1 00:00:00,567 --> 00:00:01,888 [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,850 --> 00:00:04,831 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Anne Strangechamps. 3 00:00:05,152 --> 00:00:06,093 [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm Steve Paulson. 4 00:00:06,854 --> 00:00:13,620 [SPEAKER_01]: Once upon a time, there was a girl and a poisoned apple, a wolf upstairs, a witch at the door. 5 00:00:14,381 --> 00:00:18,946 [SPEAKER_02]: There were hard times and evil spells, a dark castle and a withered land. 6 00:00:19,281 --> 00:00:23,065 [SPEAKER_01]: So she has no choice but to set out for the wild woods. 7 00:00:23,405 --> 00:00:26,928 [SPEAKER_02]: Or she cries and wanders, but does eventually find help. 8 00:00:27,329 --> 00:00:32,734 [SPEAKER_01]: From a talking tree, or an enchanted bird, or a fox, or a frog. 9 00:00:33,138 --> 00:00:36,519 [SPEAKER_02]: A helpful spider, a den of mice, a family of bears. 10 00:00:36,819 --> 00:00:38,539 [SPEAKER_00]: The message is pretty clear. 11 00:00:39,059 --> 00:00:46,481 [SPEAKER_00]: People who don't really know fairy tales or who didn't grow up with fairy tales are constantly asking me, what on earth are you writing about fairy tales for? 12 00:00:46,501 --> 00:00:47,501 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they don't get it. 13 00:00:48,062 --> 00:00:55,163 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's kind of hard to explain sometimes just how deeply the images and the characters lodge inside us. 14 00:00:55,543 --> 00:01:02,845 [SPEAKER_00]: Even the simplest of stories can provide this vast array of psychological insight and inspiration. 15 00:01:03,465 --> 00:01:04,166 [SPEAKER_00]: They're magic. 16 00:01:04,826 --> 00:01:17,773 [SPEAKER_01]: And they offer what we most need today, a trail of breadcrumbs out of the wasteland and back into relationship with the imaginal world, where archetypes mingle with animist roots and ecological memories. 17 00:01:18,208 --> 00:01:26,496 [SPEAKER_02]: Our guest today is Sharon Blackie, folklorist, fairy tale scholar, feminist psychotherapist, author of half a dozen books about fairy tales. 18 00:01:26,797 --> 00:01:30,921 [SPEAKER_01]: Also an extremely popular literary sub-stack, The Art of Enchantment. 19 00:01:31,381 --> 00:01:34,104 [SPEAKER_01]: And I've been reading Sharon Blackie's books for a decade or more. 20 00:01:34,604 --> 00:01:37,767 [SPEAKER_01]: And she's one of the first people I wanted to talk with for this podcast. 21 00:01:38,448 --> 00:01:43,291 [SPEAKER_01]: Partly because I grew up reading fairy tales, and they've just always felt really potent to me. 22 00:01:44,051 --> 00:01:46,933 [SPEAKER_01]: These are very, very old stories. 23 00:01:47,493 --> 00:01:51,415 [SPEAKER_01]: Folktales that go back hundreds, maybe in some cases thousands of years. 24 00:01:52,136 --> 00:01:56,358 [SPEAKER_01]: You could call them the origin code of our collective unconscious. 25 00:01:56,879 --> 00:01:59,100 [SPEAKER_01]: The wild woods of the human imagination. 26 00:01:59,440 --> 00:02:01,820 [SPEAKER_01]: So maybe messages from the ancestors. 27 00:02:02,161 --> 00:02:06,121 [SPEAKER_01]: Or accumulated psychological wisdom distilled into story form. 28 00:02:06,761 --> 00:02:12,643 [SPEAKER_01]: And also a path back to ways of knowing that challenge much of what we've been told about the nature of reality. 29 00:02:12,883 --> 00:02:17,944 [SPEAKER_02]: So it sounds like you and Sharon think there's something countercultural about fairy tales. 30 00:02:18,524 --> 00:02:24,345 [SPEAKER_01]: In the sense that they show us how to resist the forces that rob our lives of meaning and enchantment. 31 00:02:24,785 --> 00:02:25,565 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, let's listen. 32 00:02:26,657 --> 00:02:31,318 [SPEAKER_01]: Sharon, you've devoted a lot of your life to reclaiming fairy tales for the modern age. 33 00:02:32,018 --> 00:02:33,959 [SPEAKER_01]: Why are these stories so important to you? 34 00:02:35,199 --> 00:02:39,460 [SPEAKER_00]: I think because when I was a child, I feel as if they kind of saved me. 35 00:02:40,080 --> 00:02:41,760 [SPEAKER_00]: I had a complicated childhood, you know. 36 00:02:41,780 --> 00:02:43,261 [SPEAKER_00]: So I had a father who was violent. 37 00:02:43,281 --> 00:02:44,581 [SPEAKER_00]: I had a mother who was an alcoholic. 38 00:02:44,641 --> 00:02:48,782 [SPEAKER_00]: I grew up in a fairly impoverished environment here in the UK. 39 00:02:49,322 --> 00:02:52,123 [SPEAKER_00]: And what I loved about fairy tales is that they reflected that. 40 00:02:52,935 --> 00:02:54,897 [SPEAKER_00]: There was no sugarcoating, you know? 41 00:02:55,418 --> 00:02:58,481 [SPEAKER_00]: The heroines walk out of the door empty-handed. 42 00:02:58,541 --> 00:03:00,703 [SPEAKER_00]: Their father has cut their hands off. 43 00:03:01,144 --> 00:03:03,366 [SPEAKER_00]: They walk out with just the clothes on their back. 44 00:03:03,386 --> 00:03:08,232 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a wolf waiting in the woods, and it just kind of felt, yeah, okay, that's life. 45 00:03:08,912 --> 00:03:10,634 [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think they always felt... 46 00:03:11,538 --> 00:03:12,599 [SPEAKER_00]: realistic to me. 47 00:03:12,939 --> 00:03:20,324 [SPEAKER_00]: And I loved the way in which even as a child, they helped me believe that you can grow up in an impossible situation. 48 00:03:20,344 --> 00:03:22,946 [SPEAKER_00]: But boy, can you find your way out of it again? 49 00:03:22,966 --> 00:03:29,511 [SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like early on, you had the sense that these are more than children's stories. 50 00:03:30,052 --> 00:03:34,595 [SPEAKER_01]: Because the fairy tales you work with, right, are even older than Hans Christian Andersen. 51 00:03:34,615 --> 00:03:34,755 [SPEAKER_01]: We're 52 00:03:40,870 --> 00:03:45,832 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, they were never really, back in the day, stories for children. 53 00:03:46,512 --> 00:03:53,034 [SPEAKER_00]: Mostly they were told by women to other women and to their daughters while they were doing domestic work. 54 00:03:53,374 --> 00:03:57,435 [SPEAKER_00]: So while they were weaving or spinning or doing all of the things that women did together. 55 00:03:57,875 --> 00:04:02,057 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's always seemed to me that actually their purpose was to say to the girls, look, 56 00:04:02,877 --> 00:04:04,058 [SPEAKER_00]: There are wolves out there. 57 00:04:04,078 --> 00:04:06,380 [SPEAKER_00]: It all looks very dangerous, but you can get through. 58 00:04:06,821 --> 00:04:18,651 [SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, particularly in the Victorian era, there started to be this kind of collection of stories that were more aimed at children to teach them how to be good girls and good boys. 59 00:04:19,432 --> 00:04:24,314 [SPEAKER_01]: So that's when you get the women with the ball gowns and the Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and the castles. 60 00:04:24,514 --> 00:04:25,654 [SPEAKER_00]: That's exactly right. 61 00:04:25,694 --> 00:04:33,897 [SPEAKER_00]: That's when you start to get the insipid, very well-behaved and obedient princesses, which weren't there at all in the oral tradition, say up to the 1700s. 62 00:04:34,538 --> 00:04:42,260 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you've said also that these were stories that were told by women to women. 63 00:04:42,681 --> 00:04:48,523 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a way in which they are teaching stories, survival codes almost. 64 00:04:49,223 --> 00:04:49,904 [SPEAKER_00]: I think so. 65 00:04:49,924 --> 00:05:03,492 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, one of the things that I was keen to do in Ripening, and one of the reasons that I began to write Ripening, was this recognition that pretty much every fairy tale, certainly with a heroine, 66 00:05:04,776 --> 00:05:07,698 [SPEAKER_00]: as the main character starts in Catastrophe. 67 00:05:08,379 --> 00:05:14,283 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, her father cut her hands off, her father walled her up in a tower and she breaks out and the land is a wasteland. 68 00:05:14,804 --> 00:05:18,326 [SPEAKER_00]: Or her mother, her stepmother throws her out with just the clothes on her back. 69 00:05:18,947 --> 00:05:21,269 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, these are stories that always start in Catastrophe. 70 00:05:21,389 --> 00:05:23,630 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we're kind of living through right now. 71 00:05:24,071 --> 00:05:25,692 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we've always lived through. 