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Never Totally Lost with Tristan Gooley
959 Plays6 months ago
Couldn't find your way out of a cardigan? Get into natural navigation with Tristan Gooley, award winning and bestselling author, expedition leader, and nicknamed “The Sherlock Holmes of Nature” by the BBC.
What I love about Tristan is that he is first and foremost a practitioner of fun, about how great it feels to notice nature’s signs and clues, about the fizzy thrill of uncorking our ancestral problem solving skills.
If you, like me, long to read the landscape and find your way through nature, Tristan’s books and courses will be your faithful guides.
I particularly loved his podcast The Pursuit of Outdoor Clues, which, in just six episodes, soothed my jangled nerves and taught me so much about nature’s whispers.
I’ll leave you to explore Tristan’s back catalogue if you haven’t already – and maybe we’ll run into each other in his online Natural Navigation course?
Tristan’s Natural Navigator courses
Tristan’s podcast ~ The Pursuit of Outdoor Clues
Get on Tristan’s mailing list!
Thinking Fast & Slow ~ Daniel Kahnemann
Kathy Holowko ~ Artist + supporter
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Resculience Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
The rooster is crowing at my front door. Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Resculience, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm gratefully recording Onjara Country in central Victoria, which is ablaze with autumn leaves and scarlet robins who've returned for winter in their freshly laundered vests and white caps. Here at my desk, I'm enjoying a moment of alignment with the microphone, my laptop and the midday sun forming a queue along the north-south axis.
Understanding True North vs Magnetic North
00:00:49
Speaker
And I was today years old when I learned the difference between true north and magnetic north, that they're not the same thing. Did you know that? If so, skip ahead about three minutes and I'll meet you in the convo with Tristan Gooley. But if not, prepare for a tasty navigational morsel. So true north is a matter of geography. It's about where you are in relation to the North Pole, which is a fixed point on the planet.
00:01:17
Speaker
But whip out your compass and its trembling finger will find magnetic north. And magnetic north is a wandering thing which can be thousands of miles from Santa's chalet. That's because magnetic north arises from the magnetosphere, the immense magnetic field generated by electrical currents running through Earth's molten iron core.
00:01:40
Speaker
Just like our guts, the underworld gripes and gurgles, causing changes to the magnetosphere that affect the location of magnetic north. So whereas true north stays put, magnetic north strays, and this causes some quarrels between maps and compasses.
00:01:57
Speaker
Today, as we geek out on natural navigation with Tristan Gooley, who's an award-winning and best-selling author, expedition leader, and was nicknamed the Sherlock Holmes of Nature by the BBC, I couldn't help but lean into metaphor. There's something about True North and Magnetic North, the way that I've confused and conflated them, that's got me curious. If True North is our material aspirations, a fixed point at which we're wealthy,
00:02:27
Speaker
worthy and successful, does that make Magnetic North the beautifully wayward alternative, a fluid and lively guide arising from the belly of Gaia, asking us to be a little less rigid, a little less wedded to the outcome, a little more receptive to change?
Interview with Tristan Gooley
00:02:45
Speaker
Look, I've been lost on top of a ridge before. I'm the last person you should listen to on the topic of navigation, so that's why I am tripping over my words with excitement to speak with Tristan Gooley, whose work is delightfully free from the kind of proselytizing that is my true versus magnetic north monologue.
00:03:05
Speaker
What I love about Tristan is that he is first and foremost a practitioner of fun, about how great it feels to notice nature's signs and clues, about the fizzy thrill of uncorking our ancestral problem-solving skills. If you, like me, long to read the world and find your way through nature, Tristan's books and courses are incredible resources.
00:03:29
Speaker
I particularly loved his podcast, The Pursuit of Outdoor Clues, which in just six episodes soothed my dangled nerves and taught me so much about nature's whispers. I'll leave you to explore Tristan's back catalogue, if you haven't already, and maybe we'll run into each other in his online natural navigation course.
00:03:49
Speaker
So sink into this short but rich conversation with Tristan Gulley and as usual stick around till the end to hear who's up next week and some very sweet shout outs.
00:04:02
Speaker
If you prefer, I can step outside because I'm in my writing cabin at the moment, but I can, it'll only take about two minutes. I could go and sit outside and we will pick up stuff. It's not because we've, we've passed sort of the dorm course. It won't be, it won't be loud, but we'll probably hear some, I mean, there's a danger we hear a vehicle or something. If you want to, I can do that. Oh my gosh. I mean, if you've got pick upable stuff and that's easy and amenable, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Bear with me a sec.
