Lives Well Lived: The 341st Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

0:00Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream. I think it's 341. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, your Dr. Heather Hying. I'm going to be a little bit of a rough one today, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it was smart to go ahead with today's live stream. We lost our dog on Monday. But we're going to talk about that. I'm going to try to hold it together. No guarantees, though. No guarantees. We're going to talk about lives well-lived and remembering them. Also lost to the world on Monday was Wendell Berry. I'm going to be talking about our amazing Labrador Maddie and the remarkable writer, the

1:00lost environmentalist, icon of a Gurry and values Wendell Berry. And I'll just say, if we have to cut this short, I know that you all will understand. There's something very strange about this environment. In general, one can keep their grieving to a private moment. And in public, the nature of the mind keeps it at bay, but broadcasting from a room with just a couple of people you know well in it to an audience of hundreds or thousands of people kind of confuses the whole thing. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. There's a lot to say, but it's going to be a little bit difficult to remember where we are. So let's do the business first and speak our ads.

2:01There are awesome sponsors doing we are grateful and then get out of the conversation. Our first sponsor this week is Timeline. Timeline makes mitochondria, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone. Your lethal A. Your lethal A is found primarily in pomegranates and has been found by many scientific and clinical studies to enhance mitochondrial function. Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells. The older you get, the more likely you are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate and joins other tissues. This is in part because mitochondria, the process by which damaged mitochondria or move from cells becomes less efficient the older you get. Which related to decline in mitochondrification not only inhibits removal of and damaged removal of damaged mitochondria, but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria, which results in overall decline in cell function. Miter purer from Timeline works by triggering mitochondria. A study from 2022 found that four months of regular use of mitochondria resulted in significant improvements in muscle strength and clinically meaningful improvements on aerobic endurance and physical performance.

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4:03The book I had as a kid from a series on sort of, you know, recreating historical figures and putting a little more flesh on the bones. I went about Louis Pasteur that had an army going in and trying to fight off the rabies pathogen. But army of little things, little creatures that were dressed like, I don't know, you know, they don't even know what era it would have been. They were reflecting, but I'm going to call it like civil war soldiers, even though that's not quite the right moment, but no, but close. But I don't know that the book was historically accurate with regard to it's not historically accurate soldiers. Yes. In the body, seeking out the rabies virus. Actually, past or yeah, yeah, past or was mentioned at the polyface conference, which we'll talk about in passing here. But anyway, the Joel Salatin put a little flesh on the bones of the battle between Pasteur

5:06and the guy whose name I'm forgetting the terrain theory guy. I don't remember the one with him. Maybe it was Bocha, I don't know. But anyway, there's an interesting tale in there. Yeah, we've talked about that somewhat before here, but I don't remember the details of the bullet. Yeah, but I got the sense of the moderns kind of lost the thread of that conversation. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this is something we've talked about fairly extensively, I think, is the idea that you have terrain theory or germ theory. Choose one. Right. It's absurd. It makes no sense at all. It never did. And Pasteur for what it's worth clearly understood that at least at the end of his life. Yep. And the terrain moralist guarantees the inhabitants, even if the inhabitants are real and do their thing. Anyway, we'll come back to that some of the time. Indeed. Our second sponsor this week is brand new to us. It is Elboy Colostrum.

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11:15You want me to start? Sure. All right. So we had to put Maddie down on Monday. Now head down out of town. We went from declining over the course of years to very rapidly declining and in fact, stopped eating all of a sudden maybe we can half a week and a half ago. We would stop eating our regular food. We would find things that she would eat and then she'd eat them once and then she'd reject them. At some level, it was as if she had decided to put an end to something and I'm sure dogs don't think about it in those conscious terms, but there was something.

12:16It seemed that she lost her will. I mean, I had here. We were both supposed to be at polyphase in Virginia. And because she had started to fail so rapidly, we decided that we couldn't both go. And so I stayed with her. When I saw her doing when she was able to move on her own, which was not often, I came to carry her born more over the last few days of her life. I was encouraging her to be outside as much as possible as always as she always wanted to be. When she was able to walk, she would often walk to places that were hidden, that were obscure to me, that weren't her usual places. And it felt like she was looking for a place to die, like she was trying to find a place to be where she wouldn't impinge.

13:18It's above all else. She, like all good dogs, was loyal and unconditionally loving and unaccountably concerned about us. Yeah, this dog, you know, it's been a long time since I've had any other dog. But Maddie was seemingly obsessed with taking care of us. And specifically you. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, one of the struggles at the end was that she was ever less able to do anything that felt like contributing to her and that clearly weighed on her. Yeah, like I think, I mean, I don't know, I've never, she's really my first dog. My brother did have a dog for a short time when I was growing up, but I wasn't close to her and she wasn't really integrated into the family. So Maddie was my, was my first dog and I've always had cats and I doorkats and I understand

14:21cats more, I think. I understand their independence and their desire for solitude. And I said, I said to you, Brett early in having her, I don't. Why does she love me unconditionally? I have done nothing to earn this. I cannot fathom this. Those dogs. Because dogs, because that's, that's what a good dog does. And it felt, it was unearned and it felt silly at first to me. I didn't, I didn't get it. And honestly, I didn't really respect it. It didn't make sense to me. And I think what I've come to, to see and to feel is that, um, whereas you know, if you have the affection of a cat that you have earned it, and sometimes you just can't, some cats won't give it to you no matter what. But if you don't, do you have the affection of a cat you have earned it? And they will take it away from you if you cease to be good to them.

