Grief, Song, and Multi-Species liberation with Alexandra "ahlay" Blakely

Grief, Song, and Multi-Species liberation with Alexandra "ahlay" Blakely

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Alexandra "ahlay" Blakely [https://www.healingattheroots.com/aboutartist], singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, and community organizer, and the creator of WAILS: Songs for Grief [https://open.spotify.com/album/3woXWO4dlKR3XjrprstZAE?si=AvF_2IZmQGebXHTw6g8aPw], an album recorded with 200 voices entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by whales and Francis Weller's five gates of grief. Drawing from the lineages of movement song, Dagara grief ritual, and a lifelong relationship with whales, Alexandra has spent years developing her practice at the intersection of collective mourning, ancestral remembrance, and the emerging movement for the rights of nature. Together, they explore what it means to grieve what we love as an act of reverence — and what it takes to carry that grief without being destroyed by it. Alexandra reflects on the land and water that raised her, the dreams that called her home after eleven years in Mexico, and a vision of multi-species liberation rooted in the belief that humans belong to this earth — and have a role within it urgently worth reclaiming. Audio note: Alexandra's world was very alive during this recording. You will hear sounds of planes, cars, and dogs. Content Warning: Discussion of suicidal ideation starting at 28:01 to 28:29. Please listen with kind care for yourself. Connect with Alexandra: * Website: healingattheroots.com [https://www.healingattheroots.com/] * Album: WAILS: Songs for Grief [https://open.spotify.com/album/3woXWO4dlKR3XjrprstZAE?si=AvF_2IZmQGebXHTw6g8aPw] * Featured Song: All The Places * Featured Song: Sacred Wild One Mentioned in the episode: * Movie: Free Willy [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106965/] * Movie: Whale Rider * Colleague: Linda Thai [https://www.linda-thai.com/] * Colleague: Laurence Cole [https://www.laurencecole.com/] * Wiki: the Dagaaba people [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagaaba_people] * Colleague: Joanna Macy [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/podcast/episode/2129b68e/remembering-the-world-as-lover-and-as-self-with-joanna-macy-in-memoriam] * Book: Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9780393242133] * Colleague: César Rodríguez-Garavito [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/podcast/episode/294f407a/legalizing-kinship-with-cesar-rodriguez-garavito] * Colleague: Lyla June [https://www.lylajune.com/] * TedX Talk: 3000-year-old solutions to modern problems - Lyla June [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH5zJxQETl4] * Book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9781571313560] * Colleague: Francis Weller [https://www.francisweller.net/] * Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9781583949764] * Poem: Sweet Darkness by David Whyte [https://onbeing.org/poetry/sweet-darkness/] Connect with the Center: * Website: wildspirituality.earth [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/] * Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com [https://www.victorialoorz.com/] * Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth * Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality [https://linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabQnFH2mJNHuo1tVJJ1X2SeGf8ZmtCDBXot0SdAPia86Y581AVrher4knw_aem_VYrMeI7I3_68p8VzciukoA] * Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality [https://www.instagram.com/center_for_wild_spirituality/] Timestamps: * 0:00 – Introduction  * 3:44 – Interview Begins  * 8:08 – Love For Whales  * 10:55 – Grief Medicine  * 11:54 – Alexandra's Movements Music  * 13:35 – Song: All The Places * 18:30 – Ancestral Memory  * 19:54 – An Ecosystem of Action  * 24:01 – Multi-Species Liberation  * 30:41 – Song: Sacred Wild One * 33:53 – We Grieve What We Love  * 43:05 – Alexandra's Wild Edge  * 45:31 – Wild Invitation  * 49:44 – Credits

Mentoring In Relationship with the More-Than-Human World with Jon Young

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Jon Young, award-winning wildlife tracker, storyteller, mentor, and author of influential books including What the Robin Knows. Since 1979, Jon has researched a single theme: why do some social groupings of people consistently facilitate deep nature connection, while others do not? Drawing from Indigenous wisdom traditions, mentoring lineages, and his own lifelong relationship with the living world, Jon has spent decades exploring how humans cultivate deep connection with nature, self, and community. Together, they explore the lost art of mentoring and the ancient discipline of bird language as a doorway back to the connected mind. Jon reflects on the grandmothers and elders who shaped him, his decades of work with Indigenous communities including the Naro people of the Kalahari, and a vision from his annual self-reflection practice — one that carries an urgent message from future generations about what this moment is asking of us. Connect with Jon: * Website: jonyoung.org [https://www.jonyoung.org/] * Book: What The Robin Knows [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9780544002302] Mentioned in the episode: * Book: Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9781565126053] * Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9781583949764] * Book: Guiding Lights by Eric Liu [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9780375761027] Connect with the Center: * Website: wildspirituality.earth [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/] * Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com [https://www.victorialoorz.com/] * Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth * Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality [https://linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabQnFH2mJNHuo1tVJJ1X2SeGf8ZmtCDBXot0SdAPia86Y581AVrher4knw_aem_VYrMeI7I3_68p8VzciukoA] * Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality [https://www.instagram.com/center_for_wild_spirituality/] Timestamps: * 00:00 — Introduction * 03:59 — Interview Begins * 05:07 — The Land Who Raised Jon * 08:08 — An Enclaved Family * 12:06 — Grandmotherly “Tricks” * 14:10 — 10 Year Old Jon Meets Tom Brown * 18:46 — The Naro People * 22:34 — The Lifetime of Mentoring * 26:37 — The 5 Needs For Mentorship * 28:04 — The 10 Stones of Connection * 36:24 — Needed Reflection * 37:56 — Deep Bird Language * 45:58 — Restoring Our Connective Capacity * 49:05 — The Message from Future Generations * 53:41 — Wandering Invitation * 55:49 — Credits

