Lexicon for Life

A Lexicon for Life: Bonus Episode — Twilight

In this special bonus episode of the podcast, Jay Griffiths reads from her book, Nemesis, My Friend: Journeys Through the Turning Times [https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/nemesis-my-friend-journeys-through-the-turning-times-jay-griffiths/7121643?aid=16802&ean=9781915068019&]. “It is twilight. And at the waking edge of night, a crescent otter surfaces looping up from its dive. In its mouth, a fish shines silver, a little crescent moon. Night chases day like one otter cub chasing another. A pine martin races quicksilver through nearby woods. On the edge of sight, a barn owl slips between the trees. This is the difficult, bewildering light, a light which makes visual puns so a tree stump with its black fingers of roots looks like a batter. Twilight plays tricks, foxing sight. The eye struggles to see, tries harder than it does in the easy light of day. The other senses grow crescent with the twilight and the moon. The body stills itself to feel more, quiets itself to hear more. Listen is an anagram of silent.” You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org [https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/jaygriffiths] Join Jay Griffiths and others in February at Byline Times’ live event ‘The Lure of Loneliness’ for a discussion about alienation, atomisation, and the decline of community in Britain. ⏰ February 2nd, 7:30pm 📍 Cockpit Theatre, London NW8 8EH [https://share.google/a9O81iSP6SF6dFaik] Get full access to Byline Times at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe [https://www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

A Lexicon for Life: Episode 8 — Spirituality

Every human culture has some kind of ritual to connect with something bigger than the self. Whether through organised religion or other spiritual practices, it appears to be a deep need in humans, but also in some animals, to acknowledge and celebrate wonder. In How Animals Heal Us, Jay describes the chimpanzee engrossed in a waterfall dance: “His enthusiasm (from en-theos, the god within) jubilantly collides with the thundering waterfall and he shakes the branches to rattling, getting everything going, struck by his primordial imperative: dance. At the end of the dances the chimp often moves into a mood of reflection. Jane Goodall writes, ‘Is it not possible that these performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe?’ Given how alike they are to us, emotionally, she asks: ‘why wouldn't they have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself. I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are.’” Looking at the stars or mountains or looking at animals, we experience transcendence, a sense of the divine, but humans are not alone in this, Jay writes: “Animals including primates may be spiritual. They may also lead us towards the divine, and birds have long been considered messengers of the gods. A skylark transposes my soul into a higher key. It rises helical as it sings, spiralling in an ellipsis of space until its distilled song becomes brightness, magnetized to heaven's quintessence, pinpointing god. The dance of two mating cranes is a symmetry of pure, divine, grace. Their pas de deux is a pas de dieu.” Jay, Joanna and John discuss the divinity of animals, and the way in which many cultures have animal gods; monkeys, mice, rats, cows, goats, foxes, crocodiles, ravens and bears are all revered and worshipped. As Jay asks, “Why wouldn’t all these be gods?” “Animals ensoul the world, giving the collective psyche limitless dimensions of sacredness. We could, with relief, acknowledge divinity again in the real and living world, knowing it as the truth that has so far vouchsafed humanity’s time on earth. Then the collective psyche could come to its senses and the individual soul come home to itself, letting the soul-medicine that has always surrounded us work its ordinary miracles, in the holy and reckless plurality of the animals, each one an iteration of life’s deepest prayer: let there be life.” You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org [https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/jaygriffiths] Get full access to Byline Times at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe [https://www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

A Lexicon for Life: Episode 7 — Dreaming

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths — Joseph Campbell Dreaming, and what we learn from our dreams, are a fundamental part of being human, part of every culture on earth, but we are not the only dreaming animals. “Spiders. Rats. Cats. Dogs. Zebra finches. Humans and other primates. Dreaming happens among many animals,” writes Jay in How Animals Heal Us. You can watch baby jumping spiders dream when, in the first ten days of their lives, their exoskeletons are see-through and their dreaming eyes have “flurries of rapid eye movement (REM)”, rats relive the experiences of their day in dreams, cats dream of hunting and jumping, and zebra finches sing in their dreams: “They experience the REM state and then their forebrains fire neurons in a distinct pattern, one that also takes place when they are awake and singing. It seems that their sleeping brains replicate the pattern of their singing, suggesting, say researchers, that these songbirds are moving their vocal muscles to the music of their dreams.” Jay, Joanna and John discuss how, for Indigenous Australians, “the soil contains the Ancestors, not only the human ones but the Ancestor spirits who travelled the land in the Dreaming, and the earth is alive with them still.” As Jay writes in Why Rebel, “Indigenous cultures very commonly assert that the land has consciousness. More: the land, they say, dreams us. This beautiful, enigmatic idea contains a vastness of vision, seeing our place on Earth as a kind of dream.” Lack of sleep damages our cognitive functions, but dreaming “opens us to a wider consciousness and understanding. Each dreamer is connected to a subconscious wisdom extending far beyond themselves, like roots extending into a communal shared intelligence under the soil.” “Sleeping,” writes Jay, “is the subsoil of the mind, the darkly luminous place for insight beyond obvious sight.” Jay also tells of her meetings with Amazonian shamans, who, she recounts, shared a certain expression, “something I saw in all their eyes, something long-sighted and intense: they were magnets to dreams. If you were a dream, it’s their sleep you’d swim towards, their minds you’d yearn to be dreamt in.” “In the forests,” she says, “you see the tenderness of darkness, for all good things are cradled in darkness first: seeds and babies, compost, healing and dreams.” You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org [https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/jaygriffiths] Get full access to Byline Times at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe [https://www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

