CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

[Cheerful theme music begins] 
 
This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 
 
This episode was recorded during a live online event on March 24th, 2021. It features author and policy expert Erin McMorrow in conversation with renegade economist Della Z Duncan. They discuss Dr. McMorrow’s book, Grounded, in which she explores both the ecological and spiritual basis of our existing climate crises as well as wisdom and tools to initiate a transformation to save our soils and our souls. 
 
A transcript of this episode is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  

[Theme music concludes] 
 

Della: Thank you Erin for joining us! So happy to be in conversation with you and thank you to everyone who is with us tonight live. So again, yeah welcome Erin good to be with you. 

Erin: Thank you, likewise. So good to see your face and to be here with everybody in the virtual circle. 

Della: And tonight, we are here to speak about and be with the theme of “On Healing Our Planet and Ourselves” and we are also here to celebrate your book, the title being Grounded. So perhaps we can begin with some grounding for all of us tonight. Would you mind leading us in something that may ground us for our time together?  

Erin: Hmm. I would love to, my favorite thing to do. All right. So, take a moment, wherever you are. If you're able to close your eyes, please do, of course unless you're driving, maybe put hands over your heart if that feels good or whatever feels aligned with your body in this moment. Maybe if you can sit or even lie down if that feels good, whatever feels true.  

Start to connect to the breath. Maybe for the first time today. Just take a moment to invite yourself into the space. So just allowing anything that was going on before this moment. Maybe the entire week, maybe the entire year, let it be outside of this space and just invite yourself into your own body and inviting yourself into your own breath. Inviting yourself into the present moment. Feeling the Earth fully supporting the body. As you breathe, maybe feeling imaginary roots drop down into rich, fertile, healthy soil dropping all the way down as far as they need for you to feel deeply rooted and grounded in Mother Earth. And as you continue to breathe, scan your body for anything that may not serve, just allow it to fall away into the Earth out through those roots, allowing it to turn into compost, allowing it to transform into something that serves. And staying connected to the breath whenever you're ready. Just inviting any nourishment drawing up through those roots into your body that feels called for in this moment and take three long deep cleansing breaths wherever you are.  

I'm just calling in great mother energy, great father energy, team highest good. So, anyone or anything who wants to be here for our highest good, our soul’s greatest growth, the highest good of all involved. Please be here with us, calling in the four directions, the elementals, the fae, anyone that wants to be here for our highest good. Please be here during this conversation, be here with us in this virtual circle wherever we are. And calling in the well ancestors of the lands wherever we are. Thank you for guiding us in this moment. Take one more long deep inhale, one more long exhale. Opening circle whenever you're ready gently float eyes back open coming back into the space. 

Della: Thank you so much Erin, thank you. And congratulations on your book [Erin: Thank you.] and the gift that that is to all to all of us and to the world and it was such a joy to be able to listen to it over these last couple weeks. Just taking you with me on walks was such a joy. [Erin laughs gently] So we're here celebrating the book and I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about it. So, the book Grounded: A Fierce Feminine Guide to Connecting with the Soil and Healing from the Ground Up. So, tell us a little bit about the book and what you would say is the main inquiry, the main question that carried you through the journey of writing it.  

Erin: Sure, I actually have it here. I just brought it just because I feel like it's fun to like hold the actual thing and I love everything about it, this little object. So okay. It started out being what I thought was a scientific inquiry about soil health. So, the microscopic life in soil and climate change. This was about seven years ago. So, the journey has been about seven years long where I thought that I was going to take my PhD in urban planning and sustainability and apply it to some unusual like interdisciplinary studies around this soil health climate thing, which I actually learned about right after graduate school.  

And that just brought me into this what I'm going to call it my spiritual journey. That was the very beginning, attempting to like getting the downloads for the call to write this book and then charging forward with it thinking that I was going to be providing scientific facts to people that were going to like change the world and like save the world or something. Whatever I thought I was going to do, and it ended up bringing me to the divine feminine metaphor. Which brought me to Bali for yoga teacher training and energetic work for the first time in my life. It brought me…I would say I stumbled upon the tantric path having no idea that's what I was doing at the time. Introduced me to the chakra system and as I started to learn about the divine feminine, the story just started to unfurl, and my own storytelling started to unfurl and so it's really hard to…I have no elevator pitch. Like I have no one sentence thing about what this is about. It's a journey and when I came across the divine feminine metaphor as sort of nature at first and then having that unfurl as Mother Earth and then maybe four years down the line realizing that the soil itself is the oldest divine feminine metaphor. So, I had been writing a book about soil for that long and the divine feminine literally not knowing that those two things were actually one in a metaphorical sense.  

And so, and just quickly I'll just this part, because I think it's the most important kind of aha moment, is that as the divine feminine metaphor when people are like “what does that mean?” It's like you have the soil, the healthy soil. You part the soil, you plant the seed, right, and then you cover the soil and then life gestates underground in the darkness and then life is born. And so, we have the seed metaphor and the plant metaphor as the great divine feminine mother metaphorically, life is born this way after gestating. And then that helped me realize that that seed metaphor related to the Moon. The Moon is a seed metaphor as well with waxing and waning and all of this started to connect me to the actual cycles of nature, whereas what we were looking at before was emissions and carbon sequestration. So, you know, like carbon going up carbon going down. And this scaled me back to a bigger picture sort of more ancient picture of connecting with the cycles of nature and I realized over the years that this is what I was actually writing about. This is what my journey was actually about.  

So that's what it's about, it’s about this unfurling of the soul and our own healing and how from sort of Western academic perspective, things look one way and then you start really getting into it. I almost said digging into it because the metaphors like never end in the silliest ways that even when we're talking about soil health and climate change actually were talking about the Great Mother. Actually, we're talking about healing with the soil and we're talking about healing with the Earth and that the inner work and the outer work are one as I say in the book where there's no way to heal unto ourselves without healing with the Earth and there's no way to heal with the Earth without healing unto ourselves. So that's most of it. 

Della: Thank you. Yeah, it really struck me how interconnected the whole book was and how many beautiful themes you wove together, and I really learned a lot. And so just to say back a few things. You said you brought up the divine feminine soil science, soil health, climate change, patriarchy, there's also economics, [Erin: Yeah.] which is of personal interest to me. So, there were so many things that you wove together. So perhaps for folks joining us tonight, and for myself even, since we have you who studied this in such great depth, let's unpack that a little bit. Maybe let's start with what's the connection between soil health and climate change? Why should we care about the relationship between the two of them? And why do you have this such intent focus on the soil health and bringing that to folks’ attention? 