15:23Um, a dog makes you want to live up to what they already believe about you. They, they make you want to be what you are in their eyes. Yeah. And I think, you know, you and I have both come, I think, quite separately to some conclusion about, um, dogs as the thing that is most likely to bring us back together, uh, as a people. You know, I've, I've sometimes said that, you know, uh, Nazi and a Jew can bond over the appreciation of a good dog. Yeah. No, I've, I've written one of the few things I wrote in my notes here today, as dogs may save the world. Uh, and I've had this sense, I, I had, I had this thought consciously for the first time I believe when we lived in Portland. And even before COVID, we moved to Portland, uh, in the fall of 2018.

16:24So we were there for close to a year and a half before COVID hit in a city that was vibrant and flailing, uh, already from the vocaries and the, and the political hatred and the division and the ideological capture and the embrace of decay. And I love that city also. Uh, and so I walked around a lot of parts of Portland and saw just so much anger and division and just like a willingness to hate people on the basis of what people imagined they believed because of what they were wearing. And the thing that I saw over and over and over again that seemed to break that down was if someone was walking a dog that if you make eye contact with a dog or dog's owner and make it clear that you are of a mind to appreciate the dog. You have a connection and you know, increasingly this is becoming harder to because people have decided that I don't know, people don't know how to train their dogs, people don't know.

17:28People have strange fears of dogs. Sometimes they're legitimate, often they're not. Um, we're told that we must keep our dogs entirely imprisoned, basically leashed at all times, et cetera. And you know, a good dog shouldn't require that. But so by the time we left Portland, I actually began to see even this decay. But usually when you, when you encounter people with dogs, you can reach some sort of understanding, even if there's nothing else in your life about what you might agree. I think there's something we've talked often about the fact that dogs are the longest standing human domesticate by far, 30,000 years or something like that. Yeah, I was going to look into it a little bit. The current estimates are widely ranging, but it's exactly between about 20 and 40,000 years. And we have like we have the oldest, uh, the oldest individual is, is aged about 14 and a

18:31half thousand years and, and no one expects that's anywhere close to the oldest domesticated dog. Um, all that time has created a most unusual relationship. And you know, it's trite to say man's best friend, but it really is at the species level that, you know, the animal has adapted to us. And that enables a bunch of things, you know, it does feel like we have, you know, genuine friendships with our cats. But those relationships are very different because, you know, if you think about the fraction of what your cat imagines about the world, it's a, it's a much harder reach than to figure out what your dog is thinking. Your dog is, um, built to be more communicative and, you know, even, even its facial structures, uh, have evolved in the time that it has been partnered with man to convey things.

19:39And so, you know, it's a very odd situation. You can have, you know, in Maddie's case, I spent as much time with her as I spend with anybody except you and a lot of the time I spent with you, she was there. So it's this really intense relationship. It's very asymmetrical. She can, of course, say essentially nothing, um, understands fair amount, but I can't necessarily know what she understands. But the, um, the degree to which you are somehow on a shared wavelength, you know, just for example, Maddie always wanted to go with me places. And I'm pretty sure that it, she felt like there were things to be done, whether it was protecting me or whatever she thought she was doing. Um, she wanted to go and sometimes it just didn't make sense for her to go. Um, and so I would tell her, you're not on this mission. And she knew what that meant, right? I don't know.

20:39She'd know precisely what it meant. I'm not on this mission. And she would stand down and stop trying to go through the door with me at which point she became glued to my side. Right. Exactly. She's on some mission. She's on some mission, no matter what. And, um, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the ways to consider the difference between our relationship with cats and our relationship with dogs as humans is to think about sort of how they, how they view us. And we've said before, um, that it feels like, um, cats engage as if we are their mothers. And part of the evidence for this is that in the wild, um, none of the wild species of cats that purr, which is the, the smaller body cats, large cats roar, small cats per, none of the wild cats that purr purr as adults. And so purring is one of these things that, um, disappears, um, with, I think with weening really, but like, you know, with, with the mother leaving the cat and, you know, cats,

21:41other than lions, cats are solitary. And so obviously domestic cats per and, um, they have this, uh, relationship with us that is, you know, deep and it feels fairly maternal. Um, but they're also primed. They're like, they're programmed to expect that at some point, this will end. And so Fairfax are epic tabby, um, does have this in him. I mean, he was, he was recovering when you say this will end their program. That the relationship, that the relationship will, yeah. And, um, we, we, you know, every cat has a different response to having its people go away and then come back. And, um, sometimes they punish you and sometimes they, you know, they should, usually they punish you in some ways. They, uh, they, they give you the cold shoulder for a couple of days. But, uh, Fairfax in particular, uh, clearly has, uh, it's like he's just triggered into this like, oh, you're dammit. It came. It happened. I guess I'm on my own. And he starts fending for himself and he amps up the hunting and he, you know, starts

22:44spending more time outside. And then, you know, comes back into sort of full as full as a cat can be domestication after we get back. Um, whereas dogs, um, do not view us as mothers. We're, we're part of the team. We're part of the pack. Uh, and, um, and that isn't supposed to end, right? Uh, that is, you know, the, the team lasts as long as the team lasts as long as there are any members standing. And it is every team members, every pack members responsibility to keep the team robust and intact and healthy and safe. And so that is, that is what we do for our dogs. And that is what our dogs do for us. Yeah. Um, I have a couple of things I want to enter into the conversation there. Um, one of them is the thing that I say to other people when they're grieving the loss of their animal, um, especially when you've had to put the animal down, which is just an excruciating choice to have to make. And I don't think we have any choice here other than the exact timing, but. And I just interrupt here. Yeah.

