The One You Feed - How to Write Haiku and Other Spiritual Practices with Clark Strand

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Clark Strand is an American author and lecturer on spirituality and religion.  He is a former Zen Buddhist monk and was the first Senior Editor of Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review.  He is also the author of many books including The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary and Seeds of a Birch Tree:  Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey In this episode, Eric and Clark discuss a few of his books in addition to his exploration of the many spiritual traditions. But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Clark Strand and I Discuss Haiku and Other Creative Spiritual Practices and … His book, Waking Up to the Dark:  The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse His exploration of many spiritual traditions Self power and other power The circular notion of spiritual life rather than linear notion of progress How a bead/rosary practice represents the circular nature of spirituality The “hour of God” or “hour of the wolf” when awake in the night Haiku and the tradition and forms of this type of poetry Translation of haiku is “playful verse” How profound meanings can come through from this playful art from Clark Strand links: Clark’s Website Instagram By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Clark Strand, check out these other episodes: The Divine Feminine with Mirabai Starr Being Heart-Minded with Sarah BlondinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The most elusive part of a haiku is what I call the turn of thought. So what the poet has to do is to add a turn of thought to the 17 syllables with the season word that results in more than 17 syllables of meaning. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Clark Strand. He's an American author and lecturer on spirituality and religion. Clark is a former Zen Buddhist monk and was the first senior editor of Tricycle,

The Buddhist Review. He's also the author of many books, including The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine Hidden in the Rosary, and Seeds from a Birch Tree, Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. In this episode, Eric and Clark discuss not only those books, but his career and life in general. Hi, Clark. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Glad to be here. I'm excited to have you on. We are going to be talking about a lot of different things in this conversation, one of which will be using haiku sort of as a spiritual practice. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable.

There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Well, a couple of things, Eric. One thing it calls to mind is the teachings of a turn-of-the-19th century Ukrainian rabbi named Reb Nachman of Breslov, who is an important figure in my own thinkings, especially about ecology and climate change. Reb Nachman advised his disciples to go out in the middle of the night to wake after everyone else had gone to bed and go out into a field where they could speak to God in their own language. And he believed that if you did this, the trees and grasses and flowers and the animals nearby would support your prayer and enter into your prayer. He very much believed in outdoor sort of plain air prayer and rising in the middle of the night. And Reb Nachman talked about focusing on the good points. This was a fundamental aspect of his teaching. He believed that in any given moment, you had a choice between focusing on what was life-affirming and positive and generous

and loving and those things that weren't. And he made that very, very simple idea the basis for much of his teaching. I wrote a book called Waking Up to the Dark. It was originally published in 2014 and, again, is coming out in paperback just next month in September, or this month, maybe by the time this airs. And in that book, the whole first section of that book is called The Hour of the Wolf. And it refers to that eerie sort of time between dark and dawn that so many people associate with a sort of predatory fatalism, right, that comes to haunt people, like, you know, their worst nightmares, their most pernicious fears and worries come about that time. What Reb Nachman discovered was that these hours were originally the hour of God, right,

a time when we could commune with our deepest feelings. And modern people, because, you know, and we can commune with our deepest feelings. And modern people, because we're so light-drunk and light-saturated, our lives are so ruled by screens and artificial illumination, we don't give ourselves enough time in the dark, enough time for sleep. And so we don't naturally wake in the middle of the night for that time of prayer or meditation and contemplation that sort of makes sense of our lives. So if you ask me what the parable means to me, it's really very personal because it's the choice

between the hour of the wolf and the hour of God. You know, one wolf feeds on light, information, certainty, power, dominion, right? The belief that we can control everything in the world and as human beings should control everything. The other wolf is trusting of our mother of the earth, right? And is willing to be fed off of her bounty. And so that's also a choice. So this parable is very personal for me in that respect. That's a wonderful response.

And I want to go deeper into this hour of wolf versus hour of God. And as I mentioned to you before the show started, I didn't prepare with that book because I didn't think it was out yet. It's a sleeper, that book. Excuse the pun. Yeah, exactly. I'd like to dig more into it. But as I was preparing for this, there was another section in your writing that when I read it, I was like, oh, okay, this strikes right at the heart of the parable also. And you describe that you really found in the Pure Land Buddhism tradition that they believe that there were two forces at work in human life, and they weren't good and evil. They were self-power and other power. Right.

Say more about that. Yeah. This was very much a formative part of my spiritual development. I was a Zen Buddhist monk in my 20s, right? I started practicing Zen, went off and joined a monastery when I was 19, and, you know, then ended up getting married, ultimately went back to the monastery, became a monk and even a Zen teacher for a period of time. After that, I was the editor of a Buddhist magazine called Tricycle, The Buddhist Review. You know, after I left Zen, I sort of came unmoored.

My wife described me as very loyal in marriage, but promiscuous in religion. Right? I did. I did everything, right? You know, I explored many, many different types of spiritual practice, mostly looking for, you know, kind of a spiritual solution to the problems that we're facing in the modern world, and specifically climate change and species extinction. I wanted to know if any of these traditions had the answer to that.

And Pure Land Buddhism, which is a very ecologically-based form of Buddhism, was really inspiring to me. Pure Land Buddhists speak of two basic types of agency in the world. One is called self-power. These are the things we can do for ourselves. It's ruled by ambition, self-determination, self-confidence, right? It's the kind of things that with a little help from somebody like yourself, you know, your self-power can, you know, be a guiding force in your life and can allow you to make strides that you otherwise wouldn't be able to accomplish in life. But it isn't everything.

And when we think about the fact that we all die, we realize that there's a limit to it. So Pure Land Buddhists developed this idea of other power. And in Pure Land Buddhism, that other power is Amitabha Buddha. And the story is this. It's a really interesting story. Pure land Buddhism comes to be about 500 years after the historical Buddha's death. Early Buddhism was very elitist, right? It wasn't particularly concerned with women.

