How much can a tiny insect tell us about our relationship with nature?

This podcast episode unfolds as a chronicle—tracing one insect, the scarab, across time and place.

From the banks of the Nile in Ancient Egypt, to the French Alps twenty years ago, to today’s Mediterranean shores, and even millions of years back, when a scarab’s body lay buried until archaeologists uncovered it.

Why has an insect once worshipped as a god by our ancestors lost its place in our modern cities?

What made it so important that our ancestors kept it so close? What wisdom does it hold? And how can we rebuild this relationship—not only with it, but with other living beings?

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Sources:

• https://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/khepri/

• https://www.naturalhistorycuriosities.com/insects/scarab-beetles-and-their-meaning-in-the-ancient-egyptian-history/

Cover: Illustration of Egyptian scarabs (public domain, from an early archaeological catalogue)

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We are in a world of mad kings. The ones that destroy life, extract more and more, leaving Earth empty.

Lately, I keep asking: What shall we do? What are we doing wrong?

If I had asked that question in the medieval Arab world, they might have said: Tell them a story. And they might have told me the story of Shahrazad, the woman who changed the mind of a mad king by telling him a thousand stories.

Stories can change minds, worldviews. And worldviews shape our actions: toward care, kinship, and love for the natural world, or toward detachment, conquest, and destruction.

So, what are the stories that could save humanity? And most of all, how do we shape them, as the storytellers we are? Why was the medieval Arab world, like many ancient cultures, so devoted to storytelling? And how did they understand the precious power it held?

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Sources:

• The Arabian Nights, translation by Malcolm C. Lyons

• Ocean Vuong, 'A Life Worthy of Our Breath' On Being Podcast

Cover: Die Favontin by Adolf Seel, 1883

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If a story reveals something about its characters, it also reveals something about the storyteller.

The story you’re about to hear is no exception.

But what could a story tell about the one who is telling it? You might ask. Well, what if, in this story, the storyteller was the Prince of them all? What if, thousands of years ago, he understood better than anyone what makes a story an invisible thread connecting humanity together? What if he told a tale you could still connect with today?

His name was Ovid. And this podcast episode is about Daphne, who became a tree; Apollo, whom she fled; and Ovid, who told their story.

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Sources:

• The Metamorphoses by Ovid, translation by Mary M. Innes

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, translation by Andrew George

• The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell

• https://www.worldhistory.org/Melusine/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20legend%2C%20and,accept%20her%20as%20she%20was

Cover: Apollo and Daphne by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1743

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