I’m about to hold space for another Ground Shots Podcast interview with the author and botanist Susan Tweit, who I met at the new Paonia Books (in Paonia, Colorado). At their opening event, after overhearing her speaking about her love of Sagebrush while I looked at a book on Oak Flat just behind her, I approached her to talk about plants. We ended up in a lively conversation around the hard cider sampling table, and decided to exchange numbers with the idea of potentially doing a podcast conversation. Fast forward a few weeks later. Well, here we go.
She wrote the book Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying (as well as a dozen or so others), about her late husband’s death and her grappling with the difficulty of remaining steady in self through such a difficult experience. You’ll hear in my reflection as I prepare for the interview, but I’m struck by Susan’s dedication to finding a bridge between the ‘depersonalization’ of science writing and data collection as a botanist, and the emotional realms of memoir writing.
Perhaps, one of the transformations that need to be made, or challenged, is to bring emotion and self-storying into science, in to seeing ecology, into the landscape reflection through the data that seems hard and fast. I mean emotion actually is there in some ways like using the words ‘aggressive’ or ‘evil’ to talk about plants, commonly used to speak about so-called ‘invasive’ plants which somehow get the ‘go ahead’ by scientists to bring in charged and emotive language to talk about them.
I was listening to Sophie Strand on Monday in the class I’m enrolled in called ‘Rewilding Mythology’ where she has guests speakers every week to talk about poignant topics in all these realms of reevaluating spirit and ecology. This week we focused on Queering Ecology and to transforming kinship bonds beyond the binary, the boxed definitions, something came up that really struck me. She and the guest speakers mentioned how Darwin in his theory of evolution was perturbed by how certain birds had beautiful foliage or even made beauty just for the sake of making beauty, or seeking same sex mates, where reproduction was not always on the table. And, how it just didn’t make sense to him, he was frustrated by it. Beauty for the sake of beauty. Biology is seen as just mechanism to function, mechanism as matter and spirit separate. Or, spirit doesn’t exist at all. A whole wormhole there exists that I think about a lot in my own work where science, spirit, emotion, connection are often kept strictly separate. Emotion is seen as subjective, yet plenty in science is actually subjective without admitting it. There is a whole philosophical detective trail there in the history of ‘western thought’ around beings and Beings, and animism, that I will go into another time, perhaps in an offering of some sort (hmmm!).
So much of my work I feel like I’ve tried to separate writing about grief and trauma and then the book-y geeky stuff but just can’t. My earlier work with Ground Shots was a lot more emotive, challenging, uncomfortable, made you cry, as I tried to alchemize what I was seeing on the land and how it also mirrored the traumas inside myself. In that reflection, it transformed it. In letting it out, it changed it.
To hear more of how I feel inspired by this way Susan explores writing, and how it hits home for me, listen to this Ground Shots extras shorts, featured here. I decided to make this one a public audio bit this time for the sake of following her rules for writing and sharing: be brave. speak truth to power. talk about things that are uncomfortable. write with honesty and vulnerability. open up a space for empathy by being real and open hearted. alright. i’m trying, slowly, to do this again after a while of not. After a lifetime of not in certain ways, ever.
I am about to go conduct the interview (or really it’s for me, like just holding space for a real open hearted conversation, and recording it) and thinking about a lot of things as I prepare.
You can subscribe to the Ground Shots Podcast wherever you download your podcasts. Here’s the direct link to the Apple Podcasts space where the audio project is held.
Reflections before my podcast interview with author and botanist, Susan Tweit