How to Navigate Our Collective Dark Night: Insights from Francis Weller

And for me, what I'm seeing is what I'm calling the long dark. That we've entered a period of descent. We are all going down. That can be terrifying if you have no context for it. But from soul's point of view, that is the imitation to holy ground. We're being taken downward into places of vulnerability, uncertainty, feeling lost, fear, grief at the levels we probably have never felt before as a collective.

Are there ways in which people can traverse that in a more effective way that isn't so overwhelming? Like, do you. Is it as simple as just.

Okay? Francis Weller joining me again. How are you, my friend?

As I said, I'm doing well enough.

The times are not.

Prone to making one feel light at this moment. So I appreciate the beauty around me, I appreciate the friendship around me, and I'm also appreciating where we are as a collective. So well enough.

Yeah, well enough. Yeah. Well, I think that's where we'll probably begin. We've. You and I have had a couple conversations now on the show. It's been a long time, though, I realized since we connected last. So where I wanted to begin is when you look at the chaos of the world currently.

How do you frame it? How do you sense, make what's happening? And then maybe after, we'll talk about, what do you do with all of that?

Okay, well, so we're starting really small and working.

Really, really small.

Really light. Yeah. How I see things.

My vantage point is almost always through soul and through the soul of the world, the Anima Mundi. So I try to get a feeling for what is the collective state saying to us at a soul level. And for me, what I'm seeing is what I'm. What I'm calling the long dark, that we've entered a period of descent. We are all going down. And that can be terrifying if you have no context for it. But from soul's point of view, that is the imitation to holy ground. We're being taken downward into places of vulnerability, uncertainty, feeling lost, fear, grief at the levels we probably have never felt before as a collective. So we're entering soul's territory, and I think there's a necessity for this because we've been so obsessively on the increase on the rise, on the heroic path, which has more to do with control and ultimately with domination than it does with collaboration and intimacies.

So that heroic quest has brought us to the edge of collapse. Economically, technologically, ecologically, culturally. All these are at the precipice of collapse. And Again, that can be terrifying, and it is kind of terrifying. But at the same time, if we begin to see through the eyes of soul, we see that we're actually in a prolonged season of descent. The long dark is not going to resolve itself in a year or two or 10 or 20. It may be taking us two generations, minimally, for us to get through this whitewater time, this period of descent. And even that's not a guarantee, is it? I mean, we don't know what's going to happen. But from the lens of soul, that gives me a place to respond to this time. How do I participate in the process of decay, of collapse, of dissolution? Certain things must dissolve right now. Patriarchy has to dissolve. You know, systemic racism has to dissolve. Economic injustices have to dissolve. And that's what this dissent is about. Things fall apart. In alchemy, this was called the time of the negredo, the blackening. And that's a very essential stage. I wouldn't even say stage. It's a. It's a season that we all encounter in our own lives, but now we're encountering it collectively. We're in the dark night of the soul, of the collective soul. So that's a place where we can start the conversation.

Yeah. And just for. Maybe for context, for the. The listener that might not be as familiar with your work or some of the terminology, can you.

Just define anima mundi, the long dark, and then the negredo, And I'll hold those just in case we get off track. But anima mundi, the long dark, and the negredo, because I think that will contextualize things for the listener.

The anima mundi is a very ancient.

Thought perception that the earth itself is a living being, that the earth itself has a soul. Anima mundi literally means soul of the world.

So it's not that I just have our own personal experiences. Right. With soul, but there's also a collective experience of soul that the earth itself is speaking through, just like our own soul would speak through symptoms, through suffering, through longings.

All of those ways that soul speaks, we're now seeing in the body of the world. It's collective depression, it's collective anxiety, it's collective suffering. Those are now what are impinging upon us individually. Even in my practice, what's coming up as content is less and less about the interior life and more about the collective life. What's happening for our children, you know, with the future, for my kids, or for the economic uncertainties or. Or the rise of fascistic Thought these are coming into the consulting room. In other words, the patient is now the world, not just the individual. So when we talk about the Anima Mundi, we're giving audience to that larger, soulful presence that is the world. And it speaks as loudly as our own personal experience of soul does. The long dark. Yeah, please.

All right, team, this episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Now, you obviously tune into this show because there is a good amount of self support, of therapeutic modalities, of insight into how you can better yourself as a human being. And BetterHelp is one of those platforms that can support you. There have been many times in my life where I've needed external support in my relationship and, you know, my family system, how to deal with certain things with aging parents, how to deal with certain things with, you know, the loss of a parent, and things like therapy have really, really supported me personally. And so finding a therapist today, in today's day and age, and knowing where to begin can be quite challenging. But BetterHelp has made that very, very easy. And so if you are looking for some support and you are looking for some help and maybe a therapist, a fresh opinion and perspective or guidance on something that you are dealing with personally, then head over to betterhelp.com mantalks again, it is betterhelp.com mantalks and use the promo code mantalks for 10% off of your first month. Give it a try. Yeah, so I think what's, what's interesting here. So the Anima Mundi, this sort of soul of the world.

I think, you know, probably last time you discovered this about me, but I really am a huge proponent of Carl Jung and in his work. And I always, you know, put the cap on of, like, what would Jung be saying right now? You know, what would he say about the current times, the political system, or how would he view some of these structures? And I think in. In some way, I can't help but feel as though the collective unconscious has been made more manifest within our conscious experience. Like before, we would touch on the collective unconscious through dreams, through, you know, sort of peak experiences, hallucinogens, psychedelics, you know, ritual experiences. But now it. It sees. Seems as though we've, like, created technology that puts us in touch with the collective unconscious, right? Where you are seeing made manifest through social media and the Internet, people's collective experiences and emotions and reactivities and shadows and judgments and projections, and they're all out there front and center, and we are having to swim through the chaos of their, of not there, but of the collective unconscious on an almost daily basis. And I wonder what that, if you, if you agree with that or if you would alter with anything about that, from your perspective, what do you feel like that has done to the individual psyche?

