S2E13: Dealing With Loss

Uncorrected Transcript

[0:00] 90 Miles from Needles is brought to you by generous support from people just like you.
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Hey y'all, thanks for joining us here at 90 Miles from Needles.
I'm Chris. And I'm Alicia.
And we are sitting under a giant boulder, sort of like slugs, in a sun-washed canyon And somewhere in the Mojave Desert, that is an extremely important place to a lot of tribes, we're going to not say exactly where it is.
It's really easy to find if you do a little research. We've come here in part because it has been a while since we put out a podcast.
It's been a little over a month.
It's longer than we like to go. And all I can say is our lives have been pretty complicated.
There's a lot of stuff going on for me at work.
Some of it extremely rewarding, other pieces of it not so much.

[1:03] And then Alicia has been having some interesting times in her life as well.
I've been going through a divorce.
My cat died.
I moved. My whole life is upside down.
But it's really good to come to this place. There's just this sense of surpassing calm underneath the buzzing of the flies and the The flies are flying, and the rocks are rocking, and the cacti are cacti-ing.
And whatever you brought with you falls away at the gates when you pass through. Yep.

[1:36] Music.

[2:05] Hey, here we are back in the studio. You might be wondering why we went all the way out to Southern Nevada to record some audio on what has been bringing us down lately.
And there are two reasons for that.
One is that this episode of the podcast is pretty late, because we have been living complicated lives.
And it's a way of explaining to you what's been going on and why you haven't had a podcast episode in the last month.
But also, with all the bad news that is following us wherever we go, we have instant access these days to all the bad news of the world in our pockets at all times.
We're all gonna be grieving something, whether that is news out of the Middle East, or news out of Ukraine, or news out of Arizona, conversion of landscapes into shopping malls or parking lots or solar facilities or lithium mines or whatever it may be, we're going to have to figure out how to navigate this kind of feeling and continue to function if we're going to do anything about making sure the world stays as livable as possible for us people and all the critters and plants that we share this planet with.

[3:21] Way to wrap it all up, Chris. I don't know. I just feel like we're getting further and further from recognizing the importance of going to nature.
With all of these other pressing issues in the world, it's so easy to just forget about signing that petition or, getting in the car and taking your dogs to that favorite dog-friendly trail.
And the world can just slow you down into a literal state that they call dorsal vagal where you are dissociating because life is just too overwhelming.
And all you can do is scroll or watch TV or eat, just shut down.
And that's something that I feel like we just can't ignore in society anymore.
It's something that we're all facing with just the state of our society and the world.
And we often face that in our own personal lives.
And going out into nature is therapeutic. It is healing.
It is, to me, necessary to survive the stress of life, to have that place to go.

[4:32] So many places to go. I feel so blessed living in such an expansive patch of desert that has been fiercely fought for and protected.
And there it is for me to just run away to whenever I just need to balance my chemicals.
I'm sorry, what did you say? I was dissociating. Mm-hmm.
Grief is tied into our work advocating for the conservation of desert lands because on a very surface level, there's, it seems, a lot more battles lost than won.
And what do we do when we suffer that grief? We always return to nature, philosophically, literally, figuratively, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Yeah, I'm reminded of something that David Brower used to like to say.
And for those of our listeners who are under age 30, David Brower is somebody I used to work with who was a famous environmentalist and look him up.
He wasn't a perfect guy, but he was pretty inspiring.
But he used to say that the problem with working on the environment is that our victories are always temporary and our losses are always permanent.

[5:44] When you think about all the different ways in which the desert is threatened, it can be really overwhelming and you can forget that you have occasional victories just because the scale of the work that needs to be done is so big.
And that's really one of the things that has been immobilizing me lately.
This is probably as good a time to mention as any that I have given notice at my day job.
The amount of threats to the desert is just staggering and disconcerting, and I needed to not live in it.

[6:19] In that stream of bad news 24-7-365 anymore. Still going to be working on bad news, because this is a journalistic enterprise here, this podcast.
But we can at least shape the way that we talk about the bad news to emphasize what you can do about each of these issues that we bring.
That's going off down a rabbit hole a little bit. What I'm trying to say is that doom scrolling leads to heart attacks and strokes and yelling at your dog.
It's just not a healthy way to live. We need to know what's going on in the world.
And it's easier than ever to know what's going on in the world.
So we also need to know when to tune out.
The hardest part about grief and a lot of the topics that we're covering in this episode is that it all boils down to change.
And humans really struggle with change. It's scary. We're anxious of it happening.
When it comes, we reprogramming and reorienting and recovering and moving on.
There's so much involved in change. And how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?
An elephant like that, you don't eat all at once.

