Noticing: A Podcast About Nothing & Everything At The Same Time
Bless the Foolish Ideas
Descripción
In this week’s episode, we speak to Jenny O’Connell, a woman who has always lived in the world with her entire body. She is a writer, naturalist, outdoor guide, ultimate frisbee player, and fierce lover of the world who reminds us to leap. What feels remarkable about this conversation is how many times Jenny had faith in her life and acted accordingly. By radiating from her bright center, Jenny beckons us to reflect on the story of our own lives. What would it feel like to write our life story as we live it? She is an apt guide; her adventure memoir WILDHEART comes out on June 1, 2027 with DK Books at Penguin Random House. Jenny identifies many moments where her life caught her, pulling her like a hook behind her belly button in a new and surprising direction, notably the time when a short conversation with a neighbor’s elderly mother changed the course of her life. Her intuition was strong enough, she says, that thankfully she was always willing to pivot where life asked her to go. Jenny sees this moment as one where she can reignite our collective heart sparks and invite us into our own wildness, which as we discuss in this episode, can take many forms. Jenny shows how stories catalyze something deep within us, and we believe her story of wildness and homecoming will arrive into your hearts as both a catalyst and an invitation. How do we, as women, fill the room with our own power? How do we protect our sovereignty? Dare to let Jenny’s aliveness catalyze something in you. Dare to ask what form wildness takes. This invitation can be as quiet or loud as you need it to be, because after all, as Jenny kindly reminds us, “we are a creature that forgets we’re alive all the time.” For more of Jenny, check out her: Website [https://jenny-oconnell.com/] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jenny__oconnell] Jenny is also on Substack! Subscribe below: A few other inspirations from this week’s episode: “Writing a woman’s life” by Katherine Heilbrun “Women who run with the wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés The John O’Donohue episode of On Being Christina references [https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/] Episode Transcript Christina: You know what’s cool about just staying with a feeling is, well, like sometimes, first of all, sometimes you have to like figure out where that feeling lives. And then once you get it to just be like, oh yeah, hey, I see you. I see you fear. Hello. I am afraid of this thing. And then, like, I feel so much lighter now that I’ve addressed it. Um, not to say that it’s done, but it was really great to identify like, oh, I think actually this thing is holding me back. And then to, to figure out why and releasing that, you know, like I know that everything changes. Everything changes. So when I think about like, what if I could go reach out into the world to do what I’m meant to do in large or small ways and then to come back and be fully present in this place, um, rather than trying to like squeeze the large and small ways into this place? It’s an interesting thought. Um, and yeah, Jessie Buckley came to mind because I remember seeing like a quick clip of her speaking with the chick who played Alphaba in Wicked in the movie. And that actress was saying like, “I always watch your roles, Jessie, and I feel like worried about you. Are you okay? ‘Cause you throw so much of yourself in them.” And Jessie Buckley’s answer was like, “Yeah, my life is so simple. So I’m able to go and throw my whole self into these roles because I come back to like this really nourishing, simple, grounded place, um, where I build everything back up again. Becky: Welcome to Noticing: A Podcast About Nothing And Everything At The Same Time. In this week’s episode, we speak to Jenny O’Connell, a woman who has always lived in the world with her entire body. She’s a writer, a naturalist, outdoor guide, ultimate Frisbee player, and a fierce lover of the world who reminds us all to leap. What felt remarkable about this conversation is how many times Jenny had faith in her life and acted accordingly. I know it inspired me and I hope it inspires you. I hope you enjoy. Christina: I have the pleasure of introducing a dear friend today. Jenny O’Connell is someone who wrote straight into my Soul and I saw her writing in, in many ways, and I think we started following each other’s newsletters or something, or Instagrams or something. It doesn’t really matter. It was just a very pointed feeling and every time I read something she wrote, I felt this is someone who was cut from the same cloth that I am. And I actually, that’s a very big deal for me to say that because I’ve never met someone that I’ve found. So closely seemed to metabolize the world like I did, and share it with a abandon. Like I feel I must someone who can tap, joy and aliveness in the way that I feel I am able to do, in a world where like I don’t, I don’t see a lot of people doing that. And then one day, I don’t remember who asked who it, it might have been me, we just decided like, can we just go sit on a beach? And it was the end of springtime, so the water was still cold. And I had seen her as someone who sometimes gets in the Cold Sea and and I said, maybe we could just go to the beach and. Just see what happens. And so we did, and it was, I will use your words back at you, Jenny, when you say like, you know, when your life just catches you sometimes being on the beach with Jenny felt like my life was catching me because we immediately went to like a deep thread that we both shared. And meeting a stranger when you can get so immediately real with them is, um pretty uncommon. And since then, uh, we have just, our friendship has deepened and it’s always been supported and incredibly authentic and refreshing to me in this life. And I am thrilled to talk to Jenny today. Becky knows you now as well. And yeah, there’s so much more I could say, but, but just meeting someone who feels like a true kindred spirit in a way, unlike anyone I’d ever met, is what I would call you. Jenny O’Connell. Jenny: Oh, so good to be here. Christina, can you just introduce me for everything I do for now? That was the most heartfelt introduction. Christina: Yeah. Jenny: There’ve been like 40 cold dips since, and I’m so glad about it. Christina: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Um, and actually I was thinking, uh, ‘cause you know, I, I’ve mentioned it here before and probably to you in real life, but, um, I read Mary Oliver. I have her Devotions book, which has a selection of lots of different, pieces, pieces of poetry from different books she’s published throughout her lifetime. And I read it to my daughters before bed. And I have one that I’d love to read because it, it, it was, it reminded me of you. And then we can just go. So here it’s, it’s called The other Kingdoms. Consider the