Sophie Strand: Glitching towards a return to each other (Ep454)

Written By kaméa chayne
“I’m always questioning what a ‘whole body’ is, what a ‘healthy body’ is. Yet a lot of us are sick because of systemic oppression. So even though I don’t want to fetishize this idea of a well body that I don’t have, I still want to actively try to interrupt the systems that make people unwell.”
— Sophie Strand

What do we need to interrogate about our dominant culture’s obsession with “wellness” — as well as its discomforts when confronted by illness? What does it mean to queer the concept of reciprocity and understand it as much more expansive than a palpable exchange of a give and take? And why do we need to refocus the idea of “community” on something that is rooted in place and proximity-oriented?

In this multi-layered episode, we are honored to share space with Sophie Strand for a round two interview to explore her latest book, The Body is a Doorway.

Join us as we chat about becoming more literate in the language of the more-than-human world, taking inspiration from fungi as both decomposers and recomposers, and glitching towards a return to each other.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker.” She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially—between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. 

Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and the forthcoming memoir The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.”  You can follow her work on Instagram @cosmogyny. 

Artistic credits:

  • Song feature: “Ocean of Your Tears” by Leïla Six

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Kaméa Chayne: So in the book, you mentioned an acquaintance who ran into you at a market and said to you, “You're glowing. I'm so glad you're feeling better,” or something along those lines. And you've also pushed back against people kinda defaulting to the statement, “I hope you're feeling better,” or “I hope you've been well” when they greet you, when they know that you are chronically ill. 

So, I want to just ease into our conversation by picking apart our culture's obsession with wellness as a sort of wishful thinking. So, how would you like to begin unraveling the foundations of this kind of default response?

Sophie Strand: Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, I think that we have cultural scripts. There are pat phrases, things that are supposed to lubricate intimacy and social cohesion.

In a culture that is deracinated, uprooted from its web of relationality, from its ecological sustainability, our cultural scripts become brittle. They don't foster the intimacy and let us ease into conversation in the way that I think they're supposed to.

So there are a lot of these pat phrases that are not particularly good at honoring the complexity of what we're dealing with right now.

As a culture, we’re not good at staying with things that are hard — with death, with decay, with legibility, with divergence. So when you have an illness that is legible, that is degenerative, that doesn’t have a cure, it makes people feel really uncomfortable. 

I always say it's really hard to be someone terminally or chronically ill, because you're always without wanting to be another person's object lesson in their mortality. And so, when we're sick and ill, we are always confronting other people with the fact that you can drink all the celery juice you want, you can live an incredibly morally upright life, and you can still get sick. That getting sick is not a moral failure, it's not a spiritual failure, I mean, our culture would like us to believe that it is, but it's not. 

People who take impeccable care of their health, of their spiritual hygiene, who lead incredibly upright lives, get sick and die every day. And I’ve lately been saying that nothing is personal. And that's a really scary, scary thing to sit with, which is that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people [laughs]. 

I think for me, one of the things, as a chronically ill person, I want to invite other people who are perhaps healthier into conversation about is, are there ways that we can create more intimacy? So when you know…so if someone comes up to me and says, I hope you're feeling better, and they don't know me and they don't know about my illness, that's fine.

I can open up the conversation, I can say, “That's really sweet of you to say, but actually my condition is incurable and degenerative, so it's really complicated, but I'm having a great day, I'm working on a new book, what are you working on?” And so, there are ways in which we can be compassionate, and we can tailor our response.

The hard part is with community, and with intimates, and with friends, and family. And that's where it's really tricky. Which is, people don't want to admit that they are degeneratively ill, or dying, or grieving. People don't want to stay with the trouble, to summon Donna Haraway. 

I think that we need to get better at staying with those hard places and asking more interesting questions of each other. We will, I think, have a deeper, stronger fabric to our relationships if we can begin to do that.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and maybe it's just like in the presence of people who have chronic illnesses, it forces us to gloss over and skip the small talk that is very superficial because it's like, well, okay, we're being invited into the big questions of life right away that are important and that may be uncomfortable,  but so vital, especially during these times.

Sophie Strand: Yeah, I also think that we don't have to go into the head, like the deep water, immediately. One of the really tricky things is when we say that to someone, what we're unconsciously saying is, I'm uncomfortable with you being sick. It scares me. I feel like I could get sick. If you could get sick, I could get sick. So I need you to “perform” wellness for me [laughs]. And so it puts an undue burden on someone who's already struggling. 

I do think that we don't necessarily need to open up like an incredibly deep conversation, but maybe we can ask something else. We can say like, “Aren't you working on that project?” Or, “It's a really late spring.” Like, I think there's a reason we have pleasantries, which is to allow us to connect with people who maybe we haven't seen for a long time, we don't know what's going on with them, it's a way of us easing in. But there are pleasantries that don't ask another person to erase themselves. So I think that's something we can be really conscious of.

