Technologies of Discovery & Return with RUTHANNA EMRYS | Kinward 32 🌗

Technologies of Discovery & Return with RUTHANNA EMRYS | Kinward 32 🌗

Author and cognitive psychologist Ruthanna Emrys [https://ruthannaemrys.com/] is a big thinker about agency, and about futures, and about the technologies that influence our ability (or inability) to decide, act, revise, remember, try, and try again to make the world together. I reached out to Ruthanna because I loved her “diaperpunk” novel A Half-Built Garden, about aliens who come to a near-future Earth to save us from ourselves—except, by then, we're finally reclaiming our symbiosis with our home planet, and we don't want to leave. There's still so much good work to do. Stories shape our sense of what is possible, or not. Ruthanna's is a lively mind in the pressing global project of holding space for many possible futures. In this conversation, Ruthanna orients us to technologies that can open up “directions of discovery,” encourage imagination and the fruitful friction required for effective problem solving in a complex world, and hold us accountable to one another. Some of these technologies are tools that can be held in the hand. Others are social technologies: design strategies for homecoming, care, discernment, and transformation embedded in facilitation practices, rituals, recipes, and norms. What social structures, what technologies, what tools, can support us in flexibly co-creating a winter with plenty of food, a space for repair, a necessary adjustment, a fierce devotion to more possibility? Over and over? If you are a writer, and you are in the work of asking these kinds of questions, Ruthanna wants you to submit your work to a story contest she is helping to judge this year: the Protopian Prize [https://protopianprize.com/]. This contest will award $5,000 each for short fiction stories that explore “Public AI”—i.e. AI designed for the public good—and “Democratic Futures”—i.e. futures where the people decide what the people are going to do, and how. Consider submitting if you’re a writer whose vision of the more beautiful world is clear—or if you, like me, don’t know where we’re going, but can feel how we need to move to get there. Visit kinwardmoves.substack.com [http://kinwardmoves.substack.com] for full show notes. Subscribe for ongoing orientations to "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible." Check out Ruthanna's work [https://ruthannaemrys.com/] Submit to the Protopian Prize [https://protopianprize.com/] Get full access to Kinward Moves at kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Right Stories About How We Are Becoming with MICHAEL LOOTS | Kinward 31 🌑

“If I hear another person on the Internet talking about composting ontologies without actually being in the work of composting, I’m gonna flip shit," says Michael Loots—educator, writer, gardener, partner and papa—in this episode of Kinward Podcast, as we affirm a basic truth: the map is not the territory. The map is not the territory—and, maybe it's true that one of the ways we can compost the stories that aren’t working is to put them in the actual ground. Have an idea? Try it out in the garden. You’ll find out whether it’s a “right story” soon enough. Michael and I, distant neighbors across the span of Turtle Island spin yarns in this episode investigating our commitments to our own growth and learning and territories, the holding of young people through change, and wise(r) responses to consequences. There's Lore here, and Law. Loots says that one of the choices we—you, me, us, our neighbors, his students—are making now is a choice of whether to iterate in the “sand mandala” of cyberspace, or iterate in space, in place. Which are you choosing? Let's meet each other in the territory. Welcome. Get full access to Kinward Moves at kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Educating Whole Souls with JENNY FINN of Springhouse Community School | Kinward 30 🌕

In this vibrantly alive conversation, wholistic educator Dr. Jenny Finn, co-founder of Springhouse Community School [https://springhouse.org/], distinguishes “the wake up call” (the insight, sometimes sudden, sometimes carried like a burden, that what we are doing isn’t working, for the world or for us) from the commitment to do, to make, to become something new. Springhouse Community School [https://springhouse.org/] is a learning environment for whole people, an intergenerational practice space for shaping a culture that takes care of Life. Springhouse is named for the structure you build around a spring, a source of water, a Life Source, to make that water more accessible and more useful. I was called to reach out to Jenny Finn because I have been seeking models of land-based learning projects that are explicitly rooted in community and place and dedicated to cultivating and protecting wholeness and aliveness TOGETHER in these times of great disruption and change. When I found Springhouse, it felt like a breath of fresh air. And more: it felt like a commitment. And it is, as you will hear. It is Life work. Jenny Finn has designed structures that foster vitality in people, communities, and organizations for nearly 30 years. She holds a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education and is a co-founder of Springhouse. Jenny Finn’s research, mentoring, and teaching invites people to strengthen the relationship they have with themselves in order to serve the world with greater clarity, courage, compassion, and creativity. Her work has taken many forms including non-profit leadership, trauma and hospice care, chaplaincy, clinical private practice, community-building through the expressive arts, and education. Jenny lives on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband Andy and their many furry friends, and she is the mother of Andrew and Lizzie. She loves riding the Peloton bike, swimming, spending time with family and friends, and watching a good British mystery. Springhouse has K-12 youth education rooted in place; adult development programs; an online community [https://community.springhouse.org/springhouse-online-community]; a print shop; and a constellation of adult stewards who are committed to their own personal transformation as they invite others to root into and experiment toward vitality. Springhouse is known all over the world as a model of education in service to flourishing, and has helped to found other “vitality-centered” learning communities globally. Jenny and her co-conspirators at Springhouse have been designing and learning and iterating and sharing what they are learning for more than a decade now. We’re lucky to have their work in the world. I’m so grateful to Jenny for taking some time to share herself, and Springhouse, with us. Learn more about Springhouse: https://springhouse.org/ [https://springhouse.org/] Subscribe to Kinward and support this work: kinwardmoves.substack.com [http://kinwardmoves.substack.com] Get full access to Kinward Moves at kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

(Re)kindling the Home Fire with VERONICA STANWELL & BEN STOPFORD of Deepen Your Roots | Kinward 29 🌑

