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Wild + Child with Claire Dunn
1.1k Plays10 months ago
It's all very well to forage weeds and track wombats, weave baskets from willow and walk barefoot cross country... but how do you stay wild in the city? With kids? With a face-sucking phone in your pocket?
Claire Dunn is a good person to ask about these things, being a key figure in Australia's rewilding movement and uncommonly balanced advocate for undomestication.
If you don’t know Claire, she’s a writer, speaker, barefoot explorer, rewilding facilitator and founder of Nature’s Apprentice -- and, as hands down one of my favourite people, it was a joy to wander with Claire around the conversational compass from her personal mythology, wild motherhood to what's up with introverts? to making peace with the concrete jungle.
Claire’s Books:
Claire’s home on the web:
NBLT ~ Nature Based Leadership Training
Joanna Macy ~ The Work That Reconnects
The Tourist Test ~ Kamana Wilderness Awareness School
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Resilience Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Resilience. Hey, this is Katie and you're listening to Resilience, a podcast about skills, the resilience they bring and living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us. I'm scripting this intro while sitting on a strip of astroturf in Jara country, the unceded lands of the Jaja Warang people in central Victoria.
00:00:29
Speaker
What am I doing sprawled on a thatch of scratchy plastic, otherwise known as astroturf, that neither sways in the breeze, is the right shade of green, nor feeds animals? Well, I'm on the top floor of a local hotel, hanging out on a balcony that adjoins my mum's room, who's here visiting me for the week. I needed to write this script, and I needed somewhere to sit.
Artificial vs. Natural: A Reflection
00:00:52
Speaker
So, the concrete slab covered in bright green nylon, it is. My first reaction to the astroturf was one of Disney.
00:01:00
Speaker
How can anyone take this stuff seriously? Such a sad approximation of the Earth's living pelt. It's like we claimed the color and the texture of grass and threw away the rest. No mowing, no watering, no bugs, no buffalo. But there's also something tragically beautiful about AstroTurf 2. It shows that the human psyche yearns for wild nature.
00:01:22
Speaker
that even in our least inspired landscaping choices we still seek green. And actually, as I look more closely at this fraudulent lawn, I'm noticing moss creeping in at the edges, corners of composting leaves, the odd bit of bird shit and a couple of pioneering bugs, albeit dead.
00:01:43
Speaker
And I'm wondering, how long before this astroturf is given over to the glorious mess of nature it was designed to transcend?
Meet Claire Dunn: Influence and Excitement
00:01:52
Speaker
Today's guest is giving out urban spaces and modern souls the moss on astroturf treatment, working alongside weeds and fungi and a fierce community of ferrules in and around Narm, Melbourne.
00:02:05
Speaker
It's Claire Dunn, one of my biggest teachers and influencers in recent years. After reading Claire's book, Rewilding the Urban Soul during lockdown in Melbourne, followed by My Year Without Matches, I picked up the scent of something really good and joined her year-long nature-based leadership immersion that I've referenced so many times on this podcast. In fact, it inspires and underpins the podcast in its entirety.
00:02:30
Speaker
That's where I learned about deep nature connection, village re-stitching, and starting fires by friction. And if you don't know Claire, she's a writer, speaker, barefoot explorer, rewilding facilitator, and founder of Nature's Apprentice. It was such a joy to welcome Claire Dunn to risk illiance for a wander around the conversational compass, from her personal mythology, to wild motherhood, to introversion, to making peace with the concrete jungle.
00:03:00
Speaker
And don't forget to cast your eyes over the show notes for all the links and trinkets. And also please share this episode with folks you know who are keen on this rewilding business and even those who aren't yet. I was thinking about how to, how to enter the conversation and what came to me. I was just up watering the garden and
00:03:22
Speaker
I felt like a camelback, you know, one of those water bladders just full to the brim feeling like I'm just going to burst with all the things I want to ask Claire. But realizing that you just take little sips and the valve regulates
Discovering Purpose: Myth and Ecology
00:03:34
Speaker
that. So I know that this conversation will go where it will and it won't just explode. But I was thinking about a story that you told and I believe it was on the NBLT retreat about your
00:03:47
Speaker
your purpose essentially and how you came to this work in a really soulful way. And I think it involved a bear. And I think it involved sparking people's passion and igniting the flames of love and connection. And I'd actually really enjoy hearing that story if you care to share it again. Sure. My gaze might not be on the laptop for,
00:04:15
Speaker
some of this. Oh, good. Yeah. Well, that question of, can I just experiment with something for a minute, Katie? And it's not, it's not, it's just, I might just do this for a bit. Perfect. I can rest into the question. Yeah. The question of how does one know their purpose? For me, I've really come to know purposes as something quite mythical, you know, kind of akin to a personal myth.
00:04:45
Speaker
or something that is not really about what job we have or even a kind of vocation in a way, but something that's more along the lines of a song or a line of poetry, but it's really about how we fit in the overall picture, like an ecological niche, just like every other creature on this wild planet has their ecological niche.
00:05:13
Speaker
So it's been many years for me of yearning and longing to know what my piece of the puzzle is, my ecological niche, and to find the images or the poetic line or how I really know myself in a deeper way than what my day job is.
