Radical Symbiosis: Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD
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Michael Reiley: [00:00:00] Our guest today is Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff. She's a scholar, artist, an activist whose work bridges, climate, justice, critical philosophy, art, and embodied ethics. She's the author of the book, Zazu Dreams and . Viscous Expectations and her writing and Visual Work have appeared in international documentaries, public television and outlets such as The New York Times and NPR.
And her projects have been endorsed by thinkers like Noam Chomsky, , Vandana Shiva, Paul Hawkin, and Bill McKibbon. Today we discuss Kara's book, Zazu Dreams, also Dream Consciousness, cultural and Ecological Extinction. [00:01:00] And what she calls apocalyptic parenting as a pathway towards a more interconnected future.
All today on the Sounds of SAND Podcast presented by Science and Nonduality.
Thanks for being here today, Cara.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Wonderful. Thank you, Michael.
Michael Reiley: . So much of your work and your writing I think weaves beautifully with what we're offering these days at SAND with 'The Eternal Song'. And yeah, just exploring and finding our way through the unknown into the future. And your beautiful book, 'Zazu Dreams', maybe if you wouldn't mind just to, to introduce a bit the book in your own words so people have a reference point for, as we speak about the book.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yes. Thank you. And again, it's wonderful to be in conversation with you and be participating in SAND's Community. And the sound of sand as you and I spoke about a little bit is actually integral [00:02:00] to, to, to the book. The full title is 'Zazu Dreams. Between the scar and the dung beetle, a cautionary fable for the Anthropocene era', and it's a fable for adults.
It is used pedagogically, inter in intergenerational contexts and also performance. And we can speak about the various venues and audiences, participants with those performance spaces. And it is in the process of being adapted into an animation. And the book is looking at the relationship between cultural extinction of ethnic minorities in relation to global ecological extinction and. Relationships of intimacy, cross species cross cultural, cross time, looking at examples of symbiosis, radical symbiosis and biomimicry. Lessons from nature [00:03:00] and our ancestral technologies as guides when we're examining and when we're experiencing, when we are navigating these converging crises in terms of ethnic cleansing, climate chaos the different realms of economic devastation.
And in terms of. Capitalism infiltrating every aspect of our the way we raise our children, the way we inhabit our bodies, or are disassociated from our bodies. So all of these ver these elements are in relation to one another, looking at simultaneously the devastation and what already exists as a source of movement, as a source of joy, as a source of transformation in the midst of these entangled systemic oppressions.
Michael Reiley: . And the themes are very heavy, but the [00:04:00] book is based on dreams, right? It's based on the dreams that Zazu your son was having.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yes.
Yeah. The so initially Zazu was six. He's now 14, my son. And initially as a 6-year-old, he was incorporating music and sound of humpback whales. Those were entering his dreams at night and he was dreaming that he was on a whale. And he would wake up and we would talk about his dreams and the audio of his dream.
The sound elements I'm assuming came from old records that I had from my childhood of Whale Song, and he was. Translating those languages into his own body in this dream state. And then I was recontextualizing that with him in another layer of storytelling. So stories embedded in stories nested in stories, historical ancestral scientific [00:05:00] ecological stories of animals, stories of different ways of communicating.
And our communication through his dreams helped me understand that I needed to write a book that was addressing specifically, initially as a departure point in terms of cultural. Ethnic minorities and I hesitate to use the term minority because then that means we're assuming that the majority is somehow the center.
So we can talk a little bit about that in terms of vulnerability and what does it mean to reappropriate vulnerability and collective empowerment. But there were, and are so few books for children or adults that actually penetrate the complexities of Sephardic Judaism, of what it means to be a Sephardic Jew of really any any kind of multicultural, non homogenous the term Ashke- normative in terms of ash Ashkenazi [00:06:00] white presenting norms in the us.
So that was the departure point. And because my work. As an educator, as a performer certainly as a writer, revolves around what it means to live our ecological ethics and climate justice. The two came together naturally to create this kind of, I'd say a fractal democracy that Zazu and I would then re metabolize and then news stories would evolve out of, again, the sort of crossover this connective tissue between the dream world and the fantastical world with what we consider reality
Michael Reiley: Wonderful. Yeah. And a couple yeah. A couple of things you're saying are pointing me to other episodes of Sounds Of SAND that I'll put them in the show notes. So you talked about Fractal and we had an episode with Jeremy Lent and it was entitled Fractal Flourishing.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yes.
[00:07:00] Jeremy is one of the people one of my interlocutors for my new book, "Radical Art in Action Unlearning What We Think We Know". And he was also a bridge with Bayo Akomolafe and those conversations and collaborations that evolved. So I'm so happy you're bringing Jeremy into this context too.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah. And then the. Sephardic Judaic piece. We had did an episode with Hadar Cohen about
Cara Judea Alhadeff: yes.
