Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to mythologist, Martin Shaw and Black Elephant founder, Felix Marquardt. 05/07/2023
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deep values, and how we can keep seeing each other as fully human, even when we are really different.
Today’s episode was recorded on the island of Patmos, in Greece, as part of a gathering of an organisation called “Black Elephant” which you will hear a little bit about. And I spoke to two guests at the same time. The first was Dr Martin Shaw, and the second was Felix Marquardt. Martin is a mythologist, he’s the author of five books, the founder of the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, which has trained hundreds of storytellers over several decades. He has a PhD in Myth and is seen as one of the world’s experts in these ancient stories. Felix is the founder of Black Elephant, which they describe as an experiential social network based on vulnerability. He’s also the author of “The New Nomads”, a book about a new age of migration and the challenges with that, but also possibly what it might gift us. We discussed both their different late–life religious conversions, and talked about what a story really is, the role myth plays, addiction, recovery, and the power of good questions to bring us together. As usual, there’s some reflections from me at the end. And in the meantime, I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Martin Shaw and Felix Marquardt’s answers.
Elizabeth
Martin and Felix, I’m going to hit you straight off with a big, juicy question on this hot afternoon. Not your standard when you first encounter someone, but as we’ll hear, you’re used to questions that try and get below the surface of who we are. So maybe I will start with you, Felix. You’ve had a bit of time to sit with it: what do you think is sacred for you?
Felix Marquardt
For many years, I felt like I had to decide that. And very late in life, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t be the one to make that decision on my own. And there are some leitmotivs in my trajectory. Very young, I learned to listen to the ‘other’, the perceived ‘other’, and I decided – I don’t know when, but very early – that it would be always critical to me, at a very deep level, to engage with people that I deeply disagreed with. There was a moment in my life when I embraced faith. I embraced my faith, and I even embraced formal organised religion. And at the beginning, the temptation was to do religion ‘à la carte.’ And I realised that it brought me back to actually something that I had read in one of Martin’s books, which is a very simple sentence, very simple question, which is: “In what temple do you serve?” And I realised that, when I did things ‘à la carte’, I was basically taking back control, or going back to this illusion that I could be running the show. And when I run the show, bad shit happens. I become miserable. Usually, I make the life of those around me miserable, and very soon, the universe tells me that it’s not going to work. So, for instance, I did Ramadan this year for the very first time – actually, seriously, did it. And it was an amazing experience. And I had not decided to do it; it happened almost… On the first day of Ramadan, it occurred to me that I should try doing it, because I come from addiction to drugs. And my journey, which is now 10 years in, has been a journey to try to make the gap between what I say and what I do, to make it smaller. And I realised this was an opportunity to walk my talk.
Elizabeth
Thank you so much. There is lots we will come back to. Martin, tell me what you think is sacred for you? Or maybe, how do you get on with the word? I imagine it’s cropped up in your storytelling and mythology over the years as a word of power.
Martin Shaw
It’s a massive word. And I’m amazed at how difficult a question it is to answer. I think probably over the years, my perception of the sacred has been a ‘moveable feast’. I think when I was younger, the nearest I used to get to it was probably long periods alone in wild places, quiet places. I lived in a tent for four years, really trying to listen to what I found sacred in a world of wires and lights. I was desperate – even though I was very far from anything organised – I know now, for that old, still, small voice. And so for a long time, it would have been nature, would have probably been the first thing that I put my hand up for. And then of course, as a parent, the immensity of your relationship with the child. There’s a curation to that, and the inevitable scuffs and mishandlings of it. That reminds me that I’m touching on sacred ground, because I don’t always do a great job. But the consequence I feel when I don’t do a great job is serious. And that tells me it’s sacred, because I don’t feel good. And now, of course, and I’m sure we’ll get to this, I’m a Christian. And so, I still venerate Creation, but I really love the Thing, the Being that created it, and that’s mind–bogglingly bigger for me. You know, Paul talks about falling into the mind of Christ. And I probably can’t say anything too sensible at the moment, because I’m falling into a devastation of love that I simply didn’t know was there before.
Martin’s childhood: Christianity, punk rock, and holding onto conscience
Elizabeth
Thank you. Let’s wind back a little bit to your childhood, and get a sense, maybe the beginning, of some of those threads. Can you paint me a picture of young Martin running around, and were there any big ideas in the air?
Martin Shaw
The big ideas in the air in the early 70s. So, I’m growing up in the West of England, born in 1971. The house is worth mentioning, because the house didn’t have a television in it, didn’t have a phone, didn’t have a car. We were just not very well off. But behind the house was, to a child at least, a large forest. And parents: a mum and a dad who had a real interest in language, they had an interest in Christianity, they were and are what you would probably call ‘non–conformists.’ So we’ve moved through a few churches over the years, burnt through a few of them. But it was very real for them, the Holy Spirit was a thing: it could be present or not present, and you could… It was dynamic, Christianity was always dynamic, but church – I struggled with. I’ve been to countless thousands of hours of church services up till I was about 17. But the form of Christianity as I was exposed to as a kid, it didn’t really have a contemplative tradition attached to it. There certainly weren’t any saints. There weren’t any wild old women of the desert. It was very sermon–orientated, very Scripture–orientated. And actually, as an older person now, I see the merit in those things. But between me and you, there was a disconnect between the radical countercultural message of Yeshua, and then everything that had been built around it seemed very domestic, rather tame. My association is of radiators that are too hot. And I had a perpetual fantasy as kid that that Aslan was going to burst in, grab the preacher, not damage them, just shake them. So some fresh air could get in the place.
Elizabeth
So did you keep hold of that thread? Or at what point did it drop?
Martin Shaw
I would have been 17, or maybe even 16. And I was playing drums in punk rock bands, and I was touring from 1988 onwards. So I was in Berlin when the wall came down, you know. Amazing stroke of luck. And I think by then, I felt… Now, if you ask me, I’d say, “Christianity is a dream, but it’s forgotten it’s a dream, and it’s in danger of becoming a hallucination.” And I think at that age, it felt like I’d been Chloroformed, and I wasn’t interested in it. I never lost, ever, for a second, a sense that there was some sort of “Being behind the curtain.” That’s not a very sophisticated way of saying it, but it’s always been there. And I think I always felt, “If in doubt, imagine that your conscience is the voice of God speaking to you.” So I’ve tried to hold on to my conscience. And I’ve made an appalling job at times, but that was the thread. It was just a sense of, “In difficult moments, can you still do the right thing?”
