Sophie Strand (00:00)
To tell you about my relationship with this land here, well, I was actually born in the city and moved up when I was a little bit older than three. ⁓ So I actually have urban origins ⁓ and was introduced to upstate.

when I had already kind of concretized as a human being. And in a lot of ways, my early experience in the city was pretty traumatic. ⁓ And I experienced some early childhood violence and trauma. And so coming to the Hudson Valley, even at that young age, felt like being saved. Like it felt like a place that was big and old enough to hold things that normal human value dualisms

could not, compost could not hold, were not robust enough, that I had seen things that were so horrible that I had no way of making sense of them. But the Hudson Valley is known giant glaciers. It is known ice ages. It is known fires. It is known genocide at the hands of the Dutch killing off almost all of the Monsilenape people. Like this is a landscape that knows how to hold harm and how...

to change it, how to change it into bluestone and to build an entire mountain range out of it, how to let itself be triterated down and alchemized. And so this land for me has been big enough, old enough and wise enough for me to be able to move through things that are part of my origin story that are really, really hard. ⁓ I mean, I think of our bodies as being kind of fictional.

that we're actually much more porous and extended than we believe. Self is only self through other. Our cells change over every seven years. We are rebuilt materially and metabolically by the food we eat, the air we breathe, the relationships we tend. And so I am built by this valley and my brain extends into it. My mind is bigger than my skin silhouette. I think with all of my relations with the honey fungi,

with the mountains, Overlook Mountain, with the black bears, the chanterelles, the mug war, even the invasive species, the spongy moths, that these are beings that, you know, when I pray, I don't pray to saints or gods, I pray to the beings that really will show up at a pivotal moment, the heron that really does fly overhead when I'm looking for some kind of sign and clarity. ⁓ And so, yeah, this landscape has been my savior.

It has built my body, it is my body, it is my brain, my extended mind. ⁓ It's kept me alive. ⁓ It is my primary relationship. ⁓ And anything that I do must nourish it. Whenever I make work, creative work, I think it has to feed the land from which it's sprouted. there's some, this work that I'm creating has to honor the multi-species,

polyphony of the Hudson Valley in some way and honor that although I am in human words telling this story, the story comes from underneath my feet. What is your relationship like with ⁓ rootedness given that you are a transplant to a newer place?

Andrew Valenti (03:18)
So.

Yeah, I've been on that journey for a while now since leaving the United States. It's been a huge question in my mind. What does being from a place really mean? Because, especially being an American. And so I went on this ancestral journey. So I moved to Europe because I got my dual citizenship in Italy through my great grandfather.

Sophie Strand (03:40)
Bye.

I know.

Mm.

Andrew Valenti (03:54)
And that just got me thinking about place because when I arrived to Italy, the land doesn't speak to me. And places that I had never been, the land speaks to me a lot more. And places like the UK, like Ireland, like Scotland, I'm in Wales now, the land speaks to me. And I have some ancestry from here.

But.

I also don't feel like this is my home. So I don't feel like anywhere is really quite home in a way. So I like to connect as much with the earth wherever I am to understand what that home is. And it's different languages everywhere you go, which is amazing. Not just Italian or French or whatever.

Sophie Strand (04:40)
and

Andrew Valenti (04:49)
land itself speaks different languages through the quality of the soil, through the birds, the bird song. You know, one thing I miss about living in the United States, or at least on the East Coast, are the chickadees and the cardinals. It's a whole different ballpark of birds over here. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on being of a place rather than being in a place.

Sophie Strand (05:13)
Hmm, that's a beautiful question. Well, first, I'll also just say that I don't ever love to fetishize some fictional idea of rootedness or belonging or kinship with place that human beings in our original, you know, 90,000 years of existence before we started to create civilization and sedentary communities were peripatetic.

We were wanderers, we were vagabonds of the earth. And we were ⁓ always following weather systems, warm weather, different species, food we could forage, that we lived in our footsteps, on our feet, moving. ⁓ And so I do think this idea of rootedness and belonging and having a certain place where you live is in a lot of ways a modern fiction. ⁓

That doesn't mean it can't be done well and can't be done more sustainably. I don't think there's any way back to Eden, back to the garden. But I do always want to question or trouble the idea of what home is for a human being. That home is the way in which we are in lovership and responsibility with the beings around us at any moment in time. It's a way of relating. For me, rather than a place.

or any kind of ownership. Home is a kind of hospitality with which you welcome other beings into your abundance and also step really, really politely into their lives and their worlds. And so for me, rootedness and home is about a kind of behavior of relationality and understanding that our actions implicate more than just us.

And that oftentimes when we do harm, that when we shoot an arrow of harm out into our wider ecosystem, it has a ⁓ long arc of coming back and coming into our own breast and harming us as well. And that ⁓ if we recognize that we are entangled ⁓ beings who are created through relationship, it makes us a lot more responsible. So for me, home and belonging have a lot to do with that.

kind of inner hearth of hospitality and decorum, interspecies decorum.

Andrew Valenti (07:42)
The only times that I've felt jealous of and I'm going use the word jealous because when I went to Sardinia it is an ancient tradition there of people. People have been there for a very long time and there's something, there's a traditional throat singing.

from Sardinia and I'm not even sure they know how far it goes back but it's only passed down from father to son. It's only men that sing and it's just the only people that have kept this on is from the father bringing it to a son and I found myself being really jealous of that because sometimes

Sophie Strand (08:03)
Yeah.

Huh? Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (08:24)
It's like you can be born into something and your life is mapped out for you. It's like this is really important for you to continue this tradition, to learn how to sing this way, to have a son and pass it down to him. ⁓ But then I also battle that jealousy. like, well, actually freedom to do whatever I want is pretty nice. But then that also feels...

Sophie Strand (08:29)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (08:51)
overwhelming to the point where it's like, well, what do I want to do? What am I going to do?

Sophie Strand (08:55)
Yeah, I think also that predates even human beings is there are long periods of stability and evolutionary inheritance of beings passing along certain traits and certain behaviors and ways of surviving. And then without fail, there's an extinction event or there's a climatological shift and there's an interruption in inheritances and rituals and ways of surviving.

