Lexicon for Life – Details, episodes & analysis

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Lexicon for Life

Byline Supplement

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/2d. Total Eps: 9

Those words are: Loneliness, Grace, Vitality, Anxiety, Dreaming, Trickster, Spirituality, and Imagination. All have a special resonance in the work of the award-winning writer Jay Griffiths (author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Why Rebel? and How Animals Heal Us). In each of the eight episodes, Jay takes one of these words for a walk – exploring how they connect us to the past, bind us to the other life on the planet and offer us a silver thread to follow into the future. Each episode features readings and discussions in which Jay is joined by the actor and writer Joanna Scanlan (Riot Women, After Love) and the writer and podcaster John Mitchinson (QI, Backlisted). Words are our species’ most brilliant invention. A Lexicon for Life shows us why some words matter more than others.

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A Lexicon for Life: Bonus Episode — Twilight

Sunday, January 11, 2026 • Duration 16:55

In this special bonus episode of the podcast, Jay Griffiths reads from her book, Nemesis, My Friend: Journeys Through the Turning Times.

“It is twilight. And at the waking edge of night, a crescent otter surfaces looping up from its dive. In its mouth, a fish shines silver, a little crescent moon. Night chases day like one otter cub chasing another. A pine martin races quicksilver through nearby woods.

On the edge of sight, a barn owl slips between the trees. This is the difficult, bewildering light, a light which makes visual puns so a tree stump with its black fingers of roots looks like a batter.

Twilight plays tricks, foxing sight. The eye struggles to see, tries harder than it does in the easy light of day. The other senses grow crescent with the twilight and the moon. The body stills itself to feel more, quiets itself to hear more.

Listen is an anagram of silent.”

You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org

Join Jay Griffiths and others in February at Byline Times’ live event ‘The Lure of Loneliness’ for a discussion about alienation, atomisation, and the decline of community in Britain.

⏰ February 2nd, 7:30pm

📍 Cockpit Theatre, London NW8 8EH

Get full access to Byline Supplement at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 8 — Spirituality

Sunday, January 4, 2026 • Duration 41:05

Every human culture has some kind of ritual to connect with something bigger than the self. Whether through organised religion or other spiritual practices, it appears to be a deep need in humans, but also in some animals, to acknowledge and celebrate wonder.

In How Animals Heal Us, Jay describes the chimpanzee engrossed in a waterfall dance: “His enthusiasm (from en-theos, the god within) jubilantly collides with the thundering waterfall and he shakes the branches to rattling, getting everything going, struck by his primordial imperative: dance. At the end of the dances the chimp often moves into a mood of reflection. Jane Goodall writes, ‘Is it not possible that these performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe?’ Given how alike they are to us, emotionally, she asks: ‘why wouldn't they have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself. I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are.’”

Looking at the stars or mountains or looking at animals, we experience transcendence, a sense of the divine, but humans are not alone in this, Jay writes: “Animals including primates may be spiritual. They may also lead us towards the divine, and birds have long been considered messengers of the gods. A skylark transposes my soul into a higher key. It rises helical as it sings, spiralling in an ellipsis of space until its distilled song becomes brightness, magnetized to heaven's quintessence, pinpointing god. The dance of two mating cranes is a symmetry of pure, divine, grace. Their pas de deux is a pas de dieu.”

Jay, Joanna and John discuss the divinity of animals, and the way in which many cultures have animal gods; monkeys, mice, rats, cows, goats, foxes, crocodiles, ravens and bears are all revered and worshipped. As Jay asks, “Why wouldn’t all these be gods?”

“Animals ensoul the world, giving the collective psyche limitless dimensions of sacredness.

We could, with relief, acknowledge divinity again in the real and living world, knowing it as the truth that has so far vouchsafed humanity’s time on earth. Then the collective psyche could come to its senses and the individual soul come home to itself, letting the soul-medicine that has always surrounded us work its ordinary miracles, in the holy and reckless plurality of the animals, each one an iteration of life’s deepest prayer: .”