Kaméa Chayne: Thank you so much for this clarification. 

Sophie Strand: Thank you for asking.

Kaméa Chayne: Your writing about illness walks people through a lot of the reframes that you've personally made with your state of being, a lot of it inspired by lessons from the more-than-human world. And part of that has been your acknowledgement that you wouldn't prefer to go back to a time before your illness. And in one part, you talk about how your trauma responses and dissociation, that you spent thousands of dollars trying to heal, were, at a stage, actually parts of you that kept you alive. 

So I kind of sense this both/and message where it is important to push back against how the dominant culture perceives illness as unclean, as pathologies that need to be fixed and resolved. It's also important not to romanticize illness. Like you said, where some people might say, “Well, illness is maybe an initiation.” So it's neither about saying that it's bad nor saying that it's good.

So, can you kind of elaborate on this cultural inclination to jump to placing these value judgments on things, rather than being able to just sit with and honor things for how they are?

Sophie Strand: Thank you so much for making that distinction, because we neither want to be the fetishized tubercular patient, the dying waif. We don't want to be like, the inspiration story. It's tricky.

We also want to imagine a world where people don't have to get sick because of systemic oppression, and because of stress, and because they can't pay for better doctors. There’s an ecotone, a place where tensions can be held without being dissolved, that I would like to stay in.

It's not helpful to me to go back and try and imagine a counterfactual where I didn't get sick, or I didn't experience violence as a young child, and then experience PTSD afterwards. If I spend so much time thinking about that other me, I end up praying to a version of my body I don't even know if it exists or if I would enjoy it if I were inside of it. 

I oftentimes say that we are haunted by an idea of a normative body, a well-body, an untraumatized body, and it's used in an almost kind of Christian way. We have to constantly buy indulgences like people would in the medieval ages, to get rid of our sins and get into paradise.

We want to do enough work to somehow earn back that whole body.

I’m always questioning what a “whole body” is, what a “healthy body” is. And yet, a lot of us are sick because of systemic oppression. So even though I don’t want to fetishize this idea of a well body that I don’t have, I still want to actively try to interrupt the systems that make people unwell.

I would never want someone else to get sick because an actively harmful system continues to plough forward.

Kaméa Chayne: There's a lot in this that I would be curious to deepen into. I think recently, I've been thinking a lot about reciprocity. And I feel called to queer reciprocity as a concept also, as in, we understand reciprocity to be a sort of give and take that is mutually supportive as an exchange in relationships. 

And I know there are different forms and different ways to give and to take, but I almost want to blur the lines, too, between giving and taking as binaries. Because I'm thinking about communities and people who have historically been stolen from so much in every capacity, land, knowledge, wealth, resources, time, and energy, that at a very pixelated level, they might not be able to give back much in any form. Or people with disabilities who are literally limited in abilities to give or do things for other people. 

Or even the land, like a piece of land that has been deforested, torn up so much, decimated. And the same sort of watering and fertilizing in soils in a different place might be enough for us to be able to practice that sort of give and take, but for these particular lands that have been so decimated, they actually might need to take, take, and take for a really long time, maybe beyond our lifetimes as well, without being able to offer much tangible in return.

So I'm curious how you might have shifted or expanded your perspectives on reciprocity over the years.

Sophie Strand: Yeah. So much to say here. So, I think of the paradigm of transaction, of give and take, as a fiction, and it depends on capitalism. And it also depends on a kind of neo-Cartesian empiricism. You know, there are things we can measure, and they flow in certain directions between atomized individuals. 

And so, you're working with a lot of different modern fictions that have not necessarily always been viable or thinkable. You have individuals, individual cells, rugged individuals. You have goods that pass between people, that people own. You have ownership, and possession, and accumulation. There's a lot of story going on here that isn't necessarily representative of the entangled parasitism and commensalism of ecosystems. 

An example I always love to use when I talk about disability is ghost pipe, monotropa uniflora, which is a small, little, almost like bowing, it looks like it's praying, white plant that grows in the undergrowth of the forest up in the Hudson Valley where I live. They kind of arrive end of June, July. I mean, given climate change right now, it's kind of unpredictable when they erupt. But they're white because they don't photosynthesize. They don't do their own food production. They receive all of their nourishment from underground mycorrhizal systems, particularly Russula mycorrhizal systems and Lactarius mycorrhizal systems that give them all of their food. 

And a lot of science in the past 200 years has characterized this relationship as parasitic because the fungi provide everything to the ghost pipe, and the ghost pipe doesn't “give” anything back. And it's very complicated because we're looking at this relationship as a snapshot that doesn't include the whole forest And we're also looking at it as a snapshot in deep time’s evolution.

