In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible, and that if we all work together, we can lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. I’m Manda Scott. Your host and fellow traveller on this journey into possibility. And we have focused a lot these last few weeks on the ways we could shift the democratic dial towards something that might actually serve the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. So now it’s time to step away from that a little bit. To look at how we get there, each of us. To that place of connection where our heart mind is connected to the heart mind of the world, where we are united with the web of life. How do we do this? How do we actually open the doors to possibility so that we can shift from the disconnection of our culture to a path of genuine heart mind connection? And then how do we help others to do it with us? That is the question that our guest this week has spent a lot of her life addressing.

Leah Rampy has been a teacher, a professor, a corporate and non-profit executive, and a leadership consultant. And now she’s author of the book Earth and Soul, Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos, which is a beautiful many layered weaving That’s a memorial to the world that is dying around us, and a paean to possibility, and a deeply imagined, deeply practical guide to how we can really engage with the living web so that we can bring ourselves into a place of understanding, connection, and service. In the book she says, We are not made to be separate from nature. We were formed from nature by the same cosmic evolution. The vitality of our lives depends on our acceptance of the gift of communion, which I think is rather lovely. This is a book full of personal insights, of stories from the islands of Britain, from Australia, from the Americas. It connects us to the work of people that you will probably know of, if not deeply, if you’re listening to this podcast. Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy, many of the other deep teachers of our time and of our recent history. It is genuinely beautiful and heartfelt, and the prose flows with an ease that you will recognise when you hear Leah speak. So let’s get into it. People of the podcast, please do welcome Leah Rampy, author of Earth and Soul.

Leah, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you in the world in what is my afternoon, and I think is your morning?

Leah: I am in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in the U. S. We’re just a little over an hour from the Washington, D. C. metro area and I’m on the Potomac River, that flows into the Chesapeake. In a co-housing community where I live with my husband.

Manda: Yes, and I did know about the co-housing community, and I definitely want to ask you more about that later. But in the beginning, you have written a very beautiful book called Earth and Soul, which that I believe everybody is going to want to read, Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos. And right at the start, you open it with a really beautiful tale, myth, metaphor that was current with the indigenous peoples of your land. And I wonder if you’d like to read that to us as our opener, please.

Leah: I would love to. This is a story that means a lot to me. A legend among some Native American tribes is told by elders.

In times of great difficulty, it is of an old woman, deep in a cave, weaving the world. Light and shadows dance around her as she weaves. She has been weaving a long lifetime, and the garment, born of her dreams and dedication, is of exquisite beauty. The only time she leaves her loom is to go far back into the cave to stir the contents of a pot simmering over the oldest fire in the world. It contains the roots and seeds of all the plants, herbs, and grains that feed the earth. If she does not stir this elemental soup, it may burn, and who knows what trouble that may cause. Living in the cave with her is a black dog who dozes while the woman works at her loom. When she rises to tend the pot, the dog rouses. While she shuffles slowly, after all, she is very old, to the back of the cave, The dog grabs a loose thread in his teeth and begins to pull. As the old woman painstakingly makes her way to and from the fire, the dog tugs at various threads, pulling until finally the weaving comes apart and the threads are scattered across the cave floor. Upon her return, the old woman sees the product of her long labour in disarray. Her efforts turn to naught. She gazes upon what remains, sitting silently for some time. Slowly, she bends to pick up a thread. Soon, the original pattern is forgotten, as a new and previously unimagined design of great beauty takes shape in her mind’s eye. Guided by this vision, her old hands begin to weave a beautiful tapestry from the chaos.

Manda: Magic. Thank you so much. So many layers to this. I love so many pieces of it. The fire that’s the oldest fire in the world, and her patience, and her kindness with her dog. And you write after this, I heard this story in three different venues before it tucked itself into my thoughts, and I began to ponder more deeply its message. What wisdom do such ancient stories offer us about living in these chaotic times? So let’s Unpick that thread a bit. For you, what wisdom does this story offer? Where does it take you and then us?

Leah: As you said, there’s many layers. And what I think is so beautiful about a good story is that every time you come to it, you can see something new.

Depending on where you’re coming from, depending on where I’m coming from, and the situation in which we find ourselves. I chose that story because of the weaving, and it feels to me that we are in a time of re weaving, a time where we’re on the threshold. We can’t go back. To what was just like the old woman, that beautiful design of the world isn’t here anymore. And we deceive ourselves if we think that we can simply back up to what was and reclaim that. The glaciers that have melted can’t be put back together in our lifetime. And there is a beautiful weaving That is possible. I feel this is so akin when you introduce your show, your podcast. I just love how you introduced it because it’s exactly what I’m also trying to say. There is tremendous possibility for re weaving. Something anew and potentially something well beyond our lifetime where we are perhaps framing that beautiful, exquisite design that others will pick up and continue to weave. I’ll say one more thing and then I will, I’ll quit expanding on this. The other thing is I think we’re in that moment of not knowing right now where she is standing. To me, that is such an important piece. She stops. And I think we are in this moment of discernment and trying to imagine what new story earth is shaping, but it’s not clear to us. We may catch glimmers. But it’s not fully defined, and so that pausing so that we don’t run ahead of grace, right? We don’t run ahead of what we are called to do and what we know is the unfolding that’s already happening.

So to me, that, those are a few of the layers. I find new ones all the time.