Martin – turning down a career in music, tent living, and rediscovering myths
Elizabeth
And you were drawn into a different or adjacent, or we might say overlapping, narrative and imaginative world, and have lived your life as a mythologist and a storyteller – which is not your classic top of a CV. How did you go from a drummer in punk rock bands to a professional storyteller?
Martin Shaw
Well, there really is a ‘Damascus Road moment’ for sure. So I would be about 23 or 24. I’ve got a three–album publishing deal with Warner Brothers. Many things seem to be going my way. But I had a call from a friend who said, “Look, I’m going to do this thing. How do you fancy going to Wales and sitting on a hill for four days and nights with no food?” Now, I don’t think he would have got a reaction out of me. But when you’re young, you say “That sounds like the greatest thing I’ve ever heard of.” He probably framed it in mythic imagery, and I found myself very near a big hill in Snowdonia, called Crib–y–Ddysgl, the ‘seat of Arthur’. And that’s what I did. I sat in the way that the Desert Sisters, and the Desert Fathers, and the Desert Mothers sat. And on the last night, in the middle of the night, I had a profound spiritual breakthrough. It didn’t come in any extensively Christian form, but it was extremely dynamic, very discombobulating. And it was actually enough for me to go back to Warner Brothers, return the contract to the head of publishing at the time, and I set out and lived in a tent for four years to try and ground quiet what had happened to me. And quite honestly, I was rendered speechless. I didn’t really have normal words – psychology wouldn’t do it. And as I sat in my tent, and time passed, it was then that I remembered, “Oh, when you were small, you loved myths and stories. And they did things to you, and they navigated your heart in a way that’s really hard to explain.” And I knew that when finally the time came that I would talk about what I’ve gone through out there, too many “I” statements were going to sort of reduce it in some way, and they were going to make me feel isolated from other people. At worst, you’re crazy, or seen as a bit of a guru or something like that. I knew this was dangerous ground. So I started to tell stories, in a way to both transmit but also to understand on a deeper level, quite what was happening to me. But I didn’t obviously consider the professional end of it. I had literally never seen a storyteller. I’d seen people read stories – God bless librarians, people in libraries – but a stand–and–deliver storyteller, I don’t think I knew it existed.
Elizabeth
It’s making me think of the film “Into The Wild”. I just have this image of this young man, possibly slightly under–washed. Your parents must have thought you were having a four–year breakdown?
Martin Shaw
You know, my parents are extraordinary in this regard. Because I went as far out from when the buses don’t park as you could possibly imagine. It was never, for me, the use of psychotropic drugs or anything like that at all. But I think the thing is, my mum and dad, they thought, “Well, what was Yeshua’s relationship to the wild? He seemed to kind of like it.” And whenever he comes into a city, he slips out fairly early in the morning to pray. And so, it’s providential, I see now. They always kept the conversation going. Not once, ever, did they say, “You’ve lost your mind, you’re Luciferic.” Nothing like that. They just said, “What happens next?” and “We love you.”
Elizabeth
Wow. I just always want to be around stories of good parenting. I feel like that’s maybe becoming one of the things that’s sacred to me. But you took that thread and started telling stories and rediscovering myths. Many, many books all over the world – this is your DNA, this is who you are. Why is it important? What are you doing when you’re telling an old story from a British, or an Irish, or another country’s oral tradition?
Martin Shaw
That’s a deep question. And that is a question that could take me many days to unpack. One of the things that I’m very interested in, is not reciting a story, but truly imagining it in front. The three of us – I actually told a story in front of you only a couple of hours ago. Now, whatever your reaction to it, the one thing that you can be assured of is that I wasn’t phoning it in; I was actually seeing it and negotiating it. The language is different every time. So there’s a sense for me that you’re dealing not with a pelt, but with a wild animal. And I like that. And you’re not meant to be a lion tamer, you’re meant to be a lion dancer. You’re moving in and out of this strange burdensome thing. I’m very aware that for some reason, human beings tend to imagine in stories, as soon as you go way back to Alaska and beyond, we tend to imagine in stories. And long before we had even cuneiform tablets, let alone smartphones, our memories were finite. We don’t have infinite recall. So the things that a particular culture regarded as truly subtle and important was secreted within stories that storytellers would then carry almost as a spiritual bundle: from tribe to tribe, from people to people. And it’s something to do with that.
Elizabeth
It’s making me think – and this is a slight digression – but when I talk about my vocation, I felt very early on that the stories we as a culture tell, are the yeast for the spiritual atmosphere. That they are what rule things in or out as possibilities, they help to find the good in this very subtle way. And they help us see each other as more or less fully human. You’ve seen the change over the centuries, and the stories that we tell, they help make the possibility of divine love imaginable or unimaginable. But often when I’ve been talking about stories and telling stories, whether through think tank research, or making programmes at the BBC, or making podcasts, I think I’m using it quite loosely. What is the story, if that’s not too enormously difficult?
Martin Shaw
No. You know, Elizabeth, I think I’ve wrestled with this a lot. Twice a week, someone will say, “What exactly is a myth?” for example. Does it mean something that isn’t true? Is it a beautiful lie? What is it? And I’ve gone round the houses, and there is almost no end to the soundbites I could now provide. But funnily enough, 51 have come to the conclusion that a functioning, useful, healthy myth – because not all myths are healthy – is a sacred story. And you know it’s sacred because it does something in the room. That doesn’t mean that it is a benign experience, it could be a provocative experience. But when a story is really functioning in in its efficacy, the psychic material of the room has just shifted. Something has just shifted. Now, candidly, between the three of us and anybody that’s listening, not all storytellers can do that. They can’t do it. Or they are telling stories in an abysmal attempt to be liked. And you can’t behave like that, stories will not respect you. You’ll realise quickly that I’m talking about stories in a very animate kind of way. They’re not really things that I learn off the page, I try and get it off the page as soon as possible. I can learn by ear very quickly. But yeah, in essence, sacred stories.
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s really interesting when you talk. It’s like you’re in a conversation with stories as selves, almost as forces in the world, as things to be respected and in conversation with, rather than captured and pinned.