People talk about parasitism and commensalism as being two different things, but they’re actually on the same spectrum of symbiosis.

And most relationships oftentimes oscillate between those two poles many different times in the millennia in which they are involved mutualistically. So sometimes it looks parasitic. One being is taking more than it's giving. Sometimes it looks symbiotic. They're both benefiting. And it depends on when you look at the relationship, when you take the snapshot. And for me, it's more interesting, also, to think about, in terms of very, very crude measurements, empirical measurements of food and sucrose and carbon, the ghost pipe is receiving food and not giving anything back.

But what about the quality of the relationship? What if the Russula and the Lactarius know that it's really important for this being to be part of the ecosystem? That in terms of the health and the biodiversity of the entire forest, in terms of the medicine made with the ghost pipe for other beings, because, especially the Indigenous people in this area, thought it was a highly medicinal plant, maybe there's something much more interesting going on qualitatively. 

So we have very, very simplistic ways we think about give and take in relationships, when if we look at it on a deep time oscillation, maybe it's one being is taking and the other being is giving. But if you played it out for another million years, it would change directions. So, especially with disability, when I can't necessarily take care of myself and be this fictional rugged individual,

I oftentimes identify with the ghost pipe, which is that I need a lot of help. And sometimes I can’t give back in ways that show up under a microscope that can be measured. But I hope that the quality of the relationship, the thing that can’t be measured, gives merit and value to all the aid that I receive.

Kaméa Chayne: So maybe we need a deeper time perspective on the concept of reciprocity.

Sophie Strand: I think so, yeah. 

Kaméa Chayne: And also a more collective perspective.

Sophie Strand: Yeah, it's the whole forest. It's not just two species. Every time we breathe in, we rebuild ourselves with other beings. So, it's very complicated. Who's benefiting from whom?

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and also, this already troubles our entire economic model of reducing everything into this singular currency of money, because there are so many other currencies that can't be reduced into this quantitative form.  So yeah, there's a lot more to go into there. Not sure if you want to expand on this a little more, or if I can...

Sophie Strand: Yes, it's also this idea of accumulation and possession, too, that I have a little bit of trouble with. You know, we want energy to keep moving. We stay alive by moving, by breathing, by excreting. We don't want to give and take in this way that is so firm, so concrete. I would like things to be a little bit blurrier. Who owns what? Today it's someone else.

Kaméa Chayne: And just to add another piece to queering reciprocity, there's a lot of talk now about the importance of building community so that when apocalypse comes, when shit hits the fan, we're networked enough to take care of each other. And I'm also thinking about people who might still be managing deep childhood wounds or relational traumas that push them in this present season or these couple of years to self-isolate, to hermit, or even have tendencies to hurt people closest to them, and end up pushing people away. 

So as the cracks of empire continue to widen, I'm just thinking about how we make sure that people and our more-than-human kin who've already been pushed to the brink and can't necessarily build community also don't get left behind. Because we might not be able to heal a lot of our traumas fast enough to be able to show up as our best developed selves for other people and our communities right now. So, how do we continue to sit with this messy version of reciprocity and community-building even more?

Sophie Strand: I think one of the concepts I've had to turn over and get sober about is “community,” because I think that it's a little bit of a buzzword now, and I don't think that it holds as much water as we think it does. I think if someone doesn't live within a 10-mile radius of your house, if you wouldn't go to their house and make them food, you're not your community. The people I'm connected with online are not my community. They're my relations and my friends, but my community are people who, even if they have a different belief system than me, even if they annoy me, even if we don't like each other that much, we live in proximity. 

For me, community is very much about proximity. And in a digital age, we forget that.

You know, it used to be you lived in a village with a lot of people you didn't like, but you lived close by to them and they grew food you needed. And maybe they had a horse that you needed to use sometimes, and so you had to have some kind of decorum, some level, some cultural scripts that let you show up for each other. 

And so I think we have this idea of “bespoke” or “tailored” community and perfect nonviolent communication. I think real community is messy and sometimes a little violent. And it's nasty. It's like, who are the people…who's the person who fixes your car? Who's the person who works at the grocery store near you? Who's gonna show up when there's a hurricane and you have no power? Who are the EMTs? I mean, this is real. 

And for me, as a person who, in the past two years, I've become much more radically disabled than I expected to become. Oftentimes, I get really sick and I need someone to show up, or I can't drive.

The people who have shown up for me are not necessarily my bespoke, shiny, like-minded community. They’re the people who are close by and know that when they’re in trouble, I’ll also show up. 

