“Earth laughs in flowers”
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Hamatreya

It is cherry blossom season in Tokyo right now, and Elizabeth is there doing an interview for a future podcast. The crew has been sharing photos of the cherry trees and indeed, they appear to be welcoming spring with joy and laughter.

When Elizabeth asked me to write this issue of our newsletter to launch our April podcast in honor of Earth Day, the Emerson quote naturally came to mind. While poets freely anthropomorphize, science writers walk a fine line to explain more-than-human behavior.

The guests on our podcast, Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters, and Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life, are gifted storytellers who write about the connections between people, plants and fungi in a way that enchants readers from all walks of life. Their best-selling books are respected by scientists and beloved by nature enthusiasts. Co-hosting with Elizabeth is Rachael Petersen, a former environmental policy specialist and organizer of Harvard Divinity School’s “Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference” where the conversation was recorded.

As the title of the conference suggests, it was a meeting of minds around recent discoveries in plant and fungi research. Evidence of problem-solving, memory, kin recognition, and other surprising behaviors set the stage for both intrigue and debate. Elizabeth recalls a session on the Boquila plant with a brilliant capacity to mimic nearby plants to evade herbivores. Merlin tells about a slime mold that could find its way out of an IKEA faster than we can. It has no brain or legs; it’s just a yellow blob that pulsates along the shortest path through mazes. Zoë shares news about fern sperm that swims through rainwater to procreate, unless a rival fern deliberately releases a killer chemical to sabotage the tryst.

The question is, do stories like these lead people to use metaphorical language like the “intelligence” and “consciousness” of plants, mold and fungi? And is that such a bad thing? Elizabeth gets right to the heart of the matter when she asks, “Does it make me an animist if I feel like the world is alive?”

The wonder and curiosity of children may make them “innate animists” suggests Zoë. A healthful aspect of writing her book was connecting to the childhood version of herself who grew up with a family of ducks in her backyard. She sensed that they too had a desire to live with each other and have a social life. As grown-ups, perhaps we become estranged from the natural environment, and we forget how to be in relationship with other life forms.

Our “illusion of connectedness” through digital devices is part of the problem, according to Merlin. But he also sees an “ecological” turn toward the origin of the word, oikos, which means home or household. It has to do with where we live and who we live with. It’s the “we” that can make us rethink our “family” in a larger sense. A deep desire to connect with something greater than ourselves can inspire us to forge “partnerships” with all life on Earth. For instance, it may be possible that “we” could tackle the climate crisis by collaborating with non-human organisms to identify solutions with biocomputing.

Rachael picked up on the way the authors played with new ideas and asked them about it. For Zoë, open-plan awareness and numinous experiences during play are the roots of discovery in science and creativity in art. A playful attitude not only staved off boredom for Merlin, it also allowed him to imagine what fun would look like to the organisms he was studying. Sometimes non-survival functions morph into new characteristics; could that be a kind of metabolic play?

These are just a few reflections from a fascinating discussion. Tune in to the podcast for insights about “The Last of Us,” AI, plant personalities, wacky forms of fermentation and more, from our co-hosts and guests.

Then we invite you to take a walk outside and notice how your experience of the living world has shifted. Whether you find yourself beneath a canopy of blossoming trees, passing a well-tended garden, or stepping along a sidewalk where dandelions push up through broken concrete - can you witness, in your own way, how the Earth laughs in flowers?

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Did You Know?

✦ Both Zoë Schlanger and Merlin Sheldrake, along with Emerson and Thoreau, were inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century naturalist who described nature as a “web” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” In his biography The Invention of Nature, author Andrea Wulf reveals that Humboldt brought together science, a sense of wonder, and the belief that “we will only protect what we love,” some of the prevailing ideas behind the celebration of Earth Day, which will take place on April 22, 2026.

✦ “Earth laughs in flowers” is a line from “Hamatreya,” an 1846 Emerson poem about human landowners’ illusion that they “possess” the land but ultimately return to the soil. The title is Emerson’s adaptation from the Vishnu Purana: Maitreya is a disciple who hears a chanted “song of the Earth” about kings who thought they owned the world, and some scholars read “Hamatreya” as Emerson’s hybrid form of “Hail, Maitreya” or an address to Maitreya.

✦ Gustav Fechner’s Nanna, or On the Soul-Life of Plants, is one of the most unusual books in the history of science. Named after Nanna, the Norse goddess of flowers, it argued that plants possess souls and an inner life. It combines rigorous empirical observation with a mystical conviction that the living world is animated from within. Rachael Petersen wrote her doctoral dissertation on Nanna, translating it into English and exploring how Fechner’s combination of science and metaphysics might have relevance today.

We’d love to know what you think of the episode. Drop us a comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

In the lead-up to World Poetry Day on March 21st, I’m in conversation with poet Chelan Harkin. What unfolded was far more than a discussion about poetry. It became a meditation on reality itself and what we’ve lost by flattening it.

Chelan’s poem ‘The Worst Thing’ names something many of us feel but don’t necessarily articulate: that we “stripped the sacred from everywhere.” We took God from the leaf; took dance and song from prayer. We dimmed “Bursting Dazzlement.” We committed to maintaining the ordinary.

This doubling down on the ordinary provides insight into today’s exhaustion and anxiety. Seeing only the ordinary requires constant effort. It requires us to shrink perception, and dull sensitivity and put on blinders. The sacrifice is immense. We split off moments when life feels too big, too strange and too alive; moments that are at once terrifying and beautiful. And in that splitting off, fear and division escalate, while deeper connection and openness to mystery recede.

