WOMAN WHO RUBS THE MOUNTAIN
a podcast and gathering place for stories of ecological embodiment
What happens when we rub on the body of the earth, how does it brush back against us?
There is a certain fidelity required when we return over and over again to be shaped, imagined even, by the beings, the weather, the land forms, and the elemental powers where we live.
Let us seek:
intimacy across language,
intimacy across culture,
intimacy across species,
intimacy across consciousness.
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RECENT EPISODES
#4 Roots and Rootlessness:
A Conversation about the Four Medicines Approach to Health
Learning from traditional animist, ritualist, and ancestral guide, Erica Nunnally, is an opportunity to feel deeply grounded and immersed in practical, earthy wisdom. You can almost hear the trees singing, you can almost smell the dirt rich under your feet as she speaks.
🎧 53 min listen
EPISODE 4
#3 Embodied Elements:
the Tree/Wood Element and Our Longing to Become
Welcome to the cycle’s beginning in a seasonal series I’m calling the Embodied Elements. The Five Elements do not live in dusty books or in the minds of scholars, existing somewhere entirely outside of us. No, they are made potent and animate through us living them into being. In some ways the Five Elements are a vital, sacred vocabulary for our internal ecosystem, reminding us that the cycles of birth, death, and renewal live in our bodies as well as in the entirety of creation.
🎧 30 min listen
EPISODE 3
#2 Nettles and Mountain Lion:
A Conversation about Aligning with the Living World and Healing the Human/Nature Split
Speaking with us from Apsaalooke (Crow) territory, in what is currently known as Livingston, MT, astrologer and Ayurvedic practitioner, Kristine Backes, gifts us with her knowledge and living experience of what it means to align with the natural rhythms all around us.
🎧 60 min listen
EPISODE 2
#1 My Love Story:
Rubbing the Land Where I Live + an Introduction of Intent
In this initial episode, Kendra introduces her overarching intent for the podcast and explains why love is an interspecies bridge and at the very foundation of these explorations in ecological embodiment. How will we ever take action, invested at the level of marrow and glacial skull and tooth-root, if we do not know love first?
In this spirit, Kendra introduces us to the land where she lives and to the Deep Dreamers, the very ancient rocks that she regularly engages in heart connection with. She describes how something old and strange pulls her forward in these relationships, deep familiarities stir in her body.
🎧 24 min listen
EPISODE 1
Gently gather some soil into your hand. Bring it to your face. Inhale. Feel it change you. All of life is contained in this single breath.
Let us begin with offerings of praise and respect to the ground beneath our feet, the land spirits where we live, taking time to acknowledge all that they have seen, all that they know.
In particular, giving thanks to the Elders- past, present, emerging- of the land where I live, the unceded territory of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation.
Actively disrupting Indigenous erasure, you can celebrate the living Indigenous people where you live through native.land.ca
THE STORY CAULDRON
Friends, this is an animist celebration with no set agenda other than to be connective and collaborative. Come share your stories: any and all fresh, strange, or disruptive ways of relating to the living world beyond the human-centric limitations of our current dreaming.
My hope is that in sharing our experiences of embodied ecology, our reality shifts, our core truths sharpen, and space is made for a new/old earth-honoring culture to re-emerge.
Join us in spoken or written word, anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes of anything you can think of smacks of earth-honoring revelry. This could be
✧ a ritual you do every morning,
✧ a thunderous insight you got after falling asleep in the crook of a tree,
✧ a chat you had with the skunk cabbage emerging from their early spring bog,
✧ lessons you’ve learned from rain, from rivers, from your shower,
✧ prayers you offered to the dead baby fox as you moved him from the side of the road,
✧ conversations you’ve had with the dead-living wood of your house,
✧ the telling of old knowings in your body, where tree roots live in your feet, where rose quartz has settled in your heart, where dandelions grow from your eye sockets.
It could be a sacred hymn, a fire-side chat, a description of something completely mundane that reveals itself to you in an unfamiliar way. It could be a story about your situated ecology, where you go to reflect, to commune, to remember what is holy in you, what is holy around you.
Perhaps a bit lost, let us unite to stroke the fissures in our knowing, the questions that want to emerge from the stomachs of earthquakes, the ones we have yet to find words for. It will only be from this place of not-knowing that new ways of relating will be discovered.
You are welcome to share anonymously if you would like. Once told, your tale will be added to this gathering place of nourishing resource for us all. Some stories will be retold on the podcast with the author's permission. Still have questions? Ask them here.
Much love and gratitude for your voice and for joining me in rubbing up against the edges, bearing the uncertainty of the new.
WRITE YOUR STORY
Meet Kendra