Manda: Yes. And I think that’s the value of these old stories. I was talking to somebody earlier and mentioning that I had heard a story of someone who works in South America with the Indigenous peoples, and they work with ayahuasca and they have all these Westerners turning up wanting to do the ayahuasca and go away enlightened. And the revelation and the understanding was it’s not working. And why not? And one of the Indigenous elders said, because we tell seven days. to tell a story. And we tell it many times, because there are many layers, many different ways of telling the story. And the white people come, and they haven’t got seven days, they’ve got a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, they need to get back for it, and they want to do it now. And even if they stay, they don’t want to hear the same story for a week, because they think they’ve heard it. once, and that’s enough. And I think what I love, one of the many things I love about your book, is that it’s got these pauses for grace and the sense that there are many layers to what you’re writing and what you’re weaving, and that we could come back to it and dip into it and learn something new each time and go out into the world enriched. And more willing and more able to make the connection with the All That Is and the Web of Life that will carry us forward. We’re clearly on the same page on this, or at least on a similar page, talking a similar language. And I’m really curious as to how you got to this, because We live in a world where if you switch on the television, it’s rarely this. And you and I both have elections in our countries this year, and the politicians, most of them, are not in this place. They’re in the old weaving, and they’re in a place where there is no alternative to the old weaving. And yet, there are people in all of the world. that understand that the old weaving is, needs unraveling quite fast, and there would be another one. How did you come to where you are now?

Leah: It was a very circuitous route. I will say that, just briefly, I grew up with a really close connection to the living world around me. When I got married, had my career, we moved around, I was doing things that really took me out of that deep connection. I always felt a calling to the living world. It unfortunately was manifest mostly on a weekend or a vacation. My work, at least a large part of what I did, was in the corporate world. And I would go downstairs, get into my car in the garage, drive to work, park in a garage, go up the elevator, go to my office. And I was really doing my best to be a successful woman. In a world that was dominated by men, and to be smarter, more strategic, to have real attention to being logical and rational, and that really caused me to clamp down on the heart. wisdom. So it was leaving the corporate world that opened a little bit of a bigger window for me.

I was doing work as a, as a volunteer, as we all do with so many wonderful small organizations that we’re working with. to address the issue of climate change from 350. org to Interfaith Power and Light, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate. I got trained to do the climate reality presentation. I was doing a number of those. So those were powerful to understand the facts around climate change. And of course I was into the we will testify for the EPA, we’ll encircle the White House. I was living in the D. C. metro area. Those, it was easy to go visit people on Capitol Hill and lobby. And so I was joining with others who felt really strongly about this. At the same time, I eventually became the executive director of a small nonprofit that was supporting people in living contemplatively in their daily life and offering contemplative leadership. So the sense of heart opening, being deeply grounded, open, present, available was also a part of my life.

And the two didn’t really seem to reconcile. This was a part of my journey was to try to bring the pieces that were important to me in my life together in a way that made sense to me and in a way that I felt would make sense to others who really longed to make a difference. and felt very frustrated by how slow the progress was, or the lack of response from people to whom they were speaking.

Manda: Can we take into that a bit more deeply? Because I have contemplative leadership. It’s quite a ways down my list of things that I wanted to talk about, but we’re here. So let’s explore a little bit more about first what it is. You’ve said basically it’s about helping people to settle and be in that space, but then let’s explore how we lead from that space. And what I’m really curious about is what is the impact when somebody has embraced contemplative leadership and then they take it into a place that has been used to hierarchical dominance forms of leadership? What, what then happens? Is this one of the keys to the doors that could take us to the unravelling of the old and the reweaving of the new, do you think?

Leah: I think it is at that that threshold place, as you’re saying, because I should back up and say that largely what I was doing for much of the time that I was working for large corporations is I was leading the training and development department or the leadership development. So I was teaching leadership. I was working with senior executives. As an executive coach, I was helping to define what our management practices would be. And part of what happened was that I got to the place that I felt like what I had practiced both as a leader within an organization and leading my team, as well as what I was teaching or guiding in my executive coaching work was insufficient, that it was woefully insufficient for the level of the issues. that we were facing. And I still believe that.

Manda: Facing as a business in terms of the bottom line of profit, or yes, they’re both and?

Leah: Both and. If the narrow definition is profit for the next quarter, which it often is, that is a particular way in which a leadership that is mind driven, that is problem solving, probably has some effectiveness. If we are looking longer term and asking a question about how do we live in this world that is shifting so dramatically, that has already shifted in our lifetime, we are not talking about problems our children will face. We’re talking about it now. Whether that is about the intense heat, that more people are dying from heat than any other natural disaster.

I’ll be careful. I can fall down a hole here because I know you know this.

Manda: Assume that anyone listening to this podcast is fairly familiar with this. So we’re not going to argue about that. We’re interested in solutions and how you get to explaining to the people who are only seeing even a triple bottom line. But a bottom line of People Profit Planet, it’s still a bottom line and the value set is still driven to creating numbers that look good in a spreadsheet, which I’m guessing is the point where you’re going, guys, this isn’t what it’s about anymore. So what did you do? This is the, if people are in a similar position and then their companies, they’re going, guys, this is not what it’s about anymore. It seems to me that’s a fast way to lose your job. How do you get to a place where you are heard and action happens?

Leah: I wish I had magic pills for this. I really do. I think exactly what you pointed out is very much the problem that we’re so entrenched in a particular way of thinking and in a particular paradigm that says this is the scope of the role of business. It is about making profit for our shareholders in the short term. I honestly do not know how to engage that unless there is a way in through the heart because the head is always going to want to then solve the problem in a very logical, rational, problem solving mode. And to do that, you filter out things that feel extraneous, don’t you?