Vision Quest: Awakening the Spirit
00:05:36
Speaker
And after many years of
00:05:40
Speaker
questing, vision questing and ceremony and asking the questions and tracking my dreams. And I've come to know my purpose through different means. And one of those is literally just looking back over my life as if I've been walking kind of up a river and looking back at the stepping stones and seeing what the kind of consistent threads and patterns are in my life, the things that just don't change the
00:06:10
Speaker
abiding passions, the patterns that are me, the patterns that don't shift. And I've really been tracking this image of the kind of wild heart for many years. The wild heart fire, these words in this image was really strong in me. And then one day I had this really strong kind of
00:06:39
Speaker
I guess waking vision, it was during a workshop and it was a deep imagination exercise. And when we talk about the imagination here, we're talking about an imagination that's not flights of fancy, that it's something really embedded in our psyche. And the image that came to me then was that I was a Raven and I had been really associating with Raven and resonating with Raven for a time. And this Raven was,
00:07:09
Speaker
was dancing and it had a little kind of fire in its heart. And then who came towards Raven was this big old brown kind of tired bear. And the light had gone out of the bear's eyes.
00:07:28
Speaker
And this old bear, you know, was coming to Raven for something, for waking up. And the Raven just started dancing from foot to foot, kind of hopping from foot to foot.
00:07:41
Speaker
And the fire started burning more brightly in the raven's heart. And the bear kind of sat up a bit and took some notice. And then these sparks started traveling from the raven's heart into the heart of the bear. And it sparked a fire, a small fire at first. And then the fire grew larger and larger. And then this bear started also moving, started dancing, mirroring the raven.
00:08:07
Speaker
and the light and the fire came back into the bear's eyes and they danced together, this raven and this bear, this bear that was so dull and full of inertia now had life. And that image showed me so much about who I am, that this wildfire that burns in my heart can actually spark other people's longing, can spark their aliveness, help spark
00:08:35
Speaker
you know, the heart of their longing for knowing their own gifts, for knowing their own purpose. And I really saw this bear also as the old kind of the dying bear of Western culture and that Western culture, our culture needs re-imagining. And that part of what I was doing was sparking the fires of a kind of cultural renaissance.
00:09:02
Speaker
you know, bringing back aliveness, bringing back a kind of
From Activism to Ancestral Skills
00:09:07
Speaker
longing for a deeper connected life in the culture of our culture. So that's, yeah, that's the kind of core image by which I know myself. Yeah, such a beautiful story and also an exercise in entrusting these other dimensions of knowing our imaginative faculties and in my imagination,
00:09:33
Speaker
You know, I was there with you on the river too, and really wanting to understand how you had walked along, trudged along, splashed along from place to place. You know, I believe that you were more of a kind of frontline activist in your earlier days. And how did you come to this more mythic, poetic understanding and being in the world? Thanks, Katie.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, I really had to close my eyes to answer that question. It's not something I can look at a computer screen and it's a felt sense as much as an image.
00:10:14
Speaker
But yes, I started this whole journey really in the forest and falling in love with the forest as a young woman recently moved from her family's home and very kind of conservative upbringing to the big smoke of Sydney and thought I'd be the next Yarn event, you know, the next
00:10:39
Speaker
abc journalist is what i was going to be i knew i was a writer that's what i was going to be a journalist but when the world you know when when i moved to the big smoke and and the world was at my fingertips and i wasn't behind the picket fence of my family anymore what i actually discovered while i was at university
00:11:01
Speaker
was this very terrible fact that our world was in great peril and that we were in the middle of an ecological crisis. And this was shocking to me. And it wasn't just something that I learnt from books, but I was taken out to clear fell logging operations and to other places that had been decimated by the
00:11:30
Speaker
capitalist military industrial world of which we're apart and I was like I had this kind of embodied experience of just what we're doing to our planet and in a funny kind of way in that moment of realizing the kind of tearing apart of the web of life
00:11:53
Speaker
that our culture is involved in right now, I also knew myself to be part of this web of life. In that moment, the two things kind of happened at once. I remember the moment well looking out onto this clear fell and realizing both the destruction of the web and my inextricable interweaving in it.
00:12:14
Speaker
So that launched me into almost a decade of frontline activist work. A lot of it was political lobbying and campaign coordinating for various grassroots organizations. But of course, the nature of that is burnout. And that's exactly what happened to me. Alongside this kind of maturing of my understanding of the ecological crisis,
00:12:42
Speaker
as one in which the root of it is our cultural disconnection with nature, which happened many thousands of years ago. And I started to turn my attention to the fact that what I felt most called to is trying to heal this rift of separation, of trying to bring together, bring Western culture back into right relationship with the natural world, back into a reciprocity and an animosity, not an animosity.
00:13:12
Speaker
and animistic relationship with the natural world. And so that needed to start with me because I realized these forest I was trying to save, I didn't even have a connection to. I couldn't tell you which way the weather came in from or what the first bird of the morning was. It just felt all wrong. I needed to find that deep place of connection within myself.
00:13:33
Speaker
So I started studying earth skills or ancestral life ways, these indigenous knowings of shelter and water and fire and food, how to support ourselves on the land. I started learning about bush tucker and medicinals and the long-term survival skills or ancestral skills, I prefer to call them, of working with fibers, of weaving baskets, of
00:14:00
Speaker
how to how to forage and and turn animal hides into clothing and all these long-term skills which really opened me up to such a sense of joy and aliveness and creativity and belonging. It was just so revelatory to me that I could this kind of girl from the farm could actually learn the skills to be able to
00:14:29
Speaker
live on the land in a way that I felt some sense of belonging. And I dove into them and as well at the same time there was a deep interest in kind of depth psychology in the more mythical, mystical world that existed when we opened ourselves to, when I opened myself to, immersions, long experiences of time in the bush.