Well, primarily it overwhelms the individual psyche. We're not wired, we're not designed to take in 24 hour a day trauma stories. We are designed to know the intimacies of the watershed and maybe we hear stories about the next community over, but we are designed to process and work with the local experiences of both gratitude and loss and death and birth. And we have a relational field for that. It's hard to have a relational field for the immensity of what's coming at us now. The second part of that is that primarily we're asked to encounter all of that material privately. We don't have collective means by which we address traumas and collective sorrows and you know, injustices and stuff. We don't typically have those. I mean they exist, but it's rare. And so when I'm forced to encounter what's coming down the Internet on my own, the heart and psyche wisely close down. And so there's, there's not a capacity to digest that much material. It's like trying to download a, you know, transform into a toaster. It's going to blow. There has to be some downgrading so that it becomes digestible and community ritual and you know, those things help to help us digest the material that's there in the collective body. And that's what I've been trying to do in my whole adult life is create ritual grounds for us to address what's moving in the collective field.

Are there just before we keep going with the long dark and the negredo. Are there ways in which you would recommend that people can.

Safeguard might not be the right word, but begin to traverse that in a, in a more effective way that isn't so overwhelming. Like do you, is it as simple as just limiting social media time? Is it, is it about getting off of apps or platforms or, you know, is there more to it than that? Is, you know, do we have to create communities around being able to have conversations about the impacts of interacting with that? Like what do you recommend?

Well, probably degrees of all of those things. Some, some distillation or discernment about how much you take in on a day by day basis of this material. It's almost addictive. At some point you become so conditioned. I remember my friend Malodoma Somme once saying, you have to be very careful what you associate with because over time you will begin to match its rhythm. And so we've been matching the rhythm of cell phones and computers and, you know, technology for quite a long time. But even now, the degree to which we are adapting to that rhythm is quite dangerous. So some sense of.

Sensual, connected, embodied experience is very, very important. So we can touch one another and hold one another. So, yes, we need to form small communities of places where we can speak the truth about this, whether that's, you know, death cafes that are springing up now or different places where we can talk about what is happening in the collective field. I mean, everyone feels it. The ambient field of the atmosphere is humming with grief and anxiety. And we are pretty good at distracting ourselves from that by making, you know, wheel of fortune the exciting thing to do at night. But.

To actually encounter what's happening, that takes some. A larger field, a larger ground. And so even if you had three or four friends, I mean, my. My dearest friends are. Doug is 92. Larry's and Richard are in their late 70s. I'm the kid at 68. We get together every other week, and frequently the conversation is about how are we holding up, what are we noticing, what's in the collective field, what are we being asked to digest and metabolize into something nutrient dense for the generations that follow? Because I'm not going to see the end of the long dark. You might, I don't know, but I am certainly not going to see another two generations down the road. But what I can do now is plant some seeds that might germinate along the way in the long dark. That's where seeds germinate, typically is in the dark. And that something.

That fosters living culture might be remembered. So I don't think we have to create much of anything. I think what we have to do is remember our deep time ancestry. It's in our bodies. Jung talked about the unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche, that somewhere deep in our own psychic recesses is the memory of what it meant to live entangled with the world, with sunrises and sunsets, with moon and star clusters and gnarled old oaks and, you know, badgers and swallows. And we once had a relational ground with that world, and we need to come back to that ground. Otherwise we'll be thrown to the ground, you know, pretty harshly.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it seems like that.

Process of being thrown to the ground is underway for sure.

I haven't heard about Death cafes before. Is that, is that like a literal interpretation, like a cafe where you can go have a coffee and, and discuss death and grief and mourning?

Yeah, it's a place for people to gather and talk about their feelings about death, how they want to die. There's, you know, spaces in there to create your own documents to define the time of your death. So it's not intruded upon too heavily by medical systems or. Yeah, it's, it's, it's trying to bring death out of the, out of the shadows so we can actually talk about it again and make it part of our conversation. Yeah.

And then what are some of the.

What are some of the nutrients or what did you say, seeds that you're discovering in these conversations? Because I can imagine some of my listeners just craving to be a fly on the wall listening to that conversation between you and the others. So I'd love to get a peek behind the curtain on that.

Well, I think what we've all kind of sense is.

That this is a long haul.

That the changes that we want are probably going to take a long time.

We also, I think there's a shared feeling amongst the four of us and many others that there's something intelligible about what's happening right now. This isn't random, this isn't just pure chaos. There's actually, I think, something intelligible and maybe even intentional about where we are as a, as a species, that the structures, as I said earlier, the ones that need to collapse, are under extreme duress right now. And there's typically two responses to that duress. One is to try to reinforce the old structures. So we see a lot of amplification of 1950s values in America. You know, get women in their place and get the people of color in their place and the white man back on top. And, you know, it's all about economics and nothing about, you know, the collective ground of our survival. And then there on the other side, there is this immune response of the planet. And I see as each of us as part of the immune response to the planet, of how do we respond to the circumstances we're in? So some of the seeds I've been trying to throw are village mind.

Primary satisfactions, long, dark. You know, all of these things are ways that we begin to.

