This is soul speaking.

Welcome everybody Okay. I can hear you guys. You can hear me. We’ve got Rocco in the room. Thank you so much for coming along to today’s event. This is a very special event. in many ways you can see this, as a soft launch for this beautiful new grove in the walled garden that Rocco Jarm and our friend from Australia is launching A lot of the stuff that you guys will hear from Rocco today, we’ve been discussing behind the scenes for quite some time now, many months, and it’s just been an absolute joy watching Rocco as he’s worked.

to bring a lot of these ideas to life and so Rocco, maybe you could just start by introducing yourself And I do think it would be good to go around the table here and get everybody to jump in and say who they are And where they’re from but maybe you could start with what time it is for you Rocco Well, that poignantly introduces my first, my first idea is so, so lovely that all of you are here.

Thank you so much, Simon, for organizing this. for me, it’s five o’clock in the morning on Monday, which means in a sense, aha, there he is, my long lost friend, Luis. which means I’m speaking to you from the future. And that is such a silly thing to say, but in the language of the silver branch, it’s an invitation actually to wonder what might that mean?

What might that mean if someone, the inspiration that they brought down was not about love, was not about beauty per se, was not about something or some art, was actually about Our story, our story from the future. And so we’re going to play with that idea. it’s a wintry, rainy day. Winter’s come a little early.

My family are asleep. And I’m just excited to be here with everyone. So, my name is Rocco. I’m the, host of the Silver Branch. I’m very grateful to, to be doing this and I’m excited to get going. So let’s do it. So maybe we should, just quickly go around and just say, you know, what’s your name and, and where are you coming in from right now?

And that’s always fun when we’re doing online events, you know, just to see the span of. locations here as well. let people just settle into their seats for now.

I think we can begin with the questions, but, it’s always interesting to know how people found their way here or what led them here in a very brief sense. Okay, so maybe we’ll start with David. Long time regular. Thanks again for coming along, David. Jump in if you can.

All right, David’s shy. Jen, another long time regular. Jen, do you want to jump in?

Sure. I’m Jen. I’m coming from Baltimore, Maryland in the United States. I’ve been on, like Simon said, a long time regular of the World Garden events, as well as Josh Bernwati, Reading and a Good Life, and was a part of Rocco’s other course. the Mojo Dojo several months ago. between following his work and signing with the World Garden, I’m like, let’s see what this next offering is and signed up for the meetup today.

Wonderful. Thanks, Jen. Thanks for being here as always. Kim, if you’re available, I don’t know if it’s just your phone here, but that’s what it says. Kim’s phone. Okay. Hi, this is Kim. I’m in Fort Worth, Texas, and I listened to the wall garden today and heard about this and thought, Oh, I really enjoyed, Rocco’s poetry.

So I thought I would, and I’ve listened on and off to the wall garden for a couple years, so I thought I’d join. And I can’t figure out how to get my name on here. I’m sorry. is it on there? Yeah, so it’s Kim Conroe’s. Yeah, Kim Conroe’s phone. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. And by the way, Native Plant Society person, advocate for native plants.

Louie, actually, Hendrick, do you want to jump in, mate? Thank you so much for coming along.

Oh, no. Turn that microphone on, Hendrick. Don’t shortchange us. Sorry, I’m on my phone. I’m not used to zoom on the phone. So I’m Hendrick. in my philosophical spiritual journey, fate brought me together with Simon a few years ago, and I’ve been helping out a little bit behind the scenes on the walled garden here and there.

And today, I just drove to my mom’s house here on the coast of Maine. And I was listening to Simon and Rocco on the podcast. And I thought, man, I want to continue this conversation. So here I am today. Thanks, Hendrik. Thanks, man. That’s what we like to hear, Hendrik. Yeah, we want to continue this conversation.

There we go. Alright, Luis, if you want to jump in. Thanks for being here, mate. Hi, everybody. My name is Luis. And, I’ve worked a long time with Rocco. Very closely. And I took a little break. And now I’m back to Exploring these teachings and making them a part of my life again. And I met Simon two years ago now, almost.

Greta, jump in. Hi there. I’m from Los Angeles and, I love studying Greek Stoicism. So I ran into the Weld Garden through that process and was emailing Simon and actually ran into him in person, which was kind of fun.

Thank you, Simon. Yeah, no, of course. It’s always good to have you here, Greta. and David, I see you’re back with us. Do you want to jump in and? Yeah, I’m David Hildner. I’m coming in from Madison, Wisconsin, and I’m retired from the University of Madison, Wisconsin, Madison. What were you responsible for?

I was in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, in South Africa, there’s a Portuguese contingent as well.

So we grew up with Portuguese kids. and there were actually two colonies, Angola was a Portuguese colony and Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. And so a lot of the school children we went to school with, so we, we picked up, a bit of Greek cultural, backwash, a bit of Portuguese, not so much Italian.

So, I’m Indian as well, so we’re, yeah, it’s a lovely thing, it’s a lovely part of our culture and a lovely part of our food as well. If you ask people what is South African food, it’s partly African, partly Portuguese, partly Dutch, partly French, and it’s, it’s great actually for exactly that reason, yeah.

Well, Rocco, I’m going to put it out there to everybody. I probably have as much expectation of what’s about to happen today as any of you here. Rocco gave me a brief outline of kind of how he wanted to run the session, but I’m going to throw it over to him. And I’m just as excited as all of you just to sit back and listen in and see what Rocco’s got for us today.

Rocco, do you want to jump in? I absolutely do. I won’t jump in. I’ll just ease in slowly into the conversation, which is how conversations need to be greeted. We just ease into them. So the one thing I would recommend is in my journey, I was looking for something. And it was very deeply tied to my sense of purpose and meaning in this life.