Martin Shaw
Now, one of the things I think we’d be interested in is the notion of new stories. Because the world I live in, perpetually, two or three times a week, plopping into the inboxes: “Please stop telling the stories that you actually tell. They’re horrible. However, could you just kind of cut and paste a new story? Because we think you probably know enough of them.” But the trouble is, when other folks try and do that, I can always tell. I can tell. Inevitably, new stories will come, mythically–inspired stories, but myth itself has this difficult weight to it, where, in many respects, myth has no author. It’s the bones of something that have passed through community to community to community. And the genius of his teller – and I’ve very rarely spoken about this in public – you have what they call the ‘matter in the sense of a story’. The matter is what happened, but the ‘sense’, the sense is what the teller that day, in that moment, one time only, creates in front of you. That kind of reassembling of that small cosmology. And that is exciting stuff for me. I mean, it’s breathlessly exciting. I saw the old woman that taught me the story that I taught you today (or told today), Gioia Timpanelli – this amazing Sicilian American storyteller. She started, and I swear to God, there were birds moving in the air around her. I’d never seen anything so exciting, I’d never seen anything so alive to the imagination. And she could draw in references to things that were happening right in the room that day without it collapsing, without a spell being broken. So I had some good mentors.
Martin – A hundred and one nights on Dartmoor and a transformational experience
Elizabeth
There’s much more we could say about that, but I am going to fast forward to your recent experience: a hundred nights on Dartmoor – what was that about?
Martin Shaw
Well, believe it or not, it’s actually 101. Well, so after that first time on the hill 25 years ago, I think now maybe longer, I trained in that work. It took eight years to become something called a “wilderness rites of passage guide”. I’ve worked a lot with what we used to call ‘at–risk’ or ‘vulnerable youth’ – there’s probably a new phrase, but that was what was happening then – where it was prison, or him. And most chose and said, “We’ll just do the time. We’ll do the time, we don’t want to be with him alone in a Welsh forest.” But I trained in it. And that led to me doing a lot of that work and training other people. It was just before lockdown when I decided to do a vigil for 101 days. Now, that didn’t mean that I was fasting for 101 days. It meant that I visited a Dartmoor forest, and I did it primarily to give something back. There was no sense of writing about it, there was no ambition for it other than listening. And I think the thing that I longed for, which I understood through the years in the tent, was I truly wanted to be wedded to the wild. We were speaking earlier: Fraser uses fidelity. Fidelity is important to me, I’m just as emotional as anybody else is, but I don’t always give my deep emotion so much credence these days, I test them. And I wanted to test if I could cope with going into a wood for 101 days, simply to give thanks, and primarily to listen. So that was what started that endeavour, though it went in a direction I never could have anticipated.
Elizabeth
Because you wouldn’t have called yourself a Christian in the intervening years between ages 17 and then?
Martin Shaw
Not in any way, shape, or form. However, I didn’t constellate adversarially to it. I don’t think it’s a young Christian’s job to have to defend the catastrophes of the last 2000 years. I simply don’t. So I never really kind of went for the jugular with it, but I would have been – and you can find this in my published works – I described myself as a pagan romantic, which even to this day, I do get a bit of a crackle of excitement by.
Elizabeth
So, what changed? What happened?
Martin Shaw
Well, it was just very odd. So I go out for three months, I think I’m going out. No one knew I was doing this, not even my daughter. It’s amazing how you can find time to just disappear for a couple of hours a day; it was often at dusk. And then, I was getting to the end of it. I was swimming in waters that were deeper than anything I’d been out through before, and I’ve been out there a while. And it was the last night, and in the centre of the forest is an old Iron Age fort. And I had elected to stay up all night in the Iron Age fort. And I was going to do my vigil there and then return, and I just wanted it to be done. I just wanted it to be done. I wasn’t fasting, I wasn’t gobbling visionary vine, nothing. I’d had a cup of tea, I’d had a meal, I go up into the forest, probably mid–evening, and it starts to get cold, it starts to get really, really cold. So you know, in English terms, maybe minus five or six, and then kind of hopping foot to foot. Earlier on, I’ve gone down to the river Dart, and something strange had happened there. I’d decided I wanted to bring up a couple of rocks from the river, possibly to beat with my hands at certain points, because I’d be praying – I like to have a rhythmic pattern going because I was a drummer. So I put my hand in the water and I picked up a rock, and then about three foot away, I picked up another rock. And then I went for a walk, and then I got into the woods. They were the same rock that had split, they’d split. Different parts of the river, the same frigging rock, like ‘click’ like that. And as I sat there in the dark, not overprocessing any of this, I started to click the two bits of the rock together. And I said, in my own way – I just can’t really remember, but I said, “Spirits of the forest, spirits of this place, I’m tired, but I’m here. I’m this strange, confused little man in the middle of a forest, hopefully in the middle of his life. And if there’s anything finally you want me to see or absorb, I will be your faithful servant.” And it was then I did something unusual. I looked up, but I don’t normally look up because in a forest, you’ve got animals moving about and that really has your complete attention. At two in the morning, if there’s a stag, it’s quite a thing. The long and the short of it is, I looked up and I saw that there was the night sky ahead of me: it’s beautiful. And then I noticed that one of the stars, peculiarly, was coloured. It wasn’t that blue or sort of pale light, it was coloured, and it was moving at speed. What happens next is so odd. I really… I just don’t know. I won’t be talking about it very often, because I don’t want it to become a story. But this star took on shape. Again, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was as real as this table. And it looked rather like the Aurora Borealis – it was those kinds of colours. And it took on the shape, almost like the tip of an arrow or a kite. This is all happening over, like, 15 seconds, and I’m just thinking, “What on earth is going on!” And then completely silently, it just landed to my right, just went “Shhhhhp” into the ground and disappeared. That was it. That was the whole experience. But of course, it wasn’t the whole experience: I’ll be living in that experience for the rest of my life. First thing to notice: it was blissful, wasn’t frightening, wasn’t strange. Well, it was strange, but there was a kind of euphoria to it. And I jumped from foot to foot, and just got through the end of the night. Then I staggered down to my cottage, and just as I was getting into bed, there was one final bit of drama for me. I closed my eyes, and I saw these nine words, which I’d never seen before. And, you know, I’m not visionary in that way. They said, “Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home.” Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home. And the word “Genesis” alarmed me, and then I fell into a deep sleep. And then, immediately, it was locked down. And so, I had the whole of lockdown to brood on what had gone on in the forest, quite what to do with it. And then it was towards the end of that period, I suppose, as they used to talk about Lewis, the most reluctant convert in all of England. I realised I was having some deep through–dreams and other things, some deep interior relationship had been formed through that last night in the forest with Christ. And I’ve just been negotiating my way through that ever since.
