Into the Woods: Finding a New Way to Feel Loved

I'm Marcus Smith, and this is Constant Wonder. Thanks for joining us in an ongoing quest for the awe and the wonder that await each of us every day and all around. Awe can be found in all creation, human or wild, vast or small, in spiritual encounters that move us beyond words. The hairy eel, the Mongolian deathworm, and a part jaguar, part otter creature from Patagonia called the eamish, as big as an ox and capable of a soul-wrenching scream. Here on Earth, undiscovered species abound, but the existence of these freakish animals, called cryptids, is disputed or flat out rejected by scientists, along with more familiar species, like Sasquatch, Nessie, and the Jersey Devil. I've named some cryptids because we're going to frame this episode of Constant Wonder with a short excerpt from The Crypto-Naturalist. It's a podcast that on first hearing seems like mere fluffery, tall tales about supernatural creatures. But our main purpose with this Constant Wonder episode is to introduce you to the utterly serious, creative soul behind The Crypto-Naturalist, Jared K. Anderson. He'll share with us his mental health story of recovering wonder after deep sadness, reclaiming something he had always loved but somehow lost, his connection to nature. You see, nature and wonder had slipped away so gradually that he wasn't even aware what had happened to him. Jared is a gifted writer and poet. When you hear him in the title role of his podcast, you quickly sense his skill as a tongue-in-cheek performer, a literary fabulous. But that's only one side of him. He shows a much more serious side in his book, titled, Something in the Woods Loves You, which pivots on his chronic depression. Jared is married to another writer and poet, Leslie J. Anderson, who has her playful side as well, but her genuine seriousness about life and meaning is a match for Jared. And her role in Jared's journey out of sadness seems to have been essential. So as a preface to our main feature, if you haven't already encountered Jared Anderson's creative work, which by the way resonates with thousands, his podcast and social media following numbers nearly a quarter of a million people, well just sit back and enjoy this small appetizer to the crypto-naturalist. Jared describes his podcast as scripted fiction about real love for imaginary nature. This comes from an episode titled Orbital Kingfisher, a fabulous bird as big as the Hubble telescope that can dive right out of space to seize its prey. It's one of Jared's less benign cryptids. Now, Orbital Kingfisher's are known to have a crepuscular streak, so I settled in and waited for dusk to approach when the Kingfisher would be more active. As I waited, I reflected on what I knew of the Orbital Kingfisher. I only knew one crypto-naturalist who had ever seen the bird in person, and her experience was a bit harrowing. Lauch-Shipatel, a fine colleague of mine, once recounted to me the story of her encounter with the cosmic predator. She had situated herself in a subalpine fir tree and waited near a mountain lake only a couple of hundred miles from my current location. Fortunately, she was able to see the Kingfisher. Unfortunately, when it dove, it dove for her, swallowing her whole. The bird digested her and excreted her in the space of a few terrifying claustrophobic moments, and she found herself tumbling back to earth to fall unharmed in a nearby lake. The Orbital Kingfisher didn't digest her flesh, rather it digested something less tangible. Down in the inscrutable gullet of that thing, Lauch-Shipatel lost her appreciation for her favorite musician, which happened to be Dolly Parton. Somehow, the creature gained nourishment from metabolizing a small facet of lauch-shis personality. She confided in me later that there are days she wishes the creature would have taken something a little more mundane, like a foot or an ear. I've mentioned Jared's sadness. It's well known that a talented humorist may be covering for pain or sorrow. This is often called the sad clown paradox. A sad clown's audience may never suspect or detect anxiety, depression, or some related mental health disorder in the humorists they love and admire. Jared Anderson, by the way, never puts up a complete facade, as your classic sad clown would do. Jared is like a sad clown, but with an important distinction. Offstage he has chosen to be completely transparent, willing to talk about his personal story of chronic depression. Something in the Woods loves you. His book is disarmingly candid, accessible, and sensitive. He throws the window wide open to his pain, but what's more, his is a story not just of suffering, not just of hidden seeds of artistry, but of clear, inspiring compassion and ultimately resilience. As we move forward getting to know the real Jared, you'll see how for him, entertaining others offers more than just some emotional release, somewhere behind a mask, and more for us, as his audience, than mere diversion. Whether you're listening to the crypto naturalist or Jared K. Anderson, each of these, in his own way, offers wisdom for life, gleaned from encounters with nature's wonders, real wonders, but maybe also some imaginary ones. My mom grew up on the east side of Newark, Ohio, a tiny sort of rust belt kind of town that was known as Little Chicago for a period of years. It had a bit of a rough reputation during prohibition for speakeasies and unlicensed boxing