In dialogue with Sophie Strand , this conversation moves through Joanna Macy’s dependent co-arising, Simone Weil on attention as prayer, the Ophiocordyceps ant and the technologies of possession we have forgotten, Peter Gray on conjuring as a speculative practice, and the function of fiction in shaping the futures our bodies then live into. Autoimmunity surfaces here as a chimerical condition: the body rebuilt continuously by otherness, in receipt of signals it did not invite, obligated to listen without the consolations of purity or transcendence.
About our guest
Sophie Strand is a writer and poet based in the Hudson Valley. Her work braids mycorrhizal ecology, deep mythology, and embodied disability into narratives that refuse the separation of the biological and the sacred. She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Divine Masculine (2021) and The Madonna Secret (2023), and her essays have appeared in Emergence Magazine, Dark Mountain, and Scaffold. Strand lives within a 20-mile radius of Woodstock, New York, on land she has covenanted with over a long arc, where her body serves as one node in a wider mycelial network of attention.
https://sophiestrand.com/
Show Timings
00:00 Welcome
00:01 Sobriety, not honesty
00:04 Impurity and the drugs that keep us alive
00:05 Material promiscuity: we are all chimeras
00:07 Dancing: stagnation versus movement
00:10 The earth’s lymph
00:12 A covenant with place: homecoming
00:15 Walking the Gaspé
00:17 Following a call versus following an idea
00:19 An unintentional pilgrimage to Jerusalem
00:21 Epigenetics and the bleeding disorder
00:22 Diagnosis at five, the slide began
00:23 The choice of speaking about illness in public
00:26 The pressure to perform productivity
00:27 Jewish ancestry, animism, possession
00:30 The spores of a story: Ophiocordyceps, possession, Jesus as tragedy
00:33 Intuitions, fear, trauma — listening to the body
00:35 Speculation: speculum, mirror, prophecy
00:37 Nocebos and the futures we conjure
00:40 Chronic illness as contact improvisation
00:43 Closing: trust, doors open in the Hudson Valley
References Mentioned
- Joanna Macy — Buddhist teacher, ecologist, and systems theorist. Author of Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (1991) and Coming Back to Life (1998, with Molly Brown). Her articulation of pratītyasamutpāda as dependent co-arising for a Western audience is the load-bearing concept of the conversation’s first half. joannamacy.net
- Simone Weil — French philosopher, mystic, and political activist (1909–1943). “Absolutely unmixed attention is a kind of prayer” is from Gravity and Grace (1947, published posthumously). The phrase functions in the conversation as a warning about identification: seven months of writing about illness as seven months of prayer to the illness. simoneweil.net
- Peter Grey, Lucifer: Princeps (2015)
- Sam Lee — naturalist, musician, and curator of *The Nest Collective*. Friend of Sophie’s who has worked with travelling communities in England on songs that are not sung from the singer but received through the breath from the ancestors. His work on the relationship between oral tradition and ecological stewardship is referenced in the discussion of the body as story-keeper.
- Ophiocordyceps unilateralis — the parasitic fungus that infects ants, manipulates their behaviour, and sporulates from their body. The conversation’s central metaphor for the body as a vehicle for stories that exceed the individual. [de Hong et al., *The Fungi* (2024)] on entomopathogenic fungi; Evans, *Sander, and Shaw*, on the Ophiocordyceps genus.
- Agni (Sanskrit: अग्नि) — the digestive and metabolic fire; the cosmic fire; the principle of transformation. In the conversation, agni is invoked as the same fire at the scale of the body and the scale of the cosmos: the metabolism of food into tissue, the metabolism of cosmos into itself, the perpetual sacrifice back and forth.
- Gunas (Sanskrit: गुण) — the properties of matter; the qualitative characteristics through which substance is known. Sattva, rajas, tamas as the classical triad; the conversation uses gunas in the broader sense of properties at different scales.
- Contact improvisation — a post-modern dance form developed by Steve Paxton in 1972, structured around the physical contact between moving bodies, the sharing of weight, and improvisation in response to shared momentum. Laure’s primary movement practice and the conversation’s metaphor for chronic illness: the discipline of dancing with unpredictability, of developing a higher threshold for the unexpected.
- Qigong — Chinese movement practice integrating breath, posture, and intention. Laure’s foundational training for contact improvisation; the retreat with her teacher near Poughkeepsie is the through-line to the in-person invitation in the closing.
- Gaspé Peninsula — a peninsula at the eastern end of the St. Lawrence River in Québec, the home of Laure’s maternal family for several centuries as settlers, and the continuation of the Appalachian range. The unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people.
- Mi’kmaq — the Indigenous people of the Gaspé and the Atlantic coast of what is now called the Maritimes and Gaspésie. Laure’s family arrived as settlers in the 1600s. Wikipedia
- Twelve-step work — the recovery framework originating with Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), centred on admitting powerlessness over an addiction, turning control over to a higher power, and making amends. Sophie was raised inside conversations about 12-step applied to civilisation and capitalism; her own eating disorder work has used the 12-step structure.
- Steroids / corticosteroids — Sophie has been on synthetic corticosteroids at points in her life; the specific one she researched had been synthesised from diosgenin extracted from *Dioscorea* species (wild yams) sourced from South Africa. The deracination argument is her own: sacred plants uprooted, forced into extractive supply lines, plugged into a medicine they did not consent to produce.
- Hudson Valley — the valley of the Hudson River in New York State, running from the Adirondacks to New York City. Sophie’s home territory; her 20-mile radius around Woodstock is the covenant. Geologically a portion of the Appalachian range; ecologically one of the temperate deciduous forest strongholds of eastern North America.
Podcast Theme music: « Tremblement » de Michaël Boudreau, from the album Terre.Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/michaelboudreau
Learn more: https://autoimmunetheory.com
Laure's website: https://mxmarin.ca
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
www.autoimmunetheory.com
