In the Absence of the Ordinary: A Conversation With Francis Weller

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Embodiment Matters – “In the Absence of the Ordinary: A Conversation With Francis Weller”

Hosts: Carl Rabke & Erin Gieseman Rabke
Guest: Francis Weller
Date: June 11, 2020
Francis Weller’s work
Episode Focus:
A profound and soulful exploration of grief, initiation, the importance of communal and personal rituals, and how embracing the “absence of the ordinary” during times of uncertainty (specifically, the pandemic) can deepen our participation in both suffering and beauty. The dialogue draws from psychotherapy, mythology, indigenous wisdom, alchemy, and more, inviting listeners to reimagine what it means to be deeply embodied and connected in a fractured world.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode centers on the transformative, initiatory potential of crisis—especially in uncertain times like the COVID-19 pandemic. Francis Weller shares his insights on grief as a communal practice, elders as carriers of collective medicine, and the soul’s journey through the “dark waters.” The conversation is rich with practices for cultivating self-compassion, patience, beauty, and depth through darkness, offering a soulful approach to collective and personal hardship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Reflections & Pandemic Solitude

• Francis shares how the pandemic has felt like a return to the ancient contemplative rhythm of the “Book of Hours,” observing the distinct qualities in each part of the day as a soulful practice.
  • Quote: "As an introvert, it's actually turned into a very rich, soulful time of reflection and imagination and kind of an intimate conversation with the mood of the world, which is quite heavy and dense and anxious right now, but it's also been quite rich." (03:27)

2. Initiation: Consequences and Meaning

• Traditional initiation involves radical severance from the known, a shift in identity, and the realization you can never return to who you were.
  (05:14)
• Initiation is for the community and the whole—not merely for individual growth.
• Trauma, as “rough initiation,” can isolate rather than integrate, causing a felt sense of isolation and a rupture in belonging.
• Healing is “suturing tears in our code of belonging.” (09:48)
• Initiation is not optional, but you can miss its gifts if you try to return to “normal.” (11:13)
  • Quote: “Initiation means to begin something, not to finish it… Our Western psychology is so self oriented, all about me. But what if the larger arc of our life was not meant to simply be about my personal growth, but about my gradually increasing circumference of participation with the whole engaged world?” (06:25)

3. On Becoming an Elder: Metabolizing Sorrow

• True elders have metabolized pain and trauma into medicine for their communities.
• Elders carry “gravity”—focused less on themselves, more on holding and serving the community. (13:35)
• Our culture is trouble-avoidant and pain-averse, but pain is inevitable.
• Spaciousness, not solutions, is the invitation of soul work.
  • Quote: “James Hillman once said… the issues we are confronted by are not meant so much for resolution as they are for spaciousness. How big can we become? How much can we hold as human beings?” (15:26)

4. The Practice of Apprenticeship With Sorrow

• Right relationship with sorrow: Neither avoiding nor drowning, but apprenticing—walking alongside grief with companionship and courage. (16:50)
• Not a quick fix: “This is not a short term thing. It’s not a weekend workshop. It is a prolonged vigil that we're asked to hold with some of the most difficult material.”

5. Four Essential Practices for Overwhelm (18:24–25:35)

• Self-Compassion: Radical acceptance of all parts, especially weakness, failure, and inadequacy.
  • “When I teach weekends on self compassion, I often begin… this is a weekend and non self improvement.” (20:50)
• Turning Toward Feelings: Courageously facing difficult emotions as guests at the door.
• Astonishment by Beauty: Find ballast and nourishment in beauty, even amid suffering.
  • “Without beauty, life would be unbearable.” (John O’Donohue quotation, 23:00)
• Patience: Letting things unfold in their own time; learning through long fidelity, referencing Jane Goodall’s years-long work with chimps.
  • “In your patience is your soul... Not so much in your accomplishments… but what if patience became a soul value that we really honored?” (24:45)

6. Restraint & Emptiness (27:38–30:01)

• Restraint—knowing how to hold back for something larger to emerge—is a rarely celebrated virtue.
• The pandemic imposed collective restraint, confronting us with emptiness.
• True emptiness is not personal failure but the missing ground where ritual, community, or nature should dwell.

7. Paul Shepard’s “Beautiful and Strange Otherness” (31:12–34:42)

• Real grief is an emptiness where connection to the “beautiful and strange otherness” of the world has broken down.
• “Our suffering is mutually entangled, one with the other, as is our healing.” (33:59)
• Therapy’s subtle goal: to help us reinhabit our own “beautiful and strange otherness.”

8. Gifts and Service as the Culmination of Healing

• The journey through suffering isn’t for us alone: what is gathered is meant to be given away.
  • “What the world needs more than anything else… are attentive and present adult human beings who are willing to wade into the mess and say, ‘I'm here and I have gifts’.” (36:55)
• Depression and sadness arise when we’re not asked to share our gifts.