Michael Reiley: So yeah. And then the final one, which w when we were speaking before we pressed record, where I was introducing myself, I didn't say this, but I worked with a practice called Deep Listening.
And actually I'm teaching a class on Sunday. Called Listening in Dreams, and it's about the sonic and how the sonic world connects with our dream world and 24 Hour Dreaming. And the author of this book is a woman named IONE who is my teacher.
And we did a, one of the first, one of the first podcasts we ever recorded was with IONE back [00:08:00] in three years ago. Yeah so her book's called "Listening and Dreams", and she was the partner of Pauline Oliveros who you know, Pauline Oliveros. Yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah, of course. Fantastic. Oh, so they were together. Okay. I'm, this is exciting that we're just speaking about. This is actually, this particular morning I was just in my dance Sangha, my 5Rhythms Gabriel Roth Sangha and ask do you practice that also?
Michael Reiley: I have, yeah. Yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Cause I was just asking my Sangha if they have a sense of when they're dreaming, what kinds of sensory possibilities are they conscious of in, in their dreaming? Do they aside from sight and perhaps touch, do we smell in dreams?
We certainly hear and I've been thinking about this in relation to my epilogue with radical art in action focusing on neuroaesthetics. And when science is now telling us that there are at least [00:09:00] 53 senses, I've been playing with the idea of what would it mean if decency was a sense, for example there, there's a new, it's not new, it's actually from the nineties.
A group of architects student architects. And it's under the rubric of architecture of decency.
With an architect Samuel Mockbee in the deep south in the us. So I've been thinking about what is, what are these different senses, and I'd love to go deeper or
More expansively with you around sensory consciousness and what that means in terms of addressing these converging horrors that we were talking about previously.
These converging nightmares as strategies, as collective tools.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. I would love to, is there a, like a paper that kind of outlines these 53 senses?
Cara Judea Alhadeff: I don't know, this is something I, there's a. [00:10:00] I was very challenged with. It's a fairly new book, I think 2024 called 'Your Brain on Art'. But their conclusions are very much techno euphoric. There's a technos saturation, a digital saturation, which is extraordinarily disappointing to me because my understanding of neuroaesthetics and what it means to experience beauty in our neuroplasticity has to do with what it goes back to 'Zazu Dreams', actually has to do with what already exists within us in terms of our cellular consciousness, in terms of the deep listening are the dreams that are embedded in our cellular. Or cellular constellations and to let go of that. And it did feel like a letting go of [00:11:00] for these mixed realities that are basically virtual reality and augmented reality rather than the possibility of not fulfilling as if there's an endpoint, but of so profoundly interpenetrating these realms sensory.
I'm not I don't know, again, that we have like what we were speaking about earlier yesterday around that language doesn't embrace necessarily those possibilities, but the 53 senses I learned from them, and it was, it I didn't, I didn't understand if there were, if how they have been categorized and defined according to our layers of how we conceptualize our consciousness.
Michael Reiley: The five senses we talk about and all of the other more subtle gradients of sense are happening pre verbally. So it's the experience that's happening before [00:12:00] we name, it's, presence and it's consciousness and dreams are interesting because the same consciousness that's active in our dream life is active right now.
It's a, one, it's Ramana Maharshi talks about that, that there's a continuation of dream consciousness that's present in waking life too, and. Sometimes it just takes, it takes the waking brain to settle down. And then these things can emerge in dream life, that reveal a deeper level of reality that we're filtering out with our waking consciousness.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: And if there was a collective movement around that kind of relishing in our potential. I so feel that could it could begin to uproot these worlds that seem to be strangulating us and [00:13:00] that lead to climate grief. And these
Michael Reiley: Yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: are certainly our economy of distraction
That, that fulfill.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. The narrative of separation, this is, this the pervasive narrative, and it's in dreams too because dreams are personal. That, the West Freudian analysis, all this stuff is like, dreams are just your own personal psychosis and it's, things you have to work out in your family and this isolation, whereas, aboriginal dreamers dreaming is a collective consciousness.
It's a place that we return to, and when we enter that realm, we're in communion with all living, living beings,
Cara Judea Alhadeff: if we could straddle those world worlds in a conscious way, in a calculated, strategic way to address the various torments to address the, these complexities that seem to be inevitable in terms of modernity when they are not inevitable by any means.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. [00:14:00] The other guest, I'm, that's I'm recalling too, is Manda Scott who wrote wrote, do you know her? She's she works in a genre. She calls thrutopia
Cara Judea Alhadeff: You used the phrase earlier. Yeah.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. So it's not u utopian, but it's it's how to connect a thread through the sort of quasi dystopian reality that we're having right now towards a future
Cara Judea Alhadeff: no I love that and I love that particularly around what it means to inhabit the in between
And to enter into the liminal, or not even enter into it, because many of us already that is, we are threshold peoples because of our ancestral backgrounds, because that is how we function in relation to the status quo.
