Episode 3 - Patrick Lydon's future

EPISODE NOTES

Patrick Lydon’s work is varied and beautiful. To learn more about the films and many installations he has made, visit his website at https://www.pmlydon.com. And I encourage you to subscribe to his thoughtful and beautifully illustrated newsletter The Possible City .

If you are curious about that documentary about urban forests I mentioned at the beginning you can find it here: https://bojanfurstphotography.com/words-and-sounds/2021/11/2/the-old-willow.

I believe that these are important conversations, so there are no ads because you don’t need another mattress commercial interrupting the flow and there are no paid perks. If you find yourself listening to the podcast and feel like you can afford to support it, you can Buy Me a Coffee.

If you’d like to leave a comment or be a guest on one of the future episodes go to www.futurespossible.com and leave a comment under an episode. The website also features AI-generated transcripts of every show.

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

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AI Generated Transcript

[HOST:] Hello there, I am Bojan First. You are listening to Futures Possible. My guest today is Patrick Lydon. The first conversation Patrick and I ever had was about trees and cities. At the time, I was working on a radio documentary about urban forests and our relationship with trees. In fact, there was one particular tree, an old willow whose fate I was following in that documentary. Every now and then, I would think about Patrick in that interview. He introduced me to the Japanese concept of kami, the spirit that resides in some part of the natural world, and, if I remember correctly, he also introduced me to the work of the visionary jurist Christopher Stone, who thought that we should acknowledge rivers and trees as legal persons with corresponding legal rights. That conversation with Patrick was thoughtful, funny, meandering, and just so enjoyable. So I called him up again. This is how Patrick describes himself these days:

[PL:] I'm Patrick Lydon. I was born in the U. S. and California. And for the last 10 years or so I've lived in East Asia, Japan and Korea. I'm a writer and an artist, and really an ecological urbanist. And I currently live in Tongyeong, Korea, doing those things here with my wife Suhee, who's an herbalist.

[HOST:] This conversation was just as delightful as that first one four years ago: we talked about the past and what changed in the last little bit, and about sour punk and beauty and truth. And so this is the future Patrick imagined. one four years ago. We talked about the past and what changed in the last little bit, and about sour punk and beauty and truth. And so this is the future Patrick imagined.

[PL:] Where we were five years ago is we were, how do you say it, not homeless, but we didn't have a permanent place to live and we were bouncing place to place, my partner Suhee and I. We had produced a film, a documentary film called Final Straw about natural farming. And that film took five years to make. And that was this point where we had to make this decision. Are we going to keep going on with our life as it is? We both had office jobs. I was in Silicon Valley working as a technical writer. My wife, Suhee, was a book editor in Seoul. And we realized all these issues in the world that we weren't able to address in our jobs that we were doing. And we didn't feel good about that. And we thought, how, like, what can we do? And so we're like, okay, do we do we just do what we can do now? And we're like, okay, we do what we can do now. And that was put our skills together to make a documentary film about something we thought that was important for the future, a sustainable way of farming, sustainable way of living. And then we realized, well, gosh, we, we spent all of our life savings and our retirement money in five years making this film. And now we don't have a home and we don't have money. But, but we have a film and we met a lot of amazing people along the way. And after the film was done, we spent two years touring it. We went to about 200 cities, but we were still so we were still floating. We don't, we don't really have roots and we have all this information about how theoretically we could make a great life and have farm and have community and all these things. But we, we didn't have a place to do it. And so the last five years were spent finding a place and now we're here.

The house is a, this one was built in the 1940s. It's a, it's a traditional Korean house. So it's like the, I would say, I guess you would say the Asian style timber frame house. It's a vernacular architecture, which uses all of the materials come from the local area. And when the house has finished its life, all the materials go back to the local area. This is also a wild concept for people to understand, but that's how we build houses for a really long time. And we've been looking for that kind of place as luck would have it, thanks to capitalism and everyone that's like attracted like a magnet to Seoul, which is the huge metropolis in Korea. And everyone's just attracted to there for mostly for financial reasons. And all of these smaller towns and villages are depopulating and it's possible to buy slightly broken traditional Korean house that needs a little bit of work and to pay cash for it. And not to have a mortgage hanging over you for the rest of your life or for 30 years or whatever. We don't have a lot of money. We don't, we're never going to have a job that makes a huge amount of money. So it doesn't mean that money's not here and we don't need money and it's, it just means that that's not the primary driver for what we do. And we're happy to, to be the next custodians of this place in this land and the garden that's here.

One of the things that I want to do in this place from here into the future is like doing all these things that people told us were are impossible and then showing how it can be done. Cause I know it can be done because we've seen it done in places and it's just, it's difficult to get them to exist in one place. Um, but I want to try to do that as much as we can to show, Hey, you know, these, this isn't a fairy tale and all these things are not, um, made up stories. They're things that you can make happen. If you have the intention and you take the action based on that intention, you can do it. A future could, could be a utopia, but it doesn't have to be right. And, but a lot of times we think of like when people are imagining utopias or imagining beautiful futures. They're imagining a fairy tale.

And I don't, I, I hate that because it means you're not intending to make it real and you don't think it can be real.

Yeah. There's things to worry about every day. And the more I worry about it, the more paralyzed I am and the less I do. And so we decided to stay abreast of what's happening in the world, but not to indulge in it because it's so easy to indulge in it. It's so easy to get, Oh, you know, Trump's doing what? And the Korean president who has been impeached and he's on trial now. He did what? We woke up one night and he called martial law and everyone's like freaking out. And it's like midnight or something, you know, North Korea shooting missiles everywhere. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that that's very worrisome, but when I can wake up and think about how, how am I going to help my neighbor today? How am I going to help my plants grow today? You know, how am I going to be a good part of this community where I am, whether that's my local community or, you know, we have communities, global communities online of people too. Like, how am I going to be a good part of this community? What am I going to contribute to it?