72 00:05:25,772 --> 00:05:27,493 [SPEAKER_00]: And so it has always seemed to me that... 73 00:05:28,394 --> 00:05:42,819 [SPEAKER_00]: These stories are about things that have always worried us, and they give us the kind of inspiration to try to find a way through, how to avoid the bad wolf that's always lurking in the forest or online, you know? 74 00:05:42,859 --> 00:05:48,921 [SPEAKER_00]: So the themes that seem to be very old actually translate right into the present day, don't they? 75 00:05:49,595 --> 00:05:53,678 [SPEAKER_01]: And they provide not just hope, it's how-to. 76 00:05:53,978 --> 00:06:01,464 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, what do you do when your father wants to sell you to somebody? 77 00:06:01,504 --> 00:06:06,988 [SPEAKER_01]: He walls you up in a tower, leaves you with nothing but a servant and enough food for seven years. 78 00:06:07,169 --> 00:06:08,229 [SPEAKER_01]: What do you do? 79 00:06:09,070 --> 00:06:14,815 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the beauty of it, because the first thing that that fairy tale heroine does is she keeps walking. 80 00:06:15,595 --> 00:06:24,379 [SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite stories is the girl without hands, sometimes called the handless maiden, where her father makes a deal with the devil, basically, because he's fallen on hard times. 81 00:06:24,439 --> 00:06:29,082 [SPEAKER_00]: And the devil says, well, I'll make you rich if you'll give me whatever is standing just behind your house. 82 00:06:29,722 --> 00:06:32,023 [SPEAKER_00]: And he thinks it's an apple tree that the devil wants. 83 00:06:32,103 --> 00:06:35,165 [SPEAKER_00]: Why he would think the devil would want an apple tree, I have no idea. 84 00:06:35,185 --> 00:06:39,467 [SPEAKER_00]: But that's a very dead world for you, actually, what's standing behind his house at the time. 85 00:06:39,975 --> 00:06:43,818 [SPEAKER_00]: In front of the apple tree is his daughter, but the daughter refuses to go with the devil. 86 00:06:43,858 --> 00:06:45,320 [SPEAKER_00]: And so the father cuts off her hands. 87 00:06:45,380 --> 00:06:52,906 [SPEAKER_00]: And so you have this kind of remarkable scenario where a father becomes rich, of course, one way or another. 88 00:06:53,707 --> 00:06:55,928 [SPEAKER_00]: And he says, I'll look after you even though I've cut off your hands. 89 00:06:55,969 --> 00:06:57,670 [SPEAKER_00]: And she says, no, I can't stay here. 90 00:06:58,170 --> 00:06:59,291 [SPEAKER_00]: I can't stay with you. 91 00:06:59,371 --> 00:07:04,235 [SPEAKER_00]: And so even though she has no hands, she has that sense of just being forced to 92 00:07:05,338 --> 00:07:09,688 [SPEAKER_00]: to move on, to walk out and to create her own kind of life and destiny. 93 00:07:10,129 --> 00:07:13,598 [SPEAKER_00]: And the way that most fairy tale heroines do this is, 94 00:07:14,687 --> 00:07:26,957 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I love about fairy tales as teaching stories is they have to do it through building community and not just necessarily a community of other humans, but a community of hungry mice or, you know, crows in the wood or whatever it might be. 95 00:07:27,698 --> 00:07:29,219 [SPEAKER_00]: They never can do it alone. 96 00:07:29,399 --> 00:07:32,942 [SPEAKER_00]: And that teaches us a lot about the need for community today. 97 00:07:33,603 --> 00:07:36,105 [SPEAKER_00]: They learn how not to other the other. 98 00:07:37,646 --> 00:07:41,907 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they learn about making friends with a very frightening bear, for example. 99 00:07:42,467 --> 00:07:47,849 [SPEAKER_00]: And then they provide us with all of these amazing qualities of character, which sound really old-fashioned. 100 00:07:47,909 --> 00:07:52,230 [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, yeah, I am just about 65, so I get to be old-fashioned. 101 00:07:52,250 --> 00:08:03,134 [SPEAKER_00]: But it is things like kind of courage, doing the work, being kind, you know, just traditional, simple values of what it is to be a good human. 102 00:08:03,874 --> 00:08:06,615 [SPEAKER_00]: They're values that situate us in this... 103 00:08:07,495 --> 00:08:11,378 [SPEAKER_00]: beautiful, animate, other than human world. 104 00:08:12,118 --> 00:08:15,020 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's not just about making good relationships with humans. 105 00:08:15,160 --> 00:08:30,090 [SPEAKER_00]: It's about understanding that a tree is alive, that a tree might actually contain the soul of your dead mother, for example, that the wind isn't just something that irritates you when you walk out of the door, but something that you might be able to catch a ride on to your destiny. 106 00:08:30,451 --> 00:08:36,915 [SPEAKER_00]: So there's all this kind of wonderful and beautiful interconnected kind of kinship that we really do need. 107 00:08:37,315 --> 00:08:39,057 [SPEAKER_00]: don't we in the world today, I think. 108 00:08:40,078 --> 00:08:45,643 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, and I think it's the story that more and more the life sciences are telling us too. 109 00:08:46,524 --> 00:08:50,868 [SPEAKER_01]: But going back to the story of the handless maiden, what does happen to her? 110 00:08:51,408 --> 00:08:58,295 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, bizarrely, even though it's one of my favorite stories, that is a story where animals don't actually much show up. 111 00:08:58,595 --> 00:09:04,437 [SPEAKER_00]: But what does show up is the natural world in the sense that she manages to find a pear. 112 00:09:04,457 --> 00:09:05,138 [SPEAKER_00]: She's hungry. 113 00:09:05,858 --> 00:09:13,681 [SPEAKER_00]: She manages to find a pear tree that she can kind of like reach up, you know, with her teeth and kind of pluck the pears because she hasn't got any hands to pick them. 114 00:09:14,301 --> 00:09:22,465 [SPEAKER_00]: And then a king who owns the pear trees comes along, thinks she's very beautiful, marries her and fashions for her this pair of silver hands. 115 00:09:23,485 --> 00:09:27,307 [SPEAKER_00]: a kind of set of, if you like, fake hands to replace the ones that she lost. 116 00:09:27,367 --> 00:09:32,190 [SPEAKER_00]: And they're very nice and he means well, but they just don't work for her. 117 00:09:32,570 --> 00:09:38,073 [SPEAKER_00]: So to cut a long story short, she ends up having to go back into the forest. 118 00:09:38,093 --> 00:09:42,855 [SPEAKER_00]: She's cast out by a kind of wicked stepmother who's in league with that devil who just won't go away. 119 00:09:43,196 --> 00:09:44,817 [SPEAKER_00]: She's cast out into the forest again. 120 00:09:44,857 --> 00:09:46,217 [SPEAKER_00]: This time she's got a little baby. 121 00:09:47,038 --> 00:09:52,581 [SPEAKER_00]: And it is through spending, I think it's the classic fairy tale, seven years, 122 00:09:53,321 --> 00:09:58,945 [SPEAKER_00]: In the forest, alone with this baby, well, she's alone with the baby, but you know, she's basically alone. 123 00:09:59,426 --> 00:10:10,014 [SPEAKER_00]: Where in the natural world, nurtured by the forest and by some beautiful spirit who's a bit angelic, but clearly is of the forest, she grows back her own hands. 124 00:10:10,474 --> 00:10:12,536 [SPEAKER_00]: But she can only do it in the natural world. 125 00:10:12,576 --> 00:10:14,057 [SPEAKER_00]: She can only do it in the forest. 126 00:10:14,617 --> 00:10:16,539 [SPEAKER_00]: She's not going to do it in the king's palace. 127 00:10:17,139 --> 00:10:21,723 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's so beautiful because that's clearly how our ancestors felt about the world. 128 00:10:22,423 --> 00:10:35,311 [SPEAKER_00]: You can find in these stories that real respect for the wisdom of animals, for the wisdom of particular plants and the characteristics of particular plants because they knew them, because they literally lived among them. 129 00:10:35,972 --> 00:10:36,172 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 130 00:10:37,271 --> 00:10:40,892 [SPEAKER_01]: What do you make of the wild wood? 131 00:10:41,752 --> 00:10:47,314 [SPEAKER_01]: So often in these stories, like the Handless Maiden that we just talked about, but you can also think of Hansel and Gretel. 132 00:10:47,394 --> 00:10:57,076 [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I can think of dozens of stories where the action unfolds in a wild wood, which is often the place where 133 00:10:57,176 --> 00:11:02,399 [SPEAKER_01]: where you go when you've lost your home or you've lost civilization. 134 00:11:02,459 --> 00:11:08,703 [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a wilderness, a place where you are lost, and it's your salvation. 135 00:11:09,183 --> 00:11:14,746 [SPEAKER_01]: It's the place where the animals of the woods show you and help you to survive. 