Erin: Yeah. Thank you. So, I again I have a PhD in urban planning and sustainable cities, and I was looking at emissions and I was looking at what cities could do to like change the built environment, but we were always focused on emissions, and like I said after I graduated I was exposed to this notion of soil health and climate change. I was like, how did I get through six years of a PhD without understanding that there's this huge blind spot. There's this huge missing part of the conversation, which seven years ago it was the case. It's seven years now like fast forward and this is becoming far more, mainstream even, but certainly within the climate conversation, soil health and what we now call the regenerative agriculture movement has made a lot of headway in the last seven years in terms of shifting the conversation.  

And the basic thing is that the soil is alive and there's microscopic life in the soil, which many of us don't even think about I don't know that I did that much before, gardeners do, you know, but people like your regular person walking around I never thought that much about it and I came to discover that through industrial agriculture and a lot of the practices that we have with our soil and deforestation, pretty much anything that destroys plants and the soil, we are releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere through that act not just through fossil fuel emissions or driving cars etc.  

And so, we started to look at that and the place I landed with this was this sort of, again the cycles of nature, the way that I break it down and kind of like the kindergarten level so we can get a picture is that there's the soil, the Earth part of the cycle, there's the air, the atmosphere part of the cycle. There's the water part of the cycle in the most simple terms. And right now, there's obviously too much carbon in the atmosphere. We know that. Ae also know that there's too much carbon in the oceans because they have been absorbing a lot of the carbon from the atmosphere which not everybody knows but it's causing what we call ocean acidification and that's another big problem that's directly related to having too much carbon in the atmosphere. And the other part of this cycle is the soil, the Earth part, and that's the part that doesn't have enough carbon because the thing is that soil like healthy soil with microscopic life in it holds carbon, it loves carbon, and needs carbon this microscopic life under the soil interacts with the carbon and plants need the carbon. They pull the carbon in naturally via photosynthesis. And so, when we destroy the plants, the forest, the soil all of this carbon escapes and then we're greatly exacerbating this problem. And when you look at it from a cyclical point of view that way, actually looking at the sort of broken part of the cycle, or the part of the cycle that is off kilter and that's the soil.  

And so, the way I started to see it as like the soil actually the Earth needs inhale, you know, it needs that, we need to reverse this thing, take it back around by honoring the fact that there's something called the carbon cycle, which it's just these, you know, extremely microscopic, little things that are hard to think about the carbon molecules are you know moving around like the water cycle. This is the way I think about it before it's like learning about the water cycle in elementary school, you know, it's like, oh the water never goes anywhere. It just moves around it transforms. It becomes all these different things. That's essentially how the carbon cycle works. And so that's the really, really basic kind of elementary school version of why the soil how the soil is related to climate change.  

And then if you get back around to it the plants themselves as they draw in carbon, they draw in carbon naturally, and the process of photosynthesis of course has always been going on for all time and is free. And what it is they essentially inhale this carbon in the simple form bring it down kind of through their bodies, down to the roots and we'll probably get into a conversation about mycorrhizal fungi that's slightly more complicated, but that there then they interact with this like fungal partner than helps bring the carbon all the way down to the soil providing the things that the microscopic life needs down there. And also, in that process creates more space in the soil for to aerate the soil. It helps the soil hold a considerable amount more of water and they clean the water and so all of these things would work together if you think of like the forest floor, in the way that it composts on its own. That's a kind of good visual to get a handle on what healthy soil is about.  

Della: Thank you. Thank you for that. And let's go ahead and introduce the third, another character in this, the divine feminine. In your book you do you go from really telling us about soil science and climate change and then you bring in the divine feminine and patriarchy and historical perspectives. So, tell us again a little bit more about the divine feminine, what that means to you and how the divine feminine enters into that relationship as a metaphor but also as a potential place for healing. 

Erin: Right. Thank you. So, I've come to learn, again by sort of stumbling onto the tantric path of the beginnings. If you think of the I get asked a lot about the divine feminine and the divine masculine and as I've learned, it's these complementary energies that weave through everything, through all of life. And this is again a relatively recent like learning in my life. And so, the way that I've learned it is the masculine is more like a mountain energy it’s sort of there. It's the great protector. It's also an initiatory energy. And then the feminine is like the ocean. It's like the energy of the ocean so equally powerful but it's more the divine feminine is more liquid moving fluids and receiving it’s the receiving energies. We have an initiatory energy and receiving energy or a giving and receiving which is how all of the dances of life flows, and when nature is in balance, this is just flowing freely throughout everything. And a lot of what I talk about is how we've fallen out of balance in this dance.  

And so again back to that sort of like soil as like parting the soil, plant the seed, this like the actual mother’s like pregnancy, right? Gestation in the dark and then giving birth and then life goes again and then to go all the way around the seed metaphor the plant then grows and then dies at some point and comes back and becomes compost, goes back to the Earth, back to the mother and we all go around again. And this is the eternal dance of life that is never ending and it's totally different than the notion of when we start to talk about patriarchy or what I sometimes call the toxic masculine, although it gets really tricky with the language because people have so many associations with these things, but that is more of a taking energy. So actually, in the book I talk about patriarchy I see it as the externalized ego. So, it's like the ego that we're all dealing with in our personal work and things like a collective ego that has somehow become like a greater force that is neither the divine masculine nor the divine feminine, has actually nothing to do with either. It's that taking energy that doesn't exist in nature like it's something else.  

And so, coming to understand these equally balanced energies within ourselves, we can do healing work around that in ourselves, and then looking at that in nature and looking at where we are harming. Well obviously, were harming the soil all the time and unfortunately there are rape metaphors, you know, we get into the goddess history and things like this, where we used to honor the Great Goddess the Great Mother and every Indigenous culture all over the world for all of time has honored the Great Mother because of what I just said, because of the birth metaphor, you know, it's just it's really obvious. Once you sort of look at it. It's like gestating life the power of the darkness, you know, the power of gestation where we do a lot of people honor, let's say the Sun as the source of life and it is it's a source of life. But also, the darkness is equally powerful, and if we had all sun and no soil. You know, if we had no place to gestate, there would be no life. If we burnt out all the soil. There would be no life. Like it's always a balance between the two.  

