"Consciousness creates matter, Language Creates Reality, Ritual creates relationship' - Oscar Miro-Quesada quoted by Nina Simons in her book ’Nature, Culture and the Sacred’ One of the extraordinary privileges of hosting a podcast like this is that I get to talk to some of my heroes, to ask questions, to have a conversation about the things that really matter. This week's guest is one of these. Nina Simons is an author, a leader - and we'll hear how that word was imposed on her and then she lear...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 17Ep. 6
Those of you who've followed the podcast for any length of time know that I feel our capacity to connect across long distances, to share ideas in real time, is one of the things that has shifted our culture from being complex to super-complex, or hyper-complex, or whatever adjective we want to create that intimates a massive increase in the complexity of our communications and our actions. One key part of this is the evolution of blockchain, particularly in its Ethereum incarnation. Most of us k...
Jan 17, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Season 17Ep. 5
Happy New Year. It feels to me as if this year, the journey is going to be one of continual change and of challenge - that 2024 will be the year when it is impossible for anyone to pretend that the life we knew, the life we grew up believing would go on indefinitely - is going to continue. The old order is dying, but if we're to absolute collapse on a global scale (because clearly it's happening locally all over the world, usually pushed by the governments of people who are statistically most li...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Season 17Ep. 4
Welcome to the second part of our conversation - if you haven't listened to the first part, please do so - it's here [LINK] and Simon has very kindly agreed to come back to join our Cutting Edge gathering on Sunday 19th March at 7pm UK time. He'll be with us for an hour during which you'll have a chance to ask him the questions that matter to you - all the things I don't think to ask - and then we'll have another hour together to explore ways each of us can ground what we're learning in our own ...
Jan 03, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 17Ep. 3
Happy New Year. My guest this week is a long term friend of the podcast. Dr Simon Michaux has been a physicist and geologist and then became an expert in the reality of the circular economy. He now works in the Geological Survey of Finland and is a regular advisor to the Finnish parliament. The day after we recorded this podcast, he was talking to the British consulate in Helsinki and in the last year, he's explained the reality of where we're at over 200 times, and one third of those talks was ...
Jan 03, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 17Ep. 3
For this time around the dark nights of the winter solstice - at least in the northern hemisphere - we've been exploring more of an inner landscape - being reflexive with Nathalie and Della, and before that, exploring the living myths of our land and how we can ground them in our current reality with Angharad Wynne. And this week, we're heading inward and outward, travelling to Peru with Dr Simon Ruffell, psychiatrist, ayahuasca researcher and student of Shipobo curanderismo. Since 2016, Simon h...
Dec 27, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Season 17Ep. 2
Here is our winter solstice meditation - please create a space for yourself where you won't be disturbed and where you can feel your way into the dark, regenerative space of the longest night. If you want to draw the curtains, switch off all the power and light a candle, this may help you to connect with the place of rest and renewal. This version is the shortest and comes with music in the background. If you'd prefer longer versions with or without music, you can find them below and if you are ...
Dec 20, 2023•17 min•Season 17Ep. 1
This is the fourth year of our now-traditional Winter Solstice podcast get-together in which Nathalie Nahai, Della Duncan 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 the seeds of new beginnings were grounded in the heart of what has passed. This is becoming one of the highlights of my podcasting year - a chance to range far and wide and deep in the company of two women whose podcasts never fail ...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Season 17Ep. 1
This week, as we head down towards what, in the northern hemisphere at least, is the long nights, the dark nights, I wanted to explore our heritage, the way we celebrate the solstice in this land, the land of Britain. I'm aware that quite a lot of you listening are from the southern hemisphere where you're heading up to your long sun and your fires burn differently. I recorded a summer solstice meditation at our long days in June and when we get to the meditation - after the podcast with Della D...
Dec 13, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 16Ep. 13
Our guest this week is host of one of my must-listen podcasts - one I've been following since the spring, when Dr Simon Michaux mailed me and said, you need to listen to Rachel - and he was right. Rachel Donald is host of Planet: Critical one of the world's top-rated podcasts on the poly-crisis and systems change. She interviews some really big players on the world stage with integrity and panache - her conversation with Alastair Campbell where she never lets him off the hook is an absolute exem...
