We Belong to Stories
Sophie Strand – one of our favorite thinkers, writers, and “life-weavers” – shared in her article entitled “Myco Eco Mytho” that, “Stories don’t belong to human beings. But human beings belong to stories. Let’s enter back into the complex, tangled work of letting go of authorship and letting ourselves be told.” This call to rewild our role across time, space, and experience – past, present, and future – sets the stage for this captivating interview where Sophie covers ideas such as the importance of ecological storytelling (creating households over heroes); fantasy as much-needed “feral futures” over the “fake realism” and of our human-centric and diagnostic stories; the responsibility we have around “creative self-fulfillment when imaging possible futures; and engaging humanity as “lovers” rather than information gatherers.
“Like Penelope in the Odyssey… we have to get better at unweaving our own shroud, every night we have to unweave our own shroud, unweave our stories, unweave our diagnoses because there’s no use dealing with a condition that’s incurable… I’m very interested in the “no-cebo effect” – if we’re given negative outcomes, told a list of side effects, and not given direct contact – we will have worse outcomes. It’s really important that we don’t tell a bad story, a bad diagnosis. Can we unweave a diagnosis that limits our future possibilities?”
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand,The Madonna Secret, and the forthcoming memoir The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.” You can follow her work on Instagram @cosmogyny.
