We’re back! Hello friends!
My daughter will be fifteen weeks old when this episode airs, on the May full moon. She’s an excellent baby. She’s learning how to roll over. She understands all the important things.
My friend Josiah Blackeagle Pinkham, a Nez Perce knowledge keeper, loves babies. I remember watching him play with my little son a couple years back, when my son was still a baby (he’s a *kid* now), and asking him what the most important thing was that he’d learned from a baby. Josiah thought for a minute and then said, “that they’re never wrong.”
Yes. Yep. Thank you, babies, for your perfect clarity.
And thank you so much, dear ones and subscribers, for your patience over this last quarter as I stepped through the birth portal and sank into the golden postpartum time. “Nature’s first green is gold”—and “nothing gold can stay.” Time to get back to work, in a good way. I’m happy to be back, and it’s been a beautiful golden time. Thank you.
In this short and playful Immersion episode, the first episode of the second season of Kinward Podcast, my friend Robin Pace and I look at water, look at the life circulating through our own bodies and every body and our memories—that is, we make contact with the mystery—through river rocks with holes in them: windows that water opened.
Specifically, the many waters of the Grande Ronde River, the great circle river, opened the apertures in our rocks. We look through those apertures and splash our bare feet in the water and listen to water and together we scry a few of the important things.
When you’re a grownup, with baggage like ours, in times like these, sometimes you need a trick or two to help you get back to the basics.
There aren’t many people I’d rather look at water with than Robin Pace, a rooted adventurer, whitewater river guide, cast iron sourdough chef, and wayfinder. Robin is a beautiful soul. She loves this place we call home and knows its nooks and eddies—and our neighbors—with breathtaking intimacy. As long as we’ve known each other, I’ve admired her for the way she moves through the world balancing hard-won skills, intelligence, palpable love (including a deep love for fun), and craft.
Our full conversation with Robin—who guides whitewater rafting trips with her outfit Winding Waters, based in Joseph, Oregon—will air in a couple of weeks. Today, in this Immersion, we explore a water way together, weaving several modes of sensing and understanding, from the quiet center of “seeing out from a cave,” as Robin describes the view from her rock, to the celebration of the geological musical bang clunk chime of canyons digging themselves deeper in spring. I hope you enjoy the ride, and I invite you to try on a few of the practices Robin and I play with for cracking the windows to the mystery a little wider open.
You can expect more practical magic in this season of Kinward, along with our usual nerdy deep dives and animist invocations.
A bit of spring housekeeping: Fifteen weeks into life with a new baby, when we are still very much in the thick of finding our new shape of family, it feels, in some ways, too soon to be “back to work.” But it’s also a great time for creative projects that push our growth edges. Caring for new babies lifts our minds out of their usual ruts; new parenthood is a precious time for adult development in part because babies catalyze so much neuroplasticity. In the swirl of this time, when I’m not completely absorbed in staring at my baby, I’m feeling very observant, enmeshed, and creative. Also a bit spooked, frankly, by the number and breadth of synchronicities that have been knocking. It’s a big learning time for me.
So, I’m tending several different projects and practices right now, all eddying around the center that has been the clear center for me for a long time: Life wants life, and Life wants us (back).
I’ve got some great guests lined up for Season Two of Kinward Podcast, and I’m so excited to share their thinking and their wise ways with you. I’m not quite sure yet what the cadence of the podcast will be this season—it may be that we prioritize going a little deeper with each guest and slow the schedule down a bit accordingly. We’ll see how it flows.
Alongside the podcast, you can expect glimpses of some of the other work I’m doing: planning a community food forest, painting watercolor yantras, reading poems about matrescence from a project I’m calling a “diviner’s crown” of sonnets. Maybe some more essays, or more fairy tales, or some excerpts from my novel in progress. As this season of this body of work unfurls, I’d love to hear what’s speaking to you and what you’d like to see more of. You can message me on Substack, leave a comment on any post, or leave a review of the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. As always, thanks so much for tuning in, slowing down, and spreading the word.
Until next time, friends, may your windows to the mystery stay open.
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