Rooted: A Podcast About Nature & Wellbeing

Autumn is a season of change. Leaves fall, the light shifts, and the natural world reminds us that letting go is part of life. But what does it mean to let go of someone or something we love while holding on to what they gave us?

After losing two dear friends in recent weeks, Susan Morgan Bailey reflects on grief, the changing seasons, and the importance of making space for both sadness and gratitude.

In this special episode of ROOTED, Susan offers a gentle guided imagery experience inspired by autumn. Together, we'll settle into the rhythms of nature, imagine a quiet gathering around a fire, and reflect on the people, animals, places, and experiences that have shaped our lives.

Through the imagery of a flame passed from one log to another, we're invited to consider what remains with us after loss. What gifts have we received? What have we learned through loving? And what might we choose to carry forward?

This is an invitation to slow down, remember, and make room for grief and the pleasures of being alive.

A gentle note: This practice includes reflection on loss and grief. Please move at your own pace, especially if your loss is recent. Listen in a comfortable, safe place, not while driving.

Connect with Susan Bailey

Website: rootedsoulliving.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susanmorganbailey

Resources

If you're experiencing overwhelming grief or emotional distress, consider reaching out to someone you trust. In the United States, you can call or text 988 for support.

What happens when we begin to think about access to nature not simply as something that's nice to have, but as part of creating environments that support human wellbeing?

In this conversation, I sit down with Amy Wagenfeld and Daniel Winterbottom, co-authors of Therapeutic Gardens: Design for Healing Spaces, to explore what decades of work at the intersection of nature, health, and design have taught them about the spaces we create.

Amy brings the perspective of occupational therapy and therapeutic design, while Daniel is a landscape architect whose work includes trauma-informed design. Together, we explore what actually makes a garden therapeutic—and why the answer depends so much on the people who will use it.

Our conversation takes us from hospitals and dementia care to spaces designed for veterans experiencing PTSD and correctional environments, where access to nature can support rehabilitation, connection, and community.

We also explore the importance of choice and inclusion: how seemingly small design decisions can affect whether someone feels welcomed into a space, how sensory experiences can support or overwhelm us, and what happens when illness, disability, or incarceration limits our ability to make choices about our surroundings.

Throughout the conversation, we return to a larger question: What might our homes, neighborhoods, healthcare settings, and other shared spaces look like if we more intentionally considered our need for nature—and made that connection accessible to more people?

Connect with Amy Wagenfeld

Amy Wagenfeld | Design

Connect with Daniel Winterbottom

Daniel Winterbottom — University of Washington

Connect with Susan Bailey

Website: rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susanmorganbailey

What happens when finding our way back to nature also becomes a way of finding our way back to ourselves?

In this conversation, I sit down with Heath Armstrong—artist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Rage Create—to explore the role nature has played in a life shaped by recovery, creativity, adventure, family, and a willingness to follow some unexpected paths.

Heath's relationship with nature has been a through-line in his journey from addiction and disconnection to traveling and living in a van, climbing mountains, building creative businesses, becoming a father, and eventually putting down roots with his family on a homestead in the mountains of North Carolina.

Together, we explore what happens when we loosen our grip on control, the stories and conditioning we accumulate, and what nature can teach us about ourselves. Heath shares a powerful experience on Mount Rainier that changed him, as well as the ways intuition, synchronicity, and creativity have shaped his understanding of his relationship with the natural world.

We also talk about connection—not only with nature, but with one another—and what Heath discovered about the importance of community after years spent moving through wild places.

Throughout the conversation, one idea continues to surface: perhaps reconnecting with nature isn't about finding something outside ourselves, but remembering that we were never separate from it in the first place.

If you've ever wondered what might change when we begin to see ourselves as part of nature rather than apart from it, this conversation offers an expansive and sometimes unexpected place to explore that question.

Connect with Heath Armstrong

Website: heatharmstrong.com

Rage Create: ragecreate.com

Connect with Susan Bailey

Website: rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susanmorganbailey

What if thriving doesn't look the same in every season?

As the fall equinox marks the transition from summer into fall, I've been noticing what's changing outside my window—and what those changes stir in me. The days are getting shorter. Flowers are fading. Leaves are beginning to change. Some things are reaching the end of their lives.

And yet, nature isn't failing. Nature is cycling.

In this Sit with SMB episode, I explore what the changing seasons might show us about our own rhythms of activity, transition, rest, and growth. Summer's abundance and outward energy look a lot like the qualities our culture tends to celebrate: productivity, achievement, expansion, visible progress. But nature doesn't remain in summer mode all year long.

