The Clearing

Conversations in Arcadia

The Clearing is a project to capture my current process of sense making with others - a pod for my friends (except that was a mouthful). The intention is to focus strictly on topics that interest me and people I love listening to. Aiming to avoid pieties, performance, or excessive edification. Themes may emerge. Recording and sharing is an experiment, in the hope that something may resonate usefully with someone - if so, I’m curious to hear about it. carrie802897.substack.com

  1. #16 - Wolfgang, death doula

    MAR 25

    #16 - Wolfgang, death doula

    Nobody isn’t going there, nobody’s parents aren’t going there—and yet so many of us show up at the threshold surprised and unprepared. Modernity seems at a loss when it comes to the dying process. Among the oldest evidence of human meaning making are artefacts to mark this passage, but today we often find ourselves without any conceptual frame that dying doesn’t break. It’s outside the event horizon. Wolfgang Schmidt Ulm Dos Santos is a trained Death Doula. He’s done many other things - men’s fashion, startups - but it is in this work that he now finds joy. We’re old friends, and it was wonderful to hear him speak about this unexpected calling. Not entirely inappropriate in the run-up to Easter perhaps. To see how an appreciation of mortality is at the root of both the contemplative and the poetic impulse, and maybe all true delight, here’s One Or Two Things by Mary Oliver. In the conversation, we touch briefly on Rilke’s Todeserfahrung. 1 Don’t bother me I’ve justbeen born. 2 The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats of flowers and the black mud; up and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes for long delicious moments it is perfectly lazy, riding motionless in the breeze of the soft stalk of some ordinary flower 3 The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things; I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever, 4 which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind. 5 One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning --- some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. 6 But to lift the hoof! For that you needan idea. 7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind.“ Don’t love your life too much,” it said, and vanished into the world.” ― Mary Oliver This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrie802897.substack.com

    42 min

About

The Clearing is a project to capture my current process of sense making with others - a pod for my friends (except that was a mouthful). The intention is to focus strictly on topics that interest me and people I love listening to. Aiming to avoid pieties, performance, or excessive edification. Themes may emerge. Recording and sharing is an experiment, in the hope that something may resonate usefully with someone - if so, I’m curious to hear about it. carrie802897.substack.com