00:04:28
Speaker
That is a riskier first, the guests transplanting themselves. A little bit of transplant shock there, but I feel like now we're going to be thriving. Yeah. So yeah, please tell me about your patch and it just, I got a spear of sunshine coming through the screen here. Yeah. What's going on there?
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, obviously the opposite end of the seasonal cycle here. We're late spring, just hoping to get hints of summer. And I'm sat outside my writing cabin, which itself is only 100 yards or so from my home, which is at the edge of a broadleaf woodland.
00:05:09
Speaker
And I'm just very, very lucky. We've got in English terms, a little patch of wilderness here, which allows me to alternate between getting out there, seeing things, immersing myself. Sometimes it's for 10 minutes, sometimes it's for days on end, but then coming back and writing it up, which is the day job. And it means I don't drop time. Lots of people are having to do journeys between the kind of
00:05:36
Speaker
you know, the observing and the recording, whereas I'm very lucky it's that the two are right next to each other. Very permaculture, stacking functions like that, integrating your life and your work. What are you getting your teeth into at the moment, Tristan?
00:05:49
Speaker
What I'm doing, my work revolves around a core philosophy.
Decoding Nature's Patterns
00:05:56
Speaker
And I sometimes think of it as the hub and spoke model. So right at the center of the wheel is this core idea that everything outdoors is a clue or a sign. It has meaning. And what sort of underpins that is that nothing in nature is random.
00:06:14
Speaker
Nature is full of variety, full of wonder, but things don't spring up randomly. And if they do, they don't last very long because it's tough out there wherever we are in the world.
00:06:25
Speaker
The way I sometimes think of it is if you clear a patch of decent land where life can have a go and you come back in two years time, you'll see a number of species, but you'll see a tiny fraction of the number that had a go there. So we might come back and find three different sort of young trees having a go, some small plants, some insects and birds, that sort of thing. But they are the tip of the iceberg. There's probably a thousand other species that had a go and didn't survive.
00:06:55
Speaker
my all of my work is based on this idea that what we see will whisper meaning to us if we give it a bit of curiosity and in my work i tend to come down a different spoke of the wheel for a couple of years and then i hop onto another spoke so.
00:07:10
Speaker
I've done, I've sort of focused on water. I wrote a book called How to Read Water and there it's the same core idea. What looks to many people like visual noise, a few ripples, is actually, it's a code, it's a language and we can understand it.
00:07:28
Speaker
I wrote a book called How to Read a Tree, exactly the same philosophy. Every leaf, every twig, every bit of bark, every root is not random. Once we know rain patterns, sun patterns, wind patterns, they leave footprints and we can decipher those in literally every patch of planet Earth, whether we're in the middle of a city, in a desert, on the ocean, on ice. There is no part of the planet where these patterns can't be seen.
00:07:56
Speaker
As a writer, that idea is just mesmerizing to me. I deal with letters and words and sentences and paragraphs, and I'm hearing you read the landscape in this profound and what I'm guessing and hoping is a deeply ancestral and normal way for humans really to be moving in the world. What does it feel like to be that literate?
00:08:18
Speaker
It's a mixture of challenge and joy. I've learned a lot over the years about how the brain works and I've got a huge amount more to learn there.
00:08:32
Speaker
But I've researched alongside nature. I've researched psychology and things like that. And I've learned a lot from academics in a wide range of fields. One of the most interesting things is the different ways the brain processes information. It's sometimes called system one or system two or fast thinking and slow thinking. The economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, I think it was,
00:09:00
Speaker
popularize this research where, so if any of us walked out into a wild situation now, our brain will process the information and it will prioritize certain things. So if we, for example, if we see a carnivore running towards us, our adrenaline shoots up, our pulse rate shoots up, our blood pressure shoots up, you know, energy's converted, we go into fight or flight mode, and we haven't necessarily consciously thought of anything.
00:09:29
Speaker
If we find ourselves in what feels like a relatively safe situation, but we decide we need to build a shelter, we're going to start a different type of thinking. We're going to be thinking, okay, how do I
00:09:40
Speaker
How do I build something with the things available? How do I measure things? And that's an entirely different thought process. So your question of how am I experiencing things is I'm always trying to balance the slow thinking, which might be, ah, I recognize that pattern. That's telling me that there's probably a hawk in the sky somewhere. I recognize that instantly. I didn't need to think about that. But then I might see a color on a leaf and go, I don't recognize that color. What is it?