23:45Um, and say, um, you would say earlier that you don't, we don't know, of course, how much she understands, but I said to her two days before you were due to be back when I thought that she's, I don't know if she will make it. Uh, and I asked her, I said, please, please, please wait for dad to get home. Um, and then the day that you were coming back, it was so hard for her. And I told her, you can go, you're free, you can go and she, she didn't, but she was so close. So in the end, we did have an amazing bet come to our house, uh, and help her go, which I hate that we ever have to make that choice. But the choice was for her. She was ready and she was in pain and not telling us. Yeah. And, you know, that at least allowed us to be right there with her.

24:45You know, if we had let nature take its course, you know, you step away. Who knows when it happens. So I don't, I don't love that these things are medicalized, but they're, you know, these animals, deaths are so unnatural anyway, because in the wild, don't get old and feeble. It just doesn't happen. Nature is the margins are too thin. The predators are too many. Nature is red and tooth and claw. Yeah. So the idea of being, you know, a feeble old animal is novel in and of itself and taking a novel approach to it. I think is, is reasonable. But anyway, when I often tell people who are grieving, you know, there's a lot of grieving online people post that they've lost their animal and then people publicly post. And I never know what to make of any of this. I suppose you could argue that we're, we're doing this here. It's not our intent. We had, you know, this broadcast on the schedule and decided to keep doing it. And it's hard to focus anywhere else.

25:47But anyway, I typically respond to people privately. I don't, I don't post publicly about, about this. But what I will say is that there is something beautiful about the life that you give a well-loved animal that you take care of their needs from one end of their life to the other. And it's torture when you lose an animal under some circumstance where you can't take care of the end. Pat gets hit by a car, gets eaten by a coyote, something like that, that leaves a wound that never, never heals. But those of which we've experienced. Yeah. But when you do end up taking an animal to the very end and then deciding how it ends, you're, though that's the book end on essentially a perfect life. Yeah. And there, there isn't any better thing to be. Yeah, that's right.

26:49To be able to have a deep, unconditional love with a deep, somehow complex but uncomplicated being, I think at least the relationship is uncomplicated. Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't know that that's possible given the ways that we define complex and complicated. But the relationship, there's no relationship you can have a real relationship with a human being other than just something that's transactional. That's not complicated. It's always complicated. But when they're up some downs with the dog and there's burdens and there's concerns and such. Ultimately, you just know that your dog loves you and you love her or him and you're going to be there for each other and go on adventures if that's what you want to do

27:51and know that you have each other's back. Have each other's back through the end. And the idea that you don't have to worry, it's not going to be easy for us, but we're going to make it easy for you. Most creatures don't have a deal anywhere near that good. And it's important to remember as tough as it is that you can give an animal essentially a perfect life and whether it's a long one or a short one or somewhere in between, that is an amazing gift. Right? As you said, nature is red and tooth and claw and life is nasty, British and short for most creatures. And it is an amazing gift to be able to give an animal a life that everything is, you know, all the big stuff is taken care of by you and, you know, the pain of their loss. It's shoulder by you, not by them. That's right.

28:53It's interesting to see the cats responding. We have two long-term viewers now with Tesla. So Maddie was 13 and a half. She was old for a Labrador. Well, Tesla is older by two years, 15 and a half, and Fairfax is younger, 7 and a half. Tesla and Maddie were very, very close and Tesla was there sitting outside with us, with her all day on the last day of her life. And he, very concerned and Stoic as cats are, but more snugly than usual. And Fairfax, I feel like, reacted like a 13-year-old boy who had suddenly lost something,

29:54perhaps a person, and had no idea how to deal with what he was feeling or communicate at. And he was angry and snippy and didn't want to be touched. And then it would be very, very close and wanted all the affection. And then again, get away from me. I can't deal with this, which is normally not his personality at all. And I think, considering, in general, how much more similar dogs are to people than cats are to people, observing this emotionally stunted as young teenagers are of both sexes, this reminded me more of a male response and a female response. It was interesting to see in a cat because cats are nothing if not emotionally stunted, and dogs are not. Yeah. I will say just in the interest of sort of completing the picture, we did allow, when Maddie

31:02was put down, we decided to hold on to her and to bury her ourselves. And part of the reason that we decided to do that, I think it was 100% the right thing to do as much as it will strike people as strange, I guess. It is exactly the opposite. And I will defend it vociferously if not today than some other day. I think it's really important. And I think we have broken our relationship with death very profoundly and are suffering greatly for having done so. But in keeping Maddie and burying her ourselves, it also gave us the opportunity to let the cats encounter her. All animals have to have some understanding that this other animal in their life is gone and is not coming back and they have to be able to update. And you can imagine, again, I have no idea how cats think about this.

32:03I would have a much better guess for dogs. But you can imagine you drive the dog off one day like you do any other day and then the dog doesn't come back. And the cat is left to whatever version of wonder a cat does. What happened? What does that mean? And one thing I've seen in Fairfax is that sometimes Fairfax is not, he's a great cat, but he's not the best behaved cat I've ever had. He'll decide to wake you up in the middle of the night either because he's bored or wants to go out, even if he has access to go out and doesn't need to wake you. But then he has some version of Kitty Guild where he will come up to you and sort of check whether or not you and he are still cool, right? He does not want to sour the relationship and he sort of knows that he's at fault for something. Yeah, he knows he's a punk sometimes and he hopes that's okay.