other kingdoms, the trees, for example, with their mellow sounding titles. Oak, Aspen, Willow, or the Snow for which the peoples of the North have dozens of words to describe its different arrivals or the creatures with their thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze, their infallible sense of what their lives are meant to be. Thus, the world grows rich grows wild, and you two grow rich, grow sweetly wild as you two were born to be. Jenny: Hmm. Christina, I can’t believe you picked that one because, that quote, the end of that poem, just those last two lines, are listed as an epigraph in the draft of my book right now that I have, uh, grow sweetly wild. Christina: Mm. I mean, that feels like. I mean, nobody even knows that you have a book. Do you wanna start talking about, I mean, I didn’t tell, I didn’t list, we purposefully don’t list people’s accolades or things. It’s um, yeah. So you’re a writer. Jenny: Um, yeah. Yeah. Well I love that. I love that you just start with the connection and it grows from there. But since you’re my friend, you also know that this is basically all I can talk about right now because I am in the process of finishing it. I have been writing a book for 10 years it’s a adventure memoir, it’s called Wild Heart. And it follows a journey that I took back in 2014, when I met. It was based in a meeting I had with a woman who was a legend in Finnish Lapland. I was, I’m a big zig zacker. I started as a musician. I, studied music in college and then I fell in love with the natural world and just, I’ve always been in love with it. But, when I came out of college, I just kept getting these nudges like, you need to go outside. You need to be outside. You need to be moving your body outside. You need to be connecting to place. And so I did a 180 from my music education career and ended up becoming an outdoor guide. And I moved to San Francisco to this national recreation area just outside the city where I taught, as a naturalist, and started to get into outdoor guiding around California as well. And it was such a strong pull. And when I met, uh, the woman’s name was Petronella, I was 26 years old, and I had been, following this poll from wild places from nature to connect. And I had been really reorienting my sense of the world around that. And I was just starting to wake up to some of the ways that I had been, for lack of a better word, tamed by my society. Ways that I had, been taught to live or to think about what I could expect from my life. And I was craving something wilder and I didn’t know how to do it. I, you know, was looking for examples. And my friend down the hill from where I lived in this coastal village in California, was taking care of her 89-year-old mother who had dementia. And so I just brought over quiche and a bottle of wine one night. And the first thing that her mother said to me, she looked at me and she said, I walked to Lapland and I was 26 and foolish enough to jump, you know? Becky: Yes. Jenny: Um, which like, may I still be, please? Im 39. Um, but I just had this moment. It was something else passed between us, like something more than just conversation. There was like this current of energy. And I immediately just felt it in my gut and I was like, fuck. Like, sorry, can I curse on here? Sorry. Becky: Absolutely. Yes. Jenny: That’s how I felt. It was like so guttural. It was just like, this is for me. I have to do this. I didn’t even know what this was like. I learned that night from the woman whose name is Petronella van der Moer and her daughter that in 1949, right after World War ii, she was Dutch. She had gone to Finland with dreams of being a writer. She wanted to be a writer. And she, , you know, it was a time when Europe had been devastated by World War ii, Finland in particular, because it was caught between these two major world powers and, they were rebuilding after the war. And Petronella sailed into Turku, Finland, and made her way to Helsinki and just started interviewing the famous city elite. Like she just started getting in with these. Hot shots in Helsinki. And then she ran out of money and ditched her hotel bills and fled the police north to Lapland where she, on the way, she met, this man on a bus who was a geologist who was heading into the gold fields where there was a gold rush going on. And so she convinced him to take her with him, and they set off on this 116 kilometer hike into the wilderness, and she ended up later signing on to just live and work with these gold perspectives in the wilderness. And she was there for about a month, and then she was arrested and deported by the secret police who thought she was a spy. Um, she, they ended up finding out about the hotel bills, and she stood trial in Helsinki. She was all over the newspaper and then she was deported and she just disappeared. So they had been searching for her, the gold perspectives who loved her and her friends in Finland had been searching for her for 65 years when I met her. And she had never returned. She had never reached out. She was very mysterious from that point on. her family in the Netherlands was very like, proper and they were horrified by this story. And, and when a reporter showed up at their house in Den Haag in the Netherlands, that was sort of, it Petronella was like, okay, I can’t, I can’t interact anymore. I have to protect my family from this. And so, um anyway, in the absence of information, her legend grew and she became, there are books written about her. There’s a musical named after her. There’s a street named after her. There’s a restaurant named after her. There are two Hills in Lemmenjoki National Park named after her breasts because of bad gold perspective humor. Um, uh, and she is just this sort of folk legend. I didn’t know any of this. All I heard was I walked to Lapland, and I left that night with this idea. It was wild to me because I was 26 when I met her. She was 26 in Finland. She turned 26 there. She wanted to be a writer. I had just fallen in love with creative writing. I had just taken my first writing class and was like all in. I had found this thing that just lit me up and deepened my perception of the world and. And our birthdays were like 11 days apart, plus or minus a lot of years. I don’t know, there were just these weird synchronicities and I was like, this is for me. And so I ended up, quitting my job and one year later I walked and hitchhiked across Finland in Petronella’s footsteps. I set out with this big red backpack from Helsinki and a mission to just retrace her path and hopefully what had struck me about her, you know, in that, back to that context of wildness and what I was missing and what I was searching for was just how powerful and self-possessed she was. At 89 years old, she died three months after I met her. Um, Becky: wow. Jenny: I only met her three times and the next two times she could barely speak. Like I watched her sort of decline, and. She just filled the room with