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 7 — Dreaming

Saturday, January 3, 2026 • Duration 35:32

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths — Joseph Campbell

Dreaming, and what we learn from our dreams, are a fundamental part of being human, part of every culture on earth, but we are not the only dreaming animals.

“Spiders. Rats. Cats. Dogs. Zebra finches. Humans and other primates. Dreaming happens among many animals,” writes Jay in How Animals Heal Us.

You can watch baby jumping spiders dream when, in the first ten days of their lives, their exoskeletons are see-through and their dreaming eyes have “flurries of rapid eye movement (REM)”, rats relive the experiences of their day in dreams, cats dream of hunting and jumping, and zebra finches sing in their dreams: “They experience the REM state and then their forebrains fire neurons in a distinct pattern, one that also takes place when they are awake and singing. It seems that their sleeping brains replicate the pattern of their singing, suggesting, say researchers, that these songbirds are moving their vocal muscles to the music of their dreams.”

Jay, Joanna and John discuss how, for Indigenous Australians, “the soil contains the Ancestors, not only the human ones but the Ancestor spirits who travelled the land in the Dreaming, and the earth is alive with them still.” As Jay writes in Why Rebel, “Indigenous cultures very commonly assert that the land has consciousness. More: the land, they say, dreams us. This beautiful, enigmatic idea contains a vastness of vision, seeing our place on Earth as a kind of dream.”

Lack of sleep damages our cognitive functions, but dreaming “opens us to a wider consciousness and understanding. Each dreamer is connected to a subconscious wisdom extending far beyond themselves, like roots extending into a communal shared intelligence under the soil.”

“Sleeping,” writes Jay, “is the subsoil of the mind, the darkly luminous place for insight beyond obvious sight.”

Jay also tells of her meetings with Amazonian shamans, who, she recounts, shared a certain expression, “something I saw in all their eyes, something long-sighted and intense: they were magnets to dreams. If you were a dream, it’s their sleep you’d swim towards, their minds you’d yearn to be dreamt in.”

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 6 — Imagination

Friday, January 2, 2026 • Duration 37:35

“If the imagination were an animal, it would be the hare. The mercurial hare races quicksilver, like a flash of thought swiftly appearing and instantly gone.”

From cave paintings to fables and children’s books, for thousands of years, animals have shaped human thought and our urge to connect with them has given rise to imaginative art.

“The full imaginative reach of being human needs the animals,” writes Jay in How Animals Heal Us. “We are made of the snort of a horse, a hedgehog bristle, and badger’s teeth. We are wren-sung and swallow-built and seahorse-etched and our imaginations are flecked with turquoise, thanks to the dragonfly. Through the animals we know ourselves.

“In cave paintings, it is animals that are painted. This is so well-known that its importance can be overlooked. The earliest art was inspired by a thrilled, observant and almost certainly shamanistic entrancement with animals.”

Jay, Joanna and John ask why animals feature so importantly in children’s books and why a love of animals is often seen as childish.

They also discuss how the language of imaginative metaphor can help explain how it feels to experience mental illness.

Jay reads from her book, Tristimania, “Metaphor matters in madness. Matters so much that you could say metaphor is the material of madness, the mothering tongue of the madstruck mind, mater of it all.”

Jay talks about her own experience of manic depression and the metaphor of mountains that helped her to communicate her agony:

“When a person is ill, a metaphor is not a decoration, not a trivial curlicue of Eng. Lit, not a doily on the conversational table, rather it is a desperate attempt to send out an SOS, to give the listener their co-ordinates, because they are losing themselves. I am on Cader Idris, just before the first peak after the path leaves the lake, do you read me? Over. The perilous geography where my psyche was situated. Situated but dis-located, alone and pathless. I had to be meticulously precise in giving the latitude of my madness, the longitude of my scraps of insight. I was lost and urgently needed to be found, to be located by someone who could (as shamans say) send their souls out to find mine. In terms of our culture, one way of doing this is surprisingly simple: listeners need to hear the metaphors and stay with them.

