Right then, this is our final episode of this year.

But first up to say a big hearty thank you to all who have listened, shared and supported the podcast this year.

To all the guests who’ve joined the rambling - respect for your time, wisdom and open-ness.

And to my podcast crew who help make this a reality - Charlie Shread, Seemah Nahome-Burgess and Fin Burgess.

And a massive shout out to those who subscribe with a monthly payment to this project.

So to Episode 113…

My guest, Sam Crosby, is an oral storyteller and myth-informed guide whose work braids together story, psyche, ancestry, eldership and the living Earth.

This episode was recorded around the fire at Ghost Wood Down - two men sitting in the half-light, speaking honestly about what it is to search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly senseless.

Across two hours we wandered, wondered, and returned again and again to the mythic ground beneath our feet - the place modernity keeps trying to concrete over.

But there were core themes and patterns we were carrying throughout:

1. Myth as orientation, not entertainment

Myth isn’t a story about long ago - it’s a technology for staying human in ambiguous, unraveling times. We kept returning to myth as a compass when the rational mind fails.

2. Eldership vs.“Oldership”

A core wound: we’ve lost the adults who know how to hold the whole. Modernity extends lifespans but not wisdom.Sam goes deep into the distinction between age and elderhood - and the hunger for guidance that can hold complexity without collapsing into certainty.

3. The mythic roots of the AI moment

What if the crisis with AI is not technological — it is mythic.Humanity is generating intelligence way faster than it is generating wisdom. Our conversation suggests AI as a kind of mirror, revealing our disconnection from story, meaning and long arcs of time.

4. The crisis beneath the crisis: meaninglessness

What makes these times unbearable is not the data - it’s the absence of orientation. Sam repeatedly speaks to the human need for story, ritual and shared containers of meaning.

5. Rites of Passage & thresholds

One of our deepest shared passions: Cultures that lack thresholds create perpetual adolescence.This is why the absence of elders is so severe — there is no one to midwife beginnings or endings.

6. Stories as living beings

Sam treats stories as alive, with their own agency. This shifts storytelling from performance to participation - a relational act where story chooses the teller and carrier.

7. The danger of speed & the loss of the underworld

Modernity has flattened the vertical dimensions of being -no descent, no soul work, no underworld, no mysteries. We point toward slowness, ambiguity, and unknowing as necessary conditions for true wisdom to spread.

Sam is a wonderful human who speaks beautifully with great humility, courage, and imagination, and is doing really extraordinary work, especially the project on rekindling cultures of eldership, which we speak to at length here and I link to in the show notes below.

LINK

Sam’s work

Eldership Manifesto

Into the Dark from Becomin Crew- Register by 9th January

This is a short share about a winter learning journey we are hosting for the 4th year- Into the Dark

It begins on the evening of 20th January 2026, registration is open until 9th January.

Into the dark invites us to enter a container over five weeks, to co-create our orientation and intentionality for the year ahead in community - human and more-than-human.

It's a deep, gentle, experiential  journey.  

Creating space for connection, contemplation and creative practice,  exploring parts of ourselves and the Earth, and ways of knowing that modernity doesn't allow us to attend to. 

Its an invitation to actively reject the urge to accelerate into productivity and growth as the year begins .

To dwell instead with attention and intention in this darker, slower time.

Unfolding over 3 consecutive weeks, peaking with a threshold walk, a self paced, powerful ancient ritual on land near you with a follow up incorporation session a week later.

A time to plant vital seeds for the year ahead.

As the light begins to return.

Into the dark is guided by Dan Burgess, Ally Kingston and Mark Sears.

Full details and how to register via link 

This Episode is a live panel recording.

If you’re a regular listener you may know about a bio-regional regeneration project called We Are Avon - in the Avon River Valley in the West of England where I live.

EP 98 and EP 102 have both featured the project.

In the last few years I’ve been putting more intention, time and energy into projects rooted into the lands around me where I live.

A big part of that is a deep knowing that the future is local.

It’s how the operating system of life works on Spaceship Earth.

I’ve come to learn that nature doesn’t commute.

Nor does it scale exponentially.

As our global civilisation with its extractive foundations rooted in a living Earth is rapidly find out.

Life is inherently local.