matches. She grew up in this little shotgun shack sort of house on the east side. It's a tiny little thing. Both her brothers were tall. I think they were both over six three, Duke and Gary. She used to tell me they had to duck to go from one room to another to get through the doorways. These tall uncles were bona fide products of their rough and tumble town, which is to say they were nothing but trouble. Living in that shack left those boys and their sister too, with more reason to duck than just to get under low doorways. They absolutely would shoot at each other with BB guns and they once asked to use her for target practice when she was on a kind of a tire swing out on the apple tree and then the price for her silence was that she got to shoot the gun as well. The most legendary story from those two was that mom's mom, Dorothy, was putting Gary to bed and asked where Duke was. Gary very nonchalantly said, well, I buried him in the yard. She thought he was joking and he was not. They went and dug up Duke and apparently he was a little blue in the lips, but he was okay. Shockingly, Duke and Gary are still with us, cantankerous and live in Florida and their mid-80s. Yeah, they're characters. That girl on the tire swing would become Jared's mother and because of her tutelage, Jared's childhood was filled with instruction about everything she knew about nature, foraging in the woods and wilds, naming plants and animals. What to expect from sun, rain, wind and snow. My mom's love of nature really started with her mom, Dorothy Huff was her maiden name, who I never met. I've spent my entire life being told I would have been best of friends with Dorothy. Just because she loved nature so deeply and had such an almost spiritual affinity for it and passed that on to my mom. For then it was bird feeders in the apple tree and repainting the house-ren house every year and she would go off into the woods and transplant native wildflowers. So even though they had this tiny little house on the east end, the local Girl Scout troops would come to get their wildflower identification badges in Dorothy's tiny garden. The family frequented a favorite patch of land away from that shack of a home with its small garden. Jared's mother would reminisce about outings there, but to this day he's never laid eyes on it. The family called it Ettyburg and there is indeed an Ettyburg road near Newark. And yet… Mom can no longer tell me where this piece of land was, even though her dad built a cabin there. So it was kind of a lost piece of family lore, but they would travel to that little chunk of woods and go mushroom hunting and that's where they would find their wildflowers and do forging. And I think of it as sort of woodland school for my mom that Dorothy would teach. And then my mom's dad died before she was out of high school. Dorothy didn't drive, so they would ask neighborhood folks, just somebody with a car to take them to that patch of woods. But all of these things were very legendary in terms of learning my family history, especially from the two grandparents I never met. What I'm hearing is that this family fondness for the outdoors got right into your DNA. It was a deeply ingrained family tradition that is part of my earliest memories that mom and I would take daily nature walks when I was a kid and talk about what was blooming or what this plant was for. We would look at jewelweed and talk about how it could soothe itch or, you know, we found a baby green heron that had fallen out of a nest once and worked on getting it to wildlife rehabbers and nature being folded in to kind of my identity or my broader family identity is really foundational for me. There's a striking detail from your family's past. I just love this. It's something that your grandparents owned that I know you never actually saw yourself. Your mother must have told you about the mural in your grandparents' living room. Yeah, that mural of the deer always fascinated me because so much of her story is about that time and that house were about austerity and how they didn't have indoor plumbing until she was 10 and how her glass of water would freeze on the nightstand and things like that. But then she would say they had this giant mural of whitetail deer in the living room and that just struck me as an odd, almost extravagance. But I guess it really shows that nature was a real centerpiece for her growing up. And then where my parents lived, sort of more on a wooded lot west of Newark, they had whitetail deer. Some was on very good terms with the whitetail deer at my childhood home to the point where it was almost a problem sometimes because they would walk right up to you and they would come up to the car and it sounds ridiculous, but I once saw her in a bathrobe in the backyard. I saw this looking out the kitchen window and she was just drinking coffee, eating a piece of toast and a whitetail deer walked up to her and she just handed it the piece of toast and the deer just ate it, walked off. Yeah, but mom would point out to me that if the deer were on good terms with you, it would sort of have a ripple effect. What she meant is that if she was out mushroom hunting or just looking around the woods and suddenly one of the whitetail deer would come and stand five feet away from her, it acted as a signal to the other animals. I've experienced this firsthand that if the deer seem to decide you're okay, she'll tell stories of cardinals or