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Planthropology
Planthropology
124. Thunderstorms, Hidden Nature, and the Cryptonaturalist w/ Jarod K. Anderson
We talk with writer and poet Jarod K. Anderson, aka the Cryptonaturalist, about mental health, ADHD, and rediscovering wonder through woods, poems, and honest work. From “brain weather” to dandelion myths, we explore how stories shape healing and how nature keeps us present.
• origin of a lifelong nature connection and early poetry in a “land lab”
• leaving academia, starting therapy, and naming depression as “brain weather”
• enthusiasm over expertise as a path back to the woods
• the Cryptonaturalist: blending natural history, humor, and gentle horror
• balancing sincerity online with a creative career
• separating dandelion facts from internet folklore
• ADHD frameworks: “more than nothing” and consistency over intensity
• sitting still versus covering ground as different forms of success in nature
• poem “Woodland You” and the idea that self-worth is innate
• book recommendations and where to find Jarod’s work
Pre-order the new novel, Strange Animals, anywhere you buy books. We’re fans of ordering from your favorite local bookstore. Find more at jarodkanderson.com and follow the Cryptonaturalist on social media
If you want to connect with the show, go to planthropologypodcast.com or follow along on social media, either Planthropology Pod or The Plant Prof. Send me an email at planthropologypod@gmail.com
As always, thanks so much for listening! Subscribe, rate, and review Planthropology on your favorite podcast app. It helps the show keep growing and reaching more people! As a bonus, if you review Planthropology on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser and send me a screenshot of it, I'll send you an awesome sticker pack!
Planthropology is written, hosted, and produced by Vikram Baliga. Our theme song is "If You Want to Love Me, Babe, by the talented and award-winning composer, Nick Scout. Midroll tunes are by Rooey.
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What is up, plant people? It's time once more for the Planthropology Podcast, the story where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vicarum Beliga, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the sciences. And as always, my friends, I am so excited to be with you today. Y'all, my guest for today is so good, and it's someone that I've followed on social media for a long time because his work is so wonderful and thought-provoking, and he is the creator of several books, of a lot of nature-based, sort of spooky, creepy poetry, uh, I don't know if like eco-poetry or how you want to cut it, but my guest today, Jared K. Anderson, goes by the Crypto Naturalist online. And if you're in some of these nature spaces and if you've spent a lot of time on Instagram and different places, you've probably seen his stuff. He puts out these really poignant, short little poems on social media, and they're about nature and they're about our connection to it. And I think about what embodies this podcast and our connection to nature and the world around us. A lot of the work that Jared does speaks so directly to me about that that I was so excited when he agreed to be on the show. A couple of things about this episode that I I'm not gonna say I'm gonna warn you about, but a little bit of a content warning. We actually have fairly frank discussions in this episode about mental health and ADHD and just some other issues that Jared and I both deal with in our lives. And there's nothing too heavy uh or too dark that we talk about except for some dark parts of nature. But if you're sensitive discussions about mental health, I would definitely just caution you that that's in here. But we talk about it and Jared talks about it in a way that's so approachable, and he gives us some like practical tips that he's learned. So we talk about everything from dealing with your mental health and working with your brain to accomplish things in your life and with nature and how we can use our sometimes challenging minds to go and just experience nature better. So we talk about his social media work, we talk about all of the books that he's written and all of his poetry, including a new one that's coming up called Strange Animals, which we should definitely go and pre-order right away, and just so much more stuff. Jared's a cool guy. I feel like I've found an kindred spirit in a lot of ways in him, and I think you're gonna really enjoy this episode. Uh, one other thing, I forgot to record a mid-roll, so I'm just gonna throw out right now if you want to connect with the show, go to planthropologypodcast.com or follow along on social media, either Planthropology Pod or The Plant Prof. That's me, and uh send me an email at planthropologypod at gmail.com. But aside from that, so I'm gonna jump right into this really insightful, poignant, funny, and sometimes even maybe a little creepy discussion in episode 124 of the Planthropology Podcast, Thunderstorms, Hidden Nature, and the Crypto Naturalist with Jared K. Anderson, I'm gonna be a little bit of a lot of money. Let's learn all about you.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk with you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so to kick things off, just tell us a little bit about your background. What did you do? How did you get into nature? Why do you do what you do today?