Liturgies, Myth, and the Age of the Wolf with Martin Shaw

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Martin Shaw, mythologist, storyteller, wilderness rites-of-passage guide, and author of seventeen books, including his latest New York Times bestseller, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us. Dr. Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University. Together, they explore the tension between wildness and discipline, myth and religion, exile and return. The conversation wanders through Dartmoor folklore, Orthodox liturgy, the role of beauty and ritual in a disenchanted age, and the deep hunger many people feel for forms of spirituality rooted in mystery, embodiment, and the living world. Martin reflects candidly on what has quietly shifted in him since reconnecting  with the Christian story the spiritual consequences of disconnection from land, and a story that didn’t make the final cut of his book — one that illuminates the challenge of this moment: how to ride the "age of the wolf" with courage and faith. Connect with Martin: * Website: drmartinshaw.com [https://drmartinshaw.com/] * Website: schoolofmythopoetics.com [https://www.schoolofmythopoetics.com/home] * Book: Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9780593716564] * Book: Scatterlings [https://drmartinshaw.com/scatterlings/] Mentioned in the episode: * Book: The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9780801071027] * Video: Ivan and the Grey Wolf [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T04fBKNpJlw] Connect with the Center: * Website: wildspirituality.earth [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/] * Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com [https://www.victorialoorz.com/] * Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth * Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality [https://linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabQnFH2mJNHuo1tVJJ1X2SeGf8ZmtCDBXot0SdAPia86Y581AVrher4knw_aem_VYrMeI7I3_68p8VzciukoA] * Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality [https://www.instagram.com/center_for_wild_spirituality/] Timestamps: * 00:00 — Introduction * 06:03 — Interview Begins * 10:56 — Re-exploring The Old Stories * 13:47 — Living Fidelity of Place * 18:24 — Discipline of the Wild * 20:42 — What’s Our Current Story? * 24:41 — The Age of the Wolf * 28:31 — The Religious Has a Place * 31:22 — Eastern Orthodox Expressions * 34:06 — How Jesus Changes Love * 39:05 — Martin’s Wild Threshold * 42:03 — Wild Invitation * 43:36 — Credits

The Grief and Grounding of a Climate Scientist with Dr. Peter Kalmus

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Peter Kalmus, astrophysicist-turned-climate scientist, NASA researcher, author, and activist. Peter's radical integrity has taken him from searching for gravitational waves to growing his own food, refusing to fly for twelve years, and chaining himself to doors in acts of civil disobedience. Together, they explore the layers of grief that come with truly loving a planet in crisis and the spiritual disconnection underlying ecological destruction. What does it mean to love the planet not as a cause but as a being? What might it look like to move from the urgency of fixing into the slower, harder work of reconnection? The conversation also wanders into meditation, ego death, the empathy required to grieve a forest, and the strange fertility of not knowing — inviting us to consider that staying in the unknowing may itself be a spiritual practice. This conversation is for anyone sitting with the unknowing of this moment, and wondering if that might, somehow, be exactly where they need to be. Connect with Peter: * Website: peterkalmus.net [https://peterkalmus.net/] * Book: Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution by Peter Kalmus [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9780865718531] * Substack: Climate Human [https://climatehuman.substack.com/] Mentioned in the episode: * Movie: Don't Look Up [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11286314/] Connect with the Center: * Website: wildspirituality.earth [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/] * Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com [https://www.victorialoorz.com/] * Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth * Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality [https://linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabQnFH2mJNHuo1tVJJ1X2SeGf8ZmtCDBXot0SdAPia86Y581AVrher4knw_aem_VYrMeI7I3_68p8VzciukoA] * Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality [https://www.instagram.com/center_for_wild_spirituality/] Timestamps: * 00:00 — Introduction * 05:16 — Interview Begins * 09:07 — The Choice To Not Fly * 12:50 — Integrity Through Life Experiment * 15:54 — Layers of Integrity Under Systems * 17:11 — Civil Disobedience * 22:33 — Unmoored * 23:52 — The Discipline of Meditation * 26:09 — Disconnection Belongs In The Cycle * 28:12 — The Holy Local Tribe * 30:20 — Aging Into Eldership * 33:18 — Grounding Practices * 39:33 — Loving Kindness For Yourself * 42:57 — Trail Encounter with the Universe * 45:36 — Encounter with Ego Death * 48:51 — Expansive Meditation Encounter * 53:08 — Wild Invitation * 54:50 — Credits

