Stone Wisdom for Dire Times, with Old School Nate
Today I’m honored to share a conversation with one of my beloved teachers and mentors, Old School Nate. Most of us are feeling ready for a deeper wisdom–one that truly comes from the Earth and from our wise ancestors–and Nate’s work takes us there. We talk about how to see one another’s gifts, the value systems of capitalism v. the natural world, why the Autumn is a potent time to change our belief systems, and more.
About Old School Nate:
Old School Nate is a wizard following the ways of his Wise and Well Ancestors. He has been on the path of learning how to make Village in modernity, welcoming others through their inborn Gifts, and tending to the Land since finding out he was born just fine the first time.
To connect with Nate, visit:
Instagram: @old.school.nate
Email: oldschoolnate108@gmail.com
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A written transcript can be found below the embedded player.
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Megan: Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Welcome, friend. Welcome to today's show. I'm so glad that you're here. We're a few weeks into the autumn season now, and I hope that you're enjoying the expression of the early autumn wherever you live, whatever kind of climate or ecosystem you're inhabiting.
I want to acknowledge that there's a lot happening in the world right now. We're witnessing hurricane damage and devastation and flooding, genocide and violence in the Middle East and Africa, and I don't want to pretend like all of that's not happening. And I also don't want to pretend like today's episode is speaking directly to all of that or like, is, um, you know, uh, a cure in any way.
I just do want to acknowledge that I know there's a lot happening that we're feeling the effects of, and violence and all of the oppression that's been, you know, lurking and living and expressing itself on our planet. And however you are attending to that and attending to yourself inside of this, I hope that you're finding the support you need.
And I hope that today's episode is supportive to you in some way, that it helps you to attend to what we're going through. What’s here in front of you, minute by minute, just attending to what you can, not pretending like all of this isn't happening, but you know, also not staying swallowed in despair.
That's a really fine line to walk, but I think more and more of us are getting more practiced with it, unfortunately. So I'm really grateful that you're here today. And I hope that this episode meets you in the ways that you most need right now, and is in some mysterious way, just a blessing to the lands and peoples and animals and plants that are being most directly affected by devastation and chaos in our world right now.
I am really thrilled to have one of my teachers on the show today, Old School Nate. I have been working intensively with Nate since my friend Megan Hayne, who’s been on the podcast twice now introduced us earlier this year and I have learned so much from Nate and his old school teachings. I asked him to come on to the show to talk about the five elements and the element of the autumn season specifically, which is mineral.
So stones, shells, crystals, bones, antlers - that realm. And I wanted to talk to Nate about how working with the elements, especially the mineral element in the autumn season, can show us where our attention, where our efforts will be most potent and most nutritive at this time. So in this episode, we talk about what the old school is a bit about Nate's own journey in that regard, the five elements and the element of mineral and other things as well.
So I'll just introduce Nate to you formally. Old School Nate is a wizard following the ways of his wise and well ancestors. He has been on the path of learning how to make village and modernity, welcoming others through their inborn gifts, and tending to the land since finding out he was born just fine the first time.
One of the first things that I did with Nate was receive a divination with him, which was really life changing. There were things that I had carried around with me, worries, questions, concerns - I carried these around for years and those quest many of those questions were answered in this divination.
My life's path, my gifts, really came into focus and clarity and what I was being invited to step into next. I was immensely blessed by that divination and I just want to say at the outset that I highly recommend allowing Nate to throw the bones for you. You know, I read tarot and I have divined for others with the tarot before, but this was like a whole new level. I was like, Oh, you know, my tarot readings are, you know, um, I think they're a blessing, but they're not like Nate's divination. So Nate gives so many of his teachings away, you know, for free. And I've really benefited from that. And the fee for his divination is one way to materially support these old school teachings and Nate's magical work in the world.
And the divination is really worth every penny. So this is a little ad for Nate's divination, just because I think it's incredible and I know he's not comfortable charging for them, but again, it is a way that, you know, we can support someone who's trying to do really good anti capitalist work and also living inside of capitalism. So I think you'd get a lot out of it if you need some guidance today.
Just a couple announcements on my end, you know, I'm in a little reprieve right now, my class, Composting Capitalism, is underway. The Living the Seasons Autumn Journal is out in the world, so I'm kind of like, hmm, just, you know, bopping along here and my load is a little bit lighter and you still can get a journal if you'd like to at a wild new work.com. And then for those of you in the Portland area, I'm facilitating three gatherings this fall. It's a learning from the land series where I'll be offering some techniques to help you attune to what the earth might want to communicate to you right now. So I'll be offering some teaching, you’ll have some solo time on the land to listen and practice, and then we'll come back together to share and deepen our learning. So you can learn more about those gatherings at awildnewwork. com slash events.
Okay, so with that, I'm gonna take us into our opening invocation. So wherever you are, just noticing your body and time and space. If you haven't taken a very deep breath today, you might want to do that now.