Local participation is fundamental to weaving a regenerative universe as Bucky Fuller once observed.

We Are Avon is a grassroots movement for bio-regional regeneration rooted in the River Avon catchment.

Our intention is to regenerate the valley ‘from the river out’, weaving a culture of care that empowers communities, farmers, creatives and wider stakeholders in becoming active stewards of land and water and participating in River Guardianship at a bio-regional scale.

We have been convening community gatherings every three months to connect, share and hold space for co-creation - with our current focus on recruiting and establishing River Guardian groups along the river.

For our last gathering in November I invited a panel of guests to help us zoom out and explore a wider theme of ‘listening to the river’:

Intentionally making space to consider how we might collectively practice de-centering the human, tempering the urge to rush in and ‘fix’

To make time for listening, observing and sensing the more than human as an integral part of regenerative and bio-regional practice.

I hosted three amazing women:

Scientist, author and Explorer Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, Ph.D.

Writer, campaigner and river wife Meg Avon

Sound Artist and Anthropologist Louise Romain

All three with very different stories and approaches to listening, noticing and sensing the more than human.

This is a recording of that panel, where we gathered upstairs at our friends Finisterre Bath store.

Anyway I hope you enjoy this one, and receive something, and if you do please let us know, and share with someone else who might appreciate it.

If you’d like to get involved with We Are Avon follow the links below

LINKS

We Are Avon

We Are Avon Instagram

We Are Avon WhatsApp Community

Mrs Meg Avon

Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinoza

Louise Romain

Into the Dark - Becoming Crew Winter Learning Adventure

Meander Magazine

Tjin Tjoelkler

What if music isn’t just entertainment, but a remembering?

A returning.

A way back into the felt sense of being part of nature, not apart from nature.

In this intuitive, playful, open and wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Sophia Shnapp - an impact producer working with organisations like EarthPercent - the Music Industry’s Climate and Nature Foundation alongside the Wisdom Keepers Delegation and Futr Earth.

Sophia works at the intersection of culture, music and systemic change but that doesn’t quite capture the essence of how she moves.

She’s a pollinator.

A bridge-being.

A shape-shifter between worlds:

From the dancefloor and the woodland, through policy rooms and prayer circles, within the music industry and the more-than-human world.

Sophia is a proper Earthling,  culture lover and movement maker  She’s guided by deep purpose, and the power of music to awaken hearts, spark change, and remind us we all belong to this great big living Spaceship we call Earth.

This was an insightful, honest, creative conversation that often led to us to riffing imaginatively on what could be and I really respect Sophia’s willingness to dance with complexity, nuance and contradiction.

We spoke about music as something that wakes us up again, not just emotionally but somatically, in the body:

How a bassline can regulate a room.

How a melody can remind us we still have a heart.

How a festival, a choir, or a dancefloor becomes a temporary village - teaching us something about belonging we didn’t know we were missing.

Together, we explore:

🌬️ Music as a gateway into feeling, intuition and interconnection.

🌿 Nature as origin story - how childhoods shaped by land root the work we do today.

🎧 Culture as systems change - what happens when artists, activists and elders collaborate.

🔥 Fear, endings and uncertainty - and how feeling is not weakness but medicine.

🌀 Rites of passage & the 4 Ds - dance, drums, deprivation, and the “drug” of altered states

✨ Imagination as infrastructure - how new worlds begin inside conversations like this

Sophia asked:

What if music is one of the ways the Earth is trying to get our attention back?

That question has stayed with me.

Sometimes conversations I have on this podcast are like doorways and this one felt like that - a shared stepping-through into a wider field of possibility.

It opened up space for imagining what could be and that in my opinion is vital exploration for these times.

It’s an episode that wanders beautifully - honest, mischievous, open-hearted.

I really enjoyed this one, I hope you do too if you give it a listen.

And if you do please let us know what it brings up for you.

And please give it a share to someone else who might appreciate it.

This is how we grow together, through reciprocity and entanglement.

Becoming Crew on Spaceship Earth.

LINKS

Sophia Shnapp Instagram

Earth Percent

Wisdom Keepers Delegation

Into the Dark - 5 Week Winter Learning Journey from Becoming Crew

What does it mean to be a man - alive, tender and creative - in these unravelling times?

