Category: Podcasts

Grief and Insurance

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 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 grief, isolation, and profit, with a side quest down health insurance lane.

The first premise that I’m always working with is that there are no individuals — only fluid and interdependent communities. 

The communal nature of our innermost being may be invisible to many modern people, and I assert that’s an intentional part of capitalism. Isolated people are vulnerable and thus easy to control. They’re also more likely to spend money on crap they don’t need to soothe the souls-deep injury of disconnection. In order to destroy the bonds of healthy, interdependent communities, modern people are intentionally isolated, both conceptually and physically. We’re isolated by the idea that there is a human and non-human sphere as well as various identitarian notions about who we do and don’t have relations with. Physically, we’re walled off in climate-controlled apartments, we work from home, we order groceries to be delivered online, and packages from Amazon appear neatly at the door. But all of this does, indeed, depend on others. Conceptually, we’re in constant dialogue with everything and everyone who has gone before. Physically, we depend  on the land and sun and rain to feed us, human beings to pick and package and transport that food, we depend on computers and their networks, which are made by groups of people and large amounts of supposedly “inanimate” “resources.” Even in our isolation we depend on vast networks of other-than-self. 

And we, in turn, must serve our part in the larger machine by going to work.

The  glue holding this fractured, depressed, delivery-dependent society together, however, is not love or clan or religion or land-connectedness — it is money. Exploitation, violence or the threat of violence, profit. There is a real, alienating, socio-pathology that underpins the social fabric of modernity and that is unsustainable.

It also makes us sad. We are sad because we know that we are interdependent, community-hungry little hairless apes and we know we are weirdly isolated by all the trappings of modernity, and we believe all this to be inevitable — and it makes us sad. We grieve for the loss of connection. We grieve the lack of relation. 

…

I’ve also asserted that Nature is alive, conscious, sentient, animate, intelligent, and willful. That the natural world reaches out to us. It longs for us to rejoin the communion of the living in relational awareness. As an aside: I hate to verbally cut “us” from “nature,” because it isn’t true; we are nature. But I think if I don’t overall clarity will be lost at this point, so go with me on this, acknowledging that it’s an imperfect articulation.

Nature also grieves humanity’s strange little detour down modernity lane.

That underlying belief leads me to assert that there are no inanimate resources lying about waiting to be exploited any more than there are women lying about asking to be raped or hospitalized people just wishing they could hurry up and die so that some CEO somewhere could buy a second yacht with their accumulated health insurance premiums. There are only delusional humans exercising power via violence or the threat of violence over other sentient, living, intelligent beings. 

And the deluded people are wrong.

The world is alive. It is conscious. And we depend on our connection to it for our health. The disconnection we suffer under capitalism leads inevitably to death.

We grieve. Nature grieves. 

Not participating in the relational exchange of life on Earth drives us crazy and makes us sick. The attitudes that arise from seeing the world as a pile of inanimate resources underlies our entire system of exploitation, of violence, pollution, climate chaos… fucking health insurance. The entire idea that healthcare could be for-profit, the idea that a person who is sick is actually a resource for a corporation to exploit and profit from…

All that arises from the premise that the world is inanimate. That premise is the root of evil. The love of money comes afterwards.

Flip the coin for a moment: If our basic worldview were that stones and trees were alive and conscious, and we treated even stones and trees as non-human people with varying levels of consciousness and autonomy, how then could we conceive of exploiting other human beings? How could we conceive of exploiting women for their reproductive function or other groups of people for their labor? If we wouldn’t exploit a rock because it has a recognizable spirit, how could we exploit a human?

Our disconnection from the larger animate world ultimately allows capitalism to destroy the entire planet with pollution, plastic, carbon emissions, corruption, perverting our social bonds and basic humanity. And because we are atomized by capitalism, exhausted in our solitary, parallel lives, we are largely unable to adequately respond. So we grieve alone.

The last two premises that I’m always trying to work with are that reconnection is healing and that if the cure to your sadness is being sold to you, it is not the cure to your sadness.

