On July 19th, Joanna Macy, our beloved teacher and past guest, died peacefully at home in Berkeley, California. In honor of her incredible legacy and the significant impact her work continues to have, we are rebroadcasting her episode “The World as Lover and Self,” originally released in January of 2015.

These three visionary Black men, along with Victoria Santos and Omonblanks, invite us into a radical re/imagination of how we respond to our time. They sense into emergent possibilities, triangulating toward a synthesis of new forms, new magic, and new directions.

Sylvia and Ayana consider questions at the very foundation of our cultures. Winding through questions of patriarchy, religion, and violence, Ayana and Sylvia do not find singular answers, but rather a wisdom that arises from questioning the things that are deeply enmeshed in our culture.

Tyson contemplates how we may open ourselves up to being beckoned outside of the ego, and how we may resist the individualizing neoliberal urge—decolonization is not just about poetry, or word, or aesthetics, and how we must be materially and fiscally decolonial for the real work to be done.

Molly details the paths that created the Work That Reconnects, an inspiring, interactive group process for anyone who longs to serve the healing of our world in a more powerful and effective way.

Fermentation is the manifestation of biodiversity, and as Sandor emphasizes, the study of fermentation is as much a study of our own tastes and cultural transitions as it is a study of our environments.

Ayana and Stephen contemplate vital questions about the value of tradition, the importance of strangerhood, the possibility of reckoning, and the meaning of ancestry. Stephen’s questions disrupt and unsettle the status quo, and perhaps lead us to the lessons we so deeply need.

Toko-pa considers the ways we may rehabilitate our imaginative capacities and encourages us to take time and pay attention to dreams. What is internally guiding us towards our potential? Connection to ourselves, to nature, and to each other are intertwined.

Abena points out, farmers are the archivists of the land, and farmers and communities have continued to preserve local foodways—saving seeds for future generations. If we recognized the true value of local foods, what capitalistic practices might we be able to evade?

Zipporah reminds us that our bodies and their cycles are a part of nature, not separate from it. Honoring the seasons of life, of the earth, and of our bodily cycles, Sam highlights the importance of both fallow and fertile times with particular attention to how this manifests for those with wombs.

Rosemary and Ayana contemplate the ways plants shape us and make us into companions when we work with them, and consider the ways paying deep attention to the world invites us to a place of radical grief and love. How do we acknowledge change, and choose to love in spite of harsh circumstances? 

Samuel Bautista Lazo brings listeners into an insightful conversation on the value of craftwork that connects us to the past and plants seeds for the future emphasizing the radical act of creating connection and meaning with the objects we need to sustain life.

Part two of the conversation between brontë and Tiffany spans further inquiry into shoals, the physical desire to belong to Earth, agency, eros, spiritual correction, the pleasure and potential of failure, and that which cannot be translated, but instead has to be experienced or co-witnessed to be understood.

brontë and Tiffany explore sacred laughter, Black and Indigenous feminism, sexuality, liberation, ceremony, and protocol. This simultaneously intimate and expansive dialogue allows us to rethink the stories and structures we’ve been told regarding Black and Indigenous relations.

Antonia dives into the tension that exists in living in and caring for lands that have been violently colonized, calling listeners to understand plants both in the ways that colonization has affected their legacies, and within anti-colonial structures that suggest there are other ways to engage with the plants around us.

Bayo Akomolafe guides listeners on a journey to lose oneself and leave behind the ties that bind us to world views that do not serve humanity’s wholeness. Bayo challenges us to lean into the “political un-project” that is fugitivity, blurring societally-imposed binaries, in order to better understand the human territory and to make more-than-human sanctuary through post activism.

Dr. Osorio guides us into a fuller understanding of aloha by returning the commodified phrase to the more extensive understanding of aloha ‘āina, wherein the possibilities for other worlds are not only born but remembered and recalled from the long history of sovereign Hawai’i and traditional Hawaiian teachings and lifeways.

Tiokasin shares about the savior mentality that can arise when we act to address the many issues that threaten Earth and kin at this moment. Rather than being guided by solutions and salvation, we acknowledge where we are at in this consciousness and how we can challenge ourselves to give back to the Earth without intrusion.

We slow down to acknowledge the beauty and power of fungal decomposition with guest Giuliana Furci who shares a lesson in divine time, the transformation of energy, and the necessity of decomposition.