So that's where the feminine comes in and just the sense of the lost stories of the Great Mother or the maybe damaged stories of the Great Mother where whenever we started to tell stories that were harmful to her as a character or to the goddesses as characters we also started to enact it in actual literal violence with women and girls all over the world and also people of color like I say that that all of genocide unfortunately and slavery and all of these things where we think that we can own something or if we can own people or land, you know, we're off we're out of balance in that way and all of these acts are an extension of our harmed relationship and our being out of balance with the masculine and the feminine. 

Della: Thank you. Thank you, Erin. And you brought up your view of the ego and I found this really interesting in your book, both of you on it. And also, how a more healthier relationship could be with the ego. Can you speak more about that?  

Erin: Sure, and this is also relatively recent in my personal journey. It's part of a internal healing journey. We're at some point, if we haven't learned this growing up, we learned that we are dealing with our own soul, our higher self and also sort of another voice this is sort of our egoic voice, whatever that is. And it's always there we can't like there's a lot of talk about like crushing the ego or getting rid of the ego or all these things, but my understanding is that it's a forever balance. It's something along the lines of I've read in a beautiful book called Sand Talk that it's three to one. So it's like three parts soul one part ego and you just have to always know that and all of the wisdom traditions know that and we work with the ego and so it's something that we reflect upon all the time, but if we let the ego if we lose our traditions if we lose our path if we forget, the ego just takes over and we just think that that's life, you know, which I think collectively it feels like it's happening often is this like…the state of climate change that we’re in and biodiversity loss and ocean acidification all this incredible destruction and all of the violence and all these other things I think are directly related to the ego out of control, you know, it's not like we need to control the ego but it's run amok, you know, it has gotten out and because we don't have these alive wisdom traditions as Indigenous cultures always have and passed along and we're not practicing as a collective right now.  

I mean many of us are obviously, like people watching this are pretty like this is not new information, most likely. But on the whole I think there’s the ego as what I would call patriarchy or the toxic masculine as a sort of entity that is doing things like mountaintop mining. You know, like extensive damage to Indigenous people still to this day, you know, all of the violence to this day is an extension of that. It's like we've fallen…all I'm not going to say we've lost our way because I don't think we're ever officially like, I don't think there's such a thing as lost but we're pretty we're pretty far out of alignment right now. I would say looking at based on outcomes, you know, based on what we're looking at in terms of climate change and everything happening in the planet and especially what we're doing to each other, you know? The fact that we still have this much violence and hatred or reaction to each other is I think a reflection that we have a lot of internal healing work to do around what we call the ego and the soul.  

Della: I'm really hearing a call for us all to remember. [Erin: Mm!] It’s like remember recall, but also re-member back together [Erin: Exactly.] in relationship with the web of life, in relationship to one another, in relationship with our higher self. As you're saying with our larger ecological self, you know, all the widening circles of who we are so yeah remembering.  

Erin: It's fascinating, I maybe it was you that wrote that I can't because I just saw that the other day as well. Maybe I was looking your bio or something, but I was thinking of the Great Goddess and her dismembering like what literally what happened in the stories was she got dismembered like humans told stories about the dismembering of the goddess and they spread her like body parts all over and all of this horrific stuff where it's when we forget and, in that way, we dismember, you know, and we disintegrate and then and then there's a great remembering.  

Which you can get into an interesting conversation about like when I'm just arriving now with like the ugus and things like this where there's like there's a great forgetting and the great remembering and there are these eternal tides that move through which I think is actually very supportive. It's like, okay, maybe we're just at one of these points that is of a great forgetting and we get to see how uncomfortable this is and how painful this is and how destructive this level of separation and forgetting is and that it's time to turn the corner and come back on around and start to remember like literally it's also like remembering is like being embodied, right? You know so much of this is about like the lower three chakras and remembering that we are embodied individuals like in people and animals, you know, like unto ourselves and unto each other and remembering how connected we are and that we in fact our nature, we are the mother as well.  

Della: Yeah, in your book you speak about that. Being in class and someone saying, “we are nature” and you really take that view on, and I'm wondering as you're speaking if compost remembers, right? [Erin laughs] Whether there is a remembering of life throughout those cycles. 

Erin: That's true. I love it when new things arrive like “I should put that in the book! I can't write it…” [laughs] like and thankfully the book gets to stay exactly as it is and there's no more editing. But absolutely it's a disintegration and a reintegration, you know a forgetting and then a remembering and a kind of reassimilating as in the material way as like matter as mother, right? So, coming back through and that and honoring that that's actually neutral. It's not a terrible tragedy. It's part of nature. It's part of the inhale and the exhale of everything. 

Della: And yeah, I know that this book took seven years and it's complete and it's out there in the world and yet I want to drop into this present moment for you right now and end of March 2021, and I'm curious what's alive for you right now. And what's moving you right now and perhaps if we bring in grief, which can help point to that which we love in the world, that which we really care about, I'm wondering what you’re grieving for or what's breaking your heart right now? Just what's alive, what's up for you. As we as we gather here right now, this evening.  

Erin: Yeah, it's an incredibly potent moment in my life, which it would have been no matter what because of the book coming out…and life just decided, you know, the way that things aligned in my life and there are many things moving. So, I actually just personally moved out of my home of six years, which was the exact, pretty much the exact duration of writing the book. You know, there's the first year when I was traveling around and then I landed in this space and exactly as the book came out into the world, I was like expelled to also into the world [laughs] birthed out like it was just time for me to be out and I'm somewhere in between, and I had some plans of what I was going to do, but I have a 16 year old cat that unfortunately she's got a sickness now, that's pretty serious and I just found out about that as like the on the second, you know, as I was moving and so I've been in this kind of tornado of like moving parts physically.  

I was just reflecting on it as I was getting ready just the root trauma, you know, and the way that I moved into that home. I had moved eight times in three years. So, it's actually a very similar moment. It feels similarly chaotic in a sense. My beautiful friend who does work on the alchemy of chaos talks about chaos being the place where all possibility exists. So again, it's the void, right? We're in I'm in the void, I'm talking about the void and writing about the void and I'm in it, you know, and I'm also in many ways also feeling like I'm getting dismembered like I'm getting disintegrated like I you know, all of the familiar things all of the things that have sort of feel like they've held me together in many ways, or have been touch points are moving like the whole thing is moving right now, which is actually very feminine as well. It's the void and it's also fluid, you know, this is fluid energy.  

