164 Sean
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Monica: Welcome to the Revelation Project podcast. I'm Monica Rogers, and this podcast is intended to disrupt the trance of unworthiness and to guide women to remember and reveal the truth of who we are. We say that life is a revelation project and what gets revealed, gets healed. Hello, dear listener. Welcome to another episode of The Revelation Project Podcast today, your in for a treat.

I am with Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue who is an herbalist. Vegeta writer, poet, teacher, and an initiated priest in two traditions as an animist, he experiences plants and fungi as our ancestors and our kin, living beings with their own intelligence who exist with us. Not for us. His work with plants and fungi weaved together insights gleaned traditional western herbalism, contemporary science, Irish and Nordic animism, and his own lived experience.

He's an author of The Forest Reminds Us Who We Are and Courting the Wild Queen. An upcoming book tentatively titled The Silver Branch, and writes a column for Plant Healer Quarterly. He teaches classes through his own other world well hedged school and serves on the faculties of the Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism and the Arbor Veda School of traditional herbalism.

Please join me in welcoming. Hello Sean. 

Seán: Hello. Thank you so much. So grateful for this invitation. 

Monica: Well, I loved your book and I was wondering if, you know, I had read the right bio for you there because I had read Courting The Wild Queen and You Ha and so I, I was reading that as you have, it's called an upcoming book, tentatively titled The Silver Branch, but you've got another one in the works is what I'm realizing.

Is that correct? 

Seán: Well, the Silver Branch is a manuscript that I just finished. It's kind of a reincarnation of my first book with allowed to be freer and war fluid. And so I just got that into the publisher in February and we're in. Oh, navigating how it'll come into the world place. 

Monica: Oh, I love that for you.

Congratulations. That is exciting. 

Seán: Thank you.

Monica: Well, I, I would love to just really start with a little bit of background because in reading your work, I am just fascinated by who you might have been as a child. And I wondered if you could start there with just kind of how you grew up a little bit and give us a little bit of background.

Seán: Absolutely. So I grew up in Northeastern Massachusetts, a bit north of Boston, a bit north of where my great grandparents had landed when they came from Ireland. And um, you know, I was at the edge of the suburbs. There was still enough forest around and there was the swamp behind the house with a skunk cabbage lift.

That became one of my great sanctuaries and I was very confused about the world I was born into. And the world I was born into was very confused about me. And

so I had, you know, a profound sense of disconnection from the time and place where I was also a profound sense of disconnection from my body that was shaped by struggles with asthma and with physical coordination as a very young child that really together with my own way of turning Catholic theology around in my head and my heart sort of made me.

At war with my body. 

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: But the places where I felt at home were in that swamp and forest behind the house and in stories of distant times and places, and especially of my ancestors. So this was, you know, I was born in 74, so late seventies, early eighties. Nobody had much of a framework for understanding exactly what was going on for me, why?

There were some areas where what seemed easy for other people, like tying shoes was almost impossible for me. And yet there I was as a young child, seeing these deep patterns in history and you know, everybody did their best. And I went to all manner of specialists trying to figure out my own peculiar brain, but they didn't really have the language and framework for understanding that I'm autistic.

Which there were times when I wished I had known that earlier in life. And I think there are ways that would've been a blessing, but at the same time, Our neurobiology as autistic people are still very misunderstood. And the things that tend to happen when you're identified early in life as autistic were not have been things that would've served my being.

And so I've come to, I've come to have a reluctant gratitude for, for the confusion. Ah, 

Monica: Yes. Yes. To reluctant gratitude. Right. It's like the disguised gift in some ways. Right. We're, we're, 

Seán: yeah

Monica: I think we all have our own story of kind of hindsight being 2020 where we both. Are dismayed, but also grateful.

You know, that there, there's that paradox right away, you know, that, that came up when, when we chose our card today, which was Chiron. Right. And I love that your first mentor, you know, had, had said, or, or one of your friends or teachers had said Kyron is the first mentor, right?

Seán: Yes. Uh, that's the wonderful, uh, astrologer, Caroline Casey, who has become a dear friend over the past few years and has such amazing insights about, this is what the sky story tells to us on earth.

Monica: Yeah. The sky clock, the sky story, there's, yeah, the original story, right? The. And how and how those influences do shape us. And depending, you know, on where we're born and who we're born of that we really are all tapestries or threads that are weaved into the tapestry of our story that end up making us who we are.

