Accidental Gods

What do we do when we feel disempowered, disconnected, alone and afraid?  We can throw ourselves more deeply into social media, drink, drugs and deeper disconnection…or we can build rituals with intention, creativity, gratitude and kindness that re-connect us with the web of life.  With Isla McLeod, ritualist and shamanic healer.Isla McLeod is a creator of ceremonies, ritual designer, transformational healer and companion at the thresholds.  She has dedicated her life to bridging the gap between humanity and the soul of the earth.  In her new book, 'Rituals for Life: A guide to creating meaningful rituals inspired by nature', she brings decades of experience in creating ritual and ceremony to the exploration of what ritual is and how it can enhance our lives, returning our sense of engagement, of being part of something greater, of 'turning up the dial on the beautiful'. In this, our second conversation on the podcast, we explore the origins of the book in Isla's own childhood in Nigeria and Japan, and the sense she had of being surrounded by rituals that held real power to connect.  From there, we explore her sense of devotion to the Earth as a living being as she encountered it in Dartmoor and the sense of ritual as a doorway to the sacred.  We delve deeply into what ritual is and how we can each create our own rituals for the thresholds that matter: what the key ingredients are and what we can play with and make our own.  And finally, we explore a ritual for each season, that touch on different aspects of our lives, different thresholds and doorways. Isla McLeod website: https://islamacleod.com/Isla on Accidental Gods podcast #111 https://accidentalgods.life/earth-alchemy/Martin Prétchel Book 'Long Life, Honey in the Heart' : https://wordery.com/long-life-honey-in-the-heart-martin-prechtel-9781556435386

We are human because for most of our evolutionary history, we have eaten meat whilst treating animals as relations and giving thanks to them. We held these the two sides of this paradox in tension. But in the past decades, we have created hells on earth in our industrialised farming and abattoirs so that eating from them is no longer remotely ethical.  How do we resolve the paradox? Is global veganism the answer or are there other ways to create a generative relationship with our humanity and the food we eat? With Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox.For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as forager-hunters, our lives intimately entwined with the lives - and then deaths - of the animals that we ate.  And then we cut that link and now we eat meat in plastic packages with cute pictures on the front to remove our awareness of the death that has arisen. And yet at our deepest levels, we know that meat is murder.  How do we resolve this paradox?Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association. The Meat Paradox is his first book and it's one of the best, deepest, and most genuinely engaging that I've read of the many that seek to address the huge cultural divide that surrounds our consumption of meat.   This is a book that delves into neuroscience (denial, cognitive dissonance and the lies we tell ourselves), indigenous spiritual/shamanic practice, ancient ancestral practice as depicted in cave paintings that were created over a span of 30,000 years (that's a long time for an art form) and the actual experience of what it is to stand in an abbatoir and make eye contact with a cow as she walks into the stun cage. Reading this book will change your life.  Talking to Rob on the podcast was a joy and an inspiration and we ranged across all of these subjects and more.  We didn't get to the last-line dedication to Odin, which I had thought would be the core of the podcast, but then I discovered in the pre-recording conversations that Odin is a rescue dog (which is wonderful, but not quite the backbone of a shamanic/spiritual podcast that I'd imagined). Nonetheless, this is a deeply felt, deeply touching podcast that delves deep into the very meat of our identities in the modern world. The Meat Paradox: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9781408713815Web: rob-percival.com https://rob-percival.com/Twitter: @rob_percival_ https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_IPES report: The Politics of Protein: http://ipes-food.org/pages/politicsofproteinSustainable Food Trust Report: 'Feeding Britain': https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/our-work/feeding-britain/LRB: A Million Shades of Red by Adam Mars-Jones: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/adam-mars-jones/a-million-shades-of-red

In this enlightening conversation, Sharon Blackie, an award-winning writer and mythologist, dives into her latest work, Hagitude. She explores the empowering journey into elderhood, drawing wisdom from powerful female archetypes in folklore. Listeners discover the magic of nature, the cultural narratives surrounding aging, and the role of myths in healing. Blackie emphasizes seeing aging as a transformation rather than decline, encouraging a shift in perspective towards celebrating this significant rite of passage.