Author Anita Johnston says emotional repression is like holding a beach ball underwater while smiling, pretending to have fun, and acting like nothing is happening, while in fact, an enormous amount of energy is going into keeping that ball submerged.

Chelan shows us it’s not just our emotions we’re holding underwater. It’s also the extraordinary: the sense that reality is much bigger than we’ve been taught to trust. Holding that down, individually and collectively, is profoundly energy-draining. It doesn’t make us “keep calm and carry on.” It makes us simultaneously revved up and exhausted. Our nervous systems are constantly managing threat and overload while something essential is lacking.

Poetry breaks this arrangement. It lets the beach ball slip past, to rise in a way we can glance, meet, or even catch. It reminds us that there is more here than we’ve allowed ourselves to embrace.

This is where Chelan’s poem Say WOW enters, and where something shifts. One line carries the whole thing for me:

“Feed yourself fire.”

This fire is not discipline or self-improvement. It’s allowing ourselves to be fed by awe or by WOW itself. When we open to the beautiful, humbling, and even the uncanny, that feeds us fire. And that fire melts armor and pre-conditioned limits. It vaporizes the stories we’ve been using to keep ourselves and our world divided and small. We won’t sail off the edge, even if it feels like it.

This is how limitations unfold into possibility not through willpower, but through contact.

Chelan speaks about how her life began to change when she started praying to live fully and to be in service of life, for herself and others.

Her story gives me chills because it doesn’t fit neatly inside the flat world.

A poem by the 14th Century Persian poet Hafez unlocked something in Chelan. She began speaking to Hafez directly as a living presence and praying. She asked for help. For the ability to express what was within and what she was receiving. Something answered as poems began coming through her with a force and clarity. She wasn’t trying to write “good poetry.” She was engaging and listening. Taking dictation from somewhere she couldn’t quite name.

This is where the story crosses into territory the flat world doesn’t like. Daniel Ladinsky, the reclusive poet-author, reached out to her. Ladinsky is renowned for bringing Hafez’s poetry into the modern world as transmission rather than literal translation. Though he lives largely as a hermit, he contacted Chelan. Recognizing something in her work, he became a mentor, helping her publish The Prophetess, which stands in conversation with The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.

Chelan tells this part of the story with humility, gratitude, and a little fear. Because when things align this quickly, it destabilizes the familiar.

And it raises questions:

• What if prayer isn’t wishful thinking, but a form of listening?

• What if poetry is expression, but also response?

• What if consciousness isn’t sealed inside us, but moving, relational, responsive?

This isn’t concretized manifestation culture. It’s participation. Chelan says it’s like riding an E-Bike!

Participation means pedaling, even though there is a motor. Moving through fear and meeting grief and facing all the reasons we didn’t move before. There is loss and mourning for the lives we almost lived. The alchemy of this suffering isn’t about getting back what we lost; it’s about increasing our experience for shared aliveness and to stay present as reality gets bigger.

Chelan writes in The Prophetess, “We are here to touch the tender cheek of reality.” Reality, she says, is an inner environment animated by Life with a capital L. Not fear, not conditioning, not who we think we should be. She then quotes:

“The moon would be much less alluring if she only knew the luminous side of her wholeness.”

This is a call for community, to be midwives who help each other come into being. Friends. Living poets. Dead poets. Nature. God. Those beings who help us stay oriented when the fire gets bright.

Chelan lives that orientation. Her experience supports the theory that consciousness is primary, not derivative; that life meets us when we stop hiding.

This is what Wonderstruck is devoted to. Not fixing ourselves, but restoring contact with each other, with Beauty, with Reality. Being alive and responsive in reality, not flat or just material.

Underneath all of this is a question that won’t leave me alone:

Why would we be here if not to fully participate in being alive?

Poetry is Reality’s muse and the Communication of Consciousness. That’s why I’m paying attention.

- Keep your ears open, Elizabeth

Did you know:

✦ The Hafez poem that awakened Chelan is called “You Don’t have to act Crazy anymore”. In essence, it is a call to stop fighting oneself and to embrace the peace that comes from living in alignment with one’s divine nature.

✦ As poet Jorie Graham says, poetry connects us - to each other and to the cosmos. Poetry is a way of staying awake and of hearing “the echo of another voice” in a fragmented world.

✦ Diane Ackerman, poet and naturalist, writes about nature and human nature and “about that twilight zone where the two meet and have something they can teach each other.”

✦ John O’Donahue, a favorite poet of mine, talks about a “pedagogy of interiority”, a way of learning how to live by turning toward the inner landscape of the soul.

✦ David Whyte, the Anglo-Irish poet, founded Invitas: The Institute for Conversational Leadership, where he applies the wisdom of poetry to group work with individuals and organizations.

We’d love to know what you think of the episode. Drop us a comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

George’s story doesn’t begin with clarity or confidence. It begins with anxiety, the kind that makes it hard to function, to plan, or to imagine a future that feels inhabitable. In his early twenties, anxiety and depression moved through his days not as passing moods, but as something heavier, something he couldn’t seem to outrun. Like many young people, George believed the answer might be strength. If he could become tougher, more disciplined, more formidable, perhaps the anxiety would finally back off.

Inspired by a video of Shaolin monks doing back flips and smashing things, he decided to become a Kung Fu master, and he didn’t intend to pursue it halfway. With a single backpack, he bought a one-way ticket to China and headed for the Wudang Mountains. The plan was simple, shaped by the hope that becoming stronger would quiet the turmoil inside.