9. Bridging Polarization With Depth (37:27–41:10)

• Outrage (as love-aligned) is distinct from reactive rage.
• The challenge: maintain relationship across difference; stay connected even in conflict.
• “Conflict done well to an initiated human being leads to breakthrough and to intimacy.” (39:24)

10. Duende: The Fierce, Soulful Energy of the Dark (41:10–44:08)

• “Duende” is an Andalusian term for the wild, deep, untameable energy that erupts from the depths, fueling authentic art and living.
  • Passion and discipline are needed to court duende; chaos otherwise results.
• Duende is an animating, gritty, moving presence—not to be domesticated, but courted.

11. The Sacredness of Darkness (44:18–49:26)

• Darkness, often maligned in Western culture, is a holy, generative space.
• Quoting Rilke: “My God is dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.” (46:46)
• “Whoever is touched by duende is baptized by dark waters” — opening to confidence and blessing that comes from the dark.

12. Disciplines of the Dark & Collective Descent (49:44–54:00)

• The pandemic is a time for “descent:” letting go, listening, rooting.
• “Fear does not disqualify the entry point. It just means that we're walking beyond what is familiar.” (49:44)
• Robinson Jeffers: “We must uncenter the human a little,” inviting us into a multi-centered cosmos, delighted by multiplicity and otherness.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Cultivating Spaciousness:
  “The issues that we are confronted by are not meant so much for resolution as they are for spaciousness.” —Francis Weller (15:26)

• Beauty as Survival:
  “Life without the experience of the beautiful would be unbearable.” —John O’Donohue, shared by Francis Weller (23:00)
  “We're not going to change what's going on in our culture or on our planet by moralistic imperatives. We will do it out of love. And love is first quickened through beauty.” —Francis Weller (23:40)

• Elders and the Community:
  “An elder is someone who really has taken themselves less and less seriously and their role in the community more and more gravely.” —Francis Weller (13:35)

• Patience as Soul Value:
  “In your patience is your soul… what are you willing to sit with day after day, hour after hour, for the long vigil?” (24:45)

• Service Beyond Personal Healing:
  “What we learn, what we gather on any kind of long walk with suffering is meant to be a giveaway at some point.” (36:55)

• Walking into the Unknown:
  “Fear does not disqualify the entry point. It just means that we're walking beyond what is familiar. And can we in this moment, rather than trying to scramble back to everything that we know, can we live in that unknown place, can we engage it and let it inform us?” (49:44)

• Language as Earth, as Presence: (Francis’ reading from his essay, 53:34)

  “I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a central earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity…”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:27 – Francis on pandemic solitude and returning to the “Book of Hours”
• 06:25 – Initiation as severance, identity shift, and no return to old life
• 13:35 – On elders metabolizing grief into medicine
• 15:26 – Spaciousness vs. resolution, the bigness of soul
• 16:50 – Apprenticeship with sorrow: neither escape nor drowning
• 18:24 – Four practices for overwhelm: self-compassion, turning toward, beauty, patience
• 24:45 – Patience and presence, Jane Goodall discussion
• 27:38 – Restraint: a forgotten virtue, meeting emptiness
• 31:12 – Paul Shepard’s “beautiful and strange otherness”
• 33:59 – Erin reads Francis’ writing: uniting in sorrow, shared presence
• 36:55 – Gifts, healing, and service to the collective
• 39:24 – Bridging polarization with relational, “initiated” presence
• 41:10 – Duende: wild, soulful force and its requirements
• 44:18 – The sacredness and generativity of darkness (Rilke quote)
• 49:44 – Disciplines of the dark, collective descent, uncentering the human
• 53:34 – Francis reads his evocative, earthy passage on language and belonging

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Tone and Language

Throughout, the conversation alternates between poetic, earnest, and gently provocative. Both Francis and the hosts embody a slow, reflective pace—inviting listeners not to rush, but to marinate in the questions and subtle insights. There’s a tangible presence of reverence, tenderness, and encouragement to turn toward sorrow, beauty, and the mystery of being alive in troubled times.

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Summary

This episode is a rich, contemplative journey into the heart of what truly “matters” in embodied living—especially when the ordinary has fallen away. Francis Weller offers both philosophical frameworks and lived, practical wisdom for walking with sorrow, cultivating depth, and embracing both the dark and beautiful gifts of our current shared ordeal. The hosts skillfully draw out not just information, but also invitation: to pause, witness, and remember our own roots of belonging and soulfulness, for the sake of ourselves and the wider world.

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Transcript

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Welcome to the Embodiment Matters Podcast with me, Erin Gieseman Rabke, and my husband, Carl Rabke. Embodiment Matters is an ongoing, rich conversation about what it really means to be embodied and why and how Embodiment Matters so much in our daily lives and in our modern world. You can find out more about our wonderful guests, about our work, you can sign up for our newsletter, and find out how to become a supporting member of our podcast online@entodiment matters.com.

[Carl Rabke]

In this.

