Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
Anne Strainchamps: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson.
Anne Strainchamps: And we are so excited to welcome you to the first episode of our new podcast.
Steve Paulson: These are intimate conversations with scientists, poets, and philosophers.
Steve Paulson: People looking for ways to add more meaning and substance to our lives, more wisdom.
Anne Strainchamps: And more enchantment.
Steve Paulson: Together, they are shaping a new story for our time.
Sophie Strand: Your body is an ancestor.
Sophie Strand: Your body is an altar to your ancestors.
Sophie Strand: Every one of yourselves holds an ancient and anarchic love story.
Sophie Strand: Every decision.
Sophie Strand: Every idea.
Sophie Strand: Every poem you breathe and live
Sophie Strand: is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself.
Anne Strainchamps: Okay, that is the poet and writer Sophie Strand.
Anne Strainchamps: And she's someone I only discovered recently.
Anne Strainchamps: And I am knocked out by her work.
Steve Paulson: Yeah, well, I have to say, you were obsessed with her this past summer.
Steve Paulson: I mean, there were a few weeks when you really couldn't stop talking about her.
Anne Strainchamps: Well, it wasn't just me.
Anne Strainchamps: It was this summer where I could not stop hearing about Sophie Strand.
Anne Strainchamps: And it was mostly from other women,
Anne Strainchamps: this kind of very viral, organic, word-of-mouth thing.
Anne Strainchamps: But the other thing is, this was the summer of the death of To the Best of Our Knowledge.
Anne Strainchamps: It was both an end and a beginning.
Steve Paulson: We were saying goodbye to this radio show, but it played out differently for each of us.
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah, you didn't really want to hear that much about sadness. Yeah,
Steve Paulson: I was kind of ready to move on.
Anne Strainchamps: Meanwhile, I was crying, while recording our farewell show.
Anne Strainchamps: But somehow in this time, Sophie Strand's writing just really resonated for me.
Anne Strainchamps: She writes a lot about death in one way or another.
Anne Strainchamps: She writes about processes of transformation and decomposition.
Anne Strainchamps: And so her metaphors are all mushrooms and underground mycelial networks and spiderwebs and ghosts and dying gods.
Anne Strainchamps: And somehow it just all fuses into this lyrical, interspecies kind of scripture.
Steve Paulson: Okay, so I don't know that much about her.
Steve Paulson: Who is Sophie Strand?
Anne Strainchamps: She is a very young writer, 31 or 32.
Anne Strainchamps: She writes a very popular Substack called Make Me Good Soil.
Anne Strainchamps: She wrote a recent memoir called The Body is a Doorway.
Steve Paulson: She seems too young to have written a memoir.
Anne Strainchamps: Just wait.
Anne Strainchamps: She goes back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.
Anne Strainchamps: She has also written a historical novel about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Anne Strainchamps: It's deeply researched.
Steve Paulson: Quite a range.
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: She's got this big mind and the scale of her thinking is kind of exhilarating.
Anne Strainchamps: And she has a really interesting backstory, too.
Anne Strainchamps: She grew up in the Hudson River Valley in the mountains in this very bookish, counterculture world of eclectic spirituality.
Anne Strainchamps: And she also had a very free-range childhood.
Anne Strainchamps: She writes about having lots of time outdoors in all seasons, barefoot, poking at frogs and salamanders.
Anne Strainchamps: And then it all came crashing down.
Anne Strainchamps: As a teenager, she was on a family trip in Jerusalem.
Anne Strainchamps: And she suddenly collapsed and became debilitatingly sick.
Anne Strainchamps: Like, couldn't eat, couldn't walk.
Anne Strainchamps: And then had years when she was in and out of hospitals before finally being diagnosed with a genetic connective tissue disease.
Anne Strainchamps: And her health still goes up and down.
Steve Paulson: That's a huge amount to deal with.
Steve Paulson: And, I mean, amazing considering all that she's done.
Steve Paulson: But my sense from what you've said is that that's not the main thing that's drawn you to her.
Anne Strainchamps: No.
Anne Strainchamps: And, I mean, she did write about this whole story in The Body is a Doorway, that memoir.
Anne Strainchamps: But she's actually not all that interested in talking about her own experience of illness.
Anne Strainchamps: It's more that that experience led her to think pretty deeply about where our ideas of health and wellness come from.
Anne Strainchamps: And then about ways of thinking about the body and what it means to be embodied.
Steve Paulson: So, what are we going to hear?