But I'm I'm very curious what is that?
In between, in terms of the trueness?
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah. And something you write about, and many people talk about this, the, that we're in a entangled web of interconnection, and you write that "only [00:15:00] by understanding how all forms of oppression or interconnected can we understand that all forms of emancipation are equally interconnected."
Yeah. Could you talk about that a bit?
Cara Judea Alhadeff: I am so happy you're bringing that up. It's essential for me as a mother of a teenage boy, for example, to return again and again. It's not a return, it's a re a remembering of the weavings as you started with the term weaving and remembering that techne from technology means to weave, to fabricate.
And we can so easily slip into the fear, into grief as paralysis rather than grief as a sense of possibility and a sense of collective responsibility. And of course as we were speaking about earlier in terms of climate [00:16:00] paralysis and anxiety. But what if, again, as a sense, we sensed so all encompassing the that the relatedness actually is empowering because when we are dealing with the horrors of institutionalized racism and the horrors of economic disparity and the endless entangled, again, nooses, if simultaneously there was a sense, another sense of.
Possibility of working together, of seeing these forms of oppression as actually forms of emancipation when we are addressing the, when we are looking for example, at a knot in a Persian rug. We are, it's, it is, it's the both, and it's the Mobius loop. And that for me [00:17:00] as a mother, as all of these categories that I live simultaneously, if I'm not in that saturation of this is the fullness rather than this is the devastation, this is the horror.
Then I couldn't go on, but because the futility of it is always in relation to my sense of integrity and what it means. To make every single choice, not necessarily consciously. And this goes back to the dreaming state and collective consciousness. If for example, there's a term. Psychopath.
Which I love. Are you familiar with the "Ecotopia Lexicon"?
Michael Reiley: No.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: It's an anthology, just a fantastic, it's speculative fiction in with nonfiction embedded across cultural. And one of the terms is [00:18:00] Cibopath which means "cibo", meaning food and path as in suffering or knowledge or intuition. And this idea of biting into, so in relation to food, when you bite into something, you taste its history.
You taste. For example, if you bite into a banana, you taste whether or not it was grown with DDT that was banned in the US and exported to the global south. You taste the the politics of the banana plantation with the hierarchies and the laborers, the physical laborers you taste the stories of the land.
You taste the petroleum that required, was required for it to come, for the bananas to be shipped back into a grocery store here in the US at disembodied space of acquisition. And what that image that you're referring to in 'Zazu Dreams' of, it's [00:19:00] a image of a tree with the roots representing.
Converging crises as well as the branches. And there's a dog digging one of the characters, the Marmut Husky, digging this idea of radical and root that the word, the root of the word radical is to, is root. We are dealing with the underlying issues of advanced capitalism in the book and in my daily life.
For example, what I'm, how I'm sharing with what it means to be a mother how I'm raising my child, the underlying issue, the underlying entanglements of renewable energies, for example, quote unquote, because they're not renewable. We know that they're rooted in, again, root in fossil fuel addicted infrastructures.
But when we are looking at these relationships, when we're looking at the entanglements, to me that gives a sense of profound empowerment [00:20:00] and. Not individual necessarily, but collective, of course, it's this constant interplay between both. But there's always the slippage to, into the space of blaming the individual.
And we can get into some of those the corporate greenwashing around who is responsible for what. But the idea of cyber path is, and I'll say another phrase around that would be supply chain consciousness, for example. What if these entanglements, these interconnectivities that show, that demonstrate, the root of demonstrate monster is the root of demonstrate, which I love. There's a monstrosity in learning. There's a monstrosity in understanding the, these relationships, these interconnectivities. I'm gonna discontinue a little bit in terms of demonstration. [00:21:00] I use an antidote.
I write about and lecture and perform and certainly in daily life with Zazu, with my child raise him with an antidote. Apocalyptic parenting as an antidote to petroleum parenting as an example. Apocalyptic meaning to reveal you're shining a light you're examining and perhaps you're familiar with the spandas, the concealing and revealing.
So this idea of. Seeing there's an, a sense of excitement and anticipation of possibility in the impossibility of in the animation.
[00:22:00] Michel Ceres uses the term time, and this goes back to dream time is crumpled. And I love, obviously the idea that time is crumpled, that we are inhabiting nonlinear. Sensorium of relationality. I'll say wrong of Bayo's, phrases. And then what does that mean in terms of our thinking as crumpled in relation to decolonizing
Our thinking process? And I'm not apologetic about that any longer. I used to try and rein it in as a professor when I taught, for example, at uc Santa Cruz, in, in gender and education [00:23:00] and pedagogy, critical pedagogy and performance.
There was such a desire for operational definitions and a refusal for relational definitions. And in the context of refusal for relational definitions, a refusal for cellular consciousness. And at this point in my life, in my mid fifties, and answering your question again, or returning to your question, remembering your question, that's exciting to me.