Elizabeth
Gosh, there is much more to be said about that. But before we turn to Felix’s story, I want to just hear: what did that mean for the tribes, and the communities, and the relationships you’ve been in? You were telling stories in indigenous communities, and in environmental communities, and in pagan communities, and have this slow, tentative, but eventually quite public conversion. What’s the aftermath of that?
Martin Shaw
Well, initially, it was extremely tough. If you’re trying to support a family and your income kind of just evaporates, there was an element of that. Many different factions of friends felt personally betrayed. There were women friends of mine, who said, “Well, I just can’t be friends with you anymore. You’ve lost your mind.” First Nations folk as well.
Elizabeth
They thought it had sort of colonial, patriarchal overtones.
Martin Shaw
Absolutely. I mean, I get stick daily for the stories I tell already, without now being a God–bother. You know, it was just open season for a while. But the last time I checked, Yeshua said, “Put down your nets; come find out.” There’s not an insurance policy. I knew what I was getting into. I knew what was going to happen. I knew there’d be porcupine quills chucked in my kidneys. And that was just how that was, because it is the ‘Pearl of Great Price’, and I’m prepared to pay it.
Felix’s childhood: toxic French secularism, fear of eternity, and escapism through drugs
Elizabeth
Martin, thank you so much. Felix, I’m going to come to our second question about the big ideas in your childhood. We’ve heard a bit about what’s sacred to you. Start at the beginning: what formed you? What ideas when in the air?
Felix Marquardt
I was born and raised in Paris. And as some of your listeners probably know, it’s a place where the relationship to God is very complex. So I grew up in a society where most people had very condescending views towards faith, the word “God”, religion… which is sort of quite a common condition in the modern world. But there’s something about it that is very intense and quite toxic in France. It is the country of Descartes, after all. That was the backdrop. And then, my mother had every possible cross around her neck, and the Star of David, and the hand of Fatima, as sort of insurance policy, I feel. And so, there was something very spiritual. There’s something very spiritual about her, bless her. But my father, who was German – she’s American, of Greek, Hungarian Polish and German descent. My dad is very German, not religious at all, like a Weberian Protestant, very agnostic character. I would say, he brought me up with a never so clearly defined, but yet unmistakable idea, which was that fundamentally: faith, and religion, and God are things of people who are lacking in education. And I really embraced that, especially because around the age of seven or eight, I ended up in a Catholic school. And in catechism, I heard the phrase “again and again, forever and ever, till the end of time” – “pour les siècles des siècles” in French. And that phrase absolutely terrified me. And the idea of eternity just scared the living shits out of me. And so, I couldn’t sleep for many months. I was really, really very uncomfortable. And I became terrified by the moment. I could find diversions during the day, but when I went to bed and I couldn’t sleep, I had to face myself, and these thoughts, and this notion, this idea of eternity. And it really played a very important role in what happened next, which was that I needed to find a way to avoid that moment. And so, when I was 13, I smoked my first joint. And that was it. I was like, “Okay, now I never have to face this moment again. I can go from consciousness to no consciousness by this artificial means.” And I used drugs every day for the next 25 years.
Elizabeth
Wow. And you had this extraordinary career of different worlds: boarding school in America, spending time at Davos, you were a hip–hop producer, into graffiti, worked for the Wall Street Journal… I have this picture of you as a kind of ‘global Playboy’, would have been a description at the time.
Felix Marquardt
So it was the International Herald Tribune. Apart from that, I would have loved that description. I loved the idea of being… some friends enjoyed the phrase “International Man of Mystery”. And, I mean, that was what was such a shock when I gave up drugs. And I gave up drugs because I really didn’t have the choice – it was the last exit before Brooklyn. And when I quit, I just wanted to stop snorting copious amounts of white powder every other day, but I thought I was James Bond. I thought it was that that person, and it took me a while to understand that, actually, this huge gap had grown between the image I had projected as a deeply, very sick narcissist that I had become with drugs. Drugs make you completely bonkers. I mean, they literally make your understanding of reality and who you are completely out of touch with reality. But at that point, I had to face the fact that I needed to change absolutely everything in my life if I was going to survive.
Felix – Faith through recovery, the 12 Step movement, and showing reverence for synchronicity
Elizabeth
Many addicts have this deep reckoning through the 12 Step methodology and the recovery movement. I know it’s gone on to be very formative in your work and in the thinking behind Black Elephant. It’s a horrible question, but what do you think is the magic of that movement that has resisted corporate money, is passed hand–to–hand quietly, from addict to addict, in this very underground democratic way? What would you say is the heart of the thing? What makes it so transformative? How did it transform you?
Felix Marquardt
Before I talked about what’s the heart of the thing, there are very few organisations in the world that pay lawyers every year to not receive money. I mean, that gives you an idea of how incredibly revolutionary AA is. They so realised how dangerous and toxic money could be for an organisation that that organisation spends a lot of money making sure that they don’t receive more than a certain sum, which is relatively small compared with what they’re offered. I think what’s remarkable about these groups – and I don’t want to speak about any specific group, or 12 Step Fellowship – but what I see is a group of people who have slowly but surely developed a kind of methodology to take people who see themselves as agnostic, and disconnected from the others, ‘terminally unique people’, as the language says. And slowly but surely, without patronising them, without any proselytism, turns these people into creatures who naturally understand the importance of humility, and to show reverence for what they don’t understand – which is not something in a way… Modernity has tolerance only for two forms of knowledge: what we know, and what we will know one day. The idea that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we will never understand doesn’t fit in this model. And I think that’s what recovery is about. It’s about not so much the talking – we’ve become a civilisation of smooth talkers, or people who purport to be smooth talkers. And instead it’s about getting people to walk a walk that is noble, and elegant, and understated.
Elizabeth
It’s a beautiful thing, being around addicts. Addicts newly in recovery is intense, energising, but addicts that have been in recovery for a while and have mentored people… I sometimes meet people and think, “I think you might be someone who’s been in the recovery movement, because there’s a certain sensibility, a certain quality that is very attractive.” We’re going to come back to that, but there’s one more piece of your story. I don’t know exactly where it fits in the timeline, but you were not brought up in Islam, but had a conversion. How did it come about?