And then after all that's done, where am I going to sit back and have my homemade wine in the evening, which corner of the garden am I going to sit in? You know, I want to worry about those things. And not just because it takes my mind off of the global issues, but because it, it's doing something rather than being paralyzed, which is what I, what happens to me when I, and I think most people too, I guess. When, when we think too much about these things that we can't control, what I can control is what I can do. So I try to do good stuff. Yeah. There's all this stuff that can go wrong, but if all the people in my neighborhood or my region are on the same page and we're doing the right things to make sure everyone has food and house and, you know, food and shelter and warmth and these Like if we got that taken care of them, we're not really that worried. And if everyone does this kind of thing, then everyone's really not worried. But then you don't need global corporate capitalism at all. And that's, that's a problem for those people. They don't like that.

In terms of what we do every day, we have multiple jobs.

We diversify the, our jobs and the, what we spend time on doing. And I think that's really important. Um, so five years from now, uh, you know, I wake up, do a little work in the garden. Um, I do some writing because that's part of, that's one of my incomes, one of my contributions, um, jobs, so to speak. Um, and we have a garden with many herbs. So he's a herbalist. Um, and so another one of our small jobs is to tend to those herbs, um, to dry them, to, to turn them into teas, to make things with them. Um, and so that's a product that we're producing. And then another good chunk of our time during the day or during the week would be to, to share, uh, lessons with people, to, to help people learn how to do these things. So teaching, teaching and sharing, those are the three, those are three things. And a fourth thing is constantly imagining and doing new things.

And I don't think, I don't want to put a qualitative tag on that because I, it could mean making artwork. It could mean, you know, a new kind of rocket mass heater. Um, some, some way of sustainably, uh, gardening or producing energy or cleaning the water that comes from the village.

I want to be constantly engaged in these kinds of works because there are so, there are so many, um, gosh, we talk about progress so much in this world, but we tie that to, to really strange things. Uh, like, okay, going to Mars and living on Mars is progress. Okay. Yeah, it is. But so is like trying to make the earth habitable in the future. Um, instead of abandoning it.

Um, I think everyone needs to define for themselves what truth means, like the word truth. And

there's a, there's a Japanese saying, um,

Shinzenbi. Shinzenbi is loosely, very loosely, because I'm, I'm not a Japanese scholar, translates to something like a truth, goodness, beauty. It's three values that might seem separate when you look at them on their own, but then you realize they're all reliant on each other. Um, and that you can't have beauty without truth being the root of that beauty. Um, and you can't have something called goodness if it doesn't, if it's not beautiful and it relates to truth. Um, and this is really interesting because it also means that beauty is sometimes things that look ugly. Um, but they're truthful. So

I like those three words and finding out how they interrelate with each other and how their meanings shift.

Um, and trying to find out how we can create a balance where all three of those words are doing, um, what they're supposed to do. And when they're connecting, truth, goodness, and beauty.

You know, every day I, I wake up and I, I think how, how can I live a beautiful life? And maybe that's the core of it. And because that's a really personal thing. Everyone defines beauty in their own way. This is like a, this life is a amazing gift, right? Even if we're not like, I don't know, religious or we don't, don't, um, practice some way of thinking like this. Everyone has to think like, okay, we, this, this is a gift. What am I going to do with it? So I, I want to, I want to wake up and think that every day. And I don't, um, but I want to more often than not to think, wow, this is an amazing gift. How am I going to live this life that I have this one life? Because I only get this chance right now. How am I going to do it beautifully? In a way that I think I feel is beautiful. What am I going to do with you?

Every human is, uh, every human is, is an ecological being. And we know that's the truth about our situation. We know that. Uh, but we forget it. It's really easy to forget that you're a part of a living system that's bigger than you. Um, and so reminding ourselves that we're ecological beings is just that it's reminding us that, hey, this show is just, isn't just about us. It's not about me as an individual. It's also not about humans only. Um, and that there's a, there's this web of relationships where we rely on all these other living beings. And the cool thing about that is like, it's an adventure that's always, that's never ending. It's always changing. You're always realizing that you were wrong, um, yesterday or the last moment and that you can do things differently or better. Um, and if we're really open to that, then it provides an infinite amount of fun and interest and challenge every day. Um, so we can never get bored.

I always try to stay hopeful. And I think that's the best, one of the best things we can do these days. The hope that comes from seeing the, the possible good in people and the hope that comes from seeing that human beings have, basically we have all the solutions we need to get through anything. That knowledge is going to get us through this. And that already exists. The only thing we need to do is share it and talk to with each other about it. Um, so that gives me hope, that kind of hope. I know we have the solutions and all we need to do is just, you know, get to it and, and start making things real. I don't, I don't want people ever to feel, um, like they can't make change in this world or like their life is insignificant. Cause it's not. Everyone can make change in this world.

And when we realize we can, then, uh, stuff gets better. Usually.

[HOST:] Thank you for listening. That was Patrick Lydon. An artist, ecological urbanist, and a human trying to live a beautiful life. I'm Bojan First and you listened to Futures Possible. I talk with my guests about their futures and a way of being they can imagine for themselves in this time of uncertainty. You can find Futures Possible wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you'd like to leave a comment or support the show, visit futurespossible.com. Take care.

EpisodeBojan FürstSeptember 22, 2025Episode, Futures Possible