Speaker 1: I'm wired for optimism and possibility. I'm predisposed to a
Speaker 1: positive interpretation of the world around me, and some of
Speaker 1: that is genetic, some of that is probably biochemical, and
Speaker 1: some of that is survival.
Speaker 2: This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, author speaker,
Speaker 2: podcast and television host Baritunde Thurston joins me to talk
Speaker 2: about grief and joy, and investing in relationships and the
Speaker 2: subversive nature of play, Settle in Everybody. All of that
Speaker 2: and more coming up right after this first break before
Speaker 2: we get started.
Speaker 3: Two quick notes.
Speaker 2: One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on
Speaker 2: break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing
Speaker 2: a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three
Speaker 2: seasons of the show. Some of these conversations you might
Speaker 2: have missed in your original seasons, and some shows just
Speaker 2: truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of
Speaker 2: the goodness. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional,
Speaker 2: relational territory and our time here together, this show is
Speaker 2: not a substitute for skilled support with a license mental
Speaker 2: health provider or for professional supervision related to your work,
Speaker 2: take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your
Speaker 2: reflections out into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends,
Speaker 2: there's so much to celebrate and there's so much to mourn.
Speaker 2: With this week's guest, Baritundae Thurston, this week's episode is
Speaker 2: so stacked with joy and silliness. I cannot wait for
Speaker 2: you to hear it now. This week's episode also talks
Speaker 2: about pain, with grief stemming from personal losses and racial violence,
Speaker 2: and generational grief, grief over the changing planet, and I
Speaker 2: can't wait for you to hear that either. Baritunda is
Speaker 2: an Emmy nominated storyteller and producer, operating, as he says,
Speaker 2: at the intersection of race, tech, democracy, and climate. He's
Speaker 2: the host of the PBS television series America Outdoors with
Speaker 2: Barratundi Thurston, creator and host of the podcast Had a
Speaker 2: Citizen with Barratunde, and a founding partner of the new
Speaker 2: media startup Puck. His comedic memoir How to Be Black
Speaker 2: as a New York Times bestseller, and in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: he delivered what MSNBC's Brian Williams called one of the
Speaker 2: greatest Ted Talks of all time. Baratunde is also really
Speaker 2: funny and kind and thoughtful and totally willing to explore
Speaker 2: topics a lot of people would probably like to avoid
Speaker 2: if they were given the chance. Nobody's given the chance
Speaker 2: to avoid this stuff when they're hanging out with me.
Speaker 2: But some of the things that we discussed in our
Speaker 2: time together, Marratunde's father died when he was a child,
Speaker 2: and we talked about how that didn't seem like a
Speaker 2: big deal when he was a kid, which is really
Speaker 2: interesting for a number of reasons, but one of them
Speaker 2: is that he's the second or third guest this season
Speaker 2: to have a parent die in their childhood, and they
Speaker 2: didn't really realize that there was grief involved there until
Speaker 2: much later in their lives. We talked about how he
Speaker 2: learned that there was grief there by getting emotional when
Speaker 2: he saw his friends being good parents to their own kids.
Speaker 2: Also fascinating, there's so much grief we don't recognize if
Speaker 2: we're not looking for it right. It's fascinating to know
Speaker 2: also that I am not the only one who feels
Speaker 2: sadness well up in me when I see somebody being
Speaker 2: kind to someone else, Like even if I am completely
Speaker 2: not involved in the thing, Like, seeing somebody be kind
Speaker 2: and amazing is really emotional for me. So if that's
Speaker 2: you to the whole, somebody being kind makes me a
Speaker 2: weepy thing. You are not alone in that baratunde, He's
Speaker 2: with you.
Speaker 3: I'm with you. We also talked about the.
Speaker 2: Kind of more obvious in your face grief, the constant
Speaker 2: news cycles of black men and black boys being killed,
Speaker 2: what it's like seeing people who look like you suffering
Speaker 2: and being harmed on a regular basis. We talked about
Speaker 2: what it's like living in a world where you can
Speaker 2: be killed for just existing. And we had this really
Speaker 2: cool conversation about getting to decide what you look at like,
Speaker 2: how you see yourself and the people who look like
Speaker 2: you being portrayed. What images do you consume? Are you
Speaker 2: like consuming only painful images? What else is in there?
Speaker 2: That led us into a slightly subversive conversation about play
Speaker 2: and joy and the healing power of community.
Speaker 3: We talked about a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2: I found this conversation to be so nourishing, so life
Speaker 2: affirming in the face of cascading pain and losses personally
Speaker 2: and collectively. There's so much bad news in this world.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you've noticed, we don't like need
Speaker 2: a distraction from the bad news. We have things we
Speaker 2: really do need to face, but we might need to
Speaker 2: find find ways to let more joy exist alongside all
Speaker 2: that pain. As you'll hear Baratunde say when we get
Speaker 2: into his hope for the future, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: power and potential in our human creativity. So if you've
Speaker 2: ever wondered how to create a life that includes both
Speaker 2: grief and joy, or wondered if that's even possible, this
Speaker 2: episode is for you. Here's my conversation with the excellent
Speaker 2: Baritunde Thurston.
Speaker 3: Baraituni.
Speaker 2: I am so glad to have you here with me today.
Speaker 2: There are so many places that we could begin our conversation,
Speaker 2: But I was telling you before we started ruling that
Speaker 2: I've been like living in your collected works for the
Speaker 2: last couple of days, and there's just there's so much
Speaker 2: joy in what you do and how you show up
Speaker 2: in the world, even when so much of what you're covering,
Speaker 2: what you're discussing, what you're getting into is really serious
Speaker 2: and really painful, and I just like, I feel like
Speaker 2: there's this combination of celebration and grieving threading through all
Speaker 2: of your work. Does that feel am I accurate?
Speaker 1: Grief and celebration is a really accurate way to encapsulate
Speaker 1: the wide range of things I'm up to. You know,
Speaker 1: I write about my host shows about I talk about
Speaker 1: race and technology and democracy, really easy stuff that always
Speaker 1: brings people joy.
Speaker 2: Megan bringing the joy.
Speaker 1: They can be very heavy, and there is a lot
Speaker 1: to mourn, you know. There's a lot to mourn with
Speaker 1: our planet and with our relationship to nature. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to mourn with the racial history in the United
Speaker 1: States and our unwillingness to integrate it as a full
Speaker 1: part of our whole history, but instead try to like
Speaker 1: pretend it didn't happen, which just makes it fester and
Speaker 1: come out sideways. There's a lot to mourn in our
Speaker 1: loss of ritual and habit and tradition. Because things are
Speaker 1: changing so quickly within a single generation, we are losing
Speaker 1: touch with ourselves. We had millennia, at least hundreds of
Speaker 1: years where a great great grandparent had the same life
Speaker 1: as their great great grandchild, and now an older sibling
Speaker 1: and a younger sibling are speaking different languages. That's worth acknowledging.
