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Hello, thanks for listening to reversing Climate change.
I'm Ross Kenyon, I'm the host of the show.
I'm a carbon removal and climate tech entrepreneur.
I'm also someone who likes books.
Today I'm going to talk about a short story that I really love
and its application to the idea of vocation, which I think it's
an underused term. Vocation if you've ever studied
any language that uses cases, Any language that uses
declension, which is when nouns change similar to how verbs are
conjugated, but sometimes nouns can also change rather than
using prepositions which are outside of the noun.
Sometimes prepositions can be a part of nouns, and the vocative
case is how it works when you are addressing someone, when you
are calling someone. So for instance, it's not a two
Brutus, it's a 2 Bruti. If you're addressing Brutus, you
change his name because you were calling him.
It's the vocative case. And a vocation is meant to be a
calling. And this can be quite distinct
from the job that you do, the work that you do.
A vocation is meant to be something that is meaningful.
In fact, a vocation opens the question of who is the one doing
the calling? Is it to your own self?
Is desiring after something that it knows that it wants?
Is this some sort of divine motivation or fate?
Determinism. Some of those funny embeddings
of meaning inside of a what would otherwise be a rather
neutral linguistic term. I think, I imagine this at least
partially comes from the Latin and the Catholic Church
referring to people who are called to religious lives like,
you know, being nuns, monks, priests as the vocations.
And I think when work is good and you know that you're doing
something that is meaningful, that is rewarding, you feel like
you're in the right place. I think that can be vocational
and it also doesn't necessarily have to be 1 single thing.
One thing that I've loved about my life since my last company
closed down is that I've been able to work with a number of
entrepreneurs in either a mentorship capacity where I am
volunteering and accelerator programs.
That's also turned into paid coaching work and accelerator
programs, in addition to advising arrangements with
companies. And that for me, has a strong
vocational meaning. I feel as though I am where I'm
supposed to be. I am adding value, I am working
through big questions and I'm able to do the job in a way that
I experience. Is being emotionally connected,
impactful, encouraging, while also being real about the issues
that companies face as well. It's not just being a damn the
torpedoes never tell me the odds.
Sometimes you need to deliver feedback that may be tough to
hear about one's company. And I can still view that job as
something that I find to be a beautiful, rewarding experience.
I actually really like educating, and I don't even
really like using that word so much.
Just I like being an external strategic enabler for others,
and that's something that I really like doing and feel very
passionate about to the degree to which I'm willing to use
vocational about 17 times so far in this podcast.
Not all work feels like that. It's not every day that it does.
I've been thinking a lot about the nature of work, of Labor,
because how could you not? And one of the other parts of my
life that feels vocational is this podcast.
Not every part of it feels vocational to me, but when it
does, I feel I'm on the right track about something important
and I feel connected to a long and powerful lineage.
I'm going to explain what that means.
In order for this to have a lick of a chance at making sense, I'm
going to have to walk you through a short story which I
adore, called Leaf by Niggle by JRR Tolkien.
I've known about this story for a very long time.
A friend of mine recommended it to me.
I don't even know how long ago. I saw them post on social media
years ago a podcast called Classical Stuff You Should Know,
and they did an episode about Leaf by Niggle and I had it
saved in my podcast app for I don't even know how long.
It was one of those. It's been downloaded.
It's at the very bottom of the list, older than anything else
that's been downloaded. I always been like, I'm going to
get to it. As you probably heard me mention
on this show before, Books finds you at the right moment.
I wasn't ready when I first tried to read Leaf by Niggle.
It washed right over me, made basically no impression at all.
But some part of me just kind of knew, like there's something
here. I'm going to want to revisit it.
So recently, probably a month or six weeks ago, I listened to
that classical Stuff You Should know podcast about leaf by
niggle. It's produced by several
teachers, as far as I can understand, from a classical
Christian Academy, the kind of school that's reading Aquinas
and Aristotle and and working through the classical
humanities, like liberal arts tradition.
And so I listened to this podcast and I'm like, OK, this
is really the exact right moment for me to be discovering this
again. And I'm going to go back and
read Leaf by Nickel. Big surprise.
I think Leaf by Nickel is brilliant.
