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 of relationships he was responsible for. Remembering him with old friends after his memorial last weekend, I could feel that tending still shining in us: a touchstone for what it can feel like to be truly nourished in community.

That's precious, a touchstone like that; and what it evokes is mysterious; and there's something there I'm trying to learn. So I was very grateful in the swirl about all of this to receive the gift of a poem from Lauren MacDonald: a poem feeling into that mystery, the mystery of culture.

You’ll hear her poem in this episode—thank you Lauren!—along with musings on fermentation; a tribute to Jim; and an invitation for you to speak, too, into the great time-love-unfolding that is culture-tending.

As always, more detailed show notes and other goodies can be found on my Substack: kinwardmoves.substack.com, where you can also become a free or sustaining subscriber. That's one way to resource this alive, fraught and hopeful navigation toward that more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Your sharing of these episodes, comments, and participation are also wonderful ways of showing up. Thank you.

Send responses to the invitation of this episode, if you like, to CdV dot Saizan at gmail dot com, and together we’ll feed the bubble-swirl of this rich inquiry. Other kinds of responses—comments, emails—are so so welcome too! Thank you so much for sharing your own gifts and growth edges with us.

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 practice spaces, the intention is to root into a warmly curious, expressive, liberated presence that Larissa calls "High-Integrity Play."

In this state, in alignment with a wider web of wisdom bodies that are always already "nudging us in the right direction," structures of empire that we host inside ourselves and express in our habitual behavior—what I call “the hex,” what Larissa calls the “bad art project”—disintegrate.

Dis-integrate, as in, we can get a little "creative distance" from them, for a little while.

Many surprises and disentanglings have arrived in me as I’ve practiced with Larissa. You’ll get a short, immersive taste of Larissa’s ongoing Embodied Dreaming offering (“You Feeling Me Feeling You”) in this episode of the podcast, along with much investigation of:

* the worthiness of play

* the decolonization of presence

* and the frontline powers of the erotic and taboo

Larissa Kaul (they/them, Portland OR) is a multidisciplinary Presence Artist, facilitator, ritualist, and counselor designing experiences to support people in waking up to their creative agency and ancestral technologies of art-making. They design play-labs and performance workshops that feed Spirit, welcome home the exiled, shape culture, and reinvigorate our birthright to embodied liberation. They are a mixed race, non-binary person living with chronic pain and mad gifts, and this blend of life experiences informs how they design. Catch Larissa experimenting in semi-abandoned malls, behind waterfalls, and in the virtuals.

The majority of their ongoing offerings are hosted in their online sanctuary space: Mukta Reveal.

Subscribe to the Mukta Reveal newsletter here, and join The Artist’s Boudoir for ongoing practice sessions and peeks behind the curtain.

Check out some of Larissa's public-facing art at their portfolio here.

Enter the dragon den: “Fully Feral Lari” is on OnlyFans.

Enjoy. Play!

For more immersive unlearning of structures that keep us small, join Kinward Moves as a free or sustaining subscriber: kinwardmoves.substack.com

Gratitudes for this episode include: to Larissa, for bravery, presence, and for gently highlighting that obsessions with safety and suffering are residues of puritanism (oh no, I feel so seen); to darius/dare carrasquillo for their decolonization work, including the (now composted) Animist Arts collaboration that introduced me to Larissa; to my son for being so enthralled and so gentle with the small new bright green praying mantis in our greenhouse yesterday; to Robert Macfarlane for his wonderful latest book Is A River Alive?, and to David Naimon for his exquisite interview with Robert on Between the Covers (truly one of the best interviews I’ve heard in years); to Heidi for sending me a Moonday School musing, thank you; and thank you so much to all of you, for showing up, listening—responding.

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 of birth, becoming, integration, death, rebirth. Little deaths and big ones. Growing bigger, moving closer to center. The rebirth of shedding and the rebirth of birth.

As you listen to this short episode, maybe try singing along with the songs. Sit in the spellwork with me. What opens up for you as you sing swallowing, sing turning? Kinward Moves is a practice space for the Great Turning.

Welcome back to Moonday School.

Find more spells, embodied experiments, and skill-sharing for the Great Turning at kinwardmoves.substack.com

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.