Yes. Even the title of your book I found moving, and maybe it's because my whole life, all I ever heard whether it was true or not, was him, his, him, right? Like his him. Whatever version of that, right? It was, yeah. All of our, his story books, all of our school books, all of the ways that it felt like anything that ever mattered was in the name of his, he, him.

And so when I saw the title of your book, Courting the Wild Queen, I was immediately attracted to it because the archetype of the queen is something that I've really been exploring these last few years. 

Seán: Mm-hmm.

Monica: And then you put the words courting, which have so many different, meanings to different people and wild.

And I was like, okay. I think these might be three of my favorite words ever in the title of your book. So, and I know that you have other beautiful works, but that is the one that, you know, I just really gravitated towards immediately. And I wondered if you could tell me and my listener about the title of that book and about its meaning to you.

Seán: Absolutely, and it really is my most intimate work, both the work that's both the writing that's dearest to me, but also the writing that in some ways was most terrifying to put out into the world because both because of the way that it reveals.

Me and my way of being in the world, but also because when there's something so deeply precious and so deeply beloved, there are always the questions of how will this be received in the world? And am I doing true service to the visions and the experiences that have been shared? And so it really comes to an understanding of sovereignty in the very, very old sense.

And actually, if I may, I might read a passage that speaks to that. 

Monica: Yeah, please.

Seán: In the old stories, the king is wedded to the land. In sovereignty as a gift to land bestows and withdraws at will. This suggests a very different notion of sovereignty than that which tends to be bandied about in the dominant culture today. People now tend to speak of sovereignty as being individual and personal, our right to control our own bodies and knives, but the individual rational actors and invention of capitalism, a concept of severs, our connections to land and community.

In reality, our bodies and our minds are ecologies. Communities of myriad beings coming together and giving rise to a more or less shared consciousness and are completely in interdependent with human, the humans, and other than humans who share our l. Just as a God might be the mind that arises from a forest, a river, a planet, or a cluster of galaxies.

So two is each person's consciousness. A collective consciousness, born of the matter. And energy that makes up beings. To be sovereign is to be an alignment, to be self-possessed, which inherently means to be conscious of the ecological selves we are members of. In the same way that are individual neurons are members of a brain, a nervous system, a neuroendocrine, emergent, self-regulating feedback loop, a human body, a family, a community, a species, an ecology landscape, a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, a universe, and the body of God herself.

And so, a lot of this was a quest for, was a personal quest for understanding how to be alive in this world in a way that really honored the life of this world and a particular, how to step into and embody a masculinity that was older than and different than what I had seen in the world that I lived in.

And voices began coming very strongly from my Irish ancestors. Speaking of the old way, which was that. You know the king was not a monarch or a ruler. The Irish word re probably king is the English translation, but it means something different and older. It's related to the Sanskirt word rig, which means shining one.

And the king was not the maker of the law. The law existed as a song that was passed from generation to generation, nor was the king, the maker of decisions. Those were made at an assembly of the people, but the king was the one who wedded the living spirit of the land herself was understood, not in the abstract, but as it was understood as a true marriage to the land, and that life was an offering to the land who offered life.

Back in return and was that point of weaving the mind of the community together and weaving and then intertwining that with living spirit of the land. And I've learned more recently, uh, that, um, the Irish, Irish word, Sears, which means free, uh, corresponds to, um, an old concept of whether a person was, was sea or not, depending, wa was a matter of a person reciting their genealogy, going back to the goddess of the land.

And that to be free was to know the way in which your people arose from the land. And of course that's a broken lineage for almost everyone, including me. I know who my people were going back to the 17 hundreds, and I know who their ancestors were before about 1500, but there are 200 years of missing stories of stolen genealogies.

And so the only way to become free when that genealogy is lost under the concept of the old law is to come into your own new relation with the living land.

Monica: There's so much beauty in everything that you shared, and I love that you had this.

Moment where you were redefining what it is to be alive in this world in a way that honored it, and also that that invited you into exploring a different kind of masculinity, and that that message came through your lineage, your ancestors, you know, that that was inspired through this inquiry. You know, and I often look at inquiry in itself as this contemplative prayer that allows those voices to reach us.

Seán: Yes. 

Monica: Yeah. And, and what a beautiful history, you know, of the king and the land and what that was really about. And, and, and unpacking that a little bit more, I think about our meditation, you know, before we started. And Mother Earth as the great goddess, right, as this, yeah. Fertile, generative, generous. Loving tempestuous. Right. But, 

Seán: mm-hmm.