I think community is lived, it’s embodied, and it’s proximal. So, who are your actual neighbors? Who checks you out at the supermarket? Who lives in your town? Who is taking care of things? These are people who you probably will not share the same political, social background. But we have to talk to them. We share an ecology with them.

Kaméa Chayne: I find this refreshing because I find that we have a tendency to want to have words hold more meaning than they actually [do]. In this sense, it's about reclaiming and rerouting the word “community,” in a very important way because yeah, I do feel like a lot of us or a lot of people are turning to community as in, who are my people? Who are the people who think like me, who share values with me, who share interests and passions? 

And I might not be able to find that locally, but I can find this community online. And so this is where I'm expending a lot of my social energy into, because these people make me feel validated. They make me feel good and aligned in all these ways. But yeah, I guess what's at stake is we forget about the rooted community that is messy, that doesn't always feel good to be around, but that is so necessary for our collective survival. 

Sophie Strand: I think that we can go… we can knock on other people's doors. We can go bridge those gaps, because it's important. It means something. Like, when I moved to the neighborhood where I am now, I introduced myself to everybody I met. And I made sure to develop a relationship with them and to offer help when they needed it. Because I knew that I was probably going to need help.

Kaméa Chayne: Do you think this concept of community changes depending on our context? As in, I live in a rural small town, so I have been forced to meet all of my neighbors, and I have relationships with people around me because I am more rural in this context, so we have to kind of take care of each other.

But for my friends, for example, who live in high rises in New York City, a lot of them don't even know the people who live right next door. So I wonder about how community might differ if they do for people living in big metropolitan cities, compared to small towns, where the webs of relationality and interaction might look a lot different.

Sophie Strand: I think it's much harder, but I also don't think it's impossible. And I think… who works at the bodega? Like, really, where do you buy your food? This is a really big thing. 

We have created so many divides between us and the people who make our lives possible. And I think it’s really important to get to know the people who are part of your daily life. 

Like, have a routine. I think if you live in the city, you have a routine. And in that routine, make sure you know the people who seem to crop up. Maybe it's not the people who live in your apartment building, but it's the people who work at the coffee shop or who show up at the coffee shop where you do your remote work. We live in a culture that moves so fast, and it's obsessed with novelty. But there's something to really be said about dailyness, about routine, about the ritual of having something you do, people you see every day, who you have continuity with.

Kaméa Chayne: I think, maybe, finding a container for people who live in big cities might be a helpful place to start. Otherwise, it can get very overwhelming. I have a lot of people here, and a lot of people at work, and a lot of people, you know, in all these different places.

Sophie Strand: And, I think, there's also more than a human community. 

Kaméa Chayne: Yes, absolutely.

Sophie Strand: There are birds, and these are meaningful relationships, or they're pigeons outside your apartment [laughs]. Are you having allergies because they only plant male trees in the city? And, can you begin to develop a relationship with these trees that are quarantined in these little patches of soil? We can also have community with these other isolated beings.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and even tuning into the microbes right where we are, we might not be able to see them, but maybe in a sort of felt way, we can engage with the life that is right here.

Sophie Strand: We can feel it. Every time we have a fever, every time we drink wine, we are being played like an instrument by microbes.

Kaméa Chayne: I love that [laughs]. Well, we've talked about seeing illness and feeling with illness exactly as how it is and to honor those feelings. And to really stand by and not necessarily apply these value judgments of whether it's good and necessary or bad, like it needs to be fixed and resolved. 

I'm wondering how this translates to how we perceive our larger chronic symptoms of climate change and more tumultuous weather events, because it seems like there is an urgency culture wanting to “fix” climate change, to medicalize it in a way and focus on carbon levels of the equation without tending to the underlying relational severances and wounds that those imbalances really represent.

So what does it mean to see and feel our planet's pains and traumas for what they are, while also not falling into defeatism or, like you said earlier, accepting that this is just how things are going to be?

Sophie Strand: Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. It's so important.

I’ll start by saying that we have this weird idea that we are the smartest species on this planet, when we are one of the most juvenile species.

We are no horseshoe crabs who have made it through the bottleneck of multiple extinctions. We don’t have much wisdom on deep time and how climate collapse happens, and the dynamic homeostasis of the biosphere.

We are young, we are like two years old when it comes to a species. And so it's crazy to think that we would be the ones with a solution. I think it's important for me to reframe what is happening in terms of the climate and weather as an adequate response to what we're doing. And that the solution to the problem is very often part of the problem, which is what Bayo Akomolafe says very wisely. Who are we to think that we are going to be able to think our way out of this?

I have oftentimes been thinking about AA, and 12-step programs in terms of climate collapse, which is like how we're all addicts of this culture. And oftentimes in 12-step programs, people say, “Our best thinking got us here.” And I think our best thinking got us here. And our best thinking will not get us out of it.