Speaker 1: The loss of pattern and legacy in that, and we're
Speaker 1: up to some dope things, you know, we still have
Speaker 1: We always have a chance to create something new. I
Speaker 1: think we have a better shot at it if we
Speaker 1: acknowledge the loss as opposed to pretend this death didn't happen.
Speaker 1: But it's not the end. Loss is not the end.
Speaker 1: Death is not the end. There's a cycle to all
Speaker 1: of this, and so I get self motivated by remembering
Speaker 1: the cycle and trying not to get stuck in any
Speaker 1: particular piece of it, especially the grieving part of it.
Speaker 1: No one has encapsulated or tried to summarize what I
Speaker 1: do as that as grieving and celebrating, and it's this
Speaker 1: duality that I've carried for a long time. So thanks
Speaker 1: for seeing that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's part of my lens on the world,
Speaker 2: right Like that is that is how I see all
Speaker 2: of that. I love that you brought up acknowledgment, right that.
Speaker 2: For me, the entire thing here is to acknowledge what's
Speaker 2: real and tell the truth about how hard it is
Speaker 2: to be here sometimes tell the truth about really difficult
Speaker 2: things I don't always go with, so that we can
Speaker 2: celebrate because there can be something kind of transactional in
Speaker 2: that for me. And again I come back to like
Speaker 2: the cadence in the way that you speak about things,
Speaker 2: the pacing with which you speak about things.
Speaker 3: I never got that sense from.
Speaker 2: You in listening to your TED talks or your podcast
Speaker 2: or reading your writing. I never got the sense that
Speaker 2: you were acknowledging so that you could move past, but
Speaker 2: that there was a twinning.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, if anything, my practice of acknowledgment has
Speaker 1: deepened over the past few years. So I'm wired for
Speaker 1: optimism and possibility. I'm predisposed to a positive interpretation of
Speaker 1: the world around me. And some of that is genetic,
Speaker 1: some of that is probably biochemical, and some of that
Speaker 1: is survival. And you know, when faced with a certain challenge,
Speaker 1: you know, you can see it play out in my
Speaker 1: patterns with my wife. She might bring up something uncomfortable
Speaker 1: and I'll try to flip it to the pie We're good.
Speaker 1: And I don't do that so much anymore. I think
Speaker 1: for a long time I didn't trust existing in the grief,
Speaker 1: and you know, and if I did, it was intuitive,
Speaker 1: but not a self aware choice. It's increasingly a choice
Speaker 1: to kind of sit with the pain, the discomfort the
Speaker 1: loss of the morning and try to even be grateful
Speaker 1: for that feeling. You know, it's such a human feeling
Speaker 1: and and to your point, not too quickly try to
Speaker 1: transact out of it. Oh aheah, I did. I did
Speaker 1: my grieving things today. That was five minutes agrieving and
Speaker 1: now I kind of sadness.
Speaker 2: The day I got this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now now we got this, but the rest and
Speaker 1: that's not true or real or honest or ultimately useful.
Speaker 1: So I don't think I've been escaping it, certainly not publicly.
Speaker 1: But you mentioned the TED talk that talk about deconstructing racism,
Speaker 1: and I wove in personal story, which was a choice
Speaker 1: encouraged by others. I had a stellar, clever, smart, funny
Speaker 1: talk with a bit of anger prepared about racism. I
Speaker 1: was good to go, and my wife was like, you
Speaker 1: can go deeper. And actually one of the people at
Speaker 1: TED kind of nudged me. Get more personal, get more vulnerable,
Speaker 1: since there's more there, what's going on there. So I
Speaker 1: had these two women in my life who were encouraging
Speaker 1: me to not race through, and the final version of it,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I paced it, I sat with it, I
Speaker 1: slowed it down, and it was much more powerful for me.
Speaker 1: And when I left that stage, which people didn't see
Speaker 1: as I exploded into tears, just absolutely a release physical
Speaker 1: and emotional, and that was a sign for me of
Speaker 1: how like real that moment was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is such a push, right, Like I know
Speaker 2: this as a fellow speaker, and how those talk whisperers
Speaker 2: are like, no, you have to you have to bring
Speaker 2: your heart to the stage otherwise this won't reach other
Speaker 2: people's home arts. And that's difficult. It's difficult on a
Speaker 2: lot of different levels. But I think like we well,
Speaker 2: I don't want to answer I don't want to answer
Speaker 2: this question. I want to ask this question, like I
Speaker 2: want to talk about like role models in grief and
Speaker 2: grief in the black community, and grief for men, and
Speaker 2: grief for the age in which you came up, and
Speaker 2: like I think all of that can sort of be
Speaker 2: covered by a question like what has been your relationship
Speaker 2: with grief, you know, coming from your childhood experiences and
Speaker 2: then up through and and where you sit with it now.
Speaker 2: I know that's a really big, like dense, dark matter
Speaker 2: kind of question which we could take like five, we
Speaker 2: could do an entire like series on just answering that question.
Speaker 2: But I if I ask you that, like, how has
Speaker 2: your relationship with grief changed over the decades, bringing in
Speaker 2: all you know about role models and what is safe
Speaker 2: and what is not safe to share with yourself or
Speaker 2: share publicly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was seven or eight. I really should
Speaker 1: fact check the timeline. I'm always thinking I'm seven or
Speaker 1: eight and there is a there's a noble there's a
Speaker 1: noble date here, but I don't know what this second.
Speaker 1: When I was young, my father was killed. He was shot.
Speaker 1: It was in the middle of the night. Maybe it
Speaker 1: was a robbery. No one was ever found for it.
Speaker 1: I remember getting the news from my mother, who was
Speaker 1: living separately from him at the time, so I lived
Speaker 1: with her and occasionally saw him, and I didn't know
Speaker 1: him that well. He was like, he was the father
Speaker 1: you're supposed to it is your dad. And I was
Speaker 1: given the option of going to the funeral, and I
Speaker 1: was like, now, I'm good. I don't looking at a
Speaker 1: dead body does not feel like a good time to
Speaker 1: this child. I will pass And I cried and I
Speaker 1: felt sad, and then I just kind of closed the
Speaker 1: door and I lost contact with his family. So I
Speaker 1: just had my mom and my sister, my older sister
Speaker 1: helping bring me up. And I thought, when I thought
Speaker 1: about him, I think I'm good here right like I'm
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to be sad or lost my father. I
Speaker 1: also know things about him that make it more complicated.
Speaker 1: You know, he had a lot of demons and they
Speaker 1: showed up in some nasty ways, and I missed exposure
Speaker 1: to a lot of that. And whatever supposed to happen
Speaker 1: in my life is happening. So I'm grateful for the
Speaker 1: life I have and this mom. She loves me, and
Speaker 1: I'm healthy, and I've gone to college, and I've got
Speaker 1: jobs and paying back loans and falling in love and
Speaker 1: just living. And I had not really dealt with his death.
Speaker 1: I'd never fully grieved. I grieved my mother's death more
Speaker 1: when she died in two thousand and five. That hit
Speaker 1: me months later, almost a year, got knocked on my ass.
Speaker 1: And I'm still processing her loss because she represented so much.