And it’s so funny how our senses of purpose and meaning are also always tied to our senses of wounding in the world. And so what I found was very profound for me, what I encountered was very profound for me. And it’s almost like I found a backlog, like a whole dam. of water, of meaning. And I came back and I wanted to share it with everyone.

And so it used to come out like a sluice gate, like a fire hose. And the only way that can manifest is as a form of deluge or overwhelm or intensity. And I’ve realized that everybody is already overwhelmed because partly they’re just trying to get by.

in this world that’s becoming slightly madder, slightly darker, and they’re also sitting with their own wounds, and sometimes all they have to come with is a cup, or maybe even just a thimble, or maybe even just a spoon, and if you hit them with a fire hose, all you’re doing is the medicine and the beauty that you have to share is lost between the two of you.

Camus said, between what is meant and not said, and what is said and not meant, that’s where all love is lost. And so I’ve decided for myself, and I probably won’t get that right all the time, we don’t always get these decisions right, but decisions are made in the heart or not at all. I’ve decided that for my part, the conversations that I join or participate in, for my part at least, they’ll be spacious and nourishing and invitational.

And that’s really what the craft and the calling of the bard actually is. So we’ll be talking about this thing all the time, the craft and calling of the bard. What does it mean to be a bard? We’ll get there. But fundamentally, we know something about a bard. It’s a storyteller and a poet, but it’s who the bard represented to the people.

And the bard was not somebody that was always at court, that was always in the presence of other people. Half of their work, half of their calling was to leave, actually, and go out into what I call the beyond the frontier of the strange, to be touched by the world, to sit with difficult questions, to sit with their own questions, actually.

And if they integrated, as I mean to, into the communities that they serve, they sat with the troubles and the questions of the people who they encountered and who they were in community with. And they sat with them almost as a form of prayer when they went out into the world. And they let the world speak to them, and they let the genius of the place.

There’s a belief, from ancient peoples that they called it the genius loci, the genius of a place. And if you go to a particularly beautiful place, not all places obviously have them, but when you get a group of people together, there is a emergent genius in that group. When you go to a certain place, a certain building, or a tree in the forest, or a little turn in the road, beside a river, there’s little places in the natural world that we encounter that have, they’re not quite postcard invitational, but they It’s almost as if they have something to say.

And what we tend to do is we go out into these places and because of the way our imagination is systematically squashed and flushed out, during our young years of academia, our school careers, the way we get brought up, we actually get taught to act as if we have rapid answers for things.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I mean, these are such enormous, expansive questions, and we’re expected to come up with short, clippy answers that relate to somebody else’s language and expectations. And in that willingness to be accepted, to be normal somewhere, we start abandoning our own questions, our own conversation.

And in that abandonment, when we go out into these wonderful places, where a conversation is already in place, we get tempted to label it very quickly. Somebody on the call here dearly loves, plants and specifically the plants that are endemic and local because they have a genius.

They have grown up in the area that they’ve grown up and they’ve adapted and they’ve brought their magic. And their wisdom, but we can’t hear it and we can’t see it because we’re too busy walking up with a handshake or a business card and going, ah, that’s the Latin binomial for this plant. And now I think I know something about this.

And in doing that, in my certainty, I shut myself off to the wider conversation That’s already happening. And the only way is to go there in sort of listening mode, carrying the mantra. not knowing is most intimate because I can’t reach in the sack of life, rummaging for an answer that I am so sure I need to pick out, especially if it’s an answer I’m not to know.

Imagine that. Putting your hand inside of a sack and you’re looking for the answer to a question that’s sitting on your heart. Now, if it was sitting on your heart, it means the answer has been eluding you. But then you shape your hand just so, to pick out this object that you are so sure you must encounter, which means you’re pre empting what the answer must look like.

And in that, the answer will evade you. And it can be the same way in introducing yourself to a new person or to a new place. already full of all the things that you believe, you know, and what they are and what you’re encountering and deaf actually to the genius that’s coming through.

So what the bard would do is they would go out in the world and they would encounter this and they would sit with this troubling question. Sometimes they didn’t even have a question. Sometimes the place or the moment or the experience that they witnessed actually imposed the question on them. I have this wonderful question that I.

live with a lot as a poet, which is, what is this? What is this? I’ve just seen something. I’ve just seen somebody say something. Was it, was it Kim that jumped on about the plants? Who was it? Who was it? It was me. It was Kim. and so my ears pricked up and I thought, what a strange thing to say.

what evident passion there must be for someone to tag onto their introduction of themselves, something that they love so dearly. What is this? And like a journalist, you don’t aim to chalk off a quick answer. Journalists have the art of the bot because they just sit with it. What is this? Now I want to know more.

Now I want to understand. And with respect, Kim, I want to know less about native plants than I want to know about why Kim is so connected to this idea, because this is a something. And when I understand the something, when I let the, this little piece of aha, write itself onto me, I can be sure of one thing.

It has a symmetry to something, some question that I’ve been asking, some pain that I’ve been unable to soothe in myself or in someone else. And then the bard takes that pain, takes that question, takes that uncertainty, takes that not knowing, and does two things at the same time. Very objective, in other words, I’m just sitting here watching, listening, asking, wondering, aware of everything, but Enough of the me that I am is in the room.

So that a personal experience of the moment is also one of the facts and details that I capture to bring back with me.

And then they sit down at their writing desks or however they muse. There is a different form of alchemy, coagulation a, a fermentation of these ideas. And then they go, and the final act, then, is to, Ah, I’ve distilled this medicine, I’ve concocted this aha, this magic.