It's so didactic, but it's also so unexpected, which makes it a
truly wonderful tale. So I'm going to tell you about
it. It's going to spoil it, but also
you could listen to it or read it in less than an hour if you
would like. Niggle is a painter and he lives
in the countryside of what I imagine is England, and he's not
that great of an artist. He's OK at it, but he's
passionate and he's always working on a picture of a tree
and it keeps getting bigger and bigger, but he never quite
finishes it. As he's working on it, his
neighbors, people from the town, just keep bothering him with
what he deems interruptions. No, he has to serve on a jury.
Oh, such and such needs a little help with their garden.
You have a distant relation who's I'll somewhere.
In other words, his life is full of the regular a business of
living life. There are people who who need
things that he is in a position to help them with.
And while he he does it and he does help these people, he never
especially wants to he he broadly resents the intrusion,
but he's compliant and and serves them his his goal is to
get back to his tree and keep painting as much as possible.
And if you know anything about Tolkien, who wrote the Lord of
the Rings and quite a lot of poetry and other mythological
works, this is basically his life.
He's trying, I imagine trying desperately, to birth into
existence an entire internally coherent, powerful mythological
realm. Immensely difficult to do.
Having a symbolically rich story that also broadly holds is a
really challenging thing to do. They joke about it in that
podcast, which by the way, if you want to listen to you, I'll
post it in the show notes. They joke that Tolkien was was
always would argue with CS Lewis about how the Chronicles of
Narnia universe doesn't actually make sense, like there's
contradictions in it that he's never been able to resolve.
So Tolkien was really trying to make this thing all sort of make
sense. And that's a lot of work.
But life keeps intervening. He keeps having to do things.
His community needs him for various things, and he knows
that he actually has an important journey coming up that
he cannot refuse. It will not surprise you to know
that that is a literary way of describing death.
If someone ever says that they have an important journey that
they cannot postpone any longer or something like that, that's
it's symbolism for death. I think almost, almost always we
have a joke in my family about how your high school literature
class would always ask you, well, who's the Christ figure in
this novel? And and by joke, there's always
one, There's always someone that you can put into that molds
because you come from a Christian civilization if you're
from a Euro American orientation.
But Niggle has to make a journey.
And his neighbor parish comes by his house and says that his wife
is ill. And he very much needs Niggle to
ride his bike to town to get the doctor for his wife because he's
worried that his wife doesn't merely have a cold, but it's
actually a fever and she may die.
Niggle knows that he may himself catch a cold.
He doesn't especially want to do this journey, but he does it to
help perish and perish his wife. And he goes.
He falls ill, and Parish's wife is fine.
I was apparently a quick call. She recovers quickly.
So the trip ultimately had no instrumental result.
That made Niggles journey worth it for the outcome.
It was one of those things where the intention mattered but the
outcome was irrelevant, which is, I think, symbolically and
theologically important to the story.
While he's there, he's also meant to ask the builders,
builders, you know, British for construction people, if they can
come by to fix Parrish's house because the roof is is failing
and it's letting in the damp and the cold.
And that's at least partially why Missus Parrish fell I'll
niggle falls. I'll soon enough.
The the building inspector comes by and says that the law
requires him to help his neighbor because they're having
bad weather. And Niggle should have helped
his neighbor more to stop the damage from getting worse during
this stormy period. And Niggle points out that the
town has an emergency fund, like he shouldn't have to be the one
to help perish. But the inspector points to his
painting and says, look, you've got canvas, you've got wood,
you've got waterproof paint. It's all right here.
You have all the means to help your neighbor and you chose not
to, even though you could have prevented his home from being
damaged further by the rain and the storm.
Of course, Niggle thinks that his art is more important than
helping his neighbor. And so if you stop reading here,
you would think this is such obvious Christian parable,
right? Niggle is selfish.
All he cares about is his art. He's not even especially good at
it. He just wants to make it for his
own vain desires. And obviously, the thing in life
that counts is helping your neighbor, and that is true to an
extent. But what I love about this story
is it doesn't end there. And there's actually a much more
sophisticated set of moral lessons that come.
So while Niggle is dealing with this very insistent building
inspector, the driver of his coach that he's been awaiting
for his travel arrives. And Niggle doesn't want to go.