And if you haven't let out a loud sigh in a while. You might want to do that now, too, just on your exhale, really letting out some sound, letting some weight off of your system. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with.
I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook, and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
All right. Well, Nate, thank you so much for being here.
Old School Nate: You are welcome.
Megan: I thought we might start with just getting to know you a little bit better and your path thus far. Can you tell us how you came to be a wizard and what that word, that term means or carries for you?
Old School Nate: You know, it's a strange thing to be in this modern world where we have film and we have television and all kinds of interesting ways technology can create pictures and do wonderful special effects.
And, you know, wizards are all over the place in the fantasy genre and it's quite lucrative. This whole fantasy genre, storytelling, Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, but there's a basis of truth in all stories and wizards are real. Wizards are born. They’re born. So you're either born a wizard or you're not.
Just like a bard, just like a keeper of ritual, just like a trained scout and tracker. Any kind of special set of skills that is timeless and universal. All these are things that you're born into. There were many years that I was training in different traditions with different people, and I never quite felt like the word shaman was appropriate.
I didn't like a lot of what shamans did. It didn't feel like I was supposed to be doing it. There were things that I had been shown by the other world that I would always be asked to do by colleagues that was kind of outside the box. And one day when I was with one of my mentors, Danny Deardorff, and all of his colleagues, we were hanging out and someone turned to me and said, well, what are you, do you call yourself a shaman?
And I'm like, no. And this, colleague of Danny's, uh, Bert Shkirky, who was a shaman, uh, looked at me and he gave me this wicked grin and he said, “You're a wizard.” And it went right to my heart, like a lightning bolt had been unlocked. And I wrestled with that for three weeks. I'm like, can I call myself a wizard?
Can I, and I, you know, wrestled with that and it stuck and other people, uh, said it. You know, at different teachers, different times. And, I just accepted, okay, well, if so and so and so and so and so and so, and they're twice or three times my age, and they've traveled and trained for a long time, said so, then it must be so.
And since working with my ancestors, it's very clear what the job of a wizard is versus certain other things. So, yeah, I, I love being a wizard because this world that we live in and the five elements that create all of reality. It's a marvel. It's fantastic. And being a wizard, you get to embrace it without reserve.
You don't have to censor how much you love the colors on a butterfly you've never seen before, or the way a humpback whale jumps, or the silence right before a tremendous thunder crack during a storm. You can revel in that and fall into the Places in the ether where there's things that are said and done that a lot of people don't get to see or do that have an intelligent design and to catch those glimpses and to be able to connect the dots and Use your gifts in ways that help other people and they're not helped any other way They try ABC and D and it doesn't work and then they say well, okay, I'll try this And then their ancestors say, okay, we'll do this.
And then that's what we do. And it works out. Oh, yeah.
Megan: Thank you. So one of your roles as a wizard is being a teacher in the old school. And I hadn't really… I'd only heard that term sort of colloquially, but you use it very intentionally. And I wanted to talk a little bit about what the old school is. And I wanted to read back something that you told me when I first asked this, and then ask you to expand on it.
So I asked you, what is the old school? And you said, quote, Well, it's real simple. It's a school and it's old. There is no website or platform or a world governing body or anything. It's just another way of saying what people have done since the beginning, that's universal. In the old school, we cover working with the five elements, working with the land, working with our ancestors, focusing on people's gifts, and using a village as a model of what has been designed as the place Where we're most likely to experience the full giving of our gifts and also to see others through their gifts, end quote.
What else could you tell us about what the old school is?
Old School Nate: I would say it's, um, immediate medicine for dire times. You know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there was a lot of movement in the new age to look at the harm that had been done from generations of, you know, European derived people, what we had done.
And out of that new age, there was a lot of questions about, you know, working with spirits that haven't crossed over from our own ancestry. Do plants and animals and beings in nature have sentience? Is there an afterlife or, you know, wheels of karma? All kinds of realms where one might find a way to help out by addressing certain problems that had been passed down generation after generation and starting to do some work to reverse this harm.
And what quickly followed was a colonial imprint. And what I mean by that is a territorialism where this teacher would create a kind of spiritual brand. This is my following and I'm the head and I'm the so so and a lot of guru stuff and cult based stuff and a lot of personalities, uh, many of them wildly gifted.
And a lot of them very well intended, but it kind of just became another collection of people making money and not having a lot of depth because they're trying to kind of recreate the wheel instead of having something that's an entire structure with working moving parts that's been tested for, you know, more than a hundred years. Something that's been tested for a millennium, two millenniums, you know, since the dawn of time, something that's proved itself, that functions really well. So the old school, we're taking apart these colonial practices, uh, because there's no, there's no kind of white person's parade where we just steal a bunch of stuff from all over the world, different cultures, and call it a magical system.