Speaker 1: She was both parents and a village at times, and
Speaker 1: with my father, I found myself on this journey prompted
Speaker 1: by the universe to reconnect with that grief. A cousin
Speaker 1: found me on Facebook. I saw you on TV. I
Speaker 1: think I'm your cousin, Like every black person thinks I'm
Speaker 1: your cousin when they see me on TV. This is
Speaker 1: not special. But she had the paperwork to prove it.
Speaker 1: She had the long form birth certificate. She had photos
Speaker 1: of me when I was a baby, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I know what I look like. I was super cute.
Speaker 1: That's me. Those are my cheeks, you know. So that
Speaker 1: begeans a relationship with my father's mother, also known as
Speaker 1: my grandmother, who I had totally lost touch with. With
Speaker 1: his brother and but most importantly, with a version of him.
Speaker 1: I started like having these conversations and moments and angry tirades,
Speaker 1: just stuff I clearly needed to get off my chest.
Speaker 1: And the evolution continued. I'm a part of a men's group.
Speaker 1: As a group of black men, we kind of we
Speaker 1: hold each other. We hold each other up, we hold
Speaker 1: each other accountable, we hold each other emotionally. I've never
Speaker 1: had anything like this in my life see dead father above.
Speaker 1: So I'm in this circle with many men who are fathers,
Speaker 1: and I'm finding I'm getting so emotional about something about them, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're being a dad. I don't know what that's like
Speaker 1: and I'm low key jealous, and I'm also like feeding
Speaker 1: off of their fatherhood energy that was completely missing from
Speaker 1: my construction, from my experience. And I've grieved that, you know,
Speaker 1: you can grieve. I've grieved the person. I've grieved the
Speaker 1: missed opportunities. I've grieved the the inability for the person
Speaker 1: who was my father to heal himself from all the
Speaker 1: things that ailed him and caused him to ail others.
Speaker 1: That's very much a journey from you know, the kid
Speaker 1: who didn't want to go to the funeral and thought
Speaker 1: he was okay until thirties. I'm forty five now and
Speaker 1: still adjusting that relationship with grief. That's one version of
Speaker 1: an answer to your prompt and your question. So as
Speaker 1: distant as my relationship with grief was as a child,
Speaker 1: there was another example which made it very close, and
Speaker 1: it was an example of collective grief. I was at
Speaker 1: this private school in DC starting in seventh grade. Sidwell
Speaker 1: Friends School is pretty famous now, small black community of
Speaker 1: students and parents. My mother is a member of the
Speaker 1: Parents of Black Students organization. Organize a gathering like a meeting,
Speaker 1: like a little revolutionary sleeper cell meeting that's what you
Speaker 1: know we do in white schools. And we were She
Speaker 1: organized us into a circle and we all closed our eyes,
Speaker 1: and she had us imagine that we were in the
Speaker 1: bowels of a ship being brought here and just to
Speaker 1: feel what does that feel like? What are you hearing?
Speaker 1: What are you sensing? Can we feel gratitude for those
Speaker 1: people who made it through that journey so that we
Speaker 1: could be here on this stage, in this meeting room wherever,
Speaker 1: and she asked us to mourn. There's so much of
Speaker 1: the black experience here that is about persevering, making a
Speaker 1: way out of no way. There are literally thousands of
Speaker 1: songs that channel the same energy, resonate at pretty much
Speaker 1: the same frequency of like just getting through it and
Speaker 1: not pausing to acknowledge it. And that was a really
Speaker 1: early modeling for me of the power of pausing, of
Speaker 1: collectively mourning and grieving and acknowledging the hurt and the pain.
Speaker 1: There's there's a lot of racial movement education stuff which
Speaker 1: is trying to get like white people to acknowledge and
Speaker 1: get men to acknowledge what they've done to women. There's
Speaker 1: all kinds like in the power Dynamic, get the powerful
Speaker 1: quote unquote to admit or acknowledge. But we all have
Speaker 1: a version of that. And I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, experience in the black community that's like
Speaker 1: I don't want to I don't want to touch that.
Speaker 1: That's too painful, that connects too many dots. I don't
Speaker 1: want to see that picture. And it's really hard. It's
Speaker 1: really hard to do it to like sit still with it,
Speaker 1: and then I breathe through it and shed the tears
Speaker 1: and then find hopefully through the other side of it,
Speaker 1: ways and reasons to keep going. The duality I'm holding
Speaker 1: right now is I'm pretty exhausted of the struggle and
Speaker 1: pain story. I'm exhausted of the like convinced white people
Speaker 1: to be better humans so that I can be human story.
Speaker 1: And so I'm you know, looking at other joyful, hopeful
Speaker 1: ways of being that don't require waiting for someone else
Speaker 1: or accepting as the main narrative suffering. That just doesn't
Speaker 1: it doesn't fit me anymore. And so our acknowledgment and
Speaker 1: evolution transcendence parallel paths to freedom like joy and silliness.
Speaker 1: That's also really, really really important to me.
Speaker 2: Increasingly, you know, I think about your writing about the
Speaker 2: killing of unarmed black men and black boys.
Speaker 3: I think about the.
Speaker 2: Rage and the grief and the morning you've written America
Speaker 2: is addicted to watching me die, to watching itself die.
Speaker 2: And as I was getting ready for our conversation today,
Speaker 2: I was like, there's a reason why I started with
Speaker 2: your joy when we are talking about what it's like
Speaker 2: to be black in this community, and I'm saying, this
Speaker 2: is a white person who doesn't fucking know anything about it,
Speaker 2: But like there is this like relentless narrative of pain
Speaker 2: and suffering, and you have to fight to not be
Speaker 2: only identified as that, yeah, which is just like Hello,
Speaker 2: it's already exhausting to stay alive in a system that
Speaker 2: keeps trying to make you dead and hold you down
Speaker 2: and hold you back, And we also have to fight
Speaker 2: this hard to have joy, to access joy, and that
Speaker 2: that joy and joy is really hard won, right, Like
Speaker 2: we prize resilience, right instead of addressing the systems that
Speaker 2: force you to be resilient, right, I mean, it's just
Speaker 2: such a it's just such trash, And to be able
Speaker 2: to ferociously hold onto joy is such a powerful thing,
Speaker 2: you know, Like I can talk myself in circles on
Speaker 2: this one. But I think that there's there's also something
Speaker 2: in what you said that leaving the white folks aside
Speaker 2: for a moment, Like it's it's hard to get people
Speaker 2: to continue to hold their gaze on how much pain
Speaker 2: and suffering there is, right Like seeing black men die
Speaker 2: over and over and over again on the news, seeing
Speaker 2: black trans women die over and over and over again
Speaker 2: on the news, seeing high maternal death rates for black women,
Speaker 2: like it's just fucking relentless and touching the grief of that, Like,
Speaker 2: I get it that people don't want to touch that.
Speaker 2: We don't want to touch grief in general, right, Like
Speaker 2: we don't want to talk about any kind of grief.