Felix Marquardt
So I converted at first… To be honest, I fell in love with a Tunisian woman. And I was really bored with French weddings in the French countryside. And we had the opportunity: we could we could either get married in France, and most of her friends and family could not have made it, or we can get married in Carthage, which is a stone’s throw from where she grew up, just outside Tunis. And I was a big fan of Hannibal and Asdrubal and the Carthaginian princes, and I thought there was nothing more exciting than the idea of getting married in Carthage. And then, she came back to me one day and said, “No, we’re gonna have to do in France because Tunisian law would require you to convert to Islam.” My worldview I described then as agnosticism. I wouldn’t quite describe it that way, because I think I did have a God; unfortunately, it was a very crappy deity: it was myself. But back then I thought of myself as an agnostic. And it was just so obvious to me that “No, no, no, let’s absolutely do it, because: A. I love you, and B….” I think the truth of it was, I was a heat–seeking, attention–seeking missile, and the idea of the frowns on people’s faces in the bourgeois Parisian milieu that I grew up in of having converted to Islam: I just revelled in the idea. And so I just went for it. And I loved to say it, but I didn’t have faith. And my faith came much later, in a very PascalIian way. I came into recovery. I was just asked, “Do you believe in God?” And I said, “No.” And they said, “Well, the chances of you staying sober, clean, without something bigger than yourself that you believe in are really, really slim.” And I said, “Well, that’s lovely, but I don’t believe in God. So what am I supposed to do here? Force myself into belief, into faith?” And they said, “No, no, you don’t. What you need is: tell us, would you be open to the idea that you could have faith?” And I said, “Well, pretty arrogant.” But I think saying no to that would be a bit ridiculous. So I just I said, “Yeah, sure, why not? Yeah.” And so I was told “Well, in the morning, first thing when you get out of bed, why don’t you get on your knees and ask for a day without drugs or alcohol. And last thing before you go to bed, say thank you for a day without drugs and alcohol.” And I think it honestly took maybe three weeks, or not much more than three or four weeks, before one day, I was sitting in rehab in Spain, sitting outside on the bench, and I saw a sunset. And I could literally, physically feel faith being born in me. And it was the first time. I tried quitting drugs hundreds of times, if not thousands of times, on my own self will. And I lasted sometimes six months – twice, I lasted six months without drugs and alcohol. Most of the time, I would last a few hours. And then one day, I followed the advice that I just mentioned. And so I didn’t do it on my own. I was fuelled by something that I didn’t understand, but that I knew was not me. And I have never had a drug or drink since then, and it’s been almost 10 years. And so my faith is not conceptual. It’s not intellectual. It’s not abstract. It is the single most empirical thing in my life. It’s just… “Of course, of very course!” And as I walked this path, I can see that reverence for what is, unfolding. There’s a wonderful story about how the word ‘synchronicity’ came about, as an attempt to find a term to talk to a reductionist scientist by Carl Jung, about to talk about what people have for centuries, millennia called, “the work of God”. When things, events, are not connected by causality, but by meaning. And I see synchronicity everywhere, and I’ve had the opportunity to see it just yesterday, and the day before. It’s such an incredible way. It’s just…. And not showing reverence for it would be would be so pathetic to me. It’s just not even option. It’s the most obvious thing in the world. People say constantly, I’m asked, “But why Islam? You converted, but you were not born a Muslim?” Well, to me, when I started having faith, it was very obvious that the right thing to do was to see this conversion as an “acte manqué” the French would say, as a “missed opportunity”, that could have probably saved me ten of the roughest years in active addiction of my life, and that the right thing to do was to show reverence for the story, and to just pay respect to it. And so, I would say, the important thing in my life is not “Islam versus the religion of my father or that of my mother”, it’s ‘no God’–God, ‘no faith’–faith. And I so happened to have landed in a certain Abrahamic tradition, and I’m grateful for it. I don’t understand why, but I don’t really care why.
Elizabeth
And it’s not always been an easy ride. You did the thing that many converts do, which is to burst out the gates with zeal and vocalness and start speaking in public in ways that got you into some quite big trouble.
Felix Marquardt
Yeah, because I have children, I’m not going to dwell on the specific trouble and the form of that trouble, but I was indeed a very loud mouth, and I needed everyone to hear. That was the only way I knew how to behave. It was “Let’s make a show out of this.” And so I had to absolutely make a show of my conversion. And of course, when you enter someone’s house, telling people what they should be doing is probably not the best idea. So I very soon found myself attacked both by Muslims who felt like “Mate, just shut up, for real. And just listen, and just keep your mouth shut at least for a while.” And by people on the far–right, who were just very, very… Islamophobia is a very, very big thing in many parts of the non–Muslim majority world – in France, among others.
Black Elephant: well–sealed vessels, breaking down barriers and trading growth for depth
Elizabeth
And how, when you look back at that time now of being thrown into very live everyday consequences of division, both internal division within Islam, and division within your own country: were you learning lessons about that? About how we see each other? About our ability to connect across differences? How much do you think that’s fed into your work now?
Felix Marquardt
I think what comes to mind when you asked me that question is, my journey has also been about trying to figure out what the ‘other’ is. And in a way, Black Elephant, the project that that I’m involved in – and Martin and I have been working on together with many others – is about how do we get started with a reflection on modern migration. And the realisation that the backdrop of politics worldwide for a very, very long time has been a clash of sorts, between those of us who move around, and those of us who don’t. And I don’t just mean move around geographically, but culturally, socially, professionally, linguistically, religiously, and those of us who do not. And there is a tendency among those of us who move to be very condescending towards those of us who don’t, and I’ve been really interested in the fallacies of that condescension. And how do you bridge the gap between the two? And in a way, how do you make people realise not in their head, but in their body, that this idea, this illusion of separation, and this idea that because someone doesn’t look like me, or doesn’t think like me, or doesn’t believe the same things as I do, that therefore, they are fundamentally different, or we are at odds somehow.