And I think that we're at this patchy moment where apocalypse and collapse are not distributed equally. So there's still pockets of people who have their rituals, their understandings, their principles, culture, intact culture. And then there are a lot of us who are already part of the interruption where we don't know yet how to survive in this new ecosystem, this new climate.

Andrew Valenti (09:52)
You talked about that in the flowering wand. What's the word I'm looking for? It's the Tolkien word. Yucatastphi, that was a new word for me.

Sophie Strand (09:55)
Yeah.

Eucatastrophe.

Me too, and I heard of it. was like, wow. Eucatastrophe would be, you know, the lucky disaster, the escape that still fits in with the natural order of things. I really love it, especially as a fiction writer who wants, who doesn't want to give, do you know about the idea of plot armor?

Andrew Valenti (10:21)
know.

Sophie Strand (10:22)
It's

super interesting. It's how you have a character and somehow they always escape and they always get out. Like, and it's not, it doesn't make sense. It actually kind of violates the natural order or logic of your universe. And a lot of fantasy and heroes journeys operate with a kind of plot armor. And I always think it's more interesting to have if your character is going to escape.

or going to survive a really horrible thing, really think about the logic of it. Think about the ecological practicalities of how it might actually happen.

Andrew Valenti (10:57)
Can you explain for people who haven't heard eucatastrophe what that is?

Sophie Strand (11:04)
Yeah, well it was a term coined by Tolkien and especially I think in his letters to C.S. Lewis who he had a close friendship with and of course it has a slightly Christian bent to it in these two Christians' conversations but you know as a gifted storyteller we can expand it beyond that simplistic paradigm which is this idea of the happy disaster which is something that happens that

is totally unexpected and happens the last possible instant where you utterly know that you could have died. And I think he describes it as like joy polished by the absolute certainty that the other thing could have happened, that you could have died. And so it very much depends on and is created by the direness and the sobriety of looking at how bad things are.

And also I think for me, Eucatastrophe very much is about understanding that we are not rugged individuals and that being saved is always interrelational. It's about a kind of humility that you couldn't save yourself. Something else had to help you. It's communal. And it's about surrender to the wildness of the world, the unpredictability of these things. And so...

You catastrophe for me is something that destroys your sense of self, your sense of self preservation, your ingenuity, but also saves you and is polished by and brought into focus by how many times other beings are not saved and how many other experiences where no one shows up. So it very much understands how unlikely it is that we are actually saved at the last possible minute.

And of course the example is the golden eagles flying out of the sky and saving Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom at the end of Lord of the Rings. And the thing about that is it doesn't rely on this older trope which is Deux ex Machina, which is like God from the machine, God from the sky, which is a violation in the natural order, which is a God shows up, magic suddenly happens, like something happens that you have no explanation for and you're saved.

With a eucatastrophe, it has to be the eagles that live in this world. It has to be an element of the actual order of this world that saves you. And so these eagles come in and save Frodo and Sam at the last possible minute. So that's a wonderful example of it.

Andrew Valenti (13:39)
⁓ And a wonderful example of plot armor because even if Frodo and Sam had perished there, they still threw their ring in the fire and the world was saved.

Sophie Strand (13:43)
Okay.

Yeah, exactly. I know. mean, ⁓ Tolkien does some really interesting stuff with heroes also, that everybody is pretty fallible in his stories ultimately, that no one really is carrying the ring by themselves. So I always appreciate that.

Andrew Valenti (14:06)
read the books. I saw the films. was like peak, prime time of my life, I was in high school, the years that the movies came out. ⁓ But after listening, I listened to your book and I loved it. And hearing about the character that was left out of the films.

Sophie Strand (14:09)
You

Yeah. ⁓ I loved them so much. Yeah.

Thank you.

yeah. ⁓

Andrew Valenti (14:29)
And hearing you talk

about this character, was like, that's actually the most important character. Can you just talk a little bit about this? didn't, I wasn't planning on talking about Lord of the Rings, but I think this character, and I can't even remember their name, but Tom Bombadil. And from an ecological standpoint, this seems like such a great lesson for humanity right now.

Sophie Strand (14:34)
Right? Yeah.

Four to the rings, yeah, I know it's...

Tom Bombadil.

Yeah,

Tom Bombadil for a lot of like real hardcore Lord of the Rings fans is this kind of anomaly in Lord of the Rings and everybody, so many people tried to press Tolkien to explain what this character was and why they were in the story when they didn't seem to further the plot in any kind of way. They weren't like integral to the story and Tolkien gave so many answers that it's basically no answer. ⁓

And Tom Bombadil is this kind of very capricious, funny, jolly, almost like Santa Claus-like character who sings and dances and can tame the trees and is kind of Lord of the Forest. ⁓ And he has Goldberry, his magical wife, and they have this magical abode in the forest. And they provide safe haven and save ⁓ the hobbits at the very beginning of the fellowship when they just begin their journey.

And they're not tired out yet. They're not bedraggled. They're not defeated. But he gives them this experience of safe haven and this kind of like this break from the fight between good and evil. Tom Bombadil is told, we are told that he predates even ⁓ like the first raindrop or the first acorn. That he's almost in some ways, some people have this conspiracy theory that he is Elivatar. He is like the singing god.

that creates the Middle Earth itself. Tolkien said that wasn't true, there's a lot to discount it, but he does seem to predate petty human concerns. The ring doesn't affect him because he doesn't even want power. He doesn't need power, he's not about acquisition or accumulation of orcs or hobbits or animals, agriculture and mastery.

He is Lord of the forest not because he owns these animals and these beings, but because he knows how to sing to them. He knows their language and their song. And so for me, Tom Bombadil is really this reminder that we are part of this story that predates ⁓ our ideas of morality, of right and wrong, that predates our idea that we are like this prized species that's better optimized and more conscious than other beings. We're actually part of

a billion long, many billions long year experiment in aliveness, of which we're probably just a blip. And so for me, Tom Bombadil is always this reminder that first of all, mastery is not about accumulation or dominance, it's about communication and play and reverence and care and hospitality, welcoming the hobbits into your house, making them food, taking care of them. ⁓ And it's also about understanding that

This story is so much longer and bigger than what we think are the big battles between right and wrong.

