But we look down and we can't see beyond the cross over Tomah I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being with us. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Janine Herbst on Capitol Hill 8 more witnesses are scheduled to testify this week in the impeachment inquiries public hearings including National Security Council official Tim Morrison N.P.R.'s Bob Yellin has more House Democrats released the transcript of Morrison's private testimony and he says that u.s. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sunland and Trump spoke about half a dozen times he says sawn land was a central player in the plan to exchange military assistance for the announcement of investigations that would help Trump politically Trump has distanced himself from song Land saying he doesn't know him very well N.P.R.'s Bobby Allen. Clashes between pro-democracy protesters and riot police in Hong Kong are growing hundreds of activists battle police who tried to storm the campus of the Polytechnic University there occupying activists fought back with petrol bombs and set barricades on fire forcing police to temporarily retreat though some arrests were made police used tear gas water cannon and rubber bullets the protests are now in the 6 month. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he's sorry for embracing the controversial police practice known as stop and frisk during his time as mayor from member station w n y c just a gold Gould reports that as he appears to be getting ready to enter the Democratic race for president at a black church in Brooklyn Bloomberg said thinking about his future made him think about his past and as mayor he says he didn't fully understand the impact Stop and Frisk had on the predominantly black and Latin x. Men who were searched and on their communities he said he's sorry I got something important raw I got something important really wrong some leaders including Reverend Al Sharpton said they appreciated the apology but it will take more to make up for the damage done to communities of color others including the current mayor and police union said it was too little too late for n.p.r. News I'm Jessica Gould in New York City Guatemala is getting ready to receive migrants who return from the u.s. To the northern jungle province of Canton Rio Martin reports this is after discussions last week and got water malas controversial asylum agreement with the u.s. The administration of watermelon President Jimmy more on this has offered few details about the controversial asylum a court signed last July what is known is that what a model would receive though seeking asylum in the us from a door and Honduras if they had passed and what the on their way north but many and what Amalek and whether the country is in a position to house and provide long term assistance for other migrants they say many communities in the region a but then have a poverty rate of more than 50 percent and that the area is rife with drug activity for n.p.r. News I'm ready Amar and you're listening to n.p.r. News from Washington. Elemis protesters marched peacefully through Paris today after violence wrecked yesterday's demonstrations N.P.R.'s Eleanor Beardsley reports the movement is celebrating its 1st anniversary many yellow vest demonstrators were frustrated after young men wearing black hoods and masks infiltrated their March and wreaked violence Saturday today marches through Paris and a handful of other French that he's proceeded peacefully What started as a protest to a gas tax last November swelled into a nationwide month long movement that paralyzed Emanuel presidency though my call eventually granted tax breaks and minimum wage bonuses concessions in the billions of euros to quell the movement most of the poor white workers who call themselves yellow vests say there's been no improvement in their lives Eleanor Beardsley n.p.r. News Paris. Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is backing the 50 percent price hike for gasoline the fuel nationwide protests yesterday some turned violent riot police and security forces clashed with demonstrators in Tehran and dozens of other cities Yeah Tola blames the unrest on the country's opponents it's not clear how many people were hurt or arrested but officials say 3 people died in the demonstrations Tehran says price hikes are expected to raise around $2.00 and a half $1000000000.00 a year which they say will be used to help subsidize some $60000000.00 low income Iranians as the markets are trading higher at this hour the Nikkei in Japan is up 110th of a percent the hang saying up 8 tenths of a percent I'm Janine Herbst n.p.r. News in Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from the Charles Stuart mob foundation supporting efforts to promote a just equitable and sustainable society in its hometown of Flint Michigan and communities around the world more admire dot org and the listeners who support this n.p.r. Station. Robert McFarlane as an explorer and a linguist of landscape and I carry his books with me wherever I travel His newest book under land a deep time journey is an odyssey full of surprises through caves and catacombs under land and under cities under forests and the meltwater of Greenland since before we were homo sapiens here right humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and to make meaning darkness in the natural world and in human life he suggests is a medium a vision and to send