redbirds coming and landing next to her, chipmunks standing a few feet off and it really is this strange sense of the deer vouching for you almost, that you're not an active threat, not a hungry predator. She would talk about that quite a bit and I experienced it when I was younger and then rediscovered it as I got older and found occasion to intentionally work to reconnect with nature. Jared says that he found occasion to intentionally work to reconnect with nature. That phrase implies that the affinity to nature instilled in him in childhood had somehow gone missing and that's a glaring understatement. What he's only hinting at here actually underlies everything in his book. Without realizing what was happening over the course of years, he had ever so gradually distanced himself from nature and leaving that natural world far behind as he would learn can come at a terrible cost. Seeing the picture all the more bleak was that even before this alienation from the natural world, he seems to have already had a built-in propensity for chronic depression. Just briefly now, I want to bring in the voice of Jared's wife Leslie. She not only plays a supporting role in this story but performs, as you'll see, an essential emotional function in Jared's emergence out of despair. Jared has been deeply proved in multiple ways to be a kindred spirit to Jared, no stranger herself, to psychological challenges. Both Jared and I have had some mental health struggles. I think at the root of a lot of mental health struggles is that our brains are kind of trained to hang on to the negative more than the positive. Just a sound bite, I know, but we're going to hear more from Leslie later. Right now I want to establish that Jared was not alone in his mental battle. He was so utterly alienated from the positive that he could no longer see his way forward. In a crisis of clinical depression, everything can come crashing down or feel that way. For Jared, his depression seemed to mean that everything needed to stop. Jared, I'd like to talk to you now with the same directness that you show in your book about this collapse. And I suppose this might be a bit of a spoiler because what you just said, reconnecting with nature, that turned out to be a road back for you from sheer bleakness. It was a medicine you vitally needed. And in that bleakness, you had stopped rubbing shoulders with nature and you needed, as your title says, you needed something in the woods to love you. So maybe first you could just describe the basic raw circumstances of your collapse. I have struggled my entire life with chronic major depression, but I didn't name it really until my 30s. I was working as a director of external relations at Ohio University for one of their campuses in more Appalachia, Ohio. And I'm an ambitious person and sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it can be good and lend meeting and light the path ahead. But I let it become all encompassing in a way that I think my depression fed off of. I was so focused on my career, there came a point when I really reached a nadir in my mental health that I started to feel the painful absence of nature in my life and that alienation that you mentioned that something was missing. Maybe you couldn't exactly finger it. You say you knew something was missing and now with hindsight, you can say that a big component of the problem was specifically the painful absence of nature. So in the meantime, though, before this insight or self diagnosis, were you proactively doing anything for your depression in the months, even the years before walking away from your job? I really kept it bottled up. I found myself pursuing kind of a checklist of supposed to's in my life. I kind of let external forces define for me what was success. I left a job that I didn't particularly enjoy and I was in a real privileged position to do that thanks to Leslie. There was part of me that was worried I was going to come home and not find him there. We need to do something dramatic because this is untenable. This is not. This is, we can't do this. To have a mental health crisis, that has caused a lot of people to either leave or lose their jobs. So between the two of you, there was this agreement about his quitting. I'm guessing that you thought it had gotten nearly as bad as it could get, maybe? For me, that made the decision very easy. Let's do something dramatic and big and reset and see what happens. So the day we had the discussion, or maybe a couple of days before, but I had actually like pulled up our budget and we had made multiple decisions intentionally that our bills would always be, you know, if painful, payable by one of us with our salary. So I knew, and you know, I sat down at lunch and figured it out again that I could cover everything with the savings that we had and my salary, it would work. We could make it work. And so when we had the discussion, I came with that, like, I think this is a good idea. I've worked it out. I think that we should do it. But it wasn't a difficult decision really. I was very willing to do whatever we needed to do to make sure that he was in a comfortable and safe place. The plan was really no plan to speak of. With the real plan, you outline the next steps you're going to take. And this plan was to take no more steps, at least no more into the workplace, just withdraw from the world, cessation. But that created this silence that had a lingering kind of