A Climate Change with Matt Matern
Climate Podcast

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I’ve got Nadia Colburn on the program today. Nadia is a writer, teacher, Yogi activist, and just wanted to remind the audience that climate change is in a tree planting phase.

And we’re planting trees in the Amazon rainforest when you follow us on Apple or Spotify. So, share our episodes with your friends and family and on social media, and we’ll plant an additional tree in your honor. So we want to plant a forest. So spread the word and spread this interview we’re doing with Nadia to tell your friends and family.

So Nadia, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much. I’m really honored to be here, Matt.

Well, you know, I just given the audience a little bit about your background, you have been exploring questions to the body motherhood, trauma, healing, social and environmental justice, and the power of narrative, your full length poetry book. The high shelf was published a few years ago and your second poetry book, I say the sky was published in early 2024. knottiest poetry and prose have been have won awards and have been published in 80 national publications, including the New Yorker, the LA Review of Books, and the Boston Globe magazine.

She has taught writing classes that bring together meditation, yoga and writing, how to has her BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia, student of tech, not Han, and offered lectures and retreats at the Harvard Divinity School. So quite a resume and a lot of amazing work. And it’s great to have you here and looking forward to this conversation.

Me too. I love I love what you do and all the different voices to bring into conversation with you.

Tell us a little bit about your journey and and what got you kind of headed in the direction of the environment. And and as a writer too?

Well, I think the to go hand in hand, I think as a writer. Our calling as writers is to pay attention to what’s happening. How do I translate my awareness then into language? And I think it’s just been a journey of paying greater and greater attention. Starting perhaps first with you know, what’s happening with me? How can I tell my story what what wants to come out what wants to be expressed in me to what’s happening around me?

And what’s the interconnection between what’s happening within me and what’s happening around me. So I think that, you know, anyone really paying attention today has to be aware of these incredible changes that we’re living through. And whether we call ourselves kind of environmental biters or not, I think we’re all living in this time. So necessarily, you know, responding in some way to what’s what’s happening, what’s changing around us.

Right? My My uncle was a writer of poetry. Reg Sonnar. And he, at one time won the Walt Whitman award, back in the I guess it was probably seven days. And so as at that time, as a kid, I was not fully appreciative of the work. I don’t think it certainly wasn’t as deeply known that the environmental crisis that we were facing at that point in time, I mean, certainly some people knew the oil companies knew. But it wasn’t as widely published. And so now, obviously, we’re facing this existential threat from climate change and the extinction of so many species. Where did where did you kind of, did you have some Turning Point moment where you’re like, Oh, my God, or was it more just a series of light bulbs starting to turn on for you?

Well, to be, you know, just perfectly honest, I think it came through listening to my own body. And that process came, I mean, who knows? And perhaps it would have happened differently, you know, if I were slightly younger, but my particular Awakening was I’m getting pregnant, which I wanted to do. And then all of a sudden, something switched, like I’ve had been in school my whole life and train to use my mind.

And then all of a sudden, it’s like, actually, my mind has nothing to do with this process. This is much bigger than I am. And my body is in control. And so what is this other natural forces taking place through me, that is creating life. And that was actually really when I started to become a writer. And then I started to pay attention to my own body, my own kind of aliveness differently. And in that process, I also, you know, had amazing, wonderful experiences.

Being a mother, I was very lucky, I had two healthy kids, but also came to encounter childhood trauma. And so this process, but I had not really dealt with in my past. And I think that that was a real waking up for me. And so what is happening, that what else is happening, that I’m not paying attention to? What’s happening all around us? What are kind of embodied layers of violence that we have not named, that we have not looked at fully, that I have not named, and not looked at fully, but also, as a society, we’re not naming and not looking at fully.

And I think once I started, by necessity, asking those questions, that came from paying attention to my own body, then I saw, this is happening all around us, in so many different forms, so many forms of violence, a violation, that we’re just kind of like walking on the surface of, but if we really look, if we really listen, if we really pay attention. There’s a lot of damage here.

But also, there’s a lot of potential for healing. Because my own experience was I came into contact with this trauma that, you know, for a while, just kind of pulled me down, but then I also healed. And I so kind of learned in my own body, the potential for healing. And I really believe that that potential if we pay attention, is also one of the natural forces around us.

Right there is this process of people becoming dead to or putting blinders on as to the trauma or violence as you would might say, to the to the natural world that has been occurring, really at an accelerating pace, since maybe a the 1850s or so when the industrial revolution occurred. And we just started strip mining and ripping things apart and burning stuff to no end.

