89 Sophie Strand === Sophie: Well, it's connective tissue disease, which also predisposed me. And they don't know why this happens, but it happens for a lot of people too. This serious blood auto-immune disease is Ehlers-Danlos syndrome with mast cell disease. And because they're both so rare, they're considered orphan diseases because they get very little funding and there's no cure. And so it's been a very, it took me a very long time to get diagnosed. After I was diagnosed, it was both exciting. And then extraordinarily terrifying because suddenly you have a prognosis, you have, you know, you're going to die by this age. This is how you're going to die. And for me, it's always been about holding that information lightly and saying, you know, anything is possible. If we commit to one story, we'll live that story. And I think one of the interesting things for me has been pairing. Ehlers-Danlos is connective tissue. It's collagen. It's my joints. It's my aorta. It's my skin. It's my veins, my eyes. And I've always loved mushrooms and mycelium. And they are the connective tissue of the soil. And the connective tissue of the plants and the forest. So, and they are also undervalued and underfunded and we are degrading the soil with pollutants and with clear cutting. So for me, it's about pairing that condition really intimately with a larger and also much smaller microscopic life form so that my survival is also intimately. Connected with something else that's survival. And I think that that's actually a really helpful thing to do, which is to wet yourself to something else to wed your story, your survival with something else. === Monica: Well, 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. He gets here. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the revelation project podcast. Today. I'm with Sophie Strand. I've been following Sophie for a while on Facebook, and I have grown to love her perspective and her writings and on a whim. I invited her to be a guest on the podcast, because again, I have just fallen in love with what she has been sharing with the world. And so I'm gonna read a little bio and then I'm going to introduce Sophie. So Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her books of poetry include _Love Song to a Blue God_ and those _Other Flowers to Come_ and. She's also written a book called the approach. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction that offers an eco feminist revision of the gospels, her book of essays, The Flowering Wand, Lunar King. Like an ISE levers. Trans-species Magicians and Rhizomatic Harpists heal. The masculine is forthcoming from inner traditions, imprint, sacred planet. Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram at cosmogony. Is that right? Sophie? I was like, hold on. How does one say that? Yeah, cosmogony awesome. So, Hey, Sophie. Welcome. Sophie: Well, thank you for that lovely introduction. And thank you so much for reading my work. I mean, putting it out there. So publicly lately has been kind of a wild shot, but it's meant a lot to connect with other interesting people. Monica: Yeah. Well, I can only imagine because you know, some of your writing, what I've been really loving about it is this really. Not only is it provocative, but it's beautiful and lyrical and poetic. And so visual. Like, I tend to get a lot of visuals when I read your writing. And I recently loved what you shared about time and the space and being on the run. So I wondered maybe if you could just start with that quick story for our listeners, Sophie: Sure yeah. I'll try and do it as, as succinctly as possible. So about a month or so before quarantine, all of my life plans melted, and then quarantine began and I was kind of initiated into this state of feeling like all of my narratives had broken down and my sense of timeliness of being on time of, of working on a schedule. No longer applied and that, that was happening on a macroscopic level globally. It was also happening on a very microscopic subjective level. And, you know, I had very serious chronic illness and I've had moments in my life where everything melts and I have to restructure. So I kind of, I understood the flavor of what was happening, but it didn't make it any easier. Um, so, and I, I was walking for hours running for hours and, um, I lived alone. I have a long-term relationship that had actually been an engagement, had just broken down and I was completely alone not seeing anyone quarantining by myself, but I started to have these strange experiences with animals, which I usually do, but they were really amplified. And one of them was that I would do walking and a feather would be falling and I would hold up my hand and it would fall into my hand. And it was a kind of uncanny experience of not shifting my pace, not running, not slowing down. It just fell into my hand. And I kept doubting myself. I'm like, I kept thinking, am I on time? Am I doing the correct things? I feel like I'm out of sync with human time with linear causal. Progressive time. Um, but the feathers kept falling and I kept trying to trust that I was moving at the right speed, but then I had a kind of amplified, very electric version of that, which is okay. Walking down my favorite local mountain. And it's a long hike. You're, you know, when you get up to the top, you're several hours from civilization and you're out of service. And I was, you know, I've seen rattlesnakes up there, I've encountered them, but I was basically running down the mountain, moving at a pretty high speed, really feeling in flow and something made me stop and look backwards. And the second I'm look forward, there's a huge rattle and. This eight or nine foot rattler, which I'd only heard about. I didn't believe that it