How women lost body time (and the remarkable way to reclaim it) - Christie Green
Episode 552, released 10th June 2026.
Lian and hunter and landscape architect, Christie Green, explore what sixteen years of hunting has taught Christie about body time, how women's bodies carry a different relationship to time and rhythm than ‘clock culture’ allows, and what gets restored when a woman stops measuring herself by external standards.
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Christie Green is the author of MOONIGHT ELK: One Woman’s Hunt for Food and Freedom published by The University of New Mexico Press (UNMP) in 2024. Her forthcoming book, SALMON DREAMING: Coming Home to Alaska will be released by UNMP in 2026 and her third book, THE NEW MERIDIAN: Undamming the West will be released by UNMP in 2028.
Christie Green resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Kenai, Alaska. Ms. Green’s platform as a land and water steward, landscape architect, local food activist, educator and hunter attracts passionate audiences in these fields. She represents a fundamental missing bridge between polarized audiences and cultural extremes.
With an educational background in US History from UC Berkeley and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of New Mexico, Green found and fashioned a profession that reflected her personal background and passion: connecting people and place. Food has since been the conduit for communion in Green’s work.
Since 1999, Green has taught educational workshops, presented locally and nationally and leads restoration projects. As a landscape architect and entrepreneur for 21 years, Ms. Green has been a featured speaker and educator at local and national conferences including, The Xeriscape Council Land and Water Summit, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Environmental Design Research Association and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.
She was an artist-in-residence in the Food Justice and Water Rights programs at the Santa Fe Art Institute and has won awards for her work, including the City of Santa Fe Sustainability Award for Water Conservation for her legacy project at the Academy for the Love of Learning, and has been recognized for her design and implementation work with the Tewa Women United Española Healing Foods Oasis.
In 2014, upon completion of her master’s thesis focused on the cultural and ecological effects of hydraulic fracturing in the 17 oil-producing counties of western North Dakota and obtaining her MLA, Green founded radicle, an alternative eco-activist landscape forum to challenge prescribed definitions of landscape architecture.
The regenerative projects of Green have been celebrated in numerous publications including: The Santa Fe New Mexican, edible, Green Fire Times, Seed Broadcast, Palo Alto Weekly. In the February 2019 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine, Ms. Green and her award-winning work we re featured in the article: The Huntress : With Her One Woman Practice - radicle - Christie Green Works to Repair Our Relationship With Nature, Including the Plants and Animals We Eat.
Green was a contributor to the quarterly publication, edible Santa Fe for four years, propagated, cultivated and sold over 100 varieties of edible crops, has been a featured speaker locally and nationally and has been awarded multiple federal grants for ecologically regenerative projects in riparian, agricultural and arroyo ecosystems. In 2012, Green was nominated for Best Santa Fe Business of the Year; in 2015 she was nominated for Best Woman-owned and Green Business of the Year.
Her essays continue to be featured in edible New Mexico and Dark Mountain, Waxing and Waning, The New Farmer’s Almanac, Seed Broadcast, and New Mexico Magazine.
In 2023, Ms. Green launched the christie nell collection of fabrics and garments, inspired by the animals she hunts and their habitats.
In this episode, Lian and Christie explore what Christie calls body time, the way the animals she hunts have gradually rewired her relationship to rhythm, to her own flesh, and to what she actually trusts as real. Over sixteen years of hunting across New Mexico and Alaska, Christie has found herself orienting less and less by the clock and more by tide, moon, darkness, and what her body is asking for. The conversation moves through what that shift has cost, what it has returned, and the specific way the bodies of animals, elk, deer, turkey, salmon, have taught her things about her own body that nothing else reached.
From there they look at what modern women have lost and what Christie has glimpsed on the other side of that loss, how the same culture that packages meat in sterile plastic also asks women to manage, minimise, and tidy themselves, and what becomes possible when a woman stops agreeing to that, even in small ways, a particular fabric against her skin, dreamy silk under work clothes, a candle at the end of the day.
Listen if you've ever looked at the clock to decide whether you're hungry, or realised you've been running on someone else's rhythm for so long you're not sure you know what your own feels like.
We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
Why animal time and body time are the same thing, and what it takes for a woman to begin living there rather than just visiting
How reaching inside the body of an elk changed Christie's relationship to her own body more than anything culture had offered her
What happens when a woman stops treating clock time as the most real thing, and what she finds underneath it instead
Resources and stuff that we spoke about:
Visit Christie’s website.
Christie’s book Moonlight Elk: One Woman's Hunt for Food and Freedom
Join UNIO, The Community for Wild Sovereign Souls: This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.
Don’t want to miss a thing?
Subscribe (BTW, it’s absolutely FREE) to the show on your favourite platform or app by clicking the relevant button below… That way you’ll receive each episode automagically straight to your device as soon as it’s released!
Thank you!
Lian & Jonathan
Episode Transcript:
Please note: We are a small team and not able to check through the transcript our software provides. So you may find some words are out of place and a few sentences don’t make complete sense. If you do see something utterly ridiculous we’d love you to let us know so we can correct it. Please email any howlers with the time stamp to team@bemythical.com.
