Tyson Yunkaporta

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Tyson Yunkaporta: author, academic, maker

Full transcript

“So back at the start, they invented the word nature and society as two separate things. And they were one thing before. And exactly the same as being able to kill the creativity in human beings, which is part of just what it is to be human. We’ve been doing it for a million years. It’s part of what we do as a species. And we’re all, every single one of us, born bloody good at it. Because that’s what we do. We make meaning. We’re beings that make meaning. And we make meaning through creative practice, which is not separate from science, which is not separate from work, which is not separate from a life.”
– Tyson Yunkaporta

Madeleine Dore: After spending the better half of a decade interviewing artists, designers, musicians, and thinkers, I’ve come to the conclusion that being creative has nothing to do with your job title or whether or not you know how to play the piano or pick up a paintbrush, and everything to do with how you relate to yourself, your days, your shared humanity.

You don’t need to be a creative to live a creative life. We all have an innate sense of creativity, yet the definition has been narrowed and narrowed. This is something that this week’s guest, Tyson Yunkaporta, speaks to in his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.

The author, academic, educator, maker, art’s critic, researcher, and poet speaks to how when we reduce creativity to a marketplace, we overlook how we are all creative. As Tyson writes in Sand Talk, “creativity is now widely regarded as a vaguely defined skillset falling randomly on individual geniuses. Deep engagement encompassing mind, body, heart, and spirit has been replaced by a dogged ethic of commitment to labour, enthusiastic compliance with discipline imposed by authority.” As Tyson puts it, we’ve become slaves to a work ethic, rather than connected to our human creativity and relatedness.

Sand Talk explores everything from echidnas to evolution, looking at global systems from an indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, how does this affect us, and how can we do things differently?

In this conversation, we take a meander through topics like routine as the death of relation to people and place, the involuntary ruts we experience from being entangled in the system, allowing flow into your environment, not being a brand, how to create checks and balances, and how ambition can be directed towards leaving tools for generations to come, and how the most powerful of those tools is story.

This conversation, like all in this season so far, was recorded remotely, and we did experience some technical issues toward the end. But luckily most of the conversation is here for you to listen in on, and perhaps rethink the creative process itself, just as I have been doing since.

In Sand Talk, Tyson describes how, from an indigenous perspective, time does not go in a straight line or a flat schedule. Rather, it’s as tangible as the ground we stand on. So, to begin, here’s Tyson on how this pattern of time plays out in our days.

TY: Well, basically, every pattern you’ll find in the universe is repeated, right down to the microbe. I mean, it would take a lot longer to get into what the sense of time is because it’s not exactly a circle. I know that’s a common representation of it, but it’s not really like that at all. There’s no separation between time and place. In our language, it’s the same word, and so imagine if you didn’t have a different word for time and space, so one thing where your time would look like and that would be like that, so if you imagine what your daily routine would be like, you’d find it’s not chaos. It’s very ordered and following in that creation pattern, but it’s following very much what the landscape is doing in that moment or it’s strongly influenced by it.

I would posit that that routine is the death of relational cognition, or contextual cognition even. It’s the death of that. A routine kills that. There have been scientific studies done on this, on childrearing practices and the way it affects cognition, as to whether a person retains a high context cognition or a low context cognition. So indigenous, a lot of Russian, Scottish, all kinds of people around the world, when shown an image of a man walking his dog in the forest, won’t see it like that. They’ll say there’s a forest and it’s this time of day and this is the season, and here’s what’s going on, and there’s the dominant species in that forest, and there’s a dude there and a dog. And that’s that more high context cognition.

And it’s because it’s a more relational way of thinking. So your thinking is defined by your network of relations in the world, and I don’t just mean relatives, but your relationship to all entities, so human and non-human. Everything around you like that.

