I first encountered Michael Meade – storyteller, mythologist, philosopher, author – at the Beloved (music and arts) Festival in 2015 or ’16. I was blown away by his tales, his metaphors, and the breadth of his existential insights into what exactly we are all doing here, now, at this time, in this life.

I attended Beloved four years in a row. Late at night, when most of the music was done, in an intimate tented setting, Meade would read aloud ancient spiritual poetry – Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, and so on – with exquisitely sensitive accompaniment by flute and oud (stringed lute) and perhaps one or two other instruments. It was pure magic!

Meade came to Portland last night – that is, October 22, 2026 – to give a talk-and-song presentation on the topic of “Transformation and Healing on Earth,” and to promote his latest book, The Heart of Transformation, at the stately and capacious First Congregational Church. It was the first time I’d seen him since 2018, and, come to think of it, the first time I’d ever seen him while not stoned on anything (which may or may not be a relevant data point).

Meade talked about how our current world is unraveling – socially, politically, ecologically – and how we are currently in a “liminal” space between the world we’ve known and the world to come. He spoke beautifully for quite some time about the process a caterpillar goes through to transform into a butterfly. He sang mythic songs and told mythic stories to the beat of his drum. He talked about the soullessness of the internet, which connects us all “horizontally” through units of data, and noted that today we are all both more connected to one another and simultaneously more isolated than ever before, and he stressed the value of imagination over what we call “knowledge.”

My experience of listening to him felt a bit less like inspiration than it did years ago at Beloved (when he was basically delivering pretty much the same message), and more like a picturesque and delightfully rendered song. My reasoning mind was very present and active during all of this, though not overbearingly so. I was aware that I did not always agree with some of his maximal sweeping generalizations, such as when he claimed that Facebook has “hollowed out” the entire concept of friendship because a real friend is someone who knows you best whereas on Facebook you can have countless “friends” who don’t know you at all. I mean, okay, fair enough as far as that goes, but I’ve also met friends through other friends on Facebook, with whom I’ve subsequently enjoyed meaningful real-life encounters. So little stuff like that, I was noticing, but it didn’t bother me.

Charismatically, and at considerable length, Meade emphasized that each one of us is possessed of a unique “genius” and a unique destiny, which we can only know by connecting with “the heart within the heart” of us, as opposed to being endlessly distracted (that’s my word, not his) by a culture that is disconnected from Nature, and that is constantly telling us who or what we have to be, but doesn’t even know itself. He asserted that, while all of us have been traumatized in different ways during infancy, each and every human being is born with an utterly singular purpose in life that they must discover for themselves. He pronounced emphatically that there are no duplicates in Nature. “No two cedar trees are exactly the same!” he declared. “No two raisins are completely alike!”

This got me thinking about cloning. I remembered reading years ago about how – after years of successfully cloning various plants and food crops – scientists had cloned an actual living sheep. (And I did a little research just now actually – since then, cows, pigs, horses, cats, deer, and monkeys have also been cloned.) I remembered there was a bit of an outcry at the time, a profound concern that humans could eventually be cloned too, and the multitude of ethical dilemmas this would entail.

Given Meade’s heavy emphasis on the unequivocal uniqueness of every living organism, I wondered what he might have to say on the topic of cloning. Did it trouble him? Did the fact that cloning actually exists constitute a challenge to his conviction about the inviolable individuality of all beings? I was eager to ask him. I was sure he’d have something interesting and thoughtful to say about it.

Towards the end of his presentation, he asked the audience if anyone had questions and I raised my hand immediately. I was standing near the back of the room (big, big room – and there was a balcony section too!) and when he said “Yes, in the back!” I got momentarily excited but, sadly, he meant the woman standing several feet to my right, and her question was something on the order of, “Can you talk about how, when we’ve experienced a re-initiation in life, we can return to the world …?” This sparked another 20-minute meandering soliloquy from Meade about various forms of ritual, and how ritual doesn’t have to be redundant, and the things we feel in our bones, and the value of real friends, and the definition of community, and so on.

When he wound down, I not only raised my hand, I waved it very visibly and then he acknowledged me – with some small annoyance, it seemed.

I said: “You’ve spoken of how there are no duplicates in nature. But how do you reconcile the phenomenon of cloning? You say no two cedar trees are alike, but science can now clone plants and even animals.”

He retorted (that’s the only word, truly), “Well, people are consistently trying to go against Nature … I think a better question is Why would anyone want to clone?”

I said, “But if clones exist, then can you say there are no duplicates in Nature? And if someone can clone me, then I’m not unique, right?”

He shot back: “I don’t know why you’re worried about cloning. Probably it has something to do with something that occurred during your infancy. But I can’t really help you with it because I’m not really interested in the question.”

The audience laughed and clapped – at least many of them did. I was momentarily mortified, and then just pissed.

I had not meant the question as a challenge to Meade’s authority or wisdom. It was a sincere and – I believed — relevant inquiry.

Maybe it was different in tone though from other people’s questions that followed, and the one that preceded it. My question did not dance to Meade’s tune; it was discordant with his rhythms. It was prosaic and specific. He apparently deemed it adversarial.

Wow. I was not expecting that.

So What Kind of Answer Was I Expecting?

I had no idea how he’d field my question, though I certainly expected him to give it an honest try. Maybe he would say he wasn’t certain that even a cloned organism was completely identical to the original. Maybe he’d say that he didn’t feel a cloned sheep constituted evidence it was possible to copy a human soul. Who knows?

Maybe he could have simply acknowledged that he had never considered the issue before, and he had no idea what to make of it, but it didn’t bother him, and it did not alter his essential view on reality even if he couldn’t blithely explain it away. That all would have been fine.

As it was, his rudeness and annoyance provided an entirely different sort of answer, and a different set of information about Meade himself.

It reminded me of a similar experience I’d had about ten years ago, when I went to see Naomi Klein and her husband speak in Portland. Klein is the author of This Changes Everything, perhaps the most definitive popular book in print on the topic of climate change and its implications. Her husband (I forget his name) had just completed making a film with the same title, on the same topic, and they were screening it for the first time in Portland, so that was the occasion.

I asked Klein a question regarding a statement from her book – that for us to achieve a sustainable level of worldwide energy consumption, we’d need to draw back to the usage levels of the 1970s. I asked what sorts of changes we’d need to make in our lives for such a thing to be possible, given that the world population had more than doubled, and developing nations were demanding far more electricity.

Klein and her husband ridiculed the question. Given how high an esteem I had held them in, I felt certain that they were misunderstanding me, as they deflected my inquiry with wisecracks about how they weren’t suggesting we had to resume wearing bell bottoms and going to discotheques — as if I’d been asking whether we would have revert to ‘70s cultural trends. I kept trying to rephrase the question so that they would be sure to understand. It was only much later that realized that they had of course understood me, but for one reason or another, they were choosing to gaslight me. (At least in that instance, the audience wasn’t laughing with them.) To this day, I still don’t understand why.

But I understand this much. There are lots of ways to speak truth to power. And sometimes truth is simply a question – an obvious question – the most obvious question that comes to mind. Last night, Michael Meade held the microphone, and he held the audience in the palm of his hand. All I had was my own voice, and a simple question. He had the power. And I had my truth.

I don’t feel I came out the worse for it. I learned yet again that people I admire may have feet of clay, and that even my heroes can behave like little fascists when they are in command of a group mind, and that charismatic people of all stripes can become drunk on their public personas.