Lava flows from Kīlauea by Cedric Letsch

For The Wild presents Homebound as an offering of curated episodes from the archives intended to share perspective and guidance in the midst of a time of tremendous uncertainty and possibility.

In light of the personal and global impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak, our team has been drawing on wisdom from the archives to anchor us and help us to navigate this new reality. We understand that while society appears ripe for transformation, we are also being inundated with information that may feel paralyzing and that also perpetuates a culture of fear. As a response, we offer this series that explores physical, emotional and spiritual preparedness, self-reliance and community sovereignty.

We invite you to join us on Fridays to hear seeds of wisdom from the weavers of transformation and mobilizers of personal and cultural shift featured in Homebound. We hope that this may serve as a North Star as we all traverse through our grief and fear that accompany this perplexing time fraught with shattering of systemic injustices alongside opportunities to co-create the world anew.

As our first offering, we’re rereleasing this potent discussion with Reverend M. Kalani Souza, a gifted storyteller, singer, songwriter, musician, performer, poet, philosopher, priest, political satirist, and peacemaker. This episode originally aired in November of 2018 but we feel that these words on preparedness are more relevant now than ever. Reverend Kalani asks us to consider:

• Do we choose to be predators or participants in life?

• At this particular juncture where fear and scarcity mindset bombard us at every turn and we may be physically distant from our community of support how can we choose to be loving participants rather than engaging in the hollow solutions of predatory capitalism - fear buying, shopping as a panacea, the hoarding of resources?

In this current crisis, it is easy to give in to fear, despair and pessimism but we must remind ourselves and each other that change is both possible and necessary at this precise moment in time. We can choose to prepare and respond in ways that will sustain each other. Make no mistake, our actions, no matter how small, either add to collective harm or collective healing.

Kalani works as Community Outreach Specialist for the University of Hawaii’s National Disaster Preparedness Training Center and is the founding director of the Olohana Foundation, a non-profit 501(c) 3 focused on community capacity and global response to climate adaptation. He is a certified FEMA Instructor and serves on the Indigenous Knowledge HUI of the Pacific Risk Management Ohana, PRiMO, which works to mitigate and respond to natural disasters. He also serves as a cultural competency consultant for NOAA Pacific Services Center and works with the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Working Group and Rising Voices Indigenous Peoples and Practice in Climate Science and Adaptation alongside the National Climate Atmospheric Research Center.

Join us in conversation as Ayana and Kalani discuss an “all hands on deck approach” to addressing human behavior and developing personal preparedness.

♫ Music by Cover Story Doo Wop