Dr. Erica Gift | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Dr. Erica Gift is a professor of psychology at California State University in Northridge. She also informally is a botanist, and is a community educator on wild foods and bioregional herbalism.
She talks with Adam Williams about how she weaves her knowledge and passions for nature, food and psychology together. They also talk about rewilding, the science behind meditation and Erica’s “pathological optimism.” Among other things.
Like, Erica’s six-month sabbatical years ago, in which she drove her 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon, named “Butter,” into the forests of the American West and sustained herself fully by foraging for food. It was a life-changing adventure that has permeated Erica’s entire life since.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Dr. Erica Gift
Website: ericawohldmann.com
Instagram: instagram.com/ericawohldmann
TEDxUCLA video: “An Urban Dweller’s Guide to Rewilding”
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:13): Welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams.
Today I’m talking with Dr. Erica Gift. And what I’ll say is a really enjoyable, thoughtful, and enlightening conversation. Erica has a joint PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive science from UC Boulder. She’s a professor of psychology at California State University in Northridge. That’s a role that she largely teaches online from here in Chaffee County. She also informally is a botanist and is a community educator on wild foods and bioregional herbalism.
Erica and I talk about the cross-section of those things in this conversation and how she weaves her knowledge and passions for nature, food, and psychology. Together we talk about how serendipity led her to Boulder and her academic career years ago. And we talk about the power of magic mushrooms and her mission in life.
(01:07): Erica took a six-month sabbatical some years ago in which she drove her 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon named “Butter” into the forests of the American west and sustained herself fully by foraging for food. She drove into the forest with limited knowledge of edible plants, but with faith that ancestral wisdom would emerge. She tells what the life-changing takeaway of that adventure was, and as she says it has permeated her entire life ever since.
We also talk about rewilding, the science behind meditation, and Erica’s pathological optimism. The Looking Upstream Podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. Show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation are published at wearechaffeeopd.com where you also can subscribe to the Looking Upstream newsletter. You can see more photos and support the podcast at We Are Chaffee Pod on Instagram.
Now here is Dr. Erica gift.
[Transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams: You grew up in Missouri, as did I. And I’m curious what area of the state?
Erica Gift (02:17): Well, it’s hard to say exactly where. My parents were divorced, and so I spent a lot of time in North County where my dad lived. Hazelwood. That’s where I went to high school.
Adam Williams (02:27): Okay. So outside of St. Louis.
Erica Gift (02:28): Yep. That’s a very typical, where did you go to high school question. Missouri if people ask.
Adam Williams (02:33): Wasn’t going to go there.
Erica Gift (02:34): But they do Hazelwood West. But my mom lived in a little town called Cuba in the South. Actually, the town is called Steelville, but most people don’t know where that is. So I say Cuba, it’s a larger city. And it’s in the Mark Twain National Forest. Their butts up against the Mark Twain National Forest. So I might say that I grew up in the woods of the Mark Twain National Forest.
Adam Williams (02:58): I’ve spent some time there. I did a series for Missouri Life Magazine many years ago where I was retracing the Missouri section of the Trail of Tears. So I was walking that and I ended up with a leg injury and it was Steelville where I ended up having to camp out and hold up and ultimately abandon the walk across the rest of the state.
But it was coincidentally historically with the forced march of the Cherokees with the Trail of Tears, that also was a location where there was a lot of illness and reason that they had to hold up that camp and just set up camp for a while. So narratively, my injury happened at a good place and it was Steelville where I spent a few days waiting to be picked up by my now wife.
Erica Gift (03:49): Yeah. Such a small world.
Adam Williams (03:51): There’s also a lot of canoeing and woodsy adventure around there, isn’t there?
Erica Gift (03:57): Tons. Yeah. When I grew up, mom would hand us inner tubes and my sisters and I would just go floating down the river while she did her fishing and hung out getting the alone time she would want.
Adam Williams (04:12): That’s great. As an influence just to be outdoors like that in general … And we’re going to get into some of this, I think, where we talk about rewilding and what’s going on maybe now versus then. But I would imagine you and I are of comparable age and would’ve grown up at a time, and then in that place where outdoors …
In my case I grew up in town, but being outdoors in whatever form was what was expected, what was demanded. I wasn’t even allowed indoors. If it’s a Saturday or it’s the summer, you better be outside. You’re not coming in and watching TV. I didn’t even have a video game system for a long time, but you’re not going to play video games, for instance.
Erica Gift (04:48): Exactly. Yeah. If we weren’t outside playing, we were inside helping mom with chores and we sometimes got the choice, most of the time got the choice. I think that way. Mom got her alone time like I said. She really enjoyed that having three girls. But yeah. We were outside from sunrise until sunset.
Adam Williams (05:06): Where did you fit into that line of three girls?
Erica Gift (05:09): I was in the middle. I’m in the middle.
Adam Williams (05:11): Yeah. Okay. And she probably then was like, “Well, you can help me with the really boring stuff if you want to stay inside or you can go outside, have total freedom and have fun.”
Erica Gift (05:22): Yeah. We had a mile radius around the house that we were able to free-range roam, if you will, and if we wanted to go any further than that, like the pool or the candy shop, we had to ask permission, but otherwise we were allowed to go anywhere with no supervision and it was normal back then.
Adam Williams (05:42): Did you live in town?
Erica Gift (05:45): It was a suburb of … Not really a city. It wasn’t a city. Not in town. Steelville’s a really small community and especially back then it was even smaller than it is now. So we lived about a mile from any of the main structures.