Experience what's happening not from a anxious and terrified place, but from a place of groundedness in the soul that says something is happening here. How do I collaborate with this? How do I participate in the re dreaming of living culture? The only Thing that's going to be sustainable long term is localized living cultures. You know, the. The civilization itself is pathogenic. It. It does not sustain life. It eats and consumes and postures upon us ideologies of consumption and achievement and productivity. And, I mean, the whole capitalistic system is driven by those values, and they are not sustainable, my friend. We know that, but we keep being addicted to. Well, what was the percent of growth last quarter? Oh, good. It was. It was still growing, because growing is our only obsession, as if growth and progress are the only two options.

In front of us, and.

That is the recipe for a disaster. And again, we know this, we feel it, we sense it, but we're so trapped in the.

That way of seeing the world that we don't know how to step out of it. We get panic when things begin to go down, like the long dark or the GDP or anything. When it begins to go down, it's like, oh, my God, this is disastrous. Well, what if that's the only thing that's going to help us is by going down the long dark is a prolonged season of descent, and we're being asked to see things differently.

It's a wonderful line from. I think it's Rethke who said, the eye. The eye begins to see the. In the dark. You know, that there's something about our being able to see things differently from this place of the dark. That's what I'm hopeful for. You know, one other image that's been helpful for me comes from the Inuit people.

North of the Arctic Circle. And. And they have a term, Kart saluni. Have I used that with you before? I mentioned kart saluni?

That sounds familiar, but.

Well, kartsaluni translates. Sitting quietly together in the dark, waiting expectantly for something creative to occur. And I think that's. That's the posture we have to take. Humility. We don't know we have all the information we need. We know the CO2 levels, we know the number of elephants left, we know the number of whales, we know we got all the data.

But something is missing. And part of that is patience. Part of that is humility. Part of that is entering into that cave of not knowing and getting quiet.

And for a collective, particularly for the white male psyche to take up the posture of not knowing, that's just. That's a great stretch. We're always supposed to know. We're always supposed to have it figured out. Leading the way, you know, leading the charge.

That isn't going to help us this time. We have to Learn how to sit together quietly in the dark and listen.

And see what comes. Maybe some new imagining.

Maybe some new way of entering into ritual space together that actually begins to mend the tear between the human and the more than human world. That would be glorious, but that takes receptivity. That takes the work that goes on in the dark, which is gestational, not so much willful, but becoming porous and receptive to the dreaming earth. The anima mundi, again, how does it dream through the human being to give us the shapes and forms and structures that would actually allow us to live here in a sustainable way, not just economically sustainable, but at a heart and soul level sustainable. That our lives begin to feel rich and dense and full of meaning again, rather than just being part of an economic system of productivity and consumption. What a trivialization of the human soul. I think it's part of our depression. So we have never been taught the grandeur of the soul and what it's capable of in terms of its relationship to the. To the living world.

Is there more about the long dark that I can offer you or.

Well, I think for sure, absolutely. I just. I want to make sure that we touch on the negredo, because I think maybe I'll preface this because I think speaking to this would be helpful. I notice a lot of, like, I can hear some people, and I see it online, I see a lot of commentary online of, you know, this sounds depressing, or this sounds like extreme. This sounds like catastrophizing.

And I'm curious about two things. One, how do you speak to something like that? And then two, how does the negredo fit in with maybe the response to that? Because it would seem to me as though, I mean, just the analogy that you were giving before of, you know, there's. There's these memes online of like, stocks go up, right? That's just the general thing. Stocks go up. That's what they do. So you put money in stocks, stocks go up, or stock market goes up. And it's kind of this funny thing, because when you really start to extrapolate that out and think about it, in nature, the only things that continue to grow are cancerous. You know, they're. They. They. They destroy, they kill. And it's not to say that humans are cancerous, because I think that that's usually what happens is that people hear that and they're like, well, are you saying that we're a cancer, you know, onto the earth, et cetera.

And so, yeah, I know I'm rambling. A little bit, but I want to pull this back in. How do you address the notion that. That what we're talking about is.

Catastrophizing or too much for people to handle? And then how does it fit in with the. With the nigredo?

Well, let's start with that catastrophizing piece.

We are in what I'm calling a rough initiation.

We don't have the elders, we don't have the community, we don't have the rituals. But we are certainly being brought to the precipice of death. And that is the hallmark of initiation. Something is dying.

So we either again, participate with that and see what is this initiation evoking out of us. And I just recently wrote a foreword for a book by Duane Elgin called Choosing Earth. And Duane looks at the next five decades of probabilities.

And holy shit.

They weren't encouraging.

But he sees three possible futures for us. One is business as usual, which basically is an extinction level event. If we keep going the way we're going to, that's bad. Second one is possible fascistic authoritarian control. We're seeing definitely signs of that emerging. And the third is the possibility of planetary culture.

That's if the initiation is successful, if enough human beings undertake this initiatory time. Initiation is not easy, is it? I mean, we go through these times in our life and they are not easy. So when people say this is catastrophizing, they say, well.

Too bad.

I remember writing in that essay for Duane that.

The hallmark for the coming decades will be grief. And so we can try to resist that, or we can say, let's engage it. Let's bring beauty and ritual and community and imagination, you know, to this time. And we're seeing that happening. We're seeing groups of people around the planet addressing this creatively, artistically, poetically. You know, that's the response we have to make at this time. It isn't just how do we turn off the lights and, you know, buy electric cars, that's fine. But at a heart and soul level, how do we engage this initiation? How do we engage the material that's arising in creative and imaginative ways? And that's back to us sitting quietly together in the dark, listening, waiting for this to come, something to come to us. So yeah, it is a dark time, but again, I see dark very differently than the collective way of seeing it. It's not negative, it's not bad, it's different. But there's a holiness that dwells in the darkness that we have to begin to Perceive again.

