Access this newsletter in our online archives

The For The Wild team is entering the month of September in a spirit of reflection and gratitude. Our team meetings have been filled with moments to look back and to consider the impact our work has made while also looking optimistically towards a future where we take an even deeper commitment to our community.  The world is calling for us to turn inward, and we hope our work serves as one of many answers to that call.

As Andrea Gibson says in their episode, “Healing is coming back to yourself and coming back to everyone.” As we return to ourselves, we can also better return to our communities. Perhaps by diving inward, we may also be able to better support those around us as well. While our team spans across coastlines and timezones, moments of intentional reflection prompted by the conversations and episodes we produce have brought us close together.

This month, we’ve been inspired to offer some journaling prompts inspired by the episodes to share this spirit of reflection further.

This past month’s episodes inspire deep questions and options for conversation.  Write with these prompts in your journal, share them with your kin, or shout them into the wild. However you engage with them, we hope they offer a moment of pause, respite, and imagination. 

ANDREA GIBSON on the Blessings of the Wound /347

In an episode that cuts straight to the soul, this week’s guest Andrea Gibson joins Ayana in a conversation that asks what it means to truly live. Andrea contemplates the ways we cope with loneliness and the deeply rooted societal fears of disconnection and of death. Facing fear, confusion, and loss head on, Andrea reminds us that healing is a return to the self, a return to community. 

What is there to be gained from the wounds of life, from loss, from our own mortality? These questions guide this emotional and heartfelt conversation. Hard things will happen in life, yes, but when we leave behind the impulse to control, we can learn so much from simply being. Andrea’s openness about their diagnosis and emotional journey, brings depth and emotion to the conversation. Through poem and spirituality, Andrea draws us to see the beauty in being alive in this particular life, in our particular bodies, at this particular time. Their presence and attention is life-giving. 

As Andrea shares their journey connecting to the eternal, genderless “We,” they invite listeners to contemplate their identities beyond this life alone. As we let the need to know fall away, what miracles might reveal themselves to us?

P.S. Andrea was just named Colorado’s Poet Laureate and we’re so glad to have had this beautifully timed conversation with them!

Introducing listerns to her fierce devotion to community and care for the animal world, Keiara Wade, the Compton Cowgirl, considers the ways care work includes the human and more-than-human. Though the connection between humans and animals is often unspoken, it is a vital tie, and Keiara emphasizes the way the specific tie between human and horse can be incredibly therapeutic, healing, and nourishing. 

Keiara shares her journey with the Compton Cowboys and her experiences as a Black cowgirl. The Compton Cowboys were founded in 2017 by a group of Compton locals who had grown up riding together. Now they “work with horses to provide a positive influence on inner-city youth, combat negative and historically inaccurate narratives surrounding the city of Compton, and pay homage to African-Americans in western and equine heritage.”

Recognizing the importance of intergenerational community and influence, Keiara hopes that this program and connection to the horses can continue for generations to come. Compton Cowboys is about so much more than just riding, and Keiara shares the significance of making spaces for young people to feel heard and valued. The respect and accountability necessary for a good relationship with a horse is also necessary for a good relationship with each other. How might animals be our guides and companions in making the world more equitable? 

What is intelligence beyond, preceding, and following human intelligence? This week, Ayana is joined by guest James Bridle in a conversation that considers multiple forms of intelligence and ways of being. 

Bringing a rich background of research on forms of intelligence, from artificial to mycelial, James posits that it is a critical failure to use human intelligence as the benchmark for all forms of knowing. Seeing intelligence as both relational and embodied, James points out that knowing has never been an independent or alienated act. Rather, it is our specific set of modern conditions which primes us for alienation and separation – both from ourselves and from the earth. 

Separation, stemming from the capitalist and extractive logic embedded in every aspect of our lives, also shapes the ways we view technology. When those who create the technology, the algorithms, and the AI that come to dictate marketplaces and the flow of information, their logic shapes the ways that these tools are used.  James points out though, that these “tools” of capitalism are just that – tools. 

James encourages listeners to move from helplessness and fear to agency.  In the same way that human agency created these systems and methodologies, we can also harness our agency to change the way they are used, to rethink our relationships to technology itself. How we heal our relationships is how we heal the world.

In the mythologies of most ancient cultures from around the world, a Sacred Tree sits at the centre of the Earth. Could understanding our co-evolution with trees and forests be key to our human blueprint, and to our thriving amidst the biodiversity that exists? Exploring this question from a mythological, cosmological and ecological framework, the Tree of Life is an upcoming eight-week online course starting 10 October, Tuesdays weekly from 7–9pm UK, curated by Imaginal: Isis Indriya, Nat Kelley, and Timo Granzotti, and organised by advaya.

Find out more about the course and register at advaya.life/courses/tree-of-life. Join me! Use the code “ForTheWild20” for 20% off single-purchase tickets to this course. 

For The Wild is primarily sustained by listener support. Join our community on Patreon to receive access to full-length episodes, transcripts, giveaways, special zines, and other special events when you join at the $5 a month tier “Go Deeper.”

Support us here.