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 5 — Anxiety

Monday, December 29, 2025 • Duration 37:38

Anxiety is rife, caused variously by the fear of climate change, by the destabilising of political structures and the speed of technological development. No-one can be free of anxiety while being aware of what is happening in the world.

“Young people are suffering a never-before-known sickness, eco-anxiety, as time is running out for the climate, the soil, and the oceans and so many creatures are threatened with extinction,” writes Jay, in Nemesis, My Friend. “The Dominant Culture is breaching the limits of what the world can stand, a transgression like no other in its consequences. In a few decades, it has seized resources, broken the wise and necessary limits, taken more than its due, stolen life itself from the future. In its greed and in its hubris, it has endangered the coral reefs, the bees, the Everything.”

Jay, Joanna and John discuss what is possible to reduce anxiety, to harness it and to help face the “unhallowed” nature of the assault on what Jay calls our “mental sovereignty”.

Our connection to animals is one of the ways to model a healthier, less anxious way to be. “Donkeys,” Jay writes in How Animals Heal Us, “are the archetype of gentleness, the holy animal of the Christ story twice over, once at the beginning and once at the end, and they seem to meditate by default as they are animals of endurance, patience and tranquillity.”

Similarly, dogs are “medicine for high anxiety”:

“We humans have been living alongside them for some 32,000 years and they give us a deep sense of safety as they can smell and hear far further out into the world than we can, so in the ancient memory of our atavistic genes, we know that they are offering us rings of protection wider than we can provide for ourselves. When a dog is there, calm, happy, maybe snoozing, an ancient part of the psyche knows ‘the camp is safe.’”

You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 4 - Trickster

Sunday, December 28, 2025 • Duration 39:42

Trickster archetypes exist in many human cultures, with a very defined set of characteristics. He is charismatic, funny, but utterly undependable, a little bit of a thief, but moving the story forward, making change happen, blasting away the status quo.

Joanna reads from Jay’s book, Nemesis, My Friend: “He bends the truth till your head hurts. Trickster is shameless. The quiet, inner voice of conscience, or of honour or truth has no place. Win some, lose some, happy go lucky, slippery as an eel gone pickpocketing in a slimy fishmarket. Boastful as a raccoon snorting cocaine off a tycoon’s bald patch. Double-duplicitous as a fake ferret on the filchy-filchy. Trickster lives entirely in an amoral world. Indigenous cultures often consider the Dominant Culture to be the Younger Brother and something of a Trickster, noting its selfish immaturity, its appetite and greed, its technical cleverness but lack of wisdom, its refusal to take the long view.

Although he disturbs the status quo, arse over tit, bouleversé, crucially, the mythic Trickster is never in power. Rather he is on the edge, marginal, outside the tent pissing in. Because he doesn’t have power, we are sympathetic to him. But never give the clown a gun.”

From Commedia dell’arte, to Shakespearean fools to the Monkey King, Jay, Joanna and John discuss the Trickster in drama, comedy and satire, the role of the Lord of Misrule in the Saturnalia, and the necessity of turning the world upside down for a while.

But the Trickster, given power, can become dangerous, as Jay reads: “Trickster is transactional, loves cutting deals and ensuring commerce, he is there in double-entry book-keeping, often using deceptive or fraudulent business practices, always needing money and near-constantly in debt. ‘I do deals,’ says Trump, mired in debt.

“He is a wheeler as well as a dealer, and prefers to be portrayed on the road, always on his way somewhere, often to rallies, Road-Runner whizzy. Trump portrayed himself as the plucky outsider taking on the establishment, using slippery Trickster speech he incited the lethal insurrection at the Capitol, in January 2021, on the back of his pants-on-fire lie that the election was stolen from him.”

She goes on: “I want the real Trickster back. I want to be able to laugh at the daft lies and ingenuity of the ‘little guy’ rather than fearing the ‘strong men.’”

