How to Commune More Deeply with Nature (Maria Rodale)
Listen now (50 mins) | "The main message from all of these creatures, plant, animal Insect is that we have to learn how to respect and live in balance and harmony with nature..."
You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Maria Rodale describes herself as the recovering CEO and chairman of Rodale Inc., which is a massive publishing entity that the family sold many years ago. They're the publisher not only of a book imprint, but magazines like Men's Health, Women's Health, Prevention. They also published Organic Gardening, which was really the beginning of the family's company, which was started by her grandparents who are immigrants in the ‘40s. Maria now is a writer. She wrote a beautiful book that came out recently called Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys Into the Heart of My Garden, which we talk about in today's episode. And she also wrote Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe, and she's the children's book author Mrs. Peanut Knuckle.
also writes a Substack. Maria is an ardent environmentalist. She is massive in the regenerative agriculture movement and she chairs Rodale Institute's board. The focus of this book, and most of her work is really about trying to recreate balance and bring ourselves back into harmony with nature by looking at the toxic impacts on human and planetary health of so many of the things that we do. She is a hopeful optimist. She believes she's seen the ground and the land regenerate, and she knows that we could do that. She's received a lot of awards, including the National Audubon Rachel Carson Award in 2004, United Nations Population Funds Award for the health and dignity of women everywhere in 2007 and the Auburn University International Quality of Life award in 2014. We strangely have a lot in common. We're walking similar paths and we talk about that as well as understanding what all those pesty weeds and plants in her garden are trying to tell her.MORE FROM MARIA RODALE:
Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys Into the Heart of My Garden
Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe
Maria’s Website
Follow Maria on Instagram
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
Hi, how are you?
MARIA:
Good, how are you?
ELISE:
Good. We finally meet sort of in person.
MARIA:
I used to finally have the opportunity to talk with you. It seems like we've had similar paths in so many ways.
ELISE:
I know. I was just, that was what exactly what I was going to say. I feel like we've been walking. Yeah, we've been on the same journey. I think you have a leg up on me in terms of wisdom and experience and just I'm older.
MARIA:
How old are you?
ELISE:
44. I'm almost 45.
MARIA:
I'm 62, so yeah.
ELISE:
Yeah, I was just talking to a friend about the conversion of knowledge to wisdom and how intense that process is and yeah, I'm still trying to figure it out. I love the knowledge.
MARIA:
Well, I recognized my younger self in so many things that you write about and talk about and say, so happy to, but you're doing great work and I'm really so glad that it's not just me alone in my room thinking these things
ELISE:
I know and well, it is. It was interesting to read this book on Shamanic journey, which we'll get to in a minute. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about your family history and then sort of the swerving in between of these things that feel connected within this category of wellness. And then you're zigzag right out.
MARIA:
How much time do you have?
ELISE:
But I do think it's interesting that the genesis of this family business was this beautiful organic farm, which was obviously the drumbeat of so many parts of the Rodale business and then how that extends out to this very specific eighties, nineties, two thousands, 2010 version of wellness, which we all recognize and know so well. And then sort of that like, wait, wait, wait, wait.
The macro to the micro really and the way that so many of us have become obsessed with the micro and the temple of our own selves rather than recognizing that we're part of this significant ecosystem and that working on ourselves isn't maybe the right place to start.
MARIA:
Yeah. So I was very lucky, fortunate, faded, whatever to grow up on the organic farm where my grandfather, Jay Rodale came up with the organic movement, the modern organic movement. As we all know, there was a time when people didn't use chemicals, but he started publishing Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine in 1942 and then Prevention Magazine in 1950 and he was ridiculed extensively. So I was born in 1962 even before the hippies kind of glommed on to the organic movement and I was able to, the little researcher that I am was able to observe all these people coming and going into our kitchen, around our dining table because my mom would make dinner for all my dad's business guests. And I, from a little child perspective observed that the health movement was both wonderful but also filled with extremists that didn't necessarily add up before people would even talk openly about cancer or things.
I knew that there were healthy fit people who got sick and got cancer or who just were terrible people who were not nice people to have at the dinner table. From that young perspective, I was like, what is real? What is true? What is God? What is my purpose here? And nature was always the comforting source, the kind of consistent wonderful thing. I didn't expect to go into the family business at all, even though we were all raised to be kind of employees there. But my older brother who's considered the heir died of AIDS in 1985. So my dad was like, okay, you're next. And he picked me primarily because of my passionate interest in organic and nature. I wasn't like an athlete, I wasn't super fit. I ate like crap just like everybody else.
