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Custodians of Culture

• Michele McAloon

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Step into a world where ancient customs still whisper the stories of generations in 'Custodians of Wonder.' In this episode, we chat with Eliot Stein, a passionate author and BBC journalist, who unveils the remarkable narratives of the last custodians of cultural practices across the globe. Eliot shares how a serendipitous encounter with an elderly lace-maker ignited his quest to document these fading traditions, revealing intricate tales from the balafon player in Mali to the thread-making women in Sardinia.

Through Eliot's storytelling, listeners will uncover how these traditions not only embody artistic expression but serve as essential connectors to community identity and history. The episode dives deep into the struggles of passing these rituals onto the next generation, fostering a dialogue about the very essence of culture in an ever-evolving world. 

Eliot's reflections inspire hope, revealing that while the future may seem uncertain, the dedication of these last guardians embodies a profound resilience and love for humanity. Join us to explore the rich tapestry of our shared heritage and to reflect on the customs that resonate in our lives today. Don't forget to subscribe and share your thoughts on the traditions that shape your world!

Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon. And we have another wonderful book, Custodians of Wonder Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions and the Last People Keeping them Alive, by BBC travel author, Eliot Stein, put out by St Martin's Press. I hope you enjoy my book interviews. If you want to find out more information about me, you can go to bookcluescom. I'm also Michele McAloon1, on X ,Truth Social, Blue Skies, all of those out there, and I'm hopefully might have a YouTube channel soon. Anyway, thank you, Enjoy the interview. Elliot Stein. Welcome to Crossword.

Eliot Stein :

Thanks so much for having me.

Michele McAloon:

We have a wonderful book today, and I know I always say my books are wonderful, but this is a book where I, literally, every page I turned, I learned something new, something a little quirky, something a little interesting, a tidbit that I had never known before. So it's actually a very profound book and, Mr. Stein, you do a beautiful job writing this book. You're a gorgeous writer. So what the book we're going to talk about is Custodians of Wonder. It's about ancient customs, profound traditions and the last people keeping them alive. It is put out by the fabulous St Martin's Press.

Michele McAloon:

They always come out with the most interesting books, I think, and we have the author, elliot Stein. He is a journalist and editor of the BBC Custodians of Wonder. This book is inspired by a column he created for BBC Travel called Custom Made, in which he profiles remarkable people upholding ancient traditions around the world. His work has appeared in many periodicals and magazines, to include the New York Times, the Washington Post, of course, national Geographic, the Independent and elsewhere. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and young son and, although he works for BBC, he is an American, elliot Stein, welcome.

Eliot Stein :

Thanks so much. Lovely to be here.

Michele McAloon:

This book is actually. It really is. It's got so many little tidbits of knowledge in it and you say it's the whisper of the last person to carry on a tradition. Why? How did you decide to write this book? Because it really is an incredible book.

Eliot Stein :

Yeah, it's a great question.

Eliot Stein :

About 20 years ago, a chance encounter in Italy sort of awakened me to the power of these final custodians.

Eliot Stein :

I was just out of college and I was walking through the streets on an island called Burano and I encountered one of the last living inheritors of an impossibly difficult and intricate form of lace making that was described to me by this custodian as embroidering the air, and I'd never seen anything like these creations.

Eliot Stein :

They sort of looked like stitched seafoam, and this person, who was 90 years old and blind, told me that for 300 years, these creations were some of the most coveted items in the Western world.

Eliot Stein :

They were, they were the, the life's work and pride of this group of women who only made these, these, these creations on this Island, and so she wanted to show me these things that she had made over time, but more than anything, she wanted to let me know that she was one of the last people who who carried on this tradition, and she wanted people like me who were traveling to the Island, to island, to remember that, in addition to the beautiful buildings and arching bridges and canals on the island, there was this quiet, gentle thing that women there did for hundreds and hundreds of years. That meant something to this place and shaped it with me, and I went on to create this column two decades later for the BBC, all about final custodians and the beautiful gentle at sometimes impractical things that they do and what it means to a place when they fade away, and that's really the inspiration for this book.

