Turning Season: Conversations with Changemakers in Our Adventure Toward a Life-Sustaining Society

Ready for a dose of Active Hope? Listen to Gloire Mudekuza, a young refugee, a social entrepreneur, a climate activist and a mentor in Uganda, making an impact in the refugee community. He is passionate about regenerative agriculture, climate action, and entrepreneurship. He is the founder and director of Plethora Social Initiative, a refugee-led organization that works to develop the inner potential and capacities of refugees in Nakivale Refugee settlement and their host community, developing a regenerative culture and building a resilient local community.

This conversation with Gloire was part of the Great Turning Summit, a daylong online event that we at School for the Great Turning hosted a couple weeks ago, on June 17. We got to hear from a diverse range of activists, visionaries, artists, and elders speaking about how they're participating in the movement for life on this planet. We talked about how we're collectively making a pivot toward a livable future, in collaboration with millions of people and the more-than-human world, all vying for life.

As part of the Summit, I had the opportunity to speak about The Great Turning in the intimate landscapes - the ecosystems - of our own bodies, and what Chinese Medicine and Deep Ecology teach us about illness and healing. I also hosted a panel on parenting during the Great Turning, and this conversation with Gloire Mudekuza. 

Click Play now to hear about:

• Gloire's arrival in Nakivale Refugee Settlement 6 years ago, having fled from his original home in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• his choice to focus on helping his community, and the shift from identifying as a victim to identifying as a survivor
• local farming, impacts of climate change, and the value of learning permaculture
• participating in the Gigaton Challenge to reduce carbon emissions and create green jobs for youth in Nakivale Refugee Settlement and the host communities
• how he sees the Great Turning happening now, particularly in terms of leadership - and what the Great Turning means to him

plus more!

This conversation was powerful for me, and for many who attended the Summit. I hope you too enjoy it, learn from it, and feel inspired in your own way.

Turning Season Podcast is dedicated to offering regular doses of Active Hope in this Great Turning toward life-honoring, life-sustaining ways of being human, bringing you deep conversations with people who are rising to their own unique roles in this worldwide movement.  This show is for every one of you who's awake to our multiple crises, feels your love for life on earth, and is finding your way to participate in cultivating ways of life we can believe in, making a life honoring present, even in the face of an uncertain future.

Learn more about and support Plethora Social Initiative and sign up for email updates here: turningseason.com/episode35

In this planet-wide, diverse movement we can call The Great Turning, one of the threads I'm personally following is medicine. I'm all in for the shift to a life-honoring, life-sustaining approach to understanding illness, treating disease, and promoting health and healing. 

Ruby Daniels is part of this shift, too, growing medicinal herbs and making botanical medicines at her home in West Virginia.

I connected with Ruby because she's on the board of United Plant Savers. I heard her talking about protecting wild ginseng, and about her mission to change the narrative of African American relationships to woodland botanicals, and educate about the herbal traditions of African Americans, which have been practiced since the time of slavery.

Ruby is the founder of Creasy Jane's Herbal Remedies. She comes from a creative and inventive family who were enslaved in Virginia and moved to the Southern coalfields of West Virginia to build a new life after emancipation. Ruby refers to her heritage as “Afro-lachian.” She spent many childhood summers in the mountains of Raleigh County, West Virginia, with her great aunt, Ruby, her grandmother, and other wise women of the community, learning about herbal traditions, God, and the plants of the mountains. After earning her Master’s of Science in Herbal Therapeutics, she returned to West Virginia, where she runs Creasy Jane's, named after her great-grandmother, Creasy Jane Pack. Creasy Jane’s offers custom-made herbal teas and tinctures, herbal soaps, and other topical herbal remedies. All her herbal products are formulated with a combination of Appalachian herbal traditional remedies, science and research and spirit.

Listen in to our conversation to hear about:

• Ruby's research into how slaves in the region used herbal medicine
• her experiences as a Black woman in her master's degree program and in the business of herbal medicine
• Ruby's family's history and "permaculture" lifestyle after emancipation
• her town's history, and herbal medicines for today's coal mining-related illnesses
• protecting wild ginseng
• the forest and garden botanicals she works with

and more.

I'm so grateful for the chance to hear from Ruby, to learn from her and to get these glimpses of how the Great Turning is moving through her in multiple ways, from making sure history is remembered to helping local coal miners with their lung health, from bringing her perspective into academic and workplace conversations to cultivating garden food and herbs. 