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so so I've had a bit of a winding trail to get to where I am. Um, always been a huge nature lover, grew up in sort of rural Ohio with a mom who used to take me on daily nature walks was some of my earliest memories. So we would just go to the woods every day and see what was blooming and what animals were around, and she would quiz me on spring ephemerals, and we'd find a green heron that fell out of a nest, and we would work on rehabbing it, and so that was always such a central part of my life. And we were not a religious family at all, but my mom always called the woods her church. So that was my background. So I don't remember a time without the nature connection. But for me, a sort of central part of my story was drifting away as I kind of internalized a lot of sort of our own kind of cultural separation from nature, the sort of American capitalism I was raised in, and then trying to figure out what was missing. And what was missing was a thing that I had once understood instinctually. And the nature writing, it's funny, I have kind of a pinpoint of where I got into nature writing because I had a teacher in fifth grade named Miss Willard, who used to take us out behind the school, and there was just acres of woods back there, and they called it the land lab. And I don't know if you could do this anymore, but she would just take a bunch of fifth graders back there with pen and paper and say, okay, just go find a place to sit in the woods and write down what you see. She would read nature poetry to us, and I started writing nature poetry. I won a Ohio poetry contest when I was 10 with some nature poems, and um yeah, I never stopped. So uh that that's when I got into nature writing. Growing up, I started to kind of get a sense that some of my passions weren't necessarily cool. And then in college, I uh I was a non-traditional student. I did sort of a lot of other things before I realized like I'm a real book nerd, what am I doing? But I worked in construction and surveying and all sorts of stuff before I eventually went and was an English major at Ohio State, and then I got a master's, started teaching literature at Ohio University, and was off to a PhD, and then I realized that I really didn't love the job, and that wasn't a goodie to have going into a PhD. But I had it in mind that if I wanted to be somebody who wrote and read, and that was my life, that I needed to be an academian. But the job was grading hundreds of essays by students who didn't want to write them. And I would get home at night and was like, okay, I hate words now. I didn't want to work on my writing. So I ended up kind of shifting as a kind of refugees from English programs do. I ended up in marketing. Um and I tried to mostly do nonprofits because I still wanted to do mission-driven stuff. So I worked for Franklin Park Conservatory, which was cool, and I started doing scholarships, that kind of work. And then I ended up back at OU as a director of external relations. And I I was really miserable. And I also had really kind of unacknowledged, serious major depression. And my job, I would describe my job as being in meetings about future meetings.
SPEAKER_00:And I just that feels that by the way, it feels like way too real. Being in academia, that feels so real.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it was and something about the depression. It was so hard to get out of bed that to make myself do it, and then and be in these meetings where I thought to myself, like, well, they didn't need me here at all. And these are my sort of limited life minutes ticking past. And eventually I had a very supportive partner who had a good job, and uh eventually she was just kind of like, Hey, quit, we'll figure it out. And I did. And then I was a little bit crushed to find that I wasn't instantly happy, that leaving the job behind didn't fix everything. And it was like I had to acknowledge, uh-oh, maybe this is me. Maybe there's something more internal happening with my mental health than gripes about my job. Um and I started going to therapy eventually, finally, which was terrifying to be vulnerable in that way. Um and what was monumental for me is I started getting back to the woods and getting back to creativity and finding that I felt sort of nourished and whole in a way that it was hard for me to articulate at first as a words guy. And I've been kind of pulling that thread ever since as I've come back to nature in a variety of ways, and sometimes it is coming back as an enthusiast. I think of myself as a naturalist. Um it's funny, I use enthusiast because sometimes my perfectionism gets caught up and like, oh, I don't have any business in the in in these conversations because I'm not an expert. And so enthusiast means like, okay, but I can come as an enthusiast, which gives myself permission to put my enthusiasm first and and boost other experts and kind of embrace the role of an enthusiast. Um, and it also that carried over to my fiction and poetry, too. Like sometimes my love of nature is in rooted in science, and sometimes it's rooted in capturing the wonder I feel through metaphor. I have a six-year-old son, he came up to me a while ago and said, Hey, are electric eels real? And I just said, like, oh man, what a reasonable question. And what a no right? Yeah, what a reasonable question, and what a bizarre answer I have for you. Like, yes. And sometimes I like to do that through fantasy and science fiction, kind of to put the real miraculous nature and fictional elements side by side and um conflate them in a bit to try to recapture that childhood sense of holy crap, our electric heel's real. Um so yeah, that has landed me where I am today. I'm a full-time writer now, shockingly, not a thing I thought was possible, but that's kind of that's kind of my gig right now.
SPEAKER_00:That's awesome. And I want to go back to what you just said, that it there's a kind of a fantastical answer to a reasonable question. And that for me, as someone who loves nature and spends a lot of time, or now I live in Lubbock, Texas, which is about the flattest, driest place on the planet. It feels that way anyway. And uh but nature, I think, is where you look for it, and the wonder of it sometimes is where you look for it. And so to have a question that's like, are electric eels real? What's the deal with narwhals? And the answer to be wow, do I have a story for you? Yeah, you are not gonna believe this. That is just such a cool thing that like you said, that's sometimes we lose along the way. We we forget to look for or something. I I don't know how to articulate that, right?