a movement toward revelation in a moment in which a new relationship to the ground we stand on has become a civilizational calling Robert MacFarlane's way of seeing the world at once scholarly and playful literary enchanting refreshes and motivates in a most life giving way. Look at the gift of being. Look at the astonishing responsibility of legacy living there is one image at the heart as it were of the land and of beyond which is the be opened. The stretched and that. First is in a way the 1st mark of odds that the maker would place their hand on the cave and then take a mouthful of. Bread occur often and then spit the dust against. The way and so you leave the ghost print. For me that. It is reaching across time that is pressing against. That leaning also into the future but also the hand of help and of collaboration and I find it everywhere. I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being Robert McFarlane is a reader in literature and the geo humanities at the University of Cambridge his many books include mountains of the mind and the last words let's just punch in you know that you there's this sentence you have. For nearly 2 decades I have been writing about the relationships of landscapes and the human heart. And you know I just find that such an intriguing way for you to describe your focus and that intersection and I I wonder you know how would you how would you trace the earliest deepest roots of this time and even as I as I wrote that question I realize that's kind of an under land metaphor that like the deepest roots of this orientation in your earliest life in the in the background of your life and childhood. That is a searching question and a very good one for it and I think whenever whenever we find a route and follow it back we will think we've reached its And then it will branch off again and surprise especially I guess if I were to follow the 1st route back it would it would take me into the mountains that I didn't live in but I did in a sense grow up in and with the mountains of the can go in the north east of Scotland where my my grandparents lived for many decades and that's really where I walked into the landscape for the 1st time and I have some pristine ated memories from those places where everything else from those years those early years is a mistake can't remember anything from my Nottinghamshire childhood but I can remember picking up a road that was as exotic as coral to me the side of a Highland river so I think that the power of that place. Those Arctic mountains of Britain they they grieved deep into me. And I also was intrigued to see somewhere a mention that your father that you grew up in coal mining country and that your father was a lung doctor and that you know that juxtaposition also seem to me to be at that point between landscape and the human heart. Well that's a very I hadn't thought of it like that but you're. Right. It was a way that I began to look inside people as it were he would bring these x. Rays home of people's lungs confidentially obviously you know not displacing anything but he would hold them up against the wind as a light box and we would my brother and I would see into this huge space of the human lung and he would show us the spotting that showed you know black cloud silicosis and he would just talk about what had happened to the people who were working almost under our feet. And the happiest person I knew when I was growing up was a coal miner who was no longer a coal miner and he taught me how to whistle. Because he loved being in the sun. So yeah so I as I said to you where we began the the official interview I have been reading you for years in kind of the sweep of your writing and exploring and I think you said it this way in another interview that you're the gradient of your body of work has been tending downwards. Because you began writing about mountains and mountains of the mind and then there were the valleys and wars and wild places and then there's traversing the world on foot in the old ways and now you have gone down to the worlds beneath our feet and you said we know so little of the Worlds beneath our feet and I think just naming that not something that we can think about how little we know of the world beneath our feet that they are dark places in several senses that so I sometimes say to my children we walk on this. Crust of this raging space of life and matter in all its vibrancy and and fury and we know who nothing of it our sight stops at our toes the tops at ground level and sight is so bound up with modern ways of knowing we can look up and see literally trillions of miles we can see the light coming from. Across the Universe across the galaxy but we look down and we can't see beyond the grass or the tarmac. Yeah and you went to such an unexpected array of places. Didn't that that then surface beyond which we can't see I mean it was really stunning I don't I don't know exactly what I expected when I open the book but. You know I think I expected the roots of trees right I didn't expect caves and a dark matter a laboratory below the ground in Yorkshire and this sub to rainy and. Alternative Universe in Paris and write any of burial chambers in Finland for high level nuclear waste and then all the way through all your adventures there's also this existential and elemental echo to the physical act of going downwards into the dark right and you you say it and. You know that since we before we were