He hasn't packed anything. He wasn't prepared to make this
long journey right now, but here it is.
It is upon him. And there's no time to do
anything except to comply. And he's also just so tired.
He's, I'll, he's just going to allow himself to be carted off
from his home and taken where the driver wants to take him.
And if you're thinking this sounds like the Grim Reaper,
then like I said, I don't really think that there's a lot of
attempts to hide the symbolism, which is interesting, right?
Because Tolkien is actually very sophisticated with how he uses
symbolism. And the Lord of the Rings books
are not straightforwardly symbolic.
Like if, if I ask you the high school literary question of who
is the Christ figure in Lord of the Rings, you could give
several answers and write several essays that would
convince your teacher that you actually did the reading and had
thought about it. Like, it could, it could be Sam
wise. You know, Sam is basically
saying Christopher. I think the mythological story
of Saint Christopher is closest for Sam, But you could also say
that Sam's amount of sacrifice and humility is Christ.
Like in this way, obviously you could say Frodo.
And then what is Oh gosh, do I want to, even if you haven't
read, read Lord of the Rings or watched it, if you don't want
spoilers, quit now because I, I feel like I have to talk about
Lord of the Rings just to, to make sense of this.
Frodo decides that he's going to keep the ring the same that
Izlder did a very long time ago before the Lord of the Rings
trilogy happens. And then Gollum tackles him and
tries to wrestle the ring away from him, bites his finger off,
and then falls into mountain doom and ironically saves the
day by his own greed rather than letting Frodo's corruption win.
It's like, it's beautiful. Like rich.
Like what? What is that story?
There's so much depth to that. It's hard for me.
I know it's symbolically important, I know it's
meaningful, but I also can't tell you exactly what is
operating there. Part of it goes back to
Gandalf's feelings about mercy that I had to look up the quote
because it's one of those things that's so, so tightly written
and so perfect that it would be a shame for me to to butcher it.
Sam is asking Gandalf why didn't Bilbo just kill Gollum back when
he had the chance and why is Gollum still alive and why
doesn't someone do something about Gollum who's just
following the ring bearer across Middle Earth?
Gandalf chastises Sam for this question and says many that live
deserve death and some that die deserve life.
Can you give it to them then? Do not be too eager to deal out
death in judgment, for even the very wise cannot see all ends.
I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but
there is a chance of it, and he is bound up with the fate of the
Ring. My heart tells me that he has
some part to play yet, for good or I'll before the end.
And when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many
Yours not least. What a powerful statement.
That's such a such a beautiful thing.
And of course Gandalf is right. If Gollum had been killed
earlier in the story, Frodo would have perfectly duplicated
the Islder story and just walked away from it.
And then we'd have a whole another cycle, potentially of
the ring being lost and found. Or maybe just Sauron would get
his hands on the ring right after that.
The mercy for Gollum allows him to stop Frodo's corruption from
allowing either the cycle to return or for darkness to to
finally win in Middle Earth. Such an interesting part of the
story here too, because you can also compare this to like when I
think about Jewish theology and Christian theology.
Jewish theology has a really strong cyclical feel.
It's all about how the Israelites, they make a covenant
with God and then they break it, and then they make it another
covenant, and then they break it and they make another covenant
and they break it. And the Old Testament basically
ends, as far as I can tell, as a layperson, without resolution of
this central circular dynamic. It's just on and on and on,
which I think is poetically so beautiful too.
If you think about our time on earth as a chance to improve
your soul, to learn things, to become a better person.
It's not a straightforward path. You might feel like it's 2 steps
forward, one step back. Maybe it's 2 steps forward to
three steps back. Sometimes in life it's not a
straightforward process. And Jewish theology having that
circularity to it, I think it's a really beautiful thing.
But then Christian theology layered on top of Jewish
theology is interesting because it takes that cycle and the
attempt is to break the like permanent revolutionary aspects
of of Jewish spiritual life. And to solve it once and for all
and to say, actually, this is the new covenant.
This is what we're doing now. Pick up your cross and follow
me. And this is sort of meant to be
a capstone on the cycle to maybe close it once and for all.