In this meandering, vulnerable and playful conversation, I sit down with Mark De’Lisser - poet, artist, youth mentor, and nature-based guide.

Mark is a friend and collaborator, part of the Becoming Crew action learning collective, guiding people through deep connection experiences and rites of passage on the land.

Together we explore:

🌳 Masculinity reimagined - strength and vulnerability as inseparable forces.

🌦️ Fear, loss, and love - how grief becomes medicine when we stay with it.

🪶 Creativity as survival - poetry, play and performance as acts of healing.

🔥 Guiding young men - the courage, chaos and beauty of holding space for the next generation.

🌍 Reconnection and Renewal - finding belonging again in community and with the living Earth.

The episode also celebrates the launch of Mark’s debut poetry collection, Ashes to the Breeze - a tender, elemental offering that speaks of renewal, grief and the power of blooming again after loss.

And Marks shares some of those poems here.

This is a conversation about men learning to feel in fearful times, about friendship as ceremony and about listening - really listening - to the living Earth that still holds us.

I really hope you receive something through this and if you do, please consider sharing with someone else, posting on your socials, or leaving a reflection on the substack.

It is through reciprocity that we grow together.

Peace and Out

Dan

LINKS

Buy Ashes to the Breeze via Waterstones

Buy Ashes to the Breeze via Bookshop

Mark De’Lisser site

Into the Dark - 5 week winter adventure -Becoming Crew registration

Becoming Fridays - Becoming Crew one day on the land

How can we learn to dance with complexity, contradiction, grief, beauty, uncertainty, horror and surprise without abandoning the dance-floor ?

Dancing feels like an interesting invitational metaphor to me for these times

It invites us into the body and out of our stuck heads.

It invites us into presence and relationship with life in the moment,

To be present with our bodies, with each other, with other life forms

It’s movement, spontaneity, flow, expression, vibe, response,

Response-ability.

Dancing is aliveness.

And we need alive-ness.

To break the numbness.

So on that, I offer a new Earth Sessions mix: Autumnism

For this season of letting go.

An hour of tunes, that have been moving me of late and that capture for me the feels of this season - the endings, the abundance, the darkness, the joy, the mystery.

I hope they move you in some way.

Tracklisting here

And if you struggle with dancing, it could well be our deep patriarchal programming - you know the voice - ‘I can’t dance’

I offer some words I heard a wise man once say about letting yourself go on the dancefloor…

‘No one’s looking at you and no one gives a f**k’

So stay awake to what is happening, what is ending, what needs to end and tend to what needs to begin.

Look around you, find the thing that speaks to you, find the others and get stuck in.

Love and care at the centre.

And try to stay curious with the trouble, the discomfort.

Do not abandon the dance-floorREPEAT: Do not leave the dance-floor of life.

As Nena and WestBam said…

‘We are the future, that’s the past

We are the moment built to last

We are the up, that’s the down

We wear the newschool engine crown’

🎧 Listening Invitation

What does it mean to practice democracy not just with people, but with rivers, forests, mountains, and the more-than-human world?

In this episode, I’m in conversation with Shrishtee Bajpai—researcher, activist, and writer working on earthy governance, interspecies justice, and radical alternatives to dominant systems.

Shrishtee’s work emerges from her deep relationship with the river she grew up alongside in North India—one of the most polluted rivers in the world. That grief and love have shaped her life’s path: exploring how communities can co-create governance with rivers, mountains, and forests, and what it means to truly listen to the more-than-human world.

We speak about:

* 🌊 Collapse and continuity: why collapse is not just arriving but has long been lived in the Global South.

* 🐝 Earthy governance: how communities take decisions in dialogue with forests, deities, bees, and rivers.

* 🌳 Radical democracy: power rooted in place, not just parliaments.

* 💔 Absurdities of modernity: the schizophrenia of cultures that worship rivers as goddesses while polluting them.

* 👂 The invitation: how we might awaken our collective capacity to listen to the more-than-human world.

Shrishtee reminds us: democracy is not only about human voices—it’s about rivers, mountains, winds, and creatures who have always spoken, if only we slow down to hear.

What does it mean to live—and act—when the dominant stories of our time are collapsing?