But as I spent my career in the business, I really saw the guts, the blood and guts of how things work and how the business works, how people humans work, how they respond to, I was in marketing, how they respond to things, how they don't respond. And there was a part of me that was like, this business doesn't make sense for the long run. Magazines are very wasteful, direct marketing is really wasteful. Again, being totally fit doesn't ensure that you don't get sick. So there's got to be something more here. So at the same time, I was going on my own personal spiritual journeying, which in the book I sent you, I don't know if you've read, it's My pleasure. I mean, it started with the Virgin Mary discovering her and that idea that, oh, if you want something you ask your mom, you don't ask your dad.
And learning how to kind of get over my fears through having a female goddess person too. But that was just the beginning of the spiritual journey that has been ongoing. I learned how to journey Shamanically about 12 years ago at Esalen, and I was actually went to Esalen because at that point the business was in trouble. Publishing was just doomed for everyone. I was like, well, maybe we could do an event center or so I heard I should go check it out because maybe that's an avenue for us. And the only course that they were offering that was interesting, the weekend that I was able to go was about shamanic journeying, and that's how I learned to do it. And I used it to help guide me through business problems, relationship problems, and any kind of personal problems. And when the time came to sell the company, which it was like we all agreed, the whole family agreed. It just made the process go so much easier and it freed me up for the first time in my life to do what I wanted to do.
ELISE:
No, it's funny, even thinking about, you mentioned very briefly in love, nature Magic, a college paper you wrote about binaries and I was like, oh, that's what I'm working on next. But just to go to this idea of Rodale or empire of Men's Health and Organic Gardening and Men's Health for listeners who don't remember, was a juggernaut for a long time and with all those ripped abs, but just this whole world that we both inhabit is full of shadow and light. And people often ask me about my feelings about the wellness industry, which are complex like yours. There's beautiful essential parts of it, and there's a lot of shadow as there isn't everything. And I loved the way that it became the perfect metaphor of your garden, which is full of flowers and weeds, but this idea that we are so fixed in our certainty about what is good and what is bad and what has value and what doesn't have value, and how the deep lessons that your garden through shamanic journeying taught you about woe Maria, you don't know what you're doing here.
So first, before we get into the lessons that you learned from milkweed and mug work, let's talk about shamanic journey because I think most people hear that and everyone calls themselves a shaman, which is one of my pet peeves, really cheapening that word, which is often like an ancestral, deeply ancestral lineage, but also that there's this idea that you need to imbibe things from the garden, magic plants and toad, venom and whatnot to journey. And you don't, people often ask me, do you do a lot of drugs? I'm like, I do no drugs actually. I've done drugs, but I do not because I do not need to blow my mind open in that way, can do that on my own. So will you talk to us about what this lineage is and how it works?
MARIA:
Yeah. So the word shaman comes from Siberia actually. But in every culture there's a shamanic tradition and it's called different things, every single culture. And it's very much, I think I've heard it said, you don't want to be a shaman. Being called to be a shaman is super hard and difficult and not fun. I am not a shaman and I don't want to be a shaman, but I was lucky to meet a couple of shamans and the one who I've worked the most closely with, Lisa, who actually lives nearby, she was actually initiated in Siberia and you studied for decades. She's the real deal, but you don't need to do drugs. In fact, I think drugs are often distraction or a crutch, but what you do need is I use the sound of a drum. There's a rhythmic sound, and that is the road that your psyche travels on to get these visions and insights. So anybody can do that. It takes a kind of suspension of and insecurity, but anybody can do that. And I talk about in my book how to do it safely.
ELISE:
Yeah, well that's important too. And you talk about opening sacred space and closing it.
One of the things that concerns me about the drugs that everyone, but this is true of any time when you're really letting someone access your energy, is that people don't know how to keep themselves safe. And I love this woman Prune Harris, who is a Celtic shaman, and she talks about with psychedelics how the whole, they're engineered to take down your entire aura, including your auric membrane. That's what they do to sort of create that experience where you are present with everything else that's present that you can't normally interact with, and that people don't know how to put their aura and their auric membrane back together. And you pick up little energetic entities. And if you're not with someone safe, it is just something to be really careful about, I guess. And short, I don't know if doing it without drugs also lends extra safety, but regardless, it requires a certain respect for the process.