It wasn't concerned with the poor. People who were practicing it were mostly educated. But people began to realize that if it was going to really last as a spiritual tradition, it had to address the needs of ordinary people. And so the Mahayana Buddhist tradition came with this idea of the Bodhisattva. This isn't like the Buddha who practices for many lifetimes and eventually sort of like, you know, gets squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed is no longer, you know, really subject to birth and death, right? But it has escaped all of that, right? It has attained a state of nirvana, of being a completely extinguishing

desire. Well, the Bodhisattva was a very different idea. Bodhisattva has reborn countless incarnations in order to save all beings. Bodhisattva refuses to become a Buddha, to enter nirvana until all beings have been saved. But if you know anything about ecology, you know that the world doesn't really work that way. And I developed a very simple test when I was, you know, journeying through all these spiritual traditions to see if they held any validity, like in an age of extinction, you know, climate change and ecological collapse. The test was this. There's a three-word motto, ecology, not theology. If a spiritual teaching makes some sense ecologically, then I kept it.

If it didn't, I literally threw it out. I had no use for it, no time for that now. But it's not in a world that's on fire and burning all around us, both literally and symbolically. And so, you know, I looked at Pure Land Buddhism and disbelief and other power and Amida, and I came up with the following sort of understanding of that tradition. Amitabha Buddha was originally one of these Bodhisattvas. But the way the Pure Land Buddhists imagined it, he existed eons and eons ago. Like if you actually do the math, like in the sutras, this guy would have lived before the creation of the known universe, right?

It was like another universe, another world system. He's so ancient. And way back then, long before the birth of the historical Buddha, he decided that he wanted to save all beings. And he needed to make it very, very easy. Because the only way to save all beings is to make it so easy anyone can do it. And so there were no austerities, there was no celibacy, there were no precepts to follow, no nothing. only calling on his name, Namu Amida Butsu, right? I take refuge in Amida Buddha. And so this Bodhisattva called Dharmakara vowed not to become enlightened, not to become a Buddha, until all beings who called on his name, without exception,

we're talking gnats, microbes, you know, human beings, animals, everything. Everything in the whole universe is delivered, is saved from suffering. So he vows not to become a Buddha. Okay, here's the weird little tautology of the thing. So Dharmakara practiced for eons and eventually became Amitabha Buddha, which means, well, it must have worked. All beings are saved. Anyone who calls on Amida Buddha's name is saved. Amida is the quintessential other power. And my belief is that these early Buddhists were looking at nature, and they were trying to come up with something that was more loving and more generous than, you know, most of the religions that were developing during the Axial Age, right? Something that really could

embrace all of nature and everything that they saw and redeem all of it. And so they came up with this ecological symbol of Amida, who is always saving all beings, right? In the process of saving all beings, right? Amida is like what we would call Gaia, right? It's like the great mother, Amida. It's really more of a feminine sort of understanding of a divinity than it is a masculine version, like a god, right? There's no dominion. Amida doesn't dominate anyone or require anything necessarily. It just includes all things and balances all things. And so we live in this world where everything is eaten and everything is eating. Whatever eats is also eaten, right? And it's an endless cycle of life. I think it was

around 1970, the very first world conference to talk about the environment was convened, I think in Stockholm. And the United Nations came up with this declaration about the rights of the earth. And as part of it, there was this wonderful thing that reads like a kind of ecological creed. I'm going to stop there for a second. I'm going to find it because I've actually got a copy of it right here and it's worth reading. This was the official report of the Stockholm Conference. So it was 1972. So in 1972, when the environmental movement was still very much in its infancy, the United Nations convened the world's first international conference to raise awareness about threats to the global ecology. The official report of the Stockholm Conference included a passage that today

reads almost like an eco-spiritual creed. Quote, Life holds to one central truth, that all matter and energy needed for life moves in great closed circles from which nothing escapes and to which only the driving fire of the sun is added. Life devours itself. Everything that eats is itself eaten. Every chemical that is made by life can be broken down by life. All the sunlight that can be used is used. Of all there is on earth, nothing is taken away by life, nothing is added by life,

but nearly everything is used by life, used and reused in thousands of complex ways, moved through vast chains of plants and animals, and back again to the beginning. Beautiful. And so this is a circular notion of time, circular notion of the spiritual life, rather than an ambition-driven, sort of self-power-driven, linear notion of progress, right? Yeah. So that's a great place to pivot to your book called The Way of the Rose, The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. You talk about a really interesting thing.

The rosary is, most people will know, it's using beads to pray. And we'll get into more detail than that. But you say something in there that I think is really interesting. You say, as a mystical practice, meditation has always been primarily a masculine discipline. One of the most interesting speculations on its origins suggests that it evolved from hunting behaviors, the need for radical stillness and silence,

for focused awareness, and for the pinpoint readiness to act when the moment was precisely right. Bead practices, on the other hand, so the rosary is a bead practice, or mala beads is a bead practice, seem to evolve from the gathering behaviors of women as they collected seeds and nuts and berries. And I thought that was really interesting. And what

led me there was you talking about the circle, right? Because a bead practice is circular. You end up where you start. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Back to the beginning and you just start over again. So it's very much that same sort of thing. Actually, I believe that section of the book was written by my wife, who is a co-author for the book. Okay. Although it's hard at this point to sort of tell who wrote what. But we founded an international rosary fellowship by the same name, The Way of the Rose, which people can join on Facebook or visit our website to learn more about it, wayoftherose.org. But yeah, the rosary is a circle of beads. And it originated actually in a much older tradition, which one finds all