Anne Strainchamps: Well, this is a conversation that goes all over the place, which is what I love.
Anne Strainchamps: But we began with a piece that she had just posted.
Anne Strainchamps: I talked with her right around Halloween, depending on your spiritual background.
Anne Strainchamps: All Hallows' Eve, Samhain, the Day of the Dead.
Anne Strainchamps: And she was thinking about ancestors.
Steve Paulson: Okay.
Steve Paulson: Let's listen.
Anne Strainchamps: All right.
Wow.
Anne Strainchamps: Sophie, I'm so excited to talk with you.
Anne Strainchamps: I've been reading and loving your Substack and your work.
Sophie Strand: Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
Anne Strainchamps: So, I wanted to start by asking you, on your Substack, you posted a piece not too long ago
Anne Strainchamps: that I just keep thinking about.
Anne Strainchamps: Like, I've been carrying this around in my head.
Anne Strainchamps: So, I wanted to ask you to begin just by reading a section, if you would be up for that.
Anne Strainchamps: And then maybe we can talk about it.
Sophie Strand: Yeah, absolutely. Anne Strainchamps:.
Sophie Strand: This is from the "Your Body is an Ancestor" piece.
Sophie Strand: Your body is an ancestor.
Sophie Strand: Your body is an altar to your ancestors.
Sophie Strand: All you need to do to honor your ancestors is breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath
Sophie Strand: loops you into the biome of your ecosystem.
Sophie Strand: Every seven to ten years, your cells will have turned over.
Sophie Strand: If you live in a valley, chances are, the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot,
Sophie Strand: the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very
Sophie Strand: molecular makeup of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes.
Sophie Strand: Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized
Sophie Strand: into the fossil fuels.
Sophie Strand: You are threaded through with fossils.
Sophie Strand: Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates
Sophie Strand: and blood lineages.
Sophie Strand: You are the ongoingness of the dead, the alembic where they are given breath again.
Sophie Strand: Today, I realize it is even possible that my body somehow holds the cells of my great-great-grandmother
Sophie Strand: or your great-great-grandmother, or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated
Sophie Strand: the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl.
Sophie Strand: Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors, a web of relations that ripples outwards into the
Sophie Strand: intimate ocean of deep time.
Anne Strainchamps: Oh, God, Sophie, that is so unbelievably gorgeous.
Thank you.
Anne Strainchamps: I remember the first time I read it, like that line, the image, "I am built from carbon that
Anne Strainchamps: once intimately orchestrated the flight of a pterodactyl."
Anne Strainchamps: There was a moment reading that, where I just stopped and looked up.
Anne Strainchamps: I guess my eyes automatically went to the sky.
Anne Strainchamps: And I just thought, it's more than that it evokes a sense of wonder.
Anne Strainchamps: There is something explosive about that, I think.
Anne Strainchamps: Where does that sense of explosiveness come from?
Sophie Strand: I think that we are so blinkered by anthropocentrism and by a very short view of a single human life
Sophie Strand: that we forget that we are part of a stream of evolutionary becoming, whereby every piece
Sophie Strand: of matter has been used, decayed, recycled many, many times.
Sophie Strand: I often times like to tell people that I believe in reincarnation, not metaphysically, but materially,
Sophie Strand: that nothing is ever lost or squandered.
Sophie Strand: Everything is used to build everything again.
Sophie Strand: The metaphor I like to use is about the monarch butterflies.
Sophie Strand: I love monarch butterflies.
Sophie Strand: In fact, I'm going to be one for Halloween this year.
Sophie Strand: It's so important to me that we focus on trying to rebuild their populations
Sophie Strand: in the Hudson Valley and we protect them.
Sophie Strand: We stop spraying glyphosate.
Sophie Strand: We don't mow down our fields of milkweed and weeds where they will build their cocoons
Sophie Strand: and feed themselves and stop on their long migratory process.
Sophie Strand: And for me, monarchs really queer our idea of a single self and generations.
Sophie Strand: Something that I think about also is the Haudenosaunee confederacy, the indigenous confederacy
Sophie Strand: that predates colonialism here.
Sophie Strand: This idea that every decision you make as a community, you have to think
Sophie Strand: like seven generations ahead, that you really have to think beyond your own lifetime.
Sophie Strand: So those monarchs for me are this great, more-than-human realization of the Haudenosaunee's
Sophie Strand: idea of making decisions for more than one generation, because when they migrate down
Sophie Strand: to the South every winter, it takes five different generations.