We know that tribalism is destroying us, that the need for 'us' to be right and 'them' to be wrong and to become enraged when we're challenged…is what's destroying us. But how do we change? How do we connect across our differences and hear pain without attributing blame? Exploring all this and more with Sophie Docker of The Restorative Engagement Forum and Open Edge.Sophie Docker is a highly experienced workshop leader, facilitator and mediator working in organisations, education and community. She is Level 3 trained in restorative Justice and CNVC Certified Nonviolent Communication trainer with a number of other decision-making, dialogue communication and conflict engagement tools up her sleeve. She has a degree in Politics and Economics and a Postgraduate diploma in Law but most of her learning came from meditation, and wide and wild experiments in living, being in community, collaborating and organising in economic, social and environmental justice campaigns and movements. Sophie's approach is underpinned by Nonviolent Communication and Restorative Practice, which she has been working with since 2012. She is a Restorative Justice practitioner registered with the Restorative Justice council and a Certified Trainer with the Centre for Nonviolent Communication and brings a systemic lens to these approaches using them personally and professionally to engage with presenting issues.Sophie's work focuses on transforming internal and external domination systems and experiencing ourselves as essential to life, and as part of a complex adaptive living system.  Her work is influenced by relational neuroscience, transactional analysis, meditation, multiple conflict engagement modalities and a deep exploration into the dynamics of personal and structural power, privilege, violence and its impacts. In this episode, we explore the nature of our binary tribalism, our tendency to 'other' that which we don't understand and to become triggered when challenged.  And then, with Sophie's guidance and experience, we talk of the ways we can move beyond that - how she has learned and is learning to step beyond our age-old tools of domination and power-over, into something where we allow our own pain but don't feel the need to project it out - and by being different, allow different outcomes. Links: Restorative Engagement Forum: https://restorativeengagementforum.comOpen Edge: https://www.openedge.org.ukSophie's page on the Nonviolent Communication Training portal: https://nvctraining.com/nvc-trainer/sophie-docker

Zineb Mouhyi is the co-founder of two charitable organizations, YouthxYouth & the Weaving Lab. YouthxYouth is a movement to radically reimagine the future of education with the goal of accelerating the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their education. The Weaving Lab is a global community of practice with the mission of advancing the field of weaving, understood as the practice of interconnecting ideas, people, projects, organizations, places, and ecologies to support systems change. Zineb is also a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) where she collaboratively explores the question: How might we facilitate a planetary transition toward systems that serve all life? In this episode, we explore the death of the old system and the birth of the new: how can the older generations become the allies the younger generations need? How can we explore together what it is to live in the wreckage of a dying system and how can we be part of the emergence of something new, generative and flourishing? Because Zineb is deeply involved in education systems and how they might change, we explore how current education is often designed to facilitate control, to deliver workers who follow rules and orders, not lively activists who think for themselves. From here, we delve into the ways young people can reclaim their own education and mould it to serve the world that could be woven into being, not the one that is dying; how they can shift from One Truth thinking to the understanding of many truths; from linear concepts to systemic thinking, to the ways we might create toolkits to untangle ourselves from the depradations of capitalism. We explore ways to leapfrog change, to put people, project and places at the heart of a global community of practice, to move out of the logic of separation into the logic of connection.This is a conversation grounded in living practice of the ideals Accidental Gods endeavours to promote: finding ways to be the change, so that we might birth a new future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us... but really talking to those younger than us and finding what they need and how we can help them. Links: https://www.youthxyouth.com/https://weavinglab.org/https://www.ciis.edu/https://curriculumforlife.com/

Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer met while working as rangers for the National Trust and soon realised that they shared a dream to live closer to the land.  They bought Lynbreck Croft at the edge of the Cairngorms National Park in the Highlands of Scotland in March 2016  - 150 acres of pure Scottishness - with no experience farming but a huge passion for nature and the outdoors.  Now, they raise their own animals and sell the produce, grow their own fruit and vegetables, and are as self-sufficient as they can be, alongside producing food for their local community and hosting educational tours and running courses. Hailed as Best Crofting Newcomers in 2018, they were given the Food and Farming Award by the RSPB in Nature of Scotland Awards in 2019 and were nominated for Nature Champions of the Decade as part of teh Nature of Scotland 10th anniversary. They have appeared in the series This Farming Life on BBC2 and have written the book, 'Our Wild Farming Life', linked below. Lynn and Sandra were newcomers to farming and to regenerative concepts, but in the past 6 years, as they have faced success and (some) failures and learned from both, they have seen regenerative farming becoming a far more widely held concept.  In this heart-felt episode, we begin by exploring the writing process, and how Lynn, a new writer, came to write such a fluent book.  From there, we delve deeply into the practicalities of farming in a relatively inhospitable landscape, but also explore the spiritual nature of land-connection, the ways we can give the animals with which we share our lives the fullest capacity to be all that they can be, so that we can become all that we can be: so that we can feel safe, and held in connection to the land and the tribes of the more than human world that surround us. Lynbreck Croft: https://www.lynbreckcroft.co.ukLynbreck on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lynbreckcroft/Our Wild Farming Life: book: https://chelseagreen.co.uk/book/our-wild-farming-life/

Holding a Ph.D. in (Ecological) Economics and having studied international development, political science, and management, Thomas Legrand works in the field of sustainability for UN agencies, private companies, and NGOs. His focus is on forest conservation, climate change, sustainable finance, and organizational transformation.His spiritual journey began at the age of 23 with an encounter with native spirituality in Mexico, before embracing the wisdom of a wide range of traditions and practices, including meditation, energetic healing and Tai-chi-chuan. He lives with his wife and their two young daughters near Plum Village, the monastery of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the South West of France, his country.His spiritual search, his thought as a social scientist and his professional experience have gradually converged on the importance of spiritual wisdom in humanity’s ongoing transition. Searching for a way to mainstream this understanding in the political and sustainability conversation, he has dedicated much of the last 10 years to researching and reflecting how we can radically rethink our model of development. The result is his book, 'The Politics of Being: Wisdom and Science for a new Development Paradigm' which synthesises so many of the foundations of Accidental Gods - the merging of a universal spirituality, grounded in connection with the web of life, and a political and social framework for a new way of organising ourselves and each other. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss how Thomas first encountered shamanic spirituality and then explore the ideas that are the backbone of his book: how do we shape our new reality and, crucially, who is already doing so? LinksPolitics of Being website: https://politicsofbeing.comThe Politics of Being: book https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Politics-of-Being-by-Legrand-Thomas/9782957758302Video intro to the book: https://politicsofbeing.comPolitics of Being Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/politicsofbeingThomas on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-legrand-b8406215/Politics of Being on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/politics-of-being/

By now it's obvious that our current system is destroying all life on the planet - and our food/farming system is key both to the current levels of destruction: industrial farming is eroding soil, poisoning the biosphere on land and sea, gobbling up fossil fuels and harming our health. Conversely, local community agriculture projects that link together viable enterprises in a network of circular economies is one part of the key to a viable, flourishing future.  Liberty Nimmo is part of a three-person team (The Three Turnips CSA) at Lower Hampen Farm in the English Cotswolds that is working towards a viable future. Their work aims to provide an environment where nature is allowed to flourish and thereby help to support a sustainable, diverse system of agriculture.  In this holistic, regenerative approach they wish to benefit all life, building soil health, contributing to cleaner air and improving water quality.  They operate a low input, low output farming system and constantly strive to reduce our energy requirements and aim to become carbon negative.Liberty herself is a Regenerative Horticultural Grower, and the Founder of Nimmo Skincare which uses Pasture Fed Tallow as a key ingredient, along with home grown oil infused herbs.  Liberty has a lifelong interest in herbal medicine and using local plants on people and livestock and combines her work at the farm with part time Italian Travel Consultancy.In this episode, we explore the practicalities of starting from scratch in the evolution of a new regenerative project: what are the aims and values that underpin it, and how can a network of enterprises grow up, each sustaining the others, so that the end result is a community supported agriculture project that feeds and nurtures the local community. Links: Hampen FarmNimmo SkinCareFiberShedZero DigCharles Dowding No Dig GrowingHuw Richards YouTube Channel (Growing)Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons Outrage and Optimism w Jacqueline Novogratz: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/outrage-optimism/id1459416461?i=1000570653731Nicole Masters: For the Love of Soil: https://www.farmingsecrets.com/mentor/nicole-masters/