It'S a body, earth, ground, holiness that we've ignored for our light, ascension oriented.

Ideas. So this time in the dark.

We'Re not used to it, it's unfamiliar, but it is the ground where the negredo is working us in alchemy, which again, going back to Jung, Jung was the one who kind of recovered alchemy from the trash bin of history and found there in those ideas and formulas and imagery, a tremendously rich way of understanding psychic process, soul work. And the Negredo, they say, was the. Is. Was the initiation of soul work. That's that soul work couldn't begin until there was enough of the blackness gathered together in the vessel, which they called the putrefactio and the mortifactio. What is decaying and what is dying, that's what's in the vessel right now. Our work is to cook that material, to keep it warm, to bring our attention, our affection, our creativity, all of it, to that material in the vessel and then to see what cooks out of that, what comes out of that attention. But the nigredo soul work doesn't begin until the negredo appears. And so we could say this is a time of soul gestation, soul making in the largest possible sense, because of where we are collectively in this time of descent. No matter where you look across the planet, evidences of the descent are there. It doesn't mean there isn't joy and beauty and, you know, connection and laughter and play. Absolutely. But it means we can no longer deny the presence of, of this other process that's going on. We are in a time of descent and that's our sole responsibility, is to engage in the descent creatively with humility, with imagination.

And lots and lots of beauty.

It does seem to almost fly in the face of modernity in some ways. Right. Which is as we've been talking about growth and expansion and new constantly and, you know, nothing ever dies. Immortality. You know, I think all of these things are kind of wrapped up in one thing. And you know, I was. It's. It's interesting because I think in some ways I've thought quite a bit about this. It almost seems as though what we're talking about. How do I reframe this? Yeah, that the Negredo or that decaying and falling apart is almost like anti American, you know, it's almost anti Western. You know, you can't let things die, you can't let things fall apart. You can't let things be humbled or be taken to its knees. And.

It'S almost like we've tried to extract or strip mine that part of existence out of our culture.

And. And to remove it as an individual and collective experience, you know, to. To remove the experience of having things fall apart. I mean, I think about the work that we do at men's weekends, where some men show up to the men's weekends because they've been. They've been hedging and pushing some type of decay, some type of dissent away as long as humanly possible. You know, the ending of a relationship, the ending of a career, the truth of their unhappiness or dissatisfaction, the facing of a, you know, a trauma or an abuse, that they've just been spending so much time and effort and energy trying to push that out into the future, knowing that it's at some point you got to deal with it and address it. But it's almost like anti. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how else to say it, but like anti Western or anti American to have things fall apart. I'd love to you for you to just maybe speak to that if that resonates with you.

Oh, 100%.

We were given, I think, mostly in, again, white Western culture, one image by which to navigate, and that's the heroic image. And the heroic is always rising, always. Always successful, always in control, you know, never showing vulnerability, always trying to manage the appearance of things.

But at some point, I remember writing a piece once called the Necessity of Defeat that I don't think a single man has ever walked into my office voluntarily. They're there because of the defeat, you know, because of divorce or depression or an addiction or an illness or a loss of a job or whatever. Something knocked them off the horse. And that was a moment of grace. As I wrote about in the Wild Edge of Sorrow, I remember sitting with a man who had recently had a pretty significant heart attack, and he was just chomping at the bit to get back to his corporate job. And I just. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm afraid you're going to waste a perfectly good heart attack. You know, what if the heart doesn't like what you're doing? What if it's protesting? What if it's saying, enough, this is not how I want to live. And I think that's where our collective state is right now. We don't want to waste a perfectly good collapse. We have to use this time. We have to be receptive to what is being dreamt in the depths. That's the other part about the long dark is that we're not going to think our way through this. And then a greater. The same sense you're not going to figure your way out of that space. It requires, again, kind of a surrender to the material and a willingness to be informed and reformed by the times in the dark. And hopefully we come back, like any time of grief, any time of descent into a long period of grief after the death of someone you loved or ending of a marriage, that time in the dark reshapes you. And hopefully you come back carrying a little bit more gravity to you, a little bit more of a sense of connection to the collective body. Because isn't that those shared experiences of loss and sorrow, that's what binds us in some fundamental way to one another?

So, yeah, I forget your question now.

It's okay. I think you answered it brilliantly.

But I. I agree. And I think. I mean, I see it all the time and I. I definitely notice that within myself, you know, and it's something that I have to constantly try and stay awake to. The urge and the desire, wherever it might come from, whether it's the, you know, how we're neurologically wired, which is to recognize patterns and move towards the known and avoid the unknown, or psychologically. But I constantly have to try and stay conscious to the fact that.

There'S a part of me that is.

Always working against the move towards the decay and the unknown. You know, there's almost always that part that's like, well, don't go in that direction. You know, if you. If you don't know what it is and what it looks like, don't do that. And I remember last year I. I turned 40 and what I ended up doing was going to Scotland, going to the Isle of Skye, which is where my lineage is from. My roots are from. From Scotland. And so I went back to the Isle of sky, turning 40. And I spent a week, seven or eight days by myself, solo, just on the land, burning fires, being in sort of communion with the rivers and the ocean and the mountains. And, I mean, it was beautiful. It was really beautiful. And I think in many ways there was a lot of questions that I was also chewing on. And one of them was the knowing and the sitting with the impending loss of my mom, who passed away in February of this year. And so I went there in September. My mom passed in February, and she was battling stage four cancer. And I really was sitting with, I mean, a tremendous amount of grief, but also the unknown of what will that look like, what will it feel like, how will it change? Me. And there was this kind of.

