Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast.
I'm so grateful some good friends enabled me to present them to you.
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Tibet House is the Dalai Lama's cultural center in America.
All best wishes. Have a great day.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: This is episode 339.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Hello, everybody. So nice to welcome you to a wonderful opportunity in which I am honored to be able to have a discussion with the wonderful osprey, Oriel Lake, who has written this amazing book called the Story is in Our Bones with a wonderful painting by an indigenous person of two women bending over and. Are they planting seeds? Are they. They're blessing the earth. Receiving blessings from the earth. I'm not sure what it is they are holding there, but they are little luminous, kind of. I'm not sure what you know, but they're really great. And they have. They have nice robes and. And the wonderful stars are up in the sky. I think it's quite nice, really. Very energetic also, and powerful.
So she's written this wonderful book and I have read quite a bit of it and I like it very much. And she is a marvelous person who won my heart when she began with the dominant cultural worldview.
And she's gradually and with actual living examples and a lot of storytelling collected from all over the world, she helps us try to correct our highly alienated worldview that is destroying the planet, actually, and with which we are destroying ourselves.
And she weaves together ecological, mythical, political and cultural understandings and shares her experiences working with global leaders, climate justice activists, indigenous peoples and systems thinkers.
And a new way, summoning a new way of being and thinking in the Anthropocene.
I'm not sure. Maybe it's the obscene, which includes transforming the interlocking crises of colonialism, racism, patriarchal capitalism and ecocide to build thriving Earth communities for all.
Welcome to the podcast, you wonderful person, Osprey.
Ospreys are like an eagle, right? It's like an eagle. It's a kind of smaller eagle. A little bit smaller and more precise. And it lives on fish. Is it mostly on the seashore? Right, so it mostly deals with it. Mostly fishes.
And Oriel Lake. How wonderful. A founder. Oh, yes, I should have mentioned we can.
Which is Women's Earth. I forgot.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Women's Earth. And Climate Action Network.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: And Climate Activist Network.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: We can. Yeah.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Wonderful. The web. It's a web of Spider Woman in her modern. Modern thing, actually. Good spider woman. People get nervous when they hear spider, but this is A good one, which reminds me of a dream I once had, but I won't impose that right now. So, Osprey, how are you today?
[00:04:39] Speaker B: I'm very good. And it's such an honor to be here with you. Thank you so much that we could have this conversation.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: Well, the honor is all mine, my dear, really. And you're so activist and you have been everywhere, but you're so young.
How can you have done all of this at such a tender age? I could easily be your dad or practically granddad, I think, really. And you've been. Because starting out from. She has a marvelous thing she recounts in this book. When she was 4 or 5, when you stopped, your parents dragged you to a Hopi ceremony in New Mexico as. Yes, maybe you like to tell us in your own words that wonderful experience instead of me recounting it from your book. Please tell us. It was. Yeah, I was amazed reading it.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Oh, thank you.
Yeah. Just a little context, you know, at the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network, you know, we really are very engaged on a daily basis with very practical matters of, you know, advocating at the UN climate talks for climate justice. You know, we do deforestation projects, forest protection. We've been working a lot to stop the expansion of fossil fuels. So everything from like on the ground projects and programs with women leaders around the world to, you know, high level meetings with government officials and financial institutions doing everything we can to protect our Earth. And why I mentioned that sort of as a segue to your question is because, you know, while I'm deeply engaged in those affairs, and that's my day job, if you will, with our network, it's so important to go upstream and look at how did we get into these multiple crises and how did we find ourselves in what many scholars are calling a polycrisis around the world? And how do we deal with these systems of oppression and change them and harms to the earth? And so in my book, it's really an upstream look at worldviews and how they inform our political landscape and our psychology and our traumas and our well being and our harmony or in disharmony with nature.
And so I opened the book with, in part about, you know, giving this big landscape of looking up into the stars at night and that reflection of where we are in time and space for that bigger view. And in that telling, it also reminded me how when we look at the night sky and we see the North Star, you know, the whole night sky, the stars revolve in a circle around the North Star. And I've just always been fascinated with that.