And that for us to be, again the fractal democracy that these simultaneous worlds are existing. And yes, there's a, we can call it a tangent, we can call it a digression, but again, those, that, that language in itself is so rooted in a Eurocentric white supremacist and in the sense of what common sense and the politics of clarity have, how have how those realms have [00:24:00] eradicated our 53 plus million senses.
.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. It's privileging a linearity that thought needs to follow a straight line that goes from X to Y, whereas all of nature, and, not just the nature, we can touch in these dimensions, but science tells us that, reality is whatever, 11, dimensions or 26 dimensions have folded in and on itself space time.
So when we move our hand from left to we're actually. . We're bubbling through all these different, folded, you said crumpled dimensions that we're just ignorant of, but are present here, and, and dreams too teach us this because, we can be in a diner having a conversation and we put the fork down and we look up and all of a sudden there's a volcano or our dead relative is there instantly, and the space and time, and we don't think twice about it.
We're just like, oh, okay, cool. Now I'm at, now I'm in, Mount Edna, it was just in a diner two seconds ago. It's just we are able to flow with that because our nervous systems know that's a [00:25:00] truer sense of reality. Instead of this
Linear, boxed off city block square city block, apartment building
Cara Judea Alhadeff: And what if that internal language actually could become a political strategy? That's what I'm
urgently committed to and curious about, and that, particularly when it comes to parenting, because that's how we're creating society through our children and for us to be constantly going back and trying to undo as we're raising our children within these.
Norms within these take it for granted. Even the f fantastic book the Empire of Normality. I think Robert Chapman is the author, the looking at neurodivergency in the context of the history of capitalism. And, the, these lessons, they're all there. We don't need more research and development funds.
Just like we don't need to spend more money on cancer [00:26:00] research. We need be focusing on prevention. And so much of that is in our, how we raise our children. So let me know if, yeah, if you have questions about the petroleum parenting or apocalyptic parenting, or if you wanna go back to south of Dreams or the bus.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. They're all interesting and now I realize why you have, 600 endnotes or whatever in your book because the, I think the way you think and create is yeah, it's just touching into all of these. It's an entangled web and you have an awareness of the entangled web too. You're like, oh, this comes from this and this is connected to this.
And so I'm I'm in awe that you can keep it all together and keep the threads, detangled when they need to be. But also, yeah, just go ahead.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: I'll share just a couple things about that.
That's good. In my first book, "Viscous Expectations: Justice Vulnerability, the Obscene" I wrote that and that has also about 600 plus and notes and 600 pages. And that's a cross-disciplinary book looking at critical philosophy looking at [00:27:00] vulnerability of the body as a strategy for social justice.
And I just wanted to bring that up in reference to what you're sharing because I was breastfeeding Zazu while I was writing it, and I think the act of breastfeeding allowed me to enter into a another. Cognitive zone that was so much about breaking these binaries between mind and body, the breastfeeding itself.
And now with radical art and action, I'm learning what we think we know. The book that I'm finishing for Vernon Press because of my sleep state or lack of sleep state, that was an, it's been another realm of crossing that threshold to be able to access these languages that are already within us just waiting to be realized as Stephen Hawking
Michael Reiley: Yes. One of, one of one of the guests in your book, Stephen
Cara Judea Alhadeff: exactly. One of the [00:28:00] spirits who merges with Rachel Carson at one.
Michael Reiley: Also your mother is in the book.
So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about this idea of lineage and ancestry and deep time as you're weaving the story.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah. My mother, Michaela Amatuea Amato is my best friend and also one of Zazu's best friends. We're the three of us are a funny little triad. And she and I collaborate have collaborated for many years around fossil fuel addicted economies. Both with her multimedia visual art and my writing, and then also with my photographic work my self portraits, and then color analog images and the story.
And she illustrated her paintings. They're guash paintings, about 150 images that are in Zazu Dreams. [00:29:00] And they're actually on traveling. Exhibit right now in the us,
.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Both with the original gouache paintings and also reproductions that we install in a variety of contexts always with student interdisciplinarity.
So I can share a little bit about something that happened recently in Miami at a university that was just delightful, the way they took it on in their personal lives, the way the students took it on in such a vast cross-disciplinary context. But my mom and I and Zazu play with what it means to be in a intergenerational space, creating the story.
Her father, my grandfather, my papu from the island of Rhodes where both families are from, and Turkey also, was a photographer in the 1920s, thirties, forties. And he also ran a botanica cross-cultural botanica in Spanish, Harlem [00:30:00] in from the thirties to the sixties.
He was the local witch doctor. So the Haitian community would come in the from the Dominican Republic. A lot of Caribbean clients. People would come in and get herbal concoctions from him for emotional and physical. Ailments, basically challenges. So that was my grandfather.