Michele McAloon:

You used the word custodian. Why did you choose to use that word? I find that interesting. And what does it mean to have custody of a tradition?

Eliot Stein :

I used custodian, actually thinking about the idea that they are safekeeping something that belongs to a larger community. What I find so profound about these traditions is that they really reflect a community's worldview, a way that they see themselves of being human and how they're connected to their environment. And so custodian for me is they're the keepers of this tradition, but they're maintaining and safeguarding it for other people. They're serving a community and doing so often in a very selfless way, and we can get into some of the traditions and what they, what they mean, but these are, by and large, humble, almost anonymous people maintaining things that, that that don't make them any money, and they're doing it for a a larger feeling, a sense of, of belonging and and an inherent pride in where they come from, and I find that beautiful and humbling.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely, and you know, I think you so rightly. It's a celebration of human ingenuity, imagination and perseverance. So I mean, it's such a beautiful way to describe it. And actually what you do in this book is you look at 10 of the world's most dazzling cultural marvels. Did you see more than 10? What compelled you to follow these specific stories? Are there more than 10 out there, or was this just the 10 that you found?

Eliot Stein :

The world is filled with final custodians, right? I mean, I've been traveling around the world for most of the past seven years profiling people doing something in this vein, so there's so many of them. What I did for this book is I wanted to focus on 10 traditions, 10 rites, 10 customs that I think kind of reflect the best of humanity artistic things, they can be culinary things, they can be musical things, but I wanted to cast a wide thematic net and I also wanted to cast a wide geographic net. So it was important to me that if I'm going to do 10 of them, they're not all set in Europe or in South America. It's a real globe-trotting journey where you go from rural Mali to a city in Taiwan, to the steamy depths of Cuba, and so I think, in presenting these chapters, these themes, these traditions, my hope is that the reader comes away with sort of a refreshing sense of all the wondrous things that human beings do and the things that make us who we are.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely. So. I'm a Roman Catholic and you know what? It's interesting? Because I started looking inside the church the Roman Catholic Church of traditions that have now lasted 2,000 years, and it's not just the Eucharist, there's so many different things that are so rooted into the actual—and it's not just some kind of divine, it's the human part, it's the customs that have come forward. So it's really kind of made me more keenly aware of what is around us and what our humanity has brought forward into today. So you start with West Africa and this to me. I had to read this chapter twice and I have to tell you why because I know nothing of West Africa. I'm sure I am like most people that are hearing this podcast, that I had no idea about the Mali Empire, and so let's talk about Balakouete and the Balafon. That is. It's fascinating.

Eliot Stein :

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for saying that and, to be fair, I think chances are most people reading this book may have never heard of many of these traditions, many of these places. There are a few that might seem slightly more familiar. One of the chapters is about the world's last night watchman, and people might have a vague sense of what a night watchman does. There's another chapter about the world's rarest pasta, and certainly people are familiar with pasta, pasta, and certainly people are familiar with pasta. But this chapter, this tradition, this place, it was admittedly a little bit of a gamble to open with this chapter, but I wanted to do so because it's an astonishing, astonishing story, and the fact that I think most people have no sense of any of this stuff is really what appealed to me about it. But the basic idea is there was a civilization called the Mali Empire, and if anyone listening to this has ever heard of it, they maybe have only heard of the fabled city of Timbuktu or a man named Mansa Musa, who is generally considered to be the richest person who ever lived. But the Mali Empire was the greatest civilization to ever come out of West Africa. It spanned nine modern-day countries and the way that it started was a ruler united a bunch of warring fiefdoms together, and when he did, he bestowed to one person this sacred instrument called a balafone. A balafone looks a lot like a xylophone, like a marimba. You tap it with wooden mallets and it's got wooden slats on it and it makes this enchanting noise. And so when the ruler said to this person, I want you to play this balafone, it wasn't just for musical purposes, but as he played it he was to recount the history and traditions of this empire, essentially to be kind of a living library of this kingdom that went on to encompass millions and millions of people. And so, in an astonishing tradition that continues to this day, the last 27 male members, rather 27 generations of this family have learned how to master the balafon, have memorized all of the epics surrounding this empire and continue to play this one original instrument that originated about 600 years ago, that's called the Soso Bala. The Soso Bala still exists. It is kept in a 150-person village in rural Guinea called Nyagasola, and only the keeper of the balafon is allowed to play it, and whenever it leaves this village it has to travel on his head. The heir to this tradition no longer lives in West Africa. He lives in Medford, Massachusetts and his name is Balakuyate.