her power. She was a very powerful woman, and so was her daughter. And I was like, what did she find? You know, out of 89 years of life, she chose this story for me. So why and why me? And what did she find in Finland that made it so deeply into her soul and her psyche that she wanted to tell me that on her deathbed? So I, yeah, I walked, north out of Helsinki and between walking and hitchhiking many twists and turns and getting lost along the way, I made my way up to Lemmenjoki National Park where I lived with the modern day gold prospectors who are still up there, for a couple of months. And, it was the journey of my lifetime. And that is the book that I’m writing. Hmm. Christina: I don’t think I actually knew that. You, I don’t think I knew the origin story of having her daughter Be your neighbor. Jenny: Yeah. Yes. Um,. And I should mention too, like, Petronella, she said I walked to Lapland, but she actually did not walk across Finland. It took me until I was like, I’m gonna do that too. And I like got all ready and I got to Finland, but all the books were in finish. And so as people started to slowly translate them for me, I learned that she had like, you know, taken a bus. And, um, so I kind of set out with this parallel but separate quest that was very much based on the feeling I got that first night and sort of the like, foolishness, and joy that you need in order to leap at something like that. And I, yeah, I go back to that self sometimes when I need to be brave and I ask her questions. ‘cause that is a particular kind of, uh, recklessness I guess that I, that has opened up the rest of my life. Hmm. Becky: We’ve had a couple conversations around this time and being in community. I find it so interesting that it was just you being neighborly and like going to your neighbor and bringing over a bottle of wine and, uh, was it a casserole or like something Yeah, yeah. a quiche . Yeah. Um, it unlocked this great adventure for you. And, um, I love the mystery of it. You were asking , why, you know, why did she do this? And, and I was curious, did she ever give you answers or did you just have to live in those questions of, of why? Jenny: That’s a great question. I asked her, why she went and she just looked at me and very slowly she said to tell a story. Becky: Hmm. Jenny: Um, and you know, I will say on this end of it too, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of story, about how when we see ourselves in a story or see somebody, that we could be in a story, it can be really catalytic. It can really change the course of our lives. And I think that’s one of the reasons that I gravitate toward writing so hard a story is sort of a, a conversation that keeps living long after you’re gone. Becky: I love this image of thinking of our, our life as a story. And it, it makes me feel into, um, we get to be our own author. Like so often I think, you know, I, I, I’ll speak for myself, I can feel like life is happening to us in this reframe of finding yourself in a story, the story of your own life and like the, the authority to, to write your own story or direct your own movies if you’re drawn to movies. You know, and I’m, uh, I, I wrote down Tame and Wild and, and it even strikes me of like. You know, it’s wild to think I can write my own story, but if you’re tamed, it’s like a different orientation, right? Like tame when you’re tamed. Um, it’s like there’s some authority outside of you taming you when you’re wild. It’s like, no, this is my story, this is my wilderness. Um, and I’m curious, what if you feel comfortable talking about it? Like how did that tame feeling that you were re realizing, how did that show up? Or like how did you start to recognize that in you? Jenny: Hmm. Becky, you’re putting your finger on the heart of my book right now and it’s so exciting to feel you just like holding it like that. Um, yes. So I think many people can relate to this feeling. I believe that we are all born wild. We are all born with this sort of innate sense of self. And for me, as someone who has been socialized as a woman in our culture, it specifically was around the time that, the culture started trying to tame my body. It was like, you know, you have to make yourself smaller than you are. You have to look a certain way, you have to act a certain way. You can’t be too messy or too loud or too much. And you know, I was this wild kid who is so in love with this world and I’ve never lost that love, you know, that is I think what actually called me back in the end. But I was always falling out of trees and skinning my knees and riding my bike and yelling, you know, into the sunset. And like, it was just, I was like, full on living in this world with my entire body. And when I started to learn that that wasn’t acceptable, I started to lose connection to that part of myself. And it, it also coincided, strangely enough, I grew up in this, I grew up in a city in Albany, New York, but I also spent every summer up in the Adirondack Mountains at this cabin that my family has. And kind of at the same time that I was, being disconnected from my body and my own knowing. There were also changes that were happening to the land, like trees were getting cut down. There were bushes that were taken down. There were like. More people started to drive golf carts around, you know, it just became a less wild place as I grew. And so I think I’ve never been able to separate, my own taming with the taming of land because of that. But I’ve seen it in so many bigger scale ways too, in our world right now. And so what really started to bring me back to myself, you know, I’d been, I had been disconnected from my own knowing in a way. ‘cause when you’re disconnected from your body, your body is a deep source of information and wisdom. And like old, old knowledge. And so when I became disconnected from my own knowing, I stopped to what you were saying, feeling like I could direct my life in a certain way or, live in a certain direction. And what. brought me back was actually following that pull to be outside and to, you know, when I started, working as a naturalist in California, I, I started seeing all these other rhythms of life that I had been disconnected from, but I was coming back to and it just started to re-center me around this idea that we are all here and we are all alive and we are all connected, like so much more connected than we think. And that connection to place brought back my connection to body. I was like, I started going for adventures. You know, I became a raft guide and I learned to read rivers and to really like throw my body into those kinds of situations. I would lead trips in. Peru in the Andes, and after my students left, I would just like, take myself on these wild hikes. And really, um, I was pushing my body so hard in wild places because when I did, there was this moment, there would always be this moment where I could touch the Divine again. I like became who I was trying to