How Can We Experience Re-Enchantment?
- colin7931
- Apr 8
- 32 min read
Today Doug opens the container with author Brooke Williams.
The episode opens with Doug exploring dreams, the supernatural and how science plays into different human experiences that are often hard to explain. Then to get a deeper understanding of human consciousness, Doug is joined by author Brooke Williams.
Together they explore the concept of re-enchantment, a notion that seeks to reconnect us with the natural world and the enchantment it holds, particularly through experiences in the wilderness. Brooke articulates his belief that our dreams, especially those experienced while immersed in nature, can serve as a bridge to understanding the unconscious and the primal aspects of our being.
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Episode Transcript:
Doug Schntizspahn
00:00:00.160 - 00:07:46.918
Today's episode of Open Container is presented by Oboz.
Many of you already know Oboz, that plucky little brand from Bozeman that stood up in 2007 in a crowded footwear space and said, there's room for me too. An upstart outlier with a weird name, roomy toe box and well built offerings for committed hikers.
It's a combination that has attracted a loyal following for 20 years, and we're excited to partner with Oboz because they are committed to shining a light on the core activity to offer all our outdoor pursuits. Hiking. You know, hiking. The thing we all do but no one is talking about. We are unified by hiking.
Oboz loves hiking and that's something I can get down with. Over the coming months, we'll be opening the Container and getting on the trail with our friends from Bozeman. Oboz love hiking.
Welcome to Open Container. I'm Doug Schnitzman. I'm a journalist, writer and overall lover of the outdoors.
I fought wildfires, reported on national politics, published magazines. I've even come face to face with the grizzly bear.
On this podcast, we're going to have an open conversation about culture, conservation policy, business issues that matter the most to the outdoor community. Let's get some Dreams intensify when you're out in the wild. At least for me.
Anytime I sleep, away from all the background noise, the traffic, the lights, the digital pollution we've inserted into our nighttime rituals, I connect better with my dreams. Perhaps this is just part of the reason we go out into the wild, to reconnect with a deeper sense of ourselves.
I've also had dreams in the wild that seem to blur the boundaries between logical thought and the mystical. I don't question these. I spent a summer living about 100 yards away from a hanging tree.
I never learned the true story about it, but it was marked as Hanging Tree with a wooden sign.
This was deep in the East Pioneer Mountains of southwest Montana, near the ghost town of Farland, where I was stationed working for the Student conservation association in 1993. It was one of the most beautiful summers of my life.
I spent the previous years as a bartender, lost in a bit of a fog, helping people get drunk, living in the city, disconnected from myself. Now I was living in a trailer in an obscure mountain range in Montana and happier than ever. I drank clean water.
I went for a run every evening and would see a great horned owl that would fly along with me. I worked hard building trails. I would look at the stars in the sky and Learn the constellations.
The trailer was not far from an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp and a more modern outpost of the University of Montana Western Outdoor Center. The camp, I had been told, was haunted. This information was given to me by an old woman named Rose, who used to live up here for decades.
The first time I met her, she stopped, looked me dead in the face and said, you have the eyes of someone who used to live here.
I dreamed of the hanging tree one night and of two young women murderers wearing white with dark hair, who had not been hungry but were guilty and aligned with me. From then on, I stayed away from the tree. Another night, I saw a ghost. There was unseasonable rain and snow that July.
And one night we had a huge storm. And as I slept in the trailer, I could hear banging and rattling all around outside.
And then, while I was between the dream world and the waking, I heard someone open the trailer door and take a step in. A figure stood over me. I tried to scream, but nothing would come out. And when I finally did, the haunting was dispelled.
I was there alone in the trailer. Which makes sense. Ghosts are not real. Dreams are simply a calculation of the subconscious. Are they? As a child, I suffered from sleep paralysis.
It's a horrible affliction, and I did not know what it was until I was in my 40s. Basically, I would be lying in my bed and my mind would be awake, but my body still asleep. I could hear my parents talking downstairs.
I could see my room, but I could not move. Then something horrible would happen. A figure would come into my room, something moving towards me, a presence of evil. I knew I had to move.
I knew I had to scream out to do something. But no words would come out of my mouth and my body wouldn't budge as this thing approached me.
And then it would be over, much like what happened to me in the trailer and the pioneers. So of course, it was no ghost. It was just an episode of sleep paralysis, which I hadn't had since childhood.
And sleep paralysis is explained by science. Truly, the body is still asleep, or part of the brain is awake and the brain hallucinates the terror coming in and tries to react to it.
Many people suffer from sleep paralysis and they describe it the same way. Sometimes it's called the witch because people see a witch like figure coming and sitting on their chest.