Adam Williams (06:03): So in that mile then you had a mile radius, it was largely natural.
Erica Gift (06:08): Yeah. There was a big open space area with a creek running through it. Tons of trees. I remember in Missouri there’s lots of deciduous trees, not like Colorado at all. Huge big deciduous trees with fallen leaves and things to play with, creeks to fish in. Yeah. It was just all natural around us.
Adam Williams (06:32): We used to go catch crawdads, things like that. Or even leeches, which I guess is gross maybe.
Erica Gift (06:39): Yeah. Mom would always warn us about the leeches. She didn’t want us getting in the water and getting covered in leeches, but we did it anyway. We looked for fossils mostly. There’s tons of fossils down in those riverbeds and around Missouri. We’d collect those and make up games and play all sorts of things. We’d always find ways to entertain ourselves in the woods.
Adam Williams (07:01): This is all still a significant part of you. Being out with nature and connecting with … I suppose yourself, nature, you tell me what you’re out there doing and what your love of that is. But this has been something that seems to have run a thread through your whole life.
Erica Gift (07:14): Yeah. I didn’t grow up with a TV. I don’t even know if there were video games when I was young. I think Atari came out at some point when I was a teenager or early teens and being in the wild has always been a part of my life and still is. I still don’t have a TV so I spend a lot of time outside, whether it’s gardening or wandering around my neighborhood or being in the mountains. I’m probably on a mountain bike ride or a hike almost every day.
Adam Williams (07:44): You have a PhD in cognitive science. Cognitive psychology.
Erica Gift (07:49): That’s right.
Adam Williams (07:50): I’m curious why you chose that path as opposed to maybe something that’s even more tightly connected to nature. Whatever all that would’ve been. I don’t know. Go be a wildlife ranger, something, I don’t know. A scientist in that field.
Erica Gift (08:05): Yeah. Well, when I graduated from college, I changed my major during my senior year to psychology from accounting because I took an intro psych course and the professor was just so stoked about life and I thought to myself, I want to be that guy. Excited as opposed to my accounting professors who are just monotone and boring. But when I graduated, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do like lot of students these days, a lot of my students. And I didn’t really know what my options were. I didn’t have a family who went to graduate school or had gotten a PhD. So I applied for the Forest Service, which was an outdoor job.
Adam Williams (08:05): Yeah.
Erica Gift (08:45): I applied for the Peace Corps and I also applied for graduate school, kind of. I had moved to Colorado right out of my undergrad and I was on my way to Las Vegas because I had a friend who I was traveling with and he had family in Las Vegas and Colorado is exactly halfway between Missouri and Las Vegas.
Adam Williams (09:11): Okay. I wouldn’t have visualized it that way, but interesting.
Erica Gift (09:11): Yeah. It’s about a 12 hour drive to St. Louis, and then about another 12 hours to Las Vegas. So we stopped for the night in Boulder and got a hotel room and I took a walk in Chautauqua and I looked around and I just said, “I am not leaving.” I love it here. And my friend was like, “What? We don’t have any money. We don’t know where we’re going to go, what we’re going to do. We were going to stay with his family for free.” And I said, “Well, will you just stay in a hotel room with me while I look for an apartment? I’ll pay for it.” And three days later I had an apartment and he decided to stay too. So I found a two bedroom apartment .and that’s how I ended up in Colorado. And that’s really how I ended up in grad school.
(09:52): I was volunteering in a research lab at CU Boulder. And I volunteered in a social psych lab, a clinical psych lab and a cognitive psych lab. I realized I didn’t really want to … And how psychology while that was what my undergrad was in, and then if I knew if I wanted to do anything in the field, I had to get a PhD. And I actually wanted to get a PhD at the time because I had taken some magic mushrooms. And I realized the power of that tool for connecting us with the greater all. And I thought if I had a PhD, I would be legit and I would be able to do that for a living if I wanted to offer psychedelics to other people to help them reconnect with themselves.
Adam Williams (10:43): How did you envision that as a possibility when we had people like Timothy Leary and people who had … Ram Dass. What was his name? Alpert before that.
Erica Gift (10:55): Richard Alpert.
Adam Williams (10:56): Yeah. They got kicked out of Harvard, right, because they were teaching such things. So had things shifted by then in terms of acceptance or did you just believe, “I can connect these two somehow, sometime?”
Erica Gift (11:08): Well, that professor who was super stoked about psychology, who convinced me to change my major just by being excited, allowed me to write my honors thesis as an undergrad on cognitive psychology and its relationship, the benefits of psychedelics on cognition. And because he allowed me to do that, it was definitely not something that was socially acceptable at the time, but he was open to allowing me to do that. I learned a lot about the research. There had been a lot of research earlier before the war on drugs nixed everything, closed down all of the research programs until really about 2000 when that began again.
Adam Williams (11:50): That would’ve started around mid ’80s.
Erica Gift (11:53): Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, I was really excited about that potential field and I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I said I was going to get a PhD. I applied for … I didn’t even apply for the program actually. I felt like I wasn’t ready to get a PhD. I didn’t submit my application and I had this fabulous mentor, Alice Healy who she said, “No one’s ever ready to get a PhD. It’s like having a baby or getting married. You just do it.” And so she marched me down to the office and said, “Erica’s application will be in tomorrow. Sorry, it’s going to be a day late.” And that’s actually how I didn’t choose the Peace Corps or the Forest Service. I just landed that position in grad school.
