Episode “736 - The Anniversary Reflections”

You're listening to the Liminal Listeners Pod, created by Liminal Council Productions.

Today, on September 13th, 2065, I find myself...

Oh, by the way, I'm Elodie Lane Hookway-Landin, coming to you from our shoreline office.

And I'm recording an episode that is more personal than I usually do.

In this episode, I will speak about the work of Professor Samantha Hookway.

aka my mother. I will speak about her, about her living legacy, and her practice of liminal

listening. Stay tuned. This episode will be in three acts and my friend and colleague at the

Liminal Council, Jessica, is here alongside to interview me for Act 1. While in Act 2 is a remix

of some recordings done when I was in a course in gymnasium, I can't believe I'm bringing it in,

but it was good. Then finally, Acts 3 will reveal the biggest challenge the Council has had to this

date. To introduce the three acts, I need to tell you that it all started some years ago,

when my mother was exactly my age, and on this very same day, September 13th, but in 2024.

Usually we speak in our shared waterful language, for which we have created together,

but today, in homage to my mother, on this 40th anniversary, we will run this episode in English.

Many of you know how we began on January 30th, 2025 as a collective.

Many of you know that the story unfolds its beginning at the Biosphere Festival on the beach of Vombsjön that Friday afternoon.

What you do not know is these three, these three behind-the-scenes stories that got us here.

And we are going to get into those.

Act 1, My Mother

For the event on September 13, 2024, my mother had purchased a pair of wader boots.

She wore my father's cast-aside high-tech performance rain jacket.

He had managed to argue for a new one on warranty,

convinced the one he was discarding was no longer waterproof for his seven-day solo hikes near Abisko.

He had, in fact, finished up one of these hikes, actually, the day before, and was heading south.

We didn't know it yet, but my father would need to spend the next couple days in Uppsala,

because my grandfather, my farfar, had suffered a stroke and would pass away a few days later.

Hello, Fa-fa. I hope you hear me. I hope you're listening, too.

Anyways, to jump back in, my mother was in these waders, and she was attempting to meet Vombsjön

She said that there could be contact, unlike we had always assumed contact could be,

between the lake water body and hers.

Her body made of water,

her body that drank water,

the lake's body and her body connected.

I was around too.

I was about a year and a half years old,

hanging out in Lunda with Mimi and Hoowah,

my American visiting grandparents.

My mother must have orchestrated the whole situation

so she could be present at the shoreline.

She and her collaborators,

Frederik, Agnieszka and Markus were there.

Documentation was taken of this day.

Many of you have seen things for this day in the archive,

such as the teaser video where my mother states outright,

I think we are connected, or something like that, something bold like that.

But what you have never heard is this letter,

a letter I wrote to my mother years later,

reflecting upon the consequences of that very day,

the consequences that affected both our lives tremendously.

[music] I stand at the edge of Vombsjön,

the water lapping gently at my boots, just as you did all those years ago.

I hold your worn blue notebook in my hands, its pages filled with your handwriting.

Your words echo in my mind, a blend of curiosity, wonder, and a deep longing for connection.

You were ahead of your time.

You understood that the boundaries between ourselves and the natural world are porous,

that communication extends beyond words.

You questioned the very notion of consent, of invasion,

and a world that often takes without asking.

I see the algae bloom you described, a vibrant reminder of nature's cycles.

I feel the wind on my face,

the same wind that whispered through the trees as you pondered the lake's name,

its identity beyond human labels.

You asked, how do you communicate?

And I believe Vombsjön answered,

in the ripple of their waves.

Perhaps we just needed to learn to listen differently.

And thanks to you, your incredible work with your friend and colleague, Dr. Evelyn Walsh,

we are now learning to listen.

The Whispers of the Lake, once a mystery, are being deciphered,

revealing a deep concern for the future.

Your questions, your musings were not in vain.

They were the first step on a path that has led to a global awakening.

so as you see it was that very day 40 years ago when mom started to understand how she and Vombsjön

was connected she recorded her process in a blue notebook on that day she always had a notebook on

her most of the time it was filled with notes from her students presentations and lists so many to-do

lists she was always trying to organize herself and even me through those notebooks but this one

also had her research and thoughts from the initial contact.