It turns out that the night I experienced the paralysis, not far from the hanging tree, someone from the nearby town of Dillon went missing in the east. Pioneers. I helped a search and rescue team look for him over the following week.
But he was never found, and I never heard any report of what might have happened to him. I've had other dreams in the wild. Shared dreams with friends. Had visions of my home being broken into far away when it was in reality.
Seen my own life more clearly written down in dreams. I take all of this very seriously. And of course, it can all be explained by neuroscience, by what we know about the world.
Yet our experience of the world feels larger than what we can explain. And that's important.
Whether it's reality or not, it's important that we connect to this primal part of ourselves, even if we can explain it away to science. Why, I'm not exactly sure I can tell you. The terror of sleep paralysis is very real. Dreams are part of the deep layers of what we are as people.
I thought about these dreams a lot when I read Brook Williams new book, Encountering Dragonfly.
It's a book about dreams, it's a book about science, and it's a book about the deep layers of meaning that humans experience all the way back, even beyond Homo sapiens. We need these experiences, this meaning.
I think these dreams tell us something important, and I think we learn a lot about that in Encountering Dragonfly.
Brook Williams has spent 30 years advocating for wilderness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness alliance and as the executive director of the Murray Center. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a biology degree from the University of Utah.
He has written four books, including Reconciling Work and Wilderness and the just published Encountering Notes on the Practice of Re Enchantment. Now let's open the container with Brook Williams.
Well, I am overjoyed to have Brook Williams here with me, who has been a longtime inspiration and friend. And he is also the author of a book that comes out today called Encountering Notes on the Practice of Re Enchantment.
So let's hop right into it, Brooke, and let me know, what is re Enchantment?
Brooke Williams
00:07:47.014 - 00:10:13.628
Hi, Doug. It's so great to be with you. Thanks for doing this. It's always a great pleasure to chat, even if it's, you know, official.
Like, this is some of more than some of our conversations, I think, to talk about re Enchantment, we need to talk about enchantment first. And, you know, I always felt like when I heard that word, I was.
It meant something like wonder and awe and something exciting, full of wonder and awe. But it actually is a historical moment when before the world was disenchanted, it was enchanted. For most of our human history.
You know, things had spirits.
That's how we lived for thousands of generations until what they call modernity, which who knows when that was exactly, but you know, 800, something like that, when the main thing that happened is we commodified nature from what had been a subject, something that we interacted with. Nature became an object, something that we used and manipulated. And a big, big change has happened then.
And I think we're seeing the repercussions of that to this day. We could no longer like cut down entire forests to build temples and forts if the trees still had spirits in them.
So we had to just assume they didn't. And then everything followed suit.
So it is a period in time which I think is fascinating that for most of our history, most of the people on the planet have lived that way and somehow we just abandon it. So I feel like if disenchantment has a role in some of the problems that we face today, like take carbon for instance.
You know, carbon is a natural phenomenon and it was in the ground and then we started to dig it up and sell it and then burn it. And now it's the reason we have what may be the worst problem humans have ever faced with climate change.
And if it has its roots in disenchantment, then my theory is that re enchantment might be part of the solution.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:10:13.724 - 00:10:31.916
I like it.
And one of the things that I think you get into the book, in the book too, is that enchantment itself isn't just simply mystical, that it's also can coexist with science. It's something that you see as working with science. Right. Especially when you look at the dragonflies.
Brooke Williams
00:10:32.028 - 00:11:24.314
Yeah, exactly. And I think a true scientist is someone that's got a real sort of divergent view.
And it's not like they're trying to find something, it's not like they have an idea and they want to find it, but it's this open ended discovery.
And the more I learn about any natural object, any natural species, any natural phenomenon, the more enchanted it becomes, because it is just an amazing force. Natural selection and evolution. What has been created and what is surrounding us all the time, and we can't ever avoid it.
It's there and we might as well learn everything we can about it and be as enchanted as possible for the rest of our lives. That's how I want to live.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:11:24.402 - 00:11:35.986
I want to live that way too. How have you found this kind of re enchantment in the wild or how can anyone find it? You know, are we doing it already. How. How do you experience re.
Enchantment?
Brooke Williams
00:11:36.098 - 00:12:41.250
Well, I think it has a lot to do with object and subject. Again, I mentioned it.
I feel like even our, you know, as, you know, really outdoor people, people who love outdoor recreation, I think it's possible to objectify the natural world, to be really consider something that we use and manipulate for our best days, for our best selves. And if you can look at it as something with which we interact, that is giving us something back at the same time, that's a whole other experience.
And I feel like the more I've studied this and tried to understand it, the more I realized that our Native American brothers and sisters have understood this from the. From time zero, that that's just how it is.