And, and maybe kind of I was thinking about it today thinking while the age of great poetry started to shift and we became less and less connected to poetry, as this industrial revolution took place, and this communications revolution took place, and radio and TV and telegraph and films and all this stuff. Kind of maybe back burnered poetry a bit, right?

Yeah, I think. I mean, it’s interesting to think about the Romantic period of poets, which was a great Renaissance and poetry, but they were responding to environmental changes, right? They were looking around them and saying, wait a minute, what’s happening with industrialization, I want to get back to nature, like, so much of romantic poetry is, is coming from that connection to nature that they were seeing being destroyed.

But I think then, after World War One, with the modernist period, there was a sense of, there’s so much violence, we don’t even believe anymore in in wholeness, we need to reflect this violence, we need to reflect this fragmentation.

So we see the kind of breaking of forms and modernism and I don’t think then we’ve really had a coming back to the healing power of art and now healing is sometimes even in the artistic world seen as naive, but and there are all these other forms of technology, which are easier and make us more passive, you know, poetry, you need to slow down. It asks us to work a little bit. And there are these other forms of entertainment that are just, quote unquote easier.

So yes, is there poetry in TikTok? Or is TikTok the antithesis of poetry?

Well, you know, I mean, I think the thing that’s interesting is there is The whole I’m not the expert on this. I’m not the one generation. But I do think there’s this whole tick tock world where people are recommending books to one another. I mean, my daughter is a great leader. And she doesn’t spend a lot of time on social media. But she does find some of the books, she reads by following people on Tik Tok.

And then there’s this kind of renaissance of Instagram poetry, which is, you know, a little bit different from more traditional poetry, but has value and a lot of people find healing and meaning in that those very, very popular Instagram poets. So it’s not all kind of black and white, I think, whatever form there is. Poetry is such a human form. Right? Like, it’s one of the oldest art forms, what is a form of song? I say, you know, as birds saying, humans make poetry and saying also, soywhatever age we’re in people always talking about the death of poetry. And then there’s also, Yyeah, it remains alive.

Well, thank you for helping keep it alive and keep the embers burning I am concerned for its, you know, vibrance, and I guess, one line at a time it it will, will stay alive. And we have to put our attention on it, as you said, it takes some work. And that isn’t maybe the easy stuff. Because it being fed stuff on Instagram or tic tac or whatever, is, is easier than digging into meaty poem.

Yeah. And I do think that poetry really, the poetry that I love the most asks us to slow down and to pay attention. And I think those are the things that we need to do to respond to our world today. You know, we need to learn how to slow down and we need to learn how to really not just pay attention in our minds, but in our bodies pay attention.

Well, you’re listening to A Climate Change. I’ve got Nadia Colburn, writer, teacher, Yogi and activist on the show today, and we’ll be right back in one minute to talk to Nadia.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, and I’ve got Nadia Colburn on the program. And Nadia, just a couple things, I want to jump into one. You graciously offered to read some poetry for us, which I’m excited to hear. Then, before I forget, I do want you to kind of talk about your spiritual journey.

As a yogi. It’s something that’s kind of near and dear to my heart as somebody who’s practiced yoga most days for the last 17 years, and your kind of journey into maybe some Eastern religion stuff. I’ve got my pocket tech, not Han with me and I know you’re a student of his eye, not that I’m competing, but I’m more of a doubt a chin guy, but And so with that, I will give you the floor to read us some poetry and we’ll see where the Tao leads us.

Okay. Well, I’m not sure how many poems for you but I’ll read this poem at the beginning of my book, I say the sky. And the first section kind of sets up questions at least implicitly. So up flying, whole flocks of geese in my childhood honking their way north, the streets dirty with pigeons, the sky black and Vystar lanes, each small pointed wings so close to another’s, there was just a blur.

Now 3 billion birds are missing. The awake to so many forms of emptiness, so much loss greets us in our sleep. In my childhood, I thought the world I’d entered would be the one I’d exit in the popular one grackle whistles, not to me. So I think you know, in that poem, it’s really kind of asking, what do we do with the awareness of the loss around us personal losses and also global losses. And how does that affect the fabric of our lives?

And then also how does it affect the artmaking that we do? You know, I was thinking of kids having a dialogue with the nine and gal and his Oh tonight and gal and that relationship between the Human in the natural world that for so long was just seen as a unbreakable cycle has shifted. And so how do we reflect that? Our life?

Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking about the, the stages of grief and denial being the first stage, and I feel like that much of the world is still in the denial phase of that the natural world is changing, and it’s not going to be the same, particularly if we don’t do anything. But probably even if we do as much as we can, there’s still forces at work that have through our past mistakes that are going to hurt the natural world.

That’s just kind of the reality. And the next stage is bargaining. So we’re like bargaining, do we really have to give away our red meat? Do we really need to give away our cars and our planes and whatever, etcetera? Fill in the blank? Plastics?

Yeah, yeah. And there’s this idea that, you know, if we’re just strong enough, we can get through anything, we don’t need to actually face it. And so I think that maybe going to your question about, you know, where does yoga practice? Where does the spiritual practice come in? I think that we get to a certain point, when we are strong enough to face the shadow side, that we’ve been given some kind of story or model that the strong people don’t need to face the difficult things, they just kind of jump from rock to rock to rock, from victory to victory.

Instead of, well, actually, it’s a sign of strength, to be able to look and see what’s around you, and face that shadow. And there are here are traditions that will help you do it, and will help you expand your range to really be in reality.

I find as you as you say that I think that the downside of our social media and entertainment blizzard that were assaulted with, if you happen to open a cable TV is, is the delusion that everything’s kind of okay, or just kind of put us to sleep with the amount of just stuff out there that, you know, disconnects us from the experience of the loss disconnects us and makes us think, hey, maybe it’s not really there, or we just hide away if we hide away from it, and pretend it’s not there. You know, we’ll wake up tomorrow, and it’ll be fine.

Yeah, I can also imagine listeners being like, What are you talking about? Every time I pay attention to the news or social media, it’s one disaster after another, right? Because there’s this polarity of, everything’s fine. On the one hand, and on the other hand, everything’s a total disaster, right? Like, you look at the news, and it’s just so overwhelming.

And sound bites. And the news is, you know, clickbait, you know, one horrific story after another, you’re gonna get more leaders if you make it more sensational. So it’s this really polarized kind of traumatized world where it’s either black or white.

And that middle ground of holding it all, which again, I think comes through a spiritual practice to be able to see both the shadow and the light at the same time not to be going back and forth, like a ping pong ball, but being able to sit in the gray, like, sit in that complexity, which I think also is what art helps us do to stay with layers of meaning.

Yeah, certainly, there are tremendous people doing just incredible work in the environmental space that I’ve had the privilege of talking to, or planting forests in the Amazon and seaweed, you know, and preserving all kinds of natural environment.

And yet, there’s still a lot of devastation going on and sitting with both those things and, and really trying to discern, hey, what’s, what are the steps that we can take that are going to make a difference and hopelessness is kind of paralyzes people to say, I’m just going to do nothing. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just have a cheeseburger and you know, veg out.

Yeah, yeah. Which gets back to right that yoga, to be supple to be flexible to be able to do the difficult poses, but also come into relaxation. To have that range, which is what I think a spirit To practice does what yoga is, and what also our does is to have that range of that emotional range, that physical range to be able to hold complexity. And to be able to, again, come into a place of acceptance, so that you can then be more present and take action.
So is there a movement to build the audience of poetry so that people, you know, get into this more and and, I guess, take steps along their own spiritual journey towards wholeness and along with healing the planet?

I hope I hope little by little, I mean, maybe, maybe I can read some other poems that are like maybe a little bit more healing, but that would be great. I think, yeah. Okay, why don’t I read two more, two more short poems. This one’s called my throat and the title goes into the poem itself. My throat is a fire is a line of birds waiting to rise up from still water is the earth, dark and heavy with spring rain is the air as the nest lifts sighing, ready to let go.

So my hope is that these poems will inspire other people, not only to read poetry, but to write poetry, to, you know, open their throat to open that creative channel that I think all of us have, that’s so many people have repressed, as we get older, you know, it kind of gets blocked off. And so everything we’ve been talking about not having that emotional range, kind of going between despair and denial, I think is part of a kind of shutting down that happens within us. Because we live in such an overwhelming, toxic filled world. But when we can open and give voice to ourselves and open to our creativity, again, we have more flexibility.

I think that’s a great message in terms of not necessarily trying to publish poetry on our own, but just to write it for ourselves and maybe share it with loved ones, or somebody we feel safe with is is a good starting point on that journey.

And I certainly have the personal experience of maybe having written some in grammar school in high school and some in college, and then just kind of more or less putting it down. Like every so often might try to write a teeny bit, but maybe feeling well that’s, that’s not something that I’m going to do that’s not utilitarian.