And so if you take that to Lord of the Rings and you're watching
the the Mount Doom scene, who is what in Christian mythology
here? Frodo's moment of darkness could
be the agony in the garden. You know, this could be
Gethsemane, where Jesus is worried about what is to come
and shows his moments of humanity here.
Could be something like that. But then what is?
What is Gollum exactly? Gollum doesn't fit neatly into
the Christian story because it's so deeply ironic.
Gollum's greed unintentionally saves the day because he bites
off Frodo's finger and falls into mountain doom.
What are we to make of that? It's there's almost like a if,
if you haven't seen the movie Burn after reading the Coen
Brothers film, it's wonderful. You should definitely see it.
But the conclusion of it has a moment where the sorry again, I
got to spoil it, but it's also been out for a long time and you
should see it. JK Simmons and the other people
at the CIA are just like trying to figure out what even occurred
in this story. They're like, what?
What was this? And JK Simmons said something
like, well, what did we learn here?
I guess not to do it again. And like, that's the conclusion
of the movie, that it's just it's contingency, it's
randomness. It just kind of happened.
But like, what are you meant to learn from that?
It's not as straightforward as Christian mythology.
There's something else. There's like Christian elements
to it. But the resolution of this is
not straightforwardly Christian in this way.
It's it's there's like a sophisticated, nuanced kind of
understanding of this. The best thing you can say about
is you have to go back to that original Gandalf line and hear
him say that like Bilbo not killing Gollum as an act of
mercy means that this act of mercy that Gollum did not
deserve, that he still does not rise to the challenge of like he
does not deserve mercy potentially even until he falls
into the lava of Mount Doom. Like the last thing you see of
Gollum is him slipping the ring on, becoming invisible and then
falling into lava and being consumed by magma.
So as far as I can tell, he didn't have a spiritually
transcendent moment. He never had his redemption.
It's like if you're, if you are looking at this from a Christian
lens, you're craving that moment of, of redemption.
You know, like if you are thinking about someone like Jean
Valjean, here he goes. No, comes to Les Mis.
It ultimately all goes back to Les Mis.
Like you want that moment of redemptive grace and of mercy,
Like you want mercy to win. And Gollum, Gollum does deserve
mercy, even if he is unable to receive it gracefully.
And that is a Christian story, right?
The gentlest understanding of Christianity here is it really
takes the the smallest acknowledgement of of being a
Sinner, which is everyone within Christian theology, to be
eligible for grace. It doesn't have to be.
It's like the pride of denying that one needs forgiveness or
mercy and feeling to be as as good of a person as one truly
can be is what it takes to be eligible for mercy.
Gollum can't get there. But Dang it, I still I still
believe in mercy. And the people who extended
mercy to Gollum were correct about it.
So even if Gollum still fails to have his reconciliatory moment
prior to his death for the souls of the people who had the chance
to to maybe intervene and, and, and his life earlier and chose
not to, it had both an instrumental benefit for this
sort of like fatalistic prophecy kind of element here that
Gandalf says of like, don't be wishing these ends upon people
because we really don't know the roles that people will play,
which is a wonderful, beautiful lesson.
It reminds me of if you haven't read the the book or seen the
movie of just mercy, it kind of reminds me of that.
It takes like a really wise person to say something like
this. And this isn't even getting into
the different personalities of Christ and theology.
And in literature, Aragorn might just represent the Divine King
version of it, whereas Frodo and or Sam might represent the
meekness version of Christ who is not royal in that kind of
way. Whatever they're.
All I'm saying is that Tolkien knows how to use symbolism and
he is very good at it. The fact that I just basically
ranted about it for 15 minutes or however long that was with
basically no script because I'm still processing it, right?
Like it's such an interesting story where you, you know,
there's poetry in it, you can feel it, but it's hard to know.
It doesn't just feed it to you either.
It's meant to be powerful imagery that sticks with you
that you're meant to chew on in the same way.
Like one of the stories I love about the Bible that I often
come back to is the idea that in Exodus, God hardens Pharaoh's
heart. Like why does God keep hardening
Pharaoh's heart? That's strange.
Is it saying that Pharaoh is not an agent with free will?
That his actions are predetermined in some way?