And so my mother grew up in that kind of environment where he was this spiritual, physical a healer, but very much of a polymath in the sense of our, and going back to your question about ancestral lineage and also what we're speaking about with these multi, with the multiple languages, the simultaneous multiple languages.
Sephardic Jews speak generally between seven, eight different languages. And the language of Latino itself [00:31:00] is such an exquisite hybrid of, Hebrew, Arabic Farsi Italian, depending on where the Jews arrived after they fled the Inquisition
1492. So incorporating, again the polyvocal, incorporating the polymath, incorporating what does it mean to inhabit the pluriverse from the position of the I of me now as an individual in continual interplay with our ancestral technologies, our ancestral wisdoms that are.
Penetrating every moment. And that comes through in the book, in the story as how Zazu the character, the main character is Zazu, and traveling with Alaska Malamud on the back of a humpback whale traveling to various places where Jews come from, where we don't think [00:32:00] of Jews as coming from in a US context because the norm is Eastern Europe.
Jews who are in the us. And learning from those communities again, referencing symbiosis, conviviality, the history of con vicia with the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims in Spain, and what does it mean now to the, especially when we're in such extraordinary polarized, absurdities one after the other.
We are the theater of the Absurd in 2025, 2026. And what does it mean to re-inhabit, to Reinvoke, to reignite these ideas of living indifference and it has nothing to do with being tolerant of difference.
Michael Reiley: And. In paradox Living in the unknown.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yes. [00:33:00] Yes. Yeah. One of the chapters in viscus expectations the first part of the chapter has to do with contradiction and ambiguity. And the idea that ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but a multiplicity of claritys. And just the idea of a rabbit hole in and of itself is there are, it's the mycelium penetrate the rabbit holes.
And that is perhaps that's the protopia.
Michael Reiley: Yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: with those mycelium
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah I'm still processing what you just said with the, so living yeah. What did you say? Just to points ago about the, paradox. A multiplicity. Yeah. Multiplicity of ambiguity, is that what you said?
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah. Am Ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but a multiplicity of clarities.
Michael Reiley: Multiplicity of clarity. Wow. Yeah.
Very nice. I'm just imagining people pausing the podcast at certain points, because a lot of the things you're dropping, you're like, wait, what? Wow. [00:34:00] Cool.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah. And again, if that multiplicity, if we were, when we brushed our teeth, when we peed, when we. If people who own cars have never owned a car but turned on the ignition, or when you turn on the tap, like I don't have a tap either of water. We get our water, we live in a school bus, we get our water from rain, rainwater catchment.
But for people, when you're doing such automatic reflex on un
Michael Reiley: Yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: out outlined mundane behavior, and, but what if the multiplicity of clarity was in there? What was embedded in the action? And that goes back to supply chain consciousness and the cibopath and the entanglement of the image that you first brought up.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah. When you're talking about eating the banana and all, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about this in the term Interbeing that, when we, yeah. What that, when we take that bite, when we taste, we can taste the [00:35:00] entire web of connected that made that banana go from a seed to in, in my body.
There's a one quote.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: influenced, oh, I was gonna say, what if that influenced our consumer decisions?
Michael Reiley: Exactly. Exactly.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: just fundamental,
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah. When you have. The means to choose organic vegetables as opposed to processed vegetables. The intention of pesticide treated factory farm, mass produced, or it's all in. It's not just the chemicals of the pesticides and the toxins.
It's all of the energy of just greed, of just let's grow as many as we can. Let's scorch the earth and just grow one crop, forever. All of that's in the food, and we're putting that into our bodies.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yes. It's, again, it's the simultaneity who determines when we. Again, brush our teeth, go pee. Who determines this [00:36:00] hierarchy of what is important, what we value, what needs to be highlighted? Why isn't when someone turns on the tap of water? Why don't we have in our sensibility why isn't that embedded on within our being without being overwhelming? This, I, often I share these ideas in people.
Two responses. One is total overwhelm. What the hell is she talking about? And the idea of privilege that somehow. Privilege shapes the capacity to even imagine these possibilities. And that in and of itself, I think, is so deeply rooted in a capitalist norm, in a, in the politics of clarity in [00:37:00] acquisitional transactions and actual ac acquisitional relationships by writing off imagination essentially.
And imagination as again, what exists. We know, quote unquote, that these possibilities that this is part of us.
.
And to say that either it's overwhelming it, I, when I'm brushing my teeth, all I have is that I need to get out the door or because I have to go make my living. I have a wage, I have to go make sure that I have
My, my, my paycheck to feed my children, or that it's, that somehow that this line of thinking is somehow separate from the act of it in and of itself.
That to me, we're [00:38:00] just we're compounding again and again, the normalcy that we're not we're not willing to investigate. We're not willing to look at the radical , to not look at the radical symbiosis, but we're not willing to be present with the radical symbiosis.
Radical again, as in root.
