What We Gain by Enchanting the Objects in Our Lives
About this episode
Klein interviews novelist and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki about her novel 'The Book of Form and Emptiness,' in which a teenager begins hearing objects speak after his father's death. They explore how meditation supports writing — through concentration, the practice of returning attention, and inhabiting characters' felt experience — and the idea that hearing voices exists on a spectrum, from creative inspiration to tormenting experiences pathologized as schizophrenia. Ozeki discusses the peer-led Hearing Voices Movement, her own teenage psychiatric hospitalization, and Zen teachings like 'not knowing is most intimate.' They consider Marie Kondo's animist tidying philosophy, the Japanese Shinto tradition of honoring objects, whether things have agency, and what our disposable consumer culture — where one satisfied want endlessly spawns another — says about our relationship to stuff.