existed on the mountain had come out and was right in front of my foot. And if I had kept running and hadn't done that instinctual turn back, I would have stepped right on the Radler. And she cause the big ones are apparently the she's. The females circled me three times. Wow. She and I I've never been. More filled with adrenaline in my entire life. I was doing the mental calculation. I was thinking like, if I get bit, do I have time to get down? Like, what am I supposed to do? But she left, she poured herself back into the greenery and I ran down the mountain. Monica: She likes circled you three times though. And then like, she was complete. Right. And like slithered off. Uh, not believable. Sophie: It was erotic. Yeah, it was crazy. Monica: Same time you had caught a feather, like what, or, or you were kind of in an inquiry about time and then, and then the snake incident happened, then Sophie: I'm definitely still in this kind of trying to uncouple decolonize my idea of time. Yeah. And, you know, time isn't necessarily linear. It doesn't necessarily just move forward. I've been reading a lot about quantum physics. You too, I've been reading the work. It's so fascinating. Monica: It is. And what, you know, it's interesting. The book I am actually reading, I want to, I'm gonna mess up the exact name, but it, it has the word revelation. It's like quantum revelation in it. Right. And it's this, and of course it's so. I think the re sometimes I have to read it with the back of my head. I mean, like Sophie: I just put, come in. Monica: Right. Let it just come in because otherwise, if I cause going back to time and linear, right. Like if I try to linearly kind of understand it, I can't, but if I just, just read it, knowing that like some part of me understands it, I I'm fine. And I'm fascinated. Otherwise I get kinda like all wrapped up around like what, what, but yeah, it's been like just. I love what you're saying about time, because I too have had moments in my life where time hasn't been. What would I a time hasn't been a satisfactory, you know, measurement or a way to be like, I haven't been able to be with it in a certain way. And, and it's hard for me to even have language for it, which is one of the reasons I'm so attracted to your work is because you have this way of really bringing language to things that I think is very. Magical and very unique. And like, I understand what you're saying. Yeah. When you, when you write about it. Sophie: Well, thank you. I mean, I. I, you know, one of my main tenants of what I try to do with my writing is to explain those uncanny moments where the language SOPs, you know, for a person who writes I'm often wordless and it takes years to arrive at the right way of describing something. I feel like leaves me speechless. Monica: Yeah. Well, what I loved, I think the word that you used when you were talking about time and the experience with the snake was you used the word embrace, did you not? Sophie: Yeah, I did it. Cause I was thinking about, I'm thinking a lot about spiralic time, circular time, the Ouroboros the snake that eats its tail. Yeah. Monica: That's so great. And, and it was it like in that moment being embraced. \In that circular motion by the snake, kind of telling you, like, you're exactly where you need to be. Uh, so great. All right. So there's so much, I want to dive into. Help me understand why the gospels, why your fascination with the divine masculine and the divine feminine help me understand. Sophie: So I was raised by two spiritual scholars who write about the history of religion. And so I grew up in a compost heap of like rabbis, theologians, monks nuns, also a lot of animals, a lot of animals. You know, my bedtime stories were, you know, the, the Tibetan book of the, of the dying. This was the stuff that I was kind of. Educated on. And so I've always been interested in spirituality and the history of religion, but it's interesting. I was not very attracted to Christianity and I, my aunt by marriage is Israeli. And a lot of the holidays I actually observed were Jewish. And so I wasn't Jewish, but, you know, I had a very Jewish experience growing up with my cousins and my aunts and my uncle and that whole Israeli side of the family that I actually have gone to Israel and stayed with them for an extended period of time. So I kind of came to Christianity eventually by way of Judaism, which is an interesting kind of off-center route. But it happened. I got extraordinary extraordinarily ill with a genetic disease that finally kicked in at age 16 in Israel, actually. And it was almost like the intensity of that experience coupled stitched itself into the landscape there and into the mythology. And I became very fascinated, also going into college with why. It seems like there's someone behind the story of Jesus. Who's more authentic. And w w why is Christianity become such a tool for oppression side genocide? What goes wrong? So that, that has really become a dominant question. So my first book that I wrote that I'm actually hasn't sold yet and it's historical fiction, and it's a, re-imagining, it's a feminist ecological re-imagining of the gospels from the perspective of Mary Magdalene. Mm. So approaching Jesus, rabbi Yeshua, the Jewish rabbi magician storyteller from her perspective, rewilding him. So my, my interest in the divine, the sacred masculine comes from this initial inquiry into Yeshua Jesus as being this nature teacher, rather than this kind of ascetic disembodied moralistic. Yeah. Abstraction. Monica: Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. All of it. I love to this word, you use the rewilding, right? Back to what you were saying earlier about time. And I think that we're at this really interesting crossroads, you