homo sapiens humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find to make meaning and that there's something seemingly paradoxical that darkness might be a medium of vision and descent maybe a movement towards revelation and as you describe all of your adventures also you also even though that is true that there's something strangely life giving about that descent but it you over and over again not just thought about but experience how it can enter into it if it is to make that doubt or dismiss Yeah you're often your mind is screaming at you not to enter this space because it perceives it as a place of of confinement and deprivation and indeed for many people that's what the under land has been prisoners and forced laborers but it has also been a place of discovery and of Revelation and I as we've touched on the 1st my 1st love is my Manton's and and the 1st book I ever tried to understand why we were drawn up would. It's often at risk of our own lives but early on in working on this book I wrote I began to realize how young that impulse is within a. Western a modern imagination it's only 300 years old it's a punk it's a stripling and yet we see oversee this this may on Everest 200 plus people queuing at 8800 metres to get there summit selfie when you look back to the 17th century and it's not absolute but broadly speaking there is no fetish of the summit there is neither summit fever and wow I felt that fever burning in me at times and it's still there but you go back 65000 years in Western Europe and you find Neanderthal artists going into caves spaces right hard to reach cave spaces to make art on the limestone walls of those caves Wow I mean that sends a shiver down my spine across time. I'm feeling like for somebody who's listening and has a read the book I would love for them to just hear a little bit like you know a little bit about one of the places you went and I I think you know and also when I 1st started reading you and I actually was looking for it again and I couldn't find it or number reading and one of your books about how you climb trees I found that so thrilling to think that that is something that an adult can still do. But also I feel like you took that same freedom with your body and that same sense of. Curiosity when you. Lose your true impossible spaces I mean I don't know what's a story that you like to tell about this under land journey if you have to do is one I mean I can tell I'd love to tell you a story I could just read you the 1st lines of the book. Which are a story which sort of me but a sort of every understand story yeah I just I've just got it great. The way into the understand is through the ribbon trunk of an old ash tree the late summer heat wave heavy air bases browsing drowsy over meadow crass gold of standing corn green of fresh hay rows black of rocks on stubble fields. Somewhere down on lower ground and seems fire is burning it smoke a column a child drops stones one by one into a metal bucket. Ting ting nearly ashes base its trunk splits into a rough river just wide enough that a person might slip into the trees hollow. And there drop into the dark space that opens below the rifts edges the smooth to shine by those who have gone this way before passing through the older and younger. Members to tell them this is On Being today with linguist of landscape and under land author Robert McFarlane. There's this counterpart to the reality. Of the of the world beneath our feet the world's beneath our feet. Which is also a huge part of the story that true you to this and that is this is part of the story you tell which is that it defies whole frontier of what we're discovering about what is below but yet we also live in an age as you say have untimely surface things of and throughout history in on burials. Yes this. History or the future everyone say over took this book as I wrote it that's probably because I'm so slowly it took 6 or 7 years really to to to finish. But what overtook me was a sense that the under land was rising to the surface in this restless that we have made and a hastening the restlessness of around ourselves now I mean to give examples of what I mean by and burials permafrost is no longer perma it is melting and flushing and as it does so it's releasing ancient methane deposits it's releasing the bodies of of reindeer killed by anthrax and the spores alive and in the air again and setting off epidemics it's releasing 50000 year old wolf pups in there in the Yukon perfectly preserved and structures to an American cultural missile base in the northwest of Greenland is rising to the surface of the ice cap it was left because it was thought that it would always be buried by snow fall but but now snow melters exceeding snow fall and so it's coming to the light and it's frightening it's frightening and then there's also just the phenomenon that is very ordinary of spring ball some flowers coming up earlier than they should right and so many great things this is another kind of resurfacing which is has puti and yet is easier feels wrong Zach Lee Yeah exactly that it's a wonderfully put has beauty but is eerie that uncanny ness of seeing things out of place but also out of time really it is an eeriness it's not a horror but these quieter ones are they are unsettled there is a sense that things are unsettled in Britain last summer we had this drought that went on for 2 months and one of the things that happened. And was that crop