Sophie Strand: The butterfly that starts the journey is not the butterfly that ends it.
Sophie Strand: And I think about what does it mean to start a journey knowing that you are not going to
Sophie Strand: see the end of it?
Sophie Strand: You are not the destination.
Sophie Strand: You don't get to see the ending, but you can participate.
Anne Strainchamps: And I do think this is a worldview that, if we're going to use language of reincarnation,
Anne Strainchamps: that is cycling around and coming back.
Anne Strainchamps: We are all, I think, learning to be more responsible about the way we treat
Anne Strainchamps: the earth, the waste that we cause.
Anne Strainchamps: Usually, I think those realizations come with, for me at least, a fair amount of guilt.
Anne Strainchamps: And I don't think that I'm alone.
Anne Strainchamps: I mean, you've written a lot about the religious roots of so many of our attitudes.
Anne Strainchamps: It seems to me that one of the challenges facing us today is to hold on to the sense
Anne Strainchamps: of wonder and not slip into this feeling of being sinful, guilty.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Sophie Strand: I think something very interesting is, so I wrote a historical fiction novel about Second
Sophie Strand: Temple Period Palestine and about all of the different types of Jewish traditions at the
Sophie Strand: time of Roman imperialism.
Anne Strainchamps: The Madonna Secret.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Sophie Strand: And in it, I was very interested in the Aramaic and Jewish roots of the idea of sin.
Sophie Strand: So the idea of sin has really been mistranslated from Aramaic to Greek through different cultures.
Sophie Strand: It actually carried a lot less moral baggage originally.
Sophie Strand: The word meant to miss the mark or debt.
Sophie Strand: And so sin was a way, actually, of attuning to your relationships, attuning to the
Sophie Strand: ways that you were affecting other beings.
Anne Strainchamps: Really?
Anne Strainchamps: It wasn't part of this idea that we're fallen, where our nature is sinful?
Sophie Strand: Well, this becomes, with Augustine, you have a progression of Gentile Roman people misinterpreting
Sophie Strand: the idea of sin over many, many successive generations as Christianity becomes
Sophie Strand: codified outside of its original culture.
Sophie Strand: But sin is a more complicated, more nuanced term in Aramaic.
Sophie Strand: And so in the original folk traditions of Northern Galilee, where we can place Jesus, it had a much
Sophie Strand: looser understanding.
Sophie Strand: But sin has become something that paralyzes us.
Sophie Strand: I think for me, sin is more of a verb of attunement in its original Aramaic sense, which is, well,
Sophie Strand: if I'm out of right relationship, if there's a debt, if I've eaten the berries and I've accepted
Sophie Strand: the gifts of the land, how do I keep feeding the land so that that relationship is constantly
Sophie Strand: rebalancing?
Anne Strainchamps: It's more complicated even than that, though, because what goes along with the idea
Anne Strainchamps: of sin is the idea of, well, at least I'm thinking about St. Augustine, the
Anne Strainchamps: idea of the body itself.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: And especially women's bodies, as being somehow dirty, impure.
Anne Strainchamps: And the opposite of where we want to go, which is, I don't know, up in the sky, to a
Anne Strainchamps: purer, better kind of state. Absolutely.
Sophie Strand: I mean, I've written a lot about the history of monotheism and empire.
Sophie Strand: I don't have any answers, but I'm very curious about how you see the schism of mind
Sophie Strand: and matter, purity and impurity, humans and nature, men and women.
Sophie Strand: And you see these value dualisms emerge post-Bronze Age collapse.
Sophie Strand: So before that, in the Mediterranean basin and Europe, you see much more earth-reverent,
Sophie Strand: partnership-based cultures.
Sophie Strand: Rianne Eisler, who's one of my favorite scholars of these early states, says—
Anne Strainchamps: Oh, I remember.
Anne Strainchamps: She wrote The Chalice and the Blade, right?
Anne Strainchamps: Early feminist, kind of archaeological, let's go back and look at the earth goddesses and
Anne Strainchamps: the divine feminine.
Sophie Strand: Yeah, and she writes that what a culture doesn't depict in its art is even more important than
Sophie Strand: what it does depict.
Sophie Strand: And one thing that's so interesting about many of the early Mediterranean states and cultures,
Sophie Strand: and I'm thinking of Cabal Hayek, Mohenjo-Daro, these early states, they don't depict violence,
Sophie Strand: they don't depict murder.