Yeah, so. So I have an online writing school called align your story. And I offer writing classes, and I bring together meditation and yoga with the writing. And on the one hand, it seems like Oh, who that’s so niche, who would that be for and we have a community now of close to 35,000 people in the school, and people of all ages. And many people think, you know, they’re not professional writers. But I just came back personally from a dance class.

I went with some friends to a dance class, we’re visiting from out of town, and it’s so much fun, and I am not a professional dancer. But it’s so great to move my body in a joyful way. And I think about the way humans lived throughout most of our existence. After dark, we’d have a fire, and we’d sit around and we’d sing and we tell stories, and we dance and we draw them and we shake and like, be in community that’s in kind of our DNA and what we’re supposed to be doing, and then it gets, you know, shut down in our culture. But I think that we’re all creative beings.

Well, amen. to that. You’re listening to Nadia Colburn. This is Matt Matern. And I am going to be back in just one minute with Nadia to talk more about poetry and spirituality and all of other great things.

You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, and I’ve got Nadia Colburn on the program. Nadia wanted to talk about making art and other forms of action and one of the things we’ve already He kind of talked about but I’d like you to maybe talk a little bit more about is how poetry builds its audience.

And you were talking about the writing workshops that you’ve done that have touched 35,000 people, and that’s certainly building some momentum there. You and we’ve talked a little bit about slowing down enough to read poetry. Maybe I’d like to talk to you more about those, those two things.

Sure, yeah. People ask me, okay, so we pay attention, we write poetry? How is this going to, you know, affect change in the world, we need to revitalize our oceans. It’s not a very big audience. Why are you doing this. And I guess what I what I believe is that the inner work and the outer work really go hand in hand. And that if we ourselves are not able to listen to ourselves and give voice to ourselves, we won’t be able to create the kind of world that we need.

And we need people doing all different kinds of things. So even if art is an art, like poetry doesn’t have a huge audience, I believe it’s keeping some human element alive. And then I always encourage people, once that creative life is more active within you, then go take other actions as well. You know, it’s not an either or it’s not create art, but don’t vote. It’s do everything, right.

We live in such a siloed world where we think people only do one thing. And you’re a lawyer, right, and you’re doing this podcast. I really believe that if we can open up to our creative life, then we’ll open up to other forms of action as well.

Yeah, I believe that too. And that I’ve experienced that myself as the more I’ve probably dug in deeper into my own healing journey that I’ve been more plugged into. doing the things that I think would be helpful to others and being of service and looking around, hey, where can I be most helpful in in the world and use my temp, time and talents for for those things?

I do have a question regarding Bob Dylan and his poetry can capture the imagination of millions. Is there someone who’s carrying that mantle now? Or do you see someone on the horizon who has the potential of bringing that kind of power to, to poetry?

Well, tick, not Han always talked to me. And I know it’s not on his one person. But he always talked about a kind of collective Sangha. And I really think that there’s an old model of poetry of being like that one great poet, right. And I think that I want to bring attention to the poet inside of everybody, that we don’t need one great master poet who’s going to lead us all into poetry, we can look inside ourselves, and find the poet within. collectively.

So again, I’m really inspired by my students who some are professional poets, and some aren’t. But that’s not really so important. How many people are reading their work, what’s important is that just the way you have a yoga practice, people have a poetry practice, or a prose practice, or creative practice that makes them healthier, more alive, more able to just know their own truth, morals just speak their own truth. And that, that can be the new, the new kind of collective collective sangha of poets all around us.

Well, I love that I think that that’s super powerful, and it doesn’t kind of give away our power to this almighty person who’s going to lead us into the future that we all have a place in this and you never know who’s going to, you know, be the breakout star deliver something amazing in their contribution. And if we don’t, if we don’t do anything, we won’t kind of have the potential of making that contribution that’s uniquely ours.

Yeah. And I think that often people are really moved and touched and and changed by poetry that their friends, right that family members, right. I in my classes, we have an online community A and people share work and the work that they share with one another touches them deeply. And you know that there’s a kind of communal effect.

And so I think you know about studies that show that the people who have the biggest impact on you are often not the world leaders, they’re your community members, they’re your family members. And we can think, Oh, if I had x, you know, million social media followers or sold X million numbers of books, I’d have such a big impact. But actually, we can all overlook the impact we’re having on our community and on the people around us, which is so important.