I’m naming this glimpse Moonday School, and maybe it’s a tolling, resonant invitation—maybe it’s opening up a space for a new kind of episode, an intimate walk-around-with-me experiment in inquiry. Maybe I’ll let similar experiments fly semi-regularly, on Mondays / Moon Days. A little riddling, a little offering, a tiny curious hum to start the week.

Our seven-day week comes from ancient Babylonian astrologers who named each day for a heavenly body. Monday is “Moon Day.” Let’s say it’s a good day, then, for loony things, moonlit alignments, wave patterns, watery alliances: a good day for resonance, for walking with mysteries, for wide-boundary entangled co-learning.

Kids ask each other, with such simplicity, “do you want to play with me?” Thank you, kid teachers! Come play with me, y’all, if you want to. Listen in, speak back.

Welcome to Moonday School.

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 international conservation organization exclusively focused on invertebrates. His yard in Portland, Oregon is a little swatch of native Willamette Valley prairie abuzz athrum achomp and humming with insects. He has been working in bumblebee conservation for twenty five years. He’s a good, skeptical scientist; a father; and a fine teacher of enthusiastic amateur naturalists like me.

And I wanted to talk to him because working with him, over the last several years of contributing to the Pacific Northwest Bumblebee Atlas, has changed my lens for what effective action for Earth can look like—and feel like.

As Rich says in this episode, several times: most people are good. We want to help. And what he has done, what the Xerces Society has been doing, is given people who want to help clear pathways to help.

> Pathways that inform scientifically solid conservation efforts, like the Bumblebee Atlas, which started here in the Pacific Northwest and is now engaging thousands of volunteers to gather bumblebee data with a common set of protocols across much of the continental U.S. Follow the link to get engaged.

> Pathways like empowering farmers, restoration practitioners and other land managers to use best practices for “pest” management and pollinator enhancement on the lands they tend. If you manage land, get in touch with Xerces to learn more.

> Pathways like habitat kits and plant lists that can help anyone with a yard or a porch (you?!) create habitat for the 97% of species that are not only interesting, not only beautiful, but also absolutely foundational to human flourishing.

After all, we’d have no fruit, no healthy soil, and very little complex life without these creatures that pollinate, create fertility, and feed the other animals.

You can help, and what you give will come back to you. Anyone can help. As Rich affirms, early in this episode, it’s a lot easier to build habitat for a bee than it is to build habitat for a polar bear. And building habitat? That’s agency, my friends. That’s real. Build it and they will come.

I hope this episode lights you up with possibilities. For more opportunities to practice deeper kinship with the more than human world, become a free or paying subscriber to Kinward at kinwardmoves.substack.com. Thank you!

“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 between people and land and water. She’s a skillful steward of conversations among humans and currents and canyon wrens. I wanted to hear more about her vision and process for creating architectures of experience that enable us to be bigger together. Sturdier. Wilder.

And Robin wanted to talk to me about play.

Robin Pace grew up among the many headwaters of the Snake River. She’s been guiding with Winding Waters River Expeditions since 2013 and has owned the business for one year this spring. She told me during this conversation that she’s nearing her 100th lap through Hells Canyon. Her passion for sharing rivers with others continues to grow with every year. She loves cultivating conversation on riverbanks next to a plate of really good food.

Robin shares some of the skills and practices she has cultivated to shape experiences on and with water that help us reap the rewards of re-creation: integrate the fun and the games, call back our sturdiness, shed what we’ve grown out of—and also grow our capacity to respond well in the midst of great disturbances and redistributions.

We laugh. I’m so excited to share this new moon episode of Kinward Podcast with you.

Book a trip with Winding Waters River Expeditions.

Sink into this decadent evocation of the Year of the Snake.

Listen to our Immersion episode with Robin, Scrying a Water Way.

I'll be doing a reading (via zoom) with Pendleton Center for the Arts' First Draft Writers' Series on June 19th at 7PM. It would be great to see your virtual faces!

For extended show notes and other goodies, subscribe to Kinward Moves on Substack. If these conversations are nourishing you, consider becoming a sustaining subscriber with a $7 monthly contribution, sharing this episode with a friend, and/or leaving a review or rating wherever you listen. Thank you!

Play well and rest well, friends.