What he found instead was hardship, a temptation to quit and confusion made heavier by the language barrier.

Taking pity on him, a local man eventually led George to a small school run by Master Gu, the only monk on the mountain who spoke English and what turned out, surprisingly, to be a Tai Chi school. Nothing ceremonial. Nothing dramatic. Just simple huts, a couple students and a way of training that was almost the opposite of what he had imagined strength would require. Life in the mountains was sparse. Cold winters. Wooden planks for beds.

And yet, this is where something unexpected took root.

Tai Chi didn’t make George stronger in the way he thought he needed. It didn’t erase anxiety or offer a clean solution. Instead, it slowed everything down. Through repetitive, circular movement, George began to relate differently to his inner world. Anxiety stopped being an enemy to overpower and became something to listen to. Balance appeared not as control, but as the ability to meet each moment as it arrived.

The difficulty wasn’t a mistake. And it wasn’t a shortcut either. George did push himself. He did endure discomfort. But what changed was how he met it. Strength stopped meaning force and started meaning presence. And in that presence, something soft and quietly hopeful began to grow.

He stayed. He returned to Wudang more than once. Over time, the same anxiety that once felt paralyzing became the very thing that oriented him toward a different way of living, one that made room for uncertainty, humility, and eventually, wonder.

Today, George is a Tai Chi teacher, filmmaker, and the founder of Balance Is Possible!. But what’s most compelling isn’t his list of accomplishments. It’s that he’s still growing, still learning how to live inside questions rather than rush toward answers. His work doesn’t claim certainty; it follows what happens when curiosity leads and striving softens.

His film, The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself, was shot in the wild landscapes of Scotland. It asks a deceptively simple question: What might the mountain teach us about how to live? The film doesn’t explain, it invites. It creates space for viewers to notice what arises when ambition relaxes and attention widens.

When George and I met, he spoke like someone still listening, still adjusting, still discovering how to meet life without trying to dominate it.

That feels deeply aligned with Wonderstruck, not expertise for its own sake, but the discovery of the sheer wonder of being through struggle and curiosity.

— Elizabeth Rovere

Did You Know…

✦ Though it appears gentle, Tai Chi originated as a martial art. Its slow movements were never meant as disguise, but as training to cultivate sensitivity, balance, and the ability to respond to force without meeting it head-on.

✦ The Wudang Mountains in Hubei Province, China, are among the most important centers of Daoism and internal martial arts.

✦ Daoism emerged in China around the 4th–3rd century BCE, with teachings attributed to Laozi and later expanded by Zhuangzi, who used paradox and humor rather than instruction manuals.

“Happiness is the absence of the idea of happiness.” — Zhuangzi

“The softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest.” — Laozi

We’d love to know what you think of the episode. Drop us a comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

Macario Giraldo, the Lacanian group analyst, joined us on the podcast this January. I expected to talk about his life and decades in group work. All of that is in the episode. But as I prepared this newsletter, one thread of our conversation stood out because it touches something many of us quietly wrestle with:

Why do certain moments pierce us so deeply, and why do they stay with us?

Macario offered a Lacanian way of understanding this, and I found myself pulled into it.

Triggers and Causes: The Pain Beneath the Moment

Most of us assume the thing that upsets us…the look, the tone, the silence…is the cause of our suffering. Lacan says otherwise. These moments are not causes. They are triggers, small sparks that ignite something already within us. They don’t create our pain; they reveal where the pain already lives.

To explain this, Lacan takes us back to the beginning. We start life in a wordless sense of wholeness. When language arrives and the “I” forms, that fullness slips away. What remains is what he calls lack, a built-in “missing piece” that shapes everything we desire. We spend our lives reaching for things we hope will restore that early fullness, but the longing is never about the object itself. It’s about what it represents.

That’s why triggers matter.

A Simple Example

You send a friend an important text.
They read it, say nothing for hours, then reply with, “Sorry, busy day.”

One person shrugs.
Another feels gutted.

The difference isn’t the text.
It’s the older wound it brushes against, maybe the childhood fear of being forgotten, or the belief that attention equals safety. The friend didn’t cause the wound; the moment simply touched it. What rises isn’t new pain. It’s familiar pain. And that familiarity is exactly what shows us where the real work is.

Locating the Source Inside Is Not Blame. It’s Liberating.

To say that our reactions come from within is not self-blame. It’s pointing toward the only place where genuine change can occur. When we stop assuming the world is “doing this to us” and recognize that life is stirring something already inside, something loosens. We don’t need every interaction to be perfect. Curiosity emerges. And in that shift, transformation begins.

We stop fighting everyone who brushes against our wounds.
We stop believing emotional peace requires perfect conditions.
We begin working with the deeper structures of our desire.

Freedom isn’t eliminating triggers. It’s befriending the parts of ourselves they reveal.

This brings to mind Shantideva’s old metaphor: the world is full of thorns. We can try to cover the earth in leather, or we can simply make a pair of sandals, paraphrased from The Way of the Bodhisattva…

Jouissance: The Too-Muchness We Keep Reaching For

Macario and I then turned to jouissance… one of those Lacanian concepts that sounds complicated until you realize you’ve lived it a thousand times.

Jouissance is not just pleasure. It’s the intensity we return to even when it overwhelms us. It can feel like touching the edge of the sun, too bright, too hot, yet irresistible. Or like trying to hug a memory, it’s impossible to hold.

Sometimes joy, sometimes pain, often both at once. It is the too-muchness we won’t let go of.

Macario spoke of surplus jouissance, the overflow that reason and language can’t digest. This excess seeks boundaries because without limits, it swallows us.