MARIA:
The key word is respect and intention. So when I first started out, I was always like, oh my God, am I saying the words right? What do I eat beforehand? What do I not eat? And it was always like the most important thing is that your intention is in your heart. You don't even have to say the words, but you have to feel 'em. And then the protection is real. And so things like smudging and yes, don't use herbs that aren't indigenous to you, but everybody is indigenous to planet earth. And every culture has shamanic traditions. And in fact, mugwort, which is my plant, is one of the most sacred of those plants. And it's also considered obnoxious weed that people want to get rid of.
ELISE:
Well, let's start with mug work where you start your book, right, with this battle. And it's so funny also, Maria, I mean, I grew up in the mountains of Montana and my mother had this incredible garden and my parents sold our house with her gardens kind of out from underneath me. This is a bit of a sore spot in 2019 right before the pandemic, and they moved into town, and I was very devastated and would've liked the option to try to figure out how to buy it, but my mom really didn't want that to happen because of her gardens. And she couldn't stand watching her gardens decay in any way. And obviously they took too much work for her. She is 75 now, so she didn't want to be present to what would definitely have been a deprecation of her gardens and part of her life's work. And I don't have that sensibility. I like houseplants, but I didn't have that. And so hearing about your garden made me a little homesick, I have to say. But I also did a lot of weeding as a child, and I understand how you enter the book in this. I will rid my garden by hand, never noxious chemicals, but I will rid my garden by hand of every weed.
MARIA:
I am just laughing a little because I learned my intensive vicious gardening from my mother. And I had a psychic once, say, after she passed away in 2009. She's like, oh yeah, your mother stands in your backyard and judges, she wouldn't do a lot of what you're doing in the garden.
ELISE:
That's perfect. That's perfect. Yeah, my mom couldn't bear witness to what I would do to her gardens. It was not possible.
MARIA:
We'll have another discussion later about mothers.
ELISE:
I love my mom. She is a piece of work sometimes. All right, so mugwort. That was it, right? That was the beginning of this, the whole exercise of this book, which is journeying to visit these plants and insects and animals to understand why they were trying to get your attention. But talk to us about your inability to remove mugwort.
MARIA:
So mugwort is a very aggressive and invasive weed in my area. I live in Pennsylvania, it's one of those things you pull and the roots just go on and on and you pull it and you miss some of the roots. It actually turns into three more plants. So during the pandemic when I was like, I am going to have the perfect garden, we were also with, Lisa was doing weekly kind of shamanic zoom sessions. And so I thought, oh, what the heck? I'm going to see why mug work is annoying me so much. And the experience, it was very a brief journey and quiet and dark, but mug work clearly said, why are you trying to kill me? Because you can't plants rule the world. And the thing about journeying is I heard that, but you feel it and you see it, and you just get it in a way that if somebody sitting across the table for me would say it, yeah, right, right.
But no, I got it. But that wasn't the end. So the journey ended and then it just, mugwort just kept appearing in these references and things that made me like, okay, is this plant stalking me? Why does it keep showing up? So it actually was the trigger that led me to write the book Love, nature Magic. And I was like, okay, it's asking me to kind of communicate with all the things that annoy me and try to understand it, which I did. And one of the things I wrote about in the chapter about mug work is that if you do quick research, it's good. It's good to help sleep and dreaming. And I was like, I don't have a sleep problem. That's not my problem. So I wrote the book and the day I was supposed to start my book tour, I had a stroke and it was like my right arm and my right leg. And of course you go to the hospital. I was in the hospital for four days in acute rehab for a week. And of course then you go through all these tests, why did you have a stroke? And it turns out I have sleep apnea.
ELISE:
Amazing.
MARIA:
There were other things, but that was a huge change for me. And for the first time in a long time, I'm able to sleep through the night because I have C-Pap machine who, his name is Ricky. He goes with me everywhere. But what has been interesting is that this journey with mug work keeps on continuing.
It's a never ending journey. And I've never considered myself who make tinctures and things. I've never considered myself one of those people. I garden, I garden and I cook, but I don't, not a witch, which I don't try to make magic potions, but I journeyed again recently to talk to my work because it was still after I wrote the book and I had the stroke, I decided, I felt in my soul, I'm just going to stop weeding, period. I'm not even going to try. And the burst of abundance I saw in my garden was astounding. I mean, roses tripled in size, trees doubled in size. I mean, it was just amazing. But also the mug work doubled, tripled in size. And the message I got most recently was like, okay, now it's time to learn how to start using me. Don't just look at me, but use me. So that started a whole new process that I'm on right now. I
ELISE:
Was going to say, you're not a witch yet.
