SLOGG and Creating Your Own Wheel of the Year

THE WONDER: Science-Based Paganism

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S4E2 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca,

Mark: and I'm the other one. Mark.

And today we are talking about invented holidays and we're talking about adapting the Wheel of the year to really fit your needs and your climate and what's going on in your practice.

Mark: Right, because one of the things that we do in Athe paganism, or generally in naturalistic paganism, is we. We focus on what's happening in our immediate surroundings naturally, rather than try to follow a calendar that's based on the climate of the uk, for example. Mm-hmm. , which is the more traditional wicked approach.

What we do is say, okay, well what is happening in nature around us at the beginning of February? You know what? What creatures are around? What's happening in the soil, what's happening in the sky? What, what part of the life cycle is happening at this particular moment, and how can we best celebrate that?

And that can be everything from the rituals that we do to what we actually name the holiday.

Yucca: Right? And I would imagine for folks who live in a more urban environ, , they might bring in other things as well as, as the, their year is changing in different ways that isn't just about the soil or the animals, but what's happening within the city itself.

So it's, you know, sure. Whatever your particular life is and what's really meaningful within your life.

Mark: Right, right. For example, I could see if you live in a city the beginning of August holiday being something that was real would really focus around culture. It's hot out. Mm-hmm. , you may not want to be actually outside doing stuff cuz it's hot

Yep. You may wanna be in museums or art galleries or music halls or. You know, or going to the ballet or the opera or the symphony or a punk club or whatever.

Yucca: Or evening time activities.

Mark: Yes. Yeah. Yes. All of that. That actually fits pretty well in with my concept of that holiday, which is sort of a celebration of both work and the achievements of humanity.

So technology science, those kinds of things. But, we'll, we'll, we'll get to talking about that. The point is that if you're in a city, you know it. Some of the holidays may be more about the achievements of humanity rather than what's happening in nature. Mm-hmm. in your immediate area. Or

Yucca: another way to approach that would be recognizing that the activities of humans I is an aspect of nature as

Mark: well.

Okay. That's a better way to put it. Yeah. Right. Yeah, for sure. Because we are natural creatures, right. We're. Quadra Pitt animals just like other Quadra Pitt animals on the planet. We just happen to have these large four brains and thumbs mm-hmm. and they lead us to do a lot of very creative things.

Yucca: Yeah.

And that's, you know, that's one of our special things about our species, so and so, and those things that we do. That too is is nature, right?

Mark: Absolutely. So there ain't nothing That ain't Nature . Yep. Well, Lisa, that's what we

Yucca: believe. That's, yep. I mean that's a, that's pretty foundational for us. So, now in addition to the Wheel of the Year, though, there sometimes are places in.

Our seasons and our lives where it seems like, like a holiday or a celebration recognition. Seems very appropriate. And so that's one of the reasons we wanted to talk about this today is Mark, you have one coming up, which you've mentioned before. That is just such a delightful idea. ?

Mark: Yes. Next Saturday, the third Saturday in January is when I celebrate Slog.

S L O G G. All capitals. Mm-hmm. . It's not an acronym, it doesn't stand for anything. It's just I guess it's all capitals because it's this sort of repudiation of of what's happening in the, in the weather around us. By the, by the end of January it is, it's been cold and still quite dark and wet in most places.

For a while. Mm-hmm. and all of the festivities of the December holidays are well behind us, and we're back at work or back at school, and it can just get to be kind of a drag. And so I invented this holiday slog because we're slogging through the dark and wet and so forth, . As a way of having a festive celebration at that time of the year.

Mm-hmm. . And I mean, it, it, it just sort of struck me as a, as a sort of whimsical idea to start with. But I've been celebrating it now for five years and it's become a part of my seasonal routine. And slog is the, it's the winter, the deep winter, Demi sabba. So it's not quite all the way to the Sabbath at the beginning of February.

But it's still deep winter and it's time to. Kind of come inside and do cozy things. Mm-hmm. . So it's a time when we wear festival, silly hats, , and we drink warm, cozy beverages like mold, wine or hot cider or even hot cocoa. Any of those things. Alcoholic or not. Mm-hmm. . Where your, your warmest, thickest pair of socks and Stay inside and play board games and just celebrate with other people.