And here psychology spills into politics.

Why We Long for Freedom and Also Long for Limits

In 1968, Lacan told a group of revolutionary students, “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.” He wasn’t mocking them, though you can practically see him saying it: the black turtleneck, cigarette, that unmistakable French philosopher confidence.

He was naming a truth: beneath the desire for total freedom lies a longing for containment. Unbounded intensity is unbearable. We see it in bingeing, in chasing highs that collapse into lows, in teenagers testing limits while secretly needing them, in revolutions that slide into new forms of authoritarianism. When we can’t regulate our own overflow, we reach for someone or something that will.

This may seem contradictory to the idea that freedom comes from within, but the two actually belong together. We need limits. We simply don’t need them to complete us. Freedom grows when we stop outsourcing our wholeness, and limits hold us while we do the work only we can do.

Listening as a Human Antidote

At this point, Macario returned to something beautifully simple: listening.

In a Lacanian sense, listening is a kind of limit. It’s a way of being present without taking over. It isn’t fixing, interpreting, or steering. It is creating a space where the other person can hear and recognize themselves. To listen is to refuse the position of the “one-who-knows”.

When we stop managing another’s experience, the wound beneath their trigger finally has room to reveal itself.

Where This All Comes Alive: Group Analysis

Macario grounded all of this in the place he knows best: the analytic group.

Group analysis is where these ideas stop being theory and become lived experience. In groups, truth doesn’t get handed down. It emerges. The unconscious doesn’t sit inside one person; it moves within and between people.

There is a particular aliveness here. There is the freedom to speak honestly, to hear and be heard, to be challenged and changed, to discover something true in real time. Groups don’t replace inner freedom; they help bring it into being. They offer the shared presence and shared limits that help us hold our own intensity and understand the deeper causes that triggers reveal.

Groups don’t fix us.
They reveal us.
And in that revelation, we glimpse what it means to be human together.

Closing

My conversation with Macario reminded me why I do this work. It invites us to rethink freedom, listen more deeply, be honest with ourselves, and find moments of wonder inside the pressures of modern life.

Freedom is not the absence of limits.
It is awakening within them.

—Elizabeth

We’d love to know what you think of the episode. Drop us a comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

This month’s episode is a special one for me. I traveled to Arlington, Virginia to sit with my longtime mentor in Lacanian group analysis, Macario Giraldo. Macario and his wife, Mabelle, have been married for over fifty years, a fact that radiates from the warmth of their home. There’s a steadiness to their presence and when you walk in, something in you settles.

Macario grew up working on a coffee farm in rural Colombia. He later joined the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order of laymen where he took vows and received an education, and because life is never linear he realized he wanted a traditional family (He now has 5 grandchildren!). This required formal dispensation from the Church (the word for this is laicization, if you enjoy learning obscure but strangely satisfying terms), and he told me about the migraines he developed while worrying that choosing love and family might actually condemn him. Imagine wanting a family and fearing the underworld would be your punishment. Yet somehow the man sitting before me is one of the calmest, most grounded people I know.

From there, he received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to Georgetown, became a psychologist, and ultimately a Lacanian analyst. What’s extraordinary, and very Macario, is that he took the inward-looking, often solitary terrain of Lacan and applied it to the living, breathing dynamics of groups, building on influential British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s early group work from the 1940s. He writes in his book, Dialogues in and of the Group: Lacanian Perspectives on the Psychoanalytic Group, “Group is of the most marvelous and extraordinary of gatherings,” as though describing a favorite fruit rather than a centuries-old psychological enigma. ;)

Sitting in his living room, we talked about the things that matter most: God, death, the Real, family, responsibility, and what makes one truly alive. Not theoretically alive, actually alive. The kind of alive you feel when you stop outsourcing meaning to other people and begin paying attention internally, inside of yourself.

At one point we wandered into Lacan’s strange cameo in political history, the 1968 moment when he reminded a group of fiery French student protestors that every revolution, sooner or later, finds a new master. “You will get one,” he said, not as cynicism, but as a kind of truth about human structure. It’s funny because it’s true: we demand freedom, then immediately search for a container to hold the overflow of our own intensity. You don’t have to wear black and smoke Gauloises to get this; you live it every time total freedom starts to feel suspiciously like chaos.

This is what I love about Macario. He brings these abstract ideas back into the room, back into the body, back into the everyday. With him, jouissance isn’t a concept, it’s the familiar too-muchness that shows up in longing, in family life, and in desire. He renders the complicated stuff human, which might be the rarest gift of all.

Our conversation moved through memory, faith, doubt, grief, and the sheer wildness of becoming who you are. Macario has lived several lives, and somehow, he holds them all with a quiet humor and a sense of gratitude.

This episode is a window into a man who has devoted his life to understanding what moves through us not to control it, not to tame it, but to listen to it. And in listening, to help others hear themselves.

I hope you enjoy this episode. It’s not just an interview. It’s a glimpse into a mind and heart formed by rural Colombia, vows, fear, freedom, love, and the extraordinary thing we call group: a place where we learn, again and again, the peculiar ways we become ourselves.