.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: It's a refusal of what is here.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. We're, we're like, as you're alluding to, we're conditioned, we're culturally conditioned, for, an example is, pretty universally. If you go into a place where there's not much light pollution and you see a full sky of stars, everyone is in awe. It, no matter your economic standing or culture or religion or anything, you're just like, wow.
You have that moment of oh wow, this is here right now. And yeah, but we, and we've we've somehow had it conditioned out of us that, like you said, taking a drink of water is the same amount of awe inspiring of wow, this is Cleopatras pee this is a [00:39:00] tsunami. That was never, this is water that the dinosaurs was in their blood, and I'm drinking it now.
That's all inspiring.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah. What and what does it mean to make, to not make but to render these verbs are just, are simply, they're not adequate. But if that awareness was a political strategy again, moving the. Eco spirituality was embedded in the political, which, for example, in Judaism, when there are prayers for everything, there's a prayer for when you drink a sip of water, there's a prayer for when you poop.
There's a prayer that it's an acknowledgement. It's a, it's a pause. But also even the word pause refers to some kind of linear time, which is frustrating to me. But in any case, there is a pause if this is the language that we're speaking. But if that awareness, when we raise our children, for example, that where the spirituality and the political, the [00:40:00] embeddedness of it all,
.
If there was an like with rabbi Hessel to waken radical amazement,
.
If it wasn't something that was. Something we do because the smartphone, I don't know a smartphone, I use a flip phone. But if, when the smartphone ring rings reminds someone it's time to meditate, or even from what I hear, there are breathing reminders on phones.
But how can Thich Nhat Hanh interbeing, become a manifesto of parenting? That to me is apocalyptic parenting. It's revealing the hidden systems. It's revealing the infrastructures. It's reminding us of the story and every object
.
And re respecting it with just the most awe, as you said.
Michael Reiley: yeah. Reverence. And you said the word remembering a few times and I sensed you were pausing [00:41:00] between the re and the remembering and it just remind, yeah, it just felt of me like, I'm a member of this. I belong to this. I'm in this tribe of existence. When you remember,
Cara Judea Alhadeff: yes.
Michael Reiley: yeah. So you, me we put a pin in it, or I put a pin in it mentally of petroleum parenting and apocalyptic parenting.
Could you talk about that?
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah. So again, with Zazu Dreams, the way I frame it is that the story is told to me,
I don't say by Cara Judea Alhadeff.
I say asked, told to and the, even what you just said about the collective, this is our sangha, this is our community. That the story Zazu tells to me that I am writing in these pages is a story of all mothers listening, deep listening exploring deep noticing. Deep noticing was a phrase that's also used years ago.
What does that mean [00:42:00] as a parenting practice to be in a place of unbelievable struggle? Zazu was born three months before the Occupy movement in Oakland. In 2011, we were a couple of blocks away from the Oakland Federal building.
We were in the heart of it all. And really from in utero I was practicing apocalyptic parenting in terms of a constant and the word constant reference to linear too. It's so funny. It's also self compounding. But let's say a dialect, an unfolding of. I don't wanna say refusing either, because then it is, it's a reaction. But I'll say refusing the norms of petroleum parenting ultrasounds. I was 39, he was born on my 40th birthday. So I was considered a dangerous age.
[00:43:00] So I see that as a, as an apocalyptic.
Parenting practice where you're not submitting to the norms of the medical establishment that inherently claims that a woman doesn't have the intuitive, and this is all going If mashala, that we're healthy enough that we have obviously C-sections, all of that necessary if they're necessary, but not as the norm
And so this isn't about binaries. This isn't either or. This is about the complimentary. This is about the relationality of the, of modernity, of the somatic consciousness that needs to be reignited at every moment because it's being challenged and degradated at every moment because of our the supposed inevitability of modernity.
But when apocalyptic parenting, [00:44:00] when that revealing and I'll backtrack just for a moment with 'Viscous Expectations', with my first book the subtitle. So 'Viscous Expectations' 'The Vulnerability the Obscene'. So the idea of the obscene, what is off stage, what is hidden? These systems that we. Again, that we take for granted that are so part of our cellular framework that they become real and they're like, common sense.
That's not real yet. At every turn we're confronted with common sense and being a parent who is trying to resist common sense, that's rough.
The a lot of what I write about in parent explore both in my body performance pedagogically and on paper is when we are living a world that is challenging the norms, what does it mean to, to [00:45:00] do the I compared to as the we, for example when. Zazu when I went to a voodoo community in Benin in West Africa that was my attempt to be in a place where common sense was expanded, where it wasn't a place of restriction. And you have a question, you're gonna go to Google and you're gonna use Google as a verb, and it's gonna replace your own possibility of inquiry.