Now the cognitive studies have shown that a baby who is raised on a clock-based schedule, that this is the time that you have your feed, this is the time you have your bottle, this is the time when you go to the toilet. So rather than according to their biological needs of the context around them, if they’re raised to a clock-based schedule, then they will become decontextualised reasoners. They’ll see that picture and they’ll just go, that’s a man walking his dog. And they might add in the forest.

It’s basically something that’s been created by civilisations, and particularly industrial civilisations, to create a kind of worker who’s capable of focusing on the task right in front of them and nothing else in their life. Or no other stage of that manufacturing process. No, they’re able to follow orders unquestioningly.

MD: Yeah, and become I guess a slave to that work ethic is something you speak about in Sand Talk. It’s interesting because a lot of this podcast is spent speaking to creative people in particular about this tension, about how we live in a routine world, but creativity can’t be organised in that way necessarily. And for you, in terms of not only your writing but also your research but also you’re a carver of traditional tools and weapons. I suppose, how do you think that the role of creativity ties into this for you personally?

TY: Well, not at all. I don’t see creativity as being anything particularly special. I mean, that’s just creation, and we’re in it and of it, and I don’t know, it’s funny. So this exact same civilisation that separated context from people’s reasoning so that they could be better workers and more obedient soldiers, etc. The same thing, you’ve had to kill that creativity in people, along with a lot of other false divisions that happened.

So back at the start, they invented the word nature and society as two separate things. And they were one thing before. And exactly the same as being able to kill the creativity in human beings, which is part of just what it is to be human. We’ve been doing it for a million years. There are carved shells from homo erectus that are a million years old and was probably a lot longer before that as well. We’ve all been these intensively creative beings, it’s part of our role as a custodial species. It’s part of what we do as a species, and we’re all, every single one of us, born bloody good at it. Because that’s what we do. We make meaning. We’re beings that make meaning. And we make meaning through creative practice, which is not separate from science, which is not separate from work, which is not separate from a life.

So as soon as you invented different words for this, like the arts, you ended up creating this… you’re basically just positioning it in a marketplace. And this isn’t a growth-based economy, so basically you have to ensure that there’s a very limited supply of arts and artists. A very limited supply because you need to have that in order to have heaps of demand.

You need lots of demand for something that’s in very limited supply so that it can have high value, and so you make sure kill creativity in most people and you allow a few, just a handful, to get through. And you give them all the resources they need. And so I’m often in these things, I'm at writer’s festivals and stuff, and every other writer… and when I’m doing things in the arts, when people are trying to frame me that way, I’m always speaking on a panel of people who basically have been fortunate enough that’s all they have to do.

All they have to do is their art, and so all there is is their creative process, and they do a bit of economy stuff, like showing up for the panels in the first place to get their few hundred bucks or whatever, that’s the other thing they do. But it’s all around the art, and so they’re able to have routines and things like that around it. But there’s only a very limited amount of people who are fortunate enough to be allowed to do that.

But basically, without relation, there can be no creation. There’s no creation without relation. And you have to be embedded in relatedness in a dynamic field in order to be creating. I see a lot of people that seal themselves off in these little pods in studios and stuff like that and they’ve become part of this factory farming of creativity and then they go out and they mine the margins of whatever poor or displaced or marginalised people for little bits and pieces to bring back to your workshop and tinker together and throw out into the marketplace, and it just goes on and on.

So I have no respect for the arts at all and very little respect for these tinkered creative processes that are sitting outside of relatedness, that are not embedded in your daily life.

MD: So how do you bring it back and embed it, do you think? If creativity was relational and embedded, what would that look like?

TY: Make sure money’s never involved. If you’re doing something that’s external to the economy, so if you’re in this, and not even in the black market of ideas, if you’re just creating. If you’re just doing. And it doesn’t matter if anybody sees it or buys it or anything else. Then you probably are getting back in touch with your human creativity. And people do that all the time. The best musicians I see, they’re not the people who have gone platinum. They’re just some uncle that’s sitting in a living room and likes to bring out the guitar from time to time.

