"The trouble comes because all of the most dangerous things are actually incredibly holy things that we neglect to treat as such."

When Devlin showed up at my door for his conversation, he was holding in his hand a small leaf and a dying bumblebee. A Bee he had found on his way over, and thought had already died. Rather than ignoring it, Devlin had the impulse to bring the bee to our conversation as an offering, to offer to it to my home and to the altar of the animate. It was the perfect herald of what was to come. In this talk we weave a dense web of felt sense, philosophy, mysticism, and the posture of the eternal student. Devlin and I are mutually curious about what it means to be alive in a world that is suffering, be alive in a world that is grieving, and equally curious about what it means to skillfully grieve, to skillfully suffer.

Over the course of the hour, we take the time to talk about the breath, to experience breathing, we talk about the intelligence of the stones, we talk about the complexities of the internet and the intelligence of the web.

This conversation, which I'm excited to be releasing on the day of the dead 2024, and the feedback I've gotten on the podcast so far, help me to feel that this is an undertaking very much worth my time. It's so rewarding to have an excuse and pretense to take time to do nothing but practice presence and dialogue.

Listen here!

What is it about speaking publicly that is so interesting to me?

An excerpt from today's conversation: On the aliveness of stone.

It's important for me to address the performative aspect of the podcasting endeavor. My guests and I are sharing with you and one-another stories and moments that are personally impactful. We're also sharing them in a public way, and that feels important to underscore.

There's a facet of discernment around what to share, secrecy with regard to personal experience. So much of what I experience, I either don't have words for or cannot speak of. And yet, I decide to speak publicly and write publicly, and invite others to speak publicly, because one way I know of to have a change in the culture is to address our important memories and feelings and stories demonstratively. Not in order for anyone to hear me and say "oh that's so heartfelt", but because there's nothing I can do but witness. Witness the dead crow on the side of footpath, stop, and say "okay, I'll find you a spot in the ground."

And how impossible is it for us to do that enough? How many times have I driven by roadkill? How many times have I ignored what's going on? Countless, countless times. It feels like bringing attention to the depth of encounter and the willingness to be affected by those encounters is in and of itself a process of rectification, recuperation, of part of what it means to be human.

Every word I speak and every bit of information I put out into the world, either consciously or unconsciously, is a living extension of my body. That means that every time data is created about me, a piece of my body is scattered to the ends of the earth and, literally, into space. The edges of my skin are ever more of an illusion if I keep in mind that the technology that I use is an extension of myself.

I don't mean an "extension" in the way of the early-20th-century-communication-studies scholars where "media" is an extension of "man." I'm more interested in considering thoughts and the relationship to the material world as living, animate forces. We bring them together within all of the interactions we have with the machines. Each of these is actually a conversation, a relationship, in which I am multiplying my body and that body is accumulating on servers and in digital landfills and in my backup hard-drives. So, I am actually gaining mass because information has material weight.

Data, mined from bodies as surely as gold from the earth. As we sleep, bodies of data are scoured for useful information to exploit, to create an ever-more-precise graph of reality. It’s just words, numbers, symbols to represent the capacity for storing knowledge, machined to perform on command. Analysis of the stockpile goes on, ever accelerating, the bits of binary adding up to fine-grained categorizations of how populations think and consume, figuring out what me and my friends will want in the future.

When did anyone consent to the digital dragnet? Just when the ocean consented to industrial fisheries. Suppose we treated our data as offspring. What if we cared for our data as for families, for lovers? Protected them, and kept them safe. Imagine personal data isn’t digital ether but flesh prone to tearing.

I'm trying to treat my digital life with respect, and inhabit this space creatively. The only way to treat my digital life with the reverence it is due is to treat the aliveness of the gold, and the zinc, and the lithium that powers my high technology with equal reverence.

To treat those billion year old rocks with respect is to see that they're actually carrying my body, and will be carrying my body beyond my biological death, regardless of whether or not the internet continues to function. regardless of whether or not I still have the electricity to power my devices, the fact is that when we make marks, when we inscribe hard-drives, those are microscopic physical marks, so small, almost immaterial, magnetic frequencies that require high-powered Magnetic Force Microscopy to see the data, but it'Ss there. We used to see such marks with the naked eye. Look at a vinyl, you see the scoring with your eyes, and it's gotten smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

In our conversation, Devlin added: It's again an incredibly human exceptionalist notion that the only body is the human body. How unfortunate, and yet, how fortunate that that's not the case, that the human body is not the only body. It could be such a gift. You know, what I'm seeing is that these marks are like prayers, they're utterances. Prayers being a way for multiple beings to connect through a rhythm and melody--Prayer being a frequency, a wave. How can we look at the data we put into the data-field, the astral-internet-scape any different that that, really? The trouble comes, actually, because all the most dangerous things are in fact incredibly holy things that we have neglected to treat as such. Like the internet, this now addictive space, as we treat it, we disembody it, rather than it disembodying us.

The flipside of this inquiry is rather more magical. Peter Grey has written about "digital skin", and that's what's fed my relationship to the computers in the past few years. So one question I asked myself, in a period of confusion, of being uncomfortable and feeling at the mercy of these objects, I asked: "Well what if I treated my laptop like a friend?" What if I accepted and even celebrated that it's a regular part of my life? Rather than attempting rejection in a cultural context where that will only further alienate me?

Devlin: And of course, we're not strangers to this conversation, it's around every dinner table. But it's rare that when the intelligence of machines comes up, anybody will say: "Well, what about the intelligence of rivers, what about the intelligence of tress branches, what about the intelligence of the willow that grazed my face on my way here?"

The originating thought for all of this was the personhood of stone. And Devlin brings up the questions of how often the river is evoked at dinner. And in this moment, I feel the relationship of reciprocity between the river and the stone in shaping each other's pathways and feeling into the deeptime connexion between the capacity for you and I to have this conversation be recorded by these electric rocks which came to be in this shape through their relationship with the animate force of the water, and of gravity and the weight of matter, as something that itself has intelligence. So it's impossible to remove personhood from any part of the process without doing violence to the complexity of the thing.

bout today's guest: Following a path of multiplicity and ambi-valence, Devlin Flynn has gathered together many ways of being- trained jazz musician, professional puppeteer, working with kids and teenagers with complex neurological disorders, metal vocalist- and has in recent times turned towards something of the sacred. Devlin has turned towards Death and Sound as two prisms through which he engages with his work. Now working often as a “sound healer” (but don’t call him that, he doesn’t like it) and practitioner of vocal resonance, he is interested in how we story ourselves, how we can be in better relationship with Place, Ancestry and Time.

Devlin on Substack⁠ // Sound of Belonging on Facebook

This conversation with Devlin, giving full credence to the intelligence of stones, birds, bees, and trees, was an absolutely joy to host, and I hope you get just as much out of listening in.

All my love,
Laure