If we want to be happy, we must reach out. Go outside. Cling to nature. Recognize that there is no separation between you and tree, bear and stone. See the flow of energy and matter through various states. Fall in love with the human and non-human worlds. Interact with the bark of trees, the cool, moist soil, the smell of fish in a lake, people in flesh. Not mediated by plastic and glass and silicone. And remember, that no one can sell you the medicine for what ails you. A toxic mimic of connection is worse than just suffering disconnection.

So, we must reconnect. One part of reconnecting with the real, animate, living world is engaging with grief. This engagement must be honest, fearless, and authentic — because the blithe, superficial, “it’s all in god’s plan” Hallmark cards bullshit undermines healing.

Grief is real and natural. Just like old age, sickness, and death, grief comes for us — all. But in this twilight of capitalism, we have sectioned off all the “unproductive” parts of human life. Sickness and death and age get sent away. And if someone is truly grieving, they’re of no use to capitalism. 

Grief is the abject sorrow of separation. It is disintegration where there should be wholeness. Grief is too real, too authentic, too resistant to being subverted and used by capitalism. So we isolate the grieving. We isolate the sick who might make cause us to feel uneasy. We tell the sad that they need to take their problems to a professional. They need to take medication. So they can hurry up and get back to work. 

As long as we are stuck in modernity, therapy and medication may well be necessary. But also, every piece of evidence we have about human beings experiencing grief and trauma and then truly healing from it, indicates that what we need physical community, dance, drums, touch, communion. Connection.

Today, in an effort to do some of the real work of grieving and healing and reconnecting myself, I would like to reach out to you, dear listener. I’d like to read a piece of prose poetry I wrote a few years ago about watching a beloved friend’s spouse die of cancer. 

As I watched the 29 year old husband of one of my dearest friends die, horrifically, the spectre of the American health insurance system was an ever-present additional torture. The for-profit health insurance system was  a vicious backdrop to everything else vicious and horrific that happened. 

From the fact that he wasn’t diagnosed with cancer at all until it had spread everywhere because — well, because of insurance, to the fact that this fully insured, fully employed young couple also spent over $100,000 cash in a vain attempt to treat this cancer, all of it. All of the suffering. Every moment of it was monetized.

And that makes me extremely angry.

In the piece I am about to read, I only brush the topic obliquely. The financial aspect was far too much additional horror to dive into in this one poem.

But I want to say here and now, that for-profit health insurance is an absolute evil. The push for private equity to purchase hospitals and doctors’ practices has only made healthcare more inaccessible, and more deadly. Use of AI in health insurance claim denial has only killed more people since this piece was written. Our grief and our rage as a society has only grown. 

Each of us, in our isolated silos, have grieved the loss of loved ones who were tortured not only by disease, but also by insurance companies. We suffer from cancers caused in no small part by the pollution and tainted food that capitalism foists upon us all, and then they torture us a little more with insurance claim denials and malicious incompetence that amounts to harassment. Retroactive denials of prior authorizations. They defend their denials until long after our loved ones have died. 

You know the rest. 

So I will read to you a piece about grief. And about rage.

The grief we collectively experience is not only of the loss of a loved one. It is the grief of isolation. Of financial precarity.  Of insurance torture. Of separation from community. Separation from a natural existence. Dependence on toxic systems. The grief of capitalism. 

So I will read to you of all this and more. Because part of reconnecting and healing is expressing our sorrows. Sharing our pain. Recognizing that everything touches on everything else. 

A Vocabulary of Grief

ANNO I

A is for absolutely stunning. You, my dear friend, could not have been a more beautiful bride, nor could the groom have been more dashing. The two of you, both twenty-something, immortalized in ten thousand photographs: you are the effortless, natural definition of grace and youth and health — absolutely perfect in every way.

ANNO II

B is for best. For going home to your kind, warm, fabulously brilliant best friend every night. For the best year ever. For your new floors and grown-up furniture and fancy new picture frames (some still sporting stock photos). For your new job. As your mom says: “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Everything is so good, your friends (maybe just a little bit jealously) are speculating whether next year, B might be for baby. 

