docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind

Hello again! I just sent you a juicy podcast with Greg Olear and told you that you were getting a second podcast, a little extra gravy to splash on your plate. And then I forgot to include that link! So, here’s a whole new plate of podcasting, a stellar one at that. Here’s what I said about it previously: In this issue, you get two for one. Novelists are not the only ones taking on corporate media. Astrologers are, too. Over at docu-mental’s sister publication, Ensouled, Elisabeth Grace...

vol. 4 issue 9 Greetings, When I started this publication, it was partially informed by a burgeoning movement called “solutions journalism.” I’d first heard about it in 2016 after being invited to a National Press Foundation seminar. The featured speakers included a couple of journos who’d been using their reporting to frame issues so that it was clear how attempts to address things like recidivism weren’t working and why, and most importantly, what could be done instead. A tipping point...

vol. 3 issue 37 Greetings, If you are white, and could speak frankly to anyone about race, what would you say? Would you explain why reparations aren’t fair, stating that you didn’t own slaves, so your tax money shouldn’t go to pay for sins of the past? Maybe you’d talk about how you’re not a racist, so you should not have to attend diversity, equity, and inclusivity training. Maybe you’d say that you work hard, you played the game, you got where you are because you did what you’re...

vol. 3 issue 27 Greetings, At long last, the promised interview with Alice “Ace” Sparkly Kat, author of Post-colonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor. It’s an important piece in our examination of the sentiment that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of Capitalism, the end of the hierarchy we have invested in, yet which cannibalizes us all in the end. I tried to keep the conversation focused on the book’s innovative way of...

vol. 3 issue 25 Greetings, This podcast episode with Acyuta-bhava Das, an ayahuasca vision quester and now a spiritually focused astrologer and bhakti yoga practitioner, is the third and final in our series exploring the intersection of mental health, psychedelics, and democracy. The tone and feel of this conversation is cozy and inviting, largely because of the energy of my guest. When I re-listened to it before posting it, I was yet again captivated by Acytua’s positive wonder at the...

vol. 3 issue 24 Greetings, He demurs when I say it, but this podcast is my interview with our era’s equivalent to Galileo, Brian Muraresku. Whereas Galileo challenged church doctrine that the Earth is the center of Cosmos — and so was put under house arrest until his death — Muraresku similarly has challenged church doctrine by connecting the dots across many specialties to convincingly argue that the Christian church is predicated on the Dionysian mystery cults for which hallucinogens...

vol. 3 issue 22 Greetings, Earlier this year, I recorded a provocative interview with Scott Aaronson, MD, clinical research director at Baltimore’s Sheppard Pratt Institute, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious psychiatric research facilities, and soon to be a site for psilocybin research thanks to a hefty investment by Compass Pathways, a UK-based mental health company, that is funding the construction of a Centre of Excellence at Sheppard Pratt’s Towson, Maryland campus. Dr....

vol. 3 issue 20 Greetings, On this episode, I talk with botanist and medical astrologer, Lee Lehman, PhD. A medical astrologer can’t diagnose, can’t prescribe, and most likely does not have a medical degree, although more modern-day physicians have studied this ancient pillar of traditional Western medicine than you might expect. So, why bother to learn, much less use, this antiquated approach to helping patients? These are the kinds of questions I put to Dr. Lehman. In that way, this...

vol. 3 issue 15 Greetings, Continuing with our look at what we might have lost of ourselves and our traditions through the necessary, but unnecessarily brutal, national acculturation process over the centuries, I offer this tender and provocative conversation with Delta David Gier and Emmanuel “Bull” Black Bear, two members of the Lakota Music Project. Based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the project began in 2009 when Maestro Gier, artistic director of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra,...

vol. 3 issue 7 Greetings, Given that January 2021 still felt a hella bunch like 2020, I am considering this month to be the start of our actual 2021, and with it, a year-long look at what healthcare, and the general policy contexts it is set within, might be like if we were to deconstruct the way we currently frame it. Here’s where I’m headed with this: …it’s tantamount to immorality to let our policymakers rail on about irrelevant factors like cutting healthcare costs when what really...