SPEAKER_02:But I think that's right. And I think a lot of it is a mind game that I know I played with myself where I thought, like, okay, well, childhood wonder is a thing for six-year-olds. Like it's a thing that's kind of locked in the glass case of the past or in childhood. But like you think of the enormity of nature anywhere you are. I mean, you can be the student of one tree species in your yard, and you will never master it. Like, you think of the enormity of it. Wonder and surprise at even the bare facts of nature. Like, there is no reason for that to live in childhood. Like, I I'm currently writing a book about dandelions for Timber Press. I thought I knew. I thought I knew a fair amount about dandelions and very common plant, and I've been shocked, just kind of again. And it's just so fun to to kind of acknowledge my own limitations and to think of those as a doorway to wonder and not something to be frustrating or galling. I think that's a thing that we lose sometimes. Like we're used to being in the newcomer mindset when we're kids, and then sometimes it takes a bit of intentionality to get back there, I think, as grown-ups.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there is something in a lot of us as adults that that just constantly reaches for that, like we're constantly longing for it, even if we can't like point a finger at it. You know what I mean? I think back to when the first uh Avatar movie came out, and there was like this documented phenomenon where people would go and see this movie and walk out of it and be depressed because of this fantastical world that they were just immersed in. And that comes out of, I think, not spending enough time looking at ours because yeah, there's like weird blue aliens and glowy things, but there is so much out there that will just blow your mind. It's just like, how does that work? Why does that work? Like, what trick of evolution came up with this slug or this snail that lives in volcanoes? Why is that a thing? Like, that's incredible.
SPEAKER_02:Or ways you can find other fantastical worlds kind of hiding in plain sight. Like, I went on a night frog walk not too long ago with somebody who'd never done one before. And like, I think she lived a mile or so from where we were, but we got a little out in the country. And it was like the sounds like what is that? And it's like, well, there are like six species of katy dids you can hear right now. Like, there are three different species of frogs we can hear. Like, there was somebody with us who was a real entomology nerd, and was like, oh, that's this katy did. I'm gonna try to find it. And we're like, You're gonna try to find it? That sounds impossible, but the person I was with was just really blown away by how strange it was to just be a mile from her house in the dark. Um, and what a different world it is. And I mean, doing that is a way to find a different world. Sometimes I talk about just zooming in. Like, I mean, turn over a rock. Like, I think of myself as a nature nerd, and how often am I surprised by something that I have no idea what it is? Constantly. I have I have a mushroom nerd pal, and we go out in the woods, and she's constantly showing me things that's like, nope, never noticed that before. This slime mold or this tiny pinprick of a mushroom. And it's funny, like my depression can constantly um badger me with sort of imposter syndrome. And that's one way to look at it. Like, I remember when I was getting myself back to the woods thinking like I'm gonna do this wrong somehow, which is on the one hand tragic, and on one hand, but if you think of it as more like a menu of different wonders that that are just there if you take the time to really try to acquaint yourself with it. Because it's not I don't care about facts or names because someone's gonna quiz me. I do it because I'm trying to make a connection, like learning a stranger's name, so they're not a stranger anymore. Like these are like breadcrumbs of information that help me feel more more connected. Um I live next to a cemetery, so like lichens are one for me. That I mean, lichens are amazing. It's I didn't know where they were, and then you start looking into it and to have a photosynthesizer and a fungi working together, and then my poet brain is like, okay, so it's like uh it's like a shepherd and its flock living together, but it's hard to say who's the shepherd and who's the flock in the relationship, and so it's cool in like a meta way, but then you can kind of dive into like, oh, this one's edible. Oh, this one is this color because of this element, and I mean, most you can find lichen on sidewalks, yeah. It's there, it's just like it's almost giving yourself permission to take it seriously enriches your world. Because I think that's part of the disconnect. Like, if it isn't part of productivity, and if it's not making you money, and if it's not part of your direct career, why are you making time for it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, oh yeah, that's so well said that I joke a lot, and my wife and I talk about this a lot that I have this really nasty habit of turning like my hobbies into side hustles because it's in my brain, right? It's one of these things that like what you just said, if it's not producing something, if it's not part of this unit of whatever, why are you doing it? And I've had to really take a step back recently. I'm in my late 30s now, and I realized that I got to where I wasn't doing things that were just for me. Yeah, you know, I wasn't doing things that like built into my own life. I did it because I needed to go sell something or I needed to go do something. And so, like, whether that's going out in nature and looking for liken, or what I kind of want to get into next is some of the social media stuff you do. It can be both. Like it can be a job, it can be a personal thing. But I think for me at least, and and I I'd be interested to hear your take on this. Like, when it starts to feel like just another job, like that's when I really have to reflect a lot. I really have to look at it and be like, okay, what are my motivations here? Why am I doing this?