ANNO III

C is for chaos. Because families are for holidays. I mean, holidays are for families. Families, a time to sit together and eat too much. And play with the little cousins. Eat too much, but not until you get a stomachache, goober. But the stomachache has grown. In reality, it has lurked there for a long time, weeks, months, quiet, barely known, but now it is something more. Something that hurts. So you take your silly husband to the doctor, and he probably has appendicitis, which is urgent, but not really any big deal in the grand scheme of things. The doctor sends the two of you to the nearest emergency room where a heavy-set, blonde woman in too-tight, sea-green scrubs scans his guts. And mild irritation wraps awkwardly around your thin shoulders as you swing your feet from the too-tall chair in the too-cold room, scrolling mindlessly through your phone. And you wait and wait and wait. But the tightness in your chest is because fuck this is expensive, and no one has time for this on the Sunday night before you both go back to work from Thanksgiving break, not because even the tiniest hummingbird-shadow of fear has crossed your minds. 

ANNO IV

D is for diagnosis. And then the doctor walks in, business-like and grim, and he says many things, but you hear only one clear word before the doctor turns away and closes the door on you: cancer. 

ANNO V

And C is for chaos. For the order-less, justice-less dance of the universe and the traffic on the way to the hospital. For the spinny little particles of dust trapped in viscous ropes of sunlight as it passes through the window of the family room on the fourth floor of the cancer ward where you should not be, looking as though your heart is a dried-out, rotten apple that has collapsed in on itself, forgotten on the counter. Where he should not be, sitting there in a robe and a blue toboggan cap wearing his trademark lighthouse smile that almost masks the terror. Where I should not be, standing around like a bad impression of myself, offering oversized trays of chocolate candies you don’t really want making small talk with your mom and his cousins.

ANNO VI

F is for things fall apart.

ANNO VII

G is for gravity. The sensation that before this moment, the air was busy filling up, moment layered upon moment, with tiny grains of sand, but I had lived my life up to now unaware. And now I see that your body has gained the mass of a dying star, and all things fall toward your center. Now, the weight of terrible possibilities descend over all our minds like wet wool that expands to fill the volume of the chest, that twists inside the belly. It is the weight of my bones suddenly shot through with nails that squirm and worm their way up and down the long corridors of my arms and legs. Bones that would give their very marrow to flee, flee, flee — but that instead sit beside you as you sit beside him as we sit beside this strange new reality in the blue-carpeted family room on the fourth floor cancer ward.

ANNO VIII

I is for insurance. See also: Quasi-Satanic, uniquely American method of torture.

And I is for indignity. For every open-backed paper dress, cold tile on bare toes, samples of every possible bodily fluid lined up in clear plastic cups with blue screw-tops labeled with white stickers, his name and ID number and age scrawled across in black marker. 

ANNO IX

P is for the paperwork that comes in official emails, that must be faxed, that arrives in envelopes large and small. Paperwork that collects, sheet after sheet, in reams stacked and filed and folded as if we were preparing the sacrifice of great swaths of forest to lay on the altar of bureaucracy in the slight hope that a capricious god would grant reprieve to your beloved.

ANNO X

O is for operation. And C is for chemo. And for a different chemo. And yet another. C is for claim. And D is for denial. S is for savings, all used up. P is for the passage of less than a year’s time that feels simultaneously like a moment and longer than a century. 

ANNO XI

H is for hopeful, still. For the foolish, unutterable, tingling, sweaty, hot, swirling mess of maybe things will be OK after all.

ANNO XII

And S is for one last scan.

ANNO XIII

M is for metastasized. For the sickness that creeps along the shadow of the fence lines of our lives, dark vines seeking purchase in untended ground. Tendrils waiting to blossom in spectacular arrays of horror.

ANNO XIV

O is for the operation to make a little more space in his lungs. Just a little space. Just for a little while. 

ANNO XV

F is for feeling like a force-fed tick. For holding all these things in my gut while I scurry the halls at work, trying to avoid the seeking eyes and prying questions of our co-workers. For feeling as though I have become insectoid and horrible, and that with every well-meaning query, my distended gray belly is tearing open to disgorge the purple morass of viscous churning news.