across the world, of weaving chaplets of flowers, right? Usually as an offering to a divinity, either Shiva or Kali in India, or usually the Virgin Mary or Inanna or Isis or Venus in the West. So these flowers were a sort of a devotional offering, usually in the spring or summertime. And they were a way of basically unifying with that circular sort of maternal inclusive principle in finding one's place in the context of the passing seasons, right? So that there was this sort of implicit belief at the bottom of it is that our lives aren't just a straight line, right? Where we come from, we don't know. We're born, we live, we die, who knows what comes afterwards. The rosary and the Buddhist mala and all of these

circular bead practices, the Muslim tesbi, right? All of the same basic sort of tactile teaching, which is that life is a circle, not a line, right? That it leads back to the beginning and we start again. And so for those who believe in reincarnation, you know, this is a very comforting sort of idea. I guess I'll only add that most people believed in reincarnation before the religions began to divvy up their different beliefs about it, right? If you go back into the

upper Paleolithic, you find human beings who were basically animists, right? They all believed that everything is alive. They believed that their ancestors are present to them and continue to speak to them. They believed that they join the ancestral realm when they die and that they return from the ancestral realm when they live again. This was a universal human belief across the whole spectrum. Today, I think people have different, you know, sort of ways of thinking about it. Pure land Buddhists, you know, imagine the pure land of Amita that they go after death. But that pure land is just a great symbol for this world, right,

in which all things belong and nothing is left out, right? And everything is endlessly recycled. All of life is recycled. We're part of something that's never born and never dies, that goes on forever. Given that idea that we're part of something that is never born, never dies, goes on forever, and that nature sort of just regenerates itself sort of endlessly. Tell me why the climate crisis feels so important to you. And I'm asking that because when I look at the climate crisis, I think of it from a human perspective and I go, oh God, from humans, we are probably well and truly screwed at this point, right? I'm not saying there's nothing we can do, but it's not going to be good for humans. I don't worry about the earth itself, right? I don't worry about life.

I worry about the specific forms of it, my son and his children and, you know, down forth. But I'm curious, talk to me about how that belief that everything sort of goes on also ties to your concern around the climate crisis and our ecological crisis. Well, I began studying climate change in the 90s. My younger brother is a field botanist and a population geneticist. And I remember sitting down with him sometime in the mid-90s and him telling me that the large sample studies that he was doing, which required at that point the computers at the Pentagon to crunch the numbers because the data sample was so large across so many different plant species. plant species. And he told me that the results that were coming in indicated to him that we were well into a mass extinction and that it was mostly due to pesticides, encroachment into wilderness areas, and climate change, right? And that at that point, already, we were locked in a feedback loop that would probably mean that we were seeing the effects

even then of things that we had done 50 years earlier. And so he was very much of the opinion that, you know, the local shit was about to hit the fan and there wasn't a lot we could do about it and it was going to be very hard to get out of the way, right? So I went on a site called climate.org, which back then mostly just had climate scientists on it. And, you know, I sort of prevailed upon people to sort of make it simple and explain it to me so I can understand it. That was really, for me, the genesis of turning to all of these different spiritual traditions, you know, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity. Go back to the oldest texts, usually try to find some little leftover bit of sanity in each one of them from the Upper Paleolithic. Because people before the invention of agriculture lived in scale with the natural world, right?

You know, occasionally they would deplete the resources in an area, but typically they were moving from one place to the next. And so they were never really, you know, using more than the world had to give. And we're not talking a lot of people either. In the Upper Paleolithic, we're talking about a world population measured in the lower millions, at a certain point, even under a million. And so these were people who had no sense of time as we understand it today, right? All time was ancestral time, people living in the upper Paleolithic, right? If you go to the caves, which my wife and I did when we were researching the Way of the Rose, go to the caves in southern France, you'll see paintings in the same cave that were done thousands of years apart. And yet, the paintings

were almost exactly the same. They were painting these animals like this for thousands and thousands of years. So we're talking about a remarkably stable human culture. And culture, we're talking about culture here, not just, quote, you know, so-called primitive people, but people who had art and song, people who experienced family and love and all the fruits of culture, but none of the perils of civilization. I think the problem, as people begin to imagine how they're going to negotiate climate change, is that they conflate human culture with human civilization. They're not the same. We've had human culture for tens of thousands of years, very durable culture at that. And that culture is still encoded within

us, right? The things that really matter in life, that are truly value, things that make us content and make us happy and keep us healthy and keep us at peace with one another. That part of us is still inside of us. The external, the human civilization that we have created since the rise of agriculture, that does not have a very long shelf life when we consider our very long history. Its expiration date is coming up, and we're going to see, I believe, you know, within the next 100 years, widespread collapse of the various systems that we rely upon to maintain our, quote, civilized way of living. But within us, there's something that endures, and I think that it will help us to survive. I do not believe we will survive the numbers that we have now. I don't know of any population scientist or any credible ecologist who believes that our present level of population is even remotely

sustainable. But there will be a natural contraction as petrochemicals either run out or they become untenable to use them. You know, world agricultural production is almost entirely dependent upon petrochemicals, petrochemical fertilizers. And when people begin to talk about, you know, regenerative agriculture and various different alternative ways of farming, right, we're not talking about ways of farming that produce the kinds of yields that would support, you know, eight or nine billion people on the face of the planet. It's just not possible. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500,

a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When most people hear the rosary, they think Catholicism, they think a lot of guilt, a lot of different things that may go with childhood traditions that were not good for them. So talk to me about what the rosary brought for you and why it became a practice for you as a non-Catholic, as somebody who's

