November New Moon Roundup 🌑
Housekeeping and Gratitudes
Happy feasting, folks, and leftovers weekend, if Thanksgiving is your jam.
My family and I are traveling right now—visiting my brother in California, checking out his egret and other bird friends, and taking it slow. Today, we’re finishing up what’s left of our gratitude feast. So, there’s no episode of Kinward coming out today. But I didn’t want to let this new moon go by without a connection point.
It’s quite a time in the world—a good time, I think, for saying thank you, and noticing what we’ve reaped.
I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has listened to Kinward over this last year as it’s slowly germinated and grown. Thank you for reaching out to share your thoughts, for sharing the podcast with friends and your networks, for subscribing, for joining me in exploring the many orientations to kinship we are finding here, and for celebrating the kinward moves you are making daily in your own lives. A founding affirmation of this body of work is the emergent strategy principle that what you pay attention to, grows. Here, we pay attention to connection. Thanks for coming on this journey with me, with my web of connections, with us.
I’m also so grateful today for family—family talking, family traveling, family showing up for each another in many ways. For the sunshine on this this mild day in Monterey, CA. For my little son in all his expressions, including committed experimentation with a) his little balance bike, and b) his full range of emotions. For my partner, who is broadening their own expression in the world (and has done most of the driving on this trip, thank goodness). Thank you, thank you.
I’m grateful for the acorn woodpeckers in the park down the street, the clarity of Monterey Bay following decades of dedicated cleanup, the time we spent in hot springs in the Sierras on our way here, the redwoods and rivers who will hold us on our way home. For safety on the road. Thank you, thank you.
I’m praying a centering in gratitude for all of us right now. May it be so.
Now, a bit of housekeeping:
First, the next episode of the podcast, which will be released on December 15 (🌕), will be our full conversation with Rozzell Medina, whose Immersion episode came out a few weeks ago. Get excited for this deep dive on art and home and the vibrancy of futurisms; Rozzell is a remarkable imagination activist.
Second, there’s been a good move in the last few years to tell more and truer stories of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island around Thanksgiving—instead of the usual flattened and colonized myths. With that in mind, I’m revisiting my conversations with Angela Sondenaa (The World’s Work), and with Bobby, Brosnan and Meadow Spenser (Remembering Together How To Be a Human Here). Perhaps you, too, might like to give these episodes another listen at this time.
Finally, I want to let all of you know that the end of this year will mark the end of the first season of Kinward Podcast. The final episode of this season will be released on December 30 (🌑). Wow!
Looking back on what I’ve made and shared since Imbolc of this year, I’m proud of these roughly-twice-moonly, wide-ranging, magical, playful and heartfelt episodes rooted in my bioregion, the Columbia Basin and the Mountain West. My intention with these episodes has been to platform dear ones and teachers who are reclaiming a kinship worldview—who are expressing, in some embodied way, their corner and flavor of “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”
I’ve done that, and I feel grateful to all my guests, and good about the values and vibe that have grounded this body of work so far.
I’ve got big plans for the next season of the podcast! And I hope you’ll stick with me and keep finding value here and engaging with this body of work between seasons.
But in the meantime, after the end of the year, I’m going on maternity leave.
My second child is due in January, and I’ll be taking a break from the podcast (and other work) for a few months to welcome her. Kinward Podcast will be returning for a second season once we emerge from the postpartum squish: I’m guessing late spring of 2025. Thanks everybody for your patience during this sacred and sensitive in-between time! I’ll try to post a (squishy) update or two.
If you are a paying subscriber, please decide what’s best for you after the new year in terms of maintaining your subscription. If you continue with your paid subscription, I’ll gratefully accept it into the learning curve maternity leave fund, and as an offset to the production costs of the next season of the podcast. Thank you.
And if you’re not a paying subscriber but would like to give me and my family a gift for the gooey times ahead, upgrading to a paid subscription is one way to do that. Thank you, thank you.
That’s it for today. Be well, everybody. And may gratitude be a tether for you and the ones you love as we continue on this wild ride together.