ANNO XVI

H is for hospital, again. And P is for pain. D is for the dread that rises from my belly, a clear, fine, sharp shape that spreads out in chrysanthemums of blue, electric shock along my collarbones and arms and palms and fingertips. And U is for unravelling.

ANNO XVII

J is for joy. Banal little snippets of sparkly, orange joy that shine through the cold, gray granite of this place. Mango Slushies. Bubble tea with popping bubbles. Watching him light up the room with that grin of his, bright as the only lighthouse on the coast, as he watches you shove Hot Cheetos into your face. 

ANNO XVIII

T is for time, for the way that time collapses to a pinprick, and I look at all my living friends and see us simultaneously as we are now and as we inevitably will be. As he is now. For the way that time is running out.

ANNO XIX

R is for regret, whileL is for lost, life, longing. And for lingering. And N is for now. Because now divides never-will-be from was, and because now is all that’s real, despite our protestations.

ANNO XX

Q is for questions, the questions your other friends hurl at me because they’re terrified and they don’t want to bother you. The questions that pierce the fragile facade of I’m fine. The questions that come with jagged, slender, innocent edges. The questions that lodge in my belly and slice me open until I spew anguish across the room and the contents of my pathetic little heart paint the walls and desks and windows with my insufficiency and my fear. 

ANNO XXI

E is for emotions. All of them. For the endless origami seascape of the human heart. The infinite possible contradictions. Because I felt all of them the day he waited until you had turned your attention to the nurse, and he took my hand in his and would not let go until I found his eyes. And I knew he knew. And you did not. Yet.

ANNO XXII

V is for vivisection, which is what I felt was happening when you told me what the doctor said that morning. Vivisection — for the cracks that seem to open in the body as a response to the heart’s pain. And for the light that shines through those ruptures. The light that shines from these fissures in who we used to be. The light that seeps, the light that pours, golden and broken. After that, X is for Xanax, which I think I may need because S is for screaming in my car in the parking lot at work. Because there is no more O for operation to buy time and no more C for chemo to buy time and no more T for time and

ANNO XXIII

Z is the sound of the buzzing in my head because

ANNO XXIV

H is for hospice, the word that transforms all possibilities and all hope and all love and all friendship into loitering corpses doped up on state-restricted painkillers. 

ANNO XXV

K is for keening. For the songs we sang on the horizon of his deathbed. For your poetry of memory, time, tide. For the high wail of his stepmother in the bathroom. The soft raking of his father in the kitchen. For your mother and I, curled on opposite ends of the couch, trying to sob silently. For attempting to fold this grief into something tiny and quiet enough to tuck between the cushions of the couch because I cannot carry two sorrows, and there is time enough for me to care for my own later. 

ANNO XXVI

Y is for yesterday, when I knew he would be dead by morning. When I went racing across the parking lot of my apartment, house slippers flapping, to stand in the graveyard next door and take photos of the dying of the day because I saw that the sun had almost set, and I was running out of time. And for the moment yesterday when I thought: I’ve missed the best of it, but no big deal, try again tomorrow. Then the thought: No, no. This sunset is marvelous and unique and alone, and the atmospheric conditions will never be just this way ever again. 

Every day is marvelous and unique.
And we are always running out of time.

ANNO XXVII

Because D is for death,

ANNO XXVIII

And W is for widow, my dear friend.

ANNO XXIX

And A is for absolute. For the line between before and hereafter.

The Dopamine of the Daydream

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 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 daydreaming, art, and the absurdity of modernity.

So, I moved back to Asia in September, and it’s taken me a lot longer than I anticipated to pull myself together to do anything creative. It’s December already, and the last three months have passed with the same kind of slipperiness and insubstantial *swoosh* as draining noodles and having half the pot escape down the Dispose-all. 

This time-disconnection is pretty typical for the neuro-fancy tribe, but sometimes it hits me that huge chunks of life have slipped away and I’ve done nothing but work and watch trash TV and read and daydream.

This thought hit me: that it is SO MUCH MORE FUN to daydream than it is to just do the thing.