And the magic is never for them, they delight in it. But of course the magic is for the community, for the people. And then the final act then has to be a form of another form of surrender because the first one going out into the edge of the strange is a form of surrender where they surrender their certainty and then they build their craft according to their calling and then they deliver that craft to the people.

to create art is a very vulnerable process because if you’re doing it devotionally, what you’re serving up is the best your heart, your soul, your craft is able to do. Now, if it’s tied to your calling, it’s always going to court, vulnerability, because this is the best I have to offer.

This is all I have to give, which makes it the most beautiful thing in the world, but also makes it the most vulnerable thing in the world because art is subject to critique. And then it gets taken and alchemized into the hearts and minds of other people. And what you’re actually doing as a bard is you’re throwing your offering onto the sacrificial fire because there’s only one first time for everything.

So this is basically what the craft and calling of the bard is, is to belong to their state of not belonging, which we can all feel like sometimes actually. And the one invitation I want to extend to everyone, which will mean more as we finish our conversation today is. that you don’t need to write poetry or play music to connect with this craft and calling.

You simply have to have some form of conversation that you’re in where you’re out at the edge of the world in conversation with something. It doesn’t have to be the wilderness. It could be just a different part of your life that everybody else that you’re in relationship with doesn’t get to see or doesn’t get to experience whilst holding that prayer or that question or that conversation openly and then coming back at regular times.

And it doesn’t matter what your interval is. It could be daily, weekly, or monthly. And you come back and you have something to share. Now, our greatest tragedy is that we don’t have places where we can come and share that. And we don’t have initiatory processes or guidance processes where people can apprentice themselves to their own craft.

And calling and be told it’s absolutely not only permissible, but hugely necessary that you start doing things like this in your life, because this is how we become more deeply integrated in our communities and in our societies. And sometimes, sometimes we think we’re pursuing enormous senses of purpose, or we having a head scratch.

And asking yourself, I don’t know what my, what my purpose is. Or perhaps, David, now that I’m retired, what does my purpose look like now? Do I still feel the need to want to connect with it? Is that it’s still there to be scratched? More questions, more troubling questions. And there’s no one answer for these things.

But there is a sameness to this. We do sorrow with kindred sorrow. And how lovely would it be if there was a community of practice? where this art was being demonstrated, this somewhat of a spiritual, sensibility was being introduced in a sensible way. And then there was a place where I could showcase some of the magic that I do go and collect in the world and alchemize in my human heart and bring forward.

And that’s exactly what the silver branch aims to do because philosophically, that’s what the walled garden aimed to do. It said. How wonderful. The world is a wild place. There is order, but it’s sterile order. And there is, natural beauty, but it’s under threat. And there are all these gems from the humanities that we can fossick through and bring back.

But, We can’t really speak about what we want to speak about. The projects that we are involved with in the world are more like Babel and less coherent. they don’t seem to pull together. The project of politics is divisive. The project of religion, regardless of what they say, aims to be divisive.

The project of business is, rapacious, and how do we create a space, a garden, to tend the things that we find beautiful and meaningful in a contained way, where in that containment, we can foster a certain culture, a certain openness, a certain sense of welcome. And that’s what the walled garden really is, in a metaphoric sense.

And just to borrow a little bit more from the craft and calling of the bard, very intentionally, everything that we’re doing here in the silver branch, which is one of the groves of the walled garden. And I think, I actually recommended the name grove many, many years back because it was going to be called faculties or something.

If you look back in some of the studies, the antiquities, like the ancient Greeks, and in Vedic scripture as well, from the subcontinent, the idea of a grove was always where some form of wisdom was practiced.

It was either contemplative or instructional, or a lot of these schools were schools founded in groves. And it’s still a very strong, part of the Vedic tradition today, so I thought that’s it. And now I’ve, I’m steering or shepherding one of these groves, and the ancient Greeks lived with this idea that the language, there were two languages, in which we could hold the conversation of life.

The one was called Logos, Reason, which is very important, which is basically the heart of what the World Garden is founded on. There has to be reason above all, because without which there cannot be a pursuit of beauty and divinity. Things have to be ordered and guided by reason. Very important. But the other language that they held the conversation of life in was mythos, which is about symbology and mythology and metaphor, allegory.

And the mistake that we’ve made, or the fork in the road that we turned and didn’t realize what we were losing while we took that journey, I believe, in our modernity. which is really what the book The Hearth and the Well is all about, is that we’ve wandered down this road, capering, gambling towards this bright arc of progress, of actualization in a very, our processes are complicated, our interfaces are complicated, our systems are complicated.

We live in a world of overwhelming complexity, which has many amazing, amazing benefits. We’re so incredibly empowered because of that. But in all that complexity, it’s become overwhelming for us. We are overwhelmed. A system, any system, from the plumbing system of your house, to the system of your brain, to the justice system in America, any system will fail.

Any system will fail when its inputs exceed its throughput when what you asking it to do in its natural course of function, the things that you’re throwing at it to do that are more than it’s processing can allow for. and the parts burn out and they fail. So it turns out that This wonderful thing, logos and reason, our reductionism and our sciences, all fantastic, but they have a shadow side.

And the shadow side is immersing oneself only in that language. Immersing oneself only in that paradigm leaves us looking at the world and therefore ourselves in a certain reductionist way. Just think about that for a moment.

the collective mind of the modern world sees everything, it objectifies everything. It’s very personally subjective. Me, me, me.

And what’s missing, of course, is this language of mythos. Now the, the, the idea from the ancient Greeks was not that you abandoned reason now and you run into the waiting arms of mythos. We’ve got a name for that. It’s called dogma. We delusion. We don’t want that either. Of course, we don’t want that.