Mm-hmm. , have, have a little community and a little festivity. In a very relaxed, you know, wear your pajamas. It's . It's, it's the kind of thing where you shouldn't have to make any real effort in order to accomplish this. All you have to do is get together, pull on a good pair of socks, stick on a funny hat, and you know, heat yourself up some mold, wine at, at the stove, and you're there.

You're, you're done.

Yucca: What are those blankets that you can wear called, They're like onesies. Well, it's like a onesie, but it's like basically like a big sleeping bag, but you got arms like a Snuggie or so, anyways, whatever they're called. Oh, that must be, yeah, those, those sound perfect for slog, right? Just get that nice snuggie blanket on and

Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And And particularly the idea here is to, especially for people that are suffering from seasonal affect disorder, because this time right around now can be the very worst for people that become depressed seasonally. And that social interaction and that warm cozy feeling and sort of, you know, creating a warm nest away from.

The cold of the outdoors. Mm-hmm. , becomes really important I think. And so, you know, drawing our our isolated friends out from their houses, people that, you know, are struggling with the season because, you know, a lot of people do mm-hmm. ,

Yucca: Especially the, the farther north you are. Yes. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, right?

Yes. That it really, you know, we forget how far north some of our some of our cities are, but when you actually look at it in a globe, you go, wow, you're not getting much light, are you? Yeah,

Mark: we're, we're pretty far up there. One of the things that I learned that really shocked me when I lived in Spain Yeah.

Is that Madrid, and New York City are on the same parallel. It's wild.

Yucca: Yeah, it

Mark: is completely wild that those two cities are on the same parallel. Yeah. What that means is that Western Europe is very far north, way far north, equivalent to Newfoundland and on up into the Northwest Territories, you know, far, far, far up into Canada.

There's a, there's a YouTuber that I love named Yana Yin. Mm-hmm. , who she lives in northern Sweden, in, in, you know, in adjacent to a forest. And she's an artist and does stuff, but she's also a YouTuber that, that does these wonderful seasonal. Celebrations of what her life is like at different times of the year.

And I remember there's one which was in the deep of the winter and they finally had a day that was clear and it's just her sitting in the sun. And she said, you know the, when the moment when the winter sun first hits your face, it's like, it's like if you're really thirsty and you have that first sip of water,

That's how powerful it is for folks that live that far north because they're so deprived. And this is after taking vitamin D tablets and Right. You know, you know, having full spectrum indoor lights and all that kind of stuff. And still there's nothing like the actual sun to Yeah. To stimulate that, that feeling in the body and.

You know, long way of saying it, but Slog is about taking care of ourselves in that time. Mm-hmm. and doing it unapologetically, you know, and in a way that's a little silly. Mm-hmm. . So, it's, it's an opportunity for us to be playful and to kind of pull ourselves out of the muck of. Of the kind of climate conditions that can be happening at the third week in January.

You can do the same thing in the Southern Hemisphere in the third week of July. It's, you know, exactly the same kind of principle. You can just plug it in at a different time of year.

Yucca: Right. Well, or something else within your own environment. Right. That might, you know, for us, we don't have. That wetness, right?

That what you're describing, the slog, it's for us, this is our cold. This certainly is our coldest month of the year. It's very bitter. But it doesn't have quite that same kind of slogging through. At least for me, I have this kind of, there's this quiet stillness to this part of the year still. Mm-hmm.

right? Uhhuh. and I, but I suspect that a lot of that is simply because the climate. Are so different. Right? There's such sure, you know, we're so dry here. And I know you do get Dr. Quite dry very brittle in your summers. Yes. But your winters are, are quite different. Right. Yes.

Mark: So there when, when we have a normal winter, we're, we're actually having a very wet winter this year.

Mm-hmm. , we have a, a long series of these so-called atmospheric river storms. Mm-hmm. that are these giant conveyor belts of moisture from the tropics that whirl up into and up against the west coast of North America. . We've had six of them so far, and we expect four more over the next 10 days. So just wave after wave after wave of pelting, rain and then snow at the higher elevations.

And this is more of what I remember from when I first moved here, God, 40 years ago. Longer. Mm-hmm. , Was that the winters January and February were consistently very, very wet. Mm-hmm. and we would have flooding every few years and it was just a really wet time. Yeah. And then we started having droughts and mm-hmm.

it's been kind of on and off with drought ever.

Yucca: When you describe your winters and you describe slog, the image that pops into my mind and the sound is, is having those, those big rubber boots on. Some people call 'em wellies. Yes. Squishing through the mud. You're just squish, squish through the mud until you get to the warm house and you can kick your boots off and put your nice blur fuzzy socks on.

