Have you ever walked into a bookstore browsing for, I don't know, just something different? Here's a suggestion: Glenn Siegel's book, "Abducted by Lichen: An Interspecies Journey of Love, Healing and Wisdom." He'll discuss the book at Pearl's Books in Fayetteville on July 2, then again this fall at the Fayetteville Public Library. During a recent conversation at the Carver Center for Public Radio, I asked Siegel how he describes the book to somebody else.
Glenn Siegel: An unexpected encounter with an other-than-human being that enveloped me in a sense of mystical love that led me to explore: how could a being like this create that feeling? And so I became an apprentice to lichen, to learn how it lives. And that journey took me in deep ways into my own woundedness, my own healing, and offered me great wisdom at the same time.
Kyle Kellams: I want to ask about this relationship, but let's back up just a little bit and talk about lichen itself. I grew up in the rural Ozarks around lakes and rivers, so I would see lichen often. I see it on my stone retaining wall in my backyard. But do I really see it?
Siegel: So when I started to look into this lichen, which I didn't know from moss, I didn't know what it really was. I learned that it's a very ancient being. It's been here at least half a billion years on the planet, so that means it's had the capacity to endure every cataclysmic event on Earth. And what allows it to do that is really how it lives and what it is. It's a symbiotic being. It's made of fungus and algae, neither of which are related to each other. They're in completely different kingdoms of biology. So how they found a way to connect across this chasm, and in doing so create this symbiotic third being, lichen, which is neither fungus nor algae. They don't stay the same. They're altered. But that combination allowed them to endure things neither one could have done alone. And so that's why they've been able to live. So this idea of a relational being as a guide to what endures is what really grabs me.
Kellams: So many of us see lichen, we may call it moss when we see it, but we see it. But as you say, it's peripheral. So what led you to focus on lichen?
Siegel: I was on a wander in a forest in northern New Mexico, and I was actually lying on the ground. And I felt literally a magnetic pull in the center of my chest. And I got up to follow it, and it was just pulling me. And it was a Ponderosa pine forest, and about 20 yards, 30 yards away, it got stronger as I approached. And hanging from a little dead branch on a Ponderosa pine tree at eye level was this sprig of lichen. It's a little different than the lichen we have in Arkansas, which is more crusty on things. This can look like Spanish moss. It can be more three-dimensional. That's the kind. And I knew it was coming from that, and when I approached it, I just had this feeling of being surrounded by love. And I was not on any kind of psychedelic. I was not expecting this, wasn't seeking it. And so that's how I encountered it.
Kellams: So then you investigate lichen.
Siegel: After that experience, I was so astounded by it because I had never felt anything of that depth of love before. So I thought, how is this happening? So I became what I call an apprentice to lichen. And so I went on this journey of studying it. How does it live? What is it made of? What is it about? And that's a whole journey that I can say more about as this proceeds, but that's how it happened.
Kellams: After you had this experience, did you tell many people about it?
Siegel: Yes. I was out there with a group on what's called a soulcraft intensive, an immersion experience through an organization that does these kinds of nature-based wanders. And I immediately wrote a poem. It was inspiring me, and so I wrote a poem within the next four hours. And at the end of this gathering, we were all invited — it was what's called Soul Theater, where we were to speak or share something about what our experience had been. And so I shared the poem, and the poem somewhat described it.
Kellams: The journey to investigate, does that start with a book, online? How did you investigate?
Siegel: Well, yes, both of those things. I think probably online these days. There's so much information accessible. And then I started to hear the voice of lichen. I was driving back to New Mexico a couple of years later, and I was concocting an email in the car, in my head, to respond to something that had really irritated me from someone else. And I was crafting these emails — we've all been there — that were going to be really clever and sort of dominate the argument, to show that I was right about something. And I hear this voice saying, look at you, look at your pettiness. And I found myself blurting out, is that you, lichen? Without any thought about that — I've never spoken, I didn't speak to lichen before that. And the next thing I heard was, remember, I came to you in love, which for me at that moment meant: what you're doing in this email, pettiness, is not at all what I'm teaching you, what love is about. So that's when I started paying attention.
Kellams: So how does paying attention to lichen develop this apprenticeship? What form does that take?