know, as a human species where, you know, we're in this process of what I call. Yes. Yeah. Right. Like of everything we have been taught to believe, and that. This system of beliefs or what I will call system of illusions yeah. Is, has been so very toxic and detrimental at so many levels. And in so many ways it's cost us our imagination and it's cost us our. You know, our inner knowing what I call our inner wild, like our instinctual understanding of who we are and also how to behave. Yeah. Um, with each other, with other species. Yeah. So it's just really powerful what you're saying. And I, I think you're, you know, you've got some, some other thoughts I'd love to talk more to you about in your experience or in your exploration. I know that you do quite a lot of talking about patriarchy as colonized inside of the ideas of the masculine. And yeah. I'm wondering if you could tell me more about that. Sophie: Yeah, that's what the book look that I'm actually, that will be coming out probably in fall of 2022 is, is about, has been patriarch. He has been conflated with masculinity, but masculinity is not patriotic. Patriarchy is a bad, bad story. It doesn't work and it's not good for men and it's not good for women. And it's not good for all the people who come in between and, and flow along that rhizome that connects all of the different pretend genders. Um, but my interest is always, I'm very, very interested in. The movement between oral cultures to textual alphabetic cultures and from paleolithic to neolithic cultures, to the bronze age, to the iron age, where did we go wrong? When did things really start to become hierarchical violence? Divided from the natural world. And so my attempt at looking at these masculine myths is, are there healthy, masculine myths? Are there fertile masculinities that we've ignored for a long time? Because we've just been focused on the last 2000 years since Christ, right. Quote unquote. Monica: And have you discovered any? Sophie: Yeah, I mean, I've had a lot of figures who kind of have been my guiding themes in this project. And the big one is Dionysus, who kind of had a smear campaign by the Romans because he was actually, he's not really a wine. God, he's a God of, I mean, he is a wine God, but he's a God of liberation. He's he was actually the divine inspiration behind a lot of revolts against the Romans. He's a, and he's even a pre Greek God, even though he's old. And poetically represented as being a stranger as arriving fresh to some city. He's actually, he exists in linear B, which is one of the oldest versions of Greek found on Crete. He's a man. He goes all the way back to Minoan culture, early bronze age. God. Okay. Yeah. So I think of him as being kind of this vegetal and androgynous. Nature-based kind of chaotic figure who can guide us into a more participatory ecologically situated masculinity. Monica: I love the word chaotic. Sophie: Yeah, they use definitely a chaotic's a gear. Monica: Well, and that, you know, again like that for me is recently that word means so many great things. Chaos. Sophie: Yeah. Will you share. Monica: Yeah. Well, so I've been really exploring this whole idea of like this re all of the repressed feminine energies and all of the ways that we have really been. Taught to avoid all of what I believe, you know, has kind of created us living in what I call the upside down because it's, yeah, it's these very places that are actually our power centers, especially as women for us to rewild ourselves or for us to reconnect and plug ourselves back into the. You know, avoided places, our emotions, our intuition, looking at chaos, even as a feminine, right. As a creative force. Yeah. That it's, that it's a gift, you know, when chaos comes, you know, I often think of the goddess Kali. Oh yeah. So there's so many ways and you just talked about Dionysus, you know, and that again, Chaos, which I think again, in, in these figures who have an integrated or a sacred masculine, right. That they're also deeply integrated with feminine energies and that those together kind of can create these. You know, powerful models for re-imagining, how to be with some of the chaos that we're experiencing now. Sophie: Exactly. And I mean, one of the guiding principles I've been working with is this idea that is kind of really problematized, Neo Darwinian ideas of progress that are actually just kind of, uh, Uh, scientific interpretation of capitalism, right. And early Victorian economics. And they don't actually have that much to do with science. So it turns out that, um, evolution is much more transversal. It happens horizontally through gene transfer and that are very cells are, were merged between like mitochondria and different procariates. So for me, something I've been thinking a lot about in relationship to the divine masculine and the divine feminine is it's a much. Some biogenetic relationship. You know, if there's, there's no hard boundary, it definitely flows back and forth. We're all entangled with each other. We can't, we can't take w we are constituted by our relationships rather by any kind of sterile, imaginary idea of individuality. So yeah, we all have both of those. Modes those nodes, those, those masks within us. And they provide very different medicines at different times. Monica: Yeah. It's, it's very, very true. I love that you used the word medicine because I think again, you know, re-imagining or even kind of unearthing some of these older mythologies, right. Can be so helpful if they're used in that. And to digital or medicine way. Sophie: And I, I mean, it reminds me of, you know, there's this, this Greek word pharmacon, and it can mean medicine or poison. It means powerful substance. I think about these myths as being like a pharma