What we have to do is work with what's right in front of us. And so we have the five elements which compose all of reality. And every culture since the beginning of time has worked with these five elements in different ways. Another part is our working with our ancestors, cleaning out the trauma that's been passed down to us by first of all, not associating our ancestors as a bother or a problem.
We come to them with respect. We come to them with humility. We come to them With the knowledge that there's so many of them that lived in a very well place before the advent of Christianity and monotheism and a lot of these colonial practices. And so simply because they have not been listened to doesn't mean they're not there and they're waiting for people to wake up because they can see what's happening on this side.
And, you know, that's why, um, that saying, you know, seven generation look ahead to this is because when you stop seeing what's going to happen down the road, if you make a bad choice, you make a bad choice. It can just get way out of hand. So instead of coming up with something new, the old school looks at what did work. We go back to the wise and well ancestors who lived in harmony with the land before colonialism and empire and misogyny and all of these things that are based on power and profit and a minority rule. I should stop there because that was a long answer.
Megan: Well, maybe you could speak a little bit to The old school being explicitly kind of anti capitalist, um, and how it doesn't have a brand it's, you know, non hierarchical, uh, many of the teachings have been passed down outside of money exchange.
Could you talk a little bit about, I think that's part of what I love about it is that it feels so different than just me paying for a program or, and not to diminish that, but. Could you tell us sort of why that is how the old school is set up?
Old School Nate: Traditionally, you know, the medicine people of the village, the medicine man or woman, uh, the druid, the wizard, the shaman, because there was more than one magical person in the village working on behalf of, um, the humans and the non humans and the land.
These people would be busy morning, noon, and night helping the village, and so, because of their special skill sets, they were often gifted things so that they could devote their time to helping people. So, it's a misnomer to think that they didn't have their own gardens and farms and work. They did. Often they didn't have to do as much because they were busy helping other people.
So they'd get extra chickens or goats or beets or whatever from whoever they were helping. Uh, but it was not a, like system of getting rich. Okay. And nowadays, right now, how, you know, we're doing things in the old school is first, We have to ask, what's the value system? And in the old school, the value system is everybody's gifted.
Everybody is born gifted. You have many gifts and you're here to use those gifts in service of the whole. That's the village. The village means the humans, but also the land, everything that lives on the land in a very animistic way, as well as, you know, our ancestors. So when we are relating to each other through our gifts, all kinds of invisible doors open all kinds of, you know, people like the word synchronicity. So we'll use the word synchronicity, all kinds of synchronicity shows up because the other world gets excited. Hey, people are remembering. And when we start to remember and we do what our actual job is, we're in a place where the money that can come to us is seen through an entirely different lens.
It's just money. There's very little value in it other than what it can do. You can have all the money in the world and if you're not giving your gifts or if you're not, if you don't even accept that you have gifts or people don't accept that you are gifted. There's going to be a huge imbalance, not only in how you use that money, but in your living relationships.
So, you know, money's going to pay your rent. It might buy your food. It can give you gas and all this kind of stuff. But we need that because we have a machine obsessed culture, you know, ever since, uh, and even before the industrial revolution, this idea of empire where people don't own the land that they live on in a way That is not based on possession, a reciprocal bond.
You own the land if the land also owns you. By that, we have to understand that that would also mean our ancestors for however many generations had pacts, had relationships with certain trees, certain rocks, certain animals, certain rivers, certain mountains where they would caretake. And recognize these are sacred places where certain things are happening.
And not just that, but whatever the land is giving them for sustenance. Let's say it's a fallow deer. Okay, well, the fallow deer is not a resource. The fallow deer is a brother. The fallow deer is a person. The fallow deer has sentience. It is allowing itself to be part of this exchange. So we can get the meat, but we can also get the hide.
We can get the hooves. We can get the horns. We can use the brains for brain tanning. There's, you can use almost every part of the deer and almost every part of any creature. And there's this idea of what are we going to use you for if we take something that nature gives and it's being used for something that denies its inherent value, and we just skip the part that it was gifted in the way You know, invites money.
What we're going to do is not only fail that relationship with the fallow deer, but quickly all the other relationships we have are going to deteriorate because their intrinsic natural value is denied. And so the land, which is the container, which is the earth, which is the element that all the other four elements go through and pass through and are recharged and balance each other.
The land itself, the soil itself, the great earth itself is forgotten. And so then it has to be coded in a membrane of moving parts where there's currency and there's cash and there's computers and there's machines quickly at the speed of light trying to keep us in this amnesia and all these messages on social media and you know television you need to buy this you need to look this way you need to do this because we're all very aware we have lost value. The value we are no longer a gift based species And this is why, you know, this question of why don't humans, uh, Homo sapiens sapiens have a niche?