Sophie Strand: And I'm curious about this period of time of collapse in the Mediterranean basin
Sophie Strand: where there were droughts, famine, plagues, genocide, mass exodus of
Sophie Strand: people.
Sophie Strand: And after this mass cultural traumatic event, you see a schism between mind and matter, men
Sophie Strand: and women, humans and nature, and purity and impurity.
Sophie Strand: That the body where you can suffer — from plague, from dislocation, from
Sophie Strand: battles — is unsafe and impure.
Sophie Strand: And that there's some other place that's safer, that's abstract, that's in the sky.
So I'm curious...
Anne Strainchamps: Well, are you suggesting that in some ways, we are all survivors of this civilizational
Anne Strainchamps: collapse, and we are carrying the memory of this trauma?
Sophie Strand: Yeah, I mean, I do think
Sophie Strand: so. Our cultures are stories.
Sophie Strand: So I think it's important to understand how these collapses may have inspired certain
Sophie Strand: kinds of narrative survival mechanisms that made sense in the moment, but are perhaps obsolete
Sophie Strand: now.
Anne Strainchamps: Play that out a little bit.
Anne Strainchamps: What's the narrative that you think that we are subconsciously holding on to?
Anne Strainchamps: And in what way would that have been a refuge from or a response to trauma?
Sophie Strand: Well, as a survivor of violence in my own life, I know that one of the ways that you
Sophie Strand: survive insurmountable violence is you dissociate, that you leave your body.
Sophie Strand: And it can protect you from psychologically breaking.
Sophie Strand: But that dissociation, when it is carried out over a long period of time in a personal life,
Sophie Strand: can mean that you're not paying attention to your body.
Sophie Strand: So I see a period of time where people experience natural disasters, drought, dislocation, plagues,
Sophie Strand: a lot of things that are deeply traumatic and that make you hyper aware of how fragile the
Sophie Strand: body is.
Anne Strainchamps: Right.
Sophie Strand: And that maybe your God isn't going to save you.
Anne Strainchamps: Or that the earth is going to kill you.
Sophie Strand: Or that your neighbor is going to kill you.
Sophie Strand: And so for me, I'm interested in what happens when a culture dissociates, when it goes into
Sophie Strand: its head and leaves behind its body, is really seeded with this base separation between mind
Sophie Strand: and matter and good and evil.
Sophie Strand: Another thing I will say is that when we are in situations that are very threatening,
Sophie Strand: we seek to simplify them so that we know where is safe.
Sophie Strand: So we simplify everything into binaries.
Sophie Strand: We live in a highly binaristic culture.
Sophie Strand: It does not have a high threshold for ambiguity and complexity.
Sophie Strand: And especially when we're stressed, it gets worse, as we're seeing right now with
Sophie Strand: the American political landscape.
Anne Strainchamps: Absolutely.
Sophie Strand: And you add in a pandemic, you add in COVID, you add in the onslaught of information and
Sophie Strand: misinformation online that our neurobiology is not built to accommodate.
Sophie Strand: Yeah, of course, our very organisms are overwhelmed.
Sophie Strand: And so we seek ways of simplifying our environment so that we can feel safe.
Sophie Strand: So I have a lot of compassion for survival mechanisms.
Sophie Strand: And I also think that we have to be conscious of the ways in which they can inspire our worst
Sophie Strand: behavior.
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: Going back to the idea that when your body feels too much pain,
Anne Strainchamps: and your psyche feels too much pain, body and psyche, when it's more than you can handle,
Anne Strainchamps: we leave. We leave the body and live up in our minds and our heads.
Anne Strainchamps: And so you can look at where we are culturally today.
Anne Strainchamps: And, I mean, I don't want to pathologize the entire development of Western science and
Anne Strainchamps: enlightenment thought, but there is a strand of that.
Anne Strainchamps: And so that's why I said, going back to where we began with that
Anne Strainchamps: piece that you wrote, and I said it felt explosive.
Anne Strainchamps: That's what I feel like you are implicitly exploding all the time.
Anne Strainchamps: The idea that we are a singular self or that decay, rot, the body, that these are things to flee from.
Anne Strainchamps: You keep taking us back into earth, the body, decay.
Anne Strainchamps: Exactly the opposite of where our culture tells us to look for wonder.
Anne Strainchamps: Sorry, that's a very large statement to get you to react to, but that's kind of what I see happening over and over,
Anne Strainchamps: the movement I see over and over again in your work.
