Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with V

DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES Episode 2 – Alnoor Ladha with V Alnoor Ladha | Welcome to the Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural interventions for systems change. Learn more at www.culturehack.io Post-production is…

The River Threshold

"She and I sat at a picnic table near a stream with a therapist who was also my uncle, and we said out loud in the summer June air that we couldn’t give what the other wanted. She said she couldn’t live with me anymore and be who she wanted to be. I said I couldn’t live indefinitely separate and fragmented. We said these things for the purpose of freeing each other, though freedom didn’t liberate…

Hope Leans Forward | The Body as Grounded Wisdom

"For years after the miscarriages, I felt barren and broken by the loss, shame, and guilt. There was a ragged, dispossessed part of me that I couldn’t shake. Here in the cold spring dampness of Kōya-san, my loss and grief were acknowledged and shared...I sensed that those in the cemetery around me understood and made space for the grieving to be and to breathe.”

From Expansion to Harmonisation | a new economic trajectory

"If we do not stop degrading the natural environment, it will collapse, so we must harmonise our global society with the natural world. If we allow global inequalities to remain embedded, we will perpetuate hardship on a vast scale, so we must harmonise our human cultures with one another. And if we continue to desire ever-increasing consumption without regard to its negative effects, we will…

Being Taught by Sacred Pain

"In an attempt to keep us feeling individualized and separate from the land-metabolism, modernity takes away our sense of the unquestionable value of life and instead creates a fundamental void that we associate with worthlessness. To feel a temporary sense of self-worth, we are made to produce stuff that modernity recognizes as valuable. To feel a sense of completion, we are made to accumulate…

The Gift of Grief

An elderly man caught my eye on Decatur Street. He was encouraging tourists to drop money in a hat for his friend, a street musician. As we chatted, we realized we were acquainted forty years ago. He was the neighbor of a family I’m close to from the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. When I asked how he was doing, he replied, “a hard life makes a good song.” The past forty…

To Lament | Dawn Songs and the Human-Bird Bond

"The term ‘lament’ is typically associated with grief, with sorrow, with loss. Maybe the loss is physical – a beloved passes. Maybe the loss is etheric – a longed for dream of what could be is dissolved by circumstance. Those who have awakened to the nature of dawn songs lament the loss of birds… Perhaps lamentation is a song that enables the necessary mystery to find us in ways that we long to…

Seven Foundations for a New Era

"I know that the coming decades will be darker, as the seas rise and the forests burn, as climate refugees flood the borders of our present world order. And that those clinging to the old stories will resist these primal changes, often through power and oppression. But over the last decades I have sensed, seen deep in the inner worlds...how the Earth Herself is changing. And I believe that there…