So, it's been a real deep invitation to taking my own medicine, you know, and this notion of like staying grounded because this is a very ungrounded moment that I happen to be in and to continue to speak about it to continue to show up and sort of like deliver. But you know, I'm talking most days about the work that I've been doing in the middle of this great transition. And then we just had you know last week we had, well we've had more than one now, even since we started connecting of just hate crimes and shootings and it's not like that wasn't happening before but one in particular is, you know, aimed at Asian women and that I'm half Chinese and it hit really close to home and there's something about that saying hitting close to home. This has been coming over and over because it's um, it’s the root chakra, right? It's home, foundation, identity, tribe. And so, the fact that there is there such extreme violence in this moment and for me the fact that it's like to me it's like, there's an interesting thing about try, because I am so disconnected as well.  

I've been doing work around my like maternal line and my paternal line. And on the maternal side, my mother came from Taiwan to the US, and her parents came from China, then that next generation around the cultural revolution. And before that I think we may have had, at least on the maternal side, we may have had ties to Mongolia which is right there. And because I've had a lot of deep spiritual intuition around like Mongolian throat singing, and just the horses and the eagles and the things that are going on there. I can feel something around it, I feel something sort of vibrational where it's like this conversation around indigeneity and when we have it or don't have it or how far you know, how far back are we connected or disconnected from what feels like our original land our original people our original tribe. And then I think it feels like that…the tragedies that are occurring as this is unrootedness in the collective, right? It's the our inability to grieve, you know our lack of wisdom practices and rituals around grief in general around death in general. The mental health aspects, I feel like are bubbling to the surface in this moment now as it feels like the world is kind of opening up in a way and this, you know the shift in tides of vaccines and all the things that are happening it was about this time last year that we were going into this, right we're going into this epic transformation and I think the kind of beginning exit like cocoon leaving moment, which is what it feels like is dredging something up, its wrenching something in all of us. And I'm seeing like a lot of pets pass. I've seen a lot of sudden illnesses people are coming down, you know, there are things like our bodies are feeling it, our souls are feeling it.  

So yeah, it's been, I've been experiencing more grief than I have in a long time, honestly. It's been it's been much more…everything was quite I actually I was in a really fortunate and I'd say like even privileged bubble for quite some time to be able to write and support this book and losing actually my literal home, you know having my cat be sick having huge things going on in the world that are incredibly painful to me and also to those that I love around that are experiencing it and feeling that those waves of grief…the yeah, that's what's up for me in this moment. 

Della: Thank you, and we hear you and I want to invite one more area of honoring our pain, the grief for the soil. I think maybe folks are less familiar perhaps around what's happening with the soil and what we're grieving there. So, can you share a little bit about, as I know you also you worked in this field, as well and maybe you could talk about that that work too, working with soil health. But yeah. What's going on there? And where’s the grief for us there? 

Erin: It's interesting, what comes to mind is less professional when you ask that question, it brings me to…I was in a really deep what I've called Great Mother ceremony almost exactly this time last year. So right just before the great shutdowns and I was I was in there for 36 hours and there was a long period of time that I was on hands and knees like child's pose and there was a moment when I actually sort of got the down I was like I would say it's child's pose like hands and knees like in forehead to the Earth, right because we're her children like the actual stuff I had been writing about, I understood sort of intellectually and I could say it or I was channeling it, but in this moment it became in this in the ceremony and this experience it became like visceral.  

Like in my body actually truly experienced real time, which is always hard to explain in plant medicine ceremonies because you're then once again abstracting it to tell people about what happened, you know and try to use language and words, but I was in Southern California. I was in LA and the place where I was, the soil was it was a lawn actually it would have been a lawn, but it was bone dry, like bone dry and it was hard. And so, to put my forehead on the Earth actually was like scraping and scratching my forehead. Like that's how hard it was, and I remember just feeling it, I can feel it now. It's like it's so dry. Like it's not it's not supposed to be that way. It's never supposed to be like compacted and hard and dry. There's no life there, it was gone.  

So, if you imagine like you imagine the womb, you know, the womb is fertile like there's microscopic life there like, that's the dance of all things. That's where life gestates. And if you imagine this like packed hard earth with like nothing. No care, no love, no microscopic life…I couldn't you know, you couldn't part that soil. That's not soil. You know, that was just packed Earth. I could just feel emotionally how painful that was for her the mother, you know, like the way she likes to be like is the forest floor you know? It's this rich like teeming with life ecosystem of things that do their things, and they compost, and it all goes around and around. And so, yeah, the grief, I think. It's in our unconscious collectively in a way that we don't, we're not fully recognizing but it's there because we walk on her and we can feel it. I don't know that she grieves exact. I can't speak. I can't speak for Mother Earth. That's silly like I'm not gonna like put myself in her shoes, but I do I feel like she has in that moment, she was actually very peaceful because I was weeping and apologizing, you know, I was like, you know, “we're so sorry.” And the answer I received was like “it's okay you're children” like you all like that's what children do like, it's just everything is forgivable and forgiven like it's she's fine, you know like it's not the way she likes it to be but it's like the lesson for us, you know, the grief is really in our own hearts because we're the ones that did it. So, I hope that answers your question.  

Della: Yes, and then reminded of flying and looking down and seeing the patches of mono crops, you know, sometimes when you fly, and I had a feeling of kind of scars across the Earth's surface or even kind of rashes like these mono crop look bizarre in their wholly calculated and very geometric shapes. So, I hear you on that but feeling for the soil and feeling with the soil. Let’s go into the soil, then. You brought up the mycorrhiza, the fungi underneath and it’s so beautiful to see so many wonderful films coming out about mushrooms and books coming out about mushrooms. So, tell us about mushrooms why folks should care maybe where folks can learn more because it’s such a hidden world, the “wood wide web” I’ve heard it called. [Erin laughs] [Erin: Yeah.] But there are so many beautiful also lessons that we can learn. I remember talking with a group of folks and saying, “oh what if we based our economic systems off of mycorrhiza fungi networks where there's redistribution of wealth when a tree dies and there's sharing of resources and information”. So, tell us about mushrooms and your passion for them, which I love. 