teach my students how to be Mm. Like somebody who was, I, I would remember my own power and I had forgotten it. We all have it, but I had forgotten it and I had lost touch with it. And so, it was this embodied connection with the natural world and with adventure that brought me back fully. And that’s why I think I was ready to jump when I met Petronella and I learned about that story. Christina: Hmm. So. This. This is really interesting. So we’re here to talk to you obviously, but I’m actually being put into the perspective of Petronella at 89 on her daughter’s. I imagine her on a couch, maybe she was on a bed, but like you just, you just said, we come. You believe we come into this world. Wild. I agree with that. I also think of cycles, life cycles. We come into this world wild. We leave it wild. There’s like a big gap in between and I’m thinking of Petronella and how she was at a point of distilling everything. My, okay. My grandmother is 96 and she talks about how she lives in her memories more than in her physicality now. So like you’re in your. You’re, you’re thinking about things. So I picture you as this 26-year-old brightly little thing coming in with aqui and a bottle of wine as a neighbor. And this woman has distilled her entire existence. Into those two sentences, I walked across Lapland to tell a story, to write a story, right. She had boiled things down into the essence of her wildness that she could hand like a torch to anyone who was willing to take it. And who knows, maybe she said that to every neighbor who popped by or like the mailman. She’s like, listen, I walked across Lapland today. I don’t know, but, but you took it, you took the torch because you saw something in her that you shared, right? And you decided to like do the thing. And it feels like now you get to. You’re not 89. You’re 39, and you get to hold that torch in your center and like pr preach it is the word that I’m coming with, but I don’t, that’s, that has some baggage, but you get to, you get to lead, you know what I mean? Like you get to lead right now so that there’s not a wide gap between a soul entering and leaving a body as wild and wild. Like what if the in-between is like really thick with wildness? Jenny: Mm mm Yeah. And I think it’s, I think it’s important to know this is subtle, but um I was in touch with my own intuition enough. Christina: Yeah. Jenny: To take her seriously. I think it was really easy. And actually a few times my brain would take over and I would. I would be like, well, you know, she has dementia. When people have dementia, they just start, like random memories come up and they just like, maybe that wasn’t actually for me, or maybe that wasn’t important. But, but what really, I mean, this, this is an interesting story. After she died, um, I brought her daughter, we, I met her for lunch. And I brought her this sympathy card that I had found stuffed in the back of all the cards at the grocery store. And it was this picture of the stars and it was this quote from the Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And it was like, I’m, I don’t know the exact quote, but it was basically like in one of the stars. I will be laughing and one of the stars I will be, . Living and all you need to do when you miss me is look up at the stars at night. I, I’ll look up the actual quote. But that was the gist of it. And I brought this to lunch with her daughter, and we’re sitting there, we’re eating our clam chowder. And her daughter looks at me and she says, you know, mommy was a scientist. Like she didn’t believe in heaven. She used to tell me that when she died, she’d go up and join the stars and she’d be up there and I could look up there and see her. And I was like, oh my God. And I, so I just pushed the card across the table and I said, I think this is for you. And she opened it and she put down her spoon and just looked at me and she said, this is uncanny. You would never have known this, but this was my mother’s favorite quote. This is what she believed. And I just. If there was any doubt in my mind before then. There had been a couple of other interesting signs too, that I was picking up on, but that was one where I was just like, all right, this was not an accident. This is for me. Becky: Oh, so, so my intuition comes to me in feelings, and that just gave me all the feels and, um, we weld my eyes. And I’m curious, ‘cause you’ve been talking, uh, that you said you’ve really, connected to your intuition. And you’ve talked a couple times about this pull. You kept getting this pull and you were following it. What is it, what is your experience of that pull and intuition? Like, how does it speak to you? Jenny: I think, um, the biggest thing for me has been not discounting it. Not pushing it away when I feel it. Often things come to me as gut pulls. Like I feel it in my gut, which is like a, ugh. It’s a little nudge. It’s a little tug. It’s like I used to describe it as a hook behind my belly button that just yanks me forward. It’s not always that obvious. Sometimes it’s more like a, a little nudge. But I think when you get that tug or that, little reminder, there’s the choice to listen to it and there’s the choice to ignore it. And I think that I was in touch enough with myself and connected enough to the world, like to the earth and to my own, inner life that I was able to act on it. I think the harder thing is not actually hearing it, it’s actually acting on it. It’s deciding. Okay, this doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t make money. This is a ridiculous idea. It’s probably really dumb, but I’m gonna do it. And god bless the foolish ideas because I would not have this life that I love so much. Had I not taken that leap before my brain kicked in and cut it, cut it off. Christina: They’re only foolish ideas because of the society we live in. Jenny: Oh, yes. I say foolish with utmost love. Like I, I mean that is a good thing. Christina: Yeah. I’m someone who does, who like lives on foolish ideas. I’m like surfing on a sea of foolish ideas to just be like, where do I go now? And it’s really challenging to, to be that type of person sometimes in. Capitalism. Becky: Yeah. Well that’s what was coming up for me is like, who’s doing the taming? And tho those, that connection to inner authority has been, has attempted to be tamed out of us, especially those who inhabit of a female body, you know? Other ways of knowing, other ways of certainty. Um. And Jenny: that is why I write about wildness like, Becky, we’re so good at distilling things down. Like you wanna come to help me finish my book right now, because that’d be really helpful. Um I write about wildness because each of us has this light in us that when we feed it and when we let it grow, it becomes too unruly to control. And there are systems of disconnection that we live in, or there’s a system that wants us to be disconnected, because others benefit from us being disconnected from our own knowing and