I attended Sophia’s psychedelic psundsay psermon recently, on an actual Sunday in an actual church, in Asheville, NC. She may be an anthropologist, but she is no anthro-apologist, for this talk regarded “inter-species dialogues & plant consciousness.”

& so we met up later that week to talk tardigrades, Jericho roses & the death & resurrection of words. To ponder prayer, spin recursive meme-o-spheres, encounter scary English angels in the polyglot-o-sphere & stand in “Uhhh” before the “awefullsome” in the realm of the sphere-its.

We exchanged notes about what she calls “stacked spirit science” & we honored the ANTcestors with fancy-antsy words like “stigmergy” & “formication”.

Even though all things that look/sound similar are connected, we managed to tell Huni Kuin from Loony Toons & Shipibo-Conibo from Evil-Knievel.

We traced the riverine roots of the milk-mustached Drunk Monkey People’s circuitous designs back to the anaconda choirs of their creation myth (scales for days). We sat, as if in ceremony, w the riddle of sickness & the serpent’s place in amazonian&Asclepius’ lore. Snake oil or serpent medicine?

We weighed the value of dream-tending vs. analysis & as we wondered how to concoct a cure for loneliness I remembered the psycho-magical Dream Theatre I used to facilitate, where we would often transcend Joseph Conrad’s maxim “we live as we dream—alone.”

&just as Sophia & I considered questions that refuse to be answered & answers that refuse to be questioned, our pod-cast spell was interrupted by a phone-call from our friend comedian Shane Mauss.

Sophia co-wrote the book When Plants Dream w Daniel Pinchbeck & has a bouncing baby blog on substack called NUMA.

Find/follow Sophia: www.sophiarokhlin.com IG: @sophiarokhlin

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The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo www.theungoogleable.com IG: void_denizen patreon.com/voiddenizen

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