## Metadata - Author: [[Sophie Strand]] - Full Title: The Flowering Wand - Category: #books ## Highlights - myths were originally situated in particular ecosystems. Just as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelia, so are myths the aboveground manifestations of specific ecologies. Myths are momentary eruptions of beings that have been growing for millennia belowground. ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=190)) - Dionysus is the mycorrhizal system of vegetal gods, weaving a net that is ready to pop up and proliferate wherever nature-based, ecstatic wisdom is needed. ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=196)) - Our bodies, it turns out, are swarms of aliveness, composed of microbes and fungi, metabolically dependent on plants and animals for sustenance, and wildly, generatively entangled with our landscapes and communities. And these bodies—our bodies—are suffering. Men. Women. And every sacred expression in between. Patriarchy’s monolithic vision of the masculine is bad for everyone and terrible for our ecosystems. ([Location 227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=227)) - Each person exists inside a different landscape, a different flavor of available magic. Our greatest spiritual teacher does not need to be bought or sought. It is right where we are. It is the specific dirt between our toes. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=376)) - Snakes are traditionally symbols of the goddess.5 They are literally close to the earth, pressing their whole kinetic, shivering life force against her. In mythology we can see the slaying or denigration of a snake as a nod to the destruction of partnership societies, nature worship, and goddess devotion. ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=519)) - The more sacred we make our spaces, the more magic we feel called to create inside these spaces. I ask you to carefully attend to your own body as a place of refuge and community. The more fertile we let ourselves be, the more we have to share with others. ([Location 638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=638)) - Let us all nourish our bodies, our dreams, our hearts, so that we can become a lap for those who need a soft place to rest. ([Location 641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=641)) - A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. A secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. A throng of singing women. A magician. ([Location 737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=737)) - We have no more time for abstraction. And we have no more time for moralizing. Species collapse every day, bringing down other beings they have been mutualistically involved with for millennia. But, conversely, the emergency of our situation does not call for the manic techno-narcissistic death dance of trying to “fix” the world. It calls for slowing down. For sitting next to the pool. And looking into the water. If we are lucky, we will see ourselves. But not as an isolated subject in the abstracted blank space of phenomenological ontology. Or in the metaverse of digital binaries. We will see that we are in the pool. We are not outside of the life forms that we are damaging and polluting. We are intimately of them. The real narcissism is to believe we can stand apart philosophically, or morally. And yes, let us, like Narcissus, fall in love with this more complex reflection. A reflection that contextualizes our being inside of, and dependent on, many other modes of being. ([Location 946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=946)) - Dionysus’s worship wasn’t only chaotic and antiauthoritarian; sometimes it was threateningly organized. Dionysus directly inspired two of the most fully realized revolts against the Roman state. ([Location 1091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1091)) - Originally, as Pagels tells us, the idea of “devil” had no theological baggage; it meant simply “stumbling block.” The genderless figure of a devil was seen as a course correction. Something that blocks the wrong way forward. You are forced to stop and reassess. You step closer to your true desires and purpose as a result. This devil, then, is closer to the modern idea of the guardian angel. It shepherds you away from danger, sometimes loudly, sometimes gently. Pagels shows that as Christianity developed, it found a “scapegoat” in the goat-horned god Dionysus. Racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism were poured into the now-singular Devil, who didn’t represent evil so much as the bowl where the dominant culture could ferment its most violent prejudices. ([Location 1219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1219)) - How can we write ecosystems rather than individuals? A hero’s journey implies a singular hero and a linear path. How can we write stories with crisscrossing paths? How can we write stories that reflect the messy, intertangled reality of living inside an ecosystem alongside many other species? ([Location 1546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1546)) - We are all bad at asking for stories. We live in a world teeming with narratives that we actively pave over and ignore every day. The Grail wasteland of our current day is not a physical location. It is our own malnourished ecological imagination. The Animate Everything is waiting to be asked for its stories. It’s not that the dragonflies and the ivy and the fungus and the frogs and the mountain lions remain mute. It’s that, high on our own narrative of human supremacy, we forget to ask, “What troubles you?” ([Location 1694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1694)) - Thinkers like Locke, Newton, Spinoza, and Descartes stressed “observable phenomena” as a new type of revelation. What we can see and prove, we can believe. While this paradigm shift could have bloomed into an increasingly sensual, interrogative mode of relating to the natural world, it withered into the bare tree of disembodied jargon and teleological excuses for using nature as a standing reserve of resources. ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1713)) - The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy. The opposite of civilization is not an idealized return to Paleolithic hunting and gathering. The opposite of a human is not an animal or a rock or a blade of grass. The opposite of our current predicament—climate collapse, social unrest, extinction, mass migrations, solastalgia, genocide—is, in fact, the disintegration of opposites altogether. ([Location 1776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1776)) - Relationships are sentient. Anima is the inhalation, carrying molecules and spores and pheromones into our bodies from the landscape. And then we exhale, sharing cells that have clung to our deepest cells, slept inside the pith of our blood. With every exhalation we decant ourselves back into the world. ([Location 1798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09SZPKRFX&location=1798))