con, which is. For me myths are the fruiting body, the mushroom of a much more, a deeper mycelium that is hyphal and connective below ground and emerges to sporulate to serve a certain kind of moment and then goes back underground. So a myth, if it's rooted in this deeper earth based pre patriarchal wisdom can be the positive pharmacon, but if you do reascinate. And uproot it from it's land-based ecological situated knowledge. It becomes pharmacon as poison. And it can be something that can be used to create fear in people to manipulate people and to yeah. To shutter their imaginations, to create the upside down as you were, Monica: right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. What like Sophie, do you feel. Well, let me approach this from a different, from a different angle. Yeah. What do you see the opportunities for us right now as a human species? Like where do you think, Sophie: Whoa, well, the one thing I will say is I have never had less of a sense of what's going to happen tomorrow in a very concrete, personal way. So in a certain way, I have no idea. I I've never had less of an idea of what is to come. I do think that this is a moment to begin to participate in the liveliness of the world. And to really start to realize that we are within a world of witnesses, that everything is, is every decision we make is we're making in the company and the audience. Uh, likeness of, of the fungi of the grasses and the animals and the ecosystems, the swarming consciousness that constitutes a landscape. And I think that the more we draw attention to that artistically somatically, intellectually practically through activism. I mean, activism can look really, really different. And I think sometimes that we, we feel paralyzed because we're like, I don't know how to be an activist. I think that, you know, there's this artist too. Absolutely love. He's a writer, he's an activist. He collects folk music in England and his name is Sam Lee. And he, he leads these nature walks or like groups out to sing with the Nightingales and the Nightingale populations are dropping in England. So it's a way of both creating, collaborating across species. I think that's something I'm really interested in is collaborating across species, across identity politics, across privilege. I mean, Across species across ideas of consciousness. I mean, communicating and collaborating with stones, but yeah, his work singing with the Nightingales and bringing people out to collaborate with the more than human world. It seems to me to be a really good example of what is possible. Yeah. Monica: Well, it's funny. Cause you were like, whoa, big question. And yeah, I also. Really feel that your response is so thoughtful and so elegant and so true. Thank you. That it occurred to me that you would have something interesting to say about that. Yeah. Well, and what the other, your piece that I really, you know love and think about also is. That we are, we are so on this, like it's like, well, yeah. What is possible when we're unbecoming, when we're actually like in a state of starting to dare to. Believe and experiment at you, like dare to believe in the things we've been taught, you know, are not real. Right. It's like, again, going back to the upside down, it's like, what if everything we've been taught exactly the opposite is true. Yeah. And that what then becomes possible. And so you were sharing how. In some ways you've never been less certain about what's happening and what I'm also making up about that is that you're calling that a great thing. Sophie: Yeah. I mean, I think something really interesting is I think oftentimes our narratives are impoverished by patriarchy, by dominant paradigms that are very wedded to capitalism, to objectifying. Our relationships to kind of imaginary dualisms that keep us separated from the environmental world that could erotically and creatively nourish us. So I think sometimes our dreaming is limited. So when our dreams break down suddenly a much wider realm of possibility opens up when we stopped. Narrativizing. I mean, the thing I'm always thinking is like, I don't want to be the author. Of my story. I want to be in alignment. I want to be in flow in those moments when I start to overly narrativize my life are very problematic. Yeah. Monica: Yes, absolutely. And you know, I think too, we're here as the. Spiritual beings having a human experience. And I love, I love the expression. Like when we align, we are divine. And when I think about our access in the divine, or like that portal into our own divinity, that's where I believe imagination. And. Like where anything is possible, right? Imagination, miracles, magic, all of that exists. Sophie: Yeah. I mean, for me, divinity is really it's this term that this philosopher used Merleau-Ponty and it's the flesh of the world. It's this understanding that every time you push back on the world, it pushes back on you that the dominant. Appetite, the dominant theme of, of being is the desire to touch and be touched. Um, and for me, it's that moment of touching into, into the liveliness of the world. That's where I locate my divinity. Yeah. Monica: I love that. I love that. So what, where do you want to take our listeners? Like, what do you want to. Tell us about that kind of in addition to what you're writing has gives our listeners more of an understanding of like your why behind all of this. Sophie: Hm. What is my why behind this? I think we're in a moment of emergency. And I think that actually provides us with a really powerful gift, which is we get to get close to the ground about what we really care about. And I think this is the moment not to make art, to make art, not to write, to write, not to do things for some kind of externalized reason. But