Sophie Strand: Thank you.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Sophie Strand: I mean, I always say I want to stitch ascent back to descent.
Sophie Strand: I'm much more interested in cycles.
Sophie Strand: One metaphor I've used in my book about myths, The Flowering Wand, is mushrooms send out millions of spores.
Sophie Strand: And we now know through modern science that these mushrooms sprout up from underground mycorrhizal systems.
Sophie Strand: So filamentous, lace-like fungi in the soil that connect plants, bacterial colonies, and trees.
Sophie Strand: They send up their fruiting bodies, these mushrooms, that then sporulate millions of spores.
Sophie Strand: And the wildest thing is that these spores cloud seed.
Sophie Strand: There are so many millions of tons of spores in the air that they act as the nucleus of water droplets.
Sophie Strand: And then they actually create cloud systems and thus rain.
Anne Strainchamps: Wait, wait, wait.
Anne Strainchamps: The spores of the mushrooms create clouds?
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: Create weather?
Sophie Strand: Create weather.
Sophie Strand: And so for me, spore gods or storm gods are rock gods.
Sophie Strand: It's a way of tying all of these movements together.
Anne Strainchamps: I mean, somehow this is also reminding me, we were talking about monarchs,
Anne Strainchamps: but you wrote about the cocoons and the way the caterpillar melts and becomes a butterfly.
Sophie Strand: Oh, yeah.
Sophie Strand: I'm very interested in consciousness studies.
Anne Strainchamps: You have to talk to my husband, Steve.
Anne Strainchamps: That's his whole thing.
Sophie Strand: It's so fascinating.
Sophie Strand: And a lot of my scientist friends are saying that we're on the edge of what they call a Copernican shift.
Anne Strainchamps: Really?
Sophie Strand: Which is like our ideas about consciousness are about to change so radically that it will feel that big.
Sophie Strand: Some of my favorite thinkers are beginning to say that brains and thinking have been conflated, but they're not the same thing.
Sophie Strand: And you brought up the butterfly, which is this great problematization of the idea that thinking or memories are stored in the brain.
Sophie Strand: So you have caterpillars.
Sophie Strand: Caterpillars are eating leaves, getting fat, getting ready.
Sophie Strand: Then they create a cocoon.
Sophie Strand: There's this hormone that gets stimulated.
Sophie Strand: I think it's called ectosine.
Sophie Strand: And they basically begin to melt.
Sophie Strand: And I always wonder, what does that feel like to a caterpillar?
Sophie Strand: It probably feels like dying.
Sophie Strand: And their brain liquefies.
Sophie Strand: That's the craziest thing.
Sophie Strand: Their brain liquefies.
Sophie Strand: And there are numerous studies of moths and butterflies.
Sophie Strand: And it's so fascinating that butterflies have the same memories as they did when they were caterpillars, even though their brains have been liquefied and rearticulated.
Anne Strainchamps: How is that possible?
Sophie Strand: They'll remember the leaves that they originally ate and go back to the same leaves and the same plants.
Sophie Strand: They did a study where I think they shocked —
Sophie Strand: I hate studies like this, by the way —
Sophie Strand: but they hurt the caterpillars when they exposed them to a certain smell.
Sophie Strand: And the butterflies remembered to associate that smell.
Anne Strainchamps: Stay away from that smell.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: In that case, where
Anne Strainchamps: are the memories?
Sophie Strand: What are the memories?
Sophie Strand: And for me, that's where my wonder is.
Sophie Strand: My wonder is in the questions we can live inside rather than answer immediately.
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: This journey, it's been personal for you, right?
Anne Strainchamps: I mean, you got really sick in your teens.
Anne Strainchamps: Maybe you can just tell a little bit of that story.
Sophie Strand: Sure.
Yeah.
Sophie Strand: At the age of 16, I went from being a very athletic, very physically fit young woman to being so radically ill that I was in and out of the hospital overnight.
Sophie Strand: And it took many, many years of misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and really degenerating health to finally get a diagnosis of genetic connective tissue disease.
Anne Strainchamps: Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Yeah.
Sophie Strand: And many other co-morbidities.
Yeah.
Sophie Strand: And then some other autoimmune things.
Anne Strainchamps: Like what you can eat is pretty limited, as I recall.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Sophie Strand: I have mast cell disease, and Ehlers-Danlos predisposes you to gastroparesis and autoimmunity and many gastrointestinal metabolic issues.
Anne Strainchamps: So,
Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: I mean, reading your memoir, you've come close to death many times.
