Architects of Desire: Research into Imagined Good Lives

How do we create the stories that will bring a whole new generation back to the web of life, that will help people find hope again, and lean into their heart's yearning for connection, relationship, being and belonging?

This week's guest, Ally Kingston, is a creative facilitator and strategy lead at Purpose Disruptors, where she co-developed the breakthrough Agency for Nature, a pop-up agency bringing nature into youth culture. A former advertising strategist, she is curious about how creativity intersects with myth, meaning, consumerism and desire, and how we might design new cultural infrastructures that seed fresh possibilities for how to live.

Equally committed to holding space for grief and loss in turbulent times, Ally has trained as a death doula and rites of passage holder and recently co-created the Tending to Endings card deck, a garden-inspired tool for engaging more meaningfully with loss. She is based in Somerset in the UK, where she lives with her partner, young son and lurcher.

In this wide-ranging episode, we explore the nature of advertising and how an industry that has been so deeply embedded in the death cult of predatory capitalism can turn all the wild, creative magic in service of life; how the skills that push us to buy the pseudo-satisfiers can instead remind us of our original connections, and turn us towards co-creation, connection and belonging.  We talk too, about grief and how learning to compost the old system is a key to the new growth we need and want.  Ally is so multi-talented, it was a joy to explore so many ways we can bring our world back into love with life, into balance, into each of us being part of the solution and letting go of the parts of the problem.

Purpose Disruptors https://www.purposedisruptors.org/
Agency for Nature https://www.agencyfornature.com/
Tending to Endings https://www.tendingtoendings.com/
Ally on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ally-kingston-75922025/
Ally on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/allykingston

ALLY is co-guiding a deep dark creative winter journey with Dan Burgess and co, Into the Dark, in January: https://www.becomingcrew.com/intothedark

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