our own power. And so I see my body of work and kind of my job here, as relighting those little fires and just reminding people of like, we all have this. We all have it. Um, and. That’s a beautiful way to resist is to just fan that spark and to listen to it and to come back into, uh, a conversation with your life, a conversation with your own knowing and your own power. Becky: Hmm. It’s, I love that you call that out, that it is resistance because it’s all these systems that want to disempower us and, um, yeah. And it’s so joyful to connect back to yourself and so powerful. Jenny: And I think when you do, you, you connect back to much more than yourself too. Right. Real wildness to me is a deep and sometimes messy connection to yourself, to other people, to your community, and to the earth. And if we remember that we are alive and connected, I think we would live a lot differently. I think that, um. We’d, we’d be able to thrive differently. Becky: Yeah. Yeah. I think the closer, I think it’s inevitable though, even if you don’t start off, even if you just start off trying to connect to your own, to use your language wildness or your own inner knowing, I think it’s inevitable that you get to a place of realizing that your true Self is deeply interconnected with every other being, every other, um, relative plant relative, animal relative. Um, and we would live a lot differently. And, and that’s, you know, one of the reasons why these systems don’t want us to connect because then we would, you can’t exploit your relatives if you recognize them as deeply interconnected with, with who you are. Jenny: Yes. Yes. And. Right now we’re watching, for example, the US Forest Service just got quote unquote consolidated, you know, and we’re watching this attack on our public lands and these wild places, and we’re watching, land being parceled and sold off for private profit. And I don’t think that this would be happening if we understood wildness as a value, if we held it, if we realized that actually wild places and wild land is so deeply integrated with our own wild selves and our, like we are all, we are all connected in that way. And I, I think if there was a stronger value placed on wildness in our society, that wouldn’t be happening. We wouldn’t be here. Yeah. Becky: Knowing what’s happening right now and knowing how deeply connected you are to the Earth and this land, how are you holding, like, and also knowing you as like holding so much joy. How do you also hold the grief? ‘cause I imagine there’s so much grief when you love the world as you do. How are you holding it right now in this, this time? Jenny: Hmm. That’s a great question. Um, I think, to be honest, that I still have work to do around feeling my grief all the way. I think that I’m not there yet and it’s probably, I’m probably not gonna be able to fully finish this book until I can. But I, I do think I’m not alone there. You know, there’s so much, coming at us all the time to grieve and I go through cycles with it. Um, it often hits me when my body is in motion somewhere. I’ll be walking or I’ll be biking or I’ll be singing and all of a sudden I’ll be weeping. And, and so I think my body lets me know when it’s time to feel something like that, to feel something that deeply. I definitely root myself in a fierce love for place and for the people in my life and for myself. And so that kind of helps anchor me in those moments. But I will also say that, there are wells of grief that I have not tapped into, and I’m scared to, and I know that I need to go there. And I know that in order to really, truly embody the wildness that I believe I need to hold, I have to sit down with it and, and let it in. And sometimes I do. And sometimes I’m, uh, kind of gliding along, right on top of it being like, not now, not now, not now. Which, you know, I think it, it goes with, um what Christina was saying too about the structure of our lives and how we live in capitalism and. There isn’t time to grieve in my life. Sometimes I just quit my full-time job to finish this book. ‘cause I realized I couldn’t do them both at the same time. I didn’t have the correct amount of emotional bandwidth if I was doing both. And so, you know, I think there will be more space now and there has been more space since. And I think we have a broken relationship to time, in our culture. And grief requires time. Becky: Hmm. Jenny: So I think what I’m trying to do right now, to get at that deeper grief that I know is there, that I need to feel and process is create more time around it. Mm-hmm. Becky: So I wanna hear more , what you just said about, we have a broken relationship to time. But first I just wanna thank you for that answer around grief. I think it’s such an honest answer and I think, you know, grief is not a linear process, so anyone, there is no like, other side of grief. So I think it’s such a beautifully honest answer there’s no right answer here. You know, there’s no right way to hold this incredible amount of grief, that we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. Um, and I’m so curious to know more about how you think our relationship to time is broken. Jenny: Hmm. Well, I, I am generalizing, but I do think that that’s true across our society. Um. I can speak for what I see in society and then I can speak specifically for myself. ‘cause I have sort of a different relationship to time that is also, or has also been broken that I’ve been working on fixing for a long time. I think with the focus, especially in American culture, on productivity and producing and you know, we just have like a keep buying it, keep making it keep, um, sending it out. Like even with content, it’s like never ending, you know, it’s, um you just have to like churn through so much of your life. I think that that culturally is our broken relationship with time. I think that, when we give so much of our lives over to that sort of churn. We miss some of the things that want to deepen us, that want to get in to heal us, to, bring us closer to ourselves. And, so societally that’s what I see. And I’ve always lived, um, kind of on the edges of that. Like as a, as a naturalist, I made I think like $11 an hour. You know, I never had a lot of stability to lose. Mm-hmm. Like I had, I had the privilege of a loving family who was like, we support this go, but they didn’t support me financially. You know, I had to figure it out. But I never, I was actually afraid of taking. A job that had more security attached to it, because I was afraid I would get stuck because I saw people doing that. Mm-hmm. And it terrified me. And so for many years I was a naturalist or a freelance writer. I mean, I am again, now I only have my full-time job for a year and a half. Um but it wasn’t ‘cause of the security. There were other reasons, but, yeah, I, uh, I gave myself more time. I valued my time over the money that I could make or a 401k or other, honestly, other life decisions that I could have