Speaker 2: And you start to get into the complex systems of
Speaker 2: grief and the overwhelming grief and the preventable grief, and
Speaker 2: it just sort of fries the circuits. Is there a
Speaker 2: way that you have found to not do the transactional
Speaker 2: joy to celebration thing, but to speak into that grief
Speaker 2: and that anger in a way that feels like it
Speaker 2: it does the grief justice in a way.
Speaker 1: When I do public speaking since COVID, during COVID, during
Speaker 1: my public talks during COVID, I dropped a lot of
Speaker 1: my put on diplomacy. I'm a natural peacemaker. I was
Speaker 1: in my family as a kid. I helped my mom
Speaker 1: negotiate with an angry motorist or neighbor, or I'd write
Speaker 1: letters on behalf, you know, to try to get through
Speaker 1: some challenge in a peaceful, diplomatic, positive way. And so
Speaker 1: I'm the family diplomat, and I've worked in school in
Speaker 1: certain circumstances, and that's just I honed that for a while.
Speaker 1: I thought, Oh, this is just who I am. I'm
Speaker 1: just this naturally positive person, and that's a part of
Speaker 1: the story. I also think there's a part of it
Speaker 1: which is like, for me to show real rage and anger,
Speaker 1: it can be threatening to people and become a threat
Speaker 1: to myself. So I have to manage those weightier emotions,
Speaker 1: those more volatile parts of myself, because that's just a
Speaker 1: story that I've seen too many times. He was in
Speaker 1: a rage, he was coming right for me. He looked threatening.
Speaker 1: He reached suddenly. I was like, I'm not reaching for nothing.
Speaker 1: I staple my driver's license to my forehead when I
Speaker 1: drive now it's a little special holder in the baseball cap.
Speaker 1: It's great. So you know, this is a reasonable solution
Speaker 1: to an unreasonable problem. Just baseball cap visors for your
Speaker 1: license and registration, pre shipped to all people of color.
Speaker 1: I found during COVID I locked. I lost the ability
Speaker 1: to maintain that diplomatic air, and I just let more
Speaker 1: of the anger show. There's a there's a physical kind
Speaker 1: of metaphor for this. When most of my presentations pre COVID,
Speaker 1: I had amazing slides, Megan, I'm so good at like
Speaker 1: PowerPoint keynote I have. I could just work. Give me
Speaker 1: like some giddy images, a little bit of photoshop, my
Speaker 1: font selection, you know, good San Sarah font like, oh
Speaker 1: let's go, let's crush this. And part of the show,
Speaker 1: even the Ted talk we mentioned that's a slide show.
Speaker 1: That is aid show there is. It's timed, this color coded.
Speaker 1: It's almost a game. And I was really prided myself
Speaker 1: on that. That's also a shield, you know, And so
Speaker 1: I put that down. I don't use slides anymore. Now
Speaker 1: that we're back in person doing live events, they're like,
Speaker 1: what do you need for AV Just a microphone and
Speaker 1: light and a backup mic in case something goes wrong,
Speaker 1: that's all. Maybe a chair if I get tired or
Speaker 1: want to strut around or lean on it with a
Speaker 1: smooth affect. Yeah, a little prop But I was not
Speaker 1: one prior to let anger into my talks. I let
Speaker 1: it flow. Now it comes across in my writing much more.
Speaker 1: My way of not transacting through to get to the
Speaker 1: joy is to like fully experience the grief, the morning,
Speaker 1: the anger, the rage, and communicate it much more than
Speaker 1: I'm used to. I've got to let it out when
Speaker 1: it's when I hold it in, when I suppress it
Speaker 1: with a perfectly timed in place but not heartfelt bit
Speaker 1: of humor. Oh look at everything. Okay, my voice goes
Speaker 1: up on the black of it is re all fine.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a telltale sign. I have learned the
Speaker 1: physical tells of myself. When am I holding back and
Speaker 1: I'm with my partner Elizabeth, you know she I am
Speaker 1: blessed and cursed with a partner who has an incredible radar,
Speaker 1: incredibly emotional radar, so she knows when I'm not being
Speaker 1: fully forthcoming, like there's no faking it till you make
Speaker 1: it with her. Which is a real problem, man, real
Speaker 1: Like you gotta be able to keep some stuff from
Speaker 1: your part not like you know crimes. I'm just like,
Speaker 1: just bake, did you buy the thing? Yeah? I was
Speaker 1: going on, Oh man, she do. So I've got more
Speaker 1: reps in in practice and my most you know, intimate
Speaker 1: and close relationship with what happens when I open that door,
Speaker 1: and it's it's harder and it's better, right, I won't.
Speaker 1: It's just it's not like, oh yeah, I just I
Speaker 1: experienced my grief now and all of my darker emotions
Speaker 1: and life's great. You know, like every moment is just
Speaker 1: that's not the story. It is not a quick fix.
Speaker 1: This is nothing but going through the experience. It just
Speaker 1: increasingly feels like me, like the right thing, and then
Speaker 1: you know, I can seek out other types of experiences.
Speaker 1: There's this thing flying around black men frolicking stilly is
Speaker 1: TikTok Instagram reels. I don't know who started it, but
Speaker 1: it's just you know, dudes holding up the selfie cam
Speaker 1: their arm as selfie stick, running through fields like, oh
Speaker 1: we frolicking. I didn't they tell me we was frolicking.
Speaker 2: Yo.
Speaker 1: And one of I have this this brother, our Juna O'Neil.
Speaker 1: He's a coach and men's leadership counselor and I've been
Speaker 1: working with him and becoming friends with him at the
Speaker 1: same time, and he shared this with me and he
Speaker 1: did a video. I'm like, I want to frolic. This
Speaker 1: is amazing. We never see men frolicking, right, We're not
Speaker 1: supposed to. Like frolicking is what girls do or children
Speaker 1: or these like weaker beings that we crush in our
Speaker 1: minds because we don't want to be anything like that
Speaker 1: about men's business, which is stoicism and pain and suppressed
Speaker 1: human experiences. That's what it is to be a man,
Speaker 1: to let your inner child run rampant through your adult
Speaker 1: life because you know no one modeled for us how
Speaker 1: to deal with these things except through maybe violence or
Speaker 1: alcohol or some other substances or just deep, deep silence.
Speaker 1: So I really kind of experience those joyful moments more
Speaker 1: fully when I'm myself have gone through the mournful moments too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something about finding ways to be real like
Speaker 2: that with yourself, with people with whom you feel trust,
Speaker 2: who who can be trusted with that depth, right, and
Speaker 2: then being able to bring more of that self out
Speaker 2: into the world.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's like it's not the math equation of like feel
Speaker 2: the pain go get your joy. It's more the more
Speaker 2: you come into relationship with what is true and real
Speaker 2: for you and find ways to communicate and connect inside that,
Speaker 2: the more of everything becomes available. Right, And you mentioned
Speaker 2: like I love that frolicking TikTok.
Speaker 3: It's awesome.
Speaker 2: I will link to it everybody. But like there is
Speaker 2: something dangerous in being playful or something not allowed subversive, subversive.