Eliot Stein :

So during about a month-long search to journalistically trace this emperor from West Africa to this person in Medford Massachusetts, I tracked him down and no one had ever written about this person, and I sent him a hopeful email asking if he would be willing to tell me his family's story and perhaps to take me back to the place where it all originated. And within 30 minutes of sending that email, I got a phone number on my phone, from a number I didn't recognize, and it was Bala. And before even introducing himself, the very first thing he said was I've been waiting for an email like this for 20 years. So we soon went back with his two American children to Bamako, Mali, the capital, to meet his extended family, and then caravaned over the border into Guinea, and I became the first foreign journalist in history to ever see this instrument.

Eliot Stein :

To give any listener a sense of how important this thing is UNESCO, which is the United Nations global body of culture. Unesco, which is the United Nations global body of culture. There are 678 items that are currently on the UNESCO intangible list of humanity, and they include things like Indian yoga, Argentine tango, Chinese calligraphy. Of the 678 items, the only one that has ever stayed within a single family is this. And when it was proclaimed by UNESCO, Bala was an undocumented immigrant working in Albany, New York. And the fact that this heir to this meaningful, deep, incredible tradition was essentially an anonymous person, I think, is incredible. So I went back, I told the story and, more than anything, I was just thrilled with how it was received by Bala and his family. He's currently taking the book back to Africa. He's showing the Malian government. I think he's immensely proud of this. Obviously this tradition, but also just the fact that it was finally recognized outside of where it started.

Michele McAloon:

You're a heck of a reporter, because you actually went to Mali 10 days after meeting him, right? Is that correct?

Eliot Stein :

It was pretty soon after meeting him and readers can find this in the book the only one who's allowed to play it and the one who, for better or worse, has to carry it on their head whenever it leaves the village. His father passed at the age of 90. So we had a trip planned that then got a little bit upended and so we eventually went once things settled down a little bit. Okay, so explain he's a jelly and a jelly does everything from. I mean, it is there at a person's birth. It's the person who announces the new child's name to the community, it it helps.

Eliot Stein :

A jelly helps bashful couples arrange marriages. A jelly is there at a wedding. A jelly is essentially a family's conciliator, if you will. It is someone who is kind of a spiritual mentor, and every community, every family, typically has one. But there are different types of jellies too.

Eliot Stein :

But what Bala's family does is they have been the keepers of this instrument and responsible for the epics that surround the entire civilization.

Eliot Stein :

So, to give you a sense, when I went to the visa office here in New York at the embassy for Mali and when Bala presented himself, the person the registrar had the last name of Kaita, which is a very popular name in West Africa. Bala instantly recognized that name and launched into about a 10-minute monologue recounting the entire Kite family history, how they descended from the north of the civilization, how they went south. It was a breathtaking monologue, to the point that when he finished there was an entire group of people standing around him in awe, and the woman, the registrar, finally turned to me and said it is an honor for you to know this person. We say in our culture that when a jelly dies, an entire library of knowledge dies with them, and so that was my first glimpse of what I was exactly getting myself into here. But it's an astonishing, breathtaking amount of knowledge that these people possess of a culture, and it's humbling to be in their presence.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely and not to bring it to the mundane, but this is actually where the epic of the Lion King came from, right. The Disney adaptation of it probably grossly simplified. And I want to encourage listeners if you get a chance, go on YouTube and listen to the balafon being played. It's interesting, it's very haunting and I know Bala has played actually a lot of backup for a lot of famous bands now in the United States, so it's having some success here in the US. But are his sons interested in taking this over? Are they interested in being the 28th generation of, or do they get to choose this?

