RON FINLEY on Cultivating the Garden of the Mind⌠ENCORE⌡ /79
“All of us humans need the same thing. I ask the question around the world, what is the single most important thing to your life? People say, “love, god, kids, my wife, my cats,” but .000% say oxygen.
What I am trying to do is to teach people how think differently about what we value. That’s what needs to be cultivated, the garden between our ears.” –Ron Finley
Molly here, Media Director of For The Wild. My episode encore is a recent one that premiered this May with “Ron Finley on Cultivating the Garden of the Mind”. When I first heard this episode I listened to it a few days in a row. I was blown away by the universality of Ron’s wisdom, there is no one out of the reach of his contact. He is speaking to all human people and asking them to cultivate the space between our ears –our mind. He is asking us to inquire about our socialization, our indoctrination into a capitalistic system of values that perpetuate unwellness.
“What I am trying to do is to teach people how to think differently about what we value. That’s what needs to be cultivated, the garden between our ears.”
Ron Finley
Ron Finley is an artist, farmer and visionary who “envisions a world where gardening is gangsta, where cool kids know their nutrition and where communities embrace the act of growing, knowing and sharing the best of the earth’s fresh-grown food.”
What I love about Ron is he isn’t trying to be someone else’s gardener, he doesn’t want to manage a bunch of farms around the city of Los Angeles; he wants everyone to critically assess the values we have inherited under the great hand of Capitalism. Who and what do we have to step over to have our needs met? What kind of action can we take in our daily lives towards a healthier philosophy of being rooted in the values of nature? He wants this to be something every single person, community and society takes active participation towards building. What does it look like to move beyond the “build it and they will come mentality” towards a more inclusive “let’s build it together” paradigm of collectives and cooperation?
Music is "Nothin' New" by Equivocal (Jack Bushman) and "Sawgrass Cuttings” and “On The Way Down" by Kite Lines (Ben Chace & Paul Defigula).
For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.