Joanna Macy's Message of Love
00:14:55
Speaker
So that led me to that year long retreat, which I wrote about in my first book. If back then you had a perspective of the world needing saving, do you have an updated kind of lens through which you look now in terms of the ecological crisis?
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah crises. I do and it's one that I learnt and feel like I understand more and more from a mentor of mine this kind of Buddhist activist and incredible elder Joanna Macy who's now in her 90s
00:15:29
Speaker
who's developed this incredible body of work called The Work That Reconnects. But when you boil it down to what she really taught me over the time that I've been mentored by her, I was once sitting at her kitchen table having a cup of tea in Berkeley in her humble little home. And she said, she just turned to me with her wrinkly eyes, eyes full of tears and love and said, you know,
00:15:53
Speaker
The thing that we really need to do most right now is just help each other love the world more. Like a wild love for the earth. Just fall more in love each day with this planet that we're living
00:16:09
Speaker
on and in. And that resonates with me more and more. We don't need to save anything, we just need to love this world more. Because from that place of love and connection, of course, then flows service, then flows the desire to give back as best we can. 17 minutes in and I'm crying.
00:16:34
Speaker
I don't know if you can see these fat little droplets. I was wondering. I can't hide it well. It's this ginger complexion of mine. It shows up instantaneously when I feel emotion. But I feel so much emotion when you speak.
00:16:48
Speaker
the recognition that as a child, I know so confidently that most of us, many of us, all of us have that experience of loving the world like that, loving climbing a tree, loving faucicking around in the dirt. I just feel that is such a, it's our natural inclination and instinct. And you've been someone who has just gently guided me back to that original kind of
00:17:17
Speaker
longing and being and I think it's this sweet remembrance and emotion and a grief remembrance because or a grief acknowledgement because the question then is how do we carve out the space to love the world with that kind of passion and commitment when there are just so many things that are siphoning off our attention and energy. Oh it's such a
00:17:47
Speaker
It's such a pressing question, Katie, for me. Two years ago, I had few living expenses and all the freedom in the world, really.
Balancing Family and Passion
00:18:03
Speaker
I was deep in my own practices of long immersions or nights away under the stars on my own or at my sit spot down on the river. And then not only did I have my own beautiful little baby, but I also adopted two stepchildren when their mother died quite suddenly. And so I went from a world of freedom to a world of three children
00:18:29
Speaker
and private school fees and a mortgage. So the inquiry for me has, I would say matured. I'm going to say the lens of matured rather than changed. And maybe it's what I needed to be able to really relate to what most of us experience, which is how do we do this most important project of
00:18:55
Speaker
of really extending our community of relations, not just to our family, but to the family of life around us. When we are beset by things to do, every moment there seems to be something urgent that might relate to school photos or communicating with a playgroup or, you know, work, of course. And yet I'm absolutely committed to this path of deepening my love for the world.
00:19:25
Speaker
So really what I'm coming to see is that there's every opportunity in every moment. My 18 month old teaches me this. The first thing you do when he gets up in the morning and has his breakfast, he's at the door wanting to go outside. And so we go outside. Even though the breakfast dishes might still be there and whatever urgent messages are on my phone, he doesn't care about that. We're outside.
00:19:55
Speaker
course at some point we'll trickle back in and tend to what needs tending to but it's like it's like that principle of do what's most important first thing in the day because the rest of the day might just get sideswiped by something else and so we wandered together in the mornings and that that's now my sit spot this place that used to be a rarefied event for me and me only with wild nature it's now shared by
00:20:18
Speaker
18 month old and sometimes the other kids we wander on the land that we're on that we're caretaking on and we notice the small things there's nothing like children to make me really pause and look at the snail or the slug or the ant or you know just he's he's exclaiming at the birds every single day invites me into that childlike energy of awe and wonder but of course a lot of the time that love for the world
00:20:45
Speaker
comes through this job that's in front of me to tend to these other mammals in my care, whether it's the love of preparing a meal or the love of washing up at the end of the day, even though I feel tired. It's this sense of, oh, my energy is being well spent. I'm tired at the end of the day and I'm looking after my relations.
00:21:11
Speaker
We're giving thanks for our food at the meal. We're giving our hearts to remembering who grew the food and the hands that have been involved in transporting it. We're caring for the land as best we can. It's like the world has kind of shrunk to a much smaller sphere of influence or geographic area, but really the love has grown. So I have faith in that.
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah and something that really had me falling in love with your work and specifically rewilding The Urban Soul, the book, your second book.
Urban Rewilding and Community
00:21:47
Speaker
There's something in your answer that calls me to those urban spaces and you know the way that you were staying with the trouble or staying with the conundrum and
00:21:59
Speaker
figuring and finding ways in an imperfect scenario in something that would be so easily cast as too hard. Yeah, what I hear in your answer around your family life and those everyday obligations and responsibilities is kind of a similar flavor to how I felt when I was in the city reading that book stuck in lockdown, feeling this, the energy and the excitement of
00:22:25
Speaker
actually finding a way, like a weed, to be in the gaps and to flourish. So I'd really love to hear your perspective. For anyone who hasn't read that book and anyone who has, who wants to hear it again and again, is how do you relate to those urban spaces and what are those messages that you shared in rewilding the urban soul that can help people who aren't in these perfect bucolic permaculture paradises
00:22:52
Speaker
actually find ways to still connect with nature and connect with themselves. Thanks, Katie. Well, it's like I kind of was living a double life in a way at the moment. There's part of me
00:23:10
Speaker
that is living up in the Northern rivers, way off grid, homeschooling my kids, growing most of my food, practicing hunting and foraging and gathering every day, way, way outside the borders of our culture. Part of me is living that, but it's in my imagination. That's what I thought I'd be doing. And yet through reasons of fate and choice,
00:23:37
Speaker
I have found myself mostly living in urban areas and right now in the very outskirts of Melbourne for the last 10 years. And I too, when I finally came to terms with the fact that it was a reality, that I had to really accept that this is where I was. And actually there was, yeah, there was an excitement to the challenge because in a way that other life would be too easy for me.
