For The Wild Podcast

DORI MIDNIGHT on Spinning Webs of Support / 310

“With a prayer to imagine beyond the current structures and systems, and kind of weave ourselves into, and be wrapped inside of, the invisible cloak that is interdependence, that is mutual aid, that supports us to reach towards each other and reach towards a vision of mutually flourishing life.” This powerful vision is shared by this week’s guest, Dori Midnight. In this sweet, meaningful, and meandering conversation, Dori discusses magical and liberatory practices, ancestral Jewish healing traditions, and the necessity of reclaiming Judaism from Zionism in the name of collective liberation. She shares sweet stories of garlic and cedar, the generosity of belonging, and the blessing of our collective and intricate work as we stretch toward liberation. 

Dori Midnight practices intuitive healing, weaves collaborative, liberatory ritual spaces, makes potions, and writes liturgy, spells, prayers, and poems. For over 20 years, Dori has been practicing and teaching on ritual and remedies for unraveling times, reconnecting with traditions of Jewish ancestral wisdom, community care work, and queer magic and healing. Music by 40 Million Feet, Katie Gray, and Aviva Le Fey. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

ISMAIL LOURIDO ALI, J.D. on Post-Prohibition Realities / 309

It’s undeniable that right now we are in a rapidly changing and complex relationship with the consumption, production, and reality of drugs, substances, and medicines, and their usage. This week, guest Ismail Lourido Ali, J.D. guides listeners through an overview of where we are in our relationship with drugs in the American context, and how this relationship is indicative of our relationship with the Earth and with humanity broadly.

 

We cannot move to a healthy and healing relationship with substances without acknowledging the violent realities brought about by criminalization, exploitation in drug production, and the exorbitant costs of pharmaceutical medicine. Ismail encourages us to move beyond the black and white view that some drugs are medicine while others are criminal. 

 

This expansive conversation encourages listeners to ask what deep, collective healing looks like, and to reflect on complicated relationships with consumption across substances. As we think more deeply on these issues, we must ask: what voids are we filling, what imagination do we need to tap into, what kind of reconciliation do we need?

 

As MAPS’ Director of Policy and Advocacy, Ismail advocates to eliminate barriers to psychedelic therapy and research, develops and implements legal and policy strategy, and supports MAPS’ governance, non-profit, and ethics work. Ismail is licensed to practice law in the state of California, and is a founding board member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. He also currently serves on the board of the Sage Institute, contributes to Chacruna Institute’s Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants, and participates on the advisory council for the Ayahuasca Defense Fund. Ismail is passionate about setting sustainable groundwork for a just, equitable, and generative post-prohibition world.

 

Music by Harrison Foster, Book of Colors, and Autumn Hawk Percival. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

 

SLOW STUDY: Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks!

For The Wild is elated to bring you SLOW STUDY: We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks! with Bayo Akomolafe – a learning journey for you to explore from home at your own pleasurable pace.

 

Bayo Akomolafe and a vast network of co-conspirators, fugitives, dancers, thinkers, children, elders, and creatives have brought forth We Will Dance With Mountains: Into The Cracks!, the fifth iteration of a series of courses hosted by Bayo.

 

“The course (often described as an expedition or a wild adventure by previous participants) is about recuperating our connections with a ‘world’ that can no longer be seen as dormant, mute and passive. It is about coming to new senses, and co-generating new practices of place-making in partnership with the more-than-human world.”

We Will Dance with Mountains is a carnivalesque course in postactivism (a formulation of Báyò), a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage.”

 

Upon purchase < https://forthewild.world/we-will-dance-with-mountains-course> you will receive a download link sent to your email with the full curriculum:

• One (1) 80-page We Will Dance With Mountains Digital Course Book with emergent curriculum, articles and artwork in PDF format

• Seven (7) Audio files in MP3 format with over five hours of explorative and provocative listening content

• Seven (7) Transcripts of the audio files in PDF format

 

COST-ACCESSIBILITY

We offer scales based on your relative financial standing. Please visit our website for further information.

HOST & LEAD TEACHER: Bayo Akomolafe
GUEST TEACHERS: adrienne maree brown, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Joanna Macy, Makshya Tolbert, Vanessa Andreotti
ARTISTS: Ganavya, Ilu Oba, Penelope Baquero
CURATOR / PRODUCER: Jiordi Rosales
EDITOR: Evan Tenenbaum
ILLUSTRATION: Jon Marro, Jia Sung DESIGN / PUBLISHING: For The Wild

Musical accompaniment by @rajna_music

 

LARK ELODEA on Appalachians Against Pipelines / 309

The Mountain Valley Pipeline, which runs through West Virginia to Virginia is on the verge of completion following intense legislative and legal battles. This episode reminds us of the danger in this, and amidst such battles, Appalachians Against Pipelines shows us what might be possible if we allow ourselves to imagine a world outside of extraction. Lark Elodea joins Ayana to discuss the relentless and direct activism Appalachians Against Pipelines has been doing to stop the pipeline, build community resistance, and advocate for the needs of their communities in the face of developers, oil and gas advocates, and a continued disregard for Appalachian voices. Lark roots the conversation in reverence for the land and the complex legacies of violence and oppression within it. Fighting against the pipeline is, as Lark says, “not only fighting for a world with no pipelines, but also no borders, or prisons or colonialism.” Our decisions here matter for communities and matter for the collective future we are building.  