00:10:09
Speaker
And then it becomes a more conscious process. So I think one of the important parts of being a human is it's celebrating both of those and not sort of getting lost in either one completely. There are different character types out there. There are people who subscribe to the idea that everything's intuition and we just kind of need to put our fingers on our temples and absolutely everything becomes apparent.
00:10:34
Speaker
I don't subscribe to that. Equally, I don't subscribe to the idea that everything should feel like an exam. I think it's one of the beautiful things about being human is we can learn and develop by thinking about things consciously, and then the brain will take shortcuts and amaze us by giving us a sense of what's going on.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, it was it was only today that I really landed on the truth that there's a quest in every question. And I think questions are such a wonderful way to maintain that that curiosity and that zest and to actually to get us out into onto the land and into wild places. Are you also an authority on, you know, the kind of questions that we can ask ourselves to pique our interest and to start exploring?
Nature's Role in Problem-Solving
00:11:20
Speaker
It's a very interesting question. I don't think I've been asked that before and I wouldn't describe, I describe myself as a student in everything and the more time any of us spend in nature, the more we realise we don't know and that can be daunting and it can actually be off-putting. There's so much that we have to learn in the course of getting through the average week. The idea that there might be a whole load more things to learn is can be off-putting.
00:11:46
Speaker
But what I have sort of noticed over the years is that I've been very, very fortunate. I've got to sort of follow my passion and I didn't expect, you know, I didn't think the universe owed me a living doing what I love doing. And as part of the gratitude for that, what I've discovered is that the reason people share some of my curiosities is because it is such an innate human characteristic. And let me unpack that a little bit.
00:12:17
Speaker
There are lots of people who think they're not interested in nature, but will watch a murder mystery on TV or will read a thriller novel or will do a crossword puzzle or do Sudoku or do any of these sorts of puzzles. And actually all of that satisfaction is the same as solving puzzles in nature. So all of our ancestors were fantastic puzzle solvers in nature. None of us would exist if they weren't. And we can almost prove this by looking at the human being because
00:12:48
Speaker
We're not a very impressive species in many areas. We're not very strong. We're not very fast. And our senses really aren't very impressive compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. And yet, we've done very well. Some people argue too well. So what are we doing that is giving us an advantage? Now, we all know what to do with our brain. But if we look within the brain, one of the things we are much, much better than animals are doing
00:13:13
Speaker
is taking in information, i.e. looking at a landscape and building a more interesting, complex picture of what's going on. So any animal might pick up that there's a predator in the area. A different animal might sense that there's water nearby. Another animal might go into instinctive, reproductive behavior because of the phase of the moon. But as far as we know, there are no animals that will put all those pieces together and say, we're going to experience this weather change over the next 48 hours
00:13:43
Speaker
I think the fish will be doing this in 72 hours time. The best time to go to that side of the lake is three and a half days time from now. As far as we're aware, that's a very human way of sensing and looking at the world.
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's not only map making, is it? It's also forecasting and yeah, a whole bunch of other really complex thought processes, I imagine. What are the implications then of this innate love of problem solving? Is it simply for the joy and the love and the adventure of it? Like, do you feel that this skill, this awakening, curiosity is important for a modern human to reclaim?
00:14:26
Speaker
I tend to hold back from, I do think it's important, but I don't go down the route of saying people should or ought to do these things because I'm a rebel at heart and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I'd followed the path that all the people in my youth suggested I should have followed. So I'm very sensitive to the idea that most of us don't change our behavior because another
00:14:53
Speaker
human being says you ought to do something. And so the way I come at it is that it helps us in a very practical and real sense, but that's not the motivation we should necessarily use to get into it. It is pure fun and the reason it's fun is because it's part of our ancestral survival kit. So coming back to this idea that it's part of what it means to be human is reading signs in nature. If we think about it, our ancestors
00:15:24
Speaker
If our ancestor was maybe sitting by the fire and totally oblivious to the sounds the birds are making, they don't sense the predator coming. They don't get to have offspring. They don't have any descendants alive today, but the one who did
00:15:41
Speaker
So, the brain is very good at, it's certainly not perfect in this area and that leads to a lot of habits and behaviours that aren't ideal, but one thing the brain is quite good at is helping us train ourselves in the things that historically were very good for us, i.e. survival. So, when we sense something in nature and we see a pattern and it makes sense, we do get a sense of satisfaction and it can be more than satisfaction, it can be fun and it can be euphoric.
