The Returning Home Podcast

The place-connecting power of friendship   The great adventure of our time is to “green our deserts” in every sense: to help damaged places come back to life, leave our local ecologies and communities stronger, and journey home together. Give this one a listen to hear what that means…   It’s easy to see the world is wanting to change, and in fact the only constant is change… But it is so natural t...

What if the next great adventure is not in faraway lands, but waiting for you in the place you already live? In this first quest of the Returning Home Adventure Series, we explore Forming Eyes of Place: learning to see in a way that helps us reenter a vibrant, connected, living world. Drop into the sounds, insects, cottonwoods, traffic, and web of life beside Bear Creek where we sit and remember w...

What are the conditions we have to get into to learn how to make our community feel more like home?  Over the last six episodes of Returning Home, I’ve been exploring six simple ways communities can learn about exactly that:  Noticing Place Finding Belonging Listening for Local Story Sensing What's Changing Opening to Possibility Acting and Becoming   This episode is a pause to look back, but most...

In Todmorden, an old textile town in northern England, Pam Warhurst and a few friends found something everyone can do, right outside their doors, and paired that with an infectious can-do attitude. For a bit of British English and a quote from Pam: “Why don’t we just start doing stuff for ourselves instead of having a whinge about everybody else not doing stuff.” They got the whole town “unstuck.”...

How a Food System Can Learn to See Itself.   If we want to live in a healthy relationship with the places we call home, with each other and the rest of life, we have to learn how to sense a better way forward together. To sense what’s possible, we have to get out into the world together. We have to journey out and learn what is actually happening. But to truly change… We have to have a quality of...

If we want to live in a healthy relationship with the places we call home, with each other and the rest of life, we have to understand what’s actually happening around us. No one person can ever see the whole picture. But what becomes visible when we weave our experiences and perspectives together?   What might be happening around you that you simply can’t see on your own? In the 1960s, the Govern...

What happens when a story of place reveals something we couldn't see before? In this episode of Returning Home, a conversation about migratory birds unexpectedly opens into a larger story about hidden patterns in living landscapes, the surprising power of story, and how people may begin seeing themselves as part of something larger by knowing more stories of the places they call home. Featuring th...

There’s an instinct we may all have, a feeling of home. In this episode, we explore that feeling as something already present, but often overlooked in a fast-moving, increasingly placeless world. In a world where many of us have lost the meaning of home, it can often be painful, too easy to ignore, or hard to name. But what if we just need to turn our heads to see it from a new angle? What if that...

Our attention shapes our experience of the world… and who we become. In this episode, we explore what it means to pay attention in a different way, and what begins to happen when we do. What becomes possible when we notice small, meaningful details in the places we live? What changes when we begin to do that with others?   This episode invites you to reflect on your own attention: Can you see the...

Returning Home is an emerging practice exploring what it would mean for people in a place to learn from reality together, over time. This podcast exists as part of that process. It’s a practice in place-based listening, reflection, and action. In this first episode, we explore the breakdown the practice is responding to and what we're focused on next. If you’re already participating, this may help...