And I feel like the more that we can live that way, as if we're surrounded by subjects instead of objects, the deeper and more meaningful our lives are.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:12:41.370 - 00:13:05.494
It's interesting. You talk about recreation and you live somewhere, you know, you live in Castle Valley where you. That's your home.
It's a place you see on so many intricate levels.
Yet if you look right up there in Porcupine Rim, you have a lot of people who are there, some of them experiencing the fullness of the place, but some of them just probably for commodification. Right. Just to do the ride, just to see it as recreation. So you see that dichotomy right out your window from where you live, Right?
Brooke Williams
00:13:05.582 - 00:13:59.580
Yeah. You know the best. I mean, there's a thousand examples of that around here. And who knows what the mindset of these extreme athletes are, for instance.
I mean, I know some of them personally, and I know that there is a spiritual dimension to their activity and their lives.
But, you know, some of them, you know, they could spread like, a slack line across from Castleton Tower to the rectory and just walk across it, just to say you've been able to do that. I'm not sure how much enchantment there is in that. I'm not sure how much of a subject that is. It's more of an object.
These are two big objects that we can spread a slack line between, and we can walk across it. And that's cool.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:14:00.720 - 00:14:14.312
Yeah, I've always loved that, isn't it? Reinhold Messner doesn't want people to climb. You know, Mount Kailash is still unclimbed, and Reinhold encouraged people not to do it.
So we do have some of these places that aren't commodified well.
Brooke Williams
00:14:14.336 - 00:14:42.072
And didn't he also have.
I forget what he called it was the white wilderness, where he really promoted climbers to not really map out or diagram or talk about their different routes.
Because that idea of being there alone in the exact moment, in a Zen sort of moment, can be sort of dissipated if, you know, a lot of other people have been there and written about it, for instance. I think that's a fascinating.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:14:42.136 - 00:14:50.800
Yeah, yeah. Especially in an age of so much technology, so much ability to say exactly where we are. It takes.
I mean, that takes some of the enchantment out of the experience, right?
Brooke Williams
00:14:51.180 - 00:14:53.332
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:14:53.396 - 00:14:59.700
So how do we find it? How do we get out there and find Enchantment and find re. Enchantment, as you call it?
Brooke Williams
00:14:59.820 - 00:16:23.058
You know what's interesting, Doug, is I'm old, 72, and part of what I'm about to say is because of that, but also I feel like my life has sort of evolved from when we first moved to southern Utah. I really liked the adventure. I like going to new places all the time.
I like sharing little maps on the backs of napkins in bars with people to find these places where not too many people had been before and so on. But lately, it's as if I've. I have like seven or eight or maybe a dozen routes that I'll go out and walk.
And I think when you see a place over and over again, it takes on a different sort of characteristic. It starts to, like, work with you a little bit. And I've even gone so far as to sort of create mythical landscapes out of the places that I go.
And I feel like it's. It is more of an interaction, and you really.
You really feel like you're absorbing something from these places if you go there over and over again, as opposed to just kind of hit and miss, you know, one day, one place, another day, another place. Does that make sense?
Doug Schntizspahn
00:16:23.154 - 00:16:42.740
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's what I think. Wordsworth talks about this in Tintern Abbey, right.
Where he talks about being different from the boyishness, you know, the activeness of his youth. And when he gets older, he feels the.
The spirit that rolls through all things when he goes to these places and sees them in a different way each time he goes to them. Right.
Brooke Williams
00:16:42.860 - 00:17:46.774
Yeah, exactly. I remember years ago, Terry, my wife, gave me for Christmas a gigantic, amazing Patagonia parka that is for, like.
I mean, if you read the description in the catalog, it's for high altitude emergency bivouacs or, you know, these intense things. And I use it for.
She bought it for me for extreme napping that I do, you know, so that I can sit out on a rock in the winter and still be comfortable.
And I once talked to Rick Ridgeway about it, who works for Patagonia, and I said, I think you're missing, like a whole different marketing idea for some of your gear. And I told him about my parka that, you know, it's really for, you know, extreme napping. And it's like the hermit parka for me.
Just be there out in the wilds with something so warm I could stay there for all day, you know, let alone extreme bivouac, extreme napping.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:17:46.902 - 00:17:55.510
I really like that. I think that is going to be a new trend. I think Colin and crew are going to get after that one in rock fight and see how the industry responds.
Brooke Williams
00:17:55.670 - 00:17:59.410
Yeah, I think there's a real potential there, don't you?
Doug Schntizspahn
00:17:59.710 - 00:18:02.636
I love it. Yeah, it sounds nothing better than a nap.