Eliot Stein :

Yeah, it's a great question and it's one of the I would say through lines of the book is that you have these 10 traditions that are each very, very old. But as we you know in quotations progress as a society. As we evolve, these age-old customs are having a tough time finding successors, evolve, these age-old customs are having a tough time finding successors. So Bala has a son, but Bala's son is American. He works at an ice cream shop after high school. He plays soccer, he's into video games, he likes YouTube, he likes TikTok he reminds me of so many teenagers here in the States and he also knows how to play the balafone.

Eliot Stein :

But the real question is whether Bala, when called, would be willing to go back to West Africa to sacrifice everything he's worked so hard for. And, as you smartly said, bala's situation is very different now than when he arrived in the US 20 years ago. He's now part of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. He teaches a course on musical improvisation at the New England Conservatory. He's performed at Harvard, MIT, at Carnegie Hall. He's incredibly successful and his whole goal in moving to the US was to introduce this tradition and this instrument to a different audience. But were he to be called and you know, were his son to one day be called. That's a choice that they would have to make, and it's I don't want to spoil the ending, but it's something that I think a lot of people in this book grapple with.

Michele McAloon:

Sure, I'm sure they do. It's yeah, and you know what? There's almost a little bit when I was reading it, it was almost a little bit of anxiety that I felt that you know, no, of course these people have to take these traditions, but they're also real human beings with real lives and real choices too. So there is that dichotomy. Now you're a bit of a Sardinian expert from Sardinia, and you, I think you have a really interesting background and interesting insight into the next, and it's the pasta, and I believe it's Paola Abriani and her sous-fil-and-du pasta. Tell us about this.

Eliot Stein :

Yes, it's one of my favorite chapters. So I lived in Sardinia for a number of years, and in the center of Sardinia there are three women alive who are the only ones on earth who know how to make the world's rarest pasta. It's called Su Filindeu and in Sardinian it means the threads of God dough, it's water and it's salt, and the real magic is in the touch of your fingertips. You pull this dough into 256 perfectly even strands with the tips of your fingers. Each strand is about half as wide as angel hair pasta. You then layer it on top of a dish in three different layers, you dry it in the Sardinian sun and you then, when it's ready to be served, you shatter it and put it into a broth with pecorino cheese and other ingredients.

Eliot Stein :

But traditionally, the only way that you have been able to eat this sacred dish which is really what it is is to hike 33 kilometers overnight from the center of Sardinia, from a town called Nuoro to a pilgrimage village called Lula, and that's what I did. I met the three women alive who know how to make the world's rarest pasta. I did this hike and then I was presented, almost like a communion, with this sacred dish. And for me, what is so special about this story but really each of the stories in this book is it's not just about a balafon player or a pasta maker, but it's about what these traditions, what these customs represent. So this story is really a window into the fact that Sardinia, specifically the center of Sardinia, was the only place in history in modern day Italy that was never conquered by the Romans.

Eliot Stein :

It's a window into the entire history and identity of Sardinia, which is it's not just turquoise beaches and luxury resorts, but it's actually this history of repelling outside forces that have come to invade it over and over again, from the Romans to the Byzantines, to the Arabs, to the Pisans, and how, in the center of Sardinia, they have this history of banditry, of what we might consider outlaws. All of this is represented by the threads of God, and so you currently have this conflict in the island where the three women left. They're all part of the same family, have mastered this tradition. They can't find successors, and so it's about what happens, not just when we can't taste this pasta anymore, but when these threads of God that have that unite an entire way of life, an entire island. What does it mean when these things vanish and it's, it's interesting, it's heartbreaking, it's fascinating and it's it's incredibly delicious.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, well, you know what it's interesting Again, I watched on YouTube video how they make it and it's funny. It looks deceptively not hard. But your testimony is that even the Barilla Pasta Company everybody knows Barilla, the blue box, you know pasta that they tried to make it by machine and couldn't do it Correct.