Radical humility and listening to other species who have been here for a lot longer, and are dynamically attuned to fluctuations of the climate, before we immediately begin to techno-solutionize everything, would probably be a good approach.

I've been thinking about what the climate is doing as a kind of storytelling, you know? The frame I use in the book, The Body is a Doorway, is Scheherazade, who's in this adrenaline-fueled storytelling event where the king kills the woman he marries every night after he marries her. So she tells these stories night after night.

It becomes the 1,001 Nights of the Arabian Tales in an attempt to convince him to keep her alive. So it's storytelling as an emergency, as a life-saving event. And I've been thinking of these floods, these temperature fluctuations, all of these different shifting atmospheric events as being a type of adrenaline-fueled storytelling, an emergency. You know, it's trying to get our attention. 

We need to act. We need to interrupt this ecocidal culture, but we also need to not try and solutionize it so we can continue our extractive behavior. I feel like so much of the way we are looking at climate is about our narrow window of habitability. You know, what's good for us? What's good for the Earth may not ultimately be good for us. And we need to de-center this hierarchy that puts our species on top of everything.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, two things come up for me here. And maybe we can go at this one by one to make it simpler. But I find it really fascinating when you talk about how different yoga positions change the form of the body to be receptive to different things. And so you say similarly, maybe the wounds of the chronically ill are uniquely shaped to see and feel the chronic illness of the planet in certain ways. 

And here I also think about how in dominant discourses on climate change, people often label the most affected communities as the most vulnerable. And my sort of reframe in that is that these are communities who are actually the most in tune with the symptoms and the language of the planet. So not the most vulnerable, not the victims needing to be saved, but needing to be listened to. 

So I just want to invite you to expand on the shapes and forms of our sensitivity and receptivity, and what it means to become more literate as you've been talking about in the language of the more-than-human world.

Sophie Strand: Absolutely.

We live in a culture that does not like discomfort. We will try and medicate away or explain away any discomfort, and this is not necessarily a good thing. 

Discomfort is often the threshold we have to step through to feel.

I always talk about the metaphor of you're sitting on your foot, it falls asleep. It's not good that it's asleep. You need it to wake back up, but there are the pins and needles that you have to get through to access feeling. And we have cut ourselves off from our body, from the Earth. We are in a dissociated state in terms of our species.

The threshold we need to probably get through is one of discomfort. So we're going to have to get better at doing that. And the people who will have advice on how to deal with discomfort are people who have non-consensually been invited into it, sick people, people who have chronic pain, and psychic anguish. People who have been with really hard things will have information on how to hold those shapes.

To what you were saying about the yoga shapes, there is an understanding in many, many different cultures that the body, movements of the body can move energy in such a way that we access different psychological states. And the soma holds memories, it holds trauma, and if we move our body, we can move our emotional wellbeing. And we can sometimes see things differently.

And so I think people who are sick are forced to hold positions that no one normally would want to hold. And when they hold those positions, they feel and see things that other people don't see. And so I think this is a time to go to those communities that are responding, those people who are sensitive and say, “How do we do this? How do we stay with this? How do we feel this and not run away from it?”

I really love that reframe about vulnerability because I actually think a responsive body is a healthy body.

A body that actually gets sick and lets you feel the sickness is a body that is good at saying, “Something is wrong, we need to respond to it.”  

And so, we oftentimes think that people who don't react to pesticides or chemicals are probably disadvantaged. You know, they're not going to limit their exposure. They're also not going to think about how it's affecting the birds or the bees outside. A small example is last summer, when we had wildfires in my area for the first time. And there were also wildfires all across the U.S., and so we had tons of smoke in the area and days where the sky was flat and grey and the air quality was horrible

I have very bad lung issues, and I'm very, very sensitive to these things. And I got sick, and I had to stay indoors. And when I was inside, I was looking outside at the birds. And I was like, how are they handling this with their small lungs, and what does it feel like, they're outside all day? They have no air conditioning. They're in smoke all the time. 

I think that oftentimes the pain that we're feeling when we are more sensitive or more attuned to this is an invitation to connection with other beings who are at the front line, who are getting polluted, who are dying, they are the canaries in the coal mine.

Kaméa Chayne: Right. Yeah. I mean, this system very much wants people to desensitize and wants people to become numb to a lot of these very important signs and symptoms and the language of the land. 

And on that front as well, the last time we spoke, we talked a lot about the transition from oral culture to written culture, and how that changed people's relationship with the world, and calcified our relationship with knowledge in a lot of ways.

I'm also curious about storytelling beyond the oral, because even before or at the time of the oral culture, there's a lot of other forms of storytelling going on as well that are beyond what is spoken and intellectualized. 