[Podcast Host/Producer]

Conversation we speak with Francis Weller and Francis is a writer, psychotherapist, and soul activist. He has a beautiful way of weaving together different traditions from psychotherapy, anthropology, mythology, different poetic traditions, indigenous cultures, alchemy. Francis is the author of the Wild Edge of Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, which I don't know anyone who's read that book who hasn't been deeply touched by it. He also co wrote the Threshold Between Loss and Revelation and just recently released an ebook from his website which is in the absence of the Ordinary Essays in Time of Uncertainty and much of this conversation we have is looking at how to be in a time of uncertainty as we're in this global pandemic and exploring the initiatory qualities of this. And and we hit on lots of different themes around the value of duende and the downward movement of soul and what are helpful qualities to cultivate in times of overwhelm and uncertainty. And I just find Francis to be such a voice of depth and soul and caring for all that we're holding in these times. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did and you can find out more information about Francis and his work at his website FrancisWeller.net.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Welcome Frances, we're so thrilled to talk with you again.

[Francis Weller]

Happy to be back with you both. Thanks for having me.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Thank you. Before we get into our long list of topics, we'd love to check in with you. Just want to ask how you and Judith are doing in pandemic time and how you are.

[Francis Weller]

You know, for the most part it's been a kind of a pause, kind of breath, and I have really found myself ironically retreating back. Not retreating, but returning back to a very old tradition in my I was raised Catholic and part of the old tradition is called the Book of Hours, or I think six times a day or so. There is a call basically called the prayer at 9am or 6am, 9am 12, 3, 6, 9, and even midnight if you're up. And they have kind of filled my days with Seeing the hours as having qualities, not just something to pass through, but having particular qualities that have invited a different kind of conversation between me and the day. So as an introvert, it's actually turned into a very rich, soulful time of reflection and imagination and kind of an intimate conversation with the mood of the world, which is quite heavy and dense and anxious right now, but it's also been quite rich. Yeah, thanks for asking.

[Carl Rabke]

So, Francis, I wanted to talk a little bit about just initiation. And you've written and taught a lot about traditional initiations and rough initiations.

[Francis Weller]

Yes.

[Carl Rabke]

And if you could maybe speak to, for people who aren't familiar with it, the sort of three traditional phases of initiation and rough initiation. And then what I'm curious about is how, as we're in this place right now of kind of some people emerging, some things opening, like how do you know when initiation is complete? Or what are ways of sort of re entering in the situation that we're in, both as a country in the US and in the world right now.

[Francis Weller]

Okay, as usual, we'll start off small and work our way.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

As we like to do.

[Francis Weller]

As we like to do. First of all, I wouldn't say those are the traditional three phases of initiation that I talk about. These are three consequences of initiation. You might be referring to Van Genop's severance, ordeal and return. That's been used a lot, with some controversy to may be too simplistic an idea. What I'm talking about in terms of the three consequences of all true initiations, there is a radical severance from the world that you knew. There's a profound change in your sense of identity, and there's a realization that you can never return to the world that was. Now those three things happen. In all true initiations that are guided by elders and the community and the ancestors and ritual and the sacred. That's the intent is to break some connection to the world that you once inhabited. Particularly if you're a young child and you're going through adolescence and you're emerging into a larger sense of being, you are going to leave that world that was. There's also a sense that your identity will no longer be what it was. The child in some sense is dead. And what is emergent is yet to be filled. And which is a good thing to remember that initiation means to begin something, not to finish it. You are initiated. That means you have begun a new. A new phase of your life. And then the third thing I say is that you cannot go back and you're never Meant to go back after you've gone through the threshold. This is where our Western psychology and our Western medicine kind of get things asked backwards, which is we're going to try to get you back to where you were before the crisis hit. And that's good. That's really a wrong visioning. Even in trauma, even in rough initiations, I don't want to get back to where I was. I want to somehow take what has happened and shape it through my. My work into something medicinal or meaningful, both in my life, but also for the community. Initiation in a traditional sense was never intended for my personal growth. It never had anything to do with me. I went through an ordeal. The initiate was put through the ordeal for the sake thereof, for the sake of the community, for the sake of the watershed, for the sake of the ancestors, for the sake of the sacred. But it was not meant for me. Again, our Western psychology is so self oriented, all about me. But what if the larger arc of our life was not meant to simply be about my personal growth, but about my gradually increasing circumference of participation with the whole engaged world? Now, that might have a much more meaningful sense of initiation? Where we are right now, culturally, collectively, in this rough initiation, can precipitate the opposite effect. However, rough initiation, like trauma or illness or these kind of tragic ordeals have the tendency to kind of shatter us into the most isolated sense of identity. If you've worked, and I'm sure I know you have worked with people who have gone through traumas, and you yourselves have probably tasted some. Whereas traditional initiation was meant to break the identity out into its larger, encompassing sense of self. I am part moon, part rose, part songbird. You know, I become part of all of it. Trauma has the inverse effect. I am fragmented out of the cosmic sense of participation and belonging to. And that's where we end up with a lot of our traumatic experiences is isolated, cut off, ashamed, lonely. And healing is a matter of suturing those tears in our code of belonging. And we can get into that in a minute if you'd like. But those are kind of my first thoughts about your question, Carl.

[Carl Rabke]

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Just thinking of where we are now collectively, like how to suture these tears and these challenges into a larger suit of belonging.

