Kinward Podcast

Author and cognitive psychologist Ruthanna Emrys is a big thinker about agency, and about futures, and about the technologies that influence our ability (or inability) to decide, act, revise, remember, try, and try again to make the world together. I reached out to Ruthanna because I loved her “diaperpunk” novel A Half-Built Garden, about aliens who come to a near-future Earth to save us from ours...

“If I hear another person on the Internet talking about composting ontologies without actually being in the work of composting, I’m gonna flip shit," says Michael Loots—educator, writer, gardener, partner and papa—in this episode of Kinward Podcast, as we affirm a basic truth: the map is not the territory. The map is not the territory—and, maybe it's true that one of the ways we can compost the st...

In this vibrantly alive conversation, wholistic educator Dr. Jenny Finn, co-founder of Springhouse Community School , distinguishes “the wake up call” (the insight, sometimes sudden, sometimes carried like a burden, that what we are doing isn’t working, for the world or for us) from the commitment to do, to make, to become something new. Springhouse Community School is a learning environment for w...

“It IS an illusion that everything is broken,” says Ben Stopford late in this spacious conversation with two collaborators deeply rooted in the British Isles: himself and Veronica Stanwell of Rooted Healing . At any hearth where we gather, Ben reminds us, we can invite each other to turn towards what is deeply beautiful. And we must, because “these things need tending.” Yes: our thriving, our lovi...

Last night was our first hard freeze. The summer plants are done. This year, for me, the end of the summer garden is very clearly the beginning of Crone season. The moon last night, not quite full, was a Crone moon. My Crone guardian has been guiding me through some difficult conversations in these last few weeks: conversations about accountability, power relations, containment. This year, as thes...

“How do we talk about [wealth] without me telling you that you have plenty?” Georgia Lee Hussey asks in this episode of Kinward Podcast. “Because that’s not helpful. YOU need to know that you have plenty, in order to take action in a way that is meaningful.” Georgia works to develop this inner knowing of "plenty" among her clients—wealthy progressives who engage her firm Modernist Financial to hel...

"The only stable footstep is a step that makes contact with terra firma," says Kinward listener and biologist and my friend Heidi Schmalz, in this woodsy exploration of “process not product”—of walking off trail in the tangled woods, with wide open eyes and no destination, as Heidi does every day in the summers in the course of her job surveying for rare and sensitive plants. Heidi proposes the on...

What’s your growth edge into the more beautiful world your heart knows is possible? And who's on the other side of that growth edge, calling you into that more beautiful version of yourself? Who's nudging you? Who's alongside you? I lost a very dear friend and mentor a few weeks ago, Jim Howell . He was a culture weaver: a person who used his clear seeing and charisma to strengthen the whole web o...

In the ritual theatre and “Embodied Dreaming” spaces that Larissa Kaul facilitates, I’ve learned and felt things far more subtle and interesting than what I’ve been able to access inside of more static practice structures. I think this is because I encounter an alive integrity in Larissa’s work that does not demand conformity to the structure —but instead invites integrity in response . In their p...

What have your scars taught you? If your deepest scar is a door, what threshold does it mark? Have you crossed it yet? How do you know you’ve crossed it? Mine have taught me the spiral. Snake (shedding), ouroboros (snake swallowing her own tail), maid / mother / crone, labyrinths, all great stories, the deep eddies at river confluences, the whole river, the water cycle: these are spirals, cycles o...

A tiny spider has made a web in the tiny tunnel of my scrying stone . Thank you, tiny spider teacher, for modeling tiny opportunistic weaving. In the spirit of resonance, I’m going to try this, too. Today, I’m trying it with a short, sweet, windblown, leaf-rustling, mostly unedited glimpse into a learning edge of mine, a feeling into the ways I orient my (amateur and effective) divination practice...

Before I started working with Rich Hatfield, I more or less thought that “wildlife” started with birds and went up from there. But a brood of baby birds needs thousands of caterpillars to grow, fledge and leave the nest. That’s a lot of insects. And that’s Rich Hatfield’s delightful, diverse and beautiful world. Rich Hatfield is a conservation biologist with the Xerces Society , the only internati...

“We don’t have to pattern toward fear,” says Robin Pace early in this 20th episode of Kinward podcast, recalling an incident where she flipped an oar boat in the middle of a class IV rapid—on her very first trip as the new owner of Winding Waters , a whitewater expedition outfit based in Joseph, Oregon. I know Robin as a thoughtful craftswoman of containers for connection between people, and betwe...