Enjoy this conversation with Ruby, and be sure to check out Creasy Jane's online shop, the research Ruby talks about, and historical photos of Ruby's family and recent photos from her garden. Links and photos are in the show notes: https://turningseason.com/episode34

Register for the (free!) Great Turning Summit: https://programs.schoolforthegreatturning.com/gtsummit

How about these goals: 

• Avoid human extinction
• Cultivate healthy economies of living systems at local landscape, continental and planetary scales
• Emerge into these systems on the other side of whatever crises and collapse(s) are ahead

What would that take?

Joe Brewer has dedicated his life to this question, and to a "living laboratory" of bioregional regeneration and community collaboration. He is the founder of Earth Regenerators and co-founder of the newly established Design School for Regenerating Earth.

I have learned so much from Joe. He's been a source of information, inspiration, techniques and strategies, and also the reason I've found many other people I'm now so grateful to be connected with (including Charles Upton, whom you heard from in Episode 21). 

Joe gave me a big grin and two thumbs up when I said that I frame these conversations in the language of Joanna Macy, so we have that in common. His roots of study spread wide in many other directions, though: He's a complexity researcher and transdisciplinary scholar who has studied cultural evolution, physics, atmospheric sciences, and cognitive linguistics, among other things. Joe is also a father, and someone who is trying to embody the pathway to Earth Regeneration. I know through community photos and stories that he's out there digging swales and planting trees, and participating actively in all the realities of community cooperation.

I've been looking forward to having a conversation with Joe Brewer for a long time, and I'm excited to share it with you now.

Click Play now to dive into:

• working for regeneration on the scale of larger landscapes, even if we live in cities (how did water move through this bioregion before these cities existed?)
• in thinking about sustainability, how much depends on the regenerative capacity of the land
• having children, being with children, and being there for children, in these times (I loved this: "children are such a profound source of human emotional regeneration")
• the tapestry of local projects being woven together in the High Andes Tropical Dry Forest ecosystem of Barichara, Colombia - a living laboratory for a bioregional-scale regenerative economy 
• the human species being in ecological overshoot, what that probably means about the future, and what Joe is "actively hopeful" for, in light of that
• how to have effective, cooperative groups - both the knowledge about how to do that, and the actual practice of doing it
• and Joe's words of advice on following your heart, and being ready for people to be confused

I continue to learn so much from Joe and the Earth Regenerators community. Maybe for some of you listening this will also be a doorway into what's next for you, in your journey toward embodying life-sustaining, life-honoring, regenerative ways to live in the web of Life.

Come to the show notes for links to connect with Joe Brewer, check out the Design School for Regenerating Earth, and learn about other topics we touched on: turningseason.com/episode33

"Somehow, we were only touching the symptoms, whether it's poaching, whether it's the destruction of forests, or unsustainable development." So said Radhika Bhagat about her 12+ years of conservation work with leading organizations in India, as she explained to me why she founded the Sacred Earth Trust. Radhika now focuses on reviving spiritual connection to the Earth, as well as scientific research and education, in her work to protect India's thousands of Sacred Groves.

This conversation was wide-reaching, and once again I am so heartened and inspired to connect with someone who's reflecting deeply on how to relate to both the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning – and who is enacting her Active Hope every day. 

I feel an especially strong resonance with Radhika and what she's doing for Life on Earth, and I'm looking forward to hearing what comes up for you as you listen.

Click Play now to hear us explore:

• sitting with our pain as a teacher, and letting it move us to change the things we cannot accept
• Radhika's experience working for a leading conservation NGO in India, and why she changed focus to reviving spiritual connection with the Earth
• what Sacred Groves are
• how Sacred Earth Trust has approached learning about Sacred Groves
• and why it's so important to protect both these groves, AND the belief systems that have kept them alive until now
• how Radhika has seen culture change in India since her teenage years, and what might revive a perspective that all life is sacred, in a modern context
• why a two-pronged approach, speaking to both science and spirituality, is essential
• and stories: change on the "mythic" level of human society's sense of itself; stories from indigenous protectors of sacred groves in India; and Radhika's reflections on the Three Stories of Our Time (Business as Usual, The Great Unraveling, and The Great Turning)

plus redefining "development" to include a more comprehensive experience of life, and more.