MARIA:
Well, I'm a good witch if I am.
ELISE:
And Maria's mug, war tinctures coming to a store near you soon. It's so funny too. I will just add that after reading your book last night, I was in bed with my youngest and a fly landed on me, and normally I would sort of shush it away. And we're also having, it's been hot here, and every time it's hot, we get ants, which it's fascinating to watch. My husband deals with the ants, but I feel bad. I don't want to murder an ant. But anyway, this fly landed on me and just stayed. I didn't really, I just watched it cleaning. Its little, is it the SCUs? And I love, just as a general note, the invitation in your book to pay attention to all messengers, not in a way that is necessarily crazy making. Not everything is a sign. Not everything has meaning. However, the insistence of the natural world often maybe comes bearing useful information. So anyway, I had a really nice moment with this fly for 10 minutes probably. So thank you, Maria. But how do you know, I guess would be my next question? I would imagine at a certain point you'll have journeyed to visit almost every, well, not every, because we know how infinite nature is, but how do you know when it's time? How do you decide that you need to go and see poison ivy?
MARIA:
Well, there's different energies a place. So once I decided to write the book, I literally felt like different plants and animals and insects were going like, okay, me, I'm next.
ELISE:
Yeah, your waiting room was full.
MARIA:
And once the book was published, that quieted down. So now it's more regular life, and I only journey maybe once every three weeks or a month, I have to feel the pull and the practice that I'm working on now because like I have been an intense reader, researcher, explorer, got to talk to this person, I got to read this book, and that's so fulfilling and wonderful, but you get to a certain point, I have gotten to a point where it's like, okay, I just need to listen to what's inside of me. That's been, the messages I've been getting is consistently is stop looking for somebody else to tell you what's true. Look inside of myself. So I just wait for the feeling and follow.
ELISE:
Similar to you, and I love this. We can talk about the trail of books, but I sort of pick up the hint. I'll see something referenced once, twice. I'm like, okay, I get it. I am onto that trajectory. I hunt bibliographies and books. I often will spy something and then something else happens. I'm like, oh, all right to that book. I go, which is so fun and so compelling and a journey in of itself, and it feels like you're engaging with the universe in a really deep way. And I also hit these extreme saturation points. As we were saying at the beginning, there's a certain amount of knowledge that I take in, and then at a point I need to process it and try and turn it into wisdom. Otherwise, I'm just an extended end note.
And finding that balance has been a big part of where I'm at right now of what can I say? This was a big criticism, a loving criticism from my editor, but which she noticed I did with on our best behavior is that I would write something and then I would go and say, okay, who else has said this? Because I want to make sure that I'm referential. She was like, some ideas can just be yours, or some ideas are shared and you don't need to be yes, reference and then, but don't do it retroactively. What are you doing?
MARIA:
I think as women, we are trained to think we need approval, and those references are like approvals. But really what we should aspire to is original thought and new ideas that nobody else has thought of before, which are scary because then it's like, uhoh, what if I'm wrong? What?
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and I'm sure this is how you feel too. In some ways I'm like, nothing is original. We're all pulling from the same collective consciousness, and whether you're downloading it or I'm downloading it, or we're doing it simultaneously, there's something present for me at least that I am tapping into. And yeah, I can just tap into it. I don't necessarily need to then say, huh, let me go and dig to find someone else to back me up here who maybe said the same thing 20 years ago. It's not that fun for the reader is also what I've learned. People just want, it's like, just say it. You just can say it.
MARIA:
I don't know if you're familiar with my substack, but the one I just posted is called The Trail of Magic, because I realized the Trail of Books, again for people like you and me who are big readers, we know what that means. It's like one thing leads to another, but it's really about more than books. It's about movies, it's about people, it's about products. So I just did kind of a roundup of my most recent Trail of magic experiences, and it's just an ongoing, joyous part of life is making these discoveries and then making connections between discoveries and having the universe nudge you on
ELISE:
With prompts. Right? I mean, speaking of the trail of magic and mixed media, let's talk about the mosquito, because I loved that chapter and the back.
MARIA:
So yeah, I was laughing when you mentioned the mosquito because in the last three days, I have tried to kill a few mosquitoes, so I'm not
ELISE:
Perfect.