Oh, that’s a great point, I had a young state legislature, state legislator, who was on the program, a while back, he had been expelled from the Tennessee State Legislature. And he talked about his heroes, being people in his family and how that was important to him. And I thought that’s yeah, that’s a great message. And it does kind of start at home. And so, yeah, sometimes we miss that one. Maybe

I can even meet another really short poem. And there’ll be again, I think, definitely, I’m inspired by other poets in reading, and my poems are always in dialogue with other poems. But they’re also in dialogue with the world around me. So this is a poem about learning from the birds. And the poetry of the birds. It’s called outside the sparrows or away, and the title again, goes into the poem.

Outside the sparrows are awake, and all the complications in my heart, I who did not know how to love my own body, who mistook the world for a task, listen, one voice, and then another, amid the rustling of beliefs. So I think that our teachers can be, you know, listening to the birds, even in the city where I live, you know, just going out in the morning, and they’re the sparrows and listening to a plant or a tree. Those can also be our teachers.

I had an experience that last night, I went to go to the grocery store, and I happen to live by the Venice Canals, and they have ducks on the canals. And so there was a male doc, and then there was a female dark in the kayak, and the male doc was making these sounds and I’m just wondering, what was he doing? And then I recognize maybe he’s kind of checking in with his maid and just letting her know, hey, it’s safe, it’s safe, it’s safe.

And so that she could kind of get a rest because it’s a wild world out there. And you never know, she might be ready to hatch her eggs or whatever. And, and, and it was kind of enlightening, because I don’t think I had stopped and really listened and looked in a way like that before and really saw something beautiful that I probably walked past 100 times never, never noticing that.

Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, if we could just pay attention, the world is around us. And the natural world is such a great teacher. I think in indigenous traditions, right? It’s like, what, what can we learn from the animals? There are teachers instead of by, you know, flipping it as if we are at the top of this pyramid?

Yeah, certainly birds have been around a lot longer than humans. So there is something to be learned from our, our bird friends.

Well, you’ve been listening to A Climate Change. I’ve got Nadia Colburn on the program, and we’re going to be right back in one minute to talk with her more about poetry in the natural world and looking forward to digging in further.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. I’ve got Nadia Colburn on the program. And Nadia, we can’t measure poetry and metrics and KPIs and goal settings. It’s intangible. We’ve kind of devalued the intangible goods in the modern worlds like poetry and nature. And the price was has become worthless in our modern world is this is tragedy heartbreaking beyond words? What can a poet do when facing this tragedy?

Yeah, again, I think it really comes down to listening, really tuning into what’s important to you. Poetry doesn’t need to be for everybody. But I think for many people, there is a calling to, to sing basically, that’s what that’s what poems are to make meaning to find meaning to give shape, to our experiences. And those are things that don’t need to be commodified.

They can’t actually be commodified. The things that are most important to us, you know, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that kind of my own awakening started with being pregnant having children, it’s not something that you, you don’t fall in love for some metrics, right? For some price. It’s relational.

And it’s relational. With ourselves. It’s relational, or with spirit, it’s relational with meaning, with tradition, changing tradition, all of those things. So you know, to be able to claim again, that space for ourselves outside of the kind of Marketplace is a beautiful thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that I certainly had been taken in as somebody who studied economics as an undergrad and, and then the law in kind of devaluing things that aren’t utilitarian and analytical and stuff like that.

And I think it’s over time I’ve, I have rearranged my worldview, but it took took some time to kind of get to that place of valuing art and valuing its its importance in our society. So speaking of art, can you read us another one of your poems?

Sure. This poem is called Power. Power. I turned the questions over and over when I cannot sleep, when my mind will not turn off the waters of the ocean creep up the shore, the temperature slides off half a degree than more, the high glacial shelf and the Arctic breaks off. What is it that I want? At my daughter’s camp at night, when it’s hot in the dark, the girls take off their clothes at the docks, at the lip of the lake for special swimming.

I want to take off my clothes for special lighting in a dark that is soft in the water that will hold me my body still girls with a whole world before me opening in song, the words not yet written on the page. Oh, letter by letter, as the oil drop by drop is coaxed from the earth is held together, broken apart, taken into the guts of fish, their cells, our mouths, our milk. Dare we ask for what we really want?

Very beautiful.

So I think that poem is actually in relationship, you know, responding to what we were just talking about? What is it that we really want? And it’s often not what we’ve been sold.

