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.

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 remember that year with shocking clarity, or maybe it feels like a dream. Either way, the story Rozzell tells acknowledges the many ruptures of that time: speaks their names, delves their emergent truths, and carries them forward and homeward. In returning to this time, we invoke the clarity—of needs, of values, of constraints—that so many of us were shocked into, and ask, what did we learn? What is still unsettled? What might still be possible?

For more [election season, seasonal, threshold] resources, the full text of the poem by Robert Hass that I reference in this episode, and extended show notes, visit kinwardmoves.substack.com.

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. The orchard—first planted in the 1930s by nurseryman Mr. Ryan and his wife, Mrs. Ryan, a teacher—is home to 250 fruit and nut trees, including many rare and one-of-a-kind varieties. Danae and her partner David are carrying on the founders’ traditions of working with children, sharing the bounty of the orchard (from scion wood to fruit to starts), and perpetuating the precious heritage of these heirloom trees.

The orchard is a tended and a wild place, a place where, as Danae beautifully describes, nothing is wasted and all is in relation. Ecosystems, including the human-tended ones, can find their way back into balance—and this takes time, and trust. The stories of individual apple varieties and trees, the stories of glass houses and clouds of crows, are woven, in this episode, among many hard-won embodied reflections on what it is to live life well, as an entangled being among beings, in relationships that are reciprocal by nature, if we could just remember that.

A deep inquiry of this episode, and of this podcast, is the question of enough. How will we know, each of us, when we can stop striving, pause grasping, even for a moment, and rest in trust that we have enough, that we are enough? How might we fulfill our own needs for safety and sustenance while also protecting enough for and among the other beings that share our lives and our world?

I hope the invitation into a wild, embodied discernment of enough is rich territory for you, as you listen to this episode of Kinward podcast.

For extended context exploring the themes of these episodes through a more personal lens, subscribe for free (or throw us a few bucks a month if you can) at kinwardmoves.substack.com. Thanks for listening.

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, including 10 species of orchids; a broad and boisterous complement of native fauna, including Great Grey Owls and Sasquatch; and one of the largest collections of crystals in the Pacific Northwest, including several that weigh more than 1,000 pounds.

You can see a few pictures of the crystals and the preserve on my Substack, kinwardmoves.substack.com, or on Instagram @kinward_moves. You can see many more pictures of Growiser's flora and fauna (and schedule your own free tour of the place) at www.growiser.net.

Andy’s background includes a childhood on a Wisconsin dairy farm, two years as a Trappist monk, a PhD in crop science (focused on photosynthesis in wheat), and decades of teaching. And he’s been the caretaker of the GROWISER preserve for thirty years, during which time he’s seen some trees die and others grow thirty feet taller; learned to propagate many of the native perennial wildflowers, including the beautiful Mountain Lady Slipper orchids (you can watch a great short documentary about this on Oregon Field Guide); and rescued a family of Great Grey Owls after the male was killed (by a Great Horned Owl).

I visited the preserve in late September with my mom, Joella, who was excited to see the place, the crystals, and the birds. Before we sat down for our interview, Andy took us on a walking tour of the nest baskets he’s put up for the Great Grey Owls. The immersive first third of this episode brings you along on that walk, so that you, too, can get a feel for the crackle and birdsong of the GROWISER preserve in early autumn, and for Andy’s gentle, curious teaching style in this place he’s been learning from for thirty years.

Andy says that people who visit the GROWISER preserve come away happy. He credits the trees, who are “always talking to us,” the fulfillment of the need that everyone has to reconnect to nature, and the crystals scattered through the volcanic basalt of his little mountain. I’m not sure Andy gives enough credit to himself, as the wise, patient, and cheerful custodian of this place and its relationships.

I hope you too grow a little wiser as you tune into this philosophical conversation with Andy and his place.

If you're enjoying Kinward podcast, please subscribe and review wherever you listen, follow us on Instagram @kinward_moves, and consider becoming a sustaining subscriber on Substack. Thank you! Happy fall.

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 arts in our effort to become an America that is less blinkered, less black and white, more spacious, just, and empathetic.

Chisao is a performing artist, community organizer, and global citizen artist. Her work shares the Japanese-American story with communities from Hiroshima, Japan to Cuba, and New Mexico to Ontario, Oregon. Her art incorporates community engagement and social action, and foregrounds omitted histories. She knows that “Artists, people of color and immigrants will create our New America.”

Chisao is currently hard at work directing the Vanport Mosaic’s immersive exhibit “Coming Home: A Week of Memory Activism in Portland’s Old Town.” This "cultural week of action on race and democracy," one of 14 such projects across the country, promises to be an expansive encounter with the lesser-known histories of Old Town and Oregon. Events will happen from September 28-Oct 5. If you're in Portland during those dates, definitely go check out Chisao's magic, and the magic of many partners and collaborators, in person.

In this conversation, Chisao calls herself “a warrior for imagination,” driven to protect the innate creative capacities that all of us are born with. All of us can hold more stories than the few we're trained to repeat and believe. This is a timely and rich conversation for these polarized and amnesiac times. Listen while walking or moving, perhaps, to ground Chisao's wise words in your body as well as your mind.