 

Lark is a person of settler descent living in the beautiful mountains of Appalachia. They have been working with Appalachians Against Pipelines in the campaign resisting the 300+ mile Mountain Valley Pipeline for over 4 years, and have lived in the region for years longer. Lark is one of many, many pipeline fighters and water protectors and forest defenders contributing to the fight against reckless fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction (across Appalachia, across Turtle Island, and all over the world).

 

Music by 40 Million Feet, Alexandra Blakely,  Camelia Jade, and Cold Mountain Child. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

 

TUSHA YAKOVLEVA on the Invitation of Invasive Plants / 307

This week guest Tusha Yakovleva calls on us to remember our millennium-old relationship with weedy beings and the gifts of wild and invasive plants. It’s estimated that worldwide spending on invasive species exceeds one trillion dollars annually. But if we were to cease our violent relationship with weeds and invasive species, what might we find? Cultural cooperation between plants and people? A whole slew of plant-relatives that are thriving in increasingly challenging landscapes? We are challenged to think about our capacity, or willingness, to know invasive plants - Tusha queries listeners to ask “Do we know their reasons for making home in unfamiliar soils? Or what gifts and responsibilities they carry?” We are left with much to think about in the realm of curiosity and acceptance, two muscles that need an exceptional amount of exercise in a time where so much is rapidly changing environmentally and socially.

 

Tusha Yakovleva is an educator, gatherer and ethnobotanist whose work revolves around generating strong, respectful relationships between plants and people. The foundations of her life-long foraging practice come from her family and first home - the Volga River watershed in Russia - where tending to uncultivated plants and mushrooms for food and medicine is common practice. Tusha is the author of Edible Weeds on Farms: Northeast Farmer’s Guide to Self-growing Vegetables. Tusha is currently completing graduate work at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry on Onondaga Nation homelands. Her research is in support of cross-cultural partnerships for biocultural restoration and takes place under the guidance of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. 

 

Music by Ali Dineen and Violet Bell. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

YOALLI RODRIGUEZ on Grief as an Ontological Form of Time / 306

This week, guest Yoalli Rodriguez brings us to the Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons in Oaxaca, Mexico, to investigate deep connections with land, ongoing colonial violence, and the grief that comes alongside loving a place. The Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons have long been vital spaces for Black and Indigenous communities, but continued colonial strategies have altered and quartered off the landscape in favor of nationalist and capitalist interests. 

 

The conversation dives deep into an understanding of Mestizo geographies and the politics of refusal in the face of oppressive power. Despite the institutional acts of violence that limit sensual and sensorial relationships with the land, people continue to make spaces of their own and lay claims to land that go against colonial rule. With this context, Yoalli and Ayana come to a heartening conversation about the importance of ecological grief, rage, and sadness.

 

Yoalli’s work pays deep attention to the everyday lives of those who live around the lagoons, and she notes the care, love, and community that make grief and resistance possible. Here, hope and grief go hand in hand as strategies of resistance and fugitivity. Perhaps slow life and slow feeling can be a counter to the slow violence that has so marred life on earth. 

 

Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera is an educator, vinyl selector, and writer born and raised in Mexico but currently based in the U.S. They are currently an Assistant Professor in Anthropology & Sociology and Latin American and Latinx Studies at Lake Forest College, Illinois. They are interested in subjects of anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist struggles, political ecology, and State violence.

Music by Fabian Almazan Trio, Eliza Edens, and PALO-MAH. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

ANTONIA ESTELA PEREZ on Uncovering Plant-Human Intimacy /305

Breathing in the joy and lessons of the plant life surrounding us, Ayana and guest Antonia Estela Perez share an enriching conversation on the power and magic of coming to know the world around us. Antonia dives into the tension that exists in living in and caring for lands that have been violently colonized, calling listeners to understand plants both in the ways that colonization has affected their legacies and within anti-colonial structures that suggest there are other ways to engage with the plants around us. 

 

The natural world is, in fact, not separated from any one of us, and in detailing her work with Herban Cura, Antonia brings her insight on connections to plants and land within urban settings expanding the horizons of intimacy between humans and plants across human-imposed boundaries. As Antonia shares more about her New York City and Chilean roots,  she reminds us of the value of connection to places for spiritual, ancestral, and medicinal means. Cultural and ancestral knowledge are vital to everyone’s survival in a world marred by colonial violence. What healing can be found within our own backyards, our own lineages? Perhaps the plants will lead us home once again – as they always have. 