136 00:11:14,786 --> 00:11:15,867 [SPEAKER_01]: What do we make of that? 137 00:11:16,407 --> 00:11:18,188 [SPEAKER_00]: I think we make of it exactly what you've said. 138 00:11:18,248 --> 00:11:22,911 [SPEAKER_00]: That's a very good way of putting it, that it's kind of shorthand for 139 00:11:23,311 --> 00:11:31,916 [SPEAKER_00]: for, I don't know, Carl Jung and others have called it like the night sea journey, you know, the descent to the underworld, whatever you might think of it as. 140 00:11:32,576 --> 00:11:35,117 [SPEAKER_00]: It's that place beyond the village. 141 00:11:35,157 --> 00:11:37,358 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the village is where everything is comfortable. 142 00:11:37,899 --> 00:11:48,184 [SPEAKER_00]: It's known rather than comfortable, perhaps I should say, where you know what the rules are and the enchanted forest, which is, as you say, almost always dark and 143 00:11:48,304 --> 00:11:56,470 [SPEAKER_00]: and filled with monsters is a little bit more like life is when you've lost everything that you once thought defined you, or everything that you once held dear. 144 00:11:56,571 --> 00:12:00,073 [SPEAKER_00]: So yes, there are dangers, but there's also beauty. 145 00:12:00,093 --> 00:12:03,916 [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's always the wise old woman with a basket of fruits if you're hungry or whatever. 146 00:12:04,337 --> 00:12:13,364 [SPEAKER_00]: And it just kind of indicates, in some way, all of the things that we fear, and yet all of the things that we know perfectly well come 147 00:12:14,008 --> 00:12:21,879 [SPEAKER_00]: out of a period of darkness, all of the kind of beauty and the possibility that comes out of a period of darkness, because isn't that just how you grow? 148 00:12:24,259 --> 00:12:37,148 [SPEAKER_01]: Through all these years of working with fairy tales as a psychotherapist and working on them with other women, you've developed a whole theory, the fairy tale heroine's journey, right? 149 00:12:37,208 --> 00:12:47,555 [SPEAKER_01]: So it's kind of a developmental model, but very much not Joseph Campbell's, you know, very popularized hero's journey. 150 00:12:48,315 --> 00:12:50,017 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think you would say, hallelujah. 151 00:12:50,337 --> 00:12:50,477 Yeah. 152 00:12:51,278 --> 00:12:54,440 [SPEAKER_01]: About time we got rid of the hero's journey. 153 00:12:54,460 --> 00:12:58,704 [SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, let's talk about what's wrong with the Campbellian hero's journey. 154 00:12:59,004 --> 00:13:06,671 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, first of all, just to say that, you know, I critique the hero's journey vehemently, but I do have a great deal of respect for Campbell. 155 00:13:07,272 --> 00:13:08,793 [SPEAKER_00]: But he was a man of his time. 156 00:13:09,133 --> 00:13:12,636 [SPEAKER_00]: And that was an age that was very heroic, particularly in America. 157 00:13:12,656 --> 00:13:12,757 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. 158 00:13:13,657 --> 00:13:24,121 [SPEAKER_00]: And I do wonder, just as a kind of aside, whether today we're finally seeing the decline of the American hero complex that we've all partaken of in one way or another. 159 00:13:24,741 --> 00:13:35,285 [SPEAKER_00]: But in essence, the hero's journey was that it was this kind of swashbuckling, individualistic journey to glory in which a hero sets off 160 00:13:36,185 --> 00:13:37,506 [SPEAKER_00]: and saves the world. 161 00:13:37,586 --> 00:13:48,074 [SPEAKER_00]: And Campbell, certainly in his first book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you know, he's talking about heroes like Jesus and Gandhi and people that we cannot all be. 162 00:13:48,914 --> 00:13:50,215 [SPEAKER_00]: This isn't just some bloke. 163 00:13:50,335 --> 00:13:51,997 [SPEAKER_00]: This is somebody exceptional. 164 00:13:52,097 --> 00:13:54,939 [SPEAKER_00]: So that already puts it out of reach for most of us. 165 00:13:55,679 --> 00:14:00,383 [SPEAKER_00]: They tend to do it by things like killing dragons or fighting battles. 166 00:14:01,103 --> 00:14:04,125 [SPEAKER_00]: It is very much about glory and individual glory. 167 00:14:04,145 --> 00:14:05,246 [SPEAKER_00]: It's not about community. 168 00:14:05,947 --> 00:14:14,994 [SPEAKER_00]: And I've always had this sense that it buys into the myth of the individual, the myth of kind of exceptionalism, that it buys into the myth of progress. 169 00:14:15,034 --> 00:14:17,436 [SPEAKER_00]: We must always have more, more, more of everything. 170 00:14:17,936 --> 00:14:18,917 [SPEAKER_00]: But in the world today, 171 00:14:19,477 --> 00:14:23,219 [SPEAKER_00]: where we have, you know, the hero's journey, frankly, has got us into the mess that we're in. 172 00:14:23,600 --> 00:14:27,302 [SPEAKER_00]: We need to go back to those older, less heroic values. 173 00:14:28,002 --> 00:14:33,025 [SPEAKER_01]: And didn't Campbell say, somebody asked him, one of his students asked him, Maureen Murdoch, right? 174 00:14:33,545 --> 00:14:35,326 [SPEAKER_01]: What about the heroine's journey? 175 00:14:35,346 --> 00:14:38,548 [SPEAKER_01]: And he said something like, oh, she's already there. 176 00:14:38,929 --> 00:14:41,390 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, women don't need to make the journey. 177 00:14:41,450 --> 00:14:44,112 [SPEAKER_00]: She's the place that the hero is trying to get to. 178 00:14:44,792 --> 00:14:47,393 [SPEAKER_00]: And he did kind of row back on that towards the end of his life. 179 00:14:47,433 --> 00:15:02,397 [SPEAKER_00]: I think he'd had a lot of pushback, but that was very clearly what he thought, that the woman really was there to be the muse for the hero, or was the goddess that the hero encountered to kind of inform him about his relationship with the feminine. 180 00:15:02,697 --> 00:15:06,138 [SPEAKER_00]: And women do have a journey, clearly. 181 00:15:07,015 --> 00:15:08,197 [SPEAKER_00]: But it's a different journey. 182 00:15:08,637 --> 00:15:21,856 [SPEAKER_00]: And I do think that we are particularly, forgive me if it sounds essentialist, but just for simplicity, I do think that the feminine is more relational and is less about killing things and more about, as I wrote in 183 00:15:22,356 --> 00:15:29,380 [SPEAKER_00]: one of my books kind of making the dragon part of your team and seeing what skills he might have to offer rather than just chopping off his head. 184 00:15:29,840 --> 00:15:32,062 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's just so much more interesting to me. 185 00:15:32,122 --> 00:15:36,944 [SPEAKER_00]: So yes, I do feel very strongly that the hero's journey has done its part. 186 00:15:37,565 --> 00:15:40,887 [SPEAKER_00]: It's now actively negative and we need to get over it. 187 00:15:40,947 --> 00:15:50,152 [SPEAKER_00]: We need to look at what I've really been working on, which is an idea of the post-heroic journey, of which the fairy tale heroine's journey, I think, is very typical. 188 00:15:50,963 --> 00:15:53,487 [SPEAKER_01]: And it has a very different shape, right? 189 00:15:53,527 --> 00:15:56,051 [SPEAKER_01]: Because the hero's journey, it's very linear. 190 00:15:56,531 --> 00:16:03,301 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you start off and you're just headed upward past the dragon, sees the treasure, and you're a hero. 191 00:16:04,022 --> 00:16:06,045 [SPEAKER_01]: The women's journey spirals. 192 00:16:07,287 --> 00:16:09,948 [SPEAKER_01]: You get tossed out of your parents' house. 193 00:16:10,028 --> 00:16:11,428 [SPEAKER_01]: You're in the woods. 194 00:16:11,508 --> 00:16:13,089 [SPEAKER_01]: Then a prince comes along. 195 00:16:13,109 --> 00:16:15,049 [SPEAKER_01]: You go with him, but that doesn't work out. 196 00:16:15,089 --> 00:16:18,890 [SPEAKER_01]: And up, you're back in the woods again, over and over again. 197 00:16:18,990 --> 00:16:20,691 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a kind of circular path. 198 00:16:21,131 --> 00:16:29,793 [SPEAKER_00]: It is more a spiral, as you first said, than a circular path, I think, because, of course, what you're doing is you're kind of accruing some kind of knowledge as you go around the circle again. 199 00:16:29,853 --> 00:16:33,454 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's not like you ever get right back to the beginning. 200 00:16:33,534 --> 00:16:36,395 [SPEAKER_00]: But yes, you repeat the same patterns. 201 00:16:37,075 --> 00:16:45,462 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a much more realistic shape, I think, for the journey, actually, that most men also make, but certainly for the journey that women make. 202 00:16:45,882 --> 00:16:50,266 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's why actually our ancestors in Ireland, I mean, you know, spirals are everywhere. 203 00:16:50,766 --> 00:16:58,713 [SPEAKER_00]: And I've always, in kind of old Celtic art, and I've always thought that that's why, because it kind of perfectly expresses the soul's journey through life. 204 00:16:59,523 --> 00:17:01,964 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you think about it, it's encoded in DNA. 205 00:17:02,004 --> 00:17:03,125 [SPEAKER_01]: What is that, a spiral? 