A Lexicon for Life: Episode 6 — Imagination

“If the imagination were an animal, it would be the hare. The mercurial hare races quicksilver, like a flash of thought swiftly appearing and instantly gone.” From cave paintings to fables and children’s books, for thousands of years, animals have shaped human thought and our urge to connect with them has given rise to imaginative art. “The full imaginative reach of being human needs the animals,” writes Jay in How Animals Heal Us. “We are made of the snort of a horse, a hedgehog bristle, and badger’s teeth. We are wren-sung and swallow-built and seahorse-etched and our imaginations are flecked with turquoise, thanks to the dragonfly. Through the animals we know ourselves. “In cave paintings, it is animals that are painted. This is so well-known that its importance can be overlooked. The earliest art was inspired by a thrilled, observant and almost certainly shamanistic entrancement with animals.” Jay, Joanna and John ask why animals feature so importantly in children’s books and why a love of animals is often seen as childish. They also discuss how the language of imaginative metaphor can help explain how it feels to experience mental illness. Jay reads from her book, Tristimania, “Metaphor matters in madness. Matters so much that you could say metaphor is the material of madness, the mothering tongue of the madstruck mind, mater of it all.” Jay talks about her own experience of manic depression and the metaphor of mountains that helped her to communicate her agony: “When a person is ill, a metaphor is not a decoration, not a trivial curlicue of Eng. Lit, not a doily on the conversational table, rather it is a desperate attempt to send out an SOS, to give the listener their co-ordinates, because they are losing themselves. I am on Cader Idris, just before the first peak after the path leaves the lake, do you read me? Over. The perilous geography where my psyche was situated. Situated but dis-located, alone and pathless. I had to be meticulously precise in giving the latitude of my madness, the longitude of my scraps of insight. I was lost and urgently needed to be found, to be located by someone who could (as shamans say) send their souls out to find mine. In terms of our culture, one way of doing this is surprisingly simple: listeners need to hear the metaphors and stay with them. “It is crucial that listeners do not scramble the message or scumble the precision of the image. If the listener can stay within the terrain of the exact metaphor the speaker is using, they will feel more findable, more reachable. (I read you. What’s the mountain weather report? Stay away from the cliff edges...) But if, by contrast, the reply confuses the image (I understand. You’re feeling very low. You’re in a dark pit) then the person in crisis will feel more lost, more isolated, and more endangered.” You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop on Bookshop.org [https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/jaygriffiths] Get full access to Byline Times at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe [https://www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

A Lexicon for Life: Episode 5 — Anxiety

Anxiety is rife, caused variously by the fear of climate change, by the destabilising of political structures and the speed of technological development. No-one can be free of anxiety while being aware of what is happening in the world. “Young people are suffering a never-before-known sickness, eco-anxiety, as time is running out for the climate, the soil, and the oceans and so many creatures are threatened with extinction,” writes Jay, in Nemesis, My Friend. “The Dominant Culture is breaching the limits of what the world can stand, a transgression like no other in its consequences. In a few decades, it has seized resources, broken the wise and necessary limits, taken more than its due, stolen life itself from the future. In its greed and in its hubris, it has endangered the coral reefs, the bees, the Everything.” Jay, Joanna and John discuss what is possible to reduce anxiety, to harness it and to help face the “unhallowed” nature of the assault on what Jay calls our “mental sovereignty”. Our connection to animals is one of the ways to model a healthier, less anxious way to be. “Donkeys,” Jay writes in How Animals Heal Us, “are the archetype of gentleness, the holy animal of the Christ story twice over, once at the beginning and once at the end, and they seem to meditate by default as they are animals of endurance, patience and tranquillity.” Similarly, dogs are “medicine for high anxiety”: “We humans have been living alongside them for some 32,000 years and they give us a deep sense of safety as they can smell and hear far further out into the world than we can, so in the ancient memory of our atavistic genes, we know that they are offering us rings of protection wider than we can provide for ourselves. When a dog is there, calm, happy, maybe snoozing, an ancient part of the psyche knows ‘the camp is safe.’” You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org [https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/jaygriffiths] Get full access to Byline Times at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe [https://www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]