33:06Yeah, and so you know, you could imagine in the case of, you know, the dog is gone. I don't know that they think, I mean, I'm sure they think of dogs as different than cats in some way. They know this dog is the one who lives here and presumably as soon as they know the dog is dead, they know it won't be back. They don't know. They don't know the other implications. But I think it is important, even just for us to have the cats be given the tools to reconcile this themselves, it's hard for us to reconcile it. They have to do their own version of that and the mysterious you drove off and the dog didn't come back thing has got to complicate the puzzle greatly. So having the dog around after she was gone, I know it will strike people as weird. It is the opposite of weird. It was important, I think.

34:07Yeah, we left her above ground for 24 hours so that we could visit the body. Yeah, and you know, I must tell you, I'm just weird, I'm talking about this here, but I remember as a kid, I woke from a terrifying dream about being buried alive. And I remember it was one of the few times that I like got out of bed and my parents were downstairs, they had friends over and I was like nodding good shape and I told them what I had experienced and I remember being told that's not a thing, you don't have to worry about it. I was like, okay, it's good that that's not a thing, but I don't really understand how that's never a thing. My guess is it's not perfectly not a thing. That's right. And I've had a terror, every time we've put an animal down, that the combination of drugs could mask an animal that's not really gone, you know, the actual fact of death is actually

35:11a little subtle as we've talked about. And what a terrible thing it would be for an animal to be put down and then wake up in a bag full of dead cats and feel betrayed and abandoned and all of that. So anyway, that little trauma has existed in me forever. And this is the first time because we just took over Maddie's body and took responsibility for it. It gave 24 hours to visit her. She looked healthy for that 24 hours. She looked like she could get up at any moment, but she felt cold of the touch and stiff and it just was so reassuring to know for sure. Yeah. That she was not just sleeping. Yep. And you know, if you've done it the normal way, even in this case, one of the options

36:14was, yes, the vet came to our house, but we could surrender Maddie's body and she could be taken away and come back as ashes. But the closure that one gets from that isn't anything like the experience of preparing the body, digging the hole and filling it in, which was rough, I have to say, but very healthy. Very healthy. Yeah. I guess there's a lot more to say about the joy of her and of having such an amazing dog who went on all these adventures with us and lived. Lived in all three of the houses that our boys ever lived in, in Olympia and in Portland and here on San Juan Island, she helped raise them. She built, she was with them when they built forts and the massive forest across the street

37:17from our house in Olympia and she went to sunlakes with you and your classes and the boys so many times and she learned how to canoe. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the sunlakes thing. I wish I had pictures, but I don't know, they're somewhere. But when our kids were little, Evergreen was a very weird place. On the beautiful things about it, you could have a field trip because students took one course at a time and you were only teaching one course at a time. You could take that course into the field and nobody had other obligations. So we would often go for a week and... Most quarters, you and I both spent a week in the field of the students. Yep. And I probably for you to, certainly for me, favorite spot was sunlakes in Eastern Washington, which is this geologically absolutely amazing and also stunning place. We talked about it last week when we were talking about the flood in the Paul and Tibet.

38:21Right. Exactly. So that place allows you to do something wonderful, which is there are trails, but you don't need to stay on them because the geology up above you allows you to dead reckon. You can see where you are. And so anyway, I would take my classes. We would take our classes when we taught together. You would take classes. And very often the kids would go with me and the dog when I was going alone. And... Alone with your class, rather than... Yeah. Alone with the class. You know, so I have two little kids, a whole lot of college kids. And... I mean, they weren't tiny tiny because we got Maddie in 2013. So they were 9 and 7 when we got her. Yeah. But, yeah, you'd have a bunch of college kids, some of whom were maybe older than you because Evergreen was a different kind of place. And your own two sons and your own dog.

39:23And the dog kind of, you know, would run back and forth. You know, the kids might be out of sight and the dog would run back and forth and kind of keep track of the kids. And I never worried terribly much about them. It seems sort of frightening now to think about it. But it all worked really well because the dog wanted a job. She was very good at her job. And the kids loved her. And so it worked really well. And we were just talking to Zach last night about this. You know, it's a very unusual and profound experience to have had growing up. And it's something he can't really convey to his friends because, you know, they've had dogs, many have lost dogs. But it's not the same as having sort of been in the wild with the dog. You know, it's much more like the ancestral relationship with dogs than it is like the modern one. And she was perfect for it. The reference to Knews, she's a Labrador.