[Francis Weller]

When I did a series of talks, I think it was last year, the year before last year, on initiation and how psyche, in the absence of traditional practices, still insists on some kind of confrontation that has the potential to break us through. And I laid out several premises. One of them is that initiation is not optional. The second premise was that human beings are shaped, that we are made through the encounters we have in our lifetime. I forget the third premise, but the fourth premise was even though initiation is not optional, you can still miss the bus.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Right.

[Francis Weller]

In other words, even if you're confronted with these ordeals which we are all being faced with right now, it does not guarantee ripening.

[Carl Rabke]

Right. Yeah. And it seems like that desire to get either myself or my life or a culture back to where it was three months ago is one of the ways of missing that opportunity.

[Francis Weller]

Right. We're clinging to old strategic forms, like adolescent strategies. We're seeing a lot in our leadership right now that's not ripening through the ordeal. The heat of this circumstance is not cooking them into something more spacious, more welcoming, more conscious of the fact that we are all entangled in this together. So you can still miss the bus. Even if everything is set in front of you. It does not guarantee that you will make that. Cross that threshold in any meaningful way. You can still insist on being an adolescent.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

I'd love to ask Frances about something that you say so beautifully in one of your. Both in our conversations, but in one of your essays in this collection, in the Absence of the Ordinary, about the pot. You know what? It's in one of my. Actually, I kept reading the essays and thinking, oh, this is my favorite. Oh, this is my favorite. But one of my favorites, I really want to say, is the second one that's called Some People Wake up. And it's about initiation and becoming an elder. And there's something about. You just speak to so beautifully about an elder being someone who is metabolized. I might not get your words exactly right, but grief or trauma or sorrow into something that becomes medicinal for not only themselves, but for the community. And I'm curious about that right now, when a lot of people are maybe metabolizing sorrow or grief or at least being confronted with it and curious about how to metabolize it also without like, rushing to the bright side of the medicine for the community. You know what I mean?

[Francis Weller]

Oh, yeah. Well, you can't.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yeah.

[Francis Weller]

If you do that, it's more about me than it is about the medicine. An elder is someone who really has taken themselves less and less seriously and their role in the community more and more gravely. There's a gravity to an elder. You can feel it. They carry a certain weight and substance, but again, it's not. Has nothing to do with them having a CV or a resume. It's just that for whatever Reason. They have found themselves face to face with life's troubles. And they have steered into them rather than away from them. Which is a huge choice point in our lives. Our culture, by and large, is trouble avoidant. We try to find the exit door as soon as possible. Whenever grief comes up or pain or suffering. How do we get out of this? We have entire industries and entire pharmaceuticals. All geared towards getting away from pain. I understand that. I don't want to hang out in pain. I'm not a masochist. But pain is also inevitable. So how do we use it in soul's understanding? As the prima materia, as the material in the vessel of our lives. That we're being asked to cook and to keep warm. And to allow it to become what it wants to become. Again, not my agenda, but what does it want to become? So when grief comes into our lives. When sorrow, when defeat, when illness, when pandemic comes into our life. What is asked of us to become immense? And an elder is someone who has profound spaciousness inside of them. That they can welcome and hold most anything that comes to their feet. James Hillman once said, you know, that the issues that we are confronted by. Are not meant so much for resolution as they are for spaciousness. How big can we become? How much can we hold as human beings. And not turn away or become small or strategic. But really to say yes to it?

[Carl Rabke]

Yeah. And it just seems like these situations with COVID 19. Like there's a natural spreading or deepening. Of all of the intensities of unresolved trauma or grief or family systems. It seems like the burner has been put on in lots of ways. And you've also referred to the strategies of our culture of anesthesia and amnesia. And it feels like that's also been amped up, too.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah.

[Carl Rabke]

Kind of how to hold the right relationship and to be able to welcome that immensity. Seems so important right now.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, Carl. Because this is what I. You know, in my language, I talk about this apprenticeship with sorrow. Very first move in that apprenticeship is finding our right relationship with sorrow. Because we typically have a kind of. I often call it a binary relationship. We either push it away and become so detached from it that we don't sense it, or we drown in it. And in the work of focusing, which I think you're both familiar with, very much so. Eugene Genlin's work. The idea is to try to come into companionship. What is the right relationship? How do I walk alongside of this grief rather Than either drowning in it or trying to beat it off with a stick. How do I, in a sense, befriend it and come into some prolonged intimacy again? That's why I value the idea of apprenticeship. It implies from the very beginning that this is going to be a long practice. This is not a short term thing. It's not a period of mourning. It's not a weekend workshop. It is a prolonged vigil that we're asked to hold with some of the most difficult material that we'll ever face. And that is the heat, that is the very ordeals that we are being asked to sit with that reshape us and remake us into something much more spacious and much more capable of showing up in the streets once we can return to the streets.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