Fall begins a movement toward rest. The living world releases, conserves, simplifies, and responds to changing conditions. Winter brings dormancy and rest, but also gestation—life continuing in ways we may not be able to see.

I reflect on my own tendency to keep going, even when my body or circumstances are asking for something different, and on what I'm learning from experimenting with doing less and allowing more space into my life.

Perhaps thriving isn't about maintaining the same pace through every season. Perhaps it's about becoming more attentive to the conditions we're actually living in—both in the natural world and in the seasons of our own lives.

As we move into fall, I'm sitting with a question:

What changes when we stop asking this season to be something other than what it is?

Connect with Susan Bailey

Website: rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susanmorganbailey

What if human connection isn't simply good for us, but essential to how we're designed to live?

Susan has long said that social support is life support. In this conversation with Pete Bombaci, founder of GenWell, that belief becomes an exploration of social health, belonging, and what happens when we become more intentional about creating connection in our lives.

Pete shares why he founded GenWell and the growing body of evidence showing that our relationships influence our mental and physical health, happiness, resilience, and longevity. He and Susan explore some of the forces that have quietly made modern life more isolating—from bigger homes and remote work to digital technology and the convenience of never having to leave our front doors.

But this isn't simply a conversation about loneliness. It's about what we can do.

Pete offers a refreshingly accessible approach: talk to a stranger. Reach out to an old friend. Create opportunities to gather. Put down the phone. Be willing to go first.

And through the lens of Rooted, another question emerges. Nature is built on relationship and interdependence; healthy ecosystems don't thrive in isolation. If humans are nature, what might that remind us about our own need for one another?

Perhaps connection isn't something extra we add to a healthy life. Perhaps it is one of the conditions that makes a healthy life possible.

• GenWell
• GenWell Weekend
• Talk to a Stranger Week
• Book - The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
• Book - Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
• Research by Dr. Gillian Sandstrom and Dr. Nicholas Epley

Pete Bombaci is the founder of GenWell, a social health organization working to educate, empower, and catalyze people around the importance of face-to-face social connection.

Website: GenWell.ca

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petebombaci/

Continue the conversation with Susan Morgan Bailey and explore more from ROOTED: A Podcast About Nature & Wellbeing.

Website: https://www.rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanmbailey/

What happens when we stop trying so hard to arrive?

Last May, I walked the English Way of the Camino de Santiago—about 73 miles across northern Spain. I've shared one part of that story before: on day three, after the noise in my head finally began to quiet, I had the realization that eventually became the seed of ROOTED: This is where I belong.

But there was more to that walk.

There were three women who became unexpected companions and showed me something about moving through life without rushing. There were feathers that appeared in my path each day, a very unsubtle snail when I desperately wanted a sign, and a bird that seemed to reinforce the message: slow down. And there was a word I kept encountering along the way—volar, Spanish for "to fly"—that eventually found a permanent place on my wrist.

Now, as I prepare to return to the Camino and walk part of the Portuguese Way, I'm thinking about that experience differently.

This time, I'm not walking all the way to Santiago. I'm not organizing the journey around reaching the cathedral at the end. I'm walking eight days simply to walk—to be outside, to carry less, and to see what happens when I give the slowing down a little more time.

Maybe that is part of what it means to walk through life as a pilgrim: to loosen our grip on the destination, pay attention to what appears along the way, and trust that sometimes the path gives us something different from what we planned—but closer to what we needed.

Buen Camino. Connect with Susan: Website: https://www.rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanmbailey/

What if some of our struggles with workplace wellbeing aren't really about individuals at all—but about the systems we've created around them?

My guest today is my friend Elizabeth Bachrad, a population health practitioner whose work explores the relationship between work and health, and the policies, practices and systems that shape whether people are able to thrive at work and beyond it.

Our conversation began with an idea Elizabeth had been thinking about: what it might mean for organizations to move from "ego systems"—organized largely around their own performance, efficiency and value—to ecosystems that recognize their interdependence with employees, communities, society and the natural world.

From there, we explored what changes when we begin to see organizations less as machines to control and optimize and more as living systems.

We talked about the difference between providing people with wellbeing resources and creating conditions that actually support wellbeing. We explored resilience, worker voice, human sustainability, leadership as stewardship, and why an ecosystem isn't necessarily a healthy ecosystem.

