Ep. 58: Dani

The host of this podcast looks back on the intimate, thought-provoking conversations she’s had over the past 57 episodes, and describes the way she’s living now.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is the way we live now.
Today is day on fourteen, since we've paid more attention
to birds Song and day fifty eight of this podcast.
When I created this podcast three months ago, it was

(00:27):
with the intention to produce it for three months. It
was my offering, my way of connecting and gathering all
of us, not to mention the privilege of having extraordinary
daily conversations with extraordinary people. I figured surely after three months,
life would have returned to something resembling normal. As we

(00:50):
all know, That's not what's happened. Life is heartbreaking, energizing, galvanizing, intimate, raw,
and sometimes even beautiful. But it does not and may
not resemble anything we've known as normal. As a writer
and artist, a teacher, a podcast host, a wife and

(01:12):
a mom, I'm learning listening, grappling, creating. I have loved
bringing together this engaged community of listeners a million downloads
into this podcast. It feels like time to hit pause.
So today will be my last interview. Tomorrow will return
with one more Friday Listener stories, And today I'm going

(01:36):
to be my own guest and turn the tables and
tell you about the way I'm living now. What am
I looking at? What am I surrounded with? Well, I'm
in my basement, in my son's old playroom. He's now
twenty one, and we built this playroom when we moved
into the house when he was three, So it's kind

(01:59):
of like this hodgepodge of furniture, and there are some
vestiges of the little boy, like I'm looking at boxed
games of candy Land and Sorry and Monopoly, and then
some art that we moved down here when I started
being down here more. There's a big poster for Family Secrets,

(02:21):
my podcast that will resume in October. There's a computer
where my husband is digitizing old family slides, and then
there's a bunch of instruments, keyboards, guitars, a drum. Uh
you know. So it's really kind of the room that
time forgot, except that it's now where I record, and

(02:44):
so it always feels very special to me to come
down here, like it's a sacred space. So what have
been the hardest aspects of these last three months? Well,
that's a great question. I think it's a combination of things.

(03:07):
The world feels so heavy with people suffering and anxiety
and grief and even though I'm in a place where
that is not at this very moment directly touching me
or those that I love. I feel it. I feel
it hanging in the air, and the collective intensity of

(03:34):
it all over the globe. I think also, I miss
my people. I mean, I'm here at home with my
husband and my son and feel very lucky about that.
But I miss my tapestry of people, my friends who
I would see regularly. UM. I miss touching them, I

(03:56):
miss hugs, UM. And I think that too has and
part of why I created the way we live now.
When I first thought of it, I thought, this is
going to be a tapestry of voices. I want to
knit together all of these different and disparate voices and
experiences and have us have peaks and windows, snapshots into

(04:20):
one another's lives. So I would have to say that
these three months of creating and producing this podcast has
given me. That has given me the opportunity to make
these windows and have these conversations. What am I learning?
You know? One of my favorite episodes of these fifty

(04:42):
eight episodes was with Galen Gangrich, the senior minister at
All Souls Unitarian Church in New York. City. I remember
when I asked galen Um actually he responded to the
question what was bringing him hope? But it's all so
about something that he learned, and he said, I've always

(05:04):
done the work all my life. I have read, deeply, thought, deeply,
lived a spiritual life, lived a contemplative life. But I
didn't really know, because none of us can really know
whether I would be up to the task in a
true crisis. And I think that that's true for all

(05:28):
of us. We don't know who will be in the earthquake.
We don't know who will be um if we're witnessing
someone in grave danger and have the opportunity to save them.
We don't know who will be in the pandemic. And

(05:49):
I think what I'm learning is that I had and
have the tools and the muscles to contend with this
period of time. And some days are easier than others.
Every day feels kind of numbingly the same and also

(06:10):
radically different as I surf my own moods and ability
to concentrate or some days are really low energy, some
days feel really productive, some days feel full of despair,
some days feel full of hope. And I think that
the awareness of the nature of all of our lives,

(06:35):
which is to say, the uncertainty and impermanence that we
all carry with us always, but that we're looking at hard.
We're staring at it right now. UM. It's unavoidable. Things
are uncertain. UM. We don't have plans. We don't have

(06:56):
hard and fast notions of what's going to happen tomorrow
or next week, or next month or even next year. UM.
That requires a kind of resilience that I've heard from
so many of my guests and from so many people
that I talked to. UM, And I think I'm learning

(07:16):
how important that resilience is, and also a sense of
compassion for oneself and forgiveness of oneself when it's hard.
Because it is hard. And as I've said since the
beginning of this show, we're all in it together. And

(07:41):
my last question for myself God is as weird, is
what's bringing me hope? I do feel a lot of hope.
I feel it when I'm sitting quietly in my library
reading and I look up and there is my son

(08:03):
and he's sitting there with his headphones on and he's
quietly reading. And I look across the room and there's
my husband and he's sitting in a chair by the
window and he's quietly reading. And we've all found this time.
While we didn't find it, it was presented to us.

(08:27):
But it's this time in which there is a tremendous
amount of togetherness, and there's a way in which we
are knowing each other better, knowing ourselves better, and knowing
each other better then we might ever have before. As
I've mentioned a couple of times on this podcast, my
husband this time last year was very, very sick. He

(08:52):
was about to face radical surgery and we had no
idea what the future would hold. But we really had
no idea. You and the disease that he had had
a name, and so it was like a bullet had
our name on it. And I couldn't have imagined at
that time a year ago that a year later, so

(09:16):
much would have happened, so much health, so much beauty,
so much bounty. When the pandemic struck, he was on
a movie set in Los Angeles, directing a film that
he had been trying to get off the ground for
seven years, and it had finally happened in this incredible, amazing,

(09:37):
beautiful way, with this all star cast and wonderful producers,
and they still have a few days left to finish filming,
but they will. And I couldn't have imagined that gift.
I couldn't have imagined this pandemic. None of us could have,
which is only to say that we don't ever know

(09:58):
what the future will hold. That can be scary, or
it can also be a galvanizing, hopeful, inspiring time of
great learning and great passion and great understanding, which I
think is something that we're also seeing during these double

(10:20):
reckonings of the spring and early summer of So I
think that I am going to leave you all, my devoted,
end wonderful listeners, to whom I'm so grateful. I have
heard from so many of you that you listen to

(10:43):
this podcast when you're gardening, or you listen to this
podcast when you're walking or when you're running, and that
it's offered you a sense of solace and a sense
of comfort, which is what I most wanted to do
from time to time. In the coming months, I'm drop
a conversation that just needs to be shared into the feed,

(11:04):
so I'm really not saying goodbye. Also, we're going to
keep up the Facebook page, so please join us there
if you haven't already, there are wonderful, supportive people sharing
their experience, strength and hope with all of us. Thanks,
and as the Italians say, a riva duci, I will
see you again soon. Thanks for listening to the Way

(11:32):
We Live Now. You can join our Facebook group at
facebook dot com slash groups slash the Way We Live
Now Pod. We are creating a community here and we
would love for you to join us. You can find
me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. The Way We Live
Now is a production of I Heart Radio. It's produced
by a lowbrol Anti. Bethan Macaluso is executive producer. Special

(11:55):
thanks to Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more podcasts
from heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.