With wonder,
Elizabeth

We’d love to know what you think of the episode. Drop us a comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

Our solstice newsletter is a guest piece by Donna Mackay on our Wonderstruck team. I love paradox and am sure you'll enjoy the beauty of this beautiful presentation. Happy Holidays everyone!
- Elizabeth

At a Wonderstruck year-end team meeting this week, we gathered from the West Coast of Southern California to the Eastern Seaboard around New York and across the pond to England for a “fireside” chat around the glow of our computer screens. It was here that we became present with Winter. In real time, we could see the turning of the Earth. In California, the room began to brighten. In London, we could see darkness beginning to penetrate the windows. The longest night of the year was imminent. We turned to the topic of the solstice and contemplated the poem by Rebecca Parker:

We considered our paradoxical relationship to the dark. From the shadowy dangers in fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm to the Duffer Brothers’ creepy and colorless “Upside Down” in Stranger Things, we are warned to rush away from the darkness or be consumed.

Not so fast, argues Clark Strand, author of Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. The dark of night, he reminds us, is a holy time when we can tend to our souls. Before the 24/7 availability of artificial light, our ancestors experienced “a darkness so luxurious it teased visions from the mind and divine visitations that helped guide their course through life.”

turns winter from a noun into a verb in Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. With a reverent nod toward the dark repose of the season, she writes, “The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive…” The innate sense to hibernate in the more-than-human world resonates with us as well. She writes, “Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment…”

We relish the beautiful, metaphoric language that honors the sunless recesses of our experience. Our philosopher friend, Bayo Akomolafe, introduced us to the Inuit word qarrtsiluni, translated as “sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to happen, to break or burst forth.” Naomi Shimada writes that qarrtsiluni is a ritual “for deep listening, for attunement to what is emerging, for the space before something takes form.” Valerie Kaur taps into fertile ground and asks what if “darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Rilke writes of the spaciousness of unlit realms: “You, darkness, of whom I am born / I love you more than the flame that limits the world / to the circle it illuminates / and excludes all the rest.”

Still, we grasp for the light in the symbolic suns we’ve crafted in our religious traditions. We gather around the menorah candles of Hanukkah, the clay lamps of Diwali, and Christmas lights on evergreens. According to Irish legend, St. Patrick added a circle to the Celtic Cross for the sun-worshiping pagans he was trying to convert.

Perhaps the winter solstice is a solution to the paradox, and the longest night of the year is meant to be a sanctuary where we can visualize the resilient spark of our spirit. This is the luminescence Hafiz writes about in his poem: I wish I could show you / When you are lonely or in darkness / the astonishing light of your own being. And then, as Parker writes, “we wake to life” with the renewed sense of our place in the universe.

— Donna Mackay

This week on Wonderstruck, I sit down with scientist and storyteller Monica Gagliano for a conversation that is immediate, arresting, and alive. There is no warm-up, no small talk, just presence. Almost immediately, she offers an image that stays with me long after our conversation ends.

Imagine a thousand-year-old oak tree.
Now imagine us, living optimistically to a hundred years.

Think of everything that tree has seen. Civilizations rise and fall. Weather patterns shift. Species come and go. Sitting with that image, something in me loosens. My sense of scale changes. The world feels larger, older, and more alive. It gently, but firmly, reframes our place within it.

Monica and I speak about the natural sacred. I say the natural is sacred, and she says the sacred is natural. “It’s just natural”, she says. For her, it simply is sacred. There’s no need to name it. For me, I’ve come to love the phrase the natural sacred. It feels beautiful to say. Either way, the meaning is the same. The sacred is not something separate from the natural world, but inseparable from it.

We haven’t lost touch, she suggests, because nature disappeared, but because we’ve surrounded ourselves with constructed realities that drown out its voice. What Monica is calling for is reconnection. A remembering.

At one point, Monica recounts meeting a tree in Australia, not as a metaphor, but as a relationship. The tree asked her to sit with it. It recognized her ancestors. It remembered her laugh. As she speaks, I notice myself listening differently, less with my mind, more with my whole body.

Stories like this can unsettle conventional scientific framing, and that discomfort feels intentional. Monica’s work continually challenges the idea that plants are passive background life. They are communicative. They coordinate. In one study, trees responded collectively to a solar eclipse, synchronizing their behavior much like a flock of birds shifting direction at once, the one that is the many.

“The word is more-than-human,” she says.

And more-than-human is not a who, but a place, a field of relationship we step into. When we connect with another person, a dog, a plant, or any living being, we become more than who we think we are. Connection itself expands us. As Roman Krznaric reminds us, empathy is not just a feeling. It is a form of perception.

This way of seeing extends naturally into how Monica thinks about science. She doesn’t reject it. She calls it back to its roots.

Plants don’t have eyes like we do, yet they see. How? It’s a question, she notes, that is rarely asked, not because it lacks importance, but because it doesn’t fit easily within existing frameworks. Plants are masters of light. They manipulate it. They live by it. They eat it.

One of the most powerful moments in our conversation comes when Monica reflects on leaving academia. She doesn’t describe it as rebellion, but as a return to integrity, to listening, to a way of working that allowed her to be changed by what she was studying. It was the moment she stopped interrogating nature and allowed nature to question her instead.

From there, everything shifts. Plants become collaborators. Teachers. Humor and mysticism sit comfortably alongside rigor and care.

As our conversation comes to a close, I find myself thinking of something historian Arnold Toynbee once observed, that civilizations rarely collapse by murder, but by suicide.

When we sever ourselves from the living world, we sever a part of ourselves.

And yet, listening to Monica, it doesn’t feel hopeless. It feels invitational.

The many is one.
The invitation is still open.
We belong here more intimately than we remember.

I can’t wait for you to experience this conversation.

— Elizabeth

We’d love to know what you think of the episode. Drop us a comment on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Instagram, or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

Did You Know…

✦ Did you know that Monica’s book Thus Spoke the Plant grew out of both scientific experiments and direct conversations with plants? The book traces her journey beyond the laboratory and into forests, dreams, and Indigenous plant teachings where plants became not just subjects of study, but teachers.