Andrew Valenti (17:50)
And a good reminder that plants and soil has, it's speaking to us always.

Sophie Strand (17:57)
It is,

always. We just need to learn how to listen. Oh yeah, I think it's a knee.

Andrew Valenti (18:02)
And we have that in us too.

And now it's an exciting time to be live because people are proving that they can hear these plants and it's coming out. I'm jumping ahead of myself, but I recently heard you on an episode of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, which has completely rocked my world listening to that. It's world-changing.

Sophie Strand (18:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's mind blowing.

Andrew Valenti (18:32)
completely world-changing. But there are non-speaking autistic people who communicate with plants. And it's the most beautiful, incredible thing that I think I've ever heard is hearing these stories from these people.

Sophie Strand (18:48)
I mean, it's not just autistic non-speaking individuals. mean, my herbal teacher ⁓ was speaking with plants and she encouraged us. of her first teachings she gave us was that she said, before you look a plant, when you're sitting with a plant and meditating with it and getting to know it locally, don't look it up. Don't look up its properties. Ask it for a dream. Ask it to communicate with you and make notes of what it tells you.

and then go and research and come to me and ask. And there were so many times when the apprentices and the other people who were studying with her, including me, would have a dream and then we would receive a communication. And then we would go and it would be totally right. Like I had a dream about nettles, that nettles would help save me with my kidney. I was in renal, pretty much renal failure.

and I had a dream about nettles and they came to me and I used them and then I learned after the fact that they're diuretics and oftentimes used for kidney issues ⁓ and inflammatory problems with histamine related ⁓ causes, which is what was causing these kidney issues. So for me, like, I think it's, we all have the capability of doing it. So many indigenous ⁓ traditions know that.

It just takes humility and widening our epistemological frame. So like widening the ways in which we think that knowledge arrives.

Andrew Valenti (20:22)
that leads me to the question of dreams because it's such a fascinating place that we exist in every night.

Sophie Strand (20:29)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (20:33)
Where do you think these messages come from? Is it from your subconscious body knowing, does your body know that it needs nettle? Or is it that we're existing in this place where we can freely communicate with plants? Is it actually nettle? Or is it another thing coming in to say it's nettle? What are your thoughts?

Sophie Strand (20:58)
Hmm. Well, I don't think that individual minds exist. think that our brains are probably more like radio receptors than they are actual thinking thought producing engines. ⁓ That's definitely like a perspective right now in consciousness studies that is gaining more and more prevalence from even like the most mechanistic

material reduction as scientists, that thinking doesn't necessarily happen in the brain, but the brain facilitates it, like picks up on it. ⁓ And so for me, in my life, I've had experiences enough with dreams, with intuition, whereby I think cognition is leaky. I'm in a mind that's bigger than me. I am being thought by, sung by, dreamed by other beings who need me.

⁓ And who I think oftentimes our dreams can be psychological and they can be very personal and they can be a time when we get quiet enough to hear intuition. yeah, I do think that, I think there many different types of dreams. Which in the ancient world, people knew that. People knew that there were psychological dreams, were petty dreams, there were anxiety dreams, there were healing dreams. I mean, one of my favorite ideas that you see pop up

all over the Mediterranean basin and all over the world. But I'll focus on the Mediterranean basin is this idea that dreams come from a place and you're like the radio picking them up and if you are ill or sick or suffering, you'll go to a place to receive a dream. So with Asclepius, there was this idea that there were these certain temples where you would go to do dream incubation to receive a dream from that place, from the medicine of that place that would tell you what you needed to heal yourself. ⁓

And for me, I've noticed that I've traveled and when I've traveled, I've had dreams in those places that were so weird and so outside of my regular assemblage of associations that it's hard for me to think about my brain as having made that up. ⁓ But of course, always, I have a very, I always try and hold the possibility of being wrong.

and of wanting to accept new information and update my perspective. I think dreams are a black box. They're weird. And they're obviously very important. If people stop dreaming, they die. Like if we stop doing deep REM sleep, if we stop having these dreams, our cognitive health declines rapidly. There've been lots of like scientific books written about this. We don't quite understand what they're doing.

We know that if we have someone memorize something and then we let them sleep and they go into REM sleep and they dream, they remember something much better or integrate it much better. We're doing some kind of cognitive work in dreaming that is very important to our survival, but we don't understand it completely. And I love it. I love a good mystery. have you, you told me you had had an experience with dreams and plants. I'm really curious to hear about it.

Andrew Valenti (24:03)
bright.

I was trying to remember when this happened. At one point, mangosteen came to me in a dream. And neither did I. And to be honest, I could not tell you to this day, because this was many years ago now. It came out of, I just woke up with the word mangosteen. It was right there. And so I looked it up and went and got.

Sophie Strand (24:17)
Okay, I don't know Mangosteen, so introduce me. Okay.

Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (24:39)
some mangosteen juice. I was able to find some juice of mangosteen. And I just drank it. I was like, okay, I guess I think I'm supposed to have this. But my wife is very tapped in. She does a lot of dream work. from a Jungian perspective. So my world has been completely rocked for the past several years since diving into dream world.

Sophie Strand (24:43)
Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

I will.

Andrew Valenti (25:04)
but she gets a lot of herbs and plants in her dreams as well. Because she also has dealt with mysterious health issues and will just ask for a dream. And the most recent one was artichoke. Just came. And looking at the properties of artichoke and things that she's been going on, it made perfect sense. And so she's been taking a tincture and...

Sophie Strand (25:18)
Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (25:33)
been feeling better, so it's amazing.

Sophie Strand (25:36)
I mean, for me, I had this period in my life where I was dreaming about mushrooms all the time and fungi. I mean, I have a very deep relationship with fungi and mycorrhizal fungi, but there was a period in 2021, 2020, where they were just coming to me different mushrooms every night. And I just started to just like feel like I was possessed by them, that I was just, they were like trying to poke me and tell me what to do.

And my life did rapidly change when I started to kind of invite them in to collaborate with me. So, yeah.