Well, we do have a niche. We absolutely have a niche. Okay. Every organism in nature has its niche and we have a niche. Our niche is recognizing our inherent gifts and giving those gifts away, not selling them. Giving them away. And so a community that gives its gifts away, you have someone that works with leather, someone that works with newborn babies, someone that works with older adults, someone that works with making flax into clothing.
When all of these people are doing their gifts, you'll find that pretty soon everyone's needs are going to be met. And we're not only staying with original value as defined, and that's the job of Mineral, the season that we're in, Autumn, we're not only staying with the original definition of value. But our place here, all the way here, Earth here, soil, entire planet here, is fully re membered.
And it's not remembered as a cognitive, conscious thing, intellectually, in this way that I always rail against the academics who have failed us. We're remembering in a physical body way. So we take the intelligence of remembering something mentally and oh, now our body is animated and we have to move, we have to get up, activate these gifts and give these gifts.
Because value is not something you believe, value is what you do. And so, You know, unfortunately we're in this world where money makes the world go round, but that's only because there's so many people trapped in that cycle. If we generation by generation remembered and changed the definition of our value back to our gifts and we relate it again through our gifts, not just Nate and Megan.
But Nate and Megan and the bumblebees outside, the rain that we're going to get tomorrow, the dead that were three generations past that, knew the signs of a heavier winter that could be coming. When we relate to other beings primarily, and what I mean by primarily is initially first. What's your gift?
We're inviting a neutral territory for us to inhabit without the need to steal or colonize. You have a gift. I have a gift. Therefore, we're both sovereign. Therefore, there's no need for me to be jealous of you or to take from you. I have something to contribute. You have something to contribute. And there's a holiness in that.
And we see that reflected in nature. So in the old school, it's a very intentional way that looks strange to people because there's not going to be likes. There's not going to be follows. There's not going to be all these fads, but what you will have is your sleeping is going to change. Your daily life is going to change.
You're going to be in relationship for the first time in your life where every Cell in your body is alive and awake, and all of a sudden, nature, mineral, earth, fire, and water are now realms instead of imaginal archetypes.
Megan: That was so rich. Thank you. Yes, I have felt that value shift and have benefited from it so much. And yeah, my life has already changed since going deeper into this work around gifts. And I do want to talk about mineral more specifically because it's the autumn and mineral season, but what do people need to know about the five elements in order for us to talk about one of them more specifically?
Old School Nate: That's a great question. So there are five, not four, not three, not seven, five. And, uh, you know, you can look at, uh, biology, you can look at any of the sciences, and there's a golden means that just goes throughout the galaxy. You know, mathematics, work, and there's mathematics in nature. So. The five elements are water, fire, earth, which is also the same as soil, nature, which is anything that is alive, the trees, humans, mammals, birds, fish, uh, moss, mushrooms, okay?
Uh, otherworldly beings we can't see, those are nature. And then mineral. And mineral is metals, bones, petrified rock. Uh, mineral can be most dense like an entire mountain, or it can be least dense like a grain of sand, or just trace elements like the phosphorus in our body. Are the calcium in our body.
Those are minerals. Those are nutrients. And it's interesting. And you've asked this question. I won't give a long thing here, but one of the quickest ways that you can dumb down to people and create something like a cash based economy that, uh, enables spiritual amnesia, slavery, and colonization until we run out of resources and have to leave the planet.
And also all of this is not from earth. This was brought to earth. Okay. So you would change the, the five elements. You would say there's only four or there's only three, or you would, you know, subvert them like the white Christian men did in the middle ages by saying, you know, there's only four elements.
There's air and fire and water. And I forget the fourth one they use. But anyway, you get into real trouble when you remove one of the primary, Laws of the galaxy, these five things. So all of our cultures have always used five originally, and many still do. In the old school, what you're training in, the teaching that I've had directly from the five elements was, uh, from West Africa, from Burkina Faso, the Dano people, through Malidoma Some, who was my direct teacher for a couple of years, and now still, I mean, since, cause he's passed down, we still talk.
And then through a lot of systems throughout Asia, um, some of it's martial arts, a lot of it is purely Taoist. Um, my teacher Lois, who's a classical acupuncturist, so we have an Asian influence, we have an African influence, and these days, as I'm teaching you and the others, the five element training that I'm getting is directly from my bloodlines.
What the old European peoples knew. So those are the Hungarians and the Norse, the Georgians from the Caucasus mountains and Scots. And black forest, Bavarian, Germanic folks. Did I answer your question? I'm kind of rambling. Sorry.
Megan: No, that's good. Maybe it would be helpful to hear a little bit about, because the elements to me felt so like big and impersonal kind of, maybe it would be helpful to hear a little bit about what's possible when we get to know the elements better and just embody them and work with them more, not as things way out there, but.
You know, forces in us. What do you feel like shifts for people?
Old School Nate: That's great. Yeah. The elements are inside our body and outside of us. And this is one of the trademarks of life. So, you know, living beings have all five elements and this is why I'm not worried about AI, you could program something. And it might get close to some kind of cognition.