00:16:10
Speaker
so there are there are patterns in trees that I see every day and and they're genuinely energizing and mood lifting and I found it there are a lot of poets and writers over the years who've gone down the
00:16:28
Speaker
the, you know, mystical is not the right word, but the kind of idea that, you know, there's this, this, this sort of strange energy we get, and it's, you know, we'll never understand it. But, but I actually think it's, it's more interesting, because we can understand it, because reading signs of nature, 10,000 years ago was the difference between life and death. And so it's not surprising that when we do it now, even though it's not for survival, our brain says,
00:16:53
Speaker
You're doing what you were born to do. You know, can we have a bit more of that? And the way it does that is it doesn't doesn't whisper those words to us. It gives us a nice, you know, neurochemical neurotransmitter sort of here and we and we feel good. So, so.
00:17:09
Speaker
Just, sorry, it's a very long answer, but I think it's important because I think it's genuinely important for mental health. I think people who ignore all of this stuff for years at a time tend to feel worse than people who don't. But it's also practical because whatever we're doing in life, we are trying to recognize patterns. So just for a bit of fun, and we haven't rehearsed this at all, name a random job title.
00:17:37
Speaker
compost toilet construction. Okay. Fantastic. Okay. Uh, I didn't know that was coming. Uh, and compost toilet, the first time they do that will, will not be perfect. And the second time they do it, it will be slightly better. Now there are, there are physical, um, practices that get better, but a lot of it is noticing when you're, you're, the patterns are telling you you're doing the right thing and the patterns that are telling you you're doing the wrong thing.
00:18:06
Speaker
And we've all had this experience from childhood. It's what we mean by experience. Experience means when you do something more than once, you recognize the patterns and that allows your brain to help you do a better job. So an example might be if you're doing it completely, you know, building a compost toilet from scratch and you have no outside guidance whatsoever, you might, you know, pick a type of wood, a type of timber that rocks within, you know, two months. And you think, okay, that's a pretty simple pattern. I'm not going to use that wood ever again.
00:18:36
Speaker
Um...
00:18:37
Speaker
So there'll be a hundred patterns within that where you might notice that sort of dark woods last longer than light woods or you might notice that there's a particular wood that gives off a nice fragrance and that would be welcome in that business. So everything we do in life is pattern recognition and it all goes back to recognizing nature signs and patterns because that's what allows us to do wonderful things like build compost toilets.
00:19:09
Speaker
I don't know if that's a career pathway, but I'm hoping that it is in the very near future because I think going door to door and trying to sell people on the benefits of composting your own glorious excrement is a wonderful thing to do, a gift to the world.
00:19:23
Speaker
So thanks for humoring me there. So yeah, moving from this kind of broader idea of ecological literacy and reading the signs and clues to specifically natural navigation, using them to navigate, are you able to define for us what natural navigation is?
What is Natural Navigation?
00:19:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's the wonderful art of using the sun, moon stars, plants, animals, people, buildings to help us find our way and understand where we are. I particularly love that you bring the human clues into this. Yeah, maybe if you could speak a little bit more about humans, human clues and clues in urban environments, that would be wonderful.
00:20:07
Speaker
The way we can think of human clues has parallels in the animal kingdom. So I'll just start by talking about birds. If you see a bird fly from, let's say, a building to a tree,
00:20:22
Speaker
We might be able to find a clue in that. We almost certainly can. The way it lands will tell you what the wind direction is. Birds land and take off into wind, for example. But that's not the point. The point is we don't want to extrapolate from a single animal's action and think we've got the full picture of what's going on in our environment. And the same is true with humans. If you go into a city and you see a person
00:20:42
Speaker
you know, behaving strangely and crossing the same street five times, there'll be a reason for that, probably. But we can't build a very, very rich picture from it. But if we look at a flock of birds, so the Pacific Island, the Pacific Islands themselves were very, very possibly first first visited by following bird migratory patterns, the academics have worked out that
00:21:07
Speaker
I think it's one of the cuckoo species, but there's certainly bird species that were migrating between the islands.
00:21:13
Speaker
And now that we have the combination of archaeology and increasingly rich genetic information, we can see that the human migratory patterns were very, very similar to the birds. And I can see that. If you see thousands of birds flying in one direction and then six months later you see the same species of bird returned from that direction, it doesn't take Einstein to realize there might be something out there. And so we use the same logic with human beings.