MARIA:
Something happens at the end of summer, early fall in Pennsylvania where they just get very aggressive. But I was scared to go talk to the mosquito, like scary. And I do think that's fear is we've been taught so much fear, and I'll talk more about that with bats, but it was probably my hardest. I had to do two journeys to get the full story. Mosquito was very demanding of me. But through the process, what I understood is that we see it as an annoyance, but mosquitoes are essential to the whole survival of nature. They're a key part of the food chain for so many animals. And as experts in medicine and science, it's like, oh, we must eradicate the mosquito. We must, because it's annoying and it bites people and it causes disease. Well, yeah. I mean, we're the vectors of the disease and the mosquito, and actually it's just the female mosquitoes who've already had children once and are now on their second kids who get the disease from us and pass it along.
So it just again shifted my whole perspective about our role in these relationships with insects, specifically mosquito, and it's similar with the bat. Again, most people are afraid of bats. It's like bat, but bats are the primary eaters of mosquitoes. So bats keep mosquitoes under control. And what's fascinating is just two or three months ago, there was almost an accidental study that happened with bats and infant mortality because bats get the white nose disease and have been dying. I think it was in New England. And they did a county by county study of bat populations. And what happens when the bat populations die from white nose disease, farmers spray more pesticides and chemicals because bats are eating the things that crops or cause mosquito outbursts in communities. And in those communities where there were no bats, there was a significantly higher rate of infant mortality. And science was really well thought through on it because it wasn't just a study that somebody created. It was taking real information and backing out all the variables. So other deaths didn't go up. It was specifically infant mortality, which was not from the mosquitoes or the bats, but from the chemicals that were being sprayed to eradicate the mosquitoes. The main message from all of these creatures, plant, animal insect is that we have to learn how to respect and live in balance and harmony with nature. Period. That's it.
And that will solve the climate crisis that will make everybody healthier. It's not about having the perfect abs.
ELISE:
It's not, I was so confused, and I love, that was a great hot tip for Maria Rodale, that if you do have a bat, and I wish I'd known this, this summer, a friend had a bat stuck in her cabin. You throw a handful of flour or cornmeal and they will go after it. Yeah, you just open the door. Yeah,
MARIA:
Just open the door, throw it out, and you're like, Ooh, food, food.
ELISE:
Hot tip. You don't have to hit it with a pillow or a broom. No. Yeah. So then let's talk about, you brought up climate change and you went to visit weather, which I thought made perfect sense in the fact that as weather told you, weather doesn't care so much, or is it doesn't overly prioritizing humans here. Talk to us about weather.
MARIA:
So yeah, I don't mean to be disrespectful of the tragedies that are unfolding right now, which are really trying to get our attention. But weather showed me kind of pulling me up and looking down at the earth, which any astronaut, any old astronaut can do, you can't see people from space that weather is really about keeping the whole planet healthy, the earth healthy. We're just a little, we're like ants in the scheme of weather, and we have a responsibility to be, well, Alberta Valdo uses the phrase earth keepers. I feel like part of our role here is to just help the Earth to protect it, and in return it will help to protect us. But the thing that, the science part of it, I'm also a co-chair of the Rodale Institute, which is the nonprofit that has been studying organic versus chemical agriculture for over 40 years. And we're the ones who discovered and organically farmed soil stores more carbon than chemical farm soil.
And partly the reason it does that is because we're not killing the microbiome, the organisms in the soil that do the work that it's supposed to do. So from a big perspective, yes, weather doesn't give a shit about us, but we have to give a shit about what we're doing to the earth. And should be no surprise that I'm a passionate proponent of regenerative organic agriculture, what I was, I feel like I was born here to be a part of. But it's the one solution that solves a multitude of problems. You're not putting chemicals in the water, you're not putting chemicals in the air, you're not putting chemicals in your body. You're creating a vibrant, diverse ecosystem for both the plants and nature. We still have issues about people not believing that or not wanting to pay the extra $2 or not being able to afford to pay the extra $2. So that's the work we still have to do
ELISE:
It seemed like every single, oh, not every, but almost every plant, every animal that you visited offered a little bit of an anecdote about the hubris of humans and our self-centeredness. My friend Carissa was saying how we're like that pesky guest that comes over and changes the thermostat to our own comfort and makes it deeply uncomfortable for all the animals and humans. We have no awareness of our impact on the larger climate. I loved you offered many anecdotes, and I think anyone listening can relate to, again, this idea of hubris that we have, that we would understand that nature is so solvable or understandable. And you mentioned Suzanne Simard’s book. She's been on the podcast—Finding the Mother Tree, which is so stunning about the networks that support these forest lives. And you also, I had never heard of Chairman Ma for pests, and that he observed a sparrow and he thought it was eating the rice. And so they killed every single sparrow and brought on a massive famine,
MARIA:
A massive famine. And so anytime you hear the war on sparrows, the war on mosquitoes, the war on rats, that will never work. The war on Jews, the war on Muslims, it will never work. So we have to learn how to live in balance and harmony. That is the key measure of health and success in an organic system, is that there's more diversity, and with more diversity, there's more health and more harmony. So yeah, we have to get over the hubris thing, but it's everywhere.