Monica: All of the ways that the courting of the land is the wild queen.

Right. She is the wild queen. Yes. Yeah. And I read something that stuck out to me. I mean so many things in your book, but one was the Wild has its own etiquette of consent. Yes. And I find that to be such an interesting word that you used consent. So would you talk more about that? 

Seán: Well, we really break the word down. It's feeling together. And so we have all these, so we have the concept of the surface of the who we think we are, being in verbal conversation with, who somebody else thinks that they are. And

my own, I think so much confusion, uh, comes from when we go only to that level and we take ourselves and each other just at the spoken word. 

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: And. If we are in a disconnected and dissociated place, then we only hear what's happening at the surface. And if we don't understand how much of a person's being is showing up for that discussion. And I think about the places I have caused hurt and the places that I have been hurt and about how much that's been about, only when there's only that awareness. And I'm so glad that we've come to that awareness after not having had that awareness as a long time, uh, for a long time in the culture.

But when we're only at that, awareness, we can miss something deeper and more fundamental. And that also can

lead to all kinds of confusions and spiraling in our stories, in each other's stories. And, but when we are really at that place of feeling together of presence, then we can feel what goes all the way to the root of the being. And, you know, isle Royale in, uh, in Michigan is a place where, The, where biologists have been able to observe, uh, the interaction between mooses and wolves for a very, very long time, because they're large populations of both on this very small place, and they've been able to set up the cameras to record the interactions.

And one thing that they see is that, you know, when there is that conversation, that embodied conversation between the moose and the wolf that passes silently, where sometimes the moose says, yes, I'm tired, I surrender.

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: And sometimes the moose says, no, not today. And the wolf walks away. 

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: And sometimes the moose says, chase me.

Monica: Yeah. That there's this inherent language that is older than words that is, that are these nuances, subtleties, shifts. Right. That, that it's that all of that is, can be observed, intuited, understood, but not from a place of words. And this kind of brings us into this conversation about animism and how disconnected we are if we.

If kind of our only experience is the ones of this compartmentalized logical

visual, right? Like I can see it, I can feel it, and therefore it's real kind of way of being in the world that is so isolating and limiting and discounts all of these other languages, all of these other ways of being that are

just as valid, if not more so. 

Yeah.

And, and anything you wanna add to that? 

Seán: Yeah, so you know, one of the great paradoxes, um, is that we have this concept of identity. And we think we are this identity. And really this identity is this continuing story that we weave in order to give coherence to our movement in the human social world.

And it's not, uh, that doesn't serve its function, but when we allow that to be all that we think that we are, then that's the form of dissociation. And my identity is a story, is an idea, and it's an idea that in many ways falls under what my late friend Stephen Buer called dissociated mentation of the cultural way that emerged when we severed from the land that made us.

Privilege that left frontal cortex of the brain and its rational ability to map things. But in order to actually experience who we are, we have to, to some extent experience a sacrifice, a shattering of identity. 

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: And go in order to reach the layers that are deeper below it. The great Irish animist writer John Moretti, spoke about the other world well, that all the waters arrived from, and he said it was at comma's other world.

Well, that I learned that being human is a habit that can be broken. And then he spoke about when we go into that deep place, who is it that we consent to be dreamed by? And when we allow, Our own identities and other stories of our identities become what we are being dreamed by. We get into very tangled and jagged places, but when we remember that we are the dream of our oldest ancestors, not all of whom are human, and that we are the dream of the land itself, and we come into relation with.

The living world of other beings, of this time and of other times. And also, we are the dream of the future, like those who are our descendants, whether they are biological descendants or the descendants of the echoes of our heartbeats somewhere in the future. They are telling the stories of how we made it through this time so that they could exist.

And they are dreaming us forward too. So going into that web in which we no longer allow ourselves to be defined just by persona, just by identity, but, and instead, The late fantasy Novello, Terry Pratchett has this, has this wonderful, uh, passage where he talks about the young witch Tiffany aching out walking on the land and about her every morning she would go out and she would remind the land, who it was in the land would remind her who she was.

And so that mutual dreaming. 

Monica: Yeah.

Seán: And, uh, choosing that who we consent to be dreamed by is what's, is those who are outside. The cultural contexts of the tangles we've found ourselves in is what allows us to become our emergent selves as part of a living ecology. 