00:24:06
Speaker
This is where most of us live. 80% of Australians live in urban areas. We're one of the most urbanized countries in the world. And if we can't find a way to live a deeply connected life, to encounter everything around us as nature, including our own wild bodies and wild psyches, this whole project of rewilding and reconnection isn't going to work because we're not all going to live
00:24:36
Speaker
in the northern rivers of New South Wales, way off grid, it has to happen where we are. The project is relatively urgent. And so once I decided that I would actually turn my attention towards this project, it became such an exploration and an adventure. And realizing things like, the cities are actually incredibly biodiverse.
00:25:05
Speaker
You know, there's like 30% of Australia's threatened species occur in cities and actually urban areas support substantially more threatened species per unit area than rural areas. I mean, it's such a mishmash of cultures and introduced species and native species. There is just so much going on and so much opportunity for experimentation with these skills. And a big part of it is just
00:25:34
Speaker
really coming to terms with the fact that the city is nature, that it's not something outside of what is natural. And then from there, anything can happen. And yeah, the rewilding the urban soul book was a culmination of about five years of experimentation with, you know, foraging and sit spotting and wandering and tracking the seasonal changes. And, you know, a lot of it became about
00:26:05
Speaker
building community. And that was one of the big revelations of that time was the rewilding movement, yes, as much as it is about nature, connection and earth skills. Actually, if we're looking back to earth-based cultures as to what we've lost, a big part of that is village and a sense of belonging to our human community. So what I really started to do in that time was realize that what I was interested in, what needed to happen was blending nature and culture.
00:26:34
Speaker
So rather than being the solo tracker out there, you know, it was potluck dinners made with food that you foraged or grown and bringing people together to practice these skills in urban parks and areas and really bringing our kind of nature observations or our passion
00:26:56
Speaker
to our gatherings in a multitude of different forms and so my house kind of became a hub for people who were practicing these things and we'd come together
Community and Introversion: Finding Balance
00:27:07
Speaker
to like we'd buy a big tuna from the market and try and bottle and preserve enough tuna for ourselves for the next 12 months or we'd go and clean up the yara and you know just hang out on the river together
00:27:20
Speaker
our you know it was kind of blending or life-stacking you know leisure and our hobbies and our work and our food and our housing and and our social life. I have a few questions now that are kind of banking up but actually what I want to just say in response to that is what about the introverts? What about people who are
00:27:46
Speaker
not wanting to engage so much with village and community and not get together and do things. And I suppose the background to that question is I felt socially drained in so many situations. I have felt like that over the years. And now I find myself actually moving in community with a lot more units of energy to give. And there's something happening there that I can't explain, but I do just want to ask what your perspective is on the village in terms of
00:28:14
Speaker
Is introversion kind of part of our separation story in some ways, our atomization, or are there people who are just less inclined to get together and connect with their kin in that way? Great question. I mean, I absolutely feel like there's differences in personality, which India won more to social gatherings or not. But my sense is also that sometimes what we call introversion in our culture is just
00:28:44
Speaker
kind of adaptation to a very individual, isolated culture. We become very used to living on our own or living in small couple units where we don't have to relate so much to people.
00:28:59
Speaker
And it starts being this sense of, oh, that the true me can only really be seen when I'm on my own or when I'm with one or two others. And then I put a mask on for these social events because they don't really resonate with me and no one's really being authentic and I'm not really doing the things I love doing. And that's incredibly draining. But I wonder if we became more accustomed to and used to just incidental contact that was not about
00:29:30
Speaker
a very planned social engagement. But the ways that we just relate to others, like I started to do in the street that I lived in in Melbourne, just through sharing eggs from our chickens or news over the fence from what's happening on the riverbank or sharing food, sharing resources, babysitting, all these kinds of different things that we start to kind of
00:29:54
Speaker
enmesh our lives which really mirror back the enmeshment that nature is that supports our existence. And so these social engagements actually just end up kind of being an extension of our ways of living rather than special things that we need to put on special clothes and special masks that drain our energy.
00:30:17
Speaker
And I, yeah, I imagine I have this, I have this vision of every Friday night in every, I don't know, street or suburb or little village, that there's a community fire that burns somewhere. Maybe there's a special area or a park and everyone brings a plate of food. Cause Friday is really about gathering. You know, Shabbat is a beautiful way of celebrating Friday nights. I love going to Shabbat gatherings, but with that spirit of the end of the week,
00:30:48
Speaker
Let's bring a meal and share some stories around the fire under the stars. You know, what, what might open from that? What kind of possibilities of kind of co-care of our land and our community might come from walking out our front door, walking down our street without much organization. We just share some simple stories around the fire. I wonder. Yeah. What is it about fire, Claire? I know you have so much.
00:31:16
Speaker
so strong a relationship with fire and so many of our interactions have been held around a campfire. That's a scene of many a good tale and many a inexplicable arising of debauchery. Why are humans so drawn to fires? And yeah, what are some stories from your campfire?