Lian (00:00)
Could the clock be one of the most powerful forces keeping women estranged from their own bodies, lives, and even their souls? Hello, my beautiful soul seekers. This week I'm back once again with Hunter, landscape architect, and author Christie Green to explore what 16 years of hunting has taught her about body time, how women's bodies carry a different relationship to time and rhythm than our clock Culture allows and what can be restored when a woman stops measuring herself by external standards. Christie is the author of Moonlight Elk: One Woman's Hunt for Food and Freedom, founder of Radical, an eco-activist landscape practice, and a land steward, educator, and food activist whose work has centered around the relationship between people, place, and what we eat. Together we explore what Christie calls body time, the way that the animals she hunts have gradually rewired her relationship to rhythm to her own flesh, and what actually she's begun to trust as real.
We look at what we modern women have largely lost and what Christie has glimpsed on the other side of that loss, how our culture packages. Meat in sterile plastic packaging, but also at the same time is asking women to manage, minimize, and tidy themselves in the same way. And what becomes possible when a woman stops agreeing to that, even in seemingly small ways. So listen if you've ever looked to the clock to decide whether you're hungry, or if you're realising you've been running on someone else's rhythm for so long. You're not sure what your own really feels like.
But first, if you've just arrived here, welcome. If you've come back, welcome home. And if you keep finding yourself here without subscribing, your soul clearly knows what it's doing. So honour that call and go ahead and subscribe. It's challenging to live in this crazy modern world. Wild sovereign soul is what we know will help. And so If you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path and your heart longs for guidance, kinship, and support, come join us in Unio the community for soul seekers. UNIO is the living home for the Wild Sovereign Soul Path, where together we reclaim our wildness, actualise our sovereignty, and awaken our souls. You can discover more and walk with us by hopping over to wildsovereignsoul.com/unio or click the link in the description.
And now back to this week's episode. Let's dive in.
Lian (02:50)
Christie. Welcome back to the show.
Christie Green (02:52)
Hey, lucky me. Hi Lian I'm so happy to be back. I woke up and I thought, oh good I get to talk to Lian again. We're gonna get it feels like this sort of you know, like little kids who steal away and they're in they get to play on their own, you know, hiding like in a fort or out in the woods or something. That's like their little secret. That's how it feels. Like I get this treat today. So thank you.
Lian (03:04)
You
Oh, I love that image and me too. In fact, it's always a good sign of how an episode is going to be when we start to talk before we start recording, the conversation goes deeper and deeper and deeper. I'm like, whoa, hang on, we're not recording. We need to begin. So yes, I'm very much, been looking forward to having conversations with you again. And it's possibly one of my
favourite conversations to have anything to do with being here in a woman's body and being on this journey of discovering what it means to be in a woman's body, simply put, and seeing the places that we have lost the feminine and yet that's still there for the discovery.
We again began talking about this before we started recording. And it was so fascinating to me how I was like, I have a sense that because of the depth and length of your experience, there's going to be real gems that you kind of brought back with you. And then it was so interesting how you were like, no, think, you know, the way I've experienced these things is just, you know, how others do.
This is such a perfect example of from the water we're swimming in, it's so difficult to see outside of that and even to recall sometimes how we used to experience life before we were in the water we're in. So let's see what emerges, but yeah, there's so much that I'd like to explore with you. I'm going to start with perhaps quite a general question. In some ways, this is maybe the question that we're going to spend the whole of this conversation exploring. So I'm not expecting you to be able to kind of just do a nice job answering it. but there's, I was thinking about the fact that you, because of the years you've been hunting and working with, let's say moon time rather than calendar time, you've stepped outside of how we typically move through the world. And specifically, this is true for humans, but just specifically as women, you've stepped outside that way of orientating to life, to the world, that most women in this kind of modern mainstream way of living experience. And I was thinking in particular, because you've also done that through the lens of hunting animals, my sense is you've lived kind of in, I'm not even going to say like no time because that would be to presume that animals don't have a sense of any time. And I have no idea, but certainly it's a different sense of time and rhythm to humans. And so my sense is you've immersed yourself into animal time as it were, all of which again is very different to most
women that are living today in today's world.
So that makes me curious as to what do you see that given your experiences over the last, I think it's 16 years, what have you glimpsed, what have you experienced that you see are the...
are what we as modern women have lost, have lost contact with, have been bereft of. What have you begun to reclaim that you've been able to through those experiences of kind of, again, almost like being outside of time, outside of the modern way of living?
Christie Green (07:33)
Yeah, it's a beautiful question and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. And as you were talking, something just came to me which I had never put these words together or the concept together, but you're asking about time and animal animal time and immersion with animals through hunting. And as you were, you know, talking about that, I thought, actually, what I think it is is body time. So if I were to go deeper into what I feel like is happening for me, and it is exactly as you're saying, through the hunt. because embarking on the hunt, you know, whether it's for deer or elk or turkey, the orientation is to their
Lian (08:07)
yes.
Christie Green (08:27)
habitat so their home and how they are how I understand them to be living in their home. So you know turkeys roost, they go up on the roost in the tree at sundown and then they start coming off the roost just after sunrise. And the elk, you know, a lot of animals of course they they operate in the those liminal times on the cusp of night and day on either end of night and day, which then I too, if I'm going to be with them and relate to them and be hunting them and be in their world, I have to orient to their way of being in the world. And so a lot of that, like I have said and we talked about last time too, is revolving around the moon more than the sun. Because the s the sun is like what I call Well, or how I feel is like the symbol and the actual maker and marker of waking time, of rational time. So work hours to five is all oriented around the sun. And then it's interesting in Western culture that nighttime, of course, we do track what those hours are, but in a way they almost don't count because supposedly not much is happening at nighttime, right? We're not on, so to speak, in a way that's about productivity or performance.
