Celebration, Hope, and Uncertainty
Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com
S2E03 TRANSCRIPT:
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Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I am your host Yucca.
Mark: And I'm Mark.
Yucca: And this week we've got a bit of an interesting one. This is a year anniversary for us working on this project and there's a lot going on in the world right now. So we'll be talking a little bit about that and also about hope about its role, about the things to be hopeful for and our duty to be hopeful,
Mark: Right? Yeah. I'm excited for this show for a lot of reasons. It's, we're recording on the 10th, so it's a few days after the riot at the Capitol and things are very much up in the air. This won't actually go live until the 18th. So who knows what will happen over the next eight days?
But we do want to acknowledge how people have been feeling about this and somehow in there to carve out a little moment for some celebration, because this has been a really fun interesting project to work on with you Yucca. I feel that having pulled it off for a year is an amazing milestone.
Yucca: It is. Yeah, it's been great. It really has become truly one of the highlights of my week and something that I look forward to every time and just to have these conversations and also to see the response. All of your listenership is just beyond what, at least on my part, far beyond what I was even imagining or dreaming even daydreaming about. So it's amazing. I'm so very grateful for all of this.
Mark: Me too. And and particularly I'm grateful for the listeners who have discovered non theist paganism, or, have discovered a community of non theist pagans through the gateway of this podcast. There've been a number of people who have joined the Atheopagan Facebook group.
Who have said, yeah, I was listening to this podcast the wonder, and they mentioned this and I thought that I'd come by, and boy, this really seems like my kind of people. And that's just really exciting to me. I like building community in that way. People of common mind and values. So that's, that is really a cool thing.
Yucca: It really is. Yeah. And I should note that we are saying that it's a, for us, this is our, we started recording before we released the podcasts. We had this grand vision that we would be three or four episodes ahead before we published, which of course is not what ends up happening. We're usually recording the podcast the night before it goes live, or this week we're quite ahead a whole week ahead.
But we started working on it a little bit beforehand to see what are we doing? What is this podcasting thing? And then we didn't actually go live until the very beginning of March. But this was a year ago was probably about the second time Mark that we'd actually been talking. Face to face.
Mark: That's right. We hadn't actually met one another other than through. Messaging and that kind of stuff. And so the first time that we got together to talk about the idea of this podcast before, long before we were even considering recording was really the first time we met one another face to face. And so it's been a relationship building process as well as a creative podcast creation project. Yeah. And and I'm just so delighted. I'm really pleased.
Yucca: Yeah. I'd like to say that a year in, you’re one of my dearest friends.
Mark: I really feel that too. I do. And And it's remarkable to be able to say that when we've never been, I've been in the same room together.
Yucca: but different lives
Mark: Yeah. This technology really allows us to reach across not only miles, but all different kinds of divides and to meet one another. So that's really a great thing. Yeah. So we're excited. We our initial goal, I think was seven weeks. Yeah, the, I, the idea was that Yucca had read somewhere that that if you make seven weeks you're actually up and running as a podcast.
And so that was our initial goal. But here we are a year in.
Yucca: We were looking at some of the topics before hitting the record button and seeing that we've gone through a lot of different topics.
Mark: We really have. Yeah. And of course that always there's this push pull with the calendar because when you're a pagan and you're the kind of pagan who celebrates the wheel of the year. There's always another holiday coming up. And so there's a theme for a show there and there's ideas for rituals and practices and themes and all that kind of stuff. But then there's all the other stuff. They're all the other topics that don't fall neatly into those calendar buckets. And we've really explored quite a number of those Which doesn't mean that we can't go back to some of them. I'm knowing me, I probably have more to say.
Yucca: I think everyone does. Yeah.
But it's definitely been interesting with fitting in the, those evergreen topics and balancing between things that are going to be welcoming to people who are newer to.
Paganism. And then also being interesting to people who have been part of the community for years or their whole life. So we, of course, always really welcomed suggestions. If there's something that you want to hear about that you want us to dive into a little bit deeper, we've always welcomed those suggestions.
Mark: Yes. It's very helpful to us to get feedback from the folks that listen to the podcast, what are the things that you like about it? What are the things that you would do differently? What are the subjects that you'd like to hear about? We we really encourage you to email us at TheWonderPodcastQs@gmail.com and let us know what you think.
Having celebrated a little bit and I'm sure that we can come back to that throughout the show. What else have we got in our grab bag of topics today?
Yucca: I did want to say looking at the list, so wrote out the list. Our fourth topic was” Love and the Time of Corona Virus.” That has been a, that's been huge for everyone over the past year.
It's been... I don't know anyone who has not been deeply impacted. And it's been the background for a lot of our conversations.
Mark: Yes. This obviously was not a normal year. By any stretch for anyone, in my case, it was more of a normal year then than for many others, because I've continued going to work as an essential worker.
But for so many, locked in place at home only going out to get food and prescriptions and things like that. Life has in many ways, ground to a halt or at least turned inward. And so that's the context within which this whole this whole podcasts so far has been produced. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the vaccines take hold, and we're able to come back out and do things together.
I know that I'm very excited to get back together with my ritual circle and do things with them and hug my friends and just all the simple human things that we love to do.
Yucca: Yeah, I know my kids are just waiting to get to see other children just to be around other people.
Mark: That's really hard too, because a year is so long in developmental time for little kids.
It's just, really profound space of time. They're just very different people at the end of that year than they were previously.
Yucca: And for adolescents too, it's a time is different for them, but so is a big chunk of the development in terms of sense of self that many of the teenagers are going through right now.
And the young adults who are just not that there's any sort of competition between generations, but as millennials, we thought it tough coming of age during the Great Recession. Imagine just having come out of college and you're looking for your first job and then everything's shut down.
At least you have an excuse for a big blank spot on the resume at that point.
Mark: Yes. I don't think anybody is frowning on people who are still living with mom and dad in 2020 and 2021. That's going to be pretty ordinary, I think. So you know, that, that's one thing that we really do need to cal…