[7:30] I don't know. Somehow change always drives innovation. Change drives growth.
Change is a very powerful force. And when change comes, you're best to heed the call.
We are in a position where we are losing entire landscapes.
And that can cause grief, it can cause shock, it can cause dislocation of the way you see yourself in your life.
That's certainly what I've been feeling about the Dome Fire and the York Fire that followed it.
Burning one of the most beautiful places in my life.
One of the most important places to me in my life story. And this is a landscape that is not accustomed to fire.
So it is going to be forever changed by that fire.
But it isn't just about wild landscapes or even literal landscapes that we're talking.
We can be talking about the loss of a place.
Some of the losses you've had recently, that is the same thing.
Basically, it could be a landscape of picturing yourself living with a cat for more years than you got.
Could be a landscape of how you pictured your life would go.
For me, I adore quite a few different philosophies, but.

[8:45] And they helped me get through stuff like that. But the most powerful piece of advice that I use is the last vestige of our freedom is to choose how we react to any given set of circumstances.

[8:59] It is where freedom lies. It is so easy to blame our pain on the state of war or the world or whatever. But right there deep down inside of us is when my cat disappeared, I did everything I could to find her but you've got to use your inner strength. I don't even know what I'm trying to say but it's to not let something destroy you. To not let your pain take away your will to live, your will to eat, your will to function.
It's the greatest triumph that we can overcome in grief and it applies to everything. How we decide to respond and I'm gonna respond with love because love is to me it seems humans love to commodify things and love is one of those things that you can't put a price on. It's free and it's priceless. It's the most valuable thing on earth. Balm for the soul. And my love for nature is a balm when I go there.
Give me that serotonin. Give me those endorphins because I need them now.
Well said. Why don't we head back out to a week ago and that beautiful canyon where we sat and discussed things and hear a little bit more of what came to mind then.
Let's get back on trail.

[10:21] Music.

[10:52] It's really good to come to this place. There's just this sense of surpassing calm underneath the buzzing of the flies and the bees. The flies are flying and the rocks are rocking and the cacti are cacti-ing. And whatever you brought with you falls away at the gates when you pass through.
Yep. At least that's how it felt for me. I feel like this is something we're getting further and further away from as a people, as society pushes us into, productive terraformed environments where we're just cogs in a machine.
This is part of the cycle to be here. This space has been devalued by colonial attitudes, capitalistic attitudes.
If there isn't something to extract or exploit here, then what value does it have? And.

[11:52] In times of grief, in times of joy, in times of contemplation, in times of sadness, in times of celebration, there's nowhere I'd rather be. It feels so good here.
Nature provides. It is in us to be drawn to places like this. Our minds have electric energy, our hearts have magnetic energy, and so do the rocks, so does the water, so does this earth.
Everything in this space we're in now feels so natural and easy. The body responds.

[12:40] There's something so spookily calming about this place.
It's like a knowing and a feeling. You know this place is special.
It's been made apparent for a lot of different reasons.
You don't need all the signs that thousands of years of humans have left to see the water source, the grape vines, the shade, the bounty of everything else that's growing in this area and then that feeling of calmness you know I'm not I mean I'm calm today but I still feel a lot of emotional turmoil and even my tears dried up way, quicker out here than they did in the car I don't know there's something that feels really good here and I don't need to have an explanation why so can you Can you see so clearly how that boulder unplugged from that spot?

[13:41] Yep. I'm going to guess that that joint would have been receiving a lot of different, or a couple, and then it started working down that face and then created a perforation and, just let's go.
That's what that looks like to me.
We often feel like that's so permanent, the boulders around us, or it takes eons for them to get the way they are. And that's true, but only once has one of my regular routes had a big chunk of rock just move suddenly. It's like the one time it was there and the next time I showed up it had slid down canyon. And I just think it's the coolest thing to get to see some of that action in action.
I like that cliff collapse at Black's Beach. When was that, last year?
Growing up in San Diego that was a regular occurrence, bus-sized chunks of glyph coming down, but that...

[14:41] I am so grateful that we can record events because that's not something you want to hear about, you want to see. It was epic and the likelihood that I'm ever going to be in the right place at the right time for a boulder to on its own go sliding down, so rare. And I'm not going to be the one who nudges it either because that doesn't count. I have to say that thinking about that kind of thing in the larger scale of time than we are used to seeing the scale of time in which these boulders are basically liquid and flowing downhill.
Right.
That's also a really good thing to think about it if you're, I don't know, mourning the loss of almost 100,000 acres that burned up.
The York Fire has taken out almost 100,000 acres of Mojave Desert.
It will grow back in one form or another, but it won't be the way it was.
And I haven't even really dealt with the impact of the 2020 Dome Fire.
And here's one more than twice as big already.
Imagining that, yeah, that used to be a volcano field. Yeah.