Enjoy, please share what you think about all this, and if you know anyone else who would appreciate this conversation with Radhika, please send them the link.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode32

Music by East Forest

This Full Moon, a new deep conversation with someone rising to her own unique role in The Great Turning - the role only she can play, coming about through what she loves, what breaks her heart, her gifts, her circumstances, her stories. Today, meet Fernanda Lenz, an educator, facilitator, and visual documentarian in São Paolo, Brazil.

Listen in to see what resonates with you about how she's relating to this time of ecological and humanitarian crises, influenced by her longtime immersion in Tibetan Buddhism and Deep Ecology. You might be inspired, or hear something that helps you recognize what's true for you, helps you find your role in these times, or helps you keep going in the role you're already playing. Or maybe you'll find yourself sitting with a really good new question.

Click Play to hear us talk about:

• the inner world, and the subtle part of us that carries on beyond our lifetimes in these bodies
• taking the small actions that can be felt more deeply than seemingly bigger, more showy actions
• facilitating the Work that Reconnects with humanitarian aid volunteers and with refugees
• what Fernanda did when she encountered a beach covered for miles with trash carried downriver
• and the worldview of "interdependence."

Fernanda teaches classes in Deep Ecology that weave her Tibetan Buddhist philosophy heritage into Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects. She brings an embodied learning approach that emphasizes empathic connection to our living Earth, transforming apathy and grief into collaborative action.

She started her career as a photographer, after graduating from the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2013. She has produced documentary work with indigenous peoples in Brazil, documented elephants in Tanzania, and made pilgrimages with her brother Lama Michel Rinpoche and Guru Lama Gangchen Rinpoche to Nepal, Tibet and Indonesia. Coming eye to eye with all of these beings and life forms, she aims to communicate our intrinsic connection with our planetary family, portraying both its strength and fragility.

Connect with Fernanda, learn more about the practice of Tonglen, check out Joanna Macy's book World as Lover, World as Self, and subscribe to our newsletter at: turningseason.com/episode31

News roundup of evidence of The Great Turning, for this month's New Moon:

• The Mother Tree project in British Columbia
• Tribes and Natures Defenders in the Philippines
• and Indigenous leadership on climate change in the Arctic (Native Movement, Indigenous Climate Action, Native Conservancy, as shared recently by Bioneers)

Turning Season Podcast is your regular dose of active hope, here with news and deep conversations with people following the thread of their own storyline in this adventure we're all weaving toward a life-honoring, life-sustaining way of being human in Earth. 

This show is for every one of you who's awake to our multiple crises, feels your love for the web of life, and is finding your way to participate in cultivating ways of living that we can believe in, making a life-honoring present, even in the face of an uncertain future. 

This New Moon episode is a very quick one. Since July of last year, on New Moons, I've been releasing short 10-15 minute episodes sharing news from each dimension of the great turning: Holding Actions; Life-Sustaining Systems; and Shifts in Consciousness.

I'm really enjoying gathering up all this evidence of the Great Turning in action. 

And I'm going to keep doing that. But after this one, I'll be sharing that on the New Moons by email newsletter. For the podcast, I'm returning to releasing only the deep conversation episodes, every Full Moon, where we get to really understand the work someone is doing in the world, plus what's happening in their mind and heart around the Great Turning and their personal role in it. 

This decision basically comes down to my own personal sustainability. I love this podcast. I love connecting with all of you listening. And I love all the other things I'm doing. Mothering is at the top of that list, and I'm running a fuller acupuncture and dreamwork practice than I did in the past, and now working with the School for the Great Turning to support all the incredible online and in-person programming provided there.

All while I also want to make more, not less, time and space for all the fun and the challenges of my family, community, and bioregion. 

So that's the plan: New Moon newsletter, Full Moon episodes. The newsletter will include a roundup of Great Turning news, along with links to other things I've come across that month that I've found heartening or inspiring, or have made me ask new questions, plus maybe a meme or two that made me cry-laugh.

Click Play to listen, and subscribe to the newsletter at turningseason.com,

Come back for the upcoming Full Moon episodes with guests from Brazil, Utah, and India. So excited to share these with you.

Thanks for being here, and for all the ways you play your part.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode30

Music by East Forest.