Being. I know maybe it sounds strange to some people, but there was this safety and security that I've always found in the land on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, which is, again, it's where my family on my dad's side comes from. And it felt like I was being held as I was.

You know, grieving, trying to sort through and sift through some of those big questions, meeting the unknown, of the impending death of my mom. And I think it's something that we. We really do not encourage people to do. Like, we don't encourage people to move towards silence, to move towards the unknown, to move towards being solitary and being still. I mean, it's. I think it's one of those things that, again, is very anti our Western culture.

But I found those times to be incredibly potent and healing in many ways. And so I'm curious, from your vantage point with everything that we're talking about, what are some of the ways or how does one stay present in the face of things collapsing? Whether it's a marriage, whether it's a culture, whether it's, you know, a career, how does one stay present and not check out? Because the desire to do that, to just eject from the experience is. Is often quite intense.

Well, we go back to those foundational practices of friendship.

I mean, these difficult times typically can generate an internal feelings of.

Anxiety and uncertainty. And what we need are some reliable grounding, some tethering.

So even just having a few friendships can be incredibly important where we get to speak what the collective field does not permit, which is grief, fear, loss, uncertainty.

That's in our bodies when we're going through losses. But we need to do that with some sense of being held. And that doesn't exclude the times of solitude. I am a big advocate for solitude.

That's kind of the place of hospitality when we can come into a creative solitude where we are listening to hear the subtle voices of what's been tenderized and vulnerable in us. So that space of solitude is essential.

Even though I'm a big advocate for community around all of this work, the truth is that much of the time that we're with our grief is alone. And you're right, there's the tendency to try to eject out of that. Like when we go into the nigredo, the first thing is, where's the exit door? How do I get the hell out of here? You know, what can distract me enough or preoccupy my attention but learning how to be patient with that space. How to be open to that space that takes some ripening, that takes some maturation. It's the mature human being who can sit in that space and not flinch and not try to run from it, but to see it as necessary and a way of deepening our own being.

So, yes, friendship.

I think silence and solitude, again, are the kind of the sentinels that. That guard the soul in times of loss to get quiet enough. But again, that takes a certain faith that the grief is not there to just overwhelm us and drown us, but actually there to foster an enriching and a widening and a deepening of our capacity to be present right now. To be present right now means you have to have the courage and the faith.

To not turn away. Courage that there's something that I can keep my heart open and faith that there's something intelligible at about this time. You know, that if I stay present, I can be informed by something again, beyond my conscious mind. Again, not going to figure my way through this time. Whether it's the death of your mother or the deaths of all the species or whatever.

That'S not going to be something we think our way through.

But we can be touched and reshaped by this time from the work below us, informing who we are. There have been prolonged periods in my life of descent.

And I couldn't tell you to this day why that happened. I couldn't even tell you what happened. All I can tell you is that I came out of it reshaped. That it's as if the lower register of my being was being cleared out so that I had a greater capacity to hold what was going to be coming into my world. You know, again, I didn't think my. I thought, I think I'll do this work now. No soul did that work and it did it outside of consciousness. But I noticed and witnessed what it was doing. The burrowing, the digging, the opening, the dredging. You know, it was doing work in the dark. And I. All I could do is collaborate with it and stay tethered again to my friendships. I would report back frequently, but where I am, I'm crying every day. I don't know what's going on. And they were just there, like steady heartbeats, you know. And then, you know, eventually, over that long time of descent, the return happened.

You know, I appreciate the. The sort of like personal.

Guidance and how you've traversed that territory because I do think that it is a, you know, metaphysical, psychological territory that we walk through. And.

I'm curious, can you give A little bit more insight into what are some of the common ways that you've noticed people block, avoid their personal descent? Because I want to make. I want to. You know, we've been talking quite largely in a macro way about culture, world, species, and I want to pull this back down to the individual. Are some of the ways that the individual themselves blocks the descent? What do we use to avoid it? And are there certain patterns that people should be aware of within themselves that you've noticed after working with people?

Well, I think you just have to look at the collective culture right now, and you see all the ways that we have devised to avoid the dissent. Busyness is probably the most notorious one. We stay so freaking busy.

I think it's in Chinese language, one of the Chinese dialects. They spell the word busy with two ideograms that mean heart killing. That's how they spell the word busy, heart killing. And we're obsessed with busyness, as if that makes us important or that verifies our worth. Is that I'm a busy man or a busy person, And I don't get it. Well, I do get it. It's part of that frenetic ideology. So we can feel that in our. In our individual lives, just how busy we stop or stay and how when we get quiet or we slow down, we get a little anxious. No, it's like. It's an uncomfortable silence. It's, you know, we feel like we're somehow failing if we stop, if we slow down, if we disengage for even a little bit. So that's one of the things. Addictions of all kinds are, ways that we can stay anesthetized to the descent, you know, and those are also, as you kind of said, ways to try to postpone the inevitable, the times of dropping other ways that we do that. I think one of the main addictions in the culture is seeking specialness, you know, that we have to be somehow so extraordinary. I have to impress you so mightily that I have to always be shining. I have to always be, you know, just at the epitome of my game. And if I'm not, I'm considered a loser, a failure, you know.

Whatever. But those associations with not being shiny, not being special, man, I remember when I was leading men's initiation. I remember working with a group up north, and on the first night, I was talking about how we call this work, the making of ordinary men.