Sophie Strand: I have indeed.
Anne Strainchamps: You've gone into anaphylactic shock, I don't know how many times, been revived, and I don't know how many ambulances.
Yeah.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: So, first, I want to just pause there and just say you're about the age of my own daughter, and I could not read any of that without reacting as a mother.
Anne Strainchamps: I began thinking about your own mother, wondering how the hell she handled any of those.
Sophie Strand: I know.
Sophie Strand: I mean, I think about what it's like to have a sick child.
Sophie Strand: I've had friends who've had children die, and I think of my own parents and how terrifying it was for them, especially when they realized, the meaning of our for-profit health care and COVID has completely destabilized the way people can access health care in America.
Sophie Strand: It's a mess and expensive and complicated.
Anne Strainchamps: I think it's really hard for my generation, looking around and seeing so many people our children's age and younger are sick.
Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: They're getting earlier cancers.
Anne Strainchamps: They're getting autoimmune diseases.
Anne Strainchamps: It's hard.
Anne Strainchamps: I don't know whether this is true or not, but in my head, it's impossible not to conflate — oh, the earth is sick, and so are the young people.
Sophie Strand: Yeah, I mean, very scientifically and practically, there are all these boundaries that if you violate them, we can't actually predict how the earth will rebalance.
Sophie Strand: And one of them are called novel particles — creating chemicals and novel particles and introducing them into the chaos of earth systems without knowing how they might cascade into feedback loops and change how things work.
Sophie Strand: And we have well exceeded the amount of novel particles and molecules we have introduced into our ecosystems in the past couple of years.
Sophie Strand: We're in an experiment right now, biologically, with plastics, with all of these things.
Sophie Strand: We don't know what the long-term effects are.
Sophie Strand: I'm not surprised that we are sick.
Sophie Strand: We have really created a very interesting soup.
Anne Strainchamps: Well, so where I was going with that, I think, is kind of thinking we need new myths, right?
Anne Strainchamps: The old mythic structures that we were talking about, they're just kind of part of the problem.
Anne Strainchamps: And it seems to me that you're interested in both myth and the ecological language of science and bringing those things together, like your image of the hermit crabs.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Anne Strainchamps: Lining up on the sand to exchange—
Sophie Strand: Shells.
Anne Strainchamps: Helping each other.
Sophie Strand: Yeah.
Sophie Strand: I do love that metaphor of the hermit crabs.
Sophie Strand: And for people who are listening who don't know it — hermit crabs don't grow their own shells.
Sophie Strand: They steal them or they borrow them.
Sophie Strand: They find them and they eventually outgrow them.
Sophie Strand: And so what they do is they'll find a new shell and it probably is not the right size, but they'll exit their old shell and wait next to the new shell.
Sophie Strand: And slowly over time, a bunch of hermit crabs will coalesce into a gathering and then they'll all exchange shells so that every single one finds the right sized shell.
Sophie Strand: I love that because it's about communal storytelling and how the only way to compost these older toxic paradigms is together.
Sophie Strand: We can't do it alone.
Sophie Strand: Learning to listen and to dialogue with beings and people who are different than us is a really important part of whatever comes next.
Anne Strainchamps: I want to pause on that image of hermit crabs lined up together on the beach.
Anne Strainchamps: This is Wonder Cabinet.
Thank you.
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Anne Strainchamps: I'm Anne Strainchamps, talking with writer Sophie Strand, and I want to pick up on that
Anne Strainchamps: idea of communal storytelling. What does that look like for you in practice?
Sophie Strand: Well, in practice, it means I have been hosting on and off for years potluck events. Sometimes
Sophie Strand: they're clothing swaps, sometimes they're just meal sharing. And usually a lot of people show
Sophie Strand: up locally, people invite other people, friends of friends, you share food, you light candles.
Sophie Strand: And then I always invite people to share a story from their life that in telling it threatens to
Sophie Strand: make them look insane, or whatever word you want to use. It threatens their credibility.
Sophie Strand: So tell a ghost story, tell a weird, spooky story, something you can't explain. And the incredible
Sophie Strand: thing about it is you can have people from many different generations, many different walks of
Sophie Strand: life. And if you get them laughing, eating food together, sitting on the ground, trying on each
Sophie Strand: other's old ratty sweaters, you get them into this kind of intimacy, and then you turn off the
Sophie Strand: lights and you light candles, and you ask people to share stories that they don't understand,
Sophie Strand: really amazing transformation starts to happen. People start opening up and sharing things
Sophie Strand: that are outside our modern framework of how we know things.