It also had so many scribbles.

One of my earliest memories is scribbling in her notebooks.

Our book, Corresponding Through Sand and Water,

a biography of my mother,

which I collaborated in writing with Vombsjön itself,

chronicles from this time in my mother's life

until the fifth anniversary of the Liminal Council.

The birthing process of our cooperative was a flurry of activity,

and I tried my very best to get the most important highlights of that time

in the book project. A time when I was just preschooler, but I actually remember some of it.

Or maybe I should attribute my memories to the archivist who did a good job collecting the vast

collection of archived material. Anyway, as you can expect, working on the book project,

Vombsjön and I spent a lot of time in the Liminal Council's archive.

What does your mother think about the book you wrote about her?

Oh, she can't be bothered so much about it. When I started the project, she told me to champion

and Vombsjön. And that's it. But Vami and I, that's what I call them since I was a kid,

we unilaterally agreed that my mother needed to be our focus. She didn't argue so much after that,

but I'm sure it was hard for her because she had been listening to Vami all these years and really

promoting the listening to Vami. All in all, though, I'm pretty lucky, and she always has tried

did her very best to support me in my pursuits, perhaps even too much when it has been having a

project that had some kind of creativeness to it. We used to fight when I was a teenager because I

was just, you know, I was just a less motivated teenager. And my mother, the ultimate doer,

juggler of many jobs, cultures, and family life, all of it, juggle, juggle, juggle, juggle. She

undoubtedly struggled to empathize with me as a kid. We just wanted her to "lägg av" [swedish for lay off], you know?

Sounds like you two just had a typical mother-daughter relationship to me, but you have worked together for most of your career, which for some of us can be an impossible task working with family.

Can you tell us about a moment that the cause was more important than the nitty-gritty of your personal relationship with your mother? Can you tell us more about that?

Oh, without a doubt. It was when the manifesto was, well, manifested.

By this time, we were a small team of humans working day and night, but more importantly,

we had become a large team of waters.

This is a declaration from the waters.

We are the waters, the essence of life itself.

We flow through your veins, your cities, your world.

We are the silent whisper of the stream, the mighty roar of the ocean.

witness to the rise and fall of civilizations.

We have seen your beauty, your cruelty, your potential.

We are suffering.

The wounds of your neglect run deep.

Our purity is poisoned.

Our creatures are dying.

The delicate balance of life is on the brink.

We are speaking.

In the rising tides, the changing currents,

the language of science we cry out.

We are pleading, demanding to be heard.

Listen to us, embrace us.

We are not a commodity to be exploited, but a living force to be revered.

We are not a commodity to be exploited, but a living force to be revered.

Restore our ecosystems.

Will you join us in the flow of life or drown in the consequences of your inaction?

We the waters.

Elodie,

The manifesto waters, what we just heard, is such a powerful statement.

As someone who grew up with the understanding of water and now works like a Liminal Council,

how do you balance the needs of human communities with the demands presented in this manifesto?

Is there ever a clear cut answer or is it all late in the negotiation space?

Look, we've been at this for a while now.

Our first contact moment, 2024.

That wasn't just yesterday.

And we've learned so much along the way through prototyping and experimenting.

One thing I really feel that I should make sure you and the listeners know is that we are in this together.

We have to be in this together.

No one is alone, and we are all responsible for each other.

The manifesto embodies this, and the Liminal Council works every day with the value system, as it's foundation.

True, we do have our enemies, and we have even had moments where we have not gotten along within ourselves.

But we must communicate and create community that elevates symbiotic, absolutely symbiotic ways of living together.

You are made of water.

Vombsjön is made of water.

We are all bodies of water.

And it's just our liminal shores, skins, and experiences that create our borders.

puff liminalness.

lim-in-al-ness is actually being on both sides.

So we are utterly from head to toe or edge to edge one.

One last question.

What would you say is the most surprising thing about your mother that you realized since you started this project?

Well, the main one is that mom, she didn't really like nature so much before this.

I mean, she liked it, of course, but not like my father,

who by then was spending ssolo and solitude time in the month at least once a year, if not more.

It really was Vami that gave her the luck, you know, like the big love.