made. You know, I also, I’m 39 and I’ve had many loves in my life and many like. Beautiful, committed partnerships. But, I also lived too fast for partnership to really catch me for a while. So there are other things that sort of, it was like a choice that, came with certain sacrifices. But my broken relationship with time happen, it’s, it’s like both what broke it and also I think what is going to heal it. And like it’s something that is really, uh, underneath so much of how I live is my relationship to mortality. In 2009, I think, yeah, early 2009, so I had just graduated from college. I was driving from my college boyfriend’s house in Corning, New York to Albany on this icy interstate called 88 in New York, and my car hit a patch of black ice. I flipped over the median and I rolled three times. And, within moments somebody had pulled over, there were men like helping me out of the car. My car was on its side and so I had to stand on my own window to, to exit the car to get out. And so they pulled me out and it was like freezing rain. And I heard one of them say like, miss the river by this much like, just ahead of me. Um, couple hundred yards down the road there was this river in a ravine. And I came out of that without a scratch and it was my miracle. Like I, I got home that night. My dad came to pick me up. He was driving like 35 the whole way. I was speeding. I was also talking on my phone, like it was a bad, bad, like young look. Um, but I. Uh, I will never forget, there was this, moment where everything slowed down. They talk about this, they talk about the amygdala in your brain, and when you come to a near death experience, it kind of slows the world down. And that’s what they’re talking about. And people’s lives flash before their eyes. Um, my life did not flash before my eyes, but everything did slow down and I could like see the coins falling out of my cup holder. And I had this moment where I didn’t even think about whether I would die. I just felt my life inside me like this, this light, this spark. And I was like, I want that. Christina: Mm-hmm. Jenny: Like, I’m gonna do everything I can to keep that lit. Um, and so that’s a really beautiful thing. It also meant, that when I moved to California and I threw myself into the world, turns out there are so many things you can do. There are so many ways you can spend your time. Um I earned myself the nickname Hurricane Jenny. ‘cause I was like everywhere all at once. Biking in and out of the city and this bike with neon duct tape on the wheels and going to Bluegrass and Speedway Meadows and playing Nerf gun spy wars and like rafting rivers and leading trips. And I, I was so determined to live my life hard, that I then like spun out actually. And I came at the other side of that relationship with time where I like packed so much into my life that I was actually missing some of the depth of it. Christina: Yeah. Jenny: Um, and I was moving too fast and it became more of a reflex instead of a choice. And so. This is, this, the crashes in my book too. It’s like how it starts, because that really felt like an underlying, launch for me. You know, it kind of launched me into this way of being that was like, okay, I have this one life. What am I doing with it? Am I living hard enough? Am I living the way that I would want to? And you know, when you do that for long enough in so many directions, it can also become shallow if you’re looking outside of yourself the whole time for the answers, for depth for what living was. And so that was something that my journey across Finland did for me as well, was like, slow me down. You have a lot of time to think, uh, when you’re walking across a highway, you know, like for miles and miles and miles along a highway. And so I just. I had to slow down. I had to open myself back up to the possibility that I might be feeling grief, that I might be feeling these harder emotions. And I had to let all of that in and really, let it season me like deepen into who I was. And the gold prospectors too, who lived up in Lemmenjoki, they were so comfortable. Well, you know, Finnish people in general have this, reputation for being sort of cold and standoffish or shy, like they won’t approach you. Um, I learned that the only loophole to that is if you have a ukulele on your backpack because, um the people I met loved music and they’d always be like, what’s that? Like, do you, do you play that? But. Both like Finnish culture itself and especially the gold peprospectorshat I lived with who chose this life that is in the wilderness. It is pretty solitary. Like they go up there and they live in these one room wooden cabins in the wilderness, and they dig for gold during the day and they like drink coffee and they make their food and they, you know, they just sort of like live in this rhythm of, um of their own lives up there. And they see each other sometimes, but a lot of them live in solitude. And um when I was up there, I was offered a week in this cabin on the side of a river. It was very hard for me to, like, I pulled every single thing off the shelf and I put it back and I like, you know, just I really. Mm-hmm. Um, I went walking and I sang every night and I learned how to forage for things and I cooked myself dinner and I, you know, I just like kept moving and eventually I slowed down enough to like really see my life and to understand, that I wasn’t sort of this threshold of becoming. Becky: Mm-hmm. Christina: I think, um, all these stories that you’re telling are, are making me think that wildness can look so many different ways. And, we’re having this conversation after speaking of time, like we’re having this conversation. Where for me personally, the last two years, I’ve allowed myself a lot of time and I’ve allowed myself to keep my schedule less busy because I, like you want to just attack the shit outta life and live as fully as possible. And that sometimes can get exhausting, even in its overwhelming, abundant goodness. And so, you know, I’m thinking like when I was living in New York City and I was walking down a beautiful little park and the light on the ground would catch me and I would think, wow, that’s happening all over the place. And it’s very slow. And it’s like, it could be the wallpaper of my existence if I want. So I started leaning into slower time and John O’Donohue talks about slower time. It’s so beautiful. And I, I listened to an episode of On Being and was like brought to. Hysterical crying in the car when he was talking about slowing time down and being present in slow time. And, that for me, being in nature in slow time and receiving my, my own life there has introduced me to my own wildness, which I would call the deepest connection to myself and everything else that I could possibly recognize. And then get to share in its many forms, this podcast included, um, with, with everyone else to remind them. Like, you’re, you are literally writing a, a heart called, or a book called Wild Heart. Right. To like ignite the wildness in all of us. And I, I feel such a kinship to you. ‘cause I feel like I’m doing that in my own way as well. And I wonder what your thoughts are about, how wildness relates to, um, divinity. Jenny: Ooh. Not what I thought you were gonna say. I love that. I love that Christina: I just dropped it or answer the question you thought I was gonna say you could do that too. Jenny: Um, wow. Well, I’ll start with the question I thought you were gonna ask, which was, like how wildness can show up in all these different ways, which I think is related to the actual question you asked. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I read this quote in a book called Writing A Woman’s Life by Catherine Hill. It was like, again, I’m gonna paraphrase here. I might butcher it, but I’ll try. It was extraordinary women are the chief imprisoners of ordinary women, and it was all about how, if somebody gets put up on a pedestal as being extraordinary, like what I did, quitting my life, walking across the country with a backpack, living with these gold perspectives in the wilderness. Um, and a lot of other stuff that happened too, that you’ll just have to read about, um, um, like that could be viewed as extraordinary. I did not see myself as extraordinary. I was just like, this is for me. I have to do it, and I’m listening deeply enough that I will. But I also think that it’s really important to. Recognize wildness in all of its forms and all the places that you can look for it. You don’t have to be grand, you don’t have to walk across the country. Yes. You don’t have to even like, put something out into the world. It can be as simple as you are. Deep noticing. It can be, you know, I think about my ancestors, my grandmothers in particular who came before me, and the constructs that they lived inside of mm-hmm. Which were even more restrictive. Um, I’m guessing, I, I didn’t know either of my grandmothers, but I know that the times that they lived in were either even more restrictive than the times we’re living in now. Um, and. I think about what wildness might have looked like for them. You know, one of my grandmothers on my dad’s side, there’s this story, this family story of, it’s, it’s not even a story, it’s like a character trait. They would talk about how she would ride the back roads of the Adirondacks without, like, she would try to ride it without trying to, without using the break. Uh, she was just kind of, you know, but I think about these little moments that make up a life, like the little ways that you reclaim who you are or that you tap into something that like brings you joy or makes you feel alive. And those are everywhere. And, um so truly there’s nothing extraordinary about reaching for wildness. It is just right there. And, um it’s about noticing it. To your point, Christina, and I think, to get at your divinity question. I think God is in the details. It is in the noticing. It is in the presence. Um, we’re, we are a creature that forgets that we’re alive all the time. Yeah. Becky: Mm-hmm. Jenny: And every time I remember, it’s often when I’ve like experienced mortality or when somebody in my life who I love is sick or, you know, there are always these little moments that sort of bring me back to how short our lives are. Um, I think living in that question and sort of dancing with that, in a way allows us to touch something that is divine or like to bring that divinity into ourselves. I think divinity is presence. Christina: Mm-hmm. I do have, I did know both of my grandmothers also. I love you so much. That question answer was so good. Um, but like I have, I knew both of my grandmothers one recently passed and the other one is 96. And both of them came from, like, I, I know stories of their, of their lives and and both of them were very devout. And both of them would see me letting my kids play naked in the mud at a family party or see me singing in my studio or see me taking a leap of faith into building something risky. And they would say, God is so happy because they’re witnessing my aliveness. Hmm. And I believe what I share your belief, God is presence, God is in the details, all of those things. And I believe that the more of us who stand proudly, loudly, quietly, does not matter in our, creative center, in our presence, in our calling, even if it looks different throughout our lifetimes, that is like a divine expression of our life lived fully. Jenny: Yeah. Yes. I’ve always been, like my whole writing career, I’ve been surprised by how similar the act of writing, when I really get into the flow of it, when I really get going, it, it feels like I’m touching the divine. It feels like there’s something else that I’m just like wrestling with or grappling with or just like. Touching. Like, I just get to be there in that presence. And that’s actually, uh, it surprised me the first few times I felt it, how similar it was to when I was, hiking on a mountain after dark or rafting a rapid with full presence and devotion of just like, we have to get, we have to do this. You know? Um, that what you, what you’re touching is the same. It’s like that, that deep presence and that deep connection. Becky: I mean, we are the only beings that we know of that are born with conscious awareness. Conscious awareness to notice what has been created by God’s source, whatever you like to call it, and then reflect back in our language in conversations like this, the beauty, and I’m not saying this sent, this level of sentient isn’t existence in other beings. We’re the only ones we know about that can talk about, look at what has been created. And I’m looking around my, I live in the country, I’m looking at the mountain. I’m even looking at these invasive ladybug impersonators that are infesting my house. But like, that’s pretty fucking cool that, that God created a being that tricks me into looking like a cuter being. Anyway, it’s like, of course we’re touching divinity, you know, because we’re touching our, what I think is our in purpose in this life is just to notice and be present and reflect back to Source. Look what you created, look what we created. Um. Yeah. Jenny: Another word for that is love. Becky: Yes, yes. Yeah. Because you can’t love anything if you don’t know it’s there. You have to look first, you have to be present with it. Jenny: A naturalist I knew when said love is sustained, devoted attention. Becky: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. What’s also striking me in these conversations, and probably because it’s very top of mind for me, but as we’ve been talking about time and right, relationship with time, and as we’ve been talking about, um, wildness doesn’t necessarily look like going, going, going, going, going, going, you know, packing in as much life as you can that the cycles that we’re. We’re all pointing to are all feminine. That that time is circular. You know, time is cyclical. Um, I, I keep thinking about