But, from this left brain thinking, this reductionism, this everything has to subscribe to logic and reason and no more, we’ve lost something along the way. And I say a lot, soul is what is missing when life feels wrong. Soul is not only this capacity inside of us that we feel is eternal, or I mean that’s up for debate.

But one thing we cannot argue is that a place can be said to have a soul. This genius that we were talking about a moment ago, the genius of a place, that can, that is an example of how a place can have a sense of soul. A building can have a sense of soul. A meal can either be rich and warm in that place.

Capacity, what can be cold and shallow in that same capacity and that capacity. I’ve got a few words that are attached to that. It’s connection. Connection. Belonging.

Can somebody capture those questions? Purpose. Vitality. Creativity. Imagination. Meaning. These are the things that gently get discouraged out in favor of reasoning. And the ancient Greeks didn’t say you had to abandon one for the other. The invitation was to hold the conversation of life in both languages at the same time.

Because what we’ve done. Unfortunately, with our very myopic, reductionist view of the world, is we’ve created a dungeon out of that form of thinking. And within that dungeon, we’ve imprisoned and we torture the cure, which is our own sense of soul. Now you don’t have to believe in anything ethereal to connect with that.

You can just look at the outside world and realize that we’ve lost a sense of connection. We’ve lost a sense of individual purpose. A lot of the things we’re engrossed in lack a sense of meaning. The most common complaint from everybody In the world, who is complaining, and who is not complaining about something political or religious, their only truth is what they’re actually feeling.

We find what they’re complaining about is a sense of isolation, depletion, overwhelm, and meaninglessness. Now the cure for those four things can only be their opposite. And those things are not found. We’re not going to reason our way to a better society. We need to perhaps open ourselves to the invitation of a more nourishing and a more spacious conversation.

And that happens in the realm of mythos. in story, in poetry, in symbolism. And this is what the invitation is here. Now, there was a question which we’ll get to in a minute, but what I wanted to finish with was, there’s this beautiful quote by Ranier Maria Rilke, and I won’t get it right, but the gist of it goes like this.

It says, take your well disciplined strengths and suspend them between two poles, because inside the human heart is where God learns. And the walled garden is such a beautiful idea. What it is, it’s this encapsulated safe space, comfortable space, inviting space, where our focus is not all the multitude of busyness and enterprise that everybody are doing out in the world.

We intend to do that as well, but we don’t intend to do that as the central focus. The central focus is connection, purpose, meaning,

and the collective pursuit of beauty and meaning. and divinity through that, that connection. Now in such a beautiful idea, there are two important things in the walled garden. The one is the wall around the walled garden, some form of barrier, Some form of boundary is a beautiful saying that says from Prentice Hemphill that says boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

The poet Robert Frost has a beautiful poem called Mending Wall, which if you pay attention to it, is actually about maintaining boundaries between a neighbor and himself who have slightly different perspectives on life. So the wall is very important in the walled garden, but then the walled garden, the wall would mean nothing.

If there wasn’t a gate in the wall, it’s opposite. A wall is a means to keep everything in, in, and everything out, out. But none of that would be relevant or meaningful if there wasn’t a gate. And the gate is exactly the wall’s own opposite. It’s a way of letting things that are outside in and letting things that are inside out.

And at the gate stands two lions or two sphinxes. And the Sphinxes maybe ask questions like, is this true? Is this relevant?

And unless you can answer both of those questions, you can’t come in. But those Sphinxes have a master and the master is the collective heart of all the people that put the walled garden together, that make up the walled garden. Because the walled garden is nothing without people. And those people want people to come.

Even though there is a wall, and even though there is a gate guarded by two sphinxes, and even though those sphinxes give you a very challenging question, is what you bringing here both true, your truth, and your relevance? We don’t want to stop anyone from coming.

Everyone is welcome. What a paradox. But in that paradox comes the other paradox is the paradox of human beings. We all actually, in this place of light that we all gathered in, in this botanical garden, we all bring a bit of darkness with us.

Why do we bring a bit of darkness with us? Because We are part of the world, and the world has much darkness in it. Even if we come here with the best of intentions, what is also true and relevant is the troubles that we carry on our heart. The way that we’re struggling to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense.

The way that we’re struggling to belong to a moment that’s unfolding in a way that we would have wished it not to go.

What’s true is we’re losing hope in humanity a little bit. And even if we aren’t everybody that we’re in relationship with is, And we don’t have a sense of leadership, we don’t have a shared story. There’s many reasons for us to carry troubles with us. We are, of course, just like plants, the product of many generations of genetic conditioning.

And the issues are in the tissues often, and we carry darkness and trouble with us that way. So, what it means is, what we could have had is a walled garden, a place of light, in a metaphoric sense, that had this secret darkness that was coming in and out. Because there is no philosophical conversation people can have, where secretly the tensions of our ideologies and our discomforts are not going to percolate up through that conversation and somehow find a home here.

I asked a philosophical question of people. I said, imagine you had the most beautiful botanical garden in the world. Beautiful botanical garden, pristine, fountain in the right place, swans on the pond. everything is meticulous and beautiful. Everything is meticulous and beautiful and vibrant. And it’s just idyllic, absolutely idyllic.

And then in the middle, you had this, Dirty trash can and not only was the trash can dirty and stinky, there were flies buzzing around it. There were, dirty fowl picking trash out and there was trash lying all over the floor. And I’d say, right, what is the one thing, and maybe everyone can have a crack at this.

What is the one thing you would change or how would you improve this idyllic garden? If anyone has an answer, by all means, shoot it out.

the knee jerk reaction so often is, oh, get rid of the trash can. What an eyesore. The only reason the garden can be so idyllic is because there’s a trash can. Otherwise the trash would be in the garden and people would have nowhere else to throw it.

That’s the reality of yin and yang. That’s the reality of the tension of opposites we all live with.