[15:56] It was all on fire at once and devoid of life. There used to be camels and saber-toothed cats and ground sloths and cave bears and American lions walking around in there.
Don't forget about the American cheetah. And the cheetahs, yep.
Because that apex predator is where our beloved pronghorn developed its speed.
Yep. I thought that was the most interesting scientific story at the time, that they sorted that out.
Like, why can it run so fast?
Why did it need to develop the skill set to run 60 miles an hour?
How cool that their predator went extinct and they got to keep going.
Lucky. They still have predators, though.
Yeah, it's like an orphan trait.
Like what people say with Joshua tree fruit and seed dispersal in a sloth, even though, it's conjecture. Right.
Conjecture that makes a lot of sense, you know? All these things that are evidence of times extremely long ago by our normal everyday human standards.

[17:07] Like 12,000 years at a minimum. And I don't know, it's a weird kind of consolation to think of myself as a spark, that doesn't last very long compared to the rocks and the, hell, even some of the plants.
It means that the stuff I'm sad about is also just a spark. Well, that's where I come back to, from a spirituality standpoint, that we're all made of the same matter.
Anything, any matter that you miss, or any matter that matters to you, it matters, all our matter matters together because we are the same matter.
I am made up of the same material as those rocks, that's why I love them so much.
For me that seems to be the connection, but you don't have to feel that way for this to be true. It's true.
We're all made of universe recycled material. The word isylem, Y-L-E-M, that's the technical term, for the recycled matter of the universe that we're all made up of.

[18:09] And this guy, fucking growing right out of a rock.
In apparently permanent shade. It's on the north face of the boulder.
Of course, that might not be a bad thing around here. We've seen some beautiful examples of persistence in the face of adversity today.
Yeah. On our walk in the wash earlier, that little three-foot section of root rope coming out of the side of the bank and the plant still alive, hanging there like a glory bell, all decorated with flowers.
It's a wonderful reminder that if you can keep on, keep on keeping on.

[18:51] Another thing that nature really helps me to see all the time is, you know, starting over again.
Everything has to start over again. And I feel like our minds get in the way of how easy it really is. We tend to kid ourselves and think, oh, it's so hard.
You have to start all over again.
No matter what that situation is that you're starting over from, that's a real challenge.
But out here, I'm constantly reminded, so what if it takes a decade?
That's how long it takes, and that's okay, Because life is a coming, you know?
And that's, it can be painfully reassuring when you think about the decade, Mark, like the Saguaros, like the tortoise. They take a decade to get anywhere meaningful to survive.
An inch of growth, a hard shell, and reproductive rights. You've gotta wait, and you might not make it, and that's just the way it is.
And that's just the way it is.
And hey, you might make it, and you might turn into an icon of the desert.

[20:03] I feel like I've been swimming in bad memories for a while now. It's exhausting.
But here I don't feel like I'm treading water. I feel like I'm out of the water.

[20:20] I'm sitting, I don't want to say I'm sitting on the beach because that sounds entirely way too pleasant but this is pretty pleasant having a hard-boiled egg picnic out in the desert with little buddy. Yeah. Talking about life and the stars just about as good as it gets really no matter what you had to swim through to get here. Had a couple of good moments today but I'm not feel like I'm really running running circles around this grief issue. Just kind of not getting too close you know. Yeah as you try and figure out how to live your life with the grief being part of it you don't want to be stuck in it all the time you also don't want to ignore it. No there's a lot of generational trauma in every family well maybe not every family but that we overlook so easily what our ancestors went through to get to where we are today and the way that those things get passed down and shape our worldview without our knowledge. We're just certain ways because that's the way our family is. And I feel like there's a real loss to the connection of family. When I was growing up, it...

[21:36] Classic teenagers, you know, didn't...teenagers didn't want to have anything to do with their parents.
They didn't want to learn about their parents, didn't care what their parents did.
You know, had their own ideas about, you know, kids growing up on the farm and wanting to run away to the city.
You know, it was very clear to me, you know, we have this choice.
We don't have to do what we're told. We can do whatever we want.
And then as an adult now, I see that that's one of the breakdowns that has prevented the transfer.