206 00:17:03,205 --> 00:17:08,387 [SPEAKER_01]: Or look up at the night sky and imagine the spiraling galaxies. 207 00:17:10,167 --> 00:17:17,951 [SPEAKER_01]: Another way of saying that, I think, is that life is built around a series of arrivals and departures. 208 00:17:18,471 --> 00:17:23,933 [SPEAKER_01]: You leave your family of origin, and then maybe you build a family or you build a life. 209 00:17:24,794 --> 00:17:27,535 [SPEAKER_01]: And then if you have children, your children leave. 210 00:17:28,435 --> 00:17:31,158 [SPEAKER_01]: If you have a job and that's the center of your life, you retire. 211 00:17:32,139 --> 00:17:41,529 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there are always these periods where you reach a place and the thing that you thought was this is it is not. 212 00:17:41,949 --> 00:17:43,631 [SPEAKER_00]: But that's the trick, I think. 213 00:17:43,671 --> 00:17:44,913 [SPEAKER_00]: You're exactly right. 214 00:17:44,993 --> 00:17:49,758 [SPEAKER_00]: But what we're taught by the overculture is that it is supposed to be linear. 215 00:17:50,486 --> 00:17:57,559 [SPEAKER_00]: that you're young and then you get married, then you have kids, then you retire and play golf or whatever you're going to do, and then you die happy and rich. 216 00:17:57,579 --> 00:17:59,743 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a whole new journey 217 00:18:00,861 --> 00:18:16,790 [SPEAKER_00]: that appears at midlife, you're coming into this starting point again, this call to adventure, if you want to use Joseph Campbell's terminology, that sets you off along a journey with a slightly different aim. 218 00:18:17,270 --> 00:18:20,292 [SPEAKER_00]: In the second half of life, it's very much a kind of turning inwards. 219 00:18:20,372 --> 00:18:22,333 [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, what was all that about then? 220 00:18:23,093 --> 00:18:31,039 [SPEAKER_00]: And so it becomes more of a kind of journey in search of meaning rather than in search of stability or persona. 221 00:18:31,800 --> 00:18:37,204 [SPEAKER_00]: And at a minimum, for all of us men and women, there are these two kind of key journeys. 222 00:18:37,544 --> 00:18:40,507 [SPEAKER_00]: But we're not taught culturally to see it in that way. 223 00:18:40,827 --> 00:18:44,270 [SPEAKER_00]: And hasn't that always been the problem with women and kind of midlife and menopause? 224 00:18:44,330 --> 00:18:48,513 [SPEAKER_00]: It's just like, okay, your journey, which was linear, has now come to an end. 225 00:18:48,733 --> 00:18:49,174 [SPEAKER_00]: Bye-bye. 226 00:18:49,794 --> 00:18:50,835 [SPEAKER_00]: And actually, it's like, no. 227 00:18:51,395 --> 00:18:53,315 [SPEAKER_00]: We have done that spiraling around. 228 00:18:53,676 --> 00:18:55,036 [SPEAKER_01]: We're ready to set off again. 229 00:18:56,176 --> 00:18:59,777 [SPEAKER_01]: These journeys always begin with a feeling of being cast out. 230 00:19:00,617 --> 00:19:08,759 [SPEAKER_01]: For men as well as women, you get to a certain age and there's a feeling of, well, we don't need you anymore when we now have such a long period of age. 231 00:19:09,019 --> 00:19:12,419 [SPEAKER_01]: We have early old age, middle old age, and late old age. 232 00:19:13,020 --> 00:19:19,441 [SPEAKER_01]: But throughout this entire period, the larger culture doesn't really have a whole lot of use for us. 233 00:19:20,381 --> 00:19:20,762 [SPEAKER_00]: Indeed. 234 00:19:20,882 --> 00:19:26,013 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that is partly because of this focus on the heroic and the outward journey. 235 00:19:26,734 --> 00:19:30,783 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's not what most people are doing by the time they get to midlife and beyond. 236 00:19:31,277 --> 00:19:34,139 [SPEAKER_00]: We're not looking at accruing status. 237 00:19:34,559 --> 00:19:36,461 [SPEAKER_00]: We're looking for what we can give back. 238 00:19:36,481 --> 00:19:37,721 [SPEAKER_00]: We're looking for what it means. 239 00:19:37,761 --> 00:19:39,523 [SPEAKER_00]: We're looking for some sense of what we're here for. 240 00:19:40,003 --> 00:19:45,066 [SPEAKER_00]: And the culture doesn't, our current culture doesn't really know how to recognize that as valuable. 241 00:19:45,106 --> 00:19:51,431 [SPEAKER_00]: Whereas, of course, in the past, that would have been immensely valuable, particularly since back then, of course, most people didn't get to old age. 242 00:19:51,451 --> 00:19:54,613 [SPEAKER_00]: So it was a rarity and they tended to be valued. 243 00:19:55,600 --> 00:20:05,652 [SPEAKER_01]: What are some of the stories you found that you think are really especially valuable after that midlife transition? 244 00:20:06,573 --> 00:20:14,463 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the stories that I talk about in Ripening is an old Siberian story about a woman at midlife who's married to a man who 245 00:20:16,039 --> 00:20:18,442 [SPEAKER_00]: She realizes one day that she doesn't know very well. 246 00:20:18,482 --> 00:20:25,549 [SPEAKER_00]: He leaves every morning through all of the years of their marriage and goes to work and comes back, or she guesses he goes to work, comes back in the evening. 247 00:20:25,809 --> 00:20:27,891 [SPEAKER_00]: She has no idea for all this time what he's done. 248 00:20:28,272 --> 00:20:29,613 [SPEAKER_00]: So one day she follows him. 249 00:20:30,094 --> 00:20:31,095 [SPEAKER_00]: He goes into a wood. 250 00:20:31,615 --> 00:20:34,558 [SPEAKER_00]: He finds a clearing, he sits on a log and that's what he does all day. 251 00:20:34,778 --> 00:20:37,741 [SPEAKER_00]: And the woman is looking at him thinking, okay, this is really weird. 252 00:20:37,921 --> 00:20:39,123 [SPEAKER_00]: What am I doing in this marriage? 253 00:20:39,163 --> 00:20:39,843 [SPEAKER_00]: Who is this man? 254 00:20:40,284 --> 00:20:42,266 [SPEAKER_00]: She's thinking, okay, I don't think I can do this anymore. 255 00:20:42,606 --> 00:20:45,869 [SPEAKER_00]: So she goes home, she puts a few things in her pockets and she says, I'm leaving. 256 00:20:45,909 --> 00:20:48,532 [SPEAKER_00]: She has no idea what she's going to do, where she's going to go. 257 00:20:48,572 --> 00:20:50,974 [SPEAKER_00]: She just knows that something has to give and she has to leave. 258 00:20:51,675 --> 00:20:56,738 [SPEAKER_00]: So she sets off along the village road, and she hasn't gone very far before she meets a giant. 259 00:20:57,138 --> 00:21:06,843 [SPEAKER_00]: And the giant, as a giant will do, picks her up, slings her over his shoulder, runs with her to the top of a mountain, dumps her in a cave, and then goes away and just leaves her there. 260 00:21:07,103 --> 00:21:09,924 [SPEAKER_00]: So the woman is thinking, okay, this wasn't quite what she had in mind. 261 00:21:09,964 --> 00:21:11,325 [SPEAKER_00]: So she starts crying. 262 00:21:11,785 --> 00:21:14,967 [SPEAKER_00]: because it's dark and it's cold and she has no idea what's going to happen to her now. 263 00:21:15,347 --> 00:21:20,029 [SPEAKER_00]: And all of a sudden, she hears a voice say, don't cry, look up, look up. 264 00:21:20,510 --> 00:21:24,432 [SPEAKER_00]: You'll see the skins of land birds above you. 265 00:21:24,452 --> 00:21:27,333 [SPEAKER_00]: So she looks up, there's a ledge, there's something on the ledge. 266 00:21:27,373 --> 00:21:28,234 [SPEAKER_00]: She pulls it down. 267 00:21:28,294 --> 00:21:31,376 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a beautiful cloak made of black, shiny crow feathers. 268 00:21:31,876 --> 00:21:33,357 [SPEAKER_00]: And she thinks, that's it, that's it. 269 00:21:33,417 --> 00:21:35,598 [SPEAKER_00]: And she puts it on, except it doesn't fit. 270 00:21:35,978 --> 00:21:42,984 [SPEAKER_00]: So she starts crying again, and eventually the voice comes back, look up, look up, and you'll see the skins of land animals above you. 271 00:21:43,405 --> 00:21:53,333 [SPEAKER_00]: So it looks up, there's another ledge, there's another beautiful orange shiny thing up there, pulls it down, and it's a coat made of fox skins, and it fits, so that's very fine. 272 00:21:53,373 --> 00:21:59,499 [SPEAKER_00]: She's warm, she's feeling a little bit more courageous, and she decides to make a run for it before the giant comes back. 273 00:21:59,939 --> 00:22:01,821 [SPEAKER_00]: So off she trots down the mountain. 274 00:22:01,861 --> 00:22:04,384 [SPEAKER_00]: It's Siberia, so it's full of snow. 275 00:22:04,864 --> 00:22:07,467 [SPEAKER_00]: And she gets to a pool and she stops and has a drink of water. 276 00:22:07,487 --> 00:22:09,329 [SPEAKER_00]: And she's looking in the pool and thinks, what's that? 277 00:22:10,250 --> 00:22:15,755 [SPEAKER_00]: And she sees her own reflection and she's grown a pair of snow-tipped fox ears. 278 00:22:16,216 --> 00:22:18,298 [SPEAKER_00]: She thinks that's very strange, but off she sets again. 