And so what we decided to do instead in this beautiful garden is create it. First of all, acknowledge that in one of those groves, compost is the answer. Yes, not all trash, unfortunately is compostable, but that’s the right answer, Hendrik.

it’s exactly the invitation as the other parts of our life, that which you deny will manifest in a way that you cannot manage. And the best thing to do is acknowledge that even in the most beautiful place, like the walled garden, there is a dark forest in the metaphoric sense. It’s not evil, it’s just dark.

And to lose yourself in that dark represents some form of danger. It’s real. Let’s imagine in our imaginary view of this garden, this idyllic garden where there’s bright groves and light and fountains and beauty just wherever you look, that just on the edge of your periphery there is a dark forest in there.

And sometimes when you’re troubled, guess where you’re drawn to. You’re drawn to the dark forest. It’s not quite a grove exactly. It’s just kind of there. And you can bring light to it and tidy it up and put candles and torches everywhere. And you turn your back and it’s sprung up somewhere else.

That’s the nature of it. But instead what we thought we’d do is like the yin yang symbol where the white teardrop invariably has that black dot in it. Let’s go deep into that black dot and find the white teardrop in it.

And so, The Silver Branch is about a story from Ireland. It’s about a man that, had a great and troubling destiny weighing on his shoulders. everybody’s feasting in the hall and they’re singing and they’re celebrating and they’re dancing and they’re carrying on, but he cannot feel like he belongs to that sense of merriment.

Because there’s a darkness and a troubling question weighing heavily on his heart. So he wanders out of the hall, out of the keep. beyond the castle walls and he is drawn to a dark forest. He’s wandering around endlessly and he comes to and he’s in the dark forest and in the dark forest he hears a song being played and he realizes that this song and the wound in his heart, there’s a, there’s a sameness.

It’s almost like he was wounded for the lack of hearing the song or the song is the medicine that’s going to cure the wound in his heart. And he didn’t know he was following the song at first. All he knew is he was actually, without realizing it, following the woundedness in his heart. His heart was the compass.

And he wanders out into this dark forest, and he hears the music, and He’s drawn to it. And the music is beautiful, not in an erotic way, but beautiful in the way that Medicine to the soul appears beautiful. And he wanders actually deeper into the dark forest. And he sees the music is actually not just coming from nowhere, it’s coming from one tree.

And he sees that much of the tree is actually withered. And then he hears and he notices that it’s, coming from one branch, one shining silver branch.

And then he gets closer and he actually sees that there’s a golden apple that’s growing from that silver branch. We’ll stop the story there. The idea of the silver branch is exactly to bring that element right into the heart of the walled garden, right in the heart of the darkness that we don’t want to be there, but which will exist anyway.

Some bright thread, the golden thread, the thing that we’re actually all following in our pursuit of philosophy, in our pursuit for meaning, that’s our safe pursuit. But deep in our subconscious, there is a pain, there is a wound, there is a longing for things to be better, for things to be well, for ourselves to belong, for ourselves to connect, with great meaning.

And we find that even from this dark forest, in this withered tree, There is still a silver branch that is growing, and on that silver branch, a golden apple. And not only do we want to face the darkness, the reality, the truth that people are walking here with, because we want to heal and soothe and ameliorate and alchemize and integrate that darkness, but we want to send people off back out into the world with the belief that in the midst of all darkness, even when the tree of humanity seems to be withering, there is a silver branch.

And on that silver branch, a song is being sung, and at the tip of it is a golden apple. And the golden apple is the symbol for replenishment, and for youthfulness, and for renewal. But what you’ve stumbled into here with me is the idea that we’re going to explore that darkness.

at the edge of what we pay attention to and the strangeness that we find amongst the familiar and the merit of courage of going deeper into the darkness and looking for the beauty and looking for the song and being guided by the music, which turns out to be guided by one’s own heart, which turns out to be guided by one’s own wounds and cares in this world.

and then eat from that fruit and take the seeds and share them in the world and do whatever you’re going to do with them. But this is a beautiful, live, thriving, flourishing, idea, but it needs to live in people. And it’s going to, for a start, live in the walled garden in the Silver Branch Grove and through me teaching the craft and calling of the bard.

So how’s that for an invitation?

Now, there was a question, Simon. There was a question, Rocco. Thank you so much. for putting this together today and just again, for all of the work you’ve been putting into the silver branch, this today is just a beautiful, it’s, it’s a beautiful moment for us because it’s finally starting to take light in the world, you know, all of these conversations in the background, but, we did have one question from Hendrick and maybe Hendrick, you can give a little bit more context for, what you’re thinking about when you ask this, but, what, what about inductive reasoning, the type of reasoning, reasoning that supposes a providential cosmos?

Yeah, that question, I guess, we don’t have to get into the details. I don’t want to derail. That was kind of like a more pointed question but, I do have some questions. I actually get Hendrik’s question here. It was at one point in time, I was suggesting that logic and reason isn’t the whole of the answer.

And then Hendrik said, but there is actually a little seed inside of reason, which leads you out of the reductionism back into the invitation of the world. Well, that’s the invitation. I also followed Hendrik and you’re dead right. Because in the same way, that in the middle of the light, there’s a dark spot.

That dark spot manifests in many ways. It manifests as a kind of, a dead end or an ignorance. In other words, reductionism can take you so far, but it misses the warm touch. But in that, there’s a place that no one looks. where you can actually apply reason against what was a hardening of reason, and the hardening was only in yourself.

And then you look at the place that’s a bit softer, and you dive deeply into that place, and you realize that the concept of pro noia, the fact that the universe is providential and abundant, And, renewing and generative in our myopic blind corner of our journeys, we can sometimes feel only the hardening of all of that reductionism and reasoning, instead of seeing that the journey that we’re on the narrative of their journey is emergence.