Monica: Hmm. Yeah. So beautiful. I mean, I love. The earlier quote that you said about the gentleman who said, you know, being human is a habit, we can break something to that extent.

Right. And yeah. What I really hear in so much of what you're saying is that it's actually in the unbecoming, you know, that, that we are able to reconnect and all the rewords come in, you know, reunite. Yeah. Reclaim, reimagine. You know that these are, that the way for each of us is. In this, what we would typically call a very unbecoming process, you know, on the surface where it, it may look messy and wild and untamed, but that is in fact where we find this relatedness to ourselves and to the world.

I loved too, I kind of grabbed this phrase that was in your writing. Her kiss awakens the memory of another way of being and, and that in, in a way, well, in all ways, we are alienated from our own bodies. We have this body armoring that actually opens back through pleasure and so I find it so beautiful again that.

In this case, the queen is the metaphor for the land, and the kiss becomes this spell breaker, you know, that allows us to disarm. Yeah. And you know, and I, I really was thinking about that kiss being the power that breaks the spell and liberates, and restores what you call this innate wild empathy. And it's this innate wild empathy that guides us to live in this place of rec, reciprocity with the earth.

Seán: Yeah. Yes. And the queen is a one step metaphor and also not metaphor at all. 

Monica: Yeah.

Seán: Because it's only when we come to her as herself and recognize and experience her just as viscerally and sensually as we would experience a human lover. That, that way opens, added simultaneously, the unmaking and, uh, remaking.

And I think about that passage from Rumi about the price of this kiss is your life. Mm-hmm. And about how quickly we go to the hio. The price of this kiss is your death. It's like, well that's a death of a story, but it's actually no, the price is your life that once you. Accept that invitation and enter into that transformation.

Nothing is ever the same. Yeah,

Monica: it's right. It's like almost, it's such a different, I say different. It's very not different for you, but I'm, I'm experiencing it as like such a different way of thinking that I find that my, I've, I've said this before. I was speaking in an episode with a woman by the name of Aquila Richards who does this work of unschooling as liberation work, and I was explaining to her what it feels like to kind.

Reach the end, almost like there's this cliff where my neural pathways are no longer connected. Like they're, they're needing to now build a bridge because I have, because somewhere along the line that bridge was, was dissected, was disconnected, was disassociated. And it, I believe it's the bridge between my hat and my heart.

But I kind of also imagine it in my brain as kind of these places where the neural pathways are like reaching out into the void. You know, like, yeah, are you there? You know, is there anybody out there? And it, because it's, it feels like this new way of thinking, such that I'm brought into this place of this.

There is no language in this place, and isn't this beautiful? And so I, I find myself speechless, you know, because, It almost dishonors to put language around it. And actually you go on to say that the language of civilization is useless while navigating the other world landscapes. And that's what I find.

You know, and E, even as I'm in this conversation with you, that there's a portion that we can be pointing to and talking about, but there's this experience that is the invitation for each of my listeners, for myself, for you, that is as intimate and as unique as we are with the Queen, right? With, 

Seán: Yeah. Yeah.

And you know that, speaking about those neuro pathways, reaching it, that is also, that is a literal truth, that, you know, our neuropath, our brains are physically reorganizing in every moment to respond to what we have allowed ourselves to experience. And when we drop the veil, that's obscured certain levels of reality.

There is a remaking that becomes necessary, but it's also exactly what we emerged to do. If we look at. The biology of our own consciousness. It's a variation. The microrisal webs that form the mind of a forest to the mind of a field, but where life decided what happens if we come into, into an individual body and have a forest contained within our cranium?

And then what happens if part of that, if a part of that becomes self-aware and experiences itself as separate. And if we look at, well, how that played out in traditional societies, that became a recognition that we are the life of the world itself come into being to experience. Itself through all of its senses in a new and unique way.

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: But somewhere along the line, historically, and we can place that at different places. But, you know, one of the major sufferings came with the rise of capitalism and the separation of people from the land in the 16 hundreds that forced people to become redefined in a more individual way. And now here we are 600 years later, uh, coming to or, or not 600 more, however many hundred years later, uh, coming to the limits of that.

And we come to limits of that, that we, we suddenly end up. Looping back. And so as we reach out for that connection, it's actually the connection beyond what's contained in our cranium. But in order to get there, what actually biologically exists in our brains needs to be reorganized. 