40:27They love water, but they don't know that at first. And Maddie, we took her to Sun Lakes and there's a beautiful lake called Deep Lake on one end of the park. And it's a very long, very narrow lake. And one of our students had a aluminum canoe, which I put on the top of our car, dragged it out to Deep Lake. And we wanted to take Maddie in the canoe and canoe down the lake and back. And Maddie had no, she did not trust that we knew what we were doing. This all seemed rather insane. And so she was sort of like she wanted to join us in the canoe, but quite bring herself to do it. And then she finally managed to get into the canoe. I can't remember there are two incidents. One of them, she actually fell in the water and then realized, oh, I'm actually good at

41:28water and became a good swimmer and loved water every day after that. But in the canoe case, she got into the canoe finally and we canoeed down the lake and there is this place in the middle of the lake is uncanny where there is a year wall, not even very tall, like maybe 30 or 40 feet of basalt rock, but very flat at one place in the lake. And if you so much has taught across from that, there's also live. Yeah, there is, but there's one, you know, you're, but you need both for the story to make sense. She, we're going down the lake. And if you even so much as talk, you hear it come back and it sounds undiminished. It's not like echo, echo, echo, it's like echo, echo, you know, it's, it's exactly what you said. And it sounds like nothing has been lost. And I remember we're going by this thing and we started talking and the dog is like,

42:33where? Where are those people, right? So then we started playing with it and shouting things at the wall and they would come back. And I don't think she ever figured out what was going on because the explanation is actually a little subtle. Yeah, it takes some physics and dogs are great at physics, but not explicit physics. Yeah, they're good at the implicit physics. I tried diagramming it on a chalkboard, but now they prefer whiteboards among other things. I guess. Yeah. But yeah, so that's that's that little piece of her story. Yeah. I don't know. We miss her. We always well. I don't want to show a picture too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, we have. We have some pictures to show. Here she is on San Juan Island. Before we lived here, we'd come to visit a very nearest spot where we ended up buying.

43:34That'd be dog. Yeah, so she was actually, Zach reminded us of this. She was actually born, not on the island we live on, but on a different island. Yeah, she came full circle. We knew her father. He was named sailor. He was a marvelous dog in his own right. And so anyway, she did come full circle. No, no, she's buried here and there's something poetic about that. Yeah. Yeah, we can we can just go through these somewhat quickly. I don't have a particular story for all of them except this is here she is mid-Yan while Tesla appreciates her Yann and they were. Tesla always wanted to sleep on Maddie. Yeah, I'm not sure Maddie was always a storm. As a puppy, this is. Wow. Wow. This is very, very early. Yeah, sure is. This is right after we got her. She was born, we didn't know her yet, but she was born right after my father died and we got her a month, month and a half later and I always felt to me like she continued

44:39my father in some ways. He's he had a dog whom he loved when he was a child on the farm in Iowa. Yeah, and she and your dad were both similarly a few words. It's true. He didn't bark as much. No, he did not bark. He did not bark. Here we have Zach with our with his pup just a few years ago. And Maddie again with Tesla out in the sun very near where she spent her last day. Here she is. Again, on San Juan. Oh, this is an Olympia, isn't McLean Creek. Wow. Yeah, that's a younger, a younger pup here. A younger pup again, Olympia with Toby who was very young then. And again, that first summer, I think this is Zach who would have been nine at the time, immediately haven't gotten over his fear of dogs upon upon meeting her or had decided

45:41to to get over it and throw it up for his before her. And here she is again, as a puppy right after we got her with with Tesla who was who was a young guy himself then to at our house in Olympia. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess the last thing, maybe there are other things to say, but you and I in our book mention that grief is the downside of love. That's right. And we mean that very, very literally. You love something and then it becomes enmeshed in who you are and at the point that you lose that something untangling it is not a simple process. And so the process of grief is one of the more remarkable behaviors that we can observe

46:47and the way that it is observed in different creatures who in retrospect are all ones that have the same problem, which is that they apparently love things that then have to be mourned. But that unwiring process, you know, I would argue that the tears are basically your brain going offline to do difficult work. And you know, you can put it off. Obviously you don't want to lose your best friend on a battlefield and be incapacitated by grief on the battlefield. You have to get off the battlefield before you can grieve. You know, if you're in that flash flood tsunami that we recently witnessed, you can't take the time to consider all of the people who didn't make it and who you won't see. Again, you have to get out of danger, deal with your injuries, whatever it is. So the body is very good at putting that off, but eventually the processing has to happen.

47:51And you know, it's not that it's good to be beside yourself. But you know, I mean, the saying is so trite, but it's really not wrong. It's better to have loved and lost and never to have loved at all. Love is this valuable thing, but it comes with this unavoidable price. And the fact that our traditions around death and burial have, they've done the same thing that we've done everywhere else where we've regularized it. And we've turned over every aspect that we can to the market and we've sanitized it. And it always strikes me that the one, you know, there are two parts of a normal funeral that make a lot of sense to me.

48:53One of them is the bearing of the casket to the grave side, like the feeling the weight of this person. And the other is obviously not a part of every ceremony, but the ceremonially taking a scoop of dirt and putting it in there so that in some sense, I buried this person. Those things are not, they're not optional. I mean, obviously they are. You don't have to do them, but because they are tied up in the way that we do process, you know, I spent, oh, it's probably three or four hours digging the hole. And those were not the hardest three or four hours, but they were super contemplative. Right. I was not beside myself doing that work because the work was hard, but I was very focused

49:54on why I was digging the hole. And then putting your in and filling it back up, which you and I did together was among the most emotionally powerful experiences I think I've ever had. Yeah. It was rough. Yeah. We need tributes and rituals of endings and not to, as you say, sanitize. And this is exactly one of the themes from Wendell Berry's life as well as teachings. We don't need a sanitized world. We don't want a sanitized world. It is not something that we should be desiring nor is it possible. The messiness, the stickiness, the unexpected nature of grief in this case is part of what our brains will use to scaffold the story, to create the story and assure us she's gone.