marks began to show on the part fields and these crop marks register the presence of old buried structures which never have been able to see but they show up like a kind of x. Ray We're back with x. Rays again on the landscape and because people fly more drones now more easily you can suddenly people started posting this footage they were like that's a Roman Watchtower or that looks like a nearly thick cause waiting closure this is never been seen before but suddenly this land was disclosing these these old histories. Right and and a point you make is that in a larger sense this these phenomena also. Said it disrupts simple notions of Earth's history as orderly they they have a power to shift our perception of something as elemental as as time he said at the end periods are mixing and entangling. Yes I mean time spending 67 years thinking about the underworld has really. Stuck my sense of die it's deepened it it's tangled it but the other thing is that the underworld tells the future and this I was not expecting that at all I should have known because Greek myth tells us the Q my oracle at Delphi they foretell the future but they do so by peering into the underworld and I were doing it scientifically where I scoring down to possibly up to a 1000000 years ago now in terms of data in Antarctica only using that in part to foretell our own climate futures right right. You know in a in a very different context these days more of the context of how people in this country and your in your country as well are very deaf socially and politically unsettled. I find it. Useful and in its way calming to invoke You know what Martin Luther King Jr called the long arc of the moral universe what a phrase and then what you bring forward which which feels to me in again it's a different context it's a corollary to this is this notion of a deep time which also just set our on Rast. Not necessarily in a soothing hunt tax but that in fact in a more reality based frame of mind right away yeah time works well I'm glad I'm glad that's how it feels to you because that's how it feels to me too there is a very nice to me familiar and I think ethically intolerable move that is made around the time which I see more and more in a kind of climate right as it were which is to say oh it's fine the planets all it has a long time ahead of it will be gone none of this really mattered and for me and it sounds like for you put in context partly by that wonderful I think King Jr quotation deep time is a sharpening context for me it says look at the gift of being Now look at the astonishing responsibility of legacy leaving and look at where you've inherited in the wonder of this world and what what will our time leave that for me is the big Anthropocene question and it's posed beautifully by yourself the immunologist who invented more or less singlehandedly the polio vaccine has helped eradicate that disease are we being good ancestors Yes Are we being that ancestors What across. Such a creates Yeah it's different isn't it to being a parent or a grandparent it's quite different because it's asking you to be responsible for people you not only have not met but will never meet right. Right it's asking you to attend to the value of what you do and plan now yeah precisely for a world you'll never say yes. There is one image of the heart as it were of under learned and of be under the hand which which is the and the the opened. The stretched fingers and that we know 1st as in a way the 1st mark of art that. Stansell as it's called which was made in early cave by the maker of wood would place that his or her hand on the cave wall and then take a mouthful of. Red Ochre often and then spit the dust against the hand and then pull hand away and so you leave the ghost print and it's such an image to me that hand of that opened the hand of that is reaching across time that is pressing against rock but leaning also into the future but also the hand of help and of collaboration and I find it everywhere actually that astonished me I met such kindness such collaboration and such readiness to to to to reach out. Yes that is so much a part of the story you tell the hospitality that greets you everywhere hospitality is so wonderful Yes that's exactly right. I do want to speak also about language and the power of words and. Magic of words that I feel. You surface in in your in your writing and also in your investigations. I mean even the word discover somewhere I learned in your writing as it has this under lend. Connotation right to reveal the excavation Yeah yeah the death. The book where you I think have focused most explicit I mean this runs all the way through your writing and thinking about the book landmarks Yes it's just kind of devoted to that. It makes me think of how in sacred traditions you know and naming has this power. And you know in Genesis like be. The original creative act next to making order out of chaos is calling things into being by giving them names. There's a sleigh swear you are writing about. I think the I love Lewis and Eris sort of their path to tribe in Arizona and use of words act as a compass place speech serves literally to enchant the land to sing it back into being and to sing one's being back into it at. Yes Well the 1st thing I should say in response to that fine thought is that not all naming is good naming there is bad naming and naming can as we know be an appropriate of active conquest and overwriting and and