279 00:22:18,938 --> 00:22:23,243 [SPEAKER_00]: And then as she gets to the bottom of the mountain, she gets a sense that there's something behind her. 280 00:22:23,803 --> 00:22:29,967 [SPEAKER_00]: So she whips around and it is her own snow-tipped fox tail that is behind her. 281 00:22:29,987 --> 00:22:33,369 [SPEAKER_00]: And by the time she gets to the village again, she is full on vixen. 282 00:22:33,409 --> 00:22:34,489 [SPEAKER_00]: She has turned into a fox. 283 00:22:35,090 --> 00:22:41,353 [SPEAKER_00]: So she sees her father go out fishing and she thinks, okay, I'll go back to my father's house because I'll be safe there. 284 00:22:41,813 --> 00:22:44,435 [SPEAKER_00]: And then I'll regroup, you know, I'll think what am I going to do now? 285 00:22:44,915 --> 00:22:55,668 [SPEAKER_00]: And so she goes to her father's house, but every time she tries to poke her head through the door of her father's house, her fox body whips her around again and it won't let her go in. 286 00:22:56,429 --> 00:23:02,196 [SPEAKER_00]: And so she has no choice but to set off across the snowy field in search of new life. 287 00:23:04,639 --> 00:23:13,503 [SPEAKER_00]: And the reason I love that story so much is I think it kind of perfectly expresses this sense that at midlife, you've got to leave something behind. 288 00:23:13,523 --> 00:23:15,043 [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have to be your husband. 289 00:23:15,103 --> 00:23:19,225 [SPEAKER_00]: It's not always about relationships, but it's that leap of faith. 290 00:23:19,825 --> 00:23:24,467 [SPEAKER_00]: She doesn't know when she sets off across the field what waits for her as a new fox. 291 00:23:24,928 --> 00:23:30,630 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's also very beautiful because it's that kind of sense of the wild embodied knowings. 292 00:23:31,918 --> 00:23:38,120 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the moment when she tries to go home again and her body won't let her go in. 293 00:23:38,580 --> 00:23:39,521 [SPEAKER_00]: Her body knows. 294 00:23:40,061 --> 00:23:49,564 [SPEAKER_00]: And every woman at midlife, I mean, most of us kind of earlier than that, if we're lucky, knows that that is exactly how we finally figure this stuff out when we start to take notice of our body. 295 00:23:50,004 --> 00:24:01,628 [SPEAKER_00]: So, I mean, you know, there are loads and loads of stories about older women and about the process of kind of menopause, but that one just says everything in a way for me. 296 00:24:02,328 --> 00:24:04,790 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's about how we know things. 297 00:24:05,190 --> 00:24:11,614 [SPEAKER_01]: Going back to, you're talking about the over-culture, it tells us the way to know things is with our rational mind. 298 00:24:12,535 --> 00:24:15,537 [SPEAKER_01]: That's not how these stories work, and it's not the only kind of knowing. 299 00:24:16,284 --> 00:24:25,851 [SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean, clearly these stories tell us that intuition and that embodied sense, I don't even know what to call it, is also a way of knowing. 300 00:24:25,871 --> 00:24:31,816 [SPEAKER_00]: And that if you can bring all of these different ways of knowing together, chances are something good will happen. 301 00:24:31,876 --> 00:24:35,138 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, the average fairy tale heroine is clever. 302 00:24:35,659 --> 00:24:36,839 [SPEAKER_00]: She can use her mind. 303 00:24:37,720 --> 00:24:43,105 [SPEAKER_00]: But she only uses her mind very often in service to her intuition. 304 00:24:43,185 --> 00:24:44,085 [SPEAKER_00]: The two are interlinked. 305 00:24:44,105 --> 00:24:48,789 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lovely old English, very old English fairy tale called Mr. Fox. 306 00:24:49,210 --> 00:24:56,015 [SPEAKER_00]: And this is about a woman called Lady Mary, who is supposed to be married to this very slick gentleman. 307 00:24:57,076 --> 00:25:04,439 [SPEAKER_00]: Something just isn't quite right, and particularly when he won't let her visit the castle where they're going to live after he's married. 308 00:25:04,500 --> 00:25:11,683 [SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, she takes it into her own hands and sets off one day to the castle, discovers that he is a murderer. 309 00:25:11,703 --> 00:25:14,884 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a bit of a bluebeard story, you know, so he's murdering these women. 310 00:25:14,904 --> 00:25:17,625 [SPEAKER_00]: There is a bloody chamber there, too. 311 00:25:18,186 --> 00:25:23,048 [SPEAKER_01]: She spies him in the middle of murdering somebody, dragging another young woman into his house. 312 00:25:23,248 --> 00:25:29,918 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because he's trying to steal the ring, the golden ring off the finger of some woman that he's about to kill. 313 00:25:30,439 --> 00:25:31,380 [SPEAKER_00]: And he can't get it off. 314 00:25:31,420 --> 00:25:33,683 [SPEAKER_00]: And so he chops the woman's hand off. 315 00:25:34,064 --> 00:25:38,170 [SPEAKER_00]: But the hand lands in Lady Mary's lap where she's hiding, you know, behind a... 316 00:25:38,430 --> 00:25:39,451 [SPEAKER_00]: a chest in the hall. 317 00:25:39,892 --> 00:25:45,417 [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, eventually she kind of exposes him at breakfast the next morning, surrounded by her brothers. 318 00:25:45,878 --> 00:25:48,541 [SPEAKER_00]: She tells him, I know exactly what you are. 319 00:25:48,581 --> 00:25:52,965 [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, ends up with Mr. Fox being cut to pieces by her brothers. 320 00:25:53,025 --> 00:25:56,989 [SPEAKER_00]: But it begins with that kind of intuition that something's not right here. 321 00:25:57,450 --> 00:26:00,152 [SPEAKER_00]: And I love that fairy tales always... 322 00:26:00,913 --> 00:26:25,377 [SPEAKER_01]: bring both into balance because the fairytale heroine is normally clever but she always has that kind of embodied deep instinctual knowing we're going to talk more about what fairy tales offer all of us right now not just individually but collectively because sharon thinks there is something about the way fairy tale narratives work that is an antidote to modern disenchantment 323 00:26:25,548 --> 00:26:26,430 [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, it's Steve. 324 00:26:26,871 --> 00:26:28,313 [SPEAKER_00]: I am so glad you're with us. 325 00:26:28,614 --> 00:26:29,716 [SPEAKER_00]: And I have a favor to ask. 326 00:26:30,277 --> 00:26:33,743 [SPEAKER_00]: This is a new podcast and we're really hoping to reach more listeners. 327 00:26:34,224 --> 00:26:37,189 [SPEAKER_01]: So we'd love for you to tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet. 328 00:26:37,590 --> 00:26:42,399 [SPEAKER_01]: And it will really help when you give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. 329 00:26:43,020 --> 00:26:48,370 [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up at wondercabinetproductions.com. 330 00:26:54,043 --> 00:27:04,288 [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about the wisdom of fairy tales with Sharon Blackie, author of Haggitude, Wise Women, and Ripening, Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now. 331 00:27:05,769 --> 00:27:10,331 [SPEAKER_02]: Sharon, so many people have fallen in love with these stories, and especially psychotherapists like you. 332 00:27:10,931 --> 00:27:15,854 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm thinking of people like Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz and Bruno Bettelheim. 333 00:27:16,694 --> 00:27:19,916 [SPEAKER_02]: My sense is that your take is a little bit different, though. 334 00:27:20,576 --> 00:27:22,677 [SPEAKER_02]: How would you describe your approach to fairy tales? 335 00:27:23,097 --> 00:27:31,402 [SPEAKER_01]: I would say I do find difficult what I think of as the traditional Jungian approach to fairy tales. 336 00:27:31,422 --> 00:27:33,503 [SPEAKER_01]: By that, I don't necessarily mean going back to Jung. 337 00:27:34,003 --> 00:27:40,246 [SPEAKER_01]: I mean what Jungian analysts today make of fairy tales, which is that all of the characters in them are part of our own individual psyche. 338 00:27:41,067 --> 00:27:43,148 [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, inside you, there is a king. 339 00:27:43,828 --> 00:27:45,169 [SPEAKER_01]: Inside you, there is a crow. 340 00:27:45,189 --> 00:27:48,531 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, no, come on, it's got to be more interesting than that. 341 00:27:48,991 --> 00:27:52,273 [SPEAKER_01]: I find that viscerally unpleasant. 