very spiritually diverse. What was it about that particular approach that sang to you? Well, there are really two answers. I'll give you the first answer and then the second answer. The first answer literally answers your question, but the second answer I think is going to be more satisfying because it explains why I not only pray the rosary, but, you know, devoted a great deal of my life at this point to spreading word about the rosary. I was traveling to Taos, New Mexico, to teach haiku with my friend Natalie Goldberg about, I want to say at this point, it must be around almost 30 years ago, right? In the sort of late 1990s. And I was on my way there. I was afraid I was going to, you know, sort of miss my plane or whatever. I was late. I'd been teaching meditation

at a convent for 10 days in San Rafael, California, and I barely made it to the plane, got there. I got off the plane in Taos and I had a day to sort of kick around before the retreat started. And everywhere I went, I kept seeing this picture of this young Mexican girl that I couldn't quite place. I wasn't raised Catholic. I was raised in a Protestant denomination, so I didn't even, you know, recognize the Virgin Mary as anything other than pretty much a Galilean housewife, right? And yeah, so, you know, there was no sense. I mean, you know, there were crutch scenes and stuff around Christmas time, but that was about it. There was no presence of the divine feminine anywhere in the religion I was brought up with.

So I didn't recognize the figure I was looking at. And I see her everywhere. She was on calendars. She was on a little statue, you know, like on the dashboard of the cab that picked me up at the airport. You know, I'd go and have lunch and she'd be on a poster on the wall. And sort of stupidly, I was walking down the street and I looked up and there was this little terracotta statue of this figure. And I asked this woman who is coming out of a building who looks sort of, you know, professorial, perhaps. I thought at one point, maybe she's a real estate agent. She had a leather portfolio under her arm. And I say, excuse me, who is this figure? She's everywhere. And she says, ah, that's La Morenita, the little brown-skinned girl, right? Says she's the indigenous form of the Virgin Mary to this region, right? Indigenous to this region.

Her Aztec name was Guadalupe. I know I'm saying it wrong, but she said, but if you say it fast, it sounds like Guadalupe, which was the name they gave to her. So this was the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe. So I bought a little book that told her story, right? You know, against the backdrop of the Mesoamerican genocide, right? The largest genocide in human history. We're talking not 10 million people, but, you know, 100 million people. We're talking an ecocide and a genocide on the scales that like we've never seen before, right? And out of that, this figure appears, this old Aztec mother goddess, you know, sort of transmutes into Our Lady of Guadalupe, right? A version of the Americas. So I somehow, I was so sort of deeply moved by this. And so I came back to Woodstock. And the first words out

of my mouth when Perdita met me at the airport with her kids, Sophie and Johnny, were really small at that point, was I said, you know, I don't know. I feel like I need to start praying the rosary. And her mouth just sort of drops open, right? She was willing to, you know, follow me through all of these different spiritual adventures. But suddenly, I'm telling her I'm going to start praying the rosary like her Irish Catholic grandmother, right? But I did start praying it. And here's the damnedest thing. I just learned the prayers, took about a day, you know, to do it. I mean, any eight-year-old with a diagram and a list of the prayers can learn the rosary in, you know, in an hour. So I learned the prayers, I memorized them, and I started to pray the rosary.

And I found myself getting into a place of deep, trusting calm, like I used to only experience after maybe six or seven days of silent meditation in a remote Zen monastery. And I didn't trust it. I thought, this has got to be like some placebo effect. How can it be that the rosary works that well, right? So I said it for about a month or two, and then I just dropped it. I said, no, I've just talked myself into this. This can't be happening. And so I abandoned it. But I got very, very fascinated

with bead practices at that point, and I undertook a study of bead prayers, right? Like the japa mala, the muttering garland, right, that Hindus use, and the various different types of juzu or ninju or malas that Buddhists use, right? And, you know, I learned about practice in Islam and even sort of Jewish analogs. They don't have beads in Judaism, but they have the talis, right? The knots on the prayer shawl that are fingered and sometimes counted and are part of the prayer. So I spent a lot of time studying these, but I didn't really come back to the rosary as a practice. And then the night of June 15, 2011, I went out to dinner with some friends, and I came back, and I went to bed, and I woke up early on the morning of June 16th, and I was about to go out for my normal walk.

I've been walking in the middle of the night since I was a child for an hour, right? You know, eventually I took up, you know, Rev. Nachman's practice, and, you know, I did various other things. I did bead practices sometimes during that time. I'd go out for a walk. I wrote about this in Waking Up to the Dark. So I got up to leave the house, and I had my hand on the doorknob. It was a full moon night. There had just been an eclipse a few hours earlier.

It was nice, crisp, and cool. We live on a very dark road, you know, in a dark part of the Catskills, so it's just the perfect night for walking. And just as I'm about to leave, I feel a hand on my shoulder, and a voice, a male voice, says, don't go out tonight. Remain inside and be very, very still. Now, being still is something I know how to do. You know, I spent years doing this, spent years teaching it, right? Zen is a very, very still discipline, the meditation part of it, that is. So I got on the couch and I began to meditate, kept my eyes closed. After about 45 minutes, I suddenly felt there was someone in the room you know just that

unmistakable sense of being stared at you know I opened my eyes and there in front of me it's like the room had disappeared and I just saw two reed stalks as if blowing in an invisible wind it was like I was in the middle of a marsh perhaps and then the reed stalks disappeared, and I saw the face of a young girl, about maybe 17 years old, round, sort of pale, moon-like face, hazel eyes, auburn hair cut close. And over her lips was an X of black electrical tape. Now, my Zen training had told me that experiences like this were called makyo, or illusion. And the wisdom of the Zen masters was that if you just sort of stare them down and don't pay any attention to them, they'll go away. So I've been doing this for years and teaching other people to do it, right? So I just stared at her for all of about two or three seconds, and then suddenly I thought, oh, the Zen masters were wrong.

