Accidental Gods
Accidental Gods
Recent Episodes
Traditionally, we have offered a meditation for the solstice - and these are available in the links below.
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.
Winter Solstice Meditation https://media.transistor.fm/25cbf6e7/e9f16280.mp3
Summer Solstice Meditation https://media.transistor.fm/4dbb7991/ddc721bc.mp3
This is the fifth year of our traditional Winter Solstice podcast gathering in which Nathalie Nahai of 'In Conversation with Nathalie Nahai, Della Duncan of The Upstream Podcast 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. So thank you for being there. I hope you enjoy what follows.
Della Z Duncan is a Renegade Economist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a co-host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, a faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, a founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and the designer and co-facilitator of the Cultivating Regenerative Livelihood Course at Gaia Education.
Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of the Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She’s author of the international best-sellers Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She’s a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.
Links
Down the Rabbit Hole - https://charliebennettauthor.co.uk/shop
Transformative Adaptation - https://shop.permaculture.co.uk/products/transformative-adaptation
How to Be an An Anticapitalist in the Twenty-first Century - book https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/933-how-to-be-an-anticapitalist-in-the-twenty-first-century?srsltid=AfmBOoq4Q9LtVqpS7BkvtrBsQwBW3eHwnbD9SKoDXxt-rT9_2BL1DdEG
How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century - article in Jacobin https://jacobin.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-anticapitalism-democracy/
God, Human, Animal, Machine https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/god-human-animal-machine-technology-metaphor-and-the-search-for-meaning-meghan-o-gieblyn/5885978?ean=9780525562719
The Psychological Drivers of the MetaCrisis
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-psychological-drivers-of-the-metacrisis/id1680606350?i=1000639851812
Feeding Your Demons by Tsultrim Allione https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/feeding-your-demons-ancient-wisdom-for-resolving-inner-conflict-tsultrim-allione/1740345?ean=9781848501737
Feeding your Demons online https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-feeding-your-demons
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!
Books:
Non-Fiction
Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machada de Oliviera https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hospicing-modernity-parting-with-harmful-ways-of-living-vanessa-machado-de-oliveira/6401710?ean=9781623176242
Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as we Know It by Ginie Servant-Miklos https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/pedagogies-of-collapse-9781350400498/ NB - you can download the pdf for FREE!
Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations for Collective Wellbeing by Yuria Celidwen https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/flourishing-kin-indigenous-wisdom-for-collective-well-being-ph-d-celidwen-yuria/7727216?ean=9781649632043
Right Story, Wrong Story Tyson Yunkaporta https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/right-story-wrong-story-adventures-in-indigenous-thinking-tyson-yunkaporta/7645728?ean=9781922790439
Down the Rabbit Hole by Charlie Bennett CharlieBennettauthor.co.uk
Fiction:
Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-ministry-of-time-kaliane-bradley/7445878?ean=9781399726344
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/venomous-lumpsucker-ned-beauman/2764635?ean=9781473613577
Denise Baden 'Murder in the Climate Assembly' You can get a feel for the book here: https://www.dabaden.com/murder-in-the-climate-assembly/
Kickstarter here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dabaden/murder-in-the-climate-assembly
Katherine Addison 'Throne of Dragons' - due March 11th US and a few days later UK https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-tomb-of-dragons-the-cemeteries-of-amalo-book-3-katherine-addison/7764905?ean=9781837864393
Films
Richard Wain: The Oath of the Hopeful https://youtu.be/JFNEPx9NYVk
Roots so Deep https://rootssodeep.org/
The Shopping Conspiracy Trailer: https://youtu.be/OVfZw_eqJW8 Full film: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81554996
Future Council - not yet released: https://theregenerators.org/future-council/see-the-film/
Podcasts
Farm Gate 1 'What is Bill Gates doing to Africa's Food?' https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/farm-gate/id1490590788?i=1000675185519
Farm Gate 2 'Down the Rabbit Hole with Charlie Bennett' https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/farm-gate/id1490590788?i=1000678521906
The Great Simplification: Future Council: How Children are responding to our Planetary Crisis https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens/id1604218333?i=1000678061953
What is a Good Life with Mark McCartney - Rekindling our Wild Nature with Diarmuid Lyng https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-is-a-good-life/id1663668603?i=1000677421697
Wild w Sarah Wilson Indy Johar: the Starkest Collapse Prognosis I've heard https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/wild-with-sarah-wilson/id1548626341?i=1000677521024
Clearly we're at an inflection point in the history of humanity. Our experiment with a notional democracy is failing and either we find something that actually works, or we sink into autocracy. And given that the current global flavour of autocracy is in deep denial of the climate and ecological catastrophe that's currently underway, then that's a pretty fast road to extinction: you can't deny your way out of biophysical reality.