342 00:27:53,160 --> 00:27:53,941 [SPEAKER_01]: Wait, why? 343 00:27:54,061 --> 00:27:57,003 [SPEAKER_02]: You don't like the idea that we have archetypes inside ourselves? 344 00:27:57,063 --> 00:27:59,305 [SPEAKER_01]: We clearly do have archetypes inside us. 345 00:27:59,665 --> 00:28:08,332 [SPEAKER_01]: But what a lot of these people are proposing is that all of the archetypes and all of the stories, all of the images are products of our own psyche. 346 00:28:08,972 --> 00:28:10,133 [SPEAKER_01]: They come from us. 347 00:28:10,273 --> 00:28:11,294 [SPEAKER_01]: We make them up. 348 00:28:11,334 --> 00:28:12,575 [SPEAKER_01]: They're just part of us. 349 00:28:13,175 --> 00:28:22,683 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's part of this thing again about we have made for ourselves such a human-centric world, okay, where everything comes from us, even the stories. 350 00:28:23,123 --> 00:28:34,172 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you go back a couple of thousand years to ancient Greek philosophy, to ancient Sufi philosophy, there was this very, very strong belief in 351 00:28:34,812 --> 00:28:49,550 [SPEAKER_01]: archetypes, images, stories, myths, living outside us, having a life in some other world or what has been termed the imaginal world, and if we're very lucky, happening to us. 352 00:28:50,595 --> 00:28:56,799 [SPEAKER_01]: So this was part of the Western spiritual tradition for a very, very long time. 353 00:28:57,239 --> 00:29:11,488 [SPEAKER_01]: And I find it very much a part of what we lost as a consequence of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, where all of the animate agency of the world, which perhaps 354 00:29:11,828 --> 00:29:15,710 [SPEAKER_01]: Plato and others thought was imbued with the world soul. 355 00:29:16,251 --> 00:29:17,692 [SPEAKER_01]: It was alive like we are. 356 00:29:18,152 --> 00:29:18,952 [SPEAKER_01]: We lost that. 357 00:29:19,333 --> 00:29:24,536 [SPEAKER_01]: And now it's all dead except for us and everything that matters comes from us. 358 00:29:24,956 --> 00:29:26,517 [SPEAKER_01]: And I do object to that. 359 00:29:27,037 --> 00:29:33,321 [SPEAKER_01]: The psychologist that I probably most relate to, apart from Jung, who is often misunderstood in this context, is James Hillman. 360 00:29:33,721 --> 00:29:39,525 [SPEAKER_01]: So he was an American post-Jungian psychologist who very much took on this and made it 361 00:29:40,265 --> 00:29:46,007 [SPEAKER_01]: the foundation stone of his work, this idea that the image is outside us and happens to us. 362 00:29:46,487 --> 00:29:48,208 [SPEAKER_01]: And we have to treat it with respect. 363 00:29:48,668 --> 00:29:51,709 [SPEAKER_01]: And we have to wait for it to reveal itself to us. 364 00:29:52,169 --> 00:29:58,111 [SPEAKER_01]: Hillman had this beautiful phrase, images, he said, but I also use it for fairy tales. 365 00:29:58,511 --> 00:30:00,912 [SPEAKER_01]: Images come to us with a moral claim. 366 00:30:01,652 --> 00:30:07,959 [SPEAKER_01]: They reveal themselves to us and they nag at us and they gnaw away at us and they will not let us go. 367 00:30:08,060 --> 00:30:12,685 [SPEAKER_01]: We obsess over them until we figured out what it is that they have to reveal to us. 368 00:30:13,105 --> 00:30:18,412 [SPEAKER_01]: That's very much my approach to it, that the stories are coming to us and they're happening to us. 369 00:30:19,072 --> 00:30:26,054 [SPEAKER_02]: I really love that because I think, you know, going back to the power of these fairy tales, the plots are relatively simple. 370 00:30:26,734 --> 00:30:37,617 [SPEAKER_02]: It's the images, the red shoes that dance on and on, the selkie's seal skin, the poisoned apple, the horse's head that talks, the mountain made of glass. 371 00:30:38,557 --> 00:30:41,820 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how to describe how powerful they are. 372 00:30:41,960 --> 00:30:48,487 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I feel the power, but I can't tell you why they're so powerful. 373 00:30:48,927 --> 00:30:49,408 [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly. 374 00:30:49,428 --> 00:30:51,750 [SPEAKER_01]: And that is the beauty of image. 375 00:30:52,511 --> 00:30:57,395 [SPEAKER_01]: They kind of transcend any ability to define them and so to confine them. 376 00:30:57,956 --> 00:31:01,419 [SPEAKER_01]: And certainly, yeah, I mean, one of the, probably the key image of 377 00:31:02,180 --> 00:31:24,345 [SPEAKER_01]: that I've always taken for fairy tales, which just, I mean, it kind of, the idea of it just still, you know, at 65 years old makes me want to weep, is that glass mountain, which appears in a number of fairy tales, but it's the kind of slippery, very beautiful, but very slippery landmark that the heroine has to scale in order to reach. 378 00:31:25,185 --> 00:31:46,914 [SPEAKER_01]: find the husband that she lost again get out of an impossible situation whatever it might be everything that she needs the whole entire purpose of her life lies on the other side of that glass mountain and she can't get across it and so that whole sense of the kind of beautiful impossible yeah that nevertheless she finds a way across 379 00:31:47,779 --> 00:31:52,141 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just, I mean, how could you not want to live by such an image? 380 00:31:52,482 --> 00:31:57,304 [SPEAKER_01]: But as soon as you start trying to explain it, the magic kind of falls away a little bit. 381 00:31:57,904 --> 00:32:06,549 [SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, of course, that's what we all try to do as writers and poets and what have you, is to kind of find a way to express what we can only really see and feel. 382 00:32:06,949 --> 00:32:09,751 [SPEAKER_01]: But that's not even just a visual image, is it? 383 00:32:09,771 --> 00:32:11,272 [SPEAKER_01]: It's something that you feel in your body. 384 00:32:12,032 --> 00:32:12,332 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 385 00:32:12,932 --> 00:32:18,674 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I was thinking, you were talking about the power of the image, and I was thinking, well, that's what a symbol is, right? 386 00:32:18,834 --> 00:32:20,455 [SPEAKER_02]: It's a visual language. 387 00:32:20,495 --> 00:32:26,017 [SPEAKER_02]: And I thought, no, a symbol is something that sits static on a page. 388 00:32:26,177 --> 00:32:27,017 [SPEAKER_02]: It's like a synonym. 389 00:32:27,077 --> 00:32:29,278 [SPEAKER_02]: This stands for X, Y, or Z. 390 00:32:29,898 --> 00:32:34,480 [SPEAKER_02]: An image, the kind you're talking about, is alive. 391 00:32:34,920 --> 00:32:37,641 [SPEAKER_01]: And growing and has its own process of becoming. 392 00:32:37,661 --> 00:32:38,061 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 393 00:32:38,541 --> 00:32:38,821 [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. 394 00:32:38,921 --> 00:32:46,184 [SPEAKER_01]: And as soon as you start to say, like a lot of dream workers do, they have like the dream dictionary. 395 00:32:46,344 --> 00:32:48,265 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, you dreamed about water. 396 00:32:48,305 --> 00:32:51,767 [SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, it must mean you're worried about emotions or whatever. 397 00:32:52,227 --> 00:32:59,350 [SPEAKER_01]: And Hillman's perspective on this was as soon as you've said that black snake represents my sexuality, you've killed it. 398 00:32:59,650 --> 00:33:00,470 [SPEAKER_01]: You've killed the snake. 399 00:33:00,631 --> 00:33:03,892 [SPEAKER_01]: The snake's gone because you haven't allowed it to express itself. 400 00:33:04,192 --> 00:33:05,293 [SPEAKER_01]: You can find it. 401 00:33:07,294 --> 00:33:11,557 [SPEAKER_01]: As so many people do in human relationships, you've told it what it is, and it isn't actually. 402 00:33:11,577 --> 00:33:13,779 [SPEAKER_01]: It might be something very much more interesting than that. 403 00:33:14,179 --> 00:33:29,569 [SPEAKER_01]: So I've always loved that whole sense of the imaginary world that dates back to the cosmologies of ancient Europe, where it was generally believed that between the physical world of our senses and the kind of spiritual world or the world of consciousness, 404 00:33:30,530 --> 00:33:48,302 [SPEAKER_01]: is this world of soul, which is called the imaginal world in some traditions, which is where, again, the stories and the images and the archetypes and the gods and the angels and all of the strange kind of supernatural creatures, dreams come from it, synchronicities emerge from it. 405 00:33:48,362 --> 00:33:49,243 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a world... 406 00:33:50,012 --> 00:33:54,495 [SPEAKER_01]: that doesn't function through physical laws, but it has meaning. 407 00:33:55,316 --> 00:34:00,159 [SPEAKER_01]: And we tap into it through story and through archetype and through image. 