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, it's gotten muddy for me lately because it was like accidentally my side hustle became the job. And so sometimes I feel a little lost in the sauce when I'm trying to think of what I want to do next, because it's like, all right, a lot of the things I attribute the success of some of the books I've written and the social media to sort of the human innate sense of sincerity and authenticity. So on the one hand, I feel like when what I do works, it's because people sense that I actually care about the things I'm talking about. And I think that's true. And yet that is also my job now. So I'm like, okay, but what is the smart career thing to do next? And then it's like, okay, but the smart career thing to do next is the thing I care about. And so that starts to feel like weird in a way of like there used to be a firmer separation between these things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And sometimes it leads me to have like secret writing projects that I don't show anybody to kind of like remind myself that this is for me, or like I'll co-write something with Leslie, is a horror writer. She had a horror novel come out last year called The Unmothers. Yeah. So so we're both writing nerds from way back. Yeah. So it is, it does get kind of muddled sometimes for me. That's true of everything in terms of. I wrote a book called Something in the Woods Loves You about my struggles with mental health. Um, but one of my big breakthroughs in mental health isn't that I feel like I've figured out depression. Like I was so worried about writing that book that I desperately didn't want to write the book that's like, go touch a tree and you feel better. Like the toxic positivity universalizing my per my experiences, stuff that I hate. But like the thing I felt that I got through sort of the mental health journey captured in that book was more like a rejection of shame as the thing that made everything else harder. And the four that I came up with was thinking of my depression as brain weather, as part of natural cycles. And just quickly, that metaphor goes like this: like if I planned a picnic and it was canceled by a thunderstorm, I would be disappointed, but I wouldn't be ashamed. Why? All right, well, thunderstorms are natural phenomenon, I didn't invite it, I don't control thunderstorms. So why would I feel ashamed if it canceled my picnic? All right, well, mental illness, in my case, depression, it's a natural phenomenon. I didn't invite it, I don't steer it, it's a thunderstorm. So, like, I can be disappointed when I wake up and feel a real serious burden of depression. But I can kick shame out of the equation with that trick. And so that lets me um be kinder to myself, because it used to be I wouldn't acknowledge it because I was too ashamed to think of myself as somebody who couldn't think my way through depression. But what we're talking about here, the hustle culture versus leaving time for what you actually like. I talk about that in the book, but it's funny, like, even though I know that, air quotes, in kind of an intellectual level, it doesn't matter. Like, I have to continually, in thinking of my own internal landscape as a natural landscape, it's subject to cycles and seasons. And understanding that means that, like, all right, I'm not crushed when I realize I've kind of fallen into the same like ditch that I've been in before. Um, and then sometimes at this point I laugh at myself, like opening to the chapter about the thing that I had figured out two years ago that now I need to remind myself of. It's like a note slipped across time.
SPEAKER_00:I I really like that's really interesting. And I think that so much of what you say resonates with me too, because I I often, when I'm teaching, I talk about ecosystems. We talk about ecology in my class, and I relate that in my own life to my life and my internal, external environment, everything around me. And like in any healthy ecosystem, there's all these pieces that that fit together. And sometimes one of them gets a little out of whack for a while, and the ecosystem figures out how to recover, but with enough little pieces and enough enough time and enough care, like it recovers, and it's something a little bit different, but it's still something that functions well, and it's still something that's that's good and that's new and all that. And I think that's really cool. And okay, so that that leads me into my next question or my next kind of big topic is uh your uh sort of persona is not the right word, but your outlet of the crypto naturalist, which again I discovered a long time ago through some of the nature poetry and stuff that you put out there. And for any of the uh for anyone that hasn't like experienced it, like you go go follow the crypto naturalist because it's this interesting mix, at least in my opinion as a as a fan, as a consumer of it, uh, of really like poignant deep stuff and then like really funny things and then like almost creepy stuff, which I really appreciate. And it it melds together into this really interesting vibe that in my mind encapsulates so much of what how nature feels just in general. Like I think you write that really well. So I'm curious just to hear how you decided to start that and and where like how that developed over time.