Or is it that God is confirming him and his own stubbornness
that pre existed God's intervention?
And also why was he was God intervening in this way to
enforce a story or a fate for for the Israelites or something
else? I think what's interesting about
the Bible, but especially parts of Jewish tradition, is that is
very much based upon asking these questions and long, long
debates for hundreds of years that ask questions and are meant
to be this sort of like this is what yeshiva is for, right?
You're supposed to just be sort of like processing this
information, asking these questions and engage in
theological debate because there is not a discreet answer to all
of it. Maybe some people think there
is. Classical texts are often more
of an invitation to a discussion rather than something that's
presenting you with the answer. And I think Tolkien using
symbolism in this way is a very sophisticated guide at
presenting these ideas to you with elements where the Christ
figure shows up across many characters.
And it's not a simple one. In fact, even as I'm saying
this, you know who Gollum reminds me of is Judas Iscariot,
where Judas is someone that, you know, gets paid his thirty
pieces of silver to betray Jesus and then commit suicide.
But the resurrection story does not happen without Judas's
betrayal. And this is one of those parts
of the Christian tradition that has long baffled people.
A more recent version of this that is not considered to be
theologically sound, but it's still in pop culture, reasons is
important is in The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus
actually tells Judas to betray him.
And granted, it's Willem Dafoe telling Harvey Keitel that, but
it still happens. And there's actually a book that
I really love that a friend of mine wrote.
It's a graphic novel about Judas, called Judas A very
appropriately, and it's about how after Judas dies in certain
Christian traditions, specifically in Catholicism,
there's a moment called the Harrowing of Hell.
So Jesus is dead for three days before he rises again in the
story. And during that time, Jesus is
in hell. And one of the traditional
elements of the Harrowing of Hell story is that Jesus leads
the noble pagans to heaven because they died before they
had a chance to know him. So he brings the Jewish
patriarchs, he brings the philosophers from Athens like
he, he brings the people who died before they had a chance
to, to learn of the new dispensation that Jesus offers.
And so Jeff Loveness wrote this graphic novel about Judas.
And Judas is not typically considered to be included in the
Harrowing of Hell. But what if he was?
His story was deeply tragic, it was necessary for the entire
narrative to even happen. And I suspect even though he
died by suicide, we can also interpret that action as being
evidence of his remorse, and therefore remorse making one
eligible for grace and for mercy.
Perhaps Judas in the Harrowing of Hell story should be elevated
out of hell and taken to paradise with Jesus.
Relatedly, I once heard someone say that God's mercy exists
between the bridge and the water, which I was.
That was such a kind, beautiful sentiment.
I think mercy should be so encompassing if it is to exist.
I'm not to always go back to Les Mis, but I'm kind of salty that
Javert doesn't get to sing in the choir.
Angelic at the end of the musical, it doesn't seem that he
go gave Javert much thought after his own suicide into the
sin and I think Javert deserves mercy as well.
So I'm I'm sympathetic to the redemption of villains.
I probably attributed to watching a lot of episodes 4-5
and six of Star Wars as a kid and loving Darth Vader's ark.
I think that's such a such a wonderful thing.
I think that really the story very, very nicely together.
But anyways, in a, in a show full of digressions, I digress.
If you've listened to previous shows where theology has come
up, I often really want this version of Mercy to be so much
more present in our culture because it's it's so missing in
the Divine Comedy. Judas is down there with Brutus,
full circle. I didn't expect to be talking
about that today with Brutus and Cassius.
I believe it's like the three of them, you know, Judas is that
far down and Dante and the Harrowing can even still reach
him then. I love that.
And related to this, I love the idea in CS Lewis has this line,
I forget where it's from, and he says something about how hell is
locked from the inside. So I thought was a really
interesting idea. Some of the portrayals of people
who are suffering even in Dante, they're so obsessed with their
own suffering and their own interest that they don't even
necessarily know that they need to ask for forgiveness.
And if you take the CS Lewis line and apply it to the Dante,
then someone presumably in Hell at this position could maybe
acknowledge their sins and then find their way to Purgatory and
this way of understanding. And this is a great moment to go
right back to Leaf by Niggle. So Niggle is on his journey.