Andrew Valenti (26:09)
Well,

I have a quote of yours written down right next to me. says that you describe yourself as an instrument being played by microbes, by yeasts, by fungi, by other people.

Sophie Strand (26:19)
Yeah, totally. Feels accurate.

Andrew Valenti (26:23)
It is. mean, and

I think the easiest one is by other people. I think we have the power to dictate the way that somebody else is. Just by...

Sophie Strand (26:28)
Yeah.

I know it's

powerful and also a big responsibility. And right now, so many of us are living out stories that were not written by us, that we are not the authors of, that we have become the instruments and narratives that we don't necessarily want to live and die within. So that's an important thing to remember.

Andrew Valenti (26:53)
Yeah.

I like the idea of having trees and fungi. Fungi, do you pronounce it fungi or fun-guy?

Sophie Strand (27:03)
You know, one of my closest friends and an amazing writer, ⁓ Patricia Kashian, ⁓ says you can, she's a mycologist, she says you can pronounce it fungi or fungai, and both are correct. So I trust her.

Andrew Valenti (27:16)
Okay. I find

myself just pronouncing it both ways in the same conversation.

Sophie Strand (27:20)
I was gonna say it both are correct whatever

however you feel compelled

Andrew Valenti (27:26)
Okay, well actually that brings me to something else. So this is also from The Flowering Wand, your book. And here's another quote that I'm gonna read because it's about names. So here's the quote, if you don't mind me reading this out loud. What we name, we often feel we own. What we name, we feel we understand well enough to name. And when we believe we have arrived at understanding, we stop asking questions.

Sophie Strand (27:40)
Yeah, go for it.

I'm going to leave the video here.

Andrew Valenti (27:54)
Now you were referencing Adam naming Eve in this quote, but this made me think of the names that we give to plants and animals and sometimes...

Sophie Strand (27:54)
Are you?

Yeah.

yeah, I was actually referencing Adam

naming all the plants and animals. Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (28:07)
And all the animals. Okay. Well,

so sometimes I feel guilty for not knowing the name of a plant or an animal or a tree. And so I'm curious for you to talk about the juxtaposition of naming something for ownership, but also naming something for respect. Because when I feel guilty, I feel like I'm not respecting the thing because I don't know its name. But then naming also.

Sophie Strand (28:33)
⁓ Well,

I think... So I'm very curious in ⁓ the history of oral culture shifting over to textual, chirographic culture. So when we transmitted knowledge through storytelling and then when we started writing things down with alphabets and language and books and how that actually facilitates a complete cognitive shift and makes certain types of thinking possible.

and closes down other types of thinking. ⁓ And for me, one thing I'm very interested in is how when we start writing things down on a piece of paper, abstracting a word from the thing it represents, ⁓ we start thinking we can own objects and people and animals and places. that in, for most of human history, in oral cultures, knowledge is relational.

⁓ It has to be, it's born in boats of breath. It has to be resurrected in community every time you speak it or sing it or recite it. ⁓ A word is an event. It's a verb. It's built of breath. It passes into relationship. But then with the advent of the alphabet and writing, a word is something that doesn't change, that doesn't respond, that is static, that is pinned to a page that we can own and accumulate. And so I'm really

curious about how we shift into cultures of accumulation and domination and how we can look at technology, material culture as informing that paradigm shift. And so for me, a name can be a way of creating intimacy. That in fairy tales, when something tells you its true name, it gives you power. It can oftentimes, know, Isis tricks Ra into giving her his true name.

and then Isis has more power. And in fairy tales, oftentimes, if a fairy tells you their true name, you have power over them. Or you have relationship, you've built relationship. And so I think naming can be very, very intimate and very powerful. But the way that I would say Euro patriarchal culture, so that not all, I don't want to generalize to all human beings, but like a ⁓ type of epistemological frame, a type of culture and way of knowing frames naming.

is as accumulation and ownership. That when you name something, you own it. That if you can write the name down on a piece of paper, you can say, if you name a piece of land, you own it. If you can name that animal, you own it. And that's what I kind of want to complicate. And I also think that there's a way in which we like to accumulate data and information without building relationship. we've, I always say that we have encyclopedias and not ecologies.

that in oral cultures you oftentimes see much smaller vocabularies, which we could of course classify as primitive. But those are words with real gold backing behind them. Each word in that culture has a real relationship, a real roots, like it means something. So many of the words that we have today are abstract. They've been colonized from other cultures. They don't mean anything. They're empty.

And I think for me I want words that have gold backing, that have real relationships behind them. And so if I name something, I want it to be, or if I know the name of something, I should be in relationship with it. So that's the way I've been thinking about it in my own life.

Andrew Valenti (32:09)
Hmm. the never-ending story came to mind.

Sophie Strand (32:12)
I have never seen the never ending story. Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (32:14)
Well,

to not give it away, there's this world that exists within this book and it's being threatened of, it's being destroyed by something I think it's called the nothing. And so this world is continually just being destroyed by blackness, it's just disappearing. And the only way for it to be saved at the end is for the reader of the book to name

Sophie Strand (32:22)
Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (32:44)
princess of who rules over this land. It's a great, great movie.

Sophie Strand (32:50)
Well, then there's power in that.

It's also like, you know, so many prayers are just recitations of the names of ancestors. And, you know, when a name drops out of existence or when we stop knowing the names of things, we stop caring about them. And I do think, you know, I love the word, not the word, the book Landmarks by Robert McFarlane, where he makes the argument that there are so many like native, so many like,

local words that change like just a town over to describe certain weather phenomenon, certain types of plant, certain season words that are passing out of existence. And that when those words stop being used, we stop actually protecting what they denote. And so I do think like keeping the names alive, like the folk names, not the Linnaean taxonomical science names, not the correct names.

but the intimate folkloric names is a way of keeping alive our desire to fight for and protect other species, plants, places.

Andrew Valenti (34:00)
You know, I had another conversation actually by the time this podcast comes out, it's gonna, this podcast that I'm talking about, it's gonna be out. It's coming out this week. But I had a conversation with a Hopi farmer and he was explaining the Hopi language is called Hopi Levi. And he was explaining to me that they don't have, they don't speak in past or future tense. They only have words for present tense.