So I would invite you to also bring that in as well.

Sophie Strand: Yeah.

I always say that humans did not invent stories. We were born into them. I always think that storytelling is just movement. 

Movement happens wherever there's a gradient, be that a chemical gradient, a chemo-sensing bacteria moving towards sugar, be that the gradient between a mountain summit in the valley that drives the rainwater down into a river. Wherever there's friction and gradient and movement, there's story for me. 

We've become so illiterate that the world is filled with voices, and we have tuned them all out, and we have forgotten how to read them and how to hear them. We think of ourselves as so literate, and yet we are the least literate version of ourselves we've ever been. And I do think it's really important to begin to learn how to listen to these other stories again. The slow ones, you know, the story of a place over 30 years, the story of a river, the story of a species that's going extinct.

Those are stories, even if they happen at a pace that is not necessarily anthropocentrically keyed.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and I think I tend to do this as an over-thinker, but when I come across something, I'm always asking, what is the lesson here? Like, what can I learn from this? What is it trying to tell me?

But maybe sometimes the message requires us to return over and over again because the story is much larger than that pixelated moment. 

Sophie Strand: Maybe we'll never know. I oftentimes think we're also so good at imagining ourselves as the protagonist, and sometimes we're a side character, mostly we are, who will never see the conclusion or get the lesson. Oftentimes, when I have animal encounters, I'm like, this is not necessarily for me. It's not a symbol. It's not a sign.

I am acting as part of a story that’s so much bigger than me, and I just have to be honored that I was invited in for an act.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, or maybe I was called here to become a lesson for the squirrel that just ran by, because they were the main character and they needed a lesson to have a human being right here in this particular moment. 

Sophie Strand: Yeah, we're all the side characters in other species stories.

Kaméa Chayne: That's a beautiful reframe. I want to pivot a little bit and go more into uncleanliness, and dirtiness, and impurity, which are big themes in your book, from how different cultures might deem certain sources of food as unclean and off-limits for consuming, and those stories actually help to play a role in conserving their overall biome, to again, illnesses being looked at as impure, or also our culture's lack of relationship with our excrements or waste and decay. 

And you have a lot of interesting musings on waste that I'm curious to deepen into because it's also been a part of my personal ponderings of like, is waste just a matter of perspective and where we're coming from? For example, when people categorize fungi as decomposers who break down decay and make them more available for other beings as nutrients, I’m like, I do that too.

I break down the decay of what I'm eating into simpler parts in my excrements and then make those things more available to other beings who see my excrements as food. And I do that while I'm also recomposing my body the same way that the mycelium is decomposing while recomposing itself. So then in a sense, wonder, aren't we all decomposers and recomposers? 

And it's not so much about waste, which suggests a sort of linear path, but maybe more so just a re-entanglement of everything.

Sophie Strand: Absolutely, everything you just said. I love that reframe of us as being both decomposers and recomposers. I think that a healthy food web is one where every being's waste is another being's food. And that nothing is not transformed. That one being's poop is another being's food. That's how it works. 

And as a culture, we have become remarkably abstract from our actual waste. We flush it away. We don't know where it goes. We think of ourselves, we think of it as being separate from us. We're not responsible for it. We offload our pollution, our waste ideologically and physically, onto other communities that didn't produce it. We are not good members of a food web. And I think that we have to get better, like really practically, at understanding how to fit our waste into other beings' appetites, how to enter back into that metabolic conversation. 

And I think metabolism is a really important metaphor for me. I think it's like, it is the material reincarnation of the universe. Everything is eating and transforming. To stop eating is to stop becoming. We’re constantly rebuilding ourselves and excreting. It’s a way of communing with other beings.

So, I think it's very important to become better participants in our food web, figuring out, like…

I oftentimes say, I think the most sacred thing you could do is figure out where your shit goes. Where does your trash go? Where does your real shit go? And what does that mean? Who’s responsible for it?

But also to go to your first comment about appetites, we're very good at consuming and not very good at excreting. And we turn everything into calories. We turn even the most undigestible biota, grain grass, into calories. We digest everything. And almost no other species does that. We eat something, and we let other beings eat other things. 

And food taboos in other cultures are oftentimes ways of honoring, I think, the fact that we are not allowed to eat everything. There are fruits in the garden that we are not allowed to eat. And I think that if we're going to be better participants in the food web, we are going to have to learn how to eat and excrete with more care.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and allowing for more mess throughout the whole process too, because like you said, our attempts at cleanliness or trying to purify or streamline the process of everything, like monocultures, to just extract the product. 

Sophie Strand: So much more waste!