Monica: Yes. I mean, it, it's, uh, it's the way of it.

Yes. It, it also occurs to me that, uh, there's this kind of interesting pattern emerging as I'm sitting here speaking to you, that you talk about kind of the apple of the other world. Right. And yeah, I was someone who. Bit the apple of the story of the civilized world first, right? And so therefore, the fruit of these worlds are, are always offered.

And so it's, it's kind of this, again, for me, this invitation to see how, you know, like being willing to eat of the fruit from a different tree is also an option, you know, that I, yes, I have this power in my own sovereignty to eat the fruit of another story that I wish. To know more about. Right. And to, yeah.

Reframe my own experience and my own life from, and also as we kind of spoke about before, to begin an inquiry that allows for some of these other languages, other voices, to reach us from other realms. Right. To take us deeper into the mystery. Because the thing that I've really noticed is this insistence in this particular world, uncertainty.

Yes. And how boring that has become 

Seán: Truly, yes. And you know, it's really interesting watching in this particular cultural moment. We have the reemergence and the curiosity with psychedelics, which are medicines that have the power to really unravel identity and create places of remaking and to repa our nervous systems.

And yet that's in some ways, you know, there are some ways in which the beings who these molecules emerged from are available to be our guides in this. And you know, my late friend Steven Buner, would often. Remind me that these are molecules and beings far older than we are and that other species engaged in this.

Entering into the dreaming too. But on the other hand, when we're broken open in that way, what we re, what we become depends on what we are orienting toward become. Depends on who we are consenting to be dreamed by. And there is a great peril when we try to make these experiences to too domesticated.

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: That and try to shaped unpredictable ways to say, I want to be changed in this way and I'm going to hire somebody to create this experience. That I will be changed in exactly that way, that we then become changed to another human agenda rather than reawakened into the fullness of who we are. Or in one of the, the gifts these medicines have is it tuning us to the flow of information intelligence in a complex system.

And for most of human history. That's then simply the intelligence of life itself, because that's been the strongest, most fluid, most complex system in our presence. So we've oriented on it and printed on it like a baby bird. I, prince Sal's mother. But now that we are in this era where there are global human information systems of technology and global economic systems, there can be the imprinting on those instead, or the imprinting on ideology.

That's like those horrible experiments where they taught baby birds to think that a basketball was their mother. 

Monica: Yes. Those horrible experi experiments because it's, it's so like what? It speaks to me of this poverty, of this, of this hungering, even in this reality, right? As it's kind of, yeah. Careening toward this.

I notice how many of us are still searching for our mothers. Yeah. Like in a very true way that. There was this severance that happened a long time ago that, you know, we talked about the archetype of the queen, but this archetype of the mother is also so profoundly hungered for, and it's she who is fully sovereign, right, like the queen, right in her full bloom and in in knowledge of her own sufficiency.

And it's in her rootedness, her rooted awareness, and in her allowing of her, all of her parts, including these wild, untamed uncivilized parts of herself that. We feel safe because she knows who she is, you know? And many of us were raised by patriarchal mothers who were severed from their knowing of their own sovereignty.

And so here we are out searching, and you're right, it won't be before lung that we're, you know, if we continue along this track, I don't even wanna imagine, but it's like, are you my mother? And we're looking in a robot's face. Yeah. Yeah. Versus the actual mother who has been here, like the oracle of the obvious.

Seán: And culturally, of course. We have the idealized version of what we think a mother is supposed to be and what that's supposed to be about. But so much of actual motherhood is deeply culturally forbidden. Yes, and thank you. Yes. And, and even in the, in the, you know, positive countercultural attempts to change that, it's still kind of, kind of like, well, we get the, the woman in perfect physical health who has the perfect supportive community.

It has all the financial resources and we get, get that upheld as what a mother should be. And yes, everybody should, every mother should have access to those realities. But the who, the way someone actually mothers in the reality that shows up is the true. Measure of what motherhood is, we would make that messiness invisible.

Monica: That's right, that's right. That's right. I mean, even just, you know, not to take this conversation too much in a different direction, but I'm even thinking as you're speaking of how we've industrialized childbirth and in those ways, and that in itself is its own messy, wild, necessary experience. And so yes to all of, yes to this entire conversation and more.

I wonder, Sean, if you could, you know, just briefly touch on your understanding of animism and why, you know, this kind of leads us into an invitation about remembering. Our birthright to be in communication with the wildlife around us and how you might guide our listener into allowing more of that.