Sophie Strand (34:08)
Yeah. ⁓

⁓

Andrew Valenti (34:27)
And I just thought that was so interesting and so fascinating. It gives a whole new meaning to be here now, in a sense.

Sophie Strand (34:35)
Yeah, I mean, so many different cultures have different ideas of temporality and time. I'm so curious about time as being a cognitive, like a frame rather than a reality. ⁓ Yeah, there's a great speculative fiction book called Time End Again, where the CIA has this project where it understands that time is just a frame of mind.

Andrew Valenti (34:49)
Mm.

Sophie Strand (35:00)
and they teach this guy how to shift his consciousness back. They put him in the Dakota in New York City and it doesn't work and it doesn't work, but he has like, they've put him in all this like 19, like 1800s ⁓ clothing. All he's seeing is stuff from that time period. And I think that if he can really shift his frame of mind, he'll time travel and it doesn't work. And then one night he goes out for a walk in the snow and he's like very defeated. And then like a horse and buggy goes by.

But it's a great idea that like time isn't so much like there isn't a past, a present, and a future. All time is happening at once and our brain is what is deciding that this is the now right now.

Andrew Valenti (35:44)
And that comes back to language because to bring it back to telepathic communication, it's often described as wordless. And we've had trouble describing how that communication actually comes across. It's more of a feeling or a texture or a sound or a color or something like that. So that

Sophie Strand (35:46)
Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (36:08)
It makes me think about how we limit our perception of things by giving it a name because we're not allowing us to experience the other way that things are communicating with us.

Sophie Strand (36:14)
yeah.

Yeah, we can't explain certain things. doesn't mean they're not happening. ⁓ And they're not, we think that the word only speaks in human words, but it oftentimes speaks through, you know, if a microbe is trying to communicate with us, it gives us a fever, or it makes us drunk when we drink, you know, yeasty beer. feelings. ⁓

Consciousness states things that defy language and explanation are very real, but it's why I'm a little, not a little, I'm very skeptical of modern psychedelic optimism and culture. And I always say I'm a psychedelic conservative. Like I think they're very useful and very interesting, but I do think that we have plunged into them in a way.

where we do them a disservice and we do ourselves a disservice. And I think that the rush to explain the experiences we have in psychedelic states oftentimes undoes them. ⁓ know, James Hillman, who is a wonderful mythopoetic thinker and philosopher, oftentimes said, don't talk about the dream. The dream was the work. Having the dream was the dream work. Talking about, and don't necessarily agree with that at all.

But I do think it's interesting, which is like, it's not about figuring it out or explaining it or pulling it apart and understanding. Just having the experience itself, just the feelings that moved through you is the work.

Andrew Valenti (37:59)
I'm curious to get some of your perspectives on psychedelics natural plant psychedelics. I have some personally strong opinions having come out of a youth. ⁓ When I was younger, I abused marijuana to the point where I do not use it anymore.

Sophie Strand (38:06)
Yeah.

I'd love to hear.

Same. Yep.

Andrew Valenti (38:25)
Good for you.

And so it was a point where as I was stopping using marijuana, it was becoming more more accepted into culture and legal. And my perception of it is it has kind of, I see an energy around it. And I've heard from...

reiki masters who can see auras that marijuana will make your aura disappear or it'll dim it, it'll dim it. ⁓ And I've also had other experiences with psychedelics where there was a definitive last time because something came to me and told me this will be the last time or else if you do this again, you're not allowed to go back.

meaning I'm not allowed to go back to reality after the psychedelic experience. And so now that it's becoming more accepted, even ⁓ psilocybin mushrooms are becoming more accepted as a mode of healing. And I also hold

Sophie Strand (39:26)
Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (39:42)
concept that it can be a very healing thing. Even marijuana, think these are powerful plant medicines. But they've just been...

misused. So tell me your thoughts on it.

Sophie Strand (39:52)
Yes.

I have tons of thoughts.

I really resonate with everything you're saying. I'll start by talking about this idea of pharmacon. Do you know about the idea of pharmacon?

Andrew Valenti (40:07)
No, but I can imagine. me what it is.

Sophie Strand (40:10)
It's this

Greek concept which is that it denotes both a potion and a poison. It's a substance that depending on dosage can do either. And in a lot of ancient cultures you don't have the word for poison. You have a word like pharmacone that denotes potency, powerful, power. And I oftentimes think that in most cultures up to the modern age there's an understanding of dosage that anything

at a small enough amount can produce some kind of effect that could be positive once or twice. But you gotta be real careful and you gotta be in relationship with that plant and you gotta be humble. And at any higher dose becomes a poison. So a pharmacon is a potion and potion and poison are these kind of doublet words that ⁓ end up meaning similar things. And...

For me, you only need a word like poison in a culture that doesn't know how to do dosage, that wants everything all the time. So you need to say, that's really powerful, you can't eat a hundred of them. Because we don't understand how to dose anything. We do everything at a heroic dose level. We also, we want the biggest, loudest, most traumatic impact experience from everything. Which means we turn everything into a poison.

Like anything can, you can be addicted to anything in this culture. Really, like our culture says turn this into an addiction. Anything. ⁓

Andrew Valenti (41:45)
I'm fully addicted to coffee.

Sophie Strand (41:47)
me too. Or like ⁓ addicted

to our phone, addicted to relationships, addicted to anything. We live in a culture that does not tell us how to be satisfied and how to get in touch with our bodies and our actual needs. That removes us from the web of nourishment that would keep us in equilibrium. And I think that, so you have this culture that is deeply repetitive, where its desire has been abstracted from

the kind of protections of community. ⁓ And so you have like a very highly addictive, a culture of addiction. I think our culture is a culture of addiction and that doesn't understand dosage. And then you also have a culture of individualistic, ⁓ capitalistic healing. that wellness is a product that you can only afford and buy if you ascend to the financial prosperity whereby you can of

afford the trip to Mexico to take ayahuasca. And your healing isn't for your community, it's not for the individual, it's for you. And if you're not healing, you haven't done enough work and you haven't made enough money to afford the healing. So his idea is called healthism, which is that health is a reflection of ⁓ your work and your worth. And that if someone's sick, it's not because of this complex web of oppression and pollution and genocide and...

all of these things, it's because you're a failure and you need to work harder. And I think this idea that taking a psychedelic for your own personal healing, especially a psychedelic that was grown in a country that your country colonized a country away, it's gonna make you more medicinal to your community. I'm very skeptical of taking plants that are not grown where you live to have a psychedelic experience. I think that...

