On S**t and Beauty: a conversation with Sophie Strand

I sat with word magician Sophie Strand and we talked about feminism, art, the creative process, storytelling, motherhood, and so much more.

Courtesy of Sophie Strand

** If you want some beautiful fairy music to accompany this reading, you can find it at the end of the essay. Enjoy!

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The word relationship comes from the word relacioun, meaning the act of telling or relating in words, directly from the Latin word relationem, meaning “a bringing back, restoring”. In Spanish, a written story is called relato from the same roots. Therefore, stories, residing in the past, help us relate to each other. Everything we know is a story, from the way we look at love, to the things we think we are supposed to do to move forward in this society: have a certain body, build a family, buy a home, and become a certain someone. Stories live in our memory, our bodies, and our eyes, from them we learn how to live, what rights to demand, and how to relate to other human beings. Stories have immense power over humans for they are the rhizomatic strands that keep us alive, they can be healing, revolutionary, and incredibly divisive. 

Humans have been relating through stories since time immemorial; with oral storytelling, our stories were changing with the context they were told in, and with what voice, they became part of the human being relating. The growth of patriarchy and capitalism have contributed to stories becoming stagnant, leaving us with single truths and paralysed histories, some of these stories put people’s lives in danger. Stories reside in cauldrons and they can get rotten if they are not moved, and that’s our responsibility: to keep stories dancing so they don’t kill us. 

Few people do this better than Sophie Strand, a magician of words who turns stories on their feet for us to heal. Last month, I met with her virtually and had one of the most intimate conversations I have had in a while. Let me tell you that Sophie and I are both very curious, enthusiastic people, and we talk a lot!

Her first book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is both a spell and a prayer where the stagnant stories of masculinity told to us for centuries, are eradicated from their soil, and replanted. Or rather, as Sophie would say, they spore into other contexts. 

Moved By Nature, © Annie Collinge

We began our conversation in a deeply vulnerable way; “I think that my heart is broken” she says, “but that feels like a generous place to plant things. You can only plant things in a broken heart, because there's space, you know, it's been cracked open.” I ask her about her journey with storytelling, “ I was raised within a culture of storytelling and interfaith communication,” both her parents are writers who focus on ecology and spirituality, so she tells me she was raised with the concept of a more than human world.  “But my love of writing actually was born in orality,  I much prefer telling stories”. She tells me she would often sit on a hammock and tell stories to the animals her family frequently rescued, “It took a long time for me to want to write them down. So I would like to practice telling stories with my geese and my dogs.” 

I deeply value her style of conversing as it is honest and transparent. In her writing and public life, Sophie is outspoken about her experience with pre-verbal sexual abuse, her disability, and her journey to understanding her own body. This raw honesty is something I resonate with, and also something I often find resistance to, I tell her people sometimes think I'm “too much” or “oversharing”, but all I want to do is talk about shit and beauty, because they coexist. “And they bring each other into visibility and contrast that the joy is sculpted by the sorrow,” by death and error. 

This brings us to discussing the capitalist-patriarchal nature of rejecting death, and how problematic this is, and I tell her about a recent piece I wrote about the difficulty of accepting error and failure.  “I think a lot about how evolution is an experiment in error, that every adaption which eventually helps us survive begins as a genetic error,” she says “ and disability is oftentimes an experiment, a new embodiment. We look at errors as being deviant but usually,  they are inherently creative. The errors in my life, the ruptures, have been places where some of the miraculous things erupted from.”  The white supremacist idea that you can't do anything unless it's perfect keeps us from relating to each other. 

Deconstructing and dismantling are the bedrock of my writing work, and this phase of my life began with me questioning that things were not normal, or perfect, and that they had to be destroyed. Sophie’s work with myth telling is also an incredible effort of deconstructing, of rupturing, what we think to be absolute truths but that is simply stagnant. “I think of the Tower card in Tarot, which says ‘Bring everything down because the tower was not built correctly,’” she tells me, “Culturally –if we can't understand the heartbreak of ecocide and colonialism and genocide – if we can't go into those cracks, and explore them and really become responsible for them – we're never going to build a stable house.” Here, we cannot but bring forth one of our inspirations Audre Lorde who, in her essay The Master’s Tools Will Not Destroy the Master's House, explains that if the foundations of our society are not rebuilt, radical change cannot occur. “That's the problem with a lot of environmentalism, it's just trying to buttress colonial capitalism. It's just trying to give us more technology to continue our unsustainable ways of being. That's not the way of rebuilding the house. We have to take this down completely. We have to go down to the foundations.” This reminds me of a passage in the book in the chapter about the legend of the Minotaur, where Sophie calls those who attempt to create weather or climate-regulating technologies Technonarcisists. I have adopted the term in my vocabulary since reading it and have been shameless about calling out those around me who think they are providing solutions without recognising they are still operating within a capitalist mindset. As Sophie says, our culture insists that we know better than Earth what is best for her. 

“I think a lot about how evolution is an experiment in error, that every adaption which eventually helps us survive begins as a genetic error”

Sophie Strand

For things to truly change at their foundation, we must be willing to reckon with the heartbreak of the climate crisis, and our responsibility within it. This would mean letting go of what we know to be the best way to live possible, and entering into an unknown territory. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher says, it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. 

“I'm teaching a class right now on disability and incurable illness and trying to interrupt wellness paradigms that suggest that you always have to be striving towards completeness and healing,” Sophie tells me, “which is incredibly problematic when people can't get better and can't resolve things, and when health is this entangled network of oppressions. We're putting the sole responsibility for healing on the individual.” She tells me that her disability forced her into the painful heartbreak many would have to deal with in order for the world to change, but that it is difficult to ask people to voluntarily have this experience. 

“So how do you wake up the people who somehow have been protected from that?” she asks.  ”You don't. But you offer a lighthouse, that when the sea gets stormy and they realize they're gonna have to reckon with this, they can sail towards you,” she says tenderly. Just last week I wrote an essay about the need for us to break our hearts to radically change, and I could not agree more with her. 

“It goes back to what you were saying about not being afraid to name these nasty, hard things. Being the person who makes other people uncomfortable, saying like, this is real, I'm not going to pretend that it's not real. So other people wake up, they know that you're safe to talk to.” I ask her about the romanticization of suffering, especially of the artist, and how we can hold the complexity of the creative process. Personally, suffering has been a catalyst for much of the work that I have put out, but so has joy and beauty. “I’ve been really trying not to pray to a god of suffering. I think if you receive a lot of suffering, and you learn from it because you're a person who's alchemical and creative, you can begin to welcome it. You can say like, ‘Oh, this is the way I learn’,” she explains, but she adds that this idea of being initiated by suffering is problematic, because many don’t make it to the other side of these agonizing experiences. “I learned from suffering, but I also learned from joy and ease, every human experience be it pleasurable or mundane, can become art”. We must not romanticize suffering, and we must not completely alienate it, holding both joy and sorrow in a non-binary way will help us move forward. 

So, as the highlight of the transcript of this interview said: Let’s talk about shit and beauty because they co-exist.

Those of you who have been following this newsletter know that every essay has an embodiment practice or ritual, a call to presence. This time I asked Sophie for her expertise and she came up with a beautiful ritual which I transcribed as told by her. This feature is for paying subscribers only, thank you for supporting this work.

From the audio, you will also get a beautiful music suggestion to read the piece, and you will hear I am in a different place, I have come to nature to be alone for a few days, and it’s been incredible.