“It IS an illusion that everything is broken,” says Ben Stopford late in this spacious conversation with two collaborators deeply rooted in the British Isles: himself and Veronica Stanwell of Rooted Healing [https://www.rootedhealing.org/]. At any hearth where we gather, Ben reminds us, we can invite each other to turn towards what is deeply beautiful. And we must, because “these things need tending.” Yes: our thriving, our loving, the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”—these things are not in some far off future maybe someday. They’re all around us, and we can choose every day to notice them, to take care of them, to offer back to them, to feed them. Ben and Veronica invite such choices over and over again in the year-long slow study course they steward together, Deepen Your Roots [https://www.rootedhealing.org/deepen], which is enrolling now. I took this course with them last year, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly. In this episode, we discuss the kindling and tending of home fires, virtually and in place; rites of passage and initiation; our reawakening to animacies of lands and waters; grief and armor; presence and witnessing; and rooting where we stand. Ben Stopford and Veronica Stanwell are incredible companions, thinkers, and weavers of the Great Turning, in their own ways and together, in Cornwall and Eryri (North Wales) where they live, and worldwide. I hope this conversation feeds your soul as deeply as it fed mine. Ben's body of work: Conscious Roots [https://www.consciousroots.co.uk/] Veronica's body of work: Rooted Healing [https://www.rootedhealing.org/] Extended show notes and opportunities to engage: kinwardmoves.substack.com [http://kinwardmoves.substack.com] Gratitudes for this episode include: to Ben and Veronica for tending the home hearth at multiple scales; to the many dreamers and workers who are helping to materialize the community orchard we are bringing into being here; to my beloved cottonwood grove (you know who you are) for your incredible golden leaves; to the medicinal waters of Hot Lake in La Grande, Oregon for a much needed birthday soak, and to my babies’ grandmother for taking care of them while my spouse and I were in the water; to our chickens for the excellent eggs; and to all of you, for listening. Get full access to Kinward Moves at kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

We All Know (Thank You) | Kinward 28 [Moonday School] 🌕

Last night was our first hard freeze. The summer plants are done. This year, for me, the end of the summer garden is very clearly the beginning of Crone season. The moon last night, not quite full, was a Crone moon. My Crone guardian has been guiding me through some difficult conversations in these last few weeks: conversations about accountability, power relations, containment. This year, as these conversations unfold, as these leaves yellow and these waters freeze and this year’s harvest is weighed and measured and put up, I’m putting a Crone face on. Sometimes—like in the dream I described to Larissa Kaul [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/p/larissa-kaul-on-disintegrating-empire] during our conversation on “Disintegrating Empire,” the dream where evil magicians were flying in the streets of our city [https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/05/federal-tactics-on-protesters-escalates-hours-after-judge-rules-against-trump/], a dream that feels, today, too close to waking life, like many of my dreams lately—the right face to wear is the face of the one who has seen it all before. When the corn is dryand there’s ice in the airwe count what can be stored.The face to wearis the face of the onewho has seen it all before. As I’ve moved in and out of tough conversation lately, I’ve been trying to walk myself back from dysregulated moments via orientation to the same guiding question: how can my next action serve my most aligned intention? If my intention is to serve the strengthening of this container, serve the purposes of (re)building trust, facilitating repair, getting everybody’s needs met (including my own), what then shall I do, now, next? That’s a weaving. And then there’s another question that arises: how will I know when to let go of what I’ve woven? To give it away? And/or—to lay all that work down on the ground and trust that it will fall apart and darken and mix and shapeshift into something else, nourish something else, when spring rolls back around? I’ve lately sensed into the hunger trees feel for the mulch their fallen leaves will make. At a song circle on the fall equinox, I talked with my friends Bobby and Brosnan and Meadow [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/p/bobby-fossek-brosnan-spencer-and] about the basket they’ve been weaving this year as part of their Wild Blues artists’ residency [https://www.hellscanyon.org/wild-blues-artist-in-residence]. The basket is made of dogbane hemp, a beautiful plant whose soft, strong fibers used to be the cordage material of choice in our part of the world, until settlers did their damndest to extirpate the plant because its sap is toxic to cattle. I can’t possibly do justice here to all the stories—all the messy and beautiful and painful truths and life histories and expressions of life—that must exist side by side in order for a basket such as this to be made in a time like this. I got to see the basket on Saturday night. It’s the first basket of its kind to have been made here in a long long time. Brosnan held it up, beautifully woven and full of dried cous. Their family spent a year weaving that container together; and they gathered those roots together in places where their community’s ancestors were massacred, not very many generations ago, while peacefully gathering roots; and that cous will keep better than it would in another kind of basket because of the antimicrobial compounds in that “toxic” sap. When we were gathering up for the song circle, I asked Bobby what they were going to do with the basket. Of course, he said: “We’ll give it to somebody.” At that song circle I shared the song I’m sharing with you all today, a simple song that has come to me in recent weeks in the mix of all these conversations and (re)turnings and unfoldings—a simple song that honors complex Crone remembering of the hard things and the true things and the simplest clearest things. Crone has seen all the shenanigans and all the barriers and all the failures and and all the misjudged reactions and mistakes—and all the gifts that have been given, and all the gardens mulched with what we’ve been able to let go of. Crone has hangups and baggage and a long-burdened lots-lost body—and deep down she knows what she needs, and so knows that we know what we need, if we can just remember. So, here’s my prayer for myself and for us today: may our hard conversations with one another, our hard histories, our hard feelings, our beautiful intentions, be not wasted but woven as true threads into strong and beautiful containers. May those containers hold what we love and what we know is precious. May we weave when it’s our time to weave, and when it’s time to let go, may we let go. May our lettings go be gifts. May the time be the right time. May it be so. Get full access to Kinward Moves at kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe [https://kinwardmoves.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]