You know, take Jesus and you uproot him from the Mediterranean basin, from Palestine, from second temple period Judaism. You transplant him to Oklahoma. He's suddenly not so beneficial anymore, you know? I think that everything is healthiest and works best in its ecosystem. And so I think if you're gonna do a psychedelic and you're gonna have that experience, the questions I wanna ask is, do you need to do it every weekend?

or do it once? Is it serving just your individual optimization and healing and process, or it is about how you're serving your community? And is it grown in your community, and how can you honor that plant and its persistence and wellbeing in your ecosystem? So, I'm like, I can see that it can be helpful in...

certain instances and it can help with neurogenesis. I see that, but I also think it's been profoundly misused. I also think that its use with people who have survived sexual trauma has been very, very complicated and its benefits have been very overstated and its harms have been very covered up. And I know so many people with complex PTSD who've been through sexual violence.

Andrew Valenti (45:02)
Interesting.

Sophie Strand (45:07)
who have been extraordinarily destabilized by psychedelics. And that's something I feel pretty powerfully angry about.

Andrew Valenti (45:15)
Hmm. I agree with you. And a question comes up and I don't even agree with this question, but to play Devil's Advocate, you know, I have heard stories of people going on these solo ayahuasca trips.

Sophie Strand (45:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (45:36)
and it affecting somebody in their family in a very positive way. It's been this strange thing that happens where they're able to do the healing for their mother. And then it also comes back to, if somebody is going at it for once in a lifetime kind of life healing experience,

Sophie Strand (45:50)
I think, yeah, I mean, I don't think that, yeah.

Andrew Valenti (46:04)
Does that not benefit the greater community because this person is now over their shit or over their trauma or seeing things in a new way to be a hopefully better person?

Sophie Strand (46:19)
You know, I'm gonna walk to the side and tell one of my favorite Buddhist folk tales, which is a woman comes to the Buddha and says, my child has died, will you please bring him back to life? And he goes, I will. When you can bring me a mustard seed from the house where no one has ever died. She goes on a long quest, long quest. And she comes back, she says, I can't find the mustard seed. And he goes, there's your answer. You know, and I say,

Andrew Valenti (46:25)
please.

Sophie Strand (46:49)
Bring me a mustard seed from the house of someone who did ayahuasca and had an ego death and has lots to teach. I haven't met that person. I've met a lot of incredible manipulators, narcissists, people who practice course of control, self-proclaimed gurus, coaches who have gotten a lot better at manipulating other people and using that experience as some kind of coin. The people I know who have the most

medicine or sober people who've done AA, truck drivers who are part of NA, you know, people who've done humble, hard work that took 10 years. This idea that we can have ego death or confront our demons with one heroic journey, one heroic dose, I think really denies the hard, banal, boring work of confronting our demons and our shadows. That's not

That doesn't discount the miracles. And I do believe in miracles. And that there are individuals who go on pilgrimage, who go to lords, who climb Everest, who do ayahuasca in the jungle, and they do it with purity of spirit, and the timing is perfect, and it changes their life. I think that happens. But I think that the norm is that people want this, they want to take the pill and feel better. They do take the pill, then they use it as a way of justifying their behavior.

that hasn't changed and oftentimes gets worse. I'm very, you know, if you're a great individual and teacher and you never tell me about your ayahuasca trip, but it changed you and you're a great teacher, then I'll trust you. But if you're constantly telling me about how your ayahuasca trip is what made you into this healed individual, I'm profoundly skeptical.

Andrew Valenti (48:40)
Well said.

Sophie Strand (48:41)
Sorry.

Andrew Valenti (48:48)
So this brings me back to...

communicating with plants. asking for plants or just communicating with the natural world, with things that don't speak to us in human language. How do you think, or at this point of your life, how do you, would you say that we could become more receptive to receiving those messages?

Sophie Strand (49:14)
Well, I think actually my answer is about community and de-stigma-fying. Stigma, I don't know what the right word is, but ⁓ stigmatific-fying. ⁓ You can edit that out or you can keep it in because it's funny. releasing the stigma around different ways of getting in touch with intuition and other beings. And for me, it's about

Andrew Valenti (49:33)
releasing the stigma.

Sophie Strand (49:43)
I have, for the past, I guess, almost eight years, done these storytelling gatherings where I get people together and I say, please share a story about some kind of intuitive, weird experience you had that you don't have an explanation for and that you're worried that if you tell it, it threatens to make you look mad or crazy. And when you get people in community, usually it takes, the first person has to be really brave. Usually people don't want to tell these stories. And then it breaks the water. And people are sharing

tons of stories about receiving messages from their ancestors, plants talking to them, you know, all sorts of weird stuff. As soon as one person says, this is okay, I believe in it, even though I don't have an explanation, permission someone else to do it. It's about creating a new culture, new communities where we can honor the ways that we, you know, we live in a culture where we are laughed out if we say that we have dreams that we talk with plants or that we hug trees.

And so it's about creating alternative nodes of connection and community where people actually acknowledge and honor those experiences. And for me, my favorite version of that is the potluck. People who gather, who share food and share stories. Super But I also think in just being kinder with the ways that we, like keeping a journal.

and it could be a journal or you could keep voice notes on your phone. There's no correct way of doing this. Of just beginning to not discount your feelings. Like, do you get a weird feeling whenever you go to this place? What are your dreams? Is there an animal you keep noticing? Like, I always say like what you are paying attention to is paying attention to you. So the minute, I think when we start to slow down,

and amplify that level of attention and noticing, it happens more. It's like courtship. Courtship is oftentimes the language I use to describe this, which is we have not been wooing our primary lover for many, years. And so they're a little mistrustful of us. They're still very generous and they send us birdsong, they send us food and beautiful flowers, but they're not going to immediately accept our advances. So it takes our attention.