MD: Mm. There was this one line that really stood out to me in another interview where people don’t really remember who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing anymore. I was wondering what it is we’re meant to be doing. If jobs aren’t what we want, what do we want?

TY: Part of what we do as humans is adaptation. That’s our superpower. And you adapt to the habitat that you’re in, which is constantly changing, and right now we are in this, so to some extent we have to be of it. It’s very hard. The way I’ve approached it is to avoid any kind of branding whatsoever.

I’ve basically refused to do branding and publicity and I’ve just said, well, if it’s a good book, then we’ll go with word of mouth, we’ll go grapevine. And I’ve identified podcasts as potentially the new campfire—podcasts where we’re just yarning like we are now, people are really wanting to listen to that, and they don’t have the short attention spans that this media now assumes that everybody has.

It was harder with the American publishers because they were like yes, and we’re going to get you on 60 Minutes and The Daily Show and all this sort of thing, and I just said no, I don’t want to do TV. And there was just this silence, and they were like, but everybody wants to be on TV, and it’s like yeah, not me. To me, that’s the way to resist the marketplace a little bit, but it’s a fine line. I do feel like I’ve given up a lot just to actually put these things in a book. It has changed my life a lot in ways that are not great.

MD: In what kind of ways has it changed your life?

TY: Writing a book is easy, it’s just doing all the stuff that comes after. And I didn’t realise this, or I never noticed it before, but people always say who are you reading? They don’t say what are you reading. So there’s this enormous pressure to be something that I’m not and, whether I’m that or not, people will project whatever they want to see on that.

And that does shape you and it requires a lot of energy to resist it, and it’s really hard not to fall into the trap of narcissism and to start to be bothered with what anybody else is going to think. Or to even just be somebody that people might care what your opinion is. It can change you a lot, you know?

Since moving to the city, I’ve come out of relation a lot just from not living in the busy anymore. That’s been really, really hard, but at least I have the people around me. So now I’m just yelling at my daughter to get away because she’s coming in on a podcast or I haven’t got as much time to spend with people, I’m just always having to do this stuff. And without your relations, then you have no creation.

So I’m supposed to have written a second book now, by September, and I haven’t started it yet. Just contractually I’m supposed to have written it, but how can I write it? I can’t do my carving, I can’t… during lockdown, I haven’t been able to go into work all year, so I’ve been working from home all year and haven’t been able to travel interstate or anything, so I haven’t seen my family in a long time now, and it’s what do you create from if you’re out of relation? My context now is a marketplace that I’m desperately trying to avoid.

MD: What you’re describing, and maybe what some of us are feeling in this lockdown as well, is this idea of burnout and drained and the antidote or the prescription that people seem to be handing out is this idea of self-care. But what you’re describing seems to me more like relatedness rather than self, so what’s your take on burnout, or even this idea of self-care?

TY: I burned out bloody 15 years ago and my workloads tripled since then, you know? I haven’t had a holiday or a break because that’s just survival. I’ve got a lot of people to support and to care for because I’ve been lucky enough to get a good enough education to make more money than the rest of the family. I’ve got a lot of dependence, and it’s just survival, really. People have all these aspirations, but my aspiration is maybe, my desperate, impossible dream is not to die on the side of the road in the rain, like I’d like to have some kind of shelter that I wouldn’t get kicked out of if I got too sick to work for a while. And that’s never been my reality.

So I turn 48 in a week and in 48 years, I’ve never lived under a roof that I wouldn’t be kicked out of in two weeks if I got sick. So it’d be nice to not live under that pressure. And I do envy, I suppose… ah, no, I don’t envy it, I just go ugh, I can’t connect with these people. I can’t connect with these creative people who have the luxury of writers block. Who’s got time for that?