Where's the fire in it? Where's the water, where's the nature. And I'm talking at the molecular level. If you don't have these things, that life form is not going to evolve. It's not going to survive. So starting really basic. We're going through the elemental training season by season, so right now it's autumn.
And, um, you know, my, my Taoist teacher always used to say, If all else fails, follow the directions. And so each element has a direction. So really simply, mineral is downward. And all we have to do is go outside during autumn to see that happening. You see downward everywhere, leaves falling off the trees, uh, but also as we age, as we get older, downward, you know, our hair falls out, our skin sag, it becomes shorter.
So yeah, uh, mineral is also an energy that records. And you know, this is why we know that we can can. We can put information on quarts and computers have mineral upon mineral upon mineral and look at what they do. You've got copper in there and cobalt and all this stuff and how much information is literally stored on a computer.
It's ridiculous how much you can store on a phone these days. So, a lot of the information we're carrying. resides in our bones and that's like through DNA. So my blue eyes, I didn't choose to have blue eyes. That was handed to me through my father's line. My dad had blue eyes, his dad had blue eyes and his dad had blue eyes.
And so that kind of genetic memory comes through us and our bones are, um, when they say, You know, this in your bones, that's what they mean. It's this old knowledge. And so when you're throwing the bones, you're getting information, you're getting a story. And, uh, yeah.
Megan: Yeah. Thank you. I think one of the things I have loved about your teachings on minerals so far is your encouragement to connect it to this idea of definition and that the autumn is a time and mineral teaches us that we can always reassess our definitions. And, um, could you talk a little bit about that and how that sort of shows up in our real lives?
Old School Nate: Absolutely. And that last show, if anyone's listening to this show, I really encourage you to listen to the previous one where Meg is talking about mineral, you know, your download old school was just amazing.
You said so many things about mineral that I'm writing down and going back and saying, wow, okay, I have to remember and tell that to people in the future and to quote you because you nailed it word for word. But you had a different insight. So we all have our own way of translating. We all have our own definitions, even though we share words.
So it's really important to understand that definitions are created. They're not locked in stone. And we can also examine our own language and we can look for examples of mineral proving itself throughout our language locked in stone. This is in your bones. You know, it's very apparent how this works. Uh, one of my oldest teachers in my early twenties said something that changed the course of my life because I was still, uh, you know, in the belief system of my parents at that time.
It was very harmful, very damaging. I hated myself. I hated most people. There was no love. It was just fear based guilt and shame, ad nausea, from a God that, you Created me, but didn't love me or want me. And I was somehow, uh, immoral. So when I came out of the closet, I had to get a new God, talk about changing your definitions.
And so this teacher, Steven, he said, uh, you can have a belief system, but how powerful is your belief system? If it only has power over you, but you don't have power over it. It blew my mind power over a belief system Like if you have power over your belief system, isn't then that just a con like aren't you just kind of tricking yourself and deluding yourself?
How does that even work? And I just I said it just like that to him and he said, okay Well, how does it work? If you never change your definitions if what you believed when you were three You tried to do when you're seven and what you did when you were seven, you tried to do when you're 14 and yada, yada, yada.
If you've never can change your definitions and see where you were either missing information, given wrong information, believe something because there was like a naivety or rose colored glasses, et cetera, et cetera. But this whole inability to say, well, I think I'm wrong about that. I'm going to change my mind.
And again, you know, in my situation, what Christianity had done is said, Don't touch the definitions. How dare you try to, this is what this verse means. This is what this verse means, period, but it was purely contradictory. So being able to change my definitions and change my belief system is incredibly liberating and free.
And that's kind of what I love about Taoism is that, you know, when they say the name that you can name, isn't the name. The Taoism that you can categorize isn't really Taoism, because again, you've just defined it all. There's no empty space, there's no room for growth. So changing our definitions not only has to do with maturation and growth, but it also has to do with a very basic fact that capitalism uses.
Capitalism uses this, and it's very, very tricky, but this idea that emptiness, mystery cannot and should not exist. We have to know everything instantly. It's extremely lucrative. And again, it's part of that amnesia. And so we have an internet that you can instantly look up anything so you can get a piece of information, having a piece of information and knowing it are two different things.
And so we have an abundance of readily accessible information. Without a naturally informed process of receiving that information that is going to deepen our bridge to the living world, to the land of the five elements, to our ancestors, to our community. Because again, what's the value of how this information came to you?
Did it come to you selfishly? Or was it carried as a gift by someone else? The information that comes to you by a gift through someone else. Changes your life. Even if it just changes your day through a small little act, that's a huge, huge ripple. And so what mineral is all about is saying, yeah, there's value.