to really ask yourself, what is your emergency and your emergency is going to be different than someone else's. I mean, maybe your emergency is, you know, the river behind your house. Maybe it's a particular story that you have to give birth to. Maybe it's child care. Maybe, maybe it's your own family. But I think this is a moment to get really, really clear about the things that we care about. And, you know, something I always think about is Adrian Marie Brown writes that she wants movements, that aren't an inch thick mile wide, but a mile deep inch, a mile, the opposite wide. And I I've been really thinking about like depths as being. The depth of experience, the depth of your relationships, your, that your rootedness in your landscape, a practice. That is my why. And I is something I want to offer to other people is, do you know the names of the beings that you live around? Do you know the names of the grasses and the mushrooms and the trees? And the indigenous people who stored the land there. Do you know the names of the types of weather that happened of the geological formations? Can you become intimate and involved and entangled with your landscape? And I think that that's actually a really transformative practice to actually root yourself back into is situated a college. Yeah. And you'll get radical when you start to do that because you'll start to care. Monica: I love that. It's so true. I love how you used the word emergency because I heard it as both. Emergence, right? Like it's a time of emergence and it's an emergency that, that word suddenly became something coming out of you. Uh, that was new for me. And in terms of hearing it as, yeah. It's urgent and it's about everybody becoming emergent. Sophie: Exactly. And I think that's the, you know, what is it called? Like the strange attractors that suddenly chaotic entropy coalesces into incredibly unpredictable action. And I think this is a moment where, you know, climate science is not figured out. You know, you sit down and you actually read about it. Long-terms study of ice coring and we have no idea what comes next. There's no way to predict it, but there's also no way to predict how emergent human behaviors are going to shift. So emergence can be something very exciting. We can make ourselves into those strange attractors who completely shift a system into a coordinated, creative participatory relationship with the world. So, Monica: so true. And how about I'm looking actually at like the many questions, but when I ask you like, Hey, what do you want to talk about? Because I'm really kind of free flowing in this conversation because part of what I want to bring to the listener is the same. Magic. I've I think you just naturally exhibit that. There's a way, well, there's a way Sophie, like you, that you occur for me, kind of like. Like a miracle, like the way that you think, the way that you express, the way that you create is so liberated and so yes. To your questions. Right. And then there's a part of me that's like, no, no, no. Ask about that. Like where does that liberation come from? Sophie: Well, I think to be perfectly honest, I got extraordinarily ill at 16 and I I've experienced. Many many, I think they're, they're classified as NDEs, near death experiences. My life, my life has bottlenecked a bunch of times and it's bottlenecks in a way where everyone around me thought I was going to die. And that's hap every single time that happens all the chaff, all the extra falls away. And it's, it's a winnowing process. It's been extremely intense and I wouldn't wish on anyone else, but every time it's happened, I've come out. A little clear about what I care about, because I think, okay. If I don't have a lot of time or if time is in some way limited, I would like to do exactly what I know is important. I would like my relationships to be deep and powerful and close and. Yeah. So I think that this is not this, this type of thinking that I've arrived at has not been effortless. I think that it can seem like that because I love poetry and I love beautiful images. And I think beauty is one of the most redeeming qualities of life. But, you know, the underworld is what brought me here. Right. You know, I I've been constituted by underworld and I do now. And when I emerge it's to share. But I wouldn't ask anyone to, to follow me through that process. Monica: Right. You know? And so for our listeners, you know, when I, when you say the underworld, I. You know, my relationship to that is also through a descent, like through, through it. I like a dark night and that, yes, absolutely. It's kind of those major life occurrences, which for me was this kind of convening of a series of events, which included health, divorce, death, right? Like all of the big, big things. And that really ended up being the disguised gift when you. Re-emerge and you realize that you have been brought to another place another time, another initiation that there, that somehow you come back, it's like down seven up eight with something else to bring the world, you know, like a gem from the depths of the murky deep. And it's, it's a powerful. Silty. There's just so much talk about mythology there. Sophie: Yeah. I mean, one of the guiding stories for me has been Scheherazade. Um, which is, you know, this is a person who is telling stories to stay alive. Yes. You know, the king kills a woman each night that he marries, she keeps him from killing her by telling these stories. But the narrative impulse comes from survival. It comes from this adrenaline fueled attempt to save herself. And for me, storytelling, art has always been, and these bottleneck moments I've always come out of them and said, okay, what story kept me alive? Or what, what story is going to keep me