So before we sign off and want to talk to you about taking action and and also your, what you’re working on, and how people can follow you and stay in touch with what you’re doing and plug into their inner poet.

Yeah, well, I mean, easy to find and easy to reach through my website, Nadia colburn.com. And I have a lot of resources for writers of really any form poets, but also prose writers. I often bring together meditation and writing, I have classes. I also have on my website, something called, like 50 ways to combat the climate crisis.

And it’s a list that I put together of systemic ways people can take action to address the climate crisis. And for me, the climate crisis. I mean, not just for me, but in my thinking, the climate crisis is related to all other forms of kind of extractive injustice, you know, racism, sexism, classism, all those things. Which is getting back to what we were talking about before. It’s like, when we put value on things, we’re often missing the inherent value in you know, healthy soil, right?

Like we can’t, we don’t even know the billions and billions of micro organisms that are in just one teaspoon. So while so, anyway, this list suggests ways to take systemic action, which for me, I think is important to use our creativity, both to create art, but also to connect with others.

So for example, I love Project Drawdown, Project ReGeneration, Paul Hawken’s amazing work in that team. And then there’s an app that I use sometimes called Climate Action. Now, that’s a really nice way to contact companies and people in government and write messages saying, you know, this is what I’m supporting.

I was just at the UN last week, and I saw Paul Hawken’s book on the shelf there. And so I had the the honor of interviewing him a while back, and it was great to see his work in print there, and obviously shows the power of one person kind of standing up and doing doing the work.

Yeah. And it’s that mind shift, also of, you know, saying, this is there are solutions. So and here’s how we can, how we can address this problem. And and the solutions aren’t just technical, right? Those things that we didn’t even, you know, put a price on the road talks about, why is it that we only put a price on a tree once we’ve cut it down?

You know, but to actually say this is the value of a stand of trees of mangoes and grasses. And I think that’s also what poets do.

Right. And it’s unfortunate that the economists of this world have not valued that are and we created this GNP statistic that guided our world for the last 100 plus years. That is a statistic that doesn’t take into account preserving nature and creating health and well being and humans that those aren’t things that are counted in a GNP stat, which is, you know, kind of ridiculous how we could be so short sighted, but yet, here we are. I like the climate out.

Now, the Climate Action Now app that you just talked about, I I kind of recently signed up for one here that’s local to LA Dashboard Earth. And I’m sure there’s other climate apps out there that encourage people to take action gives you give you some ideas of who you can act can connect with. And I think just taking the smallest action is so important to take that first step.

Yeah. Because also, we’re doing that for ourselves, as well as for others. I mean, and I don’t say when we do something for ourselves, we’re doing it selfishly. But I think that distinction between self and other is also not helpful, that when we take action, we are feeling more empowered ourselves, we’re getting out of that despair, denial, you know, polarity that we talked about in the mid in the beginning, and moving into a place where we feel like we’re connected. And that connection is life. Right? And that happens in those spaces where often the economists don’t go.

Right. And yeah, it’s it’s maddening to listen to your economic forecasting. And commentators talk about this type of stuff, because they just completely miss the most beautiful, important pieces of our world. And don’t assign value to those those things.

Hopefully, the some economist will listen to this and bring poetry to economics and start talking about these important things that we just need a mind. We really need to do kind of a headstand on our hand stand on economic statistics so that we’re turning our statistics upside down and start valuing the intangibles and devaluing things like money. Yeah.

Because, you know, it’s really it’s life. I’m thinking about the conversation. It’s a creative life is lifeforce. It’s the lifeforce within us that we’re giving expression to. And it’s that lifeforce that you know again, when the row talked about why is it that a tree is only given value once it’s cut down once the life is no longer part of it?

That we If we have ways to think about, you know, valuing life and I’m not thinking about like, I’m just thinking about what would it be if we took back the term pro life and put it into all areas of peace? well being, health, art, right, the natural world, there’s seeing those interconnections that, you know, right, all life talks about.

All right, all life has value and, and worth preserving. And, you know, I greatly appreciate the conversation, Nadia, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show, and everybody should follow you and check out your poetry online and, and start writing poetry themselves and follow us on Apple and Spotify and get please trees planted in the Amazon with your names on it, so you can follow them and so everybody go out and take action today. The smallest step is is an important one.

Yes, thank you so much. I so agree. And yeah, it’s really an honor to be here and anyone who’s listening send me a message through my website. I’d love to hear from you. And you can also order my book anywhere it’s sold. books are sold. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely check out this book. So again, thank you and keep keep the connection going.