00:21:43
Speaker
You can look at this in lots of different ways, but one of the simplest ones is we all probably know a town where a restaurant goes bust repeatedly. And what tends to happen is an entrepreneur will come in from outside the area, think they've got this amazing concept, and they'll decide to buy this restaurant that's just gone bust, and they are going to make the difference. Their incredible fusion cooking is going to be the thing that makes a success at that spot. Two years later, they go bust.
00:22:12
Speaker
Same pattern happens. We've all kind of seen something like that where locals know why it goes bust. It's because when people come out of the station, they turn left because they want a coffee. They never even see the restaurant. The cafe itself will be where it is. And if it is successful, it'll be because of footfall. And depending where you are in the world, if you're in a cold part of the world, it'll be on the
00:22:35
Speaker
the sunny side of the street, and if you're in a too hot part of the world, it'll be on the shaded side of the street. You know, people have to wait even 20 seconds for something. Well, they're more likely to do it in comfort. So what we find is flows of people shape the urban ecosystem, every bar, every cafe, every restaurant, every shop.
00:22:54
Speaker
will, like every organism, will either succeed or fail, and that will reflect the flow of people. In a very broad sense, in a big city, if you go against the flow of people in the morning or with the flow of people late in the day, you'll find a transport hub, probably a station of some sort. So this is the thing. You can look at an individual, and this is classic Sherlock Holmes thing, and say, oh, I can tell from their shoes that this is somebody that walks more than a mile every morning or something.
00:23:21
Speaker
but really in natural navigation we're looking at the combined effects of repeated patterns so we find a flow of people towards parks at lunchtime and that sort of thing and over time these leave footprints in the buildings we see so every religious building has its focus somewhere else either on planet or earth or out in space in the case of things like the pyramids but
00:23:47
Speaker
you know, Christian church is most synagogues. All of these things are not are not thrown up randomly. There's a huge amount of thought given to another place on planet Earth. And once we tune into that, we have clues there. So it comes back to what we've what we've touched on before, which is this core idea that nothing's random. You know, if if if you
00:24:07
Speaker
If we put all of our savings and resources and everything else into building a home, we're not going to roll a dice in terms of which way it's aligned or where we put it. And that's true of every building on planet Earth. Some thought and logic is there to be found.
00:24:22
Speaker
a very little logic. I mean, so many buildings don't face the right way. It baffles me, but I hear what you're saying. Yeah. I absolutely loved your podcast and I was devastated that it was only a mere, I think, five or six episodes. And it was such a beautiful format of you wandering somewhere in your neighborhood, in your locale. And there were moments of you actually
00:24:46
Speaker
tuning into clues that you were maybe experiencing or seeing for the first time. Are there things that you're still learning as a natural navigator and perhaps what's alive for you this season? What have you discovered that's kind of tickling your interest?
Why End a Successful Podcast?
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah thanks again for the feedback about the podcast. I enjoyed recording it and I think it was well received and was quite popular. I stopped doing it for one main reason which is that I'm a writer mainly and that has its forms of feedback as you'll know as a writer. I don't think writers
00:25:25
Speaker
I think the impulse to write would be there without any feedback, but I don't think it can last a lifetime if things disappear one way. And the sad thing about the podcast is, by all accounts, it was listened to and continues to be listened to by quite a lot of people, but I never get any sense of that. So it did slightly disappear in the ether for me, and it just felt a little bit hollow.
00:25:47
Speaker
Whereas the books, including the audio books, um, generate a bit of discussion and it comes back to me in lots of little bits. You know, I couldn't, I couldn't cope with, with, you know, um, you know, feedback all day, every day, but just a little kind of hint of what's going on is, is, is very nice. And, and, and I've found actually my newsletter is, is, is one of the things that's a very nice balance that way. Cause it's mostly going from me to subscribers.
00:26:13
Speaker
But then there are little you know little bits that sort of just even digital feedback there tells me what people are interested in and that energizes me Like like most creative people. I don't wake up in the morning thinking I want to do what I think other people want it comes from Within and I do that but it is also nice to know you're not on your own in interest and things So so to answer your question, you know
00:26:37
Speaker
I'm learning something literally every single day. I mean, just today I've been trying to unravel the problem of asymmetry within the seasons. So what we find is in spring, the canopy trees are going to come into leaf and cast a huge amount of shade and basically shut out the light for the forest floor.
00:27:01
Speaker
but there are a whole load of lower species, small plants and wildflowers that jump the gun and bloom before the canopy closes over in broadleaf trees. So that makes sense because they're grabbing a bit of light before the show's over, effectively. But it would make perfect sense for them to stay in leaf late in the season after the broadleaf trees of the deciduous broadleaf trees have dropped their leaves.