But don't forget, you're the one deciding how long an inch is versus a yard versus a mile. And that's just a definition. This guy over here might use cubits, might use a metric system, so who's right? And when we go to such extremes like war, or, you know, deforestation, overfishing, because we don't all agree, All the definitions again, because underpinning value of that is missing because we don't have a value informed by gifts.
Thank you, Ancestors. So Ancestors just spoke up. Mineral, just a short answer would have been mineral keeps things sane. Cause if in your lifetime, you only need so many definitions that work. Well, why do we need more than that? Why do we need to go to such lengths and not changing them and to fight over them?
It's just silliness. So, you know, we value something enough and we'll treasure it. What we've forgotten how to do is treasure each other's ability to change your definitions, you know, and then that's, when that's not there, then we have control.
Megan: So what are some ways if someone was curious about You know, on this show, we talk a lot about living in alignment with the seasons and that there's a layer that's getting added if we add on mineral to the autumn.
So I feel like a lot of us have a good grasp of like what living in alignment with the autumn looks like. But if we add mineral onto that, what are some ways that we could live in alignment with mineral for the next couple of months?
Old School Nate: So each of the five elements is going to also resonate with particular emotions we experience as humans.
And we have these emotions because they're part of our learning system. They're part of our relating system. They help us to relate. So, um, the two, I would say strongest, uh, are most commonly associated emotions, mineral have with humans is grief and gratitude. Gratitude. So those are going to be sharper or more easily felt during autumn.
And if we want to honor or cultivate a relationship with mineral during autumn, let's just look around at Halloween. For example, you've got 16 foot tall rubber skeletons in everyone's yard. And inside that house is probably a hundred hungry ghosts from ancestors that are unwell, that have never fully crossed over, that are just passing down all kinds of epigenetic mess as well as the living that have unprocessed grief. What if instead of taking that money and buying a 16 foot tall rubber skeleton or a grim reaper or any of this other foolishness, you simply made a shrine of bones, stones, minerals and, and kind of a semi private space, maybe your backyard or maybe even somewhere in the woods.
And you just considered what it feels like for people not to be able to ever come home. And so we have all these ancestors who are They're not home. They're not with the rest of their people, with our, our village, you know, this wise and well continuum of people that are interested in the preservation of human life and the continuing of the human mission, which is to live out these gifts and service of each other, the village and the planet.
And it's not a hard thing to grieve for the dead. It's not a hard thing to grieve our, our, um, unprocessed grief. And if you have trouble. Just pick up a heavy stone, get a big stone like the size of your head and remember something that you grieve and put that in the stone. And imagine that you've been carrying that all this time.
And what that's doing to your life, and your heart, and your relationships, and how you relate, and to your gifts, and how good it would feel to be able to let that go, to all the way grieve it out and let it go, and that the second your fingers slip, because they will get to a finite point where you have to drop that stone, it just frees itself from your hands, it just returns to the earth.
Because the mineral's direction is down, it wants to sink into the earth. That's its primordial function within time and space. To keep life going, these five elements follow a rule. Minerals rule, go down. But not free falling through space. That rock needs to sink into the earth because it's gonna, as the rain washes it, Year after year after year, the dew and everything else, these trace elements from the stone are released into the soil, enriching the soil.
The bones break down, the worms eat them, and the soil becomes enriched. Soil has to be enriched by a mineral. It's not enough to have just dirt that's wet and warm. It has to be enriched by the mineral which breaks things down. And these are all these meanings and definitions. That's why there's so many different kinds of minerals.
So when we can let a piece of grief drop, think about what it does to the soil of your life, how you can grow from this. So tending your grief, attending a grief workshop. If you know people that are skilled, a guest that you had on your show recently, he goes down by Rainier Baumorr, Ben, you know, he's one of my students.
He attended and helped facilitate a grief ritual recently with men in Port Townsend. Powerful, powerful, these rituals are, and my gratitude to him for doing that. So the other thing, quickly and easily during autumn, is tending your gratitude. So, you know, this is the second harvest, which starts the beginning of the recognition of Autumn for most European derived people in the Northern Hemisphere.
And, you know, this second harvest, this autumnal equinox was the time when the animals would be fat enough to slaughter. And you would know how much meat do you have, how much protein for you and your tribe through winter. So you would have either some grief, Oh crap, we might starve. So we'll have to go hunting or gratitude. Yay, we're going to make it, we're going to live. Look at all the pumpkins, all the squash that's coming in. Lots of gratitude that you're going to be able to face the winter with some, without this harshness or death. And indeed, when we have Thanksgiving in autumn, we're giving thanks. Uh, and here in America.
And so again, what is the direction of gratitude? Well, just like grief can bring you to your knees and you're just like, Oh, flat on your face, or it's hard to get out of bed. It's hard to get up. You're so down. Gratitude is also down. And so let us not think of these emotions as one's bad or one's good or one's destructive or one's helpful.