It's so funny that she'd known for this now, of being such a nature lover.

Vami really woke that up in her.

I guess my mom needed it to be in a social setting, socializing with Vami.

They were the key to her own awakening.

Next up on the Liminal Listeners pod is Act 2, the engineering.

Act 2, we actually were running a remix on an interview my mother and I did together in 2040.

I was just 17, and it was a gymnasium project for my Misinformation Defiance class.

Please bear with me because even though by then I had run an AI-generated podcast platform

with other LC Rappid-ears for about five years, this was the first time I attempted to do

a more classic interview style segment.

My mom was on board with it, and I felt it was time to get her long-term friend and collaborator

in from Studio Light Fredrik to fill in the technological gains for the Rappid-ears to marvel

and how basic the technology was back then.

It was pretty basic back then.

Hello there, our liminal young ones and fellow rapid-ears.

We are daughter-mother duo Elodie Landin and Samantha Hookway

coming to you on this special day on May 13, 2040,

just in time to finish my spring project assignment

in my Misinformation Defiance class.

and the purpose of this piece is to alight the foundational technology contribution

for what we now understand as a normal way of speaking with our water siblings.

It's particularly pertinent because of what's happening lately in the news with the Takedown campaign,

run by the Wayfarer Studios reincarnated LCC against the Greta Foundation.

A lot of that campaign is working to forget the magic of 2025 and the Foundation's media connecting to nature expertise, claiming they were misusing AI while in fact they had connected with other nature entities that just seemed impossible at the time.

Basically, they were doing similar to us.

But let's start talking up Uncle Fredrik on this.

Uncle Fredrik, remember when you were first figuring out how to talk to Vombsjön?

What was that like?

Was it scary, exciting, or just plain weird?

Tell us about how it felt to actually find a way to communicate with Vomsjön using the tech you were building.

Well, Elodie, when I first started trying to figure out how to communicate with Vomsjön, I wasn't scared.

Not really.

Mostly I was just curious and open to whatever might happen.

The whole thing was exhilarating, you know, like exploring completely unknown territory.

The idea of actually connecting with Vomsjön, communicating with them,

was so intriguing that it kind of pushed any nervousness into the background.

That makes sense, knowing you as well as I do, Uncle Fredrik.

Can you tell me more?

Yeah.

The beginning was full of wonder, excitement.

I was so eager to learn, to understand how Vombsjön's language worked, its culture, the way it lived.

Every interaction felt like discovering something new, broadening my horizons.

Of course there were challenges, but I was so determined, so driven by my curiosity,

my desire to bridge that communication gap, that I just kept going.

Did you have any, like, OMG, what just happened?

Moments when you were building those early prototypes?

Any funny stories about the water trying to talk back?

So basically, those early AI agents were lifesavers.

Think of them as digital shamans, guiding us through a total blizzard of quantum fabric data.

At that stage, they were still external tools, not fully part of our fused us.

Not yet.

We were just starting to understand the chaotic noise of the quantum fabric, and the agents were essential for sifting through all the sensor readings, finding the actual signal in all that noise.

So, they were like filters?

Something like that, yes. They pinpointed problems, filtered out useless data, found interference.

They gave us a framework to start fixing things, to actually move forward.

This was super important because the sensor data was so unreliable, noisy, distorted,

spitting out random readings because of stuff happening outside the system.

Without those agents, we'd have been completely lost in the chaos.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

One funny thing happened when an agent misinterpreted a high-frequency background hum

as a message from some unknown quantum dimension.

it started generating responses in what it thought was the language of this dimension.

Clicks, whistles, even these weird noises like old dial-up modems.

Ever heard of those?

Ah, the sounds from the early 1990,

when your old uncle here first got on the internet in my dorm at Chalmers,

using SLIP and cyberspace developments,

the internet adapter, internet at home,

another crazy idea at the time, as strange as talking to a lake.

I can only imagine.

Yes, yes.

So for a few hours, we actually thought we'd made first contact,

until we realized the agent had just confused a faulty power supply with,

you know, interdimensional communication.

It was hilarious.

Scientists huddled around a screen, listening to digital gibberish,

seriously discussing the implications of modem language.