Kaméa Chayne: And then with our sewage systems, it's all compiled into one funnel, one place, and then there are these massive wastewater treatment plants that are sanitising everything and not allowing the food to become food to nourish the soils.

Sophie Strand: Our ideas about purity are always the dirtiest thing. I mean, the joke is always, as someone who's often in a hospital, is the dirtiest place you can go is to a hospital. Because they're using intense, intense antimicrobials to clean everything, and they breed these super, super resistant bacteria and fungi. Because they're killing off and self-selecting these intense microbes.

And I think oftentimes, and the same with monocropping, when we kill off pathogens again and again, we select the most virulent ones.

So, oftentimes our ideas about cleanliness create our villains.

Kaméa Chayne: I see this overarching invitation coming through, which is to follow our waste and where it goes. And then also to follow our food and maybe the community that helps to make that possible. 

Sophie Strand: Yeah, I mean, there's no pure diet. Like, I'm a person who's very, very sick. And, I always say that to have a moral diet is to be privileged with an able body, you know? That, oftentimes, the decisions we make about our diet are just about trying to stay alive. So I think it's important to complicate that. But I do think that we can become more responsible about where our food is grown, who grows it, and who was harmed in the process of making it

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, human and more-than-human, always.

And I also want to deepen into the concept of listening a little bit more as we're starting to wind down. Listening to our bodies, listening to other bodies, listening to the bodies of the more-than-human world and what they're asking for. I think there's a really, it's a really important time to lean into these invitations. And I think my question rests in this acknowledgement that our bodily pleasures, desires, and cravings are culturally and environmentally shaped and are also continually shapeable. 

So like, the idea of what feels good to me and restorative for me and makes me feel alive is so different from my grandma, who grew up in a big city and is scared, honestly, of places that are more quote-unquote wild.

So maybe this takes us back to the foundations of what healing means and what we're healing towards. But how do we root ourselves and know what to orient ourselves towards if the desires and senses of vitality of our bodies and the land are constantly changing?

Sophie Strand: Such a good question. And I don't think there's any solid answer. I think there's a verbing into that question. 

I think there's no pre-cultural self. We arrive in this complicated paradigm, and it shapes us. And so I think, you know, I'm writing an eco-romantisies right now. I'm looking a lot at the history of romance and how we oftentimes critique women's desire, because it oftentimes queers or responds to domination or problematic paradigms. 

But rather than trying to get rid of them, what if we investigate with them and compost them? And so something I'm interested in right now is desire.

We’re in a culture where if someone doesn’t know what they want, the culture will give you its own desires. It will make you an instrument of what it wants.

And I think a radical thing we can do is start to get really, really clear about what gets us off. And I don't mean that sexually. I mean, it could be sexual, but I mean, where do you find your flow state? What are you oriented towards? What do you really love?

Because I think if you go towards that, you're going to become more radical, and you're going to become better at listening. And we're all going to have a different place we need to go and a different lighthouse we need to sail towards. But I think that our desire is a powerful compass.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and also an important reminder, maybe, is to become more attuned to what we're addicted to. As in, sometimes I wake up and the first thing I do just on autopilot, I'm reaching for my phone. And the phone is very much an addiction. So even though I might have the desire to reach for my phone right away, that's not necessarily something that is the most life-affirming for me. So to kind of lean into those nuances as well.

Sophie Strand: You know, Anne Carson would say, I've been reading Sweet Bitter, her book about desire, and she would say there's a difference between craving and desire. A craving is often a cultural artefact, and it's something you can satisfy immediately, and then it's unsatisfied. It's this constant: you want it, you do it, it lasts for a second, you want it again.

A desire is something that is never achieved. It's yearning for yearning, desire for desire. It's more movement towards it. It's a gesture.

How does filling up my life with craving not leave enough space open for my actual desires? 

And how can I begin to look at picking up the phone and then maybe taking a long walk, which is actually going to bring me closer to myself?

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, thank you. I love that so much I want to delve more into that. As we come towards the end of our conversation, I want to read this quote from you: “Aliveness necessitates movement, which necessitates mistakes and glitches. It's not about achieving wholeness, it's about change. The species that stop adapting die when the environment changes, and the environment is always changing.”

So this kind of sums up a lot of what we were talking about today. And I think when you talk about our glitches, it's not just our kind of genetic mutations through evolution, but glitches at every single level. And it makes me think about how maybe we're experiencing a sort of systemic and collective glitching out from the past century or so, with the extractive systems that certain cultures have created that are now kind of taking over, and that kind of being a glitch itself.

But what is it that determines what sorts of glitching out stay? And what other glitches eventually get rendered as just a glitch in time that doesn't necessarily line up meeting other glitches of the time. In other words, maybe the question is, how do we continue glitching towards a return to each other?