the control of that is gather side of that that pair right is a power exactly it is such a foundational act to give a name to you and with names often sort of call them portals to love and care we rarely care for what we cannot name. I mean I became fascinated over 4 years in the mid twenties if I can call it that historically a few years back let me say by led by Lexus for landscape and the sense that we were making to certain in British English increasingly with the generic portfolio of your health field would river stream right town and I and I sensed I knew that there was this word horde there within the did the wonderful diversity of languages and dialects objects we have in these islands and this was a particular focus for me in the beginning in Gallic what we might call Scalia Gallic but Kalak affectively and so to give some examples from the mall and language of the Outer Hebrides really. Is means in long form the shadows cast on more than and by clouds on a sunny day. And there is a there is a drama right unfolded I do this this 2 word phrase and in the mind's eye. Yeah I mean that I mean how many events covered. I mean hundreds certainly perhaps the how to read 2000 probably in the 1st edition and then I really didn't because people began send me these letters or in from around the world there and around Britain as postcards like like feathers coming. I feel also that this adventure you've been on is also is also full of. You know the realities and discoveries that things that we're only now learning to see. In order to put words around. Me like one of those things I don't know if this is new to you but it was new to me in just the way you described about the connection between ice and the nature of ice and memory that I have has a memory in the color of this memory is blue. That I remember sent detail and it remembers for a 1000000 years or more ice remembers forest fires and rising seas ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last ice age was that a discovery to you. Cry a file I love ice with all my with all my warm blooded heart. And I always have done and so I it wasn't a surprise to me but but delving into the science of that memory if we can call it was it was a revelation and I remember standing in a cold store I'm in Cambridge where I teach and just nearby we have the British Antarctic Survey which is the heart of Polar Science really in Britain and I went into this cold store with a robot mode very near climate scientists Graciella just and he took out a section of core that had come up from from deep in the Antarctic ice cap and then he took out a slice of it and held it up and it's like looking into. A planetarium or a night sky it's sparkles the stuff and the sparkles bubbles and the bubbles that was trapped when this ice fell. Softly softly caught in its ladders and as the ice gets buried so the it gets compressed into these bubbles and the bubbles memory and they remember what the atmosphere was like what it contains at that time and I love this thought of ice as having a memory and we're learning now to read that memory to recover that memory even as the memory itself is being lost through melt. Another. Thing that I learned through reading you is that that even in the last couple of years there's been this. Revelation of what you call the deeper life's ecosystem in the earth's crust that is twice the volume of the world's oceans and containing a biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon. By that a. It's just this this all came out after a 5 year search project disclosed its findings in I think about 9 months ago or so oh yeah guys there's folks there's a there's an entire ecosystem down there which dramatically exceeds in biomass the entire human population of the earth at present is incredibly diverse and it goes 7 miles down and probably more I mean what about that for a declaration of a little. After a short break more with Robert McFarlane and you can find the show again in 2 of the libraries at on Being or ecology and Nature and Science and being find this and so much more and on being dot org Support for being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world learn more at Fetzer dot org. Colorado is brimming with diverse viewpoints and interests k.u.n.c. Introduces you to new perspectives with reporting that connects you to our state and see our story happens here. Day sponsors provide support for a day's programming on key you win see our days sponsor for today is the Rosenberry trust in honor of Walter as Rosenberry served Krista Tippett on Being is also supported by the union colony Civic Center presenting the Neil Diamond tribute performing right performing diamonds poetic expressions an eclectic mix of very musical styles Friday at 7 30 pm tickets at you see stars dot com. Coming up tonight at 8 on fresh air we can enter a grocery talking with Reese Witherspoon storage executive producer of the new series The Morning Show. We continue with Krista Tippett On Being on k.u.n.c. . I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being today with Robert McFarlane he's written about the human fascination with mountains the old way of knowing land by walking at and he's a lyrical excavator of the last words for the natural world in his newest literary adventure under land he explores the hidden world beneath our feet and we've been talking about the world of a margin discoveries about that another whole new. It's like