Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to speaking

with joy. It was such a delight to read Elegance of the Hedgehog with you all, and I've still been

enjoying getting your comments and notes as you've been catching up. It was kind of a whirlwind of

a book club. But I hope you all have been enjoying the rest of your summer. I know that I have been.

And I'm excited to be back to finish off my series on my book. You Are a Tree and Other

Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. August 20th marks, I think, it's six months

since the release of the book. And so to celebrate that, I am posting the last few series of interviews that I did on the metaphors in my book.

So if you haven't gotten a chance, I have so enjoyed having these conversations around the different metaphors I explore and You Are a Tree with people like Malcolm Gite and Alison Milbank and Christopher Ten.

Every conversation has just been such an enjoyable experience.

And I'm excited to share these final two, although end up being three, because one of them

is in two parts, conversations about the metaphor, safety is not a castle.

And then a kind of special episode where I explore the

parenthetical knot in all of the chapters. So each of the chapter says you are in parentheses,

not a tree. And I discuss with a really influential theologian who has influenced me why that not is important. But today's conversation

is with Henry Jameson, a singer-songwriter whose work I followed for the better part of a decade

now. And I've always enjoyed his music because it has this kind of otherworldly and yet very worldliness about it.

Each song has a sense of describing something that actually happened in his life,

and yet there's a sense of archetype that emerges out of it and a sense of there being

deeper meanings in our ordinary experiences.

And it was such a fun thing in releasing this book to be able to

...