And that was a huge moment for me. I thought, oh, they were wrong. This is not illusion. If anything is the illusion here, it's me, not her. It was as if she was the only thing in the universe that was real. Everything else was unreal. You know, I wrote in Waking Up to the Dark that it was like looking at the face of God, except it was a girl. And so I

did the only thing I could do, really, because there was such urgency in her eyes. I leaned forward and I pulled the electrical tape off of her lips. And, you know, the sensation was so vivid. I could feel the pull of her skin against the tape as I pulled it off. And when I did, she gave a big gasp. And I described it once as like the sound of air rushing into a crypt that had been sealed for a thousand years. And I thought that she would speak. I was dying to know who she was. I had no idea what was going on.

I'd never had an experience like this before. No visions, no nothing. This was age 54. I've done all kinds of spiritual practices, had all kinds of spiritual experiences my whole life, nothing approaching this. But she shook her head as if nothing could be said. But after that, she was always there. You know, I could always feel her. So anyway, I looked at her for a while and I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, about 40 minutes later, she was gone. Two weeks later, I saw her again. And this time I asked, who are you?

The obvious question. Again, I woke in the middle of the night to go out for a walk. Again, the same voice. Get on the couch. Be still. This time she said, I am the hour of God. This was a phrase that I've been using for a long time to describe that luminous, quiet period in the middle of the night when the prolactin levels rise. And, you know, the psalmist described it as, you know, I sleep, but my heart is awake and deep, deep calm as if you're asleep, but your mind is completely lucid.

So she did use those words to describe it. And I said, stupidly, I think I know what that is. And she said, if you really knew, you would have said who, not what. And that was it. I mean, you know, my whole life was different after that. You know, I had always thought of the world as a what. I think I thought of myself as a what. You know, after that, I realized that, you know, everything I looked at was a who.

Everything was alive. Everything was sentient. You know, every aspect of life, every particle of life. I mean, I've been writing haiku poetry, which is a, you know, 17-syllable verse that's devoted to nature. I've been writing that form and teaching it, you know, since I was a teenager, teaching it since my early 30s. And yet I don't think I had really fully understood what it was about, right? That when you look at nature, you're looking at a who, not a what. That the whole universe is filled with who's.

Everything is alive, right? Everything looks back. And so, you know, I didn't know. I guess my fear, my unspoken fear, you know, was that it was the Virgin Mary. You know, I always say, well, I didn't really know who she was those first few weeks or so, first couple of months, right? My wife says, oh, you knew. You did know. And I guess I did, but my prayer was, oh, please don't let it be the Virgin Mary. Don't let her be the Virgin Mary. Because, you know, Ed, I was done with religion. I wasn't even done with Buddhism at that point. You know, I was just so sick of the whole patriarchal mess that the last thing I wanted to do, if I was going to become anything,

it certainly wasn't going to be Catholic. So I was terrified that this meant I had to be a Catholic, right? If this is the Virgin Mary, then what is she going to ask of me? I asked her finally one time, you know, am I supposed to go to the bishop or something like that. And she said, no, the editors are the bishops now. I want you to write a book. But in any case, I guess about 10 weeks after that, we were vacationing on Cape Cod. And again, she woke me up in the middle of the night. And this time she said, if you rise to say the rosary tonight, a column of saints will support your prayer. And I realized, I guess, in that moment, I said, oh, I guess this is who we're talking about, because I wasn't Catholic, but I wasn't stupid. There's only one figure in all of world religion who asks you to pray the

rosary and makes promises based on whether you do it or not. So then I knew. And she quickly made it clear that she wasn't the least bit interested in Catholicism if I tried to talk to her about priests or Catholic doctrine or anything like that she would just look bored what she wanted to talk about again and again over and over was the way human beings live on the planet and what our deep past has been and what we carry from the past into the present and the things that we need to know in order to move forward and to survive what's coming. So in the classic sort of, you know, fashion of Marian apparition, she came with a simple message. Times are bad. Here's what you need to know. I'm there. Hold my hand, and I will guide you through it.

So that's why I pray the rosary. It's the reason why our Way of the Rose group is post-religious, post-Catholic. We have such a diverse membership, approaching 20,000 people at this point, spread all over the world. And our members are Wiccans, witches, pagans, Buddhists, Jews. We have Catholics as well, but we wouldn't exactly call them card-carrying Catholics, right? We have a lot of people who are devoted to folk Catholic witchcraft, right? That's not a term I hear very often. Who like the saints, right?

Well, we read a book by a woman who talked about her Catholic upbringing, and she said the nuns would give her all these saints cards in Catholic school, right? And she loved the cards and would take them home and arrange them and say the prayers and pray for things and stuff like that. As an adult, she had this realization. She said, the nuns thought they were teaching me Catholicism, but what I learned was magic. That's great. That's wonderful. There's so much you said there that we could go so deep into, but we only have so much time, and I've got a few other topics I want to hit. And one of them is I want to talk about this hour of God idea.

This idea that in the middle of the night is a very fertile time for spiritual development. I'm paraphrasing, but I think I'm in the neighborhood. Most people's experience of being up in the middle of the night is not that. Most people, if they wake up at three in the morning, what happens is the worries of life rush in, and they are 10 times magnified and 10 times scarier than they are at three in the afternoon. Yeah, that's the hour of the wolf. That's it right there. Yeah. So what is a way for people who don't sleep well, right, who just for whatever various reasons are up in the middle of the night, and they find that time to be the hour of the wolf, as you're saying, what are some things that those people could start to do,

besides getting your book and reading it, about starting to transform that time from something that is sort of nightmarish to something that's really fertile and generative? Yeah. Well, you could work it basically from both ends, I think. To begin with, the reason why people wake in the middle of the night to that eerie predatory fatalism that has come to be known as the hour of the wolf, the reason that happens is because we no longer go to bed and fall asleep two hours after dusk and rise with the dawn. after dusk and rise with the dawn. Prior to the invention of modern forms of illumination, human beings would retire across the planet. We were just wired this way. It's part of the way our endocrine system works. Our hormones directed this pattern. Human beings would tend to settle down and begin to get still sometime within a couple of hours after dusk. And about two hours after dusk, they would finally fall asleep. They would sleep for four hours and then wake for one