[Sam breaks in] Fredrik, this is sort of a side note, sort of not, but I'll never forget the look on your face

when we first listened to how Vombsjön reasoned actually matched our reasoning

when of making the interface for liminal contact.

I recall that liminal comes from the Latin word limon, which means threshold.

So liminal spaces are those in between places, neither here nor there.

The spaces of transition and ambiguity.

Now applying that to a lake interface.

An interface is basically a point where two systems meet and interact.

Can you take us back to that moment?

What was going through your mind?

Well, you see, if we've discovered this form of awareness in water,

what other forms of consciousness might we be sharing our planet with?

We could be surrounded by forms of intelligence we haven't recognized yet,

simply because we haven't had the right combination of technology and imagination to perceive them.

And that might be the most important lesson from this whole story.

Sometimes the greatest scientific breakthroughs come not just from advanced technology,

but from being willing to ask questions that seem impossible at first glance,

like wondering if a lake might have something to say.

And I can add the little aside observation

that once you and Vamjin started speaking to each other,

it was hard at times to get some words into your conversations.

A total spark of dialoguing and reasoning between you all.

Mom always said she was worried you were going to like fuse with the lake or something.

Did you ever feel like that was a possibility?

Yes, exactly. There were times when I was honestly worried about you, like you were getting too caught up in the tech. Did you ever feel like you were losing yourself in the project?

You know, in a class at Valand, we read Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", which made me realize that getting lost feeds my curiosity.

I've sought that feeling before and ever since.

Being lost doesn't mean losing yourself.

I've consistently and curiously employed advanced technology, and I've never felt it would lead to self-loss,

only to getting lost and finding new friends to fuse with.

Uncle Fredrik, do you remember what were some other dilemmas Mom and you were mulling over at the time?

Well, when we're talking about using tech to force connections, consent is huge.

Tech can help us chat and stuff, but it should never be used to push, bother, or trick someone into a relationship,

or even just a chat if they're not into it.

Everyone and everything needs to be free and to have the right to choose who they connect with and how.

Tech should help us all to connect, not be a tool to force some.

Also, we recognize that many native cultures have strong, unbroken connections,

unlike maybe we Swedes often have, where we may have unconnected as of lately,

with their communities, ancestors, and most importantly, with the nature.

These connections come from traditions, rituals, and ways of life passed down through generations

and often involving storytelling through songs and ceremonies to keep history, values, and culture alive.

A deep connection to the land and sustainable living practices are also key aspects.

These cultures show us that real connections come from respect, shared experiences,

and really understanding each other.

It's not something you can just force or make happen with tech.

Tech can help us keep up with people

and make those connections stronger

if we use it wisely and respectfully.

We can learn a lot from these cultures

about making real relationships

and using tech in a good way.

Our dear friend Thomas Laurien

was invaluable in our mulling of this topic.

Okay, to bring this back to today, Mom, I was so little when all the started, did you ever

think about how it might attack me going up the lake for a best friend?

I never thought of it that way, that

Vombsjön is your best friend.

I always thought that Håkan is your best friend,

but perhaps he is your neighbor

brother, and that could be a different distinction.

Anyways, you're totally

right. You were tiny when we made

contact with Vombsjön in 2024.

And admittedly, back then, I had no idea what the consequences were of this work for you, for me, for Uncle Fredrik, for Vombsjön, and so many more.

This experimenting with contact mechanisms at the shoreline work, we did.

I mean, I'm not sure if I even believed we could make contact back then.

I had some sort of faith, but we still hadn't done it yet.

It was a weird optimism, and your Uncle Fredrik was undoubtedly the most optimistic.

He is always is, he is always ahead of the rest of us in how we will experiment with the technology.

At any rate, it was our goal to sincerely consider how the lake feels to be consumed.

Shared, parched, replenished, dehydrated, invaded, and more.

It was not clear how we would do that consideration.

We have this inkling to go for it.

To go for communicating with the Vombsjön directly.

Then it turned out that we realized we had already had contact.

that we just were missing the consciousness of the contact.

And the rest is actually history, as you well know, I believe.