I had to write my book in two weeks. That was all the time I could do for it, and I’m still paying for that. I’m still paying for taking that time to write the book, and now all the time that you have to put in after it, it’s just in a constant state of struggle and survival, so you just do it where you can, and you try and keep part of your ‘what it is to be human’ alive. You try and keep a memory of that alive because we can struggle to try and change the system as much as we like, but like I say, it’s like trying to make your dog vegan. A lot of people are trying to do that right now, but they discover that, within six months, only one of two things are going to happen. That dogs going to die or it’s going to eat you.

And that’s the same with this system. You can tinker it to try and make it look more fair or just or balanced or diverse or whatever you want, but it’s a dog and it’s going to die or it’s going to eat you. And while we’re waiting, for me, I direct all my activism and efforts towards leaving tools behind for the people who are coming next because, as you’re probably aware, this civilisations taking a bit of a nosedive right now and it might take a while for it to completely collapse, and hopefully it doesn’t take every living thing with it as it goes.

I guess the best thing that we can do is to leave tools behind for the people who are coming next, and what would those tools be? They’d be things of steel in a time capsule or will they be cans of food or something like that? I don’t think that’ll help much. Seed banks? I don’t know. But what I know for sure that they’re going to need is good story, and they’re going to need to be able to recover their human cognition, and so they’ll need tools for that. And so I try and leave behind things like that and just seed those in the only place where that’s sustainable. And that’s not on a piece of paper. These things decay. It’s not digital because that teetering hulk of a system is not sustainable beyond a few more decades, I don’t think. So I'm not leaving it behind there. You’ve got to leave those seeds in people’s minds and let them do with it as they will. They’ll change it, they’ll adapt it, and they’ll pass it on, and that’s the best place to leave things that you want to last. It’s the only place where you can leave knowledge that’s going to last.

So for me, the book isn’t even… in the book, that produce that’s in the marketplace right now is what people are looking at, but no, it’s in these carvings here, and they won’t last forever. But more than that, it’s in the yarns and conversations and minds and actions of thousands of people who have come into this yarn with me. And the book has changed because the books not in the pages, but that yarn has changed. It’s moved on and its grown and half the time, most of the time, 99% of the time, I’m not even in that yarn anymore, it’s taken off on its own path and it’s growing. And some very interesting things are coming out of it. The things that people are creating.

I get a few letters every day, like emails and that, or people calling me up and telling me all the same thing, and this is people from right across the political spectrum and all over the world. Different cultures, different languages, people are all saying the same thing, that they feel like it’s changed them at the genetic level. They feel like their DNA has changed.

But that’s not the words in the book. That’s Oldman Juma passed on a lot of that story to me, wanted me to pass it on around the world, but it’s in his images that are in there. There are Sand Talk images, the practice of drawing on the sand to convey big information. He’s got Sand Talk images in there that are part of an almost ritual, magical act that he believes, if it goes far and wide enough, that it’ll bring all the seven spirit families together and give us a period of harmony. So that’s why he wanted to put them out there, and really, the book is just a delivery system for that.

And while I did have to find creative ways to do that, and I really didn’t want to change the idea of what a book could be and even change the idea… I mean, I didn’t want to really increase knowledge so much as just change the idea of what can be known. Yeah, I had to be fairly creative in doing that. But that didn’t really come out of any routines, it came out of a web of relationships and obligations and finding ways to respond to those.

MD: Circling back to what might have got us in this mess in the first place, once thing you point to is narcissism and how the better than or the greater than has been the most destructive idea in existence, and the source of human misery. So I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, and maybe how we get those checks and balances?

TY: That idea came out of a lot of creation stories. You’ll find at that moment of creation, there’s also born this sort of seed of narcissism and you usually find a character or two who are looking to put themselves above others, above the land. They have that idea of I am special, I’m really something, and it is the most destructive idea in creation.

But also, it’s part of creation and it’s there for a reason. You don’t have to do purity tests and hate people, or you hate yourself because you see it in yourself because it’s supposed to be there. It’s part of what drives you to act on the world in perfect ways.