Lian (09:26)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Christie Green (09:46)
Right. So it's as if that which is
Lian (09:48)
But they're also kind of, it to me is it's almost like night only, like we measure night in relationship today. It's kind of like there's day, which is the time we prize and it matters. And night is this kind of almost like anti-time. It's like anti-day. It's not, it's not really time in its own right. It's in relationship to day.
Christie Green (09:58)
Yes.
Exactly. It's almost like I thought this was interesting to someone recently remarking, and of course this is nothing new, but I think it's the way it struck me, is women who are married get called, you know, misses, right? Like we you know, it's traditional that we take the man's name. Like we are only in reference to him.
Whereas the man, no matter what, whether he's married or not, is always mister and he always has the same name. I mean, that's just one example of all the ways we as women are regarded as like in a way like a accessory or something, right? As if we don't stand alone and we are our own person in and of ourselves as the ultimate and holy she being. But okay, so I'm getting off track. But so thinking about like for example last summer I got to go back to Alaska. I drove to Alaska which from here is about five thousand miles and Alaska's where I grew up and I went back
Lian (10:55)
Mmm.
Christie Green (11:21)
To spend the summer. I got to spend three months and I was working on the second book, Salmon Dreaming. And I said to many of my friends and family, I said, you know, I think that's the happiest I've ever been in my life, which that's a pretty extreme statement. But part of that I relate to there being no time. And it's ironic because in Alaska in the summer, because of the latitude, the extreme northern latitude, it's always
Lian (11:36)
Hmm.
Christie Green (11:49)
light. So it's ironic that it doesn't just depend on darkness. It depends on what I feel like a defiance of a clock.
Lian (11:53)
Mmm.
Christie Green (12:00)
So in that case, the sun is defying night. And then when I'm hunting, I'm defying a clock-oriented time because I'm going I'm configuring my day around the animals. Likewise in Alaska, when I was there, my days corresponded to the tide. So I was relating to tidal flow because that's when the salmon are moving in relation to the flow, which of course the moon.
Lian (12:26)
Mmm.
Christie Green (12:29)
So it's like I couldn't see the moon because it was light all the time, but there was this pulsing push pull of the tidal rise and fall because I was on the coast. And so when I walked and where I walked, depended on the tide, directly related to the salmon rhythm. And the same is true when I'm hunting, like what I was talking about is this cadence that is a liminal cadence on either side of quote productive sun-oriented work-oriented time and so all of that over the course of years the cumulative effect for me is actually preferring to or reorienting the hierarchy of time to my body rhythm what my body is feeling and where my body is in space in place regardless of what the clock says. And that has taken a number of years. Even in Alaska last year, like it it has taken years and years and days and days of in a way of like wearing down my orientation of Western time and productivity and performance that happens during logical, rational daylight time. So animal time I would say with the salmon, the elk, the turkey, the deer as the iconic
Models of defying time, they're moving according to their body's rhythms because that's how they must, because that's survival. Surviving and thriving. You know, they're not imposing something external that is in a way false. I mean, our time is actually made up. Of of course, but and it's also fascinating to me that most people in the whole world have agreed. We've actually agreed to the dominion of the clock. I mean everything is run that way, whether it's a flight or when stores are open or or whatever. And so it feels like a radical defiance to orient to my own body first and foremost. And that I give direct credit to the animals. It's not it's not something I would have known or tried to do or been practicing, I don't think, without without them, you know, so I don't know if that's if that makes any any sense or or is what were talking about.
Lian (15:10)
Yeah, it's, it makes so much sense, so much sense. So there was, my gosh. So firstly, that animal time, body time, probably one and the same. And how it's actually not time as we know it. There is this, as you described it, it's orientating within place and what's going on within the body. And again, there is, what you said there about this collective agreement that, there is this way of measuring time and then we're going to impose that upon ourselves. But it's so invisible. Sometimes we might talk about those collective beliefs that we have. It could be about money, you know, like these days we barely use coins and pieces of paper. We've collectively agreed that these are worth something. And then now it's become, you know, pieces of plastic and then numbers on a screen, but we've collectively agreed they mean something, it's kind of invisible that we've done the same with time. And that in itself, I think, is so few of us have experienced, it's so funny, because even using, I have to use the word time in order to even say this sentence. So few of us have experienced time outside of time in the way that you have.
I mean, no, the times is hilarious to me how I can't describe any of this without using this word. The times where I've had tastes of it have been profound. And some people don't have any experience of that. Very few have the extended periods that you have. But it just...
Christie Green (16:52)
I know.
Lian (17:14)
It's just, think it dawned on me. I'm almost like struggling to name what I'm experiencing listening to you. Because again, it's such, it's such an alien concept to us as, more like time is real, it exists. How dare you say it's kind of, you know, made up. Of course it is. And then to be like, wow, that to even imagine ourselves out of that, think starts to give us a taste of what we've lost, is my sense.
Christie Green (17:49)
Yeah, I think so. And I think like you're saying, it's we can't conceive of something that is inconceivable in a way. It's like to imagine it is the first step of I feel making it real. It's like to believe the dream, become the dream, to become the dream, believe the dream. Same with you could replace the word dream with a vision, sensation, you know, whatever. I am animal. Hmm, concept, imagination. What does that feel like?
Lian (18:08)
Mmm.