Erin: Yeah, so many things come to mind at the same time. I hope I can like catch them all. But first, my first thought was the Fantastic Fungi book and movie I think are great place to start if this is brand new information to you. I just think it's a really rich and well-done piece of work and Paul Stamets is obviously like Mr. Mushroom, like in his mushroom hat. Met him in person once and he is like he is that person. So, if you want to really nerd out about mushrooms, there are many, many opportunities. There are like groups of mushroom enthusiasts around the country, which I had no idea there were like, well there were mushroom fairs before when we had fairs, but they'll come back.  

And then there's of course the relationship with psilocybin and like the magical mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms and the healing capacity of the plant and fungus kingdoms. And how they are so very much our teachers, you know, where we're sitting here with our egos again, you know thinking that we can like control these things and that we can like kill them, you know, and it'll be fine and then actually they're sitting here sort of like patiently, like teaching us and just in their beings and their existence and then also sometimes like medicinally and in ceremony.  

I so I learned about so mycorrhizal fungi in the very beginning, it's like this also this sort of kindergarten like things like the notion is that you've got your little plant, right? You've got your soil and then like you've got your roots and I always thought the roots were the things that did all that work. You know, they do the sort of bartering that goes on with whatever is under the soil and actually for most plants this other thing, this mycorrhizal fungi, this like spider-like fungal network thing that it's like white when you like, you know, pull up your soil. Sometimes you see this white stringy stuff. That's what it is. If you have a garden out there and you don't know.  

And it is the middleman. It's like the in-between and it actually very much assists the plants and its roots in this bartering network. And so, this mycorrhizal fungi is essential for all of life on Earth and it's essential, gardeners particularly know this I love this about…they're like, “oh yes”, because they buy the things and they put them in there to help the plants, right? But in like industrial agriculture for example and over-tilling and the number of things that were doing that are harmful to the soil. We're actually like over-tilling, for example, it's like you just if you cut through those thin spider-like threads you can eventually kill them. Right and that is a huge part if you imagine those wonderful little things are dying off. Then what's happening is all that carbon that was being brought down and being stored in the soil and this healthy wonderful kingdom just sort of dies off and then releases back into the atmosphere, and then it's exacerbating this problem.  

And so yeah, you've got down there. You've got a cute thing. So, you've got like your nematodes and like your worms look like all these crazy…[laughs] you get into nerding out about microscopic life. It's really, it's really something. So yeah, and then also this love for the fungus kingdom because they, it, whatever it is brings so much, and we don't even know it's like, a it's a very strange huge kingdom. It's like, we actually there's so much we don't understand about it and I think that's why when you really get into it and go to like a mushroom fair or something, like all the different kinds and the different ways that we have identified them and the ways that we can eat them and then the ways that we can work with them in ceremony. I feel like the way Paul Stamets runs around with his like mushroom hat, like literally he's a guy wearing a hat made out of mushrooms, which is another thing we can make things out of mushrooms like the way that they're kind of the way that hemp is like a super plant, mushrooms have this capacity to be made into all kind of leather-like substances and things that are compostable and so it's a huge question of my like why we don't have so many more mushroom based companies and things when we're looking at like a regenerative economy, a compostable economy, a zero-waste economy. We need to make things that can compost and also be strong and useful.  

So, there's so many, I mean it goes in all of these different directions to like the just sort of like the cute like attachment and then the profound nature of psychedelic work and healing to the role that they play in plants and agriculture and feeding us. And Paul Stamets says that they are sentient edge runners and that they can sense our past like when we walk by they know that we’re there. Which I just feel like it's so incredibly magical and it's just such a funny thing to not be conscious of not be aware of that. This is part of the remembering is like remember our partners in life, you know, we need them. 

Della: Yeah, the web of life that we are a part of right, is under us and all around us. And yeah, I love walking in forests after like a mist or rain where you can actually see all the spider webs connecting everything. [Erin: Yeah!] And just reminding us of interconnectedness and from you just now is just that yeah, the web that's underneath our feet in healthy soils, right?  

Erin: Yeah. Well, the web and like the metaphor of the spider as the great creatrix also where the eight-legged creatrix and the spider webs like the weaver grandmother spider, like weaving creation weaving what we call reality weaving consciousness. Like that's storytelling and that's where that's where we get into that conversation about what our origin stories do, we have origin stories are underlying Western, what I would call Western culture loosely? What are the origin stories from around the world? Like it actually ties directly into this notion of webs and then of course the metaphor of like the internet and the in our brain webs like how much they look like these webs that remind us of the interconnectedness of all things. 

Della: Erin, would you tell us a story? [Erin: Yes.] Because I studied, and you looked up a lot of goddess stories in the writing of the book and exploring the divine feminine, partially the again going to grief, the ways that those stories have been changed or you know co-opted or altered but maybe if you could tell us some of the originals, maybe one of your one of the goddesses that you'd like to call in to folks listening or to us during this time right now. 

Erin: Yeah, thank you. There are a few I feel like I don't know if I can say just one. I'll try it. We'll see what happens. [Laughs] One that has jumped out of course is Lilith. And so, she showed up early in plant medicine ceremony for me. She made herself very well-known and I discovered her story, which I didn't know which also is has been buried in many ways. But she was apparently Adam's first wife.  

So, Adam of Adam and Eve. Adam's first wife, apparently Adam had a wife, and they were made of the same Earth is the story that I've been told. And so, they were equals and then there was this moment, the version they're all different versions, but the version that I've heard the most is that Adam wanted her to be subservient sexually in a specific way. And in this story, there's already kind of another like male God figure which is it wasn't always there. It's not in every story. But in this version, there's like an outside male God figure. And so, Lilith, they go to God and then it's like “oh if she leaves if she doesn't do this, then she will have demon babies for the rest of her life” or something. She'll have a thousand babies a day and then and she'll watch them all die is this horrific story, and she chooses not to. Still chooses not to be subservient to Adam, exits and gets this takes on this punishment. So chooses this punishment. And so basically, she represents feminine autonomy, in a sense.  