And the power behind that emergence, the thing that makes emergence perennial, is this providential nature of the cosmos, which we can call in a word, pro neuer, and pro neuer is this psychological opposite to paranoia. Paranoia says everything is out to get me, and isn’t my friend. Whereas paranoia says everything aims to do me great service and is absolutely my friend and my benefactor.

The only thing I can’t see is the wider arc of meaning, which means I’m holding the conversation of life in too small and too tight and too narrow a framing that I can’t be invited. to the wider conversation and to the beauty of all of that. Thank you, Rocco. And I think that kind of ties a follow up question I had very nicely with reminding yourself that framing seems to be so important, but also difficult to do.

I think you’re talking about finding a weird place or a strange place, right? And I think in the morning when I carve out time to meditate or read a text or, garden even, you know, you take this feeling with you, but then the reductionist world drags it out of you, right? When you get an email from your boss or someone hits your car or whatever it is.

And then it reminds you of that quote from Emerson or Pectitus saying, carrying that philosophy with you is what marks a tranquil soul. So I’d love to kind of. hear how you talked about the craft of the bard and reminding you how to carry that forward or take it on.

I’m stumbling over words a little bit, but yeah, thanks. And I don’t want to. I like the stumbling over words because we only stumble over our words when our heart is running quicker than our mouth can. And it means our heart is running. And that’s, that means the questions coming from the right place. So I, I love that question.

Can we explore that question together? Thumbs up. Let’s go. Yeah, Let’s do it. So we’re talking about the same thing here, or there, there is a saying, which I absolutely love. It’s one of my, the core pillars of, of Rocco. And it’s this quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was an Austrian philosopher and he said, the limits of my language define the limits of my world.

The limits of my language. define the limits of my world. Kim, if we go out into the world and we know the Latin names for all of those plants, but we don’t respect the language that that plant is trying to communicate in, we are limited to a certain shallow experience of what could be the most rich and beautiful invitation.

Languages are not only linguistic. There’s many forms of language. Dance is a form of language. A smile is a form of language. Here is a mystical phrasing which I’d like you to all sit with. If you want to truly meet or encounter something intimately, greet it in its own language.

The richest conversation that’s on offer to you all the time is the conversation that’s not happening in English.

It’s the, the other conversation, the conversation of, body language of, little symbols and messages that pop up all the time. And what I’m suggesting why this is an answer to Hendrik’s beautiful question is to try and frame that entire project. under the word philosophy can denude it of some of its beauty and meaning, or misguide a reasoning mind, educated the way we have been, that philosophy is only the dry, academic, vaunted texts and high minded sayings.

Which it is too, but some of my favorite philosophers have one thing in common, is that Philosophia just means the love of wisdom. And there is wisdom in plants, there is wisdom in your body, there’s wisdom in your breath, there’s wisdom in stillness, there’s wisdom in many places that you cannot capture into language, into words, and freeze and transmit.

there’s other forms of wisdom. And one of the forms of wisdom that I’m trying to revive and revitalize and share is this wisdom that sometimes when the logic and the reason and the high mindedness and the philosophy Or, there’s no feeling, the idea is good, it makes good sense, but the question is how do I make that touch me in a meaningful way every day, how do I be, I’m not just looking for the knowing and the understanding, I’m looking for a warm hand on my shoulder in some way.

I’m looking to feel like I’m in conversation with the world. something meaningful in this world.

And so we believe that we have to go to spirituality or religion, or we have to go to philosophy and reason. And what I’m suggesting is that they are two winding snakes, or there’s a vine and a serpent that are both climbing and descending from the same tree. And it’s the same tree, it’s the same soul, it’s the same project, it’s the same polarity.

Maria Rilke, take your two well disciplined strengths and suspend them between two poles because inside the human heart is where God learns. The polls don’t only just go like this, they also go like that. That is what it means to be a human being. It’s to have this dual experience and not all of our experience can just be comforted by reason.

And there is a different form of nourishment and of, poignancy that we find great sense of connection to the, that no amount of reason. in philosophy can ever touch, but you’ll find that the greatest philosophers were always pointing to that. They were always pointing to this non verbal conversation, this silent kind of exchange.

This contemplative exchange where you were sitting exactly now, what were they doing? What were they talking about? It’s, it’s, it’s a word or a phrase that I call walking with prayer or prayerfulness that does not mean putting your hands together, closing your eyes and speaking to some imaginary deity.

It’s just allowing for the truth. of the questions that weigh on your soul most heavily and trying to find a way to articulate that, trying to find a way to ask that question in the right way, trying to even ask, am I asking the right questions? And sometimes it means not only aiming the listening ears, but also out into the outer world to wait for some sort of signal, because we can do this sometimes.

Sometimes if we follow the wisdom of philosophy, we get instructed that it’s our state of imperfection or our state of lack of reasoning that disallows us to connect with higher truth and beauty. So we always infer that the work is with me, that if I’m missing something, or if I can’t reach an answer, I need to do more work.

And every failure to get that prayer answered becomes a reason for me to impose more expectations on myself, to perfect myself more. And sometimes the answer is not doing more. Sometimes it’s stop the doing. Sometimes it’s not listen ever more finely in the wrong direction. It’s listen in the other direction.

Because your body is already saying something, your breath is already saying something. The answer is actually going to come at least half the time from inside you, because there is a wisdom that you inherit, not just darkness that you inherit generationally and from the place that you grew up.