Brooke Williams
00:18:02.798 - 00:18:03.500
Right.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:18:04.120 - 00:18:19.820
Getting back to. Do you have certain places in the wild that you return to that you feel more powerfully than others? Are these personal places, do you think?
They're places we all feel are kind of part of the Jungian collective? A little bit of both.
Brooke Williams
00:18:20.840 - 00:19:35.922
That's a really good question. I feel like the more you get to know a place, the more powerful it becomes, for sure.
And then when you start like I have at certain places have started to sort of give different aspects of the environment meaning just by my attention, I think that's a little bit arrogant. But I also feel like that's a piece of it.
Where places that are seemed that are deemed to be sacred by other cultures are, I believe, sacred because of the accumulation of stories around those places. And if you don't know the story, then you have to take somebody's word for it or the guidebook, that this is like a sacred place.
But if you know the stories and you live those stories, then that place can become sacred to you too. So I feel like it's a very conscious. It's a conscious process.
I think we're dealing with where you create your own sacred places by the stories that you leave there.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:19:36.026 - 00:19:48.626
And this is something I think you get at in the book quite a bit too, this idea that places can have mythical, mystical significance because they have layers of cultural meaning put upon them. Right?
Brooke Williams
00:19:48.698 - 00:19:49.090
Yeah.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:19:49.170 - 00:20:05.022
And you go as far back as to Australopithecus. You talk about Lucy, the famed kind of early hominid and her experiences and how they might be part of our current consciousness even. Right.
Brooke Williams
00:20:05.126 - 00:21:32.850
Well, when it comes to it, one of the things that well, my book is about dragonflies, and it's about an experience I had where I had a dream while taking a nap about a dragonfly. And then within hours, I was seeing them everywhere. So something had shifted with my attention during. During that. That dream.
And I couldn't figure out what it was. And it took me a while to come to the. To the conclusion that maybe my life had been re. Enchantment. Re. Enchanted at that moment. And.
And what that means is that these creatures that have this natural history of. You know, a lot's known about dragonflies, a lot's known about a lot of different creatures in terms of, you know, where they.
What their flight season is, what their habitat is, what they eat, what their predators are, how they look, those kinds of things.
But then there's another dimension to it, which is this kind of historic or cultural meaning that that's attached to these creatures, but also archetypal and symbolic. What. What happens when you dream about a dragonfly? What does it really mean in terms of your unconscious and the collective unconscious?
And I think that when you. When you bring up Lucy and the fact that I can't remember the dates, but that Australopithecus goes back, what, 5 million years? Is it.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:21:32.890 - 00:21:34.098
Yeah. Good Lord. I'm not sure either.
Brooke Williams
00:21:34.114 - 00:22:22.070
Yeah, yeah, I think it is. But dragonflies go back 300 million years. And so I started to think about that.
And it's like if they're everywhere on Earth and they are, they exist on every continent but Antarctica, that every human that ever existed probably had some exposure to a dragonfly and there was some image that is imprinted on that ancestral brain that we still have access to. So to me, that's, like, miraculous that when we dream about a dragonfly, it has these particular meanings based on what our species has always.
How we've always seen them and how he's always interpreted them. I think that's a miracle, don't you think?
Doug Schntizspahn
00:22:22.190 - 00:22:48.720
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That there is this accumulation of human knowledge and human meaning. Right. I mean, Jung loved this, obviously.
Well, and then I love what you do with the book too, is each chapter in the book is kind of you seeking out a different dragonfly in a different place. My son is a big birder, loves to go birding, and I've done a lot of that. And you're kind of dragon flying in this book is really what it's about.
Right. And I've never heard of anyone doing that before.
Brooke Williams
00:22:49.180 - 00:24:33.790
You know, it's interesting because now that I've, like, been thinking about this for a long time, I've noticed that, you know, you buy. You buy a field guide, and it says, you know, here's. Here's how you go find them. I, I.
There are places I know I will see them, but I feel like more than anything, I'm just astounded when I'm surprised by seeing them. In other words, I think they're everywhere. But when I actually see them, it's like such a gift, and I have to figure out.
And now what I do is I really look at the meaning. Most cultures believe that dragonflies are the messenger between worlds.
So if that's true, which I assume that it is, and I'm confident that it is, when I see one, I feel like, what message is there? What message am I supposed to be getting from this inner world?
And I think that's really amazing because I think the inner world, which Jung named the collective unconscious, is the entire evolutionary history of our species, including everything we ever needed to save ourselves.
So what if that collective unconscious, which, you know, as young white American boys we grew up with no thought of it, was like nobody really told us about it. We didn't think about it. We didn't know what was going on. When we had a dream, we sort of.