Manda: Or difficult, or painful.

Leah: Difficult, exactly. Or that we don’t know how to do, because our leadership is built on our past experience and what we can think. And if it’s beyond that, then we do have to filter it out, because we don’t know what to do with it.

Manda: And as you were saying at the beginning, the old pattern is gone. And so our past experience isn’t actually going to be that useful. But even the understanding of that doesn’t seem to be settling. Again, because the people who understand it are going to leave. We spoke a little while ago to Jessica Buckler of the Aleph Trust, who leads extraordinary, shamanic theatre really, of people doing really amazing things. And she’s had people from big institutions like the army and the police. And my question to her of the podcast really was, and what happens to these people? Because if they go back into the army or the police, I can’t imagine that institution changing. And she said, no, they leave because it’s no longer sustainable. And that seems to me that really, that fact is the fact that it has to change. That somehow we have to be able to go into the big institutions. The army and the police are probably quite a long way down the line, but Shell or Microsoft or, Monsanto, what happens? How do we bring heart feeling into it?

And it seems to me reading your book that you’ve explored the edges of this and you’ve got a lot of really beautiful personal experiences of realisations of heart space coming in. And you’ve been in that world. You can talk the right language. You’d know how to do that. Dress in the right clothes, which, those of us on the outside have no idea how to look the part so that then we will be heard. Is that something you can expand on or are we just, am I just going around in circles?

Leah: I love the question. I guess what I would say is it feels to me like there are moments of being close to cracking in some places because of the desperate way that people are holding on. I think there’s a lot of fear for any kind of change of this magnitude. So what I want to look for is where there’s this grasping. Because to admit that this way of being is no longer viable, is no longer healthy, maybe never was healthy, you have to deny a lot of who you’ve been then. That’s what it feels like. Or you have to admit the number of mistakes that you’ve made. One of the things you will probably notice in the book, I have a colleague she and I laugh about, it you know, we write, it feels like we’re always telling about how inept we are. One of the reasons I keep sharing-

Manda: And that does not come across, Leah, honestly, but you write movingly. So things like the rat, tell us about the rat, because that struck me as maybe one of the things you’re thinking of, it was an occasion where you had a realisation. Tell us a little bit about that and we can move forward with that.

Leah: Sure. We had an infestation of rats in our community. I hate to say that. It feels very embarrassing and I want to quickly say, oh, but we’re very clean and we do take care of our trash and all of that. It has a it has a weight for me. Plus, it has a huge ick factor. Mice, rats, rodents. I just can hardly say the word without shivers going down my spine. I can tell you at some point if you and I had a long time about sleeping out in the middle of the Australian outback and a infestation of field mice where they crawled into our sleeping bags and all over us and got into our luggage.

Manda: Oh, but field mice are cute. Was it that bad?

Leah: They weren’t that cute in my sleeping bag with me.

Manda: Okay, fair enough.

Leah: Anyway, so we had we had rats and we were in a community discussion about what to do. A number of people said we need to set traps. We jumped very quickly to say we didn’t, we would not poison them because we know the impact on owls and other predators and we did not want to poison beyond the rat problem. They were in our garden. They were enjoying our compost. They were going underneath the raised beds and getting into the beets. They had a particular affinity for beets. This a few years ago.

Manda: And it’s a lovely warm space under a raised bed. And it’s perfect. You’ve just provided them with the perfect at home.

Leah: They were very happy. So someone said, but we should not kill them. And I immediately just rolled my eyes, whether I did literally or not, I know I did figuratively, because I am like, Oh my gosh, you have got to be kidding me. We have got to get rid of those. And my husband whispers to me I’m not sure maybe we shouldn’t kill them. And I’m like, just don’t say anything because I didn’t want him going.

Manda: Let’s censor that. Self censorship!

Leah: It was a visceral reaction, just a real kind of emotional reaction. And there was this lovely couple saying, we have to honour all life. And I am just like, oh, you’ve got to be kidding me, but not rodents. We don’t have to honour them. So it was a few days after that. I was reading an article and somehow this article was about rats and it was talking about how family oriented they are and how they care for each other and they are looking out for members of their family and they miss them when they’re gone. And I just went, Oh no, look at this. Now I’m going to have to face into this fact that I am wrong – that this idea that we should set traps and kill them has a consequence. And I can’t keep denying that consequence because that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to solve the problem. I did not want to think about any ramifications of our actions. And over and over again, we don’t think about our ramifications of our actions.

Manda: Yeah. And I would like, because you’re the kind of person I can explore this wit – So there’s two separate ways I’d like to take this. 1) I would like to know what you actually did. And as a subset of that, so 1b) I would like to know, did anybody think about journeying or dreaming to the rats and holding a conversation with them and seeing, can we negotiate? You can have that raised bed and leave the other ones alone. Yeah. I think that would be a really interesting experiment, particularly in something like your co housing community, where my projected assumption is you’re all on the same page. So that’s question one – park that. Question two is, I am living very much in the narrative space of initiation versus trauma culture. Francis Weller’s concept of initiation cultures being whole, trauma cultures being our Western hegemonic culture. And also, I’ve just written a novel where the primary character dies at the end of the first chapter. I’ve spent the last couple of years really exploring death, so that now I exist in a place where death is not a bad thing. What happens, what matters, is the quality of the death, how much awareness as a human being I can bring to the process of dying, but also the relationship between that which lives and that which kills because the owl could eat the rat and nobody would be at all upset that this was happening. That’s part of a natural cycle.