But most human cultures, over at least the last million years, have developed, from most of human history until recently, those cultures have developed as a way of holding that narcissism in check.

MD: Do you see any possibility of those checks and balances, even in small little ways in our days, being able to be introduced?

TY: I see people enacting them all the time. It’s whenever there’s a break in the illusion, people just seem to recover this very quickly. So you see in a lot of natural disasters, basically I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but a disaster is just disruption of the state and the marketplace. State and the marketplace being the two things over the last century that have come to replace family and community and connection to land, you know?

The things that land used to provide for us in our community or family in that landscape, which was everything, are now provided by the state and the marketplace, and everybody’s supposed to have a job in order to access those things. And whenever you see that disrupted, so in a natural disaster or something, and that state control is gone and the economy’s gone, you see people just suddenly return to it. Entire communities collectively getting together and making sure they survive it, but they tend to to more than survive and they actually thrive. You see these little informal marketplaces springing up and sharing economies that are really vibrant and just amazing.

You see that often. You also see people who fail to make sense of it and just descends into misery. That happens too. But you see it in individuals too when, just in a moment of realisation or just a reset or a reboot, that the illusion of the civilisation is temporarily disrupted, and you see them recover the humanity for a while.

Potentially, that’s the space that a lot of creative people, who are professionally creative, that’s the space that they enter. And I can understand them when I think of it that way why they need to retreat to studios and places like that and seal themselves off from the world. Because they almost have to imagine them into that space of being human again in that way.

So it’s not something that we have to struggle to recover or anything, it’s just something that will reboot as soon as any moment that these controls are removed. And I guess it remains to be seen which way that coins going to drop over the next decade of this depression that’s coming. It’s beginning to start now. It’ll either be more of what we’ve seen of autocratic controls coming over on everybody, tighter and tighter controls, which will result in a push-pull of rebellion and anarchy and all that sort of thing. Or it will be an emergence of real ways of being.

And it won’t be in the artefacts of what you’re doing. The sourdough loaf that you bake or the scarf that you knit, or anything like that that people try to pep themselves up with. Oh, look, I'm rediscovering crochet on lockdown. It’s more than that. It’s a way of human being together, which really can’t happen on lockdown because we can’t interact in true human communities and we can’t be in relationship to each other and to a landscape.

MD: It’s just making me think of this idea of discipline as paramount and boredom has been weaponised is something that you’ve mentioned. So rather than all the doing of the sourdough and the doing of the crochet, if we look at a rut, that period of stagnation, do you think that’s important? Or do you think the more important thing is to keep moving? Or do we need both?

TY: Well, I think most of us are seldom involuntary. We’re not in voluntary ruts. Most of us are in a rut that’s imposed by a marketplace that we’re struggling to survive in. We’re in a rut of exhaustion and work most of the time. That’s most human beings. I know it’s different for a handful of people in different strata of this society, but for most of us, are ruts are imposed. And if they’re ever lifted, then there’s no rut.

And I think if you’re out of relation to that reality, then I can see how you also would be sort of stuck in a rut as well, like just from being cut off from the reality around you. How are you supposed to relate? What is the engine that’s going to drive your creativity? You have to find increasingly darker corners of your soul to mine to bring those things up, or you have to go out and look to other people and try and take their things. It’s a very difficult and dehumanising reality to be trying to deal with, I think. Those ruts are terrible things.

MD: Do you think that the energy of the gut comes into this at all? I thought it was interesting to see how that tied into that constant movement between mental and spiritual and physical and, without that movement, people can become sick. Do you see a connection between the imposed rut that we’re feeling and then the inability to move and therefore becoming sick or burnt out, or whatever you want to put to it?