Speaker 3: In being playful.
Speaker 2: And you know, you think like, oh, it's easy, like
Speaker 2: just go do this and this, but like we were
Speaker 2: talking like decades, centuries of so many things that say
Speaker 2: exactly how you described it, right, Like play is weak.
Speaker 2: Joy is weak, and it takes a lot of strength
Speaker 2: and trust to play with other grown ups.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. That's a good one. That's a really
Speaker 1: good one. I remember a poster from maybe the nineties.
Speaker 1: Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten.
Speaker 2: Oh right, Oh my gosh, Yeah something was that guy's name.
Speaker 2: Oh I'm gonna have to go look it up. But yeah,
Speaker 2: we're both like, where is it in the brain library?
Speaker 2: Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten. It's
Speaker 2: about like sharing and taking turns and like not wiping
Speaker 2: your nose.
Speaker 3: On your sleeve, all all of that.
Speaker 2: Stuff, But there is, like there is there is something
Speaker 2: very scary about joy and very scary about play. And
Speaker 2: if there is anything transactional in exploring the depth of
Speaker 2: emotions or the truth of emotions, it's that you know,
Speaker 2: the more you come into connection and relationship with yourself
Speaker 2: in that stuff, the more you can come into relationship
Speaker 2: with that stuff in others. Absolutely, And I think like
Speaker 2: this this sort of also brings us to again listening
Speaker 2: to your collected works and reading you and listening to
Speaker 2: your podcasts and watching your talks, like not only does
Speaker 2: joy and celebration weave through so much of who you
Speaker 2: are and how you show up, but also community as
Speaker 2: restorative medicine, as necessary medicine for surviving what needs to
Speaker 2: be survived. So if we bring community into this, I
Speaker 2: feel like that's a nice dovetail from being safe enough
Speaker 2: to play with grown ups? Like, Yeah, where does community
Speaker 2: come into all of this conversation?
Speaker 3: For you?
Speaker 1: As yearning and longing in part as I'm still relatively
Speaker 1: mobile in my life and I'm feeling needs to root
Speaker 1: more dig into where I live as urgency given age
Speaker 1: and the steady realization like oh, there may be some
Speaker 1: maybe less time ahead than behind, like that kind of moment.
Speaker 1: I will live to one hundred and thirty. But if
Speaker 1: I'm keeping myself in the range of regular mortality, then
Speaker 1: you know, forty five is a good time to start
Speaker 1: thinking about that kind of stuff. And you know, who
Speaker 1: do I love? Who am I spending time with? Like
Speaker 1: who's my chosen community? Whose emails I'm going to read first?
Speaker 1: You know, like this could be my last email.
Speaker 3: I can sense the overthinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, all right, so maybe I shouldn't be reading email.
Speaker 1: I think I'm just appreciating the specialness of trusted community.
Speaker 1: Increasing This Black men's group I'm a part of has
Speaker 1: been so healing and beautiful. To have a community of
Speaker 1: fellow men who are being emotionally open with each other,
Speaker 1: really open, who are nudging each other toward that vulnerability.
Speaker 1: I'll bring that challenge your face into the group. There's
Speaker 1: some things we cannot do alone, and most things worth
Speaker 1: doing we probably you know, shouldn't do alone. There's just more,
Speaker 1: literally more with others, and we can share burdens, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of practical values to having other people around.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think I'm becoming more conscious and more
Speaker 1: actively aware of like why I'm drawn to people, what
Speaker 1: groups of people in community kind of bring out in me?
Speaker 1: And there's a magic and an alchemy in a community
Speaker 1: setting of being there for each other in different ways,
Speaker 1: in different moments, and becoming one through the group, like
Speaker 1: a forest does. Everything is everything and then we're just
Speaker 1: trees with thumbs and you know, more selfish and tendencies.
Speaker 1: But the idea that these trees have this you know,
Speaker 1: underground root system and they hook each other up and
Speaker 1: one is low on nutrients and one is diseased and
Speaker 1: transmit information back and forth through fungi. Maybe like community
Speaker 1: is a life thing, right, It's not just a human
Speaker 1: human thing. And so I just I'm in awe of that.
Speaker 1: I love it. It makes me want to be a better
Speaker 1: community member and be more intentional with like who I'm
Speaker 1: in community with and what am I doing? What am
Speaker 1: I bringing to you know, community, what am I offering
Speaker 1: to a community? Which is and in a non transactional sense, right,
Speaker 1: just for the relationship value. You know that our men's
Speaker 1: group is not a finance group. We're not like investigating
Speaker 1: each other's come that might happen at some point but
Speaker 1: that's not the goal. It's just to be in relationship.
Speaker 1: And that's so it's a real prerequisite, I think, for
Speaker 1: a whole life.
Speaker 2: Hey, before we get back to my conversation with Baritunde
Speaker 2: thirst And, I want to tell you about a new
Speaker 2: way to get answers to your questions about grief. Each month,
Speaker 2: every month, I host a live video call in Q
Speaker 2: and a session just for patrons. If you've ever want
Speaker 2: us to know if what you're feeling is normal, come
Speaker 2: ask me. If you want to know how to have
Speaker 2: that conversation with your nosy relative who keeps butting into
Speaker 2: your business with their ideas about what your loss or
Speaker 2: your experience should look like, come join us. I'll help
Speaker 2: you figure out how to communicate a boundary where there
Speaker 2: needs to be a boundary once a month, every month,
Speaker 2: if you've ever wished you could talk to me directly
Speaker 2: and get your questions answered, this is by far the
Speaker 2: easiest way to do it. All of the information is
Speaker 2: at patreon dot com, backslash Megan Divine, or you could
Speaker 2: find the link in the show notes. I hope to
Speaker 2: see you there this month. All right, let's get back
Speaker 2: to my conversation with author, speaker, television host, ridiculously awesome
Speaker 2: human being Marratunde Thurston. We have this pacing in our
Speaker 2: conversation today of like personal collective, personal collective, personal collective
Speaker 2: which I love. I love a micro macro pacing here,
Speaker 2: and a lot of what you're talking about in your
Speaker 2: own personal community building. That's part of how to citizen, right,
Speaker 2: is how do we become.
Speaker 3: A true collective culture.
Speaker 2: How do we show up in our local communities, how
Speaker 2: do we show up in the larger world?
