Tag Archives: nature

What are the lessons of wolves? I talk with cultural theorist and natural philosopher ERICA BERRY about what wolves have to teach us about being human on AEWCH 262!

30 Apr

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Friends,
This is the third episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways. Across these episodes, we’ll be considering the healing and connective powers of the void of space, terrifying encounters with predators, the development of the concept of nature, reflections on our own animalistic violence, the truth and complications of the scientific method itself, and the ways in which we connect at the tiniest layers of existence. These episodes are not “scientific” episodes per se, but they aren’t scientistic either. Each one is an exploration of what science can bring into our lives. 
The series started with AEWCH 260, on which I talked with Marjolijn van Heemstra about connecting with the expansiveness of space to understand the challenges we face today. And then on AEWCH 261, I talked with bear biologist and the Tooth & Claw podcast co-host Wes Larson about our fascination with animal attacks.

On this episode, we stay close to predators. But one in particular: The wolf.

The wolf is both living myth and skulking shadow in our imagination. It’s also a flesh and blood animal that uniquely relates to both space — in their range, and encroachment and disappearance from territories — and also time — in reintroduction strategies and old fears that we hold onto but don’t make sense today.

We can learn a lot from wolves if we allow ourselves to sit with what they rouse in us. One of our great wolf-contemplators is my guest on this episode: cultural theorist and nature writer ERICA BERRY  author of the excellent meditation on wolves and humans:
Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell about Fear.

This conversation reveals that focusing on one beast leads us into a whole ecology of thought. Erica and I discuss desire, violence, communication (with people and animals), the experience of non-humans, nonfiction, and more.

I’m so happy to offer this episode, and I hope you love it!

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The Tooth & Claw podcast meets Against Everyone with Conner Habib! I talk with Wes Larson about why people are fascinated by animal attacks on AEWCH 261!

23 Apr

LISTEN VIA SOUNDCLOUD ABOVE OR:  Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker

Dear friends: Does this podcast offer you inspiration?
If so, do support the show on patreon.

Give a one-time annual or monthly pledge to Patreon.com/connerhabib to connect to and give economic life to something you find value in. Thank you.

Also, please do subscribe to the show, give it a 5 star rating and warm review on Apple Podcasts.

You can also buy my novel Hawk Mountain (and give it 5 star rating and a positive review on Goodreads!)

Friends,
This is the second episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways. Across these episodes, we’ll be considering the healing and connective powers of the void of space, terrifying encounters with predators, the development of the concept of nature, reflections on our own animalistic violence, the truth and complications of the scientific method itself, and the ways in which we connect at the tiniest layers of existence. These episodes are not “scientific” episodes per se, but they aren’t scientistic either. Each one is an exploration of what science can bring into our lives. 
The first episode in the series was AEWCH 260, on which I talked with Marjolijn van Heemstra about connecting with the expansiveness of space to understand the challenges we face today.

This is a very different episode… and it’s about animal attacks!

It’s an exciting and interesting for me on many levels – not the least of which is that it’s with WES LARSON, wildlife biologist and co-host of one of the only podcasts I listen to on a regular basis, THE TOOTH AND CLAW PODCAST,  which he hosts with his brother Jeff Larson and their friend Mike Smith!
Every week is just a different horror show, where the guys tell a true story about animals attacking people. As a longtime listener,  I did have to ask myself, as any reasonable person would: Why am I so interested in animal attacks? Why is anyone, for that matter?

It stirred up, well, quite a bit actually! So Wes and I talk about all that and more at length.

I’ve got to say, I don’t often get a chance to talk with my favorite podcasters, so I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

Also: Be sure to support the The Tooth & Claw Podcast patreon. I’m a longtime patron myself!

BOOK LIST
Since Wes doesn’t have a book out yet, a few good books that tie into this episode are:

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Is nature spiritual? Listen to AEWCH 212 on How To Live: Beyond Nature Worship with legendary spiritual teacher, David Spangler!

31 Jan

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Friends,
Welcome to the How To Live Beyond series of eps on AEWCH! To open 2023, each episode in this series will consider a set of tools or way of thinking that are useful but that we’re ready to go beyond in 2023. We’ll be looking at abundance and manifestation, magick and entheogens, the wellness industry, and more. The first episode (AEWCH 208) featured Mitch Horowitz on How To Live: Beyond the New Age. The second (AEWCH 209) featured Lisa Romero on How To Live: Beyond Psychedelics & Sorcery. The third (AEWCH 210) featured Pilar Lesko on How To Live: Beyond Money Magic. And on the fourth (AEWCH 211), we went beyond wellness with Fariha Róisín.

These are the techniques and traditions we use to cope with and confront the challenges of our time, but risk –  if we can’t consider them deeply – getting us stuck in those challenges or worse, funneling their strengths back into those challenges. These episodes aren‘t a call to forget about these techniques and traditions, but instead a call to bring forward what they‘ve offered without the barbs of the problems they’re tangled up with.

This time:

Everywhere we turn, there are conversations of ecology and disaster, the environment and its needs, the planet’s and humanity’s shared future. If they are not purely materialistic conversations (and the majority are), they often offer only a shallow sense of the spiritual. People talk about “nature” as having its spiritual work removed from relationship with us, as if no more exploration into its actual spiritual orientation is needed. Or we have (some, not all, of course!) neo-pagan views that don’t go much further than translocating the names of old gods and onto the natural world. Or we have neo-primitivism and object oriented ontology which in which humans are supposed to somehow be de-centered, even though humans are the ones coming up with these concepts and pretending to the magically decenter themselves.

