Falling to Our Knees: Willow Defebaugh

Reverence, Participation Mystique, and a World in Constant Transition

Willow Defebaugh is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Atmos, the climate and culture magazine built to re-enchant people with the living world. She joins Michael Reiley to ask why science and spirituality were ever treated as two things, what reverence asks of us that awe and wonder do not, and why she sees everything, including death, as matter in transition. Along the way: Joanna Macy’s Great Turning, the plant that can see without eyes, intuition as nature speaking through us, and the idea that what we sacrifice our hours for is what becomes sacred.

Topics

• 00:02 Atmos
• 00:07 Desensitized
• 00:08 What separated science from spirit
• 00:09 The Great Turning
• 00:13 What could be more sacred than life
• 00:16 Falling to our knees
• 00:20 Why irreverence became cool
• 00:23 Oneness is not sameness
• 00:26 Transition, and being here
• 00:33 Listening, and silence
• 00:35 Intuition as nature speaking
• 00:39 What death actually is
• 00:41 What we sacrifice becomes sacred

Willow’s Links

• Atmos
• The Overview
• The Nature Of

Mentioned

• The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram
• Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change by Sherri Mitchell, source of the line “oneness is not the same as sameness”
• The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger
• Songs of Gaia SAND Podcast episode with Monica Gagliano
• Our Sacred Earth SAND Podcast episode with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

SAND

• The Eternal Song
• Become a SAND member