50:55She is gone. Now what do I take forward? What I take forward is not going to be so useful if I keep wondering for a long time if she's actually gone. And not that we don't all do that. You and I have both imagined her still. And you have to my father died. I thought I saw him several times. And I think, especially when you're living with someone or near someone, it is much more likely to happen. As you keep like, they're in the fabric of your life. And so putting a number of things into that experience as it's over, the equivalent of sitting shiva, of being able to visit the body and lay hands on and cleaning the body as you did with Maddie and carrying the body and burying the body are all incontrovertible.

51:59And together they become the bookend that you can then use to remember an amazing life we'll live. Yep. I think I will save this for another day, but I also think that there is a discussion that we are overdue for about the end of life for people. I think it's a little different with animals. In other words, I think you and I would both strongly have preferred, as we've only had to happen one time with all the animals we've lost. We lost one animal who was scheduled to be euthanized and died in your lap. He crawled into my arms an hour before we were going to the vet. And I had enough time to call you and the boys to me and he died there. Yeah. And it's definitely the best way to go. But worse than the animal expiring, maybe frightened alone somewhere on their schedule.

53:07And as you mentioned at the top of the thing, the fact of being so old that you expire of natural causes is not a normal thing for an animal. So, you know, you're sort of compensating for one abnormal thing with another and you could make the same argument for people. However, the inclination to medicalize and schedule human death is, I believe it is a kind of maming psyche, that it is denying us things about our humanity that only a fool would disrupt. And anyway, I'd like to come back to what I think that looks like some other day, but but one of the lessons of the last – you know, and you can pick your time period the last year, the last five years, the last decade, the last 25 years, is that where we have disrupted

54:10normal biological complexity, we have done so at our peril, and that as much as the rituals surrounding death arriving, and the aftermath of death may seem archaic and primitive, and not modern. That's really an indicator that there is something about them that is important, that we probably have not written down, so it's very easy to bypass it, of course, it's tempting when the vet says, so you'd like cremation, then, you know, so you'll take the body right away, of course, everything is easier about that, and you think, okay, I guess it's all taken care of, it's just a signature, a credit card, and then, you know, I can have my ceremony when the ashes

55:13come back, but you don't understand what you have surrendered in that choice, and not everybody can bury their animal in the backyard, I'm not saying it's possible, but thinking about how you're going to deal with convincing your own mind that the animal is really gone, or the person figuring out how you're going to prompt your mind to do all of the recalibrating of what your life now is, those are not small matters, and I would just counsel people to be very conscious about traditions that we have now abandoned. Well, that's an excellent segue, actually, to talking a bit about Wendelberry. I want to, we've talked about Wendelberry a few other times on the podcast, he died the same day as our beloved Labrador did in August 31st. I don't want to just give a bit

56:14of a bio and then share some readings of his, and maybe that's sufficient. We'll see. So Wendelberry was, he died at 92, he lived a full, good, amazing life. He was an environmentalist, a writer, a philosopher and defender of the land, and a philosopher and defender of traditional ways of being and doing. He died at home in Kentucky at 92. He was raised on a farm in North Central Kentucky in the area where his ancestors had lived since 1803. Fifth generation, not just Kentucky, but from that area. And he went on to study English at the University of Kentucky where he met his soon to be wife with whom he was for the entire life. Then he studied creative writing at Stanford, where his mentor was the great philosopher, writer of the American West Wallace Stegner, one of my heroes. One summer, he and his wife, Tanya, returned to Kentucky and spent it in, quote, an old two-room cabin

57:15on the Kentucky River at Port Royal in Henry County where his ancestors lived since 1803. The cabin had been built in the 1920s by a great uncle. That's from the New York Times of the jury of him. It was a place where he had spent many summers as a child. And Barry said in a later essay about that place and about that summer. In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted. It was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige. So for those who don't know Wallace Stegner, the idea that this young man from Kentucky had ended up in the creative writing program named for and mentored by Wallace Stegner, along with like Ken Kisee, Ken Kisee and other who was actually his classmate, is extraordinary. I like this was a man who had a great literary future ahead of him and in fact he does, but as we'll see he stepped away from what was expected. After Stanford, he and his growing family spent a year in Italy and the south of France on a Guggenheim fellowship before landing at he landed a faculty

58:17job at NYU. New York City was considered then as now the just the home of everything literary, the beating heart of literary life in America. The place that you tried to get to and if you made it, you didn't leave. NYU, faculty, English, NYU, after two years he left. After two years, Barry left with his family returning to rural Kentucky to make a life on the land where he had grown up. In a 2012 interview Barry said, I don't think I had a single literary friend who thought I'd done the right thing by leaving New York and coming back here to live, but after I did, I understood what Walla's stegna are a lot better than I had before. When I read Wolf Willow, one of Stegna's pieces, I began to realize how responsible he had been to his region. That mattered to me immensely, and I began reading his books with a better understanding. When I first went to Stanford in 58, I thought I would move the way a lot of writers have done from university job to university job. My education had implied over and again that you couldn't amount to anything in a place like this,

59:19speaking of his home in Kentucky. I grieved over that. I liked the work of the farms. I liked this country, this place, but at Stanford I thought I was the commencement of some kind of an academic bag of bondage that would carry me, I didn't know where. I was in no position yet to understand Walla's stegna's commitment to the West and to his long endeavor to understand the implications of heritity beyond the 100th meridian. I began to accept the influence of Kentucky and so it brought their education home. My father, of course. After we moved back here, I understood that my subject was here and that wherever I might have gone, I would still have been drawing on this country because it was what I knew. I was in an interview with the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2012. Speaking six years later in 2018 to the New York Times, he had set up this decision again, this decision to move, to leave the being heart of the literary world in New York City and to go home to Kentucky. He said returning to his home, New York Times writes that