00:31:42
Speaker
Well, what I can tell you is when I first witnessed someone, a woman making fire in the same way that it's been made here by Indigenous Australians for so many thousands of years, something in me
00:31:58
Speaker
I don't know, woke up to the sacred nature that is fire. There was something just so fundamentally human at a very essential level to our species about being able to make fire from materials from the land. And so I decided to really fiercely apprentice myself to that skill.
00:32:19
Speaker
which it ended up taking me quite a few years, actually, and a lot of blood sweat and tears and blood blisters on my palms to make my own fire in that way. So I could say a lot about my own personal relationship with fire. It was a huge source of angst and joy, but such deep,
00:32:42
Speaker
Satisfaction, satisfaction's too insipid a word. It was like some part of me just landed into my animal body, into my kind of ancestral lineage through learning how to make fire by friction. Such a fundamental human skill.
The Primal Connection to Fire
00:32:59
Speaker
And of course, fire in a more general sense, it's a gathering point. You know, in a kind of on a directional wheel, as I like to think of it, or a medicine wheel,
00:33:12
Speaker
Fire really represents the place in the West where the sun sets and that's the natural gathering time. You know, in a cycle of a day in a healthy village, we've all gone about our business. We've, you know, we've been productive. We've been growing our food and tending to our communities and our creativity. At the end of the day, we light the fire and that's the signal that it's time to come together. So in a kind of literal and metaphorical sense, I feel like it's time.
00:33:41
Speaker
to light the fire for our culture, for us to come together and really share our hearts about what it is to be alive in these times. These are really hard times. We need to be sharing the stories and a story is
00:33:58
Speaker
almost always more true and more vivid and more, it lands in my heart more when it's shared around a campfire. And also the coals, you know, the coals that travel around from fire to fire. We had one popped into our fire from the tent embassy in Canberra with Meg Almond's last grief circle. And there was something so incredible about the smoke from that fire. It kind of touched every single one of us in turn that night.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah, I find myself in situations that I can't readily explain with words anymore. I'm sure you're living that kind of life as well. Yeah, absolutely. And what an incredibly powerful living symbol to carry the coals from the tent embassy into your grief circle. It's not just symbolic. Something real is happening there with that coal in a kind of
00:34:58
Speaker
something real, it's holding the energy of that tent embassy and that place. And you hold these spaces for people to either dip their toe in or dive right into a ceremonial space, a vision quest, and I'm wondering
00:35:18
Speaker
what you perceive when someone who's very, very new to all of these ideas and ways shows up there, is there, I guess it's different for every person, but do you feel like people generally, something old is kind of remembering what it is to be in ceremony, or does it take a bit of gentle hand holding?
00:35:45
Speaker
Well, it's interesting. I've just come back from a five-day retreat, running a five-day retreat, which was not a vision quest or an explicit ceremony. But in essence, I feel like all of this work really, for me, is held in a context of deep reverence and a sacredness of these skills. And I use the word sacred in a specific way, sacred in the way that they connect us to life, that they protect life and preserve life.
00:36:15
Speaker
that I have a relationship to them and in that relationship they become sacred to me.
00:36:22
Speaker
And I kind of assumed that anyone who'd signed up for a year-long training would already be pretty comfortable in the bush. Some people had never been camping before, some people had never set up a tent before. And so there's always that moment for me of kind of remembering where people are at in their kind of urbanness, you know, that a lot of people are really coming to this work
00:36:48
Speaker
very deeply steeped in an uber civilised, uber domesticated life. They might never take their shoes off on the earth. They might have never slept on the land. And yet they somehow find me or find this work, this body of work. And so I track for what happens when I give some really simple invitations for them to walk barefoot on the earth for
00:37:16
Speaker
you know, to build a simple earth shelter and lay their body inside it to put some charcoal or ash on their bodies or some clay on their bodies and move slowly on the land or to simply find a place alone out in nature and
00:37:32
Speaker
sit there and really open up their senses and open up their wild heart and really let the land listen to them as much as they're listening to the land. Even though I've been doing this for so many years, I still wonder if one day someone's going to say, you know what, this isn't for me. I'm going back to my life. Well, it hasn't happened yet. And what I find is so quickly people
00:38:03
Speaker
just sink in. It's like what my mentor, one of my mentors, John Young, calls the connectivity system. He says, we've got a nervous system, we've got a circulatory system, but what most people don't know is we have a connectivity system. And it's that system that switches on. It's like, it's like they're a kid again. And the invitations they didn't get that they really, really wanted as a kid that they needed as a kid, just to be kind of like, they're handheld,
00:38:32
Speaker
by their grandmother, taken out to the backyard, shown the constellations and the moon, shown the herbs that will heal them or will nourish them, shown how to grow food, just these really simple things that they might not have received, they're still waiting to receive them. So when I'm there or another guide is there to just take them by the hand and take them outside, they're ripe.
00:39:01
Speaker
they're right for it. And I constantly am reminded that I don't really need to do much. I'm just a bridge, I'm just a bridge to get them out there. Nature is a teacher, nature is the mentor, nature is the healer. And when they come back with their stories to the village, it's this kind of, it's this going out, coming back to the hearth, having their story heard and told and seen,
00:39:30
Speaker
That's healing right there. It's actually, it's healing and it's healing at a personal level. It's completing tasks that weren't completed in childhood that needed to be to become a whole human, but it's also healing culture. It's restoring culture.