So what can we do, we who care deeply about passing an inhabitable - thriving - world to the generations not yet born? We need to go back to basics. We all need clean water, clean air, safe shelter and good nutritious food - and we are rapidly heading for a space where just accessing these will become more of a priority than our recent experiment with unleashing ancient sunlight has led us to believe. But more than this, the community that grows around these, particularly the growing and sharing of food - is the glue that keeps us together. We are a prosocial species. We are astonishingly creative when we put our minds to it. So what happens when we put our minds to creative ways of growing and sharing food that are founded in solid values of cohesion and connectivity? One of the things that happens is the Open Food Network which is a global community of farmers, growers, community food enterprises and software geeks with a common belief that world food systems are broken - and that better, more connected, open, resilient systems can arise in their place. They are building alternative food systems from the bottom up: this is their theory of change and this is a recent podcast about a new OFN project called the Power of Food.
So this week, I've been talking to Nick Weir who helped to set up the Open Food Network UK. Nick has a background in IT account management, but, as you'll hear, he is also a long-term grower who co-founded the Stroudco Food Hub and Stroud Community Agriculture and is deeply passionate about the role of innovative food systems in creating a kinder, more interconnected society, and the ways in which the Network can model a new way of working which empowers people to bring more of themselves to their work. If you're feeling crushed by the global political chaos, I hope this conversation cheers you as it did me, with living examples of change happening on the ground, and the ripple effects it can have.
Open Food Network Global https://openfoodnetwork.org/
Open Food Network uk https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/
Power of Food podcast https://www.wearecarbon.earth/power-of-food-collaboration/
Open Food Network resources https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/resources/
Landworkers' Alliance https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/our_vision/
Sustain https://www.sustainweb.org/about/
Social Farms and Gardens https://www.farmgarden.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do
The Power of Food theory of change https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oSn8g-b-GlVku9g9TOKoVO0GvxSRSuCy/
Living Justice https://livingjustice.earth/projects/
How do we become the change we need to see in the world? What are the actual, practical steps to grounding, connecting and resonating with the world?
We're on the brink of cataclysmic change. Knowing this, we have choices: we can either fold into despair, terror, rage…whatever rises up in us as we watch the whole biosphere hurtle towards irrevocable tipping points. Or we can become the change we need to see in the world: each of us. This is a cliché by now, but that doesn't stop it being true. Here are others: we are the people we have been waiting for and if not us, now then who and when? We've been saying these for a long time and if you're listening to this podcast, then you're already on board, at least intellectually. You know there is no going back, that ideology cannot win out over biophysical reality and avoiding ecosystem collapse doesn't just mean moving to regenerative farming or buying second hand clothes or even changing all the narratives of all the world's media systems - good though each of these things would be.
But there's been a gap between what we know and how we behave, between where our better selves might push us and the behaviours that are locked into the core of our being, our firmware, if you like. But now - this minute now - we're hitting the buffers where the old paradigm is so obviously not fit for purpose that we need something new. The core questions are what? And how?
And this is where we're going with the podcast just now - After Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network reminded us of our purpose on the earth, and Andrea Hiott of Waymaking helped us embrace paradox - now we're talking to someone who can help guide us into the embodied reality of a different way of being.
Dan McTiernan is a certified Transpersonal Psychology Coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor. With is wife Johanna, he's the co-founder of embodied coaching organisation, Earthbound. He hosts the Being Earthbound podcast which is absolutely on my must-listen list, as is the Substack blog from which it arises. He's a facilitator on Alef Trust’s Nurturing the Fields of Change programme and is the project leader for the Embodied Permaculture Project - an international 2-year action research project exploring the impacts of holistic wellbeing on outer ecological change work. The first 9 weeks of this programme are about to be released as a self-study course - and by the time this podcast ends, you will want to join up with that - I'll put a link in the show notes as soon as I have one - hopefully before this goes live.
He is currently working with Alef Trust and the A Team Foundation to deliver an innovative project supporting farmers and growers in the UK with a programme of embodied wellbeing known as Calmer Farmer which will be launched in January 2025.
As you'll hear, Dan is working at the leading edge of the change we need to embody. He has 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 people: 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. This is what we're here for. And Dan has routes to get there.
For more information about this coaching approach, to book a 1-1 appointment or to find out more about Earthbound’s courses and practice group: www.earthbound.fi
For more information about Calmer Farmer: www.calmerfarmer.org
To read more about Dan’s work and to listen to the Being Earthbound podcast: www.beingearthbound.substack.com
The Embodied Permaculture Course is here https://earthbound.fi/embodied-permaculture-course