to two hours, depending on the time of year and the length of the night, and then sleep for another four before waking up in the morning. Now, what's really fascinating is that if you do this today, you will have the experience that these people had, which is experience of very deep, profound calm. If you go back and you look at the earliest prayer traditions, like in Judaism and in Islam and in Buddhism and Hinduism, you find that they were all following this schedule. Usually the founders of the religion, you know, experienced their great awakening like the Buddha, right? The Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment during the hour of Ushitora,

which is between the hours of the tiger and the ox. I think that's right. It's a time period between like two and four o'clock in the morning, right? Jesus would rise in the middle of the night to pray. And again, you see over and over again in each tradition, Muhammad would wake up to pray in the middle of the night. Many of his revelations were received at that time. So biochemically, what's happening at that time is that prolectin, which is the hormone that lets down in mothers when they are nursing to keep them calm. It's also the hormone that reaches elevated levels in birds that are roosting on their necks. It basically keeps us still while

we're sleeping and very calm. Normally, when you wake up in the middle of the night as a modern person, your prolactin levels fall immediately, right? And you can even begin to feel a little restless and anxious at that point because of that. But if you give yourself enough darkness, what happens is the prolactin levels remain at sleep levels, even though you're aware and awake. There was a very famous study done by a man named Thomas Ware at the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s. Thomas Ware was a guy who discovered seasonal affective disorder, basically, right? He was the world's leading expert on, you know, biorhythms and circadian rhythms. He came up with this question. He said, did human beings always sleep the way they do now?

Right? We've consolidated our sleep nights, like our work days, into convenient eight-hour blocks. But did human beings really do this? So he decided to take people off the street, just ordinary people, and take them off of all forms of artificial illumination for one month to see what would happen. For like the first three weeks, what happened was that they slept a little longer than usual, repaying what we're called the national sleep debt, right? And then at week three, every single subject in the study began waking up after four hours of sleep to two hours of calm stillness. And then going back to bed for another four hours.

At the end of the study, and these were results that if you know anything at all about scientific studies, you know, are unprecedented. You don't get results like this, you know, with every study. I mean, this is ironclad. So clearly there was this older pattern at work. So we're asked them all to self-report, and they all said the same thing. We feel like we've never been awake before in our entire lives. Finally, we feel like we're awake. And so we're decided that what people were doing beginning around a couple of thousand years ago is various forms of artificial illumination begin to creep in and extend our days into the night. Is it religious practices or an attempt to recover what was originally effortless and simply a human birthright. It's like I one time called it, like a worldwide nightly meditation retreat for every homo sapiens on earth. All right, so that's what's at play. So you can work it from the darkness side, okay? You can go to bed earlier, give yourself more time. If you do that, you will not experience insomnia.

You won't experience the hour of the wolf. You give yourself a few weeks on that schedule. When you wake up in the middle of the night, you'll feel like a peace that you can't even, you know, imagine. It'll be better than anything you get from mindfulness, right? Because, you know, you're working it from the bottom up, not from the top down through your head, trying to do backflips to maintain proper awareness. This is something that just wells up from within you as a natural state.

So that's one thing to do. Or you can work it from the other end, which is what works for most people. And that is, in fact, something like saying the rosary, right? Or mindfulness. something like saying the rosary, right? Or mindfulness or some practice that gives you that sense of peace and calm. I call it the cultivated dark, right? Not the literal dark, but the cultivated darkness, right? Where you can let go of the need to know everything and to have your life perfectly ordered, right? You let go temporarily of your ambitions, your anxieties, and your worries, and enter a state of deep relaxation. Rosary is great for that because it's tactile. You have

something to hold on to. And once you start it, you know, you don't even have to think, right? You just go from one prayer to another, one bead to the next, until you complete the circle. And quite naturally, what happens is your biochemistry changes, you enter into a state of, well, the way it's described in the Song of Songs, right? I sleep, but my heart is awake. A deep state of relaxation and a heightened state of awareness, a place of great fertility and peace and creativity. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just

stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I would be remiss in talking with you if we didn't talk about one of your life's great works, which is haiku. And the way I came across

you, the way I found you was my friend, Chris and I, who's the producer of this show or engineer of this show started this practice where we would write a haiku together each day. One of us would start with five syllables, text it to the other guy, the next guy would fill in the seven. And then the guy who started it would finish it. And so we started doing that, and I really was enjoying it. And so then I was looking at books on haiku, and I saw your book, which is called Seeds from a Birch Tree, Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. And I was like, that is the book for me. And I grabbed it, and I just love this book. There's so much in it. And let's start with how to write haiku, the basics. We can cover it in two minutes. What's the three simple rules of haiku?

Yeah, so it's very simple. And first of all, you and your friend Chris, you said? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you and Chris figured it out, right? Haiku is a collaborative art form, something we do in groups together, right? In fact, it evolved out of a collaborative poem where people took turns composing verses in a chain, right? In fact, it evolved out of a collaborative poem where people took turns composing verses in a chain, right? So you basically did that. One of you would create the five-syllable opening for the haiku, and the next person would come along and complete the poem by adding a second line of

seven syllables and a third line of five, right? That's the first tradition of haiku, which is the form, 5-7-5, for a total of 17 syllables. The second is the inclusion of a season word or a seasonal reference, right? This is where haiku meets animism, right? Haiku poets don't see human life as the point of everything, right? Haiku poets experience their lives in the context of nature, that their life is about relating to nature and relating to one another through nature. So haiku poets share this common language, which are these words that indicate the season, like dandelion for spring, right? Or spring rain, autumn moon, right? Crickets for autumn, morning glories for early fall, and so forth and so on. So you'll take one of these words as the topic for a haiku. And oftentimes

you have to work from a list. You can just go outside and find some sign of the season and choose that as a topic for your haiku. So there's the 575 syllable form, there is the season word, and finally, the most elusive part of a haiku is what I call the turn of thought. So what the poet has to do is to add a turn of thought to the 17 syllables with the season word that results in more than 17 syllables of meaning, right? The essence of haiku is compression. The fact that there's this very, very small poem with sometimes a very big meaning, right?