Because I think it's, it is in this allowing versus kind of this, it's, it's like in the disarming, right? It's it that, that, that kind of starts to happen. And so whichever way you wanna take that, you're welcome to, but I'd love to kind of bring that in. 

Seán: Yeah. And so Animism, is the understanding that the world itself is alive and, uh, We are not more than other beings are in this world in the way that our culture has taught us to be, nor are we less than in the way that our shame and guilt at looking at what our civilization has done often makes us stink.

And I actually think, you know, one of the great dangers is in that demonization of human nature and in part that serves to erase the memory that there are other ways. Of being human. When we say humans have always been this way, humans have always been that way. Uh, so often it's not true. So often we are saying things that have only been true of particular groups of people for a few centuries.

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: In a vast, vast history of this world. In it's the recognition when we are encountering other than human beings, that, um, as my friend Julie mcIntyre says, it's their experience too. 

Monica: Hmm.

Seán: And their, his intelligence and presence in life on both. 

Monica: Yeah.

Seán: And it really is about building relationship. And one part of that building relationship is consistency and time showing up.

I often will ask someone to find the one tree that they see every day in their daily world that speaks to them at some level, and make a practice of spending a few moments each day with that tree and a few wanted. You want to take that experience a bit deeper? A bedrock practice for me is one that Steven and Julie taught to me, which is we're learning to work with our heart as an organ of perception, which is something we all innately have the capacity to do, and it begins with just bringing your attention to your heartbeat and not to the thought of your heartbeat, but to actually feeling your heart beating.

And then remembering that your heart has beat for you in every moment of your life without needing, you're needing to think, without you needing to ask. Playing out the rhythms of every moment. Rhythms of joy and the rhythms of sorrow. And then just allowing gratitude to rise for that and stay with that.

And then once you've learned to Hank in that place, allowing the awareness to extend outward from that place to feel the presence of another being. And this is the oldest way people have learned from the world. It's the oldest conversation that we're part of. And when we truly make this. A practice when we truly do this again and again over time, it really begins to change everything.

And there's also the level of reciprocity that becomes important, both in a grand sense of once we are in relation with another being. We take on a responsibility for being part of protecting that other being's life and nourish that other being's life. And also at the level of the ritual practice of bringing gifts to a tree, to a stone, to a lake, and.

On one level, thank you. It's a gift. But on another level, when we actually physically enact giving something precious to another living being, it changes the way we're showing up in a way that changes how that being experiences us. 

Monica: Mm-hmm.

Seán: So, I don't know if the Hawthorne knows that it's whiskey and honey and milk that I'm bringing to it, but I know that the Hawthorne knows the way that I'm coming when I'm bringing whiskey in Honey and milk and calling it by its name in Irish.

Monica: Mm-hmm. 

Seán: That is different than if I showed up with Mountain Dew and said, Hey, yo, Hawthorne, how's it going? Yeah. And you know, maybe that, maybe that'll be received too, but be received differently. And so there may or may not be something about the actual words and the actual physical material, but there is something about the way that I'm coming that makes my presence a different kind of gift.

And I can't just go through the motions and say, well, I'm, I'm, let's pretend this is whiskey. No, because my being knows that a layer deeper than language in words what I'm actually bringing. And so that changes how I show up. 

Monica: I mean, it, it really is so simple and yet so profound and. It is so true. I mean, we can, we can relate to this if we think of an experience between humans, but we don't think about it as it relates to what we've thought of as inanimate beings.

Right? And so therein lies that change of perception or that opening to perceiving from a different, more open and connected place of allowing for there to be the potential and the possibility of an exchange. And, and if we're not even open to the possibility, right, it would. Otherwise not happen. I had an experience recently, Sean, that I'll share with you and my listener, that I was really agitated one day and a voice kept coming.

Go outside, go outside, go outside. And so I finally reluctantly listened, got my running shoes on, and just, I started walking the perimeter of my neighborhood. And when I moved here 14 years ago, there was this lore that there was some path that led to some nature preserve that it was right near my neighborhood.

And I've walked this neighborhood and I've walked this neighborhood and I've walked this neighborhood. And I just decided that whoever said that was wrong, that there was no. That they must mean some other territory or neighborhood. So I'm walking around and suddenly this woman just comes out of nowhere.