And we kept returning to the relationships between people and the systems they inhabit.

Perhaps the question isn't only how we help individuals become healthier or more resilient. Perhaps we also need to ask whether the systems around them are healthy—and what conditions might allow the whole system to thrive.

Impact Management Platform A collaborative resource for organizations working to manage their impacts on people and the planet. https://impactmanagementplatform.org/

B Corp Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet B Lab's standards for social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. https://www.bcorporation.net/

Benefit Corporations / Public Benefit Corporations A legal corporate structure designed to embed consideration of stakeholders—not only shareholders—into company governance. Terminology and legal requirements vary by jurisdiction. https://usca.bcorporation.net/benefit-corporation/

LinkedIn: Elizabeth Bachrad

ROOTED: A Podcast About Nature & Wellbeing

What do you notice when you stop trying to get somewhere and simply pay attention to where you are?

In this WALK WITH ME episode of Rooted, Susan invites you on a guided sensory scavenger hunt — a chance to slow your pace, step outside if you're able, and experience the place around you through sound, sight, smell, touch, and even taste.

The walk begins with a simple check-in: How much tension are you carrying? How rushed do you feel? Where is your mind right now? From there, the invitation is simply to notice — a sound you haven't heard today, something you might normally walk past, the texture of bark or stone, the scent carried on the air.

And then the walk becomes a little more playful.

What might this place feel like if you experienced it as another creature? A fox moving quietly through familiar territory. A bird seeing the shape of the landscape from above. A rabbit alert to every vibration beneath its feet.

For a few moments, the scavenger hunt becomes something more than a search for things to notice. It becomes an exploration of attention, belonging, and what changes when we remember that we aren't simply observers of the natural world. We are creatures, too.

There's nothing you need to accomplish on this walk and nowhere in particular you need to arrive. Just bring yourself, move a little more slowly than usual, and see what you notice.

Perhaps the things we've stopped noticing haven't disappeared. Perhaps we've simply been moving too quickly to see them.

Connect with Susan: Website: https://www.rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanmbailey/

What if simply paying attention to birds could help us feel calmer, more present, and more connected to the world around us?

In this episode of Rooted, Susan talks with Holly C. Merker, professional birding guide, nature-based wellness practitioner, and co-author of Ornitherapy and The Power of Birdwatching.

Holly shares the practice of ornitherapy and mindful birding—an approach that shifts the focus from identifying and counting birds to slowing down, engaging our senses, and simply experiencing the birds around us. They explore the growing research connecting birdsong and birdwatching with human wellbeing, the power of sit spots, and how birds can draw us naturally into presence, curiosity, wonder, and awe.

Holly also shares how birds became an important source of presence and support during her own experience with cancer, and why she believes developing a relationship with the birds around us can ultimately inspire us to care more deeply for them and the places we share.

You don't need binoculars, a field guide, or even the ability to identify a single bird to begin. You simply need to notice.

Connect with Holly: Ornitherapy: https://ornitherapy.com Mindful Birding Network: https://www.themindfulbirdingnetwork.com

Connect with Susan: Website: https://www.rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanmbailey/

What do the dog days of summer have to do with a star? What does a coneflower have to do with echinacea? And what might a bald eagle flying over a busy city or a dragonfly resting in the grass reveal when we pause long enough to really look?

In this Walk with SMB episode, Susan follows a handful of questions sparked by things she's noticed and learned this summer. The familiar phrase "dog days of summer" turns out to carry an ancient connection to Sirius, the Dog Star. A coneflower and echinacea reveal themselves as different ways of knowing the same plant. An unexpected bald eagle challenges assumptions about where nature belongs. And a close encounter with a female darner dragonfly becomes an opportunity to marvel at something as seemingly ordinary—and astonishing—as a pair of wings.

Together, these observations lead to a larger question about curiosity, knowledge, and wonder. We often think explanation removes mystery: once we know how something works or what it's called, perhaps it becomes less remarkable. But what if the opposite is true?

Looking closely can reveal how much more there is to notice. Learning one thing can lead to another question. And sometimes understanding a little more about the living world doesn't diminish wonder at all—it deepens it.

During these dog days of summer, what are you curious about right now? What might become visible if you looked at something familiar a little more closely?

Resources Mentioned

Sirius (the Dog Star) and the origins of the "dog days of summer"

Echinacea / coneflowers

Darner dragonflies

Connect with ROOTED

https://www.rootedsoulliving.com/rooted-podcast