a whole new planet in our midst is what you I don't think this language of the word white the word Wide Web Yeah Would that that were my phrase but it is it is not. Did dear was that fresh to you the this revelation of the World Wide Web No I mean I I don't know if I'd heard that phrase before or not I have been aware of this. What we're learning about. Trees and yes and forests and and things like fungus and masses which are things we thought of as parasites turns out are essential to vitality in and collaboration levers and. Yeah it's cool Laureus Mitchell isn't which is about 450000000 years old we think because a fossil photograph lithograph effectively exists for and then showing it in action whereby fungus and funky. Things of this grand writes can talk to one another. And this once you've met this idea wow it shakes the ground you walk on. A park is a is a wondrous place but it also challenges our ideas of of what an individual is what an organism is where being begins and ends it does not enter the body horizon we we know that ing increasingly in complex and often political ways. There is a you are describing a conversation and place but it also challenges our ideas of of what an individual is what an organism is where being a begins and ends it does not end at the body horizon we we know that ing increasingly and in in complex and often political ways. There is a. You are describing a conversation and under land with Martin Sheldrick in Epping Forest in your murdered Merlin the the wonderfully named Merlin sheltering Merlin is right with Marilyn and you quoted him this is fantastic saying my early superheroes weren't Marvel characters but like him and funky in that they and Nial laid our categories of gender they reshape our ideas of community in cooperation they screw up our hereditary model of evolutionary descent they utterly liquidate our notions of time . What's more superior than that yes. I think that you're also making me think you know kind of circling back around where we have circled around in this conversation and let me say that we were speaking a minute ago about places we find hope and kind of new. New imagination yes for new realities forming and I do experience and you know I can every good word gets overused in human cultures right so I feel like now the word ecosystem is being overused but but it's a tectonic shift really like thinking about how institutions work and leadership works and how things happen. How movements work how forms are changed how minds are changed how we work together to create new realities it does feel to me like these kinds of discoveries about how reality works how life works are are not only relevant to how we're reimagining I think some ways that historical narratives of progress but also remaking how we structure our life together I hope so. I really hope so at the core of them is something a bit more complex than just connection it's entanglement and to me entanglement is different to connection because connection is purely a structural effect but entanglement is as it were requires a mutual ism to be recognized that there are consequences of entanglement that if one thing is destroyed or or lean too heavily on or exhausted then then this will require as it were we we have to long thought of ourselves as a. As an arrogant species that can draw on the world as inexhaustible standing resource whether that be to. Vied or 2 to accept that which we disposed of and that relies on a very magic notion of being and these revelations of entanglement are they they they destroy those ideas and they show us to be profoundly porous and to be nothing but holes. And string. I think Donna who whose work you well know she talks about making can. Another lovely word she has is simple yes this priestess has that that sense of creation of creating but gives us that creating with so the idea of making canon of sympathy system and for her way working with Lynn Margulis this is happening at a. Genetic level an app a genetic level as well as a kind of creative uncommon on societal level so it has form as a way proceeding if you like life has always literally flourished and and grown through making. Ok this is a turn. Minecraft. I was so surprised and this just reveals the limits of my knowledge that you wrote a piece about mine and you started it by saying the imaginary landscape in which I spend most time is born out of a book or a film but of an algorithm I get to spend time in my craft with you want to tell Yeah yeah when I was writing when I wrote that short piece about Minecraft I was spending a great deal of time in in that underworld. And it was also the time when I was you know when I was I was in physical understands a great deal and I just I became fascinated by it is this virtual realm of course people have written about how it is a sort of parable of extractive human progress right you got to get get down there and mind your resources and build and build and build but it also has this realm this mythic realm called the nether. And the nether is what you pass into through a portal that you construct out of obsidian and the nether is all are underlines rolled into one and so I have sometimes I would come back from these these trips into. Nuclear waste storage facilities or cave systems. And then I would be sitting down with my kids and they'd be like Let's go to the Never do I just come back from there. I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being