1:00:21he had said that returning to his home was a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to ensure to himself that he would always be bound by the truth. And here a direct quote from him in 2018 as reported by the New York Times, it made a permanent connection between me and my native place and with its landscape. The landscape was there to chuck me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwards of Kentucky. So we've spoken before of Wendell Berry. I read poems of his in February of 2022 in episode 116 and prose in April of 2023 and episode 170 and I'm going to read a little bit more now. He was prolific. He was an extraordinary writer and he was prolific, nonfiction fiction poetry. Perhaps his most famous book is the unsettling of America culture and agriculture. You probably can't see but this book is as book darted up as any book that I have. And so I chose a few passages to share but really every page of

1:01:28this book is important and as unexpected things. And nowhere now is there a market for minor produce, a bucket of cream, a hen, a few dozen eggs. One cannot sell milk from a few cows anymore, the law required equipment is too expensive. Those markets were done away with the name of sanitation but of course to the enrichment of the large producers. We've always had to have a good reason for doing away with small operators and in modern times the good reason has often been sanitation for which there is apparently no smaller cheap technology. Future historians will no doubt remark upon the inevitable association with us between sanitation and filthy luger. And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons. It's interesting. Obviously you didn't get to go to polyface this year which is too bad. It was

1:02:30amazing. Yeah. I was doing more important work though. You were doing more important work. But while you were doing that work, Joel Salaton actually spoke, gave an incredible talk as he always does. And he mentioned Wendelberry. And the thing he said struck me, never heard it before, it mirrored something that I've said in a very narrow context and I have been unable to come up with the quote. But he said in effect that Wendelberry had stated that a civilization must, civilization can only survive if it keeps its minority perspectives a lot. Now I've said in the academic context that every field must have at least two schools of thought alive. And that the reason that the entire academy has gone insane is that the school of thought that's making the biggest progress at the moment kills off all of its competitors. And when it runs its course during diminishing returns, nobody remembers how to think any other way. And so that all fields get

1:03:34grounded and sounds like Wendelberry had made the same argument for civilization generally. But I can't find the quote. Monoculture, be it agricultural or actual culture is not good for the landscape. 100%. Yeah, and this is one of the things I ended up talking to Joel about is the conference had a theme, I think, accidental almost, where we had a bunch of farmers at sort of different stages in their development. You know, Joel Salatin is one of the few famous farmers on earth, really. And, you know, Ryan Cole is a doctor, an artisan, an farmer, a scientist. Thomas Massey is an engineer and a congressman and a farmer. And these are three totally different regions too. We have Virginia and Kentucky and Idaho,

1:04:35that order. Yep. And then Robert and Jill Malone, doctors, scientists, farmers. And so anyway, there was sort of this accidental focus on the fact that these realms, you know, I started to think about it in terms of when I hear Joel Salatin speak, I hear him, there's a kind of wisdom that comes from the very practical hand-dual aside of what he does, that he has come to understand some deep philosophical truths and he's come to them through managing the land in a way that few farmers even do. You know, you have people who are very good at farming the land who don't know nearly as much about it as Joel does. But it is, I think, not surprising that, you know, the monoculture is a bad idea whether you're growing stuff or ideas. That's right. That's right.

1:05:39A competent farmer is his own bus. He has learned the disciplines necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by economic obligation, loyal to his place, pride in his work. His work days require the use of long experience and practice judgment for the failures of which he knows that he will suffer. His days do not begin and end by rule but in response to necessity, interest and obligation. They are not measured by the clock but by the task and his endurance. They last as long as necessary or as long as he can work. He has mastered intricate formal patterns in ordering his work within the overlapping cycles, human and natural, controllable and uncontrollable, of the life of a farm. Such a man upon moving to the city and taking a job in industry, it becomes a specialized subordinate, dependent upon the authority and judgment of other people. His disciplines are no longer implicit in his own experience, assumptions and values, but are imposed on him from the outside. For a complex responsibility, his substituted a simple dutifulness. The strict competencies of independence, the formal mastery, the complexities of attitude and know-how, necessary to life on the

1:06:42farm which have been in the making and the race of farmers since before history, all are replaced by the knowledge of some fragmentary tasks that may be learned by root in a little while. Such a simplification of mind is easy, given the pressure of economics and social fashion that has been behind it and the decline of values that has accompanied it, it may be said to have been gravity-powered. The reverse movement, the reverse movement is necessary and some have undertaken it, is uphill and it is difficult. It cannot be fully accomplished in a generation. It will probably require several generations, enough to establish complex local culture for the strong communal memories and traditions of care. One more piece of prose from Wundelberry. What has drawn the modern world into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future. The modern mind longs for the future as the medieval mind longs for heaven. The great aim of modern

1:07:44life has been to improve the future, even just to reach the future, assuming that the future will inevitably be better. One of the oddest terms of praise in our languages is futuristic. Bar out as a term of universal deprivation is perhaps a linear descendant. Such terms are used to identify the signs and landmarks that confirm that we are indeed on the right road to the future, that we are getting there, that at any moment we may at last arrive. And this is no elitist obsession, it is commonplace. Politicians understand very well the power of the promise to build a better or more prosperous or more secure future. Parents characteristically strive and sacrifice to make a better or more secure future for their children. Workers work to secure future in which they will retire and enjoy themselves. Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us. The future has been envisioned, dreamed, projected, painted for us by profits of every kind. Scientists, comic book writers, novelists, philosophers, politicians, industrialists, professors. And of course by ourselves, the cold of the future has turned us all into profits. The future is the time when science will have solved all of our problems,