[22:07] Of that generational knowledge. We're not on the farm, we're not in our traditional places, our roles where we got our names, those jobs are long gone, you know, our trades, everything that, made us who we are today is kind of, in the last few generations, kind of just morphed rather quickly. Yeah. That disconnect, there's a lot of grief for me in that because I know that I have very strong family connections to earth and to to life on earth. And there were so many times in the last decade that I just wished I could talk to a grandparent because I know my mom's mom would have been great when I was struggling to raise the young German shepherds or, you know, working with horses many years ago, it was like, God, I wish she was around so I could ask her what she would do. Whether I would do that or not doesn't matter. To have access to that knowledge. We're having children later, so parents and grandparents are dead and gone by the time kids are, like, everything is breaking down to keep that verbal, oral passing down is fading. It's really tragic that we can't read ourselves to discover what connections we have ancestrally, what.

[23:28] Specificities we have. What it really boils down to is what our gifts are. What we can give. If you don't understand what you can give, how can you give anything? And that can leave you feeling so fucking empty. Very empty. I don't know. Rant over. Joint lit.
I guess what we're saying is there's good news even if you're having a shitty time in your life.
There are ways you can help yourself by going outside. If you're the kind of person that likes being outside, just remember to do it.
Whether it's in the desert or the redwood forest or the...

[24:08] Beaches along the gulf coast Getting outside couldn't hurt, Unless you're here in the desert and it's August, That'll hurt that could hurt But even having an experience like that, I don't know. Maybe maybe it's maybe it's too much to say, You should go do this because maybe it doesn't work for everybody, but it certainly works for me. I.

[24:32] Think it's safe to say that nature is healing, nature is grounding, nature is soothing, just the sound of it, the colors of it, just a practice of sitting on a bench and looking at a view and observing those beautiful green shrubs, the beautiful tan expired blossoms. You don't have to know what anything is. You can just appreciate the colors and that is good for your brain.
It is good for your body. All your cells vibrate differently when in nature.
They are happy here whether you are aware of it or not. The city is agitating to your cells whether you realize it or not. You can love it. You can love being agitated that's real but yeah just listening to it and looking at it you don't even have to interact too hard I believe that it is healing and it is, soothing and it's good for the body it's good for the soul even if you don't like, it yeah I think having a practice like that where you sit down and just say alright I'm just gonna enjoy the colors what colors do I see that I like it's, It's gonna be hard to be a brat to yourself.
Like, I don't do anything that I like. You know, who does?

[26:01] Music.

[27:26] Okay, we promised you some news about the podcast. We formed a non-profit organization to be a home for the podcast. It is the Desert Advocacy Media Network.
Damn!
The acronym is DELIBERATE. And we also have made some changes in our own work lives that are going to free up more time to work on this. We look forward to the next year. We're going to do some amazing work. Going to get on the road and do some recording on location in places like the Four Corners, or Southern Arizona, or Northern Nevada.
We're coming for you, Utah.
We need your help.

[28:02] We are building something pretty great, and we would love it if you would join us. The Desert Advocacy Media Network has so much work to do, and we can't do it alone. Join us by email, by Patreon, by GiveButter, voice messages, podcast episode suggestions, music contributions, whatever strikes your fancy. If you want to jump on board and help us out, we're really open to hearing all of the ways you would love to help us.
We want to build this organization into the place that is the first place you think of checking when you want to find out what's going on in the desert.
Wouldn't it be great if there was just a place where you knew you could find information on everything that was going on in the desert? Not only a compendium of current events, but a permanent resource site.
If we're going to do the job we want to do, it's going to be at least a halftime gig, probably more. And it's just not sustainable to do that without having a budget to allow us to be able to eat and pay rent or mortgage and just keep going on with our lives. Please check us out. 90milesfromneedles.com slash donate. If you decide you want to raise funds for us on your birthday on Facebook, you can do that.
Just search for Desert Advocacy Media Network when you set up a fundraiser and it'll come to us.
We're going to do great things. We are going to change the world with this podcast and you are going to help us do it.

[29:30] Music.

[30:33] Rohini Walker is a desert expatriate from the UK who is really reshaping the way a lot of people in this part of the desert at least think about things like history and race and colonialism and health and spirituality and she's just a marvelous person. We are lucky to have her as a friend and she has some thoughts about trauma and nature and healing from wounds of whatever kind physical, mental, emotional. And we wanted to share that with you.
Let's listen in.
Hi there, lovely listeners of 90 Miles from Needles. This is Rohini Walker in the high.

