Soft, Earthen Futures

Visionary Archetypes for Worldbuilding

If you are someone who feels “called” to build a vision in the Western World and you know that that calling is coming from somewhere deep inside yourself, you are also asking big questions about what it looks like to survive doing it. How do you earn enough to stay afloat as the economy shifts and tightens around us? How do you build sustainably when the ground beneath us is shifting? Turns out, rent is still due at the end of a world. And so are payments for our Student loan debt. Turns out that taxes still have to be paid to the United States Government even though we all know that the taxes we pay are funding enslavement and genocide. How do we reconfigure? What is the prayer? Who do we need to become to move through these experiences together without losing our humanity and soul? How do we keep moving, creating and building in the face of so much culture change, moral expense, and death? I don’t have the answer to these questions. I think that these are inquiries that we need to turn to ceremony for. We need spaces of shared prayer and listening and quiet. We need ashrams, covens, dojos, zendos, sanctuaries and caves to hold these questions together and pray. I don’t believe that the answer will come as one large prophetic vision from one person. I believe it will come through fragments of dreamtime, shards of many people listening and receiving insight and vision from the belly of the Earth. It will come from spending time as individuals together, remembering who we are. It will come as a million different conversations that move through us as a multi-faceted dream of the Earth. Links Mentioned: * The Visionary Archetypes Quiz [https://www.visionaryarchetypes.com/] * 3-Hour Live Workshop :: Worldbuilding with the Visionary Archetypes [https://courses.storywork.studio/c/studio-calendar/visionary-archetypes-for-worldbuilding] * Substack Post: Visionary Archetypes for Worldbuilding [https://substack.com/home/post/p-193835102] The Visionary Archetypes are for you if… * Your notes app is filled to the brim with ideas and half-baked plans but you’re not entirely sure where to begin or which ideas are viable yet. * You've been pushing hard to build but the data (revenue / margins / exhaustion) is showing you that it's time for a much different approach and you’re not totally sure what steps to take next. * You’re overwhelmed by the potential of what you’re building but you’re feeling some trepidation on taking the necessary steps to make things sustainable. You’re feeling afraid of change and of inviting new teammates in. * You’re ready to serve, lead, and share your ideas to a wider audience, but you feel you lack the structure, discipline and systems to sustain the work. * You know you need to support, but you’re afraid to ask for help. * You feel tacky trying to build a business and share your offerings in a world on fire.

Worldbuilding in a Dumpster Fire

I know that the world is burning, but personally, I’m not someone who has ever been able to surrender myself to any particular end-of-the-world-mythology. The reasons why are because: 1. I don’t want to give the technocrats that much power.  2. I believe that the world is always ending and beginning again. And perhaps we find ourselves in the midst of a greater cosmic order that is older and bigger than our capacity to understand it. 3. I don’t want to spend my mythmaking, oracular energy, discernment, and creative power imagining a future where humanity is launched into a zombie apocalypse, ivy growing out of glass towers, while Pedro Pascal runs around the streets of Apocalyptic Boston, claiming his redemption arc as a Father. I’m not saying that these stories aren’t waiting for us somewhere on the horizon. They are just not the kinds of stories I want to vote for with my imagination.

New Moon Eclipse in Aquarius

The Cup of the Water Bearer is Spilling Over I believe eclipses aren’t isolated events that happen to us in one moment. Rather, they’re energetic, ouroboric fields containing a theatre of archetypal forces that reveal our hidden material and shadow. They offer us swells of data meant to reveal truth. Eclipses are neither good nor bad. They are inflection points of sensation and data. Some eclipses can be quite mild, while others can be acute with their teachings. Most of us have been taught to engage with eclipses as big, dramatic, solitary moments on the calendar that we brace for, survive, and then move on from quickly. And this framing robs us of the threshold medicine that is available during these seasons.

Becoming a Dream of the Earth

On healing our relationship with fantasy and the imaginal realm. This episode is a spiritual and philosophical meditation on the interconnection between human consciousness and the Earth's dreaming, with a focus on imagination, desire, and our capacity to become conduits for the Earth's creative vision for herself.

Grief as a Doorway with Melissa Word

In this episode, I sit down with artist and death midwife Melissa Word to explore grief as a doorway into the vast field of creative, visionary, and even erotic information that lives at the core of the psyche. We talk about what it means to retrieve these scattered parts of ourselves—the aspects of self that have been lost across timelines, memories, events, and family systems—and bring them home to reify our own wholeness. Melissa shares her philosophy of tending to grief through creative practice, from the improvisational quilting work of Grief Threads to the somatic, embodied approach she brings to all her facilitation. We discuss the underworld not as a place of peril but as fertile ground where parts of us have been steeping, learning, gathering intelligence we can't access through conscious striving. This conversation is for anyone who has avoided their grief work, who has wondered why we can't just skip to the good part, or who senses that creativity and loss are more intimately connected than our culture acknowledges. Connect with Melissa * Visit Melissa's Website [https://www.melissaword.com/] * Follow Melissa on Social Media [https://www.instagram.com/melissawordstudio/] Topics We Explore * Grief as retrieval: collecting the parts of ourselves scattered in the underworld * The daffodil bulb teaching: why some things require deep darkness to grow * The intelligence of hands and what fabrics can teach us about loss * Why grief work makes us honest—and why avoiding it makes us a liability * Ritual, creativity, and what gets recalibrated at the level of soul * The symbiosis between personal grief and collective healing * Getting free: what happens when the roots go deep enough About This Podcast Soft, Earthen Futures is a podcast about imagining and crafting a more whole world. We explore what it means to stand at the threshold between what has been and what is trying to emerge—tending to that in-between space, listening for what the earth is dreaming through us, and giving those visions form. This show is for wild-hearted creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. Hosted by Daje Aloh.