Eliot Stein :

Right. They tried to commodify it. They couldn't do it. There's a celebrity chef in England named Jamie Oliver who went to go meet Paula, the main custodian. He tried learning for two hours. At the end he said this is a direct quote I've been making pasta for 20 years and I've never seen anything like this. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And he couldn't master it. And, as you said, there are videos on YouTube that show the entire process, top to bottom, and there's no secret here. I mean, there's no secret ingredient, there's no secret formula. But for something that looks very, very easy, it's very, very hard. It's deceptively hard and so hard that no one else has been able to master it outside of this family.

Michele McAloon:

That's incredible. Do you? You know what, Elliot? Do you think that there's customs now that we have, that maybe in 20 or 30 years there'll be dying, customs that we take for granted, that maybe in maybe 50 years that are dying out? Have you seen anything like that?

Eliot Stein :

Oh, of course, I sort of hinted at that at the start of our conversation there. The world is filled with final custodians doing final things in some way. Right when I live here in New York, there's one shop left that repairs neon signs. In downtown Istanbul, there's one person who is left that repairs gramophones right.

Eliot Stein :

What I really try to focus on, though, is less final custodians for final custodians' sake and more how the unique traditions that they themselves have maintained have profoundly shaped a place. So each of these traditions is really a window into the unique identity of a place, and what makes a place a place. So it's not just the threads of God, but it's what makes a Sardinian person act a certain way. It's this sense of defiance, it's this rugged rebelliousness. It's not just about a bolophone or about a night watchman, but it's about the fact that people in this town in Sweden can't sleep without hearing the call of the night watchman, and what that means to them and how one person that I interviewed said if you take away the night watchman, this is just any other medieval town. So yes, there there are many traditions left that are fading away. I mean, this morning there's a headline about how trump is gonna is gonna stop printing the the penny right but I saw that, yeah, I saw yeah.

Eliot Stein :

But what I really find interesting is just how these things shape a place and how they're a unique window into the souls, the spirit of these places, that make each place around the world different and worth exploring.

Michele McAloon:

You have a very sweet chapter on bees. I thought I thought that was very sweet, and especially because you've lent a little bit of your own biography to that. But tell us about the telling the bees. I think this is so fascinating.

Eliot Stein :

Thank you. It's a sweet chapter. It's all about, as you said, this custom of telling the bees and what telling the bees is. As the name implies, once upon a time in the rural reaches of Ireland and England and the entire UK, everyone who kept bees followed this touching tradition called telling the bees, and what that means is that the beekeeper's job, whenever important news would happen in a family, whether it was a birth, a death, a marriage, even important local town gossip and comings and goings their job would be to crunch out of their home and to go to the beehive and to lower themselves down and to very quietly, very calmly, explain what was happening to the bees.

Eliot Stein :

And if they didn't do this, there are many, many accounts of terrible things happening Bees would die, bees would swarm, bees would leave. They wouldn't do this. There are many, many accounts of terrible things happening. Bees would die, bees would swarm, bees would leave, they wouldn't produce honey. And a long time ago, if your home relied on bees, this was a pretty terrible fate. So the most important thing that the beekeeper would do is, when someone passed, they would put the bees into mourning, especially if it was the former beekeeper. They would then say that the quote-unquote mistress of the house or the next heir in the house would have to do this, but you'd drape the hive in a veil, you'd put them into mourning, and if the bees didn't mourn with you, then they might pass as well.