[31:18] Desert in Joshua Tree with a commentary on trauma as culture. For me, the working definition.

[31:27] Of trauma that's been the most clarifying is from the somatic therapeutic lens, that's from the body and sensation-based therapy. And this looks at trauma as our body's reaction to an incident rather than the incident itself. So when we're traumatized, our bodies become flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormones, which moves us and activates us into fighting, fleeing, or freezing. And the reflexive reaction of fawning or appeasing is also a trauma-induced response in response to relational threat. So the rush of these chemicals is experienced as an intense energetic charge through our nervous systems, including numbness, which is the presence of too much charge and overwhelm. These trauma responses and the mobilization of stress hormones serve an evolutionary purpose when our lives are in actual danger, like running from a predator or being robbed or surviving abuse or swerving out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. But they start causing disease and imbalance in our systems, collectively, individually, when they become chronic, when they become culturally normalized in our bodies.

[32:50] In our lives, and in society. We become traumatized when the impact of a trauma response, the energetic charge, isn't resolved and released from our bodies and systems sufficiently and.

[33:04] Remains frozen or sometimes inflamed in place, this eventually becomes an identity layer from which we start to operate in the world, especially if we experience an event that, evokes an uncomfortable feeling but is not actually threatening.

[33:22] So when this happens we end up having less capacity, less space for life. We're not in current time because physiologically and therefore unconsciously we're still looping on this stuck energetic charge of a past traumatic episode. Essentially we just haven't fully processed and integrated the experience and so on a biochemical level our bodies haven't realized that we've survived it. And when calcified trauma like this becomes the structure of identities, of beliefs and behaviors, and it's then unconsciously handed down from parent to child, it becomes ancestral and intergenerational, creating the cultural context and patterns of family life. Meanwhile, the artificial social, political and economic systems that we live in and are currently in the process of evolving out of, I hope, also emerge from millennia-old traumas of oppression, of enslavement, exploitation and genocide. One of the rawest wounds inflicted by these systems is belief in the lie, the maladaptive lie, that we're separate from nature.

[34:36] All of this ends up creating the dominant culture that we then become marinated in, a culture that's built by generation after generation of humans interpreting the world through the distortions of the trauma that's stuck in their bodies and in their nervous systems.

[34:54] From this, we then unconsciously again create our own beliefs, our own meanings about ourselves, the world, each other, which then unfold into our individual and collective experiences.

[35:08] When you look at animals in the wild, however, they instinctively know how to literally shake off the energetic charge after an event that caused a trauma response.
Observe a jackrabbit that's managed to escape from a coyote.
Once she's safely got away, she shakes her body to release the excess charge, and calmly goes on with her grazing.
Meanwhile, our cultures colonized us into deeply distrusting the wild wisdom of our beautiful animal bodies. From the earliest of ages we're taught to sit still, be good, not fidget and most certainly not shake or express any stuck charge or distressing emotion that needs to move through us. Our parents were taught the same and their parents were taught the same and the ones that came before them and so on. Trauma is not for repressing, for becoming unconsciously identified with and then creating our culture from. Trauma needs to be tended to, related to, and given the space to naturally resolve. It's a doorway, an opportunity, through which we can come to know ourselves as inextricably part of the weaving of nature.

[36:23] We can start doing this by just becoming curious. The next time you become reactive, say for instance, someone says no to you for a request that you have for them or you see something, on social media that triggers you, just notice what that feels like in your body.
And you don't need to judge it just start noticing the sensation, the constriction, the heat, the numbness if there's numbness, just start noticing what it feels like without judging it and just being curious and giving it the space to be there and this is a really powerful simple first step towards beginning to dismantle and dissolve trauma as culture in our bodies, in our psyches and in our lives.

[37:17] Music.

[38:04] That's it for this episode. we have in the pipeline include talking about desert bighorn sheep, talking to native experts on the Saguaro to find out how indigenous cultures in the desert relate to that queen of cacti. We're talking to someone who is combating the rise of poaching of reptiles based on social media posts.
And many more to come. Very likely, including episodes that you, our listenership, and our supporters and our our friends suggest to us.
This is not a two-person operation. It's got to have more people contributing, more shoulders up against that wheel if we're going to move things.
And we look forward to hearing from you.
If you are one of those people that likes to either talk on the phone or text people, you can do either of those to us at 760-392-1996. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you. See you next time. We love you.

[39:01] Music.

[41:05] Where'd you go? Up here.
You picked a spot in the sun, Chris? I just wanted a view for a second.
I don't even know what to do with you sometimes.