That meaning is collaborative, right? You can't save everything in haiku, so you have to suggest your meaning. You have to suggest what you want to say and trust the reader, right, to unpack the poem using their own experience, their own imaginations. And so every writer of haiku is also a reader of haiku, and every serious reader of haiku also writes them. What I love about haiku,

and, you know, that's what I do for a living now. By the way, the 25th anniversary edition of Seeds from Birch Tree will be coming out from Monkfish Books next spring. So I'm working on the final edits for that this week. Wonderful. But yeah, I think I'm probably, as far as I know, the only full-time teacher of haiku outside of Japan. That's how I make my money. I write a column for Tricycle Magazine, Tricycle the Buddhist Review. I write a quarterly print column and a monthly column and quote haiku challenge on tricycle.org forward slash haiku, where I assign a season word each month and hundreds, sometimes thousands of people will submit their haiku. It's a blind process.

I don't know who's written them. I just look at the poems and I choose one winner and two honorable mentions and then, you know, write a commentary on the winning poem. It's also a haiku tip every month. In addition to that, I have a group on Facebook called Weekly Haiku Challenge with Clark Strand. In that group, we do the same thing every week. Every Monday, I sign a new season word and post the comments on the poems from the week before. And it's a wonderful thing because, you know, haiku is really a group art. So people learn

together. They inspire one another. Last week, we wrote on jasmine, right? It's a summer season where the flower got very sexy poems on jasmine. You know, if you've ever smelled the flower, you can see why, you know, it's some traditions, it's a symbol of purity. But if you spend much time with that flower, it's really quite intoxicating. But people inspired one another. And, you know, one person wrote a poem, which they post in the comments on, you know, one person wrote a poem, which they post in the comments on, you know, in our little Facebook group, but, you know, relating it to time, right? The experience of being overwhelmed by this very powerful scent can dislocate you in space and time and make you sort of confused about even where you are. It's so overpowering.

So four or five other poets thought, I want to try that, right? So they came up with their own versions of it. And so there's this wonderful sort of mutual inspiration society that developed in a haiku community like that. So yeah, it's what I really love. But again, it goes back to the very beginning for me. You know, my first book, Seeds from a Birch Tree, you know, opens with talking about writing haiku in nature and about the fact that nothing can be thrown away, right? Everything belongs. That's really the lesson of haiku. And the four seasons are just like the rosary. They go in a circle. We're talking about a circular experience of time and an inclusive relationship to the natural world in which we belong, right? We're not in

charge of it. We belong to it. Yeah. There's a few other ideas from that book that I would love to hit that I think are really important. And one of them is you call it the paradox of haiku. You say, if we cultivate a strong desire to write a haiku, haiku will never come. In Japanese, this quality of mind at once fully engaged and detached with concern with the result is called Furu. Do I have that correct? Furu. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that idea that there's actually a word for that very important concept that comes up on this show very often, which is all through Taoism, right? You know, do your work and step back, right? You know, as the popular modern fitness teacher, Tony Horton would say, do your best and forget the rest, right? But it's that idea of if we're too wrapped up in the result, good things don't come out of it.

And I love the idea that there's a word for this idea. I think you said it means sort of wind flow. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, it's variously translated as elegance, refinement, wind flow. I think flow for me is the best word. as elegance, refinement, wind flow. I think flow, for me, is the best word. But you know, the best word to describe what happens in haiku is, big surprise, haiku, the word itself. Because it's composed of two Chinese characters, you know,

which are imported into the Japanese language, hai and ku. Ku means verse. Hai means playful, playful verse, right? And so I often say to people when they first join our group and they're working really hard to, you know, craft their eight poems that they want to submit for the week to throw into the mix with all the others, right? I often say to them, you know, if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. Right? So the idea is that, you know, haiku are so short, you can write a lot of them, right? So you don't really get too attached to the result of a particular poem. Right. That doesn't mean that our poets, some of whom have been, you know, writing haiku, you know,

every week like this for years, don't really put a lot of thought and effort into their poems, sometimes working on a single poem for an entire day to get it just right, right? That does happen. But it does mean that the way you get it right is by relaxing and not, you know, sort of putting the judgmental mind, the Don Hull, and just playing with the words and the feelings, right, until they come out in the right form. Now, every haiku is basically a word puzzle in search of a 17-syllable solution, right? And so it's just like word, you know, it's a very, very playful art form. But profound meanings can come through when you relax like that and enter into that sort of childlike sort of place of openness. And you're working with a very small,

very lighthearted sort of form. Surprising things come through. Like, I mean, we get poems that, you know, just make you weep. They're so beautiful or so sad, right? And, you know, that a mere 17 syllables can achieve that. You know, I read entire novels that don't make me feel that way sometimes, but I see a haiku that will touch me in a very deep place. There was one, I don't know if you'll be able to remember it. I listened to a talk of yours at Upaya, and I think it was a recent one. and you read a haiku about a child on a swing. Are you able to recall that one? Because talk about a 17-syllable, like, wow. Yes, that poem was by Vicki Wilson, a participant in our UPAIA retreat this year.