00:27:27
Speaker
But they don't do that. And there's no obvious reason why. So I've been wrestling with that and trying to understand that. And there'll be a very good reason for it. Nature can't do randomness. It's such a poor strategy. But today, that's something I'm learning about. But it's a mixture of observation, noticing things like that, then a bit of humility, appreciating that.
00:27:50
Speaker
I'm not the first person who's noticed anything and there's a very good chance that whether it's our ancestors thousands of years ago or an academic in an air-conditioned building somewhere that somebody's looked into this. And so I try and bring those pieces together and then my work really is about noticing something, learning, finding the sign and then sharing and then the process starts again. So if I find the sign within that,
00:28:15
Speaker
I mean, there's something I discovered recently. I was trying to find the pattern in why some certain trees come into leaf before others. And it's not, you know, there are some very simple patterns like small trees come into leaf before tall trees, for example, but then there's mysteries.
00:28:30
Speaker
And it turns out one of them is to do with the way water flows. So the bigger the water vessels, the earlier the tree comes into leaf, I believe. But I'm still working on that. I could go on and on. But what I mean is, I know there are patterns. I know there's meaning in everything we see. And it's a very, very odd week if I don't add to the collection of signs in some way.
00:28:53
Speaker
I also love that within humility is the humus, the earthly lowliness that is a beautiful space to occupy. What I've heard you speak about before, Tristan, is how you love the shaping of the journey. I've also heard you talk about how when you're a 10-year-old
00:29:13
Speaker
Boy, some of those super local, super low-key adventures and explorations totally trump the testosterone-filled conquests of mountains and seas. I love this concept because it speaks to me of the idea of relocalisation, and especially in the times that we're living through, how we can find that joy and fun and wonder in our own backyards without having to call on a bunch of resources.
00:29:40
Speaker
So yeah, I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more to this idea of relocalizing exploration and navigation. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it was a very organic, gradual process with a couple of tipping points within it. And, and yeah, there was definitely a tipping point moment when I was, I, I wouldn't say I wasn't enjoying the big expeditions, but it did feel
00:30:06
Speaker
Um, I mean, to give you one example that sums it up quite nicely. Um, and it's a bit of a joke within my family, which you'll have to indulge me here. But sometimes if, if my wife and I go away for a weekend, she'll, you know, cause she's, she's used to being a mother now. And that, that transfers onto me sometimes. And I probably deserve it quite often, but she'll say something like, have you remembered this? It's not quite, have you remembered your toothbrush? Have you remembered this? I sometimes, you know, have to sort of smile and say, um, when I, when I sell single handed across the Atlantic,
00:30:36
Speaker
I had checklists of checklists. I had so many items of so many lists that I had to have a list of the list. I had over a thousand items to remember to bring or do and it ended up in a massive Excel spreadsheet. You can kind of see the romance is gone when you've got a massive Excel spreadsheet. So yeah, so I started doing these tiny little journeys. I mean, literally one mile sometimes. And just seeing if I could use nature as my guide. And it definitely, it felt like a,
00:31:07
Speaker
it almost felt like a drug. It felt like there were neurons and synapses firing within my brain that hadn't done anything for years. And so I had this strange but really wonderful feeling that I'd
00:31:24
Speaker
I'd got back that joy of childhood, jumping in tiny little boats as a 10 year old and I really did genuinely find it very exciting going up tiny hills on my own when I was a kid. I mean really really small things, things that would perhaps only take half an hour to get to the top of and I'd got that feeling back but I was well into my 20s by this point and
00:31:45
Speaker
I think all of us have probably had that experience where you relish the freedom and opportunities and choice that comes with young adulthood.
00:31:56
Speaker
but you then suddenly find yourself, you know, you're not skipping through days. You suddenly look, you know, there's a slight oppression of the reality and the repetitiveness and all these things. And I found natural navigation was just, it was just like a massive injection of childhood joy. And it had a load of practical, practically appealing things. Like you could do it every single day. You know, some of the expeditions, I mean, one of my expeditions took seven years to plan.
00:32:25
Speaker
Whereas natural navigation, you can do literally for a quarter of an hour once a day, costs nothing. And it sounds bizarre, but was equally satisfying as something that took years and years and cost money and all the rest. Brilliant.