question of like, now what? Okay, you have time to turn toward your mental health, but just having the time and space to do it isn't the same thing as an answer. And it was a little terrifying to go to one income, but I also was deeply haunted by suicidal ideation and something that is sort of like deferred maintenance on my own brain. Like I hadn't taken my mental health seriously. And it turns out kind of ignoring it as a policy for years and decades wasn't a great plan. So I have a history, not unlike you, of depression. And fortunately for me, it was not chronic. It was more an acute season of my life of maybe a few years. But I do remember extraordinarily well becoming such a naysayer to everything that whatever I saw in the world, human or animal or the built environment or the sky or whatever it was, poetry, music, I could look at it and experience it and say, no, no, that's nothing. Yeah. When you first headed out into the woods and saw a heron, the great blue heron, they're elegant. Oh, they're elegant. That was sort of the very first step, the way you tell it, of wondering if you shouldn't maybe be saying yes to a few things. Yeah. Yeah. That was really before I had accepted help from a doctor. It was before I sought out therapy, but it was after I had left my job and was sitting with silence and depression is a really good liar. And my depression would always tell me that pleasure is theoretical or pleasure, interest, curiosity, wonder. These things might be real for other people, but for me, they're a relic of the past or they're not relevant or they're not real. And so in order to take the first step toward healing, toward really working on my mental health, I really needed to find a why. Like, what's the point? Why is it worth it if I don't believe that there is anything for me in the world? And faced with that, really thanks to my foundation with nature and the relationship that I had fostered as a kid, when I was met with the question of like, what do I enjoy? What do I find meaning in? What is it for me? The answer seemed like nature in an intellectual way, but it really was a leap of faith to actually go to nature. Because even with the encouragement of Leslie, even though it made sense with my past and how I thought about my own identity, it didn't feel like a good or productive thing to do. So your leap of faith to go to nature took the form of, well actually Leslie, let me put this question to you. It seems too simplistic to just say a lot of walks in the woods is going to be the right prescription. Did you think from the get-go that fresh air and birds and trees and maybe some butterflies would all help to do the trick? Yeah. I mean, if not to heal Jared, at least, you know, ameliorate some things. It's not hard. Like, you know, if he's in a depression and then he goes for a walk and he comes back and he is visibly lighter, the pattern recognition was very easy to do. And you know, I did have to sort of push and be like, I need you to go on walks. I need you to go to therapy because I cannot be the only help. Like it needs to, we need a team and we need tools. But yeah, it was very easy to see that like, okay, when he doesn't go for daily walks, he is more depressed. And when he does go for daily walks, he is less depressed. That was very easy, you know, two and two to put together. Walking in the woods as it turned out would indeed fill a vital need for Jared. And even though it wasn't a total remedy for his crisis, no complete answer to his questions, at least it was the beginning of an answer, an answer that first appeared in the form of a bird. I'm talking most immediately here about that great blue heron already mentioned, but there's also a red-tailed hawk coming up in this episode. So remember that phrase, the form of a bird. It's going to serve us well for more than just one thing. But before Jared leads us into the woods to describe various things he found there, I've got to say, it takes a certain kind of person to stand by a partner who is experiencing an emotional or mental crisis. Leslie was that kind of person for Jared, in no small part because of her own emotional challenges that stemmed from a very rough upbringing. In just a bit, we are going to roam out into nature with Jared, but first we need to fill in a bit of a gap in the matter of this couple's sympathetic relationship of mutual understanding. We need to go back to when these two riders first met and warmed up to each other in grad school. Leslie, as it happened, was just the right person for Jared to stumble into and stumble he did in an embarrassing way. As you're about to hear next on Constant Wonder, Jared K. Anderson is with us along with his fellow poet, writer and spouse Leslie J. Anderson. Jared's book is titled, Something in the Woods Loves You. It's one of many shows from the BYU Radio Family of podcasts. Wrap yourself in captivating stories, expertly woven by talented storytellers. You'll hear live studio audiences taking immense delight in a broad tapestry of tales, some humorous, others poignantly reflective. The Apple Seed is always a family-friendly experience. It sparks imagination, creative enough to make fiction feel like fact, and bring real life events back to life. The Apple Seed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. We now return to Constant Wonder. When she married Jared Anderson, Leslie kept her surname. Not actually hard to do when your maiden name is