Like pollen poetry being spewed forth by ragweed flowers into the four winds, my new storytelling project launches today! Say hello to The Botanarchy Hotline.
The Botanarchy Hotline is an eco-poetic field guide for cyclical living in the Anthropocene, a repository of ecological wisdom and poetry that invites you to honor the old adage: Avoid gurus, follow plants. Call 1-833-Eco-Poem and jump into an exploration of the natural world through Chinese landscape poetry, the wisdom of the ancient sages, and ecological embodiment exercises that invite you to explore inner and outer landscapes in new and novel ways. Each episode is a verdant garden bed to sow the seeds of botanarchy, a storehouse of poetic prompts for connecting to the sacred wild within and throughout. Callers are invited to leave a message on the hotline, contributing field notes to the project by transmitting their experiences in the inner and outer wilds. I think of The Botanarchy Hotline as a college course in Eco-poetic Rewilding Studies.
Recordings are updated every two weeks, and guide the caller on a journey into the dynamism of the natural world through the wisdom of Chinese medicine, landscape poetry, and local ecology. The hotline follows the warp and weft of Los Angeles as it unfolds through the seasons, spanning one full year beginning and ending on the Spring Equinox. At the end of each season, all episodes will be archived on Spotify Podcasts with accompanying visual field recordings that show the changing seasonal landscape of LA’s resident sacred mountain, Mount Lee, as viewed from The Institute of Anarcha Taoist Poetics. The episodes themselves are layered with field recordings taken from all over California, even from within the trunk of a giant sequoia in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The hotline is in vintage ham radio mono, and the Spotify edition is a textured, sumptuous, ASMR audioscape.
This project was birthed in the crucible of the LA wildfires, and it’s a love letter to the strange magic of this numinous boundaryland that’s half wild, half urban, and all panache. During our wildfires, it became more clear to me than ever that this elusive thing we call wellness stems from a connection to place. Wellness begins and ends with our connection to the procreative web of life surrounding us, and stems from a reverential awareness of our elemental teachers, our human and more-than-human neighbors, and the cosmic processes we are all embroiled in together. By cycling together through the seasons with the plants as our gurus and the mountains as our stage, we can watch life rebuild itself on our fire-scorched landscape, and we can connect to the cyclical motions of regeneration and renewal that are intrinsic to all life on this planet.
If you’ve ever been to my AcuTemple, you know that I love to create transportive experiences that remind us how magic is ever-present, even down a Hollywood alleyway littered with dumpsters and jasmine. I could have made a podcast or created another substack, but as an avid explorer of inner and outer wildernesses I like it best when you have to use a little elbow grease and work for the view. Terence McKenna often said that nature is fond of big gestures, rewarding the bold and the extravagant. It is with that spirit that I hope you’ll break up the monotony of the infotainment monoculture, dial 1-833-Eco-Poem, and be transported into deep time.
Through this storytelling project, you’ll come to find that these poems and stories aren’t just about meadows and mountains, they are meadows and mountains, and you can wrap yourself around them like a gossamer fog, amble up and down them in your birch hat and bark clogs collecting rare roots from their sediment-rich riverbeds. So don your robe of fig leaves and sash of wisteria, dial 1-800-Eco-Poem, make like my favorite poet Li Po, and follow the creek back towards its source!
See you on the hotline,
Carolyn
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