This conversation with Jon Alexander was recorded in July on the land at Ghostwood Down, just before he set out on an overnight solo.

It is raw, intimate, unplanned—full of the wild energy of two men wrestling with collapse and possibility in equal measure.

Jon, author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us, co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, and long-time mischief-maker of beautiful change, has spent years helping communities and movements remember that all of us are smarter than any of us. But in this fire-side exchange, the themes stretch beyond politics or strategy.

We talk of:

🌑 The collapse of the “consumer story” and the dangerous rise of authoritarian certainty

🌱 The emergent “citizen story” rooted in participation, connection, and response-ability

⚡ Dancing with panic, grief, and rage without leaving the dance floor

🌳 Ceremony, community, and even oaks as companions in uncertain times

🔥 How to become fully available—to the work, to the world, to each other

It’s an honest, vulnerable exploration of how to stay human, relational, and creative amid breakdown. And it feels even more urgent now, as violence, oppression and absurdity intensify around us.

Links

Jon Alexander

Overnight Community Solo Autumn Equinox Weekend

What happens when we step away from the noise of modernity and sit quietly with the land, with our dreams, with each other?

In this intimate conversation, Dan speaks with Betsy Perluss—esteemed elder, Wilderness Guide with the School of Lost Borders, Jungian analyst, and psychotherapist.

Betsy has spent decades guiding people into the wild, into themselves, and into the shared spaces where land and psyche weave together.

Supporting people into deep relationship with Earth and soul, through solo time on the land and the ancient practice of council.

Together we explore how these deceptively simple practices—fasting alone under the sky, listening deeply in circle, paying attention to the more-than-human and tuning into our dreams—can shift our orientation to life in profound ways.

This is a conversation about mystery, grief, presence, and the possibility that wisdom is always already available… if we learn how to listen.

How do we learn to listen differently — to land, to mystery, to each other?

We talk about the practice of solo time on the land—sitting out, fasting, letting Earth be both mirror and teacher. And we talk about council—an ancient, simple, radical practice of listening and being listened into deeper presence.

These are quietly revolutionary practices.

They offer ways of being that modernity can’t commodify or quantify—ways that remind us we belong.

The conversation also opens into dreams, the unseen, and the deep mystery that enfolds every life.

Betsy reminds us that paying attention to mystery may offer more than all the technologies and rational maps we’ve been taught to rely on.

This episode is not about solutions. It’s about presence. It’s about remembering that the land is always speaking, that our dreams carry wisdom, and that listening together can be its own kind of healing.

Themes We Move Through

🌲 Solo time on the land as a mirror and guide

🪶 Council as a way of listening each other into deeper being

🌌 Dreams and the unseen as teachers

🌀 What modernity blinds us to—and what becomes possible when we remember otherwise

💙 Crew questions: what it means to belong, to serve, to stay awake together

🌐 Guest: Betsy Perluss

* Wilderness Guide, Jungian Analyst, and Psychotherapist

* Long-time teacher with the School of Lost Borders

If you’re interested in experiencing these practices, Becoming Crew Collective are hosting a final Community Solo, a weekend on the land including fire circles, council and a fully guided overnight nature solo at Ghostwood Down, Nr Bath - 19-21st September - full info here

What does it take to reforest a country that’s forgotten its forests?

In this grounded and wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with surfer, grower, and land-restorer Matt Smith—co-founder and CEO of the Hometree charity in Ireland.

A lifelong wave-rider turned regenerative farmer, and landscape rewilder, Matt has poured his vision and determination into one of the most ambitious rewilding efforts on the island.

But this isn’t just a story of saplings and success.It’s a story of tension—between aliveness and economy, vision and system.

Together we explore:

🌊 The courage it takes to ride both waves and grief

🌱 How regeneration must be cultural as much as ecological

🪵 The challenge of convincing farmers to plant trees—even now, even here

💸 The heartbreak of realising that money still speaks louder than the land

🎭 The role of artists and storytellers in restoring relationship to place

This episode asks: Can we grow forests from love rather than incentives? Can we compost the logics of modernity while still living inside them?

It doesn’t offer easy answers. But it does offer soil, surf, and story.Listen for the entanglement, not the solution.