408 00:34:00,639 --> 00:34:05,883 [SPEAKER_01]: And that as a cosmology, as a spirituality, has always made sense to me. 409 00:34:05,923 --> 00:34:09,385 [SPEAKER_01]: It's the foundations of Western philosophy, for heaven's sake. 410 00:34:09,425 --> 00:34:12,207 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's only very recently that we've lost it. 411 00:34:12,227 --> 00:34:12,327 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 412 00:34:13,308 --> 00:34:29,862 [SPEAKER_02]: It's an idea that I love so much, but I find difficult even to think my way into, partly because it is so counter to the Western worldview, as though my mind doesn't work that way. 413 00:34:29,882 --> 00:34:31,484 [SPEAKER_02]: So can you talk just a little bit more? 414 00:34:31,524 --> 00:34:32,384 [SPEAKER_02]: Tell me more about that. 415 00:34:33,245 --> 00:34:39,286 [SPEAKER_02]: The mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, I know a tiny little bit about. 416 00:34:39,727 --> 00:34:48,289 [SPEAKER_02]: I associate it with, there's a French philosopher named Henri Corbin, who was a specialist in Sufi Islamic mysticism, right? 417 00:34:48,869 --> 00:34:53,770 [SPEAKER_02]: So this is also a tradition that goes way back in the Middle East. 418 00:34:54,450 --> 00:34:56,452 [SPEAKER_02]: And now we've reached the limit of my what I know. 419 00:34:56,592 --> 00:34:57,513 [SPEAKER_01]: You're exactly right. 420 00:34:57,553 --> 00:35:05,659 [SPEAKER_01]: It was Henri Corbin, a French theologian who specialized in ancient, mostly Arabic mysticism, Sufism specifically. 421 00:35:06,400 --> 00:35:12,985 [SPEAKER_01]: What's interesting about this is that that tradition, just like the Christian tradition and the traditions of Judaism, 422 00:35:13,886 --> 00:35:26,935 [SPEAKER_01]: really emerged, were profoundly influenced by, people might shout at me if I say emerged, although mostly it's true, from Plato and from philosophers around about the third century AD who were called the Neoplatonists. 423 00:35:27,015 --> 00:35:32,900 [SPEAKER_01]: And they had this very strong concept of the world as divine and the world kind of 424 00:35:33,660 --> 00:35:56,488 [SPEAKER_01]: imbued as i said with the anima mundi the world soul the sufis were interesting they took these old neoplatonic ideas which i'm not going to go into because we'll be here all day and they really did conceive of this sense that there was the world of the divine there was kind of like a transcendental world where what we might think of it's not really god but it's kind of the ground of being you know some kind of universal ground of being 425 00:35:57,968 --> 00:36:02,209 [SPEAKER_01]: So they would call that the world of consciousness, the world of the intellect, the physical world. 426 00:36:02,269 --> 00:36:11,632 [SPEAKER_01]: But there was this intermediary world, which is the world, which was basically, as you say, the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, which is where the world soul kind of dances. 427 00:36:11,692 --> 00:36:14,293 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like the dance floor of the world soul. 428 00:36:15,053 --> 00:36:16,954 [SPEAKER_01]: And it contains... 429 00:36:18,074 --> 00:36:22,196 [SPEAKER_01]: intermediaries that try to mediate between us and the divine. 430 00:36:22,256 --> 00:36:30,999 [SPEAKER_01]: So it contains gods, it contains angels, who've always been seen as in some way trying to kind of connect people to the divine in one way or another. 431 00:36:31,479 --> 00:36:36,281 [SPEAKER_01]: But also, and particularly in the Sufi tradition, it does contain images and archetypes. 432 00:36:36,962 --> 00:36:38,262 [SPEAKER_01]: Dreams come from there. 433 00:36:39,843 --> 00:36:44,805 [SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar in lots of ways to the Celtic concept of the other world. 434 00:36:45,285 --> 00:36:50,288 [SPEAKER_02]: I was going to ask you if it's related to, you know, that idea of the world behind the veil. 435 00:36:50,569 --> 00:36:51,189 [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly that. 436 00:36:51,209 --> 00:37:10,261 [SPEAKER_01]: And when I was studying Celtic mythology, that's one of the main insights that I had, that this concept that we have, which is so clear even today, and certainly in Scotland and Ireland and Wales, and I think also in lots of parts of England, this concept of the other world as being something that we can just tap into 437 00:37:11,262 --> 00:37:14,623 [SPEAKER_01]: is very much the same as this idea of the mundus imaginalis. 438 00:37:15,064 --> 00:37:21,666 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a world where, I mean, we think of them as the fairies, but back in the day, they would have been thought of as the gods live there. 439 00:37:22,147 --> 00:37:26,529 [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes you can peer through it and you can see into the other world. 440 00:37:26,609 --> 00:37:29,610 [SPEAKER_01]: I've always said about Ireland, where I lived for many, many years, 441 00:37:30,250 --> 00:37:35,652 [SPEAKER_01]: and I'm a national of Ireland as well as of Britain, that they still walk with one foot in the other world. 442 00:37:35,692 --> 00:37:39,093 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a way of saying, as you describe it, it's like seeing through the veil. 443 00:37:39,493 --> 00:37:40,573 [SPEAKER_01]: And this is no different. 444 00:37:40,593 --> 00:37:43,374 [SPEAKER_01]: This idea of the mundus imaginalis is no different, really. 445 00:37:43,894 --> 00:37:52,937 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a sense that there are layers of reality and that all that modern Western culture teaches us to believe in is the physical reality. 446 00:37:52,957 --> 00:37:53,557 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 447 00:37:53,857 --> 00:38:01,603 [SPEAKER_02]: When you say the other world is real and people can see some of it, walk with one foot there, 448 00:38:02,175 --> 00:38:05,516 [SPEAKER_02]: I think we have to sort of specify what do we mean by real? 449 00:38:05,936 --> 00:38:09,497 [SPEAKER_02]: Because some people listening would say, that's not real. 450 00:38:09,698 --> 00:38:11,078 [SPEAKER_02]: That's imaginary. 451 00:38:11,338 --> 00:38:13,599 [SPEAKER_02]: That's the definition of not real. 452 00:38:13,759 --> 00:38:17,440 [SPEAKER_02]: So we think what's real means it's made of matter. 453 00:38:17,960 --> 00:38:28,664 [SPEAKER_02]: To put it another way, I would love nothing more on the planet than to go for a walk and encounter an other being. 454 00:38:29,607 --> 00:38:31,369 [SPEAKER_02]: I do not believe that's possible. 455 00:38:32,030 --> 00:38:34,113 [SPEAKER_02]: But in my mind's eye, I might. 456 00:38:34,653 --> 00:38:39,739 [SPEAKER_02]: And so then the question is, well, why do I think if it's in my mind's eye, it's not real? 457 00:38:40,340 --> 00:38:41,221 [SPEAKER_02]: Do you know where I'm going? 458 00:38:41,241 --> 00:38:42,182 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm getting lost there. 459 00:38:42,503 --> 00:38:43,003 [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no. 460 00:38:43,064 --> 00:38:44,025 [SPEAKER_01]: You're exactly right. 461 00:38:44,085 --> 00:38:45,206 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like ways of knowing. 462 00:38:45,266 --> 00:38:47,889 [SPEAKER_01]: We're taught that only the intellectual way of knowing is possible. 463 00:38:48,510 --> 00:38:53,814 [SPEAKER_01]: a proper way of knowing that the only thing that is real is something that we can touch or see with our physical senses. 464 00:38:54,134 --> 00:38:56,715 [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, everybody knows that's nonsense, right? 465 00:38:56,736 --> 00:38:58,457 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just that we don't have a framework. 466 00:38:59,377 --> 00:39:07,102 [SPEAKER_01]: Again, and I can only talk about the places that I have lived kind of on the western fringes of Ireland and kind of the western fringes of Scotland and the islands and what have you. 467 00:39:07,162 --> 00:39:07,683 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like, 468 00:39:08,323 --> 00:39:09,803 [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody knows it's there. 469 00:39:10,404 --> 00:39:15,245 [SPEAKER_01]: And some people are more gifted than others at being able to express it. 470 00:39:15,765 --> 00:39:28,429 [SPEAKER_01]: But I defy really to find anybody who has not had an example of Carl Jung's big dream, for example, where we have those dreams that have this profoundly numinous quality. 471 00:39:28,489 --> 00:39:29,529 [SPEAKER_01]: We know they're different. 472 00:39:29,929 --> 00:39:37,391 [SPEAKER_01]: And they turn out either to be kind of prophetic or they turn out to really represent something that we really need to know or... 473 00:39:37,811 --> 00:39:42,834 [SPEAKER_01]: some essence of who we are or the nature of our work, then where do we think they come from? 474 00:39:43,374 --> 00:39:44,755 [SPEAKER_01]: They don't come from matter. 