00:32:45
Speaker
Well, I don't want to close the conversation without really playing into the metaphorical value of natural
Natural Navigation as a Life Metaphor
00:32:53
Speaker
navigation. It feels like the most metaphorical subject in the world. I was struggling to think of questions that were literal.
00:33:00
Speaker
You know, you have spoken about this beautiful interplay between physical navigation and finding our way and finding our way through and with nature. And as someone who is confused and disoriented, a large portion of the time is extremely compelling to me to ask
00:33:21
Speaker
for your perspective on this but also too I think as a you know big chunks of our of humanity we find ourselves quite lost and adrift and really not knowing which way to go at this point in time so what what is on the tip of your tongue about natural navigation and how we can individually and collectively way find our way through
00:33:43
Speaker
this time. Well, I don't have any, I'm not sure if you're inviting solutions for the big problems we face as a society. If you've got any up your sleeve, Trista, don't hold back. Let me just pull out this list. Leaning back a bit towards the metaphorical, but I think again, there are genuine and practical implications that can flow from this.
00:34:09
Speaker
I get asked sometimes you know have you ever been lost and I have and those are different stories but but there's a there's a sort of half joke truth in the idea that we're never totally lost because we always have some idea. However vague it is of where we've come from so even if god forbid somebody gets kidnapped blindfolded stuck in a van and driven somewhere for an hour.
00:34:33
Speaker
they know for sure they're within one hour's drive of where they were kidnapped and that's a very sort of silly example but within that there are so natural navigation teaches us that we never have perfect information and we are never perfectly lost so to give you an example
00:34:50
Speaker
you're in a city you've never been to before and you suddenly feel completely and totally lost you just start to think about the biggest possible features there's very very likely to be a river or a coastline not a million miles from you and then you start to think well okay I do remember there is a river that runs through this city and then you look at the street you're on and you suddenly notice it's not flat there's no such thing as perfectly flat flat earth even in a city
00:35:15
Speaker
And so a very gentle downhill gradient takes you to the point where you see the river. So whatever we're doing, that approach works. So whether we're sort of physically lost and trying to navigate or lost in the metaphorical sense of not sure what to do in terms of our career or even our personal life and things like that, I do think this idea that
00:35:36
Speaker
There is something about the brain and I don't understand this yet. It's a fascinating area that does occasionally, you know, a switch slightly goes and we get close to panic. Many people have childhood memories. Mine is being in a supermarket aged about five and losing my mom and it's one of the scariest things that's ever happened to me in my life and I'm not exaggerating. So there's part of the brain that does like to sort of lose the plot a little bit and go, I really have no idea what's going on and this is terrifying and that sort of thing. And it is related to getting lost being potentially dangerous
00:36:06
Speaker
for our ancestors and to a lesser extent for us. But in terms of the, you know, adult challenges, I think a sensitivity to nature science and natural navigation does help with this very broad approach that we can pick up one small vague thing that helps us, which then clicks the brain into a more
00:36:31
Speaker
Oh, it's okay. Deep breath. I can actually do this. So I'll give you one actual real example of this. I was being interviewed by a Dutch journalist in Amsterdam.
00:36:43
Speaker
And journalists, you know, they've got to make a story. They're writers and they know they can't list a load of facts or quotes. It doesn't work. So these journalists have decided, unbeknownst to me, to spring a surprise on me. And we walked fairly quickly, taking lots of turns through Amsterdam, not a city I know at all well.
00:37:06
Speaker
uh and then you know in the middle of asking me some quite sort of complex um you know slow thinking type questions about my background all sorts of other things uh they just sort of said can you point to where we started and i i couldn't instantly you know sometimes i can sometimes we all can sometimes we can't and at that moment
00:37:28
Speaker
I thought, oh, okay, you know, there's a slight feeling of panic. Oh, I see, you know, the whole of the Netherlands is going to think I'm an idiot very shortly because I have no idea. And so that feeling of, you know, the five year old lost in the supermarket came and then I, I was able to kind of click back into that very simple idea of we never totally lost. We never, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't answer his question or point in the way he wanted me to at that moment.
00:37:52
Speaker
But I said, OK, what I'm going to do is I just I just reached and touched a wall and it probably seemed a little bit new age to the journalists. But what I was doing is feeling temperature. There's a cloudy day, but the south side of rocks and buildings is still warmer in the northern hemisphere on the south side. And the opposite, you know, deep in deep in the southern hemisphere, of course.