When humanity was engaged with the web of life, they might eat the rats. I have a friend who used to work for a petrochemical company. He’s now dead, and he went to Thailand and the kids were eating rat on a stick and he was really worried because they’d just taken pesticides into Thailand and he had to go around and go, guys, stop! We can’t poison the rats, the kids are eating them! There are cultures in which rat is a delicacy. And nobody complained. then, although one could imagine depending on how you’re breeding and killing the rats you could, but it’s more to do with the intent, I would question and you live in a, what sounds like a really switched on community, and having a conversation with the rats that goes, we’ve drawn a line here, come inside this line, I’m sorry, but it’s free game and we will put traps and you stick your head in them, I’m sorry you’re dead. But if you stay outside the line, you’re completely safe. That strikes me as a not unfair conversation to have with the head of the rats and see what it says. But I don’t know, we’re heading off the edges of where people normally sit at the moment, but I’m thinking you might, sit in this space. So tell us what actually happened and then what your felt senses of the hypotheticals I just threw.

Leah: Oh my gosh. I love this conversation and you’re just opening up a whole array of possibilities that never even crossed my mind. So thank you for that. We did we did a middle ground. We’re learning to, we acknowledge that we all came some more than others, but most of us came from a very competitive culture. And so to come here, even though we hold an intention of being a collaborative culture and really honouring the world, the living world around us, we’re still really learning what that looks like and we’re learning how to do it together. One of the things that we did was we dug in deeper around our raised beds. It’s like the chicken wire that you put deeper into the ground.

Manda: Just, yeah, put a barrier around. Okay.

Leah: Put a barrier. Yeah. We redid our compost. We took compost that we didn’t want further away from our community garden. And some of the food compost, the food waste in particular, we put it in closed bins and tumblers so that those would not be such a tempting feast. And I don’t know that anybody even thought about the possibility of engaging in that conversation, but I have to say I really love it. We are doing that with land, we’re thinking about for the land, what do you want here?

Manda: Yes. And how is that moving? I realize we’re taking this away from the book.We’ll come back to the book in a minute because it’s full of really rich things, but I’m really curious about now how the ideas are out there. How do they actually land? So you’re in a community. You’ve got a group of people from, who lived in the old hegemonic paradigm, trying to live at the emergent edge of change and ask the land, what do you want? And What’s your actual experience with that?

Leah: First of all, I would say the comfort with that is a range, as you would expect. For some people that feels very natural and welcoming, and others are a little if that’s what y’all want to do, go ahead. I’m not going to stop you. We don’t have anybody who’s ready to lock us up or who’s, chanting that we need another mode of consideration, but they’re a little less you do your thing and I’ll let you do that.

Manda: If you ended up with two people who had very different visions of what the land wanted, how would you resolve the difference? Do you have resolution mechanisms?

Leah: We do, and we do that anyway. For major decisions, we really intend to hold consensus and to invite conversation and more conversation until we come to, I won’t stand in your way because I understand what you’re saying and I, I’m not feeling harm will come to any of us in this.

Manda: Good enough for now. Safe enough to try.

Leah: Bingo. You got it. That’s my favorite expression. Yes. It’s grand,

Manda: isn’t it? Yes. I think we reduced it to an acronym. Last time we were using it just cause we can write the initials down, but I can’t remember what it is. G E F N S O T T. There we go. Okay. So just consensus until nobody objects and then we go forward. Interesting. I guess just in my limited experience of even shamanic work where we’re, two or three weeks in a set of teepees together – unless you’ve got people who are really practiced at listening, you get a lot of projection. And then projection becomes belief, and one of the things that people will fight hardest over is belief systems, because they’re unprovable. And so I have to really fight my ground to, to feel that I have validity and it can become quite a toxic mess quite quickly. But then that’s part of working through that is working through the nature of humanity. Let’s come back to the book. This is a fascinating conversation and I would, I could just explore rats forever.

Leah: It’s my fault. I did bring it up. I put it in the book, you did, but it’s

Manda: But you put a lot of other stuff. I’m interested. I’m particularly interested in your use of the Mobius strip and grief. I’d like to explore a little bit about grief. We talked to Douglas Rushkoff a few weeks ago and he spoke about the ocean of grief right beneath the surface of everything. And it seems to me that even some of the people you quoted in the book were saying back in the 80s that, maybe our grief will enable us to act. And 40 years later, we’ve burned more oil since then than the whole rest of humanity’s oil burning combined. And people are starting wars that look like they’re designed to tip us over the edge of a cliff. So the trauma is still there, and the traumatised people are still acting out their traumas, and the rest of us are grieving oceans of tears.

Tell us a little bit about the Möbius strip, and then let’s explore possibly Matthew Fox, possibly Joanna Macy, possibly other ways where we can integrate our grief and still be part of the change and not just end up drowning in the ocean of tears.