✦ Did you know some “forests” are actually a single being? Clonal trees share one vast root system, sprouting many trunks that are all one organism, some surviving for tens of thousands of years. They aren’t just old. They are ancient life resting beneath the soil.

✦ Did you know plants have personalities? In studies, individual plants show “shy” or “bold” tendencies, some rush to send alarm signals, others hold back. Fennel pushes neighbors away, while basil grows like a friend. The plant world has quirks and characters all its own.

✦ Did you know plants can recognize family? Some species compete fiercely with strangers but soften around kin, sharing space and resources instead of battling underground.

My friend and co-worker Donna Mackay is writing the introduction for my interview with Mark Vernon. Actually, we have two delightful Mark Vernon recordings this month, our podcast episode and an event with the CSWR (Center for the Study of World Religions) at Harvard Divinity School just this past week. I managed to do a short contemplative reading and Charles Stang interviewed Mark about his new book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.

I say ‘managed’ because I’ve got a concussion. I’m not cleared yet to be working, so just like my reading, this note will be short. I was hit accidentally by a Yeti water bottle. The official diagnosis according to the neurologist who sees this injury frequently with seventh graders at bat mitzvahs is “being yettied”.

I had hoped for the bonk on the head to open the Blakean doors of perception…but this has yet to happen.

The silver lining has been a deeper engagement with the imagination: drawing, meditating, spending more time in nature, which is lovely on the one hand, and on the other, sometimes it’s rough going. Back on board soon, and now to Donna…

— Elizabeth

As the search for meaning grows more urgent in a world of constant change, Mark reframes the crisis. The problem isn’t a lack of meaning; there is an overload of competing messages in a “horizontal flatland” of countless therapies. What’s missing is the vertical dimension of life, the transcendent axis that orients the soul and gives depth to experience.

It can be difficult to speak of the soul in a secular setting like a therapist’s office. So Mark turns to The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval text on surrender. When clients reach aporia, Plato’s word for descent into despair, suffering becomes intelligible and necessary for transformation.

The conversation turns to whether this soul work is possible for those averse to religion or the symbol of the cross because of guilt. Mark points to the Greek Orthodox tradition, where the cross is not a ledger of debt but a pattern of theosis, dying to self for a rebirth of spirit.

Here we encounter paradox and polarity—descending to ascend, dying to live, releasing to receive—as themes that teach humility in literature, parables, and religion. Meanings shift, but our longing for divinity endures. Any path that suppresses the soul leads us astray.

Listening to Mark, it felt as though mystics, philosophers, and poets across centuries were tending to Elizabeth’s questions, inviting us to see pain as passage and surrender as grace. In crisis, Rumi’s words about love turning pain into medicine come to mind. What could be more liberating than realizing meaning abides in our own hearts when we open to the sacredness of life?

— Mackay

In this episode, we discuss:

✦ The overwhelm of conflicting meanings and remembering the sacred
✦ The spiritual thread connecting Dante, William Blake, and Jesus
✦ How wonder helps us access the divine
✦ Why psychotherapy is a path for ‘spiritual intelligence’

Mark’s work invites us into the depths of wonder and spirituality as a necessity for the soul. We’d love to know your thoughts on the episode.

Drop us a comment on YouTube, Spotify, Instagram or here on Substack. Thanks for listening with us.

We also recorded the special event that we co-hosted with CSWR at Harvard Divinity School, where Mark Vernon, Harvard scholar Charles Stang, and Wonderstruck’s Elizabeth Rovere explore how William Blake saw imagination not as a talent of the isolated mind, but as the living, divine presence in which we already exist.

Blake saw exactly the same as everybody else, but he saw more of it. This conversation invites us to see more as well, and to rediscover what Blake knew: that everything, when rightly perceived, is infinite.

DID YOU KNOW… Sudden Savant Syndrome is a rare phenomenon in which a traumatic brain injury unexpectedly unlocks extraordinary abilities…mathematical genius, musical mastery, or fluency in a new language…as if a hidden chamber of the mind has been flung open. As Mark Vernon explains, through “different kinds of death…more life is found.” Under certain forms of rupture, the psyche can access capacities that feel uncanny, latent, or otherworldly.

DID YOU KNOW… Jim Morrison naming his band The Doors ties back to when William Blake coined “the doors of perception” in his 1790 work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? He wrote “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Aldous Huxley borrowed Blake’s phrase to title his 1954 mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception, which inspired Morrison in 1965… and well, the rest is history.

Join us at Wonderstruck, where bewilderment becomes belonging and awe might just change the way we see.

A few weeks ago in September, I had the extraordinary honor of joining Harvard Divinity School Dean Marla Frederick at the Vatican’s World Meeting on Human Fraternity. To be there, alongside leaders, thinkers, and bridge-builders, was deeply humbling and profoundly inspiring. Sharing the experience with Dean Frederick, whose moral clarity I admire, made it all the more meaningful.

I was scrambling at the last minute to find the right black veil (yes, a fascinator hat in the end), while clearly endured shoes that pinched far more than they should have. Our group even whispered about the “right” way to greet the Pope, Holy Father? Your Holiness?, only to laugh later as we were too far back to shake his hand anyway.

That weekend also made history: the very first music concert ever held at the Vatican: The Great Embrace in St. Peter’s Square. We witnessed John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, Pharrell Williams, Voices of Fire, and Andrea Bocelli singing Amazing Grace with Teddy Swims. The drone show lit up the Roman sky in a way that felt both cinematic and divine.