For extended show notes, podcast archives, and to join the conversation, visit kinwardmoves.substack.com. Consider becoming a sustaining subscriber while you are there. Thank you! You can also follow along on Instagram @kinward_moves.

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 the American West, and stories about men and masculinity. His memoir The Mountain and the Fathers, two novels, and four books of poems invite inhabitations and expansions of these saturated themes, while committing deeply to the agency and guidance of the land, which he calls “our root and measure.”

We sat down for this interview in person in my hometown of La Grande, Oregon. As our conversation roamed the fraught personal and political territories of the West, and the consequences of our layered histories here—for men and boys, for the land, for those of us who feel a little different, for all of us—Joe kept circling back to something he knows for sure: we need stories, and we can cultivate the discernment to know when the stories we’ve gotten comfortable with are no longer serving. We need to find the old stories, the new stories, the different stories, the more stories about who we are, and who we can be together.

I hope you enjoy this rich conversation. For more, check out Joe’s Notes From the Journey Westward on Substack and/or get ye to the bookstore or your local library and read one or more of his books (they’re all good). Maybe you can even catch a tour date; Joe’s still out and about with The Entire Sky—reading, listening, and lifting pints with old and new friends.

For more from Kinward, follow us on Instagram @Kinward_ Moves and subscribe at kinwardmoves.substack.com.

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 apocalypse, communication beyond the human, embeddedness in place, and embodied transformation—with a witch and some magical froglets, to boot. 

Writing and conversation are both important modes of synthesis for me. I thought it might be fun for you all, too, to occasionally get a taste of this other way of exploring and entangling with stories of this wild, wild moment we’re in, in this wild world. 

I’d really love to know how this very different kind of episode lands for you! Please leave a comment or message me at kinwardmoves.substack.com, or DM me on Instagram @Kinward_Moves.

Happy harvest season, friends. 

'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 Portland Oregon whose projects integrate equity, social-ecological wellbeing, and environmental stewardship. Axcelle is also currently finishing up his master’s degree in Geography at Portland State University, with a thesis exploring the dynamics that have maintained inequities in access to green spaces and urban tree cover. 'Shade Equity' is an essential environmental justice consideration for our climate-chaos future, and Axcelle has won the prestigious Bullitt Environmental Prize for his work on this topic. As we discuss in this episode, the forces that have aligned to keep some neighborhoods shady and cool while others bake are not always as obvious as you might think.

Our conversation ranges from the very personal refuges Axcelle has found among trees and made with family, to a headier discussion of environmental justice in practice, to speculations about how we might live the futures we long for now. The thread I follow throughout is a thread of yearning for healthier relationships: in practice, in process, at all scales.

If you love this episode and/or you’re proud of us for hitting double digits, consider becoming a sustaining subscriber to Kinward Moves, follow us on Instagram, and please do leave a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This helps a lot with visibility. Thank you!

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 thousands of years. They've also been leaders in contemporary conservation, working tirelessly on behalf of species and places ranging from California Condors to salmon and rivers to oak savannas—and Angela herself has brought a powerful voice, despite many barriers, to this legacy of contemporary Indigenous leadership. The US Government's current interest in co-management of public lands with Tribes, which we discuss in this episode, also goes some way toward healing the harm that has happened to both land and its traditional stewards since their forced dissociation.

While we don't shy away from the fraught histories of what has happened between people in this land, or the wrongs that humans have perpetrated on the rest of the living world, there is so much will to heal, and felt experience of healing, in this conversation. As we mend our separations, break old habits, and embrace new/old ways of sustaining the web of relationships that sustains us all, the part of Earth that is us heals.

If some part of this episode makes our mutual healing feel more possible, please consider becoming a subscriber: kinwardmoves.substack.com

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 has spent much of his career uplifting the voices, stories and perspectives of other Black creatives in Oregon—a state with a still-reverberating legacy of trying to make Blackness impossible. But “Blackness is equivalent to limitlessness,” Jason says, and I feel this in the Blackness of fertile soil, in Jason’s great breadth and depth of creative work, and in the rooms full of all the colors at the Black Artists of Oregon exhibit at the Portland Art Museum (which wrapped up this spring, in which Jason is represented, and which we discuss). In all this, there is an extraordinary abundance of Life finding ways through the cracks, across the electric fences, and into the next flowering of the world. Which of course is what creativity is for.

In this wild bloom of a conversation, Jason and I affirm our powerful potential to make magic through intention, experimentation, creativity, self-inquiry, and genuine human (and beyond-the-human) connection. In these dynamic times, remembering that we “contain multitudes” may help us to discern paths and ways that, as Jason puts it, “we maybe have been tricked into believing are impossible.”

I recommend loosening up a little for this conversation and riding along with us. If this episode shakes something awake in you, please share it with a friend, leave a review on Apple Podcasts, follow us on Instagram, and consider becoming a sustaining subscriber at kinwardmoves.substack.com.