 

Antonia Estela Perez grows medicines, gardens, and networks that work to interrupt anthropocentric, individualist, separatist socialization and bring folks into deeper awareness of their ecological family and belonging. They are first gen, born and raised on Lenape territory in NYC, and descended from the Mapuche peoples of Chile. They have cultivated a deep relationship with their plant relatives since a very young age, and their passion for open-source pedagogy founded the inclusive healing, learning, and collaboration space Herban Cura along with its medicinal product line.

 

Music by Julio Kintu and The Ulali Project with Pura Fé. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

 

DR. MIMI KHÚC on Claiming Unwellness / 304

Guided by her curated work Open In Emergency (a “hybrid book project” including a Tarot Deck and a “hacked” DSM), Dr. Mimi Khúc and Ayana share in a deep conversation touching on mental health, collective unwellness, and the power of communal care. Mimi provides listeners with a reminder of joyful slowness and the vitality of finding the agency to care for self and others.

 

Mimi’s work is grounded in the question: “How do we find new ways to talk about what hurts?” Flipping diagnosis on its head, Mimi guides us to find new ways to name what we feel and to decolonize the language of feeling itself. How is what we feel a reflection of what we have been told we must feel? How are our understandings of wellness centered around a productivity that benefits expansive capitalism over humanity? 

 

Together, Mimi and Ayana reflect on the ethical callings and commitments to care for each other and begin to unpack the systems that must be dismantled in order to truly care for one another and find vulnerability together. These are spiritual and religious questions. Perhaps connection and care in this individualized, alienating world are true magic. 

 

Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell and visiting professor in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the managing editor of The Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health. She is very slowly working on several book projects, including a manifesto on contingency in Asian American studies and essays on mental health, the arts, and the university. But mostly she spends her time baking, as access and care for herself and loved ones.

 

Music by Jeffery Silverstein, Samara Jade, Grief Is A River (Sarah Knapp). Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

 

DR. BRETT STORY on How We Belong to Each Other / 303

This week, Ayana is joined by filmmaker and author Dr. Brett Story. Together, they ponder justice, accountability, and interconnection in a complex and rapidly changing world. 

 

In this intellectual and timely conversation, Brett begins by unpacking how carceral logics and conceptions of the “criminal” work, mark and dictate the world spatially, while at the same time explaining the socially-constructed nature of crime. Brett’s work examines the ways we individually and collectively metabolize our anxieties, and through this lens, she makes connections across the broad issues of our current reality from changing climates to criminal justice systems that were designed to enforce control rather than to produce true justice. 

 

At the center of the conversation is the question of  interdependence– emphasizing the need for community and collective action in the face of neoliberal individualism. Mass-incarceration and climate change are not crises of the individual, but of our culture. The abolitionist imagination may be the key to a collective future– as Brett reminds listeners that our aspirations can be both practical and utiopan. 

 

Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto whose films have screened at festivals and theaters internationally. She is the director of the award winning feature documentaries The Hottest August (2019) and The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), both of which were also broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. Brett holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America.  Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.

 

Music by Jahawi Bertolli, Jahnavi Veronica, and Leyla McCalla. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.

 

CLAUDIA SERRATO on Earth-Centric Gastronomy / 302

This week, guest Dr. Claudia Serrato opens our minds to the sensual, political, and vital nature of our relationship to food. Our bodies are a landscape in their own right and with Indigenous feminist theory in mind, this episode bears wittness to the cycles of gastronmies and of life that keep us tied to the earth. Claudia turns to her own landscape to remind us that there are times to dry up and times to bloom.  

 

To consume food means that we enter into a relationship with it, we physically embody it. In this conversation Claudia and Ayana dive into what that relationship could be, and how embodiment may be a spiritual quest. Honoring foodways and the gifts of the earth is about more than just changing our diets, but is rather a cultural, spiritual, and political project. How might we honor both where we came from and where we are now in ways that respect traditional foodways alongside place-based geographies/ food ways? 

 

Decolonizing the body and the landscape also means decolonizing the kitchen.Through the sacred work of food sovereignty, we can create a better kitchen, a better palate – one that resists the violence of colonization and globalization. This work is the toil of gardening, the pain of remembering, the prayers of the season. This is not easy work, but it is vital, human, and intimate.  

 

Dr. Claudia Serrato is a cultural and culinary anthropologist, an Indigenous plant-based chef, and a food justice activist scholar. Claudia has been writing, speaking, and cooking up decolonized flavors for over a decade by ReIndigenizing her diet with Mesoamerican foods and foodways, cooking traditions and nutrition, and culinary ways of knowing.

 

Music by Justin Crawmer, Julio Kintu, and PALO-MA (Paola De La Concha). Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.