Cause they're both the same in terms of how they help. They're both essential. Gratitude brings us down because When we're grateful for something, sometimes we sink to our knees. How grateful are we to sit down when we're, when we're tired? I'm sitting down talking with you. I'm very grateful for this experience.
I love hanging out with you. Grateful for our friendship. It feels good and I'm grateful when I can lay down. After a hard day of work and sleep on a soft bed, I love kneeling down, getting down there in the dirt and harvesting the vegetables I've grown, you know, cutting away the plants and doing things like this.
It's so much fun going down to look for four leaf clovers. All right. Digging holes. Uh, there's so many things that I find in my life, uh, when I'm going downward that have gratitude in them. So, uh, look for gratitude and look for grief. And again, Let this return to the earth because that's the direction of mineral.
The leaves that fall off the trees are going downward to decompose back to become more earth. But they're also conserving the life of the tree. The tree can let go of all that dead weight. Now it's going to have a better survival rate. So when we let go through both grief and gratitude, Uh, we're healthier, so that's a long answer again.
Megan: I love it. Thank you. I only prepared a few questions because I knew each one would be very rich. Thank you. Maybe in the spirit of mineral and the freedom to update our definitions as we need, is there a concept or idea that you wish More of us would redefine or a definition, you would really like to see more of us update or give ourselves permission to update.
Old School Nate: Yes. What would it mean to my language system, my personal speech? You know, my lexicon, if I practiced relating to others through their gifts and I just didn't see them through the label of friend, uh, relative, coworker, but what if each person is gifted and you have this gift? I, I've tried it out this fall a little bit more, especially at my work, uh, when someone In the morning, instead of just rushing into the job, what is your gift?
Oh, it's this thing. And I look for it to show up in the conversation or in the space. And then I'll say, you're really good at this. Uh, this really helps me when you do this. Thank you. And you know, it's good to have you back if the person was sick or whatever. And something where I'm speaking, not just to their current perception, but I am speaking to the living spiritual force of their gift as if it is aware and therefore, since I'm addressing it, it must then respond. It's on home. It's up to bat. Now it's your turn. Here's the invitation. Knock it out of the park. How often do we invite each other to share our gifts through the everyday?
I think that's if we could just be really skilled at always remembering to include everybody's gifts. Because it's so much forgotten. I just made a practice out of that. I think we would be at the top of the mountain being able to see 360 degrees as to all the things that we can change. But sometimes those seem so huge and so hard we stop.
But I think this thing of, in our speech, talking to each other's gifts as if they're self aware and making, trying to make that a daily habit. Not only is that something we can do, but I think the force of that, uh, would be immense.
Megan: I believe you. Thank you. This went really fast, but is there anything that we haven't covered that you feel like is important in the realm of the elements or the old school or autumn?
Old School Nate: Yeah, I would say. You know, the seasons are the universe's way, creation's way, spirit's way of saying here's a chance to work on this again. So if, you know, you have never really sat down again down and taken a time out and looked at your definitions and realized that you have permission to change your definitions.
It's not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You're just trying to get clarity. Or you're just becoming more honest with where you are. And sometimes your definitions have to change in order to save your life. You know, I'll tell you a super short, quick story. I did three years of this. You know, Christian, uh, this ex gay bullshit in my early twenties and I got ulcers and I ended up going to the emergency room more times than I can count trying to be, you know, something I wasn't a straight man cause I didn't want to be, you know, thrown away by my family and my friends.
Uh, and I didn't want to live with all that self hatred. So the last time I was in the emergency room, and it was the same ER doctor, and I was 21 years old, and he's standing in his, you know, white threads, and he's next to the gurney I'm on, and he's got the, the IV bag, and you know, in his left hand, in his right hand, he's got his clipboard, and he's got the nose, he says, well, you know, Nathan, this is a, you know, how many visits this year, and you don't smoke.
You hardly ever drink, you run three miles a week, you're in excellent shape, yadda yadda yadda. Why are you here? And I was so tired and so in much pain from my ulcers, and so just exhausted, I just finally looked at him and said, I'm gay. And we weren't alone in the ER. And he said, what? Now looking back, I can see that this man in his late 50s was doing something intentionally.
But I knew he heard me the first time and I said louder, I'm gay. And other people kind of turned and looked at me. And I'll never forget it. He slapped that clip, the clipboard down against the side of the metal gurney. And I kind of jumped a little bit and he looked at me with frustration and he said, “Don't you know, there's nothing we can do for that?! You’re fine. Get out of my hospital. Don't ever come back.”
That changed my definition. This was a surgeon. This was an ER doctor who knew physiology, who was not there because of an outdated dogma. Based on slavery and, and, uh, alien belief systems. He was there because of medical science and trying to help people not die.