today with Robert McFarlane his pulque under land is an odyssey full of surprises through the hidden worlds beneath our feet from caves to the meltwater of Greenland to physicists searching for the nature of dark matter in an underground laboratory. So you have also said that what started as a journey. To pure matter became to your surprise an exploration of hidden human. Both wonderous and atrocious we all carry under lands with an ass but only rarely acknowledge their existence and it does seem to me that so much in the landscapes you explore and also the science you explore around at the discoveries we're making speak to and of women in the depths of human experience. Well it's lovely to say that they they live in that only only a few parts of them of course and only the corners I can see when I raise the taper to my face but I guess when I'm leading to that sense of of the underlines we carry with us that for me is. Trauma it. Lost memories or buried memories in some sense so that says it whether the dark matter and you are a real dark matter and us you know us well the light does not interest yeah yeah and either we can't bring those things to the light or we choose not to and I did and there's a there's a chapter in the middle of Underland which takes place up in the Slovenian Italian limestone Borderlands which was the darkest place I'd ever been that's about some of the reprisal killings that were carried out really using the landscape as a means of execution and a means of disposal in the in the closing years of the 2nd World War and the sinkholes and the cost limestone landscape that became a place where people were taken to and pushed into either alive or well we ended or dead and bodies and bones are still being recovered from these places that says stream a disputed complex highly politicized history that is still itself unburying again and again it's an unclosed wound in that part of Europe and that was a terrible place to come to terms with and that's really whether the heart of the horror is and and then oddly you know hope is fact in a nuclear waste storage facility where we were people were trying to do the best they could in Finland and that's right there is a moment where you're having mass conversation with this very intriguing and physicist Stan Christopher Toth is that right yeah and you ask him. Where you're searching for dark matter and he says and I think you say without hesitation to further our knowledge and to give life meaning if we're not exploring we're not doing anything we're just waiting and and then you said to him is that an act of faith. Yeah. Yeah. It's partly because we were we were close to River one of the great sister. Of my country. And I'd driven past it earlier that day and I just suddenly realized that these you know the monks sending their prayers up to an unseen God had such strong echoes for me with these scientists and extraordinarily constructed in this case sort of trips cut into 270000000 year old rock salt. A mile underground almost and they too were scrutinizing the universe for messages from a. Unseen unknown presence. It beautifully faithful both from 700 years. There's. Some words also said that since before we were homo sapiens humans had been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning and that there is something seemingly paradoxical and that that darkness might be a medium of vision and that descend may be a movement towards revelation and it seems to me like that for you personally there was something in that well I definitely was more changed and learned more. About myself and I think about the world more broadly speaking if I can call it that from the years of this book than any other and that may have something to do with. You know being 43 yes 3037 when I began it 36 and when you were reading those words I was remembering being in the cave of the red dances which is this sea cave in Arctic Norway hard by a huge whirlpool that is known as the miles drum which which gives us that that word that is now generic for world pools and so there are 2 entries one into the mountain and one into the sea right by each other and in what we might call the bronze age 2 to 3000 years ago people traveled to that hard hard place and they made art in the darkness red dancing figures that leaped on the walls of that see cave. And they crossed to thresholds they crossed the threshold of venturing the cave and then they cross the 2nd one which is in a way the more powerful one which is where light gives way to darkness and it was in once they cross that 2nd threshold that they began to paint and that to me I mean I wept I wept when I saw those figures partly because it had been such a hard winter journey to get them in but also to. Time shifted in in ways I've never really experienced before in the space. You're now I understand doing some work in hospitals in the u.k. To bring Yes yes to life sometimes about that oh god that's crossed your path Yes This this arises from a book called The last words that I made with Jackie Maurice which. Has been the wildest thing I've ever been involved with in the sense that if you plant an acorn in a in a while which springs up around it the simplest form of the book is just 20 words that fell out of a widely used children's dictionary because they weren't being used enough yeah words words for nature acorn. Bluebell Kingfisher Conca ran well and so we just we just wanted to make