Leah: It is something I felt that I had to name and to claim in order for us to be in any kind of conversation about what was going on in the world now and what we might hope to do going forward. So I use the Mobius strip as an example. It came to me in the middle of a conversation that I was having with a group where we were talking about grief and the sense that it just was overwhelming and all encompassing. And of course it can be, and there are times when that is what is, and there’s nothing for it but to sit with that hopefully together, and by together I tend to mean you and me and the beings around us, the trees and the plants as well. Those who are also grieving. It came to me though in part because of how I was responding to the death of my father. I had been very close to him. I didn’t feel like his ending was what I had hoped for him. I wasn’t there in the moment he died. That made me feel very ashamed like I had let him down. And I was pushing that whole sense of feeling and thinking to the side because it was so painful for me. And someone in the midst of, a totally different conversation started talking about their parents. And it just struck me that I am denying the richness of the relationship, the life, the work, the person, when I am refusing to be in this conversation, even with myself, because of the grief that it brings up for me. So I planted a couple of rose bushes, one for my mom and one for my dad, and I talked to them because I needed a way to express myself and I needed a way to honour so much of their life that was not about grief, but was about beauty and love and hard work and people who cared very much for each other and so on. It was a real strong example for me of the idea that if we deny part of our feelings and numb ourselves to them, it is hard then to keep other feelings alive. So that was the Mobius strip inspiration to me, that it is all a part of a whole. That we will grieve, and there is beauty, and there is joy, and there is loss, and there is sorrow, and there is wonder, and there is awe, and it’s all a part of this world in which we live, and it’s a part of our very being when we go to our hearts.

Manda: Yes. And just tell us about the actual functionality of how you built the Möbius strip because I thought that was lovely and something that I’d love to share with some of my students.

Leah: Sure. In the class when I’m on, and they’re on Zoom, I ask them to bring a long strip of paper. It could be two feet, three feet whatever they have out of their recycled bin a couple inches wide. And then to write on one side with a marker, a pen, all of the ways in which they are grieving. And this takes place after a module where I am talking about grief and loss in this beautiful world. And so how did you feel while you were listening to that to write all of that down and then flip it over and on the other side go back to when we were talking about awe and wonder and what is all of that expresses that kind of delight in being alive in this time and to take that strip in and you want to hook it together, but right before you do, make that final twist before you staple it or paste it together. And then I say, take your finger and run around. You cannot get off of that Mobius strip. There’s no other side.

Manda: And then you can use it as a meditation tool. It seemed to me you were describing in the book where you can immerse yourself into whatever feeling is under your fingers at the time and then move on and then move on as slowly or as quickly as is useful for you at the time.

Leah: Exactly. Linger with this one if you need to.

Manda: Beautiful.

Leah: And you can make your Möbius strip in every circumstance, right?

Manda: Yes.

Leah: I’m often asking people to make something that’s more generic. We can do it for that loss of the woods that are right outside of our home right now that are being cut down.

Manda: Okay, very specific grief. Or very specific joy, and wonder. Yes. Beautiful. Alrighty. Taking this forward, because I’m aware we could just have a fantastic conversation, but I want, there are places I want to get to. And one of them is opening up various things. You speak, you’ve trained with Joanna Macy. And have you trained with or just read a lot of Matthew Fox? Because I remember when I was a student, I just absorbed everything he’d ever written. He was one of the formative teachers of my 20s. Is he still alive?

Leah: He is yes. And still very outspoken in a beautiful articulation of how he sees the world and his teaching is wonderful and amazing.

Manda: It’s beautiful. And you’ve incorporated that sense that, because it seems to me that we live in a world where there are those who are still locked in business as usual. And there are those of us who understand that we’re in the middle of whatever we call this transformative time. And there’s a spectrum there as well. I spent some time at the weekend with people who genuinely think there is no hope and that what we need to do is prepare for the end times and basically learning how to grow food with no mechanisation is the best thing that we can do. And I can see where they’re coming from, but I, also think that’s not actually a very long term sustainable plan.

And I am immersed in the concepts of complexity, that the web of life is the emergent hyper complex process. It’s a miracle in its own way. And that if we connect with it, we have no idea. This idea that we shut down to what we can imagine is terrifying for me because our imaginations are fed by such narrow inputs. And as soon as we broaden our inputs, literally anything is possible, and we don’t know what it is. And it seemed to me that particularly with Matthew’s four pathways, that he got there way ahead of me, and I didn’t know, because I wasn’t aware of these four pathways. So can you talk us a little bit through what they mean for you, as well as what they are?

Leah: Sure. So I think we started it when we were talking about the Mobius strip this idea that there is what he would say is a via negativa this pathway that is very difficult it’s harsh and maybe heartbreaking and maybe even what, Some might call the dark night of the soul there where we cannot see a way forward. It’s an impasse. Everything we knew that worked before no longer works for us. That’s the via negativa. And the via positiva is It’s this beauty that is all around us that is always here, right? This awe and wonder that we immerse ourselves in, that comes and gets us sometimes, even when we’re trying hard not to be immersed because we’re thinking about something else. It will grab us and bring us into this amazing state where our self is small. It’s not the big S self. It’s like we’re subsumed into this much greater, sacred, incredible whole, that web of life you were talking about. And Matthew was saying that weaving these two together. I guess we could try to do that intentionally, but it’s also being aware that they do weave themselves together anyway, leads to the creative, that out of holding all of that, out of being within all of that is a response that we could not have imagined. It is beyond our knowing. So for me that when I write about earth and soul is going into that depth of who we are at our essence. Going into that deepest heart space where there’s wisdom that we don’t know until we let go of words.

So then out of that comes the creative and out of that the via transformativa. So then we can be transformed and the spaces around us can be transformed. The work that Joanna does, because I think she’s such a brilliant, wonderful elder for us in this work, dovetails so wonderfully for me in the work that Matthew Fox has done, because these wise elders have been having this conversation.