And that our work is to actually surrender our addiction to specialness. And a man who was sitting on the ground literally Jumped up off the ground and just started screaming at me, saying, I spent my whole life trying to be special, then you're going to take that away from me? You know, he was incensed. As if that specialness is the only currency we have to some sense of pseudo belonging, you know, so we are so attached to trying to prove to you that I'm somebody worthy of your attention or maybe even a provisional sense of welcome. So those are things that we do that try to push away the descent. We have no faith in that movement downward. The only image we're given are ascension and resurrection. Those are both, you know.

Times of rising. Nothing wrong with rising. It's beautiful. We need that too. But consequently, our one dimensional adherence to that image only makes times of descent really unsettling and quite terrifying. So, yeah, we have a whole collective.

Arsenal designed to keep us from going down. Fortunately, psyche doesn't give a. It will still take us down individually and, and collectively.

Yeah, we're not the arbiters of where we go right now. It's, it is happening. And you know, from a soul perspective, this is, this is important and it's essential.

This is a necessary time.

I think you're, you're contextualizing something that I've really grappled with and I, I would love to get your perspective on if I can ask you a personal question. Personal for me.

I've always grappled with this notion of, of mediocrity. And, you know, I think my upbringing was one where it was tumultuous. There was abuse. You know, I was verbally told, you'll never be good enough, those types of things. I heard that quite a bit. And I was pretty average in most of what I did growing up was, you know, pretty average at hockey, wasn't, you know, anything quote, unquote special, pretty average academically in school. And, and so I've always felt this thrust to do great things and I can feel that capacity in there. And I can also feel that when it switches into a more addictive place.

But you used a word when we started this. I asked you, how are you doing? And you said, adequate, I'm adequate. And I, I mean, that was just the funniest thing to me. I was like, this is going to be such a great conversation.

I think I've, I think I've struggled in some ways. Personally, I think this is a very, maybe, maybe it's a male oriented thing. I'm not sure, but I think it's a very human thing, which is I've struggled With finding. Sometimes, sometimes in my life I can settle into it like, you know, sinking into the couch with a good book. But sometimes I really struggle with finding a place of this is adequate because. And maybe it's just a cultural narrative that to do so, to be just in a space of adequacy is to arrive at mediocrity, which is the literal definition of. Of modern hell.

Right.

Like, to be mediocre is sacri. Like, that's just. You should not do that. That's like prison. And so I'm from a personal place that I think will probably resonate with some of the audience. I would love for you to speak to that. Like, how can you find adequacy and satiation in a way.

That doesn't require this constant pursuit? But that also doesn't mean that you're sinking into the dredges of blah, you know, as a clinical term. What are your thoughts on that?

It's way over my head. I don't.

Mediocrity is a performance evaluation, you know, and when I'm talking about ordinary or adequate, that's not about performance. It's about, in a sense, dropping into who I am. It's ordinary for me to show up and care for my family, for my friendships. It's ordinary for me to be concerned about my watershed and my neighborhood. Our neighbor just died, you know, two weeks ago, so we're helping to prepare for the memorial for him. And there's nothing special about that. I'm not doing it for praise. So, you know, our attempts to rise above mediocrity are oftentimes hidden signals about trying to get the approval of the world, to try to reassure myself that I'm okay, that I don't have to outperform everybody else in order to get to zero. That.

My work at a soul level. That's. We were telling the men too, in the initiation work, your work is to embody your medicine, period.

That's your work. And you can't do your medicine. You can only be it. The moment you start to do your medicine, it's for you. And it's an attempt at special. It's an attempt at approval. It's an attempt at getting the feedback again. Nothing wrong with that. Some part of us needs that, for sure. But to be in our medicine, that's simply being yourself. And there's nothing more ordinary than that. I just led a five month grief ritual training online with people from over 30 countries, and one of the questions that came up was, was.

Do we all need to be Therapists in order to do this work.

And I said, if that's the case, where.

K. To swear on your program?

Yes. Okay. So my response is, if. If we're waiting for all of us to be therapists, we're, you know, what is more ordinary than sitting with somebody in grief? But somehow we've made even grief specialized. We have to be a grief specialist.

My God, how far have we come from the ordinary of holding one another in times of loss and sadness and grief? And, you know, these are not specialized things. They're very ordinary. And that's what I have faith in, is the ordinary practices of connection, friendship. That's, I think, what's going to help us get through nothing. But going back to your question about mediocrity, and.

I think that sits upon a bedrock of uncertain welcome and belonging, you know, so we spend much of our lifetime trying to prove our adequacy that I actually deserve a place in the circle. I remember in Malidoma's village, he said that it was the goal or the work of the village to impress into every child that they were somebody of worth and value and that they were utterly welcomed.

I said, well, we've turned that 180 degrees around where it's up to me to impress upon you that I'm somebody worthy of belonging. So my life turns into an ongoing performance.

And at some point the performance has to. It's going to fail. And then what, you know, what happens after the performance, you know, crashes. Where's my belonging set at? If it's not based on performance, if it's not based on perfection, if it's not based on specialness, what is it that is about my life that's essentially enough? And that's when you come back to soul. You know, soul will take everything that happens in our life as material to work with.

Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say I resonate with what you're saying deeply because I think even there's many parts of the modern culture that teach men. Like in the red pill community, I don't know if you're familiar with. Do you know what red pill community is? The red pill.

Okay.

Oh, matrix.