00:39:47
Speaker
I'm thinking about leadership because that course is nature-based leadership training and I never really understood the leadership word. It was something of a question mark for me and I think I'm still
00:40:04
Speaker
glimpsing what that might mean. But I'd love to ask you about leadership because despite that acknowledgement that it is, you know, the more than human world is this healing, this space of healing for people, you are holding a lot as well. And as a leader in that space, you've got to be ready with, you know, prompts and questions and reflections. And there is a lot going on.
00:40:33
Speaker
So I'd love to know what your version of leadership is and how people can start stepping into that space if they feel that this is part of their calling.
Leadership and Nature Connection
00:40:43
Speaker
I mean, partly the leadership word means we we get some grant money, which probably wouldn't be. Brutal honesty. It wasn't the reason in the first place, but in hindsight, it was really wise decision because it opened doors
00:41:04
Speaker
In another way, framing it as a leadership training kind of puts a bit of accountability on people in a way. It's not just something to consume, but there's a sense of giving back as well. It's assuming that everyone actually is a leader and that everyone has their gifts to offer. And that's part of this right relationship. It's part of this reciprocal relationship is
00:41:31
Speaker
we are all leaders and we will all be giving back. But at the kind of deeper level of why we've included that word in the training is my understanding and my witnessing that when people really reach a level of deep peace through being connected to the natural world, a sense of belonging, a sense of
00:41:58
Speaker
a sense of really that embeddedness in place, which includes embeddedness in a human community, when they can really feel like they can be who they are in the world and feel safe and seen and enlivened by the planet that we live on, enlivened by their place. Then what naturally arises is this desire to really know what their gifts are for the world.
00:42:26
Speaker
It's not because we tell them it's now the module on leadership. It just surfaces because they're so full of love, connectedness. They're so seen and heard and witnessed. They can see that who they are is valued. Then they want to give back. And that's where leadership comes from. It's like leadership from the ground up.
00:42:49
Speaker
It's not something that is self-imposed or like a certificate to say you're a leader or it's, it just arises. It just arises naturally.
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah, even gifts in the same way as leadership. For me, I have an odd relationship with that word or maybe an allergy that I've come through and healed because at first when I was doing that mentoring for nature's gifts course with yourself and John, I was really confused. I was like, what are these gifts? Is this Christmas?
00:43:22
Speaker
You know, is it, it sounds like maybe something you'd placate someone with to say, oh, you've got so many gifts, but I'm not going to tell you what they are. Just go and be brilliant. I don't know. I really, again, like had to spend time understanding or becoming comfortable with this idea of gifts. And also because we have, you know, rampant tall poppy syndrome, especially in this country where you don't want to say, hey, this is my niche. This is my gift. This is my,
00:43:49
Speaker
particular thing that I'm going to now offer back. So yeah, maybe if you could spend a little time expressing what gifts really mean and also how, you know, I've been a person really confused. I still am a confused person on the whole, but around what my gifts are. Do I even have any? Am I one of those anomalous creatures that doesn't feel a niche? Yeah, I'd love you to speak to that too, that process of surfacing gifts.
00:44:15
Speaker
Well, and at some point I'm going to turn the question back on you, Katie, because you're a living example right now of embodying your gifts. So something must have dropped into place for you. Just enjoying hearing the kookaburras outside. I mean, really what I mean by gifts here is that it comes alive for people through their passions and through what really brings them alive.
00:44:42
Speaker
through how they want to express their creativity. We are all just deep wells of creativity. Our psyches are just bursting with creativity. But we've often been told it's not appropriate or we can't really do that thing because someone else does it better. So it's really about giving people permission to follow those threads. Maybe they're just like floating at the edges of their awareness. This thing like, oh, I'm really passionate about this thing.
00:45:12
Speaker
maybe I could bring it to the world. And again, through their connectivity system switching on, through becoming more empowered through knowing their place, feeling a sense of belonging, acknowledging their grief and despair for the world, that's often a big piece of it, that it comes out of the closet and acknowledges that actually this concern, this fear, this anger, this grief that I have for the world is actually evidence of my connectedness. It doesn't need to hold me back.
00:45:44
Speaker
Again, what naturally springs forward are these creative ideas that we just literally kind of, we're just backing people. Go and try it. You know, we're here for you. Go and give it a go. Like if that thing brings you alive, what's stopping you? We have this one wild and precious life. And I'm curious from you, Katie.
00:46:06
Speaker
staff studying this mentoring for gifts course and these skills and what did you understand about the link between your journey of nature connection and your gifts?
Nature and Creative Life
00:46:18
Speaker
Hmm, I'm definitely feeling like there's something in the pipe that just wants to be said, which is like, what if those gifts aren't compatible with the modern paradigm? So I think that that's a very real conundrum for people. Look, this is something that
00:46:38
Speaker
I don't have a clarified answer to. All I know is that something has very much shifted that feels to me akin to wandering and allowing physical wandering in wild places or less wild places.
00:46:56
Speaker
And that entails a kind of, there's movement, there's always a kind of momentum, but there's very, you know, necessarily a lack of direction and a lack of strategy. You're just wondering. And that seems to parallel with maybe the more formalized parts of my life, making this podcast, writing, working on the farm, knowing that when I wander in wild nature,
00:47:26
Speaker
There's always something really surprising or a story that arises or there's always an affirmation that I belong out there and I can follow my nose and my instincts and I don't need to have it figured out, I just need to kind of keep
00:47:45
Speaker
keep going. So I think that that lesson in and of itself and that practice has infused, um, the more indoor domestic modern facets of my life with a sense of trust that all I need to do is kind of follow my curiosity and not, not be anxious about that. Yeah. So surrendering a sense of over kind of control,
00:48:11
Speaker
or needing to know the outcome or that things have to be wonderful and perfect has been the biggest thing for me. Yeah, well, I hope you don't cut that out of the podcast because I think people really need to hear that. And you're right, there is often a conflict between how do we express our gifts in a way that is compatible with the modern paradigm. And I think where people get caught up a bit is feeling like they suddenly need to make all their income from it.