And so this idea of walking with prayer or sitting with prayer, I’d like to make it very, very clear that in the context, in the paradigm of the silver branch, of the craft and calling of a bard. It’s by definition, It’s not a religious exercise. Deeply spiritual, yes. But imagine if we could take the word prayer and wash it clean and restore it to any form of deep and meaningful conversation that touches us the way that we want it to be touched.

Even if it doesn’t answer the questions immediately, because if it answers the questions immediately, it’s chat GPT. It’s not a conversation. Conversations don’t give us only what we expect. Conversations, a real conversation with a capital C, a real conversation draws you more deeply into the conversation.

Sometimes what you’re listening for is an answer and all you get is more questions. That means you’re having a real conversation.

how wonderful, because what else are we doing with our lives except being in conversation? Half of our life is out there in the doing and the mucking through the world, but the other half has to be, what is my story? What is my connection to this? What is my sense of meaning? And let me tell you what, if you want to get to the end of it and say, I did this well, and I lived it well, and it had all the meaning, and here’s an idea.

I get to the end of life, And let’s say that what the ancient Egyptians were speaking about was just a metaphor. There’s no real Anubis that weighs my soul, but something happens psychologically for which the weighing of a soul or a heart in a scale actually explains a lot. I’ve got a column of all the things that I look back on that I wish I had done differently.

I’m ashamed of the outcome, I’m ashamed of my cowardice, I’m ashamed of the smallness with which I was holding the conversation, and it really stings because it reminds me of the opportunity lost, the hours of my life I gave to fear not to love. And let’s call that column regret. Now, our life is without some regret, because having our hearts broken is what teaches us about love, and losing things that are important to us is what teaches us gratitude in the end.

But let’s imagine the other, so we want some regret, otherwise we wouldn’t grow and learn. But I’m talking about the stinging regret that really makes us feel ashamed that we didn’t live life to its full capacity and potential, and we didn’t discover our own true potential. And the other column is all the things that we feel the other way about, that we feel really proud of, the way we invested, we stepped up, we did so many beautiful things.

And let’s call those things that you are proud of, that you would gladly do again, even if they cost you something. Because why? Because they were attached to the name above the column, which is meaning.

So it really is a toss up between regret and meaning, in a way. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get to the end of this and have column B outweigh column A. That, let’s call that the definition of a well lived life, where more things that I did Then I had regretful now the one way to start carving and stitching and weaving together meaning in your life is not via a journal of facts and details and reason.

It’s a story. It’s a narrative. With you at the center of that story, none of us are living each other’s lives and none of us are going to get points in those two columns at the end of the day for being self effacing. We still have to shepherd our own happiness and our own souls and our own wellness as best we can and how much of our wants and needs and loves in this life are we silencing because they don’t seem virtuous, because they don’t seem rational or logical to whichever texts we’re following.

Now that language of meaning making can only be through narrative and story and the language of that is symbols and metaphors and totems. and archetypes, and essence, and form. That is the language I want to teach and share, because it gets you the other half, the other missing half of the conversation that is exactly nourishing, that is meaning making.

And you can’t make a coherent, thread of meaning without story. Storytelling is the most powerful, instructive technique. It’s the most powerful medium to garner people’s attentions, to teach them a lesson, to share a bit of wisdom, to make sense of what doesn’t make sense. Myth is a way of taking tall tales.

Lies, really. Myth is a way of taking lies and weaving them together in a way that illuminates a deeper truth about life and about ourselves, always with this beautiful symmetry. And out there in the world, the ugliness of our reductionist worldview takes a lot of facts and details and has woven them together in a restrictive matrix that creates a great lie about the meaninglessness of our lives.

And the only way to reverse that then, the form of rebellion then, is storytelling. And becoming part of a great story and becoming part at the heart of this little unraveling, not as the world unravels, we’re going to take all those loose threads and we’re going to search for the golden thread in the dark and our own golden threads, and we’re going to bring them all together and weave them in a tapestry and that tapestry is going to create a story that not just makes meaning of our past.

and of the unfolding, but also points the way which our souls will lead us with eyes closed towards a future we want to belong to. And that medium is story. Compost is the answer. As Hendrik said,

compost is the answer. Let’s have everyone’s mics on and just getting into the conversation. I think we’re close to the end now, probably Simon, probably have a few minutes left, but. I think that’s a nice place to, to wrap up and open the floor and

maybe I can just quickly, throw in something that stood out to me and if anybody else has any thoughts or any questions, we can open that up right now. But for me, one very interesting moment was when you said, you were talking about how we follow texts

Okay. Okay. They’re all good. you know, and how limiting it can be if perhaps, we’re following a particular text and that is the ultimate authority in our hearts, in our heart of hearts of what is true and good and valuable and meaningful. because I know my own capacity to do that, to, in my heart, lift up a particular text or philosopher or, Anything. And now this is, this is where I go to for my approval, right? Of myself and my actions. That’s it. can I offer an invitation in that? Because what I want to teach Silverbranch is every conundrum actually comes smuggling its own invitation in its other hand.

It’s not that there is inherent danger in text. The inherent danger, if there’s such a thing, is. in your limitation of framing, your overvaunting that it needs to carry so much of the whole complete answer, which is putting such an unreasonable responsibility on the teacher that shared that with the world to have the forethought and the translators who translated that text to understand a perennial context for life that is actually always emergent and unfolding.

To have been perfectly captured and for your education up until now to perfectly, that’s the foolish project. And the thing is to always ask the question, what is the shadow side? What is the invisible? What’s the missing? What’s the inverted implication of what I can’t see, what I can’t imply, because it’s always there.

It’s never not there. The dark forest is always in the old garden, the light is always deep inside the dark. The opposite always exists. So if you just live with that also all the time, that everything is about paradox, everything is about the tension of the opposites, everything cannot not be because we are here because of duality.