In this short and playful Immersion, the first episode of the second season of Kinward Podcast, my friend Robin and I make contact with the mystery via river rocks with holes in them: windows that water opened. There aren’t many people I’d rather look at water with than Robin Pace, a rooted adventurer, whitewater river guide, cast iron sourdough chef, and wayfinder. As long as we’ve known each oth...

“I think one of the most fundamental things that humans have lost in promoting and supporting and empowering the concept of ownership is connection and relationship with the rest of the living world," says Antonia Malchik —Montana-based writer, mother of two, daughter of a Soviet exile, and old-school well-rounded thinker—in this nineteenth episode of Kinward podcast (the final episode of season o...

As listeners of this podcast likely know, and as Rozzell Medina emphasizes throughout today’s conversation, “radical” literally means “of the root.” In the space of this interview, Rozzell and I consider this word—consider roots —in relation to Home, homecoming, and homelands; punk rock; the flourishes and fruits of Indigenous, African and Afro futurist cinema; the strange loops and chaos-play of...

There are lots of hot takes and post mortems circulating about why the US vote went decisively to Trump on November 6. This episode of Kinward is not trying to be another one. But, as this season in politics got stranger and stranger, I knew I wanted to have a nuanced conversation, after the election, regardless of the outcome, with someone I trusted to reach toward a bigger picture. So I asked my...

Happy Samhain : season of acknowledging thresholds, reckoning with ghosts, and feeding them. My sense (maybe yours too?) is that the hungry ghosts are out in force this time, this year. In this short Immersion episode with artist and educator Rozzell Medina, we time travel with back to early 2020, a time when, as you might recall, many of our habits and expectations were cracking apart. Maybe you...

I’ve known Danae Yurgel for several years. Plants she gifted us are abundant and thriving in our little food forest. I consider her a dear teacher in the arts of permaculture, orcharding, and a life well lived in alignment with deep values. Danae is a Tai Chi instructor, a student of rewilding, and the current steward of Avella Orchard, a 2-acre heirloom fruit and nut orchard in La Grande, Oregon....

GROWISER is an acronym. It stands for Grande Ronde Overlook Wildflower Institute Serving Ecological Restoration.  GRO WISER is also an invitation. Andy Huber established the GROWISER native plant preserve in Summerville, Oregon in 1992. The preserve began as 160 acres of prairie and forest “with a 360-degree view.” Today, its lovingly tended 275 acres are home to 209 species of native plants, incl...

In this episode of Kinward Podcast, I try to breathe and move, as well as speak, with Chisao Hata—a dancer; an artist; a community weaver and “memory activist” based in Portland, Oregon; and the daughter of two Japanese Americans who met and married at a WWII incarceration site in Poston, Arizona. Throughout this conversation and through her work and life, Chisao affirms the power of the embodied...

One guiding theme of Kinward podcast is an inquiry into what feels possible, or not, for our moment and futures, based on the kinds of stories we tell. And this is one reason I wanted to speak to Joe Wilkins . Joe grew up “father-haunted” in the “Big Dry” of Eastern Montana. He’s a father himself, a writer, a gardener, and a very adept unpacker of two interlinked sets of stories: mythologies of th...

August First is Lúnasa, the Gaelic festival day that marks the beginning of the harvest season. In the spirit of harvest, I thought we’d try something a little different today: a fairy tale, written and read by me, CdV. This story is fiction, and it's also a true story, in its way. It splashes through many of the themes we’ve been exploring on this podcast: water and what water wants, the apocalyp...

'All relationships are ecological relationships' has been a mantra of mine for the last several years. In this tenth (heyo double digits!) episode of Kinward podcast, I speak with my longtime friend and role model Axcelle Campana about the many ways our struggles are intertwined and our thriving mutual. Axcelle is an Environmental Justice Practitioner with Knot Studios , an urban design firm in Po...

Angela Sondenaa, Ph. D.—Siletz Tribal Member, ecologist and “student of ecology,” and longtime land steward with the Nez Perce Tribe—is a passionate advocate for the paradigm shift in resource / “life source” management that Indigenous voices can bring to the field of land management in this time of climate crisis. Tribes have been powerful shapers and stewards of land on their own terms for thous...