00:48:38
Speaker
because that's just not always the reality, especially at first. Maybe there's a sense of, you know, you have your, as Bill Plotkin calls it, your survival dance, but then you have your sacred dance. The survival dance keeps you alive, keeps your family alive. And maybe one day that will also be your sacred dance. But as long as there's a way that you're actually really able to be at your creative edge and bring those gifts forward and keep asking the question of mystery,
00:49:08
Speaker
what is that image that is truly mine? And live your way into it in a way that the question itself and the journey it takes you on is so mysterious and life-giving that it's worth the longing, it's worth the asking. Another medicine that I draw from you and your life unbeknownst to you is your journey kind of through relationships and into motherhood at a time
00:49:37
Speaker
which is late in the piece, physiologically. And the way that you navigated those years, which I assume involved a lot of trust and courage to know what was or wasn't right for you and what was wanting you ultimately. I don't know if there's anything you want to speak to around
00:50:05
Speaker
doing things differently, following your instincts and not playing it safe in those realms. Yeah. Oh, it's, yes, it's, it's, um, what can I say about that? Well, I did, I had a little, little river who I can hear upstairs, uh, when I was just shy of my 44th birthday and
00:50:30
Speaker
When I turned 40, part of the ceremony that I enacted with a group of women for my 40th kind of celebration was really grieving around the fact that I wasn't going to have children. I turned 40, I wasn't in a relationship and
00:50:54
Speaker
It's something I always thought I would do without going seeking, you know, I didn't kind of seek it. I just assumed that this is something that would arise in my life because, because good things happen to me. And it certainly for a few years, there was a, was a great source of pain and confusion around why this very natural thing that I've always wanted, uh,
00:51:23
Speaker
wasn't gonna happen. At the same time, you know, there was so, my life was just so full of wonderfully wild and creative adventures that I was also at peace with the fact that life was going to have other things in store for me. And what that really comes down to and did come down to was a deep faith in mystery. When I say mystery, I mean the inconceivable,
00:51:54
Speaker
a thread that moves through all of us, a kind of linking consciousness like the Greeks call anima mundi, the soul of the world, that I'm a soul that is part of this greater soul and the enmeshment between souls,
00:52:15
Speaker
gives me great faith in the mysterious unfoldings and things and having the pleasure and honor of tracking many people's journeys over time, I am constantly astounded by how mystery works through their lives. It builds my faith in things happening in their time and people's fate and destiny being very full of meaning and synchronicity.
00:52:44
Speaker
as well as agency. And so, of course, agency came into the fact that I ended up meeting a beautiful man later on in life who was very clear that he didn't want to have any more children. Of course, that was another source of grief for me. But I followed that sense of rightness is that this relationship was one that I wanted to pursue and
00:53:10
Speaker
He changed his mind and then Little River appeared not long after he changed his mind, which has been an incredible blessing, which is a kind of a small way of saying that this child has brought such enormous joy and love into my life that I didn't know I was missing.
00:53:33
Speaker
And while life would have been joyful and full without him, I feel like my heart has just tripled and quadrupled in capacity to love not just this child but
00:53:52
Speaker
the world. I now cry in a way that I didn't when I hear of the suffering of others around the world, especially children. I'm so touched by the quality of innocence and just the beautiful fresh innocence of an infant, that stage of life that is just 100% sweetness. It is so sweetening to my heart and so
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah so full of compassion for all beings through this one little gorgeous child. There's a lot of things weaving into a question I want to ask about your story for the future and words like mystery and synchronicity and agency and babies all come into that question for me and
00:54:47
Speaker
You know, this podcast is loosely about the future, about how we're going to have resilience through tougher times. And I'm curious to know how people see what's ahead, how they frame that in their own minds, or what you're, if anything, doing to prepare for an altered society.
00:55:15
Speaker
which is really the core of your podcast resilience. You know, I often wonder about how am I helping create a more resilient future? Of course, on one hand, there's the skills. And I'm really glad that I know, I know some, I have some knowledge of, you know, how to support myself on the land and my family. That feels important.
00:55:42
Speaker
And I feel really glad that I know a lot of kind of village technologies, how to relate well to people, how to communicate well, how to build community, what kind of practices and processes really create community and heal conflict and peacemaking processes. Really, I invest a lot of energy in the story of Joanna Macy's story of the Great Turning.
00:56:13
Speaker
that is not about the great unraveling and it's not about business as usual, it's about being alive, aware and awake to the nature of our times, both the devastation, but also the enormous opportunity it offers. And I really feel that palpably, not in a, I don't know, not in a kind of wishful thinking way, but I do feel like it's drawing from us this kind of
00:56:44
Speaker
great change that's so needed in not just in the building blocks of our culture, but in our very consciousness. I feel like there's a huge opportunity for a collective initiation, initiatory process. And my work really is about initiatory processes for individuals. But on the collective level, I put my faith in the fact that we are in the midst of a huge collective
00:57:14
Speaker
overhaul of our operating system, of our worldview, of our story, our narrative. And I can hold both the complexity of holding that I'm going to pour myself into doing everything I can to bring forth a life-affirming culture, to be an artisan of cultural renaissance. I'm going to pour myself into that. Actually, what that really means is I'm going to embody who I am, that raven.