Elizabeth
And what’s brought us, the three of us to Patmos, is this project, this Black Elephant project. And it’s been really interesting preparing to talk to you both and seeing how the kind of ingredients have gone into the pot of a recovery movement that focuses on small persons or person gatherings in which people are vulnerable, and tell their stories, bring their own stories and the way they’ve been shaped by the mess of the culture and the mess that they’ve told about themselves. And that these gatherings can bring people together, addicts can come from across all the tribal lines: political, geographic, socio–economic – a really big one. I’m going to come to what is Black Elephant trying to do in the world, Felix, but maybe Martin, who has joined slightly later, could you just tell us what happens when a group gathers at what’s called a ‘Black Elephant Parade’? Because that’s the name for a gathering of elephants.
Martin Shaw
Part of the power is, it’s so stupefyingly simple. It’s baffling, really. In mediaeval alchemy, there’s a phrase “vas bene clausum”, and it means “the well–sealed vessel”. And the Parades are really well–sealed vessels: there’s something robust in its simplicity, which means you can go really, really deep. I often think as a modern culture, we’d benefit from trading growth for depth for a little while. Felix had this embryonic idea and was reaching out for this, to collaborate and co–found it. And really, it’s whether it’s in person, which I love, but also online, astonishingly, it actually does really work online. You’ve got usually about six to nine people from extraordinarily diverse situations. They’re not “one visiting exotic”, surrounded by lots and lots of people from London or Paris. It’s truly diverse. And we brood on two to three questions. There’s one person that sort of facilitating it, and those questions are often rather disarming. They’re not black–and–white questions, they’re not questions you can really respond to with a yes or no. And so, that was what intrigued me. As a storyteller, I realised that stories that were being told, disclosures that seemed incredibly unique, incredibly personal, had not just a cultural universality to it, but a mythic universality to it. I was hearing echoes of very old stories that I’ve been telling for a really, really long time. And that made me feel that something really exciting was happening, because this isn’t an accident. This is happening. This is a kind of peculiar simpatico. So, I’m intrigued by hearing people from… it’s tremendously refreshing to be around folks from massively different experiences. And then, from my point of view, as a storyteller, I start to see the tributary of their disclosure, leading to this great ocean of myth that is often just out of sight from them. So it’s wonderful.
Elizabeth
The most particular and the most universal always comes to mind when sitting in the conversations. And I’ve been in Black Elephant Parades where you have a former Conservative Defence Minister sitting next to someone who’s literally just got back from being released from prison because they’re an Extinction Rebellion campaigner. People speaking from Mali, or Senegal, people from Dublin, the religious, and class, and socio–economic, and race, and gender, and worldview diversity is not something I’ve ever seen before. And the magic of that, which could be a kind of recipe for an explosion of tension and tribalism, right? I think we’re very formed, we’re very used now to showing up in a group and thinking, “Right? Where are the disagreements? Where are the divides? Who’s like me? Who’s not? Who might I offend? Who am I going to get offended by? Where is my slight fight–or–flight kicking in to make me prickly and defensive?” And something about starting with good questions just diffuses it. And I think we were drawn to each other, Felix, because it feels very adjacent to what The Sacred is trying to do: to ask an unusually deep question, and then just listen to people. Just listen to people I don’t know, people I might not agree with, people who I might not feel tribally aligned with… And over the course of listening, they go from the two–dimensional stereotype which I had in my head, to a full human person who’s fragile and foolish like me, and beautiful and precious.
The Black Elephant Question: common ground beyond the topical and the superficial
Elizabeth
What makes a good Black Elephant question? What is the kind of question that maybe listeners can use in their own settings to get beyond the two–dimensional to the person they’re in conversation with, whether it’s a family member, or a work colleague, or a stranger?
Felix Marquardt
The answer is that, usually, when there’s a perceived gap between people, our culture, the Enlightenment culture that we bathe in, tells us that we should talk about the thing that we might disagree about, and so on. And so, we don’t go there directly, but we basically stay in the realm of the reasoned conversation. And I remember a conversation with my first sponsor, who is an amazing man who is a school teacher nowadays, and he has 20 years clean plus, but he used to be an intravenous heroin addict. As I mentioned earlier on, I thought I had a serious problem with drugs, but I was a pretty awesome dude. And so, I went to 12 Step fellowship meetings and I told people what I thought of whatever. And one day, it was probably in the first weeks of my recovery, he said, “Instead of telling me, why don’t you just shut up and listen.” He said something that saved my life. He said, “You know, Felix, when you talk about whatever philosopher, like the thing that came up during the meeting that reminds you of this or that school of thought, or when you talk about those things, sometimes it’s very interesting. But it doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help me save myself. But when you tell me about how you felt on the last day that you use drugs, or how you feel today, that really helps me.” And at some point, Black Elephant, at first the project was doomed. I mean, it was really not looking good because we were gathering very different people, and then we were just talking about the thing, the issues, and it just blew up. There’s a New York Times Magazine somewhere about one of these Parades going very, very badly, with essentially a bunch of Muslim intellectuals in Paris and a whole bunch of people who are about to vote for the Far Right. And it just did not go very well.
Elizabeth
I sort of love that you thought, “I know, I will just put all those people in a room!”
Felix Marquardt
Whatever went through my mind. But at some point, it dawned on me that in a way, that the single most momentous political act in the troubled world that we are in, was actually to not talk about the politics, to not talk about the issues, and to just talk about what might allow us to identify with one another. And identification is a huge part of recovery. You come in, and you think “I am different from all of you, and this is not going to work for me.” And what happens is, at some point, if you’re lucky, you hear someone’s story, and you realise this guy or this lady, they were just as bad as me. They were really, really in trouble, and yet, here they are. And if they could do it, maybe I can. And that is part, that identification in a different way, plays a role, I think, in Black Elephant because it allows us to say, “Hmm, you know, I thought…” I’ve heard this time and time again, just after meetings, people say “I thought this person was really awful. And actually, they’re quite nice.”
Elizabeth
Well, what the questions like, “what are you most afraid of?” or “what are you resisting in your life?” or “who did you want to be when you grew up?” – those kinds of questions that get us beyond the kind of CV–based, impressive face that we present to the world – are designed to do, and you say Black Elephant’s kind of special sauce is creating a safe and appropriate container for vulnerability, for being a social network with vulnerability at its heart. Why is that such a powerful thing, revealing something of ourselves? Why is it magic?
Martin Shaw
It’s magic because you don’t bring a room closer through victory stories. It just doesn’t work, they never worked like that. It makes people lonely. And most of us are terrifically lonely. And so you leave a meeting feeling far less isolated than you went in,
Elizabeth
Can you say a little bit about Ted Hughes and ‘contact’? In your book, you quote Ted Hughes, this great nature poet. How do you think that relates, if it does?