Christie Green (18:19)
to imagine myself as animal and then what choices do I make to try to realize or make that real? And so part of that going back to body time for me, which is is still completely revelatory, my life has been forever changed because of the animals, is the very first moment when I cut open an animal and put my hands inside the animal after choosing to kill the animal to make food, to make meat for my own body, was this most profound intimate connection inside that animal. So there's blood, there's fascia, there's seeing and feeling so clearly how the body is put together, you know, the connective tissue, the diaphragm, the synovial fluid, the blood, the lungs, even even feeling very clearly, vividly the esophagus. So where the food enters the body goes all the way through the body to feel that, trace that through the intestines, all the way through the digestive tract to the anus and the feces. Actually it is this whole of course complete ecosystem. And it is all
Lian (19:38)
Mm-hmm.
Christie Green (19:39)
extraordinarily beautiful and necessary. Like there is not one with one part without the other. And in seeing that and feeling that, in this case it was my first animal was an elk, Lian it was like, I literally could see my own body. I literally could see my own bones, even fat, like so in processing, you know, taking apart an animal, a lot of times the their health, the gauge of their health is measured by how much fat they have around their heart, how much they have on their hips, where on their body is their fat, and that is celebrated as a healthy, robust animal. And I remember feeling like, well, why am I pinching my thigh?
And thinking of that part of my body as something separate from and ugly are worth worth less than the parts that are better. So in a way like viewing my body objectively and dissecting it part by part as like, I've breastfed, now my breasts I have gravitated and they're smaller and they're not quote.
Lian (20:44)
Mmm.
Christie Green (20:51)
Beautiful, or you know, there are wrinkles now because of age or you name it. In being with the bodies of the animals, it was like, what does my body actually feel like? How is the genius of my body functioning? Not what do parts look like? You know, in other words, like projecting some idea of should or supposed to or productivity. It's almost like I do. I feel like I'm not sure if I can articulate it clearly, but it is like imposing the clock on my body is akin to imposing an idealized image on my body. And so releasing time and releasing ideas of what should be have become possible through the bodies of the animal and the no time of animal time.
It's like freedom. It's literally the closest I've come to freedom. It's sort of like even I don't know if you ever experienced this where you ask somebody, are you hungry? And instead of responding by a body hunger, they'll look at their watch. Like, I guess it's lunchtime. Or I guess it's dinner time, you know, or how do I feel in my body with what clothes I'm wearing, not by what size the pants.
Lian (21:48)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Mmm.
Christie Green (22:17)
is right like I'm okay in these clothes if it's the size I think I should be wearing. It's actually how do they fit and how do I feel? I don't know. It again it's for me it's like this radical orienting literally to the body, body and time space like or even thinking, geez, I should go to bed it's late. Well I'm actually not tired. So I don't know. It's it I just
Lian (22:18)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Christie Green (22:45)
For me, it is all directly related to the animals inside them and outside them in their worlds and their habitats and their rhythms.
Lian (22:55)
Yeah, it was so, it's so interesting. As you were talking about that intimacy with the Elks body and therefore your own body, and then talking about that related to time, of course, it's only through that true intimacy with the body can one be on body time, like there isn't a way of how on earth can you be on body time without being in the body. And it's, it's no wonder we're so far away from that in this, in this world. You say we have both going on with, we've got this interjected sense of time and we're so disconnected from our bodies. And so it's no wonder we do and say all the things you were saying, know, like kind of looking at the clock to see if we're hungry. So a couple of, a couple of questions I have. One, one is, and I think you've touched on this, but I would like to ask more directly. So when you are hunting, you're very much immersed in body time. When you are back kind of in sort of day to day life, not hunting.
How does that experience of kind of being in pure body time change how you orientate in life where, for example, just even showing up for this call at a certain time that is calendar time, how do you find that embodied sort of… strange, I can't really say it in a way, but like almost like an embodied sense of body time is now carried into times where there is that calendar passing of time and agreements and commitments that you make. How does that play?
Christie Green (24:57)
No,it's an excellent question. And I think that one thing that helps me and that I'm actively practicing is integration. So I know we talked last time about how every morning I wake and I write and draw my dreams. So You could say, okay, there's a dream journal. There's this the stack of books from years and years of dreams, hundreds and hundreds of dreams. So in some ways it's like, okay, well, the dream can remain in the book, literally between the lines, right? And when I close the book, then supposedly I'm stepping into the real world or my real day. Well, the same can be true, can be said of or described of the hunt. Like I'm in the hunt. That's almost like being in the dream, because it is this liminal space that is not like waking practical clock time. So for me, what would be really hard and what causes like in a sense a feeling of schizophrenia is if I were to keep those worlds separate. Like my hunting self is self as other and my dream self is other. But actually what I've been trying to do is is those are becoming integrated into daily practice through
Lian (26:05)
you
Christie Green (26:18)
clock time. So if I can integrate the dream life like a message or a lesson or an image from the dream and and actually feel that and live that and bring it into the day and even talk about it instead of keeping it hidden because you know the world that you know we even we have that phrase it's just a dream and it's automatically discounted as not real like that's just gibberish right same with like the hunt like out there as if it's only out there and doesn't count but actually if I can bring those worlds into my clock time world. And mostly it has to do with this active conscious practice of paying attention to my body. And it sounds so simple, but it actually is profound and it takes for me, it's a deliberate paying attention. So Like, of course, I knew I had this at ten o'clock my time today, which is so interesting because it's a totally different time on the clock for you. I love that. Like we're defying time already. You agree to it, but we're also like we're making it up, right? But there's a part of that, yes, I am in this waking world. I am part of a modern culture.