going? So the stories that I've I've arrived at finally have been the ones that have worked for the longest time. Yeah. And recently it's been these stories of the masculine news, kind of rewilding older neolithic figures. Who've been really helpful for me. And, you know, I, I come from a place where I used to be really angry at men. I've experienced great violence at the hands of men, like pretty serious violence. So I, I, but that anger didn't heal me. It didn't heal them. And so this has been a more complicated tender, reentering. Into that. That place where the anger lives Monica: Well, and yeah, I mean, it's, it's true. I think, you know, I can share that same sentiment with you and that anger has never healed me. And so, you know, there's always this inquiry and I Al always pretend, right. Like, there's nobody out there, Monica, like, it's, it's all within you, right? Like that, playing with this, understanding that like, That alchemy, that change, that integration all has to happen within for me to experience any kind of change on the outside. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, do you mind sharing with us at all Sophie about the illness or that, you know, like what is it like an auto-immune. Sophie: Oh, sure. Well, it's connective tissue disease, which also predisposed me. And they don't know why this happens, but it happens for a lot of people too. This serious blood auto-immune disease is Ehlers-Danlos syndrome with mass cell disease. And because they're both so rare, they're considered orphan diseases because they get very little funding and there's no cure. And so it's been a very, it took me a very long time to get diagnosed. After I was diagnosed, it was both exciting. And then extraordinarily terrifying because suddenly you have a prognosis, you have, you know, you're going to die by this age. This is how you're going to die. And for me, it's always been about holding that information lightly and saying, you know, anything is possible. If we commit to one story, we'll live that story. And I think one of the interesting things for me has been pairing. Ehlers-Danlos is connective tissue. It's collagen. It's my joints. It's my aorta. It's my skin. It's my veins, my eyes. And I've always loved mushrooms and mycelium. And they are the connective tissue of the soil. And the connective tissue of the plants and the forest. So, and they are also undervalued and underfunded and we are degrading the soil with pollutants and with clear cutting. So for me, it's about pairing that condition really intimately with a larger and also much smaller microscopic life form so that my survival is also intimately. Connected with something else that's survival. And I think that that's actually a really helpful thing to do, which is to wet yourself to something else to wed your story, your survival with something else. Monica: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I love that. I love that, you know, just philosophy right. That, because it does really speak to the interconnectedness and I love that both literally and metaphorically that it, it offers. So much more depth. Some there's so much more available in terms of understanding that connection, that connection. Sophie: Yeah. We, you know, we're all doors to open both ways. You know, the more that we study bodies, the more that we see that we're just nest. Matryoshka dolls. We're just rushing dolls. Our guts contain so many microbes. I think there are more microbes in our body than human cells. And then you think about that on an even larger level or cosmic level. We all constitute each other. Monica: Yeah, we sure do. So how do you like to use stories? Like obviously storytelling is a huge, huge part of who you are. How would you, I guess. Counsel us to use storytelling just in, in everyday life. Like where would you point us as listeners to start using or yeah, using storytelling as a way to. Connect at a deeper level, kind of like what you were just talking about with your auto-immune thing. Sophie: If two, I have two things that I've been meditating on. Well, one is the most important stories are non-human stories more than human stories to use David Abram's term. And so I would say, start, noticing, start keying yourself to non-human stories, to the story of landscape, you know, what's been happening in your landscape over a hundred year period. To noticing animals to noticing their behaviors over the period of a month. Is there a wood Chuck in your area that you continually see? So key yourself to, you know, we, we get a lot of human stories, but there are, there are many more, there's a polyphony of stories that make up your world. But also, and I think this is really, really powerful is to start telling a different story about yourself. And to see if that loosens any knots. Is there a way you can tell a different story and that you can be curious about the stories you've told? Monica: Yeah. Like give me an example, Sophia, like telling a different story to ourselves. What I make up about that is we all live in some kind of narrative about our life. And so what I'm hearing you say is try. Try a different way to tell that story or come at it from a different perspective. Sophie: Yeah. I mean, I, I think if it is almost like being light on your feet and dancing for me, you know, so this blood condition, I have predisposes me to anaphylactic allergic reactions to pretty much everything in a very unpredictable way, but after I've reacted to a food, I get very, I get a story about that food or that experience and it can be very, very scary. I can think. Okay. I can never eat that again, but it's always helpful for me to say, you know, maybe this health thing worked before, maybe it doesn't work now or maybe something new is