already Anderson. In fact... I knew he had a crush on me when he explained why he knew we weren't related. The rationale he gave was simple. His Anderson surname stemmed from a great grandfather who had been adopted, not an Anderson by blood. Leslie thought it was telling that Jared felt any compelling urge to explain this at all. Now during his grad school days, before he even met her... He had been the only Anderson teaching in the Ohio University English Department up until my arrival. So he walked into the classroom marked Anderson. It was my classroom, and I had to go kick him out on my very first day. And then he bought me a drink later to apologize. An honest mistake. No sooner has she met him, though, than Leslie has to set him straight. Hey, these are my students, and this is my classroom. And on her very first day instructing as a grad student. Awkward. It was a while after this first botched meeting that any fondness emerged between the two. A fondness that first got going in an offbeat sort of way. Does anybody nowadays even remember the animated Wonder Twins superheroes from late 1970s television? Their superpower of shape-shifting? Well, they're mostly forgotten. But this next scene does remind me of the Wonder Twins. Jared had a functional car, so he was always driving us, you know, the group of grad students to get groceries or to Columbus for Christmas shopping. So we were all in the car, and he was sort of squinting to see if it was our exit, and just jokingly said, form of the hawk. And I just went, kakrah! Because that made perfect sense to me. And he laughed, and I laughed, and I think everyone else in the car was like, okay. We became really good friends, and we tended to both be the only people up at like 3am in the morning for walks or trips to Waffle House. So yeah, we were very, very close friends for about a year, and then he asked me, you know. Honestly, the first time I realized I liked him is the brakes went out in my car. And the first person I called was Jared, and I was sitting there like, why am I calling Jared? Jared doesn't know anything about cars. It was because he made me feel better. So I wanted him there in that moment. But Jared was not smitten by you at first. He writes that he disliked you immediately, and that you seemed to be unserious about your coursework. Just what was it about you that he found so annoying? I mean, I'm a hot mess. Let's be real. I love that Jared loves my hot messness now, but I get it. Like when he tells me, you know, I was just constantly doodling, and I was all over the place, and I was probably semi-difficult to have a conversation with. As he talks about in the book, I'd had a little bit of a raised by wolves experience. In grad school, I was learning how to be a person. Leslie had grown up with alcoholic parents. She would eventually share harrowing stories about childhood with Jared. But knowing nothing about that yet, what he initially saw in her seemed unfocused and erratic, directionless, maybe flaky, certainly lacking the seriousness he expected in a fellow grad student studying literature. He didn't know he was actually observing simple coping mechanisms to deal with traumatic memories. She coped by constantly drawing random stuff she liked to draw, and being a little too conspicuously goofy and spontaneous, he had no idea yet about the family ghost of alcoholism or being raised by wolves, as she says. Maybe there was a touch of the sad clown in Leslie too. Yeah, I think he was frustrated with that because he saw me as flippant, where I was just trying to corral a brain that didn't like to sit still for any period of time. I think that now he sees those things as endearing and not frustrating. Slowly but steadily, we need to get to that heron in the woods. It represents a turning point, a pivotal juncture in Jared's life, disrupting his depression and allowing for a reset. So to get to that bird, let's just move to the part in this story where Jared and Leslie have been married a while. His career is more than stifling to him, although chronic depression has plagued him well before that alone. But now he's quit his job by mutual agreement with Leslie. She's worried for him. She's helping him explore the next steps, but she's convinced that at minimum getting outside is going to be helpful if a reset is even possible. One practical step is that he needs to get out of the house, not just out of doors, but into the natural world. Even though nature felt like it was locked away in a relic of the past, it also had a parking lot near me. There are a lot of great parks near where I live, and I went to one of them called Shale Hollow, and I would make deals with myself. It's like, all right, well, I'm going to go, but I'm not going to enjoy it. I'm going to do it mechanically. All right, well, I'll get out of the car, but I'm only going to walk to that tree, and I'll be able to tell Leslie that I did it. I did something so that when she looks at me with fear and worry, I'll be able to say I did something. But I got to this park, and I got out of the car, and I went beneath the trees, and the intellectual, maybe nature will help, fell away and was more replaced by a feeling. It was a broad feeling of relief that I was just there to be there, and it was hard to argue I was doing it wrong on those terms. So do people actually say from time to time, I'm doing nature wrong? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, since I post poetry online quite a bit and talk about mental health, people will reach out to me, and on many occasions, people have said something along the lines of, I'd like to connect with nature, but I wouldn't know what I was doing, or if I went to the woods, I wouldn't know what I was seeing. And I think it's this idea that, well, what's it for, though? Am I going to impress somebody? Am I going to be productive? Am I going to show mastery or expertise? And so a lot of these folks seem to be coming to me for permission, and I'm happy to give it to them. We need more gerrids giving permission for us to just be out in such places. Everybody could use their own shale hollow. That time is a vivid memory for me, that first visit back to the woods and shale hollow. Every step was a refutation of that idea that I could no longer connect with nature, or that it was kid stuff, or that it was trapped in the past. I was there. I was out touching trees, and even though I felt that guilt of, oh, I used to know what that tree was called, oh, I used to know what that bird was called, that guilt was no match for the general sense of wonder and connectedness and relief that there was no pressure to be performative as an employee or a spouse or a friend. It was just there to be there. And something about depression, too, is that it pushes you into abstraction. All of the am I successful? Who am I stuff lives out in the abstraction? And then it's like, okay, but is moss soft? The woods essentially pulls me into the moment and gets me to zoom in and use my senses and look at concrete examples of wonder in the world. I don't have an encounter with the concept of a squirrel. I have an encounter with a squirrel. And so I was walking along the path, feeling that general sense of relief and feeling a bit of wonder that this was happening or that it could still happen. I rounded the bend and there was this shallow creek and there was a blue heron standing in it. And I just remember instantly being choked up and feeling tears run down my cheek and just thinking, I know this bird and it's still here. It's all still here that I had gone away, that nature hadn't gone anywhere, that I could come back. And that wasn't a visit to my doctor. It wasn't the work of finding a therapist, but it was something. It was something that was a breadcrumb trail for me, that there was still good in the world and things to be curious about and things to see and reasons to be there. That first step made the other steps possible. I had the encounter with the heron and I wanted to reconnect with nature and I wasn't sure how to do that in kind of a metaphysical identity level way. And well, so what did I have? I had a store where I could buy a bird feeder. So I went and did that. The bird feeder store was full of helpful, well-meaning experts that told me on and on about all of the technologies they had to exclude certain kinds of birds or pest animals like squirrels. I listened dutifully and I bought a baffle and I looked at seed that was laced with cayenne because birds can't detect spiciness, but mammals can. I ended up sort of buying all this stuff and then as is my want being philosophical about it later and thinking, well, why am I picking one kind of nature over another here? Why do we hate squirrels so much? I'd be happy to see a squirrel in my backyard. Why am I paying extra to drive them away? Driving squirrels away, excluding them from our immediate environment. Well, that became an important metaphor for Jared. As he and I chatted, he likened this exclusion of squirrels to the stigma that frequently exists around mental illness. Some people don't want to be near certain other animals. Jared has clearly thought about this metaphor at some length and he takes issue with the idea that the worth of humans, maybe of squirrels too, comes with only one type of productivity, that animals should be productive only as humans want them to be. Otherwise, they're a nuisance, maybe purposeless pests. Consequently, he wasted no time in making his next move. He purchased a squirrel feeder to compliment the one for birds. Little by little, as he felt himself growing more able to cope with what ailed him, taking these little steps like purchasing animal feeders, provided him with meaning and purpose, he needed to see that heron, he needed both kinds of feeders, but he needed additional tools beyond these small steps. So he broached the topic of depression with his doctor, overcoming his inhibition to do so. That proved to be a far easier conversation than he had originally anticipated. And from his doctor, he obtained helpful medication and then he signed up with a professional therapist. And of all the dumb luck, the therapist turned out to be the perfect fit for his needs. My wife suggested that I summoned him out of the mountains or something because she came to a session with me once and this is a guy who enjoys deer hunting and made his own kiln and has a stand of woods where he taps maples and makes syrup. So he very much got it. He very much understood how nature was important to me and a release valve on a lot of the pain and tension in my life. And he was very encouraging to use that as part of the tool set. I try not to universalize. I had some trepidation going into writing a book about my experience with mental health because I desperately didn't want to write a book that said, go touch a tree and you'll feel all