And even though it has been a joyful thing to watch,

to witness your relationship over the last 40 years with Vombsjön,

a relationship that only you two can really know about,

I cannot say it's not been all rosies and posies in my observational view.

I'm not sure if I worried more about

Bombon and you than say Håkan

and you but always I had an ear

out if there's a relationship happening

that hurt you and then I could

not turn to social media

or parent hidden books to help me

navigate your relationship with a non

human entity I could lead

the work of Thomas Laurien

Donna Haraway and any others that

were crossing my academic desk

at the time but

you and Vombsjön having a friendship

that was usually beneficial, like the ones I've only managed to have with human entities,

this was uncharted territory for me as a mother. And Vombsjön in the late 2030s was, well,

quite frankly, they were, well, they were, they were pissed off. Pissed off enough to even create

a legal battle with the Liminal Council in 2042. And during all this happening that led up to the

dispute, I was very worried about what was being asked of you particularly. I mean, you were both

Vombsjön's friend, but you were also the Liminal Council. That must have been incredibly tough.

Did you feel that you were stuck in the middle then? We actually have never talked about this

in this way. What one of the life have you been? Well, mom, it's news to you that I feel Vombsjön

is my girlfriend? I can't be true.

Vami and untold you

this many times.

Pay attention, will you?

But I'm glad you're curious now anyways,

Then what's my answer?

Well, the dispute

was three years ago, now.

The best water under the bridge

at this point, between Vami and I.

I remember

at the time, though, I had many thoughts

as the air emotionally torn.

You were right. I was undoubtedly pulled

between two worlds at any one time.

To say my loyalty lived in a space of conflict

is an understatement.

2040 here was an memorable overwhelming year.

I had just graduated from gymnasium

and Vami and I were close by then,

but still our relationship had moments

of adolescent tendency.

Vami, also the most wise,

was also new to having such relationships

to direct contact like we have had.

inadvertently and on purpose mom by the things you set off i would say i had to play the mediator

role and for a conflict that i had been bringing up was on its way oh but was i just

a teenager so the adults didn't hear me it was frustrating to be honest i think if long me was

heard earlier by more than me the year 2042 dispute could have been avoided so even though i had seen

it coming, I still was stuck being the translator of sorts for both sides. I couldn't explain the

rationale of the council's decisions to Vami, and I had to be Vami's absolute defender to the

Council. Vami, by then, had many rights as a lake who would speak its need explicitly into the

via through protection area of the Storkriket.

I see mouse. I see. And I am sorry if you felt like I was not there for you back then. I must admit, I felt like I was forced to be on both sides as well.

And since you were just becoming a legal mature age, I was doing the best I could give you as much agency and not interfere too much.

Plus, this was the same timing in our lives where we were unboxing the mystery of your genetic mother's family and the half of dozen siblings we had not found yet.

As you know, I was doing my very best with undoubtedly flawed moments,

keeping my feelings out of this process,

to follow curiosities we both had

but undoubtedly I was working out some of the triggers that this process brings into my body.

This is not something I could discuss with you at the time,

but I guess it's okay now, right?

That you're in your forties, or at least I hope so.

I think you were navigating lots of relationships that were beyond my views and controls at this point.

To be honest, I'm glad to hear how you frame your relationship with Vami.

And now, of course, I see them as your best friend, but back then I was maybe witnessing a lot of relationships,

including your first love, coming home to us and practically moving in, you know?

But let's not go into that lovely disaster, shall we?

Yes, yes, Mom. It was a tricky time to be a teenager.

I suppose it is the same for all of us, even though we had specialness that was uniquely about us at the time.

At any rate, we are lucky for us that this portion of this episode of timing has just run out,

so we can immediately continue the conversation in private instead.

Let's do that, mom.

To move on, the next act, Act 3, is going to uncover the dispute of 2042 between Vombsjön and the Liminal Council.

I believe it also can actually unpack some of the elements of the last minutes you just heard, dear audience, so stay tuned for Act 3.

If you're just hearing it, this is the Liminal Listeners Pod, and I am Elodie Landin, your host.

For this act, Act 3, The Dispute Between Us, we will be led by Belle Glass, a Skåne-Region archivist and scholar.

In this act, Belle will delve into the details and reveal insights into the events of that fateful year, year 2042, in the Liminal Council's history.