And you know, how, you know, throughout, you know, human history, people have looked at the North Star. It has been different stars in different eras, but, you know, most recently the North Star. And it came to me how the North Star sort of like the belly button of the sky, the center of the body of the sky that we see. And it made me remember something from my childhood where I had been with my family in Germany, living there for two years when my father was stationed in the. The military there.
On our way home, my parents, we made stops along the way. I think we were in a Volkswagen Bug driving from, with my sister and I from the east coast to the west coast to California. And along the way we stopped in different places because my parents are, you know, were very interested in other cultures. So we stopped somewhere in the Southwest. I'm not sure where. I asked my mother many years later, but she didn't know where we were. So somewhere in the Southwest where, as people might know, you know, the indigenous peoples there. I'm not sure if it was Hopi or other. I. Like I said, I don't know, but, you know, kindly whether it was in New Mexico and Arizona, they kindly open their doors at time for people not in their communities to be part of a public dance.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: And so this is what I participated in. I was about three years old and I don't remember a lot, but what I had remembered is that there was a rain dance, which we are. We probably heard different stories how there are rain dance in that part of the world. And this one dancer shot an arrow into the sky to. To make prayers of the thunderclouds, to bring the reins.
And I saw the arrow going up into the sky, up into the stars and returning and landing in. In my belly button, landing in my stomach. And for me, so amazed by that.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: You know, I mean, it's just, you know, when I say it out loud now, it's like, this is really very wild. But, you know, for me, this was just. I just had this experience. There was nothing abnormal to me about it. It wasn't scary. It was just like, oh, I'm having this experience, you know, and I remember being really moved and mesmerized by the, the music and the dancing and, and the beautiful regalia of the dancers and just being pulled into this incredible feeling and energy that I had never experienced before. And so then, you know, I. I told my parents, you know, like, this, this is amazing. You know, this happened just, just reporting like this this happened, and they were very concerned. And, you know, we know, being protective parents, you know, very. You know, they're doing what they thought was best. And they were telling me, no, no, no, that didn't happen, that the. The dancer, you know, it's just simulating, you know, that arrow, you know, like, they're not really shooting an arrow.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: You know, and. But for me, like, I had this experience, so we sort of were in disagreement. I just remember being really frustrated, and.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: You were not giving in. You did not give in to this.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: I was just frustrated that somehow this wasn't being received, you know, and so.
And then I. I reflect also my book, Heather. I have a photograph of my sister and I standing with my parents when we were at that place. And not, like, angry, upset, but I'm just, like, looking off into the distance someplace from another world.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Early. You're an early indigo.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And so then the last thing I remember, because, you know, it's just little pieces of memory. I mean, I was quite young, but I do remember one an. An older man, I believe, from the community. I can't remember his face or anything coming down to my level, like, whether he was kneeling or squatting and looking at me and explaining to me what happened. He said, yes. All I remember from what that exchange was was somebody heard what I said and agreed with me, and then that was it. And then I never spoke about it again to my parents because, you know, the reflection back was this was not something to talk about, but I just assumed for a great period of time that there was this arrow, this, you know, lightning arrow in my. My stomach. I thought it was really magical and cool thing, and that was just it. And of course, years later, I had forgotten all about it until I started getting into this writing and that, you know, the reflection of looking at the North Star and suddenly reminded me of this story. And then I went back, you know, and asked my mother, who barely, you know, remembered any, you know, details to help me other than we had stopped, you know, she had remembered going and in the journey. But anyway, so the reason I brought it up at the beginning of the book is because I wanted to show some reflections on worldview. You know, of course, I go through a very sort of academic explanation of what is worldview and why it's important. But. But beyond the academic expression, I wanted to also share with people personal experience of being in a different worldview and being. Having a transformative moment with nature, with life. And, you know, because I think many of us have these experiences and we can write them off because our dominant society doesn't hold them with value or for a myriad of reasons.