He's sleepy. He's like kind of passed out and
he ends up in a station where he's shuffled along by people
and it ends up at a workhouse, which, you know, I don't.
I don't know how much you know about Victorian British history,
but not a very nice place, a place where the indigent would
go and perform various types of work and made not to starve.
They were not comfortable places.
They were not very nice places, but they were an attempt to
provide welfare in its early days.
But he actually takes to it really well.
He does relatively menial tasks and Niggle, does carpentry and
he's involved in the building of various things.
And soon enough, he forgets much about his life and what he was
worried about, forgetting when he didn't have anything to bring
with them when the driver showed up, and is more focused on where
he is now than what was happening in his life.
And then he gets transferred to a much more menial task of I
think just digging holes, digging ditches.
And that's not great. But even still, he rises to it
and sort of takes to it in his own way and has no idea how long
he's been at it. And at one point when he's
resting, he hears 2 people debating the course of his life.
And as it's often the case, especially if you've listened to
this podcast on theological episodes, the two people arguing
represent mercy and justice. And justice is making the case.
That niggle was so self involved that he only viewed his his, you
know, charitable obligations as interruptions from his prime
duty, his painting that he wasn't even that good at.
And yet he had a hard time helping his neighbor whose house
was falling down. And and he was so obsessed with
this dumb painting that gosh, niggles just really not
deserving of any amount of mercy.
And mercy was saying that after Nickel did these things, he
never thought about it again. He didn't necessarily think that
Paris should have thanked him to a greater extent.
He didn't feel entitled to a greater amount of gratitude.
He just did the thing that he had to do.
And maybe he didn't love it, but he also didn't resent it after
the fact. He kind of just moved on with
his life and try to get back to his painting and his painting
was often times that of noticing the world around him and was a
lovely thing. And they they talk about how the
tree as a whole is not that great, but he was amazing at
painting Leafs and he painted one leaf in particular that was
truly sublime. And as they're debating Nichols
life, Mercy gets the last word. And Nickel did know that he had
a chance of not being able to finish his painting.
Should he go on the bike ride to try to bring the doctor and the
builder from town to help Missus Parrish.
And he did it anyways. He had an intuition or a feeling
like this was, this might be the last trip I'm able to go on and
it's going to cost me time to finish my painting.
And he still went. And so Mercy argues persuasively
that Justice would be better served by being gentle with
niggle. And Niggle is so thankful
because he does not believe himself to be deserving of this
mercy at all, that in fact many of the things that are said
about him appear to him to be true.
That what Justice says about his behavior was self-serving,
obsessive, insular in ways that are not really what the law,
either truly legalistic law in his life or the moral law of
Christianity demands of him during his life.
And so the two interlocutors ask Niggle if he has anything to say
for himself. They notice that he's listening.
And Niggle takes the opportunity to ask how Parrish is doing
because he knows he has a a lame leg.
That's why he had to go on the bike for Parrish, because
Parrish's leg was bad and couldn't get there himself.
And they say that Parrish hasn't arrived here yet.
But Niggle make sure to to specify that Parrish gave him a
number of potatoes that saved him time.
In fact, early in the short story, it's revealed that Niggle
had a potato field, but he put a barn over it so he could paint
more stuff. So Parrish is also taking care
of him because Niggle made a decision to prioritize art.
And Niggle make sure that Mercy and Justice know that Parrish
did these things for him, even though Parrish maybe didn't even
understand the art that he was trying to to make.
And so they keep that in mind. Mercy wins the day.
Niggle is put back on the train and is taken to a beautiful
environment that seems so familiar to him.
And it seems so familiar because it's the place where the tree
that he's been trying to paint his entire life is.
He looks at it and not only is the tree there, but everything
that he would have painted had he the skill, had he the time
that expands beyond the tree is also there.
He's just over the moon. He's, I mean, this is a
wonderful experience for him. This is essentially as far as I
can understand, and the podcast talks about how this is sort of
taking the model from Dante. This is Paradise and he's at the
start of working through Paradise.
It seems like he broadly skipped hell in my understanding.
He went to Purgatory and now he's at the bottom of Paradise.