And then the extension of that is then Eve was written in, so she was written in like from Adam's rib, so now woman is not made from the same Earth, Eve is made from the man. And this male God character that's relatively new is sort of there and then we get the Adam and Eve story that goes on where like woman becomes the fall of man and this whole original sin story. And that did it like that, that's very particular, I feel like to Western culture and to the Abrahamic religions and how and that evolution of going from Great Goddess like Great Father Great Mother Earth based spirituality to some kind of other like what I would call it is a patriarchal story with like a kind of a singular male God and a subservient woman. And then Lilith basically from what I understand that in Christian traditions has become totally demonized and apparently, they're even like wristbands or something where like, they're anti-Lilith or something because she has been perceived as a threat to the holy union. Which is Adam and Eve, right?  

So if you watch the evolution of these origin stories and how this original let’s say a couple, you know, the way that like love like romantic love in this sense, between a man and woman in this case, was portrayed and then completely shifted with the power completely being taken away and with her suffering so she's been vilified as this demon for all of his time and I put her in the book because I want to reclaim her story or help her reclaim her own story. Which is that actually she's a symbol of feminine empowerment and autonomy and choice and she took on this horrible fate to choose herself, which is unbelievably powerful and then you can also watch the legacy of how are we telling stories about like romantic love about sex about this one male God and like, who is he? Where did he come from? And when did all this get written?  

And so that's one big one and then I also I feel Hera coming in. So, like Hera and Zeus right of the Greek origin stories and apparently Hera was a, in Indigenous Greece, like pre-Hellenic Greece, Hera was a Triple Moon Goddess unto herself. So maiden, mother, crone, you know, there's much more ancient sort of notions again to the Moon, the seed metaphor, the maiden, mother, crone is always written into these origin cyclical nature related stories and origin stories. And she was that. She was a Great Mother. She was the Great Goddess and then some people came along to like take over again. And now we're talking about private property. We're talking about conquest. We're talking about colonization. Somebody came in and wrote in Zeus.  

So, Zeus didn't, he didn't exist. And if he did, he was like a much smaller character and he was not her partner. So, he was written in as her partner and they wrote him in as a rapist and so he became like the origin story sitting at the base of what I'm going to call Western culture is a rape story. And so he was this like philanderer. He was a shape-shifting rapist. This is like our Great God, right? This is like one of the original sort of like male God characters. And again, these are origin stories that actually aren't that old. You know, I think relatively speaking. I think we forget in Western culture we because these stories have been kind of planted or made as if or like parenthesize as if this is all of time, which is really silly like this is a very small period of time and actually relative to all of time. And what's existing around all of this of all of time is the Great Mother and in all of her glory. And in this little parenthesis, we've got this like, awful character frankly and then Hera in this situation never leaves him. So she stays by obligation, but she gets written into this sort of like jealous woman who like acts out on all of these other goddesses because he's running around like raping and doing whatever he's doing and so she takes it out on all of them in this in this whole line of mythology that we have sitting now in our subconscious, you know, we've set however many thousands of years we've got these characters written in this particular way which strips power from the Great Mother, strips power from women, places rape metaphors there and gives all the power to this person who's enacting these terrible crimes and then creates a caricature out of the wife, you know, or whoever that character is.  

And so, for me, I mean, this is I can feel it now. So I talk about grief and rage in the book because I'm like when you get to this point in the book, you probably most likely you will, if you're connected to it, you'll feel grief and rage and I offer some exercises and some ways to kind of manage what happens when we suddenly become conscious of this storytelling and the through lines and the way that things that may seem not so relevant are actually immediately relevant to what we're doing now to like mountaintop mining, you know and harm to Indigenous peoples and lands. Like it's there's a direct line to how we treat women and girls all over the world in terms of violence, in terms of lack of education it goes on and on.  

So those are the ones that…there's actually there's another one if we have time to do…[Laughs] So Vesta is another one and she was the keeper of hearth and home as I understand it and the keeper of the sacred flame. And she was also, she led the Vestal Virgins who were sacred sexual priestesses. And this, you know I talk a lot about sexuality in the book actually and it's about sexual healing and again, I'm talking about the tantric path. We're talking about the balance between the masculine and the feminine were talking about the second chakra. So, we talked a lot about the root chakra and like the first one and home, identity, foundation. We get to the second one. It's creativity sexuality money and sexuality as the creative life force of the universe the creative life force that runs through everything and that runs through all of nature.  

If you look at nature, it's very sexual of course it is, you know, it's the nature of nature.  

And so, she was she oversaw the Vestal Virgins and at some point, once again with like a an actual like physical take over an actual sort of like colonization. She the way that she was worshipped got broken apart and she was separated from the virgins and the word virgin was co-opted and shifted to what we know now. So, virgin used to mean “woman unto herself” or something along those lines. And as sacred sexual healers, their role was it was sacred. It was incredibly important to have these sacred sexual healers and their roles got split in two so they were told that they could either, they could keep their role as sort of nuns, but they had to give up their sexuality which would make them then virgins like not having sex which is a new definition. And if they did that, then they could keep their political power and their money.  

And so apparently like the word Vesta, her name has been rolled into the word investment. So, we're talking about as we look at, you know the state of capitalism and what how that is playing out in in the world and this word investment and the way that we think about private property which is the way that we think about land and the way that we think about people. There's a direct line to Vesta in her keeping of the sacred flame and the keeping of sacred sexual healing and the incredible importance of that in society which is which is alive but very, very heavily suppressed and oppressed even violently to this day.  

So yeah, I want to bring back, I mean just bringing these Great Goddesses back and their stories and unpacking these I would say devastating rewrites that we are continuing to live out and play out in society because we've left it in the unconscious and so it's just running the show and so we and so we retake those stories back rewrite those stories claim our power give power back to the Goddesses to which you know, they once belonged and remember, remember. 

Della: Yeah, remembering the Goddess stories. Thank you. So, I really love this metaphor. It's called the “upstream metaphor” and it's one where you…the metaphor comes from, I know it from public health, where you imagine you're standing at the bank of a river and you see someone float by who's drowning. So, you have to go upstream to figure out you know, why is this person flowing down the river drowning? Why do all these people keep floating down the river drowning? And we've spoken about a lot this evening around everything from you know, the soil experience that you had with your forehead being so dry, the tilling which is cutting the mycorrhiza networks. The acidification of the ocean, we've talked about the hate crimes that have happened recently. We've talked about your own feeling of you know, dislocation and having to move and feeling disconnected, right? And then of course these stories of domination over women in the stories, the retelling of the stories and in yeah in general violence against women and girls, so I'm wondering if you were to take these challenges, some are historical some are present, right? And if you were to go upstream from them, what are the root causes that are causing these what are the root causes of these problems that we're facing?  