Lian (27:24)
Yes. I love that too.
Christie Green (27:37)
I have, you know, three other things to do today that are about time. But the difference for me now is I don't actually believe that that's the ultimate truth. I choose to participate in it. and sometimes I resist because some of the things I have to do I don't really want to do. But before the thing that was different is I actually thought that was the only truth or the the most real regulator.
Lian (27:48)
Yes!
Christie Green (28:03)
of me and now I know through my other practices that they are I mean to be honest they are more my my truth than clock truth and all I have to do all all I have to do is within me is to remember it's like my body what does she crave and I actually made t-shirts that say the governing body because it's like here's my reminder my body is the governing body.
Lian (28:28)
Hehehehehe
Christie Green (28:32)
not some external body, whether it's a clock or the US government or a man or anybody else. Actually it's my own body. And it is, it's rat it feels radical to me, to my own self, because to follow the rhythm of my body or the rhythm of the earth It's freedom.
Lian (28:50)
Gosh, there was something that really landed for me where it just, had chills and tears when you said, I'm going to paraphrase now, but for you, body time, dream time, hunting time, which equates from what I can understand to body time, they now feel more real, more true than clock time. There was something in that when you said it I was just like that's it right there. There is something in you. I could feel the truth of you saying that and I was like that's the difference. You when I was saying before we started recording there's something you've experienced that is different to even those of us that are you know somewhere and possibly quite deep on the journey of reclaiming what you're reclaiming. I had a sense there was something that you'd experienced and it's that. It's like you being able to say that's become more real. It's that. And yeah, that took my breath away.
Christie Green (29:58)
You know what I think too? I think of there's an architect named Paul Disco here and he does like zen architecture, timber frame architecture, which is joinery. So the wood is joined without you know, nails or screws or anything. And I have his book, I think it's called
Lian (29:58)
Hmm.
Christie Green (30:19)
Zen architecture, I don't remember, but this is decades and decades ago. He went to Japan to learn from the Japanese about joinery structures. So he goes to this master, and right away he wants to start building and working with the wood and putting things together and making structures. Well, his teacher says, actually, I want you to plane the wood. So he has Paul Disco just touch pieces of wood and plane them.
Over and over hours and hours and days and days and days. And Paul Disco's like, What did I come here for? Am I really? Is this all I'm gonna do? It's like this grunt labour. Well, actually, and I don't remember what period of time this took place over, but what he learned was he was becoming wood, and the wood was becoming him. It was like this exchange, this embodiment. Because there's no way to learn wood intellectually or theoretically. I same for me. There's there's no way for me to learn no time without my body experiencing it for years in all these ways. I'm just beginning. I'm not there yet but I'm beginning to feel what I've been talking about with you the no time or body time because of direct immersive experience with the earth and with the animals. And I don't there's no shortcut, I don't think. At least for me, I don't know a way. There's not like L to pop. There's not a quick read. There's not a podcast and then you got it. It's like I for me I feel like it's and it's ongoing. And it is a choice. It's a choice. It's a moment by moment choice. Am I going to choose
Lian (31:48)
you
Yeah.
Christie Green (32:07)
The body time way or the you know the straight line way and there's so much in both of those because for me the straight line too going back to our first conversation straight line adherence to a straight line is kind of like an a a masculine or like a toxic masculine where I am going to defy desire, defy the body, even defy the earth and impose something that is about will and dominance.
I mean, and those are kind of extreme ways of talking about it or saying it. but I do believe that's like the extreme version of masculinity and the opposite of that is the feminine, which for me is abiding by and trusting the body. I for me, that's the ultimate feminine.
Lian (32:58)
Hmm. Yeah. I love the story of wood time. Yeah, that's yeah. So much in that. So I'd love and of course you, you can't know this for sure, but I would still love to know your, your perspective.
What do you see is different in what you've learned discovered how you've changed as a woman having had the experience you've had? versus if it was a man having had, you know, almost as much as he could have had the experiences you've had. Obviously there's some that you can only have as a woman, for example, hunting on your bleed. But I'd love to know what do you feel is specific to you being a woman and having the experiences you've had?
Christie Green (34:03)
Well, a couple of things. It's a beautiful question. And yeah, like you say, there's there are so many things that are exclusive to women and I'm very thankful for that. You know, lactating, giving birth, carrying a baby, being pregnant, you know, menstruation.
So again, going back to the body and Western culture's way of objectifying the body and sort of projecting onto women an ideal vision of what is beautiful or what is acceptable, right? How we're supposed to look in our faces, our skin, our hair, our breasts, the size of our waist, our hips, our thighs, you name it. I mean, this is from time immemorial, right, in all cultures, how women are supposed to look and and then also behave. And I think it's fascinating, like even like menstruation, feminine products, right? There's something about how they're wrapped, what they're called, sometimes they're scented. So we're supposed to actually mask what our scent is.
We're supposed to smell a different way, be kind of neat and tidy in a way, right? It's almost like I think of meat, how meat is sold in grocery stores. It's like this anonymous perfect chicken breast, like you can't even tell where it came from, right? That the animal it came from. And how many people would touch what is, in a way, quote, ugly of the dead animal or killing an animal and processing that animal? Like, we would rather have a neat and tidy little perfectly sealed sterile.