It was literally like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland, like you know how the rabbit appears and is looking at his watch? And she looks at me and I look at her and I then she continues kind of along her way. Now she's come out the path and onto the road and I look and I would've never considered it a path cuz it's going between these two houses.

So I just follow where she, and it opens up into this nature preserve that is literally like this wonderland right in my backyard for 14 years. I have never seen it. And as I walk along this path, I realize there are streams and, and there's this little reservoir, and they're all of these even little, um, you know, monuments and temples and ferry houses that have been built along the way.

And then I arrive around this one area and there's this tree, you know, and I hear the voice again. Ah, you came. And I thought, oh, you, you called me here. Thank you. You know, like I was so moved and I went up to her and I put my hands on her and I knelt, and I was just so completely filled with this sense of like gratitude and horror, horror at my arrogance at the audacity to think ever right, that there was a time in my life that I didn't believe that this kind of communication was possible and this other deep gratitude and, and awe that I was being shown that there is, there's so much more that I, you know, if I, if I am willing to be uncertain, if I am willing to not know it all.

Yeah. If I'm willing to un become from everything that I have been taught was becoming was real. Yeah. 

Seán: And a horror is so interesting because it's so interesting that agree to which we will turn that inward and say, how could I not have seen this? How could I have allowed myself to be fooled? But you know, if you met someone who had spent their entire childhood in a compound of religious cults Yes.

Then, then you would not expect them to know anything from outside that. In the same way we've spent our whole lifetime in this culture. And we've had this cult. Yes. Yes. And we've been programmed in this particular way. And if anything that says something really beautiful about our own being that no matter how much we are indoctrinated, that memory will still rise up and rise up in the most unexpected people, in the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways.

Monica: I love that. Thank you for that. And in that moment, I just saw those neural pathways meeting. 

Seán: Mm.

Monica: You know that across that chasm, like in that remembering, oh my gosh. Thank you for such a beautiful like soul stirring. Conversation truly. I have just deeply loved your offerings through your writing, and I'm so happy to hear that you have another one on the horizon.

I can't wait to dive into your other works that I have not yet read. And I wanted to just ask you one last question, which is, what does the word revelation or the experience of revelation mean to you?

Seán: That's a wonderful questions. Um,

so I'm brought back to a moment. On a ferry from, from the mainland, Dr. Moore, one of the, a islands and the skipper of the boat was wandering around and trying to tell people things. And most people were just sort of rolling their eyes and looking the other way. And I, but he noticed me sort of listening to all the parts of the conversations.

And then when we, when the ship pulled into the dock, as I was walking off the boat, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, history on this island exists in layers. Walked to Angus and you will understand. And so I spent that day walking across the island to this. Iron age stone for dedicated to Angus, the God of love.

And what I found as I walked was that with each step was a hair seeking into a deeper layer. And so to me, revelation is about those layers of being, those layers of history. It's about what happens when we look past the layer that we are used to and discover that there's so much more that exists, that the myth is like the layer of soil beneath our feet and what's been hidden from us.

Can be seen. And it's so interesting because of course in the Greek word, apocalypse refers to revelation. And in this culture we've been so.

Programmed to think there's only one level of reality that if that level of reality starts to crack, then we think of it in apocalyptic terms. But the true apocalypse is just the revelation is just remembering. Yeah. And I'm so grateful for your work and inviting people to experience that, and I'm so grateful for this co-creation and invitation today.

Monica: Me too. Thank you so much, Seán really, it's just been a total honor, and I'm actually in a little bit in tears at the moment, which is a welcome thing because I love, you know, having a conversation that to me kind of just occurs from nowhere and ends up just fe feeling profoundly beautiful and inspiring, and fulfilling.

And so thank you for being my partner in that and, and thank you to my listener. You know, for your generosity of spirit for continuing to listen. Because I think in the listening, and I think of that gentleman who saw you listening, right? 

Seán: Mm-hmm.

Monica: Yeah. It was through the listening and the noticing of the listening that a gem was given.

Yeah. You know, and it's the gems when we listen that if we then, You know, are willing to recognize them as gems and follow them, that more will always be revealed. Yes. Yeah. So thank you to my listener as well, and I'll be sure to put all of Sean's links in the show notes. And until next time, more to be revealed.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information, please visit us@jointherevelation.com and be sure to download our free gift, subscribe to our mailing list, or leave us a review on iTunes. We thank you for your generous listening and as always, more to be revealed.