Kinward Podcast

Happy Strawberry Moon, happy week of Juneteenth, happy solstice, friends. It was snowing a few weeks ago when I recorded this conversation with Jason Graham ( @mosleywotta ): painter, musician, poet, storyteller; multidisciplinary Creative Laureate of Bend, Oregon; traverser through "the ecology of conversation"; life-listener; partner and father of three; and extraordinary creative spirit . Jason...

Kirsten Shockey, co-founder of the Fermentation School and writer at Fermenting Change , reminds us in this episode of Kinward, “ humans play to learn.” Jakob, Kirsten’s son and founder of Project Beaver , adds later, “I’m very interested in avoiding getting pigeonholed as an expert in anything, and” (to his mom) “I think you are too—because we’re not. We’re just playing in these spaces.”  Mother...

This delicious Immersion episode with Jakob Shockey, founder of Project Beaver , and his mom Kirsten, co-founder of The Fermentation School , is a beautiful taste of the rooting and belonging that one family has woven to support and nourish their good work in the world. Kirsten and Jakob share a morning wakeup blessing, a simple practice for connecting and grounding with each other at the end of t...

Renee Patrick is a triple-crown through-hiker with over 20 years of experience planning, hiking, and improving long-distance trails. She is an environmentalist and passionate outdoor enthusiast who believes that long-distance hiking can deepen our relationship with the landscapes and environmental issues that desperately need more advocates. Intentional Hiking , one of Renee’s current projects, af...

Happy Beltane, dear ones. In my neck of the woods, blackbird songs are giving way to frog songs, the garden is popping, and my druid baby just turned two. For many reasons—deep and fresh, ancient and young, celebratory and fiery—Beltane feels like the right day to release this loving, vulnerable, intimate episode with Lauren Macdonald of Ripple Medicine: my dear friend, beloved, and teacher; herba...

Lauren Macdonald—herbalist and doula, home-tender, poet, labyrinth-walker, singer, nurse, and caretaker of a “dynamic and evolving medicine practice,” Ripple Medicine —guides us generously into a water-body meditation in this short full moon Practicum 🌕 Our full episode with Lauren—in which we invite alliances with the more-than-human world, explore sensitivity as a superpower, and honor the life...

Kevin Swift practices low tech process based restoration, which is to say, he uses simple tools, a collaborative ethic, and a lot of humility to coax damaged and simplified waterways into fuller expressions of their aliveness. This is potent, rewarding work that is needed everywhere. The questions that led me to reach out to Kevin are perennial questions of this podcast: how do we act practically...

I encountered Kevin Swift—a restoration practitioner, founder of Swiftwater Design , who describes himself as a “two-legged beaver”—at a beaver conference in western Oregon last fall, when I was still working my conservation job. Among many excellent presentations by many humans lauding the lifeways of this continent’s most extraordinary rodent engineer, Kevin’s talk stood out for its sensory embo...

Just before Equinox, my family and I spent an evening with Bobby Fossek, Brosnan Spencer, and their daughter Meadow. These neighbors-across-the-mountains are the space-holders and weavers of Naknuwiłama Tiiča̓mna (Caretakers of the Land) , an Indigenous-led organization based in eastern Oregon, serving land and community: the Native people and species of the Big River (the Columbia), and the rela...

I’m so excited to share this conversation with Craig Childs—adventure journalist, desert devotee, and “transformation junkie”—on recommitting to earth’s rhythms; rewilding (and domesticating) ourselves in ways that are responsive and responsible; and opening all the doors. We know that in times of chaos and complexity, new orders emerge. Craig drops us into this conversation by immersing us in a r...

Genevieve Flanagan owns and operates the one-woman show the Urban Acre Homestead : an urban farm in Northeast Portland, focused on serving fresh, beautiful, and nourishing food to neighbors. The Urban Acre is a diversified small farm with vegetables (especially greens), fruit and berries, perennial edibles, medicinal and culinary herbs, and a fledgeling tea plantation.  If you listened to our Prac...

Genevieve Flanagan is a resilience thinker, an urban farmer (owner-operator of the one-woman show the Urban Acre Homestead in Portland, Oregon), and is "not a practicing wiccan" — just an opportunistic one, we might say, since the pagan high holidays happen to map right onto the farming calendar. This short "practicum" episode, which we recorded in person at the farm on Imbolc weekend, on a sunny...