Erin: I mean, I think it takes us right back to those Goddess stories that we're talking about. So somewhere, and this is interesting because I think it's impossible to pinpoint. I have tried to chase it around kind of historically and there's no, as far as I can understand, there's no exact -we don't know like there was some tipping point where I would say like the ego got loose and it don't quite know how it happened or like when or what or maybe it's just part of the great inhale and exhale of all things and it always happens, and it's happened multiple times. In time, space or it gets kind of like psychedelic in like non-time, space.  

But it happens and we are living in a world where the ego is basically totally run amok to the point where it's sort of unconsciously running the show. These stories are unconsciously running the show and the show that we are creating is incredibly destructive to the point of almost destroying ourselves. And so, it's right in that juncture of wherever we went from living in harmony with nature, living with earth-based spirituality and wisdom and wisdom keepers, and ceremony, and ritual, and plant medicine working with plants, listening to the plants and animals, remembering, and living in balance in that way and having when we would fall out of balance a little bit there was a community or there were ways to help reinvite us back into balance and to stay.  

But when that thing tips in the collective, then we lose track and then we have lost our ceremonies and things that even to the point where the wisdom keepers, the actual humans the people who are/were connected to the land that have violence enacted upon them to try to erase those ways. And we talked about like the criminalization of plant medicine, right we have like look at how much stuff is legal and then look at this incredible healing modality for humans that is criminalized. Like that's astounding what we have done in this in this huge reversal.  

And so, I think that, separating from the plants separating from the land, at some point the notion of private property arising and so anybody believing that we can own land, anybody believing that we can own humans, will downstream create exactly what we've got, which you know through that line we've got genocide, we've got slavery, we've got colonization, we have climate change and extreme violence basically. Like that’s when you break apart this original connection, you get all of these problems.  

And so, the way to heal all of that is like, circle back around, like turn that corner, whatever that looks like and start to remember as we're talking about and reconnect with the soil, reconnect with ourselves, reconnect with the Great Mother, the Great Mother stories and myths, the ceremonies, Indigenous peoples and lands who are alive right now, you know, there are ways and ceremonies that are very much alive in the world. Coming back around as a whole collective to re-honor that and remember and humble ourselves and be taught, you know, instead of thinking that we've got anything right. Because right now we're really, we're pretty far out of a line. We got a lot of things that we could really learn rather than thinking that we know what we're doing.  

Della: Yeah, thank you. So, yeah, I heard you know this the separation, the domination over or power overview, the objectification, and then commodification ownership over. And then I love that you're now moving into where I wanted to go last, which is how to heal. You know how to remember, reconnect, re-honor, as you said. So, let's go over some, let's call them invitations for ourselves, and as you said you’re you know, taking your own medicine right now as you're going through this difficult time as you move. And I know I will appreciate these as well. But for all of us listening all of us this evening, let's go through some invitations. So, the first one, you know working with the ego because I too read a lot about the ego and I understand it's important to notice, right to be aware mindful, mindfulness of ego. But then what? How do we work with ego in your view? What would be some invitations for folks to take this on as an invitation for their life? 

Erin: Yeah. Thanks. Okay, so it depends on how much experience we have with it. Some of us have practiced this a long time. Some of us are brand-new to it. And if you're brand new just starting to listen just sort of drop in it, recognize that it exists at all that there's more than one voice going on in our heads and you could start to…the tarot teacher, Lindsay Mack, teaches us incredibly well as like how do you tune into, she calls it like radio station one and radio station two. It’s like the voice of the ego is often maybe criticizing sometimes yelling, directing, you know, there's all kinds of ways, you can start to recognize its voice. And the voice of the soul is often guiding inviting sometimes whispering and it's always guiding us to our highest goods and the ego is often operating in fear, and so we've got this sort of thing going on and the soul will be guiding us towards love right even if even when it takes courage. And the courage often comes in having to face the ego and because the collective ego is so strong right now, the collective ego I think is feeding the individual egos, and so to actually have the courage to be on the soul’s team and like walk with one’s soul, you may have to really face down that ego. You know, there may be a lot of work there.  

So that's one just sort of getting a sense, starting to navigate, you know, realizing that this thing is here and getting a sense of what am I listening to my sort of intuition to my higher self when is when is the ego jumping in. And then starting to invite oneself to be in one's higher self more often and whenever that ego hops in or whenever like sometimes we can go a whole day or some long period of time in the ego like just operating straight from ego and whenever we sort of catch that, you know, just being gentle and forgiving of ourselves of just the fact that like that happens. Re-inviting ourselves back around I put a really beautiful self-forgiveness exercise in there, which I learned from a wonderful coach of mine which is we can forgive at any time. So, we can always reset, there's no need to like double ego.  

So, what happens is we’ll catch the ego and then be like, ah! Hard on ourselves because we were in the ego, we’ve got like double layers of ego. So just like always realizing that we can be gentle with ourselves and the self-forgiveness exercise is when we can identify a thought form that isn't serving like for example, like I am not worthy. This is a really like that's a top hit you know of most of our egos are running around saying I'm not worthy which is also a root chakra trauma, like harm. So, I put my hands over my heart, and I say I forgive myself for believing in the misunderstanding that I am not worthy the truth is and then I say the truth the truth is I'm infinitely worthy. The truth is I'm part of an infinite universe and I am whole, and I am valuable and worthy, you know, and that's a really simple exercise but it invites us into this ability to kind of just rewire. Rewire every single time. And gently so with ourselves without being hard on ourselves. I think that's yeah, that's my primary way of working with ego check in with it find it start to work with it and then start to do that self-forgiveness exercise. 