He just said, there's nothing we can do for you. You're gay. You're gay. You're fine. And that stuck with me. And I left the hospital and I remember feeling in so much pain to the car, but then in the car, turning the keys and driving away. I was just so happy and then the happiness grew and grew and grew in a couple hours.
All the pain was gone and I called everybody I knew and I just started telling, okay, okay, okay. And so people, you know, I lost, that's the way it was, but the people that are my real family that know me and love me rejoiced and I thank the gods for that doctor. And I mean, every year I send them a big old blessing.
I don't know what his name was, where he is or anything, but I get all my juju and I say, rain down on that man, all the blessings of everything. Cause he saved my life. But he also was one of my very best mineral teachers because he said it, but I had to believe him. I had to change the definition. He said, you're gay, you're fine.
But I had to say, you know what? That's, that's right. And so once I did that, once I took that key and unlocked that, uh, Boom. No more ulcers over being gay. That's it. And then bam, you know, all the, all the wizard teachers came, it was just like one after another, after another, after another, it was like a backed up cue.
So I think maybe he wasn't seeing me in my pain. I think maybe there was a chance he knew that my gifts were blocked and maybe that's why he said it in that way. I'd like to think that, but definitely that was a mineral training for me. They're one of the biggest ones in my life.
Megan: That's a beautiful story. Thank you. I love that. Ah, okay. Well, where can people find you? Uh, again, I know you're not everywhere on the internet, but you know, if people would like to learn from you or have a divination with you, can you just let folks know where they can connect you? Oh, sure.
Old School Nate: Uh, well, my email is oldschoolnate108 at gmail.com. There's no periods. It's all lowercase. Or I'm on, uh, the Instagram, but I, I don't really use that. And I don't know, there's so many things I should be doing for my friends to like, you know, help them out with their stuff by clipping and posting. And so I'm a Luddite when it comes to technology, so probably the email's the best.
I do throw the bones for people now, and then when they ask over a Zoom session. It's not a, a small divination. You yourself have had it. Um, it's a life changing thing where, you know, the homework can last easily a couple of years, um, at a minimum, most of the time it takes people about a season or a half year to fully integrate all the homework that the ancestors give them.
But it's black and white specific advice. It's not loosey goosey. I'm trying to make you feel good. It's very surgical. It's this part of your life is doing this. This is what's happening over here. This is what's happening over here. Using a visual backdrop of the five elements and based on, you know, what the other world and the ancestors who are wise and well, not just mine, but also the clients, the person asking for the divination.
So it's the old school. at work, uh, in a divination, you know, I ask people for 300 bucks to do it. It takes around three hours, sometimes more. And then I, you know, give them a full report afterwards. I email it to them and then check in with them, you know, every couple of weeks for a bit, just to make sure they're, they're okay.
But you know, if someone was in a state and they didn't have that kind of money, I'm not going to tell someone, no, definitely. I'm not doing this for you. Cause again, it's not currency based. Okay. It's also a serious thing. And so, because there's a lot of stuff that's going into it, I do ask for a certain amount so that it's not a, uh, you know, one of those things that, that people just do for entertainment.
You know, it's a serious thing. It's, it's a serious thing. Like I said, you know, it, it, it, uh, moves your life around. So it's also a way of telling someone, are you really ready? If you want this change, here's what they're saying, but you know, once you start this, it's going to move. So make sure you're really ready for what you're asking for.
You know, there's some grownup stuff in it for sure. For sure.
Megan: Yeah. I would say the old school in general is a very grown up place from the get go. Oh, Nate, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. And I feel like we could have gone so much longer, but I'll close this here for now, but just want to say a huge thank you for coming on.
Old School Nate: You're very welcome. Thank you. I love your podcast. I've listened to it ever since I ran across you. We became friends and colleagues and working together and everything about it is it just gets better and better and better. And I'm so excited for, you know, what's coming through autumn and this work you're doing with your journal.
I recommend everyone, I mean, get Megan's journal. What she's doing with autumn is not, um, quaint folks. This is old school stuff. This is solid, you know, We need real help for our time and Megan is definitely hearing the call of the other world and showing up and saying, I'm a first responder. Let's go. So thank you for your work as well.
Megan: Thank you.
Okay, my friend, thank you again for being here. I hope this episode felt really nutritious to you. Again, I encourage you to connect with Nate if you're in need of some divine guidance or direction right now. His email is in the show notes for you. Thank you to everyone who has supported the show by pitching in financially or who has shared it with your friends or subscribed or given a rating, especially on Apple.
Thank you so much for helping this podcast grow and be The shining light that I intend it to be in the world. If you get something out of the show and would like to help make it sustainable for me, then you can pitch in financially at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. You can pitch in a few bucks once or become a monthly sustainer.
And thank you so much to those of you who have done that already. And are continuing to do that to make the show possible. I will see you again in two weeks where we will go deeper into the autumn's lessons of decline and transformation and everything that's just possible in this incredible season. I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.