Chicken breasts, and in a way it's also what we're asking of our own bodies. We're asking them in this culture to not age, to not break down, to not be, you know, stretch marks, cellulate, all the things. There's products and products and products of all these ways. We're trying to get ourselves to not be living, breathing animals. And I feel like that is more true for women in Western culture now than for men. Like what is expected of women?
Lian (35:48)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Christie Green (36:13)
Different than men. And through the animals, I mean, I can't say that I am free of those projections. I for my whole life I've looked at my body and judged every part of my body, and so much of my body I haven't liked. But now, literally, through the animals, I have felt so much more freedom and so much weight lifted around my body and and actually accepting her, not only accepting her, but adoring, revering because of the genius of what my body is, or even looking like last night I was putting shea butter on my legs. You know, it's very dry here in the in New Mexico desert. And I was noticing like, I'm 55, my skin is different. And now I feel like I can observe and feel my body with curiosity and wonder and love more than hatred and wanting to her to be different. Like right, there's there are these wrinkles or my eyelid is drooping now. You know, it's like, right, she is showing the relationship to the earth over time. You know, it's just like a stone eroding or a river you know cutting through a canyon. That's time and space in the body. And how can that be something that's beautiful for an animal or for the earth? And why can't it be true for me?
Lian (37:29)
Mmm.
Christie Green (37:45)
And so beginning to see that as true for myself, or there was an elk one time I killed and she did not have a calf. I did not see her offspring with her at all. But when I cut her open, she was lactating, you know, so I was feeling her nipples, I could feel the swell, and there was actually milk. And it was so interesting because it was just a few weeks after I'd had a mammogram. So I had seen my breasts and
Lian (38:14)
Mmm.
Christie Green (38:15)
through the science, right, of an X ray. And then I'm feeling her body. And I there was something about seeing it through her body, seeing her nipples and milk through who her body. It's it's hard to again hard to describe where I could actually appreciate my own body differently as this
Lian (38:35)
Mmm.
Christie Green (38:36)
giving biology that is extraordinary and exquisite, you know. And I did get to breastfeed. I did get to nurse my daughter, you know, one of the greatest gifts. And I feel like at the time when I was nursing her I could see that genius and the miracle of it. And then afterwards it sort of becomes like, here's this body that I, you know, I put a bra on or I just go through the motions of, you know, waking life. So, there are very specific things because of the animal that I feel like I notice and appreciate the female parts of myself more.
Lian (39:10)
Just yeah, so much there. Firstly, this is what you were touching on in part was body time over time, if that makes sense, you know, how there is body time in the moment. But then there is also, we typically see age, for example, measured in clock time. But this is also an invitation to be in body time. as you described, you know, the carving of the river through the land, that's another way of seeing body time kind of taking shape over time. was like, yeah, there's so much here. And then I was contemplating as you were describing the elk lactating, and I was thinking exactly the same. It seems to me as though when we've experienced say pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding for that period, we often can be kind of brought into the miracle and the beauty and perfection and the just, you know, the wondrous experience of those things. And often it will give women, and it certainly did for me personally, it does give women this, that experience you're talking about. And it often like we then go back into the clock world, as I'm now going to think about it. And we then often lose contact with that appreciation, with the truth really of our bodies and then get seduced back into objectifying again. And certainly for me that it's been interesting going from having, let's just say through the lens of breastfeeding, having that completely different relationship to my breasts through breastfeeding, then being kind of back again, immersed into the clock world and into the sort of more objectification perspective about breasts. And then through my own kind of personal journey, reclaiming that appreciation again from a different way, not in the same way that you have, but in… different experience I've had, the different work I've done. And I was like, yes, it's so interesting howtThere is something goes back to what you were saying earlier about that kind of integration. If we are going to be in this clock world, there is, I guess, a way that of bringing back these experiences, whether they are again, through our own giving birth, lactating, or through experiences that you've had with the elk. So how do we carry that embodied knowing back into the world with us?
Because it feels to me that perhaps there is some intentionality needed for that to become, as you said, more real for us, the body clock, body time becoming more real to us, more true to us than the clock world. What's your sense of that?
Christie Green (42:36)
I think it is that the integration for me, the way that I practice it and I'll say remind myself throughout the day is The way I remember body time is by engaging my senses. So it might be to light a candle and to see that the warmth of that light or even just that action of it feels like a conscious making conscious ritual of I'll do that usually in in the on either end of the day, starting the day in in like sunrise, sunset, acknowledging with a candle or any kind of scent, like a scent from, you know, a sage plant, it could be incense, it could be anything. ⁓ it could be sound, it could be a particular song or a bird song or something. So because anything that is engaging my senses will if I'm conscious about it, especially if I'm if I'm actively trying to invite and ignite that, it's it's an immediate reminder to to to to reorient to the body clock body time instead of clocktime So even if I'm going into a meeting, let's just say like right now we're in a meeting course, this is different. Like let's say I'm gonna go into a very fact-driven type meeting where I'm meeting with developers and
Lian (43:49)
Mmm.
Christie Green (44:01)
architects and engineers because you know I'm a landscape architect and we're talking business, like actual structural kinds of space and time, and it's kind of serious. I might wear, I might choose to wear the most dreamy, delicious silk panties. And it it is, it's my own Nobody else has to know about it, but it's my own way of remembering. I'm not only living in that world and I am actively choosing to I guess maybe defy it but or or I don't want to say defy because I think that gives that world too much power, but I want to say I'm actively choosing my own sensual body as my barometer. And I'm all the ways I can that and it might be that I put lipstick on like I did today or a little perfume or I might have something soft in my palm
Lian (44:49)
Mmm.