Manda: So expand for people who don’t know the ways that Joanna takes this.

Leah: So we could go in a couple of different ways for Joanna, but you brought up a part of this idea of looking at there is business as usual. Keep going the way we’re going and, maybe hope for the best. Then there’s a great unravelling.

Manda: Or don’t care even. You’ve got a bit in your book about, I think, one, I can’t remember where it was, somewhere in Indonesia going, we’re opening ourselves up to money, we don’t care about saving the planet.

Leah: Exactly. That was in the Congo. It’s not my job to save the planet. Yeah.

Manda: Yes, business as usual. Let’s just mine it for all it’s got because tomorrow we die.

Leah: Business as usual. And that’s where we were. That’s a little bit about what you and I were, a lot about what you and I were talking about when we’re talking about a lot of that corporate stance is that business as usual. And then there’s the great unraveling. And the great unraveling is where you’re trying to do business as usual, but you cannot because it, it just is falling apart. And we can see, I think many signs, as we were saying earlier of how, not only the work we do is falling apart, but how the world around us is so frayed. And then there’s this great turning. There is this turning, I’m going to say, away from what has been into something anew that is beyond us, right? It comes through us.

Manda: And that’s the Via Transformativa from Matthew. It’s a similar place.

Leah: Exactly. Yeah, I think so.

Manda: So if you’re leading courses online or in person, which you do, how do you help people move to that place of potential transformation? You can’t make someone transform, but you can lead them to the emergent edge where inter becoming and emergence happens. How do you do that?

Leah: So the place that I start, it feels important to me. I suppose there are many other places. that you could begin, but the place that I start is establishing kinship with the world around us. Until we do that, we are othering. And as long as we are othering the trees, the plants, the birds, the life around us, those rats, as long as we are othering them, we live then in a place of hubris, a place where we believe that our knowing supersedes the knowing of the earth and that all of the incredible beauty and bounty abundance of this earth is for our consumption, for our use, for our desires. I’m not even going to say needs just for our wants, to serve our wants.

Manda: To heal a wounding that we don’t even acknowledge is there, I think, is part of it.

Leah: And the irony, isn’t it, is that wounding is because of our immense loneliness.

Manda: And disconnection from the web of life.

Leah: For each other, yes. But for the larger world, that is built into us. We could not exist if our ancestors were not deeply woven into the world around them.

Manda: But for 10, 000 years in parts of the world, the trauma culture has managed to subsist by continually enslaving and conquering and colonising other places. And now we’ve got to the point where there’s nowhere left unless we go to Mars, which I think is going to prove to be quite uninhabitable, but let’s leave them to work that one out when they get there. We come from the trauma culture. We have many generations, some of us, me obviously some much less, but lands of Britain, we were invaded by the Romans 2,000 years ago, I think that’s when they brought the trauma culture. So we’ve got a hundred generations of people feeling separate from the land, and then we’re you know, We sent a genocide to your land, and look what happened!

How do you help people to find the healing from that? Because I think it’s one of those things where I see a lot of people who understand with their heads that they’re not separate but they still behave as if they are separate. And that’s because our culture is set up to keep us separate.

Leah: It’s one of the One of the opportunities, again, we don’t have a magic drink. We’d love that, wouldn’t we? Because that is a part of our culture too. Is there a pill for that?

Manda: Oh, I think that’s why people go for the ayahuasca. They think it’s going to be the red pill, but they don’t want to stay for a week and listen to the stories first.

Leah: I know. I’m so glad you told that story. And it’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? It really is heartbreaking. So I think that’s a part of the hope and the intention of a retreat is to help hold the space for people to feel that they can go out and listen to a tree and say to a tree, what is it like to be you? What is the word that you have for me? I co-lead with my colleague, Beth Norcross, who’s, who founded the Centre for Spirituality and Nature, a program. We did a six session video, and then we support the class with a Zoom conversation where we ask people to choose a teacher tree and go and sit with this teacher tree over and over again. And throughout this class, we’re offering them guidance for what they might ask of or participate with. I’m, I’ve started to use the term Anamkara, which John O’Donohue uses, right? Soul friend. Soul friend in the Celtic tradition of somebody who you could share everything with. That can be a tree. That can be a plant. For many people, they know that because many people have companion pets that they do believe is a soul friend, so take that out, name that, claim it, listen, cultivate that listening and connection. When you have established a friendship with a tree, it makes it much more difficult to discount it as simply lumber, or an annoyance because it’s dropping leaves and twigs and nuts in my yard and filling up my gutters so I’m going to cut it down. It’s slowly shifting our sense, our perspective. To me, that’s the work and it is not for any one of us, there may be moments when the scales fall from our eyes. They often don’t stay because our habits are so deeply entrenched. So we have to keep going. We have to keep relearning over and over. We have to keep practicing. That’s what a practice is, right? To replace that habit because I keep practicing a new one.

Manda: Yes. And it has to be resilient and to withstand Monday morning syndrome, where I go home from my retreat I sleep on Sunday night, I go, I put my suit on, go back to work on Monday morning and that part of my brain that just woke up just immediately is cut off and put in a box because now I have to function in the old business as usual world. But it seems to me that there must be a tipping point somewhere, we will not know it until we’ve gone beyond it, where enough people are awake and alive and have Anamkara with the tree, such that they can’t maintain the business as usual. And then we don’t know what will happen. Things will shift, but we don’t know how and we don’t know where. Are you seeing, am I fantasising or are you seeing little bubbles under the surface of this?