Anne Strainchamps: Let's do it now.
Sophie Strand: Totally.
Anne Strainchamps: What's a story, something that's happened to you that you can't explain?
Sophie Strand: Absolutely. One of my favorite stories that I sometimes tell is — me and my friend
Sophie Strand: Nora lived during the summers between college in a tiny little upstate town that was nearer to a much
Sophie Strand: bougier town with lots of fancy restaurants. So occasionally we would treat ourselves, we would
Sophie Strand: drive from our tiny little town over to this much fancier town to go out for dinner. So we finished
Sophie Strand: our work, we drove over there, we had done the drive many, many times. And we ate dinner,
Sophie Strand: we were totally sober. It was dark, but early. And we started to drive back. The drive should have
Sophie Strand: taken 15 minutes, we'd done it many times. And suddenly, we were out of service. Our phones
Sophie Strand: weren't working. And suddenly the clock on the car wasn't working. And we were driving through farm
Sophie Strand: field after farm field. And we had no idea where we were, we were totally lost. So we kept driving.
Sophie Strand: And I said, Nora, I have to pee really badly. Will you pull over so I can pee on the side of the road?
Sophie Strand: She was like, no, we're not stopping the car, which is amazing, because she was beginning to feel like
Sophie Strand: something really intense was happening. So the distance between Rhinebeck and Tivoli is very short.
Sophie Strand: But we were driving for a long time. And we had no street signs, no markers that we recognized,
Sophie Strand: nothing. And then all of a sudden, a giant owl flew down in the road in front of her car,
Sophie Strand: causing her to slam on the brakes. And we screamed. And then the owl put out its wings,
Sophie Strand: looked at us and flew off. And then our phones got service. And the clock started to work again.
Sophie Strand: And suddenly we kept driving. And there was a street sign. And we were five minutes from Rhinebeck.
Sophie Strand: And we'd been driving for a long time. And we were both so spooked that we actually
Sophie Strand: parked the car, got out of the car. We had no way of making sense of what
Sophie Strand: had happened. What I now know is, this is the area where Rip Van Winkle was written. And it was
Sophie Strand: written because this is an area where there's a deep folkloric tradition of something called time
Sophie Strand: loops. People will report getting stuck in loops where you don't know where you are. Time moves at a
Sophie Strand: different pace. And then you get out of it. And you can't quite make sense of what happened.
Sophie Strand: The beautiful thing about these stories is I hold them lightly, which is if there happens to
Sophie Strand: be an explanation that does describe it, I'll accept it. I want to be able to update my understanding.
Sophie Strand: But I also don't want to rush to a bad description of what happened, just because I need an answer.
Anne Strainchamps: So when I said, let's share one of these stories.
Anne Strainchamps: And then I thought, oh, shit, I don't have any. And then I started thinking, what the hell is
Anne Strainchamps: wrong with me that I don't have any? I'm sure you do. So here's the thing, I probably do,
Sophie Strand: but I guess I've repressed them. You're not the only person. At these gatherings, this is what happens
Sophie Strand: without fail. And I've done this dozens of times. There will be two people who are certain and have
Sophie Strand: very intense stories who break the ice, and everyone else will say, I don't have any stories.
Sophie Strand: And then as everyone begins to listen, they're like, I've never told anyone this. And I haven't
Sophie Strand: thought about it in 15 years. But I haven't told this.
Sophie Strand: I haven't even thought about it. But it's a relational communal thing. When we live in a culture
Sophie Strand: that tells us to deny other ways of knowing, and mocks us and tells us that these things are
Sophie Strand: not real, it's very hard to hold them in our own bodies and our own psyches. I will also
Sophie Strand: say that it is a pretty recent, modern veneer of culture that doesn't believe in ancestors, that
Sophie Strand: doesn't believe that we can be contacted by the dead, that the trees can speak. But I do think that our
Sophie Strand: culture has been so good at making us feel scared about even acknowledging these stories to
Anne Strainchamps: ourselves. I mean, this is why I read fantasy. And in certain moods, magic and fantasy can feel
Anne Strainchamps: like medicine, like the best medicine or vitamins that you need when you feel like you've been sucked
Anne Strainchamps: dry by the culture that we live in. You can kind of just feel it in some ways, what makes
Anne Strainchamps: you feel better. And if for me, it's the story of some children who wander through the back of a
Anne Strainchamps: cupboard and find themselves in another magical landscape, or a young woman who's starving in a
Anne Strainchamps: forest and shoots a wolf who turns out to be fey.. An avatar. I love that reference. Amazing.