TY: Yeah, I mean, every system relies on the constant flow. Flow of energy and information. That’s what a currency is, and that’s why it’s called a currency, like a current in a river. It has to be a constant flow. It’s the same in your body. Body-mind as an energetic system. There has to be a constant flow. So you do need to be clearing that gut because the gut that is your big spirit and your greater intelligence.

It’s tricky though because there isn’t a direct biological link between that and the rest of the system. We know now your mind is not just brain bound, that there is that haptic embodied cognition going on, that there are neuro processes going on beyond your brain, and there’s still not really good definition, scientifically, what our mind is or what consciousness is. So it’s something that has to happen on that plane. So you have to be able to accept that that’s your reality as well.

MD: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Is there anything that you do, given that you’re pulled in so many different directions and you were burnt out 15 years ago? Is there anything that you do to keep yourself connected or keep that energy of the gut clear and moving? How are you still awake? Is kind of my question.

TY: I try and be responsive and adaptive to the environment. But there’s different parts of spirit and I guess we’ve referred to different parts, like the shadow spirit, where narcissism sits, and your big spirit with that belly power, that one. There’s your ancestral spirit that comes from the land, and we’ll go back to it and keep recycling through. But then there’s your living spirit too, which is like imagining a string bag in a river, it’s always full of water, but the rivers flowing so it’s never the same water from moment to moment. You have to allow that, so whatever environment you’re in, you have to allow that flow, no matter how toxic it is, because it’s even more toxic to try and hold onto just that singular energy that’s in your body because that stagnates.

So you’ve got to let it flow through you and in your yarns with everybody, you have to talk to everybody. As many different people as you can. And preferably people who don’t see the world exactly the same way you do. You have to hear their stories and you have to allow that informational spirit to flow into you, and you have to let it change you. And I guess you don’t get radicalised by that as long as you’re listening to as many different points of view as possible. And you won’t be radicalised by just one.

You’ll allow an aggregate of stories, and therefore something approximating the truth, to enter you and move through you. But then you still don’t hold it. You just pass that onto somebody else and then you let it keep flowing through. That’s the way you have to be in the world. And if you’re living in a very sick environment and you’re not sick, then you’re a disconnected person anyway. I mean, if you’re living in this environment, this horrible civilisation, if you’re living it and you’re not experiencing some form of mental or physical illness as a result, then you’re a profoundly disconnected person who’s probably going to get sick soon anyway because you’ll stagnate. You’re living an illusion.

So I guess I just allow my environment to have its way with me, and I move through it. And so I guess what’s being affected for me at the moment is my living spirit, which is so incredibly toxic, and with areas of stagnation as well. Of things that I’m holding onto and not letting go of. It’s made me quite ill and tired. But it’s like everything, you have to go through it.

This isn’t a story of complaint here, I’m not whinging about this. It’s a fact, you know? I mean, if I fail to make meaning of all of this, then I’ll experience trauma from it. Trauma never happens at the point of impact. Trauma occurs later, and it’s tied up with your failure to make meaning of something. Your mind, your spirit will always try and keep coming back to that thing to make meaning of it because that’s what you have to do.

So I’ll be all right, I’ve just got to figure out what it all means from my point of view and then pass that onto people, and then keep going. Do that over and over. This is just something we all have to go through and it’s neither good nor bad, it just is. And you just have to have an acceptance of it. And you do what you can, and you try to retain whatever you can of your ancestral cognition and the gifts that we have as human beings. You try and retain some kind of pattern of the role that we’re supposed to be occupying, the ecological niche we’re supposed to be occupying, and you just do that.

And go easy on yourself. You can only do what you can do with the smallest sphere of influence you have in your life, and that’s what you’re limited to, so you just do that. Because realistically, that’s the only way to grow that sphere of influence, is to operate within it and to cease yearning for things that are beyond it, then it’ll grow. If your focus is outside of that sphere of influence, then you’ll find it getting smaller real quick.

MD: Is this sort of what you meant by meaning is made in the meandering path? Is this just allowing the meandering path?