In one of your pieces, you were articulating four things or four practices maybe about responding to overwhelm, including self compassion. The second one is what you were just talking about. Turning toward the feelings, being astonished by beauty and having patience. And this is so important right now. Every one of them.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah, I think they are like medicine kits for us right now. Self compassion, we struggle with that a lot. I think we're taught to be very harsh. Even again, our psychologies are always about progress. And that idea of progress can become kind of a cudgel that we beat ourselves with. Even just today, someone that I was working with said, I don't think I'm making much progress right now. I feel like I'm regressing. And my internal response is, oh, good. I wonder what psyche is saying here. That the agenda isn't always forward motion. But that's our progress addicted culture. We're always supposed to be moving forward. Self compassion is really about the radical acceptance of what is. Can I make room for the weak part of me? See this heroic idea that we have in this culture too. That's why we have to be careful. Going back to Carl, your original question about initiation. Initiation is not about improvement. It's really about ripening and becoming a more fertile ground for how soul wants to manifest itself. So self compassion is really about making a space for all the things that don't fit the heroic ideal. You know, the weakness, the inadequacy, the failures, the shame, the feelings of insecurity. These don't fit the heroic ideal of the culture. So we typically banish these parts of us. And now I'm basically a caricature of my identity. I'm not myself. I'm kind of a fiction of the impression that I might think you will find Approvable. But essentially I'm not showing up. To show up means I have to bring all of who I am. So that's the self compassion piece. When I. When I teach weekends on self compassion, I often begin the workshop by saying, this is a weekend and non self improvement. You know, just, can we just allow that the space to emerge in which we can make a space for all of what has been outcast? That's really holy work as far as I can see. The second one about turning toward the feelings we just talked about. Yes. About finding the courage to turn towards the most difficult guests at the door. That is really a huge piece of our work. Beauty. I don't think we can face what's going on right now without massive doses of beauty. I mean, I think you share a lot of photographs online, Aaron, about all the beauty that you encounter day by day. Why do you do that? Why is that so important to you?

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yeah. You know, I want to say, just as you're bringing this about beauty and like gratitude that probably, oh, I don't know. For at least 15 years I've been in a wrestle with this question around. Is it okay to revel in the beauty when there's so much struggle and suffering in the world? And sometime in the last year, maybe I've wrestled with that question long enough that it, it landed like it's not only okay. It is an absolute responsibility, you know, to receive it and praise it. And I feel teary just talking about it right now. You know, it feels so important to me. We need it as ballast.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah. I think. What was John o' Donoghue saying? Life without the experience of the beauty, of the beautiful would be unbearable.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Totally.

[Francis Weller]

So imagine trying to, you know, endure COVID 19 or, you know, our government without daily doses of beauty would become unbearable quickly. Hillman said that beauty is the means by which the gods touch the senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life. So imagine without beauty what is it that attracts us into life? We're not going to change what's going on in our culture or on our planet by moralistic imperatives. We will do it out of love. And love is first quickened through beauty. The allure of a flower or a face or a child or a fox or, you know, a sunrise. Fall in love outward, which is what Robinson Jeffers says we must do. We must fall in love outward. Well, that happens because beauty quickens our hearts and stirs us and elicits a return of affection, a smile, a gratitude bow. Something happens inside of us that Puts us now in relationship to the thing that we are witnessing, we're not observing. We've actually entered into conversation through that appreciation. And then the last one is patience, a very un American value. But when working with soul or with trauma or anything, patience becomes a key practice. It allows things to begin to show themselves to us rather than, again, for me to somehow imprint my impression of how it's supposed to look. Again, Hillman would say that in your patience is your soul. What are you willing to sit with day after day, hour after hour, for the long vigil again, that's where soul will take root. And your patience is your soul. Not so much in your accomplishments, not so much in what you've achieved or your productivity. But what if patience became a soul value that we really honored?

[Carl Rabke]

Yeah, I remember you've referred to just the quality that Jane Goodall brought to her work. And that it wasn't any kind of instant gratification, but a slow, long process.

[Francis Weller]

I believe it took five years before the chimps were willing to get close enough to touch her. Imagine if we had that kind of fidelity, if we could sit with our unfinished pieces that long, with that amount of tolerance to allow something to unfold rather than to push it and force it. That. I'm glad you brought that up, Carl, because she's kind of a hero and to me, really the icon of someone who really knows what it means to keep that vigil, that fidelity, for the long walk. And we absolutely need that right now. This pressure to open the country back up again and the economy back up again shows a complete lack of patience and a complete lack of understanding of Village Mind. We talk about freedom, but freedom without the Village Mind is anarchy. And if you look at that word, anarchy, it's anarchy without archetypes, without those forms and foundational behaviors that actually shaped us into human beings knowing how to be in relationship to each other and to the watershed. Now we are without archive, without these bounding forms. And it's all about me again, the absurdity of the individualism right now under the rubric of freedom. And it's causing tremendous, tremendous suffering because we do not know how to think well. Another one of those values that's very under recognized is restraint essay, too.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

That's another one of my 14 favorites.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah, I wrote about that, too, in this little book. That restraint is really one of those almost completely unrecognized practices and values of knowing how to hold back, how to not move forward even if you can, for the sake of something larger to emerge. I Love restraint. I think it's incredibly important. Outcast value.

