EP 188: The Biology of Safety, Rejecting Quick Fixes and Tending to Cultural Wounds with Sophie Strand

In this episode, Kimberly and Sophie explore the nuances of being public entrepreneurs and authors. They wonder aloud together about the various roles of knowledge, expertise, and experience and discuss issues such as psychedelics for women, the complexities of social media, the need for eldership, disability and sickness as an altered state, as well as healing practices outside of a hyper-fixated and individualistic framework. The common threads connecting their questions center around identities as facilitators and writers, the need for connection to community and lineages, and managing the challenges of social media and identity politics in a hyper-individualistic culture. Ultimately, they land on the beauty that comes from maturation, wisdom, and growth over time that cannot be done by a quick-fix nor in isolation.

Bio

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays “The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine” was published last year in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include “Love Song to a Blue God,” “Those Other Flowers to Come” and “The Approach.” Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, “The Madonna Secret,” that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels, and will be released this summer.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

What She Shares:

–Cultural band-aids for deeper wounds

–Public and private identities

–Demonizing and idolizing figures

–Impact of social media and identity politics

–Elderhood, wisdom, and changing perspectives

What You’ll Hear:

–Problematizing psychedelics 

–Gendered experiences with psychedelics

–Harder for women to recover after psychedelics

–Cultural band-aids on wounds

–Sophie addresses disabled writer label

–Publishing editorial choices and confinement

–Public identities and social media

–Collective energy demonizing or idolizing figures

–Navigating social media pressures and intuition as entrepreneurs

–Is the medicine of these times insignificance?

–Story of Joan of Arc

–No saviors, no heroes

–Creating money and wanting to be insignificant

–Tensions between community, authority, and parasocial diffusion

–Bodily impact of social media

–Problematizing gatekeeping of knowledge and lived experiences

–Risk-averseness and obsession with safety 

–Safety as limited capacity to survive

–Hyperfixation and hyper-individualism of healing

–Impact of identity politics on youth

–Maturity, wisdom, and changing perspectives

–Discerning between privacy, secrecy, and transparency

–Using discretion when writing memoir

–Difference between rot and fermentation

Resources

Website: https://sophiestrand.com/

IG: @cosmogyny