Duality is what is fundamental. And if I can. stand in the heart of a paradox and let it pull me apart. What emerges out of that uncomfortable question is the revealed you. if America wasn’t pulling its part, there wouldn’t be the tension that is created in our hearts to say, there has to be a better conversation.

We are the result of that discomfort. The secret aim of all tension is transformation. And it’s the middle where things emerge, not the fringes, actually. Fringes are just what’s pulling apart. Yeah, noise is emerging, but the silence, the question, the uncomfortable thing that gets yielded from the tearing center, that’s where you need to be.

That’s where you need to look. And the art of the bard is to step into that often, to belong to your not belonging. You know, when they go out on the edge of the strange, whether it’s an actual pilgrimage. Or whether it’s just stepping away from what they’re familiar with in some other way. They are not belonging.

But when they get back into the heart of the people and stand next to the fireplace and deliver the poem and the story, they are actually still an outsider. They never belong to that circle either. They’re a servant to that circle.

They belong to a state of not belonging on either side. It can be lonely in a way until the loneliness itself becomes a companion.

You belong to your state of not belonging. You belong to yourself very much and you apprenticed to your own craft and calling of not belonging and ebbing and flowing because isn’t all life just ebbing and return, ebbing and return, as Sharon said. That is all of it. Seasons operate like that.

The moon is like that. The tides are like that. How can we become, allow that actual truth inside of us? Which is actually always, today I felt like this, but tomorrow I felt like that. Now, how much energy do you waste trying to reconcile a middle point between two things that can’t exist instead of just accepting today I will feel like this and tomorrow I will feel like that.

I am the pendulum, I don’t have to pick a fixed point between the two without which my identity is uncertain. I have a dualism or a multiplicity to my truth.

Because all natural plants, as Kim will tell you, the ones with the greatest medicine are poisoned at the wrong dosage and vice versa. Yes, they are.

So we’re going to talk about things like herbalism, correspondence, astrology, alchemy, but we’re not going to talk about them pretending that they’re true. We’re going to stop our language where it wants to make things true or not true. abandon that, go into the edge of the strange, listen to what is true and let ourselves be what is written on, and then be enriched by that conversation.

And that’s how we enter more deeply into the conversation.

Thank you so much, Rocco. I want to make sure everybody else has a chance. If anybody has questions or comments.

Compost is the answer. I’m just happy to be here. I missed you, Rocco. I missed you too, Luis. Man, it was a lot. It was a lot. But this is the perfect tone setting for everything. And you said everything is story. You’ve said that so many times. And now you’re using story in a way, kind of, heals instead of having story always be the thing that’s messing everything up and sending you down the wrong path.

Now you’re using story to a different light, if you will. And it’s both, you know, because we’re all caught in some version of story. That’s what paradigms are, you know, a story of doom is also a story, but it’s both. It absolutely is both, but it only changes if we are the weavers at the heart of that story.

We’re doing it with awareness. knowing that it’s not real, but we give it as much power as we want. Well, we can make it real by weaving a new story and making that have meaning and following that story and surrendering actually to our own story. I’ve started doing that and I’m living a much happier life,

And it’s not that I’m deluding myself. The Greeks call that being double minded, not choosing one of the conversations. languages to have a conversation of life in. But what they called wisdom was being double minded, which meant holding those two conversations of reason and mythos together at the same time, at every moment.

And letting them just ebb and flow slightly, because in the tension of the two is where the story is revealed. are you wearing a pin? A metal pin? Yeah, it’s a little thing from my wife. My wife’s Irish, and this is a cross of St. Bridget, who before the Catholics got hold of it was one of the natural deities.

They didn’t have any great distinction between heroes and goddesses and things in that tradition which I like because it points to the fact that human beings have a divinity in us. We have a heroic nature in us. We’ve got a, vocation in us. So we have different archetypes that we can relate to.

I like this little one. I’ll tell you maybe one day what it all stands and means. this is my robe of office as a bard, you know, I have my bards baton, you know, that I made, which has a snake winding up it and the letters Aleph. Which you can’t see very well. That’s the Hebrew letter Aleph and Tav, which are the top and tail of the Hebrew alphabet.

It’s all got great symbolism and meaning. And the lovely thing is all teaching archetypes, like a wizard or whatever, always had a wand or a staff or a something, but Bards had a baton. And uniquely about a baton is it’s not just a symbol of power. A baton is meant to be passed on. The race always continues and you pass the baton on, and one day I will pass this baton on.

That’s the point. Anyway, I hear the pitter patter of, title of feat at the door. So, unless there’s any more comments or questions, I think it’s probably a good place, Simon, to, to draw a bow on this. can we just close the space together?

Yeah, I think let’s see here. Who have we got? Oh, yeah. David’s still here. And Greta, I think may have dropped off. Yeah, that’s right. So what I just want to do in closing, if that’s okay with everyone, if everyone can just be really present for a moment and stop what you’re doing, if you’re doing something else.

I invite you to explore whether this conversation has been expansive and nourishing and spacious for you. And there’s nothing profoundly mystical or anything that I want to say. It’s just. for us to have come together here to talk about something so profoundly hopeful and beautiful, and to have shared this time with you means an awful lot to me.

I have true gratitude, that I don’t have to solicit the words for inside of myself. I’m truly just expressing my own truth here because this is what I wanted to do with my life. And it’s meaningless if there’s not people to share it with. So I really appreciate that. And from that sentiment of gratitude and appreciation, I’d like to close this space.

And send you all on your way with these ideas and let them trouble you in beautiful ways until we meet again.

Thank you so much Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for being here what you can do is stop recording and i’ll stick around if anybody has questions, but it will be chaos time. Thank you for being part of the conversation.