This is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Friends, I'm so excited to share this episode about Irish traveler's stories and medicine and spirits featuring author, activists, and herbalist,

Owen de Vardun with you. But I know it's a little bit of strange timing because the U.S.

election at the time I'm recording this is tomorrow. So I wanted to talk about that first

and why I decided to post this episode around then,

instead of doing some sort of pre-election whatever.

Back in 2004, I remember when George W. Bush won a second term.

And a friend of mine called, and she was very upset. And of course,

one could understand why she was upset, especially with all that had happened, especially since

2000, September 11th of 2001, in that Bush presidency. And I found myself sane to her because I knew she lived in rural Massachusetts.

I said, okay, go outside. Go outside. And look at the trees. So she did. She took her phone

outside and she was looking at the trees. I said, what are they doing? And she said, they're just

standing there and the wind is blowing through them. And I said, okay. So that's something to note.

And what are the birds doing? While the birds are flying from branch to branch, there's some

bird song. It's November, so it's getting a little cold in Massachusetts, but there's still some.

And look at the sky, what's happening there. And so on and so forth, going through each thing that was outside,

because it brought a kind of calm, but also a kind of wisdom

that evaded the trap and the constriction of the election.

Now, that's not to say that elections or political events aren't important, or that

human actions and processes don't affect the rest of the world.

But what dimension were those trees in, those clouds in, those birds in,

...