SPEAKER_02:It first developed when I was still in those meetings about meetings as just a full act of rebellion of like, all right, I want to do something just for me that is the opposite of what I am currently doing, trying to be very suit and tie. I was kind of on the I don't know how this happened, but I found myself on the administration side of academia, and that was, if anything, even more uncomfortable. Um but so I'm like, all right, well, what if I just do something just for fun, just utterly for fun, that resolutely reject is for anything. And so it was all right, love of nature and fantasy, science fiction, monsters. It's like, all right, perfect, easy. Like I had I started this podcast that was scripted, um, short episodic fiction. That's just this one guy who was the crypto naturalist, and he was a bit of an homage. I think of him as a character homage to the sort of nature shows I liked in the late 80s as a kid, and in particular was called Wild America, which was this dude from Tennessee. Yeah, who just was like, Oh, I'm in a swamp and now I'm picking up an alligator snapping turtle, and oh, he's pretty angry. Uh I was like that guy, but it's the X-Files, yeah. Um so that was the premise. But since it was just for me, I wasn't really thinking of like a brand in the sense. So, like, yeah, I would throw in poetry, or I would have on guest poets, and on the social media, sometimes it would be the creepy stuff, and sometimes I would just post a nature poem I wrote, or a cool thing that happened when I was volunteering at a wildlife rescue, and all of it just kind of I would say to people later when it started to have more of a following that like I understood that I had like an inscrutable brand and that that was strange. And somebody pointed out to me at one point, it's like, yeah, but you are the connective tissue, like this is all stuff you're interested in, and so it can feel connected because it's all coming from your brain. And it's like, all right, yeah, I like that because it gives me permission to continue to do sort of whatever I want. And that's that's how that the social media presence in the podcast grew. Um, it does now sometimes create small friction because, like, this novel I have coming out in February, it's from Ballantine Books, big cool fantasy sci-fi publisher. My editor was the editor for The Martian and Ready Player One. Really cool. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Julian Pavia, awesome guy, awesome editor. Um, but like it leads toward the creepy. Like it is more of a story of hidden nature being foreboding. Now it's about someone coming to terms with it and realizing that the sort of mysterious nature and real nature are both miraculous in their own way and kind of finding his place in in this new landscape. But some advanced copies have gone out, and there's a website that sort of gets opinions from advanced readers. Great response to the book. But one review I saw said, like, well, I really loved his memoir about depression, and it was so gentle, and honestly, this was just really too scary for me. And I was like, Yeah, fair. Like, I I publish a lot of gentle nature poetry and uh and stuff about the poetic side of nature and mental health. And it's like, all right, well, now but here's horror elements in a fantasy novel. So yeah, so sometimes it can be confusing to people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I I I can see that. I can see that, but at the same time, what a cool picture of how nature is just uh at a large scale, right? And and I'm thinking through this as I'm saying it, but I I have always thought that we put uh like value judgments on things that just are. Yeah, nature is just being nature, and so you'll watch this documentary and you start rooting for the the penguin or the baby seal, and then oh, here comes the polar bear or the orcas, and it's an emotional roller coaster. And there are uh quote unquote or or what we would think of as like dark, scary parts of nature, but it it also just is what it is, right? And I think that one of the things that uh at least in my opinion, or in my experience and the people that I've talked to and worked with, that one of the things that gets people off track sometimes is that we uh as humans, and maybe this is just part of our nature, we try to put everything in neat little boxes, right? Like this is this is this, and we're over here and nature's over here, and all these, but like it's it's all just part of the same thing. Absolutely. And if as people, as our own like internal ecosystems, we have the happy fun parts and the whimsical parts and then the dark parts too, like nature's the same way. And but I I do take that that comment though of someone commenting like oh is a little too scary based on this. Like, I I've written a children's book and then I post like some really most of my stuff on social media is me yelling about five-minute crafts and the which I love.
SPEAKER_02:I love the I love the There Are No Seeds and Bananas trip.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god. It's just you Jared, I get so many of those in my inbox. It's like everyone sees them and they're like, oh, I know exactly what some must do.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you're doing good work, someone needs to be answering these. They're shocking.
SPEAKER_00:And so someone made a comment. There's actually a section in my book talking about things that we can actually do with bananas and and ways that like we can use it to do everything from like hair products to shoe shine, to there's all these ways we can repurpose the peels that actually do things. And someone was like, Don't you spend all of your time yelling about bananas? I'm like, okay, listen.
SPEAKER_02:Specifically, yeah. Specific context, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So, no, I I totally get that. So you've written a lot between your poetry, your fiction, your memoir, everything else. Like it's really a great body of work. Like, how do you decide? And you kind of answered this a little bit already, but I I just wondered if you have a process of like what's next. How do you think through like what's on the horizon sort of project plan?