yin and yang in, in Tao’s philosophy, in Chinese medicine the yin is the feminine. It’s dark, it’s hidden in the shadows. Even what you, what you talked about of like the, the exceptional women ent trapping the, i, I can’t do quotes, but you know, the essence of what you’re talking about, of like, it’s not just the people climbing Mount Everest who are, who are in touch with their wildness. It’s, it’s people quietly in the shadows, just being with their own life. Um, and yeah, I think of the masculine, it’s, it’s the light, it’s the sun, it’s everything is seen. You know, if you, if. If you don’t capture it on Instagram, it didn’t happen. It has to be in the light. And especially since we’re, you know, three beings in female bodies. I just think what I keep seeing us being pointed towards and orienting towards is a more feminine connection with time and with life. Which is cyclical. There’s a winter, you know, what do you do in winter? Well, maybe that’s a good time to grieve, you know? Um, yeah. And I’m so grateful, especially as I think back to my female lineage. Just, the fact that we could have this conversation and start touching on and noticing, um, we maybe don’t have the right relationship with time right now means things are shifting and they’re coming into consciousness and, you know, things like your book, Christina, your work, my teaching like this, they’re all coming at, opening up possibilities for people to live a different way. Jenny: Hmm. Yes. And I’m, so, I’m always thinking about. The people who came before me that built this, you know, that made this possible. As you were talking, I was actually thinking about the book, women Who Run With the Wolves by Claudia Pinkola Estes, where it’s all about that. It’s about coming into your own cycles and finding your pack. And there are these sort of tenets of being wild. And that’s been a foundational text for my thinking as well. But over the years, through story, through research, through living in these different directions, people have been paving the way to this moment. And I think you’re right where we are at a moment where things are shifting now, but it’s not lost on me how many people had to like throw spaghetti at the wall before me. Mm-hmm. Um, to see what stuck and to like build to this moment. There are so many voices that we stand on and I’m so grateful for them all the time. Becky: And Christina: I think conversations like this build scaffolding for more, you know? Jenny: I hope so. Becky: I think so. I mean, I’m even thinking back to when we were talking, to Lea and talking about like activists in the past and the feminism in the past who it’s easy to look back and think they didn’t go far, far enough, or they didn’t, you know, do enough but they passed the baton. They, they rose so we could stand on their shoulders. Mm-hmm. Jenny: Just like petronella. Mm. She didn’t mean to, I, you know, I am sure she was responding to the need of the moment and sort of the desperation of it. She wasn’t thinking, oh yes, one day this will, like, I’m going against the grain and this will inspire somebody. Um. But she was living close to herself. She was Becky: listening. Well, that’s, that points me to like a, Christina and I have talked so many times about the ripples out of these conversations and the ripples are none of our business. It’s, it’s nice to, you know, when someone reflects back that a conversation touched them, it’s amazing and wonderful and it’s not the point. And we never show up here with that intention and talking about, like, touching that Divinity when we touch that wildness inside and live from that place, it’s not our business to know how it ripples out. But I, I just think there’s a harmony and there’s like a bigger. Web that we are interconnected with. And when we touch that wildness and live from that place of divinity or, or whatever language works for you, that place of knowing inside that aligned place, um, then you’re playing your piece in the ecosystem, right? You’re playing that very necessary, irreplaceable role in the ecosystem of the universe. And, she might have just been like telling us, she, she did her walk. She’s telling a story to you doing her thing, and it’s not her business how it ripples out. But she needed to, to do that because you needed that little piece. You know, she gave you resources or nutrients, for you to live into your own. Wild place and divinity and it’s, I don’t know that that excites me. Just imagining this cosmic web that we’re all connected to and we all play our role. Jenny: Hmm. I’ve been thinking about the nature of legend a lot as I write toward the end of this book. And I think that all it really is, is that legendary people are people who illuminate what feels legendary in us. Like what feels like it has the potential to be legendary. They make the people who read about them or think about them or tell stories about them, feel the legendary nature inside of them. Mm-hmm. And that’s what she did for me. Christina: The music was recorded live as a part of the sound service at 3S Art Space in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in January 2025, where musicians responded to the changing light in the room that reflected and refracted through Christina’s suspended artwork. Andrew Halchak, the composer of this piece, is playing bass clarinet and Tomas Cruz and Katie Siler are singing. Becky: I just had a thought that utterly tickled me. I, I won’t even do progression of thought to try and get you to catch up to how I got to this thought, but there was a lot. But the thought was, you’re the Jessie Buckley to my Chloé Zhao. ‘Cause I’ve been watching, like through this whole award season, I’ve been watching a lot of interviews with both of them. And like you’ve already said you connect with her, you totally have the same energy. But I’ve watched them both like through this experience of making this movie, both of them being just alive and present and, um, touching their own gifts in a deeper way, it like magnified out, um, like their partnership, similar to our partnership, turned it into this like, um, I don’t know, something bigger than themselves, right? Yeah. All I have to say is it tickled me and it made me very grateful for you. Um, and it really is when people, like there’s something about our reciprocity that amplifies out and I think it’s probably less rare in this world than, um, I feel like when people are fully themselves and in touch with their gifts, then they resonate with the people that will amplify their gifts and each other’s gifts. I think that’s just kind of the way the universe works. It’s really fucking cool. I’m really grateful I am finding the people who amplify my gifts and that I get to amplify theirs. Reciprocity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit noticingpod.substack.com [https://noticingpod.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
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