I guess I was believing some "bright green fairytales" myself - because the truths in Bright Green Lies burst a few bubbles in my mind. In a tiny nutshell: Solar, wind, hydro, and recycling do worse than not solve our problems. They continue the harms of industrial society, and divert the attention of people who want to address our ecological crisis away from what matters most.

This book intensified some of my biggest personal questions, especially about relinquishment, and my ongoing participation in destructive ways of life.

So I was prepared to feel the weight of all this when I spoke with Max Wilbert, one of the co-authors of Bright Green Lies.

Instead, I felt lighter. I felt heartened. I felt grateful. Once again, I am reminded, there's nothing like connecting with someone who's bringing their whole mind, heart, and activist body to The Great Turning. Max is a community organizer, writer, photographer, and wilderness guide, living in rural Oregon with his family. He has been part of grassroots political work for 20 years.

He dove right in with me to: 

• what he loves about being alive
• what's breaking his heart
• his take on the "Business as Usual" story, emphasizing the short-term advantages gained by those who are willing to desecrate the living Earth and oppress other people
• his background in labor activism, and how we've come further now than simply wanting more just distribution of industrial measures of economic wealth
• the cautionary tale of the insatiable spirit of Wetiko, or Windigo (as described in the books Columbus and Other Cannibals, and Braiding Sweetgrass, among others), and the possibility of co-creating different culture by telling different stories
• how it's not that easy or obvious to relinquish the ecocidal aspects of the lifestyles we currently enjoy - and how social change has always been messy
• the campaign to protect the Nevada area known in English as Thacker Pass, and in Paiute as Peehee Mu’huh, from becoming an open pit lithium mine
• looking around wherever you are to find something worth fighting for
• and a future we can't imagine yet, knowing we can be creative about how we transform.

I have so much appreciation for the work Max is doing in the world, and deep gratitude for this wide-ranging conversation. Hit Play now, and after you listen, come to the show notes for links to the books we mention, more about protecting Thacker Pass / Peehee Mu'huh, and great resources from Max.

Let's carry the weight together, and keep enacting our active hope.

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode29

Here at the new beginning marked by the Lunar New Year, come back with me to the beginning of Turning Season Podcast, for what is still one of my favorite conversations yet, with dreamworker, beekeeper, and new mother, Ariella Daly.

A warm hello to all of you who've started listening since this show was born. I know not everyone has gone back to Episode 1 - so please join me in enjoying this rich conversation. If you've heard it before, listen again and let me know what strikes you this time!

We can each be guided by what we love, and by what breaks our hearts. Ariella Daly's heart is with the bees.

If you've listened to The Dreamers' Den series, you heard Ariella in Episode 31, speaking about dream mirroring, bee shamanism, and the dreamweave of the earth.

She joined me again in Autumn 2021 to kick off Turning Season Podcast, opening her heart about how she relates to this time of ecological crisis and possibility, humans as a part of nature, and teaching natural beekeeping.

Click Play to hear us talk about:

• the 3 stories of our time -- Business as Usual, The Great Unravelling, and The Great Turning -- and how these three stories are playing out for bees, and for beekeepers.
• the differences between conventional beekeeping, natural beekeeping, and other ways of being with the bees
• the "alarm bell" bees have been ringing, with their deaths and "colony collapse," and what we can do
• bees on almond trees and bees on city rooftops
• what it feels like to bring a child into the world while feeling great love for life on Earth, and going through times of ecological apathy and dread
• and looking through multiple lenses to realize there are no simple answers, so we focus less on policing each other or exiting a destructive system, and more on nourishing new ways of life

You'll hear the voice of Ariella's baby, too (6 months old at the time of this conversation), and hear her get distracted by the beauty of leaves outside the window. I love those moments, because no matter what else we're focused on, parenthood and trees in the wind are present too, all the time.

Subscribe to Turning Season Podcast to get every dose of active hope. Returning to this conversation now in February 2023, I'm thrilled by how this expanded podcast has grown and is fulfilling the original vision: bringing you into conversation with healers, changemakers, visionaries, wisdom-keepers, and all kinds of people doing the on-the-ground work of The Great Turning.

Show notes and resources: turningseason.com/episode28

Music by East Forest

Which is easier to feel in your own mind and body: 

The sense of living in The Great Turning (aka, our transition toward a life-sustaining way of being human on earth), or the feeling of "Business as Usual," a way of being human that values being productive, consuming, succeeding, and never feeling like you've done enough or have enough?