TY: Yeah, well, that’s kind of more rigorous than that word would suggest. English is tricky. So you say meandering, and it seems random, like you’re just kind of drifting and you’re not being guided by anything. But you’re not. If you’re walking in the bush, you’re being guided by so many different signals. A lot of signals. And it’s quite a rigorous process to keep your mind on that and your observation just crystal clear so that those things are coming in, and they’ll direct you to where you need to go. And I guess the shape of that that comes out is meandering, but there will be pattern in it.

MD: What’s the difference then, do you think, between pattern and routine?

TY: Ooh. Oh, that’s real good. Well, I guess a routine is a pattern, but it’s an entropic pattern. I think any pattern that keeps replicating itself infinitely is an entropic pattern that will break down. There needs to be change. People who know design will know this, that a pattern only becomes interesting and beautiful through its disruptions and the way it moves, the way it responds and seeks to reset the pattern, but then the patterns changed, so when it gets back on track, it’s different again. And it’s strangely always a little bit more complex than it was before, and I guess that’s how mutations happen. That happens at the level of our DNA and it’s a continuous thing. Your DNA changes throughout your life. It’s fluid. It’s this co-evolutionary process responding to information that’s coming in from the environment around you.

It’s not completely deterministic, but it is also that as well. And that pattern will seek to reset itself but, when it does, it’ll be changed slightly from the mutation that’s occurred.

MD: Yeah, adapting. Your book answers a lot of big questions about why we’re here, how we should live, through an indigenous Australian perspective, and those questions are very much about how we live our lives and potentially measure our lives, and I like to put it to people how they think about measuring a day if we strip away things like work and productivity and output. What is left for you?

TY: Every day is different, and the weather will tell you what to do because the weather is telling everything else what to do, so you’ll be getting cues from birds, possums, clouds, trees, what they’re doing. You might have a plan for what you’re going to do down the river, but you go when the seasons changed, and the rainbow lorikeets have started mating and nesting in the tree hollows. They’ll be screeching at you if you walk in a certain place and you think, oh, I want to go there.

You take your cues from your environment, your relationships around you, and the relationships are important because everybody else is on a trajectory too. They have their day happening and your day is very much dependent on how their day goes and what happens. Your daughter might slam her fingers in a door. How does that work for your schedule?

So I guess a daily routine is about being responsive to the cycles and patterns and biology of what’s occurring in the social environment around you. You’re being responsive to those things. And, I don’t know, if you’re lucky enough to be in a place where everyone else is doing that too, it’s beautiful and it all just fits together. And it’s amazing and generative and you all get so much done. You can’t believe it. You get a month’s work done in like three hours and then you’ve got the rest of the day free to do whatever.

MD: Well, that’s kind of like that idea of flow, isn’t it? But you put it so beautifully in the book about the two types of joy. The light-heartedness and the fierce engagement and concentration, and how when that happens, you don’t need all day if you’ve got that experience of joy or flow or whatever you wish to call it.

TY: Yeah, exactly. It is that flow. And I’m describing it almost as this altered state, but I think as organisms, we’re supposed to spend quite a bit of our time in that state, and it’s not really supposed to be an unusual thing. Or a heightened state to attain or achieve through following the bullet points on your mindfulness PDF or whatever.

It’s how we’re supposed to be living and making sense of the world.

MD: Tyson reminds us that we have to be moving and adapting in a system that is in a constant state of movement and adaption. As he writes in a chapter of Sand Talk called ‘Be Like Your Place’, “you have to be living the patterns of your place if you want to tap into this kind of genius. When you engage with this way of being, you will find it changes you in subtle ways. Being in profound relation to places changes everything about you. Your voice, your smell, your walk, your morality”.

I’m Madeleine Dore … and that’s what I hope to share with this podcast – that our days are constantly movements, and perhaps perfecting the routine or avoiding the rut isn’t what we should be aiming for.