And this is where it comes back to what it means to be
vocational. What's interesting about this
set up here is that Niggle's tree that he was trying to paint
his entire life was not something that was generated
from within his own mind. Niggle's tree is a
transcendental form. It exists outside of the human
mind. It may be in fact divine
reality, and the artist can only ever reflect it back to one's
peers into history in an imperfect and incomplete way.
For instance, after Niggle dies, the people in the town and the
building inspector are debating about what to do with Niggles
canvases and they use them for practical purposes to patch
houses, specifically Parishes house.
But they do save one leaf as a painting that's a perfectly
painted leaf and they they take it eventually ends up in a
museum where it is called leaf by niggle and is admired by all
as an example of a perfect leaf painting.
It's like the smallest artistic triumph that niggle achieved in
life. The smallest representation of
this tree was still beautiful in this kind of way, divisible even
down to the leaf, to the single leaf.
It's still that important of a thing to reflect back.
Ultimately the museum burns down, which is a very funny
ironic thing about what it means to have legacy on earth.
Ozzie Mandy and kind of arrogance.
You know, look on my works. He mighty and despair.
Who even was Ozzie Mandy is who even cares kind of deal.
But what I love about this is that feels his entire life that
he's he's working on something that is transcendental that it's
something that he's communicating.
It doesn't even come from within him.
The artist role is to reflect back some divine, universal,
transcendental truth or beauty. This is the aesthetics of
Tolkien. This is what the work is meant
to be when it's truly transcendental.
Soon enough, Parish ends up in the same environment with
Niggle, and they end up building a house together and being
engaged in the practical work of just like being in this
environment. They, they, they sort of just
know that they're meant to build a house together and work
together. Niggle does much more of the
construction, even though Parish is the one who's much better
with practical things. And Parish spends much more time
wandering around the woods and staring at leaves and just
appreciating nature. And one Parish sees the tree
that Niggles been trying to paint.
Parish realizes what a fool he's been that he didn't realize that
Niggle was trying to paint this reflection of divine truth for
his friends and for his neighbors and for his community,
that this was actually a really important thing to do.
And Parrish is so sorry that he bothered Niggle so many ties
with things that were frankly less important than trying to
find ways to reflect divine truth.
And Niggle apologizes in turn that he prioritized that to such
an extent that he was not able to wholeheartedly give to
perish. And now that they're in this
world together, they sort of reverse their roles and they
both developed the parts of their personality that we're
lacking. You, of course, need to be a
good member of the community and to nourish the practical needs
of your friends and neighbors and community members.
But you also are meant to find these reflections of divine
truth and appreciate them. But it's also constitutive of a
life well lived. 1 doesn't necessarily need to have one or
the other, but it's it's a combination of both, at least in
this particular telling. The story concludes by them
meeting a shepherd who's passing through their little beautiful
spot. Niggle wants to see what lies
beyond the mountains above that he's been staring at and
painting behind his tree for so long, and decides to follow the
shepherd into the mountains and to see what else is out there in
this divine space. He's ready to to move on while
Parrish decides to wait for his wife, who he knows is short and
coming because he knows his wife would want him to wait for her.
The train stop, which had previously been unnamed.
It is decided that will now be called Niggles Parish.
And that's sort of the end. They they love that.
And then they both proceed with no more documentation of their
story of the afterlife. This show feels vocational to me
too. And many of the shows that I've
done recently that have been more emotional and content, more
theological, more existential. The shows that I'm doing about
what it means to be a human during very hard times, what it
means when the world is dangerous and changing, and the
kinds of things that we should be thinking about and preparing
our souls to undergo. Those feel vocational to me when
I do that work. And I do that well.
And this will sound a little bit like Ernest Hemingway, but like
when I put down something into this podcast that I know is true
and it's from the heart in this kind of way, I very much feel
like Niggle reflecting back a divine reality to the listener.
And what I love about that way of understanding the creative
process here is that it doesn't actually make me smart or
elevate me in any way. What I'm drawing from, what I'm
speaking about, topics of this nature do not originate from
within me. They are me channeling wisdom
traditions or the wisdom tradition of the world.
It's essentially me trying to channel the wisdom traditions
that precede me. Any of those shows that you can
listen to where I'm talking about different theologies and
and different stories of people who have gone through hard times
and and develop some amount of wisdom, I can't take credit for
any of it. It's not.