a spell but that might come to them back but you know hospitals of taking the art and taking the spells and have designed them floor to ceiling across 4 stories for example of a new Peter Rehabilitation Hospital in North London and also in a critical care unit in Wales and and they're actually becoming part of the healing work that's done so where young children who are recovering from orthopedic difficulties they they walk the corridors doing their physio and so Jackie would put a tiny mouse in each panel of the miracles and the children would move a little further each time to to find the mouse hidden among the buttercups and and the mouth and I mean it's really it's about nature much much more than the book the book is just a catalyst for that makes me think of the work that's being done studying you know in heart in hospitals that if people have a window and can see a tree outside the window their healing is accelerated that they put their outcomes Yeah right I'm curious about the language of. Book and spell songs there's an album that goes along with the book which I just started listen to last night and it's so beautiful oh I'm so glad you think so beautiful so where did tell me about that bad language of spells for you or does that emerge when I could read your quickly out it's probably the best way to instantiate it I did bring it. I mean suppose it's there to be spoken that's they they have an oral power they're utterances and I've always loved reading aloud and writing to read aloud as it were and. So in that sense I wanted to write a language that tumbled on the time and turned turned around and this is ren. The Wren is this tiny quick moving bird that we hardly see them in this country that there are 8000000 breeding pairs of them because they move so fast they seem to teleport so he goes around. When ren words from stone to fur as the world around her Slayers the wren is quick so quick she is the 3 which she flares Yes rapid rain is needle rapid ran his pen and rend song a sharp song crossed on Thorn song and wrens flight is dark flight flick flight light flight Yes each Wren she's Chiz switches glitches Yes now you think you see ren now you know you don't. I. I feel like you've been speaking about this the entire time that I'm curious about how this adventure this investigation and just these things you've been thinking about these years. This is a ridiculously large question So just how you would begin to reflect on it you know how this has changed the way you think about life and death and what it means to be human how you move through the world how you how you parent differently. Well in a way I can't remember what it was like before beginning this river. River Run because each book flows really into the next tonight of the last as it were so that it started 20 years ago. For that you know I guess I mean I am as you said at the beginning landscape in the human heart this is to me in an inexhaustible and eventually on mappable terrain and of course the heart is a many chamber thing and some of those chambers hold hold hate but it also activates love and grace and joy but I think most when you asked me that question about my 6 year old who features as a 4 year old quite a lot in and in and and I took him up to these spring sites now at near our house where the book ends the book surfaces but we went back not so long ago but there they should be a place of life where water rises from wells up from within the ground but they were they were dead there was nothing there was no life they'd trunk to a puddle and a mud bath and. This is because of over obstruction water that we use in our household but also a and Anthropocene drought really that's gripping the south east of England in the longer term and he was he doesn't really understand any of that stuff obviously but he was it's just struck his soul to see a spring site dry and he came back so forceful so clear about what needed to be done and he has been on our case to use ever since and so it was such a fascinating moment for me to watch this with an absence translator self-interest sorts of The Politics of us tax year old and so I think you know be out get out look up. Where and when you can and be curious and be astonished by the world live in a given what the miracle the storm of wonder for a few minutes or a few hours each week. With kids. And speak the things you see. Can. You travel from. Little fish to say on the street. With good Robert McFarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge His books include mountains of the mind landmarks the last words and most recently under land a deep time journey. And same. Live it. Has provided. The last. Of the On Being project it's distributed to public. Funding partners include the Fetzer. Supporting organization. Humanity. At home and around the world. Fulfilled lives and the lily and down met and Indianapolis based private family foundation dedicated to its founders interests in religion community development and education on being is produced by. Studios in Minneapolis Minn. Krista Tippett on Being is supported by to u.n.c. Members and by troopers leins offering endure entertainment with arcade laser tag and boldly available for holidays birthday parties group of events and family friendly New Year's Eve plans more a trip resilience dot com. This is k.u.n.c. 91.5 Greeley park Commons k v n c 90.9 Minturn Vale k. 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