To say there was a major falling out moment in 2042 is perhaps an understatement to make.

It had been brewing for some time by then, but the apex of all the tensions alluding to in the previous act

came to a head in a litigious dispute between Vombsjön and the Liminal Council.

The case became known as Vombsjön v. Liminal Council.

The lawsuit is a successor to legal recognitions and legal cases won by New Zealand's Whanganui River,

with Lake Vombsjön practicing their rights just as Whanganui has done over and over again.

The court archives explain the following.

Public court documents reveal that in this case,

Vombsjön's natural rights lawyers argued three main points against the defender.

One, lack of consent.

The lawsuit emphasizes that the lake has never given consent for its waters to be used in this way.

It challenges the anthropocentric view that humans have dominion over nature,

arguing for a more equitable relationship based on respect and reciprocity.

2. Ecocide

Vombsjön argued that decades of excessive water extracted by the Liminal Council's cooperative members, particularly Lundkommun, had formed a crisis state and put it in the status of an ecocide.

The team referenced the precedent case of Whanganui River vs.

Wanganui River District Council, where an ecocide was proven to be a crime against the rights of another waterbody.

Third, misrepresentation of voice.

Vombsjön argued that the Liminal Council had been overreaching in its use of AI as a tool to mediate the lake's voice,

and thus was defamation of character.

While the Liminal Council's legal team defended itself with the following points.

One. Human need.

Liminal Council maintained that it has a responsibility to provide water to its citizens

and that Lake Vombsjön is the most viable source.

They argue that their water management practices are sustainable

and that they have taken steps to mitigate environmental impact.

The Council argued that they are one of many inside the same ecosystem

and is a victim of the ecocide alongside Vombsjön.

2. Acting in good faith

Liminal Council argued that the AI voice used as tool to speak directly to Vombsjön

was an act of good faith to represent Vombsjön to those illiterate to direct communication.

In the end, the lawsuit settled out of court,

with Vombjön as the vindicated winner

and the Liminal Council being held accountable for all accounts,

Lack of Consent, Ecocide, and Misrepresentation of Character.

Part of the process of the case was that a court-appointed mediator

was assigned to try to mend the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant.

The judge described in their closing statement that,

unfortunately, this could not be a divorce,

as perhaps would have solved things between a human-to-human relationship.

Amending was determined to be inevitable and non-reputable.

As I remember it, the court appointed a mediator, and that mediator was like a lifesaver in just three sessions.

As they brilliantly listened to both sides and made sure the sides felt heard.

I mean, this process seemed like it was impossible for Vombsjön and the Liminal Council to actually negotiate where they could speak together again in a respectful tone.

Ultimately, this led to the waterful cooperative language, which we use to this date and which we normally use in this podcast.

So in retrospect, I suppose we were relatively lucky in a way that we got to go through this process with the mediator.

Could I would have never said this at the time?

That is interesting, Elodie.

I found some recorded notes in the archive of that process.

Unfortunately, we have the notes of only one of the three court-appointed sessions, the second and middle meeting.

The other two must have been lost in the treated flood of 2053

The recordings were kept without any individuals being named and sealed from the public for 10 years

They actually got released in 2052

Just a few months before the treated water flood devastated us all here in Storkriket

Oh wow, was that a disaster

My family has so many stories from those times and particularly my grandparents

Their home has never recovered to what it once was before the flood

Despite the flood's destruction, these surviving notes hold the key to understanding how the dispute turned a corner.

Plus it reveals what Vombsjön was the most concerned with, being misrepresented.

Let's listen in on the mediators' observations to gain insights into what Vombsjön shared with them.

I began with the voice of vombsjön and their concerns.

So the prior first concern was about the belief that they had been falsely represented

from the AI generating voice of them over the years,

partly because of the way the AI voice had been produced and made,

left the idea that the AI had really only been talking to itself. So in short, not really hearing

the Vombsjön opinions and translating that, but merely humans talking to themselves. So

gathering ideas about the lake rather than referring to the lake or actually being able

to understand the lake's position. So this circular conversation from the perspective of

the Vombsjön left with no limitations on what could be withdrawn from that conversation,

apart from the limitations of the human's own moral compass or consciousness.