And it's gonna
Michael Reiley: which has gone even more, which has gone even more, extreme with AI. now ChatGPT how to do everything. Like, how do I file my taxes? How do my child's coughing? What do I do? Like these kind of, yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: This is the which is one reason why it was disheartening to see in the Neuroaesthetics material this reliance on these kinds of technologies [00:46:00] rather than the, that, rather than that our brain and our brain that's embedded. If we look neurologic, if we look embryologically, that our brain was our gut
In utero
.
And apocalyptic parenting is part of that revealing process, that commitment to again and again witnessing what already exists in contrast to these.
Worlds that are stripping us of our sensuality. And certainly, of course body phobia goes hand in hand with capitalism, goes hand in hand with eco side goes hand in hand with human rights infractions.
.
It, there, and back to the question earlier about the tree and the image, the entanglement of the roots.
That's exciting to me because if we can address that one, then we can address all of them.
.
But I think really as parent, that it, it has to be in community
In, in all of these contexts.
Michael Reiley: that are [00:47:00] afflicting us didn't happen to us individually or from one person. They came about because of systemic conditions. And so the healing also needs to be systemic. It needs to be done in community and relationality.
. What I'm loving is that you write and inhabit this world as part of your work and your art, but you also live it so authentically.
Like you mentioned, you have a flip phone, you've never owned a car, and you sent me this beautiful video of. Love Bus, and I'd love to hear more, [00:48:00] more about we'll share a video of this
Could you talk a bit about the Love bus?
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah, so that's a perfect example of what I would call a apocalyptic parenting as an antidote to petroleum parenting. Everything is reused. I'll start with that reclaimed material. The process itself, Zazu again. So the bus was maybe about a year after Zazu Dreams was published, first published the new edition of Zazu Dreams came out last year with a forward by Vandana Shiva.
And the original book that came out in 2017 was endorsed by Noam Chomsky and Paul Hawkin, bill McKibbon ler, James C. Hansen, David Orr, Tom Harden my brother-in-law, Shahi Humpty. He and the bus was a process with, very much with Zazu. Our we built a whole homeschool [00:49:00] curriculum around it.
So it was a bus that was heading to landfill. It was heading to this idea that comes up again and again in, in Zazu dreams that there is no a way. We don't, there's, you don't flush any there's nowhere to flush anything. There's the idea again and of matter is neither. Created or destroyed.
It is simply transformed. So the bus we renovated in about 30 days. It was we it was Michigan in the outskirts of Detroit freezing. And we were able to find all reused materials ranging from 14 foot board boxes in an alley that the company was transporting pipes in. And they would make.
Pine boxes that were sent to them and then dispose of them, and they were just stacked up in the alley, for example. So those now are covering the [00:50:00] walls that have reused insulation. So at every level of taking the bus apart and putting the bus back together as a home. So taking the bus apart as a public transportation for children and then putting it back together as a home and home referring the idea of ocos the route of both ecology and economy that ocos is at the root of the Love bus, because of its relationship to multiple kinds of sacred economies of economies of solidarity economies of collective parenting in relation to obviously ecology and what it means to be living in a small space with everything, as I say, even in the film down to the last screw, is something that is, is reused.
So there's a sense of respect and care for each of the objects that we [00:51:00] put together as a family.
Michael Reiley: Nice. Yeah, and it's the, it looks joyful, which I love
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Oh, good.
Michael Reiley: because, you hear the phrase apo apocalyptic parenting and, you think about, Cormac McCarthy, the Road or The Walking Dead, where everything's gray and dire and Oh, we're living in a bus and it's horrible.
But your bus looks so cool. It looks so fun. Enjoy. Joy is a medicine, it's a medicine that's getting us through it. And it's what the people that are orchestrating these systems of oppression don't want, is for us to be joyful. And it's
Cara Judea Alhadeff: no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's challenging using a term that we have all these associations with, like apocalypse, of course, but. one reason why I'm emphasizing remembering, or two fabulous books. Catherine Keller, one of my colleagues, Catherine Keller facing Apocalypse, and she writes about apocalyptic mindfulness.
That's about paying attention.
.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Or a fantastic book [00:52:00] about a Quaker the first revolutionary abolitionist Quaker in the 17 hundreds contemporary of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin published his book, Benjamin Lay and how he was also fixated on Revelation on this. It's the simultaneity of birth and death, the simultaneity of.
Yes and no. The both and the bus is so much about beauty in relation to these stories that. Are about pain, right? You and I are on computers. Those, our computers are stories of pain. The, all of the mechanisms that went in the embodied energy, the supply chain that went into it, and then how do we live in that with beauty?
And that's what the bus is. It's a refuge of respect.
.
And we've experienced, so the irony also is that we've [00:53:00] experienced so much discrimination, tiny home discrimination, because people's associations around negligence. You must be whatever stereotypical stereotypes about hippies and and living in a junkyard and when.
Especially, for example, in Boulder County I'm from Boulder, Colorado. And the restrictions there around living in a bus for example, because it's, it devalues the neighbors property value. And again, going back to property and socially appropriate and what is seen as.