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 3 - Vitality

Saturday, December 27, 2025 • Duration 22:06

“Vitality is zest, enthusiasm, fizzing like a vitamin in the psyche. Vitality is the inextinguishable life force, the sap-rising iridescence. Vitality is not necessarily correlated with age, and an eighty-year-old, drinking in vividness, can be elastic with vitality as a core inner strength. It is a key measure of psychological health, the mind's appetite for life and vigour, the vivid experience of being alive, playful and alert.”

Jay, Joanna and John discuss the ways in which vitality demonstrates itself — in the laughter of animals — including humans, but also bonobos, rats and dozens of other species — and in the ear-dazzling song of the tiny wren.

“This is undaunted gift” Jay says, before asking: “how much sheer magnificence can you pack into one tiny wren?”

“Birdsong seems to happen on the horizon of the human mind, just beyond the extent of our senses. Immanent but untranslatable — the dash — ! — the glimpse, the hint, the ellipsis. All birdsong is light, where light is both weight and sound, both brightness and joy. It exists in the place between.

Between sound and silence. Between earth and sky. Between visible and invisible. Between literal and metaphoric. Between seeing and dreaming. Between sight and insight. Between memory and longing, a synaesthesia of the soul in its pure vivacity.”

You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org

Get full access to Byline Supplement at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 2 - Grace

Tuesday, December 23, 2025 • Duration 30:20

Grace is one of Jay Griffiths’ favourite words; its connection to gratitude, to charisma, to that something more than was asked for. “It’s in the grace notes of music, the thing which is not strictly necessary, but the beautiful extra that gives life that quality of given, cherished, unearned beauty.”

There are moments, she says, where we are in a state of gratitude for something of astonishing grace: “Events when animals have saved people, when they have acted without training or reward, simply seeing the trouble and electing to help, are moments of extraordinary grace dropped into the ordinary world.”

Jay discusses with Jo and John the Ethiopian lions who saved a 12-year-old girl from kidnappers, protecting her until human rescuers arrived; the parrot who alerted a childminder to a child in danger of choking and the crows who brought “bright tokens of regard” to the little girl who gave them food.

They explore the connection with caritas, love and care, and the inherent grace of wild creatures:

“Wild things have inherent grace, which is why all wild creatures are so bewitching – they are not just in, but they are a state of grace. Life itself is a state of grace: at the heart of it all, there is this primeval wild comedy, and the Earth is hot with, bursting with, fermenting with, dizzy with, hooting with, gasping with – life.”

You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop at Bookshop.org

Get full access to Byline Supplement at www.bylinesupplement.com/subscribe

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A Lexicon for Life: Episode 1 - Loneliness

Monday, December 22, 2025 • Duration 29:46

Loneliness, Grace, Vitality, Anxiety, Dreaming, Trickster, Spirituality, and Imagination.

All these words have a special resonance in the work of the award-winning writer Jay Griffiths (author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Why Rebel? and How Animals Heal Us).

In each of the eight episodes, Jay takes one of these words for a walk – exploring how they connect us to the past, bind us to the other life on the planet and offer us a silver thread to follow into the future.

Each episode features readings and discussions in which Jay is joined by the actor and writer Joanna Scanlan (Riot Women, After Love) and the writer and podcaster John Mitchinson (QI, Backlisted).

Words are our species’ most brilliant invention. A Lexicon for Life shows us why some words matter more than others.

Today’s word is Loneliness.

“Lonely hurts. It just does. It hurts in particular places, on the edges of the self. All of them.” In this episode, Jay Griffiths reads from How Animals Heal Us and discusses how pet animals “offer medicine for loneliness in simple touch that salves the loneliness at the body's edge.”

She also reads from Why Rebel? and talks to Joanna and John about the loneliness of humans as a species. “We humans in the Dominant Culture cutting ourselves off from all The Others, the teeming worlds of insects birds and animals who are the only other life we know of in the universe: without them, how silent and foreboding is the loneliness of humanity.”

You can order any of Jay Griffiths’ books from her online shop on Bookshop.org

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