Adam Williams (12:39): There are a couple of things about this I’m really curious about. One is the idea of serendipity that like you just said it, I did not choose these other paths because this is how this came together. But also the fact that you went through town and you said, “I’m staying here.” Do you think how you’ve pretty much lived your life is that there’s this openness and a willingness to change course instantly? I don’t know what that energy is for you or how you look at living those moments. Can you describe that for me?
Erica Gift (13:11): Maybe we can even tie this back to my connection with the natural world. I think when you recognize that you aren’t separate from nature, but rather a part of it, I at least realize that there’s an infinite number of possibilities that allow me to remain open and true to myself without feeling like I have to make a decision. Sometimes the greater all makes those decisions for me. And most of my life I’ve spent allowing circumstances to come my way rather than seeking those circumstances. So my professor job, I took my job because I got the most number of hugs on my interview. I’m pretty sure hugs are illegal these days, but at the time I was like, “Yeah, I really want to work with these people. They’re fabulous.” They hugged me. Like seven of them.
Adam Williams (14:11): Wow.
Erica Gift (14:11): Yeah. I don’t know. I do feel like most of my life I’ve spent being very open to possibility and the possibilities show up.
Adam Williams (14:23): I feel like we’re … Maybe all people, maybe especially Americans, we’re socially conditioned to make what we want happen. You have to have ambition, you have to have goals. You have to climb something somewhere and say, “This is what I want and I’m going after it,” which is so against the openness you’re talking about.
And sometimes the conversations in my household between my wife and I are like, “Where do we allow that openness to say, “This is the way we’re going to go. That’s the job we’re going to take.” Or the opportunity or the travel experience, whatever it is, versus getting too rigid about saying, that’s the thing I want?” And then what do you do when that doesn’t come through? You apply for that job and that doesn’t happen if you’re too rigid and set for that one thing how do you handle that?
Erica Gift (15:10): Exactly. Exactly. Most Americans, not all, and increasingly Westerners are very individualistic. It’s an individualistic culture that we’ve grown up in. Raise yourself up by the bootstraps. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting something and going after it by any many means. But the collectivist approach, recognizing that you’re just part of an entire system, that you’re just part of a natural world and everything needs resources to survive and thrive, really can allow you to remain in a more open approach or collectivist viewpoint.
Adam Williams (15:48): If we talk about that perspective of individualism being I need to conquer, again, it’s not allowing the space for things to evolve and to say, I’m only one part of this vast universe. How do I fit in with this and flow with this rather than try to control or contain or conquer or-
Erica Gift (16:08): Exactly. And if you think about … The way the brain works, if you’re expecting something and you’re going after it and you get disappointed by that, what you’re going to get is a big dopamine dip instead of a big dopamine spike. Dopamines are the neurotransmitter that helps us feel joyful and happy. And if you have lots of potential options that will make you feel joyful and happy, then regardless of which occurs, you’ll be happy. And my mission in life is to maximize dopamine spikes and to minimize dips.
Adam Williams (16:44): So how do you combine the fact that you also are a botanist though I think informally. That’s not where your degrees are in.
Erica Gift (16:44): That’s right.
Adam Williams (16:52): But you are combining that with this cognitive psychology research. You’re a professor. All the studies and degrees you have in that. It seems like you have managed to maybe shape for yourself this niche that says, I can put cognitive psychology, food, plants, the wild, all of this together, all of these loves I have together. How do you do that? What does that look like for you?
Erica Gift (17:16): Well, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that being in nature improves cognition. It enhances our ability to pay attention, to be able to focus, and also to perform tests that require sustained attention. It improves learning, it improves memory, it reduces stress, it reduces internal focus, which allows us to focus externally. So there’s a ton of research out there on the benefits of being in nature on cognition. And I got especially excited about this topic when I developed a course called Food and Cognition.
I was working at Yale with a man named Kelly Brownell. He’s a really famous clinical psychologist who studies factors that influence our food choices among many other things. And I was curious about evolutionary psychology and how these ancient bodies that we have that we inhabit are in essence misaligned with the modern world. Our ancestors didn’t have vending machines. They didn’t have Twinkies, I mean yum. Soft drinks, those kinds of things. They had to go out and exercise to get their food. And evolution changes so much more slowly than culture. And so we have these very ancient bodies that aren’t necessarily matched for the modern world.
(18:41): And so I decided I wanted to figure out how to live in alignment and what that would look like. I’ve always been really curious about wild food and natural food because my mom had grown up on a farm and did a little bit of foraging. And so I was really connected to the land through my mom. I think as an academic, one of the beauties of being an academic is that you can do whatever you want really.
As long as you have questions to answer through some research and maybe even get some funding for it. The world is your oyster. I have a million questions about how the mind works and if I ever run out of questions about how the mind works, then I should probably transition into some other field. But I just don’t even see that as a possibility. So I tied together these what seemed like disparate areas of my field of psychology, but really they’re all connected in some level.
Adam Williams (19:43): I think not all of us are experienced at seeing the way everything is connected. Actually, that’s already a thread running through this as we’re talking about if we’re individualistic, we’re not recognizing we’re part of a greater something. Not just human to human, but human as an element of nature in all its vastness. That curiosity, you had to connect these dots and then you again are a professor, so you teach these things to university level students.
How long have you been working in this area? And I would imagine taking that curiosity, those million questions and just being able to go deeper and deeper in this lane that … Maybe I’m making an assumption here by the way. I said you have a niche in this and I think that’s part of academia is you want to find what is my lane? Where is my specific curiosity because that’s how when you write papers or you teach things, it’s going to stand out a little bit from somebody else who’s also in psychology. But maybe they found a different lens on it, their own personal lens. How long have you been going with this and creating what I’m assuming is your own lane?