I can daydream all day about creating one-woman plays, I can make endless concept albums in my mind, build complex plots for novels that will never be written.

Daydreaming is so fun! — It’s just, I wonder… is it really? More fun? Than actually creating something? What’s going on? This seems… this seems particularly absurd.

Because I do experience joy after a day of actual writing or tinkering on a song. I do enjoy making things with yarn and paint and fabric.

But the days walking around the mountains, reading, daydreaming, making little watercolor notes in a cafe in downtown Taipei. THAT, that is the life. 

Maybe capitalism’s emphasis on production is the problem. I mean, we all need time to just be. What would we even produce if we never had time to be still, be unproductive, read, think, meditate — right?

But I think my love of daydreaming is more of a maladaptive coping mechanism. If I explore enough, daydream enough, I don’t have to confront my own dislocation in space, time, or history. I won’t have to confront my own boredom.

Maybe I’m just pathologically restless and unfocused which, I suppose, should surprise no one considering the premise of the podcast is animist ADHD neurospice-ological musings on existence during end stage capitalism. 

So anyhow, lately, my unproductive time has been spent reading David Byrne’s How Music Works, and that, coupled with a side quest down Joan Didion Lane, a quick jaunt down Camus’ dark alley, with a pit stop at the Cafe Nietzsche has me… daydreaming. 

A lot.

David Byrne has me pondering What Art Is, what it can be, should be. What defines music? Is it the intangible experience of people making music in a room? Is it the recording, which is static, an object that can be bought, sold, possessed (to say nothing of the reality that we own nothing these days, what with the digital streaming services).

But is art a thing that can serve capitalism? Or is Art a holy communion that might save us from an ecocidal and self-destructive nihilism? 

Could art for arts sake save us from the absurd death-cult that is modernity?

If the relentless march of totalitarian capitalism leaves our world increasingly disenchanted, materialized, and commodified; and then we are, as a result, increasingly bored, restless, rootless, aimless, and empty, is Art a way out? A way around? A way to be so radically free that your very existence is rebellion? 

An answer, the right answer, to Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem.” The question of whether or not life is worth living.

Because yes, we are captives in a for-profit prison. Every aspect of natural existence is compelled into the service of profit. All needs are stolen from the natural world and sold back to us. We are denied even time to dream guilt-free.

Because yes, daydreaming for dopamine to survive a life stripped of meaning by a sociopathic and ecocidal drive for profit IS ABSURD.

Modernity IS ABSURD.

But so is giving in to this fascist regime of capital, saving the corporate healthcare scheme millions in profits by shuffling yourself off the ol’ mortal coil (since they won’t have to pay for you in your old age, right?). How dare these fuckers trap us so vilely, so thoroughly in meaningless machine existence.

The long you live, the more you feel like a lab rat, and the white-coat-lords-above keep shaking our cage so that we’re always off-balance. Always unsure.

But are we really unsure of what Art is? 

No. I think not.

Somewhere deep within we know. So do they. 

Art is communion. It is unmediated communication. Between our inner selves and the broader community of seen and unseen beings that make the animate, conscious fabric in which we are embedded. Art is reconnection with the world as an enchanted place. Art brings the gods and powers back into the body of the world. Art is healing.

And the true medicine that heals us from the absurdity of modernity can not be bought or sold. That’s why corporate “art” works so hard to convince you that you can’t make art. You can’t sing. You can’t dance. You can’t whatever as well as whatever professional whoo-ha. Crush the natural human drive to create with insecurity.

Failing that, they’ll let you have the tools, the computer, the method to self-publish, but then the rules change and no one can make a living doing art. No one can survive on that income alone, and you’re working two jobs to make rent, so who has the time anymore…

To do anything more…

Than daydream.

So let’s daydream a new world. And let’s steal time to write it. And let’s steal the space to share our ideas. And let’s just live outside of 24-hour clock time that was invented for the fucking factory system, and let us live outside of productivity and outside conventional notions of focus and just be. 

Be human.

All too human.

After all.

The Wandering Path of Desire

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. 

Vultures and Crochet

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.