We are kicking the podcast off this year with a warm spring

offering from Dan and a few Willow trees up at Ghostwood Down.

‘Ghostwood Down?’ You may be wondering - where is that… what is that?

Well, we welcome you friend

Up into the hills surrounding Bath.

There rests a magical Ghostwood - a land which was once the place of a great forest

A land riddled with scars, gold dust, earnest joy and deep sorrow.

On this land we are slowly nurturing a return to woodland, while honouring the place as it is now.

The ghost of a wood. Hence Ghostwood.

And as it is downland , well… you guessed it... Ghostwood Down.

Anyway enough of my attempts to ramble lets get into the real ramble.

Today’s episode is a little unusual.

Unusual you may ask? Thank god I hear you say - ‘that’s why I am bloody subscribed to this podcast.

Because the world… Well, the world is a little more than unusual, it’s quite frankly insane.

Insanity is kind of why Dan has chosen to make this episode.

The rigidness and immediacy that feels expected of us to make sense of the world around us and in us is so ludicrous that often we feel like we don’t have the words to express them.

And that’s where Rambling comes in.

Rambling almost has a negative connection…

To ramble is to be indecisive.

To ramble is to not know what you’re talking about.

To ramble is not know.

But, what if that’s what we need in these times?

To not know?

So, if you’ve read this far, go give Dan a listen - you may be surprised by how infectious the ramble can be.

Rambling on:

Rambling as social technology

Ghostwood Down  - place of intergenerational regeneration

Exhaustion of life within collapsing modernity

Psychopathic war mongering leaders

Tuning into Hedge Media

‘Unhoming’ - hat tip @Ece Temelkuran

A politics of care and community

Belonging

Liminal spaces for creativity and connection

Willow trees

Enjoy

I originally recorded this episode with Chris Hines, EP 17, seven years ago in 2019.

I’ve decided to repost it now.

This week in the UK we had the launch of the Channel 4 real life drama series - Dirty Business

A three part doc-drama based on a decade-long investigation into England’s water companies, it follows the story of two unlikely citizen detectives who notice that the fish in their local river are dying and are determined to find out why.

Telling the real stories of whistleblowers and victims who believe their lives have been destroyed after encountering sewage polluted water, Dirty Business is a factual drama investigating one of the biggest corporate scandals in British history.

And it is well worth a watch.

It also features Chris Hines (through an actor) - surfer, environmentalist, sustainability innovator who over 35 years ago co-founded environmental surf charity Surfers Against Sewage in Cornwall UK.

Their work has been pivotal over the years in connecting the s**t and pollution in the British seas and rivers to the gross negligence of the privatised water companies, extractive economics and short term politics.

This conversation I hosted with Chris in Dublin back in 2019 explores that journey, what was happening at that time in the early 90’s and what drove Chris and fellow founders to build out this movement despite having no real idea what they were up against and with absolutely no resources.

But this is a story to inspire all of us, that if you care enough about something then go and make stuff happen.

It’s worth a listen in my view because it’s more relevant today for those who are feeling outrage and fury about all manner of things around them and want to do something about it.

How with no resources and getting creative and working with your community extraordinary things can and do happen.

Chris is wise, humble, a true elder.

Let me know what you receive if you listen and do share with others that might appreciate it

LINKS

A Grain of Sand

Surfers Against Sewage

In the last few years I’ve been recording DJ mixes at particular moments in the Earth cycle and putting them out on the podcast - Earth sessions - they are a way for me to mark the season, the moment in the year and how it makes me feel and how it makes me want to move through electronic and dance music.

This is a new one. A live mix to honour this darker time of the year, and the darker times unfolding on Spaceship Earth.

Recorded in my kitchen on a Friday night after a long walk in the woods.

I wanted to start slow and ambient, to acknowledge the slower liminal space of winter and gradually pick up the pace.

This was a mix of vinyl and digital - spanning 30 years of releases.

From ambient electronica, early rave inspired house, breakbeat, melodic techno, tech house and some progressive bits.

Respect to all the artists and producers for these sonic offerings.

I hope the mix moves you in some way

Movement, dancing and connection is a way through these unravelling darker times.

We must stay together.

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.