Anne Strainchamps: So what I'm trying to figure out is how do I go from thinking it's okay for magic to live inside the
Anne Strainchamps: covers of a book, but I don't know how to feel like I'm walking around inside a magical
Sophie Strand: world. Well, for me, science is my magic, to be perfectly honest. Yes, I have weird stories. But
Sophie Strand: the thing that's most magical is the monarch butterflies. I actually find the most magic in reading
Sophie Strand: scientific papers, findings about the sensory worlds of mantis shrimps that see colors
Sophie Strand: we can't even imagine. I just kind of bring that up because I do think there are different ways of
Sophie Strand: knowing than we allow within our material reductionist world. There are different ways of knowing. People
Sophie Strand: experience their ancestors talking to them. People have dreams that give them advice. We can begin to weave
Sophie Strand: those back in. But for me, my access point is my relationship to plants and animals and reading
Sophie Strand: about them and learning about them and thinking about the just pure synchronicity and magic that we
Sophie Strand: are all here at once, that we all evolved to do these things. That to me is deeply magical.
Anne Strainchamps: You're reminding me, Steve and I chose the name Wonder Cabinet for this new podcast.
Anne Strainchamps: It's great. Thanks. Well, so the original Wonder Cabinets were created by wealthy collectors
Anne Strainchamps: beginning in the 16th century, 16th until 18th century. And it was really this period of time
Anne Strainchamps: when there was an older magical worldview coinciding with the birth of the age of science. And so you
Anne Strainchamps: get people collecting preserved skeletons and fossils and rare minerals and magical objects that they
Anne Strainchamps: thought were unicorn horns or the philosopher's stone that would turn anything into gold. And all these
Anne Strainchamps: things coexisted. Science and a magical worldview were not opposites. And so maybe that's what you're
Anne Strainchamps: saying, I mean, at some level, that's why I think our larger project is essentially a
Sophie Strand: Wonder Cabinet for the modern age. I love that idea. That's amazing. I mean, we forget that Newton,
Sophie Strand: that most of the big heavy-hitting scientists, were alchemists. They were
Sophie Strand: dabbling in something we think of as being wizardry now. And magic isn't about something being like
Sophie Strand: from fairy. It's more about the wonder and the edges of our understanding. I mean, quantum
Sophie Strand: physics is very magical in that. Oh, absolutely. That things are much more verbs than they are
Sophie Strand: objects, much more becoming than they are foreclosed. And that's exciting to me.
Anne Strainchamps: One of the very next interviews we'll be airing is a conversation Steve had with Carlo Revelli,
Anne Strainchamps: the discoverer of black holes, who says pretty much exactly what you just said.
Anne Strainchamps: Talks about how all of us are constantly becoming. And so why would we be afraid of
Sophie Strand: death? It's just another step in a long dance.
Sophie Strand: You know, just one monarch in a migratory circle. I think about that with myself also as I've had to
Sophie Strand: really confront mortality in a fairly real way. And I think about, okay, maybe I'm not going to
Sophie Strand: finish all my projects or finish all my books in time, quote unquote. But can I weave myself in where
Sophie Strand: I create enough nourishment, I make enough good soil that something can grow from my unfinished
Anne Strainchamps: projects? Yeah. That's the beautiful title of your Substack, "Make Me Good Soil."
Sophie Strand: Thank you.
Anne Strainchamps: Sophie Strand is a poet and writer and author of a memoir called "The Body is a Doorway."
Steve Paulson: I'm Anne Strainchamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. And this is Wonder Cabinet.
Anne Strainchamps: And by the way, that conversation with Carlo Rovelli that we just mentioned,
Anne Strainchamps: that is in our next episode on the beauty of physics. Carlo Rovelli:
Anne Strainchamps: At that precise moment, I fell in love with physics. It was madly falling in love with physics.
Anne Strainchamps: Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the most beautiful human creations.
Anne Strainchamps: I mean, there's this curving of space, stretching on time. It's better than LSD.
Anne Strainchamps: I hope you'll join us.
Steve Paulson: Wonder Cabinet's audio engineer is Steve Gotcher, theme music by Joe Hartke.
Anne Strainchamps: Send questions and comments and sign up for our newsletter at wondercabinetproductions.com.
Anne Strainchamps: See you next time.
Bye.