SPEAKER_02:I try to respect my ADHD, where like my ideal career really is like this year is a nonfiction year, and this year is a fiction year. And if I have my way, I will sort of do that kind of alternation into the future. And then the poetry just kind of always happens. Poetry always happens because it's a tool for me. Geez, it's cathartic, it's an outlet, and maybe most importantly, I'm always saying I don't know what I actually think about a thing until I write it down. Um because my brain is a noisy place, and sometimes it's a tough place. And things can remain slippery and abstract as ideas until I start tethering them to words and anchoring them to the page, and then they take shape in a different way for me, and I can like have a conversation, I can sit the idea down and talk to it. And poetry does that for me. And so I have a fourth poetry collection that's getting close, but what getting close means is when it's long enough to be a poetry collection, I'll put it out as a new poetry collection. So like the poetry accretes, and then the longer projects, like I just I really do have eclectic interests, but you've hit on it. I don't find them to be as separate as sometimes I think other people do. Like, I don't find there to be that stark of a separation from what it is to write fiction and what it is to write nonfiction. Because even like this book I'm writing about dandelions, Timber Press published the memoir, and they came to me and said, We're just doing this series of short illustrated books on specific plants and animals. Do you want to do one? And I said, Yes, dandelions. Um, which really came from me struggling with all or nothing thinking in my own life. And dandelions are an interesting subject in terms of the conversation of thinking of non-native versus invasive, how we categorize them, what we do about them, what does it matter, ecosystem services they provide. So I picked dandelions because it was a thing I wanted to think about. But even though it's nonfiction, the way I think about it is still as a storyteller, it's the same as when I wrote about depression. So, no, I'm not inventing plot, and I'm not thinking about character arcs, but I am thinking about putting myself in the reader's shoes, and I'm thinking about human animals being creatures that understand the world through stories. So they don't feel that different to me. It's more like a flavor thing of when I'm working on the dandelion book, I go down rabbit holes where somebody will make a claim on a blog, and then I'll spend the next hour looking up peer-reviewed papers to see if there's anything behind it. Yeah. And often there's not. It's interesting. Like, dandelions are so common that somebody'll say a thing, and then you'll see the game of telephone on the internet. Where like seeds can travel 500 miles. Okay. Like, I see this here. I see it repeated on a paper at Cornell. Not a paper, like a blog article. And then, like, I'm like, based on what? Well, based on nothing. Someone said it once and then it got repeated. Like, could that be true? Yeah, sure. Under ideal circumstances. It's that repeating for the dandelion paper. So that's part of the process. When it's the novel, it's not that at all. It's I'm bored with this section. So I will write in all caps, write a transition later, and I will move on to the next thing that's fun. So um they don't feel that different, but what's fun for me is to add variety to the writing just to kind of keep it all interesting for me.
SPEAKER_00:I totally get that. And I I identify strongly with having to wrangle or work towards the strengths or the patterns of an ADHD brain. And like having the people are always like, you do so many things. I'm like, yeah, I do, because I have to, yeah, or I get like in like I'll vapor lock at some point if I get a it hurts to not to try to lock yourself into the same pattern for too long.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I'll like sit down to write a paper or work on a book or do whatever. And then after a while, my brain's just like, no, you're done with this today.
SPEAKER_02:And respecting that is is important. It doesn't always play nice with like modern work culture, right? So it's hard, but I do try to think of it as a feature, not a bug sometimes. Because it also can do hyper focus sometimes. I mean, did you ever get that? Like we're just all in in a way that that people who don't have don't struggle with ADHD don't do. The problem is I don't control that switch, right? Like there are times I wish I could flip on the hyper focus mode because I really want to write 2,000 words today. And yeah, I don't control it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.
SPEAKER_00:I totally get that. And then you do what you can and then you work around it. And eventually, what what I tell people a lot is in the end, like it gets done. It all gets done. The time scale may be a little goofy, but it all gets done. And then sometimes it's like way more than I intended to get done.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah. Yeah, my whole thing, like sometimes people be like, Well, how do you write a whole novel or how do you write a whole book? And it I have this more than nothing mantra, is all it is. I have I have the saying, consistency over intensity. Like, stop thinking about the whole book. Start thinking about I'm gonna write at least a paragraph every day. Like, that's how you write a whole book. Um, so it's like it's almost like I can't think about the book, I can only think about like the pattern, like the habit. Like I yeah, and and for me, with the with the weird brain, like I will loosen it sometimes so I can continue to feel successful of like it's 500 words or it's 20 minutes of dedicated effort. Yeah, because sometimes it's just that squirm me in the chair, I don't wanna. And but like if I sit with that for 10-15 minutes, like like sometimes it'll break loose. But if it doesn't, I'm still counting it like as a win if I do the 20 minutes, like still effort, yeah. It's just again, all these tricks to and validate that idea we talked about that our own minds are parts of ecosystems cycles, and reject the thing I used to do that was all or nothing. Either I'm on track or I'm totally broken, either I'm on the path or I'm completely lost, one or the other. Zero, zero sum game. And now I've gotten a lot better at being like, no, this is this kind of day. Success looks like this on this day, and it's gonna look like something else on a different day, and that's perfectly okay and perfectly natural.