And then there was a quiet moment of synchronicity. My family traces back to Pope Julius II della Rovere, who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. He was born near Savona, in the same Ligurian region as my grandfather. To stand beneath that ceiling, centuries later, knowing history and heritage intertwined there, was moving in ways my words won’t capture.

What a gift. One I’ll carry forward with awe and gratitude. Thank you, Harvard Divinity School and Pope Leo for opening the doors to this unforgettable gathering.

Did you know?

✦ St. Peter the Apostle is buried directly beneath the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica, where Brian and I are pictured in the image above.
✦ Excavations in the 1940s uncovered bones consistent with a 1st-century man, giving powerful weight to tradition.
✦ Pilgrims have been coming here since Christianity’s earliest decades.
✦ Emperor Constantine built the first basilica on the site in the 4th century.
✦ In 1506, Pope Julius II laid the foundation stone for the grand St. Peter’s Basilica that stands today.

This October, we welcome Bayo Akomolafe, who joined us in the studio this summer and later for a home-cooked Nigerian dinner in Brooklyn, courtesy of Travis Reece and Kayodé’s Restaurant Mirage. I hope he returns, because this conversation has really stayed with me.

Bayo’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences is a fascinating read, but hearing him speak surpassed even that. He speaks like a poem sounds with words layered, alive and imagistically evocative. Sometimes it took a beat for the meaning to land, and when it did… I felt more awake, more aware.

Bayo draws our attention to the cracks, to the things we’d rather smooth over. As a psychologist, I couldn’t help but think of the return of the repressed. As the French say: chassez le naturel, il revient au galop (drive out the natural, and it returns at a gallop). And here we are, mid-gallop in our global dysfunction. Bayo doesn’t fix the cracks with platitudes; he welcomes us to stay with them. He takes us deeper with stories and paradox: justice becoming reincarceration, civil rights as entry into a burning house, even his own name invoking death as growth.

He weaves in dazzling turns of phrase like sensorial apostasy, ontological fugitivity, and then drops reminders like this: categories aren’t truths; they’re rituals we repeat to make the world seem stable, even when it isn’t. He invites us to notice how the field of perception shifts, not because we control it, but because it moves. And he leaves us with a metaphor that felt spot on: The spider doesn’t make the web. The web makes the web. It’s not about us at the center, spinning control, but about webs of relation weaving themselves. Consciousness has us; we do not have it.

Bayo is playful, funny, and warm. He is like a prophet, a jester, and a sage. You’ll hear his American car metaphor, his mischievous phrasing, and his humor that wakes you up. He makes us wonder: What are we capable of perceiving that we can’t yet see?

For me, this conversation was full, heavy, hopeful, bewildering and beautiful. A dialogue that tilts the world just enough that you can’t see it the same way again.

- Elizabeth

In this episode of Wonderstruck®, we explore:
✦ How physics becomes philosophy… and poetry offers a new way of seeing.
✦ How AI unsettles our ideas of consciousness and what it means to be human.
✦ His vision of an “autistic politics,” shaped by those who move differently through the world.
✦ The role of sanctuary and sacred spaces in times of upheaval.

This is less a conversation of answers than of reimagining; an invitation to pause, to listen otherwise, and to encounter the mystery shimmering inside the fractures of our time.

We’d love to hear from you. Listen in and let us know what you think!

If you’re moved by how Bayo Akomolafe speaks in the episode, you’ll find the same depth in his book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences. Written as letters to his daughter, it reflects on the world she will inherit and offers wisdom for living in uncertain times.

To learn more, visit The Emergence Network (TEN), the organization he founded where artists, activists, and thinkers collaborate on experimental courses and creative projects that explore new ways of being in the cracks of our current systems.

On another note, this month we passed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. To me, this milestone is less about numbers and more about what it represents: a collective of people around the world leaning into mystery, choosing curiosity over certainty, wonder over apathy.

Thank you for being part of this unfolding. I’m humbled, astonished, and so grateful to share this journey with you.

Mycelium is profound. The way it links and connects trees through the forest allowing them to share nutrients and even communicate is something science has only begun to understand in recent decades.

In the 1990s, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard made the groundbreaking discovery that trees are not just individuals competing for resources, but part of vast, cooperative underground networks. What she found challenged an entire worldview of competition in nature.

And then, along comes Merlin Sheldrake, a mushroom hunter, forest wanderer, and friend of Wonderstruck® guest Giuliana Furci. Together, Giuliana and Merlin alongside their colleague César Rodríguez-Garavito co-founded the Fauna Flora Funga Initiative to ensure fungi are finally recognized in conservation, law, and global ecological policy.

What fascinates me is how mycelium is both real and literal and works as a symbol. It makes me think of the theologians and philosophers I studied at Harvard Divinity.

Tillich calls God the Ground of Being. Heidegger reminds us that truth hides… until it breaks through. And eco-theology names it more plainly still: spirit showing up in the soil. And to me, well, this totally speaks mushrooms.

I love paradox. And I love the idea that transcendence isn’t always some far-off beyond in the heavens. It’s imminent and woven into the hidden networks that hold life together.

The mycelium beneath our feet is more than biology. It’s a sign of the transcendent depth that connects us all. And here’s the revelation: connection itself is the way beyond.

We already know this, and it plays out in our lives every day.
Community is transcendent. Division is not.