475 00:39:45,315 --> 00:39:52,759 [SPEAKER_01]: Synchronicities, you know, more than just coincidences, those things that cannot possibly happen, and they do. 476 00:39:52,879 --> 00:39:55,420 [SPEAKER_01]: Where do we think they are coming from? 477 00:39:55,540 --> 00:40:06,206 [SPEAKER_01]: So I do think that most people believe in such things, but we don't have a framework for talking about it in any way that doesn't sound completely bonkers. 478 00:40:07,658 --> 00:40:23,556 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think, you know, so it was in the late 1800s, Max Weber, the German sociologist, famously came up with his concept, the disenchantment of the world, to describe modern Western industrial civilization. 479 00:40:23,696 --> 00:40:27,260 [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that is a phrase that really... 480 00:40:28,040 --> 00:40:36,368 [SPEAKER_02]: resonates for a lot of us, that most of us would have a bone-deep sense of what it means to live in a disenchanted world. 481 00:40:36,448 --> 00:40:43,815 [SPEAKER_02]: Although at the same time, we couldn't exactly tell you what would it be like to live in a magical or enchanted world. 482 00:40:43,895 --> 00:40:45,736 [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I don't know how to get there. 483 00:40:46,097 --> 00:40:47,898 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, a lot of people, when they think about enchantment, 484 00:40:50,364 --> 00:40:53,167 [SPEAKER_01]: As a phenomenon, they think, oh, it's magical thinking. 485 00:40:53,247 --> 00:40:54,849 [SPEAKER_01]: And it isn't magical thinking. 486 00:40:54,909 --> 00:41:01,817 [SPEAKER_01]: It is very much about that sense of the world around you as being alive, that you can actually be in relationship with a tree. 487 00:41:02,358 --> 00:41:04,880 [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, I've never heard a tree's voice. 488 00:41:05,741 --> 00:41:07,002 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not hearing voices. 489 00:41:07,402 --> 00:41:08,483 [SPEAKER_01]: That's not my gift. 490 00:41:08,903 --> 00:41:14,307 [SPEAKER_01]: But I know perfectly well that something in me is reaching out to the tree and that the tree is reaching back. 491 00:41:15,308 --> 00:41:22,232 [SPEAKER_01]: I firmly believe that old, ancient, millennia's long concept of everything filled with soul. 492 00:41:22,292 --> 00:41:24,474 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think there are times when you can... 493 00:41:25,174 --> 00:41:28,378 [SPEAKER_01]: catch it, but we're not taught to look for it. 494 00:41:28,879 --> 00:41:35,988 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think if we do look for it and we're just a bit more aware of that possibility, then most people will find it. 495 00:41:36,049 --> 00:41:39,333 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think this sense of disenchantment, yes, I think you're absolutely right. 496 00:41:39,373 --> 00:41:42,477 [SPEAKER_01]: It's been imposed upon us really by the current culture. 497 00:41:43,423 --> 00:41:46,864 [SPEAKER_01]: But it runs contrary to most people's experience. 498 00:41:47,824 --> 00:41:56,447 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's finish up by talking about the technique of active imagination, which can be used to let yourself move into that imaginal world. 499 00:41:56,907 --> 00:41:58,287 [SPEAKER_01]: A bit like lucid dreaming. 500 00:41:58,447 --> 00:41:58,868 [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of. 501 00:41:58,968 --> 00:42:01,628 [SPEAKER_01]: And this is something that I've been working with for a long time now. 502 00:42:01,648 --> 00:42:06,470 [SPEAKER_01]: And it is very much based on Jung's experiences, which he outlined in the Red Book. 503 00:42:07,010 --> 00:42:21,615 [SPEAKER_01]: during what people call his breakdown years at midlife, where he produced this technique which he later called active imagination, which was basically, it's not like a guided imagination journey or like shamanic journey, which some people do. 504 00:42:21,655 --> 00:42:23,895 [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like, yeah, you close your eyes. 505 00:42:24,296 --> 00:42:31,138 [SPEAKER_01]: I tend to take people deeper into a more kind of trance-like state and bring to mind either a particular scene 506 00:42:32,165 --> 00:42:35,228 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, it can be a scene from a fairy tale if that's where you want to go. 507 00:42:35,648 --> 00:42:39,572 [SPEAKER_01]: You can imagine yourself standing in front of a glass mountain if that's where you want to go. 508 00:42:39,592 --> 00:42:45,037 [SPEAKER_01]: Or you can just imagine yourself outside or in a dream that you had last night. 509 00:42:45,637 --> 00:42:48,019 [SPEAKER_01]: And then you don't control it. 510 00:42:48,140 --> 00:42:50,562 [SPEAKER_01]: You wait to see what happens. 511 00:42:50,842 --> 00:42:53,324 [SPEAKER_01]: You wait for something to move. 512 00:42:54,205 --> 00:42:55,887 [SPEAKER_01]: A character will happen along. 513 00:42:56,580 --> 00:43:00,925 [SPEAKER_01]: the mountain will disintegrate and become, I don't know, a pool of water or whatever. 514 00:43:01,425 --> 00:43:02,647 [SPEAKER_01]: And then, then... 515 00:43:04,038 --> 00:43:09,141 [SPEAKER_01]: You invite whatever is showing itself to you into conversation and you treat it with respect. 516 00:43:09,181 --> 00:43:14,123 [SPEAKER_01]: You treat it as you would, hopefully, another human being that you happen to encounter in a place. 517 00:43:14,183 --> 00:43:19,125 [SPEAKER_01]: You ask it, you know, what it is, what it has to say, if anything. 518 00:43:19,826 --> 00:43:28,630 [SPEAKER_01]: I find it incredibly powerful because it does enable people who, you know, say you've woken up and you had a really weird dream and you know that it must mean something because it was so vivid, but you don't know what. 519 00:43:28,650 --> 00:43:32,652 [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, okay, imagine yourself back in that dream world and 520 00:43:33,312 --> 00:43:37,836 [SPEAKER_01]: and engage in conversation with whatever's revealing itself to you. 521 00:43:39,798 --> 00:43:46,363 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I have to thank you for enriching our lives and selfishly for enriching my life. 522 00:43:47,224 --> 00:43:54,550 [SPEAKER_02]: There have been, as there are for all of us, I think, small wasteland periods, you know, when you just feel kind of empty. 523 00:43:55,997 --> 00:44:06,181 [SPEAKER_02]: And there have been times in my life when it was one of your books that reminded me that there is this deeper way of connecting and it shook something loose. 524 00:44:06,581 --> 00:44:10,743 [SPEAKER_02]: So I just wanted to say thank you for the work that you've given all of us. 525 00:44:11,083 --> 00:44:12,183 [SPEAKER_01]: Wow, that's lovely to know. 526 00:44:12,263 --> 00:44:13,684 [SPEAKER_01]: It makes it worthwhile. 527 00:44:13,764 --> 00:44:14,584 [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much. 528 00:44:15,685 --> 00:44:16,605 [SPEAKER_02]: Sharon Blackie. 529 00:44:17,141 --> 00:44:23,922 [SPEAKER_02]: She's the author of Haggitude, Wise Women, Foxfire, Wolfskin, and other stories of shapeshifting women. 530 00:44:24,603 --> 00:44:27,143 [SPEAKER_02]: Also a popular substack, The Art of Enchantment. 531 00:44:27,783 --> 00:44:33,104 [SPEAKER_02]: And she has a brand new book coming out called Ripening, Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now. 532 00:44:33,965 --> 00:44:38,986 [SPEAKER_02]: If you want to know more about the Neoplatonists, you can check out her new project, The Nostos Institute. 533 00:44:39,426 --> 00:44:44,847 [SPEAKER_02]: And we've put all those links on our website, so just visit wondercabinetproductions.com. 534 00:44:45,747 --> 00:44:52,170 [SPEAKER_00]: Wonder Cabinet is produced by Anne and me, wherever we are, sometimes in Madison, Wisconsin, or Versher, Vermont. 535 00:44:52,710 --> 00:44:56,832 [SPEAKER_00]: Our audio engineer is Steve Gottscher, with digital direction from Mark Rickers. 536 00:44:57,313 --> 00:44:58,093 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Steve Paulson. 537 00:44:58,473 --> 00:44:59,594 [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm Anne Strainchamps. 538 00:45:00,194 --> 00:45:01,515 [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for joining us today. 539 00:45:02,135 --> 00:45:04,976 [SPEAKER_02]: Wonder Cabinet, you know, is a labor of love. 540 00:45:05,076 --> 00:45:07,918 [SPEAKER_02]: So if you liked what you heard, let us know. 541 00:45:08,478 --> 00:45:09,198 [SPEAKER_02]: It makes a difference. 542 00:45:09,819 --> 00:45:10,579 [SPEAKER_00]: Until next time.