The Underlying Human Ailment

A Collaboration with Film Maker Nic Askew

On Monday May 12 we premiered a new short film collaboration with the inimitable Nic Askew, creator of Soul Biographies. (If you are not familiar with Nic’s filmic portraits, stop what you are doing right now and visit his site. IMHO he is one of the finest artists working today. Twenty-two hundred years ago the African Roman poet Terence has a character say, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

I am human; nothing human is alien to me.

Nic’s work is an experiential conduit to knowing this for yourself. It demands (and deserves) your full attention when you watch it: a deep antidote to the restless flicker of TikTok attention spans. Put on headphones, go fullscreen, lock out the outside world; dive deeply in.))

The film, and the production process beneath it was deceptively simple. Nick brought his camera, and a single lighting standard into the forest that I steward. I sat at the edge of a table that we had just finished building by hand from two enormous slabs of Oregon maple. We both got very quiet.

At some point, in the silence, Nick asked me to take off my shoes and socks, and I did so, and pushed the soles of my feet down into the earth. At a certain point he started the camera, and we continued to sit in silence for nearly ten minutes before he invited me to open my eyes.

Our conversation on May 12 was primarily concerned with where, in consciousness, we are speaking from. A couple of decades ago, Nick realized that people tend to speak from one of two places, which I’ll call the doing or the being. When we speak from the doing it is typically cognitive, egoic, more-or-less our ordinary sense of self. When the being speaks, however, it comes through us. The doing originates in our minds; the being originates somewhere behind, or in the case of this film, below us.

What I had forgotten until Nic spoke about it during the screening was this directive for me to take off my shoes and socks. He noted that it was never something he had asked a film subject to do before; that sitting there in the harmonious cacophony of birdsong, insect scree, and palpable volumes of silence, this directive had simply arisen, and so he had voiced it.

I found this detail significant, for the simple reason that the only rule I gave myself when I sat down to write the second book in the Autonomics trilogy, Ground: How Modernity Disconnected from the Earth, Why it Matters, and How to Fix It, was that at the beginning of each writing session I take off my shoes and socks. My hope with this protocol, and the intelligence that made itself known through Nic’s request, was that the book, and the film, would arrive as an upload from the earth: a form of transmission through that contact.

Here is the film, which I’m making publicly available: please share it with those you feel would find it resonant.