Christie Green (44:58)
to touch anything like that. It's very I don't think it has to be dramatic. I don't think anybody has to go like necessarily to Japan for years and study with a master in plain wood so that then it becomes embodied or go hunting and kill an animal and have your, you know, be elbow deep in in the body of the animal. It's I think for me it's even very small, subtle, deliberate choices to awaken my senses. So the more I can remember my body senses, the more I remember body time. And the less then I feel subjected to or at the mercy of clock time. I do not want to be resentful. I don't want to be angry. I don't want to even be protesting. I actually just want to be feeding what it is that feeds me or that brings me to life. So the way I do that is like some very simple things. You know I might yeah paint my toenails or I might decide to if I do have a Zoom meeting I might decide to sit outside in the garden or you know, they're very simple things we can do or even if we're on some tight schedule where we're working nine to five every day and we to rush and be in traffic or rush and catch the train and go to work. I think there are still ways to invite beauty and sensuality into our experience so that we can we are on body time. I think it's not easy, but it does require I think a conscious kind of choosing.
Lian (46:26)
Yeah, yeah, I so agree. It's it's interesting to hear you share that having had such an immersion in body time, the the way that you are consciously still evoking and honoring it, I think is a really helpful thing for for listeners to hear. You know, this is even if, as you say, someone's in a kind of very busy job or busy day that there's still those opportunities to touch into body time and you know it's it's there it's there all along waiting for us to pay attention so beautiful
Christie Green (47:12)
our bodies is the ultimate guide and the ultimate reminder, really. I mean, I think about even people will say, Well, I wouldn't wear that or I have nowhere to wear something like that. It's too fancy or something. And I think, well, even if you're going to the grocery store or going to the mailbox, in those moments, if you want to feel silk on your back or on your thighs or your calves as the dress moves against your body. Isn't that enough? Just for your own, our own.
Lian (47:44)
Mm.
Christie Green (47:45)
actual experience. It's not about some external reflection of what you're supposed to or when we're supposed to, or I I don't know. I just think, yeah, and I'm saying this not because I've figured it out or I'm getting it quote right all the time. It's like this it's a continual daily practice and daily reminder. But I do notice I feel yeah, more authentic and and honestly just more joyful when I am moving through the day and night in alignment with my body. That's it's so basic it's not basic, you know.
Lian (48:20)
Mm.
Yeah.
I just I love where this conversation has taken us. And as you say, it's kind of basic and not basic, simple and yet not always easy. But yeah. my gosh. Is there anything you feel is important that's just on your heart that you would like to end this conversation with that that we haven't we haven't journeyed into?
Christie Green (48:51)
I guess one thing that's I'm not sure what to do about it, but I noticed like in my daughter, she's 21, and her friends and young people, young women that I am friends with, I wish there were a way to relieve their struggles and their extreme pain. It feels like pain about their in their relationships with their own bodies. I see so much suffering in girls and women of all ages. But I guess I'm it's heightened for me right now because my daughter's twenty one and I witness it with her and and and other people her age, other women her age.
It's almost like a whipping as an extreme punitive relationship with the body about what what they eat, what they're wearing, how they need to look. They're working themselves to death, working out, not eating all of that. And it and to me it is like it's the opposite of how I think we're supposed to be in our bodies, you know. I and I think again going back to the animals or even to to plants, you know.
Lian (49:53)
Mm.
Christie Green (50:09)
They're not surviving in the world or thriving in the world based on some external imposition of an agreed upon aesthetic or or an agreed upon clock time, let's say. It's like actually the plant will go toward the light or toward the water or toward the richest soil. The elk will go to the best grazing land because that's the best thing for the body. It's not like I don't think I've never interviewed an elk in human words, but like they're not moving, they're not like looking at their arses and wondering how they look. You know? It's like
Lian (50:45)
Yeah.
Christie Green (50:46)
They're being their whole they're being their complete wild body embodied selves. And if there were any way I could relieve any other woman's really what I feel is like extreme suffering around body image and body relationship, I sure would. I guess that's something that weigh's on me a lot. Yeah.
Lian (51:05)
Mm.
Wonder whether Well I'll share my own sense and I'd love to know whether this feels true to you. So I reflect back and I think I had quite an unusual relationship to my body growing up, in part because I was raised by a single father. So although and it was an unusual upbringing as well, so I wasn't I wasn't internalising my mother's relationship with her body, but I was also for various reasons somewhat protected from our culture's messages about what a woman's body should be. And so I grew up, I didn't necessarily have so much of a sort of strong relationship with having a woman's body that that came later, but I certainly had a kind of I said I guess let's say healthy, a healthy relationship with my body.
That I think was very unusual. And I look back now and I feel like, my gosh, I didn't even know to be grateful for it. It was just what seemed normal to I didn't have any hang ups about my body, which you know, so rare. And I then look at my daughter, who of course is growing up with a mother and is, you know, much more part of the modern world than I was. However, my hope is because she experiences me having a kind of loving, honouring relationship with my body, that I can see that her relationship to her body appears to be much more akin to that than what I see is typical for girls of her age. She's turned 16 next month. And You know, whilst I have been, you know, somewhat conscious of almost like protecting her from those sort of mainstream ideas of what it means to be a woman and have a woman's body, there's also been just a kind of you know, what's rippled out from me that I think has probably been more important in her growing sense of her own body. And I imagine the same's true for your daughter. And so it's a very long-winded way to say. I so agree with you. I see the pain in so many women around their body, and I have this, I'm I'm very naturally rose tinted anyway, but I do have this real sense of kind of hope and optimism that as those of us are reclaiming what it means to really be in our bodies and love our bodies, that does ripple out. It ripples out to our daughters. It ripples out hopefully to people in their lives and, you know, one day to their daughters, that's been my sense, but I'd love to know if that's what you see.
