Episode #67 of the Ground Shots Podcast is a conversation with Ted Packard, who currently lives in Ignacio, Colorado, just outside of Durango, Colorado.
Mariner’s Museum Park (which we talk about on the podcast)
(Pentax film photo Ted took of me typing things to his hair- 2010?)
Ted and I were friends in college and have kept up all these years. Ted studied History and Anthropology at Christopher Newport University, got a Master’s in Teaching, went on the road with the Momentary Prophets band for awhile, and then went went to study nature connection mentorship with Alderleaf Wilderness College and Wilderness Awareness School. He taught various program for youth around the greater Seattle and Puget sound area for many years before relocating to Durango, Colorado to dry out, as he says. After some years of a break, Ted just started up a new nature connection program for youth in the Durango community. Ted does lots of things, including various handcrafts, refurbishing guitars and other instruments, music-making, writing, wood-burning and more. We talk about many of those things in this episode but also basically do a 15 year check-in since we first met. As college peers, we spent a lot of time in the library together researching things like mushroom cults, the esoteric origins of Judeo-Christian religion, the anthropology of psychedelics, zen koans, and more. We both have lived in different places since this time and woven in and out of each others’ lives so we spent some time really checking in about how we think about things now vs. when we were radical activist driven neo-pagan coyote-trickster troubadour mind-melters.
(photo I took of Ted in 2008)
old photo I took of Ted and his art (2008)
In this episode with Ted, we talk about:
Ted’s nature connection mentorship work with youth in Washington and Colorado
Ted’s upbringing in northwestern Virginia
Our experience in college of community: artists, philosophers, musicians, activists, and neo-pagans and our reflections on that time now
seasonal ritual as a somatic map
ways that Ted’s anger at an eco-cidal culture has transformed over the years to a yearning for finding points of connection vs. telling someone they are wrong or how to live
what is a community of mutuality in a broken society that emphasizes hyper-individualism?
activism can look many ways and can even be in small moments of advocacy
awareness of the isolation of capitalism is often crippling
the reality that financial security is generally not available to our generation (millennials)
Ted’s musical projects which include Momentary Prophets from his early 20’s, that had a coyote-troubadour element with community driven instigation, as well as his own solo projects
paying attention to ‘nature’ bringing you closer to crazy synchronicities that become signposts to keep going
weaving a web of interrelated ideas and ecologies as a way of being, our reflections on how we’ve done this since we first met
trauma, neutrinos, quantum physics intersecting eastern philosophy, bodies as multiplicity, the mycelium nature of everything, music as ecological channeling
A little throwback to when Ted and I were in college, many of these photos I took:
A couple poems of Ted’s:
Rising Star Lane
Tonight,
walking by light of moonOn this, the second-longest night
(I’d say who’s counting but
by one god or another
We sure as hell have been for a
very
long time)snow crunches into softness beneath me
and the cottontail tracks float like Legolas above
and I am all hard crust
and I am all soft underthing
and maybe, I am floating tooand there - oh, waxing poetical - there
is the irrigation ditch
And
is
she
transformedfrom some vulgar line of cow shit and roundup ready imposition
to transcendent sheen, shimmering smooth and bubbling cold,so suddenly worthy
Of coyote going along
edgewise
picking just. this. spot. to step down waterside
where, next week,
(dark god of winter willing)
There may be a way across this half-frozen body of lifeUntil then,
I look into the shadows
beneath piñon and juniper,knowing that
all my bright-nighted wandering
hasn’t yet touched
the deep
wondering below those trees
where dreams beyond the wary sleep of deer
are growing12-21-21
There, Underneath
in what would otherwise be
a new moon’s dark
this is new snow’s Shining Night among
the standing ones
needled and barked
still as growing stone
I find the place
shelter enough for
long enough to chew, for
long enough to melt snow down to earth,
which they did,
before they left
So, I am gifted their bare ground
needled and barked
to lay my body down
where snow falls upon my cheek
shards of tiny quiet,
almost painful
And that petty desert god
did not know any three
of the hundred names of snow
And he does not know me
tonight
•••
When I open my eyes again
after uncounted breaths of
warm wool comfort and
cold ground seeping,
I stand and see
There, Underneath
dark form of my body
curled, knees drawn, head on hand,
black ground among the new-white-snow
And that mark
I am proud to leave
upon this earth:
A shadow to be covered,
a heart once held so close
as to be a blanket under snow
12-30-21