better. But when I go touch a tree, I often feel better. And so, yeah, I just, since I was a little kid, if I go up and if I lay my hand against the bark of a hickory or a sugar maple, there's just, I just feel something there. And the fact that I can feel kinship and a sense of life in a tree or a wildflower or a passing chipmunk, it just, you know, it just enriches my life so much in terms of thinking of myself as part of a, just a vast, cool living universe that created so many amazing, amazing beings. Our main guest in this episode of constant wonder is Jared Anderson. He's author of Something in the Woods Loves You and maker of the much loved podcast, The Crypto Naturalist. As Jared's mental health improved, he found not only renewed access to nature, that vital connection that was modeled by his mother, but also a renewed capacity for whimsy. In a moment, the grown-up Jared validates his mother's theory that being harmless in the presence of deer will lead them to vouch for you with the other animals. But before that, to do justice to the importance of this whimsy, let's take a quick peek at a moment in time when Leslie and Jared together, before his emotional crisis, were feeling carefree and shared unburdened whimsy. Jared writes this, When someone loves you, I think they can sense when you are inviting them to come inside and participate in a vital part of who you are. Leslie knew she was seeing to the core of me when I was chasing lightning bugs. Jared had perfected his own method of catching these insects using an open palm. He was teaching me how to catch fireflies. And I don't know, it was such a sweet moment where he was just sort of giving me this little gift of, you know, a little skill, a little piece of knowledge, and I got to hold this little beautiful thing because of it. It's definitely a moment that I treasured. I did not know he treasured it the way he did until I read about it in the book. So that was, that really, it's making me tear up now. It was just, it was a very, very sweet memory. That notion that my mom would talk about the strange effect that a deer's approval would have on the scene came up more recently as I was getting back into the habit of going to the woods, not just for recreation or exercise, but for meaning essentially. One day when it was a little crowded out in my usual parks, not one company essentially, I just headed directly off the path into the woods, just trudging through leaves and briar bushes. And it's amazing how you can stumble upon deer even in autumn woods when you'd think you would be able to see for a long distance, but you absolutely can. And I did that day. It was a handful of deer and they were bedded down in the way that deer do where they love to be in deep leaf litter so they can hear anything coming is the way I think about it. And the deer saw me stood up. And so there were all these sort of snowy white chins and black noses trained on me. And it was a moment of deja vu thinking back to my childhood with deer and my mother's words. I almost feel like I know a few words in the language of deer, not enough to have a conversation, but I could ask where the bathroom is. And I wanted to tell these deer as best I could that I wasn't a threat, that I understood them. And if they're worried about anything that looks like predation, and so I would point my eyes away from them. I wouldn't square my shoulders. I turned away. I started looking at the bark of a tree and looking at the map of Lycan on the gray bark. And I eventually sank down to sit, which I think is a great way to tell deer that you're not about to chase them. And I didn't do it perfectly. I know at one point one of the deer got spooked and took a couple leaping steps away, but they largely decided that they understood what I was saying and started to walk more slowly and meander and look back. And they didn't lay back down, but they started to turn away from me in the way that feels like a release of tension, I think, in the woods. And there's a kind of magic in it where you feel that tension melt away. And a nut hatch came and landed on a tree nearby. And it really was a return to that lesson my mom told me about the deer deciding if they would vouch for you and how other animals would decide you were probably okay to be around. Another example of the idea that all these things, these wonders, these important parts of my identity were not lost and they were not trapped in childhood that I could experience them today. The Andersons have a five year old. We have fireflies in our backyard. A couple months was the last time we were all out in a backyard catching fireflies. Our son is getting pretty good at it. And that's got to be genetic, I think. He doesn't need a metaphor to sense the wonder in nature. He'll shake bodily when he sees a bumblebee because he's so excited. Such a just easy going, sweet hearted little boy constantly telling me about animal facts. And I have to be very careful not to be like, yeah, I know. I have to be like, oh, wow, yeah. Oh, fascinating. Like, you know, let him teach me. He came up to me the other day and he said, he just said very quietly and very earnestly, are electric eels real? And I laughed and thought, what a very fair question. What a strange thing to be real. But yes, that is absolutely real. And you know, I think commonplace things like trees, you know, trees are solar powered, self replicating, carbon fixing machines that can