James Brown is an athlete, inventor, social entrepreneur, multi-Paralympian gold medal winner  - and climate activist.  There was a time when James was known most for his astonishing achievements across many sports. Between 1980 and 2015, he took part in no less than five Paralympic Games (winter and summer) as well as eighteen World Championship events.His range of disciplines was extraordinary: they included track running, cross-country skiing, triathlon, swimming, road/track cycling and guide-running. He has several Paralympic Gold medals, was holder of the 800m World Record for eight years and has three other World Firsts to his name, including being the first registered blind person to compete in a World Track Masters cycling event at the velodrome in Manchester. In 2018, everything changed for James when his daughter - then at university - broke down in front of him in a cafe in Exeter and explained all she had been reading about the climate and ecological emergency.  James wept with her, but she offered hope in the shape of the newly formed Extinction Rebellion, and the possibility that non-violent direct action might help foment change. James committed to being at her side in whatever actions she took and within weeks, they were walking arm in arm to the blocking of the five bridges that were the first London Extinction Rebellion action. Since then, James has been arrested 13 times for his non-violent actions (once for spraying chalk paint on the road outside DEFRA in Bristol where it was raining so hard the chalk was washing off as they sprayed it one and was gone long before the arrest process was complete). Most recently, he spent two and a half months in Wandsworth prison for the action that propelled him to climate-activist super-stardom - when he climbed onto a plane at City Airport and superglued himself to the top. The Facebook Live video that he recorded at the time has gone viral and James received thousands of letters and emails while he was in prison, from people who felt desperate about the climate emergency and wanted to know how to find the same courage. So this is what we explore in today's episode - courage and agency and activism in an age of total transformation.  What can we do, and how can we find the courage to take the action we know the world needs? James Brown Website: https://jamesbrownparalympian.co.uk

With a track record of founding startups at a young age, and executing entrepreneurial roles in global non-profits, Saurav Roy was selected as one of the youngest Global Shapers by the World Economic Forum at Bangalore in 2017.  Since then, he has studied for a Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher Collage, and is now working for the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based, independent financial think tank that strives to influence the nature of global finance, away from stranded fossil fuel assets. It has cemented the terms 'Carbon bubble', 'stranded assets' and 'unburnable carbon' into the financial lexicon. Saurav's Master's thesis focused on the 'just transition' elements of the Green New Deal with the realisation that 'everything would change and everything would stay the same' in terms of the balance between the global north's endless consumption at the expense of human dignity, ecosystem annihilation and cultural balance in the global south.  He examined the lack of supply chain justice in the existing concepts, evolved radical, inspiring ideas of how a global token system might fund non-debt-based climate reparations, and created the idea of a 'Carbon Truth and Reconciliation Commission' - because not all climate devastation can be healed simply by throwing money at it. In this inspiring, thought-provoking episode, we explore these ideas in depth, evolving ideas and questions for COP27 and learn Saurav's three core concepts for healing our times. Saurav on LinkedInCarbon Tracker InitiativeSDRsBarbados PM Mia Motley: articleJayati Ghosh