Eliot Stein :

And sort of touching on what we said a moment ago, it's not just this cute tradition, but to me what is really magical about this chapter is exploring the evolution of human beings' kinship with bees, the fact that we've always recognized in this species there's something remarkable and beautiful and similar to ourselves. I mean, we've relied on bees, for they, through pollination, produce half of every bite of food that we eat. They're responsible for the cotton clothing that we wear. For much of our history they produced the only natural sweetener that we had. They produced the longest burning, cleanest light that we had from most of human existence. There's a certain kinship and relationship with bees that I think transcends humans and animals, and something very special there.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, it's actually a very sweet chapter and you know it's interesting. I just heard a really interesting story about why Napoleon used the bee as a symbol. Not only was it a symbol of resurrection, have you heard this story where Clovis, the first Christian king in France, his grandson Childeric, I think Childeric II died and during Napoleon's reign they found the sarcophagus, or they found the coffin. They opened it up and he was covered with golden bees and Napoleon decided that this would become an emblem of his reign, simply because he was the great social media king of all time and he understood that this would have a significance and power. So he used these bees and I just heard that. So when I read your chapter on bees, I thought that was really interesting.

Eliot Stein :

You know I hadn't heard that. That is fascinating. One thing that I had heard is there's a company in England called Lyle's Golden Syrup and it's known as having the oldest emblem in the world. It's actually an emblem of a dead lion surrounded by bees and it's inspired by, I think by the story of Samson from the Old Testament.

Michele McAloon:

Sure Okay.

Eliot Stein :

It's been unchanged for something like 140 years. But it's sort of a window into bees making I'm sorry, into honey making and the reverence that we have for these animals as well.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, absolutely John the Baptist. Supposedly he went out in the desert and ate honey. So really interesting. Okay, one last one, and I have to do this in ode to my youngest son who actually told me and I had no idea about this, and I think most Americans I didn't know about soy sauce. I mean, I thought soy sauce always came in the little Kikkoman, you know the little Kikkoman jar, and sauce always came in the little Kikkoman, you know the little.

Eliot Stein :

Kikkoman jar, and that was it. That was it for soy sauce. But there's some good soy sauce out there that is in danger of going away. Right, that's right. Unless you've been to an old craft brewer in Japan, chances are, if you're listening to this, you have never actually tasted real soy sauce. And that's because for most of soy sauces, let's say, the past 700 years, it's been made in a certain way.

Eliot Stein :

But after World War II, when Japan was obviously decimated by the war and by our bombs, the Japanese government, led by the US, which really had a major role in rebuilding that country, issued a sort of unofficial nationwide rule where they wanted to change the development of soy sauce. They wanted to speed up and modernize production and as a result, I mean, every company followed suit. But the soy sauce that we taste today is really a very cheap imitation of this nuanced, rich brew. And traditionally, the way that you make soy sauce is you ferment it for four years, the same way that you might ferment wine or other things. And the way that you ferment it is you build this massive, massive cedar barrel called a kiyoke, and a kiyoke traditionally hasn't only been used to brew soy sauce, but it's been used to brew all of the five to brew soy sauce, but it's been used to brew all of the five traditional Japanese fermented elements, like miso, vinegar, mirin, and these five elements form the basis of what is known as washoku cuisine, which is Japan's traditional food, and it's inscribed in UNESCO as well.

Eliot Stein :

So there's one person left in the country who knows how to make these kyoke. He learned it himself. His name is Yasuo Yamamoto. He's a fifth generation soy sauce brewer and he lives on an island off the coast of Japan called Shidoshima, which fittingly means small bean island.

Eliot Stein :

Biggest soy sauce comes from soybeans.