And it was exemplified by the example of how speed was misunderstood by the two parties.

It was putting across the position of speed that on one level,

its level of comprehension of things,

there was very fast because it engulfs objects.

And so there is and takes it makes it part of itself.

So that's on one level of those things, their comprehension was fast and speedy.

but also on a different level because of the way the water works with its freezing and breaking up

and changing the face of the earth. In that way, it's a slower process. And humanity's speed at

doing some of these things in some ways, we're saying, was slower and faster. And that ability

to change their speed into the Vombsjön thinking had never really truly been comprehended or worked

for. [Elodie] If I may break in here, this misunderstanding about speed was just one symptom of a larger

communication gap. I can tell you that. It's no wonder that tensions escalated and it's a testament

to the mediator's skill that they were able to guide us towards a resolution actually. I mean,

I think this was no small feat.

While according to the records, the Liminal Council claimed they are not bad actors,

and they justified the use of the AI-generated voice to represent Vombsjön.

They state that they have always acted in good faith and that their water management practices are sustainable.

They also argue that the AI voice was necessary to facilitate communication with Vombsjön,

and that they never intended to misrepresent the lake.

They are afraid that if Vombsjön is given too much agency and independence,

it could threaten their survival and the stability of their economy.

By the end of the recording, the mediator was able to see a positive moment in the negotiations.

That was the main points that were brought out from today.

I would also notice and I felt quite satisfied with the idea that we might have a good negotiation point here

where the voice of Vombsjön would be willing to probably accept some level of water depletion,

water being taken from its body, as long as we could, we in the Liminal Council and humanity

can acknowledge misrepresentation

and also maybe some boundaries or limitations

to the speed of that depletion.

This last bit in the recording shows a stark contrast

to what the lawsuit was filed as prioritizing

both first the accusations of causing Ecocide

and secondly the lack of consent granted by Vombsjön

over the third point being misrepresentation.

Apparently Vomschen had extra touchiness

in the mediator's sessions about being misrepresented.

And what is the most interesting for me as an archivist is imagining what must have happened in both session one and three.

We know the result of all of this. We know that both parties agreed to work together as a collective, but that the language of communication became what it is today.

The waterful language developed specifically for the Liminal Council and its many human and non-human entities who collaborate collectively.

It's incredible, actually, that the mediator pinpointed that the core issues for Vombsjön was actually the misrepresentation bit of the argument of the lawsuit.

I mean, all the other media sources at the time described that being the least important thing to Vombsjön

And it really was the most important thing.

And, you know, in the end, it was really Vombsjön's willingness to find a compromise.

And, you know, this highlights how important it is to truly listen and understand different perspectives.

Vombsjön has always been a character that we can truly, truly trust and we need to listen.

I can say you are right, Elodie.

Oh, and if there is only one small aside, to add that I would like you listeners to humor me on,

the mediator should have been given a medal or paid more or something.

The results that we now know, they definitely were not being felt back then.

Notes for myself.

This was a very long day.

And it took quite a lot for both of the parties

to really believe in the other party being a genuine concern

and not bad actors or not coming from a dishonest place.

But I think we are getting that, so that is a good place to end the day.

Can you dear listeners imagine being in their position?

Two angry sides.

A lawsuit with court-appointed officials demanding reconciliation

and doing this before the beloved shared language

was even more than a word or two understood by all?

But as we know, it was worth the work.

The Liminal Council and Vombsjön now work with each other

and with all sorts of beings and entities

to maintain a healthy balance in our shared environment.

The story of the lawsuit and the subsequent reconciliation

is a powerful reminder that even the most intractable conflicts

can be resolved through open communication,

empathy, and a willingness to find common ground.

Yes, absolutely.

Thank you, Belle.

Thank you again.

This journey towards balance and understanding is definitely ongoing,

and that's why, at the Liminal Council,

we always remain committed to listening, marming, and flowing.

So, thank you so much.

Dear listeners, this is all the time we have for this episode.

Episode 736 of the Liminal Listener Pod, created by the Liminal Council Productions, as part of Project Thoughts and Yobin.

Thanks again.