1:08:49gratified all our desires. When we will all live in perfect ease and an air condition fully automated womb, when all the work will be done by machines to sophisticated that they will not only clothe, house, and feed us, but think for us, play our games, paint our pictures, write our poems. It is the earthly paradise, the other shore, where all will be well. And if we are living in the future, no. And if we are living for the future, then history is on our side, or so we are at liberty to think, for the needed proofs are never at hand. That there has for some time been growing a cult of dread of the future, testifies not only to the innate silliness and frivolity of this vision, but to its power. The adoration of the future may be beginning to falter, but it is still dominant, still available and useful to the exploitive mind. There is no aspect of our life as a people that is not now under the dominance of this industrial dream of the future as paradise. All our implements, automobiles, tractors, kitchen utensils, etc, have always been conceived by the modern mind as in a kind of progress or pilgrimage towards the future.

1:09:49Forms. The automobile of the future, the kitchen of the future, the classroom of the future, have long figured more actively in our imaginations, plans, and desires than whatever versions of these things we may currently have. We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate, or even excellent, we have preferred instead to have things that are up to date, but to be up to date is an ambition with built-in panic. Our possessions cannot be up to date more than momentarily unless we can stop time or somehow get ahead of it. The only possibility of satisfaction is to be driving now in one's future automobile. Oh, that's so good. Why do we be better shot as the future the way we do, especially in light of the evident trajectories? Why can we not find beauty and salience and satisfaction, if not static satisfaction,

1:10:50in what is here and now? It's Buddhist. There are many traditions which ask us to be present and to be satisfied. We can still strive. We can still yearn, but we can also be satisfied and find the beauty and the joy and what is. In fact, if you think about it, because there are these zones where the newest thing, this is the fastest laptop Apple has ever built. The. Okay. The doctor's not making them slower. Right. Of course it is. The latest one is going to be the fastest. So, a fast is something that matters. Then of course, the latest will have that characteristic. This is the, you know, the newest drug for managing headaches. Okay, but in the case of managing headaches, it is not obvious that I want the newest drug. In fact, there are very strong reasons I should want a drug that's

1:11:50well understood, rather than the newest drug, which carries dangers that may not be known for, you know, 25 years, if at all. Yes. So, at some level, there needs to be an art. We are all trained by the zones in which, you know, cars really are better than when you and I were kids. They just break down less. They go farther, same amount of fuel. But they're also more fly by wire. Yeah, they're fly by wire. You can't fix them yourself. You can't fix them yourself. There are circuit boards that weren't present before and that has made them more reliable. But it has also made them impossible for a human without other tools, technological tools, to work on them, fully themselves. True, but you could be forgiven for thinking that given the trajectory of the last 50 years, the newest cars are likely to be better, just because cars have

1:12:51gotten better. But that is actually the exception, not the rule, right? There are certain technological zones. If it has a battery, it's probably way better than it was 20 years ago. Battery's everything. But batteries are new. Yeah. But most things, there should be a fairly high bar to... Well, the older it is, the more likely you are to have reached the plateau, the asymptote, whatever, already. And incremental changes are likely to be incremental and may even go in the opposite direction. Yes, often there will be downsides you don't know. Like, you know, the refrigerator of today looks fancier, but you know, it lasting 10 years is not guaranteed. So anyway, the argument should have to be persuasively made that this is a place where progress is desirable, not if there is a new version. It's better than the old one. You know, you're a fool if you think that that's obviously true. Yeah. Okay. I want to finish with two poems by

1:13:57Wendell Berry. One I read in February 2022. It's perhaps his most famous poem, Manifesto, the Mad Farm Relaboration Front. Love the quick profit, the annual rays vacation with pay, want more of everything ready made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die, and you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something, they will call you, when they want you to die for profit, they will let you know. So friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord, love the world, work for nothing, take all that you have and be poor, love somebody who does not deserve it, denounce the government and embrace the flag, hope to live in that tree republic for which it stands, give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance for what man has not encountered, he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium, plants Sequoias, say that your

1:15:02main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophecy such returns, put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to Carian, put your ear close and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world, laugh, laughter is a measurable. Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself, will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields, lie easy in the shade. Rest your head and her lap, swear allegiance to what is nia's your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicals can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction,

1:16:02practice resurrection. Amazing. I wish we had met him. Yeah, we too. The last poem is very short and I want to end with it and my parting words of the podcast. So if we want to talk anymore before we go there, I think we're there. Thanks for joining us and considering the end of Maddie's life. I know that seems like a small thing probably, but it is a window into many, many things that are profound. Indeed. Another poem by Wendell Berry, a meeting. In a dream, I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far. And yet he is the same

1:17:11for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed. Grones changed to what I was. Yet I the changed one asked how you've been. He grins and looks at me, ibinating peaches off some mighty fine trees. Rest in peace, Wendell Berry and rest in peace, Maddie. The amazing Labrador and all of you in our audience until you see us next time, which is going to be in only two days. Be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside. Be well everyone.