vol. 3 issue 6 Greetings, Smoking is awful for one’s health. Generally speaking, that’s not a controversial statement. I could go down the rabbit hole about how smoking chemical-laden cigarettes on a regular, perhaps addictive, basis is what is actually bad for you, not the occasional inhalation of medicinal smoke into one’s lungs…but that is far from the point of this fascinating conversation with physician, historian, and author, Victoria Sweet, MD. The actual take-away from my talk...

vol. 2 issue 57 Greetings, There is no other. Except that there is. I know that last time I said it isn’t about “him” or about “them” but only about us, but there is a caveat. To say we humans are all one is really only a half-truth, as we learn in this episode of docu-mental: healing the american states of mind. My guest, James Griffith, MD, chair of the George Washington University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, lays this out clearly by...

vol. 2 issue 54 Note: docu-mental’s coverage of The Blacksmith is a joint venture with DC Metro Theater Arts. You can read a slightly different version of this feature and review/preview of Opera Lafayette’s production of The Blacksmith, here. The video interview above and the commentary in this feature is exclusive to docu-mental. Greetings, Take any decent road trip through the American West and you’re bound to pass half-a-dozen old opera houses in varying states of disrepair, or repair...

vol. 2 issue 52 Greetings, It’s rare that docu-mental publishes on Sunday, but that is the way things turned out in this week of ghosts, goblins, and now with this issue, astrologers. Today for many is known as El Dia de los Muertes — The Day of the Dead, also All Souls Day (although apparently, some calendars claim it is tomorrow). And of course, Tuesday, November 3rd, is our election. What do all these events at this time have in common? It is not the spookiness, the goons, nor the...

vol. 2 issue 51 Greetings, If you’ve been reading docu-mental for a while, you are aware that I don’t see the mondo bizarro criminal behavior of the current occupant of the White House as the cause of our national woes, but as the ultimate manifestation of our damaged collective psyche, the one we have forced for the past half century to carry the burdens of a patriarchal and thus hierarchical system predicated on an ethos of “to the winner goes the spoils”, and everything else as...

vol. 2 issue 46 Greetings, This issue, podcast, and video features what is more a word concert than an interview. It’s a conversation between myself and the poet, author, policy analyst, Fulbright scholar, and celebrated Washington, DC resident, E. Ethelbert Miller. Among Ethel’s most recent works is an essay entitled, If You Don’t Know Me by Now. It explores how in our riven nation we might find the strength to love. It begins: We uproot the past looking for historical clarity....

vol. 2 issue 44 ‘We’ve let the tangible inform the spiritual, when it should be the other way around.’ ~Timothy Nelson, artistic director, IN Series Opera Apologies for the late release of this issue. Migraine + tech issues + deadline = no muy bueno. I regret and am irritated by these events, but that’s life. Have a great weekend! WMF Greetings, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra conductor, Delta David Gier, once remarked to me that one reason why orchestral music outfits in the US...

vol. 2 issue 41 Greetings, This past Tuesday marked the 401st anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the ship called The White Lion at Point Comfort, now Ft. Monroe, off the Virginia coast. Today is the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech, part of the peaceful March on Washington. It’s also the 65th anniversary of the disappearance in Mississippi of black teenager Emmett Till, found dead three days later, having been not just...

vol. 2 issue 36 Ritual is the way to connect to the sacred in all relationships; they help us live out our meaning on a daily basis. -Gwendolyn Reece, PhD, High Priestess of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel Greetings, Baptism of fire. Dark night of the soul. Wrestling with the angels. There was a time when the advent of a spiritual crisis, one that challenged our sense of what matters in life, was viewed as an honorable experience that marked the intersection between our human struggle...

vol. 2 issue 30 Greetings, I love this podcast episode with Marie Leznicki. She’s the creator of Mindstead.org, the world’s first marketplace of personal growth tools, including for a variety of mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression. Imagine it being like Etsy, only for personal growth and mental fitness, a sort of 24/7 mental health fair. What’s exciting to me about this is how it offers virtually everyone access to the wide range of mental health tools and modalities...