Christie Green (54:25)
Mm-hmm. No, I think you're right. I think you're exactly right. And I remember years ago I went started going to therapy like 10 years ago, just because of di different things that were coming up in my life. And a lot of it was actually centered around my daughter. And the therapist said, Christie, just sit on the couch or eat what you want to eat, or basically she is cueing off of you, not what you say.
But how you live and what you do, which of course that makes sense. It's just again going back to the animals. You know, newborns from the moment they whether it's right now the moose or calving or the elk are calving, those animals are imprinting on the mom and they know they're following the mom's lead because that's how they're so they'll survive. So why would it be any different for us? And so it has taken me a very long time to begin to come to a place of loving myself and and sort of
Lian (54:57)
Mm-hmm.
Christie Green (55:21)
Letting go of the control reins of my body and what I think I should look like, do like, produce, you know. and just having that ease and softness and acceptance. I feel the difference in myself and I hope that that's like you say rippling out not only to my daughter but to others because I think when I'm more at ease and loving with myself then I can be more at ease and loving with everybody. You know, I'm not gonna be as harsh and critical with other people either. So it's definitely a practice, you know, but thank God I you know I'm thankful that I have who knows how much more time I have but it at least there's this shift now, and there is still there's always an opportunity to be to be conscious of that and make that choice.
Lian (56:06)
Mmm. Yeah. And of course this very conversation is also going to ripple out there. Hmm. Well, before we before we close, where can listeners find out more about you and your wonderful work you do, your books? Where can they find all of that?
Christie Green (56:13)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I am online at Christie Green.net. That's my website. You can send an email. You can find out about Moonlight Elk, my first book. The second book, Salmon Dreaming, comes out next year. and I'd love to be in contact with people. Anybody that wants to reach out can find me there at Christie Green.net.
Lian (56:51)
thank you. And I feel this a real gratitude to you for experiencing everything you've experienced, for the courage I'm sure it's taken at times to tread the path you've taken. And so yeah, real gratitude to you for sharing that. And also I feel a kind of It's a gratitude to the animals as well that you've learned from. I was thinking as you were saying then how you know the the baby animals learn from their mothers, not from being told. But I was also thinking it's interesting how you learn from the animals without being told. You know, they were just being and that was rippling out. And me just hearing you talk about that has rippled out to me. So yeah, I feel immense gratitude to you, but also to those animals that that you learned from. So thank you.
Christie Green (57:50)
Yeah, I feel the same. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me into conversation and and going into ideas and subjects that maybe aren't so easy or and aren't necessarily easy to articulate, you know. And having a wide enough kind of embrace to allow this conversation and the topics to come up and then I guess trusting each other that know we're going we're gonna go into this wholehearted and offer something and hopefully there are people who you know will resonate and and and again like I would love to hear from your listeners, from readers, from anybody what what anybody's experience is and I too am I just like eternally grateful for the animals like every day. I mean they changed my life and and yeah, forever, forever grateful.
Lian (58:43)
Hmm. Thank you, Christie this has been such a joy, such a joy. And yeah, I was just smiling thinking conversations between a vegan and a hunter. Who would have thought Thank you so much.
Christie Green (59:00)
So wonderful. It's the best. Best of the best. Thank you.
Yeah.
Lian (59:10)
Another fabulous conversation with Christie. My goodness, I love that woman. Here were three things that stayed with me from the conversation. Animal time and body time, as you heard, are really the same thing. And most women are living so far from that it's actually just become the water we swim in. We don't even know that's happened. But the animals don't measure themselves against an idea or a clock.
They move towards what nourishes them. And that orientation is what the hunt for Christie over those years has restored. But my hope is having listened to that, you find ways of that calling you back in your own way. I don't necessarily know we all need to go hunt. And yet there's something in what Christie shares with us that I believe can call us back in our own way.
Reaching inside the body of an animal changed something just fundamentally for Christie. The fat around the heart, the architecture of bone and fascia, the way every part serves every other part. And ⁓ just no apology, no sense of it should be with any other way. And ⁓ you could just hear how fundamentally transformative that has been for Christie. And for women who have spent their whole lives judging their bodies. What's available to us is to start to recognise that there is a way back to relating to our own bodies in the way that Christie was discovering in that intimacy with the elk. When a woman stops treating clock time as the real time, she doesn't necessarily need to just disappear from the world.
She can choose to participate in it rather than being subject to it. The body becomes the governing body, as Christie said. the body becomes the clock. And that, as Christie said, is the closest she's come to freedom. If you'd like to hop on over to the show notes for the links there at wild sovereign soul.com slash podcast slash five five two.
And as you heard me say earlier, if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path in this crazy modern world and your heart longs for guidance, kinship, and support, come join us in Unio, the community for soul seekers. You can discover more and join us by hopping on over to wildsovereignsoul.com slash Unio. Let's walk the path home together.
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