My guest in today's Full Moon episode, Nisha Mody, explores with me how these different stories live in our bodies and minds, and play out in our lives. She brings her experience as a feminist healing coach, writer and speaker. 

In her work, Nisha explores the intersection of anti-oppression, intergenerational healing and relationship. She helps people sit with their feelings, claim their agency, and relate to the world with care.

Click Play now to hear us talk about:

• relational vs. transactional connections (with other people, our own bodies, the Earth) 
• some of the mindsets and the medicines her parents brought with them when they immigrated from India
• feeling like a failure, and mixing up your "work" with your "worth"
• your healing story as a massive, epic love story...
• ...and how that doesn't mean it only includes loving, loveable moments; just like The Great Turning, which is an adventure story, full of positive change but also peril and heartbreak

and lots more. 

I have very much enjoyed getting to know Nisha over the last year and a half or so. I find her writing and coaching to be such a heartening example of The Great Turning taking place within someone in their own unique way. 

I especially appreciate that even though she doesn't present her work as being particularly about ecology, or Nature, or Earth-connection, she brings her own connection with the Earth to her work, and supports clients in tending to theirs.

Of course, I celebrate each and every one of us who does describe our work in terms of ecology and Earth-love - but I am also excited to see this sense of interconnection and reciprocity with the rest of the living Earth woven into all kinds of work and ways of life. 

And bonus: In one of Nisha's former careers, she was a librarian, so she has great book recommendations. You can find the books she mentioned in our conversation and others she recommends in the show notes at turningseason.com/episode27.

You'll also find links there to Nisha's website and Instagram.

If you're listening to this episode close to the date it comes out, you still have time to sign up for a free online workshop I'm hosting on Tuesday, January 10th called:

Keep it Moving: Practical Wisdom from Chinese Medicine and Deep Ecology about your Emotions, Your Health, and the State of our World. 

Come to turningseason.com/moving to sign up to attend live, or get access to the recording. 

I'll share with you a Chinese Medicine-inspired way of looking at stress and stress relief that might be new to you, explain how different emotions affect the body differently, and how our physical health also affects our emotions, plus teach you a couple of practical techniques from self-acupressure massage and qigong for moving the stagnation caused by emotional stress.

We'll also do a little bit of the Work that Reconnects and explore how Joanna Macy and a Deep Ecology perspective teach us how our emotions about what's happening in the world can help us serve and make change - how our human emotions might be a crucial way that life on earth sustains itself. 

Sign up at turningseason.com/moving to attend live or have access to the recording.

Turning Season Podcast is here to bring you regular doses of Active Hope, through news and deep conversations about our adventure toward a life-honoring, life-sustaining way of being human on Earth. This show is for every one of you who's awake to our multiple crises, feels your love for life on Earth, and chooses to participate in cultivating ways of life we can believe in, making a life honoring, present, even in the face of an uncertain future. 

Hosted by me, Leilani Navar. I facilitate the Work that Reconnects, I practice acupuncture and dreamwork, and I believe in the power of conversation. This podcast is one way The Great Turning happens through me. Thank you for being here. 

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode27

Click Play for 13 minutes of Active Hope to hearten you today, in the latest news episode of Turning Season Podcast. Hear about:

• the work of a young refugee in Uganda named Irenge Mudekuza Gloire, founder of Plethora Social Initiative, teaching permaculture and regenerative agriculture to fellow refugees and host communities
• Fossil Free Research campaigns to get universities to break ties with oil and gas companies - and never let them fund research on climate, energy, or environmental studies
• and the Declaration of Revolutionary Love, written by civil rights leader and visionary Valarie Kaur

Turning Season Podcast is here to bring you news and deep conversations about our adventure toward a life-honoring, life-sustaining way of being human on Earth. This show is for every one of you who's awake to our multiple crises, feels your love for life on Earth, and chooses to participate in cultivating ways of life we can believe in, making a life-honoring present even in the face of an uncertain future.

Hosted by Leilani Navar, acupuncturist, dreamworker, and facilitator of the Work that Reconnects.

Free workshop January 10: Keeping it Moving: Practical Wisdom from Chinese Medicine and Deep Ecology on Your Emotions, Your Health, and the State of Our World

Show notes: turningseason.com/episode26