It's something that is truly democratic and universal that
anyone can plug into. I really don't think there's any
gatekeeper whatsoever. I think there's a reason why so
much converges around the same themes with people that we
consider to be sufficiently wise to discourse on things of this
nature. And it mostly is about how your
time in your body is limited, that kindness is important, that
showing a great amount of love is what you can be proud of, and
to not be so afraid of death that one will do anything to
avoid it. There are so many different ways
to plug into the world's wisdom traditions.
I'm Catholic, but I'm also a very ecumenical person.
I like to read widely and when I have a chance to, to channel
some of this information through reading and reflecting on on
what it means to be human at this particular moment in time,
I do feel like I'm tapping into something that is much deeper
than an audio essay that I am so smart for having created.
I really it's, it's I honestly just feel like this is something
that exists outside of me that I'm reflecting back to my peers
and I hope that there's a small leaf of it that can be
appreciated. That was like, wow, that really
was a divinely inspired piece of art.
The one this show is good. I want it to be art, and I want
it to be art that reflects back some amount of divine truth.
And I mean that in the broadest, most ecumenical sense here as
well. And it's also so funny to pair
shows like this with shows that are such intensely nerdy inside
baseball about carbon dioxide removal.
I recognize that it just show has many personalities and is a
a vessel for so many different ideas.
I hope that there's room enough in your heart for both of those
things. I think they both are important
to be super practical and to be dealing with art that is
reflective of what I hope to be sort of a universal democratic,
divine truths that we all have access to if we have the right
ears to listen. And is that not exactly how it
is with parish and Niggle? The podcast has both of them.
This is a niggle show. The parish shows are are ones
about private equities and involvement in the biochar
industry. That's funny, I did did not
expect that. That link to come.
That's cracking me up. If you have any sort of thing
that makes you feel the way that I do when I'm talking about
Nichols Tree and his art as reflecting back that
transcendental platonic form of beauty of truth, go do that.
I honestly think that that kind of thing you almost can't go
wrong with. You might look a little bit
silly, you're going to sound a little woo sometimes, but
honestly, I think creation like that can be truly vocational
when one taps into that type of spiritual calling.
I think it can be that when I find that I can bring something
back from Nichols Parish, my own version of it, at least I'm
trying to. I do feel like I'm on, I'm on
the right track when I'm there and when I'm doing that work, I
think it's more than the exact right financial mechanisms for
making sure that carbon removal can survive a period of
geopolitical reshuffling and uncertainty.
I think the heart portion of this is going to be the thing
that makes the difference. I think ultimately this policy
work is going to be dependent upon how we mature as a global
civilization. I don't think the policy will
ever be robust enough without spiritual maturation, because
there are always going to be very practical reasons to to
follow the discount rate and to do the easy thing now, but not
the hard thing. Anything that brings wisdom back
from that Platonic realm, that can coax us out of the
competition that we feel with other people, with other
individuals, with other countries, and can inspire those
transcendental feelings, I think is truly doing divinely inspired
work, vocational work. Even if we know that our work
while alive, we'll end up in a museum that will ultimately burn
down. Same as leaf by niggle, The work
is still worth doing for its own sake, and even if it is not
permanent, it can still be invaluable.
Somebody will say that if a podcast I make reaches one
person, I consider that to be good enough for this.
If one person listens to this and says wow, I never thought
about it this way and like that really, I really connected with
that. I love getting notes like that.
Feel free to send them to me if you ever feel passionate enough
to to do so. But also, I'm recreating my own
soul in the process of making this too.
So even if no one listened to this, in the process of me
explaining this and exploring this, I'm also trying to change
my own heart, my own soul, my own relationship with all that
is. And you can do that too.
Thanks for listening. I hope you'll find a way to heed
the vocational call and something that feels
transcendental to you. I'm grateful for you listening,
I really am. Thank you so much for being a
part of this show. If you're listening to the very
end here, I know how many things there are to do in life.
You chose to spend it with me. I do not take that for granted.
I've said that before and I'll keep saying it.
I do sincerely appreciate you. That's all for now.
Good luck.