Leah: I do see little bubbles. I and I see too that I really feel the hope in the ways in which we continue to learn how Earth is resilient in all of her manifestations. Now that, please, that is not an invitation, do what we will because Earth is resilient. That is not what I’m saying.

Manda: You keep burning the oil because it doesn’t matter because somehow buffers in the ocean will solve it. Yeah.

Leah: That’s right. Yeah. All the heat’s going to the ocean anyway, right? But it is to say that when we can collaborate with the living world and we put our soul into these deep connections. Then we can be guided by, we can be inspired by, we can be transformed by, what Earth is also doing. Those trees have been here far longer than we have, and they have survived the last great extinction in some form.

Manda: As did we. I think it’s worth remembering that our ancestors, whatever they were, survived five massive extinctions to get us to here. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And all our human predecessors survived at least to be able to reproduce, and they reproduced living children, or we wouldn’t be here. It’s a miracle. And we take it for granted. So sorry, I interrupted again.

Leah: No, I’m just putting an exclamation mark on what you’re saying, and we’re all part of that family tree, right? This is the family tree that holds us all.

Manda: Yeah. Last mass extinction, 97 percent of life on earth was rendered extinct, and everything that’s alive now is part of the three percent that kept going. And it would be nice if we didn’t create another bottleneck. 64 million years from now there will be another amazing ecosystem regardless, but it would, I think, be very nice to keep this one going.

Nate Higgins says he’s not pro-growth, anti-growth, pro anything, anti-anything. He’s just pro the continuation of complex life, and I think that sounds like a pretty good aim to be going for.

Leah: Yes, absolutely. And could we try to cause less pain and suffering?

Manda: Yes.

Leah: Because we do have some control over the degree of pain and suffering we are going to cause. What we have done thus far may be written in. The more we keep doing as we have done, living in that business as usual, the more likely that we are going to make so much pain for all of the beings in this beautiful world, in this time where we have had such rich ray of life.

Manda: Yeah. And yet the metaphor we used to use when I was, I did a master’s in regenerative economics, and we had this metaphor of what we try and do is take a Boeing 747 in mid-flight across the Atlantic and turn it into a helicopter without killing any of the people on board. And that’s hard. And you’re in a co-housing community, which seems to me one of those ways where we can minimize our impact while maximising our wellbeing. Because we don’t need as much stuff because we’re prepared to share and help each other and do the things that we evolved to do and be in relationship and build our serotonin mesh and become less reliant on the dopamine drips. I don’t know how long you’ve been there, but is it your experience living in your co housing community that it’s working, that you feel as if you’re treading more lightly on the land?

Leah: Absolutely. I think we all still see that we have so far to go, and yet it’s so rich that we’re going together. That is such a gift.

Manda: Okay. This is the nature of human community, and this is what we find in our hearts when we build community, is the richness that we’re not gaining by buying stuff off the internet and having Amazon deliver us boxes six times a day. It doesn’t work, but we still do it. Triumph of hope over experience. We still give it a go because we don’t know what else to do. And because there’s quite a sophisticated consumer culture telling us that if we buy the right thing, we’ll heal when plainly our experience is that doesn’t work. Are you seeing, I’ll stop asking logistical questions in a moment, but you’re heading to an election which seems quite divisive, we’re in an election that is quite divisive, and it seems to me quite urgent that we get to a point where we all see that the existing democratic structural system is not fit for purpose. It’s not that it’s broken, it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do, which is to elevate value up towards the one percent of the one percent, but it’s not serving anybody else, and we need a new democratic structure that’s actually democratic. Are you saying seeing any signs anywhere that kind of a narrative could take off in your side of the Atlantic?

Leah: Wow, what a terrific question. I see signs in that people are asking that question more than I remember ever growing up. I don’t remember ever hearing that kind of a question. So I do think there is this increasing awareness, the how that kind of a transformation might occur feels incredibly muddy at this point and there are some people who will say it will have to all fall apart before anything new can emerge.

Manda: Yeah, that’s a bit doomsterish though, doesn’t it? And I don’t believe that’s true. Actually, if everybody could agree on a set of principles, human creativity is amazing – Audrey Tang just gave up being the digital minister for Taiwan and she brought an extraordinary amount of digital democracy to Taiwan. And now she’s working with Frank Court and there’s things that I’m not sure, even at the time this goes out, we can talk about. But it’s aiming to transform the nature of social media. Because if we give you the incentives, we give you the outcomes. At the moment, the incentives for social media are to make the hedge funders very rich. And they do that by hijacking our lymbic systems and harvesting our attention and promoting outrage, because that’s the way they manage to make a lot of money. But it doesn’t have to be that. And harnessing digital technology to a desire for a peaceful, flourishing democracy… Watch this space. I’m hoping to talk to Audrey later in the year, possibly early next year, about the possibilities of what’s happening.

So I don’t think they’re right, but this is your podcast, so we’ll shut up about the things that I think.

Leah: No, don’t. I love the fact that it’s a conversation. So thank you for that. And I like little glimmers of hope, where we can find some models. It’s so inspiring for us. I don’t think it’s always going to be that way. I think sometimes we are going to be the ones who are walking to create the path, yet where there are little bits of, pathway, a few stepping stones. That’s so exciting for us to see the possibility.

Manda: Yes, I have this concept of that those of us creating these things are casting ghost lines across the landscapes of tomorrow that people can then walk and when a few have walked them they’ll be turned into paths and then people see that they’re paths and be able to go and it’s finding the ghost lines and casting them out is the key.