SPEAKER_00:And that's awesome. And I know you don't know it, but that's something like I needed to hear this week. So I appreciate that. Because I'm I like I've been traveling for work, and you get back from being away at a conference or whatever for a week, and you're six months behind somehow. Like there's some weird time vortex, and then it just like feels like, oh my god, I haven't accomplished anything. When the fact is, it's like, no, you still accomplish a lot, and you take the success where you can.
SPEAKER_02:And the conference is important too and deserves to have room. Like, but you're right, like you can there are a lot of weird forces that are out there trying to make you feel like a failure. But yeah, it's hard. I have to do this. My my my partner and I do it constantly of like just kind of saying our off-the-wall anxieties out loud, like the worst case scenario stuff. Because boy, it is nice. I mean, one of the fun things about humans and language is that we can borrow other people's brains for this stuff too, that we don't have to take our own word for everything all the time.
SPEAKER_00:That's a cool way to think about that. I like it. So to bring it back a little bit, thinking about your childhood and growing up and spending all this time in nature, do you have a and I asked this question for a specific reason, sort of. Do you have like a favorite natural space? Is there a place that like if you think of I'm gonna go be in nature, that's what pops into your head?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, generally it's sort of like Ohio deep woods. And for me now, there's like a specific trail in a specific park that is it's like the it's like a trail that's a trail in name only, and most people who go there don't use it. I think it's called a primitive trail on a map. It's muddy, and I can tell by the orb weaver webs that I take in the face when I go on it that nobody else is walking on it. But it's just this crooked little footpath that leads past a bunch of really huge shagbark hickories. And so, like, it's a very popular place with red squirrels and gray squirrels. I saw a barred owl once out there and just kind of sat on the leaves for as long as it would tolerate me. And it's just it feels like honestly, it feels like the woods where I grew up. And the success looks different on different days, things apply to that too. Because yes, it is a specific place, but there are days when going to nature means finding a big tree and sitting. I see more animals, I see more of nature in general if I sit still and I do it a long time because the birds that acclimate to me, what I will see in the leaf litter, what I will hear is so different than when I'm trying to really cover ground. But covering ground is a different day for different success. I have a kind of depression that feels like that, like the vapor lock you mentioned, where like what I need is motion. And on those days, it's like I'm gonna do the mile loop and maybe I'll do it three or four times. And it still matters to me that it's in nature. I still see things, I still startle white-tailed deer, I still see a jack in the pulpit or some plant that is fleeting, I'll see some kind of new fungus, but like I need to cover ground. And so those are two different kinds of being there that both are medicinal to me and both count as success.
SPEAKER_00:Like when you are someone who spends a lot of time in nature, we paint pictures in our mind. And I was just curious to hear your answer because as a writer and as someone who paints these things with language a lot of times, it was just it's interesting for me to hear how people talk about it and what people describe about their favorite places in nature. Like, so I I do some photography, and I have a lot of friends that are in this photography community, and when I ask them a similar question, a lot of times they'll talk about sort of the colors and the views and the the pictures they brought that that nature paints for them, and it's cool to hear you say that you get to sit and listen and that you experience it through sort of that quiet. I like I like that a lot.
SPEAKER_02:Part of it is that part of why I feel better in nature is that it refuses to be stagnant, that it is much more of a verb than a noun on any given day. So, like it's never one view, it's nature forces me to be present because like the opposite of it is like depression, kind of internal voice that tells me that everything's ruined or there's no point in anything, or like something's a lost cause. These are like static states of hopelessness or sadness, and I always say that depression is a liar, that's kind of part of it tricks. Now, going out in nature, when I'm struggling with all of these sort of mean abstracts that are claustrophobic and make me feel trapped, like I don't have an encounter with the concept of Eastern Cottontail Rabbit. I have an encounter with that one on that day, and it's doing this, and it wasn't doing that last time I saw it. And the whole vibe is different on that day, and that encounter isn't like any other encounter. And sitting in nature or walking through nature, part of the point for me is that it isn't static. It's like, yeah, it's a place, but it's still a place on a rock hurtling through outer space, and that place is always moving and the soil and the plants and the trees and the animals. And so it will snap me out of that claustrophobic feeling in my own life because like I can't ignore the dynamism, the motion, the constant systems, cycles, organisms, growth, decay. Like it is all there in such a vibrant way that also feels like home, even though it's and so the fact that it's constantly shifting and feels like home helps me have peace with like impermanence. It helps me have peace with the idea that I'm always changing, aging, growing, having backslides, and what I thought I knew about mental health. Like the fact that it is a place but it is always changing kind of helps me make friends with that in in my own life and body and mind.