[Carl Rabke]

Yeah. And it seems so, so important now as far as moving forward and climate. And I think just the way that these last months have sort of brought an external constraint on activity and travel. Like what. What if restraint was something that was a celebrated value of can I travel less, can I make less, can I expand less? I think it's. That's really important.

[Francis Weller]

I think what happens currently is this restraint, or the constraints, as you're calling it correctly, is it puts us face to face with this profound feeling of emptiness. And we freak out when we get close to that abyss. We don't know how to get close to it without running frantically towards what I call secondary satisfactions. Busyness, addictions, power status, distractions of all kinds. But what we really need to do is find the courage to sit at that and dangle our feet over the edge of that void and begin to have a conversation with it. We read that emptiness as a kind of a reflection of personal failure. But that emptiness is actually an absence where village, nature, beauty, ritual, community. I think I said that already, all should have taken shape. And when that failed, that curve, there is this sense of emptiness. I hear about it all the time in my practice. Will feel empty. But they read it again as some personal failure. It's not. But it's still very hard to face it and get close to it.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yeah, I'm thinking about. You almost said it differently in your own words. But Paul Shepherd's quote, and then I have several quotes from your essays I'd love to invite you to maybe read. And I can if you don't want to look it up. But on page 45, there's one where you unpack a little bit. Paul Shepherd's phrase about this, where the great otherness should be about opening ourselves to take in the sorrows of the world. And that before either you read that or I read that, I just. I want to say, like, it's so tender to me to. To meet and work with so many people who are terrified to open in that direction and then find a different. I don't know what to say, like a kind of courage that when facing what is, there's a kind of empowerment instead of a collapsing in the face of it often.

[Francis Weller]

Right, right. Well, if we do have the courage to come into that conversation, it does break out. It does break us out of our isolation, and we come back into that beautiful and strange otherness. The quote you're referring to is Paul shepherd was being interviewed by Jonathan White for a collection called Talking on Water. And I can't remember the question, but his response was, the grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. That passage just strikes me so deeply. I mean, shepherd was referring to that. Our myopia, our failure to kind of maintain the intimacy, the conversation with the natural world has created this breach. There's this gap between the human and the more than human world. But I think it goes even further than that. I think we're supposed to see that beautiful and strange otherness in each other's eyes. That this kind of the incipient domestication that all of us have gone through has dulled that brilliance in our eyes. And we don't really see it. And I think we miss that. I miss seeing that in other eyes, my own eyes. I want to see that flame. I want to see that beautiful and strange otherness in me as well as the people I'm sitting with. That would be the. You know, the. If we could put a goal on therapy or this kind of work, that would be a beautiful goal, which is to help us reinhabit our own beautiful and strange otherness rather than trying to kind of conform into some sense of mediocrity. You know, that sense of being normal puts us in the middle of everything. And the soul did not come here to be in the middle. It came to be eccentric. It came to be on the edges of the center, so that we are expressing our unique character, not our formulaic character that fits in, but that gets us all the way back to that sense of the failure of belonging and how much we then substitute conformity for a true sense of. Of belonging.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

I would love to read just one of these quotes of yours on Shepherd's phrase. When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world. And in some strange, alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no out there. We share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.

[Francis Weller]

That's quite nice.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

It's good, right? It's good. Yeah. It sort of hints at the courage to turn toward the feelings, as you say, and to turn toward the world. And this. This alchemy that can happen of being united. And it's achy, but it's so alive and so necessary.

[Francis Weller]

It's utterly necessary. I know when I work with the cancer help program, which I would have been at in another two weeks, but it's canceled for this time. I give them 10 practices to use to optimize the healing response of their bodies and their soul to their. To their illness. And the first one, I say that you can use these in any order you want. You may use some more than others. You may not use some at all. But the number one is number one, and that is self compassion. There is no healing response without self compassion being preeminent. Number 10 is often number 10, and that is service. That what you've gathered along your healing journey was not meant for you alone. At some point you'll be asked to give it away, to share it with somebody on a bus or in a cafe who you understood now is also facing cancer or who also knows suffering. What we learn, what we gather on any kind of long walk with suffering is meant to be a giveaway at some point. Otherwise, what is the meaning of it? Just so I feel better, that's useful. But the world is suffering. And what the world needs now more than anything else besides love, sweet love, are attentive and present adult human beings who are willing to wade into the mess and say I'm here and I have gifts to understand that we are utterly needed at this time, that no one is dispensable. I think one of the greatest depressions we carry around is feeling cosmologically insignificant, as if we don't matter and we don't know that our soul came in sheltering great gifts to give away. And that's part of what, you know, that's part of our depression, it's part of our sadness is not being asked to deliver our gifts. Yeah.

[Carl Rabke]

Holding that view that each of us has some unique essential gifts to give. What comes to mind is just the. What's different in how we hold ourselves and others when that's the come from versus the way in our country and just around the world, these sense of vast oceans of otherness are happening between, you know, the mask wearers and the not mask wearers or the right and the left. And I would love for you to just talk a little bit about how to hold those sort of deepening cultural gaps with this from this perspective of yeah, each of us and our uniqueness and sort of a soul level approach.

