devotee of rotting in unremitting, barren paralysis?
I think it’s because the Internet was suddenly in my pocket. Or bag. Or on the table next to me. I think it’s because the potential for bullying felt like it was omnipresent. Inescapable.
Social media can be a tool, if we approach it as one facet of a rich and truly multifaceted life. If the vast majority of our time is spent outdoors in the sunshine (or rain or wind or snow), or with people, plants, and animals in the actual meatspace of embodied life, if we devote ourselves to working with our hands and reading books (with pages that we can turn) and writing with a pencil and paper – if we re-inhabit our bodies – and occasionally check in on Instagram… I think, maybe, that the Internet might be a cool way to connect.
But if it takes over our skulls, if it masters us… naw. Fuck it.
Throw it away.
We can do better.
We used to share printed zines and have pirate radio shows. We used to write paper letters and meet up in libraries and coffee shops and parks. We used to ride our fucking bikes around the godsdamned neighborhood.
And ya know, that was actually pretty fucking cool.
Well anyway, here’s a video I made to go along with a song I made (with my brother). A stridently imperfect song about being creatively paralyzed and how ridiculous that really is.
Because we’re all gonna die. And the bullies are just as scared of the vast, open question that is the end of life as anyone. So fuck it. Might as well create something now.
My brother and I have been talking music a lot lately. He played trombone, studies classical music in his free time, and reads books on stuff like arrangement and voice leading.
I’m more of an impressionist. How can I smear this sound across your ears and get you to feel something like the catastrophe that I feel?
Chris paints Rembrandts in sound. There’s a clear story, introduction, rising action, climax, denouement. His musical phrases are characters that enter and re-enter the scene, strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more (until they show up in a motif as part of the finale).
You know what I mean.
I’m more like a four-year-old who someone gave a box of very expensive paints.
I’m smearing color across my face (and everything else) in rapturous joy (or misery) with psychedelic abandon and the kind of confidence one can only have when one knows ZERO music theory. My “songs” are generally more of a free-verse poem, half-sung, half-chanted, and sitting alongside musical notes that may or may not form some kind of chord progression.
So it’s fun to work with him. I’m learning a lot. And he hasn’t killed me yet, so there’s that.
Sometimes, out of our talks, I do get an idea for song structure.
The other night, I was making dinner, listening to music, and the Great Algo sent to my headphones an old song, Untouchable Face, by Ani DiFranco. It’s a song about having Big Feelings for someone who’s already in a happy, stable relationship.
(The chorus is “Fuck you, and your untouchable face. Fuck you, for existing in the first place. And who am I, that I should be vying for your touch? Who am I? I bet you can’t even tell me that much.”)
And, just because it’s a fun song and I haven’t heard it in ages, I thought about covering it about a dozen different ways as I listened to it on repeat: musical theatre, punk rawk, lounge singer…
But it occurred to me that the kind of feelings one has in that situation are like a loop. You get stuck on repeat. So I made this loooong loop of the bass line and had it set to an upright bass and a cello. And then went about making a kind of trance-loop-echo chamber piece that I think is a pretty accurate aural representation of being caught in the soft gauze of ones own looping thoughts.
I’ll never make radio music. Or dance music. Or doin’-chores music. But I will keep scratching out these images of emotion caught in a moment. With the technical skill of a four-year-old who got their hands on some very expensive paints.
Ducks of the World Tree 