Tami Simon interviews Micah Mortali about his workshops and writing on Rewilding (link below).
Mortali shares key ideas from the field of diagnosing and healing and recovering our contact with aliveness: "...we may be suffering from what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls 'species loneliness'..." "I think that the earth has the solutions. I don't think we have them. And I think we have to get out there and start listening and paying attention to the weather, to the animals and the plants on our lands. We have to become a part of this earth again if we're going to be a part of what's coming next."
"...the hurricane is our teacher. It will teach us how to live in Florida. It will teach us how to build our houses and where to build our houses. The earth can teach us how to live here if we listen. But if you look at the modern home, it's built with absolutely no consideration of where it is on the land."
"It's strengthening to be uncomfortable and be outside and get cold and get hot and get wet and get dry."
And he shares his own "bear story"--
"I was feeling a lot of gratitude, and I just started praying and I just said a prayer: I asked my divine Spirit to come and share in my gratitude with me. I was just feeling really good about where I was in my life and I just was saying thank you, and I really just invited Spirit to come and sit with me. And those were my words that I spoke out loud in that moment.
"And for some reason or other, a few seconds after I uttered those words, I started to hear footsteps in the forest and I thought it was somebody hiking, so I just continued to meditate. And then, I noticed that the sound of movement was getting a little closer, a little closer, and I started to wonder what was going on. But I remained still. And then, I heard a twig snap right behind the tree, like two feet behind me. And I heard a loud exhalation, like a [makes loud breathing noise], and all the hair on the back of my neck stood up and every cell in my body, I knew that there was a bear right behind me."
And practices like ancestral skills such as making a fire without matches using a bow drill: "...turning a wooden spindle against a small piece of wood with something that looks like a bow and you're drawing the bow back and forth, and the spindle is spinning and it's being pressed down into another piece of wood. And the friction creates heat, and that heat begins to smoke. And you have a little bit of dust from the wood that's being ground off. And eventually that dust will ignite into a coal, which just smolders, and you place it into a little bundle of tinder that you hold in your hand and you blow into it. And then, out of your palm leaps a flame.
And if you've ever seen it or if you've ever witnessed it done or if you've ever done it, it's an experience, for me, which sometimes just brings tears to my eyes." The intro page to the interview, and the link to the audio : https://www.soundstrue.com/store/weeklywisdom?page=single&category=IATE&episode=14107&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=N191222-Podcast-Mortali&utm_content=%5BNew+podcast%5D+A+conversation+on+%22rewilding%22+with+Micah+Mortali&_bta_tid=15776956005476418810300132752105192885882068822583489741289448674250300556552749301546063743529246430980&_bta_c=d70qabta3pkp8htcgitrb78e6l0qj
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