It takes us showing up. It takes us not discounting these experiences for them to begin to amplify them. So I think that there's a mutuality with us and our environment as we begin to honor and not discount these experiences, they also start to happen more. And then when we share about them in community and we're brave enough to do that, it permissions other people to notice and honor their own experiences.

Andrew Valenti (52:32)
I always say to new gardeners, there are a things that I say, but observation is the biggest. know, just go to the garden every day, but even if you're not gonna do any work, touch a single thing, just go out there to observe, just to see what's going on, because you're gonna learn so much by just observing.

Sophie Strand (52:59)
What are your ways of knowing and communicating with the plants that you're working with?

Andrew Valenti (53:06)
⁓ A fun example that I documented in just a single Instagram reel. ⁓ Last summer, I noticed that I had an artichoke plant that was becoming covered in aphids. Now, most people would be like, ⁓ there's a pest problem. There's a problem, right? I need to do something. I need to intervene. I need to do something.

Sophie Strand (53:15)
F.

Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (53:33)
I decided to observe, see what was going to happen. And I observed the aphids growing in a population. But then the next day I observed a ladybug. And then I observed some more ladybugs. And ladybugs eat aphids. So after a short amount of time, some of the artichoke plants were completely cleaned.

Sophie Strand (53:55)
you

Andrew Valenti (54:02)
of aphids because of the ladybugs. And so the aphids would move to a different plant and the ladybugs would follow. And then I started to observe little yellow eggs underneath the leaves and these were ladybug eggs. something that eats more aphids than ladybugs are ladybug larva. So as soon as those ladybug eggs hatched, the larva were just going to town, cleaned the aphids. The plants were completely fine.

Sophie Strand (54:23)
God.

Andrew Valenti (54:33)
They thrived. it's so simple. It's just, don't do anything. Just observe. ⁓ And that's...

Sophie Strand (54:35)
That's an amazing story.

Andrew Valenti (54:44)
You know, another thing that I say is the garden can provide every metaphor you're ever gonna need in life. ⁓ So, yeah, just observe, just get out there and see what's being said. See how nature is handling itself.

Sophie Strand (54:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's infinitely wiser than us.

Andrew Valenti (55:07)
⁓ So your sub stack is called make me good soil. And another thing, so I get asked a lot of gardening advice. So observation is key, but one of the very first things I say,

Sophie Strand (55:16)
Yeah.

Andrew Valenti (55:30)
to new gardeners is before you focus on growing vegetables or fruits or anything like that, focus on growing the soil because that's where everything happens. That's where it all, that's where your focus of life should I'm curious knowing that the garden holds every metaphor, what does it mean to you to make good soil?

Sophie Strand (55:41)
Yeah.

⁓ so many things. So the first thing is, you know, I have a degenerative connective tissue disease with no cure as of right now. So I am in a process of breaking down and that can make people really uncomfortable who need a wellness narrative, who need to feel like I'm getting better. But, you know, I'm not. Things are slowly falling apart and I can work with that and dance with that and strengthen other parts, but I'm not.

becoming better. And so I've had to get really intimate with decay and degeneration and how important that is to growth. That when you interrupt cycles of decay, things go really, really hectic. I always think about the Carboniferous period where there was all this woody matter. White rot had not yet developed to break down lignin and you had all of this undigested matter swamp out life and the ability for other plants and biodiversity to flourish.

And it's that compacted vegetable matter that is fossil fuels fueling ecocide today. It's very interesting to me, that metaphor, speaking of metaphors. so breaking things down and creating soil creates space for new life. That if we don't have decay and degeneration and rot and soil, we don't have the room to grow newness, new experiments and liveliness and relationship.

And so soil for me is a tomb. It's where things go to break down and die, but it's a womb that grows and nourishes new life, makes room for new life. And so for me, I have tried to think about rot in my life as being a metaphor and a reality, which is one thing is how do I make my life good food for other beings? How do I make myself edible?

Soil is that which has been eaten and digested and reintegrated into a food web. Human beings are very good at creating waste but not very good at stitching it back into appetites and food webs and figuring out how to make our waste digestible and reusable. And I think for me, soil is this, you know, it is our greatest wealth. ⁓

It is what nourishes us, it is what holds us, what breaks us down, which keeps us woven into the material reincarnation of the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere. That if I prayed at anything, it's to soil. I would love to become edible. I would love to be woven back into community. I also think for me, soil is a place that relishes in maximalism rather than minimalism.

and an antibiotic approach. We live in a culture of antibiotic gestures, that if we kill off things, sterilize things, make them clean, they'll work better. We've learned that's actually probably not true. know, sterilized gut has dysbiosis, you get sick, the Christmas tree farm with only one species is much more vulnerable to blight. Places where you throw everything on the compost heap, where everything is touching inappropriately, places of maximalism.

interdisciplinary practices where scientists and artists are working together. These are the places where new ideas sprout and new ecosystems flourish. ⁓ And so metaphorically and practically. So for me, soil is this, it's like my, it's what I want to become, it's what I pray to, it's what I am made from.

It's my only, it's, you know, I'm soil punk. I guess it's kind of like my religion.

Andrew Valenti (59:40)
And so in your journey of all of your health problems, and I've just started your most recent book, which is intense, it's really intense to hear, and it's also very brave of you to make that public. ⁓

Sophie Strand (59:53)
It's yeah.

Andrew Valenti (1:00:01)
And perhaps you explain this a lot more in the book and I haven't gotten there yet, but I'm curious how nature has played a part in your healing, in your day-to-day grappling with the pain and reality that you're living in.

Sophie Strand (1:00:19)
Yeah, I mean, that book is very much an ode to that question. ⁓ Not an answering of it, but a living inside of it. ⁓ I mean, I oftentimes think that our wounds are a doorway into the wounding of other beings. That when I found, I was becoming obsessed with mycorrhizal fungi and their science at the exact time when I was diagnosed with degenerative ⁓ genetic connective tissue disease.