I don't know how you were, but I like to have dreams, even as a kid, but I never gave them much significance. But I do now.
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Doug Schntizspahn
00:26:29.430 - 00:26:52.174
Well, I know that I have this quote here that Jung says that the dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego, and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. I love that.
Brooke Williams
00:26:52.262 - 00:31:05.800
Yeah, I get chills with that. I mean, I've read a lot of Jung. I have not read. Maybe I've read that particular phrase, but I don't remember it.
But that gives me chills because it's. I mean, think about it. If you consider your dreams like that, that's like the most amazing thing you can even imagine.
And, I mean, what a gift that is, right? And, you know, Jung loved it when one of his patients came to him with a dream. You know, the famous story of.
He's got a patient who's a very powerful young woman, very successful, but she's having a difficult time in relationships. He's having a difficult time sleeping. And he's been treating her. They've been having many sessions.
And one day she comes and she says, oh, by the way, I had a dream the other night about a piece of jewelry, I think it was, that was in the shape of a scarab beetle. And so he's like, oh, my God, this is fantastic. She's had a dream. Let's talk about this dream.
But they're in the middle of discussing this dream, and he hears something in the window, and he looks over, opens the window, and grabs a beetle that had been trying to get in through the window.
And I mean, so that whole thing just completely turned her upside down and completely changed the way the effectiveness of the treatment that she was getting and everything started to sort of fall into place.
So, I mean, that's an amazing idea, that a dream can have that kind of power, which I know that because of the power that the dream I had about dragonflies had.
But that being said, another thing that Jung did was realize that how important it was that people did remember and were able to relate their dreams to him. But often people couldn't remember their dreams, or they couldn't. They didn't have dreams. A lot of people don't have dreams that they.
That they know about. I don't know about you. I have a lot of dreams, but they aren't very. Terry's grandmother helped me with this. They're not what they call numinous.
They don't carry a lot of power. And I maybe have two, three a year that are so powerful that I have to obsess over them for weeks.
But what happens with Jung is he developed this process called active imagination, where you can put yourself into sort of a calm state, meditative state. And then you go through this like a story.
And the symbols that appear are considered in the same way that symbols appear in a dream so that you can get the same or almost the same effect from these visualizations. And I'm not sure I really know what I'm talking about when it comes to active imagination, but I do know I like to visualize.
And in my book, there's a couple of places where I've had questions. It happens to me with my writing a lot where I get stuck.
And so I'll just do this sort of a visualization where it's usually pretty simple, where you go up some stairs and out on a path through a familiar landscape and you meet somebody who has something for you. And it's amazing how whenever I do that, it sounds so simple. And yet every time it's different.
And it's like the story, whatever the story I need, it comes out then and it's really sort of magical. And I don't know. I mean, you can say all you want about how it's just imaginary or whatever, but Jung would say it doesn't matter if it's imaginary.
That's the whole point, is that whatever comes up has some kind of meaning for you. And isn't life more interesting if you consider that? I think so, absolutely.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:31:05.960 - 00:31:22.056
Now, do you? I know I have. I know when I'm out backpacking or when I've been out sleeping in the wild, I have had. I tend to have more of these kind of dreams.
You're talking about the really powerful dreams. Does that happen to you during your extreme napping? You know, when did the Dragonfly. Where were you when the dragonfly.
Brooke Williams
00:31:22.248 - 00:32:16.870
I was extreme napping when I had that dream, that's for sure. But, you know, I don't feel like I can really say that that's an issue when I dream.
Like I said, I don't often dream really significant, numinous dreams, but when I do, it doesn't really. I can't really say it happens more when I'm out sleeping under the stars or when I'm not.
I don't know about you, but getting older, I tend to not sleep really great out for the first few days when I'm out. So the dreams I have are sort of those in between, that in between state, where am I really thinking this or dreaming it?
And then the question is, does it really matter? I don't think it does.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:32:18.290 - 00:32:45.738
Well, getting back to the dragonflies themselves, I love this idea too, that once you saw them in the dream, then you started seeing them everywhere. And not only did you go out looking for them, they seemed to find you as well. I love the scene in the book when you're in B.C.
you're talking to a Tlingit man about the dragonfly obsession. You say that there was an arctic dragonfly was behind him listening to your conversation even. Right. That you're seeing them everywhere now.
Brooke Williams
00:32:45.874 - 00:34:24.124
That was really something. And I think I wrote about this, but I'm thinking about it now how the idea that this dragonfly had a message, say, between worlds.
And here I was literally talking to this young Tlingit man. And when I went back to think about it later, when it came back to me later, everything became a symbol, like it was a dream.
And I treated it like a dream. And I think there's a lot going on in my psyche about Native.