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. And, and even, even sort of, Walking through ankle deep water in a pair of wellies, right? Yeah. I mean, the wellies will keep the water out, you know,

Yucca: but you gotta work twice as hard to get those feet up. Yeah, that's right.

Mark: Yeah. And you, and by the time you get home, you're well ready to be in a place that's warm and isn't raining on you and.

And where you can enjoy a hot drink and put on a funny hat. . Yeah, .

Yucca: So we have a, a holiday that that my kiddos made up last year and they're very excited about doing it this year as well. So it's, it's probably gonna end up being a tradition for us. We'll see. But they made up snake. Snake day. Snake day.

Yes. And where we live there are a lot of snakes and we do have rattlesnakes. So it's, and since they're so little, it is a big deal to really be very vigilant about that. Because you really don't want, you, you don't wanna be. In any situation, you don't wanna be bit by a rattlesnake. My mother was actually, she had this scar from it and, you know, apparently had, was not a very pleasant experience, but with a child that can actually be very dangerous or with an animal.

So, but we also love the snakes and there's, and we have both snakes and, and non venomous snakes as well. We really only have the one kind of just rattle snakes that you have to watch out for. But it's something that is, that is exciting because when the snakes are back, It's summer, right? It's kind of, we talk about their, there's not really four seasons here.

There's eight seasons or two seasons as I see it. Oh, . There's, there's the warm and then there's the cold. But when the, the snakes come back, it's the warm. But the, the, that day moves because the day that the snakes come back is. Is different each year. Um mm-hmm. , and I can tell you after decades there's the different species will come out at different times, right?

You'll see the little fence lizards and things out weeks before the snakes are back. But when the snakes are back, you see one, there's 10, right? There's 20. They're all, I think they actually d together. And they, they come out interesting at the same. Even though they're interesting solitary animals usually, right?

But when they, when they hibernate, they're not. So their idea was we draw pictures and make little clay snakes and make all of these things in preparation in the coming weeks. And we're looking for them and looking for them. And then the first day that we spot the snakes is when we bring out all the snake celebration, the pictures that they've been drawing over the weeks and put them up.

And they've actually been bugging me about when do we get to. Prepping for snake day. I'm going, it's, it's January . Hold on for a while. We're not there. But that's really meaningful for, for our climate, but also for our particular family because somebody who lives in one of the cities doesn't have to deal with that.

Right. Because they, they don't have, they've gotten rid of the snakes in the city, so they don't, you go out outside of it and Yeah, you'll find them, but not in downtown. You know, Albuquerque or Yeah. Or Pueblo or any of those types of places, you're just not gonna find them.

Mark: Well, but, but this, this brings up some, an interesting thing because what you're talking about really is the seasonal indicator.

that that's the beginning of the warm, right? Yeah. That, that's the true warm, yeah. Yeah. When, when the, when the snakes are confident enough that it's gonna stay warm, so they won't get marooned out in the, and have it suddenly freeze. and kill them. Yeah. That's, that's a turning point in the year for you.

And there are other turning points in the year in various kinds of climates that would make total sense as holidays like I know that in Canada, First snow is often celebrated as as a thing, right? Mm-hmm. the very first snow, well, here it is, winter is here, you know, officially. It's, you know, because we don't get snow unless, So, unless it's winter, so this is the time in the tropics I could see holidays, like the first day of monsoon rain.

Mm-hmm. , or the first day of the, the heat that follows in the dry season after the monsoon rains are gone. Or

Yucca: the return of a particular bird. Right. Right. When that, when all of those birds are coming back in some areas that have The cherry blossoms. Right. And some of their more temporary areas of the, the spring, it's like, oh, yep, it's, it's spring, you know, when the, they start to bloom.

Mark: Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal in Japan. Yeah. And and in Washington DC . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Cuz they have the Japanese cherry trees. Yeah. So that is a way mm-hmm. , that we can augment the eight holidays of the wheel of the year with meaningful and and frankly practical celebrations that, that add to our celebration of living around the course of the year.

Right.