And it didn't seem coincidental that I was obsessed with the connective tissue of ecosystems and soil and I had an absence or like a breakdown of connective tissue in my own body. That I couldn't solve it in my own body, but I could let myself be colonized metaphorically by the connective tissue of the world and become their emissary.

And I think that oftentimes we can see suffering as becoming this kind of solipsistic loop of feeling like, whoa, it's me, I'm the person suffering. No one understands how bad it is. And I always wanna say that like, when you have a problem that can't be fixed, it doesn't have a pill or an easy answer. It's oftentimes the exact shape of some other beings suffering. It is an invitation into relationship. But I think in our culture to be well is sometimes to be isolated. It means that you don't need help.

and you don't need relationships. To be disabled, to be sick, is to need to depend on other beings, to realize that you need medicine. You need your neighbors, you need your family. Even if your family is not great, even if your neighbors have different political ideologies, even if the medicine is created in complicated ways, ties you into more complex ontologies. Like there's no purity when you're sick and disabled. You have to understand that you are kept alive.

in all of these complicated ways. ⁓ And that is ecological to me, that there is no purity, that there's microplastics threaded through our blood, there's blood pressure stabilizers in our rivers. We're never getting this stuff out. We're gonna have to learn how to collaborate with it, how to be like oyster mushrooms that learn how to digest cigarette butts and grow towards the radiation in Chernobyl. That this is perhaps our imperative right now.

is to learn to get better at collaborating with all of this impurity. And for me, environments, our environments are suffering, and it doesn't surprise me that we're suffering too. That if we're anxious, I think, of course, our whole nervous system, our whole biosphere nervous system is out of alignment and struggling to come back into regulation. Of course, these tiny little beings living inside that giant nervous system are anxious. Why pathologize that anxiety as being wrong?

rather than saying like, wow, that might be like exactly the normal response to our situation. So for me, it's understanding myself as being in a, ecology comes from the word oikos for household. Understanding my suffering as being part and parcel of a wider systemic ecological breakdown, it hasn't fixed me, but it has helped me. And I also think,

You know, my relationships with animals, with other species are so much wilder and fiercer than, you know, spending hundreds of dollars on boutique therapies that are unproven and don't end up working. That, you know, you know, when I'm, my aunt died in December, really, really suddenly. Like, I didn't think that there was a single human being that could hold

how bad I felt and how little I felt like it made sense except the Ashokan Reservoir. This area, this giant blasted piece of land that has been where towns and valleys were flooded through with the redirected Aesopus Creek. Like I was like that land. If I go there, that is a big enough patch of land that has known real violence that can hold this feeling for me.

Like for me.

We evolved in footstep, in concert, in photo negative with these ecosystems. Our hands are a photo negative of ancient grasslands. Our bodies are love songs to ghost landscapes and to trees and plants and smells that are still alive today. And when we need medicine and we need nourishment and feelings of resonance, we can go to our

puzzle piece or our photo negative lover ⁓ in the land. ⁓ It's not an answer, it's not a pill. For me I'm much more interested in healing as being about my level of connectivity, my level of joy and relationality that I might be at death's door and totally healthy because I'm filled with joy and have so many incredibly dynamic relationships.

And so I'm always trying to problematize healing as being a destination, as being an optimized or a well body. ⁓ What is a well body? What is a normal body? ⁓ Yeah, and so nature is very good at showing me that, that survival is not about wellness or wholeness, it's about scrappiness and it's about collaboration and symbiosis.

Andrew Valenti (1:05:53)
And that makes me think of so much that we've talked about. This brings me back to dreams. And actually one of the very first things you said is you mentioned the Blue Heron. And that's one of my ⁓ messengers, I think, which initially came in a dream many years ago. And it was a powerful dream where I was visited by a friend who's

Sophie Strand (1:06:05)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Valenti (1:06:23)
passed away and she came to me. My life was about to change in a way and I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I was about to be leaving something and she came to me in a dream and pointed to the sky and Blue Heron flew past and there was a message written in the clouds but I can't remember the message. But the message that it took away was the Blue Heron.

Sophie Strand (1:06:27)
live for that.

There's nothing.

Yeah. ⁓

Andrew Valenti (1:06:54)
And so

every time, nearly every time I've set out on a new journey, a blue heron will go across my path. And it's this, to me it's this great sign that, okay, I'm on the right path. Or even if I'm not on the right path, I'm being protected. Something else is there with me. And...

Sophie Strand (1:07:11)
Right?

Andrew Valenti (1:07:22)
That's a beautiful way to connect with nature, to connect with ourselves. Asking for those signs, looking, or at least being able to pay attention to the signs that are given us and recognizing them.

Sophie Strand (1:07:32)
Yeah.

And they're beings that we live, I say like we live under the zodiac of a certain being for a certain time. Like there was a period of my life where woodchucks were coming to me all the time. that, they were there to teach me. And then they kind of, they're still part of my pantheon. They're part of my divinity team. But there was a period of time where they were really instructing me. They were my mentors. ⁓ And it's nice to also notice these different seasons.

of beings coming in to teach us something.

Andrew Valenti (1:08:11)
What is one of your favorite food memories?

Sophie Strand (1:08:16)
Oh my God. Well, as someone who has only like three safe foods and hasn't been able to like eat anything for years, this, there's so many things. No, it's interesting. I actually, I think this is going to be such a strange answer, but I remember sitting, there's so many delicacies and beautiful baked goods and things that I used to make and rice pudding that I ate with my English grandmother.

Andrew Valenti (1:08:22)
I've recognized that after...

There's no wrong answer.

Sophie Strand (1:08:41)
I could say, but I actually think my favorite food memory is the combination of a local wild, like some apple from a local orchard. I my family had gone like apple picking, sliced, and I was sitting on my back porch in my parents' house in their yard outside of Woodstock, and it was a windy, windy day, and some sharp cheddar cheese, and I had slices of apple and sharp cheddar cheese, and those combination of tastes was just perfect.

But was also like being outside, the movement into cold. Delicious. Loved it. I think that's one of my favorite memories of eating anything.

Andrew Valenti (1:09:20)
Beautiful. So simple.

Sophie Strand (1:09:23)
Yeah, simple but perfect.