Dec 06, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Season 16Ep. 12
Our guest this week is Hugo Spowers, Company Architect of Riversimple, whose purpose is 'To pursue, systematically, the elimination of the environmental impact of personal transport.' Modernity demands that we have personal transport and the thought of giving it up is one of the many sticking points when people try to imagine a way through to a regenerative future: nobody wants to be limited to their immediate vicinity for work, leisure or social connection. At the same time, we're becoming incr...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 30 min•Season 16Ep. 11
Words have the power to change worlds. Powerful words, powerfully written can open doors to the future. Beautiful words, beautifully written, can give us hope . Richard Wain's new collection of poetry is doing all of these, with panache, and heart and soul. We all know by now that we need total systemic change - and a central thesis of this podcast is that we'll get there best by creating narratives that build this - both highlighting the need for it and exploring possible paths through. What's ...
Nov 25, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 15Ep. 10
My guest this week is someone who is both right at the edge of the emerging futures and in a position to exert leverage at some of the highest points of the scale at which change happens. Sophia Parker is the Emerging Futures Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a philanthropic organisation with a long history of progressive work, aiming for social and cultural equity. It is still committed to the research that sheds new light onto the nature and scale of poverty and injustice in the UK. ...
Nov 22, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Season 16Ep. 10
How do we move ourselves – individually and collectively – from the broken Trauma Culture of our times, to the Initiation Culture that will allow us to step forward, healed and whole? Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy have co-authored a book: Post-Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse. Vandana Shiva says of it, “Ladha and Murphy walk us through the deep logics of neoliberalism, the foundations of globalisation and the ideology of corporate free trade … the authors dissect ph...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 16Ep. 9
This is an Accidental Gods bonus Episode recorded at the Marches Real Food and Farming Conference held at Linley Estate in Shropshire in September. Josiah Meldrum is co-founder and Director of Hodmedod's - which was set up specifically to enable local growers to farm regeneratively - and sell the produce they want to grow (and can grow in ways that help to regenerate the land), to people who want to buy their produce. This sounds obvious - but in our hyper-industrialised world, where industrial ...
Nov 08, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 16Ep. 2
We all know the climate and ecological tipping points are terrifyingly close. What can we do - as individuals and collectively? Simon Oldridge has ideas that answer both of these. Simon first joined us back in episode #182 when he joined his colleague Anthea Simmons and they spoke eloquently about the strategies of the South Devon Primary group which are aimed at raising one progressive candidate in borderline constituencies in the UK, so that the hard right doesn't swan through the middle on a ...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Season 16Ep. 8
If we're at the moment of choice between flourishing and destruction, what would you choose? We are at a moment of decision: We either step forward into our own Great Destruction, which could theoretically see us wipe out all of humanity and most of the More than Human World…Or we could step into what Indy Johar calls 'The Great Peace', claiming our birthright as the Interstitial Generation between the old paradigm of extraction, consumption and pollution—and the new one that could arise where w...
Oct 25, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 16Ep. 7
How can we, as parents, grandparents and anyone who cares about the fate of future generations, live our lives in such a way that when our children ask us why we didn't do more, we can say with honesty that we did all that we could? How do we help them to build resilience, to feel safe in a supportive community and in connection with the natural world so that as they grow, they can face the truth about the world they have inherited? And how can we use our role as parents to create conversations ...
Oct 18, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 16Ep. 4
How much do you know about AI, blockchain and Web 3.0? If you're like us, the answer is probably very little. But these techs are going to change our world out of all recognition and while there is the potential for catastrophe, in the right hands, the same technology has the potential to help us shape the future we'd all be proud to leave behind and this is what this podcast is about. Monty is one of the founders of ReFi DAO. Monty is working deeply and effectively at the cutting edge of emerge...
Oct 11, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Season 16Ep. 5
How does soil health intimately and profoundly impact human health? What's the link between the soil microbiome and the human gut microbiome? How can we begin to restore our health, and the health of the living earth in concert with each other? These are the questions posed by the outstanding book 'What your Food Ate: How to heal our land and reclaim our health' and the co-authors, Anne Biklé and David Montgomery are this week's guests as we delve deeply into the nature of soil, the functions of...
Oct 04, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Season 16Ep. 2
Here at Accidental Gods, we are increasingly of the opinion that our most urgent need as we face the polycrisis is to find a sense of being a belonging that changes our life's purpose. We all know we're not here just to pay bills and die, but knowing what we're not here for is not enough: we need to feel at the deepest level what we are here for, to rebuild the deep heart connections to the web of life such that we can take our place in the web with integrity and authenticity and a true sense of...