going to work. So trying to not get stuck in an idea of how something is supposed to happen or work. Monica: Yeah. Sophie: So I, for me, it's very paired to health, but I think it could also happen. You know, it happens in relationships. We get into romantic relationships. And we think that they're supposed to progress in a certain way and we're living the story, but we're not in the story. Suddenly we we've changed. We're not the same character. And so sometimes it's very helpful to journal or to talk with other people and to ask other people, you know, this isn't a solitary thing. Storytelling. I used to run these storytelling gatherings with people once a month, mainly with femininity. We would get together and we would try and tell stories in different ways about trauma, about abuse, about. Mental health and trying to just see if other people could help us shift the plot. So bringing other people in, you know, relationships are just the most important thing. We can't, there's no such thing as a rugged individual, we need help. We need to ask for help. Monica: Right. There's also this idea too, that I I'm thinking of as you're speaking of this, right. One thing that I've been practicing over the years since the revelation project came into my life is really this idea of like being in the present moment. And also knowing that in that present moment, I am in a co-creative process with everything around me. And, and sometimes instead of telling me. The story, like what happens next? It's more about, or to be revealed that it's, it's really about pausing from thinking about an outcome, knowing that there's so much more magic available to me, if I can dwell. In the present moment, as well as the mystery of the unfolding of what is to happen next, that, that somehow keeps me liberated and free versus has me kind of live out a narrative that hasn't even happened. Sophie: Beautiful. Yeah. And something I've been thinking a lot about is this philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead writes about how time we actually perhaps create this readiness potential from the future that we, we think backwards and pull ourselves physically forward that we live physically forward, but we think backwards and that we're constantly being kind of attuned to our future minds without knowing it. And. That also to me is a kind of almost erotic, juicy place of being like, I am being pulled into place by myself, but I can't even see it. And I need to enjoy this process of dancing with an unseen person. Monica: Yeah. And it it's, it really does take some. Some allowing, right. Because letting be, and just kind of, I think, you know, so many of us have just. Shut down that imaginative process. Right. And so often I'm really also looking for other creative individuals because I go back to the village and the card that we chose. I know. Yeah. And how the village in that way. And for our listeners, we chose the, the Wild, Unknown Archetypes. The card we chose before our episode today was the village. And, you know, the village can be both a good place. And not a great place, depending on what needs to happen. And we're at this just really, I think creative time where we it's like the indigenous people have been saying to us, like, it's time for you to dream a new dream. Yeah. And it's this idea of like the imagination and this day dream. To allow ourselves the, the magic and the opportunity of the daydream without the pragmatism, without all the ways, again, that we've been conditioned to be realistic logic, right? Like, and just to, not to practice, just getting rid of those preemptive posed boundaries that keep us from really imagining something different. Sophie: I love that. And that's something I've been really thinking about, you know, in the west, we've really colonized Buddhism and we've made it into this product that will optimize our PR our progress. And it's become mindfulness. It's become something that makes you a better worker. Yeah. I lately I've been telling people I don't care about meditation. I care about reverie and daydream, unstructured, cognitive play that taps into the deep life. As you know, one of my favorite philosophers Bachelard writes about how reverie is the way we get in touch with this. Non-human right. This is deep life and this imaginative force that is, you know, it encompass as humans. It's probably very good for us, but it's not just human. And that happens yeah. Through this daydreaming, this unstructured unproductive, but also very productive, very chaotic to go back to your term, kind of. Spiritual mental play. Monica: Well, yeah. And, and back to what you said, you know, about getting radical about it because that's when we start to care and, you know, we're, we're no longer kind of in this trance, you know, that keeps us along this trajectory of like eminent self-destruct, you know, unless frigging go with the program here and disrupt the trance. So it's Sophie: Go into a trance to get out of the trance. Monica: Yes, that there's, there's just so many different ways to kind of avoid catastrophe. We like chaos, not catastrophe. Right. So, yeah, it's just so powerful too. And you know, and when, at this point in my life, when I had my own descent was when I started really recognizing all these ways of. Seeing and being in the world that included like when you and I had started working with, uh, shamans early on to do some healing and just really understanding that everything is everything and pulling from it all as energetic sustenance, and knowing that, you know, we're nourished by so many different interrelated. Forces and elements. And so, you know, there's these, again, back to the upside down, like we think there's this one visual world, you know, and for me, the