Erica Gift (20:47): Yeah. That’s a really great question. I remember in graduate school at CU at the end of every year we would get a letter from the faculty letting us know how we were doing in the program. And every year I was doing well enough. Obviously they didn’t kick me out. But my letter would say something to the effect of, you need to focus. You have too many interests. And so I did what I needed to do to get through the program, but then as soon as I got out, I realized I could do so much more.
And so I began my career doing what exactly what I did as a grad student. I studied the motor cortex and how motor imagery worked. I worked at UCLA for a little while with medical doctors to understand how to help people who had stroke rehabilitate more quickly through the use of motor imagery. After about a year of doing that, I was just ready to quit my job. I really didn’t like doing it. I didn’t like working in that field. And I read this New York Times article that said all fast food restaurants in New York, the state of New York was going to require that they put calories on the menus just next to the price. And so I got really curious about how that would impact decisions. And that’s when I really started studying food choices.
(22:08): I moved through that process of looking at why we eat and what factors influence our decisions when it comes to food, and started getting really interested in, like I said, these other fields like evolutionary psychology and anthropology and thinking about our ancient brains and what our brains and bodies really evolved to eat. And so that took me into understanding how hunters and gatherers lived and whether or not we could still live in some semblance of that ancient way and what that would look like for us.
At the same time I started thinking about what is just new research coming out around immersion and nature for reducing anxiety and depression and stress? All of this was just being published. I linked the stuff that I was doing already with the psychology of food, with the psychology of nature, and a new field for me was born. I don’t know that I need to create a niche for myself, but it is true that we’re constantly developing new fields and new ways of understanding how the mind works, and I like to contribute to that to whatever degree I can.
Adam Williams (23:26): Are you familiar with the term multipotentialite?
Erica Gift (23:28): I’m not.
Adam Williams (23:31): Another word that gets used sometimes is scanner. They mean pretty much the same thing I think. And that is somebody who has multiple interests and maybe talents. And when we are coming up in this society that’s like from the time we’re little children, what are you going to be when you grow up? The idea being you’re going to have to identify one thing you’re going to be in your life. One area of interest. That’s what it has to be. That’s the end.
For those of us who have a lot of maybe talents or interests or we want to be able to put together more of an individualized life to ourselves and what we can contribute, that can be painful. Trying to fit into those boxes where you have people telling you you like too many things. Narrow it down. That’s what we’re comfortable with. Fit into your box. And it sounds like you’re a multipotentialite. Different interests. And maybe you jumped through the hoops you had to get through that program. That’s what we all end up doing. And I love that you ended up finding your way to what you really wanted anyway.
Erica Gift (24:24): Yeah. Me too. I will say that I do think that my joint PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive science was helpful for that. Cognitive science is a corpus of disciplines all aimed at understanding how the mind works. So philosophy of mind, education, computer science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, you name it. If the field is interested at all in how the mind works, it’s part of cognitive science.
As a PhD student in that program, I did have to take courses from outside of my department and learn how other people studied, how the mind works. I think that helped a lot. I think it exposed me to all these different fields and all these potential ways of studying the mind. And in my field especially, we learned that the scientific method is the end all be all. But in philosophy for example, it’s not. Logic is the end all be all. That’s their method. And every field has a different method. And so I think that really helped me think about the limitations of my own field and the need to be able to understand the world from lots of different perspectives.
Adam Williams (25:36): In 2012, you took a six-month sabbatical and had an adventure.
Erica Gift (25:41): I did.
Adam Williams (25:41): That few of us really get to do or choose to do. Tell me about that.
Erica Gift (25:46): Yeah. Like I said, I decided I wanted to find out what it was like to live in alignment with my ancient genes. I was actually going to go on a sabbatical with my best friend, Roger Moss, who was one of the co-founders of Greenpeace. He was also a professor at my university at California State University in Northridge. And he got really sick. And so the work we were going to do together wasn’t going to be possible. He died pretty quickly after that. And Roger, I always used to say we co-taught classes together. I was the brain, he was the heart. He was 35 years older than me, and so at the time he was in his late 60s and I felt like I needed to go find my heart. I lost it.
Adam Williams (26:33): How do you think that happened? Why do you say that?
Erica Gift (26:36): After he died, I felt like-
Adam Williams (26:39): I understand. Okay.
Erica Gift (26:39): After he died, I was just-
Adam Williams (26:40): So heartbroken and grieving.
Erica Gift (26:43): And I really didn’t know how to teach the courses and the content that we had developed together, which was super powerful, like brain, nature, psychedelics, all of this work without him. And I do what I always do when I need to recenter and reconnect with myself. I decided I would go into nature. And I needed to find a sabbatical project because professors do have to work on their sabbaticals. And so I decided I would go spend six months living in the wild foraging a hundred percent of my food to learn what it was like to live in alignment with my hunter and gather ancestor body.
Adam Williams (27:26): You’re saying you have to have a project that you come out of that six months sabbatical to validate having taken the time out of the classroom.
Erica Gift (27:34): Exactly.
Adam Williams (27:35): I thought the point of a sabbatical would’ve been complete relaxation, stepping back. Relaxation in terms of the stress or strain that might come from perpetual teaching otherwise and research and all of that. As a chance to get a fresh perspective.