Vicki Wilson, and it goes like this. our Upaya retreat this year, Vicki Wilson, and it goes like this. The boy on the swing, surrounded by war rubble, does not swing at all. The boy on the swing, surrounded by war rubble, does not swing at all. This is a reference, I believe, to a war in Ukraine. This is what I wrote about that poem at the retreat. We created a kind of an anthology to distribute to the members afterwards, recording the most memorable poems that were written by, I think, the thousand-plus participants at that time. I said, this is the best of the anti-war haiku I have seen in the past two weeks,

and I have read hundreds. The last line, which is heartbreaking, achieves a surplus of emotion and meaning that shouldn't be possible in a mere 17 syllables. How? The poet has chosen a symbol of transcendent childhood joy and given it a devastating twist. I've read a lot of empty swing haiku and haiku about swings that were still. This was the only one with a child in it, and it is all the more sorrowful because of that. And of course, the assigned season word was swing for spring. It's a spring season word, right? And thereby noticing what lies outside the self. And, you know, I've often said my spiritual journey for me has all along felt like exactly that idea. Like, how do I peel back the self so that I can connect with the world more? And I love that idea of haiku becoming a way of unwrapping ourselves. Yeah. Well, the haiku tradition is very broad, multifaceted, and so there are very self-expressive haiku. There are poets, I think, who focus on expressing themselves rather than, quote of unwrapping. What happens is, as you begin to interact with your subjects, right, which are typically things related to the season, sometimes they can be human activities, for instance, like plowing or, you know, seed sowing or something

like that. But typically, they follow the pattern of the four seasons moving through time. And so, follow the pattern of the four seasons moving through time. And so as you begin to address your subjects and contemplate them, there's a sort of a natural pull, like almost a gravitational pull that draws you out of your own box, right, into the wider world. I'm very struck by the fact that of the six different traditional categories for season words, The season proper, like, you know, the names of the months and things like that. That's one. Another one is the sky and elements, the weather, what's happening in the heavens, right? The other is like the landscape. Then there are plants and there are animals. That's five. The sixth is humanity. And so only one of the six categories is humanity. And even then, even when human affairs are season words like, you know, seasonal foods and things like that or celebrations or holidays, the focus is not exclusively on humanity, but the way that human beings exist within the cycles of nature. And so even when you're writing on a subject like, I don't know, the 4th of July,

which is from the subcategory observances or holidays within, you know, humanity, even when you're writing on something like that, it's not enough just to express, you know, sort of the human side of that. We assigned that season word this year, and right after Roe versus Wade was overturned, and there are a lot of women, a lot of feminists in my haiku group. And let me tell you what, most of the poems were pretty angry, right? Yeah. So they used it to express their feelings. But in every case, those poems were all grounded, right, in a particular moment in time, in a circular pattern of the seasons. And each poet,

even when they were expressing themselves, felt drawn out of their own sort of narrow box into the broader world. And I think the most important thing is that because haiku is so dependent upon the reader, right, because the reader has to supply so much, and the poet can only suggest a little, there's a natural tendency in haiku to sort of have to step beyond ourselves in writing them. You're writing this very short poem for another person that you hope will be able to grasp or intuit your intent. You're in relationship to your reader in a much more intimate way than you are in writing a longer poem, right? I mean, Western-style, you know, free verse poets write longer poems typically work in isolation. They don't work in groups. They don't necessarily have

readers for their poems until they publish them. Usually they don't. A haiku poet has, on a regular basis, weekly or monthly, readers for their poems that they are writing for and who, in turn, write poems which they share with the writer. And so, there's this constant going back and forth. And so, we're drawn out of our comfort zone, as it were, by the seasonal topics, but also by the other people, the other poets with whom we write and to whom we relate in a very intimate way. In that respect, it really does help to release those strictures that bind us, I think, bind the self to discomfort and pain, suffering, isolation, loneliness. Yeah, yeah. I think those haiku groups that you're describing could

be a wonderful way to come out of isolation. They're like 12 step groups in a certain way, because you're going around and sharing. And, you know, the main point is, I mean, everybody's there to get sober from one thing or another, but really the, you know, what makes it work is just simply breaking isolation. Yeah. That's the main thing. Once you break the isolation, I know that you have undergone your own journey with these things. But there was a man named Ernest Kurtz who wrote a famous book on the history of AA. And at the end of this very long, very academic history of Alcoholics Anonymous, he finally sums it up and he says, what makes it work? He asked the question, what really makes it work? What's at the bottom

of AA? And why has it inspired so many other fellowships for so many other behaviors or substances that people become addicted to? Finally, he concluded that the secret of AA was one alcoholic talking to another. That was it, at bottom, right? Once you get two people getting together, breaking their isolation and overcoming feelings of shame or disempowerment and sharing what's in their hearts, that's the basis for it. The 12 steps naturally flow out of those early relationships.

I think in haiku, it's much the same way. You share your hearts with other people and learn to express yourself in a way that feels life-affirming and, you know, life in the context of the natural world. You begin to develop a more wholesome relationship to yourself, you know, to other people and to the world. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation because there's a few more things that I really wanted to hit on haiku that we just didn't get to, among them being what is a haiku walk? What's a good way to read haiku to understand it?

So we're going to continue that. Listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, and all kinds of other great things, as well as the joy of supporting a show that you love, go to one you feed.net slash join. And we would be happy to have you as part of our membership community. Clark, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a great conversation. And you've just explored so many things over the years that I've really enjoyed this. Well, thanks, Eric. I don't know that I've ever done a podcast where it took in quite so much of my career. We really started at the beginning and came up to where things are now. Yeah, we have covered a lot of ground.

None of it probably as deeply as either of us would like, but that's the nature of the medium. So it's good to see it all on one page. All right. Thank you, Clark. Thank you so much, Eric. It's a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you feed community.

Go to one you feed.net slash join the one you feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.