Sophie Strand: Glitching towards a return to each other. I love that as the title. I think glitches that destroy entire species, that kill people, that steal people's land, steal other beings' land, that make food impossible for other beings to eat, that hoard biodiversity, those are not the glitches I want to accept or move towards [laughs]. 

I think the funny glitches… I think I want to be in a comedy. I don't want to be in a tragedy. I want to learn how to write a happy ending. And I think the glitches that make us a little embarrassed and that show our hearts to each other are the ones I want to feel into. I’m interested in the glitches that are relationship-building. 

I'm just thinking about, when you're in a new relationship with someone, and someone gets food poisoning [laughs]. You know, it's a rite of passage. It's horrible, and embarrassing. All of your carefully tailored ways of being with each other go out the window. It is nasty. But after that, after that glitch, you know each other a lot better and you're more intimate with each other, and if the relationship's gonna last, you know it. 

And I think that the glitches like that that create laughter and create intimacy are the ones I'm interested in. But to pull back a little further, we cannot see the end of the story because it is so far outside of our comet streak lives. And I think that humility is also important to acknowledge. I think a glitch today that could look like a terminal illness could be perhaps adaptive in the climate of 100,000 years from now, but there's no way of knowing it.

I oftentimes say to people who are really, really sick right now, “You are on the front line of evolution, and it is the scariest and most creative place to be.”

And a lot of people don't survive it.

// musical intermission //

Kaméa Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read lately, or publications you follow?

Sophie Strand: Thanks. Right off the top of my head, Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta. And I read it because I saw that you were reading it.

Kaméa Chayne: I actually got to interview him on that and that episode will probably publish right before this one. So I'm excited.

Sophie Strand: I'm so excited. Just a side note, I love your writing so much. I love everything you reference, and it is just an intimate and important part of my compost heap. So, thank you so much. 

Kaméa Chayne: This is so mutual. Always very moved and shifted and stretched by your writing and work as well.

What is a motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Sophie Strand: I summon by name every being, be it ancestral, insect, microbe, imaginary, author who died in a 20-mile radius of my house every morning, just to kind of feel that deep ancestral pulse, and to feel my extended web of support. And also know that the decisions I make are going to affect this whole web of beings.

So I summon everyone from the ghost pipe that I mentioned to the limestone that was destroyed by settlers and used to build New York City, but was considered sacred by the Indigenous people here, to my friend who died, who lived in the house that I lived in previously.

Kaméa Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Sophie Strand: Oh, that's a good question. 12-year-old girls.

Kaméa Chayne: Specifically? [Laughs]

Sophie Strand: No, really. This is like a powerful age and a powerful… the archetype of the 12-year-old girl. I've been going to the local bookstore to get… I'm reading and writing YA romance and fantasy, and sci-fi. And I think that some of the most critical, difficult readers who have high expectations are 12-year-old girls. 

You know, they know when you are not being genuine. They know when you are half-assing it. And they are, right before, they're still feral. They have so much erotic life force. They're so funny. They're amazing. So whenever I go to the bookstore to pick up a pile of these books to read as reference, there's a young girl probably in seventh grade, and she's looking through the books, she's putting them down, and I always say, “What are you reading?” And she gives me a recommendation, and those are the people I want to write for.

Kaméa Chayne: I love that. Thank you so much. Well, we are coming to a close here, but Sophie, it's always an honor to be in conversation with you. I'm feeling so enriched by this conversation and looking forward to just sitting with everything that we talked about today even more. 

But as we close off, where can people further support your work and find your book? And what closing words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as Green Dreamers?

Sophie Strand: First off, this was such a delight. Thank you. Thank you for all you do. You can find me online on Instagram at Cosmogyny. I have a Substack. I try and offer a lot for free on it. It's called Make Me Good Soil, sophiestrand.substack.com. And if you want more intimate updates and book lists, you can become a paid subscriber, but as someone who's been a starving artist, it's very important to me to also offer a lot for free. 

My books are out there. You can get them on ThriftBooks online. You can, I always encourage people to get them from local bookstores. I love local bookstores. Yeah, all I have to share is that I'm just really happy to be here today. It's been a hard couple of years, and I think every time I come full cycle, I talk to someone whom I haven't talked to in a long time, I just feel profoundly grateful that I'm still here.

Kaméa Chayne: Beautiful. And any closing words of guidance for our green dreamers that you'd like to leave?

Sophie Strand: Yeah, go say hi to your neighbor. If your neighbor is the person you see at the coffee shop, if it's the person who lives across from you, I don't know, whatever that word means to you, go introduce yourself to your neighbor. Very simple.

 
kaméa chayne

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Tyson Yunkaporta: Shifting from ‘health & wellness’ to communities of care (Ep453)