Erica Gift (27:50): Well, that would be really great, but since sabbaticals are paid and they’re, in my case, paid by students and tax dollars, I’m a public servant. We do have to have a project. And so you write an application. My project was to work on a book about this experience.
Adam Williams (28:08): Okay.
Erica Gift (28:08): Yeah.
Adam Williams (28:09): So take me into this experience because you were in the LA area at the time. Los Angeles. And you’re heading out into the forest. You’ve got six months that you are going to forage. You’re going to be out in nature. I’m curious about the transition one out of such a large urban area into the quiet of that experience and then on the other end when you come back in.
But first I would love to hear about that experience of doing that. And my understanding from watching your TEDx UCLA talk from some years ago, which I’ll also include the link on our website in the show notes so people can watch that as well. You did not go out there with this dearth of knowledge about I know how to eat off the land easily. You went out with a whole lot of faith it seems to me that you were going to figure it out.
Erica Gift (28:57): It’s true. Yeah. I had bought a VW bus, a Volkswagen Vanagon. Living my little VW van life, dream life. And I knew what most of us know. I knew a handful of mushrooms actually. I had learned a little bit about mushrooms. Porcini, what locals here call boletes, chanterelles. Maybe I knew the hawk’s wing back then. I knew that raspberries were edible. I had eaten them. I knew strawberries. I knew you could eat dandelions, but I had never actually eaten one.
And so I took a milk crate full of books and decided I would follow the rain. I did know the weather. Since I grew up in Missouri and spent a lot of time in Colorado and had lived in California, I knew at least the Western us. When it’s winter in the Midwest, it’s in snowy, it’s rainy on the West Coast. And so I knew generally, okay, higher elevation means more moisture in the drier lower elevation times of the summer. So I knew a little bit about weather and mushrooms and berries and greens all need moisture. And so I knew a little bit about how I would travel. What my route would be.
(30:15): And I took off headed straight north for the Sierra Nevadas. It was May at this time, and so higher elevation meant greater chance of finding some food. On my very first day, I stopped at a gas station and the clerk came out with a box full of day-old donuts. I pulled one of those out of the trash and ate one and that was what I had for the day. I was super grateful for that. The second day I was driving, stopped at my campsite for the night. I found a bag of Doritos and it was unopened. Some campers had left it behind and I found a Dr. Pepper sitting in a creek. Someone had left it there to keep it cold. I normally don’t eat those things. But I was foraging spend no money on food. So there we go. I had that.
Adam Williams (31:09): Yeah. The plan was to not spend a penny for the six months.
Erica Gift (31:12): Exactly. Exactly. So day one was donut. Day two was Doritos and Dr. Pepper. Day three, I had gotten chased down by this vehicle. I was like road rage. This vehicle was chasing me through this windy mountain road near Mariposa.
And I was terrified because my VW had a stick. It was a manual. And I wasn’t really accustomed to driving that. So by the time I found a place to pull over, I was in tears. I was afraid. This car stopped behind me. I was like, “Oh my gosh, road rage.” He gets out. He’s my neighbor from LA and he recognized the van and he had a truckload of food in the back that he had just come from a wedding and the wedding caterer was going to throw it all away. And he was like, “Do you want any of it?”
Adam Williams (32:00): So did he know something of your route to at least be able to say, I can-
Erica Gift (32:03): No. He just happened to pass me. Literally.
Adam Williams (32:06): That food was not intended for you.
Erica Gift (32:08): No.
Adam Williams (32:09): Wow.
Erica Gift (32:09): He just happens to pass me.
Adam Williams (32:10): Serendipity again.
Erica Gift (32:11): Exactly. And you know that time, the third time I thought to myself, I need to learn how to forage. This is like the universe saying, “All right, girl, I got you. This is it. You’ve got enough food to last a week. Now figure it out.” And so I started studying and I read all my books. I started taking my books through the forest with me identifying every plant that I could. I learned about lamb’s, quarter amaranth. I ate dandelions. I learned about lots of different kinds of berries. I learned about acorns and how to leach them so that I could make bread on the campfire. I really used that as an opportunity to kickstart my knowledge. And from there on out, I always found what I needed.
Adam Williams (32:58): You named the Vanagon “Butter” right?
Erica Gift (33:01): I did.
Adam Williams (33:02): Is that because that’s what it looked like?
Erica Gift (33:03): Well, she was creamy, but if you know anything about VWs, they’re pretty slow.
Adam Williams (33:03): I do.
Erica Gift (33:08): And mine was a diesel. It was an ’82. It was the only year they made the diesel, and it had a rabbit engine with a turbo. It’s smoked on high heat just like butter does. It went pretty slow around the curves. Just slow food butter. Right.
Adam Williams (33:21): I’ve got a ’75 with a camper top.
Erica Gift (33:25): Fun.
Adam Williams (33:25): That I’ve had for about 20 years. And made my own three-month interior voyage of the US.
Erica Gift (33:32): Oh, awesome.
Adam Williams (33:34): Almost 20 years ago. And that also was for a book project for me at the time writing. So we do have that in common, and I’m sure we could parse those stories and get into a lot of stuff there and we won’t because I have other things I want to ask you about, but I did want to at least mention we do have that in common.
Erica Gift (33:34): I love that.
Adam Williams (33:51): Maybe that’s a future conversation.
Erica Gift (33:52): Yeah. For sure.
Adam Williams (33:53): So again, that transition from LA out there. Were you pretty much heading out into the woods with full solitude? Were there any other rules around how you were handling it? Are you going to be just in campgrounds? Are you going to be around people, is what I’m getting at? Are you going to national parks and there’s going to be lots of tourists and things like that, or were you trying to find this immense quiet that would really be so different than your life was in LA?