00:38:14
Speaker
But the point is I wasn't trying to find north or south. What I was trying to do is remind my brain that I wasn't helpless, that there are things that we can observe and sense and deduce. And just through the process of doing that, the kind of the route we'd followed started to make more sense and some of the clues that I had picked up but had sort of
00:38:33
Speaker
hidden in hidden my brain in the in the in the short sort of alarm and thinking oh god i i can't do this um and and i and i was able to make a reasonable go of it but it's it's yeah whatever whatever we're facing whether it's massive massive challenges or or or small small conundrums practicing finding meaning finding you know spotting signs is is is helpful and um uh and it's fun
00:39:01
Speaker
That is such an excellent note to finish on because I too am allergic to the shoulds and I think that fun, everyone can get on board with something that's fun. That's what your work inspires in me, that childhood wonderment and awe. It's just such a pleasure to speak with you Tristan. What direction would you point people in to access your coolest work, the work you're most proud of?
00:39:24
Speaker
Oh, thanks so much, Katie. And you know, thanks for your interest in my work. If people would like to dip in, I have a website, naturalnavigator.com and hundreds of examples. And you can explore through, because I'm a great believer that we're all tribal. And what I mean by that is not tribal in the sort of sociologist sense of the word, but tribal in our interest in nature. So there are people who think that
00:39:51
Speaker
The wildflowers are boring, but they love stars. There are people who think reading clouds is fascinating, but they have no interest in animals. In time, I think we all develop an interest once we know the science to look for, but we all need to know the routine to find these things fun and interesting. So I've organized the website so you can click on stars or the moon or water, you know, reading water. And then you hopefully find one or two things that appeal to your curiosity tribe.
00:40:18
Speaker
Um, and the other thing I'd be very grateful for is if people, I have a free, um, email newsletter, uh, and it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's a good way of me kind of, you know, I send puzzles in it. I, it's a bit sporadic. I might send three in a month and then none for two months, but it normally starts with a, you know, which way are we looking or, or what is this cloud telling us sort of thing. And, and that, that, yeah, that's quite a good, good way to kind of, you know, play with this idea and see if you enjoy it.
00:40:45
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, I highly recommend them. I loved receiving, I think it was yesterday's one, looking down on the ice pattern. That was a brain bender. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I hope you enjoy that beautiful sunshine today. Oh, thanks so much, Katie. Happy navigating.
00:41:01
Speaker
That was Tristan Gooley, who you can find at naturalnavigator.com or wherever good books gather. Tristan very kindly agreed to join me on Resculience despite a full schedule and a moratorium on random interviews, so it really did feel extra special to hang out with him in a video chat box for 45 minutes at opposite ends of the planet.
00:41:24
Speaker
Who's up next week? Well, it is another warm, wise, and generous human who is standing up for the weeds. It's Diego Bonetto, aka The Weedy One, who indulged me in a deep and life-giving conversation about foraging, belonging, art, and animism, which is one for the foodies and poets and apocal optimists for sure. That'll be airing next Monday.
00:41:51
Speaker
The other day, I was floored by a message that I received on Instagram from a local artist named Kathy Holoko, who gifted me a weekend away in her little stone cottage, an artist's retreat on the edge of the forest, to say thank you for the podcast. Artist's family calls this the flow of gifts economy, and I have never experienced such a clear and compelling example.
00:42:18
Speaker
Thank you so, so much to Kathy for extending the offer and also Kathy for your provocative exploration of futures and creatures and ecologies through sculpture, through your creative practice, which I've linked in the show notes.
00:42:33
Speaker
Well, that's one end of the podcast-supporting spectrum, but there are so many other ways to bolster resilience. You can leave the podcast a review on iTunes, give it some stars on Spotify, share it on social media or tell a friend about an episode that particularly resonated with you. I've also just created a Patreon page
00:42:54
Speaker
which is a little bit bare bones at the moment but will be fleshed out with behind-the-scenes stories in good time.
Supporting the Resculience Podcast
00:43:01
Speaker
You can find that at patreon.com forward slash reskillience. And a river red gum sized shout out to reskillience's first supporter Robin Payne who is my lovely mum who's already an emotional buttress but now contributes a few dollars each week to reskillience's welfare.
00:43:20
Speaker
I won't be paywalling any episodes or content at this stage. The podcast will stay free. Patreon is purely a place to donate if you have the means to and hang out if you have the time to. Maybe I'll see you there. But there is really no escaping our appointment. First thing, next Monday for Diego Bernardo. On foraging. Thanks for listening. Catch you then.