#265  Solstice Cheer: Three Friends uphold a Podcasting Tradition with Della Duncan, Nathalie Nahai and Manda Scott

This is the fifth year of our traditional Winter Solstice podcast gathering in which Nathalie Nahai, Della Duncan and I sit around our virtual dark-nights fire to reflect on the podcasting year just gone and explore what has changed for us since the last time we three met in one place. By any measure, this year has been pretty turbulent and our capacity to predict anything at all for 2025 is fairly ragged, but that doesn’t stop us from celebrating Della’s news, and sharing the ways we find stability and maintain sanity in a world that feels increasingly precarious. Whatever else is happening, friendship is the glue that builds community and all of us – we who make the podcasts and everyone who listens – are building a de facto community of passion and purpose.

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#Bonus – Seven Generations Perspective Meditation for December 2024

This meditation aims to offer a long-wide-deep perspective on our place as conscious nodes in the web of life – the journey that brought us here and the places humanity may go. Please give yourself plenty of time both to experience the journey and to reflect afterwards. If it helps to write down your feelings, images, ideas or sensations afterwards, please do.

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#Bonus – Must Read, Must Listen, Must View: Manda’s favourite books, podcasts and videos this Winter Season

It’s that time of year – when all we really want is to curl up and reflect, go inside, become the potential that will arise in the unfolding spring. If you want things to listen to or watch or read as you head into the long-nights, then these are (some of) the things that have caught my attention this year. Enjoy!

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#264  The Power of (good) Food with Nick Weir of the Open Food Network

Good, nutritious, affordable – obtainable – food is crucial not just to our survival, but to our flourishing. Knowing that our global food/farming system is broken, how do we transform to something that works at every level? The Open Food Network asks these questions and offers a living, working, transparent, compassionate system that all of us can build on and with.

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#263  Avoiding Burn Out, Fall Out, Drop Out (and Freak Out): Practical Routes to a whole, healed future with Dan McTiernan of Earthbound

Our guest today shares straightforward practices that any of us can do to help us with grounding, attunement, opening and integration so that we can be the nodes in the web of life. This is key: we need to stop trying to think our way out of this with our head minds. It doesn’t work. It’s not going to work. We need to come into our physical bodies, find that truly calming place of peace – and then find connections we can trust with the wider web.

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#262  Adaptation is Here: Launching the TrAd (Transformative Adaptation) Book with Rupert Read and Morgan Philips

As we head rapidly into biophysical and cultural collapse, how do we adapt and transform to the changing realities?

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#261  Holding the Paradox: Navigating a changing world with Andrea Hiott of Making Ways

We are not going back. But how do we go forward now in a world where the old norms are under assault by people who move fast and break everything? How do we find a place of balance and compassion – for ourselves, each other and the More than Human world – so that we can move forward in a way that isn’t just a replaying of the old binaries?

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#260  Being the Best Ancestors we can – with Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network

How do we all respond to the seismic events of the US election? Specifically, how do those of us over 50 respond? (and how would the younger generations like us to respond)?

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#Bonus: The System is Dead.
Long live the (new) System!
Thoughts on the US election and self-terminating algorithm it reveals.

It occurs to me that we are now at an inflection point in the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and – notionally – Democratic) culture that has been so successful in destroying the ecosphere. So where do we go from here?

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#259  Turning waste into wellbeing, wildlife, food and forests: Bringing permaculture to schools with Elliot Riley

Young people are facing a world where the only certainty is uncertainty. where the only known is the unknown. So what can we do to offer them the best grounding to move forward into the transition to come?

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#258  Having your C.A.K.E. (Compassion, Awareness, Knowledge, Empathy) and sharing what you learn – with Andrew Hale of Dog Centered Care

How does an understanding of what makes dogs tick, help us to understand ourselves and our place in the world? What does it take to feel safe – as a human, or as a dog (or cat, or horse, or… anything)? And how can we help ourselves and each other find regulation in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous)?

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#257  Rethink, Repair, Rebuild – with Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

How can we achieve total systemic change? And are there politicians anywhere who are ready to make it happen (in a way that supports the continuation of complex life on this planet, not the scorched-earth destruction of the right)?

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#256  The Lama, the Oath and the Web of Treasure Vases – with Cynthia Jurs, author of  Summoned by the Earth

How do we recover our birthright as awake, aware nodes in the greater Web of Life? How do we find the compassion and courage to be the best of ourselves? Cynthia Jurs is a Buddhist who has spent the past 34 years carrying out sacred pilgrimages all around the world, burying a network of ’Treasure Vases’ to build a web of compassion and care – and more people are joining her all the time. We can all be part of this.

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#255  Living Well in a Tiny House with Rachel Butler and Maddy Longhurst of Bristol Tiny House Community

How do we offer secure, safe, dry, affordable homes to all the people who want them while not breaching our planetary boundaries more than we have already?

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