Speaker 1: Right, there's something and the good the you know, citizen
Speaker 1: as a verb is our whole thing, and you can't
Speaker 1: citizen alone. It's antithetical to the idea of being a
Speaker 1: member of society and being in a membership club. Like
Speaker 1: that's what social belonging is, whether it's formalized as a
Speaker 1: democracy or a voting precinct or not. We're all part
Speaker 1: of many communities and we have power. Even if we're
Speaker 1: living in an explicitly authoritarian state, we still have some
Speaker 1: power to shape how that community operates. You know, what
Speaker 1: we give to and what we get out of it
Speaker 1: and the good news, you know, in terms of this
Speaker 1: personal communal micro macro vibe, that I've been learning that
Speaker 1: I had a very formal idea of citizen ing and
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, we elect these people and we go
Speaker 1: to community meetings and very external Megan, it's very like
Speaker 1: the world out there is broken. Let me go with
Speaker 1: my virgoness and my male fix it, and let's let's
Speaker 1: fix it. I've identified problems. I have this brain. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna use it to help the situation out. That's what
Speaker 1: we need. And yeah, but also inside you know, in here,
Speaker 1: you know, invest in relationships is one of our pillars
Speaker 1: of what it means to citizen and the long version
Speaker 1: is investing relationships with yourself with others in the planet
Speaker 1: around you. And so in order to have a relationship
Speaker 1: with the city council or your block committee or your
Speaker 1: office working group, it really helps to have a relationship
Speaker 1: with yourself. And so we can start citizening and experiencing
Speaker 1: and practicing and benefiting from community in way more tangible,
Speaker 1: close and proximate and informal ways. And that just out
Speaker 1: of that was a relief for me. I've been I
Speaker 1: think I've been inundated with a kind of civil education model,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, how a bill becomes a law,
Speaker 1: and you write Congress and you put a change dot
Speaker 1: org petition and you you give all your money that
Speaker 1: like Brian Stevenson for the Legacy Museum with the Lynching
Speaker 1: Museum or whatever. Like you watch Black Panther all the time,
Speaker 1: right and Blu ray and DVD and all the streaming services.
Speaker 1: So yes, there's a lot of external stuff that we
Speaker 1: got to do and that is aided by doing internal
Speaker 1: stuff too, And it's just the bar of entry is
Speaker 1: actually just it's very low. Frontline is us and that's
Speaker 1: I find that very freeing and like destressing. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: we all we literally all have something we can do.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, coming it's terrifying, but it's not complicated,
Speaker 2: yeah right, coming into relationship with yourself and practicing telling
Speaker 2: yourself the truth and listening for that and being brave
Speaker 2: enough to play and find joy and all of the things.
Speaker 2: I love that you just say the frontline is in
Speaker 2: us because this is so much of what I feel
Speaker 2: like I want to talk about and am talking about.
Speaker 3: Like there is.
Speaker 2: Liberation in telling the truth about how hard it is
Speaker 2: to be here. Sometimes there is real community to be
Speaker 2: found when you allow what is real to be real,
Speaker 2: and it does unlock joy and connection and community and
Speaker 2: the change that we need to bring forth.
Speaker 1: There's a study that we came across in making this
Speaker 1: season of the podcast. The season is all about how
Speaker 1: do you create a culture of democracy? Now? How do
Speaker 1: you change the makeup of Congress? Right? How do you
Speaker 1: change the kind of soil that Congress emerges from? And
Speaker 1: because they all come from somewhere, absolutely, they all come
Speaker 1: from next door, right, They come from the classroom next door,
Speaker 1: the house next door, the office next door, and so
Speaker 1: we're we're in community with all these eventual leaders, including ourselves.
Speaker 1: In the Conflict Resolution episodes, one with Prea Parker and
Speaker 1: one with a group called Beyond Conflict, there's a study
Speaker 1: that reveals that we're basically not as divided as we
Speaker 1: think we are. That the way I think Republicans think
Speaker 1: of me is far worse than what they actually think
Speaker 1: of me, which is terrify Because'm pretty sure I don't
Speaker 1: think too now undermining the science, But would we would
Speaker 1: know that for ourselves if we showed up honestly in
Speaker 1: our relationships, right, if we trusted ourselves to be ourselves
Speaker 1: with each other and instead a lot of what has
Speaker 1: happened is we've outsourced that trust and faith to mediators,
Speaker 1: technological mediators, journalistic or allegedly journalistic mediators who have a
Speaker 1: profit motive to convince us of something that isn't as
Speaker 1: true as they want it to be. You know how
Speaker 1: devastatingly and intractably divided we are, how much trash so
Speaker 1: and so it thinks you are. You hear what they
Speaker 1: said about your mama, Like that's the business model for
Speaker 1: a lot of news media, And you believe what they
Speaker 1: said about your mama? Who said what about my what?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: It's on right. And to be in real relationship doesn't
Speaker 1: mean one of us has to interact with all eight
Speaker 1: billion of us. That doesn't scale, but it can scale
Speaker 1: at intermediate steps. If I'm more real with you, more
Speaker 1: real with my partner, more real with my team and
Speaker 1: my staff, that's a little permission structure for all those
Speaker 1: people to mirror that back and be real with me
Speaker 1: and each other and the relationships that they're a part
Speaker 1: of that I'm not a part of. And then we
Speaker 1: get this ripple effect. I wouldn't call it trickle down.
Speaker 1: I'd call it kind of bubble up as a different
Speaker 1: kind of metaphor, so that we end up creating the
Speaker 1: environment and the culture we want. That's some of the
Speaker 1: power of that authentic experience and that real experience of pain,
Speaker 1: sometimes of anger, sometimes of joy sometimes like bring your
Speaker 1: real some of us smother our joy too. Is inappropriate,
Speaker 1: it's inappropriate. This is a professional.
Speaker 2: This is a professional and serious times we are living
Speaker 2: in Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you see, you know, and then we are
Speaker 1: coached to perform that as evidence of leadership. Well, real
Speaker 1: leaders I'm cracking jokes in a meeting, adding gifts to
Speaker 1: the slack channel. Lead greholders might think you're not serious
Speaker 1: about maximizing their value. You ran back to pillaging and destroyer,
Speaker 1: right right, I should say laser focused on that. You're right, yeah,
Speaker 1: no distraction.
Speaker 2: Well, and this is this is true, right, like that
Speaker 2: we can destroy others and the environment when we otherize
Speaker 2: them and when they aren't human and when we don't
Speaker 2: have that limbic resonance with them to go all dorky
Speaker 2: for a second.
Speaker 1: When we think of them as them. Yes, right, Well,
Speaker 1: that thing over there, that forrest, that tree, that nation,
Speaker 1: that person that not me is what we're saying that
Speaker 1: that other you know, as you said, so if we
Speaker 1: can shift that, this Valerie Corps our very first guest.
Speaker 1: I can't talk about her enough because she set us
Speaker 1: on a certain path with her book see no Stranger.
Speaker 1: The stranger is just a part of me. I do
Speaker 1: not yet know. That's the summary of the book. You
Speaker 1: should still read it, but that's the basic point. And
Speaker 1: so if we can internalize the external, then we're actually
Speaker 1: being very selfish when we care for others. That's a neat, little,
Speaker 1: a little semantic act. And we we are a part
Speaker 1: of and that apart from so I keep I keep
Speaker 1: bumping into this annoying lesson Megan in like different areas
Speaker 1: of this, Like, Okay, I did a podcast about citizen
Speaker 1: in cool, cool, cool, Yeah, we're all one. Great, And
Speaker 1: then I've got a little men's group over here. Oh
Speaker 1: we're all one. Here we go again, Here we go.