Transcendence is an ascent that is also a descent into what already holds us. The beyond hums beneath us, in the hidden weave of being. Maybe I am just poetic but it feels so resonant! I hope you enjoy our newsletter and the new episode with Giuliana Furci! And see below for some pics from our trip to the Telluride Mushroom Festival where we bumped into Paul Stamets…

— Elizabeth

Fungi are everywhere. Under our feet, in our food, in our medicines. Yet they remain one of the most overlooked kin-doms of life. In this episode of Wonderstruck, we speak to Chilean mycologist Giuliana Furci, a self-taught champion for fungi and founder of the first NGO in the world dedicated to fungal conservation, the Fungi Foundation. She reveals how mushrooms shape ecosystems, inspire culture, and hold ancient knowledge. From sacred candlelit ceremonies to songs created in a cloud forest, her stories will change how you see the world. Give it a watch or listen!

Telluride Mushroom Festival was a wonderful event filled with contagious enthusiasm and profound reverence for the natural world and the mushrooms that thrive in it. The Wonderstruck team, Travis Reece and Eliana Eleftheriou, experienced the wisdom of the mycelial network through the interconnectivity with people they met for the first time, from which the beauty of humanity was seen.

Can’t get enough of the fungi kin-dom? Giuliana, Merlin, and Toby Kiers made a short film with National Geographic, Flora, Fauna, Funga— It is a visually stunning journey into the hidden life of fungi. It’s eye-opening, reminding us that what lies beneath the forest floor may hold the deepest truths about connection. Enjoy!

Wonderstruck® is a space for those called to the edge of knowing: where awe, mystery, and the sacred collide.

Wonderstruck is not so much about rainbows and kittens. It’s about something far more primal, visceral, deeply moving and sometimes even deeply unsettling.

The Wonderstruck Podcast is a space for exploring the full spectrum of awe: moral beauty, shivers down the spine, the uncanny, and the moments that stop us cold. Awe that expands, inspires, humbles, yes, but also overwhelms, unsettles, and reorders us. Think of Moses before the Burning Bush: undone, terrified, barely able to bear it, and his life utterly transformed. Within theology, this might be called a theophany: when something profoundly sacred breaks through.

Across cultures, awe shows up the same way: widened eyes, a softened face, and a universal exhalation of breath. Thank you to for researching awe across cultures.

We’re not exactly talking about the casual pleasure of noticing a sunset (though sunsets can certainly strike us into awe). Wonderstruck is about experiences and phenomena that bring us to the very edges and beyond what we can explain.

Here, wonder is not an escape from reality or a form of spiritual bypassing. It’s a return to what is most Real.

People who’ve had extraordinary experiences often describe them as more vivid, more real than ordinary memory. Compare that to dreams we forget upon waking.

The Wonderstruck Podcast and Striking Wonder Productions™ venture into this territory:

… from the visceral beauty of a sunset to the strangeness of UAPs

… visions and writings from ancient times that might be more than allegorical

… the weird, the wondrous, and the inexplicable that refuse to fit neatly into a world built on rational materialism

… the universal yearning to make sense of what feels ineffable

In a world that often asks us to dismiss or explain away these things, Wonderstruck asks: How do we behold in wonder?

We’re not here to unhinge people, but to guide them toward a deeper sense of wholeness, to awaken the more that already exists within our perception, just waiting to be tapped. As says, “Once you see them, you see them.” And although he is talking about mushrooms, this can apply to anything hidden in plain view.

We’re here to explore the wilder, weirder interconnections of life: the mycelial networks, Indra’s web, the hidden threads that bind us all: The Community, as William Desmond calls it: the Common Unity. It’s about helping people feel part of something larger, mysterious, and profoundly humbling.

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We ask big questions. We welcome mystery.

We listen for the quiet things waiting to be revealed: truths hidden in plain sight.

This is not about proving or disproving. It’s about being fully present with the unexplainable, paying attention, and embracing not-knowing as a source of transformation.

Wonder is not the same as pondering, reflecting, or contemplating (though these have their place, and Wonderstruck moments often break through them).

To be wonderstruck is to be knocked off your feet, ego dissolved, your worldview turned upside down. It’s not particularly incremental but I suppose it could be. Wonder is expansive, visceral, and humbling and we need more of that humility in the world today.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote:

At the back of our being is a forgotten blaze… a burst of astonishment at our own existence.
The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder,
so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he is actually alive, and be happy.

And here is another quote that came to me while listening to ’s Silk Road talk on voluntary necessity and theosis (Theosis is basically a form of Enlightenment within a Christian context but is a universal experience):

Give up your cleverness and become bewildered.
Open the door of your heart—and let yourself fall into God.
— Rumi

Wonderstruck explores this blaze and this bewilderment:

• The awe that strengthens social bonds and transforms the body (lowering inflammation, increasing oxytocin, quieting the nervous system)

• Rudolf Otto’s The Mysterium Tremendum adopted by Carl Jung to describe the uncanny and the ego-dissolving.

• The terrifyingly weird (like ’s giant purple alien praying mantis in How to Think Impossibly)

This isn’t about living a busy life but, rather, a meaningful one.
Not about moving fast but about being moved. - Paul Pearsall

Importantly to note, Wonderstruck isn’t just about the terrifying and inexplicable. It’s also about the quiet, soulful beauty of ordinary life when it’s seen fully: the flock of geese alighting on a pond. The mystery in the extraordinary and the extraordinary in the everyday.

We build bridges, not fences.
We’re here for the “crack” between official narratives and personal knowing.

We invite people to see.

Join us as we look for answers, interviewing top experts and experiencers as we attempt to bring the “out there”… in here.