Sep 27, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Season 16Ep. 1
Manda's Equinox meditation focuses on finding our sense of balance as the tilt of the world balances between summer and winter, light and dark, day and night. And from that, finding a stable place with the three pillars of our heart minds: joyful curiosity, gratitude and compassion. The meditation is available with Birdsong and with Music Birdsong https://media.transistor.fm/66b6845b/79a1c49b.mp3 Music https://media.transistor.fm/8284fc49/d9bae6ab.mp3...
Sep 23, 2023•22 min•Season 15Ep. 13
As we head into winter in the northern hemisphere, as the tilt of the world hangs in balance, we reached our 200th episode. So this is a time to look back and look forward: to look at where we've been, where we are and where we might go. From our origins as an adjunct to the Accidental Gods Membership , explaining the neurophysiology and neuropsychology behind what we're doing, and then then the spiritual grounding of connecting to the web of life... we moved into talking to people who live at t...
Sep 23, 2023•25 min•Season 15Ep. 13
In this, our 200th episode of Accidental Gods podcast, I am delighted to be joined by André Tranquilini, estate manager at Waltham Place, a 220 acred biodynamic estate in Berkshire, in the UK. André is a biodynamic farmer, consultant and teacher. He has been the manager at Waltham Place since 2018. André has worked extensively as a market gardener, Steiner school teacher and farmer, and was a founding member of the seed company, Living Seeds, in Portugal. Born in Brazil, André has had the opport...
Sep 20, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Season 15Ep. 13
"Grasping the Nettle' is at the heart of the film. Making a dress this way is a mad act of will and artistry but also devotional, with every nettle thread representing hours of mindful craft. Over seven years Allan is transformed by the process just as the nettles are. It's a kind of alchemy: transforming nettles into cloth, grief into beauty, protection and renewal. A labour of love, in the truest sense of the phrase, The Nettle Dress is a modern-day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of n...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Season 15Ep. 12
How do good people create systems of oppression? What is Health? What is unHealth? And how do we move from the latter to the former in ways that mean good people create systems of co-creation, inter-being and connection? This week, we explore all these questions with Sophy Banks, Founder and Lead Facilitator of Healthy Human Culture. This week's guest is a remarkable woman who was one of the shining lights amongst those who came to teach us at Schumacher college, before the pandemic Sophy Banks ...
Sep 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 15Ep. 11
We're on the edge of so many tipping points it's hard to know where to start. But paralysis isn't useful and so we need to talk to the people who are still moving forward - and who have ideas of how we can carry more and more people with us. With that in mind, this week's guest is a many-time friend of the podcast: someone completely aligned with our aims and ideals and whose energy, activism - and capacity to write and publish books that are right on the nail - leave me awestruck. Professor Rup...
Aug 30, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 15Ep. 9
In this week's episode I'm talking to someone I met on last year's Thrutopia Masterclass: someone who was there to explore and share ideas about how we might get through to that flourishing future we'd be proud to leave behind. Elisa Rathje is an artist, a filmmaker, a podcaster, a writer, an unschooling parent - and a homesteader whose life is an expression of her philosophy that we need to live closer to, and in harmony with, the land. She and her family farm one and a half acres on Saltspring...
Aug 23, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 15Ep. 8
This podcast is focussed on all the ways that we can bring all of ourselves to the project of total systemic change: our minds, bodies, spirits, hearts - and the practicality of what we do. Given this, we're delighted to welcome to the podcast Maddy Harland, the Co-founder and Editor of Permaculture Magazine . Maddy, and her husband Tim, co-founded a publishing company, Permanent Publications , in 1990 and Permaculture Magazine in 1992 to explore traditional and new ways of living in greater har...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 15Ep. 8
We all know that we need to reconnect to our HeartMinds and to bring our Heart Intelligence up to meet the explosion of left brain intelligence - we just don't know how to do it. This week's guest is one of my living heroes - who does have clear, grounded ideas of how to do this. Dr Scilla Elworthy was thirteen years old when she saw the Soviet Invasion of Hungary on the television and understood the horror of what was happening. Her mother found her packing a case to go to Budapest to help and ...
Aug 09, 2023•53 min•Season 15Ep. 7