This whole idea of Native people as more being more primal and elemental to who we all were at one time, you know, and you and I. I don't know exactly what your heritage is, but, you know, I come from. I come from Europe.
And I don't know, you have a really strange last name, so you could come from anywhere. I don't know. But I come from. And we and my people sort of cut themselves off from our Native heritage. You know, we are related to Native Europeans.
And there's a lot of similarities, I'm sure, between Native Europeans and Native Americans and Native Russians and Native everything else. But that was just part of the story. We cut ourselves off.
And I think that the significance of that dragonfly being there as I was talking to that young man had something to do with this that I just mentioned.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:34:24.252 - 00:34:24.732
Sure.
Brooke Williams
00:34:24.836 - 00:34:25.520
Yeah.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:34:26.020 - 00:34:43.564
Now, another thing I know you talk about, you've written about before is ghosts or spirits. Right. And being out there in the world and feeling them and having that presence around you. So are there ghosts? Have you seen ghosts?
How do you interact with ghosts, especially in wild places?
Brooke Williams
00:34:43.612 - 00:35:01.116
I think that's such a good question because, well, I feel like I've had experiences with people who are dead. I've never really considered it a ghost, you know, I don't know. Do you ever read any Murakami?
Doug Schntizspahn
00:35:01.228 - 00:35:06.060
Yes, I have. Kafka on the Shore and. Yeah. Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Yeah.
Brooke Williams
00:35:06.220 - 00:39:27.880
Oh, yeah, yeah. I just love that guy. And for a long time I read, I tend to find an author and I read every. Everything I can get my hands on until I get tired of it.
And so I read a bunch of his stuff, maybe up until like four or five years ago, but then I've just discovered there's two newer ones and one of them is called the City and Its Uncertain Walls.
And I really think now as I read Murakami, I feel like he would be a great third part of this conversation because I think his, that's the way his mind works. And I feel like you just don't make that stuff up. It's there for a reason.
The point I'm bringing up is that in this book he's one of the main characters is a ghost that lives in a library. And it's a very real being, you know, and if that's the definition of ghost, I've not really experienced that.
I have experienced influence from what I, what, what I feel is like important information from another world through dead people.
And part of that is I wrote Terry and I have discovered this 19th century nature mystic Richard Jeffreys, a book that he wrote called the Story of My Heart. And it was so interesting because we love the book. We got a publisher to reissue it.
And the idea was that Terry would write the introduction and I'd write an afterword. But something happened and that person, Richard Jeffries, sort of inoculated me or came into my life or something.
And I felt like for six or eight months I was at his mercy. I mean, it was like he was out there somewhere.
And he really felt like this was time for this generation to have the information that was in that book. And by God, I was the messenger and he wasn't going to leave me alone. I mean, it got pretty crazy.
Like one night I went home for got home and Terri had set three places for dinner and I said to oh, Terry, who's coming? And she said, well, Richard Jeffries, he's always here, we might as well feed him.
But I got obsessed with it, you know, and another book I wrote about and I discovered an ancestor of mine, a great, great grandfather who was born in the same town at the same time as Charles Darwin. And I really feel like he was like riding on my shoulder for a couple of years as if he had information.
I mean, when you think about it, if they're out there, if the dead are out there, they know stuff. They know stuff that we don't know. I mean, the main thing they know is what Happens after you die.
Like, the most amazing question, they've got the answer to that, right? And so I feel like I've had those kind of experiences.
And, you know, the thing that's so amazing about it is people can just go roll their eyes back and say, oh, you just made that up. Well, what's the difference? Maybe if I'm. It had to come from somewhere. You know, those. Those ideas don't just get, like, conjured up because of the.
The spaghetti sauce that you ate or something, you know? And I loved it because the. The. The. Barbara Rass, dear friend, she edited that book, and it was really great because the book was done.
They were starting to promote it and try to sell it. And she said, the big question we have, Brooke, is where in the bookstore do we put this book? Is it in fiction or nonfiction?
And I said, oh, you know, I really am intimidated by novelists. I have so much respect for the novelists that I've read. I would never want to call myself a novelist.
And she said, well, okay, let's call it nonfiction. I said, okay, but I made a lot of shit up. And she said, I'll never forget it. She said, brooke, relax.
Just because you imagined it doesn't make it fiction.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:39:28.860 - 00:39:37.364
Love it. Love it. I love, too, that you said you were the messenger for Jeffrey. So basically, you were the Dragonfly, right? You yourself were the Dragonfly.
There you go.