Della: Beautiful. Thank you. Thanks for making it practical. And the next one I'd love to ask is around the soil and climate change part. And I'd love to ask this for invitations of the individual behavioral but also of the systemic right? So, what can folks do personally in their own life. Let's not leave it there, like what are the maybe larger movements or even bills or policies or you know? International laws that would be really supportive of more healthy soil and a more stable climate and planet? 

b Yeah, so I think the simplest thing is start to compost, which may not seem that simple depending on where you are. It could be very simple for you, you may already be doing it. My agent actually learned in Manhattan that she could just go to where she already goes to her farmers market and she could take her clippings her food clippings and just drop them off and so she was able to like keep them in her freezer. And this also interestingly like takes food waste out of the trash but in New York, that's a huge deal because it means you don't have, and anywhere is a huge deal, and you don't have rotting food in your trash. Right? So, like taking that and then giving it back. However, if it's a compost bin in your yard and your community if you don't have access to a yard, there are community gardens you can take them to, there are farmers markets and things there are ways people are organizing these things just like do a little Googling figure out how to compost one way or another.  

Also, the food that we purchase like we've heard this one before but even eating organic is better than not, but I would say if you can get to farmers markets if you can talk to your farmers, if you can get to know them if you can ask them how they're treating their soil and even better just finding you can search now regenerative farms. So, Regeneration International is a great organization, Kiss the Ground is a great organization. In Detroit there's a wonderful one called Detroit Dirt where they collect actual organic matter and give it back, so those really basic steps, like just sort of paying attention to your food where it's coming from and then policy a lot of it’s local.  

So, it's also like helping to get municipal compost going. You know, San Francisco has a great system, LA has been working on it, New York has been working on it. But in many places there's not one at all. If you're like small homeowners association or something you could start compost like there's a million different ways and there are again, I would follow these organizations to get the ins and outs of the higher policy stuff because it changes all the time with administrations and things like that. So, it's probably new stuff happening but follow your policy local, regional, state and then get it get into contact with these nonprofits that if it's too much research for you get into contact with them, but also just support them. You can donate to any of these organizations that are helping to heal the soil, you know, vote with your fork whatever food that you're purchasing whether it's restaurants or farmers markets or whatever it is. 

Della: Thank you. And if I could add one as well and thinking about folks who might think “oh, well not everyone can buy organic because of the cost” or spend the time to go to a farmers market. So, I would say on a systemic level. I would encourage folks to get involved with movements to raise the minimum wage [Erin: Mhm.] to distribute wealth and to reduce the income gap. Because then more folks can live ethical and sustainable lives and not have to make that choice for their own self and the planet so just want to bring in that economic system again.  

Erin: Absolutely. Yeah! And I didn't mention growing your own food, you know, if that's at all possible within your realm or sharing in community gardens that can also help and be economical can be more affordable and support, if you have extra, support others that are doing those things. 

Della: Thank you. So, the last one is around the healing ourselves. So, I really love how in your book you reflect off and on the outer and inner transition together and in balancing. So, you know as we've spoken about re-membering, you know, what steps can folks take if they're feeling this disconnection, disembodiment, dislocation, dismembering, right? What can we do and I also want to say that in your book I appreciate the I think you call them “soul soil” in the end of each chapter. So, I just really appreciate that you brought that to a practical level there. But yeah, what would be your invitation for folks listening for that healing of their selves and working on those inner mental formations and thoughts and yeah deepening our own resilience so that we can do this work in the world.  

Erin: Right. Interestingly one just popped to mind that doesn't always but connecting to the wheel of the year is really important. I have found that I found that in my group work and then most recently in this time of great transition, I'm realizing how easily it can go out the window and how grounding it actually is. Like it's easy when I was sort of a more stable that it was like, okay, I'm following the new moons and the full moons and I'm setting intentions on the new moon and I'm releasing things on the full moon. But now this is it's an incredibly important practice and honoring the like the equinoxes and things like that. We just had an equinox.  

But on a really simple personal individual level like taking three breath sounds really not that interesting. I feel like people have heard, you know, it's not like you don't know that. But actually, doing it like actually, you know, you can set a timer on your phone for once an hour or something like that and literally just stop and take three breaths. It's a tiny meditation and it's a moment to kind of notice the ego you know running around for that and just like a tiny pause, a one-minute meditation if that, you know. I found it to be incredibly powerful and also easy to forget when things start to get really kind of wild and like haywire. And then literally taking your shoes off and put your feet on the Earth. It seems like often people won't do this because it seems too simple, you know, but it's like no, no, that's the thing. Like that's when especially when it seems like you don't have time like doing that thing and getting that literal grounding that like earthing connection to Mother.  

And then those exercises with the ego that we talked about before self-forgiveness I find is one of the most powerful things that I've ever learned, and I only came across that exercise a few years ago. So, I'd been doing other kind of personal work for a while. I found that that was like the missing link like that was the key that would help me really to just clear thought forms over time. And so, when you're starting to work with unhealthy thought-forms things that are not serving and really letting them go and self-forgiving that's when the work starts to really gain traction if you're a little more advanced if that's like, if you've been doing it for a while.  

Della: Thank you for all of those, that’s beautiful. So, I'm wondering if you have any closing thoughts that you'd like to share for folks listening. Thank you for all that you've shared with us today. From your personal story, to the practical, to the very deep, any closing thoughts or ways that you'd like to connect it all. 

Erin: Oh, I'm just I'm so grateful for everybody out there and for being in this work and for caring about this topic when you saw it come up for being out there and I just would say this the greater message of reconnecting with the Great Mother in this sense of this like energy of this life force energy of everything that is. And just inviting us all into that journey wherever you may be on that journey that I feel like you can't go wrong when you align with Mother Nature and you can't go wrong when you align with the Great Mother and listen to that sort of soul’s voice that intuition voice and that will guide you wherever you need to go on this journey. It will always guide you exactly what you need to be. 

Della: Thank you, Erin. And I just want to again say the name of your book that we're celebrating today and that we heard so much from and about. So the book Grounded: A Fierce Feminine Guide to Connecting with the Soil and Healing from the Ground Up. So very exciting. Definitely a good thing to check out and I want to end with a quote from the book. "There aren't enough pill-based medications in the world to handle what ails us, from our personal health to climate change, we've been treating the symptoms not the systems." So hopefully you take with you some of the interconnectedness that Erin spoke about. All the way from female sexual liberation and the divine feminine, to healing our soils health, to addressing climate change and all the systems that we’re embedded in. And so, I want to thank you Erin. Thank you for your book. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you to all who are listening. And just want to say as Erin reminded us, in the meditation: you are worthy, you are part of the infinite universe, you are whole, and wherever you go you are held in the web of life. So, thank you everyone for joining us this evening.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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