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 other, I’ve admired Robin for the way she moves through the world balancing hard-won skills, intelligence, palpable love (including a deep love for fun), and craft.

Our full conversation with Robin—who guides whitewater rafting trips with her outfit Winding Waters, based in Joseph, Oregon—will air in a couple of weeks. Today, in this Immersion, we explore a water way together, weaving several modes of sensing and understanding, from the quiet center of “seeing out from a cave,” as Robin describes the view from her rock, to the celebration of the geological musical bang clunk chime of canyons digging themselves deeper in spring. I hope you enjoy the ride, and I invite you to try on a few of the practices Robin and I play with for cracking the windows to the mystery a little wider open.

You can expect more practical magic in this season of Kinward, along with our usual nerdy deep dives and animist invocations.

Your ratings, reviews, and shares help others find the show. Thank you!

For extended show notes and other musings, become a free or sustaining subscriber on Substack: kinwardmoves.substack.comFollow along on Instagram: @kinward_moves

“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 one).

Antonia’s lens on our foundational loneliness—the hungry ghost which I believe drives so many of our culture’s maladaptive expressions—is the rich and seemingly omnipresent lens of private property. In her telling, “water, women and seeds,” were the first and most drastic instances of our life sources, our foundational relationships, being forcefully enclosed: converted into “property.” Belonging became belongings—and this fundamental rupture from our “life-givers” ushered in the estrangement that has left us hungry, lonely, and ashamed.

And, on the flip side, our acknowledgement of that loneliness, that rupture, is a first step toward the good work of remembering and reclaiming the commons: re-investing our bodies and our care and labor in all that we (still) share. Claiming and tending our commons is a homecoming to a vital and enchanted belonging among our fellow humans and the wider web of life.

Antonia Malchik has written essays and articles for Aeon, The Atlantic, Orion, High Country News, and a variety of other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, is about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity. She currently writes On the Commons, a newsletter about ownership, private property, the loss of the commons, and being human amidst all of it, and is working on No Trespassing, a book on private property and the commons. She was born and raised in Montana, and lives in her hometown with her family.

I hope you love this wide-ranging, curious and nourishing conversation with Antonia Malchik, a kinward spirit. If you do, please share it. And definitely check out Antonia’s Substack, On the Commons, which is a wonderful place to land any time, and maybe especially right now.

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 Avant Garde art; and our own practices of imagination.

Rozzell Medina is a multicultural artist, musician, writer, and educator with ancestral roots in Hopi-Tewa, Mexican-American, and European traditions. He is the director of the Portland EcoFilm Festival at the Hollywood Theatre, the premiere international ecological film festival in the USA Pacific Northwest. Through partnerships with the Clemente Course in the Humanities, Bard College, and Oregon Humanities, Rozzell creates and instructs college courses on intersections of avant-garde imagination, futurisms, and socially engaged art making.

Rozzell and I cover quite a bit of ground in this interview, but its commitment to radical imagination for the sake of “the world’s child” feels very complete and full circle to me—especially in conversation with the Mad Max 2020 Immersion episode with Rozzell that I released back in November.

Enjoy these two episodes on their own or back-to-back. And if you're enjoying the expansiveness of this body of work, please leave a rating and review of Kinward Podcast wherever you listen, subscribe to Kinward on Substack, and follow us on Instagram @kinward_moves.

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 brother John de Villier, whom I respect enormously for the wide variety of frames he’s cultivated to see the world through, if he’d sit down with me.

As we acknowledge in this episode, probably every one of the hot takes we’re reading has some truth in it. And, we agree, most of those simple stories don’t come anywhere close to the deeper forces that are at play right now.

This episode of Kinward is about trust. And power, and the information environment, and vulnerability and the origins and ongoing practice of democracy and staying grounded. And mostly trust—which may be the opposite of verlassenheit: the pervasive sense of loneliness or abandonment in the body politic that philosopher Hannah Arendt names as a precondition for the rise of authoritarianism.

John de Villier is an aspiring naturalist turned climate and energy consultant who is frequently distracted by history and the classics. If the world was more ok he would probably be on his knees in the woods digging in the dirt and trying to figure out how the hell trees and mycorrhizae get along so well. His life project is collecting and sharing as many lenses as possible through which to view the world.