This is the third in a series of episodes on HOW TO LIVE IN 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop, create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about.

This episode’s theme is CONNECT
And my guest is organizer, activist, and writer, DEAN SPADE

Our disconnection from each other is the negative space that power thrives in. It's a void that threatens to overtake us with its heavy unfeeling emptiness.

Connection is the remedy, but more than that: it's the great meaning we all seek.

The connections we form with each other can create networks of mutual aid, solidarity, safety, love, pleasure, and happy engagement with the challenges of our time.

Dean's new book, Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together offers a powerful look at connection. And it gives everything its title promises: a wealth of practical steps you can take to learn how to live well in this world through what you learn in relationship with others.

It’s a book about relationships that takes nothing for granted from the dominant narratives that rule our lives.

Rather than trying to fit society as it is, the book asks us what it would look like if our relationships were built out of our desires, including our desire to create a better word through better relationships.

This is the second in a series of episodes on HOW TO LIVE IN 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about.

This episode's theme: PRAY
and my guest, ⁠BASTIAAN BAAN⁠.

Bastiaan Baan is a teacher, author, and was a Christian Community priest in the Netherlands. His many books include the just-released ⁠Trust in the Future: Facing Uncertain Times With Confidence⁠; his book on the relationship between Christianity and the elemental beings, ⁠Lord of the Elements: Interweaving Christianity and Nature⁠; and his exploration of christian paths of meditation, ⁠Ways into Christian Meditation⁠. He also speaks around the world on spiritual topics.

This is the first in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about. That way, you won’t only be participating by listening, but you can actually bring some of the vitality of the conversation forward.

The theme and action of this episode is ENVISION.
And my guest is ROB HOPKINS.

Rob is the author of From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want and the forthcoming Falling in Love with the Future. He's also the host of the excellent 100-episode podcast, From What If to What Next which features a different conversation with big thinkers on each episode. He's also a founder of the Transition Network, which works via multiple initiatives (planting trees, local food sufficiency, alternate modes of transport, mental health support, and more) to usher towns and communities out of their entanglement with cultural, political and economic death, and into thriving and healthy sufficiency.

The task ahead is daunting: We must totally recreate economy, politics, and culture. How can we move forward with help from the three gifts of the magi: gold, frankincense, and myrrh?

I talk with money teacher and listener favorite PILAR LESKO about the spiritual realities of making, spending, and gifting money in challenging times.

Our inner lives do matter, more than ever, in this moment. But how do they matter, and how can we offer them up to the tasks of our time? And what if some of us get those inner conditions properly oriented to the spiritual work of the world we're in, but most people don't? Will any of it make a difference?
To discuss this, I welcomed author and teacher Lisa Romero back to the show.Lisa and I talked about these themes before on the show, on AEWCH 257, but now we develop them more deeply here, particularly in relation to how the world is unfolding.

Friends,
In the wake of Donald Trump’s second election win, amongst those who didn’t vote for him at least, calls for mourning and grieving have been issued all around. The idea being that something has been lost, that it may be irretrievable, that a brokenness must be felt and that we should honor that feeling.

But what if instead of making room to mourn, we notice that we’ve already made plenty of room for feeling — too much, in fact — and what if all that expression of feeling has become part of the problem?

On this episode, I look into the problems with our feelings about politics when they don't meet our thinking and action correctly. Rather than make lots of predictions about what's next. or try to figure out who to blame, or even assume that anyone who listens to the show voted one way or the other, I consider

1. The problems with the intense expressions of emotion.

2. How Trump was elected again anyway (with as little speculation as possible).

3. Why the political realm is dead in its current form.

4. Where we can draw strength from to create a new political life that can adapt to individuals and economies.

5. What to do about the fact that a lot of people are our "enemies."

6. The path that we're on in the world and in our own development.

Together and in each of our individualities, we will create a new way.

I talk with Faroese songwriter and performer Eivør about music, water, The Faroe Islands, and myth!

I talk with authors/teachers/organizers DEAN SPADE (Mutual Aid) & SHULI BRANSON (Practical Anarchism) about how to get out of the mindset of the state as the election approaches, and how to think about creative and real engagement with the political instead.

On the heels of the release of their first album in 20 years (!) I talk with Karate frontman GEOFF FARINA about music as a conversation with ideas, and how music creates a lens for life.

Michaelmas is the esoteric christian celebration of the Archangel Michael. How can connecting with the impulses of the holiday show us how to co-share their burden of those who are suffering; strengthen love through our will; and leave the path of empowering violence?