[Francis Weller]

Well, first I would confess I get caught in that place myself. So it's not that I'm immune from polarization. I think there's actually some place for that, for discernment, for recognizing what actions are life enhancing and what are life inhibiting. And I will fight against those things. I am committed to try to do my best without making you bad or wrong. But I'm also going to trust my soul's outrage. See, outrage is very different than rage. Rage to me, feels more like an adolescent response to being hurt. Outrage is recognizing the hurt in something that I love. You know, and if I'm in love with this world and I see decisions being made that would compromise the integrity of the ecosystem or community, I'm not going to be neutral. I am going to respond. And I think the trick is, how do we respond in ways that remain relational? How do I stay in relationship to you, even if I am vehemently in disagreement with the position you're holding? Can I do that? So that, to me is what would be the mark of another. Someone who's gone through some levels of initiation. They know how to stay in relationship even when there's conflict. Conflict done well to an initiated human being leads to breakthrough and to intimacy. That's really the difficult skill we need right now. It's easy to polarize. It's easy to make someone wrong in our mind. It's much harder to say, I disagree, but I'm still in relationship with you. We are in this mess together. I mean, no one is exempt. Right now.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

I don't know if this feels like too much of a subject jump, or if we can go here, but I would love for you to talk a little bit about duende. Yeah, just what do I want to say? Had a conversation with someone recently about contexts that can get very spiritual without the gritty grounding soul energy or duende. And I definitely share that. I have a bit of an allergy to too much of the bright side and ungrounded positivity. As much as I'm sort of an optimist anyway, I just love how you speak about that and refer to Lorca. Whatever you want to say about duende, I think it's an important word and energy for us to know.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah, it might be a new word for some of your listeners, I don't know. But duende comes from the Andalusian people in Spain. And on one level, on its most kind of mundane level, speaks to something like a poltergeist, kind of a ghost in the house. But in a more soulful reflection on duende, they are speaking about the fierce energy that rises up out of the black earth. They'll Often imagine it through an artist, like a dancer. Like there's a woman dancing flamenco. She could be dancing perfectly, but the room would be untouched because there was no duende in her movements. But the same person or another person dancing who has been touched by the heat of duende will have everyone weeping in the audience because they touched something so darkly soulful that it touched the very core of our being. Duende, they often talk about as a fierce heat that kind of comes like. And it's like drinking powdered glass. It's a wild, vital energy that you cannot domesticate. The best you can do is court it, and you court it. Ironically, Lorca says to the combination of discipline and passion. See, this is again, very un American. We like the discipline. I mean, we like the passion. We like to be. We use the word. We want to be wild all the time. But wildness without discipline is again chaos. Think of all of our wonderful artists who we've lost. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. They had lots of passion, but somehow lacked that containing energy, of discipline. So that to give their heat form and shape, they needed. We all need that. What else can I say about duende? It requires movement. It's not a meditative energy. It's an eruptive energy. You can hear it in a singer, in a guitar player and a dancer. You can see it sometimes in adolescence when there's this kind of breakthrough of courage. It has a very fierce heat to it. I don't think I'm touching this one as deeply as I want to.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Is it related to the way in which, when you speak alchemically, you talk about the nigredo, the darkening phase?

[Francis Weller]

There's parallels. I wouldn't say they're the same thing by any stretch. The nigredo is actually a state of being that we're taken into. And they would call it the blackening. And the nigredo is a shedding. It's a thinning. It's a decay state of decay, of loss. It's sevia negativa. It's things leaving us. Whereas duende is a presence that actually enters us. And when we're touched by duende, we shudder, we move intensely. It asks things from us to be displayed, to be shared. So it's quite different than the negredo. But they both come into the territory of darkness. I think we could spend a couple minutes on. Darkness in Western culture is negative. It's hell. You know, you're gonna go and go into it. Or they entered into a state of great darkness. Well, that State is frequently associated with depression, with flatness. But darkness in the old imagination was as sacred as the light. Had a very different quality to it. I often use the images of, like, think about your heartbeat right now. It's happening in utter darkness, and yet we hope it never sees the light of day. We hope the tree roots remain wonderfully encapsulated in darkness so that the magic that happens there to transmute minerals and water into tree, into fruit continues to happen. So much happens in the darkness that I consider it to be exquisitely holy. Blake Rilke talked about the darkness oftentimes in his poetry. One of his favorite. One of my favorite lines of his is, and yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. It is so exquisite. Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Wow. Yeah.

[Francis Weller]

There's so much that goes on under. We know so little about what's happening. Psyche knows much more. Call it the unconscious, but it's actually we who are unconscious of knows damn well what it's doing. But we're oftentimes just trailing behind, trying to keep up.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

It's beautiful. I love just being with those roots right now.

[Francis Weller]

Mm. Another one of Lorca's lines about duende. He says, you know that duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yeah.