Yucca: Both of the examples that we gave each from our own environments, they really have that practical, yours is about, or at least part in, about the keeping the connection with the friends and, and, and looking out for your loved ones and neighbors and that, and getting through that time period. For us, there's a, a safety element of, okay, now we know we have to.

more aware, like kids can't run off on their own. Like there's this, it's, there's the practical part, but we add that extra like kind of special meaning to it on top as well. Mm-hmm. ,

Mark: right? Yeah. So, I mean it doesn't all have to be practical. Some of it can just be celebration for the sake of it. Mm-hmm.

Cuz you know, we're all about that. We think that's great. . But the, the I think the upshot here, the point here is that the cycle of your year doesn't all have to be about a, a calendar. Mm-hmm. , I mean, astronomy works on a calendar. We have a sun cycle, we have lunar cycles. Mm-hmm. , you know, those are predictable and we can put 'em on a piece of paper and then we can say, okay, day after tomorrow is when I'm celebrating the, the full moon.

Mm-hmm. , that's great. And and it's a great thing to do, but it's not the only kind of holiday. Some of them are a movable feast, right? Mm-hmm. , some of them are. Or when it's just practical to, or, or when some indicator in nature in the world outside US says, okay it's, it's time to do this thing.

Yucca: Yeah. Hmm. And then of course there's other ones like birthdays and death days and anniversaries and, and all of those.

Mark: Yeah. Right. Yeah, because, and, and like, Yuri's night for example mm-hmm. , which is the anniversary of the first human going into space and orbiting the earth. Mm-hmm. , in April the April 12th, I think it is.

I acknowledge it every year, but I never remember.

Yucca: I'm pretty sure it's the 12th, maybe the 11th. I'm pretty sure it's 12th. 12th, so Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's the 12th and there's pie day, right?

Mark: Pie three 14, and then there's TA day, which is 6.28, which is double pie day. Okay. Tau is is two pie. Yes. So Tu pi r is your circumference of mm-hmm.

of a circle. Right. So, so Double pie Day is June 28th. Mm-hmm. . And you get two pies. So it's

Yucca: okay.

Mark: About Pirate day. Oh, go on. Yeah. September 19th, international talk, like a pirate day. We always celebrate it in our household . We have, we have P gear that we can put on and we can talk like we're From the Westlands in England, which actually has nothing to do with what Pirates talk like, but did have to do with what the actor who played Long John Silver in the original Hollywood production of Treasure Island sounded like.

Mm-hmm. . And that's why everybody thinks Pirates talk that way now. . Yeah. So there you go. All right. Einstein's birthday, which happens also to be pie day 3.14. Mm-hmm. , celebrated by atheists A lot to celebrate science and critical thinking, and particularly a good one for atheopagan, I think because.

Einstein rather, like Carl Sagan was of a philosophical mind. Mm-hmm. , he wasn't just a technician, he was also a thinker about, well, what does this all mean? ? Mm-hmm. , you know, where, where, you know, where did the universe come from and how does it work and what can we take away from that in terms of meaning for us as humans.

And that is very much in line with our approach to the. Yeah. So why don't we talk a little bit about the, the formal wheel of the year the, the two equinoxes, two solstice, and then the four midpoints between those four stations. That was invented in the 1950s by Gerald Gardner and others. Mm-hmm.

, many of these holidays have been celebrated traditionally for a very long time by various different cultures, but they haven't all been pulled together into a single map of eight holidays around the course of the year until the 1950s. Right. Which is one reason why in atheopagan we're comfortable drawing on it because it's not really cultural appropriation.

It's something that was invented by a retired English civil servant in the 1950s. Mm-hmm. , that's, that's, that doesn't qualify as cultural appropriation.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that there's, there's more nuance to that discussion though, in terms of the choices that he made and how much of what he did was appropriating.

I, I think that there's, I think there's more to be said about that and explored. But that today it is a very widespread approach and there's a strong. There's, there's a lot of logic to it, which is what I think makes it so appealing today. Yes, because those dates are built are based on real concrete.

Things. Right. We're talking about the solstice. Right. That, I mean, humans have been doing, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, more than a couple, a few weeks ago with the solstice. We've been doing this for, we know, thousands and thousands of years at least.

Mark: Right? Right. Yeah. These, the, the solstice is an equinoxes are astronomical facts.

They're not cultural artifacts. Yeah.

Yucca: They're the dates that we celebrate them. Yes. That's a little shaky there. Yeah. Yes,

Mark: exactly. The, you know, if, if you celebrate your winter solstice holiday on December 25th, that's cultural. Mm-hmm. , because it doesn't actually happen then. Right? It happens on the 20th or 21st and that moment.