Brooke Williams
00:39:37.452 - 00:39:39.524
Yeah, that's a good point. I probably was.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:39:39.612 - 00:40:14.740
One thing you mentioned, too, when we were talking is you were talking about your ancestors. And I know that you're, you know, you're a native Utahan, and I believe your family's been there for. For a long time. Right. I wonder how that.
You know and I know both you and Terry are very proud of being Utahns and part of your state. Despite conflict, you come in into with the political leanings of the state at some point.
So I wonder how your connection to your home state continues to kind of motivate the work you do, especially in advocacy and conserv.
Brooke Williams
00:40:15.140 - 00:42:49.264
Yeah, that's a hard question. It's a good question. I. You know, Brigham Young's my great, great grandfather, which, you know, is not saying a lot because he had 26 wives.
And I did a little math. I figured if each wife had four kids who had four kids, I would have, like, 10,000 cousins at my generation, right?
So it's not a big deal, but I feel like a lot of.
And I don't know how this happened, but from a very young age, I didn't see that whole Mormon influence as an inspiration as much as something to push off against, like to react to, to.
To have to justify not believing, for instance, because Brigham Young and the Mormon migration is one of the greatest examples of Manifest Destiny in the whole world, where an entire people move from one place to another just because of certain circumstances, but also the opportunities that existed. And it's kind of the story of the world in this microcosm. So it's something I pushed off against, for sure.
But also, I feel like we cannot really abandon our history and the connection to our ancestors. So we have to, you know, that's who we are. And so people talk about. Because of politics, oh, I can't. You know, Trump got elected.
We got to leave the country. That's not. That's the farthest thing from my mind. I'm so connected. Connected to this place.
You know, I mean, I could not just, like, cut, cut, cut my. Sever my connections to this place. Like, you know, I mean, my ancestors did. You know, William Williams, who I wrote the book about, who.
Who, like I said, obsessed me for those years, he was one of those people that, you know, was. Had lit. Was living a very meager life in England with his family.
When the missionaries came along and offered him an opportunity to go to America and Utah, he jumped all over it. But he cut himself off from that entire part of his history. And I just. I think that's. That's dangerous.
And although I'm related to him and a lot of people that did that, I could never do that. Based on what I think, I think.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:42:49.272 - 00:43:25.852
You bring up something, too, that's really inspirational for.
For a lot of us right now, because you've been living, you know, been living in a very red state as a very outspoken conservationist going against the grain. So you've been fighting this battle for decades and decades that some people might just be experiencing now. Right. Of being disempowered. Right. So how.
And does that give you more hope for conservation?
More hope that some of these policies that are really going to affect things we care about more, hope that we can fight against them and weather them and how we can do that?
Brooke Williams
00:43:25.996 - 00:46:08.328
You know, that's a really good question. I feel like this is just part. This is exactly the way things should be. I feel like it's terrible and I hate it, but everything has led to this.
And I feel like. I love that Chinese term, zhujian tzu. J A n It means.
A lot of people interpret it to mean, like, spontaneity or freedom, but David Hinton, as a writer and a translator, I really respect his definition is Zhujian is the perpetual generation of the 10,000 things. In other words, this is just moving. It's just ongoing. It's ongoing.
And we just have to kind of find the way that we can be just tapped into that force.
And I realized that, I mean, terrible things are happening and more terrible things are going to happen, but we just have to, like, find the spot in all of it where we feel not only the most effective and the most powerful, but the most creative and where we get the most satisfaction out of what it is we're doing. And I don't know, I feel like it's been constant. I mean, we've had.
You know, they always say about environmental work, you have to win over and over and over and over again, but you can only lose once.
And when I look at what has happened since I've been aware of it, in terms of protecting wild places, you know, I look to sua, especially Southern Utah Wilderness alliance, and just how they have been so stalwart and so constant, applying pressure where it's most needed, but in really creative ways. You know, it used to be we wanted. What was it. It started out 5.7 million acres of BLM land turned into wilderness. And then things started to evolve.
Now it's. Then it was even more.
And then it was like, well, we can't really get a bill this time because of how the Utah politics are, but maybe, oh, we get a national monument back in the 90s, the Escalante Grand Staircase, and then later we get Bears Ears, and then they both get cut because of Trump. And now they're. They got re. Re. They got put back into place by Biden, and now they're probably going to get cut again.
And that's one advantage of being old, is you see a longer, like, process and realize that whatever is happening is not going to be forever.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:46:08.424 - 00:46:24.900
That's a good point. Over your long career in conservation, what do you think when you look back? Where do you feel like, wow, we have made a lot of progress.
Were there some things that were dangerous in the past that now we've really moved beyond? Are there any.
Brooke Williams
00:46:25.920 - 00:48:36.218
That's a good question, too, because I think about.
