Willow Defebaugh

Maria, welcome to The Nature Of.

What a joy.

I have to say, because I got to see you talk last night, I was thinking about a word that feels very central to our friendship and to your life and to my life, which is wonder.

And you described it as being an antidote to selfing.

As a place to start, can you share a little bit about what that means?

So being in a space of wonder, of searching for wonder, is a way out of this mind loop where we're trying to arrive at certainty, where we're trying to arrive at certainty of the self, certainty of the world.

How do you practice staying open to wonder without searching for it in your life?

I want to go back to what you were sharing around selfing being the root of so much of our, dare I say, suffering and getting outside of ourselves as an antidote to that.

I think that that's so powerful for today because I think everything that we are being trained to interface daily, I mean, I think about social media, I think about the internet, it's who are you?

What are you expressing to the world?

What is yourself?

And all of that pushing inward is exhausting.

And also when you say I am this, you're also saying I am not everything else.

And, you know, it is, as you said earlier, it's a narrative construction of certainty.

It's our way of saying, this is me, right?

And if certainty and wonder can never coexist, it does kind of contour or cover up.

just the wonder of a soul, of a person.

Especially when we are also stardust and we are also many other species that coexist within our bodies.

Now that we've set the table, I want to speak a little bit to how we met.

The first thing that you said to me, you approached me and said...