Is simply an astronomical fact. And facts are available to everyone. Yeah.

Yucca: Well, and also when it appears on a cal, like the Equinox, for instance or the solstice, if it happens at two in the morning at utc, when it gets so calendars, unless it says otherwise, they're always gonna give it basically in.

Universal time. So you might actually be off technically by a day or two for what it is in your time zone when the, you know, but, but when we're talking about those, how important is being? Exactly the day onto you or can you be off by 12 hours or off by 15? Like each person has to decide that for themselves.

I've set it an alarm cuz I think it's fun, , but, oh well. We actually celebrate kind of as, as close to the date that it is convenient to us.

Mark: Right. That's, that's when I do my rituals. Mm-hmm. , as close to the date as is practical. And that's usually a weekend or something like that. Mm-hmm. . But on the actual, at the actual moment, I mean, I like to take a moment and go, oh wow.

Okay. It's, it's the equinox, the, yeah. We're right at the point. Right at the point where we're crossing the ecliptic right now, which is we

Yucca: set an alarm and go Woo and ray, shake our hands in this, in the air and then go back to what we're doing.

Mark: Yeah. Uhhuh. . That's great. Perfect. But another thing that you can do is you can build traditions around the actual time and then, Do other traditions in the convenient time.

Mm-hmm. . So just like you're, you're talking about my imagined celebration that I would love to do at some point in one of these events that is, It happens deep into the night. So like at two o'clock in the morning, you know, the, the solstice rolls around. What I would like to do is to do midnight margaritas, like in the movie Practical Magic

I just think that would be a perfect thing. I, I just think that that would be a really fun thing to share with adults, obviously. I mean, you wouldn't do that with kids, but

Yucca: Sure you would. I mean, depending on the kid's age, you might wake them up for the two. , you know, they can have the sparkling water or whatever it is that they particularly like,

Mark: right?

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, that's, so that's basically how we approach the Wheel of the year. Do you want to talk a little bit about. Each of the holidays or how we

Yucca: Oh yeah. Well, I think instead of, instead of going into each of them, because we, we do that throughout the year. We'll, pretty soon we have the February holiday coming up.

We'll be talking about that. But I think what might be interesting to do is talk about how, so you and I are both established in our, in our places pretty well. But if we were to move. Our wheel. Wheel of the year would probably change the way it looked, because yes, if we were to suddenly go to another climate, then some of the things, some of the themes are gonna stay the same, but different things are happening in the different climate.

So it, how would you approach an, let's say you moved to Miami. Right next week you got the Dream Job offer and you decided that you were gonna pick up everything and move to Miami. Wow. How would you start building your Wheel of the Year?

Mark: Well, I think I would do it as we've talked before with a phenology journal.

You know, I, I think I would have to start by doing a bunch of data collection about what's going on around me, because, you know, the, the South of Florida, that's the subtropics. Mm-hmm. and it's laden with insects, none of which I would be familiar. Way, way more insects than I'm really interested in , interested in contending with, but there they are.

The insects are there.

Yucca: Oh, there's some pretty amazing ones though.

Mark: There there are. It's true. Yeah, it's true. There's

Yucca: And it doesn't necessarily have to have to be Miami, but I would, you know, I was just picking something that seemed very different from where you are. I think

Mark: that's a great example.

Yeah. So, you know, being aware of. I mean, the sunrises and sunsets would be at radically different times there than they are where I am. I'm way farther north. Mm-hmm. than that. So the first thing would be gathering information about what's going on in the natural world and how those things cycle.

And it might take me, you know, a year of gathering information before I started to make adjustments in. In my holidays I know that I know that for someone that I know who lives in Tampa there is a moment in September-ish when the temperature finally becomes tolerable. because it's so humid and so hot in the summertime that you don't really do outdoor things very much.

Mm-hmm. , because it's just so hot and oppressive and so the time to go and do outdoor things is not in the summertime as it is where I am now. Mm-hmm. , it's, it's later on in the year simply because the conditions are, are different. Hmm. You know, when, when you get to the deep of winter and it's 70 degrees mm-hmm.

That's just a very different kind of condition to, to set up. So I don't know. I would think that some of the things that I would probably end up celebrating might be, I mean, I might take on the carnival kind of, celebrations, you know, like Mardi Gra and so forth in. You know, the early wet parts of the year are still at a time when you don't collapse from heat exhaustion.