I mean, it was even a little before my time, back in the 60s and Nixon, and a lot of really interesting, amazing things happen with clean air and clean water and the whole idea of the Wilderness act itself before that. And I feel like, again, this is just this process of where our species, especially our Americans, have really gone down the wrong path.
And at some point, the powers that be are going to have to acknowledge it because we're sort of headed into oblivion. I think we do one thing and then we have to do another thing to offset the impacts of the first thing that we did. Damage control.
We're in constant damage control. And I feel like the Antiquities act has been one of the most positive things when it comes to conservation.
And I'm sure there are people out there that spend most of their day trying to figure out how to get rid of it, because it, you know, it's. It goes back to commodification. Like, what did our. Who's the. The new Secretary of Interior? Is it Berman? I wrote it down somewhere. Who.
During his hearing, he said, our public lands are our balance sheet. That's the whole point of public lands for them is it's like a bank account that we can spend freely. It's just.
It's the most antithetical thing to my way of thinking. And I just. I mean, after the election this year, I don't know how you felt, but I woke up and I thought, I don't know these people.
I don't know this country. I don't know the language. I don't know. I just have. I'm lost to feel like this is where we've come to.
But I also feel like I've got my work to do and I'm gonna just keep doing it and trying to discover what I can, and I feel like it'll make a difference.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:48:36.314 - 00:48:49.594
So what would you say to younger people, to younger activists, conservationists, even someone who cares about the outdoors a little bit? Like, what would you tell them to do in a time right now when even someone like you feels that way?
Brooke Williams
00:48:49.762 - 00:49:41.820
I would just tell them to keep getting out. Keep to getting out with your butterfly net and your bird book and your binoculars, because that's where the inspiration comes from.
I mean, that's what I really believe is that there is this force in the Earth that is ongoing, and we feel it when we're out there. It comes up through our feet, and I feel like we're going to know what to do.
I feel like we've done this for millions of years, since Lucy, you know, that's why we're still here. That's why we're the most successful species on Earth, is that we respond to. We consciously now we can respond to evolution.
And I think it's ongoing, and we have to figure out how to play our best role in it.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:49:42.120 - 00:50:00.802
Well, I think that leads right into. Unfortunately, it's been such a fantastic conversation.
We're nearing the end of our time right now, and I'd like to ask you the question that I end with, with every guest on the podcast now. And I think it leads into right what we're talking about right now. And that is simply what gives you hope.
Brooke Williams
00:50:00.986 - 00:50:52.132
I think that's what gives me hope, to know that I can, like, put on my shoes and I can walk out the door and I can wander around in the desert and something will happen that will change my life for the better. I mean, who knows? I could get, like, smashed by a rock or something, but most of the time, it's for the better. And to me, that is.
That's the most hopeful thing there is because I feel like I don't even have the capacity. I think hope is such an interesting idea because it means that you have a vision of something that you want to have happen.
But I feel like I don't have a vision of it. I just know that there's something positive in the future, and that's because of how it's always been.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:50:52.316 - 00:51:16.718
I love that. Well, Brooke, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show.
You've been an inspiration for me as a conservationist, as a writer, and just as a good guy for years. Brooke Williams, your latest book is Encountering Notes on the Practice of Re Enchantment.
It's been such an honor to have you on the show, and hopefully we'll have you back on again sometime.
Brooke Williams
00:51:16.814 - 00:51:27.070
I would love it, Doug. And it's so great to be with you. And every time we're together, I feel inspired and fortunate to share the world.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:51:27.190 - 00:51:32.850
Thank you. And how can people find the book, which comes out today, I believe, April 9th?
Brooke Williams
00:51:34.310 - 00:52:03.488
I'm hoping it'll be in every bookstore imaginable. And, you know, I'm going to be on the road talking about it, so look for. At your bookstore. Maybe I'll show up there. I don't know. It's just.
I mean, I love the whole book industry to know that there are these bookstores everywhere that you can just feel at home in. You can find what you need in every town, in every city in the country. Don't you love that?
Doug Schntizspahn
00:52:03.544 - 00:52:11.176
I love that. Sounds great. Well, look for Brook Williams at your local bookstore and look for dragonflies all around you. Thank you for listening.
Brooke Williams
00:52:11.288 - 00:52:12.380
Thank you, Doug.
Doug Schntizspahn
00:52:14.160 - 00:52:36.690
Thanks for imbibing Open Container, a production of Rock Fight, llc. Please take a second to follow our show on whatever podcast app you're listening.
To us on and send us your emails and feedback to myrockfightmail.com our producers today were David Karstad and Colin True. Art direction provided by Sarah Gensert. I'm Doug Schnitzbahn. Get some. Thanks for listening.