Yes. Sort of. Yeah, yeah. It's like the. The red pill community is a group of men that there's a very specific framework and dogma that you follow. And it's. It's basically, this is how you need to operate as a man, to be a man in order to be good at being a man. And it outlines how women are very specifically and how to interact with women and yada, yada, yada. But, but part of the core tenant is women are born with value, men aren't. And the notion is that you as a man have to develop your value to contribute to society because otherwise you don't have any inherently. Right. So you have to build your value to contribute to society, to attract women to be, you know, sort of high status in order to, you know, find the right partner, et cetera, et cetera, because you're not born with value. What's your take on that? What's your thought on that?

That's pretty disturbing if that's the premise. Again, we. We. We. That's the trick word right there. We, who we talking about? I mean, white Western masculinity, maybe, but we're only one of 7, 000 languages on the planet. There's 7,000 other ways of imagining what it looks like to be a human being, you know, and we think we got it right.

You know, so I think what I always been attracted to, traditional cultures, indigenous cultures, is because they seem to have a wider imaginal lens on how to see the humans relationship to themselves, but also to the community and to the surrounding ground of nature. The thing that scares me is talking about masculinity as a singularity. That scares me. That's fundamentalism in my mind. That's why when you look at traditional cultures, they oftentimes have multiple iterations of the gods and the goddesses, that there's multiple ways to imagine what the masculine looks like, what the feminine looks like, what the otherness looks like. And they're not fixated on one image. That's a monolithic system to say it all has to look like this. In the 50s it was John Wayne, you know, in the 60s, I don't know, but it still kind of narrows it down to you got to look like this. But what if I don't fit into that? What if my style, what if my way of being, what if my gender, what if the whole thing kind of shakes that foundational image that I'm not masculine enough? I was just working with someone this week, you know, who just feels like I'm not man enough. Well, again, your job is to articulate the masculine that comes through Connor. My job is to articulate the masculine that comes through Francis, not to try to shape my sense of the masculine according to that one image. So when I hear about masculine, I want to talk about masculinities.

What are the wild, weird, strange expressions of the masculine? And that's what Initiation was meant to do was to activate your particular genius, your particular way of expressing that energy. So we're not living in a homogenized, you know, monocrop. We all look and dress alike and talk alike. And that's disastrous from soul's point of view. See, the soul in psychology, we talk so much about getting centered, you know, but psyche, soul says, I want to be eccentric out of the center. I want to be on the edges of my own discovery, my own expression. Soul came here to articulate its own being, and it's up to us to help it articulate itself. But if I'm caught in the trap of conformity.

Then I will betray or abandon those calls for eccentricity. For me to be uniquely myself, which again is not special, but also quite ordinary. It's ordinary for us to be unique. That's not special. But this idea of homogenization down to a singular articulation, I think that's fundamentalism. And that scares the out of me. Well, however expressed through Christianity or any religious system or economic system, that that stuff just is dead, deadening.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. I always come back to the first line of the dao, which is the dao is called the dao is not the dao. Right. The way that's called the way is not the way. It's like as soon as you define that thing as a singular thing, you've lost the thing. In some ways.

I do think that our rational mind is very appealing and appeasing to the rational mind to give it some type of singularity of this is exactly what masculinity is. And this is how it looks. And what's. What's fascinating about the red pill community, not to go down this pathway too much, but I thought you'd find this interesting. Is the one of the main guys, his name is Rolo Tomas. He wrote a bunch of books and he talked about Jung once and he said, you know, curse Carl Jung for even creating the notion of the anima and the animus. How dare he say that men have a feminine. And so it was sort of this. That kind of gives you a sense of what the ideology has baked into it, right? That in order to be masculine enough, you have to completely annex and destroy your own feminine nature, because that can't exist inside of you. And like, what a. What a crushing experience to. To have to live in some ways. But anyway, I have two more questions for you that I think will be very helpful. The first is you talked about being your medicine, embodying your medicine. And not doing it. And I would like for you to just expand and colorize that for the listener. What might that look like for somebody to embody their medicine?

Yeah, you know, when we were working with the, with the men for a year, we would do this process. And it was our job as the initiators to watch how they interact with the other men in the circle. You know, if somebody was in pain or in grief, who showed up for that man? If somebody needed support or encouragement, who showed up, you know, and who was the one who was able to actually step into the territory of grief? And so we began to watch.

Not so much.

Well, we began to watch how they kind of intuitively responded to the world that was present in them. And so we gave them a name at the end of the process to reflect the medicine that they carried, that they are available now for the community and also for their brothers. So the idea is like.

The wounds that we carry, the medicine that we carry are right next to each other. That's a very old idea. I'm sure you're familiar with that. So my wound was shame.

And I wouldn't wish that upon anybody. It was a difficult wound to grow up with. It made me question my belonging my whole life until, you know, my 40s. At the same time, when I began to not try to get rid of the shame, but begin to see that as the.

In a sense, the unripened seeds of my own initiation.

I began to see that my work in the world was right alongside that territory. So I was given a name by my melodoma. And the name translates into he who sets straight the bone.

So I can go into the most twisted, difficult, shame filled territories with anybody and I can sit there and help set the bone straight again. You know, I probably couldn't do that if the shame hadn't also been been part of my lifetime. So I don't do that, you know, per se, But I am in that when I'm in that medicine. I can go any place with you into the most difficult territories of law or of shame and inadequacy and worthlessness. And.

I can bring medicine to that place. So again, medicine isn't something you do, it's when you're simply being yourself that the medicine comes out. And everybody carries medicine. And one place you can begin to look for it, and this is what we do is on the year long is watch and engage them around the heart of their woundedness. What is the nature of your wound? And when we take it out of performative psychology, out of feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. The wound now is now no longer a commentary on my being. It's simply the entry point for which my gift, my medicine, can be found. So does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah.