SPEAKER_00:That's really cool. That's really cool. Well, as we kind of wrap up here, there's a question that I like to spring on guests, especially if they're not expecting it's fun for me. Because it's sort of a big question I ask him, I'm asking you to distill a lot. But if there was something you wanted to leave with our audience, uh, if there was a piece of advice, a piece of wisdom or something you've gained, and that can be like about nature, it can be about writing, it can be your favorite cookie recipe, I don't care. Like, what would you want someone to take away with them after listening to his chat for a while?
SPEAKER_02:Can I read a poem?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you can. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:I'll read a poem. Because I have a poem that's sort of a thesis statement that I like. Hold on. It's never too far away. Okay. This is a poem called Woodland You. It's easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It's less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature, the pathways of your mind, your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock, your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass. It's the same as the nature you make time to love, that you practice loving, the forest, the meadow, the sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.
SPEAKER_00:That's great.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks. That's a thing I constantly have to come back to. Um, and it's why I find nature so healing is that I oftentimes don't have like an instinctual love for myself, but I easily have an instinctual love of nature. So remembering that I'm part of that same grand system that isn't in any way actually separate from myself helps me get back there to to making peace and finding finding love for myself that isn't based on productivity, isn't based on anything. The idea that my worth is innate in the same way that the worth of the forest is innate, in a way that I don't have to argue with myself.
SPEAKER_00:That's yeah, wonderful. That's really beautiful. I like that a lot. Well, Jared, I I appreciate your time and you coming to chat. I think that in a lot of ways, I I feel like we're kindred spirits in some ways, in a lot of the ways that we think about the world, and I and I appreciate hearing some of the things I think from another person. Like that's again validating. We don't have to like we get to share this, like you said. So, real quick, uh, run us through a list of of where we can find you, what you've got coming up, where people can order your book, all that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so the main thing I'd love people to do is pre-order the new novel, Strange Animals, and you can order it any in the normal places. I'm a big fan of ordering it from whoever your favorite local bookstore is. Yeah. Um, the book about nature and mental health is something in the woods loves you. I have three collections of nature poetry, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, Love Notes from the Hollow Tree, and Leaf Litter. Uh, and you can find information on any of those at jaredkanderson.com. Or I'm the crypto naturalist on most social media, so you can find me there.
SPEAKER_00:Very cool, very cool. Well, man, that was great. I really enjoyed chatting with you. I'll have to try to do this again sometime. And I can't wait to read the book. Cool.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm excited for people to see it.
SPEAKER_00:Y'all, I feel like I could have taken notes during this episode. Maybe I should have. Maybe I'll go back and do that because there was so much wisdom and knowledge and and just insight that Jared shared. And I hope that you really enjoyed it because I certainly really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for listening to Planthropology and being a part of the show. You know I do this because I love you, and because it brings me so much joy just to tell stories about nature and nature people and help really cool plant and nature people tell their own stories. So thanks for following. Thanks for listening. I hope you go follow Jared all over social media, the Crypto Naturalist. I hope you'll go pre-order his book, Strange Animals. I already have, and I'm very excited to read it here in a few months. Planthropology is written, hosted, directed, produced, all the other things by yours truly, Vikram Baliga. Our intro music, and normally our outro music, is by the award-winning composer Nick Scout. But today, since I didn't have a mid-roll, I dropped in my buddy Rui's song Yarrow here at the end. You can find links to their stuff in the show notes. If you want to support the show, you can go find all that information there too. So thanks for being a part of it. Keep being kind to one another. If you have not yet been kind to the people around you, give that a shot. We really need you to do that. Do that as a favor to your plant daddy here. Who I didn't I didn't like that. That had a bad mouthfeel. I'm gonna leave it in, but I'm also not gonna say it again. So in a couple of weeks, I have another great sort of spooky Halloween y episode for you. And I I don't want to ruin the surprise, but it's so good. It's gonna be so good. So thanks again for listening. Be kind, be good, be safe, and keep being really cool plant people.