Martin Shaw
Well, Ted Hughes was a great fisherman. He was an angler, and he used to fish occasionally in the river Dart, right at the bottom of the garden where my cottage was. And I always have an image, when Ted is fishing, that actually his line is going into not just a river, but a blood vessel. He’s kind of hooked into the blood of a location. He’s hooked into the immediacy, and the power, and the primordial mythmaking of Dartmoor. And all good writers are very patient, fisherpeople. And so they go there and they just wait, and they wait, and they wait, and they wait. And then something happens. It’s back to this word I keep using ‘fidelity’. Life is a contact sport, that’s what I realise. I’m at the end of about five weeks or so of being on the road, and I’ve met thousands and thousands of people. And it shines an uncomfortable light on me that after a while, I don’t like people very much. And I have to rehydrate myself actually through prayer, through general basic conviviality, because, ironically, in in a fairy tale – and I use fairy tales in a positive sense, because I think they are in many ways – in a fairy tale, when you’re going to end up in a bad spot, it’s always when you’re isolated. A dark man will come down from the woods and say, “You’re not meant for this place; you’re better than these people,” or “you’re worse than these people.” And there’s a poet called Antonio Machado, and he says this, he says, “In my solitude, I have seen many things that were not true.” In my solitude, I’ve seen many things that were not true. And I really, really experience a breaking of that enchantment. The parades? It’s extraordinary what is going on. And that’s why I’m here.
Elizabeth
That’s beautiful. There’s a Jewish theologian and philosopher called Martin Buber – who regular readers that regular listeners will be bored of me quoting – but he talks about “I/Thou” moments. And the line that comes back to me is “All living is meeting”, which I think is another way of saying life is a contact sport. The really real are the moments when we see each other, and see each other as fully human, as fully vulnerable. Martin, you have crossed tribes, navigated differences, done so quite recently. We’ve heard about vulnerability: is there anything else you’d offer that you’ve learned? Have you managed to repair any of those relationships? What helps us cross those divides, and have those moments of contact, even when we might assume, frankly, that we’re going to hate each other, helped?
Martin Shaw
Loving attention. Loving attention. That doesn’t mean though, that you’re endlessly malleable. I’m not endlessly malleable. But on the other hand, I’ve just stopped taking everything so intensely personally all the time. Robert Bly once said, an American poet, who said to me, “You know,” he said, “sometimes people are like oak trees, pretending they’re willow trees, or you’re a lion pretending to be a mouse; cut it out.” And I was like, “Wow, okay. There’s a different way of being in the world. You shouldn’t be a bully, especially if you build up knowledge.” We’re all walking wounded. We’re all walking wounded. And there’s just some basic barometer of health. When that is acknowledged, and you haven’t walked 100 miles in that person’s shoes, you don’t know the worries that’s going on in their body at that moment, which causes any number of reactions. So yeah, I’m not one of nature’s huggers, really. When I love people, I hug them constantly. But travelling across Canada, people were always trying to hug me and I said, “I just don’t roll like that yet, and it would be inauthentic for me to do that.” It’s funny. For years, I’ve had a phrase, I think it’s in Courting The Wild Twin, “In your incompleteness is your authenticity.” And that is a Black Elephant statement if ever there was one: in your incompleteness is your authenticity.
Elizabeth
Felix, what have you learned crossing religious tribes, political tribes, geographical tribes? What helps us see each other?
Felix Marquardt
Okay, I’m not gonna do justice to the way this should be said in Scottish…
Martin Shaw
Scottish? What are you about to do to us?
Felix Marquardt
There’s a poem by Robert Bly that really made me think of Black Elephant and it’s called People Like Us. And it goes:
“There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can’t remember where
He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second–story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.”
Elizabeth
Felix, Martin, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Reflection and Outro
Elizabeth
Well, obviously, Felix saying “engaging across difference and connecting with the other” really is something that I love to hear. And then this line he used in that first question, “who’s temple that you serve in?” has really stayed with me, and it’s making me think about whether what’s sacred has to be something outside of ourselves? It’s the thing that we orient our lives to. In one sense, it’s what we worship. It’s what we are seeking to bow down to. Martin said that he struggled to answer the question, which interests me, and he thought it might have been Nature previously, but now because of his quite recent, ecstatic conversion to Christianity, it’s something bigger than Nature or deeper than nature – I can’t remember his exact words. But he has this amazing line that he is falling into a devastation of love, which is just a very beautiful thing to say. And presumably a very beautiful thing to experience.
That was contrasted with how he describes the Christianity of his childhood: as something that had been chloroformed. I do think that’s too many people’s experience, that the wildness that Martin has been drawn to all his life and latterly, in Christianity, is really tidied up in a lot of churches and a lot of people’s memories of their childhood. You know, this image of two warm radiators, and in my case, colouring in, and well–meaning older women, and slightly out of tune hymns. It reminds me of what a previous guest in the series, Dougald, talked about sitting in a cathedral and thinking “we’ve forgotten that this bit is supposed to be the punch line.” That the deadening effect, actually, of some of the way we enact – I’m just gonna talk about Christianity because I don’t want to speak for other religions – but I think most of us listening, if we’re in a Western context, will have experienced that sometimes Christianity can be really boring. And it sounds like that was Martin’s experience in his childhood. He uses this phrase, that he never lost sight that there was some sort of “Being behind the curtain.” Such an interesting thing, isn’t it? I wonder if people… what is it that means that some people have this intuition, this deep sense that there probably is something beyond us. And some people just don’t have that. In fact, might have the intuition that there probably isn’t. And I’m sure some of that is that formative time in childhood, and when our kind of imaginative world, and our sort of plausibility structures are being formed. And even sort of our neural pathways are being formed: what is and isn’t imaginable, what feels obvious and what doesn’t feel obvious, is so key. And I also wonder if there’s a kind of temperamental thing, if that breaks down across personality lines.