[Francis Weller]

Not something you engage lightly because it will shake the house, it will level the house. And you can only tolerate that so often. Again, we don't want to idealize it, but it's something that brings depth and significance and meaning into our lives, particularly when we become too pure and too light sided. How do we really navigate and engage those qualities of darkness? Yeah.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yeah. I think that's how I relate to it from, you know, the historical. In my own life, like, tension of, I don't know what, trying to be pure or something like that, and the relief. And lately I just am so reveling in the connection of the words about human and humus and humanity and humor and just this, like, coming down to earth with a little less performance or something, a little more grit. I just. I relish that so much.

[Francis Weller]

Well, I forgot. The title of that essay you're referring to is called Baptized by Dark Waters. There's not a work of line that whoever is touched by duende is baptized by dark waters. So there we're talking about baptism, which is, you know, in Christian tradition and many traditions, is basically consecrating you to the sacred. But what would it mean to be baptized by dark waters? That's a whole different imagination. That what's coming up is blessing me into a. Into a confidence that arises up out of the dark.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

I just have some wish for that for us collectively right now in this time, you know, because, you know, a lot of folks are struggling in various ways to be as. I'm not going to repeat it as beautifully as you just said it, so I'll just leave it as you said it.

[Francis Weller]

But we need disciplines of the dark. How do we walk into that darkness? There will be fear because we're walking into the unknown. Fear does not disqualify the entry point. It just means that we're walking beyond what is familiar. And can we in this moment, rather than trying to scramble back to everything that we know, can we live in that unknown place, can we engage it and let it inform us?

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yes.

[Francis Weller]

Dreams through imagination, through art. But, yeah, disciplines of the dark, again, react.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yes.

[Carl Rabke]

Yeah. One that seems like such a time where, you know, it's not about the productivity and the ascension, but like, what. What roots or invisible seeds could be growing through this challenge of the last months.

[Francis Weller]

Yeah. I mean, that's the great. Oh, yeah. This is a time of descent. It is not a time of ease and confidence and success and power. It is a time of letting go, of allowing, listening. Those are all disciplines of the dark.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

It's something like. I think you share this in one of your essays, too, about de centering yourself or the human and leaning a little bit more into what is being asked of me right now, rather than just what do I want?

[Francis Weller]

That's a beautiful line from Robinson Jeffers where he says we must uncenter the human a little, you know, and I. And I took that idea of what it would mean to uncenter our minds because, you know, again, in Western psychology, we're always talking about getting centered. Right. But what if we live in a multicenter cosmos?

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yeah.

[Francis Weller]

And to enter into that, I have to become uncentered a bit and enter into the multiplicity of all these other centers that are manifesting in flowers and in clouds and in conversations. There are many, many centers, all inviting a rapport between you and the other. When we're so encapsulated in our own center, trying to get centered. Well, I get nothing wrong with that, by all means. But I also want to live in a multicenter world. That's where soul comes in, where a spirit tends to go towards the one. The sublime soul loves the ten Thousand things, as the Dao would say, multiplicity, wild extravagance of shapes and forms. And wouldn't it be boring if we only lived on managed plantations? Oh, my God, yeah. To walk into a wild forest, a climax forest, is to really engage that multiplicity and the wild extravagance of form and to be moved and touched by it. That's walking in the holy.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

I would love to ask you to read, Frances, if you would. It's on the. From these essays in the Absence of the Ordinary. At the end of page 53, there's a paragraph goes a little bit into 54, about. I want to see our words. It's so good, and I want to hear it in your voice.

[Francis Weller]

All right. These words were written while Judith was gathering sweetgrass up on the coast in Northern California. And I was sitting my back against an old tree, and these words just kind of came out. And I said, I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a central earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful that we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. What if our words could once again echo the larger reality of the sacred and not solely the world of economics? But that would take an act of remembrance, a slowing downward into a state of presence, awareness and being. And this means being in the world. Enough of this talk that makes us strangers. I want to know I belong here. And if my words can say to you that I'm a man of this earth, this particular piece of earth, then I will feel like I have arrived. My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannas coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language, and only then can my longing for eloquence be granted. Until then, I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.

[Carl Rabke]

Damn. Oh, that's so good.

[Francis Weller]

Thank you for asking for that.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

It's just that aspiration to that living, intimate language. It's just so beautiful. Thank you for reading that.

[Francis Weller]

You're so welcome. Good to sit with you both again.

[Carl Rabke]

It's so good to sit with you, Frances.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

As we were half joking at the beginning of our conversation that we have about five hours of questions.

[Francis Weller]

Another one we can do, another we.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Get to talk to you again. Maybe not on the podcast, but. And yes, we'd love to do that again, too. Thank you so much for taking time to be with us.

[Francis Weller]

You're very welcome. You're very welcome. And I look forward to sitting down for the popcorn and wine again soon. Yeah.

[Carl Rabke]

May it be so.

[Erin Gieseman Rabke]

Yes.

[Carl Rabke]

Okay. Take care, Francis.

[Francis Weller]

Be well.

[Podcast Host/Producer]

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