raise water hundreds of feet in the air silently. We can't build anything as cool and sophisticated as trees. I think wonder is there all around us, but I do think it takes some intentionality to notice. And I think if you approach it with the right mindset, and for me, playfulness is really key. I think it can really unlock more opportunities for wonder in the world. That mindset is beautifully illustrated in the passage from Jared's book. It's a willingness, a whimsy to just be with nature. And I asked him if he wouldn't mind giving us a reading of that passage. The truth is I need whimsy to live. I suspect many of us do. I need to wander through insectile constellations and fields beneath the dull copper glow of a summer sunset. I need to chat with maple trees and share meaningful moments with herons. I need to see myself as a dark, warm wilderness through the perspective of my gut bacteria or an inscrutable striding giant through the senses of a jumping spider on my kitchen counter. Choosing fun and wonder isn't an impractical, passive escape. It's a valuable, active method for enriching our days, an intentional way to invest ourselves in the premise that life is rich and worth our attention and effort. I need to zoom in to the swirl of my fingerprints and see them as living maps of galaxies, or zoom out and see the water in my body as part of a continuous abstract river flowing from storms over a blooming meadowland, down to a midnight seabed where giant spider crabs paste the darkness, beneath darting flashes like living lightning, bioluminescence from creatures they do not name, while high above whale shadows drift across the liquid sky like passing clouds. A person who gives himself permission to do all that may well also allow himself imaginative free reign in the persona of the crypto naturalist. So with Jared's permission, we're going to devote the rest of this constant wonder episode to an extended excerpt that I hope you'll just sit back and enjoy. It shows not only sophisticated wit and charm, but it's also graced with a wisdom that's only slightly cryptic. There may be many worlds. There may be many universes. But while you're here, why not try to see the good in this one? Welcome to the Crypto Naturalist. Hello listeners. Today we're on the water, floating on a lake called Goldenrod in northern Minnesota. It's almost sunset and I'm sitting in a lime green kayak. I've stowed my paddle and I'm just drifting. It's amazing to see how much a lake like this can change even in the span of an hour. Earlier there was a texture to the water, ripples and gentle swells. The lake's surface was sort of like a cable knit sweater. Now it's all still. I'm floating along a dark sheet of glass. Hear that? That's a loon call. One of my favorite birds. Like a black and white photograph of a water bird, but haunted with a bright red eye that seems to match their eerie call. Just lovely. Now today I'm here to see the Greater Northern Pond Hawk, one of the largest semi-corporal species of cryptid dragonflies. Pretty deceptive name all in all. This is definitely a lake, not a pond. And the creature we're here to observe clearly isn't a hawk. But there is an undeniable poetry in the name Pond Hawk. Dragonflies, like moths, have some truly great common names. Pond Hawk, Meadow Hawk, Darners and Dashers, Skimmers and Pennants. It's a really perfect evening to be out here. I'm gonna need to shift to a telepathic mic once I spot the pond hawk. When you hear a shift in the quality of my voice, that's why. In the meantime, I just gotta bob in the water and try to keep still next to the wild rice. The sun is dipped beneath the tree line, which means... Wait, oh there she is. Okay, now stand by for... And that, friends, is why I hooked up this telepathic helmet mic before I went looking for the pond hawk. You are now listening to my inner voice, because speaking aloud is no longer possible. The thing is, once you see it, the world shifts, and you find yourself floating on the underside of the water's surface, looking down into what is now the sky above. That beautiful, vivid pond hawk is just hovering there, near the border of the wild rice. This species is one of those cryptids that is both inviting to scrutinize and feels a little dangerous to study too closely. I'd rather avoid seeing my own reflection in the mirrored shine of its body. Not sure if anything would happen, but I'd rather not switch places with a reflection of myself on a cryptid's exoskeleton. Huh, normally these pond hawks stay for a moment, and then zip away in pursuit of their prey. This particular pond hawk sure is lingering, which, well, could be something of a problem for me. I guess if it comes to it, I could try to poke up through the water's surface and startle the creature away. The problem is that I don't really want to risk falling through the water's surface and then continuing to fall into the sky. Hang on a sec, nothing strange is coming this way. We've closed today's episode of Constant Wonder with an excerpt to Cliff Hanger from the Crypto Naturalist podcast with Jared K. Anderson. Our thanks to Jared for being our guest and to his wife Leslie for joining in with us. He's author of Something in the Woods Loves You. Producer for this episode, well that would be me, with assistance and support from Tennery Taylor and Lydia McElroy. Sound design by James Call. I'm Marcus Smith, Constant Wonder is a production of BYU Radio.