So Martin says he didn’t know you could be a storyteller. And that he’d never seen a storyteller. And the time that we were recording, this is the first time I’d ever seen a storyteller, because Martin was telling us stories as part of this event. And I have to say, it was absolutely spellbinding. The deep comfort and fun of been told to sit still and be told a story, in all seriousness. It was just very moving, and just a very powerful thing – these old stories told well. It made me wonder, “why aren’t there more storytellers? Why is this less? Why has this sort of been edged right, right to the edges, of our kind of cultural options?” We watch films, we go to the theatre, we read novels… it’s not that stories are not present in our lives, but the role of someone who used to be called ‘the Bard’ who would transmit stories, live, in front of groups: let’s have more of those. That’s what I was left thinking. And then, the response of Martin’s parents. I really do at the moment feel like I’m magnetically drawn to stories of good parents, where people were held in love by their parents making good choices, even when they might have been imperfect in lots of other ways. You know, like Martin said, his parents said, “Okay, you’re living in a tent, wandering the wild”, but they didn’t berate him or harangue him or trying to make him fit into a more conventional life. They just said, “Okay, what happens next, we love you.” Just beautiful. I love this idea of stories as kind of things of their own with their own agency. Martin at one point says, “If you mess too much with it, the stories won’t respect you.” That it’s a wild animal, not a pelt. And a sense of them as the oldest and deepest form of cultural transmission, that a culture worth in name will take what’s important to it and pass it down via a story. There’s something very close to magic about that. He really tried to get to what a story is, and the sense that a sort of efficacious story shifts something in the room, in the psychic material. I’m going to have my eye out for that I think, next time I go to the theatre, or next time, there’s a sort of collective moment. I wonder if this happens when we hear a story together, that’s important. And then there’s this this bit of Martin constantly being asked to tell different stories, because the ones that he tells are too violent, or too colonial, or too misogynistic. There’s all kinds of ways we’re reassessing the cultural fabric that makes up our common life. Actually, at one point in the time, I challenged Martin on this, because the first story he told felt to me like the only female characters were very passive. And very gently, and I hope with curiosity, rather than being a pain in the ass, I was like, “What do you do with this? Is the body of myth mainly stories of men, basically?” We’re in a really good conversation about it, and it’s not the first time Martin has been asked that question, and he had some very kind of thoughtful reflections and a real body of work to show how serious he takes that. And the other stories he told us during the time were not like that at all. In fact, I found the very moving and inspiring in their female characters. But it just made me realise how much we are currently in a moment of scrapping about what stories are legitimate, and what stories we choose to tell, and what stories we choose to be formed by. Actually, if we can do that in ways that are respectful, I think that’s probably healthy, I think those are really good questions to be asking.
He wanted to be wedded to the wild. This idea of fidelity. What a strange thing to want to do, to go to the woods and give thanks and listen, as someone who called themselves as a pagan romantic. And we talked a bit about Martin’s conversion, but as he said at the beginning, “I won’t be talking about it very often because I don’t want it to become a story.” And I see this often with people who’ve had conversions and then talked about them in public – and not to make it all about me for a second, but I’m writing a book which involves some of my story with my faith as a complicated thing, because 1. memory is a strange beast. And the further away you get from it in time, it’s hard to know exactly what happened, particularly intersects with other people. It’s hard to know if you’re being truthful, you can only tell it from your point of view. And 2. it can deaden into an anecdote. And I really respected Martin’s “I’m still processing. This strange thing happened. I would now call myself a Christian. I need to not milk it too much, almost. I need to not tell it until it until it until it goes dead.” So even though I could have spent a whole interview talking to him about that, that’s why it was quite a boundary. And then finally, on Martin, the response to his conversion being a slightly difficult thing to navigate. And it reminded me again of what we spoke about with Inaya Folarin Aman: how much of our friendships and relationships are premised on sameness, on the sense that we agree on the big things, and how destabilising it can be when someone we know and love changes their mind on something. I wish there was more guidance, or more normalising. If these are the things that help when your friendship or your relationship is shifting, because someone’s changed their mind, or change their tribe, don’t panic. You will probably still have other things in common. And you can find ways through this if the relationship is important to you. That that fight–or–flight response, like “something in me is under threat because someone I love is changing”, I’d love us to find a way to make that less devastating all round.
And then we turned to Felix and his context in France, with “laïcité” and the sense that religion was basically for stupid people. And this really sort of sad thing about being terrified by the idea of eternity and not wanting to go to sleep because of this existential dread that led him into addiction and 25 years of numbing his feelings and numbing his existential longings with weed and cocaine. He described that period of his life honestly, and I have said this to him: he sounds like he was a first–class arsehole. So I’m really glad I didn’t meet Felix in this period of his life, because the narcissism, and the ego, and the alpha–energy and must have been quite a lot to behold. As recovery often does, recovery is a place where people with those tendencies can go and find a better way to be in the world. I didn’t know that AA just refused money, but it doesn’t surprise me. I am so fascinated by the recovery movement. It must be – I spent a lot of time in the ‘social change world’ with people trying to come up with kind of programmes and interventions for all kinds of things. AA must be the best evidenced, most enduring project intervention process that brings transformation in people’s lives, surely. It must be. It’s global, millions of people have been through it. And yet, it’s not carefully branded or corporate, or earning anyone any money, really. And it’s just a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing. I said in the interview, how much I’m drawn to addicts who’ve been in recovery for a while, because there’s nothing like it, for forcing people to get to grips with themselves. The deep theological roots of it came out of a theological group called the Oxford movement, but then drew in kind of Carl Jung’s psychology and a bunch of other influences. But the kind of ‘reckoning with your own brokenness and seeking help and repair through vulnerability’ is a very, very powerful cocktail of things. Before we talk about Black Elephant, I should say, converting to Islam because you want a cool wedding and you want to piss off your bourgeois French friends – that’s a new one. That’s a new reason to become religious. I’m really glad that there was a later moment in which something more serious slipped into that container.
And then we talked a bit about Black Elephant. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk to both of these people for the podcast, is because they’ve had really interesting lives, and they have crossed tribes, and they have learned to navigate difference. But I also wanted to talk to them because Black Elephant feels like it has something at its heart that is not a million miles away from The Sacred, a commitment to something that is possible for us to see each other as fully human, to show up as ourselves and resist our self–righteous, finger–pointy, disconnecting tendencies. And that, at the heart of that is listening, and listening to someone not just about what their job is, or how their day has been, or if they’re going on holiday, or what their political positions are, but listening to something deeper, listening to who they really are – if there’s such a thing – the less polished public version of someone. And there were a couple of lines that I’ll take away with me: “you don’t bring a room closer through victory stories”, and “life is a contact sport”.
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