Spelade

  • With the announcement that water futures have begun trading on the stock market, it's time to take a deeper look at our relationship with water. Water challenges us to ask how we are in relationship to something that is both continuous and discrete, something that flows, moves, evaporates, seeps, and pours forth. Yet rather than honor this multivalent nature of water, humans have tended to treat water as an object and a servant. Water is compartmentalized, sequestered, and marginalized, bottled and sold in plastic, all in the effort to make it 'just another commodity.' This episode examines what right relationship with water looks like and advocates a relationship not simply based in metrics of quantity but in metrics of quality — in feeling, in longing, in reciprocity, in reliance, in ritual, in art, in song, in bodies — a relationship in which we construct our lives around water instead of expecting it to serve us, in which the mutable aspects of water are honored. Water, beyond plastic, beyond lines. Special guests include Water Activist Isabel Friend, Designer and Professor Dilip Da Cunha, and Greenpeace USA's Oceans Director John Hocevar.

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  • Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what it feels like to have whiskers? Those bristling antennae, so bright and alive... Or have you put your hand on one of those globes at a science museum and felt the energy surge through the very ends of your hair? Today on the podcast, we’re going to talk about hair. Tumbling, cascading, curling, radiating — hair holds a very special and very energized place in the imaginative mind. Across the world, visions of the divine involve wild-haired goddesses, bristling white beards, and even silver-haired baboons. Turns out that hair and energy and even consciousness are very closely linked in the human mind and in some traditions, even the cosmos itself is a little bit hairy. These aren't just Rapunzel stories, this is something wilder and more unkempt — hair that sprouts out of the back of trance practitioners, hair in the shamanic experience of animal transformation, and hair as a qabbalistic mystery.

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  • The word ‘resonance’ is commonly used these days to convey agreement with a point of view or perspective. But resonance is much more than this. ‘Resonance’ implies a universe that is sonorous and reverberatory and that operates according to the principles of harmony. Within this, many cultures have seen the role of the human being to become an instrument — to cultivate, through ritual repetition, a resonance with our fellow beings, with land, and with cosmos. This vision is not metaphorical. Science is increasingly finding that nature operates through resonance, that music predates language, and that when human beings decide to do things — to embark on adventures, to vote for politicians, to join groups — the primary driving force to do so is not ‘fact’ but resonance. Culture itself almost certainly arose through resonance, as we entrained to one another, in sync, through musical somatic ritual in resonant spaces. From the deep sounding board of the Paleolithic cave to the resonant spaces that birthed Greek prophecy to mythic visions of humans-as-instruments, this episode explores how resonance is utterly central to human experience, how modernity has become what one sociologist referred to as a ‘catastrophe of resonance,’ and what we can do to reclaim our deep resonance with one another and the natural world.

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