ELISE:
Yeah, but it is really that quick certainty that we have about what belongs and what doesn't. That weeding the way that we started the conversation talking about what's a weed and what's the wheat? And we really have no idea.
MARIA:
The more I've studied the weeds that grow in my yard, the more I realize so many of them are edible, medicinal, have amazing uses and purposes, and I've now come to think of them as first responders because if you plow or bulldoze something, what's the first thing to happen? Weeds sprout up and they're the first responders to try to heal nature and heal the earth. And so we should be really grateful to them.
ELISE:
And the perfect metaphor for this is you mentioned Roundup and how with GMOs that are engineered to withstand Roundup and how that ground gets sprayed. I mean, it's raining Roundup in the Midwest, but I think a lot of people don't understand the GMO mechanism that what? It's not necessarily the GMO part of the plant. It's resistance to Roundup, which then means that Roundup can be sprayed extravagantly. And then you get into these situations where you have these super weeds, which are terrifying. It's essentially the same thing as what's happening with antibiotics and super bugs. But what's kind of wild when you think about those super weeds as first responders is that the land has become so toxic that it requires a tree size weed to make that land fallow and unusable for at least however long it will take for it to regenerate. So it's like we're getting the message, we just choose not, we choose not to the message.
MARIA:
That's true for everything really. It's like if we don't pay attention, the message will just get stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. I know you like to ride horses, and I used to do natural horsemanship. The teacher I had, it's like the first step with a horse is mosquito, gentle little, come on, let's do it. The second is sparrow. It's like a little bit more in your face, then it's something else in the middle. And then the last one is like, Eagle, come on, let's do this. So there's a stepping up process that happens, and whether it's health issues that we have or environmental issues like with the climate, we're getting up to the eagle phase where, come on, listen.
ELISE:
Yeah, and yeah, listen. And these weather events are not an indictment of the people who are being affected, which obviously is a lot in the southern hemisphere, and a lot of us up here have been largely protected from our own, the creation of so much, the usage of so many fossil fuels, and we're creating a lot of the, or majority of the climate change, and we're all connected here. So it is really on us to pay attention to the message that is trying to break through.
MARIA:
I think the important thing is that every single person can create a regenerative organic habitat wherever they are, and that adds up to create a healthier world for everyone.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I agree. And just even tuning in to nature and being more present and curious I think would, and there's such an incredible bibliography of books and reference guides for understanding what these things mean if people don't want to journey themselves in the book. But I agree. I think just recognizing that the universe is trying to both collude and conspire and invoke your curiosity is one big step for the planet. So Maria is just one of those people who I've had many weird synchronous with, and we've come to be friends on Instagram and online, and she is walking a similar path to me, but she's a little bit ahead and love nature magic. She has written obviously many, many books, and I'll link everything in the show notes, but this is a really beautiful book, whether you are a gardener or not, it's really, I think, I love reading about gardening and the emergence of life in such a beautiful and abundant way.
And I just wanted to read to you a bit from the chapter on mugwort where she's talking about this dawning awareness that she was making this plant, this weed, this noxious weed so bad. “After a few minutes in stern attack mode, I stood up, took a breath, and thought for a moment when I was a CEO and staff members complained to me about the same thing over and over again. I would say to them, if you feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall, maybe it's time to try something different. I looked down at the single mugwort plant I had been about to murder. Maybe it was time for me to take my own management advice. The leaves were kind of pretty. I suddenly sensed the plant trying to get my attention, and I felt something shift in me as if a different lens was placed over my eyes with a direct line to my soul.
For a brief second, I felt the aliveness, the consciousness of everything, especially that little sprout of mug work. What was I doing? I was expending all this energy and fury, and it was just a plant who said it was bad. Was this how I wanted to spend my life? Was this the hill I wanted to die on? Why was I making mugwort my garden nemesis?” Alright, friends, hang in there. If you like today's episode, please, please rate and review it and share it with a friend.