Siegel: This is a great question. So that first idea of love being the primary thing I would seek started to guide me in my exploration, and I wanted to explore in myself what that meant for me in my daily life — if I was going to approach every situation differently than that kind of smaller, reactive self, what that would look like. And I started writing. I started writing my ideas. And eventually I went to a monastery. It was actually on that trip — the second one, where I heard that voice — to write. And it was there that I really encountered the crisis that I would call the dark night of the soul. I went to a monastery in northern New Mexico, and I was planning to spend nine days there writing. It was surrounded by lichen all around me, to see what would come up. And what unexpectedly happened was there was a painting on the wall in my cell, and that image penetrated something in me — it was like an image that encapsulated my entire childhood wounded story in one image. And I went through a kind of inability to — I panicked, I had a panic feeling. And that night I couldn't sleep. I felt as if I didn't remain vigilant, my breathing would stop, that it wouldn't continue on its own. And that went on all night, and I was getting kind of terrified. I had a sense of terror that I was going to die.
And so I fled this monastery in 24 hours instead of nine days. And I spent the next year, two years, exploring what happened. What is this? And lichen, in my view, had led me there to have that experience of that image. So what happened was that image brought me to a grief — I would say the story of lichen for me is a story about love and grief — and it brought me to the grief I couldn't feel in my childhood because it was so overwhelming it would annihilate me. Back then, it was the grief about my mother dying when I was a child, and that level of grief, my psyche couldn't manage. And yet the image on the wall was a mother and a baby — it was a kind of a Virgin, a Mary and Jesus, with a lamb, a sacrificial lamb, in her other arm, which was a kind of — like, the future, there's going to be death. And somehow that all wrapped up, got to me, and the grief that I thought would annihilate me as a child, or my mind did protect me from feeling, started to come up. And that's why I felt like I was going to die. It took me a couple of years to figure that out. And so that experience — you know, I'd been through psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, I'm a psychiatrist, I've been exposed to all kinds of things — but nothing had ever reached me like that. And so it felt so sacred, particularly because it wasn't human. It felt so clean — there wasn't any psychotherapy transaction or anything involved. And that was so healing for me to go through, because I survived it, by the way. The fourth night of not being able to sleep — this went on for four nights, because I thought I'd die — I'm sitting up, just, what do I do? I can't live this way for the rest of my life. And I heard the voice again, and it said: you must love your way into your own death.
Kellams: I'm going to guess most people who tuned in to the show today didn't think they'd hear about lichen. So let me play the role of — not skeptic, but curious newcomer. Glenn, this sounds profound. I believe all of this, but I'm having a hard time thinking that this was lichen leading you to this, and not just you, and some sort of inner growth, perhaps because of your medical training and your decades of practice.
Siegel: I don't particularly separate myself from lichen. I mean, one of the teachings of all of this is the interconnectedness of everything, and so I don't need to make a distinction like that. If my relationship with lichen led me to unearth what's already in me, I do believe that — I do believe that's the process — but it required that relationship to do it, and it required my being in relationship with a being that lives very differently than me, for me to start to glimpse this. Here's a being that lives in silence, lives with no movement, has a combination of elements that is algae, which is photosynthetic, which creates energy, creates life, and fungus, which is designed to create decay and death. And they live in relationship. Now, if we could do that — if we can embrace both our vitality and our certain death — what would that mean for us, instead of being phobic about our death? That kind of thing led me, and still does, into profound awakening inside myself.
Kellams: You mentioned the trauma — as a young child, losing your mother, which I cannot imagine how horrible that would be. And forgive me if this is a trite way to bring this up: do you think you are healing from that trauma now?
Siegel: I'll say a bit about why lichen's way of being reached me about this trauma. The death was one thing, but the real traumatic element of it was the silence around it. As a child, no one ever spoke to me about the illness. No one told me she was dying. She didn't tell me she was dying, even though everyone knew she had breast cancer. And even after she died, it was never mentioned. So the silence is what was the trauma. And the fact that lichen is silent — and I'm now in a relationship with something that I feel love with, but I also feel incredibly impenetrable silence around — the silence is what brought me to that place that I experienced as a child.
Kellams: Are you happier now?
Siegel: Well, happy is not it. I think there are moments — I think joy is really the word. I mean, I know it's a subtle difference, but I really think they're different. And joy is an underlying sense of well-being for me, no matter how I feel, because my emotional state is not the deep part of me. There's something else, you know? And so I've glimpsed it. I've had the miraculous gift of this. And so I suppose I am happier, if that's how people want to think about it. But it really is more of a sense of well-being and joy, even if I feel disturbed or disrupted or angry or depressed in a moment. Depression doesn't really set in.
Kellams: Thank you so much for the book, and so much for your time.
Siegel: Thank you, Kyle.
Glenn Siegel will discuss his book, "Abducted by Lichen: An Interspecies Journey of Love, Healing and Wisdom," at Pearl's Books in Fayetteville on Thursday, July 2. Our conversation was recorded earlier this month.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