Erica Gift (34:21): I never wanted to take a major freeway, so that was also part of my journey. I think I had to one time between Eugene and maybe Portland because there was no other option. But otherwise I was on the windy small mountain roads. Even from LA up to the Sierra as I took the 99 instead of the five. I didn’t have an intention on not meeting people. I’m pretty social, although I’m also introverted, but I do talk to people at the gas station, especially people with VWs. Everyone wants to say Hi, everyone wants to see inside your van. Everyone wants to give you a peace sign and ask you what you’re doing.
And so I would let people know I’m foraging, and I would say about half the time I would get invited to someone’s house for dinner. I would get invited to forage in their garden. I would be handed food as if I was starving. I can’t tell you how many people I got to connect with along the journey just by telling them what I was up to. So that was a surprise. Actually that was a real surprise for me at how many people wanted to feed me and vastly different people than who I thought I was. Meaning politically different, socially different, having different moral and religious belief systems. But we all united around food.
Adam Williams (35:53): People I think appreciate someone who’s out trying to do something. I don’t know. Adventurous. Something they wish they could do. Whatever it is they see in you as you continue on by them. Because they’re going to have this brief period with you, but you’re going to continue on with some grand adventure. They now become a little bit part of your story, your experience. And I think people probably feel good about that.
Erica Gift (36:15): Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I have at least a dozen homes that I could go back to anytime and park in a driveway or even have a meal with. I’ve developed all these new friendships from this experience. So much support.
Adam Williams (36:30): When your goal was to forage, to not spend any money for food, you’re getting a lot of support from the universe, from people you encounter, whatever. How did you feel like the project was going at that point when you’re having these other things that are non-plant like? You’re not out there picking berries, is what I’m saying in those moments. I know you end up doing that over the period of time, but did you have any conflict about is this what I’m out here to do is have this adventure where I meet people who provide me dinner versus the idea of I have to be in the forest 100% going through plants or I starve?
Erica Gift (37:06): Well, I would just clarify that 90% of the time I was in the forest foraging. So I met maybe a dozen people who fed me during the course of the six months. Most of my time was spent in the wild. Those few times when I did meet someone, it was really lovely. It was like I said, a lovely reminder of how similar we all are.
How many shared belief systems we all have regardless of what president we vote for, regardless of what our religious beliefs are, we all want clean water, we all want clean air, we all want good food. We all want to be able to take care of our families. I found that unity to be so surprising and refreshing, especially in a world where there’s so much tension. So I was really grateful. Plus I got some hot showers.
Adam Williams (37:06): Yeah. Yeah. That’s worth a lot isn’t it?
Erica Gift (37:58): Yeah. When you’re living in the forest, a cold splash bath in the river is pretty much the norm.
Adam Williams (38:05): Did you find whatever you might’ve hoped or expected for in that experience ultimately? In relation to the project that you had to come back with what were the takeaways? What did you learn about yourself? Whatever you were out there to discover.
Erica Gift (38:19): I teach a lot of classes about climate change, resource degradation, drought, energy depletion, all of these topics that are related to scarcity. And when I lived in the forest, one of the things that surprised me the most was just how much food surrounds us. I felt like mama earth has my back. It was constant. There was food everywhere. I was so surprised by that. And it really shifted my worldview from one of scarcity to one of abundance.
And since then, my entire worldview has been around abundance. I don’t even talk about scarcity in any of my courses anymore, and I never feel like there’s not going to be enough of whatever it is I’m referring to. And so I think that’s how the trip changed me the most. That I have this new abundance mentality that has permeated my entire life.
Adam Williams (39:22): Let’s talk about rewilding.
Erica Gift (39:23): Yeah.
Adam Williams (39:24): Because you and I grew up at a time where being outdoors was the norm and now it feels like it’s not. And I have two sons, 12 and 14, one of them, he can go spend hours fishing at the lake in town, or if we take him somewhere else, he can just hang out with friends. He’s got that whole thing going on because we live in a town in a place where that’s possible.
Erica Gift (39:45): Totally.
Adam Williams (39:46): I love that. It’s not unlike how I grew up. Then I’ve got another son who’s so into computers. Whether it’s gaming or something else, it can be a hard push to get him to get outside and live in that way. Rewilding as I see it because I’m a parent, often gets associated with for our children. But it probably actually applies to society at large, doesn’t it? Adults as well. We’ve become so sectioned off by the walls of whatever we’re living in, whether that’s office or home, technology. What are your thoughts on the need for rewilding and what that says about where we are as a society right now?
Erica Gift (40:26): Well, four of the five leading causes of death are diet related. So we’re completely disconnected from our food and dependent on food-like products that are killing us. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes. All of those. Clearly there’s a need for us to get connected to the land and the land that produces our food. Stress is a huge problem among all adults and kids these days.
Increasingly children are experiencing stress. Sitting on a park bench underneath a tree, even in the middle of a city or right here outside the door of the studio, underneath the blue Spruce has been shown to reduce stress levels, reduce cortisol levels, even for just 20 minutes. It’s pretty clear to me that a lot of the tension and the anxiety and the depression that we see in this world … One out of four women my age take an antidepressant. It’s clear that we need to do something. And I think spending time in nature is the cure to most of what ails us.