00:57:43
Speaker
And at the same time, I know I'm going to witness a pretty distressing collapse of our living systems. And I'm not going to give up because that's going to happen. In fact, I feel like the opportunity here is that we really come into full passion for our
00:58:08
Speaker
our service, our offerings to the world. This is the time. This is the time where they're so needed. And so really, if I can offer anyone anything these days, it's it's waking them up to what's really going on in our world in a way that enlivens them and gives them permission to like step outside the bounds of the life that they've been living. And it's possible. People are doing it every single day, making a different choice and
00:58:38
Speaker
I just feel so much gratitude that I have the privilege and the honor to witness people in those monumental shifts. Yeah, I remember you describing that feeling to me as a tugging on the hem. And that's really stuck with me because it is the quality of something invisible, but very much alive, pulling me in a certain direction. And a lot of my friends over the years have asked, how are you
00:59:06
Speaker
where you are, why you, how have you had confidence to follow this kind of more unconventional path and it has been this tugging at the hem and I'm not sure if you could attest to the fact that a lot of people or you know most people feel that and many people might be in situations where they can't
00:59:25
Speaker
answer it in the fullness of, you know, with a response that seems like it's truly coming from the heart. But what are some of the first steps that people can take to recognise that they're being pulled in a certain direction that might be quite inconvenient? I think it is really inconvenient for a lot of people. I think Paul Hawkins maybe talks about the blessed unrest or that kind of disquiet
00:59:53
Speaker
which is a, it's a motivator, just like any pain. It motivates one to move, to shift, to start rearranging the, you know, rearranging life. Where to start? I mean, really where I would start is with a pen on a blank piece of paper on my clear desk. I'd put some flowers on my desk. I'd turn the phone off and I'd start writing the question.
01:00:22
Speaker
What am I really longing for? What am I really yearning for? What brings me alive? And I just see what that pen had to say and I'd read it back to myself as if I was reading a letter from the earth itself. I'd kind of take that as my marching orders. You know, that's the starting point.
01:00:47
Speaker
What are you really longing for? What moves you? What stirs you? What grieves you? And move deeper into that longing. What's beckoning you? These are the questions that really get us moving, but they're dangerous questions. Don't ask them unless you're really willing to listen to what that pen might have to say. And I love the questions that you
01:01:14
Speaker
your signature questions at this point. One of them being, what is the first bird you hear in the morning, the first bird that calls in the morning. Even that is such a starting point, you know, clay on the wheel for sculpting this completely different life.
01:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, some really simple questions that wake us up to what we don't know that maybe we should know. Maybe it would do us well in our humanness, in our wild humanness to know what the first bird of the morning is, to know what the nearest edible wild plant is to our back door or to know when we turn the tap on where that water's coming from.
01:01:52
Speaker
Maybe we could visit that place where the water first starts trickling from the spring in the mountain. What might that do for our sense of
01:02:02
Speaker
Heart moved by the heart with that water that comes out of the tap that I feed my family with. Is that called the tourist test? And it comes from the Kamana Independent Natural Studies Program. Awesome, thank you. I sometimes try and find it and it might be really, it's really buried deeply in there somewhere. So I'll try and find the link because I just feel it really appeals to my sense of it's like a scavenger hunt.
01:02:31
Speaker
A quest. Yeah, yeah, it's a good wake up call. Yeah. Yeah. Claire, is there anything else that you wanted to extend in the conversation or that I haven't asked you that you were really excited to speak about? I think you covered so much ground, Katie, and really beautifully. And I would, yeah, I feel, yeah, I feel like I've gone to places that are most authentic for me at the moment.
01:03:00
Speaker
you know, you haven't just stuck to the kind of main threads. And I really appreciate that. Okay, lovely. Yeah, likewise. Really appreciate your candor and the territory we've covered. So excited to share this.
01:03:17
Speaker
Thanks to Claire Dunn for carving out time for this conversation, and to you for listening, all the way to the end. If you're the kind of person who sticks it out to the audio encore, you might also be the type to notice that I missed last week's release.
01:03:33
Speaker
I'm super sorry about that, and thanks to all who messaged me to check I was still alive. I've been fiercely wedded to this weekly schedule, meeting my self-imposed Monday deadlines, often by the skin of my teeth. And I really don't want to skip a beat, because I've given regular jobs and careers and security the cold shoulder for the most part, so it's on me to commit to this creative path.
01:03:56
Speaker
But last week it was just so busy. I had to surrender to filling the social cup, facilitating community events, fielding last-minute bushfire prep, bottling tomatillos, and falling in love. For all those self-made oddballs out there, if you're crafting your own livelihood, steering your own professional ship,
01:04:16
Speaker
I'm really interested to hear how you approach this consistency thing, this self-compassion thing, and how you're subverting the machine, the expectations that we place on ourselves to work in such a regimented and rigid fashion, how you're cutting yourself some slack, and then also staying accountable.
01:04:35
Speaker
And to me, this really does all come back to resculience because the way we work and find meaning needs a shakeup. And it'll probably require us to practice not only forging new paths, but following them through some rougher and tougher patches. Always keen for a chat over email, probably better than Instagram at this point. So get in touch at katyatkati.com.au. And meanwhile, I'm 97% certain I'll see you next Monday. Bye.