revelation project is. Unveiling of the worlds that we think we know and into that way that we can often be consumed with the mystery, right. With the wonder of it all. And that's that place that I can breathe again. Sophie: Yeah. And breathe breasts. You know, we, our voices are not human. They are spirit ruach. You know, the root of all the words for soul is breath. Hebrews moment. It's it's sacrament. It's our participation, our voices, our participation, and they are fluid. They are interstitial. They are, they carry microbes from us out and into the world. And then, you know, phenols and all sorts of other environmental. Stuffed back into our bodies. Um, it's that kind of infinity loop of participation. So I love what you said. The most tender thing is to realize that we don't know, because when we feel like we know everything, we, we, we begin to shut down. Monica: So Sophie you've and of course I'm like pointing to your name. Cause I'm about to ask you about Sophia. Yeah. And so yes, to the divine sacred masculine, what, um, if I were to say, you know, what does Sophia, you know, in the divine feminine and Mary Magdalen, like tell, tell me more. Yeah. Sophie: Well, Mary Magdalen for me is I've written her as a human being and as a Jewish woman who is raised in a time of Imperial control and violence, and also radical restriction from her own people. So Mary Magdalen for me, A, a kind of revolutionary, intelligent, complicated human being. But the divine feminine for me, I've been almost thinking of it as divine animacy, rather than, than conflating it with a gender. It's something much more material, much more. Soil-based much less human for me. It's more that kind of spark that inhabits any, you know, divine spark is this Gnostics term. And Sophia is this Gnostic idea. Of the goddess that comes down into the world of matter. And so it's that spark that's alive and everything that it set spark that reflects back your own spark. Yeah. So for me, divine feminine, if it's anything it's animals, it's my encounters with mountain lions and bears and lakes and mountains. And I really love, I love Kali. I love aNona. I love Artemis. I love all of these female characters, so, so much, but for me, Humans aren't big enough to hold them. They are ecosystem. Monica: Yeah, I love that they are ecosystems. And I got curious here too about, you know, I have, and I'm sure you have too been very much kind of in this leaning in and really listening and interpreting. I don't even again, there's sometimes. Doesn't serve. Yeah. Oftentimes it doesn't, but really kind of looking at the return of the divine feminine as something that feels very needed. Very essential. And I wondered if you have thoughts some that, Sophie: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, women have had a really hard time for a long time, but women have had a really hard time parenting. Nature which we are. And with queer people and with femmes and with, with all sorts of different identity classifications, that it's actually, you know, you only people who have been having a very good time are a very small group of people. So for me, the divine feminine is a plurality. It's an embrace. It's saying everyone, right? Invited to this party. So the divine feminine coming back for me is it's a paleolithic idea. It's that idea that in, you know, in the, the ancient caves humans do not dominate. Yes, we have goddess figurines, but we mostly have images of animals. And then even in Minoan culture, which is relatively recent as compared to the cave paintings, human beings are not. The central focus, the focus is on bees, on spirals and oceans and bowls. And so for me, the divine feminine is always reorienting us from the human. It's always saying, where is your landscape? Where are your animals? Where are your plants? How are you involved with them? Monica: Right. I love that. It's like, what I'm hearing you say is like reorienting re pointing us back to the matter to what matters and to the garden. Yes. And to the garden. So good. Yeah. So good. Well, okay. So my final question is general. Is there any question that I haven't asked you that you would like me to ask? Sophie: You know, I mean, If you have anything else you want to ask, I'm open, but I'm just, I'm thrilled to have spoken with you and with someone who's so awake and curious, Yeah, I guess my one thing, my, my one tenant that I've been living by is I want to live in the world in an interrogative way, a conversational way. And so I felt like, I feel like that's also how you, you work. So that's very inspiring to be involved with Monica: Very much. So, in fact, I never know, and that's what I love. I never know, kind of like what's going to get created knowing and trusting that whatever happens right. Is its own process. And so I'm always looking for dance partners and, uh, you're a fabulous dancer. So thank you so much, Sophie, it's been an absolute pleasure to, you know, bring your work into the world in a bigger way. And to I'll be just so thrilled to continue kind of following and watching, because I think, I think you have a lot to teach. Sophie: Well, likewise. And I think, I think you're doing something that is really important, which is there's no one story there's so many different voices. And, and what you're doing is, is you are facilitating storytelling. So, you know, you're like the mama mycelium, you're connecting all the trees.. Monica: I love that. I love that so much. And I can say the model. Mon psyllium. Right. So good. Awesome. Well, and for our listeners, I'll be sure to have Sophie's links of course, to her books and to, uh, what will be her latest work as well as her new website will be coming. So 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.