Acceptable when only norms are determining. It's so basic. It is so common sense that the common sense is so istic.
.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: It's but, and foucault term, which is even a lot alive and well internalized fascism, just how we have [00:54:00] taken these to be fact taken, these values and living next to a multimillion dollar house in a school bus and being told that our home has less value.
When you look at the history of how the embodied energy of what went into making that house and the layers of tyranny and that's seen somehow as justifiable, that's seen as beautiful.
.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: The utter perversity is heartbreaking and. Absolutely Motivat motivating that is the galvanizing factor for
Not allowing that to be the norm.
Michael Reiley: Exactly. Yeah. And that for me, that's one of the things, obviously the COVID, the pandemic was a horrible time for many people who got sick and lost their jobs and had economic hardship. But I think it did show us as a planet that we can change things pretty quickly.
They were just like, everyone stay home. No one get on a [00:55:00] plane and we did it. Everyone's okay, cool. We'll do that. So we're very, neuroplasticity also I think, extends to our society that we're very pliable, we're very able to adapt and change the ways of life.
Getting back to interconnectedness. It did reveal an interconnectedness that this virus emerged. It made some people sick, and part of that web of life became, the skies became clear. Birds started to sing louder. They talk about dolphins and Venice. I don't know if that's true, but things like that.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yes. These stories. Yeah. No, absolutely. But then that line between understanding our human community and acting accordingly, and the line that can very easily slip into habituated obedience
And can slip into automatic behavior. Where, so I think we just need to be.
Always vigilant of what is our adaptability? Is [00:56:00] our adaptability because it's feeding into convenience culture because we're being told by experts. Because I, I think as long as we're asking questions and also noticing our patterns and our possibilities for re-patterning, but our patterns after what happened after COVID, or, there is no necessarily post, but even with Hurricane Helene, for example my son Zazu was in the hurricane.
He was in Asheville when it happened. And the communities came together beautifully. It was extraordinary. However, they've gone back to their flushing toilets, even the rural communities that could have, or even in Asheville, you can do compost toilets in all kinds of environments that we don't even realize because we assume that the regulations will restrict us.
So what [00:57:00] I'm suggesting is that we're asking questions. We're re-imagining possibilities when we're being told. That's impossible. This is inevitable when by asking questions in relation to one another. I think so many more possibilities would emerge and ways of being cautious creatively where we can take creative, collective creative risks.
.
In a way where there is caution around power dynamics, hierarchy, corporate co coercion, all of these layers that are often directing us maybe inadvertently, but to pay attention.
And that's that's the apocalyptic mindfulness,
.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Rein, re invoking that
Michael Reiley: Nice. I'm gonna check out that book
It's been a delight speaking with you today. Even though you're gonna gimme a lot of work for the show [00:58:00] notes 'cause of all the things we mentioned,
Cara Judea Alhadeff: I was worried.
Michael Reiley: but No it's all good. I'll it'll be good for me to find all these books and all these references and everything, and we'll of course, have links to your website and that's the best way for people to find out about your upcoming writings.
And you're doing you mentioned earlier, you're doing performances of Zazu Dreams.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Yeah. I've done hundreds of performances over the past few years in a variety of contexts from outdoor get off the grid festivals with no tech to planetariums with 25 plus performers, and the full dome projection with the images.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: so that continues in different, mostly university and also spirit based contexts.
The next couple of ones are in a geography department and a unitarian church. For example in the next week actually in North Carolina. And then my new book, "Radical Art in Action, Unlearning What We Think We Know" is coming out. And I have a [00:59:00] substack if people are interested. And the site is very involved with my photographs and publications from 2020 to 2025 now.
And then I have a site of work from 1992 to 2019 again with image and text. And I'm happy if you wanna share my email, that's fine too. I'm happy to be in conversation with people.
Michael Reiley: We'll do that. Yeah.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: And because this is about a movement, this is about being in, in a space of collaborative vulnerability.
I really am open to an eager for conversation.
Michael Reiley: Nice. Beautiful. Thank you Cara, thank you for yeah, these answers, but also these questions that you gave us and welcoming us into this space of the unknown. The space of wonder. The space of awe that I think only art can really we've, we, I think we both at times we're [01:00:00] coming up against the edges and the limitations of language.
So yeah it's art, it's music it's illustrations, it's poetry. I think that can lead us more authentically into the unknown.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: And if we build a language of aesthetics,
Michael Reiley: Hmm.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: think that's part of our responsibility to ourselves on this planet to be in co-creation around a, a language. So it's both. It's, again, it's the both
Of language and not language. But I think we owe it to ourselves to also find and to remember the words that we use all the time.
And to bring respect and a sense of the sacred to the language that the languages, the multiplicity, the polyvocality that does exist.
Michael Reiley: Yes indeed. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cara.
Thank you.
Cara Judea Alhadeff: Very much appreciate it.
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