Last question for you is we touched on the en Mamuni. We touched on, you know, nature and sort of inadvertently our relationship to nature. Would love for you to speak to how one can go about developing a deeper relationship to nature or to the anima mundi itself.

I think there's so many ways to do that.

The most obvious one is to spend time.

Getting to know your neighbors. And what I mean by that is the honeybees and the towhees and the crows and the ravens and the grosbeaks, and these are all my neighbors and I know them. In fact, I was saying to my wife the other day, huh, the cricket started two weeks early this year. I wonder if that's because of it's been so hot, you know, because their song usually doesn't start until August here where we live, but they began in middle mid July. So my neighbors are waking up a little bit differently. So I know when the blackberries are ripe. I know the whole rhythm of this place after being situated here for 20 plus years. So I feel like I'm a part of the neighborhood. I'm part of this.

You know, unique little space with the fur trees and the redwoods and so get to know who you live with is a good place to start. We think nature is something out there.

But there's no separation. Every breath I take is a consequence of these trees blessing us with oxygen and breathing them in. I can see you today because of the light, the photons from the sun. You know, I'm sitting in this chair because of this affectionate embrace of the earth. There's not a moment that I exist that's separate from nature.

But the fiction is that I live in civilization and nature is out there, you know, but nature is always in here. Whether it's the spiders or the, you know, salamanders or this, the obsessive.

Lizards that keep trying to crawl under the door into the house. I don't know what they want in here, but, you know, they're very much part of our. Our neighborhood. We have ants that we have a tolerant relationship with, and we allow about a dozen of them to be in the house at any given time, you know, and.

They'Re our friends, we know them. And people come over and say, you got ants? I said, we know we know they're part of our house, and we put a little food out for them, and if they get too many, we take a few outside. But.

So, you know, kind of letting this fiction of separation fall away. I remember going to bed. I don't know if I shared this. Last time we spoke in 2020, I was going to bed right before the election, and I was full of despair. I was pretty certain that things were going to go bad.

And just as I was about to crawl into bed, something turned me around and pulled me over to my bookshelf over here and reached for this collection of essays by Linda Hogan called Dwellings. And I opened the book to the chapter all my Relations.

And I realized in that moment I had forgotten all my relations.

And the moment I began to extend my filaments back out to the moon that was shining that night and some of the stars and the turtles and salmon, and my despair lifted immediately because once again, a member of this teeming, singing, dreaming earth. And to forget that is really depressing. But to remember it, we rejoin the singing chorus of this world. Paul shepherd, whom I've talked about a lot in my writings and teaching, was being interviewed. He was a human biologist who died in the mid-1990s, and he was being interviewed once, and he was asked the question. I can't remember the question, but the answer was. The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.

Now, that's a profound statement. The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to, you know, ourselves is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. To meet the fox, we have these foxes that come across our property quite frequently, and sometimes they're quite.

Rambunctious in their displays of being foxy.

And turkeys and coyotes and bobcats. And.

That beautiful and strange otherness excites us. It enlivens us. But what if our depression, what if our deadness was their absence? What if this is more of a question of emptiness.

That we don't hear the wolf howl, we don't hear raven speech, we don't hear the red tail hawks creaking during the day, we don't hear the owl call at night. That silencing of the world, I think, leaves us feeling empty and depressed. So we have to re. Establish that intimacy with the world that we're not separate from it.

Um, it's beautiful. I. I love that. And I. I don't know if I said it last time when we spoke, because it was. I think. I think the first time we spoke was right after my son was born. And then we spoke after that, a little while after that. And I had this ritual. We have a different. We have different rituals now, but I had this ritual when he was a baby where every morning I would take him out. First thing in the morning, I would take him out and we would sit on the grass and we would. When he was old enough to crawl and walk, I would have him put his hand on the tree and we'd say good morning to the tree. We could say good morning to the lake that was there, and we'd listen for the birds and, you know, all of. All of that type of connection and now where we live. So we're about two hours north of Manhattan, up in.

Upstate New York. And I mean, there's so much wildlife here. You know, deer come through the property almost daily. There's wild turkeys, there's raccoons, there's. We have like a massive frog infestation right now. Like, I don't know where they're coming from, but I mean, we. We're like a frog farm, man. Like, we have hundreds of frogs on our land. And my son is obsessed with it. Right. I love froggies. I love froggies. So it's very interesting because.

I think in some ways it's. That part of me has always been there, you know, to wander off into nature, to talk to the trees, to listen to the wind, to hear what, you know, what different parts of nature are. Are saying to me or just are saying in general. And it's really reignited that, having my son and.

Doing what I can to teach him to have a relationship, you know, with nature, with the broader context, with this other that you're talking about. It's been such a special gift to witness him and. And to. And to also teach him the sanctity because he's, you know, he's a little boy and he wants to stomp on ants. And so, you know, getting. Getting to teach him all those things is wonderful. But listen, Francis, this has been outstanding. And as always, I could just sit and talk to you for hours and. And I hope selfishly one day to sit around a campfire with you and. And hear stories of your work and your life and for everyone that's out there that is listening to this and wants to learn more about you and your work and your writing. Where should they go? Where can they find you?

FrancisWeller.net is my website, and that's a good place to find programs that I've offered in the past that are available. My writings. Yeah, all of it's there. I'm on sabbatical, so I'm not offering any workshops right now. So it's time to write. Yeah.

Wonderful. Well, we'll have.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, you betcha. You betcha. We'll have all the links for that in the show. Notes for everyone that's listening. Don't forget to man it forward and share the episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. And until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.