Eliot Stein :

So he's taken it upon himself to lead this heroic nationwide effort where not only is he making these kyokie barrels as fast as he can and has learned the craft himself, but he's teaching anyone that he can find how to make these, because he recognizes that the future of Japanese food not just of soy sauce but of all Japanese food that form the basis of this, of this Washoku cuisine the secret ingredient are these barrels. So he's been leading workshops, he's been essentially giving away his patented information to anyone, because he knows that the more people that know how to make these barrels, the better chance traditional Japanese food has of surviving, and it's a wonderful, wonderful story of resilience, of trying to find a successor, of what it means when the 700-year-old recipe fades away, but also about what is currently happening in Japan, where the population is rapidly, rapidly dwindling, where fewer people are having babies, where people from rural communities are quickly migrating to megacities. So, again, this story about soy sauce is really a window into what is happening in Japan. And how did Japan form?

Michele McAloon:

Right, I actually see this in Europe, as Europe goes through a demographic decline, of how much do they hold on to going forward? And actually all of this is about change, and it's about change in the human experience and what we hold on to and what we move forward. And ultimately, I think it's a story of humanity, of what truly makes us human beings, of what makes us, of what anchors us, as you say, to a community, what anchors us to other people, what anchors us from one generation to the next. I think every life is replete with customs, with traditions, and this is our way of handling down our humanity to the next human being, to the next set of human beings, and you really especially know that as a parent or as a grandparent.

Michele McAloon:

So it's a great book. The stories are so colorful and so well written. It's a little wistful. At the end you're just like, no, we don't want to lose that. I mean we didn't talk about the hanging bridges in the Inca Empire. I mean, just, it's amazing what and you know what? The bottom line, it's amazing what human beings can do when they want to do it and what they put themselves through and their ability to self-sacrifice for others in a community. It's an amazing story.

Eliot Stein :

Well, thank you so much, and I think you've so smartly touched on one of the things that I hope readers come away with, which is it's a celebration of humanity, and you earlier said some of these things it's wistful. You had a sense of anxiety of how you don't want these things to go away. I hope that readers come away actually with a sense of hopefulness that the world can still be a wondrous place, especially when so many headlines these days are about doom and gloom and negativity. My hope is that in writing this book, I'm in a small way, introducing readers to things that they might not have known about, but also perhaps instilling a sense of wonder that when everything seems dark, there's a woman at 7 am who slips on an apron and starts making the world's rarest pasta every day.

Eliot Stein :

Or how, in the northern reaches of Germany, there's a man who crunches through the woods in a forest to deliver love letters from hopeful singles to the knot of a 500-year-old oak tree. Or that there's this person, this family for 12 generations, who has dangled off a ravine to suspend the world's last Inca rope bridge 500 years after the collapse of the Inca. And why we do these things when we're not compelled to do them. Humans are what we believe. It's what separates us from everything else, and I hope that this book is a celebration of what we believe, for better or worse, and why we believe these things and what keeps us going.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely, and I think you know what absolutely. You nailed it. I said wistful anxiety, but your title is actually right on. These things are wondrous, they're wonderful and you're right, they are filled with hope. And you know, I think as we move forward, there's other customs. My family right now is celebrating Mardi Gras in Mobile, alabama. That's over a 200-year tradition. So I mean there are things that we do and we take for granted and we bring together community. So I really congratulate you on this book. Where can listeners?

Eliot Stein :

find your work. Sure, I have a website. It's wwweliotsteinme. So my name is one L and one T and, yeah, I write and work for the BBC. So if anyone wants to check out BBC Travel, there's a lot of my work there too. But Custodians of Wonder is probably the thing that I'm most proud of, if only because it's been a dream of mine, a real highlight of my life, to be able to meet these incredible people who have so graciously let me into their lives. But, yeah, thank you so much for for having me on, michelle. This has been a real pleasure.

Michele McAloon:

Oh well, thank you. And you know what? Thank you for writing this book, because I mean it really is. It's very rare I read, read, read all the time. It's very rare where I read, pick up a book and I learn on every single page there's a new piece of information. So it's, it's really kind of an amazing book in that way. All right, elliot Stein, thank you so much.

Eliot Stein :

Thank you.