Earth and Soul. Reconnecting amid climate chaos. What would we like to leave the listeners with? There are so many beautiful things that we didn’t get to. There was a story about a dolphin that threw fish, which just absolutely made my heart explode with joy, and I didn’t know it, and it was glorious. But we’ll leave people to read that. And Matthew Fox; we generate in communion with the Divine, who dwells and generates within us. And I thought that was so beautiful. What, of all the things that you’re doing, what can we take forward, or where are you going next, is possibly a useful one. If people are listening to this and they want to know more, I will put your website, leahrampy.com, into the show notes. How can they explore more deeply the depths and the richness of what you have woven?

Leah: I would love for people to be in conversation about this. I put book group questions at the end of the book because I was hoping that an individual might sit down with one or two others and really be in conversation about it to take it home. Of course, I would love everybody to come to retreats that I lead, but I know that’s not practical or possible. But people could probably find somebody else to be in a conversation with, and that’s really my hope. I wrote it because I think this is the conversation that I want to be in for the rest of my life, and I’m hoping that others will engage in this kind of conversation.

I will also say though that I’ve probably given you a few little clues to that. My co-author Beth Norcross and I have a book coming out in 2026 in the spring called ‘Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees’. It’s published by Broadleaf Books. and we’ve already got our manuscript in.

Manda: Okay, publishing impressed here, and it’s coming out in 26. We’ll have you back on the podcast. If the podcast still exists and we’re all still able to communicate across the Atlantic, definitely come back for the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees. That would be glorious.

Leah: So I also really encourage people to, if you pick up this book, do some of the practices. Just take one. And if you don’t even pick up the book, find a particular place that feeds your soul in this living world and sit with it every day. Open the senses, open the heart. Let’s all get out of our heads for a little while and remember that there are other ways of knowing and that would be a way that we could gift ourselves and gift the world.

Manda: Find somewhere beautiful in the Web of Life, ideally not in a concrete box, where you can sit and just be. And very briefly, we are over time, but just briefly, you spoke quite early in the book about tuning the five strands of the harp, which struck me as a really good practice. Tell us just a tiny little vignette of that.

Leah: Sure. This is said to go back to the Celtic Christians. I used to lead a lot of retreats to the Isle of Iona off the coast. off the coast of Scotland, a sacred island with rich history and a very frequent pilgrimage site. We would start every morning with this practice called tuning the five stringed harp.

And the five strings are the five senses. So drop into each one of those just one by one. Listen. Close your eyes. See if you can let go of everything around you. Listen. If it’s people talking, it’s people talking. Just keep tuning the listening. And what’s beyond that? What do you hear more than that? What else is there?

Manda: Because on Iona, there will be the sea always.

Leah: Absolutely. And the birds. And I find that for me, my sense of smell is particularly challenged if I don’t ask myself to be intentional about it and try to let go of the other senses, to smell the pines, to smell the wafting of the beautiful flowers in the spring, whatever it is, just tuning each one of those one by one. And your taste, you can do it at every meal if you don’t know what you’re eating out in the wild. And even sight, because we tend to try to see something rather than to gaze softly and let. it come to us. Let that be given to us to see.

Manda: A wide gaze rather than that very I need to focus on what’s in front of me. Magic. All right, that’s a really beautiful practice. I think let’s call it a day at that. I will put links to your site and to everything else that we’ve talked about into the show notes. Is there anything else that you wanted to say to the listeners as we close.

Leah: I would just say to you, Manda, that I love the work you’re doing. I think it’s so wonderful. You’re bringing all these voices to the world and I’m just really grateful to be a part of this. So I cheer you on.

Manda: Thank you. Thank you. It’s a joy and a delight. I tell you, it’s so much fun. I get to talk to people like you that I otherwise would never get to meet. So thank you. Thank you for coming onto the podcast. Thank you for giving us your time and thank you for writing such a beautiful, deeply woven, gorgeous, many layered book. It’s grand. So we’ll see you again when the next one comes out. Thank you.

Leah: That’s terrific. Thank you.

Manda: And that’s it for this week. Huge thanks to Leah for writing a beautiful book and for being so articulate. So able to engage with the things that really matter. So willing to explore beyond the edges of things and to think deeply. And for having such clarity of soul. It’s such a pleasure to sit in company with somebody who has that sense of inner peace that comes from a lot of time spent sitting, spent tuning the five strings of our inner harp, spent just listening to the world around us, feeling into it, engaging with it. Until we become a living part of the living web, I genuinely think that this is the single most important thing that any of us can do now, and that there must be a tipping point. I don’t know where it is, but if enough of us connect to the web in authentic ways, such that it changes the tenor of our lives, such as it comes to be the most important thing that we do, then I think the world will shift, and I certainly think it’s worth trying.

So if you’re looking for something to do this week, then, as Leah said, go outside, sit with your back to a tree, walk in the hills, sit on the edge of a loch or a lake or a river, sit wherever you can feel wild, and let the world speak to you. And we will be back next week with another conversation.

In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, to Alan Lowes of Airtight Studios for the production, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Lou Mayor for the video, to Faith Tilleray for the website, and the conversations that keep us moving forwards. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. Please do go and buy Leah’s book. It’s beautiful. I’ve put links in the show notes. You will not regret it. And if you know of anybody else who wants to understand the many ways we must and can connect to the web of life in this time of transformation, then please send them this link.

And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you. And goodbye.

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