A Hero’s Journey for Humanity: Death in the Garden with Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez

Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez are on a journey to find the truth and the root of connectedness through their film, podcast series, and future book - Death in the Garden. In this episode, we unpack a lot of the stories, mythologies, narratives, and perhaps truths of what it means to be human. At the beginning, Jake and Maren lead us through the garden whether they are the physical gardens we tend, Eden, or our conception of utopia. In those gardens, they touch on concepts like consciousness, order, chaos, nature, agriculture, and beyond. Underpinning those conversations are questions like: what is the human role with earth? In a time when misanthropy runs rampant, how do we reclaim our place in the garden with the rise of AI and the machine? We unpack Jake and Maren’s past and history with food, with veganism, and whether or not eating meat imbues us with more aliveness and a sense of the sacredness of relationships. But there is no food without death and so next we unpack death and what it means to practice dying, to try to control death, to accept death, and to look at death not as an end, but as an alchemical space of transformation. Jake weaves in our own more recent mythologies, and how Harry Potter and Star Wars have become a part of our narratives around death.We also talk about:Intimacy with foodthe Hero’s Journeyand so much more!Timestamps: 00:07:24: the Death in the Garden Project and Being ‘In Process’00:17:52: Heterodox Thinking and Developing a Compass for Truth00:25:21: “The Garden”00:48:46: Misanthropy + Our Human Relationship to Earth01:06:49: Jake + Maren’s Backstories // the Hero’s Journey01:18:14: Death in Our Current Culture01:31:47: Practicing Dying 01:46:51: Intimacy with Food 02:08:46: the Latent Villain Archetype and Controlling Death: Darth Vader meets Voldemort02:21:40: Support the FilmFind Jake and Maren:SubstackDeath in the Garden Film + PodcastIG: @deathinthegardenJake IG: @arqetype.mediaMaren IG: @onyxmoonlightSelected Works from Jake and Maren:The Terrible and the Tantalizing EssayWe Are Only Passing Through EssayResources Mentioned:Daniel QuinnThe Wild Edge of Sorrow by Frances WellerWhere is the Edge of Me? By Nora Bateson Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall KimmererFall of Civilization...