Mm-hmm. , right? So it just, I don't know, but I would have to find out what it was like when I was there and then do my celebrations accordingly.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . It's a very similar approach that I would take, I think is just the really observing. And it would probably take a take some time because you don't know that what year is a typical year or not what you're experiencing.

I mean, you can communicate with people who have been there longer and read and do all of that, but I think that I would probably still. Recognize the, the holidays as they came along, but would know that each year I was building onto them. Right. I might be thinking about the summer solstice more in terms of what's going on with Earth's orbit and just kind of keeping an eye out and an ear out for what's happening in my new ecosystem.

Mm-hmm. and then incorporating a little bit more each year, kind of like. Like when you move to the new place, it would be like your first few years are you getting to grow up in that spot, even if you're an adult already, you, you know, your first few years you're kind of figuring out life just as a human.

You move somewhere, you have a few years to figure out life in that new

Mark: place, right? Yeah. That's, that. That's very similar to how I would approach it. I mean, I have a very mature. Cycle of celebrations now because I've been living in the same place for a long time and have been, you know, accumulating information and traditions around that for a long time.

Mm-hmm. , and it would take a while if I moved somewhere else to, for that, that level of development to happen again. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So. I guess where we're going with this for our listeners is first of all, to feel a lot of freedom around how you celebrate. You know, you do not have to celebrate the February holiday as in bulk, the time when we cast seeds out onto the snow.

If you live in a place where there ain't no snow ,

Yucca: And or here, don't put any seed. Where I live. Do not put your seeds in the ground. They will die in the beginning of February. They won't work. Yeah.

Mark: right? You do. Don't plant

Yucca: until

Mark: May. So . Yeah. So, you know, be aware of where you are and relate to that place.

Initially I think. Well, okay. Nevermind. Let me, let me retract the beginning of that sentence, what Paganism has come to mean for many. Mm-hmm. is about a deep relationship with nature, right? I mean, the initial threads were things like free masonry and western ceremonial magic and, and a whole bunch of stuff that may not have had anything to do with that.

But what modern paganism has come to mean for many of. Both naturalistic, paganism pagans and non naturalistic pagans is a deep relationship with reality, with, with the natural world. Mm-hmm. Earth based. In order to have that Yes, we're, we're earth's earth based.

Yucca: Yeah. That's what the earth-based part means, right?

Right. Yeah.

Mark: So given. Once again, as we've talked about so many times, you know, the, the, the greatest pagan skill is simply to pay attention. Mm-hmm. , you know, to, to be connected with what's going on around you. And it's a, it's a hard skill to cultivate because in the routines of our life, we tend to just sort of skip over things and we may not notice that that tree now has leaves growing.

it's been bare for months and, but now suddenly it has some leaves leafing out on it. Noticing when that happens, noticing that the buds were there before the leaves butted out. That's an important moment and it tells you something about what's happening with the season that's coming. So, feel latitude to adjust.

Your wheel of the year to reflect what you're seeing around you, because ultimately what we're celebrating is life, right? Mm-hmm. , we're celebrating what's real, so we don't, we don't have to have a symbolic celebration about some other climate somewhere else that somebody experienced a long time ago and wrote down.

Yucca: That's beautiful. We're accustomed, but that doesn't Yes. That's not necessarily your experience.

Mark: Right? Right. Yeah. And we are, we are very accustomed in this culture because we are taught by the over culture to get our cult, to get our,

our spiritual experiences prescribed by what's written down. in books, whether it's the Bible or the Talmud, or or you know, somebody's, you know, big book of witchcraft or whatever it is. And what we're seeing is you can get input from those kinds of themes, but ultimately the, the script of, of the nature path that's around you is written in nature.

Right. And that's where you can, that's where you can find the deep wisdom about what living in your place is about. Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Well, this was a good conversation. Thank you, mark.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. And, and I hope that this, let me see this podcast will post. On the 16th and the following Saturday is slog . So if you find any appeal in the idea of suspending the dismal of winter, wherever you are for a while and having a celebration, feel free to take advantage of that holiday.

And don't forget to wear a silly hat.

Yucca: Right. And if you have rainbow toe socks, those sound great too.

Mark: I need

Yucca: some of those. They're, they're great. Then you can still pick things up with your toes. Fantastic. Ooh, . Alright, well we will see you all next week, so. Alright. Thanks everyone.