Speaker 1: I'm out in the woods making them this PBS America outdoors.
Speaker 1: Oh we're part of nature. Not apart from we're all one?
Speaker 1: What's with the oneness? Who's writing these bullet points in
Speaker 1: my project?
Speaker 2: I have actually in my notes this whole concept of
Speaker 2: like we're all one. So like I'm apparently I've been
Speaker 2: I've been conscripted to be part of your bullet pointing.
Speaker 2: Here's but here's the thing, right, is that same topic
Speaker 2: different tones, right, Like this is something that happens very often,
Speaker 2: Like when we start talking about race and inequality and injustice,
Speaker 2: you've got some folks being like.
Speaker 3: But we're all one.
Speaker 2: There's no difference here. We're all just can't We're all
Speaker 2: just oh my god. Right, But there's a way that
Speaker 2: we can talk about our interrelatedness and our interconnection as
Speaker 2: a way of bypassing the real work that needs to
Speaker 2: be done. And there is a way to engage with
Speaker 2: our interrelatedness that actually makes things better.
Speaker 1: Thank you for that distinction, Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the whole we are one thing is really irritating.
Speaker 1: Right, But so.
Speaker 2: Much of what you're doing in this whole like we
Speaker 2: are one thing. And I hear that, and I see
Speaker 2: that theme running through in the way that you're claiming it,
Speaker 2: and it's like there's this drive to embrace the complexity
Speaker 2: and that you don't have this part without this part,
Speaker 2: and you don't have the healing or the restoration of
Speaker 2: this part without this relationship. And it's all about relatedness,
Speaker 2: not about the erasure of difference.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely, that's it. That's it. And the people who
Speaker 1: want to skip to the happy ending, you know, they're
Speaker 1: just kind of like reading that last sentence on oh
Speaker 1: we're all one cool, then I don't I don't have
Speaker 1: to do any I don't have to do anything. That's
Speaker 1: the bypass thing that you talked about. So, you know,
Speaker 1: the healing where it requires acknowledgment of injury and pain,
Speaker 1: and so there's some necessary sequencing of some of these steps.
Speaker 1: I do believe they head in that same direction. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, we've created a lot of compelling fictions for
Speaker 1: ourselves that draw lines between us, and then we've built
Speaker 1: powerful structures along those fictional minds to make the impacts
Speaker 1: really felt. And that's the that's it's almost a paradox.
Speaker 1: It's certainly a kind of a conundrum. You could take
Speaker 1: it as well. Okay, race isn't scientifically real, but it's
Speaker 1: a socially constructed thing that was based in law and
Speaker 1: finance and physical labor and actual abuse and real blood.
Speaker 1: So racism is that's kind of a logical slippery thing.
Speaker 1: Race isn't real. How is racism real? Because we made
Speaker 1: it real. That's the power of our mind and our
Speaker 1: collective minds. The US dollars not real. Actually, it's just
Speaker 1: like a collective shared delusion that's powerful enough to get
Speaker 1: us to go to work and pay for food and housing,
Speaker 1: right with this made up thing that has no basis
Speaker 1: in like physical reality. So fiction is powerful. Things that
Speaker 1: aren't real can make things be real. And that is
Speaker 1: a that's a beautiful confusion and then a beautiful tension
Speaker 1: and paradoxical thing. But I think some of the best
Speaker 1: things in life are right, they are and they aren't
Speaker 1: at the same time. It's they're they're That's kind of
Speaker 1: a quantum thing. Keep bumping also into quantum. Stuff keeps
Speaker 1: coming up from Sam Raider. She talks about quantum all
Speaker 1: the time, and quantum Marvel keeps launching these quantum movies.
Speaker 1: So from from pop culture, it's like deep you know,
Speaker 1: emotional and psychological work. Quantum ken coming up, So there
Speaker 1: must be something to it.
Speaker 3: There must be.
Speaker 2: I mean, biggest living organism in the entire world is microhizome, right,
Speaker 2: So like that's quantum and it is all the same time, like.
Speaker 1: We really what is your biome telling you the.
Speaker 2: Visible and the invisible world? Oh my gosh, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to keep you for the next three years here
Speaker 2: on this sip. But like we didn't even get to
Speaker 2: talk about like forest ecology and how that like all
Speaker 2: of the all of the things. So I I'm going
Speaker 2: to pull my own brain back from the radness of
Speaker 2: quantum overlaps with everything and.
Speaker 3: Set us up for.
Speaker 2: The last complex thing that we'll discuss on our time together.
Speaker 1: Great, all right.
Speaker 2: At the end of your twenty nineteen Ted talk, now
Speaker 2: Helen Walters ask you a question, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: completely paraphrase here. She said, basically, there's so much ugliness
Speaker 2: in our culture everywhere all around, and she wondered if
Speaker 2: you had any hope and going back to what you
Speaker 2: just said about the power of fictions that we create
Speaker 2: and the power of stories that we create. Your answer
Speaker 2: back then in twenty nineteen was about freeing ourselves from
Speaker 2: the lies that we'd been told. And so we're sitting
Speaker 2: here three years later. You've already talked about how things
Speaker 2: have changed for you, about what you're willing to do
Speaker 2: and how you're willing to show up in those three
Speaker 2: years sense, but I want to revisit that question. Yeah,
Speaker 2: knowing what you know, and living what you've lived, knowing
Speaker 2: what's unfolded since that stage three years ago. What does
Speaker 2: hope look like for you now?
Speaker 1: Hope looks like a tree. It's deeply rooted and it's
Speaker 1: striving to grow. It's willing to change. It's not threatened
Speaker 1: by growing a new limb or maybe losing one. It's
Speaker 1: just this in the nature of treeness to experience all
Speaker 1: these things. And I think there's something for me about
Speaker 1: hope that it has to remain very grounded. There is
Speaker 1: a fleeting ethereal wispy hope that you can't grab on to.
Speaker 1: It's like smoke. I don't like that one. I think
Speaker 1: that one's less useful. It makes for pretty words, but
Speaker 1: maybe not much else. So I hope that's grounded. I
Speaker 1: hope that grieves so that you know, at some point
Speaker 1: it can help celebrate. That's more of my flavor. The
Speaker 1: thing that I was feeling in that stage moment, which
Speaker 1: is a very unscripted moment by the way, I caught
Speaker 1: me off guard. I was like, I'm done, I'm good.