Adam Williams (41:40): Something like your sabbatical would be an incredible experience for any of us. I think it would be valuable to all of us. But of course not everyone can make that choice. They need to work consistently or whatever their case is. So how would you maybe offer, if there is advice for how we find balance between the technology? I know you’re saying 20 minutes a day and whatever, and we can go out for walks and there is benefit in all of that.
But I’ll tell you, when I go for a walk, almost a hundred percent of the time my phone is in my pocket still. Obviously that’s a choice. I could choose to leave it at home. But it’s a common issue that we can’t get away from, whether it’s the technology of our phones when we’re out in nature or it’s the highway nearby because we’re going for a walk in town, whatever it is. How do we actually get maybe a more substantive balance between those things when we can’t necessarily go out for months to get into nature?
Erica Gift (42:34): This is a hard one for me to say, but if you can’t make 15 minutes to spend doing something outside, I think you need to re-evaluate your life. Of the 16 hours you are awake, maybe more, if you’re not getting enough sleep, 15 minutes, 20 minutes should be something we can all do and should prioritize. There is though some pretty cool work that I’ve contributed to looking at the effects of technological nature on cognition, anxiety, depression.
So in technological nature, we have screensavers on our phones or on our computer screens that display images of nature and there’s some evidence that technological nature does improve mood, reduce anxiety and improve cognition. Not to the same effect as actual nature, but if you’re that connected to your phone and you really can’t get away, pop on some screensavers with trees and forests and oceans, whatever it is that makes you feel calm because you’ll likely benefit from it.
Adam Williams (43:48): With some sound.
Erica Gift (43:49): Actually, the research has been done with just visuals. So sound probably enhances the effects but-
Adam Williams (43:55): I’m thinking sounds of birds, sounds of water, things that might be a part of a meditation app or you could just find it online.
Erica Gift (44:01):
You could do it. I think more is better, but the research has been done with photos on walls, on computer screens and on your screensaver on your phone. So pop up some nice art on your walls of photographs of nature. All of that will help.
Adam Williams (44:17): That’s interesting.
Erica Gift (44:18): It is pretty cool. Literally just seeing scenes of natural images elicits a reduced but similar effect as being in the natural world.
Adam Williams (44:28): Of course, where we live in rural mountainous Colorado, there’s an awful lot of us around here. It’s a very active community of all ages, which is something that we love just to be part of, just to be around. It’s encouragement I think when you see somebody who clearly is maybe in their 70s or even 80s or whatever, and they’re riding bikes up mountains and you’re like, “That is inspiring, and I want to keep going and be that.”
Erica Gift (44:53): Totally.
Adam Williams (44:54): So I think my question comes in that larger, broader sense of we as a people especially in urban environments where they maybe feel like it’s a harder push to get out to a trail, for example.
Erica Gift (45:05): Exactly. Most urban environments do have parks though. And even just being in a space where there’s a few trees will produce some benefits.
Adam Williams (45:14): I don’t think I would’ve want to live in a city without a lot of green spaces. We’ve certainly enjoyed that in the past. I think Denver, as far as Colorado goes is great for that. Yeah. It’s just such a big part of life.
Erica Gift (45:25): It is a big part of life. But even Los Angeles where I moved from before I left Colorado and up in Boulder, everyone was telling you, you’re going to hate it. You’re going to hate LA. It’s so many people, so much concrete. There’s a great big Pacific Ocean. The Santa Monica Mountains are beautiful. The San Gabriel Mountains are amazing. There’s so much wild even around LA.
Adam Williams (45:49): I mentioned your TEDx UCLA talk in that video. You have a funny line in that talk. I don’t know if you know where I’m going with this. If you remember the specific line. You say, “I’m a pathological optimist. Even my blood type is B positive.”
Erica Gift (46:03): Oh, right. It’s true. My blood type is B positive and I’m also a pathological optimist.
Adam Williams (46:08): You still are.
Erica Gift (46:09): Oh, totally.
Adam Williams (46:09): Because I noted the date on that video was earlier in 2016.
Erica Gift (46:14): Yeah.
Adam Williams (46:14): There’s been a lot that’s happened since that has stressed a lot of us out. And I’m curious about that innate disposition for you or if it’s been something that you’ve also learned maybe from your mother or cultivated throughout your life and how you might offer wisdom on optimism for those of us who really feel anxious and distressed about the world right now.
Erica Gift (46:40): It’s normal to feel anxious and distressed about the world right now when you look at everything that’s going on around us, it’s very easy to point to all the ways that there are all the problems that exist. But it’s also easy to look at all the ways people are working toward change. Look at this podcast that you’re doing. You could look at all of the environmental organizations who are working to make sure that we all have clean water and clean air and better futures for our children.
You could look at organizations that are working toward human rights. I could point to any number of organizations, thousands of organizations that exist and individuals who are working on making the world a better place. And we don’t know, and I don’t think we’re going to know in our lifetime, which, whether the demise is going to happen or the revolution is going to happen, and we’re going to see a better future for our kids. And so all we can really do is continue working toward whichever one makes us feel the best.
(47:42): So if working toward betterment makes you feel good, then do that. If we’re working toward the demise makes you feel good, then do that. But for me, I’d probably just be sitting on a beach drinking margaritas for the rest of my days if I really thought that that was what our future was. And so I feel like because I don’t know in my lifetime which is going to win, I can’t be attached to the outcome of any of my actions.
I just have to work toward better because it feels good right now, not because I think I’m going to make a difference. And once you let go of that attachment to the outcome of your actions, then you can’t really get down when you don’t see something better because you’re probably never going to see it. It’s not going to happen in your lifetime. If we go the way of the dinosaur, that’s going to happen well after you and I are gone.