So how can we approach nature from a spiritual perspective? And how can we work with the being and being-ness in nature in a real way? For example, should we engage with the trees? The formative forces of the trees? The postmodern assemblage of “tree” or “becoming-tree?” The “dryads” in the trees? The tree gods? The “nature spirits”? We don’t have the taxonomy or the navigational aptitude to even know what we’re encountering, so how can we hope to know how to help?

So I invited David Spangler onto the show. David’s huge and generous body of work includes being the person who coined the term “New Age;” being a prime developer of the Findhorn Community in Scotland; popularizing the concept of manifestation as long ago as the 1970s; founding the Lorian Association, which helps people encounter the lessons developed by David and others on the path of Incarnational Spirituality, authoring many books (including the one we touch on the most here, Techno-elementals); and more.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO
I went into the exploration of fairies (particularly fairies in Ireland), and why we don’t take them seriously enough, with anthropologist Dennis Gaffin on AEWCH 187.

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
Although David does some of the best work expressing the many different kinds of elemental beings, for a one of the greatest expressions of how the elemental beings intermingle, no one to my mind does it in plainer, easier-to-udnerstand language than Cypriot healer Daskalos. I recorded an episode of the show – AEWCH 67 – with one of Daskalos’s students, Daniel Joseph. His book, Swimming with the Whale: The Miracles, Wonders & Healings of Daskalos & The Researchers of Truth is very helpful in this area.

MORE ON DAVID
Many of David’s books (and related books) are available from Lorian Press, which David developed in conjunction with the Lorian movement. You can also find self-study modules on David’s site here. David’s lectures on manifestation, written decades ago, are so far advanced that they move us beyond most people’s current writings on the topic. You can find them in this book The Laws of Manifestation. And one of my very favorite books by David, which is not so easy to find these days, is Reimagination of the World: A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture.

A photo I took earlier this month at the stone circle in Drombeg, Co. Cork

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On whales, water, and transformation with writer Philip Hoare on AEWCH 164!

22 Sep

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FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.

Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 164 on bookshop.org! Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!

Friends,

I’m so happy I got to talk about animals at length on the show, given their importance in my life. And one of the best people to have a conversation about animals with is undoubtably Philip Hoare , an interdisciplinary writer and artist, whose books include his moving and almost unclassifiable memoir/nature writing/philosophy book, Risingtidefallingstar: In Search of the Soul of the Sea, his recent book about the evolution of art and how we think of animal, Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World, and what is probably his most famous book, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea , which weaves together beautiful passages on cetaceans and images of whales in popular culture, particularly in the work of Herman Melville.

This was a beautiful and moving discussion for me, I hope it will be for you, too.

X
C

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Phil, visit his website. Here’s a short video of director John Waters praising Phil’s book, The Sea Inside. He curated (along with artist Angela Cockayne) The Moby Dick Big Read – where actors (including Tilda Swinton!) and other artists read Moby Dick chapter by chapter. And here’s Philip’s short film about poet Wilfred Owen, I Was A Dark Star Always.

• I wrote about the new rhythms of lockdown – including the new rhythms that the animals are experiencing – for the Irish Times.

• And AEWCH 155 is all about extinction, from an occult perspective.

• The Natural History Museum in Dublin (AKA “the dead zoo”) is a great and morbid and wonderful place.

• Here’s a short article with a nice little video about Dublin’s Forty Foot – where you jump off the rocks into the green-blue water. And below is a photo of Irish writer Brendan Behan getting out of that same water.

• Here’s a bit on selkies – seal fairies that shed their skin to walk around in human form.

• I’ve been working on utopia with my friend Una Mullally, who appeared on AEWCH 151 and AEWCH 87.

• I’m still so taken by Phil’s statement in this interview: “I could list all those things (that hurt me most about the way we treat the ocean) here but I’d rather anyone reading this went out to their nearest water and prayed.”

Until next time, friends,
CH

PS: Here’s Phil looking through a whale’s eye.

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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 155: OCCULT EXTINCTION

6 Jul

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor

FRIENDS:

Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Buy all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 155 on bookshop.org.Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!

No show notes this time, just enjoy the ride, if you can!

XO CH

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Let’s destroy nature together! (repost of AEWCH 22)

27 Aug

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AEWCH82

Hello friends!

Re-upping this past episode of AEWCH because I’m starting to reinvestigate these ideas about how environmentalism is flawed at its foundation: nature. Nature is a concept that we must destroy if we ever want to see and engage with our planet.

To express the point, I pull in my pals Patricia Highsmith, Sigmund Freud, Paracelsus, and more.

This episode is becoming part of a larger project called Occult Philosophy Now!, a book and a set of courses and lectures coming your way in 2020. There’s a new intro to the episode, and I hope we see it with new eyes.

IN THIS EPISODE

  • Why “nature” is a poorly defined but totally accepted concept.
  • Why our main environmental narratives – going green/sustainability, neo-primitivism, deep ecology – depend on the flawed concept of nature.
  • “Nature is the word we use for the feeling we have of separation with other aspects of the world.”
  • “The concept of nature is the external exhibition of the death drive.”
  • Who are we if we’re imaging mass death to “save the planet?”
  • Have you ever fought just to feel?
  • Erasing the lines between the living and the dead.
  • The world is consciousness states, not objects.
  • Putting ourselves at the center of the world is the only way to encounter it, much less “save” it.

Lots to investigate more deeply in the SHOW NOTES

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