Vultures and Crochet

Transcript: Welcome to Ducks of the World Tree, the podcast that waddles across the manicured lawns of suburbia like an overfed pet peking, flaps wildly in front of a speeding Tesla, and then dives deep into the cool waters of – well, hopefully a pond, but probably some kind of pompous drainage ditch masquerading as a natural water feature. Anyway – come with me for the next few minutes. This one’s short. I promise. 

I had grand plans for something organized and focused. And then I realized… who am I kidding? I’ve never pulled off anything resembling organized or focused in my entire life. My disaster-ass self is smeared across like 16 countries, 20 jobs, and three or four languages.

But I do have some things to say.

In this podcast, I’ll be documenting my artistic, autistic, radically animistic, ADHD journey as I stumble through life in end stage capitalism, in the endgame of ecological disaster, with a poet’s heart, a dirt-worshiping heathen’s souls… and a glimmer of hope that we can somehow reawaken something wild and authentic and rebellious and beautiful in us – in time to watch the sun set on the catastrophe of industrial civilization – together.

Before we set off on this strange and rambling journey, I want to lay out a few premises:

The first is that there are no individuals – not the way conventional western thought conceives of them. We are communities.

I am a community. All of us are communities. We’re communities of multiple fractious spirits in bodies that are communities made of animal DNA that creates a symbiotic planet for uncountable bacteria and fungi. We’re embedded in entangled communities of plants and animals who have their own soul communities and wills and desires. And we all move in a greater web of spirit communities in a kind of endless fractal magic mushroom trip vision – and all of our edges – I mean ALL of them – are kinda arbitrary.

If you’re familiar with the science behind mitochondria and chloroplasts’ independent evolution, you know that all plant and animal life on Earth is literally a community. There are no plant or animal individuals. And we’re only alive at all because photosynthetic bacteria decided to join forces with another species about 900 million years ago. Forests stand because of the communion of mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots within the soil. Human beings are band animals, in the same way that dogs are pack animals or ants are hive animals. There is no place where we can draw real, hard lines between self and other that don’t involve caveats and approximations and oversimplifications.

The second premise is that nature is alive, conscious, animate, intelligent, and willful. Trees have desires. Mycorrhizal fungi have wills. Viruses and horses and dogs and bean plants and soil all have spirit and intelligence, each in their own way. And if we utilize the time-honored techniques that traditional cultures around the world have used to open our consciousness, we will know this for ourselves. It is possible to directly experience the animacy of the world. And we should do this. We must. Because reconnecting with the huge and beautiful and consuming, spiritually alive reality behind nature is the only thing that can save us as an animal species on this planet.

The third premise is that disconnection is death. When human beings began to turn toward an increasingly mechanistic worldview, when we began to sever our understanding that we are as embedded in the world as the cells of our hand or our heart are embedded in our bodies – that is when we began to wither. We, human beings, are, in fact, threads in a great tapestry. When we remove ourselves, the tapestry begins to fall apart. We are meant to be communities held in the constant embrace of a thousand-thousand other communities. We are never alone, and yet, the specter that haunts modernity is loneliness. The feeling of disconnection, of isolation, of feeling completely adrift is the absolute hallmark of contemporary life. And it will lead to ecological collapse, as we seek to soothe our abject despair with more plastic crap we bought off another plastic website.

The fourth premise is that we can heal ourselves if we can reconnect – to the enmeshed communities of our souls, other people, the spirits of nature, the bigger spirits we might call gods, to ancestors, to the directly observable animist truth of our physical reality.And a corollary: it is difficult, if not impossible, to do any good in this world if the wound of disconnection is not repaired. Basically, hurt people hurt people. No matter what their intentions are. If someone’s ego is all big and swollen and their heart feels all dark and icky, they’re going to leak that ick. They can’t help it. And that’s why most organizations that try to do good wind up eating themselves. Everyone is still fundamentally disconnected and thinking of themselves as individuals in a hierarchy. It’s all bullshit. I pinky swear.

A fifth premise that tags along with all this talk of healing: No one can sell you the medicine. There are no saviors out there. You have to learn to breathe. You have to face the chasm in your chest and the maggots in your belly. There’s nothing to buy. There are no courses, no books, no lecture series, no $500 drum circle that will save you. Go out in the woods. Breathe. Beat a stick against the dirt. Maybe find a mushroom on a cow pattie. Make friends with people you can touch and smell. Only you can save you. Anyone trying to sell you a cure is a faker and a cheat.

With those premises out of the way, let’s talk wounds, vultures, and crochet.

If a wound has been open a long time, (10,000 years?) it’s probably infected and festering, so the first step in healing is that you’ve got to get rid of that necrotic tissue. In the natural world, the organisms that eat dead and rotting things are the detritivores – vultures, maggots, earthworms, fungi – they eat death and break it down into nutrients that new life can use to build new connections. Vultures are holy. Maggots and earthworms; Holy. Fungi – probably the holiest.

In human society, artists do something very similar to these holy creatures. We take in the pain and rot that humans have created, the dead and dying social tissue that no longer serves us, we digest it, and use it to support healthy, interdependent social tissue – healthy, reconnected, vibrant, entangled communities.

So, as an artist, I aspire to the nobility of the worm. I aspire to the vulture’s path. I serve all my communities by learning to eat… shit. And with that, spin wildly uneven yarn that we can use together to crochet new life, healthy connections, and webs of resilient communities.

And it’s no accident that I choose crochet, for my final metaphor, dear listener. Because knitting is the foundation of the entire digital age. And crochet? To this day, crochet cannot be done by a machine. It can only be done by hand. By human hands. Slowly, laboriously, with love.

And so, kind listener, I invite you to stumble along with me as I, the quintessential awkward duck, waddle along the riverbanks toward reconnection to the animate holiness of vultures and crochet.