Adam Williams (48:33): It’s such an interesting answer because you allowed room for the demise. It’s not just toxic positivity that makes this assumption that, oh, everything’s rainbows. It’s all good. I’m not going to look that direction.
Erica Gift (48:45): Of course.
Adam Williams (48:46): Because that’s where darkness is.
Erica Gift (48:47): It’s all there.
Adam Williams (48:48): It comes down to then … I learned a term recently, “preparation pain,” that a lot of us spend a lot of time worrying and creating pain for ourselves in preparation for the thing that we don’t want to have happen. So I’ve really been trying to be aware of that lately and be like, well, am I stressing myself out over something because I’m trying to prepare for the worst? What good is that doing me right now? How can I maybe relax and allow, if that were to happen, I can handle it? How do I back off of trying to put myself through it every day until it might or might not happen?
Erica Gift (49:27): Totally. Totally. Someone once said to me, worrying is putting a down payment on a problem that you may never have.
Adam Williams (49:35): Bad investment.
Erica Gift (49:36): Exactly.
Adam Williams (49:37): Yeah.
Erica Gift (49:38): And catching ourself. I do a lot of meditation. I think that’s another part of how I’m so optimistic. I’m able to detach from the worry and the anxiety because I’m able to catch myself. I’ve spent years and years practicing this. I do think that meditation helps reduce general anxiety, and like I said, anytime I’m feeling really stressed or anxious or worried about the future, I go for a hike.
Adam Williams (50:05): I think a lot of people who are unsure about meditation, they might see it as a woo woo thing that has nothing to do with them. They might see it as something that, oh, I couldn’t possibly do that because they have whatever image in mind of you have to sit in total stillness. Well, I can’t do that. Do you have a simplified way of telling people who maybe fit into that category of uncertainty about it? Do you have a way of simplifying for them, no, this is really what it is, and maybe why you want to give it a shot?
Erica Gift (50:31): Well, there’s tons of research showing the scientific benefits of meditation on calming, clearing, relaxing the mind. And so for those who think it’s woo woo, there’s a lot of science around the benefits of meditation, and I’d be happy to offer some resources. But the UC Berkeley Greater Good Foundation has a ton of research on their website. You don’t have to sit quietly and clear your mind entirely. You can do all sorts of things like focus on your breath or focus on your mind racing because that’s going to happen. Sitting and focusing on your breath is maybe the best way to begin a meditative practice. And then to just practice observing when your mind starts to talk.
(51:24): One of the things that I learned when I did a yoga teacher training years ago is we were required to take cold showers every morning, a three-minute cold shower. I’m thin, I don’t have a lot of body fat. I don’t like being in cold water. I didn’t find it pleasant. And what I recognized during my three-minute cold shower was that my mind was just constantly saying, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone. This is really bad for your dosha. I don’t know.
I was coming up with all sorts of weird things. But the point is I was noticing my mind talking the entire time, and I think that was the whole point of the cold showers. To notice that your mind speaks constantly. And it’s not just while I was taking a cold shower, but it was all the time. And to get good at recognizing that that happens and being able to catch it and say, “Hey, you don’t have a voice right now. I appreciate whatever it is you’re trying to protect me from, or whatever it is you’re trying to say, but I’m not going to give you the platform right now. I’m trying to focus on my own breath.”
Adam Williams (52:30): That is the essence of meditation, isn’t it? People think that because their mind is racing, “I’m bad at this.” Instead, it starts with cultivating that awareness. “My mind is racing. This is what’s going on with it. How do I set that aside?”
Erica Gift (52:44): Exactly.
Adam Williams (52:45): And just exhale.
Erica Gift (52:47): Exactly. And not necessarily to stop it, but to notice it.
Adam Williams (52:50): Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Erica Gift (52:51): Because in the moments when you’re noticing it, you’re getting better at noticing it in other contexts when you’re not meditating.
Adam Williams (52:59): Yes.
Erica Gift (53:00): All the ways we judge. All the ways we ruminate and don’t catch ourselves if we’re not careful.
Adam Williams (53:07): My mother used to tell me to breathe. So if I’m maybe agitated, I’m upset, and now what I would recognize as, okay, my chest is tight, I’m not breathing. It’s such a simple instruction, and it really is the basis of all of this, I think, to start relaxing and giving more space for our mind to be aware and all the things. Exhale, exhale out some of that tightness. Have more conscious breathing. Inhale and exhale.
Erica Gift (53:32): Totally.
Adam Williams (53:33): So my mom would not have known necessarily and probably still doesn’t necessarily connect it to meditation in that way, and yet the basic wisdom of that in whatever form you want to hear it or make use of it’s there.
Erica Gift (53:46): Totally. Yeah, totally.
Adam Williams (53:49): This has been really enlightening. I appreciate getting to talk with you, Erica. Thank you so much for making time for me to do this.
Erica Gift (53:54): It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
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Adam Williams (54:06): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you, and if so, you can learn more in this episode show notes at wearechaffeepod.com. If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me at adam@wearechaffeepod.com.
(54:28): I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality. I also welcome you’re telling others about the Looking Upstream Podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation.
Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to Khen 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado. And to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative.
(55:02): The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and it’s supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity.
You can learn more about the Looking Upstream Podcast at Wearchaffeepod.com and on Instagram at We Are Chaffee Pod. You also can learn more about the overall We are Chaffee storytelling initiative at wearechaffee.org. Until the next episode as we say at We Are Chaffee, “share stories, make change.”
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