Listening Across Species: What Animals Know with Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden, social anthropologist and founder of ANICOM, a European research project exploring intuitive interspecies communication across cultures and contexts. Vanessa reflects on her years living with Maasai communities in East Africa, where immersive fieldwork cracked open a radically relational way of seeing the world, rooted in the cosmology of Osotua, a word meaning "umbilical cord," in which who you are is defined entirely by your relationships.  Together they explore what it might mean if animals, land, and the more than human world have something urgent and necessary to say to us right now, and whether we still have the capacity to hear them. Vanessa's research brings together indigenous knowledge holders, professional animal communicators, and hard scientists to ask whether other beings might be participants in knowledge making rather than objects of study. The answers emerging are surprising, humbling, and full of hope — and why recovering our ancient capacity to truly listen across species may be one of the most profound spiritual and scientific invitations of our time. Connect with Vanessa: * Vanessa's Website: vanessawijngaarden.com [https://vanessawijngaarden.com/] * ANICOM's Website: anicom.uliege.be [https://www.anicom.uliege.be/cms/c_12677327/en/anicom-the-anicom-project] * Film: Maasai Speak Back (Trailer) [https://vimeo.com/441949526?fl=pl&fe=vl] * Article (osotua): Wijngaarden, V. & Paul Nkoitoi Ole Murero. 2023. Osotua and decolonizing the academe: Implications of a Maasai concept. In: Curriculum Perspectives 43(Suppl 1): 33-46. Special Issue: Narrowing the Gap Beyond Tokenism: Transdisciplinary Search for Innovative Approaches in the Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Epistemologies in Higher Education. DOI : 10.1007/s41297-023-00190-2. Abstract and full text [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41297-023-00190-2] * Article: Wijngaarden, Vanessa In print. Secularization and decolonization of the academe: In conversation with African faiths and knowledges. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Decolonising Knowledge in Africa. [https://parnassusbooks.net/book/9783032213839] * Article (lion and cat): Wijngaarden, Vanessa 2023. Interviewing animals through animal communicators: Potentials of intuitive interspecies communication for multispecies methods. In: Society and Animals 32 (5/6): 519-539. DOI: 10.1163/15685306-bja10122 [https://brill.com/view/journals/soan/aop/article-10.1163-15685306-bja10122/article-10.1163-15685306-bja10122.xml]. Full text [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368463971_Interviewing_animals_through_animal_communicators_Potentials_of_intuitive_interspecies_communication_for_multispecies_methods] Mentioned in the episode: * Wiki: Maasai Mara [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_Mara] * Book: The Little Soul and the Sun by Neale Donald Walsch [https://bookshop.org/a/113174/9781571740878] Connect with the Center: * Website: wildspirituality.earth [https://www.wildspirituality.earth/] * Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com [https://www.victorialoorz.com/] * Email: hello@wildspirituality.earth * Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality [https://linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabQnFH2mJNHuo1tVJJ1X2SeGf8ZmtCDBXot0SdAPia86Y581AVrher4knw_aem_VYrMeI7I3_68p8VzciukoA] * Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality [https://www.instagram.com/center_for_wild_spirituality/] Timestamps: * 00:00 — Introduction * 03:58 — Interview Begins * 05:39 — The Land Who Raised Vanessa * 08:30 — Osotua * 11:19 — Building Trust in Relationship * 16:56 — Humpback Whale Encounter * 17:52 — Wallaby Encounter * 18:26 — Fasting During Deer Encounter * 20:23 — Normalizing Relationship * 21:13 — Research in Animal Communication * 25:17 — Starting with the Experiential * 26:31 — Unseparating Professional and Personal * 31:05 — ANICOM * 34:44 — Lion Says * 36:09 — The Theme of the Alive World * 38:38 — Intuitive Interspecies Communication or IIC * 39:23 — Conversation with a House Cat * 43:08 — Restoration of Trust and Earth Power * 51:01 — Victoria Falls Tourists * 54:12 — Wonder in the Mountains * 55:24 — Elephant Encounter * 57:24 — Changing the Ethics of Relational Research * 61:39 — Reciprocity of Approach * 66:03 — Next Threshold * 68:51 — Real and True * 71:49 — Wild Invitation * 74:38 — Credits