Speaker 1: The fiction part that we were just talking about is
Speaker 1: so it's it's kind of the whole thing. My hope
Speaker 1: is grounded in our creative possibility, in our own creativity,
Speaker 1: and we can be destructively creative, but I also think
Speaker 1: we can be beautifully you know, hopefully creative. And so
Speaker 1: when I look at when I'm grounded in the evidence
Speaker 1: of what we've chosen to make real from our fiction,
Speaker 1: it's pretty devastating, you know. There's there's a you could
Speaker 1: have an indictment sheet from a grand jury for abusive
Speaker 1: imagination by the human species and never finish reading out
Speaker 1: that list. But there's a lot more to it, and
Speaker 1: we're capable of a lot more so. Even even the
Speaker 1: devastating things we've done to ourselves and each other is
Speaker 1: evidence that we can create anything that we think serves
Speaker 1: us and then follow through on it. And it's not
Speaker 1: just a negative example. There are many positive examples of
Speaker 1: what we have created, whether systems of government, beautiful works
Speaker 1: of art, collaborative, cooperative economic things like we can use
Speaker 1: tech differently, we can use money differently, like we can
Speaker 1: be in relation to all of these in a way
Speaker 1: that really serves a collective us, allows us to be
Speaker 1: collectively selfish. So my hope is grounded in a lot
Speaker 1: of dirt, you know, and pain, and in the knowledge
Speaker 1: that ultimately we just make things up. So if we
Speaker 1: are aware of that more, can we choose more consciously
Speaker 1: to make up something that's better for all of us?
Speaker 1: And I believe we can.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: It is such a joy to spend time with you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being here with me and
Speaker 2: with us. Obviously, we're going to link to everything and
Speaker 2: everywhere that people can find you, your Ted Talk and
Speaker 2: your podcast in America outdoors in the show notes. Is
Speaker 2: there anything else you want listeners to know about where
Speaker 2: to find you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm wherever baratun Days are found. I've been. I
Speaker 1: don't wish I'm pretty much I'm not the only one,
Speaker 1: but I'm like the the easiest to link to. There's
Speaker 1: a Barton Day in Atlanta who I'm a big fan of.
Speaker 1: I have to meet him at his new business. He
Speaker 1: does nanotechnology stuff, he's a science He have Barretune de
Speaker 1: Cola check out the other Barton Day.
Speaker 3: So what you're saying is you're googleable.
Speaker 1: I'm google doable, so find that now we're just you know,
Speaker 1: I've been writing a lot with this new media company,
Speaker 1: puck to at puck dot News, and that's where I'm
Speaker 1: exploring more slowly and deeply. A lot of these themes
Speaker 1: raise tech, democracy and our possibilities with all of that.
Speaker 1: So if you want to have a textual experience, check
Speaker 1: out what I'm up to at PUCK and what my
Speaker 1: colleagues they are up to. I'm proud of all their reporting.
Speaker 1: I am not a reporter, but it's good to be
Speaker 1: in the company of people who really really do that
Speaker 1: job while I get to opine on things and process
Speaker 1: my emotions and feelings through words on a screen. This
Speaker 1: has been I feel like I need a nap. This
Speaker 1: has been an experience that is so beautiful. It's been
Speaker 1: this really like heart forward, heart open journey. Thank you
Speaker 1: for inviting me into what feels like kind of a
Speaker 1: sacred space here, and then for what you're doing to
Speaker 1: help us all be okay with not being okay and
Speaker 1: to explore our relationship with grief and with hope. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, stay tuned. I'll be right back with
Speaker 2: your questions to carry with you right after this. Each
Speaker 2: week I leave you with some questions to carry with
Speaker 2: you until we meet again. You know what really struck
Speaker 2: me through this entire conversation with Baritunde was how easy
Speaker 2: it was, how easy it was to weave through all
Speaker 2: the different topics and aspects of life. We discussed, like
Speaker 2: there's something in that for me that when you're living
Speaker 2: this stuff, when both joy and mourning or celebration and grief,
Speaker 2: when both of those things are welcomed and acknowledged in
Speaker 2: your life, it's just like it's easy to move back
Speaker 2: and forth between them. Being okay is normal. There's no
Speaker 2: need to like set aside a special scheduled time to
Speaker 2: like talk about heavy discussions about like you don't have
Speaker 2: to do that stuff. When you have relationships where everything
Speaker 2: is welcome, you just do it. You talk about what's
Speaker 2: there when it's there, and it's so.
Speaker 3: Easy.
Speaker 2: This whole conversation made me feel really hopeful about the
Speaker 2: joy that I stitch into my life, that there's joy
Speaker 2: in building relationships and friendships that include everything whatever is
Speaker 2: up at any given moment. It also really stressed the
Speaker 2: importance of play, which is something that I full disclosure,
Speaker 2: often forget to prioritize in my own life. And I
Speaker 2: love what Baratunde said about his hope being bound with
Speaker 2: the human power of creatingivity, Like, how can we not
Speaker 2: have hope knowing what's in our power to create?
Speaker 3: That's a really interesting idea. What about you?
Speaker 2: What's stuck with you from this conversation. Everybody's going to
Speaker 2: take something different from the show, but I do hope
Speaker 2: you found something to hold on to. If you want
Speaker 2: to tell me how today's show felt for you, or
Speaker 2: you have thoughts about what we covered, let me know.
Speaker 2: Tag at Refuge in Grief on all the social platforms
Speaker 2: so I can hear how this conversation affected you. You
Speaker 2: can follow the show at It's Okaypod on TikTok and
Speaker 2: Refuge in Grief everywhere else to see video clips from
Speaker 2: the show. Also use the hashtag It's okaypod on all
Speaker 2: of the platforms. Not only so that I can find
Speaker 2: you when I go looking, and I totally do search
Speaker 2: that hashtag so I can see what you're talking about,
Speaker 2: but use that hashtag so that other people can find
Speaker 2: you too. It's a really cool way to start building
Speaker 2: conversations and community. None of us are entirely okay, and
Speaker 2: it's time we start talking about that together. Hashtag's just
Speaker 2: one tool in building.
Speaker 3: The world that we want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay, You're in good company.
Speaker 2: That's it for this week, friends, Remember to subscribe to
Speaker 2: the show and leave a review. Your reviews help make
Speaker 2: the show easier to find, which furthers our mission of
Speaker 2: getting more people to have interesting conversations about difficult things.
Speaker 2: And your reviews are really special to me and I.
Speaker 3: Love to read them.
Speaker 2: Coming up next week, musician and author Sarah Raimi joins
Speaker 2: me to talk about chronic illness and why having your
Speaker 2: music show up at a hit TV series is a
Speaker 2: mixed bag of awesome and exhausting. Follow the show on
Speaker 2: your favorite platforms, friends, so you don't miss an episode.
Speaker 2: Want more on these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As
Speaker 2: my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
Speaker 2: that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about
Speaker 2: this stuff without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements
Speaker 2: is an important skill for everyone. Whether you're trying to
Speaker 2: support a friend going through a hard time, or you
Speaker 2: work in the helping professions, or you just want to
Speaker 2: be better at human ing. Get help to have those
Speaker 2: conversations with trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book
Speaker 2: It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus The Guided Journal
Speaker 2: for Grief at Megandivine dot Co. It's Okay that You're
Speaker 2: Not Okay. That podcast is written and produced by me
Speaker 2: Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Fozzio, Logistical and social media support from Micah, Post
Speaker 2: production and editing by the ever patient Houston Tilly. Music
Speaker 2: provided by Wavecrash, and today's background noise provided by the
Speaker 2: Endless Spring Drone of chainsaws cleaning up after the La
Speaker 2: Winter rains